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The Abstract Reality of Edward Epstein
Part 1: “Focus on the Media: Edward J. Epstein”
Part 3: “Edward Epstein: Warren Commission Critic?” (Probe vol 7 no 1, 1999)
On his web site, Edward Epstein preserved his article published in The Atlantic in 1993 on Jim Garrison. To my knowledge, that is the only place one can find it since (thankfully) it does not appear to be available at The Atlantic web site. A few months earlier, in late 1992, he had just published a hit piece on Garrison in the ever-accommodating New Yorker. This was written on the occasion of Garrison’s death. Epstein now used the excuse that Oliver Stone was coming out with a double VHS box set of his film JFK to justify a second hatchet job. This allowed him to widen his focus a bit. Now he could include both Stone and his consultant Fletcher Prouty in his machine-gun strike.And make no mistake. That is what these two pieces are, out and out drive-bys. One definition of a hatchet job is that the author ignores the record, distorts the record, or even worse, deliberately misrepresents it. All done in order to disguise what is an act, not of reportage, but of propaganda. As we shall see, there is no evidence that Epstein ever once consulted the original records of Jim Garrison’s investigation for either of these two articles.. These were available to him from three sources at that time. First, there was a collection of them at the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) in Washington DC. Second, co-screenwriter of the film JFK Zachary Sklar had many of them. Third, Jim Garrison had what was probably the largest collection of them at his home. I never heard of any attempt by Epstein to consult these records for either of his two articles.
Because of that, this allows him to say, in the second paragraph of his 1993 Atlantic piece, that the idea that Clay Shaw had participated in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy was based on nothing but the testimony of Perry Russo. So right out of the gate, Epstein commits a faux pas. For Garrison did not make Shaw a person of interest because of Russo. The way that Garrison came to be interested in Shaw was through the testimony of lawyer Dean Andrews in the Warren Commission volumes. There, Andrews said that he had been called by a person named Clay Bertrand within 24 hours of the assassination. Bertrand wanted him to go to Dallas and volunteer to defend Lee Harvey Oswald. That call was corroborated by at least four sources, including Andrews’ secretary and his investigator. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 51) When Garrison talked to Andrews, he refused to reveal who Bertrand was. Just as he had previously refused to reveal the man’s true name to Mark Lane, and he would later refuse to do so with Anthony Summers. He claimed he would be in physical danger if he did reveal the name. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 181)
Consequently, Garrison sent out his investigators to find out who Bertrand was. It turned out to be Shaw. Again, there are plentiful references to this in Garrison’s files, which Epstein did not survey. (DiEugenio, pp. 387-88) But beyond that, even the FBI knew that Shaw was Bertrand. And they knew this as far back as 1963, because his name had come up in their original investigation. (Davy, p. 192) Since he is either unaware of, or wants to ignore, this information, Epstein can 1.) Deny this evidence and 2.) Attribute the whole Shaw/Bertrand case to Russo.
II
Before we begin to address Epstein’s over-the-top attack on Russo, let us lay down some facts, which Epstein does not do. Without these facts, there is no baseline to form any kind of informed discussion. And informed discussion is what Epstein wishes to avoid.
Garrison’s assistant Andrew Sciambra first interviewed Russo in Baton Rouge on February 25, 1967. Russo stated that he had attended a gathering at David Ferrie’s apartment in September of 1963. During this gathering, the talk turned to an assassination plot to kill President Kennedy. Some anti-Castro Cubans were on hand as well as Ferrie, a man Russo called Clem Bertrand, and a man he called Leon Oswald. Sciambra gave Russo photos to identify, and he picked out photos of Ferrie, Shaw and Oswald. Sciambra took notes on a legal pad and marked the photos the witness had identified. He concluded by telling Russo he should come down to New Orleans for further discussion.
In the office on Monday, Sciambra began transcribing his notes. He was in the process of doing this when Russo arrived. Garrison wanted to test his testimony, so he was taken to Mercy Hospital and given Sodium Pentothal (truth serum) and later placed under hypnosis by Dr. Nicolas Chetta. Russo told the same story to Chetta as he did to Sciambra in Baton Rouge. (Davy, p. 121) Chetta told Garrison assistant Alvin Oser that there was no chance one could lie under truth serum; what Russo said had to have happened. (Joe Biles, In History’s Shadow, p. 38) Russo’s story was partly corroborated by his friend Niles Peterson, who had left the gathering early but recalled the presence there of a Leon Oswald. On February 28, Sciambra drove Russo by Shaw’s apartment, where Russo identified Shaw from a parked car. Finally, posing as an insurance salesman, he greeted Shaw at his door. This finalized the identification.
Sciambra then drafted his first completed memo based on the Chetta sessions. In fact, it is dated February 28, the day after the truth serum was administered. Later on he finished a second memo. This related the things outside the scope of that gathering at Ferrie’s, and was the actual second memo Sciambra composed. (See Biles, p. 44) When Lou Ivon typed up a search warrant for Shaw’s apartment, he referred to what Sciambra told him about the conversation he had with Russo in Baton Rouge, which was reaffirmed by the truth serum session. This information is right in the warrant, before Sciambra even typed up his second memo. Ivon could only have gotten the information from Sciambra. And Sciambra could only have gotten it from Russo. (ibid)
What Epstein does to confuse matters is to borrow the same scheme that the late James Phelan used back in 1967. After reporter Phelan met with the DA in Las Vegas, Garrison unwisely let him copy the memos. The DA was obviously unaware that Phelan had been a conduit for the Saturday Evening Post to write government-sanctioned stories. And, in fact, Phelan had three meetings with the FBI about Jim Garrison, urging them to intercede with the DA. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 245) Phelan took his copies of the memos and said that, since one mentioned the gathering at Ferrie’s and one did not, this meant that the one that did not came first, and the one that did came second. Therefore all the information about an assassination discussion was induced into Russo by hypnosis. This is rendered false by both the date on the first memo and by Ivon’s search warrant.
But let us go further with Phelan. Phelan went to visit Russo in Baton Rouge and he took photographer Matt Herron with him. He later said that on this occasion, Russo told Herron and himself that he never mentioned the assassination discussion in Baton Rouge, only in New Orleans. Phelan later told author James Kirkwood that Herron would back him up on this point. When this writer contacted Mr. Herron, this was exposed as a lie. Herron told me that Russo strongly stated that he first mentioned the gathering in Baton Rouge. (ibid, p. 246) Even further, Phelan said he had taped this conversation with Russo. Under cross-examination at the Shaw trial, Phelan admitted this was false also. (Biles, p. 46)
But there was still another fallback position that Phelan and Shaw’s lawyers then took. They said that once you looked at the two sessions done by Chetta with Russo, the reader could see that Russo was prompted by Chetta to recall Bertrand. It turned out that this was another deliberate misrepresentation. Only when the second session is placed first and the first session placed second is that the case. But in Garrison’s files they are properly labeled as A and B. When they are read in this order, it is plainly seen that Russo recalls Bertrand’s name without any prompting. (DiEugenio, p. 247)
Now, at the time Epstein wrote this article, in 1993, he could have discovered all this information on his own. He could have spoken to Matt Herron, Andrew Sciambra, and Lou Ivon. If he wanted written evidence, he could have asked Garrison for the memos and the search warrant. Apparently, he did not think that was important. And he also either believed Phelan, or thought that Phelan’s scheme could not be exposed. Well, it was exposed. This proves that 1.) Epstein did not do on the ground research for his article, and 2.) That he had an agenda from the moment he started writing it.
But further revealing his shabby research methods, Epstein does not even seem to understand that Russo was not supposed to be Garrison’s lead witness. The lead witness was supposed to be a man named Clyde Johnson. Johnson was a preacher turned reactionary politician who told Garrison he had met with Shaw, Leon Oswald, Jack Ruby and a Cuban in a Baton Rouge hotel in 1963. Shaw gave him money for his campaign, two thousand dollars, the equivalent of about $17,000 today. When he went to the bathroom, he heard them talking about “getting someone”, and he became apprehensive. But it turned out they were talking about Kennedy, and using Johnson’s attacks on him to lure him to the south. Johnson had a witness who partly collaborated his story about Shaw’s support. He also had a contemporaneous address book, in which he had made notes about Shaw and Ruby. Johnson did not testify at Shaw’s trial even though Garrison had hid him outside of town. His office was so infiltrated and wired for sound that Johnson’s location was discovered. During the trial he was beaten to a bloody pulp. He was hospitalized and could not testify. (Davy, pp. 72-73) Again, Epstein could have found out about Johnson if he had asked Garrison for documents. He apparently did not think it was important.
III
Building on his foundation of sand, Epstein now decides to jump to a scene from the film JFK. This is a scene that focuses on the man who was Garrison’s chief suspect. The film shows us David Ferrie in a panic after Garrison’s investigation had been prematurely exposed in the local press. He calls Lou Ivon at Garrison’s office and says that this is a fatal development for him. Investigator Ivon, Garrison and a third assistant then go to visit him at a hotel room that Ivon has secured for Ferrie. Now, to be fair, let us grant the screenwriters a degree of dramatic license. In reality only Ivon was there (Davy, p. 66), since he was the one person in Garrison’s office that Ferrie trusted. But in terms of the film narrative, one had to have Garrison there since he is the central character. And contrary to what Epstein said at a debate in New York sponsored by The Nation magazine, Garrison did write about this incident in his book, On the Trail of the Assassins. (see pp. 138-39) Epstein can scream until the cows come home, but there is very little in this scene that stretches the facts about Ferrie. Let us do something that none of Stone’s critics have done. Let us break it down.
Ferrie first says he worked for the CIA. This fact was reported to Anthony Summers by CIA officer Victor Marchetti for his book Conspiracy. Ferrie also mentioned it to at least one of his friends. (see Summers, p. 300; also Davy, p. 28) Ferrie then says that Shaw had a high clearance, and this is also true. Shaw had a clearance for the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division codenamed QK/ENCHANT. This was the same clearance Howard Hunt had. (Davy, pp. 195-96) Ferrie then adds that both the Cuban exiles and Oswald were also associated with the CIA. There is no doubt that Sergio Arcacha Smith, Ferrie’s closest Cuban friend, was a CIA operative. He had been sanctioned as such by Howard Hunt for the local leadership of the Cuban Revolutionary Council. This was a sort of a government in exile for Cuba that the CIA set up before the Bay of Pigs invasion. (ibid, p. 9) Eladio Del Valle, another Cuban exile, paid Ferrie for flights into Cuba. (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy, p. 119)
Ferrie then says that the CIA and Mob had been working together against Castro for years. This is such a commonplace, even back then, that it should not even be noted. But Ferrie was in a good position to know about it since he had a sideline of working for an attorney who represented Carlos Marcello. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 135) And his aforementioned paymaster for flights into Cuba, Eladio del Valle, had ties to Santo Trafficante, who actually was part of the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro. (Summers, pp. 319, 491)
“I have found that the assassination was much more complex than anyone believed, and that a corner of it—I’ve never pretended it was more—existed in New Orleans …. John Kennedy was killed because he was against the war in Vietnam. There is no doubt of that.” ~Jim Garrison
Concerning Oswald and the CIA, the odds are high that, as Garrison wrote, he was acting as a CIA agent provocateur, especially in light of the revelations in John Newman’s book Oswald and the CIA. But even in 1993, with all that was known about Oswald being at Guy Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street through books by Garrison, Philip Melanson, and Anthony Summers, plus Oswald’s visit to the Clinton/Jackson area with Shaw and Ferrie, most objective people would have had to grant this. What else would a “communist” be doing hanging out with so many right-wingers?
When Ferrie mentions that he knows things about Ruby, there is also evidence for that. This comes from Clyde Johnson, as mentioned above, and also Ferrie associates William Morris and Thomas Beckham. (See Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, pp. 79, 124) As far as Ferrie saying that Ruby ran guns to Castro in the early days, there were records that Ruby did do that prior to the Cuban revolution. This was even written about by reporter Earl Golz in the Dallas Morning News. (See August 18, 1978; also John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 177) What this all exposes is not Stone’s flawed writing, but Epstein’s non-existent research.
We now come to the exchange that drove Epstein up the wall. Garrison asks Ferrie, “Who killed the president?” It is clear that he does not mean that Ferrie was in on it. It is simply an exploratory query. Ferrie says he does not know. He says no one knows, not even the assassins. Because these kinds of things are all wrapped up in a layered cover operation. But the odd thing is this. If Epstein had looked, there was evidence in Garrison’s files that Ferrie at least planned an assassination attempt.
Most us know from Garrison’s Playboy interview that Ferrie had a rather rare preoccupation. He measured trajectory angles and distances of shells ejecting out of rifles. (DiEugenio, p. 215) One would not need to do that for guerilla fighting or firefights during Operation Mongoose—which Ferrie was a part of. (Davy, p. 28) But you might need it for a covert operation that included assassination.
Jim Garrison had planted a mole on Ferrie. Actually, two of them. One was named Max Gonzalez and one was Jimmy Johnson. Johnson said that he had gone through some of Ferrie’s documents and come across a folder marked “Files 1963”. In that folder he found a set of papers that looked like a diagram for an assassination plot against Fidel Castro. From the markings on the paper, the plot seemed to have to do with killing Castro from a plane. (DiEugenio, p. 215)
But a different witness found a different diagram in Ferrie’s desk in attorney G. Wray Gill’s office. Clara Gay was a Gill client who knew Ferrie. After the assassination, she called Gill’s office: the word was that Garrison had questioned Ferrie about the Kennedy case. She heard what sounded like some panicky voices in the background. So she went over to Gill’s office. Walking over to Ferrie’s desk she saw what appeared to be a diagram of Dealey Plaza: it depicted a car from the perspective of a high angle with tall buildings around it. When Clara tried to pick it up, the secretary came over and pulled it back. But during the struggle, Clara noticed the words “Elm Street” written on the diagram. (Ibid, p. 216)
Epstein’s idea that Ferrie would somehow be alien to crafting assassination plots is not backed up by the evidence. And clearly, Garrison made a mistake by not listening to Ivon and having Ferrie testify before a grand jury after this tense discussion with him. (Garrison, pp. 139-40)
Once the record is referred to, we can conclude that there really is little or nothing in this scene that cannot be justified by information that the DA had about David Ferrie. Consequently, when the facts are adduced, Epstein’s howls about violations of the record are the equivalent of a stray dog barking in the night. What makes it worse is that there is really no excuse for his journalistic irresponsibility. Because when Stone and co-scenarist Zach Sklar released the volume The Book of the Film in 1992, it included the script’s research notes. On page 88, the text reads that although Garrison’s book refers to this episode in passing, the exchange is actually based on interviews with investigator Lou Ivon. This reviewer called Ivon back in 1993. When Garrison’s investigator was asked if a man named Ed Epstein ever got in contact with him about the Kennedy case, he replied that, back in 1968, yes. I asked him, what about more recently, since Stone’s movie came out? Ivon replied, no, not recently. Epstein thought it was unimportant to consult the primary source.
IV
Epstein couples his howls over this scene with similar complaints about one that shortly follows. After a scene showing Garrison discovering that his office has been wired for sound—which it was—Ivon gets a phone call. (For the electronic surveillance see DiEugenio, p. 232, and pp. 264-65) He is alerted that Ferrie has been found dead. Garrison and some of his assistants rush over to his apartment. As Garrison goes through the place, he discovers an empty bottle of Proloid, which is used for low metabolism. As the photographs taken at the time reveal, there are many other empty pill bottles around. When Garrison had the Proloid drug checked out, his expert said that excessive use of it in someone like Ferrie, who had hypertension at the time, could cause death without a trace. (DiEugenio, p. 225)
What makes this even more suggestive is that two forensic pathologists reviewed the autopsy photos in advance of the film’s release. They both noted contusions on the inside of Ferrie’s mouth. Dr. Cyril Wecht and Dr. Frank Minyard said these could be indicative of someone inserting some kind of tube with the pills in solution down Ferrie’s throat. In fact, one of the cuts is on the inside of the lower lip, where the tube may have been inserted. (DiEugenio, p. 226; Sklar and Stone, p. 102)
There were other oddities about the scene. According to one of the local newspapers, Ferrie’s body was first found by someone who said he did not know Ferrie. He told the police he just happened to wander in, even though Ferrie lived on the second floor. (New Orleans Times Picayune 2/22/67) Ferrie also left two typed, unsigned suicide notes. (Flammonde, on pp. 34-36, features their text) Also, there was the nearly concurrent death of Eladio Del Valle, who was shot and hacked to death within the same 24-hour period. Unknowingly, Garrison had sent CIA infiltrator Bernardo De Torres to find Del Valle in Miami. The note Garrison got back about his death read as follows: “He was shot in the chest and it appears ‘gangland style’ and his body was left in the vicinity of BERNARDO TORRES apartment.” (DiEugenio, p. 227)
Then there was the time of death. First the coroner said that Ferrie had died late in the evening of the previous day. But then reporter George Lardner came forward and stated that he had been with Ferrie until four AM on the day his body was discovered, which was February 22, 1967. (Davy, p. 66) Because of this, the coroner now revised his estimated time of death—by over four hours. This is a real stretch. Most coroners will say that expanding the estimated time of death by four hours is unusual.
Then there were the observations of Dr. Martin Palmer, Ferrie’s physician. He criticized the official verdict of a ruptured blood vessel, or beury aneurysm, as the cause of death. Palmer called the autopsy “slipshod”. He went on to say it was incomplete since they did not open the brain case. Further, there was no iodine test done, and Ferrie’s blood samples were not kept. (Mellen, pp. 106-07)
So why did Coroner Chetta rule as he did, that the cause of death was a natural one, by beury aneurysm? As Minyard told this reviewer, no one could recall a case in which the deceased left a suicide note—in this case two of them—and then died of a seemingly natural cause. (DiEugenio, p. 226) Chetta apparently wanted to play it safe in the face of the tremendous publicity Ferrie’s death had caused. Which included a phone call to him from Robert Kennedy. (Mellen, p. 107))
What Stone and Sklar do in this scene is to contrast Garrison and his staff going through Ferrie’s apartment while picking up some of the odd artifacts, like the two suicide notes, or the empty pill bottles. Stone then intercuts shots of what Garrison was thinking may have happened: some Cuban exiles forcing the drugs down Ferrie’s mouth. The first time we see this, Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) is staring in a mirror; the second time, the coroner literally asks him what he is thinking. These brief cutaways—which include a depiction of the death of Del Valle—are shot in high contrast black and white, as opposed to the actual film, which is in color. In the parlance of film grammar, these are called subjective scenes, since they depict what a character in the film is thinking. Given all the evidence I have presented here, they are completely justified. Epstein ignores it all.
V
Then there are Epstein’s transgressions about the character of Willie O’Keefe, played by Kevin Bacon. Epstein calls O’Keefe a fictional character. This is not accurate. He is a composite character. That is, the screenwriters collapsed certain real life characters into one. This is not an uncommon practice, and most film critics accept it as a way of getting information across while saving time. Again, it is very hard to believe that Epstein is not aware of this, because this information is clearly conveyed in The Book of the Film. This includes the shooting script plus the research notes. It was published in 1992, many months before Epstein’s essay appeared. On page 66 of that book, scenarists Stone and Zach Sklar reveal that O’Keefe is made up of four people: David Logan, Perry Russo, Ray Broshears, and William Morris. Logan was interviewed by assistant DA Jim Alcock. Logan is the source for the dinner at Shaw’s luxurious apartment where a homosexual party follows, which includes Ferrie. Logan’s testimony about Shaw’s sex habits was quite explicit and, if anything, is understated in the film. (Mellen, p. 123) William Morris was in prison when Garrison’s assistant DA found him and talked to him. This is why the first time we see O’Keefe he is in jail. Like Logan, he also knew Shaw as Bertrand. Shaw used him for sexual purposes and he was procured for Shaw by a man who appears to have been Shaw’s pimp, Eugene Davis. (ibid, p. 124) Broshears figures in Garrison’s book and also in the work of author Dick Russell. Except he was closer to Ferrie personally and had only been introduced to Shaw. Broshears said that Ferrie had confided in him what he knew about the JFK assassination. Namely, that he had been marginally involved, was supposed to be an escape pilot and that is what he was doing in Houston on the day of the assassination. (Garrison, pp. 120-21) Somehow we are supposed to believe that Epstein was not aware of any of this.
Epstein ends his hysterical screed with a multiple-page rant against the Mr. X character in the film. This is the former military man who meets with Garrison in Washington. Mr. X, who was originally to be performed by Marlon Brando, is played by Donald Sutherland. This mysterious character is based upon Fletcher Prouty, who was one of the technical advisors on the film. Both Stone and Sklar understood that Prouty did not actually meet with Garrison until after the Shaw trial. But they wanted to convey information to the audience about the reasons for Kennedy’s assassination. And in The Book of the Film, the scenarists actually quote Garrison on this point:
I have found that the assassination was much more complex than anyone believed, and that a corner of it—I’ve never pretended it was more—existed in New Orleans …. John Kennedy was killed because he was against the war in Vietnam. There is no doubt of that. (p. 106)
This is why Prouty is portrayed in the film. Now, in the film, the Mr. X character details his past history in the military. Prouty was the military support officer for intelligence operations and he interfaced with the CIA when they needed arms and munitions they did not have in their supply depots. Therefore he had knowledge of certain of these secret operations, which are briefly described in the film. Since he served until the end of 1963, he had inside knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Operation Mongoose, and Kennedy’s withdrawal plan for Vietnam. And these are the main points he is meant to discuss.
Col. Fletcher Prouty (1917-2001) Incredibly, Epstein pretty much ignores these. Which is kind of shocking, since the climax of the scene is X/Prouty’s participation in Kennedy’s withdrawal plan from Vietnam in the fall of 1963. Epstein deals with this keystone concept in exactly one sentence. And even that is done tangentially. With Epstein, there is no reference to NSAM 263, the Taylor/McNamara report which was the basis for that Vietnam withdrawal memo, nor does he refer to Lyndon Johnson’s NSAM 273, which, after Kennedy’s death, partly reversed that earlier action memorandum. Nor is there any reference to how the latter memorandum opened the door to direct American involvement in Vietnam, something that Kennedy consciously resisted. (See John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 445-49) To ignore all of this is simply inexplicable.
As noted in the film, Prouty was directly involved with the Vietnam plans, along with his friend and colleague, Marine officer Victor Krulak. They were so intimately involved that they understood that the whole McNamara/Taylor report was not written in Saigon, which is where Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor had been sent in the fall of 1963. It was written in Washington by Krulak and Prouty, under the supervision of Robert Kennedy, upon the orders of the president. (p. 401) President Kennedy was not leaving anything to chance about his withdrawal plan. In October of 1963, he was taking control of it himself, even if he had to write it and ramrod it through some reluctant advisors. That ghost-written report, secretly written by Kennedy, would be the basis for NSAM 263. And that memo would begin a withdrawal of American troops that December, to be completed in 1965. This information is in John Newman’s landmark book on the subject, JFK and Vietnam. Again, since that book was published in 1992, Epstein could have found it in those pages. Or he could have called Victor Krulak, who was alive at that time. Apparently, Epstein had no intention of doing either. Because that would have meant the film was correct and Prouty’s information was accurate: Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam, as Garrison had figured out decades previously.
Since he cannot launch a frontal assault, Epstein decides to discredit the information by doing a smear of Prouty. To call it a smear is actually being gentle. Prouty’s career is pretty much well described in more than one source. (Click here) He was a well-rounded, intelligent, candid, curious man. He dealt in banking, military affairs, and education. He wrote both articles and books about his past military experience. And he served as a consultant to several media projects, including JFK. For Epstein to deny some of these things is silly.
Documents pertaining to Colonel Prouty’s service record But Epstein has to contest what Mr. X says about the Secret Service regulations in place at that time. Or else, what the film implies—that a huge Secret Service failure took place in Dallas—would be accurate. Which, as we know today, is the case. So Epstein says that, contrary to what Mr. X says, the Secret Service manual did not demand that all windows on the motorcade route be sealed, or that teams should monitor rooftops, or there should be a constant speed during motorcades. No one knows more about this aspect than author Vince Palamara. He has written two books on the subject and has a third coming out soon. In an email communication to this reviewer, Vince had the following to say about these topics. After consulting with two top-level Secret Service officers, one who authored the manual, he wrote: windows along a motorcade route were to be, at the least, monitored. Building rooftops were to be guarded. And the motorcade route was to be regulated at a top speed of 35 miles per hour. (Palamara email of April 6, 2017) Obviously, these strictures were all disobeyed in Dallas.
Contrary to what Epstein writes, Len Osanic—who knew Prouty for over ten years—related to me that Prouty was not an editorial advisor to the Church of Scientology. They asked him to look at some documents about L. Ron Hubbard. He did and rendered his opinion. There was discussion of a book, but that never materialized. His association with the Liberty Lobby was that they republished his book The Secret Team. He delivered one of his standard addresses at a seminar of theirs, concerning the Kennedy case and the secret team. But Osanic does not recognize the quotes Epstein attributes to Prouty in his article. By including them, Epstein can now inject the rather standard smear of anti-Semitism. (For Prouty’s actual statements concerning the Arabs, Israelis and the price of oil, see chapter 3 of Understanding Special Operations; after clicking here, scroll down to “The Changing Nature of Warfare: From a Military to an Economic Basis”.) Further, contrary to what Epstein implies, Prouty’s meeting with General Edward Lansdale about sending him to the South Pole was not worked out months or even weeks in advance. As depicted in the film, it was a November, 1963 surprise to him. (Phone communication with Osanic, April 7, 2017) Probably no one alive knows more about Prouty than Osanic, and I refer anyone who is interested in the man to his web site, prouty.org.
Epstein concludes his wild rant against Prouty by saying that the colonel thought that Leonard Lewin’s 1967 book Report from Iron Mountain was a work of non-fiction. This is supposed to show that Stone should never have trusted Prouty. He couldn’t figure out fiction from non-fction. But what it demonstrates is how abstract the reality of Epstein’s warped world is. For if one goes to Prouty’s web site, as posthumously managed by Osanic, one can click on the “more articles” tab and scroll down to the bottom. There you will see a link to a 1972 NY Times report of Lewin saying that the book is not a work of non-fiction. It is a satiric novel. Osanic told me that when he was setting up the site, Prouty insisted on this link. If one goes to the Black Op Radio site, and clicks Archived Shows, and scrolls down to Program 825, one will be able to listen to an interview Prouty did with Sean Mackenzie. If one goes to the 49:00 mark, one will hear a discussion of Lewin’s book. Prouty, no less than four times, calls it a novel. But he appreciated the satiric edge of the novel, since many people he knew in the Pentagon talked as Lewin depicted: we cannot abandon the warfare state.
Anyone familiar with propaganda techniques can see what Epstein has done. To distract from the solid information about Vietnam in the film JFK, he has abstracted certain aspects from Prouty’s life to present them under the worst possible light. That The Atlantic printed this hatchet job says a lot about their editorial standards.
But there is a larger issue here. And it relates not to just how bad the media is in America, but also to certain elements of the JFK critical community. Jim Garrison had his secret JFK murder probe exposed by the local media in New Orleans. From there on in, it was crippled, because the larger media decided to zero in on it, just as they would later target Richard Sprague when he took command of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Reporter/agents like Phelan, Hugh Aynesworth and Walter Sheridan created a barrage of smears and phony stories that the MSM ran with, and much of the public swallowed. This now became the paradigm about the Garrison inquiry—even in the research community! There, the largest proponents of this paradigm were Peter Scott, Paul Hoch, and Josiah Thompson. It was not until the ARRB collected and declassified Garrison’s files that we had an opportunity to look at what his real evidence was. That release, combined with memoranda from other sources, has allowed a different paradigm to now circulate. As I have written elsewhere, we will never really know the complete extent of Garrison’s files, because so many of them were lost, stolen or incinerated by his successor, the disastrous Harry Connick. But what did survive reduces Epstein’s weird world to rubble.
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Carmine Savastano, Two Princes and a King
Way back in 2003, Lisa Pease and myself co-authored and co-edited an anthology volume entitled The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X. The title is a bit misleading, because not all the essays in the book came from Probe. Four essays and the Afterword were new and were written for that volume. I was quite pleased with the book, for two reasons. First, it was unique in the sense that it covered all four assassinations. Second, the work was distinguished in both its quality, and its originality, since much of the book was based on new information.But third, as I wrote in the Afterword, we hoped that the book provided a new prism to look at those cases. Because Lisa and I thought it was wrong to survey them only as individual incidents. They were related to each other. Especially in their cumulative impact. First, the fact that the perpetrators got away with the JFK case made it easier to contemplate the other murders. Secondly, when the slaughter was complete, what constituted the liberal left in this country was pretty much politically finished. In fact, I would argue that it has not recovered since, even though Bernie Sanders managed to stir some of the embers in 2016.
As I hoped, the book seemed to influence some in the research community. Larry Hancock began writing on both the Robert Kennedy and the Martin Luther King cases. In 2008, Cyril Wecht’s 45th symposium at Duquesne was about JFK, MLK and Bobby Kennedy. The late John Judge began to sponsor conferences in both LA and Memphis under the COPA banner for, respectively, the Bobby Kennedy case and the King case. He even sponsored one for Malcolm X. (Click here to view it) I am gratified this happened. And I hope that ripple grows and prospers. Because I believe that is one way this polarized, and psychologically crippled nation can understand why it has ended up as it has.
Carmine Savastano is the latest person who has tried to ramp up that ripple into a wave. His memorably titled book, Two Princes and a King, surveys the JFK, MLK and RFK assassinations. Quite naturally, he takes the murders up in chronological order. He tries to deal with them in a systematic way, fitting them into a formalistic analysis of which forces were involved in each. The broad outlines of these forces he groups under four rubrics. These are, an Underworld Arm, i.e., organized crime elements; an Officials Arm, that is, elected officials who suppressed evidence; a military intelligence arm, which is self-explanatory; and finally, The Conspirators, that is, the actual operatives involved in the murders. As we shall see, this framework does not work out that well for him.
II
Quite naturally, he begins the book with a discussion of the JFK case. He first examines what he terms the underworld aspects of the crime. Like others before him, he notes the increase in prosecutions against organized crime during the Kennedy administration. In certain categories the percentage increase was simply spectacular. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had gathered all the resources in his office to battle the Mob as no one had previously.
But he then makes a curious statement. He says that the Warren Commission failed to discover plausible connections between Oswald and Mafia Don Carlos Marcello. (See p. 26: all references are to the E-book edition.) To my knowledge, the Warren Commission never even investigated this aspect, so of course they would not discover them. He then makes another curious statement. He says that both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations used the Mob to attempt to kill Castro. (ibid) As I, and many others, have stated, this is simply not backed up by any credible evidence. In fact, the two most lengthy and authoritative examinations of the matter both concluded that the CIA started the actions and continued them. The two examinations I refer to are the Senate’s Church Committee inquiry, and the CIA’s Inspector General report. (See The Assassinations, pp. 327-30)
The author continues in this vein by noting that two of the three Mob leaders the CIA cooperated with on the plots to kill Castro—Sam Giancana and John Roselli—ended up murdered on the eve of the formation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He then spends some time on the figure of Richard Cain, Giancana’s undercover agent in the Chicago Police Department. Cain was eventually fired from the department and moved to Mexico. He turned informant for the FBI and CIA, but neither thought his information was high quality, especially the latter. For example, according to Larry Hancock, Cain tried to say Oswald was in Chicago plotting to kill Kennedy in April of 1963, and that the alleged assassin actually bought a rifle there at the time. (Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, 2006 edition, p. 13) Rumors about Cain’s involvement in the JFK assassination are undermined by his son’s research in his 2008 book entitled The Tangled Web. That book uses a credible eyewitness to place Cain at the Cook County Court House on the day of Kennedy’s murder. (Click here for a brief biography of Cain)
From here, the author goes into a concise version of how Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano and Santo Trafficante originally schemed to open up casinos and brothels in Cuba under the dictator Fulgencio Batista. He also notes how Lansky, Luciano and Bugsy Siegel first originated an assassination enforcement arm, which later turned into Murder, Incorporated. (Savastano, pp. 29-30)
This background becomes the author’s way to introduce the character of Jack Ruby. Like Cain, Ruby was a virtual insider with the Dallas Police (although Savastano understates how many cops Ruby actually knew.) Like Cain, he was also an FBI informant. Ruby idolized the gambler and Trafficante colleague Lewis McWillie. And there was also the relationship between Ruby and the local Campisi brothers in Dallas. The Campisis reportedly took command of Mob operations in Dallas after Joe Civello died in 1970. Civello attended the famous Apalachin national Mafia meeting in New York in 1957. Ruby had dinner at the Campisi restaurant the night before the assassination. And Joe Campisi was one of the first to visit Ruby in jail after he killed Oswald. (ibid, p. 33)
From his overview of the Mob, the author segues to some of the failures of the Secret service in the JFK case. He briefly mentions the Chicago plot and Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden, and he couples this with the destruction of the 1963 Secret Service files before the Assassination Records Review Board could see them. (ibid, pp. 36-37) He also specifically mentions the incident of several Secret Service agents drinking and partying until 3 AM at The Cellar nightclub in Dallas the evening before Kennedy was killed. These and other failures he notes made it easier for the plotters to succeed.
Jumping to the performance of the FBI, Savastano states that the Warren Commission relied upon the honesty and efficacy of the FBI for its inquiry. That trust was misplaced, and this seriously compromised the Commission’s work. (p. 41) He elaborates on this by adding that the reason for this may have been due to a relationship between the Bureau and Oswald. And here he does a brief summary of that relationship and the paper record that exists concerning Oswald and the FBI. This extends at least as far back as Oswald’s defection to the USSR. He also notes that there were no reports filed with the Warren Commission on Oswald from FBI agents Regis Kennedy or Warren DeBrueys. Which, if accurate, is odd since those two men were on the anti-Castro beat in New Orleans in 1963. (ibid, p. 45)
In his discussion of the LBJ angle, his most interesting comment is a quote from Johnson assistant Marvin Watson. He quotes Watson as saying, “…the President had told him in an off moment that he was convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination. The president felt the CIA had had something to do with that plot.” (ibid, p. 50) He then discusses the Billy Sol Estes/Mac Wallace angle and concludes that both men were too close to Johnson for him to contemplate employing them to kill Kennedy.
In his discussion of the Warren Commission, Savastano makes a couple of dubious statements. He first says that CIA Director Allen Dulles was not actually fired by Kennedy. He resigned. This many be a matter of semantics on the author’s part. In every discussion I have read about this issue, including Howard Hunt’s in his book Give Us this Day, after two reports on the Bay of Pigs were submitted to the White House, Kennedy requested that Dulles resign. In other words Dulles was forced out. (See Hunt, p. 215) In James Srodes’ rather sympathetic biography of Dulles, he quotes the spymaster himself as saying he learned he had been fired through national security assistant Walt Rostow. (p. 547)
The other dubious statement Savastano makes here is that somehow Robert Kennedy was responsible for appointing Dulles to the Warren Commission. This is something that Philip Shenon was pushing over a year ago. And that Robert Caro also advocated in his disappointing book about Johnson and Kennedy, The Passage of Power. As I wrote in my review of that book, it was Bobby Kennedy who was most responsible for getting Dulles removed in the first place. Because he was his brother’s personal representative in the White House review of the Bay of Pigs debacle. And, in fact, RFK was so upset with what he learned about Dulles’ duplicity during the Bay of Pigs that he then requested of Secretary of State Dean Rusk that he also fire his sister Eleanor who worked at State. The reason being that RFK did not want any of the Dulles family around anymore. (Leonard Mosley, Dulles, p. 473) Further, as David Talbot writes in his book The Devil’s Chessboard, it was Dulles who lobbied the White House to get on the Commission. (Talbot, pp. 573-74)
To argue the contrary, Shenon had used a memo from November 29, 1963 written by LBJ crony Walter Jenkins. The memo said that Abe Fortas had talked to Nicolas Katzenbach at Justice and he had talked to RFK about Dulles. The problem with this memo is that it bears a time stamp saying it was entered into the system in April of 1965! Which is 18 months past the date it should have been entered. Way past the issuance of the Warren Report and past LBJ’s discussions with Warren Commissioner Richard Russell explaining how neither man believed the Single Bullet Theory. As lawyers like Dan Hardway have stated, this document could never be entered into a legal hearing. (Click here for a full review of the issue )
By saying Dulles resigned of his own volition and that Bobby Kennedy actually proffered the idea of putting him on the Warren Commission, Savastano minimizes the facts that Dulles wanted to be on the Commission, he then became the single most active member of the investigative body, that he was very much involved in its many blunders that led to its mistaken conclusions. And then after its errors were exposed, he, along with Gerald Ford, became its two most stalwart defenders. (Talbot, op. cit., pp. 588-92) One cannot say all these things about any other member of that ill-fated body.
III
The author sidelights briefly into Nixon and Watergate in an effort to show how the JFK case managed to spill over into other presidencies. He states that Nixon wanted all files on the JFK case from the CIA. (Savastano, p. 64) This may be based on the famous anecdote by H. R. Haldeman in his book The Ends of Power. There, Haldeman was trying to get Director Dick Helms to aid the White House by taking part in the Watergate cover-up. When Helms hesitated, Haldeman was instructed to allude that this may trace back to the Bay of Pigs invasion. When Helms came unglued, Haldeman took his reaction to mean that Nixon was using the Bay of Pigs as code for the Kennedy assassination.
Yet, because of further, and belated, declassification of the Nixon tapes, it appears that it was Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick’s report on the Bay of Pigs operation that Nixon wanted. In Stanley Kutler’s book, Abuse of Power, he features a transcription of a tape of July 1, 1971. There, Nixon states that he wanted papers on the Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs. But he then adds, “these are the things that will embarrass the creeps.” Charles Colson then chimes in by saying that maybe Nixon should hire Howard Hunt, his fellow alumnus from Brown University. Because Hunt told Colson that if the truth about the Bay of Pigs were ever known it would destroy Kennedy. So the implication of the conversation is that this is an extension of Nixon’s ever enduring obsession for, and envy of, Kennedy. President Nixon was trying to dig up faults in JFK’s stewardship of Operation Zapata.
But what actually appears to be the case here is that Helms knew something that neither Hunt nor Nixon knew. Namely that Kirkpatrick’s report does not make Kennedy look bad. It makes the CIA look bad—in several different ways. Even on the issue of the so-called cancellation of the D-Day air strikes. In fact, Kirkpatrick’s report was so coruscating toward the Agency that the CIA resisted declassification for decades. And they did not release it until the nineties. (Today it is available in book form, edited by Peter Kornbluh under the title of Bay of Pigs, Declassified.)
Savastano’s other comments about Helms seem cogent and accurate. Nixon did ask Helms to pay hush money to Hunt, which the Director refused to do. Therefore, the White House did so through Nixon lawyer Herbert Kalmbach. And Nixon did request that Helms provide a false cover for illegal money going through Nixon’s campaign and to the Watergate burglars. Helms agreed to do this, but about ten days later changed his mind on it. From this, the author then postulates that maybe Hunt was actually a CIA asset who guaranteed the Watergate burglary would fail and then blow up in Nixon’s face. (Savastano, p. 64) Which is a view that more than one noted author has advocated for, e.g., Jim Hougan in his classic book Secret Agenda. In fact, the minority counsel for the Senate Watergate committee, Fred Thompson, also believed this to be the case. (See Thompson’s 1975 book entitled At That Point in Time.)
Savastano mentions the famous memo where the CIA admitted they had pulled 37 documents from Oswald’s file before the HSCA reviewed it. (p. 88) And from this and other points, he concludes that he CIA has lied repeatedly about what was in the Oswald file and what is missing from it. Which relates to Oswald, the CIA and Mexico City. The author mentions the fact that the Mystery Man photos sent to CIA HQ and given to the Warren Commission are clearly not of Oswald. And that the voice sent up by the CIA Mexico City station, allegedly of Oswald’s phone calls, are not of Oswald. He also properly scores the deception that the tapes disappeared within days of the assassination. Simply not true. He even notes that there is evidence in the Lopez Report that CIA station chief Winston Scott did not think the voice on the tapes was Oswald’s. (Savastano, p. 94) He then concludes that ultimately there is no credible evidence that Oswald was at either the Cuban or Russian consulate. (ibid, p. 95) And further, Scott likely knew who the Mystery Man really was, one Yuri Moskalev, a KGB agent under diplomatic cover. (ibid, p. 97) The author concludes that the reason there is so much confusion and misunderstanding about Mexico City is not due the researchers, but because of the CIA.
The next major section of the book deals with the more obvious indications of a conspiracy. Here, the author leads off with the impersonations of Oswald in the fall of 1963, a prominent example being the Homer and Sterling Wood alleged sighting at the Sports Drome Gun Range in Fort Worth. On November 17th, a man began firing at the target next to the Woods in a very accurate manner. When Oswald’s picture showed up on TV on the 22nd, both men thought he was the man shooting at the rifle range. (p. 101) The author then notes the HSCA report stating that the box arrangement changed in the sixth floor window within minutes after the assassination. This could not have been done by Oswald, of course, since, according to the Warren Commission, he was tearing down the stairs after the shooting. Then there are the problems with the fingerprints, which even the Warren Commission had problems with. There was no indication of prints found on the rifle before it was sent to the FBI on the night of the assassination. And Sebastian Latona found none of value at FBI headquarters. A palm print turned up after the rifle was returned to Dallas. (p. 108)
From here the author goes to the autopsy evidence. He quotes photographer John Stringer as telling Jeremy Gunn of the ARRB that photos were missing from the inventory. The author then adds that Stringer said the photos of the brain are not accurate. (p. 122) Which actually understates what the witness said. Stringer actually denied he took those photos. He based this on the fact that he never used the film they were shot with, nor the technique that was used to take them. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 164) This, and a myriad of other evidence—some of which the author mentions—strongly indicates that the brain photographs at the National Archives are not a representation of Kennedy’s brain.
There are a couple of faults in this section that I should mention. The author writes that the covered-up scandal during the HSCA about a CIA liaison tinkering with the autopsy photos was done independently of the Agency. The liaison’s name was Regis Blahut. It was discovered that the safe holding the photo was open, some of the pictures were removed, and one was actually taken out of its sleeve. A guard discovered the missing notebook on a windowsill. Blahut was interviewed three times and it was evident to even HSCA chief counsel Robert Blakey that he was lying. The CIA refused to give the HSCA Blahut’s Office of Security file, which may have revealed if he was part of an operation. Blakey, when given four options, then picked the CIA to do its own investigation of the affair. Blahut still flunked three polygraph examinations. But this aspect was kept hushed up by Blakey. Even members of the HSCA, like Richardson Preyer, were not aware of it. Predictably, even amid all of Blahut’s deceptions, the CIA acquitted itself of any broad design against the committee. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp.85-87)
That secret verdict survived for about a year, until it was leaked to George Lardner of the Washington Post. His story created such a furor that the House intelligence committee decided to open a reinvestigation. They found out, among other things, that the Inspector General did not do the CIA inquiry, the Office of Security did. They also found out that Blahut left the room with the photos. And that when Blahut was called in for his first questioning, he was waiting for a call from the CIA. That committee found that Blahut was part of an undercover program codenamed MH/Child. (Washington Post, June 28, 1979, p. A6)
In referencing people who he considers as unreliable sources, the author groups James Files and Judy Baker with Gordon Novel. I agree that the first two are not reliable. But such is not the case with the late Gordon Novel.
There are major differences between him and the other two. First, as Paris Flammonde showed in his book The Kennedy Conspiracy, Novel really did work for the CIA during the preparations for the Bay of Pigs. As Lisa Pease then demonstrated in a three part series for Probe Magazine, his knowledge about that ill-fated project was informed by his experiences through the offices of Guy Banister. The infamous Houma heist, where Novel raided an arms bunker on a Schlumberger lot north of New Orleans and transported the Interarmco munitions back to, among other places, Banister’s office, is corroborated by the other participants in the raid. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 106) When Novel attempted to infiltrate Garrison’s office and was later found out, his odyssey afterwards was sanctioned by the CIA. There are several indications of this. One is the fact that his four attorneys were being, as he said, “clandestinely remunerated”. They had to be since Novel was not working at the time. To take another aspect, this reviewer has it from an on-the-scene witness that Novel was ultimately safe-housed in Columbus, Ohio. And that house was being electronically surveilled. (ibid, pp. 262-63) Finally, Novel was handsomely reimbursed for his efforts against Garrison. (ibid, p. 311) The startling aspect of Novel’s information is that the things he was writing about in 1977 were still being borne out by declassified documents well into the nineties. For example, about the CIA concealing Clay Shaw’s true Agency status from the public and JFK investigative bodies. (See Joan Mellen, Our Man in Haiti, pp. 54-55)
I should add that in this section, the author makes another questionable statement. He writes that there is no proof of Oswald being an FBI informant. In the purest sense, this might be accurate, since evidence does not equal proof. But consider the following. In early August of 1963, Oswald was temporarily jailed after his altercation with Cuban exile Carlos Bringuier in New Orleans. While he was imprisoned, he asked to be interviewed by an FBI agent. When the call from the police station came into the local FBI office, the employee who answered the phone was young William Walter. At the responding agent’s request, when Walter checked the index for any corresponding files he found that Oswald had a file as an informant. And that file had agent Warren DeBrueys’ name on it, one of the two agents on the Cuban exile beat. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 287) Secondly, former FBI agent Carver Gayton told the Church Committee that FBI Dallas agent Jim Hosty told him that Oswald was an FBI informant. (Interview of 1/17/76) Finally, one has to ask: what was Oswald doing requesting an FBI interview after his arrest for disorderly conduct? And why did it last for over an hour?
Before going to the MLK section of the book, I have to ask why the author designated a military intelligence arm when what he mentions there is very minimal. But most of the information he provided in this category is actually related to the CIA.
IV
In his discussion of the King case, the author again maps out categories of involvement. The first he calls the criminal aspect; the second is what he calls the Officials Hand, the third is Military Intelligence and finally the last is the actual conspirators. But he begins his review of the case by saying that the Mob—which fits into his first grouping—likely did not participate in the MLK hit. Their involvement is mostly speculation. (Savastano, pp. 160, 163) William Pepper would probably disagree with him since he presented evidence in court that suggested they did have some involvement. To the point that a local Mob agent, one Frank Liberto, supplied money to Memphis tavern owner Loyd Jowers to go along with the plot. Pepper produced three witnesses who said they heard Liberto state words to the effect that he was involved. (Op. cit. The Assassinations, p. 493) But the author dismisses Liberto by saying he had no motive. Which might be true about Liberto, but would not apply if the orders to him came from above.
The author does a nice job describing how Ray used three different aliases, all of them real people who dwelled within a five-mile radius of each other in Toronto. It is hard to think that such was a coincidence. But this seemed to help him escape the FBI manhunt for at least an extra month. As the late Philip Melanson concluded, the access to these names suggests that either Ray, or his handler Raoul, was in contact with an identity specialist. Savastano properly notes that there is no adduced evidence that Ray ever practiced with either the rifle in question, a Remington Gamemaster, or a similar rifle, in the month leading up the King’s assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. (Savastano, pp. 161-62)
Savastano briefly mentions that the identity of Raoul was not known. (p. 161) But at the 1999 civil trial of Loyd Jowers in Memphis, William Pepper presented six witnesses on this issue. They all identified a passport photo that private investigator John Billings had procured as being Raoul. Both Pepper and British TV producer Jack Saltman—who was filming a mock trial presentation of the King case—both arrived at the same home in the northeastern United States to try and talk to the person in the photo. A reporter from Lisbon who spoke Portuguese also arrived at the home—since the ID passport photo depicted a man entering America from Portugal. She talked in Portuguese to the lady of the house. The woman told her that government agents had communicated with them three times in three years, and agents were monitoring their phone lines. Needless to say, the man suspected of being Raoul would not submit to a deposition or appear in court. (Op. cit. The Assassinations, p. 502) Again, I wish Savastano had made the distinction between “evidence for” and “proof of”.
The author does a creditable job in setting the background for and run up to King’s murder. He lists the major achievements that King was a major part of, e.g., the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He then notes how King spread out from civil rights and into broader issues like poverty and the Vietnam War. (Savastano, p. 170) He gets more specific as to time and place when he mentions the sanitation workers strike in Memphis and how King made an appearance for this cause that ended quite badly with looting and rioting. Which may have been provoked by Marrell McCullough, an undercover agent in one of the youth gangs called the Invaders. And that gang was a part of the provocations that resulted in looting. Therefore, King was intent on returning to Memphis to redeem that earlier incident. Further, a newspaper article criticized King for not staying at a black-owned hotel while he was in Memphis. This played a part in directing him toward the Lorraine. (ibid, p. 181) But upon his return, his usual black security escort was not guarding him; that detail was withdrawn. And to this day, no one knows for sure how and why this was done. (ibid, p. 172) In any case, it is clear that this made it much easier to kill King on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel.
An odd thing about his section on King is that his murder really does entail a military intelligence aspect. Yet I could find scant mention of it by the author. Savastano gives much more play to the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation against King. This largely stemmed from J. Edgar Hoover’s personal animus toward King and his innate racism. As most of us know, it included planting informants in his camp, like Ernest Withers, who was a photographer. The FBI also sent a letter and tape to Coretta Scott King in November of 1964. The tape was allegedly of King cheating on his wife, although, to people who heard it, there was no way to know if it was King. The letter branded him a hypocrite and a hoaxer. The threat was that unless he took his own life, these secrets about his sex life would be exposed.
The military intelligence aspect in the King case seems to me to be significant. In May of 1963, the Pentagon started a program that used military spies in plainclothes to monitor domestic disturbances. (John Avery Emison, The Martin Luther King Congressional Cover Up, p. 115) This program ended up with 1500 men in the field and 300 mangers at Fort Holabrid in Baltimore. The program had many leftist targets. One of them was King. They had files on King, surveillance reports on his activities, and they had wired his office at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. (Emison, p. 122) This is quite interesting since, at the Jowers trial, Pepper introduced evidence that the Army’s 111th Military Intelligence Group kept 24-hour surveillance on King. This included his last days in Memphis. On the day King was killed, two US Army officers approached firehouse captain Carthel Weeden. They asked to be allowed to go to the top of the station. The reason being they needed a lookout point for the Lorraine Motel. (Op. Cit. The Assassinations, p. 502)
One thing I thought was lacking from this part of the presentation was a thorough exposure of how Percy Foreman essentially abandoned his client James Earl Ray by not giving him a defense and copping a plea. Something Ray’s first lawyer, Arthur Hanes, never even thought of doing. Hanes was determined to go to trial and strongly advised Ray against accepting any plea offer. This is a central part of the King case.
V
One of the most interesting parts of this section of the book is what Savastano writes about Jessie Jackson and Reverend Billy Kyles. According to one source it was Kyles who relayed a message to the police that King would not need his regular security in Memphis. Also, although Kyles claimed to have been in King’s room along with Ralph Abernathy prior to the assassination, the police surveillance logs—there is a difference between surveillance and security—place him outside. (Savastano, p. 190)
But to explain why Kyles aroused suspicion, I can do no better than to link to this video clip and urge the reader to watch it.
Recall, Jessie Jackson at that time was not a national figure in the civil rights movement. He was King’s administrator for the Chicago office of the SCLC and headed that branch’s Operation Breadbasket, which was designed to find jobs for unemployed black Americans. Jackson was in Memphis when King was killed. At the time of the shooting he was in the parking lot below. Yet Jackson later said that he was the last person to speak to King, and that King had died in his arms. To say the least, other witnesses hotly dispute those claims. But further, Jackson urged the rest of the entourage to accompany King to the hospital. This gave him the opportunity to address the media, which he did. (ibid, p. 191) In fact, he became the main TV talking head speaking about King’s death as an insider. To the point that he had the SCLC public relations director booking his appearances.
He also added that he had placed his hands in Dr. King’s blood and then smeared it on his sweater. He then appeared on TV in Chicago wearing the bloody sweater. And he used that mark to convince Mayor Richard Daley that he should speak at a King Memorial. Because of this newly acquired visibility, during a talk he had with SCLC member Don Rose at the time, he clearly implied he would now take King’s place, when in fact King had never ever said anything like that to anyone. (p. 193) Ralph Abernathy became the new leader of the SCLC. Jackson later resigned and formed his own group in Chicago, Operation Push. Finally, Jackson has never been in the front ranks promoting a reopening of the King case. During the entire nearly three year ordeal in Memphis where the King family backed the attempts by Bill Pepper and Judge Joe Brown to give Ray the criminal trial he never had, Jackson was notable by his absence.
As the author concludes, one can make the case that Jackson actually took advantage of King’s death to launch his own career. If that was his aim, he succeeded.
VI
Savastano concludes with the Robert Kennedy assassination. He begins with the familiar critique of Sirhan’s original trial lawyer Grant Cooper. Today there can be little doubt that Cooper was simply either incompetent, or he sold out his client. Because not only did Cooper not mount any kind of defense for the charges against his client, he actually stipulated to the evidence, even though the prosecution admitted to him that the bullets and ballistics evidence had a weak foundation. (The Assassinations, p. 577) Thus the trial became about Sirhan’s mental state at the time of the shooting. (Savastano, p. 205) The author properly notes that Cooper was under investigation at the time for paying a court bailiff to steal grand jury transcripts in the famous Friar’s Club case. One of the defendants in that card-cheating scandal was John Roselli, a mobster who the CIA reached out to in their plots to kill Castro. Cooper could have been disbarred for this bribery. He ended up with essentially a slap on the wrist: a thousand dollar fine. There are many, including Lisa Pease who believe that his pitiful performance on Sirhan’s behalf enabled the leniency he was shown in his own case. (p. 206)
The author reminds us that Sirhan was not a Moslem. He was a Greek Orthodox Christian. Christian missionaries brought him to America from Jordan. He did not attend a mosque and there was no library of pro-Palestinian literature at his home. Therefore, the assumed motive for the crime is dubious.
But further, there are real evidentiary problems with this case. Most of which the public has no knowledge of. The author begins his exposition of those problems with a discussion of the Stanislaw Pruszynski audio tape recording made as he followed Bobby Kennedy from the podium in the ballroom to the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. (This link provides a tutorial on this tape) The sum total of this new evidence proves that there were more shots fired than Sirhan’s gun could carry; that the shot sounds came too rapidly to be fired by one gunman; and the sound frequency betrays two different guns being fired. When one adds in the fact that Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy showed that all the shots that hit Bobby Kennedy came from behind, and Sirhan was always in front of the senator, then clearly if Cooper had mounted a real defense, Sirhan would have been acquitted.
But it’s actually worse than that. Because all of the shots that entered RFK came from an upward angle, and the fatal shot to the head was fired at point blank range, which Noguchi specified was a distance of 1-3 inches. Sirhan was six inches shorter than Kennedy and the witnesses said that his arm was stretched straight outward. And not one witness could say that they saw the gun jammed into the back of Kennedy’s head. (The Assassinations, pp. 617-18)
The author briefly mentions the famous Girl in the Polka Dot Dress. This was the girl who was seen with Sirhan by over a dozen witnesses in the pantry. She seemed to signal him before he started shooting. Sirhan’s last memory is of her pouring a cup of coffee for him before she led him back to the pantry. She later ran down the stairs of the hotel shouting, “We shot him! We shot him!” (Savastano, p. 211) In this reviewer’s opinion, the author did not make enough of this angle to the RFK case. Because when this is coupled with Sirhan being under post hypnotic suggestion, the case for Sirhan being manipulated becomes quite strong. (Please click to this video for a demonstration)
Very appropriately, Savastano spends page after page dealing with the almost mind-boggling shortcomings of the LAPD. This includes their seemingly willful destruction of evidence before all of Sirhan’s appeals were exhausted. He also scores the manifold failures of criminalist DeWayne Wolfer who shockingly linked the recovered bullets to a different handgun! (Savastano, p. 226) Suitably, he quotes the official Krantz Report done by Deputy District Attorney Thomas Krantz to bring home Wolfer’s incredible sloppiness and, there is no other word to apply here, his negligence. As Krantz wrote, “The apparent lack of reports, both written and photographic, either made by Wolfer or destroyed, or never in existence, raised serious doubts as to the substance and credibility of the ballistic evidence presented in the Sirhan trial.” (ibid, p. 227)
The subtitle of the book is “A Concise Review of Three Political Assassinations.” In other words, the author has designed the book as something of a primer on the three cases. A way of getting the lay person interested in all three of these momentous murders rather than just the headlining JFK case. They were all clearly and demonstrably conspiracies and they all shared certain traits, which the author tries to point out. Most importantly, they resulted in a tremendous shift in power. Therefore let me end this review with the memorable quote of Congressman Allard Lowenstein:
Robert Kennedy’s death, like the President’s, was mourned as an extension of the evils of senseless violence; events moved on, and the profound alterations that these deaths … brought in the equation of power in America was perceived as random …. What is odd is not that some people thought it was all random, but that so many intelligent people refused to believe that it might be anything else. Nothing can measure more graphically how limited was the general understanding of what is possible in America.
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Focus on the Media: Edward J. Epstein
Edward Epstein began his career with a graduate thesis that he then sold as a book. It was called Inquest. He then wrote a book called Counterplot. The first was about the inner workings of the Warren Commission. The second was about the Jim Garrison investigation. These two books are discussed at length in the ProbeMagazine article we have excerpted.The important thing to remember about the books is that in the first one, Epstein takes the stance of an outsider trying to understand how a governmental body worked and came to some rather unusual conclusions. In the second book, which was originally a long magazine article, the outsider stance was abandoned. Epstein was no longer a graduate student. He became an insider, a working member of the club. And The New Yorker became a longtime haven for him.
His career largely centered on two areas: the intelligence community, and the JFK case. He wrote three books on the latter. He wrote four books on the former. In addition to his books, he has published many articles in magazines like The Atlantic and The New Republic. Incredibly, he has managed to convince some people, like Ron Rosenbaum, that he actually knows something about the world of national security and intelligence. After all, he once tried to argue that James Angleton was not really duped by Kim Philby, but that Angleton was playing Philby. For these kinds of errands, he was well compensated by business entities like Reader’s Digest, which excerpted his useless book about Oswald entitled Legend.
His latest book about Edward Snowden is equally pitiful. (Please click here for a good review) As the reader can see, Epstein is up to his old tricks. What is hard to believe is that anyone still believes him or pays for his work. In reading these two pieces one will see that the last thing Epstein is is an investigative journalist. Spending hours on the phone with the late James Angleton does not constitute investigation. Most people would call it visiting a victim of early senility. But that is what Epstein did for his books Legend and Deception. Finally, in 1991 and 1992, Tom Mangold in Cold Warrior and David Wise in Mole Hunt exposed Angleton for what he was: a truly imbalanced and actually a dangerous man. A man whose paranoia wrecked several lives and paralyzed the Agency. A man who should never had been the CIA’s counterintelligence chief in the first place.
Epstein didn’t learn from his previous error. And maybe it really wasn’t an error. But if more people had understood who he was, then he would not be allowed to keep on his giant misinformation campaign. In its latest incarnation, Edward Snowden is really a Soviet spy. Just like Oswald. Oh, my aching back.
The following is a letter written by Jim DiEugenio to the editors of The New Yorker. It was a reply to a nearly 8,500 word essay by Edward J. Epstein entitled “Shots in the Dark.” Epstein’s article was published in the November 30, 1992 issue. DiEugenio wrote this letter on December 10, 1992. The editors refused to print it. It was published in the January/February issue of Gary Rowell’s The Investigator. It appears here in a slightly edited and expanded form.
Jim Garrison died on October 21, 1992. On November 30th, The New Yorker carried a nearly 8,500 word article about the New Orleans DA and his investigation into the death of President Kennedy. Allowing for editing, lead time, press run and distribution schedule, Edward Epstein’s piece must have been submitted at least 8 to 10 days in advance. Considering its length, the question inevitably arises: was the article being prepared before Garrison died? The fact of his long and serious illness had been popularly known in wide circles. If this is so, why did The New Yorker rush the hit piece onto its pages so quickly and rather tastelessly?
Epstein states that his motive was to counteract the impact of Oliver Stone’s acclaimed and popular 1991 film JFK. The film starred Kevin Costner as Garrison in a recreation of the only conspiracy inquiry and trial into the murder of President Kennedy. Epstein calls the film a fiction event, even though it is based on two non-fiction books, Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins, and Jim Marrs’ Crossfire. Epstein, a former Warren Commission critic, has seemed to have had an astringent reaction to the film. He debated Stone, among others, in New York in a symposium arranged by The Nation magazine about the merits of the film. In the new compilation of his books on the subject, he added an Epilogue attacking the picture. He is now preparing another attack on the film and Stone to appear in the Atlantic Monthly, apparently timed for the video release of the longer version of JFK in January. It should be added that Epstein complained to Stone at that New York symposium that a scene depicted in his film was not depicted in Garrison’s book. If Garrison had written about everything in his files, his book would have been several volumes long. Which shows how familiar Epstein was with this raw data. (This author was shown these files by Lyon Garrison and can vouch for their volume.)
To dispense with the specious argument over the historical accuracy of Stone’s film. Any historical film will, of necessity, rearrange events, settings, circumstances, and also often collapse characters to convey a dramatic whole. Stone’s film does this, but much less than other popular films dealing with historic subjects: e.g., Mississippi Burning, The Untouchables, Bugsy. Often, Stone prefaces speculative scenes by having Costner say, “Let’s speculate”, or shooting a sequence in sepia. But to anyone familiar with the actual facts, when all is said and done, Stone’s picture actually ranks with films like Lawrence of Arabia in its relative allegiance to the adduced record. As we shall see, it is Epstein’s unfamiliarity with that record that seems to be the basis for his specious article.
It is strange that Epstein should be so flummoxed by this film which during its climax, tears to pieces the Warren Report, just as Garrison’s assistant DA’s did in New Orleans in February of 1969 at the trial of Clay Shaw. What makes it even more ironic is that Epstein’s article contains more “fiction” or distortion in relative terms than JFK. This begins with his portrayal of Garrison as a flamboyant, egomaniacal publicity hound who pursued the Kennedy case for his private purposes. This does not correspond to anyone who observed Garrison in his last years or watched his last two interviews when he was still healthy. The former DA was a reserved, intellectual, literary man who carried the painful scars of his two-year battle against the Washington-New York power center in his prosecution of Clay Shaw. He ended up with a tarnished reputation, a pile of bills, $5,000 in the bank—he financed some of the expenses himself—and many leftover death threats. The Kennedy case was the reason he was voted out of office. In fact, it ruined a promising political career where many said he could have been the governor of the state. Garrison later stated that if he had it all to do over, he probably would not have done it because of the personal and emotional toll.
Epstein writes that Garrison, “artfully managed to stretch out the interval between the charge and the trial … while he engaged in a wide range of diversionary actions.” Precisely the opposite is true and documented. It takes author Paris Flammonde almost 13 pages to chronicle the delay tactics of Shaw’s lawyers, who were consorting with both media allies and friends in Washington in order to torpedo Garrison. Epstein actually scores Garrison for bringing charges against the likes of “media “ people like Walter Sheridan, even though affidavits reveal that Sheridan threatened and bribed important witness in the case. I guess this is OK with Epstein. After all, it’s only the murder of the president.
The photos Epstein describes Garrison showing on The Tonight Show were furnished by researcher Richard Sprague. Epstein sometimes wears glasses. Perhaps this is the reason he feels the object being picked up in Dealey Plaza is a pebble. Most people I have talked to think it is a large caliber bullet. Epstein also has not kept up with research in the field, since he derides Garrison for saying the man retrieving the object was a federal agent. It turns out he was just that, an FBI agent to be exact. And if Epstein really thinks that both J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson were dedicated to uncovering the facts in this case, he has not read the Church Committee report or interviewed any former FBI agents, like, for example, William Turner. This may be the single most ludicrous declaration in the entire article, which is saying something.
Epstein relies on the House Select Committee X-rays and photos as his sine qua non that only three shots were fired, and all came from the rear. What he does not say is that the HSCA altered the Warren Commission findings on the autopsy. They moved up the entry wound in Kennedy’s skull from the bottom of the heard to the top, and they moved down the back wound. Further, the pathologists never dissected the track of either wound in Kennedy’s body. Therefore, the directionality and the trajectory of the wounds is not known. At any murder trial, these materials would be mercilessly attacked. And it is questionable if they would have been admitted into court, since some of the exhibits do not correspond to what the witnesses at the autopsy saw.
Epstein implies that Jim Garrison failed to reveal any “hidden associates” of Oswald’s in New Orleans. This is simply balderdash. As depicted in the Warren Report, Oswald was supposed to be a Marxist oriented, pro-Castro sympathizer. Yet, as Garrison showed, here was a communist who had no communist friends. On the contrary, he associated almost exclusively with anti-communist extremists, intelligence operatives, and/or anti-Castro Cuban exiles in both New Orleans and Dallas: George DeMohresnchildt, Guy Banister, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, Richard Case Nagell, Orest Pena. Which is an odd group for a communist to be hanging out with. You will not see most of their names in the Warren Report. But you will see them in Garrison’s files. In fact, if not for him, you likely would not have heard of them at all.
Epstein tries to trivialize Garrison’s complaints about the extreme secrecy involved in the JFK case. He writes that this was essentially grandstanding and it was not really important to the facts of the case. Garrison disagreed and stated that it undermined public confidence in their government. The Warren Commission had the equivalent of one day of public hearings. (And that was because witness Mark Lane insisted on his hearing being open to fellow citizens.) The House Select Committee on Assassinations had about three weeks of open hearings. The combined lifespan of both investigative bodies was a bit over three years. The former locked up over 365 cubic feet of materials. The second inquiry left almost 800 boxes of files. Today, the federal government has over 2 million pages of material classified on this case. Even though the murder is three decades old and the official story is that Oswald alone killed Kennedy. Is Epstein correct in saying that most of it is unimportant? How can he possibly deduce such a conclusion before the files are declassified? We know from previous declassifications that such was not the case at all. For instance, the declassification of the FBI report on the JFK case revealed that Director J. Edgar Hoover did not agree with the Single Bullet Theory. He believed that a separate shot hit Governor John Connally. To use another example: the government is today holding a 300-page report about Oswald’s alleged activities in Mexico City. The problem, as the authors of that report have stated, is that the CIA could not produce a photo of Oswald being there, and the voice on the audiotapes the CIA made of Oswald is not his. You will not find any of that information in the Warren Report. Which never questions any of his activities in Mexico.
Epstein writes that many documents that were originally classified have since been released. Yes, and many have been released only in response to public revulsion with the classification process. Many others have been released through the efforts of private citizens who have had to sue the government to get them. Further, many of these released documents have not been released in full. That is, they contain what is termed “redactions”, that is, much of the wording has been blacked out. Plus, the fact that the information was released later dilutes the impact and effect the information has on the case and the public. In fact, this contributes to the whole “too-late-to-solve-it” syndrome that afflicts the Kennedy case. One has to wonder: was this the intent from the start? If so, it succeeded.
Epstein is familiar with these problems, since they impact on the mystery surrounding the man he wrote about extensively in his last book on the JFK case, Legend. This was George DeMohrenschildt, sometimes termed “The Baron” due to his upper class White Russian standing. Epstein was reportedly the last person to interview DeMohrenschildt in Florida before he died of a shotgun blast. Although the official verdict in the case was that The Baron took his own life, others who have investigated his death still have questions about it. Mr. Epstein, whose early attack on Garrison in The New Yorker was circulated by the CIA to worldwide station chiefs, was in Florida at the time to interview DeMohrenschildt for Legend. Epstein received a large half million dollar advance for the book, the highest ever in the JFK field. The book’s backers also furnished him with a research staff. Epstein offered DeMohrenschildt large sums of money for interview sessions. Epstein himself was quoted as saying he was involved in a “very big project, which involves a lot money.”
Previously, Epstein had been involved in a campaign to clear the FBI of charges that it had used clandestine and conspiratorial methods to destroy the Black Panthers. In regards to my previous point, later declassified documents revealed that the FBI had done just that. Epstein’s book Legend had an odd—some would say perverse—spin to it. The thesis was that the KGB had recruited Oswald while he was in Russia and he was acting as their agent when he killed Kennedy. Epstein tried to fog this framework, but the book’s last section—dealing with Oswald’s return to America—is titled “The Mission”. And the last chapter is called “Day of the Assassin”. In an appendix entitled “The Status of the Evidence”, Epstein backs every dubious claim of the Warren Commission. He deals with complex issues, like the dubious capability of Oswald’s rifle, in a less than cursory manner: in this case, all of two sentences. Epstein’s interview subjects, like Jim Botelho, a service buddy of Oswald, insist that he distorted their responses on his way to his offbeat conclusion, namely that the Russians, through the KGB, killed Kennedy.
DeMohrenschildt was important to this scheme. For the simple reason that he and his family came from the Soviet Union. So, in the upside down world of Legend, one could argue that somehow The Baron was acting as Oswald’s handler in the USA, as some kind of deep cover KGB agent.
But Epstein’s most questionable decision was the liberal use of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton as a major source. This is the same Angleton whose Cold War paranoia paralyzed the CIA to the point that Director Bill Colby backed a press leak campaign to force him to step down. The same Angleton who, once retired, started a defense fund for agents caught in “black bag” operations, or robberies. The same Angleton who actively encouraged destabilizing governments, not in Guatemala or Iran, but in allied countries like Australia and England.
Understandably, many have read Legend as Angleton’s outlet for the defense of his—and the CIA’s—conduct in relation to both Oswald and the assassination. More cynical observers see it as a detour away from both Oswald’s and DeMohrenschildt’s secret status as American intelligence agents.
Epstein’s activities with The Baron toward the end are notable. As stated, an inquest ruled that DeMohrenschildt took his own life. But Mark Lane talked to the state attorney who interviewed Epstein about the day of DeMohrenschildt’s passing. Epstein told David Bloodworth that he had paid his subject three thousand dollars and let him go after a rather short session. Lane’s report, published in Gallery of November 1977, went on to say that Epstein told Bloodworth that even though he spent all this money, he kept no notes and had no tape recordings. Bloodworth told Lane that he did not believe that statement, not after Epstein spent that much money. Bloodworth then added that Epstein showed The Baron a document that indicated he might be taken back to Parkland Hospital in Dallas for some electroshock treatments. (DeMohrenschildt had been suffering from depression.) Bloodworth then looked at Lane and said, “You know, DeMohrenschildt was deathly afraid of those treatments … DeMohrenschildt was terrified of being sent back there. One hour later he was dead.”
This is the man who now writes in reflection of Jim Garrison and his investigation of Kennedy’s murder. Is it too much to suggest that Epstein is jumping into a “spin control” mode? People like Howard Hunt and J. Edgar Hoover also did this in relation to the life and death of John Kennedy. But they had the sense to wait a while so their efforts would not be seen as transparently self-serving. Epstein exercised no such self-control. Which makes his work not just inaccurate but offensive. And The New Yorker acted as his accomplice in this defamatory exercise.
Part 2: “The Abstract Reality of Edward Epstein”
Part 3: “Edward Epstein: Warren Commission Critic?” (Probe vol 7 no 1, 1999)
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Max Holland and Donald Carpenter vs. Jim Garrison and the ARRB
The first time I recall hearing of Max Holland on the JFK case was through the Wilson Quarterly. This was back in 1994, when he reviewed three books on the JFK case. It was quite clear from that article where Holland stood on the issue. But what was puzzling about Holland was this: What were his credentials on the Kennedy case? I could not figure out what his prior work on the case was. Or how long ago it originated.
As time went on, it became clear that Holland had very few credentials on the JFK case. What he had was a position on the case. He would therefore pick and choose bits of information to back that position, ignoring other information that vitiated it. What was surprising about Holland’s dubious scholarship is that somehow it did not hinder him from expanding outward from Wilson Quarterly. For instance, for a time he actually was a reporter for The Nation. His ostensible beat was the progress of the Assassination Records Review Board and later developments in the JFK case. The predictable problem was that , to the best of my memory, Holland never reported on any of the bombshell information that the Board released. For example, the Lopez Report contained some fascinating information about whether or not Oswald was in Mexico City. The investigation by Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn revealed some utterly bracing facts about what happened, or did not happen, at President Kennedy’s autopsy. Yet, I don’t recall Holland ever explaining the import of these discoveries to his readers. Just like I don’t recall other volumes he was supposed to be writing which never materialized, e.g., a biography of John McCloy.
Holland also found a home for a while at the Miller Research Center in Virginia. At the time Holland subscribed to Probe Magazine. When I saw what he was up to, I wrote him a note and told him not to renew his subscription since I could not in good conscience keep him on our list. He wrote back saying that if I did that, he would have to subscribe under a false name. That is how desperate he was for us to do his research for him. (I later found out that Holland’s cohort, Patricia Lambert, subscribed under her husband’s name.)
Holland spoke at the 2004 AARC conference in Washington entitled “The Warren Report and its Legacy”. At that conference Holland talked about a previously published paper of his concerning Jim Garrison and his knowledge about the mysterious Permindex operation in Italy and Clay Shaw’s connection to it. The implication of Holland’s presentation was that Garrison had been a dupe of KGB disinformation. At that conference, Gary Aguilar rebutted Holland’s talk and his paper. Through him and other sources it turned out that all the overtones of Holland’s thesis were wrong. Garrison’s ideas about the CIA role in the JFK plot did not come through a series of articles planted by the KGB in the Italian newspaper Paese Sera; the story about Clay Shaw and Permindex was not planted by the KGB; Shaw was arrested before the articles appeared, but the six part series was commissioned six months prior to that event; Shaw did serve on the board of that organization, as he himself admitted prior to the assassination; and there were indications in its financing that Permindex was CIA related. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pp. 385-86)
Shortly after a coruscating letter to The Nation about Holland’s shortcomings by Zachary Sklar and Oliver Stone, Holland either left or was forced out of the journal’s pages. He then started up his own online magazine called Washington Decoded. In 2012 he wrote Leak, a book about Mark Felt’s role in Watergate. Of the three books written in that time period about Watergate—the other two being James Rosen’s The Strong Man, and Ed Gray’s In Nixon’s Web—Holland’s was the least distinguished. And it wasn’t really close. The major topic of Holland’s book was the motive that Felt/Deep Throat had for leaking damaging information to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward about the nefarious activities of the Nixon White House. But with archival research, the Gray book showed that—contrary to what Bob Woodward was still saying—Deep Throat was a composite. And to this day, we don’t know who the other sources were. (To anyone interested in Watergate, this reviewer strongly recommends reading In Nixon’s Web.)
Of course, Holland is still on the JFK case. In 2011, he produced a documentary for National Geographic Channel on the JFK case. This sorry pastiche was called The Lost Bullet, and Holland used some of the usual suspects to help him salvage the Single Bullet Fantasy. Among them were Larry Sturdivan and Robert Stone, who had previously done their best to shore up the fraud of the Warren Report (which Sturdivan actually worked on). This program was so poor that not only did this site pan it—as did fellow critic Pat Speer—but even Commission advocates like Dale Myers attacked it. (Read our review on this site)
But Holland still persists. He was seen attending the Cyril Wecht Conference in 2013. And he still hosts his web site with articles from those who agree with him. Which brings us to the topic of this essay.
II
Jim Garrison was the first public official to denounce the Warren Report in no uncertain terms. Because of that the New Orleans District Attorney has always been a stone in the shoe of supporters of the official story. Today, over five decades after the fact, he remains the only DA in America to investigate the Kennedy assassination after Oswald was murdered. He made the first serious inquiry into who Oswald’s supporters and friends were, for the Warren Commission said he had none. In public, he called Oswald first a decoy, then a patsy, then a victim. (See his Playboy interview from 1967) He was the first and only DA to actually unearth evidence that convincingly contradicted the theses of the Warren Report about the actual role of the alleged assassin. For example, it was Jim Garrison who first investigated the strange life and death of Rose Cheramie. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pp. 181-82) It was Jim Garrison who first discovered that Oswald had been associated with David Ferrie in the Civil Air Patrol. And, after the assassination, Ferrie was calling CAP members to be sure that there was no evidence they had which would reveal that association. (ibid, p. 177) It was Jim Garrison who first investigated the Clinton/Jackson incident, the odd journey that Oswald, Clay Shaw and David Ferrie took to Feliciana Parish about 90 miles northwest of New Orleans in the late summer of 1963. (ibid, pp. 88-93) It was Jim Garrison who uncovered the mystery of the 544 Camp Street address, which was printed on some of the literature Oswald passed out on Canal Street in New Orleans during that summer—and which the FBI tried to eradicate from the record. (See John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 310) Garrison was also the first person who interviewed the man who he would later call, “The most important witness there is.” This was CIA/KGB insider Richard Case Nagell, who was in prison at the time. (op. cit. DiEugenio, pp. 183-84) As revealed in his book, The Echo from Dealey Plaza, Garrison was the first person to send an investigator to interview Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden. I could go on and on, but in sum let us refer to an interview Joan Didion did with James Atlas for Vanity Fair: “It goes back to … the Garrison case. Remember, he had this elaborate conspiracy theory. The stones that were turned over! Fantastic characters kept emerging … this whole revealed world … .”
My only dispute with Didion’s quote is that none of the items I refer to above is theoretical. It was all genuine evidence that clearly indicated that Oswald was being manipulated in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. It also showed who the people doing the manipulating were. And the Warren Commission—actually FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—deliberately kept this information out of their 1964 official story. It is true that Garrison did formulate a theory from this, and the reams of other evidence he garnered. But I would argue that, as Didion implies, his evidence was much more credible, and his ideas much more logical, than the Warren Report. Which Garrison, on The Tonight Show, termed a fairy tale. (Listen to that show here)
Garrison was challenging the Warren Commission, and by extension the FBI, and he ended up accusing certain aspects of the operational arm of the CIA for being closely involved in the Kennedy murder. For this, he was viciously attacked by certain power centers of the American establishment. The media, which had clearly sided with the Warren Commission, was glad to go along with it. Today, there can be no doubt about how this assault was organized, who was involved in it, and how it was executed. For the declassifications of the ARRB have been quite strong on this issue. So much so that I devoted no less than sixty pages to exposing several aspects of how it all worked in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed. (See especially pages 226-85) This belated exposure—which was lied about at the time—is all backed up with scores of footnotes. Therefore, actions that were previously assumed are now out in the open, names are mentioned, operations can now be described. Can we detail it all completely? No. But that is only because certain documents seem to have been elided from the record or, as yet, not declassified in full. But what we do have is copious enough. And it indicates that the reason for all of this obstruction—and the eventual destruction—of Jim Garrison was rather simple. In the fall of 1967, at the request of Director Richard Helms, the CIA convened the first meeting of what the Agency termed The Garrison Group. The meeting opened with counter intelligence chief James Angleton’s assistant Ray Rocca issuing a dire warning. After studying Garrison’s case for months, Rocca said that he felt “that Garrison would indeed obtain a conviction of Shaw for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy.” (op. cit., DiEugenio, p. 270)
Make no mistake: the creation of this Agency body is what Shaw’s lawyers, and Shaw himself, wanted. In fact, his lawyers went to Washington and pleaded their case for extralegal intervention. This is a point that Shaw’s lead lawyer, Irvin Dymond, lied about to this author and William Davy during a 1994 interview in his New Orleans office. Contrary to Dymond’s prevarications, there can be no question today that they got such aid. And in abundance. For example, in January of 1968, a CIA cable was sent out. It read in part, “[Garrison] case is of interest to several Agency components covering aspects which relate to Agency … office heavily committed to this endeavor.” A later memo states that certain offices will be “tasked”, as part of an ongoing review. (ibid, p. 277) One of these tasks was to provide any Garrison suspect or witness who switched sides with a lawyer. And since men like Walter Sheridan had bribed and intimidated several witnesses to defect from Garrison, these lawyers came in handy. In fact, after certain witnesses were talked into changing their stories, they were told to call Dymond. Dymond would then tell them that if Garrison should try and charge them with anything that he would get them an attorney and bond would be posted for them. (ibid, p. 241) When Gordon Novel, a CIA infiltrator in Garrison’s office, was called by Garrison before the grand jury, he fled from New Orleans before his appearance. He eventually employed four attorneys. Since he did not have a job at the time, he was asked how he paid for these four lawyers. During a legal deposition he stated that they were being “clandestinely remunerated”. (ibid, p. 263) As they should have been, since electronics expert Novel had been originally recruited to wire Garrison’s office by Allen Dulles. (ibid, pp. 232-33)
The above is only a short précis of what we know today about what happened in New Orleans through both ARRB declassifications and by field investigation from people like William Davy and Joan Mellen. Suffice it to say, the literally tens of thousands of pages of new documents about the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department and Jim Garrison, have led to three major reevaluations of Garrison’s inquiry by Davy, Mellen, and this author. Those three volumes amount to over a thousand pages of mostly new information. It is all quite fascinating in both its actions and overtones. Because, for example, Helms ordered the Garrison Group to consider what Garrison would do before, during, and even after the trial of Clay Shaw. As has been demonstrated in these volumes, the interference with Garrison went on both before and during Shaw’s trial. Robert Tanenbaum, House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) Deputy Counsel, actually saw some of these documents. He said they came out of Richard Helms’ office which, of course, would be the highest level of the CIA. (ibid, p. 294) But, in addition to the CIA, the Justice Department was monitoring Shaw’s trial in real time. (ibid, pp. 299-306)
III
In light of the above, the question then becomes, how does one write a book today about Jim Garrison and/or Clay Shaw which sides with the official position of 1964? Namely that there was no conspiracy and Oswald was a lonely sociopath without friends and colleagues, let alone confederates. Well, leave it to Max Holland to try and do so. Currently up at his site is an article by one Donald Carpenter. Carpenter was a CPA for 25 years. He then turned to writing novels. In 2013 he wrote a biography of Clay Shaw entitled Man of a Million Fragments.
I started reading the book at the time of its publication. I did not get very far. Because early on it became apparent to me that Carpenter’s writing was, shall we say, not very candid. For example, when I read what the author wrote about General Charles Thrasher, who Shaw served under as his aide de camp during World War II, I blanched. I deduced two things from this part of Carpenter’s work: 1.) He was determined to minimize or eliminate any ties Shaw had to intelligence work, especially covert actions, and 2.) He was going to color over the very real accusations against Thrasher of participating in war crimes against German POW’s. These charges had been covered up at the end of World War II. But through some extraordinary archival research, author James Bacque had uncovered them and assembled a startling expose of these crimes in his 1989 book Other Losses. From Carpenter’s maneuvering on this issue, I deduced that if the author was going to do something like that with Thrasher, then there would be no holds barred with Clay Shaw.
After reading Carpenter’s current article at Holland’s web site, it appears I was correct. What Carpenter and Holland want to do is sort of like what H. G. Wells once wrote a novel about: place the reader in a time machine and transport us back to 1969. That way, the censorious duo can make believe that everything described above does not exist. Unfortunately for them, we live in the dimensions of time and space, therefore it does exist. One can make believe it does not exist, but then that means that what you are writing is make-believe history. This is something like attending the Paul Hoch College of Historical Studies. Let me explain what I mean by that.
In Chicago in 1994, I sat in the audience at Doug Carlson’s fine Midwest Symposium on John F. Kennedy. Hoch spoke at this event. He assumed the role of grizzled veteran giving advice to the newbies who were about to go through the declassified ARRB files. One of his pieces of advice was to ignore anything in there on Clay Shaw. I never forgot that since it went against everything I had learned in graduate school. Namely that scholars are supposed to seek out as much new and relevant information as they can find. That is the way historians fill in gaps in the past. What Hoch was proposing was the historical version of prior restraint on free speech. To me, this was the opposite of what real scholarship was supposed to be about. All I can say is that Carpenter has written both a book and essay that satisfies Hoch’s See no Evil, Hear no Evil, and Say no Evil (Orwellian) dictum.
IV
Right at the beginning of the article, Carpenter shows just how much he is in disregard of the archival records of the ARRB. He pegs the beginning of Garrison’s inquiry to the famous conversation the DA had with Senator Russell Long on a plane ride to New York City. He then adds that the actual date of the November plane trip is not known, and that this marked the beginning of Garrison’s inquiry. Both assertions are wrong. William Davy tracked down the origins of the trip to NYC and the date. (Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 57)
But more importantly, this does not mark the beginning of Garrison’s inquiry. As almost everyone knows, except perhaps Mr. Carpenter, Garrison had inquired into the JFK case back in 1963. Then he did a brief investigation into the event because Oswald had lived in New Orleans for several months in 1963. He ended up by calling David Ferrie into his office for an informal interview. Garrison was curious about a seemingly inexplicable journey Ferrie made with two friends to Houston and Galveston on the day of the assassination. Ferrie said he took the car ride to go ice-skating and goose hunting. Except as Garrison had figured out: 1.) Ferrie did not go ice-skating once he got to Houston; 2.) He drove 400 miles through a pounding rainstorm not to skate; and 3.) His second excuse, to go goose hunting was vitiated by the fact that he did not take shotguns with him. (ibid, pp. 45-47) This ridiculous story seemed utterly strained and patently ersatz to the DA. So he turned over Ferrie to the FBI.
The Bureau interviewed Ferrie. He lied to them as he had to the DA. For instance, he said he never knew Oswald, which was provably false. But even more ridiculous he said he had never used a telescopic rifle and would not even know how to use one. He also said he had associated with no Cuban exile group members since 1961. (DiEugenio, p. 177) Which was preposterous, since Ferrie had been involved in Operation Mongoose in 1962. (ibid, p. 115) As most people understand, lying to an FBI agent is a crime. Evidently, Ferrie understood that it did not matter. Someone in the FBI hierarchy would protect him. As they did. There is not even a hint of any of this FBI cooperation in Carpenter’s article.
But returning to my main point about Carpenter’s inaccuracy about Garrison: it’s not really true that Garrison’s original inquiry was relaunched by the talk with Long. As Joan Mellen notes in her book A Farewell to Justice, Garrison was collecting various critiques of the Warren Report as they were published. And he urged his assistants to read them also. (Mellen, p. 4) But, beyond that, in the Garrison files donated to the ARRB by Lyon Garrison, one will see that there are some memos in the time period of 1965-66. When this author interviewed chief investigator Lou Ivon, he affirmed that Garrison would get interested in a certain assassination issue and send someone out to do an inquiry. (DiEugenio, 177-78) Therefore, right at the outset, Carpenter’s essay is marked by incompleteness and inaccuracy. And Max Holland had no interest in correcting any of it.
Carpenter continues his march of folly by writing that, in 1966, Garrison picked up “three already spent leads.” One will understand how ridiculous that phrase is when Carpenter lists the first ‘spent lead” as Ferrie. Apparently, Carpenter is fine with Ferrie lying to both the DA and the FBI. Unlike our intrepid essayist, most curious and objective readers would have liked to know the following:
- Why did Ferrie lie about the purpose of his trip to Houston and Galveston?
- What purpose was served by denying he knew Oswald when it could so easily be shown that this was false?
- How on earth could he deny that he was not familiar with a telescopic rifle, or even known how to use one, when he participated in training for both the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose?
As any professional investigator comprehends, when a person of interest lies under penalty of perjury, it usually indicates that there are higher stakes involved. Today, there can be little doubt that this was the case with David Ferrie. Any real investigation of Ferrie would have uncovered a welter of incriminating evidence. Not just about him. But about Sergio Arcacha Smith, Clay Shaw, and Guy Banister. There are also links between Ferrie, Sergio Arcacha Smith and David Phillips.
For instance, during a legal deposition for his lawsuit against Garrison, Gordon Novel described a meeting at Banister’s office. At the meeting were Novel, Banister, Arcacha Smith and a man who clearly fits the description of Phillips. (Davy, pp. 22-24) Secondly, in preparation for the Bay of Pigs, Ferrie trained Cuban exiles in underwater demolition at the abandoned Belle Chasse Naval Ammunition Depot, just south of New Orleans. Ferrie revealed that Sergio Arcacha Smith was the conduit for the arms coming into the camp. In an after action report, the CIA officer who summarized the types and dates of training, noted that the Belle Chasse base had now been sterilized; meaning no trace of CIA affiliation remained. That memo was written by David Phillips. (ibid, p. 31) Third, an INS agent named Wendell Roache told the Church Committee that they were tracking Ferrie because of his close associations with Cuban exiles illegally in the country. They had traced him to 544 Camp Street, and also found out he took films of a training camp. This may be the film that HSCA Deputy Counsel Bob Tanenbaum said he saw in the early days of the HSCA inquiry. If so, it featured Oswald, Banister and Phillips. (DiEugenio, p. 116)
So much for Ferrie being a “spent lead”.
Another so-called “spent lead” the author refers to is attorney Dean Andrews. As many authors have pointed out, someone put the fear of God into Andrews about revealing the true identity of the mysterious Clay Bertrand he referred to in his Warren Commission testimony. On at least three occasions—with Mark Lane, Anthony Summers and Garrison—he refused to reveal who Bertrand was. (ibid, p. 181) This was an important point because Andrews told his assistants that while he was in hospital, Bertrand had called him and asked him to go to Dallas to defend the accused assassin of JFK, Lee Oswald. Who Andrews knew previously, since Oswald had been in his office more than once that summer. (Davy, p. 49) Not only was Andrews threatened not to reveal Bertrand’s true identity, but his office was rifled after he got out of the hospital. (DiEugenio, p. 181)
Further, the FBI visited him in the hospital and did all they could to intimidate him into retracting his statements about Clay Bertrand. (Davy, p. 50) Clearly, there were forces way above Andrews that did not want him to reveal the true identity of Bertrand. In fact, the FBI wanted him to say that he had dreamed the whole episode up while under hospital sedation. As William Davy has demonstrated with hospital records, on November 23rd, Andrews made a call to his secretary about going to Dallas to defend Oswald before he was medicated. And it was not even close. He made the call to his secretary at 4 PM. He was given a sedative four hours later. (Davy, p. 52)
But further, there are multiple paths of corroboration for Andrews being called by the mysterious Bertrand. Andrews had talked about the call with his friend Monk Zelden, president of the New Orleans BAR association. He had called his secretary Eva Springer on the 23rd and reported it. He told his investigator, former Sgt. R. M. Davis, and he told his wife. (ibid, p. 51) In light of all this, it simply was not credible that Andrews could not recall the true identity of Bertrand. This selective amnesia was clearly caused by the threats of people Andrews said were from Washington and threatened to inflict serious bodily harm if he revealed who Bertrand was. (DiEugenio, p. 181)
V
Which leads to who Bertrand really was. In his obsolete article, Carpenter writes that Garrison figured that Shaw was Bertrand through a process of descriptive evaluation. In other words, through Andrews, he had information that Bertrand was close to some Hispanics, was a homosexual, and spoke some Spanish. All this was based on the fact that Andrews stated that Bertrand had sent him clients who were, as he termed it “gay Mexicanos”. Therefore, from this information, Garrison deduced that these traits fit the description of Clay Shaw. And, according to Carpenter, this is how Garrison fixed on Shaw as a suspect.
There is a rather familiar problem with this statement by Carpenter. Namely, it is wrong. As anyone can see by going through Garrison’s extant files, the DA spent many hours sending his investigators out pounding the pavement trying to find out who Bertrand was. The process literally extended over a period of months. The reason being that many denizens of the French Quarter did not want to talk to Garrison or his agents. The reason for that being Garrison’s previous crackdown against B-girl drinking in the Quarter. That legal action closed several bars permanently, and many others temporarily, thereby putting many people out of work. But when Garrison stopped going on these inquiries himself, slowly, over time, his staff began to get results. Today, with the release of Garrison’s files, there is really no question that Shaw was Bertrand. The number of witnesses that attest to this is in the low double digits. (DiEugenio, pp. 387-88) And the information has nothing to do with “gay Mexicanos”. It was such common knowledge that the FBI knew it. The Bureau wrote three separate memos about this issue from 1963 to 1967. These memoranda say that Shaw was of interest to the FBI in December of 1963 in relation to the JFK case, and that they had at least three witnesses saying that Shaw was Bertrand. (ibid, p. 388)
But the best source on this would be Dean Andrews. Who, unfortunately, was frightened out of his wits. Yet, thanks to the efforts of estimable researcher Martin Hay, we have now found out that Andrews did reveal the fact that Shaw was Bertrand to one source. That source was Harold Weisberg. While working with Garrison, Weisberg met with Andrews several times. Harold developed a rapport and trust with the lawyer. Andrews eventually told him that Shaw was Bertrand. But he told him so under the restriction that he tell no one else. Weisberg kept his word. It was not until many years later, in the manuscript for an unpublished book, that Weisberg wrote about this secret revelation. Hay found it by sifting through the late Weisberg’s investigative files at Hood College. (ibid)
The obvious question that Garrison never got to ask Shaw was this: Why did you call Andrews and tell him to go to Dallas to defend Oswald? To put it mildly, the implications of that query are thunderous. By not consulting the declassified record, Carpenter avoids posing it.
What Carpenter does with the trial of Clay Shaw is SOP for him. Carpenter admits that Shaw’s lawyers were the main cause of the long delay in getting the case to trial. What he does not say is that this was done in order for Shaw’s secret allies to infiltrate, clandestinely record, and intimidate and bribe Garrison’s witnesses. There are too many examples of this illicit behavior to even begin to describe them in this essay. I will describe just four.
Bernardo DeTorres was a high level CIA agent who ended up working with weapons expert Mitch Werbell. He reportedly had photos of the Kennedy assassination stashed in a safe. He was one of the first infiltrators into Garrison’s office in late 1966. The unsuspecting DA sent him to investigate Cuban exile Eladio Del Valle, David Ferrie’s paymaster for flights into Cuba. Garrison never saw Bernardo after this assignment. But the report that Garrison got about the subsequent murder of Del Valle reads as follows: “He was shot in the chest, and it appears gangland style, and his body was left in the vicinity of BERNARDO TORRES apartment.” (DiEugenio, p. 227) Would you show up for work after your boss got such a report? Needless to say, Del Valle would have been a very important witness for Garrison.
William Wood aka Bill Boxley, was a former CIA agent who volunteered for Garrison’s staff. Boxley wanted Garrison to do some very bizarre things. Like, on the fifth anniversary of JFK ‘s death, indict a man named Robert Perrin. Perrin had some visibility due to the fact that he had been the husband of Warren Commission witness Nancy Perrin Rich. The only problem with this idea was that Perrin had died a few years previously. Boxley then said, well, he wasn’t really dead, the authorities had mixed up his body with another. Boxley—along with the late William Turner—was also the main culprit in inducing the whole Eugene Bradley debacle. Where Garrison had to withdraw an arrest warrant when he discovered that Boxley had made some very dubious claims about Bradley that were not accurate. It later turned out that Boxley was, of course, a CIA agent who knew about the Garrison Group and how that desk operated. (ibid, pp. 278-81)
I will briefly mention two other cases. From Garrison’s files, it appears that James Angleton had a whole book written simply to mislead Garrison. This, of course refers to the whole, elaborate Farewell America hoax. The uncovering of which, is also due to Harold Weisberg. From his extensive field inquiry he discovered that the book was actually supervised by a French double agent named Philippe De Vosjoli. De Vosjoli clandestinely worked for Angleton. (ibid, pp. 281-83) Finally, in his discussion of the Clay Shaw trial, Carpenter doesn’t mention the name of Clyde Johnson. Johnson was supposed to be Garrison’s lead witness. Since many of his witnesses were being terrorized—e.g., Richard Case Nagell had a grenade thrown at him, Aloysius Habighorst was almost run over by a truck—Garrison hid Johnson. This was at an out of town location. But to show just how infiltrated his office was, this location was discovered. Johnson was beaten to a bloody pulp, was hospitalized and could not testify. (ibid, p. 294)
The point of all this is to show that the constant delays were strategic in intent. It gave the CIA, the FBI, and others a longer time frame in order to weaken Garrison’s case. Carpenter also brings up the old chestnut of Garrison not trying the case himself. Again, this shows his ignorance of Garrison’s files. Decades ago, Garrison explained to a correspondent that he was stricken by a painful back injury and also the Hong Kong flu during the trial. (ibid, pp. 292-93)
As the reader can see, the entire prosecution of Clay Shaw was more or less sabotaged by several covert operations. But even at that, Shaw had to lie his head off on the stand to escape. In sum, Shaw deceived the jury on every material subject there was. He denied knowing Ferrie or Oswald, denied being in the Clinton/Jackson area with those two men, and he denied being associated with the CIA. He even denied using an alias. (ibid, p. 310) With what we know today, these denials under oath reduce his testimony to the level of grotesque black comedy.
The deceit about his association with the CIA actually goes beyond his lies, because the CIA actually lied to itself on this issue. This is how ingrained the cover up was about Shaw at Langley. In many of their memos at the time, the Agency denied any connection to Clay Shaw. Which, of course, was false. Afterwards, they admitted he was only a business contact. Which was also false. It later turned out that Shaw had a covert security clearance for a project code named QK ENCHANT. As former CIA officer Victor Marchetti later said, this appears to have been a part of the Domestic Operations Division run by Tracy Barnes, and which also employed Howard Hunt. (ibid, p. 385)
But actually it’s even worse than that. As Joan Mellen later discovered, the CIA had hidden away documents that proved that Shaw was a highly paid, valuable contract agent from early in the fifties. This document was not declassified until a historical review program did so in the nineties. (Joan Mellen, Our Man in Haiti, pp. 54-55) This information corresponds with what Gordon Novel revealed in a written communication made back in the seventies. There he wrote that, back in 1964, the CIA had sent out an order through Director of Security Howard Osborn to conceal Shaw’s true Agency status from inquiries into the JFK murder. To say this tactic was successful does not really do it justice. But it shows the price the public must pay for the almost maniacal secrecy the national security state demands.
The most inadvertently humorous part of Carpenter’s pathetic essay comes at the end. There he praises Oliver Stone for helping create the declassification process of the ARRB. Why is that funny? It’s funny because this essay does not use any of those ARRB declassified documents it credits Stone for releasing.
-
Alexandra Zapruder, Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film (Part 2)
What the Zapruder Film Is (and Isn’t)
The Zapruder film is (most probably) an intact and authentic 8mm motion picture sequence. Information appearing in the film corresponds with common segments of other amateur films taken in Dealey Plaza during the assassination event, as well as existing still images. The extant images match the general description provided by Abraham Zapruder, the man who filmed the images, during his live televised appearance at WFAA studios in Dallas approximately two hours after the shooting. Later suspicions Zapruder film frames may have been removed or altered, after the film was processed and initial copies printed, gradually gained momentum in the late 1970s/early 1980s as a previously unacknowledged analysis of the film was revealed which challenged the established chain of custody with the film’s possession. Suspicions increased after the Assassination Records Review Board took specific interest in authenticating the film in the late 1990s. Although there is not currently any hard evidence that tampering took place, the presence of a Zapruder film (original or copies) at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) on the weekend of the assassination has been effectively established, even as official records of this event have inexplicably failed to appear.
Limits to Fakery
NPIC analysts at work
during Cuban Missile CrisisThe most precise description of a possible how and when pertaining to alteration of the Zapruder film was developed by Doug Horne, who had worked as Chief Analyst for Military Records for the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in the 1990s. Horne assisted in the joint efforts between the ARRB and Kodak to preserve and assess the authenticity of the Zapruder film. During this process, as former employees of NPIC added detail to events on the weekend of the assassination, Horne came to realize two things: two separate teams developed distinct sets of briefing boards from selected frames of the film; and, from recollection (albeit many years after the fact), each team believed they were handling the original Zapruder film—one group working from an 8mm film reel, and the other from an unslit 16mm reel.1 Horne postulated that, in the approximately twelve-hour period between the work of the two teams, the original film could have been sent to a top-secret CIA film facility attached to a Kodak plant in Rochester, NY (Hawkeye Works) and there revised over the course of the day on an optical printer. A freshly altered “original” film was then presumedly returned to NPIC for a new set of briefing boards, and the existing prints of the original film were swapped out.2.
Information pointing to two separate briefing boards, and two different film formats used to create them, should not be dismissed. Official clarification may yet be discovered, perhaps in the still missing official history of the Zapruder film’s presence at the NPIC written by Dino Brugioni. As speculation has otherwise filled the vacuum, it’s worth considering what was, and was not, possible to do manipulating film images in 1963. Evidence of an 8mm reel of film on one night, and an unslit 16mm reel the next does not automatically or logically lead to an alteration hypothesis.3
The alteration argument vis-à-vis the Zapruder film has been prone to a certain illiteracy regarding the mechanics and science of special-effects filmmaking, specifically the use of the optical printer, which ranges from mildly informed to wildly uninformed, even as the whole of the argument requires intervention of such machines. Roland Zavada, a retired Kodak specialist hired by the ARRB to authenticate the Zapruder film, explained technical issues mitigating against alteration in a patient, if somewhat exasperated, response to Doug Horne’s theories and criticism published in the fourth volume of Horne’s Inside the Assassination Record Review Board.4 The substance of Zavada’s response can be, and is, supported by relevant professional technical and descriptive texts, as well as, if sought, personal affidavit from technicians experienced in practical application of optical printers for celluloid-based motion pictures (a skill set largely displaced since the advent of digital technologies). The notion that elements within the Zapruder film’s frames could be removed or rearranged at will, let alone done so without evident and obvious trace, is completely mistaken. Such sorcery was not possible with the available optical printer technology, and, for what was possible, the relatively short time period available in Horne’s hypothesis would not allow for anything but very limited—very limited—activity.
An Oxberry 1600 aerial optical printer,
a common commercial modelIn an article titled “The Cinemagic of the Optical Printer”5, Linwood Dunn lists the variety of visual effects achievable on the optical printer: creating transitions such as dissolves and wipes of varying complexity; changing image size and position on screen; frame modification such as speeding up or slowing down a sequence, or “freezing” a select frame; optical zooms; superimpositions; split screens; adding motion, e.g., creating a rocking effect for a scene set in a boat or aircraft. He then describes “special categories” of effects work: travelling mattes “used to matte a foreground action into a background film made at another time”; blow-ups and reductions used to convert formats, e.g., 16mm film converted to 35mm; anamorphic conversion to change aspect ratio; and “doctoring and salvaging” which includes salvaging unusable scenes due to mechanical or human error on set or adding elements to previously filmed scenes.6.
Claims of Zapruder film alteration usually cite changing image size, frame modification, superimposition, travelling mattes, and doctoring. Where these claims tend to fail is by misunderstanding necessary limitations in the use of these techniques. A common claim is that an altered Zapruder film has removed or repositioned bystanders along the visible motorcade route through doctoring and superimposition combined with a travelling matte of the Presidential and Secret Service limousines. What is not understood while making such claims is, prior to the introduction of digital workspaces, mattes and superimpositions found seamless effect by utilizing hard vertical and horizontal lines within the frame to join separate elements, or by adding images to a flat uniform background. Consistent vertical or horizontal separation points or uniform backgrounds within the Zapruder film are virtually nonexistent because a) the sequence is always in motion as Zapruder panned with the motorcade, b) the motorcade varies in size within the frame as it approaches and passes Zapruder’s zoomed-in lens, and c) the shaky hand-held filming is inconsistent (i.e., this is not a steady locked-off pan performed with a tripod).7
Any element within the frame said to have been removed from the Zapruder film would require an equal consistent element to replace it; for instance, removing a bystander from the Dealey Plaza lawn would require additonal lawn in place for the requisite number of frames, just as a replaced bystander closer to Elm Street would require a replacement background consistent with what already is visible (portions of road, sidewalk, landscaping and other persons). These replacement elements must also adjust plausibly in perspective as Zapruder’s camera drifts and pans, and blur when the camera is unsteady. Again, this is long before digital technologies, and the workspace of each individual celluloid frame was 8mm in diameter. Theoretical radical alteration of the Zapruder film would require exacting work in multiple areas of each frame, for many dozens of frames, which would require many weeks, at least, to accomplish.8 At the end of such a process, it would be necessary for the results to appear as a seamless element of the original, an impossible task to conceive. Any removal of persons, geographic features, or even splatter from a large exit wound, should be obvious through inconsistencies produced by attempting to replace the lost information. If the Zapruder film was in fact somehow radically altered, appearing as it appears today, then it would stand as the single greatest trick shot in cinema history, even as the technique developed by these magicians would never be exploited for any other purpose, or even rumor of such incredible feat leaked as the magicians never sought credit.
Another important consideration for determining what is possible with an optical printer is the requirement for precise testing related to exposure and color temperature, to maintain consistency as film stocks have varying exposure indexes and grain structure. Print stocks used with optical printers are different from those used in the field, and production of an intermediate internegative with these stocks is a necessary part of the process,9 adding generational loss. Alteration of the Zapruder film would then require not only seamless work within the frames, but also assuring the resulting altered film’s colour, exposure, and grain is consistent with the original 8mm film stock, a feat with no known precedent.10 Discussing this, Roland Zavada determined that the minimum time to evaluate these factors, including filming, processing, and viewing the necessary tests, would have been more than seven hours,11 which factors poorly in considering an alteration scenario limited to Sunday November 24.
Z-313: a painted blob and debris removal? Incredibly, although Zavada’s peer-supported professional opinion mitigating against alteration to the Zapruder film should have largely diminished the controversy, the notion of alteration has since hardened, and a substantial number of persons have somehow become convinced that radical alteration is a proven fact. In truth, time constraints and technical limitations make plain that if alteration was in fact engaged in that Sunday, it would necessarily be limited to, for example, a “blob” added to a frame or a black mask added to a few frames. However, even this work appears unlikely due to the difficulties in returning the altered product to an undetectable plausible 8mm “original”.12.
Aside from the technical reasons mitigating against Zapruder film alteration and substitution, a set of other considerations was articulated by Josiah Thompson in his 1998 article “Why The Zapruder Film Is Authentic.” 13 Thompson notes, from the officially vetted timeline, the original Zapruder film was in the possession of either Abraham Zapruder or representatives from LIFE Magazine that entire weekend. This notion is no longer assured. Even so, Thompson makes the point there was no means to ensure additional copies of the original intact version were not created before the film could be presumedly delivered to Hawkeye for alteration. For example, an extra copy could have been printed surreptitiously at the facilities in Dallas on the first day, or a copy perhaps made by the FBI from a borrowed Secret Service print, as discussed in memos from Saturday November 23.14 Thompson also notes that there are numerous films and photographs depicting the same sequence (or portions thereof) which potentially could require alteration as well (some thirty-eight persons had cameras in use during this sequence), and, as important, on the weekend of the assassination it could not be known if all photos and film had been accounted for—that is, a then unknown film or photograph could appear later to reveal the forgery.
Finally, other than a painted “blob” or black mask to hide wounds, it is unclear what exactly it is believed the alleged alteration is concealing. In the numerous films and still photographs which feature portions of the exact sequence captured by Zapruder, and in sequences taken before and after Zapruder was filming, there is nothing to suggest a person or event which would require excision, such as during the limousine turn which does not appear in the Zapruder film (although Abe Zapruder suggested he had filmed it during his Warren Commission testimony). One frequently cited presumed alteration is the slowing down and near complete stop of the Presidential limousine in the moments ahead of the fatal (Z312) shot which, it is claimed, was removed from the film. This is not true, but can appear that way because Zapruder is panning his camera to follow the passing vehicle; the camera itself in motion assumes a certain pace even as the vehicle slows within the frame. The slowing of the limousine becomes apparent if the viewer is able to identify Zapruder’s panning motion as a separate element from the motion of the vehicle, and follow as the pan in turn slows to keep the limousine relatively centered in frame. The camera pan actually gets ahead of the vehicle, highlighting its decrease in speed. That the limousine had come near to a complete halt can be observed in the person of Secret Service Agent Hill who rapidly gains on the static chassis. The acceleration of the vehicle is also obvious, and is even more so in the Nix film.
The Zapruder Film Is Not A Precise Clock
According to Dino Brugioni, one of the NPIC staff interviewed in the late 1990s and 2000s, representatives from the Secret Service were at NPIC on Saturday evening November 23, 1963 and were “vitally interested in timing how many seconds occurred between various frames.” Brugioni’s colleague Ralph Pearse informed these men that the Zapruder Bell & Howell Zoomatic 414PD was “a spring-wound camera, with a constantly varying operating speed”, and attempts to determine precise timing would be “unscientific” and could lead to false conclusions.15 The Secret Service agents insisted, and Pearse apparently used a stopwatch to gauge time between “various frames of interest.” Later testing by the FBI would determine that the Zapruder camera ran at an average speed of 18.3 frames per second, and, with that established, it was claimed that a count of frames between significant events appearing in the Zapruder film, divided by 18.3, could produce a precise reading of the time between which these events occurred, particularly the timing between presumed shots.
This formula unfortunately bypasses the important qualifier “average”, as it became commonly reported that the camera’s film speed was 18.3 frames per second, and thereby it was claimed the Zapruder film could serve as a precise clock for the assassination sequence.16 This is not the case, due to the spring-wound mechanism of Zapruder’s camera which, as Ralph Pearse noted, had a “constantly varying operating speed.” This factor is apparent in the results of the tests done by the FBI’s Lyndal Shaneyfelt, “focusing the camera on a clock with a large sweeping second band”, later counting frames from the developed film to ascertain the number of frames per second as determined by the sweeping second band. A “sync” motion picture camera, with a crystal sync oscillator maintaining consistent operating speed, would indeed produce repeatedly the exact same number of frames per second, but a spring-wound camera would vary.17 This spring-wound effect is reflected in the FBI report:
“This study has been made by checking the film speed of the Zapruder camera at ten second intervals throughout the full running time of a fully wound camera. Several checks were made on a full roll of film and it was found that the film speed of the camera when fully wound runs at an average speed of from 18.0 to 18.1 frames per second (fps) for the first ten seconds. It gradually increases to 18.3 to 18.5 fps for the next 20 seconds, then gradually decreases slightly to 18.1 fps for ten seconds before the final twenty seconds that run at an average speed of 17.6 to 17.9 frames per second. Mr. Zapruder has stated that the camera was fully wound when he started filming the President’s motorcade.”18.
According to the above calculation, the Zapruder film, once the Presidential car comes into view (the 132 frames of the head of the motorcade accounts for approximately 7.3 seconds) was exposed at 18 to 18.1 fps for about three seconds, and then “gradually” increased to 18.3 to 18.5 fps for its duration. The 353 frames, according to the FBI’s calculation, occurred over somewhere between 19.138 seconds to 19.332 seconds (without accounting for the “gradual transition from 18/18.1 to 18.3/18.5). The shooting sequence (LIFE 12/6/63 frame Z-190 to Z-312) occurred from somewhere between 6.595 seconds and 6.666 seconds (again not accounting for the “gradual” transition), a difference of between one and two frames. So, while not demonstrating extreme variation, the FBI’s work, at least as described, demonstrates that, giving or taking even two frames in a short span, the Zapruder film cannot be considered an exact clock. Other tests on similar cameras noted even greater disparity between individual “checks” than a few tenths of seconds.19 Such disparity is more in keeping with the advice of NPIC’s Ralph Pearse that a spring-wound camera’s operating speed was constantly varying and that attempts to measure precise timing could lead to false conclusions. In fact, the FBI’s “average” speed seems unusual for these cameras in that the results inferred suggest comparatively minute differences.
Might the FBI have dropped a high frame count pass and a low frame count pass recorded by the Zapruder camera during their speed tests, in the interest of arriving at a more precise statistical average? This statistical method is known as a “truncated mean.”20 An odd reference to frames-per-second appears in a chart presented to the Warren Commission in January 1964, presenting timing scenarios for the Presidential limousine’s approach to Dealey Plaza, based on measurements which identify a high and low miles-per-hour determination (15 mph and 12 mph) with a similar constant frames-per-second count (“22 fps” and “17.6 fps”).21 It is very tempting to speculate that these numbers—22 fps and 17.6 fps—might represent the high and low markers of the FBI’s speed tests with the Zapruder camera. Shaneyfelt told the Warren Commission “we ran through several tests of film … and averages were taken.” (WCH Vol. 5, p. 160)
In 1967 CBS time-tested five same-model cameras and got varying results If so, the presumed “average speed” of 18.3 frames-per-second is, as Pearse told the Secret Service, meaningless in context of the assassination as there is no possibility or means to determine the frame rate when Zapruder’s camera actually ran on November 22. In theory, the “constantly varying operating speed” of the spring-wound camera would mean the frame rate varied across the duration of any filmed sequence. Although Pearse articulated this, and Brugioni apparently attached this information to the first set of prepared briefing boards, the insistence of the Secret Service agents suggests determining a time sequence for the assassination was an investigative priority. This insistence would create for the developing lone assassin narrative a series of problems.
How Did LIFE Magazine Know The Camera Ran At 18fps?
Before the FBI ran their speed tests with the Zapruder camera, LIFE Magazine’s article “An End To Nagging Rumors” (December 6, 1963) already states: “from the movie camera’s known speed of 18 frames a second—two frames a second faster than it should have run—it is possible to reconstruct the precise timing …” Zapruder’s Bell & Howell camera, according to its operating manual, was supposed to run at 16 frames per second in its RUN setting. That it actually ran some two frames faster could only be determined through tests similar to what the FBI would later do—filming a clock with the original camera. The LIFE Magazine article does not directly state that LIFE itself conducted tests and determined the speed, it says only the speed is “known”.
Although there is nothing in the record about testing Zapruder’s camera before the FBI took possession of it on December 4, 1963, it appears highly likely that a test to determine the speed of that camera was undertaken as part of an official investigation, connected with the Secret Service and CIA, sometime during the week following assassination. Information derived from this test was subsequently shared with LIFE Magazine. 22 Philip Melanson’s 1984 essay “Hidden Exposure: Cover-Up and Intrigue in the CIA’s Secret Possession of the Zapruder Film” first noticed a brief aside in an December 4, 1963 FBI memorandum discussing the possession of the camera: “(Zapruder) advised this camera had been in the hands of the United States Secret Service Agents on December 3rd, 1963 as they claimed they wanted to do some checking of it.”23 If the Secret Service were in possession of Zapruder’s camera on December 3rd, they may well have been in possession of the camera before that date. The memorandum certainly does not clarify.
When the Secret Service visited NPIC on the evening of November 23, 1963, “vitally interested in timing how many seconds occurred between various frames” Dino Brugioni recalled: “Ralph Pearse informed them, to their surprise and dismay, that this would be a useless procedure because the Bell and Howell movie camera (that they told him had taken the movie) was a spring-wound camera, with a constantly varying operating speed.” A 1975 CIA description of the same NPIC event states that since “the film had been taken in a spring-powered movie camera, it was not possible to determine precise time between shots without access to the camera to time the rate of spring run-down.”24 Access to the camera was necessary to determine the information the Secret Service was intent on establishing. That the Zapruder camera, and even the Zapruder film original, may have been, or probably were, examined at NPIC shortly after the assassination should have been an expected procedure. The Secret Service considered themselves holding “primary jurisdiction in a case of this nature”,25 and, as Philip Melanson notes, “the Secret Service of the 1960s and early 1970s had some sort of technical dependence upon the CIA.”26.
An FBI memorandum dated November 29, 1963, generated by Dallas field agents, discusses a meeting with Secret Service Special Agent John Howlett, in which Howlett described an ability to determine the distance from the alleged sniper’s nest to the Presidential limousine at the time of shots striking the President, ascertained from 8mm movies of the assassination.27 Howlett places the first shot, “where the President was struck the first time in the neck”, at “approximately 170 feet”. Paul Mandel’s LIFE article also places the first shot at 170 feet ( “The first shot strikes the President, 170 feet away…”, also identified as Zapruder frame 190 since 122 frames are then counted to the third shot which “over a distance of 260 feet, hits the President’s head.”). Howlett would inform the FBI the fatal shot was at “approximately 260 feet”. As Howlett was meeting with the FBI men, LIFE’s issue with Mandel’s article was being readied for the printers. It is hard not to believe that Special Agent Howlett and LIFE Magazine’s Paul Mandel received their information from the same or similar sources, derived from analysis conducted at NPIC.
A later chart created by the Secret Service, listing distances which differed slightly from Howlett’s,28 and associating these distances with Zapruder film frames (CE884), would situate the given distance of the first shot as equivalent to Zapruder frames 200 or 201, shortly before JFK disappears behind the Stemmons Freeway sign in the film. A certain flexibility in determining position and frame number has been introduced as early as Howlett telling the FBI men on November 29 that the Secret Service “using the 8 millimeter film have been unable to ascertain the exact location where Governor JOHN B. CONNALLY had been struck.” This uncertainty reflects the difficulties for the developing official story, as the FBI’s Robert Frazier had determined on November 27 that the bolt-action rifle in evidence required at least 2.8 seconds to operate between shots at moving target, the equivalent to approximately fifty Zapruder frames. Determining that Connally was not struck until somewhere around Z-250 (in relation to a first hit on JFK at frame 200) is not supported by the Zapruder film, where it appears the strike occurred at least 20 frames earlier.29 Differing from Howlett, Mandel in the LIFE article, provides a precise frame for a shot striking Connally (Z-264):
“The first shot strikes the President, 170 feet away, in the throat; 74 frames later the second fells Governor Connally; 48 frames after that the third, over a distance of 260 feet, hits the President’s head. From first to second shot 4.1 seconds elapse; from second to third, 2.7 seconds. Altogether, the three shots take 6.8 seconds—time enough for a trained sharpshooter, even through the bobbing field of a telescopic sight.“ (Paul Mandel, “End To Nagging Rumors: The Six Critical Seconds”, LIFE Magazine, December 6, 1963)30
In her book, Alexandra Zapruder ponders the irony that her grandfather’s film had displaced the view from the purported sniper’s nest; standing in, so to speak, for “seeing the assassination through Oswald’s eyes”. In actuality, the true irony is that, by insisting on establishing exact timing and ignoring Ralph Pearse’s advice, federal investigators wrapped themselves into a straightjacket trying to explain the visible shooting sequence, and the “exact” timing of the film, against the self-imposed limitation of three shots and one bolt-action rifle. Ultimately the Warren Commission had to go with both the single bullet theory and the claim that it could not determine when the first shot was fired. For its part, the HSCA’s photographic panel seemed to determine that the President was struck before disappearing behind the freeway sign in the film and also endorsed the single bullet theory, which are mutually exclusive.
What Happened At The NPIC November 23-25, 1963?
Dino Brugioni in 1962 It appears that two sets of “briefing boards” were independently created—one through the Saturday evening into Sunday morning and one through Sunday evening into Monday morning—both using frame blow-ups derived from a copy of or the original of the Zapruder film. Dino Brugioni was involved with the Saturday night event, and Homer McMahon the Sunday evening event, as developed by Doug Horne. Brugioni’s recollections are corroborated by a CIA submission to the Rockefeller Commission made in May 1975.31 This document, describing an analysis of the Zapruder film at NPIC, matches Brugioni’s account of the presence of the Secret Service, that establishing elapsed times between rifle shots was of primary concern, and the subsequent production of briefing boards. The document states the Secret Service “were present during the process of analysis” and took away one set of briefing boards, while CIA Director McCone retained another. The briefing board set “was controlled carefully; very few people saw it.” Notably, the document does not date the event, instead choosing to vaguely locate it in “late 1963.” Results of the analysis are deflected: “We assume the Secret Service informed the Warren Commission about anything of value resulting from our analysis of the film, but we have no direct knowledge that they did so.”
On the day following this first disclosure of a Zapruder film analysis at NPIC, the Rockefeller Commission requested “memoranda or other textual information provided to the Secret Service by CIA after NPIC’s analysis of the Zapruder film.” The CIA responded a week later, claiming they “had no indication in our records that any such written material was provided to the Secret Service. Attached are copies of the only textual matter in our files pertaining to the NPIC’s analysis of the Zapruder film.”32 Xerox copies of six “written or typed papers” were attached, described as the total existing documentation of an analysis process which spread over a thirty-six hour period and featured the production of two separate briefing board sets. That the May 7 CIA Addendum included information about the “spring-powered camera” which appears directly derived from Brugioni’s briefing board notes attached, but no such notes are among the sparse released documentation on May 14, does not inspire confidence that the CIA is on the level here.33.
Among the six papers provided to the Rockefeller Commission is a typed page which features an undated columned list featuring four “panels” with Zapruder frame numbers listed below each panel. Each frame number has a corresponding “print” number, totalling 28 prints. This appears to be for a set of briefing boards presumably created the weekend of the assassination, perhaps the second session, as Brugioni said his boards consisted of less than twenty prints. Handwritten notes on another page calculate time needed to “shoot internegs”, process, test, and make three prints. During interviews in the 1990s, Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter recognized their handwriting on this document, and also on portions of another handwritten document recreating the previously described typed briefing board chart.34 Three more handwritten pages are included, author unknown, which appear to have been created at a later date than the November 23-25 analysis as these pages feature charts and calculations which refer directly to information appearing in LIFE ’s December 6 article “An End To Nagging Rumors.”
These relatively unsophisticated charts were presented as artifacts of the 1963 NPIC analysis,
even though they were clearly drawn up later.In fact, these pages seem to have been drawn up by a person completely unaware of the first weekend briefing boards, or that the Secret Service had already possessed the information that appeared in LIFE. The hand drawn charts feature phrases from the Mandel article in quotation marks: “74 frames later”; “48 frames after that”; “2 FPS than it should have been run”. A question is written out: “how do they know frames of first and second shot?” Timing calculations cluster the page, with division tables setting scenarios of 18fps (attributed to LIFE) and 16 fps (the camera’s speed according to its operating manual). Alternative shooting scenarios, most of which feature Zapruder frame 242 as a second shot, appear next to the LIFE attributed shooting sequence of Z-190—Z-264—Z-312. Whatever is going on with these unsophisticated charts, the impression left by the CIA’s 1975 presentation on the NPIC analysis—from lack of documentation to the sketchy attribution of “late 1963”—is of a conscious decision not to admit analysis occurred on the weekend of the assassination. Making it appear the NPIC, the premiere image analysis lab anywhere at the time, relied on timings and frame numbers printed in LIFE Magazine served to deflect attention from the actual analysis done, as did the diversion of highlighting the Secret Service’s supposed sole responsibility to share “anything of value resulting from our analysis.” The NPIC analysis event had been effectively disappeared from the record.
The typed frame chart produced as part of NPIC’s records. This may be from the second analysis event, Nov. 24-25, 1963.
The briefing panels in the record seem derived from the above typed chart.
Dino Brugioni was certain these were not the charts he had created during the first analysis event Nov. 23-24, 1963.
This motion sequence features the selected frames from the above chart.
That the panning of Zapruder’s camera gets ahead of the slowing vehicle is apparent.
For its part, the Secret Service had nothing to add, claiming that by 1979 all documents relating to the assassination had been passed to the National Archives. Nothing directly attributed to an NPIC analysis appears. The Warren Commission—which sponsored two conferences in April 1964 at which the Zapruder film was closely analyzed in the presence of Bethesda and Parkland doctors, ballistics experts from Edgewood Arsenal, FBI agents, Commission attorneys, and even John and Nellie Connally—did not receive any information regarding the November 1963 NPIC analysis.
In her book, Alexandra Zapruder asks about the NPIC event: “Who cares when it happened?” That is not the appropriate question. More appropriately: Why was the NPIC analysis hidden from the official record and the official investigation, and then, when uncovered in 1975, its “when” was obscured and its documentation was obviously incomplete?
A reason for this may be the NPIC analysis clearly demonstrated that a lone gunman conclusion was not viable; that something like the “flurry” of shots described by Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman—seated in the passenger seat of the Presidential limousine—was more apparent. Homer McMahon, during his 1990s interviews, said it was his impression that “he saw JFK reacting to 6 to 8 shots fired from at least three directions.”35 Robert Kennedy would tell Arthur Schlesinger Jr., on December 9, 1963, that CIA Director John McCone, who received the NPIC’s first briefing boards, had indicated to him “there were two people involved in the shooting.”36 A few hours after McCone’s briefing on Sunday November 24, LIFE Magazine’s publisher C.D. Jackson sent instructions to Dallas to negotiate the remaining rights to the Zapruder film which had been explicitly left out of the contract signed the previous day. An internal LIFE memo would note that “C.D. Jackson bought the copyright to Zapruder’s film to keep it from being shown in motion.”
The Zapruder Film Proves Conspiracy
A week after the assassination, the Secret Service was continuing its investigation utilizing a shooting sequence which commenced with a first hit at either Zapruder frame 190 or frame 200. At the same time, LIFE Magazine was preparing its December 6 issue featuring an article which placed the first shot at Zapruder frame 190. Years later, a House Select Committee on Assassinations photographic panel systematically analyzed the Zapruder film in a manner similar, if not more extensively, to that done previously by the NPIC.37 The HSCA panel would report: “At approximately Zapruder frame 200, Kennedy’s movements suddenly freeze; his right hand abruptly stops in the midst of a waving motion and his head moves rapidly from his right to his left in the direction of his wife. Based on these movements, it appears that by the time the President goes behind the sign at frame 207 he is evidencing some kind of reaction to a severe external stimulus.”38
Zapruder frames 190, 200, and 207. Analysis determined Kennedy began to react to a “severe external stimulus” at this point. The Warren Commission Report would claim “it is not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission to determine just which shot hit the Governor.”39 This is not true, as essential findings of the Commission included the determination that only three shots were fired, all from a particular bolt-action rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. If the President was reacting to a “severe external stimulus” (i.e. a shot) before disappearing behind the Stemmons freeway sign, as seen in the Zapruder film and as determined by both expert panels in 1963 and 1978, there was not enough time to operate the rifle’s bolt and fire a second shot to strike Connally consistent with his observed reaction (struck approximately Z224-230). The Commission’s Single Bullet Theory proposes that Kennedy and Connally react to the same bullet as they come into view at Zapruder frame 222-223, although in the film it appears obvious the President is already reacting to external stimulus while Connally is not. It has been suggested that Connally’s reaction is somehow delayed, although the smashing of his rib bone by the passing bullet would initiate an immediate involuntary reflexive response.
Since the time of the HSCA, independent researchers have been successful in aligning close analysis of the Zapruder film with eyewitness testimony and with other photographic evidence.40 With this work, the determination advanced by the analysis in 1963 and 1978 that the President was struck by a shot at a point between Zapruder frames 190-200, before disappearing behind the Stemmons Freeway sign as seen in the film, has been corroborated by the accounts in the official record of at least a dozen witnesses, and their interlocking observations are further supported by the photographic record apart from the Zapruder film.
The testimony of Jacqueline Kennedy exemplifies this support for a first shot circa Z-190. She told the Warren Commission that she turned in her seat to directly face her husband as the result of a commotion, a noise, which can be identified as this first strike (which probably hit in the back, as witnesses located behind the Presidential vehicle described his reaction as a slump to his left). Mrs. Kennedy can be observed in the Zapruder film as turning just ahead of the disappearance behind the sign, and afterwards her hat remains largely visible holding this position, looking directly at her husband. Proponents of the single bullet theory are suggesting that a shot from a high-powered rifle blasted through Kennedy’s neck and struck Connally, while Mrs Kennedy looked directly on, closely positioned, and she didn’t realize what had just happened. What is observable in the Zapruder film is that Jackie Kennedy, looking directly at her husband in the moments before the devastating shot at Z-312, is bewildered as to the source of her husband’s distress.
Mrs. Kennedy turned to look at her husband as the result of an audible commotion,
generally conceded as the strike of a first shot. She is doing so before the vehicle disappears behind the sign.Dino Brugioni, during his 2009 interviews, recalled that the Secret Service agents who arrived with the Zapruder film at NPIC on November 23, 1963, and who directed the analysis of the film “in individual stop frames”, paid particular attention to the portion of the film which showed the Presidential limousine just ahead of the Stemmons sign, its subsequent disappearance behind the sign, and then the frames after it reappeared. The Zapruder film is unique in the photographic record as capturing this portion of the assassination sequence, and what it shows cannot be reconciled with the official conclusion of a lone assassin—as the Secret Service, and its CIA partner, surely realized less than forty-eight hours after the event.
NOTES
1 The 8mm film in Zapruder’s camera was actually a spool of 16mm film, exposed along one side and then flipped and exposed on the other. After processing the film would be slit down the middle, the two halves spliced together to make one continuous roll of developed 8mm film.
2 For an overview of the National Photographic Interpretation Center and excerpts from Horne’s work, see Bill Kelly, “Washington Navy Yard NPIC”, JFK Countercoup blog http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2010/02/washington-navy-yard-npic.html.
3 That the Saturday 8mm reel is assumed to be the Zapruder original relies on Dino Brugioni’s recollection that there was film information between the sprocket holes. Brugioni’s memory appears fairly solid, and is corroborated on crucial points by the available sparse official documentation, but the Zapruder film possession timeline is tight because LIFE Magazine did its own work with the film at some point over the first weekend. If Brugioni is mistaken on this detail, then he was working from a Secret Service first generation copy of the film. Brugioni remembers an 8mm projector was used to view the film, but it is hard to believe NPIC employees projecting the actual original due to risk of damaging the film. It could also be that the Zapruder original was retrieved from LIFE on Sunday, possibly delivered to Hawkeye to create additional copies, and then sent to NPIC for creation of a second briefing board. Roland Zavada determined in his authenticity report that the Zapruder original initially remained as an unslit 16mm reel, as seen at NPIC Sunday night. The compartmentalization of the two briefing board sessions may reflect that the first was an “in-house” analysis, and the second featured a differing set of impressions.
4 Zavada’s open letter can be read here: http://www.jfk-info.com/RJZ-DH-032010.pdf It is a response to Chapter 14: “The Zapruder Film Mystery”, Douglas P. Horne, Inside the Assassination Record Review Board, Volume Four.
5 Linwood G Dunn, ASC., “Cinemagic of the Optical Printer”, American Cinematographer Manual, Fifth Edition, 1980. The Fifth Edition features a unique section on special effects cinematography. Dunn’s company Film Effects of Hollywood was established in 1946, and Dunn was a pioneer in optical printer technology. The American Cinematographer Manual has served as an essential professional reference book since its first edition was published in 1935. The latest Tenth Edition appeared in 2013. These volumes are compiled and published by the American Society of Cinematographers.
6 The specific examples for this final category are much simpler than might be inferred by the term “doctoring”. In the film It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a gag was to feature a truck bumping into a wooden shack which subsequently collapses. During filming, the breakaway shack was pulled before the truck had backed up far enough for the gag to work. Using the optical printer, the frame was split vertically between the truck and the shack, and the frame portion of the intact shack was held (frozen) until the other frame portion saw the truck reversed to the position that would sell the intended gag. Note that the ability to achieve this effect depended on a lack of moving elements in the portion of the frame featuring the shack, as can be seen in the movie itself. A second example was of using split screens, trick cuts, and superimpositions to create close explosions and artillery fire near a group of actors playing refugees for a film titled One Minute To Zero (the desired effect was unsafe to attempt on the set.)
7 ”A Hollywood or other film production requiring postproduction optical effects is a product of a carefully planned and executed script in advance. The key subject matter, foreground and background scene content, camera image focus, depths of field, masks or mattes, etc., are carefully executed ahead of time and incorporated into the camera film that becomes the optical master…(the Zapruder film) was handheld, unsteady, panned to follow the limousine causing bystanders and background to be blurred and Zapruder jerked as reflex reaction to rifle shot reports or other stimuli.” Zavada, p. 19.
8 Consider the time required to produce relatively simple shots of the USS Enterprise against a black space background, as described in an online article (http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Film_Effects_of_Hollywood) discussing Film Effects of Hollywood’s association with the first Star Trek television show. This indicates the time-consuming and sometimes imperfect results using optical printers. The effects seen in the original Star Trek program are nothing compared to claims of Zapruder film alteration.
9 “Preparation of an internegative which closely simulates the characteristic of the original has always been the goal of optical houses throughout the industry. In spite of the superb quality frequently achieved in internegatives, it seems virtually impossible to attain characteristics identical to those of the original negative in the duplicate generations for the following reasons: 1) The non-linear response of photographic film limits the range over which the following generations can duplicate an original. The internegative is one or two generations away from the original, depending on the stock used. 2) Many variable elements are introduced during the processing of the internegative. 3) The exposure characteristics of the optical printer may vary from time to time.” Mehrdad Azarmi, “Exposure Control of Optical Printers”, American Cinematographer Manual, Fifth Edition, 1980.
10 “There is no known film production history that would provide a technology reference for the use of an 8mm KODACHROME II camera film as a printing master to allow subsequent significant optical special effects into selected scenes and then reconstitute the adjusted images on to an 8mm KODACHROME II daylight film ‘indistinguishable’ from the camera original.” Zavada, p. 18.
11 Zavada, pp. 30-32.
12 One text cited as “proof” that altering the Zapruder film was plausible has been Techniques of Special Effects Cinematography by Raymond Fielding. When excerpts of alteration arguments were shared with Fielding by Zavada in 2006, Fielding’s response included: “in my judgment there is no way in which manipulation of these images could have been achieved satisfactorily in 1963 with the technology then available … if such an attempt at image manipulation of the footage had occurred in 1963, the results could not possibly have survived professional scrutiny … challenges regarding the authenticity of the NARA footage and assertions of image manipulation … are technically naïve.” Zavada, p. 18.
13 The article is derived from a presentation made at a conference in Dallas November 20, 1998. (http://www.jfk-info.com/thomp2.htm)
14 DeLoach to Mohr, “8 Millimeter Color Film Taken At Scene of Assassination” https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=62256#relPageId=43&tab=page.
15 Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, Volume Four, p. 1233. This fascinating and important information, derived from an interview conducted by Peter Janney, is worthwhile considering in full: “… He also said that the Secret Service was vitally interested in timing how many seconds occurred between various frames, and that Ralph Pearse informed them, to their surprise and dismay, that this would be a useless procedure because the Bell and Howell movie camera (that they told him had taken the movie) was a spring-wound camera, with a constantly varying operating speed, and that while he could certainly time the number of seconds between various frames if they so desired, that in his view it was an unscientific and useless procedure which would provide bad data, and lead to false conclusions, or words to that effect. Nevertheless, at the request of the two Secret Service agents, Ralph Pearse dutifully used a stopwatch to time the number of seconds between various frames of interest to their Secret Service customers. Dino Brugioni said that he placed a strong caveat about the limited, or suspect, usefulness of this timing data in the briefing notes he prepared for Art Lundahl.”
16 The HSCA’s photographic panel did note in its report “only the average, and not the precise, running speeds for the camera are known.” Despite this, the panel would go ahead and calculate time between frames anyway. HSCA Report Appendix, Volume VI, p. 31.
17 “In crystal drive systems, a crystal oscillator of extremely high accuracy at, or in, the recorder, provides the sync pulse. The camera, in turn, is driven by a specially designed D.C. motor and control circuit which is capable of operating in exact synchronism with a self-contained crystal oscillator of comparable accuracy…both camera and recorder reference to self-contained crystal oscillators which are so accurate the effect is the same as if they had been tied together.” Edmund M. Di Giulio, “Crystal Controlled Cordless Camera Drive System”, American Cinematographers Manual, Fifth Edition, pp. 469-472.
18 FBI Memorandum, Griffith to Conrad, January 31, 1964. https://www.maryferrell.org/archive/docs/062/62298/images/img_62298_37_300.png.
19 CBS did their own tests for their 1967 news special on the Warren Report. Using five cameras, the same model as the Zapruder camera (not the actual camera), their tests filming a clock with a sweeping hand resulted in a fair amount of disparity. Roughly matching the timing of the shooting sequence, the common exposed frames came in at 6.16, 6.70, 6.90, 7.30, and 8.35 seconds. Pat Speer: “IN 1967, CBS PURCHASED FIVE IDENTICAL CAMERAS AND FOUND THAT THEY RAN 15.45, 17.7, 18.7, 19.25, AND 20.95 FRAMES PER SECOND, A SIMILAR RANGE WITH A SIMILAR AVERAGE OF 18.4 FPS.” A New Perspective On the Kennedy Assassination, Chapter 2B http://www.patspeer.com/chapter2b%3Athesecretservicesecrets.
20 “It involves the calculation of the mean after discarding given parts of a probability distribution or sample at the high and low end, and typically discarding an equal amount of both.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truncated_mean.
21 CD 298, p. 59 (https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=10699#relPageId=59&tab=page) and CD 298, p. 62 (https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=10699#relPageId=62&tab=page). It should be noted that 17.6 frames per second is cited in the FBI’s January 31, 1964 memorandum in reference to average running speed during the final twenty seconds of the Zapruder camera’s wind. This does not explain how “22 fps” entered the record. Further discussion is found in Pat Speer, A New Perspective On the Kennedy Assassination, Chapter 2B http://www.patspeer.com/chapter2b%3Athesecretservicesecrets.
22 LIFE’s publication schedule was such that editions were assembled a week ahead of publication date. So the December 6 edition would have been largely prepared by the weekend of November 29-Dec 1, and on the newsstands by mid-week.
23 FBI 105-82555 Oswald HQ File, Section 16, pp. 30-31 https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=57688#relPageId=30&tab=page. This report also states the “camera was set to take normal speed movie film or 24 frames per second.” This is incorrect: the Bell & Howell camera’s normal run speed, as noted in its operating manual, was 16 frames per second. The camera had no setting to reproduce 24 frames per second.
24 This comment was most likely derived from Brugioni’s briefing board notes. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=7135#relPageId=4&tab=page.
25 Memorandum 11/25/63, CD 87, p. 91.
26 Philip H. Melanson, “Hidden Exposure: Cover Up and Intrigue in the CIA’s Secret Possession of the Zapruder Film”, The Third Decade, Vol. 1, Issue 1, November 1984. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=48721#relPageId=15&tab=page.
27 Barrett/Lee, Dallas, 11/29/63. https://www.maryferrell.org/archive/docs/010/10406/images/img_10406_120_300.png.
28 Howlett’s measurement for the fatal shot is “approximately 260 feet”, whereas the Secret Service chart (CE 884) notes the distance as 265.3 feet.
29 The FBI’s Frazier would tell the Warren Commission that Connally’s wounds could not have occurred past Z-231, if the shot was fired from the designated TSBD 6th floor window. A week after Howlett shared information with the FBI, the Secret Service would promote a different set of measurements, extending the shooting sequence to the equivalent of Z-217, Z-283, and Z-343 (CE 585). A Visual Aid Guide presented in January 1964 by the FBI to the Warren Commission (CD 298) would include a similar extended measurement whereas the first shot strikes at “167 feet”, the second at “262 feet”, and a third at “307 feet”—a full 45 feet beyond the location of the headshot seen in the Zapruder film. This Visual Aid Guide is therefore saying the fatal shot at Z312 is the second shot in the sequence. See Pat Speer, A New Perspective On the Kennedy Assassination, Chapter 2B (http://www.patspeer.com/chapter2b%3Athesecretservicesecrets) for more discussion.
30 Mandel goes on to describe a sharpshooter test, using the “director of the National Rifle Association”, firing “an identical-make rifle with an identical sight against a moving target over similar ranges for LIFE last week. He got three hits in 6.2 seconds.” Later, at the request of the Warren Commission, the FBI investigated this sharpshooter test. It was determined that the sharpshooter used by LIFE was not “the director” of the NRA, and the test had no connection to the NRA. The test target was approximately fifty yards away and moved “from right to left and back, running for a distance of thirty-three feet in one direction.” (CD 1309) This test may not have been directly related to the Zapruder camera speed test results, as numerous media outlets, including LIFE, were interested in timing tests with a similar rifle very soon after the assassination, even in the absence of any published exact time for the shooting sequence. The “nagging rumor”—that there wasn’t enough time for three shots—probably derived from observation of the bolt action mechanism of the purported assassination weapon. Five decades later, well-founded skepticism remains.
31 “Addendum To Comment On Zapruder Film” https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=7135.
32 “NPIC Analysis of Zapruder Filming of John F. Kennedy Assassination” https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=31994.
33 A handwritten note written by then NPIC Director John Hicks, Brugioni’s boss in 1975, attests that these are “the only known” documents available. In a 2009 interview, Brugioni recalled discovering one of his briefing boards from 1963 during the 1975 review, and that Hicks was distressed about this.
34 Douglas P. Horne, Inside the Assassination Record Review Board, Volume Four, p. 1230.
35 Douglas P. Horne, Inside the Assassination Record Review Board, Volume Four, p. 1224.
36 For discussion of this see Bill Kelly, “CIA Director Told RFK Two People Shooting at JFK” http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.ca/2013/01/cia-director-told-rfk-two-people.html.
37 “The Zapruder film was viewed by this group on a frame-by-frame basis and at various speeds approximately 100 times.” HSCA Report Appendix, Volume VI, p 16. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=958#relPageId=22&tab=page.
38 HSCA Report Appendix, Volume VI, p. 17. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=958#relPageId=23&tab=page.
39 Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, p. 19.
40 see, for example, Pat Speer, A New Perspective on the Kennedy Assassination, Chapter 12 http://www.patspeer.com/chapter12%3Athesingle-bullet%22fact%22. Barb Junkkarinen, “First Shot/First Hit Circa Z-190”, Kennedy Assassination Chronicles, Volume Five, Issue Two, 1999 https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=4884#relPageId=24&tab=page.
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JFK at 100: State of the Records
Audio of CAPA Conference (posted at BlackOp Radio, 827a).
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Reopening the R.F.K. investigation: Paul Schrade and Congressman Allard Lowenstein (1973)
Once again, we thank David Giglio for his help in unearthing this fascinating interview between Paul Schrade and Allard Lowenstein given over KPFK radio in early 1973.Paul Schrade needs no introduction. He was a very effective labor leader of that era who was one of the people shot that night with Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Schrade has worked for decades to get the RFK case reopened, and he is still at it today. He even showed up at the latest parole hearing for Sirhan Sirhan and pleaded with the board to release the alleged assassin.
Unlike for Schrade, the modern readers probably does need an introduction to Allard Lowenstein. Lowenstein graduated from Yale Law School in 1954. He worked on Capitol Hill for Hubert Humphrey as a foreign policy advisor and then volunteered for the civil rights movement during Freedom Summer in Mississippi. One of his many other achievements: he toured southwest Africa in 1959 taking testimony about the reach and deeds of the Union of South Africa. He then wrote a book on the subject entitled Brutal Mandate. Because of that experience, he was called on to help Senator Robert Kennedy compose his landmark address given to the National Union of South African Students at the University of Capetown in 1966.
Sickened by the Vietnam War, Lowenstein started his remarkably successful “Dump Johnson” movement in 1967. He attempted to get both Kennedy and Senator George McGovern to run in the primaries against President Lyndon Johnson. When they both refused, he enlisted Senator Eugene McCarthy to run. After McCarthy nearly defeated the president in the New Hampshire primary, Johnson decided to drop out of the race.
After Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles, Lowenstein successfully ran for Congress in New York. After serving one term he was gerrymandered out of his seat by the Republicans in the state. It was about three years later that Lowenstein decided to listen to some of the complaints being first addressed about the questionable evidence in the RFK assassination. These were first surfaced by a small group of people mostly located in the LA area: Floyd Nelson, Lillian Castellano, Ted Charach. The more he listened, the more he became convinced that there really was something wrong with the official verdict in the case. He therefore became a species of a rare bird: an elected official who actually became an outspoken critic of the authorities in one of the major assassinations of the Sixties. When I say outspoken, I mean outspoken. For instance, in a speech he gave at Stanford in 1975, Lowenstein stated: “We have carried the investigation as far as we can without help.” He then named the DA’s office, the Attorney General of California, the Los Angeles Times and the LAPD as being obstructions in the search for the facts.
Lowenstein’s courageous stand helped inspire other young people to get involved in the RFK case, people like the late Greg Stone. Stone helped Lowenstein write one of the earliest essays to appear in a mainstream journal on the Robert Kennedy assassination. This was his essay in the February 19, 1977 issue of The Saturday Review, entitled “The Murder of Robert Kennedy: Suppressed Evidence of More than one Assassin”. It’s hard to believe, but that essay was the cover story for that issue, something that would seem almost unimaginable today. It is even harder to believe the following: in 1975 he appeared on PBS with William F. Buckley to address these questions about the RFK case.
Lowenstein had nothing but admiration for Bobby Kennedy. In 1971 he called him the greatest leader of the era, someone who every one else who followed would have to subconsciously be measured against. But he then sadly concluded, “We’re not going to get anyone of that quality or capacity again…” He later said something even more prescient, something which characterized the entire end of the decade of the Sixties, and all four assassinations:
Robert Kennedy’s death, like the President’s, was mourned as an extension of the evils of senseless violence; events moved on, and the profound alterations that these deaths … brought in the equation of power in America was perceived as random …. What is odd is not that some people thought it was all random, but that so many intelligent people refused to believe that it might be anything else. Nothing can measure more graphically how limited was the general understanding of what is possible in America.
~ Jim DiEugenio
Transcribed from Pacifica Radio Archives. PRA Archive #BC2125
(Scroll to the bottom for a recent interview of Paul Schade by Len Osanic on BlackOp Radio.)
REOPENING THE R.F.K. INVESTIGATION
Paul Schrade and Allard Lowenstein interviewed by Jim Berland
Jim Berland:
Godfrey Issacs, the attorney for Sirhan Sirhan has made a motion for a new trial in the case of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. He’s not the only one interested in that matter. With me this evening are Paul Schrade, who does labor commentary for KPFK, and Allard Lowenstein, former congressman from New York. They have also taken an interest in the case and, as a matter of fact, have recently issued a statement calling for certain steps to be taken to look into the investigation, which has resulted in a good deal of confusion, perhaps more in the Los Angeles media than in any place else as the assassination took place in Los Angeles.
One of those confusing episodes was the contradictory statements by Thomas Noguchi, the coroner in the case, at one point saying that the bullet that issued from Sirhan’s gun could not have killed Robert Kennedy, and then a couple of years later saying that Sirhan was the only one who could have killed Robert Kennedy. What other contradictions are you pointing to, and what would you like to see done about it?
Paul Schrade:
Well, the contradiction that worries me most, because I was directly involved, is that the Los Angeles Police Department has made an inventory of the eight bullets fired by Sirhan, by his gun. And that inventory says that the bullet that wounded me in the head passed through the right shoulder of Robert Kennedy’s coat. That bullet didn’t wound him, but it passed through from back to front.
I recall that I was standing behind Robert Kennedy observing him shaking hands with the workers in the Ambassador Hotel kitchen, and was to his left behind him. I cannot, in my own mind, reconcile the passage of that bullet from back to front through Kennedy’s coat and winding up in my head. He would have had to been completely turned around facing me in a totally different direction. When I was shot and became unconscious as a result of it, at no time had he moved to that position. If that’s the case, then, if we can’t reconcile that part of the inventory at the Los Angeles Police Department, then we have a ninth bullet. So, that’s one of the major contradictions that appears based upon the evidence provided by the Los Angeles Police Department and the prosecution.
Jim Berland:
What other kinds of contradictions? I know that Issacs has said in his motion that he feels that it was physically improbable, if not impossible, for Sirhan to have fired the bullet that killed Robert Kennedy.
Allard Lowenstein:
The central fact, which some how or other gets lost when you listen to Chief Davis or Mr. Busch, is that the bullet that killed Robert Kennedy went in at one inch, and the it is impossible to find any of all those people who were in that kitchen that, in fact, testified that the gun that was supposed to have fired that bullet was anywhere near one inch from Senator Kennedy’s head. Now, I find that compelling, not because eyewitness testimony is reliable. It is not and everyone knows that, but it clearly is difficult to say that a bullet that killed Robert Kennedy at a distance of one inch was fired from a gun which is variously placed at anywhere up to six feet away from him.
And when the police and the district attorney try to get past that by saying, “Nobody saw another gun, therefore it’s clear that it was Sirhan’s gun,” what they’re doing is taking the position that there are none so blind as those who will not see what the Los Angeles Police want them to see. Because in fact everyone has testified the same central fact that has to be faced, which is that Sirhan was in front of Kennedy, that even if Kennedy had turned, and he had, and had not turned back, and that’s in dispute, it is impossible for a gun to fire a bullet point blank into Kennedy’s head if that gun was feet away from him.
Now, I think that if that can’t be reconciled, if we can’t find some way to square that, that we then must go beyond our fantasy, which has always been mine particularly, and I’m talking out of a sense of my own guilt and negligence, not pointing fingers at anyone else. But we ought to get past the fantasy that’s gripped us all these years that somehow or another there was nothing here except Sirhan. What there was beyond Sirhan, I don’t know, but I’m saying that we mustn’t fantasize answers. We must try to find facts and then decide from those facts what, in fact, occurred.
So, I start with a very real concern that we not let the continual misstatement of the eyewitness testimony confuse us. The eyewitness testimony is the main basis on which Davis and Busch and these other people insist that the case is closed. They say, “Everyone saw Sirhan shooting Kennedy.” Well, everyone saw Sirhan shooting. The issue of whether they saw them shooting Kennedy has to do with where the bullet entered Kennedy, or bullets entered Kennedy, and where the people put the gun that was shooting. And so they quite intentionally turn around what the eyewitness testimony is to try to make it say what they want it to say, and it says the opposite.
So, while I have problems about the number of bullets, I think that’s the central question. Paul mentioned one of the explanations that the authorities have given for the fact that there are so many mores holes than there are bullets. They give others, of course, when they find these don’t stand up. I have problems about that, and I have problems about the fact that the bullet in Senator Kennedy’s neck appears not to be from the same gun as the bullet in the walls of his stomach. I say “appears” because we’re not making any definitive statements about that either. But what troubles me the most is when you take everyone’s view of what they saw, and you take the statistics that have been compiled about those bullets and you take the autopsy report and you add it together you have a probability factor that says, “Something is rotten in the way this thing was explained to the public.”
It’s at that point that we say, “Answer these questions,” and what we get when we raise these questions is even more troublesome because what we get is a combination of suppressing our position so that, in fact, it’s impossible to find out what it is. As for instance the Los Angeles Times, which has twice declined to report extensive statements that Paul and I have made about the facts and about our questions. Never have those questions that we’ve raised appeared, but instead of that they have taken out of context and distorted what we said and then attacked us for saying things we didn’t say.
And the same has been done now to Mr. Harper, the ballistics man in Pasadena whose affidavit has been, I think, as careful and thorough as any man’s could be on the basis of what he’s been allowed to study. And yet the papers that have reported what he has said have alleged that he has repudiated what he said without ever reporting what he said, and, in fact, what he said was that the evidence is not definitive, that the questions are serious and can be determined if we will go through certain procedures so that we have some idea of what the facts are. That, they say, is repudiation of something without ever reporting what it is he said they say he’s now repudiating.
So I get troubled about the effort to distort what we’re saying and then to discredit us. I heard poor Chief Davis saying the other day that the people on lecture tours are doing all this. That’s a sad thing for the man to say. He knows perfectly well that not only am I not on a lecture tour and not only is Paul not on a lecture tour, but beyond that all the expenses that are involved, considerable expenses, have been paid out of my rather limited pocket and out of Paul’s. We don’t get subsidized, we don’t want to get subsidized.
For a man in Chief Davis’ position to be that careless about his statements about people who are earnestly trying to get to the facts, who have met with him, never questioned his motives, never imputed Mr. Busch’s motives, we’ve tried very hard to work with them cooperatively, is disturbing because if they’re that careless about this how do I know that they can be trusted in what they say about anything else? So there’s a whole pattern that I believe has emerged since our pubic statement of distortion and of an effort to discredit, of a failure to deal with the questions we’ve raised, which has intensified our sense that there has to be an investigation.
Jim Berland:
What are the ballistic things that Mr. Harper has referred to that should be tested in order to clarify what he calls, now, an unclear situation?
Paul Schrade:
Well, one of the most important things that he discovered was the question of the cannelure. A cannelure is a neuraled ring on the bullet itself, and the reason this becomes significant is that on the whole bullet that’s in evidence that was pulled from the stomach of Billy Weisel, who was the ABC Television producer wounded that night, that bullet in comparison with the bullet that was fired into Kennedy’s back that was recovered and is still in evidence, those two bullets differ in the number of cannelures they have. Those on the Weisel bullet, there are two stripes or cannelures. On the Kennedy bullet there’s only one. That becomes important because the manufacturer of the bullets in the Sirhan gun never made more than a two-cannelure bullet, so the one-cannelure bullet coming out of Kennedy then becomes important in raising doubts that Sirhan was the only person firing a gun in there that night.
Now, the prosecution, again, raised questions about this. They say the bullets in evidence have been tampered with or damaged, yet two sets of photographs of those two bullets, one was made in 1970 under the auspices of William Harper. The other set was made through a court order received by county supervisor Baxter Ward. That second set was made April of ’74. Those two photographs, when you look at them, show no damage to the bullets, and no deterioration as Busch and Davis charge, or at least they raise that question.
Allard Lowenstein:
Hint.
Paul Schrade:
They hint that that’s the case, yet they never say, “Let’s take a look at them to find out if they’ve been damaged or there is deterioration.” So, the cannelure question becomes important because if these are two different manufacturers then Sirhan could not have fired that one bullet into the back because that bullet would have had to come from a different manufacturer. Now, the Los Angeles Police Department and the prosecution confirm that Sirhan’s gun carried the bullets of only one manufacturer, Cascade Cartridge Company. So, that’s one part of the ballistics on it.
The other is that both Harper and McDonald and, by the way, a third ballistics expert or forensic expert as they’re called, have checked out the photographs and have determined that the rifling angle and the barrel markings are significantly different. This could, then, be the basis of finding another gun involved rather than just the Sirhan gun. So, we’re asking that the gun be re-fired, these comparisons be made, that all of the bullets in evidence, seven of the eight, portions of which, or all of which, were collected by the Los Angeles Police Department. That the ballistics experts have a chance to take a look at those barrel markings and riflings and check out the manufacturer.
There’s one very good test that was canceled by coroner Noguchi on the basis of advice from the LAPD’s expert, DeWayne Wolfer. That test was called a neutron activation test. That test can determine the content of the bullets or the bullet fragments still in evidence and go a long way in determining the manufacturer. Again, if variations in manufacture show up in those tests, then we’re on the road to determining there was a second gun. So, all of these tests can be made and should be made.
It’s really very difficult to understand why Chief Davis and District Attorney Busch refuse to do this. We know that Sirhan’s moving to get a new trial. We think the issues and the questions in this case are much more compelling than anything Sirhan wants to do, and this is why we’re carrying on our independent investigation and presentation of information to the pubic because there are broader issues involved than just Sirhan’s welfare, and this is why we’re so concerned and why we raised these questions in our statement last December 15th.
Jim Berland:
I noticed that you talk about the nature of Sirhan’s trial and explain the fact that it was not a trial of fact. Could you explain that to our listeners? What actually happened at Sirhan’s trial the first time around?
Allard Lowenstein:
The defense position was that Sirhan had, in fact, killed Kennedy, but that he was of diminished mental capacity and, therefore, should not get the gas chamber. His lawyer then, his chief counsel, Grant Cooper, who’s a very distinguished member of the Los Angeles bar says now that if he’d known then what he knows now he would have had a different defense. And, in fact, one of the questions that’s disturbing is why some of the information that is clearly pertinent wasn’t available to the defense at that time, and that’s a question that, I believe, may account for some of the nervousness of the authorities.
The authorities acted at that time, I want to give the most generous interpretation I can to what’s happened on their side, they acted on the knowledge, which appeared total, and which I shared, which that is to say all of us shared. I think very few people questioned the certainty that Sirhan had killed Robert Kennedy, and acting on that certainty as it appeared then, the trial was not a trial as it would have normally been in determining the facts of what occurred. But, giving that generous interpretation of what happened, and I think it’s a fair assumption that the authorities could have believed that and therefore have assumed that anything to the contrary was confusion, giving that interpretation to it would require them now to say, “Look, in view of what has become clear we want to cooperate in finding out what did happen because this is not a matter of intentional deception or anything at the time of the murder. What this is is a question of what occurred at one of the turning points in recent American history.” Robert Kennedy was a person so potential, so beloved, really so unique for this country at that time that his demise, then, scooped out the country from its chin to its knees. It left us with a sense that almost has gotten worse with time, which is unusual with a death of a person. That that should be treated as something where it is only a historical footnote to know how it came about, understanding the impact of that death and understanding the potential lesson for the future that may or not lurk in it as to how that happened and what it portends, there is no way that a person who loves the United States and cares about what happens now can say that this has to be considered closed.
It isn’t closed, it will not be closed. It will be closed only when these tests have been conducted, and if these tests are not decisive, then so be it. Let’s at least find that out, but don’t say we won’t conduct tests because the results of those tests may not be decisive. That’s simply using an excuse to prevent trying to find out something which we have a right to try to find out. If in the end we can’t find it out, at least let it be not that we never tried, but that having tried we failed and then we have to live with it. I believe we can find out a great deal by these tests, and that what the authorities ought to be doing is to move quickly to cooperate in bringing those tests about in order that we know all that we possibly can know, and then develop from there the kind of investigation that that may dictate.
If it turns out those bullets match, if it turns out the eyewitness testimony can be reconciled, if it turns out that when the gun is test fired there is no problem of matching that with the bullet from Senator Kennedy’s neck, if the neutron activation analysis supports the theory that Sirhan’s gun did in fact, then I would say, “All right, the trajectory problem remains, but let’s accept the fact that the preponderance of evidence is that, even though it’s hard to understand, that those eight bullets did inflict those bullet holes.”
Do you see what I’m saying? Is that if any major chunk of these doubts can be allayed, as I believe they can, if they’re allayable, then the other questions, some of which we haven’t even mentioned today because they’re so numerous that they could take hours to list, we would, I think both of us, be prepared to say, “Well, we will accept as nearly definitive we can these answers.” But it’s the concealment and the dishonesty and the effort to discredit the questions. It’s the fact that when people give information from official positions they’ve told me repeatedly things which were not true, which doesn’t make me feel that they’re interested in getting to the bottom of the case. These kinds of things make what are doubts become more persistent doubts, not less.
Jim Berland:
Now, you’ve called for the release of a 10-volume report of the official investigation and of the official trajectory study. Does that include the information from the coroner’s office, and what kind of things do you expect there, or what are you hoping for? Is it common for this kind of material to be released?
Allard Lowenstein:
Well, it’s difficult to know what’s in it since we haven’t had access to it. It’s also difficult to know why we can’t have access to it since there seems to be no reason why if the information there sustains the verdict it should be kept secret. There’s no rule that requires that information of an investigation of this kind be, in effect, classified. There’s no suggestion that the national security is involved or that the foreign policy of the United States would be compromised or any of the things that would may be be used as a justification for preventing the public from having access to information which is of public concern. So, I don’t know why it’s not made available.
The kinds of information that I would like to see available to the public include, for instance, the issue of what happened to Senator Kennedy’s clothes. The reason I’m pausing is I’m trying to take examples which are not so complicated that it takes longer to explain why it’s crucial than it’s worth. Take this, one of the bullets that Paul referred to the peculiar course of the bullet that was supposed to have hit him. There was another bullet that was supposed to have gone through Senator Kennedy’s chest, hit a ceiling panel, which was an inch thick, gone through that to the ceiling above, that is the floor above, bounced off that, come back through another ceiling panel, also approximately an inch thick, and then taken off down the pantry 20 feet to hit Mrs. Evans in the head. Mrs. Evans was, at the time, troubling over her shoe, which had fallen off, and she was hit in a direction that went up, not down in her head.
One of the things that I would like to find out is what the evidence is on those ceiling panels. I’d like to see, as I’m told it can be done, which bullet holes in those ceiling panels are entry holes, where the bullets went up and where they came down. Then you understand, you find something out. If the bullet didn’t go up through one panel and down through the next, then we have to have another bullet. Furthermore, I’d like to find out whether firing a bullet through someone’s simulated chest and then through two ceiling panels that are almost an inch thick each, and then having it go 20 feet and hit a lady in another simulated head, whether there would be 31 grains left of that bullet out of the 39 that it had when it started. If so, I’d like to know that, but if not I think the police ought to want to know that because that means that their explanation of that bullet doesn’t stand up.
Now, there are a lot of other questions like that. I’m afraid I’m going on at length, and I didn’t intend to. What I’m suggesting to you is that that we submitted 23 questions over a year ago to the authorities. They could be expanded probably three or four times as much. But those 23 questions are questions which, presumably, this 10-volume report should be able to answer one way or another. I can’t believe that these questions didn’t occur to anyone til we came along. That seems to me to assume almost an arrogant attitude about the wisdom and the intelligence of the people dealing with the case. If these questions were dealt with there’s got to be some way that we can find out what the answers were to these questions, and so far the authorities have not either been able or have been willing to give us those answers. I’ll give you one other example. No, I won’t. I’ve talked too long on that question.
Jim Berland:
Well, the interesting thing is that there has been some investigation done, and the existence of a second gun is not just a matter of conjecture. What of the second gun? How did that come about? How did that discovery take place? Is there, in fact, a real second gun, or is it the figment of some other biased investigator’s imagination? Is that [inaudible 00:21:23]?
Paul Schrade:
There’s been a lot of private investigation going on over the years. Both Al and I share guilt in not recognizing there were serious questions before this. But those of us who were friends of Robert Kennedy felt very deeply about his death and it was very painful for us to even consider there was anything else involved than the one-gun, lone assassin theory because that’s what obvious was before the public. It was presented in the trial and so forth. But there were people who were diligently working at finding out more information because there were questions in people’s minds right from the beginning. One film I’ve seen on the second gun, I’m displeased with the film itself because I think that it’s not well-done. It does raise very important information, and should be seen. Although, my criticisms, I believe, are valid of that film.
Ted Chirac, who did the film, did discover something that the Los Angeles Police Department with all of their investigators and the tens of thousands of hours of investigations they claim they made, and probably did, they were not able to discover, that an armed guard in that room was carrying a gun, had pulled that gun during the assassination, although he himself said that he didn’t fire it. I’m not charging he fired it or is even a suspect in this case, but there’s some other things about him that were discovered by a private investigation. One is that he owned a 22 caliber pistol that he claimed he sold in February of ’68, months before the assassination. Well, private investigator, Ted Chirac, found out that that gun actually had been purchased by a person in September of ’68, after the assassination. So, most likely it was in the possession of this guard during the period of the assassination. Now, on the record he said he sold it beforehand.
So, that question was never explored by the Los Angeles Police. They never confiscated the gun that he said he had in the room that night, which he claims was his 38 pistol that he carried as a guard. So, the police didn’t get into this question. The police did say that they checked out everybody in the kitchen area that night who might possibly have been present during the assassination to check political background. They said nobody of extremist views or antagonistic to Kennedy was in that room that night. Yet, this same guard testified that he raised money, a small amount, for George Wallace and distributed leaflets for him. The same guard considered both Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy enemies who were selling out the country to the commies and to the blacks, and so here is a man of very extreme political views present there. Yet, the LA Police Department investigation did not discover that, or discovered it and didn’t say anything about it. So, that man ought to be checked out.
There’s one other thing that the police didn’t discover, and that is that there was a man working for the Ambassador Hotel in the kitchen who was listed by the Secret Service, according to Metro Media, listed by the Secret Service as a man dangerous to presidents. Now, I would think that man had some extreme views, and, yet, the Los Angeles Police Department never mentioned that in the investigation.
Allard Lowenstein:
Nor the fact that in Sirhan’s pocket the night he was arrested was found the key to a car and that when Sirhan refused to reveal his name and the police dispatched two detectives to the Ambassador Hotel with instructions to find a car that that key fitted so they could find out who they had at Rampart, the key fitted the car of this individual that Paul is talking about. The explanation given is that this man’s ignition was lose, and that’s why Sirhan had a key in his pocket that fitted that car. Now, one of the questions I asked a year ago, to which there may be a simple answer, is did the key that was found in Sirhan’s pocket fit Sirhan’s car?
I’m not interested in the excuse or the fact that the ignition was lose. What I’m interested in was he carrying the key to another man’s car, and if so what connection does that indicate existed between these people? These questions are among that sea or that web that I mentioned earlier on, are answerable questions, and may not indicate anything at all. But, because of the central circumstance there have to be some concern about the failure to investigate thoroughly or to answer accurately these kinds of questions.
There’s an extraordinary woman that lives in Los Angeles called Lillian Castellano who has a whole, literally an attic filled with documentation of inconsistencies in official positions. Most of those inconsistencies, if you could square the central facts, one could accept is the result of haste or bungling or human failure. But, failing to get those kinds of central questions answered, when you find that the police are saying that witnesses said things which are literally the reverse of what they said, you get troubled. I think what we’re suggesting today, as we’ve been suggesting for some time, is that if these questions can be answered, so much the better. But, if they can’t isn’t it urgently needed to find out some facts from which we can then try to understand what damaged us so much that night?
Paul Schrade:
And here the authorities have a very important responsibility in getting to the truth in this matter because there are serious doubts about the case now, and I’m sure many people agree with us on it. Yet, we find the authorities most reluctant to do anything but slam the door on us and not answer any questions. The authorities are really responsible, in great part, for the doubt, for the gaps in the evidence that we’ve discussed here this evening, and are doing nothing to allay those doubts, and therefore they have some responsibility in this. And this is why I get very, very concerned when the authorities tell us, “Well, let Sirhan take the initiative. Let Sirhan go to court. Join Sirhan in what he’s trying to do.”
Well, I’m unwilling to do that. First of all, my own personal feelings are most likely evident to most people why I wouldn’t want to do that. But just on the more serious question of the truth in this case, it’s more important that the authorities and concerned citizens get involved and try to solve these problems rather than leaving it to a person who, obviously, was there intending to kill Robert Kennedy, who said on the witness stand that he did kill Kennedy. I don’t see why the authorities allow the initiative to remain in Sirhan’s hands. And this is why we’re going to continue to insist that the authorities who, in great part, are responsible for the doubts, for the lack of a competent investigation, or their keeping information from the public, that they have an initiative in this one, too, and have a greater responsibility than anyone to get to the bottom of these questions.
Allard Lowenstein:
And since we’re recording in Los Angeles may I just say that I would hope that the citizens of this city, if nothing more came of listening to us, would insist that the Los Angeles Times, which has pretenses of being a national newspaper of quality, and has prospects of that, which I’ve admired for years as a paper that one can rely on ahead of so many other papers because of its thoroughness and fairness, that the Los Angeles Times explain to the citizens of Los Angeles what conceivable circumstance justifies refusing to report accurately questions raised by responsible people about a murder that occurred in this city. And then distorting those questions and attacking the people who raised them in a way which makes it impossible for the people of this city even to know what the issues are. I think that question ought to be put to the Los Angeles Times by the citizens of this community until an answer is obtained.
Jim Berland:
Have you received any positive response from public officials, anyone associated with the City of Los Angeles, with the congressional or senatorial delegation in California, with other public figures in the United States?
Allard Lowenstein:
Yes, I would say that there is overwhelming support, sympathy, interest from public people and that if it gets to the point to where we have to join in this kind of public, I hate even to contemplate it, of a public argument going on, that that will be marshaled. We have not asked, nor do we now want, to try to get into that situation. We still hope that there will be through the channels that are appropriate and without a political battle that there will be cooperation. But if that doesn’t happen, I can assure you that the information that is necessary to bring about major support from political and other influential people around the country will occur.
Jim Berland:
One last question, how is it that not only this assassination, but the assassination of John Kennedy should become embroiled in this kind of confusion? What is it about assassination, do you think, that leads the local authorities to apparently fix on a target as the criminal involved and be so reluctant to expand their investigation?
Allard Lowenstein:
I wouldn’t want to say something about that that I’m not sure Paul would agree with. We haven’t really talked this through, and I’m not speaking for anyone but myself. I am not now prepared to generalize about the assassinations. I am only prepared now to generalize about questions about assassinations. I’m no longer prepared to believe automatically, as I did for many years, that the Warren Commission was correct. Obviously, that seems to me now to be subject to reexamination also. But it may very well be that there were in each of these assassinations separate circumstances that produced these assassinations. They may not be at all interlocked. The circumstances attending the investigations may all be separate, even though there were similar difficulties, so that I would say first that it’s possible that the bedlam that’s caused and the horror that’s caused induces a kind of momentary incompetence among people who then cover up their own incompetence out of human concerns for their careers. That’s very possible.
I would want to expressly state that it seems to me as injudicious to go from where we are now to a conclusion that there is a pattern in these assassinations that interlocks them in either investigation or in cause, as it was as injudicious before to conclude that only loose nuts could have done these things. The one thing that I most want to do, and pledge that I will try for myself to do, is to come to no conclusions until we have facts on which we can make reasonable conclusions.
But, obviously, if we now let Los Angeles sit in its present state without understanding what the evidence is that we can get, then we are going to, I believe as Paul said before, multiply the doubts about everything because people are going to say, “Well, my goodness, if they won’t even take, the authorities, that is, won’t even take these simple steps. Why can’t they test-fire a gun? Is there a rational person who can understand why a gun can’t be test-fired? Why it should take a court fight to test-fire a gun?” There isn’t anyone who can understand that once you understand that we don’t even know if the gun was ever test-fired because the authorities say that when they test-fired it last time and they introduced the bullets into evidence they put on the exhibit, exhibit 55, the number of a different gun. We didn’t do it, they did it, and why they don’t want to clarify what may have been a clerical error by test-firing that gun and answering that question is baffling.
And so, we come back to your question, why these things occur? Maybe because there were separate circumstances that overlapped by coincidence, maybe not. But, if we don’t start to get answers to these questions, the sense that there’s something more that leads people to stonewall, which is the thing most Americans learned most clearly in the last two years, is that when authorities stonewall there’s something they don’t to have people know, and people are not accepting that any longer, I believe, in the United States. Now, if Paul wants to separate his view on that I’d be glad to yield to that.
Paul Schrade:
Well, it’s similar to that, and it raises a question of why the men who’ve been assassinated in this country are those who are in some way dealing with very serious problems Americans have, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King. You can even include the contract out on Cesar Chavez’s life that was discovered a couple of years ago. Why are these persons the targets of assassins? That question comes in very strongly in this case and has to be dealt with.
One of the convincing things that has come, to me, is that even though I knew Richard Nixon when he first began running for office and knew how corrupt he was, I still had a very difficult time believing that he would do the kinds of things and abusing the power of the presidency that he did while he was in office. And when you take that into account, plus the revelations now about the CIA being involved in domestic activities, the FBI and the military being involved in the campuses during the periods of demonstrations in the last several years, are totally corrupting the democratic system. And, using burglary and surveillance and murder as tactics in maintaining their particular form of control over the population, those things strongly motivate me in getting to the bottom of these questions.
But, this is why we also have to exercise a great deal of discipline and self control. We’ve got to get at the bottom of these kinds of questions on the basis of the evidence, and we’ve got to do it based upon what we think is a system of justice so that we get to the bottom of these questions based upon the questions we’ve raised and the answers to them. I’m willing to back away from this whole thing if the serious questions we’ve raised with the authorities are reconciled in some intelligent, rational way. And, yet, all we’re getting is stonewalling, suppressing of information, questioning of people’s motives and no real objective consideration of these questions, and this is what we’re demanding of the authorities. And, we’re going to continue demanding answers to those questions, and I’m sure the public will support us on those.
Jim Berland:
Paul Schrade and Allard Lowenstein, thank you very much. For KPFK in Los Angeles this is Jim Berland.
Written by OurHiddenHistory on Monday February 20, 2017
Interview of Paul Schrade by Len Osanic, BlackOp Radio, March 2, 2017
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