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 Oswald Puzzle: The Pieces That Won’t Fit – Part 1

    The Oswald Puzzle: The Pieces That Won’t Fit – Part 1

    The Oswald Puzzle: The Pieces That Won’t Fit – Part 1

    By Johnny Cairns

    “I worked in Russia. Er… I was… er, under the protection… er, that is to say, I was not under the protection of the American government, but as I was at all times… er, considered an American citizen.” Lee H. Oswald, New Orleans- 1963. 

    Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? That is the $64,000 question, isn’t it? A question that has been debated endlessly since that fateful afternoon in November of 1963 when he was dragged from the darkness of the Texas Theatre and thrust into history. He was cast as an assassin, charged, murdered without trial, and sentenced to a posthumous verdict of guilty—his name forever etched in infamy. Truly as it was written long ago; The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones. 

    Oswald’s death remains a festering wound on the soul of a nation—a nation that, for over sixty years, has continued to grieve the loss of one of its finest leaders: President John F. Kennedy.

    The name Oswald will forever be synonymous with one of the gravest injustices in history. And yet, his short life remains an open contradiction—an enigma that defies easy explanation.

    On one hand, we have the Marxist Marine—a contradiction in itself. A public ‘defector’ to the Soviet Union. A man who, throughout his life, openly espoused socialist, Marxist, and communistic ideologies at the height of Cold War America.

    On the other, we have a man who always seemed to be at the center of American intelligence operations. A man who was impersonated multiple times—including once when he wasn’t even in the country. A man whose closest acquaintances were a who’s who of the most fiercely militant anti-communists of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

    Men such as:

    •David W. Ferrie

    •George De Mohrenschildt

    •Clay L. Shaw (alias Bertrand)

    •Guy Banister

    These were not just random acquaintances. This was a who’s who of intelligence-linked operatives, far-right extremists, and shadowy figures operating at the nexus of covert operations.

    Their connections to Oswald were so striking that Senator Richard S. Schweikerwould later remark: “The fingerprints of intelligence are all over Oswald.”

    And it is this very contradiction that compelled me to write this review of The Oswald Puzzle.

    II

    In the interest of full transparency, I must first acknowledge my respect for co-authors Larry Hancock and Dave Boylan. They are serious researchers, meticulous in their methodology, and their work is thorough, well-sourced, and deeply considered. In fact, it was through the generosity of Dave Boylan that I was able to write this review at all. With the book’s UK release delayed until mid-March, Dave was kind enough to send me a copy from the U.S.—a gesture I greatly appreciated. 

    And on the surface, Larry and Dave stand on solid ground here. They follow Oswald’s own writings, a literary North Star, which guides them through the “swamp” of “conspiracy” research and into their contrarian conclusion on his true ideology. 

    In essence, Oswald’s writings are a literal treasure trove of Marxist ideology. But you know what they say: actions speak louder than words, but Inaction screams loudest of all. 

    For example, if we take the view that I espouse, that Oswald’s Marxism was a facade, a carefully constructed legend, then his writings should be the first thing held as suspect. After all, a good intelligence operative doesn’t just prove their loyalties with actions; they do it with words designed to be seen. And Lee Oswald was seen.

    But before we jump into that, I think we need to remind ourselves what the culture surrounding Socialism, Marxism, and Communism looked like in the United States of the 1950s. Would there even be a distinction between the three? 

    Though Senator Joseph McCarthy himself had faded from power by the time Oswald’s ‘Marxism’ emerged, the suspicion and paranoia he unleashed still gripped America’s national psyche in a stranglehold of fear. The spectre of Communist infiltration loomed large, fuelling an era where mere suspicion could end careers, shatter reputations, and destroy lives. The machine of McCarthyism had been set into motion, and even in his absence, it continued to devour those deemed ideologically impure.

    This unrelenting witch hunt led to the blacklisting, expulsion, and imprisonment of Americans—men and women whose constitutional rights were shattered, cast into political exile for even the faintest whiff of leftist affiliation. Careers were obliterated, reputations tarnished beyond repair, and lives upended—all in the name of eradicating the Communist spectre.  Yet, in the midst of this ideological purge, Oswald—the overt, self-proclaimed Marxist—stood untouched.

    Why?

    For nothing about Oswald’s documented behavior, affiliations, or the way he was treated by the U.S. government aligns with the paranoia and persecution of Cold War America.  How did Oswald escape the fate of so many “suspected” leftists before him? Men whose mere associations with Communism—often far less explicit than Oswald’s—led to ruin?

    • Alger Hiss.

    • Langston Hughes.

    • Milo Radulovich.

    • Dalton Trumbo.

    • Irving Peress.

    • Howard Abramowitz.

    Yet Oswald—a man who openly espoused Marxism, declared his allegiance to Communist ideology, and even attempted defection to the Soviet Union—remained inexplicably untouched. What made him so exceptional that he was able to avoid a national security investigation?

    And here lies the dichotomy at the heart of the Oswald Puzzle—a contradiction too glaring to ignore. If Lee Harvey Oswald’s blatant Marxist/Communist ideology was truly genuine, then why was it tolerated by the staunchly conservative, fervently anti-Communist institutions of Cold War America?

    Why did the Civil Air Patrol, the United States Marine Corps, and ultimately the U.S. government itself turn a blind eye?

    It is a question Larry and David, in my opinion, fail to answer. 

    Civil Air Patrol

    “Oswald and Ferrie were in the unit together. I know they were because I was there. I specifically remember Oswald. I can remember him clearly, and Ferrie was heading the unit then. I’m not saying that they may have been together; I’m saying it is a certainty.” (Bill Davy, Let Justice Be Done; p.5) 

    Who was David Ferrie? Was he a pivotal figure in the life of Lee Harvey Oswald? If you were to judge by The Oswald Puzzle—where he is mentioned only once in passing—you’d think not. And if that glaring omission isn’t shocking enough, then the book’s characterization of Ferrie as merely a “commercial airline pilot” should leave you a bit dumbfounded.  Because, to put it mildly, David Ferrie was far more than that.

    He was a dangerous, militant right-wing extremist, a rabid anti-communist, and a man with deep, verifiable connections to U.S. intelligence, paramilitary operations, and underground networks.

    His absolute hatred for Communism is best captured in a letter he wrote to the U.S. Air Force, offering his services in the fight against the “Red menace”:

     “There is nothing that I would enjoy better than blowing the hell out of every damn Russian, Communist, Red or what have you. We can cook up a crew that will really bomb them to hell… I want to train killers, however bad that sounds. It is what we need.” (Davy, p. 7) 

    CairnsPt1CAP

    And this fanatic wasn’t just some peripheral character in Oswald’s orbit. As one can see from the above, he was the squadron leader of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Civil Air Patrol unit.

    So now we must ask the question: Are we truly expected to believe that a man who wanted to “train killers” to obliterate Communists would have had a benign, indifferent view of a cadet who—according to The Oswald Puzzle—was already:

    “forceful in the expression of his own views on government, social issues, and geopolitics”? A cadet who, according to William Wulf, “started to expound the Communist doctrine? Who was allegedly “highly interested in communism” and believed that “communism was the only way of life for the worker”. 

    Most astonishingly, however, was the revelation that Oswald “was looking for a Communist cell in town to join” (The Oswald Puzzle; p.40) ( WC Vol VIII; p.18)

    Would such a cadet have been tolerated under the leadership of a rabid “Red” hater like Ferrie?

    We do, however, have testimony on record that directly contradicts the characterisation of Oswald as a budding Marxist in his youth.

    His fellow Civil Air Patrol cadet, Ed Voebel, who joined the CAP alongside Oswald, dismissed the notion outright when testifying before the Warren Commission:

    “I have read things about Lee having developed ideas as to Marxism and communism way back when he was a child, but I believe that is a lot of baloney”. Voebel also stated that he saw no evidence whatsoever that Oswald was studying communism in 1954.

    Robert Oswald’s testimony would further reinforce this:

    “If Lee was deeply interested in Marxism in the summer of 1955, he said nothing to me about it… Never in my presence, did he read anything that I recognised as communist literature”. 

    So what changed?

    If Oswald showed no interest in Marxism in 1954-55, then what triggered his sudden transformation? The evidence suggests that his introduction to Marxist literature was not organic but rather coincided with his encounters with David Ferrie.

    Can’t you see the contradiction?

    Even more damning is that The Oswald Puzzle explicitly states:

    “It is around this time that Oswald is showing clear and consistent indications of his beliefs regarding political and social systems.” (The Oswald Puzzle; p.40) Yet if this were true, then why—just a year later—would Oswald, the supposed overt Marxist, voluntarily enlist in the United States Marine Corps—an institution built to uphold and defend American capitalism and imperialism? The very antithesis of Marxist ideology.

    Oswald’s half-brother, John Pic, testified before the Warren Commission that Oswald had no ideological motivation behind his enlistment. Instead, he suggested that Oswald joined the Marines simply “to get from out and under the yoke of oppression from (his) mother”, Marguerite. (WC Vol. XI; p.10) 

    Possible. But I believe the answer lies elsewhere—at the feet of David Ferrie.

    One of Ferrie’s primary roles in the Civil Air Patrol was to encourage and recruit young men into the U.S. military—particularly the Marines. He frequently boasted about his connections to intelligence and military operations, and he would speak to cadets about the orders he received from those channels.

    In fact, when Lee, underage, tried to join the Marines just after his 16th birthday, his mother was visited by a man passing himself off as a Marine Corps recruiter. As Bill Davy rightly points out, “this was a clear violation of the law”.

    Ferrie, as it turns out, “often posed as a military officer and exhibited domineering and controlling behavior towards his cadets”. (Davy, p.6; James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pp. 152-153) 

    Now, consider this. If Oswald was truly the overt “Marxist”, why, while preparing to enlist in the U.S. military, did he begin to do two opposing things simultaneously? He starts to obsessively study his brother’s Marine Corps manual, memorizing it “by heart.” While, at the same time, devouring Communist literature. (WC Vol I, 198.)

    Now take a moment to really let that one sink in for a second. 

    That’s tantamount to me, as a supporter of the Glasgow Celtic, turning up each week to Ibrox Stadium to cheer on the Glasgow Rangers. It defies all logic. (And would never happen). And logic should be an easy trail to follow, especially if one is as intelligent as Oswald. 

    To just ever so briefly skim over Oswald’s relationship with Ferrie is not presenting the totality of the evidence.  As James DiEugenio, a specialist in New Orleans, wrote: “Oswald’s relationship with Ferrie had a powerful, perhaps crucial, effect on his life.” (The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 177). Which is likely the reason that, in the wake of the assassination, Ferrie was frantically trying to conceal that relationship. (ibid, p. 176)

    The Marxist Marine

    “At the time he entered the Marine Corps, Lee Oswald… was very much interested in socialism and Marxism.” (The Oswald Puzzle; p.40) 

    Yet, which is the real Oswald?

    “Oswald was not a Communist or a Marxist. If he was, I would have taken violent action against him, and so would many of the other Marines in the unit.” James Bothelo. 

    Two statements. Two conflicting realities. Both cannot be true. So, which one is the illusion? With this, we enter a phase of Oswald’s life that defies explanation—at least if one assumes his Marxist convictions were genuine. His enlistment in the United States Marine Corps (USMC) stands as a glaring contradiction, compounded by the military’s staggering negligence in addressing his overtly pro-Soviet behavior.

    How could a staunch Marxist thrive within the staunchly anti-Communist U.S. military? How was his open admiration for the Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba tolerated—at the height of the Cold War? And why did none of it trigger the alarm bells that destroyed so many others?

    Some have suggested that the Marine Corps simply viewed Oswald as an eccentric ideologue, dismissing his vocal admiration for the Soviet Union and his praise for Fidel Castro’s revolution as nothing more than a harmless personality quirk. But is that even remotely plausible in the rigid, hyper-vigilant, anti-Communist climate of the 1950s?

    Had Oswald merely harboured private sympathies for leftist ideals, perhaps this argument could be entertained. But that is not what happened. His behavior was neither subtle nor sporadic. He was a Marine who, while actively serving in the U.S. military—a force dedicated to opposing Communism—repeatedly and publicly expressed Marxist ideology, Soviet allegiance, and disdain for American capitalism.

    This is not just an inconsistency—it is a contradiction. And one that requires rigorous scrutiny.

    The Marxist Résumé

    “He must have had a secret clearance to work in the radar center, because that was a minimum requirement for all of us”. John Donovan. (WC Vol VIII; p.298)

    “We all had secret clearances.” Nelson Delgado. (Vol VIII; p.232)

    Below is a documented list of some of Marine Radar Operator Oswald’s openly pro-Soviet activities while serving in the U.S. Marines, under normal Cold War security policies. Any one of these actions should have immediately marked him as a severe national security risk.

    • Openly Studying/Declaring interest in Marxist/Communist Ideology. (WCR; p.388) (Oswald Puzzle; p.57)
    • Declared publicly his support for the Soviet system. (WCR, p.388) 
    • Believed that communism was “the best system in the world”. (WCR, p.686)
    • Gigged by his fellow Marines about “being a Russian spy”. (WC Vol; VIII; p.322)
    • Described by his commanding officer as a “Little nuts on foreign affairs”. (WC Vol VIII; p.290)
    • Complained about the incompetence of the “American Government”. (WC Vol VIII; p.292)
    • Made Remarks About “American Imperialism” and “Exploitation”. (Edward Epstein, Legend; p. 82)
    • Referred to Fellow Marines as “You Americans”. (Ibid)
    • Made serious references to “American Capitalist Warmongers”. (WC Vol; VIII; p. 315)
    • Denounced Capitalism and praised the Soviet economic system to fellow Marines. (WCR; p.868)
    • Nicknamed “Oswaldovich”. (WCR; p.388)
    • Made remarks stating his preference for “The Red Army”. (WC Vol VIII; p.323) (WCR; p.388)
    • Had his name in Russian on one of his jackets. (Vol VIII; p. 316)
    • Played Russian records at extremely loud volume (particularly Tchaikovsky’s “Russian War Dance”) (Ibid)
    • Studied The Russian Language. (WCR; p.388) (Oswald Puzzle; p.55-56)
    • Made remarks in Russian frequently or used expressions such as “da”, “nyet,”or “comrade” to his fellow Marines. (Vol VIII; p. 315) (WCR; p. 686)
    • Read a Russian language newspaper. (Vol. VIII, p. 315-321-292)
    • Read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, which is fundamentally a Marxist work but is also foundational to Communist ideology. (Vol. VIII, p. 254)  
    • Read and subscribed to publications directly linked to the Communist Party USA: The Daily Worker-The People’s World. (Elaborated on later). (WC Vol VIII; p.292-320-323) (Tony Summers Conspiracy; p.147)
    • On February 25, 1959, Oswald sat for a Marine Corps Russian proficiency exam—an event that, in itself, is rather shocking in its improbability. The Oswald Puzzle states that “Oswald may have been motivated by the fact that scoring at certain levels of proficiency would add to his monthly base pay” or “he just wished to test himself” in the Russian language.“ In other words, Oswald—a Marine assigned to anti-aircraft radar operations, with a secret clearance—chooses to take a Russian language proficiency exam.  But it’s not because it had any bearing on his military duties. But either for a small financial bonus or as a personal intellectual challenge. This explanation, however, is so weak that it collapses under even the slightest scrutiny.

     

    The late District Attorney of New Orleans, Jim Garrison, famously ridiculed the absurdity of such a test for someone in Oswald’s position. He noted, “In all my years of military service during WWII and since, I had never taken a test in Russian… I could not recall a single soldier EVER having been required to demonstrate how much Russian he had learned… A soldier genuinely involved in anti-aircraft duty would have about as much use for Russian as a cat would have for pyjamas.” (On The Trail of The Assassins, p. 23). (WCR; p.685) (The Oswald Puzzle; p.56) 

    • Received mail on base suspected to be from the Cuban government. And openly supported Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution.  (WC Vol VIII; p.240-243)

    By any rational metric of Cold War security policy, Oswald’s conduct should have led to:

    1. A full-scale investigation by the USMC and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).
    2. Immediate dishonourable discharge.
    3. Blacklisting from any future government employment.
    4. Court-martial proceedings.
    5. Possible imprisonment for espionage or subversive activities.

    And yet, none of this happened.

    If one attempts to reconcile Oswald’s “radicalism” as nothing more than a mere “personality quirk”, then the U.S. Marine Corps was running the most reckless, incompetent security operation imaginable—hardly consistent with the military ethos of Cold War America. And if The Oswald Puzzle expects us to swallow that narrative, the real scandal isn’t just Oswald—it’s the alarming possibility that other “personality quirks” were freely roaming U.S. military bases, unchecked, with the potential to defect to the Soviet Union.

    Even more alarming, Oswald had access to one of the most sensitive military installations in the world—Atsugi, Japan. This base housed the U-2 spy plane program, one of America’s most closely guarded Cold War secrets. And yet, this proclaimed Marxist, who referred to his fellow Marines as “you Americans,” was reportedly seen strolling around the base, casually taking photographs (Philip Melanson, Spy Saga, p.8).

    Oswald’s Ability to Follow Orders and Authority

    It has often been argued that Oswald’s temperament—frequently characterized as rebellious, defiant, and resistant to authority—would have made him wholly unsuitable for intelligence work. Detractors paint him as a loose cannon, a man who bristled under orders and was incapable of following directives. 

    However, as with so much else in the Oswald enigma, this portrayal is contradicted by testimony on the record. Nelson Delgado testified that;

     “He used to take orders from a few people there without no trouble at all…If he had respect, he would follow, go along with you.” (WC Vol VIII; p262)

    This statement suggests that Oswald’s alleged inability to follow orders was not an intrinsic trait, but rather a selective disposition—he was fully capable of obedience when he deemed it warranted. A quality, one might argue, that could be highly desirable in certain intelligence circles. 

    How Did Oswald Learn Russian?

    The Oswald Puzzle makes the case that Oswald’s Russian proficiency was solely the product of his own self-discipline, a testament to his determination to master the language through solitary study. The book cites various Marines recalling his commitment to learning Russian, as if this alone explains how a young radar operator—without formal instruction—somehow acquired an impressive grasp of one of the most notoriously difficult languages in the world. (The Oswald Puzzle; p.55)

    This argument, however, begins to unravel when faced with a striking omission from the book—a name that should have been central to the discussion but is instead left out entirely: Rosaleen Quinn.

    Quinn was the aunt of Oswald’s fellow Marine, Henry J. Roussel, Jr., and she had a personal stake in learning Russian. She was preparing for a position at the American Embassy in Moscow, which required passing a State Department exam in the language. To achieve this, she undertook a Berlitz course and received formal tutoring for more than a year. (WC Vol. VIII; p.321) (XXIV; p.430)

    At her nephew’s arrangement, Quinn spoke with Oswald one evening for over two hours in Russian. She later recalled that Oswald spoke the language better and more confidently than she did! (Melanson; p.11)

    That revelation alone should be enough to pierce the myth of Oswald as a self-taught Russian student. Here was a woman who had received structured, professional training, yet she found herself outpaced in fluency and confidence by a 19-year-old Marine with no formal instruction.

    It gets even more implausible when we consider the timing. This conversation took place after Oswald had already failed his Russian proficiency test in February 1959. According to The Oswald Puzzle: 

    “Oswald got two more questions right than wrong, however, his overall rating on the test was poor. Oswald scored -5 for “understanding” (listening to spoken Russian) +4 for reading and +3 for writing. Those scores suggest that he had been teaching himself Russian from a book up to that point in time”. (p.56)

    So we are supposed to believe that a man rated as “poor” in Russian just months earlier—who had a negative score in listening comprehension (-5)—could, by the time he spoke with Quinn, outclass a trained Russian speaker? 

    Jim Garrison captured the absurdity of this contradiction perfectly when he wrote: “I am reminded of the man of said his dog was not very intelligent because he could beat him three games out of five when they played chess.” (Garrison, p.22)

    But beyond the numbers, there is an even larger problem. Russian is not an easy language for an American to master, even with professional training. Dr. James Weeks, a professor of modern languages at Southeastern Massachusetts University, taught Russian himself and underwent military language training. He was consulted by researcher Phillip Melanson and was asked whether Oswald’s supposed rate of progress was feasible.

    Weeks stated that attaining Russian fluency requires more than twice as many hours as Spanish or French—1,100 hours or more, including instruction. Weeks opined that the kind of progress described in Oswald’s case would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to attain in such a short time by using only the radio and self-study props. (Melanson, p.12)

    This is not an opinion—it is a fact supported by decades of linguistic research. 

    We must also consider a particularly revealing exchange from the January 27, 1964, executive session of the Warren Commission, in which Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin made a rather curious admission:

    “We are trying to run down to find out what (Oswald) studied at the Monterey School of the Army in the way of languages”. History Matters Archive – January 27, 1964 transcript, pg

    This single sentence raises profound implications. Why was the Warren Commission investigating Oswald’s possible enrolment at Monterey?

    The Monterey School (Defense Language Institute) was not some casual language academy—it was a top-tier training ground for U.S. military and intelligence personnel. Students did not elect their own courses; they were assigned languages based on operational requirements.

    If Oswald had indeed studied at Monterey, this would explain both the speed and depth of his Russian proficiency, as well as why his behavior in the Marine Corps—so outwardly pro-Soviet and politically suspect—never raised alarms within the military establishment.

    The very fact that Rankin and the Warren Commission found it necessary to “run this down” suggests they had reason to believe Oswald’s Russian training was more than just the efforts of a self-motivated Marine flipping through textbooks in his spare time. (Melanson, p.12)

    Click here to read part 2.

  • Fair Play for Burt Griffin and Leon Hubert of the Warren Commission?

    Fair Play for Burt Griffin and Leon Hubert of the Warren Commission?

    Fair Play for Burt Griffin and Leon Hubert of the Warren Commission?

    By Paul Abbott

    The Warren Commission has been undeniably and rightly vilified since its 1964 release up to and including the ultimate counterargument – 2023’s The JFK Assassination Chokeholds. Its Oswald-did-it-and-did-it-alone conclusion seemed to be arrived at first, and then the evidence seemed cherry-picked in order to make that verdict stick. But aside from Commission dissenters like Hale Boggs and Richard Russell, there were others within its ranks who tried to pursue at least a halfway decent investigation into the peripheries of the Lee Oswald orbit. 

    Leon Hubert and Burt Griffin were the two attorneys tasked with leading the Commission’s inquiry into Jack Ruby, which included how he came to kill Oswald. This involved their mobilization to Dallas – between late March to early May of 1964 – to question dozens of witnesses related to Ruby and the Oswald murder. This included employees of Ruby’s and members of the Dallas Police Department who witnessed the Oswald slaying. 

    Reading through witness statements, it was clear that both Hubert and Griffin only pushed so far when it came to scrutinizing the conditions at Dallas City Hall on the morning of 11/24/63. But Griffin did sense a weakness in Sgt. Patrick Dean and his inability to adequately address the question of whether the stairwell door from the Annex Building into the basement car park was locked. Reading that exchange it is clear that Griffin sensed that this was an alternative method of entry for Jack Ruby that morning, and he was calling out Dean for his attempts to deflect away from it. Aside from this episode, Griffin took exception to Dean’s account of how Ruby told him he entered the basement, down the Main Street ramp, just minutes after shooting Oswald. This was done, despite the lack of initial corroboration from fellow DPD personnel or from the Secret Service’s Forrest Sorrels. It all led to Griffin talking to Dean off the record during a break and imploring him to tell the truth – in a blink two times if you’re in trouble kind of way. As Griffin outlined in a subsequent memo to his WC superior, J. Lee Rankin:

    ‘ I told him (Dean) that in the two or three hours that he and I had been talking, I found him to be a likable and personable individual, and that I believed he was a capable and honest police officer… I then stressed that this investigation was of extreme importance to the National Security and that .. if there was some way that he could be induced to come forward with a forthright statement without injuring himself, the Commission would probably be willing to explore a means to afford him the protection that was necessary…’ 

    In response to the way he felt he was treated by Griffin, Dean lodged a complaint with Dallas DA Henry Wade, who conveyed this to the Warren Commission. 

    Griffin and Hubert returned to Washington from Dallas and put forth a case for either a chapter or sub-chapter to be included in the final report by the Warren Commission titled ‘The Killing of Lee Harvey Oswald’. To justify this and the numerous threads they had picked up on Jack Ruby, Griffin, and Hubert tended a report to Rankin for his consideration. It is included as verbatim below:

     

    May 14, 1964

    To:    J. Lee Rankin

    From:   Leon D. Hubert Jr. 
                  Burt W. Griffin

    Subject: Adequacy of Ruby Investigation

    1. Past Recommendations. In memoranda dated February 19, February 23, February 27, and March 11, we make various suggestions for extending the investigation initiated … in connection with the Oswald homicide. Shortly after March 11, 1964, we began preparation for the nearly 60 depositions taken in Dallas during the period March 21 – April 3; after we returned from Dallas we took the deposition of C.L. Crafard (two days) and George Senator (two days), worked on editing the depositions taken in Dallas, and prepared for another series of 30 other depositions taken in Dallas during the period April 13-17. On our return from Dallas, we continued the editing of the Dallas depositions, prepared the Dallas depositions exhibits for publication, and began working on a draft of the report in Area V. As a consequence of all this activity during the period March 11-May 13, we did not press for the conferences and discussions referred to in the attached memoranda. The following represents our view at the time with respect to appropriate further investigation.

    2. General Statement of Areas Not Adequately Investigated. In reporting on the murder of Lee Oswald by Jack Ruby, we must answer or at least advert to these questions:
      1. Why did Ruby kill Oswald;
      2. Was Ruby associated with the assassin of President Kennedy;
      3. Did Ruby have any confederates in the murder of Oswald?

      It is our belief that, although the evidence gathered so far does not show a conspiratorial link between Ruby and Oswald, or between Ruby and others, nevertheless evidence should be secured, if possible, to affirmatively exclude that:

      1. Ruby was indirectly linked through others to Oswald;
      2. Ruby killed Oswald, because of fear; or
      3. Ruby killed Oswald at the suggestion of others.

    3. Summary of Evidence Suggesting Further Investigation. The following facts suggest the necessity of further investigation:
      1. Ruby had time to engage in substantial activities in addition to the management of his Clubs. Ruby’s nightclub business usually occupied no more than five hours of a normal working day…. It was his practice to spend an average of only one hour a day at his Clubs between 10:00 am and 9:00 pm. Our depositions were confined primarily to persons familiar with Ruby’s Club activities. The FBI has thoroughly investigated Ruby’s nightclub operations but does not seem to have pinned down his other business or social activities. The basic materials do make reference to such other activities (see p. 27 of our report of February 18), but these are casual and collateral and were not explored to determine whether they involved any underlying sinister purpose. Nor were they probed in such a manner as to permit a determination as to how much of Ruby’s time they occupied. 
      2. Ruby has always been a person who looked for money-making ‘sidelines.’ In the two months prior to November 22, Ruby supposedly spent considerable time promoting an exercise device known as a ‘twist board.’ The ‘twist board’ was purportedly manufactured by Plastellite Engineering, a Fort Worth manufacturer of oil field equipment which has poor credit references and was the subject of an FBI investigation in 1952. We know of no sales of this item by Ruby; nor do we know if any ‘twist boards’ were manufactured for sale. The possibility remains that the ‘twist board’ was a front for some other illegal enterprise. 
      3. Ruby has long been close to persons pursuing illegal activities. Although Ruby had no known ideological political interests (see p. 35 of our report of February 18), there is much evidence that he was interested in Cuban matters. In early 1959, Ruby inquired concerning the smuggling of persons out of Cuba. He has admitted that, at that time, he negotiated for the sale of jeeps to Castro. In September 1959, Ruby visited Havana at the invitation of Las Vegas racketeer, Louis J. McWillie, who paid Ruby’s expenses for the trip and who was later expelled from Cuba by Castro. McWillie is described by Ralph Paul, Ruby’s business partner, as one of Ruby’s closest friends. Ruby mailed a gun to McWillie in early 1963. In 1961, it was reported that Ruby attended three meetings in Dallas in connection with the sale of arms to Cubans and the smuggling out of refugees. The informant identifies an Ed Brunner as Ruby’s associate in the endeavor. Shortly after his arrest on November 24, Ruby named Fred Brunner as one of his expected attorneys. Brunner did not represent Ruby, however. Insufficient investigation has been conducted to confirm or deny the report about meetings in 1962. When Henry Wade announced to the Press on November 2, 1063, that Oswald was a member of the Free Cuba Committee. Ruby corrected Wade by stating “not the Free Cuba Committee; The Fair Play for Cuba Committee. There is a difference.” The Free Cuba Committee is an existing anti-Castro organization. Earl Ruby, brother of Jack Ruby, sent an unexplained telegram to Havana in April 1962. We believe that a reasonable possibility exists that Ruby maintained a close interest in Cuban affairs to the extent necessary to participate in gun sales or smuggling. 
      4. Bits of evidence link Ruby to others who may have been interested in Cuban affairs. When Ruby’s car was seized on November 24, it contained various right-wing radio scripts issued by H.L. Hunt and a copy of the Wall Street Journal bearing the mailing address of a man who has not yet been identified. In May 1963, Early Ruby, operator of a dry cleaning business, is known to have telephoned the Welch Candy Company (owned by the founder of John Birch Society). The purpose of the call is unknown. Jack Ruby’s personal notebook contained the Massachusetts telephone number and address of Thomas Hill, a former Dallas resident, working at the Boston headquarters of the John Birch Society. Although it is most likely that all of those bits of circumstantial evidence have innocent explanations, more have yet to be explained. 
      5. Although Ruby did not witness the motorcade through Dallas, he may have had a prior interest in the President’s visit. A November 20 edition of the Fort Worth Telegram showing the President’s proposed route through Fort Worth, and the November 20 edition of the Dallas Morning News showing the President’s route through Dallas, were found in Ruby’s car on November 24. 
      6. On November 16 Jack Ruby met at the Carousel Club with Bertha Cheek, sister of Mrs. Earlene Roberts, manager of Lee Oswald’s rooming house. Mrs. Cheek said that she and Ruby discussed her lending Ruby money to open a new nightclub. Ruby was not questioned about this matter. On November 20, 1963, a woman, who may be identical to Earlene Roberts, was reported to be in San Antonio at the time of President Kennedy’s visit. The possible identification of Mrs. Roberts in San Antonio has not been checked out. In addition, the link formed by Mrs. Roberts between Oswald and Ruby is buttressed in some measure by the fact that one of Ruby’s strippers dated a tenant of the Beckley Street rooming house during the tenancy of Lee Oswald. We have previously suggested the theory that Ruby and Mrs. Cheek could have been involved in Cuban arms sales of which Oswald gained knowledge through his efforts to infiltrate the anti-Castro Cubans. Our doubts concerning the real interest of Mrs. Cheek in Jack Ruby stem from the fact that one of her four husbands was a convicted felon and one of her friends was a police officer who married one of Ruby’s strip-tease dancers. We have suggested that Ruby might have killed Oswald out of fear that Oswald might implicate Ruby and his friends, falsely or not in an effort to save his own life. We think that neither Oswald’s Cuban interest in Dallas nor Ruby’s Cuban activities have been adequately explained. 
      7. Ruby made or attempted to make contacts on November 22 and 23 with persons, known and unknown, who could have been co-conspirators. Ruby was visited in Dallas from November 21 to November 24, 1963, by Lawrence Meyers of Chicago. Meyers had visited Ruby two weeks previously. Ruby also made a long-distance call shortly after the President’s death to Alex Gruber in Los Angeles. Gruber had visited Ruby about the same time as Meyers in early November. Both Gruber and Meyers give innocent explanations. Meyers claims he was in Dallas enjoying life with a ‘dumb but accommodating broad.’ Gruber claims Ruby called to say he would not mail a dog that day, as he had promised to do. Finally between 11:35 pm and 12 midnight, Saturday, November 23, Ruby made a series of brief long-distance calls culminating with a call to entertainer Breck Wall at a friend’s house in Galveston. Wall claims Ruby called to compliment him for calling off his (Wall’s)  set at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas. Background checks have not been made on these persons.
      8. In fact, we believe that the possibility exists based on evidence already available that Ruby engaged in illegal dealings with Cuban clients who might have had contact with Oswald. The existence of such dealings can only be surmised since the present investigation has not focused on that area. 
      9. We suggest that these matters cannot be left ‘hanging in the air.’ They must either be explored further or a firm decision must be made not to do so, supported by stated reasons for the decision. As a general matter, we think the investigation is deficient in these respects:
        1. Substantial time segments in Ruby’s daily routine from September 26 to November 22 have not been accounted for. 
        2. About 46 persons who saw Ruby from November 22 to November 24 have not been questioned by staff members, although there are FBI reports of interviews with all of these people.
        3. Persons who have been interviewed because of known associations with Ruby generally have not been investigated themselves so that their truthfulness can be evaluated. The FBI reports specifically do not attempt evaluation. The exception has been that where the FBI has been given incriminating evidence against Ruby, it has made further investigation to determine whether others might also be implicated with Ruby. In every case where there was some evidence implicating others, these other persons were interviewed and denied the incriminating allegations. Further investigation has not been undertaken to resolve the conflicts. 
        4. Much of our knowledge of Ruby comes from his friends Andrew Armstrong, Ralph Paul, George Senator, and Larry Crafard. Investigations have not been undertaken to corroborate their claims. 
    4. Specific Investigative Recommendations 
      1. We should obtain photos of all property found on Ruby’s person, in his car, or at his home or clubs, now in possession of the Dallas District Attorney. We already have photos of Ruby’s address books, but no other items have been photographed or delivered to the Commission. These items included H.L. Hunt literature and newspapers mentioned in paragraphs 3d and 3e.
      2. We should conduct staff interviews or take depositions with respect to Ruby’s Cuban activities of the following persons:
        1. Robert Ray McKeown. Ruby contacted McKeown in 1959 in connection with the sale of jeeps to Cuba. The objective of an interview or deposition of McKeown would be to obtain information on possible contacts Ruby would have made after 1959 if his interest in armament sales continued. 
        2. Nancy Perrin. Perrin claims she met with Ruby three times in 1961 concerning refugee smuggling and arms sales. She says she can identify the house in Dallas where meetings took place. Perrin now lives in Boston. Ruby admits he was once interested in the sale of jeeps at least, to Cuba. 
      3. We should obtain reports from the CIA concerning Ruby’s associations. The CIA has been requested to provide reports based on a memorandum delivered to them on March 13, 1964, concerning Ruby’s background including his past Cuban activities, but a reply has not been received as yet. 
      4. We should obtain reports from the FBI based on the requested investigation of allegations suggesting that Earlene Roberts was in San Antonio on November 21.
      5. The Commission should take the testimony of the following persons for the reasons stated:
        1. Hyman Rubenstein, Eva Grant, Earl Ruby. All are siblings of Jack Ruby. Hyman is the oldest child and presumably will be the best witness as to family history. He talked to Jack on November 22, reportedly visited Jack the weekend before the assassination, and participated in Ruby’s twist board venture. Eva lived with Jack for 3 years in California prior to World War II, induced Jack to come to Dallas in 1947, and managed the Vegas Club for Jack in Dallas from 1959 to 1963. Earl was a traveling salesman with Jack from 1942-1943; a business partner from 1946-1947, and made phone calls before November 22, 1963 and afterwards which require explanations.
        2. Henry Wade. This person can testify to the development of the testimony by Sgt. Dean and Det. Archer against Ruby and of seeing Ruby on November 22 in the Police Department building
        3. Jack Ruby
      6. We should take the deposition of the following persons for the reasons stated:
        1. Tom Howard. This person is one of Ruby’s original attorneys and is reported to have been in the police basement a few minutes before Oswald was shot and to have inquired if Oswald had been moved. He filed a writ of habeas corpus for Ruby about one hour after the shooting of Oswald. He could explain these activities and possibly tell us about the Ruby trial. We should have these explanations. 
        2. FBI Agent Hall. This person interviewed Ruby for 2.5 hours on November 24 beginning at approximately 12 noon. His report is contradictory to Sgt. Dean’s trial testimony. He also interviewed Ruby on December 21, 1963.
        3. Seth Kantor. This person was interviewed twice by the FBI and persists in his claim that he saw Ruby at Parkland Hospital shortly before or after the President’s death was announced. Ruby denies that he was ever at Parkland Hospital. We must decide who is telling the truth, for there would be considerable significance if it were concluded that Ruby is lying. Should we make an evaluation without seeing Kantor ourselves?
        4. Bill Dellar. This person claims to have seen Oswald at the Carousel Club prior to November 22, and this rumor perhaps more than any other has been given wide circulation. Should we evaluate Dellar’s credibility solely on the basis of FBI reports?
      7. The FBI should re-interview the following persons for the purposes stated:
        1. Alex Gruber. To obtain personal history to establish original meeting and subsequent contacts with Ruby; to obtain details of the visit to Dallas in November 1963, including where he stayed, how long, who saw him, etc. The FBI should also check its own files on Gruber.
        2. Lawrence Meyers (same as Gruber)
        3. Ken Dowe. (KLIF reporter) To ascertain how he happened to first contact Ruby on November 22 or 23; (Ruby provided information to KLIF concerning the location of Chief Curry), and whether KLIF gave any inducements to Ruby to work for it on the weekend of November 22-24. 
        4. Rabbi Silverman. To establish when Silverman saw Ruby at the Synagogue and obtain names of other persons who may have seen Ruby at the Synagogue on November 22 and 23. Silverman states that he saw Ruby at the 8 pm service on November 22 and the 9 am service on November 23; but both of these services lasted at least two hours and we do not know whether Ruby was present for the entire service. Silverman (and others) could ‘place’ Ruby, or fail to do so, during critical hours. 
        5. Mickey Ryan (same as Gruber plus employment in Dallas.)
        6. Breck Wall. This person was an entertainer at the Adolphus Hotel, Dallas, at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination. Ruby called him in Galveston at 11:47 pm on Saturday, November 23, 1963. He also visited Ruby at the County Jail. A background check should be conducted as to this person. 
        7. Andrew Armstrong, Bruce Carlin, Karen Bennett Carlin, Curtis Laverne Crafard, Ralph Paul, George Senator. These persons were deposed at length because of their friendship with Ruby, familiarity with Ruby’s personal and business life, and contacts with Ruby on November 22, 23, and 24. In general, each has professed to have had no knowledge of Ruby’s activities during those three days.

          Andrew Armstrong was very active in the operation of the Carousel and worked closely with Ruby for 18 months. His deposition covers Ruby’s activities and emotional state generally and particularly several hours on November 22 and 23. A background check should be conducted as to this person and selected parts of his testimony should be checked out to test his veracity.

          Karen and Bruce Carlin were the recipients of a $25 money order bought by Ruby approximately 9 minutes before Ruby shot Oswald. Marguerite Oswald testified that she believed she knew Karen Carlin. Background checks should be conducted on the Carlins.

          Crafard fled Dallas unexpectedly on Saturday morning November 23. Although we tend to believe his explanation, we believe a background check on him plus verification of some of his activities on November 23 are warranted.

          Paul is Ruby’s business partner. A background check should be conducted as to him, and his telephone calls during November should be checked out.

          George Senator, Ruby’s roommate, alleged by Crafard to be a homosexual, claims not to have seen Ruby except at their apartment Sunday morning and for a few hours early Saturday morning. The senator’s background and own admitted activities on November 22, 23, and 24 should be verified. 

    5. Other areas of Ruby Investigation which are not complete.
      1. Various rumors link Ruby which do not appear to be true; however, the materials we have are not sufficient to discredit them satisfactorily. Such rumors include: 
        1. Communist associations of Ruby
        2. Oswald’s use of a Cadillac believed to belong to Ruby;
        3. After the depositions of Nancy Perrin, Robert McKeown, and Syliva Odio have been taken, further investigation may be necessary with respect to Ruby’s Cuban associations. 
      2. Ruby’s notebooks contain numerous names, addresses, and telephone numbers. Many of these persons have either not been located or deny knowing Ruby. We believe further investigation is appropriate in some instances; however, we have not yet evaluated the reports now on hand. 
      3. We have no expert evidence as to Ruby’s mental condition; however, we will obtain transcripts of the psychiatric testimony at the Ruby trial. 
    6. Other Investigative Suggestions. We have suggested in earlier memoranda that two sources of evidentiary material have been virtually ignored:  
      1. Radio, TV, and movie recordings. Two Dallas radio stations tape-recorded every minute of air time on November 22, 23, and 24. We have obtained these radio tapes for all except a portion of November 24, and the tapes included a number of interviews with key witnesses in the Oswald area. In addition, the tapes shed considerable light on the manner in which Dallas public officials and federal agents conducted the investigation and performed in public view. We believe that similar video tapes and movie films should be obtained from NBC, CBS, ABC, UPI, and Movietone News, and relevant portions should be reviewed by staff members. Wherever witnesses appear on these films who have been considered by the Commission in preparing its report, a copy of such witnesses’ appearance should be made a part of the Commission records by introducing them in evidence. If one person were directed to superintend and organize this effort, we believe it could be done without unreasonable expenditures of Commission time and money. 
      2. Hotel and motel registrations, airline passenger manifests, and Emigration and Immigration records. Copies of Dallas hotel and motel registrations and airline manifests to and from Dallas should be obtained for the period October 1, 1963, to January 1, 1964. We believe that these records may provide a useful tool as new evidence develops after the Commission submits its report. We do not suggest these records necessarily be examined by the Commission staff at the present time. But, for example, it is likely that in the future, persons will come forward who will claim to have been in Dallas during the critical period and will claim to have important information. These records may serve to confirm or refute their claims. 

       

      LHHubert/smh

      Cc: Mr. Hubert

    So what of the people that Griffin and Hubert referred to in their memo? Below are those that had already testified to them in Dallas in April 1964:

    • Earlene Roberts – Oswald’s landlady in Oct & Nov ’63: was not asked about linkage to Jack Ruby through her sister, Bertha Cheek.
    • Bertha Cheek – friend of Jack Ruby and sister of Earlene Roberts: testified about investment dealings with Jack Ruby. Brief acknowledgment only that her sister was Oswald’s landlady on 11/22.
    • George Senator – Jack Ruby’s friend and roommate: testified to his friendship with Ruby, business dealings of Ruby’s and his (Ruby’s movements) across the weekend of 11/22.
    • Andrew Armstrong – employee of Jack Ruby’s: testified to Ruby’s personality, running of Carousel Club, and Ruby’s movements across weekend of 11/22.
    • Larry Crafard – employee of Jack Ruby’s who left Dallas suddenly on 11/23: testified to being employed by Ruby and his volatility.
    • Ralph Paul – business associate of Jack Ruby: testified about Ruby’s historic and current business dealings. 
    • Karen Carlin – employee of Jack Ruby: testified about Ruby’s management of the Carousel Club and Ruby’s movements across the weekend of 11/22.
    • Bruce Carlin – husband of Karen Carlin: testified about Ruby’ and Ruby’s movement across the weekend of 11/22.

    Of the people highlighted as being of further interest to Griffin and Hubert in their memo, only the people below were subsequently interviewed by the Warren Commission:

    • Henry Wade – District Attorney for Dallas: he doggedly defended Sgt. Pat Dean
    • Lawrence Meyers – friend of Jack Ruby: gave insight into Ruby’s business dealings in Dallas and his (Ruby’s) adoration for JFK
    • Nancy Perrin Rich – former employee of Jack Ruby: focused on Ruby’s volatility and links to DPD 
    • Hyman Rubenstein – Jack Ruby’s older brother: testified about Ruby’s family upbringing, Jack Ruby’s volatility, and business dealings leading up to and in Dallas
    • Earl Ruby – Jack Ruby’s younger brother: also testified about Ruby family upbringing, Jack Ruby’s volatility, business dealings leading up to and in Dallas plus handling of Ruby’s defense for shooting Oswald
    • Eva Grant – Jack Ruby’s older sister: testified on Ruby’s upbringing, Dallas business, and contact with him on weekend of 11/22.
    • FBI agent who first interrogated Ruby after the Oswald shooting: testified to the conversation that he had with Ruby at Dallas City Hall on 11/24 that didn’t include any reference by Ruby as to how he entered the basement.

    It is interesting to note in particular that Ruby’s first attorney after the Oswald slaying, Tom Howard, was also referred to as a figure of interest for Griffin and Hubert but did not testify before the Warren Commission. Howard would die suddenly in 1965, therefore he remains a mysterious figure in the grand scheme of things because:

    –  he was present in the City Hall basement when Oswald was shot

    –  it was only after Howard first spoke with Ruby a few hours later, that Ruby was first actually documented–by Forrest Sorrels– as disclosing how he entered the basement down the Main Street ramp. 

    –  and he was one of three people out of five who met at Ruby’s apartment on the night of 11/24 and would later die under sudden and mysterious circumstances.

    We have the benefit of 60 years to reflect on Griffin and Hubert’s position in May of 1964, some 4 months prior to the release of the Warren Report. As such, we know that:

    –  Burt Griffin and Leon Hubert were not allowed to return to Dallas to conduct the next round of witness depositions there. That said, they did still carry out depositions on witnesses before the Warren Commission, only they took place in Washington D.C., clearly under the close watch of the Warren Commission hierarchy.

    –  In response to his treatment by Griffin and some suspicion in some sectors of the media, Patrick Dean lodged a request to Police Chief Jesse Curry to carry out a lie detector test. This was granted but despite being allowed to write his own questions to answer, Dean failed the test. 

    • Subsequently, the Warren Commission was never told that the test took place, and therefore its results. When the House Select Committee on Assassinations found out about Dean’s failed test during its investigation 14 years later there was no trace of it to be found. 

    –  Dean was flown to Washington D.C. and received a personal assurance by Earl Warren, in the presence of Allen Dulles and J. Lee Rankin, that no member of the Commission has the right to accuse any witness of lying or falsely testifying. In short, Dean got a pass from the highest level of the Warren Commission.

    –  There was no dedicated chapter to the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald – just a section within an existing chapter. 

    –  There was no acknowledgment or further pursuit of the leads Griffin and Hubert had inferred regarding Ruby’s links to:

    • Cuban gunrunning in the late 50’s, 
    • subsequent anti-Castro Cuban associations 
    • dealings in narcotics

    –  Ruby pled for the Warren Commission to take him to Washington so he could safely reveal all he knew. 

    What this all reinforces is that the fix really was in when it came to how deep the Warren Commission investigators would be allowed to dig and how far-raising leads could be pursued. So, in effect, it not only did its best to cement Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole assassin of President Kennedy, but it also basically plied the same on Jack Ruby – only he was cast as the police-loving, shady nightclub owner who killed Oswald on his own impulsive volition. 

    Was there anything more to Ruby’s own sudden demise in early 1967 after he had been granted a retrial outside of Texas? 

    Who knows? There may be some answers to the Oswald / Ruby aspect in the remaining JFK Files.

    (Paul Abbott is the author of the book Death to Justice: The Shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald.)

  • Sky News Australia Interview of Jim DiEugenio

    Sky News Australia Interview of Jim DiEugenio

    Please watch the interview here.

    The SkyNews.com.au show notes are available here.

    Interview Transcript

    Well, it won’t be long until the world finally knows the truth about former US President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

    Last month, President Trump signed an executive order to declassify the secret files on JFK’s 1963 death.

    Since then, the head of the task force that’s aimed at exposing federal secrets, Anna Paulina Luna, has declared that from what she’s seen so far, she believes the single bullet theory is faulty.

    She believes there were two shooters involved.

    Our first investigation will be announced, but it’s going to be covering on a thorough investigation into the John F. Kennedy assassination.

    And I can tell you, based on what I’ve been seeing so far, the initial hearing that was actually held here in Congress was actually faulty in the single bullet theory.

    I believe that there were two shooters.

    And we should be finding more information as we are able to gain access into the SCIF, hopefully before the files are actually released to the public.

    Now, most Americans do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

    So what has been hidden away for decades that we’re all about to find out when the JFK files are released?

    James DiEugenio is considered one of the best writers and researchers in America on JFK’s assassination.

    He’s written multiple books on the subject, including co-author of the JFK assassination chokeholds that prove there was a conspiracy.

    And he joins us on Power Hour now.

    James, thank you for joining us.

    We heard Anna Paulina Luna claim that she believes there were two shooters.

    That’s a conclusion, I believe, that you’ve come to as well.

    Can you talk to us about the evidence that support this?

    Yeah, well, I think it’s really good that she’s going to reopen this.

    And I think Trump signing that executive order was another really good thing.

    As per the belief that there was more than one shooter, there’s a Pruder film which shows Kennedy rocketing backwards when Oswald was supposed to actually be shooting from behind him.

    There’s the 42 witnesses at Parkland Hospital and at Bethesda at the morgue who did the autopsy that night who say that there was a big baseball-sized hole in the back of Kennedy’s head, which is strongly indicative of a shot from the front.

    All right?

    There’s also the fact that there was no sectioning of either wound.

    There was no dissecting of either wound, either the back wound or the head wound, to see if it was a through-and-through shot, if it did actually penetrate the body.

    There’s all this kind of evidence out there today that was not public back in 1963, which indicates that there was more than one assassin.

    And she’s correct.

    The Warren Commission report was, to put it mildly, you know, rather faulty.

    The Warren Commission determined in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

    How did it get it so wrong?

    Well, there’s a lot of reasons why the Warren Commission report was faulty.

    You know, one of them was that they relied almost – about 80 percent of their work was based upon the work of the FBI.

    And the FBI, of course, did not do a very thorough investigation.

    To put it mildly, you know, J. Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI, was not in really friendly terms with Bobby Kennedy, who was at that time was about to resign.

    But he was the attorney general, all right?

    And if you recall, you know, this is very interesting.

    That weekend, Kennedy was killed on a Friday.

    That weekend, J. Edgar Hoover went to the racetrack.

    In other words, he didn’t even come into work on Saturday.

    He actually went to the racetrack with his second-in-command, Clyde Tolson.

    So it was not, you know – again, I’m being mild – it was not a very thorough investigation by the FBI for a lot of different reasons.

    Why has some of these files been kept secret for so long?

    The FBI says it’s discovered now 2,400 new documents related to JFK’s assassination.

    What are you expecting from them?

    You know, I’m really glad you brought this up because those 2,400 documents that the FBI has just found, those were not even previously reported.

    You know, everything was supposed to be declassified by 94 to 98 by the review board.

    Apparently, they didn’t even know about these documents.

    I think we’re going to find out a lot more about Oswald in New Orleans, and I think we’re going to learn something about Oswald’s reported visit to Mexico City, which was about in late September, early October of 1963, all right?

    And he was, of course, in New Orleans that summer before going to Mexico City.

    Oswald was, to put it mildly, a very, very interesting character, which the Warren Commission never even scraped the surface of, all right?

    Most people today who have studied this case don’t believe the Warren Commission verdict about him being a communist, all right?

    They think he was some kind of low-level intelligence agent.

    What do you make of the assessments that are out there?

    There are a few that it was a foreign adversary, the mafia, or the CIA.

    You know, seeing a lot of the theories that are exposed and all the research and investigating that you’ve done, what’s your assessment of them?

    I think that the most logical conclusion today, and that which most people who have researched this case believe, that it was kind of like a triangular kind of a plot involving the Central Intelligence Agency at one point, the Cuban exiles at another point.

    And then when Oswald was not killed the day of the assassination, the CIA brought in his ally that has organized crime, you know, who they have been trying to knock off Castro before.

    And they brought in the mafia to go ahead and send Jack Ruby in to silence Oswald.

    Donald Trump promised that he would declassify the files during his first term, but he was visited by the CIA, the FBI, I should say, the FBI, and was told by Mark Pompeo not to open them.

    Why do you think he delayed opening up the files?

    You know, that’s a very interesting question, because a week or so before, Trump had tweeted that I’m looking forward, you know, to declassifying the last of the JFK documents.

    Then the very day he was supposed to do this, he’s visited by the CIA and the FBI, and he backs out of it.

    Now, according to his talk with Andrew Napolitano, he said words of the effect that if they would have shown you what they showed me, you wouldn’t have done it either.

    And Andrew said, who is they, and what was it they showed you?

    Okay, you know, and then Trump said, well, next time I talk to you, and there’s not 15 people around, I’ll tell you what that meant.

    You know, so he’s never explained exactly what it was, all right, that gave him pause.

    The implication is that it didn’t look very good for the Warren Commission, you know, but we don’t really know that.

    But the fact that they both went in there on the last day, and they warned him not to do it, I think that’s a very, very revealing kind of situation.

    Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it?

    It just makes you wonder why the truth was covered up for so long.

    And do you think that trust will be restored in the government when these files are made public?

    Well, I’m sure you’re aware of this. 65% of the public does not believe the official story on the JFK assassination.

    And a lot of social scientists believe that the lack of the belief in government today, which is very low, and the lack of the belief in the media, which is almost as low.

    A lot of them attribute this to the 1963-1964 events.

    You know, they trace the fall of the belief in government and the media because it began in 1964 when the Warren Commission report was first issued.

    And it was so vigorously defended by the mainstream media in the United States.

    And this includes CBS, NBC, and the New York Times.

    So hopefully we’ll get some restoration of this when all these files are finally out there in the open.

    And perhaps when Representative Luna’s investigation takes place in an open environment.

    One of the worst things about the Warren Commission is that it was a closed, all closed hearings.

    You know, so this contributed to the cynicism about their verdict.

    It’s interesting you bring up the media.

    I wanted to get your assessment on what role the mainstream media really played in covering up the truth, I suppose.

    You know, has it been frustrating for you hearing a narrative on repeat that’s possibly not the truth?

    It’s always been my belief that the main obstruction between the American public and the truth about the JFK case is what is termed today the mainstream media.

    Because from the very beginning, you know, from the very beginning, 1963 and 1964, the mainstream media was out there, okay, defending the Warren Commission verdict.

    To give you one very good example, in the fall of 1964, on the day the Warren Commission report was issued, both NBC and CBS broadcast shows endorsing its verdict.

    Now, Gabriella, the Warren Commission report is 888 pages long.

    How could you possibly read that many pages in one day and then report its contents without even referring to the evidence behind it?

    Because that wasn’t released until a month later.

    And this is what I think, I believe, that has contributed to this air of cynicism about the media.

    They’re reporting on something they couldn’t fact check.

    It would be impossible to fact check it.

    It’s interesting, you know, you’re expecting quite a bit from these files.

    Do you think there’s, as you say, 65% of Americans don’t believe that the Warren Commission got it right?

    Is there going to be much in here that’s going to shock us?

    You know, I really, I wish I could say one way or the other, but since I’m supposed to be a responsible kind of a person, without reading this stuff, you know, I can’t really say that.

    Now, I do know people have gone down to Washington, like Andrew Iler, okay, and a lawyer from Canada.

    And he told me that a lot of these closed files deal with Oswald and Mexico City.

    And let me add one last thing about this subject.

    The review board, which expired in 1998, made what is called a final determination on all the documents that they saw, which means that they all should have been declassified in October of 2017.

    If the agency made a final determination, that’s what that means.

    So the question is, why are we here in 2025 still debating about these documents that should have been declassified almost eight years ago?

    This is what gives people an air of cynicism and skepticism about this case.

    Absolutely.

    Look, when we do finally get the truth, what does this mean for RFK Jr., for the whole Kennedy family?

    Well, that’s a very good question also.

    Bobby Kennedy Sr., okay, never believed the official story.

    And as his son, Robert Kennedy Jr., he has never believed the official story about what happened to his uncle.

    And I think that when all this stuff comes out, finally,  you know, they’re going to both be vindicated on this subject.

    Also, I should say one other thing, and this isn’t commonly known.

    John F. Kennedy Jr., JFK’s only son, never believed the official story either.

    And according to an old girlfriend of his that doesn’t like to talk about it, but she does write letters, you know, one of his goals was to enter the political arena and try to find justice for what really happened to his father.

    Now, that’s a very interesting story, which I believe is largely true, that very few people know about.

    Yeah, well, absolutely.

    It’ll be really interesting to see what happens, and importantly for that family.

    The task force aimed at exposing federal secrets is also going to investigate the assassinations of RFK and MLK.

    It’s also going to look at the Epstein client list, the origins of COVID-19, UFOs, the 9-11 files.

    There’s so much that we’re going to learn about.

    What are you expecting from these other cases?

    You know, I thought that was really interesting.

    You know, there’s such a thing as picking up too much that you can carry.

    You know, that’s a lot of very serious cases for one committee to go into.

    You know, can you possibly do justice?

    I think it’s seven or eight cases to all those things.

    You know, but if they do, you know, and if they do find that something is faulty every place, well, then this really gives questions about, A, the mainstream media, and also our American historians, who seem to have been afraid to go into all the details about all of these cases, which the MLK, RFK, and JFK cases were really instrumental in what happened to America in the 60s.

    There would have been no Vietnam War if those three men had lived, which means about 58,000 Americans would be alive today and about 3 million Vietnamese.

    So there’s a whole change, a shift in the historical focus if those three people were killed by conspiracies.

    Where we are today in 2025, we are finally getting some truth, more transparency.

    Do you have faith going forward about the government in the U.S.?

    Do you expect there could be other instances being covered up in the future?

    Well, you know, it depends a lot on this congressional committee.

    You know, if these things are done in the open, and if they’re done with the best information that we have, and the committee members are really honest about their job, I think it might have a significant impact, you know, going forward.

    And I think it’ll be interesting to watch this.

    And, Gabrielle, I think one thing to look for is how much pressure from the outside is put on this committee.

    Because the MSM has a lot to lose if she comes out of the gate really swinging strong.

    Okay.

    Their credibility is going to be on the line.

    So that will be a very interesting tell about how that committee is going to deal with the pressures from the outside.

    They really don’t want this to happen.

    James DiEugenio, thank you so much for your time.

    How can we stay up to date with your work?

    Okay.

    I’m at kennedysandking.com.

    That’s my website.

    And I have a sub-stack under my name also.

    So that’s how you can read the most current information in this case.

    Thank you very much for having me on.

    Really appreciate you coming on the program.

    We’ll speak to you again soon.

    Okay.

    Bye-bye.

  • The Death of Tippit – Part 3

    The Death of Tippit – Part 3

    The Death of Tippit – Part 3

    By John Washburn

    My prior articles covered unusual movements of particular police officers in the period up to the death of Tippit and the 20 or so minutes immediately afterward. 

    The focus of this article is whether those officers also display peculiarities in the period up to and including the arrest of Oswald at the Theater.

    THE MOBIL GARAGE AT 10TH AND BECKLEY

    In my William Mentzel article, I gave a reason why Tippit would drive from Top Ten Records to E 10th Street via Sunset Avenue rather than the more obvious route via West 10th.  I deduced that because the Sunset route was the route Louis Cortinas said he took to get from Top Ten Records to the Tippit murder scene at 400 block E10th, on hearing of the shooting there. The route via Sunset would avoid the traffic lights at W 10th Street and Zang Boulevard. Those at Top Ten Records who saw Tippit leave there said he left at speed, hence it follows that Tippit would also have gone for the fastest route.

    I posited that he rendezvoused with Mentzel at E 10th and Beckley at 1:07 pm before then setting off to an ambush further east along E 10th approximately two minutes later. [https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-missing-calls-of-officer-mentzel-pt-1]

    The testimony of Officer Hutson (credit to Education Forum member Steve Thomas) reveals that there was a Mobil gas station at 10th and Beckley. This map shows the current site.

    WashburnTippit3 1

    Notes to map

    *The red dotted line is the route Louis Cortinas took from Top Ten Records (green spot) after he heard Tippit had been shot.

    “M” is the red site of the Mobil gas station. 

    The yellow dotted line is the Lansing alley, which runs parallel with E 10th and Jefferson.

    The blue spot is Beckley and Jefferson, where – per CE 2645 – Mentzel said he was after Tippit was shot. 

    The blue spot is also where Hawkins, Hutson and Baggett were, heading towards the Texas Theater before officers were alerted to go there by radio call at 1:45 pm. 

    The peach colored spot is where Sgt. Jerry Hill placed himself in his radio call at 1:21 pm, Twelfth and Beckley. 

    The purple spot is Hardy’s Shoe Store, where the fugitive was seen before purportedly entering the Texas Theater at approximately 1:45 pm. 

    HUTSON, HAWKINS AND BAGGETT

    The testimony of Officer Hutson (Vol VII p 26)  was taken at 9:00 am April 3, 1963 by Counsel Belin. Hutson said that he arrived at that gas station with officers Hawkins and Baggett. Hutson said the other two officers got out of the car to make a landline call and were inside the premises when the alarm regarding a suspect at the Marsalis Library came over the patrol radio. Hutson said he sounded the siren to get their attention. That event occurred at approximately 1:30 pm.

    Hutson had appeared in my prior article because his Warren Commission testimony contradicted Reserve Sgt. Croy’s description of traffic conditions on Main Street. Hutson’s testimony set out how he, as a three-wheel motorcycle patrol officer, hitched a car ride with Hawkins and Baggett after he’d arrived in Oak Cliff. He did that as his clutch had burnt out.

    Hutson’s testimony indicates that he arrived at the 400 block of E Jefferson sometime before 1:30 pm and then went to the Mobil location with Hawkins and Baggett from where he heard the library call (which turned out to be a false alarm) on patrol radio at 1:30 pm. 

    Hutson’s testimony also indicates there may be calls missing from the tape and transcripts. He said, “I believe they gave us a call for us to call. I mean, their number to call in.” 

    No such calls remain on transcribed tapes. 

    Contrast that with Officer Hawkins, who omitted any mention of the Mobil incident. His testimony (WC Vol VII, p. 91) was taken at 9:50 am on 3 April 1963 by Counsel Ball.  I set out the relevant extract so as to convey the lack of precision in his movements and the glaring omission of the incident at the Mobil Garage.

    Mr. BALL. Tell me, did you receive any instructions as to what to do?

    Mr. HAWKINS. No, sir, I did not.

    They called—I heard a citizen come in on the radio and state that an officer had been shot, and it looked like he was dead.

    We had just finished the accident at this time, and I was driving an officer, Baggett, and I proceeded to Oak Cliff to the general vicinity of the call after checking out with the dispatcher, stating that we were proceeding in that direction.

    We arrived in Oak Cliff, and there were several squads in the general vicinity of where the shooting had occurred- different stories had come out that the person was- the suspect had been seen in the immediate vicinity.

    Mr. BALL. Did you go to 10th and Patton?

    Mr. HAWKINS. We drove by 10th and Patton—we didn’t stop at the location.

    Mr. BALL. What did you do then?

    Mr. HAWKINS.  We circled the vicinity around Jefferson and Marsalis and in that area, talking to several people on the street, asking if they had seen anyone running up the alley or running down the street, and then they received a call, or I believe Officer Walker put out a call that he had just seen a white man running to the Oak Cliff Library, at which time we proceeded to this location. Officer Hutson had gotten into the car with us when we arrived in Oak Cliff, and there were three of us in the squad car- Officer Baggett, Officer Hutson, and myself.

    Mr. BALL. Hutson is also a patrolman?

    Mr. HAWKINS. Yes, sir.

    Mr. BALL. A uniformed patrolman?

    Mr. HAWKINS. Yes, sir; he is a three-wheel officer. We went to the library, and this turned out to be an employee of the library who had heard of the news and was apparently running in the library to tell the other employees there.

    We then, after this checked out, we then continued circling in the area around 10th and Patton and Marsalis and Jefferson.

    We then heard on the police radio that a suspicious person was at the TexasTheatre, and at this time, we proceeded to the theatre.

    Ball – one of the more challenging of all counsel – would not have been aware of this omission because Hawkins’ testimony was taken in the same hour with different counsel.

    Hawkins, referring to ‘circle[d] the vicinity of Marsalis and Jefferson’, which is where the library was, avoids the fact he’d been half a mile west at the gas station and that Hutson had to set off the siren to get him out of the shop  

    Hawkins’ actions also need to be seen in the light of the call he put out on Channel 2, DPD time 1:30 pm. Bear in mind that there is no reference to Westbrook directly or indirectly before this call on either Channel 1 or 2.

    221 (Patrolmen R. HAWKINS and E. R. BAGGETT) Can you give Captain WESTBROOK any information as to where he was shot?

    Dispatcher (Henslee). Repeat. 

    221 (Patrolmen R. HAWKINS and E. R. BAGGETT) Can you give Captain WESTBROOK any information as to where this happened?

    Dispatcher (Henslee). In the 400 block of East 10th near Patton.

    15 (Captain C. E. TALBERT). Did you say he was DOA (Dead On Arrival) at Methodist?

    The wording indicates Hawkins was with Westbrook in person to make that call on his behalf. But Hawkins’ question is extraordinary given that Westbrook, by his Warren Testimony, already knew the location where Tippit was shot. It had been on patrol radio, and Owens drove him there. Hawkins also knew the location. He’d been to 10th and Patton and drove by the murder scene.

    The dispatcher seems to have done a double take. The first question, “where was he shot” could be interpreted as was he “shot in the head”?  But the rephrasing the second time around, “where this happened,” removed such ambiguity.  

    Hawkins should have wondered why he had to ask the same question twice. As we shall see, Hawkins is also a person of interest as he handcuffed Oswald on arrest. 

    It is not possible to ascertain whether by 1:30 pm, Channel 2 DPD time was in step with real time or Channel 1’s still tampered time. However, there is a benchmark. 

    Both Channels had a command to cut sirens on Hines Boulevard. The odd Westbrook call was a minute before that. The library call – where Hutson places them at Mobil – was a minute after the Hines call. That odd call on Channel 2, therefore, times as approximately 1:28 pm, which fits with Westbrook’s second arrival in Oak Cliff.

    To recap on the calls that were on Channel 1.

    1:29     The Hines cut sirens call.

    1:30     CT Walker. “223, he’s in the library at Jefferson — east 500 block Marsalis and Jefferson”. That is the time Hutson, Hawkins, and Baggett were at the Mobil gas station, 10th and Beckley.

    1:31     Owens. “We’re all at the library”.

    1:35     Westbrook (550) made a call “What officer have you got commanding this area over here where this officer was shot?” area over here where this officer was shot?” Then Owens and others return to 410 E 10th. There is then more WFAA-TV (Reiland) footage, which showed Westbook, Poe, Owens, and Croy examining a wallet at the scene. 

    Westbrook testified that after the library incident, he was in the vicinity of Crawford Street and Storey Street. Those locations are, respectively, two blocks and one block from the Mobil gas station. He gave the Warren Commission no clear reason why he would have been there. 

    Mr. BALL. Now, you came from the library—where is that library?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. The library is at Marsalis and Jefferson, sir. It must be here on Turner Plaza, right here.

    Mr. BALL. You drove west on Jefferson, did you?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. We drove west on Jefferson.

    Mr. BALL. And you got out of the car where?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. We got out of the car about here [indicating].

    Mr. BALL. At what street?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. It was between two streets, and I would say it was between this Storey and Crawford.

    Mr. BALL. Why did you get out of the car at that time?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. Just more or less searching- just no particular reason- just searching the area.

    Mr. BALL. You were just looking around to see what you could see?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. Yes, and at this time, I had a shotgun—I had borrowed a shotgun from a patrolman.

    Mr. BALL. Where did you go when you got out of the car?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. I walked through, and this is a car lot or a parking area, right along in here, and I don’t know whether I am wrong on my location or not, but I think I’m right.

    SUMMARY

    Summarising all of that in order to try to make some sense of it. 

    Westbrook arrived in Oak Cliff twice. The first time, he arrived with Owens. He then went back to the Depository, returning in Car 207. On his second arrival in an unmarked car, he made contact with Hawkins, and at approximately 1:28 pm, he asked Hawkins to put out a call on Channel 2, which gave the impression this was his first arrival in Oak Cliff. 

    Hawkins then went to the Mobil gas station and made a landline call. Westbrook was then in the area towards the Mobil gas station. Thereafter, Westbrook was present for the discovery of a planted wallet at the Tippit murder scene, and then Westbrook also discovered a jacket.

    Westbrook later tried to cover up the finding of the jacket and the wallet. Hawkins covered up making a call from the Mobil garage and placed himself six blocks away to the east. 

    WESTBROOK, THE JACKET, and WALLET

    Westbrook’s subterfuge is betrayed by the Reiland TV film (the wallet) and the submission to the Warren Commission regarding the jacket. As Henry Hurt so ably pointed out, this jacket had two laundry marks on it.  The FBI visited over 700 establishments in Dallas and New Orleans.  They could not find one that could match either mark. (Reasonable Doubt, p. 151) Further, the FBI could not find any other article of Oswald’s clothing with a laundry or dry-cleaning mark. As Hurt also notes, the Commission made no mention of the extensive –and failed- FBI effort to find a match.  In a real investigation, Westbrook would have been pointedly interrogated about this lacuna.

    The evidence would seem to suggest a situation whereby Hawkins, Westbrook, and others were communicating to put the final phase of the original plan in place. As many have theorized, the plan being the elimination of Oswald at the Texas Theater; after the appearance of a decoy to give the impression that Oswald had arrived on his own shortly before his arrest.  Were that the intended plan, then there would be the unexpected difficulty of more officers being in the area due to the impromptu killing of Tippit, and the decoy being on the run from the Tippit murder scene.

    An operation like that would require two things. A group of accomplice officers would need to be the first to arrive at the Texas Theater, to secure the decoy and deal with Oswald. Meanwhile, other officers would need to be distracted to go elsewhere by false alarms. 

    There is support for both in the evidence. 

    From Hutson’s testimony:

    Mr. Hutson. Yes, sir. Then, we left that location as we were proceeding west on East Jefferson, and as we approached the 100 block of East Jefferson, the radio dispatcher said that a suspect had just entered the Texas Theater.

    The 100 block of E Jefferson was just two blocks east of the Theater, which was in the 200 block of W Jefferson. East and West Jefferson meet at Beckley. That indicates Hawkins was already headed west towards the Texas Theater before the radio dispatch call at 1:45 pm made it a place of interest. 

    However, Hawkins said of that,

    We then heard on the police radio that a suspicious person was at the Texas Theatre, and at this time we proceeded to the theatre.”

    Hawkins omitted that he was headed towards the Texas Theater, before the call on police radio.  

    NO FUGITIVE BUT FALSE ALARMS

    There were also false alarms. It is relevant which officers made those false alarms. 

    For the fugitive – by the Warren Commission version of events – to have got to the Texas Theater on foot, he would have had to cross the six lanes of Zang Boulevard and the four lanes of Beckley Avenue. Either crossing would be conspicuous. Also, something Commission zealots do not like to admit, the distance from 10th and Patton to the theatre is significantly less than from the Beckley boarding house to the Tippit murder scene. It was possible to get there in 10-11 minutes.

    Assistant Counsel Liebeler commented on that. 

    “Then I was surprised to learn that the police radio did not send out information about the suspect being in the Texas Theater until 1:45, about 30 minutes after the police first learned of the Tippit killing from Benavides over Tippit’s radio. What were Oswald and Brewer doing during this 30 minutes? Oswald was strangely inactive during this period, considering all that he had done in the 45 minutes following the assassination.”

    Let us speculate: a reason for the lack of detection in that half hour because the fugitive was being held safely – in a vehicle – before the final part of the tableau was played out?

    Altogether, there were four false alarms directing police to the east and north of the Tippit murder scene, away from Beckley and Zang. Each false alarm was made by a person of interest, and as covered later, each person was one of the early arrivals at the theater.

    1. The furniture stores in 400 block E Jefferson, the alarm led by Hill,
    2. Officer McDonald put out a call telling people to go to the (Abundant Life) Church at E10th and Crawford, 
    3. CT Walker put out an announcement that the fugitive was in the Library at Marsalis and Jefferson. 
    4. At approximately 1:40 pm, Westbrook (using 550) put out an announcement: 550: …and work to North Jefferson. We’ve got a witness that seen him go north.

    BACK TO MENTZEL

    Despite Tippit being shot in Mentzel’s district 91, Mentzel himself made no declaration on the radio of where he was until after Oswald was arrested.

    Until the Texas Theater (west of Beckley and Zang) became a point of interest after 1:40 pm, it’s difficult to see why Mentzel would – legitimately – stay away from the area of action, which was east of Beckley and Zang. 

    Mentzel didn’t play an overt role in the arrest of Oswald, but he was in the vicinity of the theater. That’s apparent because after Oswald was arrested, Mentzel offered, over patrol radio, to deal with the car CT Walker had left behind at the theater. Walker having got into the car which carried Oswald to City Hall.

    Again, let us speculate: could the purpose of Hill’s call “12th and Beckley” have been to signal to confederates that the fugitive had been picked up safely? 12thand Beckley was 250 yards from Hardy’s Shoe Store, 213 W Jefferson, two blocks north and one block west. Was Mentzel harboring the fugitive, having rendezvoused with Hill?

    But prior to that, in my Mentzel article, there was a gap in my assumption as to the form of a trigger that could have caused Tippit to head east at the right time after a rendezvous with Mentzel. The “right time” being after the components of the ambush were in place.

    I had deduced that Tippit was taking landline instruction from the phone at Top Ten Records, on East Jefferson.  Tippit merely needed to listen rather than saying anything.  This was at approximately 1:00 pm, departing two or three minutes later at speed. 

    Mentzel, per CE 2645, was talking on the landline at Luby’s Cafeteria, also on E Jefferson, a short distance to the west of Top Ten Records. I assumed a rendezvous at the 10th and Beckley (the Mobil Gas station) as that would account for several things.  

    Firstly, why did Tippit leave Top Ten at speed only to then drive slowly along E 10th to his demise? The inference I drew was that he may have gotten new instructions by a rendezvous.

    Secondly, Edgar Tippit, the victim’s father,  told author Joe McBride that an officer–all but certain Mentzel–was working with his son during Tippit’s last minutes alive. (McBride, Into the Nightmare, pp. 427-30) Both men were a short distance apart at Top Ten and Luby’s, close enough for a simple rendezvous.

    However, if the objective was to get Tippit to 10th and Beckley as a trap, then Mentzel would hardly be able to walk up to Tippit to say, “let’s go to E10th and Beckley”. The fact that there was a landline at the gas station at E 10th and Beckley ameliorates the problem. Mentzel, or possibly Tippit himself, would have been able to make a landline call from there, and that would have been the trigger for Tippit to head east.

    Mentzel’s story that he was using the landline at Luby’s to get through to DPD HQ provided some cover for his having been seen using that landline.  Similarly, Mentzel’s statement in CE 2645 that he was cruising in the area of Zang and W10th would give a degree of cover if it were to come out he’d been seen at the gas station on Beckley and E10th (those two locations are 150 yards apart). 

    WHY DID TOP TEN ONLY EMERGE IN 1981?

    The story regarding Tippit and Top Ten records didn’t come out until Earl Golz wrote about it in 1981. Some Dallas police officers must have known about Tippit and Top Ten. Louis Cortinas said he drove straight to the Tippit murder scene on hearing on the radio he had been shot. It would be apparent to him that he’d been one of the last people to see Tippit alive. Wouldn’t he have reported that at the scene?

    But this memorandum from 3 December 1963 was sent by Carl Walters, a clerk to the Warren Commission, to the FBI Special Agent in Charge, Dallas Office. It concerns a phone call from a “John D Whitten” stating that Oswald was seen in Top Ten Records the morning of the assassination.

    WashburnTippit3 2

    The Memorandum has the annotation “No Action – Oswald was at work all morning 11/22/63”. 

    So, Top Ten Records was a place of interest in December 1963, and that memorandum provided evidence that Oswald was impersonated on the morning of the assassinations at a place in proximity to the Texas Theater. I return to this point later since there is also evidence that police officers searched the Texas Theater on the morning of the assassination. 

    Interestingly, a John Whitten was a CIA officer assigned by CIA Director Richard Helms to review the CIA records on Oswald. Was he the source of the information? There is no – local – John Whitten in the Dallas City Directory for 1963. Researcher Bill Simpich thinks it is.

    Whitten’s preliminary finding that Oswald acted alone was delivered by Helms to President Lyndon Johnson the day Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby, 24 November 1963 [https://www.history-matters.com/essays/frameup/WhatJaneRomanSaid/WhatJaneRomanSaid_5.htm]

    Whitten continued the investigation with a staff of 30. On December 6, Whitten read an FBI report on Oswald showing that the FBI had information about Oswald’s links with pro-Castro Cuban groups, which neither the FBI nor Helms had communicated to his investigation. He complained to Helms and James Angleton that this information rendered his initial conclusion “completely irrelevant”.

    Helms took the investigation away from Whitten and handed it to Jim Angleton.

    Whitten testified to the HSCA in 1979 that as soon as he learned he had been denied key files on Oswald, he complained to Helms. That was around Christmas time 1963. 

    Whitten was never promoted again and took off to Vienna in self-imposed exile.  According to Jeff Morley, he became a singer.

    THE ARREST – THE OFFICERS ENTERING THE TEXAS THEATER

    A document for the FBI, written by James Bookhout, of 30 November 1963 states that Officers CT Walker, Hutson, McDonald and Hawkins were in on the arrest of Oswald.[https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/9/4607/7460709/content/arcmedia/dc-metro/rg-272/605417-key-persons/mcdonald_m_n/mcdonald_m_n.pdf]

    But Westbrook put himself there by his own account, as did Hill.

    CT Walker on 2 December 1963 said [https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth339462/] he entered with Hutson and McDonald but omitted Hawkins. 

    Hawkins on 2 December 1963 said  [https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth338399/m1/1/] he entered with Hutson, McDonald, and CT Walker.

    McDonald on 3 December 1963 said [https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth340009/] he entered with “three others”. 

    Hutson on 3 December 1963 said [https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth338138/m1/1/] he entered with Hawkins and CT Walker but omitted McDonald.

    By the time of their Warren Commission testimonies, there were some changes to what these people said. Only CT Walker said the same as in December 1963. McDonald named three officers and said he entered with CT Walker, Hutson and Hawkins. Hutson again said he had entered with Hawkins but clarified that CT Walker and McDonald were joining them on the floor of the theater.  Hutson’s testimony is clearly articulated, internally consistent, and consistent with radio. It undermines those superior officers, displaying a pattern of inconsistent accounts. 

    Jerry Hill, in his 5 December 1963 statement, stated [https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth337082/m1/1/] that he entered the front of the theater with Agent Bob Apple (there was no Warren testimony for Apple to check against). He immediately went to the balcony. Hill said Captain Talbert was there and asked if the roof had been checked. In that statement, Hill also said that the radio message that a suspect was in the theater came out at 1:55 pm. However, that call was, in fact, at 1:45 pm, and even the tampered DPD tape had corrected the time by then. 

    McDonald said 2:00 pm was the time of entering the Texas Theater. That’s wrong – the time of entry was 1:50 pm. By 2:00 pm, Oswald was already being taken to City Hall. CT Walker said the 1:45 pm radio call was at 2:00 pm. Hawkins and Stringer were silent on the time. 

    Contrast that with the 3 December 1963 statement of Hutson, who correctly puts the time of the 1:45 pm call as 1:45 pm. 

    For Hill, McDonald, and CT Walker to all be adding 10-15 minutes to the real time is consistent with parties adding time to make the time of Tippit’s shooting appear later than it was. But in so doing, they did not realize that there would later be transcripts where the time stamps would synchronise with real time.  Because by 1:45 pm, those events were publicly verifiable. 

    Making matters worse for Hill, McDonald, and CT Walker, is the fact that the three-quarter hour of 1:45 pm is a pretty easy time to remember.

    HUTSON PULLED A GUN

    Back to Hutson’s testimony, which said: [https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth338138/]

    Mr. Hutson. Yes, sir. Then, we left that location as we were proceeding west on East Jefferson, and as we approached the 100 block of East Jefferson, the radio dispatcher said that a suspect had just entered the Texas Theatre.

    …then……

    Mr. HUTSON. We pulled up to this location, and I was the first out of the car to hit the ground. As I walked up to the fire exit doors, Officers Hawkins and Baggett were getting out of the car, and the door to the theater opened, and this unknown white male was exiting. I drew my pistol and put it on him and told him to put up his hands and not to make a move, and he was real nervous and scared and said: “I am not the one. I just came back to open the door. I work up the street at the shoe store, and Julia sent me back to open the door so you could get in.” I walked up and searched him briefly, and I could see by the description and his clothes that he wasn’t the person we were looking for. Then I entered the theater from this door, and Officer Hawkins with me, and Officer Baggett stayed behind to cover the fire exit door. We walked down the bottom floor of the theater, and I was joined there by Officer Walker by me, and as we walked up the north aisle from the center section, I observed Officer McDonald walking up the south aisle from the center section, and we observed two suspects sitting near the front in the center section.

    Mr. BELIN. You were on the right center or the left center?

    Mr. HUTSON. I was on the left center.

    Mr. BELIN. That would be the left center,

    Hutson testified at 9:00 pm on April 3, 1964. CT Walker testified on the same day at 1:30 pm. Both of these testimonies were taken by Belin. The timing of those testimonies is relevant. Belin asked Walker whether anyone drew a gun on entry. But Walker, despite claiming to have entered with Hutson, only referred to himself as having a gun. 

    McDonald testified that he drove to the front of the theater and then walked to the rear of the theatre, where he met Hutson, Hawkins, and CT Walker. But McDonald too failed to mention the incident of the pulling of the gun. 

    That indicates that only Hutson and Hawkins initially entered the theater, but CT Walker and McDonald for some reason pretended that they’d entered at the same time. 

    WESTBROOK

    Westbrook’s discrepancies were again legion. He said to the Warren Commission and in a report dated 3 December 1963 [https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth338798/] that he, Stringer, and FBI Agent Barrett (there was no Warren testimony for either of those two) went in a squad car with an unknown officer driving to the rear alley of the theater. Westbrook failed to mention Hutson and the gun incident with the shoe shop employee Brewer. Westbrook also said that there were two or three cars at the rear. But Hawkin’s 1:47 pm radio message said that there were five cars at the rear. 

    Barrett, on November 23, 1963, filed an FBI report. [page 3: https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/9/4607/7460709/content/arcmedia/dc-metro/rg-272/605417-key-persons/mcdonald_m_n/mcdonald_m_n.pdf] He refers to entering via the front and made no reference to Westbrook.

    Ewell said that Westbrook drove him to the front of the theater with Stringer in an unmarked car.

    However, Sgt. Stringer, on 3 December 1963, said that he was questioning a boy in the 100 block of S Patton with an officer when the alert at the Texas Theater came through. And that officers Hawkins and Baggett drove him to the alley at the rear of the theater. [https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth337160/m1/1/]

    Stringer lied. Firstly, he was not at South Patton the minute before the Texas Theater call came through. He was on Crawford Street putting out the message on the radio regarding the examination of the jacket. Second, he did not arrive with Bagget and Hawkins; Hutson did. Third, he made no mention of Hutson pulling the gun on the person who opened the theater rear door.

    By that, Westbrook and Stringer were both lying about the method of arrival and the point of entry. No one else supports either of their accounts other than Hawkins. Who, by the time of his Warren Commission testimony, had changed his December story to add Westbrook.

    “Mr. BALL. Where did you park?

    Mr. HAWKINS. I parked my squad car in the alley at the rear of the theater.

    Mr. BALL. Then, what did you do? 

    Mr. HAWKINS. Officer-I believe Officer McDonald was at the back door at the time, and Officer Hutson and Captain Westbrook and Officer Walker and myself went in the rear door. All went to the rear door, and at this time we saw a white male there and began talking to him and he identified himself as being the manager of a shoe store next door and that he was the person who had noted the suspicious acting on the suspect, and he at that time was brought into the rear of the theater and on the stage.” 

    To summarize: Hawkins had put out a strange call for Westbrook and then made a land-line call from the Mobil garage at 10th and Beckley at 1:30 pm. Hawkins’ car was the closest to the theater at the time of the 1:45 pm call, already heading towards it. CT Walker and McDonald were in the theater very soon after (or possibly before, via the front). Westbrook was pretending he had entered the back of the theater, avoiding the fact he’d driven and parked at the front. All of those irregularities indicate that there was more going on than merely the arrest of Oswald. 

    A HYPOTHESIS

    It might be that certain officers – all of whom later lied on one matter or other – did not need to rely on the message on patrol radio that a person had entered the Texas Theater if they already knew what was to happen next.

    Those officers were Westbrook, McDonald, Hill, CT Walker, and Hawkins. Four of whom had issued false alarms, and one had made a landline call from the Mobil gas station.

    That then takes us back to the proposition that there were two persons of interest in the Texas Theater. Oswald, who–according to employee Butch Burroughs–had been there from just after 1 pm on the first floor; and the decoy, who entered at about 1:40 pm and went to the balcony. With that, Oswald was taken out of the front, the other out the back. 

    Is there further evidence for this hypothesis? Yes. The choreography of officer movements and the layout of the theater are relevant.

    THE BALCONY, DOWNSTAIRS, THE FRONT AND THE BACK

    The first radio reports had the suspect being in the balcony of the Texas Theater. Butch Burroughs said Oswald was in the theater from just after 1:00 pm. Bernard Haire said an Oswald lookalike was taken out of the back. Officer Stringfellow filed a report saying Oswald was arrested in the balcony.

    The balcony of the Texas Theater was accessed from stairs at the front of the Jefferson Street foyer, or by an external fire exit in the alley at the rear. The main floor of the theater was accessed either from the main doors at the back of the foyer or ground level fire exits opening to the alley at the rear. It was also possible to get from the outside front to the outside back, and vice versa, via an outside tunnel alley. 

    It is not disputed that Oswald was arrested on the first floor and left via the front. But if the fugitive was in the balcony and taken out via the back, the question is who went up there to deal with that and who assisted with that person being taken out the back.

    Hill admitted he went in via the front and up to the balcony. Westbrook seems to have covered up that he, too, entered via the front. McDonald seems to have parked at the front, and then either gone in via the front entrance, or used the rear entrance via the tunnel alley. 

    Hutson’s testimony reveals an odd command from Westbrook:

    Mr. HUTSON. The gun was taken from the suspect’s hand by Officer McDonald and somebody else. I couldn’t say exactly. They were all in on the struggle, and Officer Hawkins, in other words, he simultaneously, we decided to handcuff him. We had restrained him after the pistol was taken, but he was still resisting arrest, and we stood him up and I let go of his neck at this time and took hold of his right arm and attempted to bring it back behind him, and Officer Hawkins and Walker and myself attempted to handcuff him. At this time, Sgt. Jerry Hill came up and assisted as we were handcuffing. Then Captain Westbrook came in and gave the order to get him out of here as fast as you can and don’t let anybody see him, and he was rushed out of the theater. I was in the row of seats behind. I saw Officer Walker and Sgt. Jerry Hill had hold of him, and that is the last I ever saw him. 

    As emphasized: Why would Westbrook say, “don’t let anybody see him”? That order was not obeyed for Oswald. Oswald was seen and filmed leaving the front of the theater. Did Hutson overhear Westbrook referring to a second person who would be taken out the back?

    But before dealing with that, another question arises. Why did the Theater staff not inform the audience and shut for the day once it was apparent the President had been shot and was dead? Wouldn’t such an outcome be a risk to any plan to make the theater the place for Oswald’s arrest?

    The testimony of Julie Postal, the ticket seller, has points of interest regarding that theory:

    Mrs. POSTAL. No, sir; I was looking up, as I say, when the cars passed, as you know, they make a tremendous noise, and he ducked in as my boss went that way to get in his car.

    Mr. BALL. Who is your boss?

    Mrs. POSTAL. Mr. John A. Callahan.

    Mr. BALL. Where did you say he was?

    Mrs. POSTAL. Yes; I say, they bypassed each other, actually, the man ducked in this way, and my employer went thataway, to get in his car.

    By that, Callahan, who managed the theater, not only didn’t shut the theater, but got in his car after Postal purportedly saw someone “duck in”.  Elsewhere, she had denied seeing someone duck in herself, but here she said he passed Callahan. That oddity can’t be dismissed as just her observation. Detective LT Cunningham said:

    We were questioning a young man who was sitting on the stairs in the balcony when the manager told us the suspect was on the first floor. (Report to Chief J. E. Curry 12/03/63)

    Detective John B. Toney said: There was a young man sitting near the top of the stairs, and we ascertained from manager on duty that this subject had been in the theater since about 12:05 PM. (Report to Chief J. E. Curry 12/03/63)

    However, Julia Postal testified that the Theater opened at 12:45 pm. The “manager” can’t have been Butch Burroughs, he wasn’t the manager, and he said he saw no one that early. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, pp. 353-54) 

    Greg Parker has published some background to the ownership of the Texas Theater [https://gregrparker.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Texas-Theatre-mysteries-5-1.pdf?595453&595453] which links Callahan and the theater ownership to right-wing interests. Why would Callahan absent himself from the scene of a major event, which had caused his staff to call the police, at precisely the point it was heating up?

    LAURA KITTRELL

    Laura Kittrell was a Texas Employee Commission employee who had interviewed Oswald in connection with his seeking work in October 1962 and again in October 1963.

    She gave a dossier of evidence to the HSCA, “the Kittrell manuscript”. The handwritten notes at the beginning are transcribed in type towards the end [https://digitalcollections-baylor.quartexcollections.com/Documents/Detail/sightings-of-lho-oct.-1963/687524?item=687528].

    Kittrell’s father, William Henderson Kittrell, had been secretary of the Democratic Executive Committee of Texas, and she took 22 November 1963 off work to attend the Kennedy lunch at the Trade Mart. She said when she returned to her office the following week, her files had been taken by the FBI. She said that all the records relating to her interviews with Oswald in October 1963 were omitted from the Warren Commission report.

    Kittrell thereafter took an interest in the assassination and interviewed Tom Bowden, the former caretaker of the Texas Theater, in 1976. He told her something remarkable: that on the morning of the assassination, police officers searched the theater. (See page 166 of the dossier). 

    The dossier also shows how Kittrell’s interest was active well before the Warren Commission had reported. 

    A Department of Justice Attorney, Barefoot Sanders, sent information from Kittrell to Warren Commission Counsels Jenner and Liebeler on April 9, 1964, stating, “I enclose a message of some length which I had the Secret Service pick up from Miss Laura Kittrell. Since this seems to concern an area of inquiry of the Commission in which you two are interested, I am forwarding it to you for your consideration and perusal” (page 5 of the dossier).

    The dossier shows she wrote to J Edgar Hoover, and that on December  26, 1963, she wrote to Senator Robert Kennedy. She wrote to Robert Kennedy again on June 4, 1965, in frustration that she had not been called to testify for the Warren Commission. Her letter to Kennedy was sent from his office to Hoover, who wrote to Kennedy on August 27, 1965, stating, “there is some question as to her emotional stability”. 

    Hoover’s response also casts doubt as to whether she had contact with the Secret Service. But the letter from Barefoot Sanders confirms that she had. 

    The attachment Sanders sent is missing from the dossier. The letter from Hoover downplays her father’s political connections. But page 156 of the dossier shows Earl Golz of the Dallas Morning News stating that the father was prominent and had been acquainted with Roosevelt, Truman, and John F Kennedy. The effect of Hoover’s inaccurate letter to Robert Kennedy was to cast doubt on Kittrell and throw him off the scent. The Warren Commission files do not have a file for Kittrell. Kittrell said that the first person she met in October 1962 was Oswald but that the second person she met in October 1963 didn’t have the same bearing (page 166 of the dossier). 

    She said that Oswald himself on  October 4, 1962 “looked very military as neat as a pin” and was “trim, energetic, compact and well-knitted” but the second person she saw on 22 October 1963 behaved badly and said he was “a trifling, shirtless, good-for-nothing lout who sprawled oafishly over his chair”. She was trained in asking questions to identify potential Social Security fraud.

    As Kittrell’s interest can be pinned with certainty as early as December 1963, then her statements and interest cannot be put down to ‘conspiracy theories’ that grew as a result of the Warren Commission report. The report wasn’t published until September 1964. 

    Kittrell said that the first Oswald in 1962 was the person all now know as Oswald. She said he had taken an aptitude test twice and on the verbal reasoning part of that test scored 126 and 127. She said that was the level expected from a college graduate, as the normal range was 100-120.

    Kittrell also noted that Oswald’s second child was born on 20th October 1963. She stated that it was quite strange for him to be at the Employment Commission on 22nd October 1963, given that plus the fact he already had a job at the Depository. She, therefore, suspected fraud of some kind. 

    BURT GRIFFIN AND CRAFARD

    That all indicates that at some time before 9 April 1964, Kittrell had independently reached the same conclusion as some Commission staff. What was it?

    A memo from Burt Griffin to staff, March 13, 1964, stated that Laverne “Larry Crafard” was one of four persons who they suspected might be impersonating Oswald. [https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-tippit-tapes-a-re-examination]

    The dossier contains an FBI document dated  August 17, 1965 (page 37 of the dossier), which summarizes the issues. That document states that Kittrell later saw a photograph of Crafard in the Warren Commission papers, and she said he was the person she had interviewed as “Oswald” in October 1963.  It was Counsel Jenner who had asked Ruth Paine on March 20, 1964 (Vol III  p 94) whether Oswald resembled Crafard, and she said he did. 

    Further, the Commission Staff note of March 10, 1964, had specifically asked for questioning regarding any discrepancies in the appearance and habits of Oswald at 1026 N Beckley and at Mary Bledsoe’s house (see my earlier article)

    [https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/mary-bledsoe-and-the-bus-part-2]

    Especially relevant is the Commission staff giving attention to Crafard being a possible decoy for the set-up of Oswald. But not calling Kittrell to the stand. The dossier shows that Kittrell was asked by the person she interviewed in October 1963 if she had visited the State Fair. She said no. Crafard told the FBI that he came to Dallas with the State Fair on 15 October 1963 and was a roustabout for a side show. (Crafard Exhibit 5226, Warren Commission, [https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh19/pdf/WH19_Crafard_Ex_5226.pdf] ). If it was Crafard, did he ask that question to ensure she would not remember seeing him in that role?

    If what Kittrell said is true, then she would indicate two things.

    Firstly, Crafard–as the Commission suspected–was impersonating Oswald in Dallas in November 1963. 

    Secondly, on the morning of 22 November 1963, the manager of the Texas Theater was in some way made aware of the police using his building for some purpose later in the day.

    Overall, Kittrell’s actions and attention would make redundant any plan to involve her in painting a story of an unstable Oswald.  She would be a woman who not only wasn’t duped but was dangerous.

    PUTTNG IT ALL TOGETHER

    The evidence I have set strongly suggests a group of police officers involved in the planned assassination of Kennedy involving:

    • getaway operations, as set out in earlier articles,
    • safe movement of Oswald in a Rambler to the Texas Theater (likely assisted by Officer Nelson),
    • staking out the Texas Theater (Mentzel),
    • evidence planting at the depository (led by Hill).

    That was supplemented by a decoy operation which involved the Marsalis bus. Otherwise, why single it out? That element of the operation was supposed to involve Tippit who, as with the other patrol officers, was under the command of Sgt. Hugh Davis. 

    A plan to have Oswald portrayed as a decoy lone assassin – who would be eliminated at the Texas Theater having been duped – would require another decoy. Oswald would carry the risk of absconding if he made his own way to the Texas Theater, if he figured what was really happening. But securing Oswald’s passage by chaperoning him goes against a lone nut narrative. That is why a second decoy would be needed to give the appearance that Oswald had made his own way to the Theater, via 1026 N Beckley, walking and on public transport. 

    The purpose of visiting 1026 N Beckley would be to explain how ‘Oswald’ had managed to acquire a jacket (having left the Depository without one) as well as a pistol. 

    I posit that the Texas Theater operation was supposed to involve Tippit, Mentzel and McDonald, (all under the command of Sgt. Davis), CT Walker and Hawkins (both traffic division). Walker, like Mentzel, was in the area of Oak Cliff at the time of the assassination of Kennedy, near E Jefferson and E10th. Captain Westbrook had the seniority to be the center of co-ordinated corruption of the DPD for that plan. 

    The successful operation in Dallas may have been a back-up “off the shelf” operation for the prior unexecuted plans to assassinate Kennedy in Chicago on November 2, 1963, and in Tampa on November 18, 1963. The other two may also have been dress rehearsals for the successful attempt in Dallas.

    Per Exhibit 5002, Hill was not formally allocated to Westbrook’s bureau for November. But Hill was working out of Westbrook’s office. Was Hill’s role one of shifting the allocation of officers and leaning on officers to participate?

    If Tippit had turned mid-operation, then he would have become a liability to everyone else involved. From 12:30 pm, everyone with any involvement would be guilty of conspiracy to assassinate the President. It would follow that Westbrook would have to go along with and organise an operation to improvise and associate the decoy with the ambush of Tippit. Hutson not going along with that is more evidence that he was not a confederate. Was his chance presence in Hawkins’ car – due to his burned-out clutch – and thence his presence for the arrest of Oswald a factor in Oswald not being killed in the Texas Theater? 

    Indeed, was the absence of Tippit also a problem? If his role was protecting the decoy on the way to the theater, then it would follow that he would be the right person to deal with the decoy at the theater. According to work done by Bill Drennas, Tippit himself was seen at Top Ten Records on the morning of the assassinations. [https://www.jfk-assassination.net/top10.htm]

    If Oswald had been killed at the Theater, then there would have been no TV coverage of him saying he was a “patsy”. There would have been no identity parades. Jack Ruby would not have needed to kill him. Jack Ruby’s role would have been invisible. So would Larry Crafard’s presence in Dallas. 

    What is certain is that Hutson’s presence in Hawkins’ car has enabled us to observe that Hawkins was lying. Just as Owens’ evidence shows that Croy, Hill, and Westbrook were lying, too.

    WHERE WAS DAVIS?

    In addition to that, there is a missing officer to consider, Sgt. Hugh Davis. CE 2645 says: 

    “On May 27, 1964. HUGH F. DAVIS, Sergeant, Dallas, Texas, Police Department, advised that on November 22, 1963, he was the supervising sergeant assigned to Districts 80 and 90, of Platoon 2, which was working the 7:00 am to 3:00 pm. shift that month. Sergeant DAVIS advised he recalled at the time of the assassination call he was driving Unit Number 179, an unmarked car, and was dispatched thereafter to the Texas School Book Depository at Elm and Houston Streets, where he remained until 3:45 P.M. that afternoon. Sergeant DAVIS advised that the course of his travels took him nowhere near 1026 North Beckley in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.”

    The reference to Districts 80 and 90 omitted that Davis had – by the testimony of Owens – taken over control of Tippit (District 78). There is a further discrepancy concerning the command and supervision of southwest Dallas that day. That is apparent from a study of the patrol district numbers and call sign system.

    Southwest Dallas comprised patrol districts 71-99, Downtown 101-119, Northwest 21-39, and Northeast 41-69. Call signs that ended in zero, being 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 110, were for supervisory use for the next 9 numbers. So, call sign 70 would be the supervisor for 71-79 districts, etc. There were no districts 00 to 09 or 11 to 19. Those were used for senior officers higher up the chain of command. Because Owens replaced southwest Dallas Lieutenant Fulgham, Owens was allocated call sign 19. 

    Call sign 70 was allocated to Sgt Samuel E Varner, reported in CE 5002 as in “Special Enforcement Detail”. 80 was allocated to Sgt Hugh Davis. 90 wasn’t allocated that day as Davis was in overt control of 81-89 and 91-99. 

    Therefore, by that system, Sgt. Varner (70) was in supervisory charge of districts 71-79, hence Tippit (78). Sgt. Owens (19) was in commanding charge of Varner and Davis.

    Looking back to what Owens said to the FBI on 20 May 1963. [https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-tippit-tapes-a-re-examination]

    “Sergeant OWENS advised he could not furnish any information as to when or how TIPPIT’s assignment from District 78 had been changed as he, OWENS, had gone to lunch and had not returned during the time that TIPPIT’s assignment had been changed.”

    Owens then stated that Tippit’s command (78) changed to the same command as Angell (81). That was the command of Davis. 

    Varner makes no impact on the patrol radio tapes. Varner also has no mention in CE2645. By what Owens said and the absence of Varner in any patrol radio traffic, it seems Davis took supervisory control over all of southwest Dallas, 70s, 80s, and 90s. On the basis that Davis was in charge of so many officers, one would expect a radio presence from him. 

    Davis (80) said “Clear” at 12:38 pm. There is then a call to 80 (Davis) at 12:42 pm, 80 says “80 Code 5,” which is en route. That call is missing from all transcripts, including the independent Shearer/Kimball transcript. That call was 30 seconds before Angell announced he was “still Lansing and 8th”. There is then no message from Davis for the rest of the day. 

    The next mention of Davis is from Owens at 1:42 pm, who asked, “is 80 in service?”. Despatch then called “80”, Owens then said “think he was called to Elm and Central. We need somebody to notify the officer’s wife”. There are then no more calls to, from, or about Davis. 

    Hence, Davis was invisible from 12:42 pm (by what remains on the tapes). That is extraordinary given what was going on in Southwest Dallas and given he had supervisory control of all officers there, including the one who was shot. 

    The matter of contacting a dead officer’s wife isn’t trivial. So why would someone supervising an out-of-the-ordinary number of patrol officers be incommunicado at the Depository? Was Davis, being the covert commander of Tippit, the person Tippit wished to meet face to face after he left Gloco, heading down Lancaster at speed?  Was this who Mentzel was communicating with?

    If Westbrook and Hill set up the decoy element of the ambush of Tippit, then someone would have likely been setting up the killing itself. Witnesses at the murder scene said that Tippit behaved as if he knew the person who shot him. Could it have been someone on the force like policeman Harry Olsen? (McBride, p.584 ) The drive from Olsen’s house-guarding location near Lansing and 8th to the murder scene was just 500 yards via the Lansing alley.

    The positions of Lewis (35) and Parker (56) also require similar analysis to the above. There was no supervisor with call sign 50, which is who Parker should have been accountable to. Sgt. Putnam (60), as a possible substitute for 50 was allocated to other duties.

    Bearing in mind that Parker was supposed to be 20 miles away in Garland, northeast Dallas, it is odd that immediately after the radio blackout at 12:30 pm, the Dispatcher asked at 12:33 pm, “Anyone know where 56 is?” That is not an obvious priority question given that the President had just been shot in Downtown Dallas. Making matters worse, when Parker did reply at 12:44 pm, he said he was at “East Jefferson”. Far out of the district and in Southwest Dallas.

    Childon (30) would have been in supervisory control of Lewis, but he had no presence on the radio. That could be explained by the fact that the 31-39 patrol districts contained both the Trade Mart (the intended location for Kennedy’s luncheon speech) and Love Field Airport. The patrolling of Northwest and Downtown Dallas was understandably distracted by the visit of Kennedy. Southwest Dallas was not..

    I have previously concluded that the Dispatcher Murray Jackson cannot have made the 12:45 pm radio call to Tippit and Nelson. This order sent Tippit to an area in Oak Cliff that was far away from where he was supposed to be.  It also sent patrolman Roger Nelson there, but he never arrived.  The order was not on the first transcript sent to the Warren Commission, which left the question: what was TIppit doing so far out of his area? I also conclude that there were so many irregularities regarding out-of-position officers and silent officers that Jackson could not have been unaware of them all.

    Why did Jackson not question why there were so many discrepancies occurring in the 71-99 patrol districts of southwest Dallas? That being the part of Dallas with no exposure to any part of the planned Kennedy visit and motorcade. Those were discrepancies which occurred before the assassination of Kennedy, and then before, as well as after, the assassination of Tippit. 

    Warren Commission apologists tend to take all police officer evidence as fact and then discredit the inconvenient evidence of those ordinary members of the public who contradicted the Warren Commission line. 

    But any version of events that doesn’t take account of Tippit’s changed command, his actual locations, the lies of particular police officers, as well as tampered tapes will never get close to the truth. 

    Click here to read part 1.

  • Cuba 1960 and Lansdale’s Playbook

    Cuba 1960 and Lansdale’s Playbook

    CUBA 1960 and LANSDALE’S PLAYBOOK

    By: Paul Bleau

    Introduction

    The CIA executive action program, code-named ZR RIFLE  ZRRIFLE, was in full display by mid-1960 in plans to remove Castro.  This was one year before William Harvey perfected it.

    The CIA tapped into regime change expertise from its Far East resources, who developed a strategy to devise an assassination attempt on Castro that would be blamed on Chinese Communists. This approach had been used successfully in the Far East and would be enacted for the eventual assassination of the Cuban leader JFK, according to most researchers.

    The 1960 plan involved CIA officers Desmond Fitzgerald, JC King, James Noel, and likely Ed Lansdale and David Phillips, who operated out of Cuba in 1959-60. The stratagem of blaming Chinese Communists may have been linked to American interests in the Far East. Most observers believe that by 1963, there was a shift to putting the blame squarely on the Soviets and Cubans for the assassination of JFK. While this focus was intensive, we may ask ourselves if the 1960 plot may have resurfaced as a contingency plan.

    In 1964, when Lyndon Johnson and the U.S. war machine were itching for its full-fledged military entry into the Vietnam arena, the U.S. fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident false reports of Vietnamese attacks on U.S. destroyers. Was there also a belated attempt to try and factor the Chinese into a conspiracy that eliminated JFK? 

    While the following December 1963 CIA file did not gather much interest, it is one of a number that began circulating right after the assassination 104-10308-10320 ATTRIBUTION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S ASSASSINATION TO AN ALLEGED CHICOM/CASTRO PLOT. In it, details are planted around Chinese and Castro sympathizers backing a plot, with funding received at an unidentified Wall Street Bank. Two individuals (Ramon Cortes and Inu Fernandez) are fingered as intermediaries present in Dallas and possibly being involved. (For more on Cortes, see State Secret -Chapter 6, Bill Simpich).

    Were there to be links between these two and Oswald? Was there some sort of tactic being contemplated here to help bolster motivation for a conflict on the other side of the world? We may never know the answers to these questions- it was sometime in early December 1963 that the CIA and Ambassador Thomas Mann in Mexico received their marching orders from Hoover and LBJ to stop arguing in favor of a Castro connection to a murder plot. In 1966, Mafioso Johnny Rosselli, who was the link between the mafia and the CIA in a partnership to eliminate Castro, said the following:  

    The last of the sniper teams dispatched by Robert Kennedy in 1963 to assassinate Fidel Castro was captured in Havana. Under torture, they broke and confessed to being sponsored by the CIA and the US government. At that point, Castro remarked that, ‘If that was the way President Kennedy wanted it, Cuba could engage in the same tactics’. The result was that Castro infiltrated teams of snipers into the US to kill Kennedy. 

    Roselli’s propensity to talk too much is what likely got him killed, chopped up, and put in a drum that was found floating in Dumfoundling Bay. Roselli was certainly wrong about Castro leading the operation; in fact, the super secret CIA Inspector General report on the plots was written to correct errors in his story. Rosselli may have been right about who some of JFK’s shooters were. He certainly was spot on about the tactics that were used if one considers the following CIA execution plan:

    File 104-10315-10011

    BleauCuba1

    This document is as explicit as it can get when it comes to directly evoking the use of the ZRRIFLE executive action program for the removal of Fidel Castro. Thrown right in the reader’s face is the subject of the Dispatch: “Proposed operation to have the Chinese Communists suspected of an assassination attempt.”

    There is a lot to unpack in this planned false flag:

    1. The record can be found at the Mary Ferrell Foundation: Title: DISPATCH: PROPOSED OPERATION TO HAVE CHINESE COMMUNISTS SUSPECTED OF ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT Pages: 2 Agency: CIA RIF#: 104-10315-10011 Subjects: ANTICASTRO PLOT 
    2. It is dated July 8, 1960, and is about a topic brought up on June 25, 1960
    3. It comes from the Chief of the Far East Division (Desmond Fitzgerald), sent to the chief of the Western Hemisphere Division (J.C. King), who relays it to the Chief of Station in Havana (James Noel)
    4. The subject is very straightforward: LCHARVEST PSYCH: Proposed Operation to have Chinese Communists blamed for Assassination Attempt
    5. LCHARVEST (TPFAST, TPTERRY, VLVIGOR) involved operations against Peoples Republic of China (PRC) scientists and efforts to monitor PRC state technology
    6. Chester Dainold is a pseudonym for Desmond Fitzgerald and Oliver G. Galbond, a pseudonym used by Colonel J.C. King, Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, Directorate of Operations, CIA (MFF).

    Fitzgerald headed the Far East Division between 1957 and 1962, when he worked closely with Ed Lansdale, a legendary PSYCHOLOGICAL OPS expert. In 1953, Lansdale was sent to Vietnam to act as a consultant for the French in their efforts to repel the uprising in their colony. The plan was to mount a propaganda campaign to persuade the Vietnamese people in the south not to vote for the communists in the forthcoming elections.

    “In the months that followed they distributed targeted documents that claimed the Vietminh and Chinese communists had entered South Vietnam and were killing innocent civilians. The Ho Chi Minh government was also accused of slaying thousands of political opponents in North Vietnam.” https://spartacus-educational.com/COLDlansdale.htm

    In late 1961, Robert Kennedy and the all-powerful SAG team tasked Lansdale to lead Operation Mongoose, a covert action program for sabotage and subversion against Cuba. Lansdale appointed William Harvey as his CIA point person, who maintained a CIA relationship with Roselli all the way to 1963, even though RFK had demoted him after the Missile Crisis. It was Desmond Fitzgerald who replaced Harvey.

    ZRRIFLE Plus

    The Executive Action program perfected by William Harvey in 1961 was really a spinoff of assassination programs used throughout the ages. Harvey learned about these in meetings with British and French intelligence who were well acquainted with the finer points of this science. e.g., British MI 5 officer Peter Wright. Mafia collaboration synergized these techniques.

    What is fascinating with the current file is the level of detail shared and that it predates Harvey’s work and is suggestive of what many have come to think about what took place on November 22, 1963. 

    Let us break down the plan and  then translate it to the JFK assassination conspiracy: 

    PROPOSED OPERATION TO HAVE CHINESE COMMUNISTS SUSPECTED OF ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT = PROPOSED OPERATION TO HAVE CASTRO BLAMED FOR JFK ASSASSINATION 

    BleauCuba2

    Replace this with JFK’s exposure in upcoming motorcades and appearances in crowded places.

    BleauCuba3

    Better yet, let’s plan the route ourselves with help from our CIA asset, Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell…   sketches and maps: As in Sergio Arcacha Smith’s possession of the sewage systems maps and David Ferrie’s sketch of Dealey Plaza… Places of vantage; like Dealey Plaza where there can be triangulation of fire… Routes of escape/ Exfiltrating… Through the railyards, in the Nash Rambler with a Latino getaway driver, through the panicked crowds, Red Bird Airport, the Flight from Dallas in a CIA plane… Locations of sites for caching the weapons… as in Julia Ann Mercer’s sighting of Ruby the morning of the assassination involved in delivering a package near the knoll, or Lee Bowers (railroad tower operator) seeing suspicious movements in the railyards and the TSBD being open to renovation teams during the days preceding the motorcade.

    BleauCuba4

    In other words, let us add touches such as an FPCC-linked, Castro-backed commie-assassin to the mix through impersonations, incriminating forged correspondence, false testimonies of assets alleging interaction between the patsy and the enemy as well as financial backing (recall the false testimony of Oswald receiving payouts in the Cuban embassy in Mexico City), back-yard photos portraying Oswald as an unhinged, well-armed Marxist fanatic, etc.

    BleauCuba5

    Simply put, we need more than just a good story… we need to set the stage with rumors and fabricate trails of “evidence” for the red herring to be believed: Planting wallets, leaking propaganda through media assets, tampering with evidence, framing patsies and opponents, etc. 

    Conclusion

    While some lone-nut theorists have often brought up the complexity of carrying out what many researchers have come to believe about the assassination, file 104-10315-10011 tells a compelling story: Regime change specialists like Lansdale, Harvey, Fitzgerald, and Phillips all had plenty of experience in the use of ZRRIFLE-like tactics during the decade that preceded Castro’s rise to power; they all likely became involved in applying these tactics for the elimination of Castro beginning in 1960; they were all omnipresent in regime change special ops aimed at Cuba in 1963 and these are the tactics that have been revealed with time, according to many researchers, to be the ones that were used to remove Kennedy.

    So yes, orchestrating a regime change is complex… Only real specialists can deliver something this grandiose.

  • The Missile Crisis: Writing on the Wall

    The Missile Crisis: Writing on the Wall

    The Missile Crisis: Writing on the Wall

    By Jerry Fresia, Ph.D.

    Martin Sherwin’s Gambling with Armageddon, the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is nothing short of a powerful, gripping tale. I’ve read a few accounts of those much-discussed thirteen days, but none come close to the palatable sense of drama and suspense that Sherwin delivers.

    As readers of this site will likely know, as soon as President Kennedy became aware that Khrushchev had placed offensive missiles in Cuba, he assembled many of his close advisers who would then meet daily with the president to flesh out new developments and possible responses. This group of decision-makers has come to be known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council or ExCom. Luckily for us, these meetings were secretly recorded and constitute our best way of grasping the reality of the ebb and flow of the individual participants thinking.

    In addition, there were also side meetings. These occurred in the Oval Office, the Pentagon, and the State Department. There were also revelations brought to light through memoirs, interviews, anniversary meetings, subsequent articles, and, of course, similar accounts offered by Soviet participants. 

    I mention this in order to explain what makes Sherwin’s style so engaging. Sherwin leads the reader through this labyrinth chronologically. Hour by hour, day by day, we watch the unfolding and changing positions, the points of view articulated inside smaller group meetings, but hidden or modified when the actors are re-assembled as a whole. Along the way, there are surprises, new crises, wisdom and insight, maturity, reckless posturing, a heavy dose of misinformation, and a touch or two of plain old madness. 

           Interestingly, Sherwin believes that to understand the Missile Crisis, one needs to understand the Cuban revolution. This is insightful because Sherwin is implicitly drawing a through-line with the liberation or reform efforts of Mosaddeq, Árbenz, and Castro, and Kennedy who, while not administering reform, blocks, repeatedly, the CIA’s effort to effect regime change in Cuba. I shall argue that there is in this episode a power dynamic that is foundational to understanding the assassination of President Kennedy.

    Liberation Movement Cuba [1]

    By opening the door to an examination of the Cuban revolution,[2] Sherwin is allowing us to view the Missile Crisis as a conflict between two distinct systems of power: one source of power are those forces committed to the preservation of colonial regimes and the other is the forces resisting that preservation in order to effect national liberation. This puts JFK in a bind. Simultaneously, by virtue of his position as president alone, he would be compelled to use his military to elevate corporate interests and squash liberation movements. This, in effect, is his presidential responsibility, his job. And yet we see him feverishly working to block his military from restoring a colonial government on the Cuban island. Let’s follow Sherwin’s lead, then, taking a peek at the Cuban revolution and the reform efforts of Mosaddeq in Iran and Árbenz to which Sherwin also calls our attention.

    Under Batista, 70 percent of Cuba’s arable land was owned by foreigners. Castro’s first priority was the redistribution of land through his Agrarian Reform act. Most of the sugar industry was owned by Americans. In addition, Castro’s reforms included education, health care, housing, and road building in rural zones. Some American ranches were nationalized, and the Cuban government ordered foreign refineries to refine Soviet crude oil. American refineries refused, and Castro nationalized them in response. The US government then ended its sugar quota, which gave Castro a good reason to nationalize all American properties. An embargo followed while Castro went on to seize all Mafia casinos, broke up drug and prostitution rings, and effectively ended the Mafia-politician corruption centered in Havanna. 

    Liberation Movement: Iran

    “Mohammad Mosaddeq, the elected prime minister of Iran, had nationalized the assets of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British enterprise that had refused to cooperate with the Iranian government’s demand for access to its books. Agents from M16, Britain’s CIA equivalent, suggested a joint operation to overthrow Mosaddeq, and President Eisenhower endorsed the idea.”[3]

    Liberation Movement: Guatemala

    “Jacobo Árbenz, the president of Guatemala who….[following] through on his economic and social reform campaign promises… threatened the landholdings of the United Fruit Company…[which had affiliations with both John Foster and Allen Dulles]….President Eisenhower authorized a…“psychological warfare and political action, ” “subversion,” and “assassination,” all cobbled together as Operation PBSUCCESS.” The operation did not run smoothly. CIA-trained fighters were pinned down until CIA planes bombed Guatemala City. Árbenz was able to flee the country.[4]

    In each of these movements[5] we find the material interests of the most powerful jeopardized. Or, if we continue examining these events in terms of clashing systems of power, we might say, using economic terms, that the surplus takerswere being overtaken by the people from whom the surplus was being taken, the expropriated. Further, a key element in this dynamic was the progressive leadership by a head of state. From the point of view of American corporate titans newly ascended–following WWII– to world hegemonic power, each of these national liberation movements would be seen as a five-alarm fire. Note the position of the CIA, which played the key role in suppressing the liberation movements in Iran, Guatemala, and Cuba: liberation movements present “The gravest danger to the US….(my emphasis).” [6] Why the gravest? Because the US believed in and feared “Soviet expansionism,” which in turn was perceived as frustrating the US hegemonic ability to expropriate colonized wealth and resources throughout the world. Note too, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ fear: “The poor always want to plunder the rich; there is a rising tide all over the world wherethe common man aspires to higher and wider horizons [and where] Russia is able to expand her influence over the earth by associating with these dangerous currents.”[7]

    The Eisenhower Factor

    “Russia is definitely out to communize the world. We face a battle to extinction between the two systems.” So wrote Dwight D. Eisenhower in his diary in 1946. In 1958, Eisenhower told Greece’s Queen Frederika  that “To accept the Communist doctrine and try to live with it would cost too big a price to be alive.” While we may have been led to believe that Allen Dulles was the rabid anti-Communist ideologue, Sherwin believes that it was actually Eisenhower (my emphasis). Argues Sherwin, Allen Dulles was “the mouthpiece, almost a puppet for Eisenhower (my emphasis).”[8]  

    So we find that even before Kennedy became president, he wasn’t trusted, given his views expressed in the Senate chamber on western imperialism. That he arranged to send to every member of the Senate, Burdick and Lederer’s The Ugly American, a book which may have made cold warriors wince.  Not surprisingly, Eisenhower was terribly upset with JFK’s victory in 1960 (his blood pressure “soaring to dangerous levels”). He was convinced that Kennedy had allowed communism to thrive just off the Florida coast and that he would “do almost anything to avoid turning the country over to ‘the young genius.’ ”[9]   It was “the repudiation of everything I’ve done for eight years.”[10]

    “It is now clear  from available evidence,” writes Sherwin, “that he would impose on his successor” a way to ensure that he would be saddled with the commitment to “eliminate Castro and his government” from Cuba.[11] This desire, not surprisingly, was consistent with a group of corporate leaders with business interests in Cuba (surplus takers) who had met with CIA Director Allen Dulles. They wanted Dulles to pass a message on to Eisenhower: “Get off of dead center and take some direct action against Castro.”[12] Eisenhower understood his order: At an NSC meeting he “decided that Castro should join Mosaddeq and Árbenz as yet another CIA Cold War trophy.”[13] This “new plan, a full-fledged invasion would be delivered to former Navy lieutenant, JFK, as an action program approved by the 5 star general-president who had organized and commanded the invasion of Normandy.”[14]

    The reader may be familiar with the rest of the Bay of Pigs story, but it is necessary to retell it in the context of the missile crisis. 

    Due to a recent declassification of thousands of pages from the CIA in 2011 (50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs Invasion), it is now known that the CIA task force in charge of the paramilitary assault knew the operation could not succeed without becoming an open invasion supported by the U.S. military. According to Peter Kornbluh, this was the most important revelation of the declassification of the official history of the CIA. [15]

    Thomas L. Hughes, a former intel specialist, told Sherwin: the entire operation was intended to “entrap” JFK, who repeatedly warned the Bay of Pig planners that under no circumstances would he authorize American combat forces to become involved in the operation.[16] And so he didn’t, and the revolutionary-minded Castro and his government survived, the only one by the way, to survive the relentless onslaught of American military power since 1917. 

    But there would be one more chance for the corporate surplus-takers and their banished allies to get their resources and power re-established in Havana. It would be the Missile Crisis.

    Thirteen Days

    Perhaps the one thing in reading Sherwin’s tale that grabbed my attention was the story of Senator Kenneth Keating from New York. The official story is that on 14 October 1962, photo-intelligence analysts discovered that Khrushchev had placed offensive surface-to-surface nuclear ballistic missiles on the island of Cuba. The information was relayed to President Kennedy on 16 October 1962, and on 29 October, Khrushchev agreed to withdraw his missiles, hence the Cuban Missile Crisis of thirteen days.

    But a Republican Senator from New York, Kenneth Keating, had been insisting since 1 September that, indeed, Soviet missiles had been placed on the island, and this was a full month before President Kennedy was presented with evidence. Further, John McCone, CIA Director, also was insisting on the delivery of missiles to Cuba. But playing his cards closely, McCone said he had no source, merely that his pronouncements were a “hunch.”

    Keating, who died in 1975, never revealed his source, but after years of pressuring, even by Senator Ted Kennedy, Keating only would say that his mystery source had provided conclusive evidence and that he was an official intelligence source within the DOD. Interesting, too, is that on October 16, when Kennedy assembled his team of advisors to deal with the crisis, “his advisers speculated that an official in the Defense Department served as Keating’s source. They named him, but the person’s name has been deleted from the official transcript of the meeting and remains classified.”[17]

    The gravity of the crisis, one would assume, would have required an immediate notification of the president. Further, that a CIA Director would just happen to have a hunch, which just happens to mirror reality precisely, strains credulity.  A more likely explanation is that this was another effort to entrap the President: he had to act since the missiles were already installed and loaded. Further, it shows that the initiation of hostility would have been welcomed by members of the JCS and others: a pretext to eliminate the Castro menace once and for all and, finally, the island could be returned to the corporate surplus takers who had ruled there since 1900. 

    The Chomsky Factor

    Let us pause for a moment to consider the Noam Chomsky perspective to help understand the power dynamics in this saga.   Chomsky has claimed that if the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged for committing atrocities. The reason why is this: the CIA has had the responsibility to crush liberation movements around the globe. The surplus takers must win; investors and wealth accumulators must win. The people on the bottom, the expropriated, must lose. It’s a system of power. This is why Chomsky will say that presidents really don’t make policy. The policies flow from institutions, and presidents just get on board and execute the policy handed to them.

    But what happens if a president like Kennedy keeps pushing for peace and doesn’t get on board when his closest advisors push hard to support covert wars that keep colonial systems in place? 

    Armageddon Nears

    Other than on the very first day when Kennedy said that they might have to take military action and “wipe them out,” Adlai Stevenson, UN Ambassador, countered no. A diplomatic solution is possible. From that point forward, Kennedy never wavered in his belief that a peaceful resolution was the only sensible one. Yet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and its Chairman and many others were ferociously committed to removing Castro by military force. Kennedy was lucky to have the UN Ambassador in the group who suggested a blockade as a way. This approach was useful in stalling the implementation of the policy favored by the Hawks.

    As with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the contempt for Kennedy was not disguised. Admiral George Anderson Jr., Chief of Naval Operations, felt that the blockade was a “lame response by a president who ducked military intervention in the Bay of Pigs.” Anderson was also furious when Kennedy insisted on having total control over military operation decision-making and that he, the president, was crossing “a bright red line.”[18]

    McCone reported Eisenhower’s position, which was “as hawkish as the Chiefs all out military action.” Kennedy didn’t respond, believing that Eisenhower was “out of touch with the world.”[19]

    Undersecretary of State George Ball’s position was that the situation was a “test of will” that required that the US respond with decisive military force in order to maintain the confidence of our allies.”[20]

    Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillion said that, “A military strike is our only solution. Survival of the free world fabric is at stake.” [21]

    General Taylor, Chairman of the JCS, intoned: “All the commanders and the Chiefs want a military assault and then invasion, take it out with one hard crack.”[22]

    Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Le May declared: “This blockade and political action, I see leading into war….This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.”[23]

    President Kennedy sharing an insight with General Wheeler mused,  “Cuba added to the Soviet arsenal didn’t add particularly to our danger. The real danger is the use of nuclear weapons.”

    General Wheeler: “Am I clear that you are addressing yourself as to whether anything at all should be done?”

    President Kennedy: “That’s right.” [24]

    Aftermath

    James Douglas points to the Cuban missile crisis as a turning point in the presidency of John Kennedy. During the last year of his life, he saw a more confident, more imaginative, peace-driven president emerge, pointing to the following bold peace initiatives that flowed from his missile crisis experience: 

    1) His audacious peace speech in June of 1963, where he states again his belief, as he did during the ExComm meetings, that while we probably would not change our minds about each other’s economic systems, we could live peacefully together; 

    2) He engineered the passage of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; 

    3) He proposed a way to withdraw from Vietnam with NSA Memorandum 263; and 

    4) he had established a covert dialogue with Fidel Castro. And if that were not enough, I would add his proposal to collaborate with the Soviets in placing a man on the moon.[25]

    Concluding Thoughts

    • The story of the Cuban Missile Crisis is, in important ways, an explanation of JFK’s assassination. Most of his advisors were flat out moving in a warlike position, as he was holding firm. He had established a direct back channel with Khrushchev in 1961, which he used to ask (the “enemy”) for help in blocking his general’s efforts. Afterward, he had also established back-channel talks with Castro in hopes of achieving a US-Cuba détente. 
    • Daniel Ellsberg noted that when the missile crisis was over, there was a “fury” within the Air Force. “There was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles. Not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup – I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.”[26]
    • The JCS, so committed to finding a path toward war, were out-maneuvered and instead were left not just with a peaceful solution, which they despised, but also a commitment by JFK to Khrushchev not to invade Cuba, ever. Further, Kennedy’s successful diplomacy also turned on meeting the second demand by Khrushchev that Kennedy dismantle the Jupiter nuclear missiles in Turkey, placed there by Eisenhower. Kennedy kept this capitulation secret, given the complexity of the negotiation at the time and the risk of the [27]JCS succeeding in pushing their agenda to the fore. Writes Sherwin: “If a diplomatic solution was still possible, he would have to pursue Khrushchev’s offer privately.” [28]
    • Kennedy ended Operation Mongoose at the conclusion of the crisis. The CIA, however, hoping for a slip into overt military action, kept the program going throughout the thirteen days and beyond.
    • The US intelligence was not terribly accurate. Instead of 10,000 Soviet troops in Cuba, there were 40,000. Also, the US was unaware that some of the nuclear weapons were operational and that missile crews were under orders to launch their missiles were the US to attack. Therefore, every single military response put forward by ExComm members apart from the blockage, if carried out, would have likely resulted in a nuclear war.
    • Often, Kennedy is lauded for his diplomatic skills but chided for having created the crisis in the first place. Khrushchev has said that he put the missiles into Cuba for two reasons: 1) to prevent an invasion, and 2) to respond in kind to the missiles put on the border of the Soviet Union in Turkey and also those in Great Britain. We now know that both the attempted invasion and the placement of missiles in Turkey and Great Britain were under the orders of Eisenhower, who arrived in office with 1,200 nuclear missiles in the US arsenal and left with 22,000. [29]

    Who Was Kennedy?

    In a campaign speech in October 1960, Senator Kennedy said: “I want to talk with you tonight about the most glaring failure of American foreign policy today – about a disaster that threatens the security of the whole Western Hemisphere – about a Communist menace that has been permitted to arise under our very noses, only 90 miles from our shores.” Yet just two years later, Kennedy said in a speech to the Inter-American Press Association, “A small band of conspirators …[had made] Cuba a victim of foreign imperialism… an instrument of the policy of others, a weapon in an effort dictated by external powers…. Without it, everything is possible.”[30]

     In the first statement, he sounds like one of his own JCS generals. In the second, anti-communism is soft; his understanding of the plight of those suffering under the weight of foreign wealth extraction could have been made by Árbenz or even Castro. Was this the turn that Douglass speaks about? Yes, a change in confidence, perhaps. But I think it always was the private Kennedy, hidden when he chose to run to the right of Nixon during the McCarthy era. His private conversations and his public commitment to peace not only show him not to be an anti-communist ideologue, they show him, as president, to be a threat to the national security interests of the US.  Writes Sherwin, “It is fantastic to watch Kennedy’s mind, how he thinks about things. It’s so different from the rest of his advisors, how those same people, in smaller private meetings just wanting to know when they can start bombing.”[31]

    Chomsky states, “The thesis is understood to imply that JFK would not have responded to the changing conditions in the manner of his closest advisers and war mongers. If true, the thesis is important, lending weight to the belief that Kennedy was indeed a remarkable if not unique figure.”[32]

    This statement was made in relation to JFK’s Vietnam policy. But I think the sentiment would apply equally to his handling of the missile crisis. 

    ________________________________________

    Footnotes

    [2] Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy.

    [3] Martin Sherwin’s Gambling with Armageddon, the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: First Vintage Books Edition, February 2022), p. 140-1.

    [4] Sherwin, p. 141-2; PB was the CIA cryptonym for Guatemala.

    [5] And we could add the “regime prevention” in the Belgian Congo with the CIA assassination of Patrice Lumumba days before Kennedy assumed office as well as the regime change in Chile in 1973 when the CIA orchestrated regime change installed General Pinochet and ousted popularly elected president, socialist Salvador Allende who committed suicide rather than being captured to the coup forces.

    [6] Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot, JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture, (Noam Chomsky, 1993), p.50.

    [7] Chomsky, p.26.

    [9]  Ibid,p. 122-125.

    [10] Ibid, p. 123.

    [11] Ibid, p. 144.

    [12] Ibid, p. 124.

    [13] Ibid, p. 142

    [14] Ibid, p. 145.

    [15] “Top Secret CIA ‘Official History’ of the Bay of Pigs: Revelations.” Nsarchive2.gwu.edu. Retrieved 2019-03-01.

    [16] Sherwin, p. 156.

    [17] The Historian as Detective: Senator Kenneth Keating, the Missiles in Cuba, and his Mysterious Sources https://www.jstor.org/stable/24911742

    [18] Sherwin, p. 362.

    [19] Ibid, p.  274.

    [20] Ibid, p.  267.

    [21] Ibid, p.  245.

    [22] Ibid, p.  248.

    [23] Ibid, p.  290.

    [24] Ibid, p. 194.

    [25] James W. Douglas, JFK and the Unspeakable, Why He Died and Why It Matters (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc> 2008), p. 326.

    [26] Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing) pp. 201-222.

    [27] Ibid, pp.  201-22.

    [28] Sherwin, p. 422.

    [30] Douglass, p.251

    [32] Chomsky, p. 81.

  • Trump and the JFK Files

    Trump and the JFK Files

    Please read the article directly on Jim DiEugenio’s substack, which is currently free. Read here.

  • The PEPE Letters

    The PEPE Letters

    The PEPE Letters
    By: Paul Bleau

    “… we will analyze similar situations that demonstrate stratagems around other subjects and incidents that occurred during the months preceding and succeeding the assassination of JFK that are revealing of a pattern that is indicative of central coordination.”

                                                    From The JFK Assassination Chokeholds

    Executive Summary

    There is a strongly supported theory in the JFK research community that the assassination bears the fingerprints of a CIA assassination program code-named ZRRIFLE, and that it was led by rogue, high-level agents linked with the failed Bay of Pigs operation. Many facts support this theory, including the association of regime change specialists with many elements of the plot, the impersonation of Oswald in Mexico City in the fall of 1963 to make him look unhinged and Castro-connected, and, most interestingly for this article, the use of incriminating correspondence.

    Shortly after the Mexico City incident, a letter with a forged signature incriminating Oswald and foreign confederates, and corroborative of the Mexico City charade was sent to the Russian embassy in Washington. The FBI eventually dismissed it as a clumsy attempt by Oswald to ingratiate himself with the Soviets. The content and the timing of the letter suggest rather that it was part of the same stratagem designed by those behind the Mexico City set-up.

    Five other letters sent from Cuba, all postmarked shortly after the assassination, incriminated Oswald, unidentified Cuban agents, and Fidel Castro himself. They contained details of the Mexico City fabrication known only to a very few. Despite this, the FBI dismissed these letters as a hoax. (See the book ZR Rifle by Claudia Furiati)

    Recently this author discovered three more incriminatory letters in released CIA files that received little attention from the research community. These very similar letters are postmarked in the late fall of 1962, the year before the assassination. This article analyzes these letters and concludes that:

    1. They reveal that plans to assassinate JFK were likely triggered by the Cuban Missile Crisis.
    2. They are consistent with and add detail to the theory that the assassination followed the ZRRIFLE playbook.
    3. The fact that the sender of these letters was directly linked to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, just like Oswald and other subjects of interest involved in suspicious events throughout 1963, provides compelling added evidence that plans to kill JFK during the last year of his life were centrally coordinated.
    4. They add credence to the theories that point to the involvement of specialists in regime change operations. They add to the suspicions that high-level officers David Phillips and William Harvey were involved.
    5. They do not incriminate the CIA as an organization, nor the FBI and Secret Service.

    Introduction

    Case linkage is a standard offender profiling technique that was never performed for the JFK assassination by the leading intelligence organizations of the country. By the time the ARRB was running, the Secret Service ensured that this could not be done by illegally destroying JFK files just before they would have been made available through declassification beginning in the mid-nineties.

    In Chokeholds, by comparing some 20 incidents and/or subjects that were worthy of exploration, we were able to present a picture that revealed: “…that the peculiarities that one can find in many of the subjects’ personas, associations and actions are hardly a haphazard collection of traits and behaviors.” One of the traits that was underscored was links with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee that existed in a vast majority of the cases explored. 

     (For more see the articles on Prior Plots and on Exposing the FPCC at Kennedysandking.com)

    In late December 2024, while reading some of the latest declassified files available at Mary Ferrell, I found a series pertaining to letters sent from Havana, written in a way to incriminate Cuba in a plot to kill JFK right after the peak of the Missile Crisis. I had a déjà vu moment. 

    The 1962 Pepe letters are not only corroborative of what many researchers have come to think, but they add a clearer picture to the offender profile that is getting more precise from added pieces to the puzzle– like these. In 1962, just following the height of the Missile Crisis where JFK was strongly opposed by his war hawks, three letters signed by a “Pepe,” were sent from Havana in a way that ensured that they would be discovered by U.S. intelligence. These letters created deep concern that there was a plot to kill JFK in the works, one that involved enemy agents in both Cuba and the U.S. They are remarkably similar to the 1963 letters and link potential patsies and perpetrators to Fidel Castro in what can only be seen as another false flag operation. 

    The FBI eventually dismissed these letters as a Cuban harassment tactic despite referring to the sender as a suspect.

    1. Was this a prequel to what would happen in the fall of 1963?
    2. Are the perpetrators of this similar case the same as those who are behind the conspiracy?

    This author believes that the answer is yes to both questions, which can only lead to more crystallization of the opinions that most researchers have, according to recent surveys on the matter, about the who, when, how, and why of the conspiracy.

    After the assassination, investigators did nothing to see how these letters linked up with the eerily similar subsequent events described earlier in this section. 

    Background

    “According to a historical study of the Arbenz removal project: discussing themes and tactics that would become constants during the following decades… deniable assassination squads… while placing the blame on designated parties (patsies).

    In 1953, sabotage and propaganda efforts were discussed but beyond that a CIA officer proposed a plan for first, spreading rumors that the communists were dissatisfied with Arbenz, then killing him in a fashion that would be laid on the communists.” (Nexus, by Larry Hancock)

    According to a recent study, most researchers are of the opinion that the maneuvers described above are part of the assassination program code-named ZRRIFLE, and that CIA regime change specialists David Phillips and William Harvey should be considered people of interest and that the Missile Crisis was a determining factor in the decision to remove JFK.

    1) ZRRIFLE

    “ZRRIFLE” was a program to recruit foreign criminal assets for various illegal activities including burglary, wiretaps, strong-arm work, and thefts in support of ZR code-breaking work. Later it was used by William Harvey as a project for an Executive Action assassination program.

    It provided a cover for recruiting individuals who could be used to provide the CIA with a highly targeted ‘executive action’ capability. Along with other CIA assassination activities, it was investigated by the Church Committee in the 1970s. That investigation was the first to document and publicize American efforts to eliminate Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and other foreign leaders.

    In 1961, William Harvey was tasked by Richard Helms with perfecting an executive action program. Key aspects of ZRRIFLE included setting up phony paper trails, the use of surrogates and patsies, as well as provisions to blame a foe. He left behind hand-written notes. The following are excerpts fromWilliam Harvey’s notes:

    “Should have phony 201 in RI [Records Integration] to backstop this, all documents therein forged & backdated. Should look like a CE file …. Cover: planning should include provision for blaming Sovs or Czechs in case of blow.”

    2) The Mexico City Charade

    Between September 27 and October 3, 1963, conspirators in the JFK assassination, developed a false flag incident in Mexico City designed to make future patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald, look like he was in league with Cuban and Soviet agents. Oswald was alleged to have received bribes from Cuban agents and met KGB agent Valery Kostikov, who was their head of assassinations in the Western Hemisphere. J. Edgar Hoover affirmed that Oswald had been impersonated in Cuba. (Also see the Lopez Report.)

    3) A forged letter sent to the Russian Embassy in Washington incriminates Cubans, Soviets, and Oswald. 

    Shortly after the Mexico City fabrication, a forged letter (see Appendix 1) incriminating Oswald and foreign confederates and corroborative of the Mexico City charade was sent to the Russian embassy in Washington. It denigrates the “notorious FBI” and refers to Kostikov as comrade Kostin. The Warren Commission eventually dismissed it as an awkward appeal by Oswald to the Soviets. In fact, the content and the timing of the letter suggest that it was part of the same stratagem designed by those behind the Mexico City set-up. The Russians, upon receiving the letter, saw it for what it was: As reported by Jerry Rose in the Fourth Decade, “in 1999, Boris Yeltsin handed Bill Clinton some 80 files pertaining to Oswald and the JFK assassination. One of the memos reveals that, at the time of the assassination, Russian ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin had right away seen the letter as a ‘provocation’ to frame Russia by the fabrication of complicity between Russia and Oswald, when none existed. ‘One gets the definite impression that the letter was concocted by those who, judging from everything, are involved in the president’s assassination,’ Dobrynin wrote. ‘It is possible that Oswald himself wrote the letter as it was dictated to him, in return for some promises, and then, as we know, he was simply bumped off after his usefulness had ended.’ In late November, the Russians sent the letter to U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk explaining why the letter was a fraud. By then, the White House was peddling the lone nut fable. Kept hidden was the fact that the FBI already had a copy of the letter.”

    In his article, Jerry Rose points out that the typed letter had many more spelling errors in it than the rough draft found at Ruth Paine’s home. (Oswald’s Last Letter: The Scorching Hot Potato)

    4) The Phony Letters from Cuba

    Five letters from Cuba (See Appendix 2), all postmarked shortly after the assassination, one of which was destined for Oswald, were part of the false flag operation and were used to incriminate Oswald, unidentified Cuban agents, and Fidel Castro himself. They also corroborate the Mexico City fabrication that very few people would have known about. The FBI dismissed these letters as a hoax, but their content and timing revealed the same tactics being used by the assassination planners. (Read the letter from Cuba section in Kennedysandking article The CIA and Mafia’s “Cuban American Mechanism” and the JFK Assassination.)

    The first letter addressed to Oswald includes: “close the business,” “money I gave you,” “recommend much to the chief,” “I told him (Castro) you could put out a candle at fifty meters,” “when you come to Habana.” Letter four specifies $7000 in bribes given to Oswald which is close to what a Phillips-connected false witness claimed he saw being given to Oswald in Mexico City in the Cuban embassy. It also states that a Cuban agent named Pedro Charles “became a close friend of former Marine and expert shooter Lee H. Oswald in Mexico.”

    The following is how researcher John Simkin (Spartacus) summarizes the evidence:

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

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

    Fabian Escalante, chief of Castro’s G-2, informed the HSCA about this letter. When he did this, he discovered that they had four similar letters that had been sent to Oswald, RFK, The Voice of America, and The Director of the Diario de New York. Four of the letters were postmarked “Havana.” It could not be determined where the fifth letter was posted. Four of the letters were signed: Jorge, Pedro Charles, Miguel Galvan Lopez, and Mario del Rosario Molina. Two of the letters (Charles & Jorge) are dated before the assassination (10th and 14th November). A third, by Lopez, is dated 27 November 1963. The other two are undated.

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

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

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

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

    The linkage with Mexico City is interesting in that very few people were even aware of Oswald’s alleged behavior there shortly before the assassination. David Phillips worked undercover in Cuba in 1959-60 and under Win Scott in Mexico City when the assassination took place. He was a lead propagandist for regime change operations for the CIA. He collaborated closely with other clandestine specialists such as Harvey over the years. Some of the letters suggest a $7000 payoff to Oswald given by Pedro Charles, “a Mexico City-based Castro agent.” Interestingly, Phillips was queried by the HSCA about misinformation from his agents painting a picture of a Cuba-backed conspiracy in league with Oswald. One of his underlings, Gilberto Alvarado, was found to be lying when he claimed that he saw Latinos giving Oswald $6500 in the Cuban embassy. 

    The Pepe Letters

    a) Overview

    In the process of reviewing the recent Latin American intel files at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a series of them that culminated with CIA file 104-10506-10007 (See appendix 3), set off alarm bells.  In it, we find the first Pepe letter translated from Spanish and other observations. 

    This file, on its own, is very revealing: 

    The letter suggests several troubling points if authentic (which it is not):

    1. It was sent from Cuba to “Bernardo Morales” at a post office box in Miami owned by an anti-Castro propaganda unit called Radio Libertad, La Vos Anti-Communista de America. It was sent by Jose Menendez and signed by Pepe. Morales was unknown to those who handled the letter and was eventually forwarded to a CIA contact linked to the JMWAVE station in Miami.
    2. It reveals a network of conspirators based in Miami, Washington, and Cuba.
    3. The letter is postmarked November 29, 1962, just after the height of the Missile Crisis.
    4. It lamely suggests that by sending the letter to the right-wing Radio Libertad, it would not be intercepted.
    5. It crudely links “Fidel” to a plot to kill JFK.
    6. It does not mince words and is self-incriminating: “if we are able to kill President Kennedy,” “It would be a great success, super extraordinary, for Fidel,” “Marxist-Leninists 90 miles from the U.S.,” “paralyze imperialism completely,” “terrorize capitalism”, “get in contact with your Friends”, “You are an artist”: all very similar to the 1963 letters. 
    7. Letter three of 1963 letters from Havana (appendix 2) was sent to the Directors of the Voice of America, which, like Radio Libertad, was a Cold War vehicle for anti-communist propaganda. 
    8. The information was sent to the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Department of State on Dec. 8, and later to the INS by Rufus Horn of Task Force W and is signed by him as Liaison and in lieu of William Harvey.
    9. The links with the 1963 letters and William Harvey (a person of extreme interest in the assassination) caught my attention. 

    As I went through other related files, the parallels would get even more evident: In short order, I was able to find out that the 1962 letter was one of three Castro incriminating letters, originally written in Spanish, sent within days of one another, all signed by Pepe. (See Appendix 4)

    The second letter was postmarked November 14 and was sent to Antonio Rodriguez who was a chauffeur for Colonel Hugo Trejo (a suspected intelligence contact from Venezuela). Improperly addressed, Trejo said that the letter arrived at a Venezuelan Delegation office. The Secret Service, tipped off by an informant suspecting an assassination plot involving Trejo, questioned members of the delegation including Trejo, Rodriguez, and others.

    The letter refers to the assassination plot in a similar fashion as the first Pepe letter discussed above and was deemed to have been written by the same sender following FBI analysis. The letter opens with Comrad Rodriguez (was Comrad commonly used by Cubans in 1962?) In Oswald’s last letter to the Russian embassy (Appendix 1), he refers to comrade Kostin. Like the letter intended for Morales, this one finds a clumsy way of clearing the Soviets in this plot. 

    The third Pepe letter (appendix 4) was sent to Guatemala. It does not refer to the assassination plot. It does link Cuba to clandestine revolutionary activities in the country.

    b) The FBI and HSCA Investigations of the Pepe letters (See Mary Ferrell file 124-10279-10068 for 21-page FBI document) and click to see the HSCA report

    FBI summary of findings: 

    The sender’s full name is Jose Menendez Ramos. The Ramos part of the name may bear significance.

    Radio Libertad was CIA-sponsored (which was also the case for Voice of America) and operated out of Venezuela. It had an antenna office in Miami. CIA representative William Finch said he was unable to confirm this link. The report affirms that the Pepe letter was acquired through a contact coded MM-T1. 

    Special agent John A. Marshall of the Secret Service and the FBI took this threat very seriously. He advised the FBI about the second letter (Rodriguez).

    Olga Duque de Heredia de Lopez and Aida Mayo Coetara, Miami Representatives for Radio Libertad, handled the mail. Lopez handed the letter to Cesar Gajate whom she described as an anti-Communist fighter. Mayo is the wife of Humberto Lopez Perez, the director of Radio Libertad in Venezuela.

    The INS identified a Morales who entered the U.S. using a fake visa. Some witness evidence indicated that he was anti-communist.

    Hand-writing analysis confirmed that the two letters were written by the same person. The FBI compared these letters to a letter signed by Jose Menendez sent to V. T. Lee but could not determine definitely whether it was from the sender because of insufficient comparable handwriting. The report concludes that Menendez moved from Tampa, Florida, to Cuba in 1961 and that he was being investigated as a suspect. 

    What the report does not state is that V. T. Lee was head of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He would later correspond frequently with Lee Harvey Oswald.

    The FBI suspected subterfuge around the flagrant errors in addressing all three letters:

    Pepe FBI

    The HSCA 1978 report sheds more light on the cast of characters and the Pepe affair:

    Concerning the third letter sent to Guatemala, it states that the intended recipient Carlos Meneses was not associated with a P.O. Box 347 in Guatemala City and consequently the letter was intercepted. It describes how Radio Libertad operatives in Caracas contacted the U.S. embassy to let them know about their broadcasting initiatives in Latin American countries, including Cuba.

    The sender Jose Menendez and his wife Carrie Hernandez had been described by the informant as members of the Tampa FPCC. Menendez got a “top Job” in the Cuban Government after his return. He and his wife are said to be extremely pro-Castro. Concerning Olga Duque, the HSCA repeats how the Morales letter went from her to Gajate, to eventually make its way to the Secret Service, without divulging the CIA Miami station role in the logistics. Aida Mayo is described as a founder of an anti-Castro organization. Olga and Aida shared an apartment.

    Concerning the intended recipient of letter 2, Antonio Rodriguez, the reports are a mixed bag. One lead with thin traces connected his father with the assassination of an anti-Castroite in Haiti. Another points to links with a Castro henchman named Pino Machado. (Note: a base story for a pro-Castro conspiracy could have emerged had a plot developed further.)

    The HSCA Weighs in

    The Warren Commission paid no attention to the Pepe incident and only made fleeting mention of the Pedro Charles letters, lazily fluffed off as a hoax by the FBI.

    The HSCA published a 165-page report (180-10108-10017 titled ANTONIO GUILLERMO ROGRIGUEZ JONES.) Towards the beginning of the report exchanges among intelligence agents all the way up to Chief Rowley, head of the Secret Service, and FBI director Hoover emphasize the seriousness of these letters. S.A. Marshall is extremely insistent about the importance of looking into Menendez. 

    The HSCA Final Report

    While the above is a summary of the raw data concerning the Havanna 1962 letters, the HSCA presented in a report, Volume 3 of its final report in which there is precious little value when it comes to interpretation. As we have seen, the FBI fluffs all of this off as simply Cubans muddying the wells. The HSCA toed the line, which seems contradictory to its criticism around the absence of case linkage regarding potential patsy Policarpo Lopez, whom they linked to suspicious behavior in and around the assassination in 1963 (compare the double standard):

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

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

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

    So, what fingerprints did they pick up on the Menendez links to the FPCC, the similarities with the Pedro Charles letters and Oswald’s last letter, and the fact that Menendez was deemed an FBI suspect in an assassination plot…?  None! None they wished to discuss that is. The HSCA also deflected somewhat by speculating that Menendez may have been someone else (Juan Jose Mulkay Gutierrez- 1977 File 104-10506-10036). The HSCA ended by concluding that there was a probable conspiracy but leaned towards a Mafia-centric one. The Pepe letters did not support this concept.

    SGA, JMWAVE, Task Force W, and SAS

    Dave Boylan is a co-author of the book The Oswald Puzzle and the essays The Wheaton Lead and The Red Bird Airport Leads. He is regarded as one of the leading researchers of JFK assassination-related files and he is currently working with this author on a far-reaching JFK research project. In it, we have produced the beginnings of the CIA org chart for 1963 as well as one specifically for the CIA station in JMWAVE and another for the SAS CIA cell. No one understands this structure more than Dave. Interested in the Pepe letters, he helped me decode some of the files and added a few to the mix. Thanks to this we can better understand the extended team that was involved with this covert operation, whether wittingly or not.

    From Spartacus: “After the Bay of Pigs disaster, President John F. Kennedy created a committee (SGA) charged with overthrowing Castro’s government. The SGA, chaired by Robert F. Kennedy (Attorney General), included John McCone (CIA Director), McGeorge Bundy (National Security Adviser), Alexis Johnson (State Department), Roswell Gilpatric (Defence Department), General Lyman Lemnitzer (Joint Chiefs of Staff) and General Maxwell Taylor. Although not officially members, Dean Rusk (Secretary of State) and Robert S. McNamara (Secretary of Defense) also attended meetings.

    At a meeting of this committee at the White House on 4 November 1961, it was decided to call this covert action program for sabotage and subversion against Cuba, Operation Mongoose. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy also decided that General Edward Lansdale (Staff Member of the President’s Committee on Military Assistance) should be placed in charge of the operation.

    The CIA JMWAVE station in Miami served as operational headquarters for Operation Mongoose. The head of the station was Ted Shackley and over the next few months, he became involved in the attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. One of Lansdale’s first decisions was to appoint William Harvey as head of Task Force W. Harvey’s brief was to organize a broad range of activities that would help to bring down Castro’s government.”

    After Harvey left America for Rome, Desmond FitzGerald stepped in to provide new leadership to the Cuban division at Headquarters, renamed as the Special Affairs Staff (SAS). Harvey stepped down as chief of Staff D.”

    By painstakingly assembling names from files, searching through directories, and working with colleagues, David and I have been putting together org charts representative of the CIA in 1963. It is a colossal work in progress that does sometimes involve guesswork and evolving conclusions. Of interest for this article is the 63-64, org chart of SAS developed by David. (Note: William Harvey does not figure in this because he had by then been demoted and exiled. In 1962, he would have had a prominent position near the top of a structure SAS replaced called Task Force W). By visiting Appendix 5, the reader will better appreciate how many of the persons profiled below worked within the Counterintelligence section of SAS under Fitzgerald in 63 and Harvey in 62.

    David’s first take on the files we looked over proved very insightful:

    “These are very close to the Pedro Charles letters! I suspect that the person that sent these was a cutout/asset for the Psychological Warfare, Propaganda guys. Notice that the memo went to Paul Maggio and Rufus ‘Austin’ Horn. Horn was SAS/Counterintelligence who met with FBI liaison Sam Papich every day. Horn worked for Hal Swenson, who worked for Harvey and later, Dez Fitzgerald. The initial source was a PW/Prop anti-communist radio station (Olga Duque). From there to an AMOT (Gajate). The AMOT sent it to JMWAVE, most likely the head of the AMOTs, Tony Sforza. Then JMWAVE sent it along to SAS (Maggio and Horn) who brought in the FBI (Papich). Of course, Harvey would have seen this.”

    Dave later added the following:

    Another possible source of the letters was members of the DRE—the Student Revolutionary Directorate. The DRE was a “specialized” student group of the larger Revolutionary Directorate. The student group was founded in the summer of 1960 by Ross Crozier (Harold Noemayr) and William Kent (Oliver Corbus/Doug Gupton) under the direction of Philip Toomey (Robert Trouchard) and David Phillips (Michael Choden) and designated AMSPELL. Kent was first introduced to Juan Salvat (AMHINT-2) by Alberto Muller (AMHINT-1). Salvat knew Kent as Gupton. Other early members of AMSPELL were Isidro Borja (AMHINT-5), and Luis Fernandez Rocha (AMHINT-53). AMSPELL was split into three sections: AMSPELL itself, AMHINT and AMBARB. AMSPELL proper was managed by Ross Crozier, AMHINT, the paramilitary section, was managed by David Morales, and the AMBARB (propaganda) section was managed by Calvin Thomas. (Note: Oswald’s interaction with the New Orleans chapter of the DRE in the summer of 1963 was key in creating his pro-Castro credentials and adding to his Mexico links to Phillips.)

    David Morales, who was part of the 1954 Guatemala coup (operation PBSUCCESS) with Phillips, was also chief of operations for the Bay of Pigs invasion under Ted Shackley at JMWAVE and was reportedly involved in various assassination projects including the capture and killing of Che Guevara and later aided repressive governments in South America.

    1) Lt. Ramos

    This link File 104-10308-10271 and File 104-10308-10272 establish that Castro’s close friend Lt. Ramos could be Menendez, the alleged FPCC-linked sender of Pepe’s letters. The latter file identifies William Harvey as its author. These files pertain to a project to assassinate Castro in 1962 called AMRANGE, likely led by Harvey.

    2) Augusto Cesar Gajate Puig

    The Morales letter was received at JMWAVE on December 7, via Augusto Cesar Gajate Puig, a Cuban exile involved in the fight for a free Cuba, who had received it from Olga Duque who worked for the CIA-sponsored Radio Libertad. The reason she got to handle it was because the letter was suspiciously mistakenly addressed to this right-wing conduit by supposedly communist assassins working for Castro. File 104-10308-10249 refers to Gajate as a CIA contact and expresses a need to protect his identity. 104-10506-10015: ROUTING SHEET AND GREEN LIST NAME CHECK REQUESTS/RESULTS describes him more specifically as an AMOT contact. AMOT is a cryptonym for a network of Cubans trained by David Morales during 1960-61 to be a new Cuban intelligence service once Castro had been ousted. It became a proprietary which produced economic and sociological reports in support of Cuban operations.

    3) Rufus Horn

    A report about the letter (appendix 3) was then written up by Rufus Horn who signed it (by direction of Victor Wallen) as the liaison as well as in lieu of William Harvey above his name at the bottom of the report. The report is sent on December 8 to the FBI, Secret Service, and Department of State.

    Rufus Horn, also known as Austin Horn, was a key liaison within the SAS group and TFW as well as with the FBI (File 104-10269-10134) where he interacted with Sam Papich. He was also well connected with Desmond Fitzgerald of the CIA who led the all-powerful SAS group that enacted major covert activity policies.

    Horn was put in the loop when Oswald was arrested for a street fight with a DRE operative (Carlos Bringuier) around his provocative FPCC leafleting activities in New Orleans in 1963: (from State Secret, Simpich, Chapter 5) “Anderson received a Sept. 24 report of Oswald’s arrest, which revealed Oswald’s request to speak with an FBI agent and share quite a bit of information while in jail: Austin Horn, the Special Affairs Staff (SAS) liaison with the FBI, also got his copy of the September 24 report on October 8. The routing sheet indicates that Horn’s copy was signed for by ‘LD,’ SAS/CI L. Demos. This document was passed on to SAS/CI/CONTROL, then Egerter, and then CI/IC Cal Tenney. Horn was active on the Cubela case at its end in 1965.” (Note: The Cubela case was another plot to assassinate Castro involving Harvey.)

    4) Richard Tansing

    Another person whose name appears in many of the Pepe letter files is Richard Tansing. Tansing describes himself as C/TFW/CI. His boss, Harold Swenson, used the pseudonym of Joseph Langosch while serving as C/SAS/CI and C/WH/SA/CI between 1963 and 1965. In a cable on October 17, 1963, that was originated by Anita Potocki (Harvey Assistant), SAS/CI, and Tansing C/SAS/CI, was a Coordinating Officer.

    Tansing is also linked to William Harvey, Desmond Fitzgerald, Sam Halpern (all TFW or SAS), Win Scott (Chief of Station in Mexico City), Papich of the FBI, as well as soldiers of fortune: Frank Sturgis (of Watergate fame) and Gerry Patrick Hemming (104-10048-10217: FRANK ANTHONY STURGIS, ALSO KNOWN AS FRANK FIORINI and 104-10218-10274: ROUTING AND RECORD SHEET). 

    Tansing was involved in an effort to recruit the Cuban Head of the Mexico City embassy, Eusebio Azcue (who had contact with Oswald) shortly before the Mexico City charade, the Cubela assassination of Castro plot, and direct involvement with CIA FPCC assets and covert activities.

    5) Anita Potocki

    Anita Potocki was Bill Harvey’s long-time loyal aide. She helped potential patsy Santiago Garriga set up an FPCC chapter in Miami. She aided CIA FPCC informant Thomas Vicente (who helped Oswald with his New Orleans Chapter) travel to Cuba as an asset for the CIA. She is also closely linked to David Phillips. Her relations with Tansing are noted above.

    6) Desmond Fitzgerald

    Fitzgerald was the head of a secret unit within the CIA called the Special Affairs Staff. His top priority, as directed by SAG, was to eliminate Castro.

    Note: In a nutshell, we can conclude that those involved in handling the Pepe letters within the CIA coalesced under Harvey and then Fitzgerald mostly in the CI section of SAS. SAS had its tentacles in JMWAVE where covert activities involving AMOTs (like Gajate) were run as well as Mexico City activities (where David Atlee Phillips was based).

    7) David Phillips

    “I’m firmly convinced now that he [Phillips] ran the red herring, disinformation aspects of the plot. The thing that got him so nervous was when I started mentioning all the anti-Castro Cubans who were in reports filed with the FBI for the Warren Commission and every one of them had a tie I could trace back to him. That’s what got him very upset. He knew the whole thing could unravel.” Dan Hardway (HSCA investigator), from Gaeton Fonzi’s  The Last Investigation

    From Spartacus: “David Phillips also worked undercover in Cuba (1959-60). He returned to the United States in 1960 and was involved in the organization of the Bay of Pigs operation. During this period he worked with E.Howard Hunt in the attempts to have Fidel Castro murdered. Phillips later worked under Winston Scott, the head of the CIA station in Mexico.

    Desmond FitzGerald arrived in Mexico City to tell Phillips that he had the freedom to roam the entire Western Hemisphere mounting secret operations to get rid of Fidel Castro. Phillips now worked closely with David Morales at JMWAVE in Miami. Phillips also provided support to Alpha 66. It was later claimed that Phillips told Antonio Veciana his goal was to provoke U.S. intervention in Cuba by ‘putting Kennedy’s back to the wall…’ 

    David Atlee Phillips served as Station Chief in the Dominican Republic and in Rio de Janeiro. In 1970, he was called to Washington and asked to lead a special task force assigned to prevent the election of Salvador Allende as President of Chile. Allende was killed in a military takeover in 1973.”

    From Someone Would Have Talked, Larry Hancock: “However, there are two further indications that he was either aware of the conspiracy or actively supported it.

    One of these is from conversations David Phillips had with Kevin Walsh, a former HSCA staffer who went on to work as a private detective in Washington, DC. In a conversation not long before his death, Phillips remarked: ‘My private opinion is that JFK was done in by a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers.’ — David Atlee Phillips, July 1986.

    The second conversation was related in an email exchange between researcher Gary Buell and David Phillips’ nephew, Shawn Phillips. As Shawn described in the email, Shawn’s father, James Phillips, became aware that his brother, David, had in some way been ‘seriously involved’ in the JFK assassination. James and David argued about this vigorously and it resulted in a silent hiatus between them that lasted for almost six years.

    As David was dying of lung cancer, he called his brother. Even at this point, there was apparently no reconciliation between the two men. James asked David pointedly, ‘Were you in Dallas that day?’ David answered, ‘Yes,’ and James hung up the phone on him.

    8) William Harvey

    Harvey hated the Kennedys, wrote up the executive action program called ZRRIFLE, and led Task Force W, which headed Operation Mongoose (an anti-Castro sabotage program). At the height of the Missile Crisis, he foolishly defied the Kennedys by sending three commando units to Cuba. This got him exiled to Rome. ZRRIFLE describes the importance of ensuring corroborative paper trails when planning elimination programs. Harvey was singled out by HSCA investigator Dan Hardway as a person of extreme interest in the assassination… something our studies confirm as a point of agreement among most researchers.

    From Spartacus on William Harvey: “At a meeting of this committee at the White House on 4 November 1961, it was decided to call this covert action program for sabotage and subversion against Cuba, Operation Mongoose. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy also decided that General Edward Lansdale (Staff Member of the President’s Committee on Military Assistance) should be placed in charge of the operation.

    The CIA JMWAVE station in Miami served as operational headquarters for Operation Mongoose. The head of the station was Ted Shackley and over the next few months became very involved in the attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. One of Lansdale’s first decisions was to appoint Harvey as head of Task Force W. Harvey’s brief was to organize a broad range of activities that would help to bring down Castro’s government…

    During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Kennedy instructed CIA director John McCone, to halt all covert operations aimed at Cuba. A few days later he discovered that Harvey had ignored this order and had dispatched three commando teams into Cuba to prepare for what he believed would be an inevitable invasion. Kennedy was furious and as soon as the Cuban Missile Crisis was over, Harvey was removed as commander of ZRRIFLE. On 30 October 1962, RFK terminated ‘all sabotage operations’ against Cuba. As a result of President Kennedy’s promise to Nikita Khrushchev that he would not invade Cuba, Operation Mongoose was disbanded.

    Harvey was now sent to Italy where he became Chief of Station in Rome. Harvey knew that Robert Kennedy had been responsible for his demotion. A friend of Harvey’s said that he ‘hated Bobby Kennedy’s guts with a purple passion.’”

    The Usual Suspects

    There are numerous reasons that many researchers have suspected David Phillips and William Harvey as being part of the conspiracy. It is Harvey’s links with Johnny Rosselli and the mob, his suspicious behavior during the months leading up to the assassination–including a possible visit to Dallas–his hatred of the Kennedys, and his experience in executive action; all these that make Harvey of extreme interest.

    In the case of Phillips, his universe is so intertwined with Oswald’s through his ties to Mexico City, the FPCC, the DRE, Alpha 66, New Orleans right-wing networks, George Joannides, etc. that renders him suspicious. He also made quasi-confessions—including being in Dallas on the day of the assassination– revelations that have led most researchers to suspect him.

    What do the Pepe letters add to the mix?

    If one agrees that—their similarities with the 1963 letters, the FPCC links of the sender, and the total post-assassination complacency displayed by investigators of this despite the obvious fingerprints and the labeling of Menendez as a suspect are not a matter of happenstance–then we can conclude that this incident, like so many others, was deep-sixed, because it went against the lone nut scenario.

    This author believes it went further than just this:

    – The fabrication of a false paper trail is alluded to in William Harvey’s executive action plan called ZRRIFLE. So are the tactics of shifting the blame on a foe and the use of proxies. All this is in full display with the Pepe letters.

    – The 1963 letters have content that only a few people could have known about, including alleged bribes and Oswald’s fall 1963 displacements. One of these people is clearly suggestive of  Phillips and another could well be William Harvey, who worked closely with Phillips in the past on covert activities and whose assistant, Anita Potocki, worked closely with the Mexico City station.

    – The 1962 letters occurred one year earlier and share a similar template with the 1963 letters. These were certainly two false flag operations organized by the same perpetrators.

    – William Harvey had already turned on the Kennedys by the time he tried to sabotage the Kennedy/Khrushchev diplomacy attempts at the height of the Missile Crisis. Phillips expressed his disgust with the failed Bay of Pigs mission which he blamed on JFK.

    – Over and above his privileged knowledge, Phillips had the contacts in Havana, in Mexico City, and at JMWAVE in Miami as well as the false flag expertise to pull off these tactics.

    – It is interesting to note that one of the recipients of the Pepe letter was a CIA conduit called Radio Libertad out of Miami. And one of the 1963 recipients was the Voice of the United States of America, another Cold War propaganda organization. Phillips would have been well acquainted with these organizations as he himself used such tools in his regime change propaganda efforts.

    Conclusion

    This author had opinions, based on intelligent speculation, about who was involved in the assassination. The prior plots to remove JFK confirmed a template. Ergo, solving a prior plot meant solving the JFK assassination. Because of negligence and obfuscation on the part of investigators, this proved difficult.

    Two things changed all this in the past four months: one—a better understanding of the intelligence universe of 1963 that culminated in organizational charts and two—the Pepe letters. 

    With declassification, the current downfall of Warren Commission apologists was predictable. The files not only torpedoed the lone-nut scenario and disgraced the Warren Commission, but they revealed the biggest challenge facing conspiracy deniers caused by the shift to pushing a lone-nut scenario which had to be improvised because the blame Castro scenario was overruled after the assassination. The fairy tale spinners could not put all the toothpaste back in the tube. Fabrication, witness intimidation, coercing media, and file classification became the order of the day. Until 1991, when the movie JFK, gave us the declassification of thousands of files, and changed the assassination universe.

    The Pepe letters operation proved more difficult to sweep under the rug because it occurred in 1962 and had been analyzed by the FBI and the Secret Service, both genuinely concerned by the threat. A suspect for a plan to remove Kennedy linked to the FPCC had been identified. The knee-jerk dismissal of the Pepe letters does not hold water. The HSCA simply tabled them, until against all odds, they were found decades later, and are only now being analyzed in detail.

     What we can take away from the Pepe Letters is monumental and could be even more incriminating with more research.

    1. The Pepe letters bear too much of a resemblance to the 1963 incriminating correspondence for them not to be linked.
    2. Both correspondence initiatives were designed to incriminate Fidel Castro in plots to kill JFK.
    3. Both initiatives use FPCC links to taint the offenders.
    4. Both initiatives correspond closely with the ZRRIFLE executive action template mastered by both William Harvey and David Phillips who are regime change specialists.
    5. Phillips’s network is omnipresent in the false flag operations around Oswald in 1963.
    6. Harvey’s network is very closely connected to the characters involved in the post-reception phase of the Pepe letters.
    7. Harvey and Phillips connect closely through their regime change operations history, members of their networks, and relations between TFW/SAS and Mexico City.
    8. Both shared a hatred of the Kennedys.
    9. SAS was a critical conduit between regime change operators and those who set policy.
    10. The post-assassination analysis was cursory and evasive.

    It remains difficult to determine who, within the networks, acted wittingly vs. unwittingly and who figured out after the fact the minutiae around the operations. However, if we conclude that what happened in the 1962 and 1963 false flag operations discussed in this article are not the result of mere happenstance, and that neither the Cubans, Mafia nor lone wolves could have pulled these plots off, we can conclude that they were coordinated by the same perpetrators who are regime change specialists.

    Find out who designed tactics for either the false flag plots, their roll-out, the propaganda themes, and who got the instructions through to contacts in Havana to send the letters, who set up the FPCC tainting strategy… You have a strong case of who was behind the JFK assassination at the operations management level. 

    Appendices

    A 9-page PDF with all appendices may be found here.

     

  • The Death of Tippit – Part 2

    The Death of Tippit – Part 2

    The Death of Tippit – Part 2 – The Timeline and Tapes

    By John Washburn

    Both Hill and Westbrook’s testimonies confuse the sequences and timelines of particular events. The discovery of the jacket behind Ballew is a particularly relevant marker, as are the various false alarms. Hill even put the jacket discovery in the wrong place.

    To help unpick the confusion, listed below are events from the 12:44 All Points Bulletin (APB) to the time officers announced they were outside the Texas Theater. 

    Times are taken from the DPD tapes, adjusted to real-time between 12:54 and 1:16 pm (where time was tampered slowly) and again after 1:16 where time was tampered fast.

    12:44          APB with description of suspect

    12:48          Hill “enroute” to TSBD, in car 207 arrives by 12:50 pm 

    12:53         Tippit says he’s at “Lansing 8th” 

    12:56         260 (Harkness) “Get us 508 (Barnes – Crime Lab) down to Texas School Book Depository”. Shells have been found.

    12:56         508 (Barnes) is en route to deal with the shells found and ‘crime scene’. 

    1:00           Unanswered call to Tippit

    1:04           “91 clear” Mentzel. (Per CE2645 at Luby’s) time 3 minutes difference)

    1:04           “78” Tippit. Appears twice on CD 280 transcript but disappears in subsequent transcripts. (1:07 DPD time 3 minutes difference)

    1:07           Mentzel is asked to do traffic call. Does not go to accident as offloads to Nolan. Is at Beckley and 10th per CE 2645, a Mobil gas station (1:11 DPD time 4 minutes difference)

    1:09           Tippit was shot, driving eastwards from direction of Beckley and 10th, the Mobil gas station.

    1:10           Bowley at the shooting scene arrived having left RL Thornton School Singing Hills at 12:55 pm with daughter (a 13–15-minute drive mainly on freeway). Waits for safety until making radio call (Bowley affidavit of 2 December 1963)

    1:10           Fugitive ran onto Jefferson (Lewis, Patterson, Russell, and Reynolds FBI interviews and Warren Commission testimony of Reynolds.) 

    1:11           Lewis called DPD. Russell arrived at murder scene. Said Police car arrived in 5 minutes

    1:11/1:12  Bowley call. (1:18/1:19 DPD time 7-8 minutes difference). Ambulance arrives exactly 1 minute after Bowley has given the location as, “What’s, what, 404 E10th” 15 seconds after he started his call.

    1:14           “Suspect running west on Jefferson”. (Lewis has phoned and Dispatch put the call out) (19:30 DPD time 5:30 minutes difference)

    1:14           “19 is en route” (DPD time 1:19-1:20)

    1:15           “19 will be en route shortly”

    1:16           “85 (RW Walker): “We have a description on this suspect over here on Jefferson, last seen about 300 block of East Jefferson. He’s a white male, about 30, 5’8”; black wavy hair, slender, wearing a white jacket, white shirt, and dark slacks”. (DPD 1:22).

    1:16           Poe and then Owens arrive at 410 E10th. “105, we’ve arrived”. “19 is code 6”. (1: 22. DPD 6 minutes difference*). Westbrook and Alexander were with Owens.

    1:20           279 says “got jacket in parking lot of garage across from Dudley Hughes.”. (DPD 1:25 5 minutes difference*). Westbrook had found the jacket under a car.

    1:20           Hill says on patrol radio he’d already been at the scene and saw the ambulance pass in front when Hill was on his way. 

    1:21           Hill says at 12th Beckley with ‘a witness’. (DPD 1:26-1:27 5 minutes difference*)

    1:21           Owens is at Ballew “One of the men here at the service station that saw him seems to think he’s in this block, the 400 block of East Jefferson behind this service station. Would you give me some more squads over here?”
    DPD (DPD 1:26 5 minutes difference*) told Warren Commission a jacket had been thrown down. Russell for second FBI interview said he went back to that scene with a policeman.

    1:28           111 (Officer Pollard said suspect was seen running west in the alley between Jefferson and 10th) (DPD 1:32 4 minutes difference*)

    1:29           Owens. “We’re shaking down these old houses here in 400 Block E Jefferson.” (DPD 1:33 4 minutes difference*). Per WC testimony Owens stayed outside covering. Per WFAA-TV Dallas footage (Reiland the reporter – see later), Hill instigated that search, and then the search moved to the Marsalis Library) *

    1:29           Channel 2 221 (Patrolmen R. HAWKINS and E. R. BAGGETT) Can you give Captain WESTBROOK any information as to where he was shot?

    1:29           McDonald “Send squad over here to Tenth and Crawford to check out this church basement” *.” (DPD 1:33 1:27 4 minutes difference*)

    1:30           CT Walker. “223, he’s in the library at Jefferson — east 500 block Marsalis and Jefferson” * (DPD 1:34 4 minutes difference). That is the time Hutson, Hawkins, and Baggett (see later) were at the Mobil gas station, 10th and Beckley.

    1:31           Owens. “We’re all at the library” (DPD 1:34 3 minutes difference)

    1:35           Westbrook (550) made a call “What officer have you got commanding this area over here where this officer was shot?” Then Owens and others return to 410 E 10th. There is then more WFAA-TV (Reiland) footage which showed Westbrook, Poe, Owens, and Croy examining a wallet at the scene. 

    1:40           Westbrook put out a call “and work to North Jefferson. We’ve got a witness that seen him go north. *

    1:41           Hill 550/2: The shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic .38, rather than a pistol.

    1:42           Hill (550/2) put out a call on Channel 2. “A witness reports that he was last seen in the Abundant Life Temple about the 400 block. We are fixing to go in and shake it down”*

    1:42           Owens (19) asks where 80 (Davis is).

    1:44           Hill (550/2) put out a call on Channel 2. “No that’s not the right one.” The Abundant Life Temple was a false alarm.

    1:44           Stringer (551 put out a call on Channel 2. “The jacket the suspect was wearing over here on Jefferson bears a laundry tag with the letter B 9738. See if there is any way you can check this laundry tag.” Per Ewell that was at the curb of Crawford Street.

    1:45           Radio call that suspect seen entering Texas Theater.

    1:47           Hawkins (call sign 211) put out a call “there’s about five squads back here [rear of the Texas Theater] with me now”. 

    The asterisked events at 1:29,1:30,1:40 and 1:42 were all false alarms (covered later).

    II

    As set out in my Tippit Tapes article [https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-tippit-tapes-a-re-examination] time was tampered with before the shooting of Tippit with the effect of placing Bowley’s call at 1:11 pm as 1:18-1:19 pm. After 12:55 pm most time stamps are missing, and a few erroneous time stamps appear. Time was slowed down. The reason for that is that anyone leaving 1026 N Beckley at 1:04 pm on foot couldn’t have arrived to kill Tippit at 1:09 pm. 

    Researcher Dale Myers says he timed the tape and a stopwatch and put Bowley’s call as at 1:17 pm 41 seconds. However, it’s difficult to reconcile that exercise with the Minnesota Library version of the patrol radio tapes on YouTube. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1-CXd9qdIQ&t=1551s]

    That tape starts at 12:15 pm and runs for 1 hour 1 minute with a minute of a stuck repeat just before Bowley’s call which was 3 ½ minutes before the end of the tape. Hence by simple arithmetic, with only an hour of calls, there could be no events on the tape that occurred after 1:15 pm. Bowley’s is 56 ½ minutes from the start, making it 1:11 pm. 

    The tape has a 7-minute discrepancy by 1:11 pm which gradually accumulates after 12:54 pm when time stamps begin to disappear systematically. A real interval of 17 minutes was stretched to 24 minutes. 

    With time having been sped up, the opposite effect can be observed after Bowley’s call. The consequences of that are apparent in at least two places. By the speeded-up tampered time, Owens appears to have arrived only 3 minutes after the start of Bowley’s call. But in real time it took 4-5 minutes. Owens appears, by DPD time, to have arrived at the library false alarm only one minute after he was “shaking down the houses” in 400 E Jefferson, and simultaneously to CT Walker calling the false alarm. But in real time the interval is 2 minutes.

    That can be explained as the tamperers needing to resynchronize with real-time at approximately 1:45 pm because of third-party verifiability of the time of events at the Texas Theater. Time speeds up, thus a real interval of 34 minutes is condensed to 27 minutes.

    The 3 December 1963 statement of Hutson correctly put the time of the 1:45 pm call saying a suspect had entered the Texas Theater as 1:45 pm. This is where real-time and DPD time resynchronized in the first transcript, Secret Service Copy CD-290.

    But on  December 5, 1963, Hill said that the radio message that a suspect was in the theater was 1:55 pm. McDonald said on December 2, 1963, that 2:00 pm was the time of entering the Texas Theater. C.T. Walker said on 2 December 1963 the 1:45 pm radio call was 2:00 pm.

    The date of those officers asserting these false timings is relevant. The first transcript appeared as Secret Service Copy CD-290 dated December 3, 1963. That version did have a 1:45 pm time stamp as the relevant time. But time stamps for 1:18, 1:40, and 1:45 present in CD 290 disappear in the 6 March and 11 August transcripts and from the tape. The 1:45 call sits midway between the 1:44 and 1:46 time stamps in these later versions.

    By that evidence, the tampering strategy was still fluid in the first week of December 1963. Therefore some officers, who presumably knew they had to add 10 minutes to time to give a false account for Tippit’s time of death, carried on adding 10 minutes to the time of events at the Texas Theater not knowing that time would end up not tampered! 

    Only Hutson didn’t lie on time and as set out later Hutson was only in on Oswald’s arrest by chance. Was Hutson a reason why Oswald left the Texas Theater alive?

    OWENS’ VS EWELL’S ACCOUNT VS WESTBROOK’S

    Back to the discrepancies in how people arrived at the Tippit murder scene.

    Ewell said:- “I left the location at the School Book Depository and jumped into a car driven by Captain Westbrook with Sergeant Stringer. I rode in the back seat as we sped across into Oak Cliff by taking the Houston Street Viaduct right beside the Dallas News.

    When we arrived in Oak Cliff, I got a chance to go into a convenience store, McCandles’ Minute Market it was called in those days, just down from the Marsailles [sic] Public Library, and I did get to make a phone call to the city desk asking them to send me a photographer. They didn’t know what I was doing in Oak Cliff. This particular editor was too overpowered by what was going on downtown to pay any attention to what I was trying to tell him, and I know I came out saying, “You know I’ve got to have a photographer out here!”

    As I stepped out of this convenience store, next door to it was a two-story boarding house, and there I saw Bill Alexander with an automatic pistol stalking across the balcony very carefully. Alexander always impressed me because, being an assistant district attorney, he was one of those guys from the prosecutor’s office that you saw with the cops. He was a squad car prosecutor. You very seldom saw the district attorney outside of his office.

    From there we proceeded to a side street down from where they said J.D. Tippit had been shot not far from East Jefferson. There was another police car there as they were examining a jacket next to the curb which had apparently been located by one of the policemen after Oswald had thrown it down as he ran toward Jefferson. I had a jacket just like it. I remember it as being a light tan windbreaker. I was with Westbrook as we all went over to examine the jacket because it was the only tangible thing we had at the moment that belonged to the killer. In fact, I held the jacket in my hands. I remember that they were talking about a water mark on it that was obviously made by a dry cleaning shop.

    They were discussing it when the report came in that the person they thought might be the police officer’s assailant had gone into the Texas Theatre. Now we were on East Jefferson, so I’m thinking that we were about five blocks from that location. Immediately, Captain Westbrook and Sergeant Stringer ran back to their car, which was across the street, and I ran to jump in the backseat. By that time, they were already turning out and accelerating. When I got in the backseat with the door still hanging open, I came out of the car hanging onto the door. They slowed down long enough for me to get back in, as I could have been flung out against the gravel into a curb if I hadn’t held on.

    Anyway, when we arrived at the Texas Theatre, we parked right in front and everybody jumped out and went into the lobby. There were other police cars getting there, too. I was very familiar with the Texas Theatre, having lived close by back when we were a younger married couple. At that time, they had some kind of stairway up to the balcony, and I remember somebody kept shouting, “Turn on the house lights! Will somebody please turn on the house lights?”

    At 1:44 pm there was this call on Channel 2, which corroborates what Ewell said, which is particularly relevant to time. 

    551 (Sergeant H.H. Stringer)         “The jacket the suspect was wearing over here on Jefferson bears a laundry tag with the letter B 9738. See if there is any way you can check this laundry tag.”

    The place Ewell describes his arrival, “McCandles Minute Market”, and where he made a phone call can be deduced. It was adjacent to the building Alexander was investigating, a “furniture store”. 409 E Jefferson was described in the 1961 Dallas Directory as “One Stop Drive in Grocery” (later to become Dean’s Dairy Way). Next to that, westwards, was 401 E Jefferson, the Texaco garage. Next to it eastwards 413 ½ an apartment building, and then 417 S&J Used Furniture Exchange. 

    Ewell’s account is consistent with patrol radio and also WFAA-TV reporter Ron Reiland. Reiland in the TV film described Sgt. Hill as instigating the search of what Reiland called “antique shops”. Reiland says:-. 

    “Another man, Officer Hill, and several others ran into the front of the building with drawn pistols. I ran around the back of the building with my camera in hopes that if they flushed this man that we were looking for, he would come out the back door right into the face of the camera.”

    This is from the WFAA-TV broadcast, “A Year Ago Today”, November 22, 1964, at 36.20 minutes. [https://youtu.be/DBOvB5RKDOo?si=TYNIGZLvlzZb0DJa]

    Ewell describes the examination of the jacket on the curb, which would be Crawford Street. Ewell was not describing the discovery of the jacket as that occurred in the parking lot near the alley before 1:21 pm.

    Ewell’s description of events around the time of his arrival – which he said was with Westbrook driving – places it no earlier than the events around 1:30 pm (real-time). Whereas Owens said he arrived in Oak Cliff with Westbrook and that time was 1:16 pm. 

    Owens and Ewell could both have been telling the truth if Westbrook had done the journey twice in quick succession. The first journey was exactly as Owens said, and arriving at 1:16 pm in Owens’ car. The second journey was exactly as Jim Ewell said, and for that second journey, Westbrook had acquired the unmarked car that Ewell said Westbrook later drove to the front of the Texas Theatre. 

    A need, and the means, for Westbrook to go back to the Depository would be car 207. The car would have to be removed from Oak Cliff, or else it would stick out like a sore thumb. I therefore posit that Westbrook very shortly after arriving with Owens rendezvoused with car 207 (Hill) somewhere near the alley west of Crawford and took car 207 back to the Depository. 

    If Westbrook revealed how he’d arrived twice it would destroy the alibi for car 207. That explains why in his evidence he would conflate the two journeys into one. Thus turning Owens into an unknown officer, leaving out Ewell and Alexander, but adding Stringer. 

    By doing that, Westbrook would also have to lie about his method of arriving at the Texas Theater. He couldn’t admit – which was Ewell’s account – that he’d driven the unmarked car parked at the front. That would undermine everything, including his dubious story of walking from City Hall. 

    WESTBROOK – THE ALLEY AND THE JACKET

    In the extract of his testimony above Westbrook omitted his activities during the 14 minutes after he had arrived with Owens (1:16 pm). Westbrook first tried to mention only the library debacle (1:30 pm). Counsel Ball was aware of that omission, so he asked a question he knew the answer to.

    Mr. BALL. So, what did you do after that?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. I went back to the city hall and resumed my desk.

    Mr. BALL. Did you ever find some clothing?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. That was before, Mr. Ball.

    Mr. BALL. When was that?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. Actually, I didn’t find it-it was pointed out to me by either some officer that-that was while we were going over the scene in the close area where the shooting was concerned. Someone pointed out a jacket to me that was laying under a car and I got the jacket and told the other to take the license number.

    Mr. BALL. When did this happen? You gave me a sort of a resume of what you had done. But you omitted this incident.

    Mr. WESTBROOK. I tell you what-this occurred shortly-let me think just a minute. We had been to the library and there is a little bit more conversation on the radio-I got on the radio and I asked the dispatcher about along this time, and I think this was after the library situation, if there had been a command post set up and who was in charge at the scene, and he, told me Sergeant Owens, and about that time we saw Sergeant Owens pass. 

    Mr. BALL. What do you mean by “command post”?

    Westbrook was struggling. Why? Because the call announcing that the jacket of the fugitive was found in the parking lot of Ballew Texaco Service Station, 401 E Jefferson, was ten minutes earlier than the library incident – at approximately 1:20 pm. (Call sign 279 being Officer Mackie or Griffin.) 

    279   We believe we’ve got this suspect on shooting this officer out here. Got his white jacket. Believe he dumped it on this parking lot behind this service station at 400 block East Jefferson across from Dudley Hughes and he had a white jacket on. We believe this is it.

    DIS:   10-4. You do not have the suspect. Is that correct?

    279: No, just the jacket, laying on the ground. 

    DIS:   10-4.

    Having been caught out Westbrook then said:

    Mr. BALL. Was that before you went to the scene of the Tippit shooting?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. Yes, sir; that was before we went to that scene.

    Mr. BALL. That was after you left the library?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. After we left the library. I got out of the car and walked through the parking lot.

    Mr. BALL. What parking lot?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. I don’t know-it may have been a used-car lot.

    Mr. BALL. On what street?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. It was actually on Jefferson, but the place where this jacket was found would have been back closer to the alley, Mr. Ball.

    Mr. BALL. The alley of what?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. Between Jefferson and whatever the next street is over there.

    Mr. BALL. Tenth Street is the street north.

    Mr. WESTBROOK. What street?

    Mr. BALL. You see, the street directly north of Jefferson is 10th Street.

    Mr. WESTBROOK. It would be between Jefferson and 10th Street?

    Mr. BALL. And where with reference to Patton?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. Well, it would be toward town,

    Westbrook was obfuscating and changing the subject and there is a sense of exasperation in the tone of Ball. Westbrook couldn’t have gone to the parking lot to find the jacket after the library incident, as the jacket had been found before. What occurred after the library incident was it being discussed on Crawford Street. 

    But making matters worse for him he: did find the jacket. An FBI report of 3 December 1963 states:

    “Captain Doughty stated that this jacket was found by Captain Westbrook of the Dallas Police Department in an open parking lot west of Patton Street between 10th and Jefferson Streets, Dallas, Texas.”

    [https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=10672#relPageId=209&search=%22doughty%22_and%20%22westbrook%22]

    Washburn P2 1 policerecord
    The police record of the jacket was filed by Westbrook at 3 pm on the 22nd. Note it has Westbrook’s name at the top. [https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth339366/m1/1/]

    But the same document submitted to the Warren Commission has Westbrook’s name obscured by a tilted strip attached over his name, in a way no other documents are.  (Vol XXIV CE2003, p117.) [https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh24/pdf/WH24_CE_2003.pdf]Washburn P2 2 policerecord

    If one looks carefully, only the words at the top “SUBMITTED TOO”, survived for the Warren Commission. The words “DPD Personnel Office” have not survived, despite being darker ink strikes in the original DPD version of the document. Those words cannot have been obscured accidentally, merely by a strip placed over those words at that angle. Nor by a parallel strip, as the words “OFFICER” and “OF” would also have survived. 

    The words on the strip that say it was released from “our” – DPD – Crime Lab on 28 November 1963 are superfluous. Both versions lower down state that the evidence was released to Vince Drain of the FBI on 28 November 1963.

    III

    For the HSCA in 1978, Westbrook admitted to finding the jacket. He said: “[he] was behind this location [Ballew] with Stringer when they found the jacket under the parked car across the alley from the rear of the church. Doesn’t recall disposition of the jacket.”

    So, by this, Westbrook found the jacket in the parking lot. Before the radio call at 1:20 pm, announcing it had been found. If Westbrook for the HSCA was correct, then how did Stringer arrive? Was he the other person in car 207 with Hill that tooted outside 1026 N Beckley?

    When Westbrook was interviewed by author Larry Sneed in 1988 he’d again forgotten Stringer’s name. But he placed himself finding the jacket having been in the alley. 

    “…I started walking up the alley, and I can’t even remember who the officers were at the time, one officer, whether he was with me or whether he was coming the other way, I can’t recall; but he said, ‘Look! There’s a jacket under the car.’ I think it was an old Pontiac sitting there if I remember right. So, I walked over and reached under and picked up the jacket, and this eventually turned out to be Oswald’s jacket.”

    To summarise. Westbrook, who had arrived at the scene with Owens, has a hole in his story, concerning his whereabouts from 12:45 pm to 1:11 pm and then again after 1:16 pm to at least 1:30 pm. He tried to not mention the jacket to Ball and is defensive when it is brought up. He oscillates between the finding of the jacket just before 1:21 pm, with the discussion of the jacket at 1:44 pm. That is consistent with his conflating his two arrivals.

    All references on patrol radio Channel 1 describing the fugitive who ran down Patton and then E Jefferson including the finding of the jacket at 1:21 pm say it was white and that the fugitive had a white shirt. There was no mention of tan, gray, or any other color. But the jacket Westbrook submitted as evidence with the cleaning tag was gray. Jacket-less Oswald himself was wearing a brown shirt when arrested.

    If Westbrook falsified the jacket submission in his submission of 3:00 pm on November 22, 1963, it would follow he may have falsified other evidence submitted at the same time. The question, therefore, arises whether Westbrook did find a jacket before 1:20 pm because he’d rendezvoused with car 207 and essentially planted it to then announce finding it. A corollary then arises: whether by the time he’d left Oak Cliff and then come back, he had a reason to switch the jacket. (A reason for there being two jackets is offered later.) 

    A map is useful to place the alley into perspective, as it’s the same alley where Doris Holan saw a police car shortly before Tippit was shot.

    Reference the FBI photograph below. (Note: because the photograph was taken from the north looking south, normal east-west and north-south directions are reversed.) 

     

    That alley (shown in the diagram below as a yellow line, my addition) is the same alley that runs behind 410 E 10th, then crosses Patton, to run behind Ballew Texaco. The red dot in the diagram below (again my addition) is the apartment block from where Doris Holan saw a police car with two policemen in it around the time Tippit was killed. The dotted element of the yellow line represents the 50 yards from the rear of 410 E 10th to where the jacket was found.

     

    The FBI produced the photograph and captions. The fugitive was last seen by people at Ballew Texaco running into the alley. The FBI drew the route for the fugitive (black dotted line) avoiding the alley and then running along Jefferson. But the jacket was found in the rear parking lot of Ballew Texaco Service Station, near the alley. 

     

    Officer Griffin said on the radio “They say he’s running west in the alley between Jefferson and Tenth”.

     

    There is also a false assumption regarding the FBI’s black dotted line for Tippit’s route. Given that he left Top Ten Records via Bishop and Sunset, the route to arrive would be along E 10th from Beckley, not coming down from Crawford Street. 

     

    Given that per the Commission transcripts, Tippit’s last location was “Lancaster and 8th” at 12:54 pm and the (falsified) time of his shooting at 1:16 pm, there could be no basis to know what he was doing in the intervening 22 minutes to deduce a route to E10th via Crawford. 

    Washburn P2 3 map

    WESTBROOK AND THE WALLET

    Westbrook omitted another incident from his testimony. At approximately 1:35 pm, WFAA-TV Dallas filmed police officers looking at a wallet Owens was holding. The news coverage referred to it as Oswald’s wallet.

    FBI agent Bob Barrett asked him, ‘Do you know who Lee Harvey Oswald is?’ And, ‘Do you know who Alek Hidell is?’

    Barrett confirmed that in this video interview of 22 February 2011. [https://emuseum.jfk.org/objects/33007] At 34 minutes in, Barrett describes driving to the Tippit murder scene in his own car and seeing Westbrook with the wallet in his hand. 

    FBI Agent Hosty said: “Westbrook called Barrett over and showed him the wallet and [the] identifications…Westbrook took the wallet into his custody [and] Barrett told me [Hosty] that if I had been at the scene with Westbrook, I would have immediately known who Oswald was.”

    There is no reference to any wallet on the radio tapes, the Warren Commission Report, papers, or police records. It does not feature in the evidence in CE 2003 that was filed by Westbrook at 3:00 pm on 22 November 1963. 

    The account that Westbrook found the wallet is consistent with the radio call from Westbrook at 1:35 pm asking where Owens is, Owens then returning to the murder scene from the library to deal with it, and then Westbrook – inconveniently – being filmed. 

    Westbrook discovering the wallet that no other bystander or officer had found in the previous 26 minutes after Tippit was shot is suggestive of more evidence planting. And in this case then losing it before 3:00 pm, as it does not appear in the report that recorded the finding of the jacket filed at 3:00 pm. The official account was that the link with Oswald and 1026 N Beckley as an address was not made until after 3:00 pm when police and sheriffs arrived at the Paine residence in Irving. 

    But Earlene Roberts said the police arrived looking for Oswald at 1026 N Beckley shortly after 1:30 pm (Affidavit of Earlene Roberts, 5 December 1963 https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh7/pdf/WH7_Roberts_aff.pdf). She had been joined by Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, who timed their arrival 10 minutes after hearing Kennedy was dead from the radio as they were sitting in their car. CBS Radio put its announcement out at 1:22 pm, faster than Walter Cronkite on US network TV at 1:38 pm.

    Not only did the Johnsons put the police there just after 1:30 pm, but Mr Johnson said it was for the murder of Tippit. 

    Mr. BELIN, All right. In any case, this man, O. H. Lee, came to rent a room from you or from your wife?

    Mr. Johnson. Yes.

    Mr. BELIN. Could you describe how you came to find out that this man had another name other than O. H. Lee?

    Mr. Johnson. Well, it was when the officers came looking for him.

    Mr. BELIN. When was this?

    Mr. Johnson. Uh-after Tippit was shot, the police_____

    Mr. BELIN. This would have been on November 22, 1963.

    Mr. Johnson. Yes.

    Mr. BELIN. And can you state what happened?

    Mr. Johnson. Well, they just came down there looking for-uh-Oswald.

    Mr BELIN. Did they say what his full name was?

    Mr. Johnson. Yes I believe they did.

    Mr Belin. Lee Harvey Oswald.

    Mr Johnson. I believe they did.

    The Warren Commission files have a note of 8 March from Norman Redlich which says 

    “it would appear that the lead to 1026 N. Beckley would have had to come from some source other than the Paines.”

    [https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/6/4606/7460606/content/arcmedia/dc-metro/rg-272/605417-key-persons/johnson_a_c_mr/johnson_a_c_mr.pdf]

    Note how Counsel Belin doesn’t press on Redlich’s point. Instead, Belin changed the subject after Johnson’s reference to “after Tippit was shot the police ___” by the inane interruption as to whether this was 22 November. The effect of what Belin did was to change the question from the time to the irrelevant matter of the date.

    Westbrook planting “Oswald’s” wallet at the Tippit murder scene after 1:30 pm could have caused detectives to go to 1026 N. Beckley shortly after that. But the wallet by 3 pm was ‘forgotten’. Oswald had a wallet on him on his arrest and two wallets point to a frame-up.

    A CONJURING TRICK?

    A plan to kill Oswald inside the Texas Theater may have failed for a simple reason. Too many decent officers moved into Oak Cliff as a result of their rational response to the murder of a colleague. Some of those reached the Texas Theater, including Officer Hutson (covered later). Hutson was in physical contact with Oswald for the arrest.

    A reason for two jackets – and Oswald was not wearing a jacket on arrest – can be explained by linking with the ill thought through planting of the wallet at the Tippit murder scene. Oswald was not wearing a jacket on arrest. Whoever left 1026 N Beckley had put on a jacket. It would be a logical part of a frame-up to need to have a second jacket for Oswald. That jacket would merely need to be said to have been “found” under the seat; as if Oswald had taken it off in the cinema–with the wallet in it. A frame-up would be complete by taking a dead Oswald’s own wallet from his pants pockets.

    If the function of a second jacket was to perpetrate that stunt, then that particular jacket wouldn’t need to be submitted as evidence, nor be identical, given the darkened cinema. The logical one to present as evidence would be the one that the decoy had been wearing in broad daylight. Once he was secure that jacket could have been switched. The wallet with ID in it would in any case be the immediate point of focus. 

    It would have helped the narrative if the decoy entering the theater had a jacket on because the evidence indicates that Oswald himself on entry didn’t. It would connect Oswald to what the decoy was wearing.

    But the unplanned murder of Tippit caused an ill-thought-through mistake, The decoy wouldn’t be expected to ditch a jacket as the decoy wasn’t intended to participate in a tableau to frame Oswald for the murder of Tippit. That scenario can explain why Westbrook planted the wallet on his second return and later changed the jacket as well as that jacket. It is therefore posited that the muddle over wallets and jackets was a result of improvisation messing up the intended conjuring trick.

    Given Westbrook first arrived by car with Owens, he couldn’t have carried the spare jacket – with the wallet inside –with him. It would be an obvious plant. But by approximately 1:30 pm Westbrook had acquired the spare jacket and the wallet. 

    HILL AT 12th AND BECKLEY

    There is a further issue. At 1:21 pm under call sign 550/2 and attributed to Hill is:

    I’m at Twelfth and Beckley now. Have a man in the car with me that can identify the suspect if anybody gets him.

     

    Twelfth and Beckley is 0.6 miles away from the Tippit murder scene, and 0.4 miles from Ballew. There is no further reference on the radio to this witness. 

    Hill testified regarding his response to what Owens said on the radio at 1:21 pm:

    At this time, about the time this broadcast came out, I went around and met Owens. I whipped around the block. I went down to the first intersection east of the block where all this incident occurred, and made a right turn, and traveled one block, and came back up on Jefferson.

    That is describing Hill moving around the sides of the blocks that contained Ballew. But if Hill was meeting Owens at Ballew at 1:21 pm, he couldn’t be at 12th and Beckley at the same time. 12th and Beckley is not close to where the witness and action was at Ballew Texaco, as it was a total of 6 blocks away. 

    If Hill had indeed found a witness to the fugitive on the run he would not have made the mistake of mixing up Dudley Hughes’s parking lot with that of Ballew. Hill avoided any mention of 12th and Beckley in his Warren Commission testimony. That leads to an indication that Hill, by, 1:21 pm, was at 12th and Beckley, and was lying to cover that up. 12th and Beckley is closer to where Mentzel put himself (see later).

    A cop lying persistently in a way that was inconsistent with other honest officers must have been both comfortable being blatant and able to bat off any officer challenging him. Did Hill intimidate officers?

    A researcher and Warren Commission advocate Dale Myers – rather than identifying Hill’s pattern of inconsistencies – has tried to explain that 12th and Beckley call as Hill carrying Harold Russell. [https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/26874-the-wallet-at-the-tippit-scene-a-simpler-solution/page/4/]

    Russell worked at Warren Reynolds’ garage which was near the Tippit murder scene where Jefferson is crossed by Patton. Russell was a witness to the fugitive on the run. Russell did not refer to being in a police car in his first FBI statement of 21 January 1964. Myers instead relies on Russell’s FBI interview of 23 February 1964. Russell did then refer to being in a police car. 

    However, that doesn’t help the case to account for that call of Hill. Russell had run to the scene of the shooting of Tippit and said that he went in a police car from the Tippit murder scene to the location where Russell had last seen the assailant – which was Ballew at 401 E Jefferson – with officers, plural.

    He stated the officers, whose names he did not know, put him in a patrol car and had him point to the area where he had last seen the man with the pistol. RUSSELL stated at this point he left the officers and then went in a nearby drug store and then went about his business and thought no more about it.

     

    [https://nara-media-001.s3.amazonaws.com/arcmedia/dc-metro/rg-272/605417-key-persons/russell_harold/russell_harold.pdf])

     

    Per the 1961 Dallas City Directory, the nearest drugstore was Skillern’s and Sons, 325 E Jefferson at the junction with Crawford, 10 yards from Ballew. The person to take Russell was Owens. Owens in this call at 1:21 pm was at Ballew, within 5 minutes of arriving at the Tippit murder scene.

    One of the men here at the service station that saw him seems to think he’s in this block, the 400 block of East Jefferson behind this service station. Would you give me some more squads over here?

    That is not evidence of Hill taking Russell to 12th and Beckley and being there at 1:21 pm. The said researcher also made a song and dance as to how witnesses at Ballew could have known a police officer had been shot by the fugitive, and also made a mystery of who had made the call to police regarding the fugitive. But the answer appears in the same FBI files that the researcher used to vindicate Hill. 

    Reynolds’ employee LJ Lewis made the call. [https://nara-media-001.s3.amazonaws.com/arcmedia/dc-metro/rg-272/605417-key-persons/russell_harold/russell_harold.pdf]

    While Warren Reynolds ran to Ballew, Russell ran to the murder scene. Owens then took Russell to Ballew arriving by 1:21 pm.  By which time a jacket was found. There’s no mystery in that. The mystery is why Hill was at 12th and Beckley at 1:21 pm and why Hill was dissembling. 

    Another red flag is that Lewis was asked to change his story by a letter from the Commission on 21 August 1964. [www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh21/pdf/WH21_PattersonBM_Ex_B.pdf]

    The outcome of the revised affidavit is that Lewis was supposed to have made the call to the police before he saw the fugitive, i.e. merely in response to hearing the shots. But the revision actually makes matters worse. For Lewis to have seen the fugitive after making the labored call, due to the confusion at DPD HQ, the fugitive would have had to linger whilst Lewis made his call.

    Of all the things the Warren Commission could have followed up on 21 August 1964 it is very odd it had to be this. And rather than dealing with a ‘discrepancy’ where none existed, it created one. 

    FOG AND WITNESS INTIMIDATION

    Hagiographical accounts of a tainted police force tend to miss the bigger picture. Indeed, Warren Commission apologists go to great lengths to suggest that Earlene Roberts got the number of the police car ‘207’ wrong. But for her to choose three digits at random which not only matched a DPD police car in service that day but matched the car used by the prevaricator Hill–and given an alibi by the persistently dubious Westbrook–would be statistically improbable. 

    The question arises whether Hill and others ever influenced or intimidated witnesses and researchers who might have challenged the circumstances of the Tippit shooting. Someone intimidated, Acquilla Clemons, an important witness to the Tippit murder. And she said they were police.

    What is also relevant is that all four witnesses at Reynolds Motors were intimidated. They were Reynolds, Lewis, Patterson, and Russell. 

    Warren Reynolds himself was shot in the head on 23 January 1963 and survived. He had told the FBI on 21 January 1964 that he could not identify Oswald as the fugitive. He told the FBI on 3 March 1963 that General Walker had asked to see him, He did not oblige then, but then did see Walker on 8 July 1963. He then appeared before the Warren Commission on 22 July 1963 and said he now did recognize Oswald.

    Why would General Walker be involved in such matters? Unless of course, he had an interest in keeping the lid on things. 

    General Edwin Walker was the only US General to resign in the 20th century. He was a far-right segregationist whom Robert Kennedy had committed to a mental institution. Walker was arrested for promoting a race riot at Ole Miss. riots at University of Mississippi. This was after the admission of a black student into the all-white university. Walker claimed that every US President since 1933 had been a communist. Walker had failed to secure the Democratic nomination to be Governor of Texas to John Connally. Such was the then Southern Democratic Party.

    Harold Russell’s FBI statement of 23 February 1964 also addresses intimidation directly. (Note. He wrongly assumed that being shot in the head meant being dead). 

     

    “RUSSELL stated about one month ago WARREN REYNOLDS, brother of the lot owner, was found shot to death at the car lot. RUSSELL stated after that he began to get worried about what he had seen, because WARREN REYNOLDS had also seen what he had seen the day of the President’s’ death and had gone in the direction where the man with the pistol had gone. When he had disappeared on Jefferson Street and had followed the man with the pistol down the street. RUSSELL stated last Monday JOHNNY REYNOLDS fired him and told him he was firing him because “he did not want to find him shot on the lot like WARREN REYNOLDS “. RUSSELL stated he did not question REYNOLDS and left the lot, but since then has worried that someone is out to shoot him like REYNOLDS because of what he saw. RUSSELL stated he had not received any threats of any kind and did not know if his life was in danger, but was worried about it because of what he saw.”

    It is also interesting the reference by Reynolds to “what he saw” rather than merely a matter of identification, which would be “who he saw”. Did Reynolds in looking up the alley, or Russell, see a police car in the alley? There were other witnesses who failed to identify Oswald. Was there something else about what Reynolds saw, that Russell also knew?

    What Reynolds, LJ Lewis, Pat Patterson, and Russell saw was clearly a problem. One was shot, one thought he would be too and moved out of Dallas, and the other two had to make late adjustments to their prior testimony. Patterson on 25thAugust had to say he recognised Oswald when he previously hadn’t. [www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh21/pdf/WH21_PattersonBM_Ex_B.pdf]

    From August 1964 the Commission had ceased to be an investigation of the facts and was seeking to twist facts and plug gaps to make things fit the narrative of their conclusions. Something now known to have been written into its unpublished terms of reference.

    There was other substantial witness intimidation besides at the car lot. As we have seen Aquila Clemons, who saw the shooting of Tippit, said two men were involved. They ran off in different directions and neither was Oswald. She was visited afterward by a policeman who told her to shut up. Domingo Benavides—another witness to the Tippit killing had a brother who was shot dead in a bar in Dallas in 1964. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 37) Benavides put that down to mistaken identification of himself. 

    As John Kelin notes in his last essay ad Kennedys and King, Helen Markham was another witness who was intimidated. Markham said she put her hands over her eyes on witnessing Tippit being shot. By chance, she also worked at Eat Well Café right by the Carousel Club and Larry Crafard ate there every day.

    Assistant Counsel Liebeler flagged the problem with Markham in this way:

    I forgot to mention that some question might be raised when the public discovers that there was only one eyewitness to the Tippit killing, that is, one person who saw Oswald kill him. All the rest only saw subsequent events. Mrs.Markham is nicely buried there, but I predict not for long. [https://aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol11/pdf/HSCA_Vol11_WC_3E2_Liebeler.pdf]

     

    But what Liebeler didn’t deal with is the fact that Helen Markham told Officers Poe and Jez on their arrival at the scene that “When she went to the aid of the officer the suspect had threatened to kill her.” Officers Poe and Jez filed a report on 22 November to that effect. [http://www.cultor.org/Documents/JFK-Dallas/Box%201/0090-001.gif]

    LET US CONJECTURE

    There has to be a reason why Westbrook and Croy prevaricated. The benefit to Westbrook of the improbable claim that he had walked may be that some officers had seen him on the street along a part of Elm, at a time later than his arrival at the Depository by car with Stringer. That later time thus connected to Westbrook and Croy getting the decoy off the Marsalis bus, with Westbrook then returning to the Depository and Croy headed to 1026 N Beckley.

    Mary Bledsoe (who lived on Marsalis, hence would get a Marsalis bus) said because of the delay to her bus she caught a bus that was behind. On the basis that drivers were disciplined if their buses ran early, then the second Marsalis bus she caught couldn’t have been running early. By that, the McWatters bus was late enough to fall behind the schedule of the next bus. 

    With at least a 10-minute interval between buses, then the hold-up at the time and point “Oswald” got off was not less than 10 minutes. But the lady got to Union Station before 1:00 pm. That places disembarkation somewhere between 12:50 pm and 12:55 pm, later than the Warren Commission timeline. That gives a timescale that would fit with alternative arrangements for moving the decoy being triggered at approximately 12:46 pm. 

    It would be logical that if there was an impromptu operation to take the decoy off the bus, and car 207 was not used for that, then another car would have dropped the decoy off. Croy’s car.

    All of that sits Westbrook arriving at the Depository by or before 12:57 pm having dealt with getting the decoy off the bus who was then taken away by Croy. That timeline would have given Westbrook from 12:57 pm to 1:11 pm time to consider his next steps whilst he was at the Depository. 

    By that Hill can have been given verbal command – presumably by Westbrook – at the Depository. Hill then left at 1:02 pm in car 207 and went to 1025 N Beckley.

    The 12:44 pm APB description of Oswald would mean that any decoy looking similar couldn’t be waiting outside the rooming house for the indeterminate period it might take for his ride to arrive. Car 207 would need to toot to indicate it had arrived and it was safe to come out. 

    Rationally too would be Croy staking out the rooming house – to ensure that the decoy did not get cold feet and disappear.

    If Hill was in position behind 410 E 10th at 1:07 pm, that would sit with Tippit at 10thand Beckley Mobil garage – where I suggested Mentzel was, being told to set off east along 10th at 1:07 pm.

    By that assumption then it would be Hill and the other officer (Croy or Stringer) who were also seen by Doris Holan in the rear alley behind 410 E 10th. And one or both were also seen by Virginia Davis immediately after she’d called the police before the ambulance arrived.

    Then when the news of Tippit’s murder was put out on the radio, Westbrook got into Owens’ car with Bill Alexander, arriving at 410 E10th at 1:16 pm. Then immediately after arrival, running in the direction of the alley to rendezvous with the occupants of car 207. Planting a jacket. Westbrook then returned car 207 to the Depository, returning to Oak Cliff at approximately 1:29 pm, this time with Ewell and Stringer in Westbrook’s unmarked car. The round trip would take 8-9 minutes.

    Trying to move the decoy by car as quickly as possible in order to allow for the elimination of Tippit as soon as possible explains the difficulty the Warren Commission had in replicating those movements, on the assumption it was lone Oswald doing all that by foot, bus, foot, cab, foot and again on foot.

    With the decoy no longer in car 207, the only car for him to have been transferred to was Mentzel’s car directly, or via Hill if he had borrowed Poe’s car.

    As I showed in my article on Mentzel, Mentzel was at 10th and Beckley, the Mobil garage, from 1:07 pm. The alley behind E10th ends at Beckley at the piece of land that the garage sat on. Hill’s call makes sense if it was either to advertise to Mentzel where he was, or to advertise to confederates that the switch of cars had occurred. 

    HILL AND THE SHELLS

    At approximately 1:41 pm and 3-4 minutes before it was announced that a suspect had entered the Texas Theater, Hill said on the radio. 

    The shells at the scene indicate that the suspect is armed with an automatic .38, rather than a pistol.

    The phraseology Hill used is also unnecessary. If someone thinks someone has been shot with an automatic, then they are shot with an automatic. There’s no need to say, “rather than a pistol”, any more than say “rather than a rifle” or “rather than a shotgun”. Hill’s comment suggests he knew that Oswald would have a pistol and not an automatic, and that was a problem.

    Apologists for Hill have also argued that he mistook the shells of a pistol for an automatic. But that isn’t consistent with his emphatic ruling out of a non-automatic weapon. Hill denied to the Commission that he had made that call which by the timing of the transcript was 1:40 pm.

    Mr. BELIN. Now, also turning to Sawyer Deposition Exhibit A, I notice that there is another call on car No. 550-2. Was that you at that time, or not, at 1:40 p.m.? Would that have been someone else?

    Mr. HILL. That probably is R. D. Stringer [note the manuscript has A.B Stringer, the relevant Stringer is HH Stringer, there was an RD Stringer in the force who does not feature that day: Author’s note ].

    Mr. BELIN. That is not you, then, even though it has a number 550-2?

    Mr. HILL. Yes; because Stringer quite probably would have been using the same call number, because it is more his than it was mine. Really, but I didn’t have an assigned call number, so I was using a number I didn’t think anybody would be using, which is call 550-2, instead of the Westbrook to Batchelor as it indicates here.

    By that deception –which as we shall see was deliberate–he wriggled out of answering the question of automatic versus pistol. 

    How do we know it was deliberate? Because later in life Hill admitted, in his 1993 Sixth Floor Museum interview, that he did make that call. He said that it was because of the close proximity of the shells at the murder scene that he assumed they were from an automatic. (Shells from an automatic are self-ejected). But that fails too. Only two shells were found near each other and those were yards apart.

    The expression that code “550/2” was “more his [Stringer] than mine” is very odd. None of the police transcripts put calls out as 500/2 as Stringer. The only call of Stringer was the one on Channel 2 using 551. Hill also testified:

    I told Poe to maintain the chain of evidence as small as possible, for him to retain these at that time, and to be sure and mark them for evidence, and then turn them over to the crime lab when he got there, or to homicide. 

    Despite that command to maintain the chain of custody, it was Hill and Westbrook who broke the chain of custody of the pistol that was purportedly retrieved from Oswald but failed to go off as the firing pin was bent. Hill took the pistol from the Texas Theater and kept it until placing it on Field’s desk. But the personnel department—where Hill was working from at the time– isn’t a crime lab or homicide department. (Michael Benson, Who ‘s Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 185)

    The cartridges that Officer Poe had acquired at the Tippit murder scene and marked with his initials disappeared. There were no marks on the ones presented as evidence. This is made even more odd by the fact that Hill allegedly told the officer to mark them for evidence. (Benson, p. 364)

    Hill’s confidence in his prevarications on KCRC Radio on 22 November 1963 about his time of arrival at the Tippit murder scene would have been based on his not knowing Earlene Roberts had seen car 207.  And also not knowing there would be a Commission that would have patrol radio transcripts and decent officer testimonies which contradicted his account. 

    Hill said in his interview for the Sixth Floor Museum in 1993 that he was working in Westbrook’s office not only dealing with applications but “investigating complaints”. The personnel office would be an ideal place to lean on officers by holding things against them. He may have had the power to make any officers uncomfortable without their being a collaborator. 

    A question is why didn’t Hill and Westbrook synchronize their stories as to how they got from the Depository to the Tippit murder scene? There is an answer. Westbrook, by not naming the officer who drove, created wriggle room for forgetfulness as an excuse. Had he and Hill synchronized their false stories to a consistent one, then the uncovering of one as false would bring down the other, proving they were in league. Placed in an invidious position an imperfect option may be the least worst choice. 

    Click here to read part 3.

  • The Death of Tippit – Part 1

    The Death of Tippit – Part 1

    The Death of Tippit – Part 1 – Where was Westbrook?

    By John Washburn

    This article follows on from my prior articles. [https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-tippit-tapes-a-re-examination] and [https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-missing-calls-of-officer-mentzel-pt-1] These identified problems with the DPD tapes and transcripts, as well correcting misinformation regarding the timing of Officer J. D. Tippit being seen at Gloco gas station.

    I have not regurgitated or revised anyone else’s prior analysis. I’ve used source data.

    The Dallas Police Department in 1963 operated from City Hall, at Harwood and Commerce/ Main Streets. It was the parking basement of City Hall where Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Oswald on 24 November 1963. The Presidential motorcade turned right at Main Street by City Hall, passing at 12:25pm. 

    This three-part series sets out the irregular movements of a handful of police officers in Downtown Dallas from City Hall; from around 12:45pm to the time police were alerted to the murder of Tippit and then proceeded to that scene at 410 E 10th, Oak Cliff.

    The command structure of southwest Dallas for 22 November 1963 was changed with Lieutenant Fulgham being sent to traffic school at Northwestern University, Illinois. Sgt. Calvin Owens stood in for him. But overt control over Tippit was changed at some time before 12:30 pm to covert control by Sgt Hugh Davis.

    Owens’ Warren Commission testimony has the advantage that it is wholly consistent with what is on the radio tapes and in CE 2645, the allocation of cars and the modified command structure on 22 November 2022. Indeed, Owens was the only person who revealed to the Warren Commission that Tippit’s command had changed over the lunch break. 

    Owens asked difficult questions on the radio after Tippit was shot: such as what was he doing in Oak Cliff? His evidence conflicts with that of superior officers who had testimonies that were self-contradictory. His questions also provide reinforcing evidence that the 12:45 pm radio call from dispatcher Murray Jackson calling Tippit to Oak Cliff was an after-the-event fake. Owens wouldn’t have needed to ask had he heard that call. Jackson would have been able to answer if in real time he had given such an instruction.

    Owens also asked, on patrol radio in the hour after Tippit was shot, why no one had contacted Tippit’s wife and asked where was Sgt. Davis, the covert supervisor of Tippit. Davis never replied. Why? Where was Davis? 

    None of those irregularities that Owens was dropping out were followed up on by the Commission.

    Officer Thomas Alexander Hutson displays similar consistency as Owens. He let several cats out of the bag, including that Officers Hawkins and Baggett made a landline call from the Mobil gas station at 10th and Beckley at approximately 1:30pm. That is the location my Mentzel article [https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-missing-calls-of-officer-mentzel-pt-1] placed Mentzel and Tippit at 1:07pm, two minutes prior to Tippit being shot. 

    Owens and Hutson are a litmus test of how officers ought to act and testify. 

    II

    Contrast this to Captain William Westbrook, head of DPD Personnel. His testimony displays either deliberate lies, or the forgetfulness and cognitive dissonance of someone not suited for gainful employment in any police role. If infiltration of DPD needed a senior person with the power to co-opt, coerce and corrupt then Westbrook fits the requirements. His testimony lends itself to suspicion. 

    Westbrook’s testimony regarding 22 November 1963 included not being able to remember the name of police officers who drove him to the Tippit murder scene–and later to the Texas Theater (which is and was actually a cinema). This is despite a journalist being in the same car as Westbrook on both occasions, saying the driver was Westbrook himself. The evidence presented here helps explain why Westbrook would have done that. There are also problems with the accounts of how Westbrook, Reserve Sgt. Kenneth H Croy and Sgt. Jerry Hill got to the Tippit murder scene and what they were doing once there. 

    Hill was a patrol officer and former head of press relations with DPD. He said he had been seconded to Westbrook’s Personnel Department to ‘investigate complaints’ shortly before 22 November 1963 and to vet “prospective police officers”. Hill was an odd choice for any ethical role (as covered later). He was reported to the FBI by a news reporter in California for false statements made on radio news the evening of 22 November 1963.

    Hill tried to attach alibis for himself as a shadow to Sgt. Owens – to account for how Hill got to the Tippit murder scene. Alibis that Owens did not reciprocate. As covered later, appropriating other people’s movements was a recurring trait of Hill.

    Sergeant Owens said in his Warren Commission testimony that he drove his patrol car taking Westbrook and Assistant District Attorney Bill Alexander. Three in a car. (WC Vol. II, p. 78).

    Hill’s Commission testimony said that he went with Owens driving, DA Bill Alexander and Jim Ewell (a Dallas Morning News reporter) over Commerce Viaduct, and then down Beckley. No mention of Westbrook, but four in a car (WC Vol. VII, p. 43).

    Westbrook said in his Warren Commission testimony he went with Sergeant Henry Stringer (his deputy in the personnel office) and an unknown officer who drove. Three in a car. (WC Vol. VII, p. 109).

    Jim Ewell said he went with Stringer and Westbrook and said Westbrook drove them over Houston Viaduct past his office at the newspaper. Three in a car and an entirely different route. [https://www.patspeer.com/chapter-4c-shining-a-light-on-day]

    Adding to that are discrepancies as to how Westbrook got to the Texas Theater for the arrest of Oswald, and who he was with. 

    Ewell said Westbrook took him and Stringer in an unmarked car parked at the front of the theater. Westbrook said he arrived with Sgt. Stringer and FBI Agent Bob Barrett, an unknown squad car driver and parked in the alley at the back. Stringer, in his report of 3 December 1963, said he met an unknown officer in 100 block S Patton who drove him to the rear of the Texas Theater. [https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth340278/m1/1/]

    This was an exchange between three Warren Commission staff as the final report was being drafted:

    ‘How critical of the Dallas police should we be?”. ‘We can’t be critical enough.’: ‘That’s just the problem. If we write what we really think, nobody will believe anything else we say. They’ll accuse us of attacking Dallas’ image. The whole report will be discredited as controversial. We’ve just got to tone it way down.’(William Manchester, The Death of a President t, p. 426)

    Despite any “toning down” the Warren Report begs question after question concerning some DPD officers. But the Warren Commission was a case of changing facts to fit a theory, and some DPD witnesses were allowed to make up facts by lying without effective challenge. DPD was protected from being investigated itself. 

    The ace syndicated journalist and razor-sharp star of What’s My Line Dorothy Kilgallen wrote on 29 November 1963:

    “The case is closed, is it? Well, I’d like to know how in a big smart town like Dallas, a man like Jack Ruby – operator of a striptease honky tonk – could stroll in and out of police headquarters as if it were a health club at a time when a small army of law enforcers was keeping a “tight security guard” on Oswald. Security! What a word for it.”

    Witness evidence is not circumstantial; but in any criminal case, a key question is which witnesses to believe. Hence credible police investigation should seek out lies. The DPD didn’t do that –and remarkably – liars included a small coterie of police officers. At the Sergeant level and above to Captain. 

    A reason for committing perjury is to avoid revealing worse offenses.

    The approach taken here has been to:

     1) identify the stated movements of all relevant police officers from 12:45 pm to the entry into the Texas Theater at 1:45 pm 

    2) identify statements and testimonies that are in direct conflict with each other, and 

    3) reconcile those with the timeline per the patrol radio tapes, with weight against those officers who provably lie, and weight in favour of those that do not 

    4) take statements by members of the public at face value, unless there are signs of coercion. 

    The purpose of that is to assess what were the underlying actions and movements that certain officers needed to obscure. Core assumptions carried from the evidence in my prior articles are as follows. 

    1. Roger Craig and Butch Burroughs were correct. Oswald left Dealey Plaza by Rambler and was in the Texas Theater just after 1:00 pm and remained there until he was arrested. 
    2. Earlene Roberts did see police car 207 outside 1026 N Beckley and it tooted just before the person left at approximately 1:04 pm. 
    3. There was an imposter acting as a decoy on the Marsalis bus. That person got off the bus after 12:50 pm, several minutes later than the Warren Commission’s timeline. Because the bus was held up longer because of the backup of traffic on Elm Street. There was no person of relevance in William Whaley’s cab. 
    4. Tippit left Gloco gas to go to the vicinity of Lansing Street and 8th Street where off-duty Officer Olsen was (that patrol district was depleted of its normal patrol officers). Mentzel rendezvoused with Tippit at 10th and Beckley at 1:07 pm (real-time). Tippit was shot at approximately 1:09 pm. 

    If there was premeditated involvement of some police officers in assisting the Kennedy assassination then Tippit’s murder was either similarly premeditated or it was spontaneous. For it to be spontaneous then Tippit, under the covert command of Sgt. Hugh Davis, must have done something whilst at or shortly after leaving Gloco to spark it, which both upset the role he was supposed to play and necessitated his murder. 

    I posit that Tippit’s role was to assist a decoy who was playing out Oswald as a supposed ‘lone nut’ fleeing by bus. But that Tippit backed out when he heard on patrol radio that Kennedy had been shot in the head. Tippit then became a major risk to the conspirators. 

    Bill Simpich says that events “went south” after the assassination of Kennedy. That is consistent with an assassination that went as planned but was followed by muddled events that weren’t planned. 

    If Tippit was murdered without police involvement then it is difficult to explain why there were so many irregularities in how certain officers arrived at the murder scene and what they did when they were there. 

    Let’s see how those assumptions play out. 

    OWENS AND POE

    By the DPD radio only two police cars left the Depository in response to T. F. Bowley’s 1:11 pm call stating Tippit had been shot. Those were the cars of Officer JM Poe with Officer LB Jez (call sign 105) and Sgt. Owens (call sign 19) said he took Westbrook and Deputy DA Bill Alexander. 

    Owens said he left the Depository on hearing Bowley’s call and his time of arrival at the Tippit murder scene per the radio (see later) fits with his testimony. He arrived at 1:16 pm, seconds after Officer Poe (call sign 105) who also left from the depository in car 94. Owens’ testimony is wholly consistent with his calls on the tapes, and ambulance travel time.

    Poe, like Owens, gave inconvenient testimony. Poe said he’d marked the bullet cartridges found at the Tippit murder scene, which were identified as from an automatic weapon. The cartridges, by the time of the Commission, had no such markings. Thus the story that they could have come from the nonautomatic pistol found on Oswald is now questionable.

    Poe also submitted a report (covered later) with Owens on 22 November 1963 regarding murder scene witness Helen Markham. As first responders, she told them that the assailant threatened to kill her. No other subsequent statements or testimony raised that. She never raised that again. Why? If the assailant had been Oswald it would be relevant evidence. But if the assailant wasn’t the dead  Oswald then was she intimidated in giving later evidence?

    PART-TIME RESERVE SERGEANT KENNETH HUDSON CROY

     

    Croy, owner of a Mobil gas station in Oak Cliff, and a rodeo performer, is an example of putting a DPD hat on someone with all the implied trust that carries. But his testimony takes any credibility relying on that status away. 

    Much of Croy’s testimony was made off the cuff because he was only supposed to testify regarding his role on 24 November for the shooting of Oswald. It was only because Croy let slip to the female Commission stenographer that he’d been at the Tippit murder scene that he was then asked about his movements on 22 November. He filed no report on his activities that day. He made no (surviving) announcements on patrol radio. 

    His role on 24 November is not fully covered here, other than to say that the level of questioning by Counsel Griffin indicates doubts as to his version of events. Griffin was one of the more curious questioners.

    Croy was the officer who organized the roster on 24 November 1963 for those in City Hall regarding the transfer of Oswald to the County Jail. He can be seen on TV footage standing immediately behind Jack Ruby. Croy moves the press pack forward and then Ruby shoots Oswald. Croy forgot the names of officers present despite compiling the roster for who would be present.

    Croy’s evidence of 10 am 26 March 1964 (WC Vol XII) warrants a large extract, as his obfuscation and self-contradiction cannot be paraphrased. What is relevant are his said locations and timings. 

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Well, now, tell me about the conversation that you had with our court stenographer here prior to coming in here, about Tippit?

    Mr. CROY. Oh, it was at the scene over where Officer Tippit was killed, at the scene.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Were you at the scene when Tippit was there?

    Mr. CROY. Yes.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Unassigned?

    Mr. CROY. Yes.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. I take it you are nodding your head?

    Mr. CROY. Yes.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. What time were you at the scene where Tippit was killed?

    Mr. Croy. I watched them load him in the ambulance.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. I see. Were you on reserve duty that day?

    Mr. CROY. Yes. I was stationed Downtown in the, I believe it was the 1800 or 1900 block of Main Street.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Were you in a patrol car?

    Mr. CROY. No; I was on foot.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Were you in uniform?

    Mr. CROY. In uniform.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Where were you at the time President Kennedy was shot?

    Mr. Croy. Sitting in my car at the city hall. I would guess, I don’t know, because I didn’t know he was shot until, I guess, several minutes after it was.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Is that where you were located when you heard he was shot?

    Mr. CROY. No. I was on Main Street trying to go home.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. You were driving your car down Main Street?

    Mr. CROY. Yes.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. About where were you on Main Street?

    Mr. CROY. Griffin.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Griffin Street?

    Mr. CROY. Yes.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. What did you do when you heard that President Kennedy had been shot?

    Mr. CROY. I didn’t do anything. I was right in the middle of the street with my car hemmed in from both sides. I couldn’t go anywhere.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. As soon as you got unhemmed, what did you do?

    Mr. CROY. I went by the courthouse there and there were several officers standing there, and I asked if they needed any help.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Did you drive your car to the courthouse?

    Mr. CROY. Yes.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Which courthouse?

    Mr. CROY. There was only one courthouse.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. There is a county courthouse?

    Mr. CROY. There is.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. There is a Federal courthouse, also, but this is the one right there by the plaza and near the Texas School Book Depository?

    Mr. CROY. The old red courthouse.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. On Houston Street?

    Mr. CROY. Yes.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Was that the corner of Houston and Main?

    Mr. CROY. Houston and Main and Elm.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. How long after you heard that President Kennedy was shot did you arrive there?

    Mr. CROY. Oh, I guess it took me at least 20 minutes to drive those few blocks.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. What time would you say it was when you arrived at the courthouse?

    Mr. CROY. I don’t know.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Who did you see when you arrived there?

    Mr. CROY. Oh, there was some officers standing on the corner, I don’t know.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Did you inquire of somebody there if you could be of assistance?

    Mr. CROY. Yes.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Whom did you inquire of?

    Mr. CROY. I don’t know. They were just standing on the corner, and I asked if I could be of any assistance.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Then, what did you do?

    Mr. CROY. I proceeded on home.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Which way did you drive home?

    Mr. CROY. Out Thornton to Colorado, and Colorado to-I can’t think of the street. It was Marsalis.

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Was that-

    Mr. CROY. Or Zangs

    Mr. GRIFFIN. Thornton to Zangs?

    The route Croy said he took to go home wasn’t his way home; which would have been due south from City Hall, not due west. And Inspector Sawyer’s testimony (Vol. VI, p. 315) contradicts Croy’s description of traffic conditions on Main Street. 

    Sawyer said he passed down Main from the same blocks after the motorcade passed City Hall. He arrived at the Depository at 12:42 pm. But he also put out a call on the radio stating that any officers on crowd duties on Main (which included Croy) should report to the Depository. He said the only traffic issues on Main were caused by dispersing pedestrians crossing the road.

    Officer Hutson also did the same route for the same time period. He said (Vol. VII, p. 26) that he went down Main, on his three-wheeler motorcycle to collect road signs after the passing of the motorcade at Main and Harwood (City Hall). Like Sawyer, he said the issue was pedestrians, not traffic.

    Jim Ewell said Officer Valentine had driven him and Hill from City Hall to the Depository in “probably less than two minutes” that too was approximately 12:45 pm (as per Ewell above link [https://www.patspeer.com/chapter-4c-shining-a-light-on-day]). 

    Croy said he was on Main Street hemmed in on both sides. That is demonstrably false. Main Street was not only not obstructed it was two-way, with two lanes in each direction. It was Elm Street which was three lanes one-way and became obstructed until traffic was released. Croy therefore seems to have indirectly revealed that he was actually on Elm Street, even further off his route home. Was he trying to conceal that? 

    III

    Croy’s reference to Griffin Street is interesting. If Croy wasn’t at Griffin and Main Street, but was at Griffin and Elm, then he can be placed close to where the Marsalis bus was held up and the person –a policeman in civilian clothes, who can’t have been uniformed Croy himself–got out of the car to tell the driver of the bus that Kennedy had been shot. 

    Croy then said policemen in Dealey Plaza told him he wasn’t needed. But Inspector Sawyer had commanded on the radio that all officers on crowd duties were needed in Dealey Plaza. 

    Croy next said he was at Colorado and Zang where he heard the radio call and got to the Tippit murder scene as Tippit’s body was being loaded into the ambulance. But the ambulance was dispatched after a phone call from a neighbor before the patrol radio call of 1:11 pm from Temple Bowley. The ambulance only had to travel 300 yards from the Dudley Hughes Funeral Home in the 400 block of E Jefferson and it arrived at the end of Bowley’s announcement and stayed less than a minute. Dudley Hughes said that from taking the call to delivering Tippit to Methodist Hospital took under 5 minutes. The autopsy request was timed as 1:15 pm. So how could Croy have gotten there by reacting to that call?

    Added to that, the immediate neighbor to 410 E10th, Virginia Davis telephoned the police as soon as the shooting had occurred.  She then went outside. The police were already there and the ambulance arrived after that. (WC Vol VI p454). She said:

    Mr. BELIN. All right, after this, did police come out there?

    Mrs. Davis. Yes; they were already there.

    Mr. BELIN. By the time you got out there?

    Mrs. DavIs. Yes, sir.

    Mr. BELIN. Then what did you do?

    Mrs. Davis. Well, we just stood out there and watched. You know, tried to see how it all happened. But we saw part of it.

    Mr. BELIN. Then what did you do?

    Mrs. Davis. We stood out there until after the ambulance had come and picked him up.

    With that in mind, did Croy arrive even earlier? That is before the Bowley radio call had been put out? Or was another police officer either in the vicinity or else very close by when the murder happened? The latter is consistent with Doris Holan seeing police officers in a car at the rear of 410 E10th at the time Tippit was shot. (Joe McBride, Into the Nightmare, pp. 494-95) 

    Croy may have been present for the impromptu shooting of Tippit. At best he arrived when he said he did but was covering for another officer (or officers) who were there earlier. 

    Croy then said he discharged himself from that scene to go home. He said he then happened to be driving by one block from the Texas Theater when the police first entered. He said he saw action at the front and back but Oswald was not by then arrested. He gave a more detailed description of the action and its progress than would be expected of someone driving on a major thoroughfare (Zang) looking sideways at something happening a block away. 

    Croy was asked how he knew that Oswald had not been arrested by then. That tripped him up. He changed his story mid-flow to say he’d been at the Tippit murder scene and had then headed to the Texas Theater because of what he heard on the radio. He was asked why he left that scene (his third self-discharge of the day). He said he wasn’t needed. How would he know if he didn’t stop? 

    Croy said he then went to Austin’s Barbecue –two miles further south from the Texas Theater.  He wanted to meet his wife for lunch. He added that she would be cross if he was late. 

    When asked how he had arranged lunch he introduced another story.  He said his wife’s car passed him by in Dealey Plaza and that he asked her if she wanted lunch, conversing with her through a car window. 

    Ponder this:  Mrs. Croy had been in Dealey Plaza minutes after the President had been shot. And this was followed by the murder of a Dallas policeman.  Would not Croy being late for lunch be a bit trivial? 

    To say the least, Croy’s behaviour from at least 12:30 pm to after 2:00 pm is rather unusual.  

    WESTBROOK’S OFFICE AND CAR 207

    Deputy Chief of Police Charles Batchelor testified on 23 March 1963 and produced Batchelor Exhibit CE 5002. [https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh19/pdf/WH19_Batchelor_Ex_5002.pdf] That is a pamphlet of DPD personnel for November 1963. It states that the Personnel Bureau comprised at officer level, Captain W.R. Westbrook (In Charge), Sgt H.H. Stringer (Deputy), WM McGee, Detective, Joe Fields, Detective and Patrolman JL Carver.

    Hill claimed to have been working in Westbrook’s Bureau on the day of the assassination.  But he does not appear in CE 5002 as being attached to it for November 1963. He is shown as a patrol Sergeant for the Downtown subdistrict, 8:00 am to 4:00 pm day shift.

    Also, there is Earlene Roberts’ observation of car 207 outside Oswald’s boarding house tooting at 1:04 pm. This was in her FBI statement of 29 November 1963.  It caused the need for CE 2645, an inventory of officers and cars as an attempt to rule them out of being in the vicinity of 1026 N Beckley around 1:00 pm. CE 2645 is useful evidence as it can be used to identify other discrepancies with cars and officer movements.

    Some Warren Commission apologists have sought to say Earlene Roberts was confused in her Warren Commission testimony as to the car number. Well, she wasn’t confused on 29 November 1963, nor was Westbrook’s statement 5 days later. Westbrook said on 4 December 1963 car 207 was Officer Valentine’s car and it had been parked at the Depository. His statement doesn’t actually confirm that it stayed at the Depository after Valentine had arrived in it.[https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth340243/]

    Hill was driven from City Hall to the Depository by Officer Valentine (call sign 104) in car 207 with reporter Jim Ewell. They arrived in about 2 minutes by a circuitous route to avoid the traffic. The arrival was also photographed. (Source: Ewell and CE 2645).  

    washburn hillarrival

    Hill (using code 550/2) announced they were en route on the radio, immediately before the 12:48 pm time stamp. “550/2 and 104 en route to Elm and Houston, code 3.” That time fits with departure being triggered by the 12:44 pm APB with an alleged Oswald-like description in it, and its mention of the Depository. Assistant Warren Commission Counsel Wesley Liebeler said of that alert in internal correspondence about a draft of the Commission’s report on September 6, 1963: 

    Following that quote it says that Brennan’s description “most probably” led to the radio alert sent out to police in which the assassin was described. Can’t this be more definite? One of the questions that has been raised is the speed with which the assassin was described, the implication being that Oswald had been picked out as a patsy before the event. The Dallas police must know what led to the radio alert and the description. If they do we should be able to find out. If they do not know, the circumstances of their not knowing should be discussed briefly.

    Sgt Gerald Hill said in his testimony:

    At this time I went back to the personnel office and told the captain that Inspector Sawyer requested assistance at Elm and Houston Streets. The captain said, “Go ahead and go.” 

    “And he turned to another man in the office named Joe Fields and told him to get on down there. “I got on the elevator on the third floor and went to the basement and saw a uniformed officer named Jim M. Valentine doing, as he said, “Nothing in particular.” And I said, “I need you to take’ me down to Elm Street.” “The President has been shot.” 

    We started out of the basement to get in his car, and a boy named Jim E. Well [sic Ewell], with Dallas Morning News, had parked his car in the basement and was walking up and asked what was going on, and we told him the President was shot.”

    Of all the cars in all the DPD force, Earlene Roberts had come up with that one.

    HILL – “THE BIG EXPANSION MOVE”

    Hill said in 1993 for the Sixth Floor Museum that his transfer to [https://www.jfk.org/collections-archive/gerald-jerry-l-hill-oral-history/] Westbrook’s department was because the presidential visit was a ‘big expansion move for the police department’. An odd turn of phrase. 

    When then asked what his role in the presidential visit was, he said “absolutely nothing”. Does this not seem like a contradiction?

    Hill in that interview confirms he went with Officer Valentine to the Depository, but he puts his movements earlier than is apparent from the radio. By the radio, he is en route after 12:45 pm at 12:47 pm. Per Ewell, the ride took 2 minutes [https://kenrahn.com/JFK/History/The_deed/Sneed/Ewell.html] 

    Hence Hill arrived at the Depository by approximately 12:50 pm. Hill was photographed leaning out of the window of the Sixth Floor of the Depository. Thus that could have been as early as 12:50 pm. Hill claimed to have found the snipper’s nest and three shells on the Sixth Floor after 1:00 pm with two deputy Sheriffs. Were that true then he’s ruled out of being in car 207 after 1:00 pm. But it wasn’t true.

    Deputy Sheriff Like Mooney testified as being the first person to see the shells on the Sixth Floor. (Vol 3 p 19) And he testified Captain Fritz was then the first person to handle them. Mooney places the time as “approaching 1 pm” and testified that he then “hollered down” to get the crime lab on the scene. He made no mention of Hill and said he stayed there “not over 15 or 20 minutes”. Nor did Captain Fritz – head of Homicide mention Hill. Mooney’s time and story are corroborated by the radio call by Sgt. Harkness at 12:56 calling for Barnes (508 – Crime Lab section). Barnes 30 seconds later is signaled as en route. 

    Hill’s story fits a pattern of his appropriating other people’s events and playing with timings. If Hill is lying, and it sure seems like he is, then he doesn’t have an alibi after 1:00 pm. But created a false one.

    HOW DID HILL ARRIVE IN OAK CLIFF?

    Hill’s time and method of arrival at the Tippit murder scene – he said to the Warren Commission it was with Sgt. Owens, DA Alexander, and reporter Ewell – is also a tangled web.  And this is so through his various accounts. Which are rendered dubious by the evidence of Owens, Ewell, and Poe. In fact, no one said they went with Hill. 

    One problem for Hill is that the testimony of Owens is consistent with the patrol radio. But Hill’s is not. Owens’ testimony was that the trigger for his departure was Bowley’s first call (which was at 1:11 pm).

    Mr. OWENS. No. I told Inspector Sawyer that I was assigned to Oak Cliff and an officer was involved in the shooting, and I was taking off, so I proceeded. I got in my car, and Captain Westbrook and Bill Alexander, an assistant District attorney, also was in the car with me and we started out to-I think the call came out at 400 East 10th or 400 East Jefferson. There was confusion there where the situation was. It was corrected and we went to the scene of the shooting.

    By the radio the clarification of the precise address whilst Owens was on his way was at 1:13 pm. Owens arrived at 1:16 pm.  He was the second car responder at the scene, announcing his arrival seconds after Officer Poe, who was carrying Officer Jez. Both Owens and Poe left the Depository, and the most direct route would be over Commerce Street Viaduct, down N Beckley Avenue. Poe’s Commission account was:

    Mr. BALL. And what did you find when you got there?

    Mr. POE. We found-.

    Mr. BALL. What did you see?

    Mr. POE. Found the squad car parked toward the curb, and a pool of blood at the left-front wheel of the car. The ambulance had already picked him up and the officer had already left the scene when we arrived. We had – I don’t know how many people there were. Looked like 150 to 200 people around there; and Mrs. Markham, I talked to her first” and we got a description of the man that shot Tippit.

    Poe doesn’t mention Owens’ car already being there, which is consistent with the radio calls placing Poe (car 105) arriving a few seconds before Owens (both 1:20 pm by the tape time). 

    But Hill testified on the basis he’d arrived with Owens.

    “Tippit had already been removed. The first man that came up to me, he said, “The man that shot him was a white male about 5’10”, weighing 160 to 170 pounds, had on a jacket and a pair of dark trousers, and brown bushy hair.” At this point, the first squad rolled up, and that would have been Squad 105 which had been dispatched from Downtown. An officer named Joe Poe, and I believe his partner was a boy named Jez. I told him to stay at the scene and guard the car and talk to as many witnesses as they could find to the incident, and that we were going to start checking the area.”

    Hill cannot have been speaking to witnesses before Poe turned up, as Owens, at the earliest, arrived simultaneously with Poe’s arrival. That is in line with Owens never putting Hill in his car anyhow. And there were no other cars announcing arrival at the scene – within a 5-minute window – before or after the arrival of Poe and Owens. This leaves open the possibility that Hill was there already, but is trying to disguise his presence.

    HILL INVESTIGATED FOR LYING ON NEWS RADIO

    Making matters worse for Hill is that his unpublished Commission file has an FBI note reporting that he had given a false story at 6:45 pm on 22 November 1963 to KCRC-Radio Sacramento. For KCRC he said he went to the murder scene with the ‘acting lieutenant’ (Owens). Hence missing out on Ewell and Alexander. This is the transcript of what he told KCRC:

    That call came out – the Acting Lieutenant in Oak Cliff and I were together standing there talking to the Inspector and he ordered us – being that we had all the police in town pulled down there on Elm Street – he ordered us to leave this investigation of the President’s shooting and go to Oak Cliff. We did. When we got out there the officer had already been picked up. We got a description of the suspect and started following his path as best we could.

     

    We had information that he was in one of two houses that were vacant over on East Jefferson. We went in over there and called for some more help to cover the buildings and everything. We shook those down and he wasn’t there, and then we got a report that he was in the library at (inaudible) and Jefferson”.

    [https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/70/4605/7460570/content/arcmedia/dc-metro/rg-272/605417-key-persons/hill_gerald_l/hill_gerald_l.pdf]

    That event can be timed as 1:29 pm (DPD time, 1:33 pm) as Owens said.

    DISP           Do you have any information for us, 19?

    19                None. We’re shaking down these old houses out down here in the 400 block of East Jefferson right now.

     

    But if Hill arrived with Owens that day he’d have had a similar timeline of events to that of Owens. One thing Hill missed out on is the discovery of the discarded jacket sometime before 1:21 pm. Hill did not offer to KCRC at 6:45 pm on 22 November 1963 any explanation of what he did in the intervening 13 minutes.

    That KCRC transcript came to the attention of the Commission via Chet Casselman of KSFO on 10 June 1964. And that file has an FBI note of 8 June 1964 where Hill had to admit that some of what he said on the radio was so-called hearsay and false. He had said:

     “The man [Oswald], I understand has resorted to violence before and possibly shot another policeman somewhere”.

    Given that Oswald was young and spent a good deal of his adult life outside of the USA and in the Marines, the idea that he had previously shot a policeman could not be credible. Shooting a policeman in the US in 1963 was a rare occurrence. Overall, Hill’s radio interview shows more concern about pinning Oswald for the shooting of Tippit than Kennedy. 

    HILL AND THE JACKET IN THE WRONG PLACE

    Hill’s story of arriving, and the first action being the search of the houses for KCRC was not the starting point of what he claimed to have done in his testimony to the Warren Commission.  But his testimony flounders. Per the radio transcript witnesses said the man on the run had immediately run down Patton, west along E Jefferson, and then cut through Ballew Texaco Service Station and run into the alley behind. There was then a search of houses in E Jefferson, then there were false alarms regarding the entry to a church and then the library.

    The first radio call in that sequence was from Officers Griffin and Mackie at 1:20 pm. It said: “We believe we’ve got this suspect on shooting this officer out here. Got his white jacket. Believe he dumped it on this parking lot behind this service station at 400 block East Jefferson across from Dudley Hughes and he had a white jacket on. We believe this is it.”

    But Hill said to the Commission  (and note he is shown the radio transcript): 

     

    Mr. HILL. All right, I took the key to Poe’s car. Another person came up, and we also referred him to Poe, that told us the man had run over into the funeral home parking lot. That would be Dudley Hughes’ parking lot in the 400 block of East Jefferson-and taken off his jacket.

    Mr. BELIN. You turned this man over to Poe, too?

    Mr. HILL. Yes, sir.

    Mr. BELIN. I notice in the radio log transcript, which is marked Sawyer Deposition Exhibit A, that at 1:26 p.m., between 1:26 p.m., and 1:32 p.m., there was a call from No. 19 to 531. 531 is your home number, I believe? Your radio home station?

    Mr. HILL. Yes.

    Mr. BELIN. That says, “One of the men here at the service station that saw him seems to think he is in this block, 400 block East Jefferson, behind his service station. Give me some more squads over here.” “Several squads check out.” Was that you?

    Mr. HILL. That was Owens.

    Mr. BELIN. Were you calling in at all?

    Mr. HILL. No. That is Bud Owens.

    Mr. BELIN. You had left Owens’ car at this time?

    Mr. HILL. I left Owens’ car and had 105 car at this time.

    Mr. BELIN. Where did you go?

    Mr. HILL. At this time, about the time this broadcast came out, I went around and met Owens. I whipped around the block. I went down to the first intersection east of the block where all this incident occurred, and made a right turn, and traveled one block, and came back up on Jefferson.

    Mr. BELIN. All right.

    Mr. HILL. And met Owens in front of two large vacant houses on the north side of Jefferson that are used for the storage of secondhand furniture. By then Owens had information also that some citizen had seen the man running towards these houses. At this time Sergeant Owens was there; I was there; Bill Alexander was there; it was probably about this time that C. T. Walker, an accident investigator got there; and with Sergeant Owens and Walker and a couple more officers standing outside, Bill Alexander and I entered the front door of the house that would have been to the west—it was the farthest to the west of the two shook out the lower floor, made sure nobody was there, and made sure that all the entrances from either inside or outside of the building to the second floor were securely locked. Then we went back over to the house next door, which would have been the first one east of this one, and made sure it was securely locked, both upstairs and downstairs. There was no particular sign of entry on this building at all. At this point we came back out to the street, and I asked had Owens received any information from the hospital on Tippit. And he said they had just told him on channel 2 that he was dead. I got back in 105’s car, went back around to the original scene, gave him his car keys back, and left his car there, and at this point he came up to me with a Winston cigarette package.”

    “The next place I went was, I walked up the street about half a block to a church. That would have been on the northeast corner of 10th Street in the 400 block west of the shooting, and was preparing to go in when there were two women who came out and said they were employees inside and had been there all the time. I asked them had they seen anybody enter the church, because we were still looking for possible places for the suspect to hide. And they said nobody passed them, nobody entered the church, but they invited us to check the rest of the doors and windows and go inside if we wanted to. An accident investigator named Bob Apple was at the location at that time, and we were standing there together near his car when the call came out that the suspect had been seen entering the Texas Theatre.”

    A giveaway that Hill is not reliable here is that the jacket was not discarded in the parking lot of Dudley Hughes, it was found in the parking lot of Ballew Texaco Service Station which was across Jefferson Boulevard (opposite) from Dudley Hughes.

    What Hill appears to have done is misread the transcript that was given to him at the testimony session and was trying to attach his movements to that misunderstanding. Hence, he turned the 1:20 pm call regarding the jacket at the Ballew Texaco Service Station parking lot opposite Dudley Hughes to the jacket being at Dudley Hughes parking lot, something that did not happen. 

    Someone who’d been in on the real action wouldn’t make such a mistake by misreading a transcript. It would be held in their head. Hill made the same mistake later in his testimony when he was questioned about Oswald after his arrest:

    Mr. BELIN. Any jacket?

    Mr. HILL. No, sir; he didn’t have a jacket on at this time.

    Mr. BELIN. All right, go ahead.

    Mr. HILL. I understand a light-colored jacket was found in the parking lot of the funeral home, as a man had previously stated, but I don’t recall actually seeing this jacket.

     

    HILL AND THE FALSE AMBULANCE STORY

     

    There is a further problem with Hill’s testimony. This was Owens (19) at approximately 1:21 pm (1:26 DPD time), having arrived at the scene. 

    DISPATCH: 19, where did the officer go?

    19:               I saw some squads going towards Methodist real fast. I imagine that’s where he is.

    That stacks up and Owens was driving. But Hill (using 550/2) had said a minute earlier per the transcript. 

    DISPATCH: Have you been to the scene?

    550/2:           The officer was already gone when I got there. He was driving car number 10.

    DISPATCH: Do you know what ambulance took him? We had three going.

    550/2:         No. Dudley Hughes passed in front of me going to Beckley. He looked like he might have had him.

    The need for two calls is odd if Hill and Owens had been in the same car. Also odd is the phrase “passed in front of me” as if he was driving, and “the officer was already gone when I got there”, if Hill had been with Owens. It would be “we.” 

    The only cars arriving from Downtown able to have seen the Dudley Hughes ambulance would have been Poe’s or Owens. But Owens made no reference to an ambulance, merely squad cars heading in the direction of the hospital. That indicates that by the time Owens was on Beckley the ambulance had already reached the hospital. That is consistent with Tippit having arrived at the hospital at approximately 1:14 pm and being declared dead on arrival by 1:15 pm.

    But there is yet another problem. Hill said the ambulance ‘passed in front’ but an ambulance traveling north on Beckley to Methodist wouldn’t pass in front. Paths would cross. 

    By the time of his Warren Commission testimony, Hill had corrected the “passed in front” to “passed us”. But he claims to have used 19 (Owens’ number) when the number Hill had used was 550/2. His testimony was:

    “In the process of getting the location straight, and I think it was at this point I was probably using 19 call number, because I was riding with him, we got the information correctly that the shooting had actually been on East 10th, and we were en route there.

    We crossed the Commerce Street viaduct and turned, made a right turn to go under the viaduct on North Beckley to go up to 10th Street. As we passed, just before we got to Colorado on Beckley, an ambulance with a police car behind it passed us en route to Methodist Hospital.”

    Belin clearly gave Hill an easy ride. Hill’s testimony was at odds on that point with the radio transcript, and once again Hill was appropriating something Owens had done. Hill observing Poe as the first squad car to roll up does make sense if Hill had already arrived in car 207 and parked in the rear driveway of 410 E 10th, accessed by Lansing Alley having dropped the decoy off at a point to the east of the murder scene. That is also consistent with what Virginia Davis said about seeing policemen immediately after she’d called the police, after Tippit was shot, before the ambulance arrived.

    Remember, Croy and Hill lied about what they did before and after Tippit was shot. Croy in particular lied about being “hemmed in on both sides” on Main Street, whilst what he described in terms of lane configuration was Elm Street, and Griffin is near where the Marsalis bus was on Elm when “Oswald” (I posit the decoy) got off. 

    Hill lied on KCRC to make Oswald look like a serial cop killer. Hill’s biggest problem though was admitting he saw Poe’s car “roll-up”. That would not have happened if he’d arrived with Owens.

    On the evidence outlined, Hill had arrived at the Tippit murder scene in car 207 shortly before Tippit was shot and rendezvoused with Westbrook who arrived with Owens, then Westbrook could have told Hill what he saw on his journey in Owens’ car. But Hill only got half the story and hence put an incorrect statement on the radio at 1:20 pm concerning the ambulance. Hill’s aim in doing that was likely to create an alibi to account for how he had got to the scene.

    To test that assumption further, Westbrook is relevant, as is what Hill did next. 

    WESTBROOK THE FORGETTER

    Westbrook said in his Commission testimony of 6 April 1963:

    “Mr. WESTBROOK. I was in my office and Mrs. Kinney, one of the Dispatchers, came into the office and told us, and of course-it’s the same as everybody says- we didn’t believe it until a second look at her and I realized it was so, and so, there’s a little confusion right here because everybody became rather excited right quick, but somebody, and I don’t know who it was, came into my office and said they needed some more men at this Texas Depository Building. You know, I didn’t review my report before I came over here I didn’t have a chance. I just came off of vacation and they hit me with this this morning as soon as I got to the office. I can’t recall whether or not it was the Dispatcher’s office, but I think it was-somebody in the Dispatcher’s office had told us they needed some more men at the Texas Depository Building; so I sent the men that were in my office, which were then Sergeants Stringer and Carver, and possibly Joe Fields and McGee, if they were in there; it seems like McGee was, and I think- I sent them to the building, and then I walked on down the hall spreading the word and telling the other people that they needed some men down there, and practically everybody left immediately. I sat around a while-really not knowing what to do because of the-almost all of the commanding officers and supervisors were out of the city hall and I finally couldn’t stand it any longer, so I started to the Texas Depository Building, and believe it or not, I walked. There wasn’t a car available, and so I walked from the city hall to the Depository Building, and I would stop on the way down where there would be a group of people listening to somebody’s transistor radio and I would stop and catch a few false reports, you might say, at that time, until I reached the building. Do you want me to continue on?”

    So, by that, Hill who was assigned to Westbrook, left his office at approximately 12:45 pm with Valentine then driving him. 

    Westbrook continued:

    Mr. Westbrook. After we reached the building, or after I reached the building, I contacted my sergeant Sgt. R. D. Stringer [sic, it is HH Stringer per the Batchelor Exhibit, R D Stringer was a different officer and not a sergeant], and he was standing in front and so then I went into the building to help start the search and I was on the first floor and I had walked down an aisle and opened a door onto an outside loading dock, and when I came out on this dock, one of the men hollered and said there had been an officer killed in Oak Cliff.

    Well, then, of course, I ran to my radio because I am the personnel officer, and that then became, of course, my greatest interest right at that time, and so, Sergeant Stringer and I and some patrolman—I don’t recall his name-then drove to the immediate vicinity of where Officer Tippit had been shot and killed.

    Of course, the body was already gone, the squad car was still there, and on one occasion as we were approaching this squad car, a call came over the radio that a suspicious person had been sighted running into the public library at Marsalis and Jefferson, so we immediately went to that location and it was a false-it was just one of the actually—-it was one of the employees of the library who had heard the news somewhere on the radio and he was running to tell the other group about Kennedy.

    So, we returned to the scene and here I met Bob Barrett, the FBI agent, and Sergeant Stringer and Barrett and I were together, and then an eyewitness to the shooting of the officer from across the street, a lady, came to the car, and she was telling us how this happened.

    Mr. BALL. Where was your car parked at that time?

    Mr. Westbrook. It wasn’t my car—we didn’t have one. I don’t know where this officer went after he let us out at the scene.

    Mr. BALL. An officer drove you down to the scene?

    Mr. Westbrook. An officer drove us to the scene.

    Mr. BALL. Where were you when this lady came up who was an eyewitness?

    Mr. Westbrook. We were at the squad car-Tippit’s squad car-it had never been moved.

    Mr. BALL. You were near 10th and Patton?

    Mr. Westbrook. And she was telling us what had occurred.

    Mr. BALL. Do you remember her name?

    Mr. Westbrook. No; the other officers got it.

    Westbrook trips himself up more than once. He said he “ran to his radio”, but he’d previously said he didn’t have a car as he’d walked. He refers to stopping on the way for the ““false reports as you might say””. How would he know they were false? 

    How could he “start the search” at the Depository? Searching was already underway before 1:00 pm and after a 20-minute plus walk, he couldn’t have started it. (As covered later, the three shells were found before 12:56 pm). His “believe it or not” is defensive. 

    Westbrook slipped out “we reached” and then corrected it to “I reached”. Also, if Stringer was already “out the front” then the “I contacted” him makes no sense. Another issue is that with so many officers sharing vehicles to get to the Depository the line that there were no cars available is not credible. 

    Researcher and Warren Commission advocate Dale Myers says that:

    “Sgt. Henry H. Stringer told me in 1983 that Captain Westbrook rode with him from city hall to the depository along with two other officers – Frank M. Rose, Burglary and Theft Bureau (driving) and Joe Fields, a detective in the Personnel Bureau. They split up upon arrival and helped searched [sic] the TSBD (films support Stringer’s recollection), then got back together just before the call came over the radio about the Tippit shooting. 

    Of course, Stringer’s twenty-year-old recollection isn’t as strong as Westbrook’s sworn 1964 testimony, but who knows? More important, in the big scheme of things, what does it matter?” [http://jfkfiles.blogspot.com/2020/11/westbrook-croy-and-tippit-murder.html?m=1]

    Myers downplays discrepancies that actually matter a lot. If Stringer was correct then he confirms that Westbrook’s forgetfulness extended beyond forgetting who he’d travelled with, to forgetting whether he walked for 20 minutes or not. And getting all that wrong under oath, plus forgetting people’s names, all this despite being head of personnel. In the “big scheme of things” the fact is that testimonies of certain senior police officers were unreliable. 

    There is also a non-sequitur in the Myers extract. The first paragraph (without references in support) claims that there was photographic evidence to back Stringer’s recollection. But by the paragraph immediately afterward things were shrugged off to a ‘but who knows’ about Stringer’s recollection. 

    Myers’ approach to vindicating the Warren Commission has the recurring naïve assumption that all police officers were clean and all their testimony was correct. The above demonstrates that this cannot be assumed. Either Stringer, Westbrook, or both were unreliable. In putting out information to support the Warren Commission theory, Myers actually throws up anomalies that serve to undermine it. 

                               THE DPD AND THE STOPPED BUS

    Dallas’ overturned prosecutions conducted under the now notorious District Attorney Henry Wade sit with a crime clear-up rate that is consistent with the routine practice of rigging of evidence against defendants. Wade, DA in 1963, had had a prosecution conviction rate of 100% until he lost Roe v Wade (1970).  Wade had withheld evidence in cases where convictions were later overturned. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 196-98)

    Had Westbrook with his “sat around a while” and “couldn’t stand it any longer” left as early as 12:50 pm – on foot stopping to hear “false reports”– then he would have arrived after at least 1:10 pm. Adding on “contacting Stringer” with some dwell time at the Depository, his timeline makes it difficult for him to have arrived by the time of Bowley’s call at 1:11 pm and immediately get into the car with the very fast responder Owens. 

    Assuming there is also some truth in what Stringer said, then Westbrook didn’t walk but arrived by car at the Depository earlier than his walking story implies, and sought to disguise that, and then departed with Owens. 

    Any credible independent police investigation with maps, blackboards/whiteboards, would have seen through the problems with the movements of certain police officers immediately, merely on the basis of the above. So should the Commission. 

    Owens actually gave a very strong alibi for Westbrook’s presence when Tippit was shot – which also rules out Westbrook being in car 207 just before Tippit was shot. But Westbrook did not take it up. That begs the question what was Westbrook doing before and after Tippit was shot that made him prevaricate? If all he was doing was covering for Hill, then his own misrepresentations wouldn’t need to be so elaborate before Tippit was shot.

    Westbrook was working in civilian clothes that day. He had also just returned to work, saying he had been on vacation. 

    Mr. BALL. Do you wear a uniform? 

    Mr. WESTBROOK. Well, it is optional. I don’t wear one. 

    Mr. BALL. On November 22, 1963, were you assigned any special duty? 

    Mr. WESTBROOK. No, sir; other than just my own routine duties. 

    Mr. BALL. What were those duties that day? 

    Mr. WESTBROOK. 8 15 to 5 15. 

    Mr. BALL. And were you in uniform on that day?

    Mr. WESTBROOK. No, sir. 

    It is peculiar for Ball to have brought up the uniform. But he asked that question after Cecil McWatters testified on 26 March 1964 and 6 days after Milton Jones’ FBI statement. Westbrook’s plain clothes could account for McWatters saying a man stopped the bus, whilst Milton Jones said it was a policeman. Did Ball suspect it might be Westbrook? Croy had given his remarkable testimony prior on 26 March 1963, ten days before Westbrook appeared.

    McWatters had told the story of the man stopping the bus which appeared in the Dallas Morning News on 28 November 1963. He said that the man was in work clothes and about 55. Westbrook was an old-looking 46. 

    It is therefore posited that Hill and Westbrook likely knew who the intended suspect should be; and that the 12:44 pm APB was itself false evidence from within City Hall and the trigger for what was to follow next. Which was evidence planting at the Depository to frame not only Oswald, but set up the Depository as the origin of all the shots at the motorcade. 

    Tippit’s covert position at Gloco immediately after 12:30 pm and Angell, Parker, Lewis, and Nelson in covert positions on other viaduct exits indicate something was planned of the nature of assistance for getaways. To assist in a getaway at a low level merely needs to turn a blind eye. 

    If Tippit turned at or before 12:45 pm, and drove to the area of Lansing and 8th, for a rendezvous with his controllers less than two minutes from Gloco, then it would be imperative to get the decoy off the bus and get him to 1026 N Beckley by whatever means as quickly as possible. That being needed to keep alive the false narrative that Oswald had reached 1026 N Beckley of his own accord.

    There has to be a reason why that particular Marsalis bus was singled out, boarded, and held up for over 40 minutes. 

    Click here to read part 2.