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Tag: ARRB

  • The Crimes of Quillette

    The Crimes of Quillette

    I’ll say this for Fred Litwin: He knows where to go to advance his cause.

    On Steve Paikan’s Ontario TV show The Agenda, Litwin stated that nothing in the declassified files of the ARRB indicated anything about a conspiracy in the JFK case. This is simply and utterly false. As I wrote about Litwin’s essay on Jim Garrison, this statement proves one of two things: 1.) He did not read any of the declassified files, or 2.) He did read them and is deliberately misrepresenting them. In my review I proved that such was the case with several specific examples. This exposure reduces Litwin to the level of Leslie Nielson as Lt. Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun: proclaiming to a gatheringcrowd there was nothing to see as, behind him, bombs explode a fireworks factory. But this is the kind of poseur that Litwin is, except he is not nearly as funny as Nielson.

    In addition to his interview, Litwin has also done an article for an online journal. That online journal is something called Quillette, which I never knew existed until someone pointed out the Litwin article. I would have never found this journal on my own, and I would not have been missing anything.

    Quillette is a libertarian inspired anti-PC, anti-liberal journal founded by one Claire Lehmann. Journalist Bari Weiss grouped Lehmann as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, along with the likes of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. (See this article for info on Peterson) Shapiro is the snarky right-winger who went on MSNBC to defend gun rights by handing the host, Piers Morgan, a copy of the constitution. Unfortunately Morgan, a Brit, did not reply with, “Ben, do you also believe that African Americans should count as 3/5 of a person for census purposes? Because that is what this document says. Should they, and also women, be allowed to vote? Because under this document they were not.” As Alice Dreger wrote, opinions are not scholarship, and that is what the members of this group generally offer. (“Why I escaped the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’’’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/11/2018) She could have added that snark does not denote intelligence. As with the Shapiro exchange, it’s often just an excuse for being a smartass. Quillette published the so-called “Google memo” by James Damore, in which he accused that company of practicing reverse discrimination which somehow hurt Asians and whites and males. The right loves this kind of thing since it is a way to repudiate the affirmative action policies originated by President Kennedy. Except, by reading some of their articles concerning JFK, I would be willing to wager than no one at Quillette even knows that JFK started that policy. The Intellectual Dark Web is really the cover layer for the rise of the Trumpian alt-right. If the reader understands all that, then everything that follows is as natural as water running over a rock.

    I

    On September 27, 2018, Quillette published an article by Litwin based on his book I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak. That article tried to make the case that somehow the KGB was involved in fostering JFK conspiracy thinking in the USA by planting disinformation stories. Litwin, not the most original researcher, largely based his piece on the work of Max Holland. He labels Holland an historian—which he is not. Two of the three pieces that Holland says are KGB produced disinformation are not disinfo at all. I dealt with them in my critique of Holland’s original article that The Daily Beast was dumb enough to print. As I noted there, the late Mark Lane did not get secret donations from the KGB. And he proved this in his book, The Last Word. (pp. 92-96) As I showed in my critique of Litwin’s essay on Jim Garrison, the last thing in the world that Permindex was was a creation of the KGB. And Shaw’s association with it was something he himself acknowledged. I demonstrated this, not just in my previous essay on Litwin, but also in my lengthy exposure of Holland.

    The third piece of alleged KGB mischief that Litwin brings up is the famous “Dear Mr. Hunt letter”. In book form this was first produced in Henry Hurt’s volume Reasonable Doubt. It is a note dated November 8, 1963, and addressed to a Mr. Hunt. It is written in cursive and reads, “I would like information regarding my position. I am only asking for information. I am asking that we discuss the matter fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else. Thank you.” Oswald’s signature follows. (See HSCA Vol. 4, p. 337) Again, Litwin says this was part of a Russian intelligence operation codenamed Arlington.

    One of the problems with that pronouncement is that the Dallas Morning News ran a story saying they had three handwriting analysts look at the note: Mary Harrison, Allan R. Keon and Mary Duncan. They compared it to samples of Oswald’s writing. All three concluded it was genuine. (NY Times, April 4, 1977) The trio belonged to a professional organization called the Independent Association of Questioned Document Examiners. Harrison said she would be comfortable going into court and presenting her analysis. Litwin gets around this problem by saying that the NY Times wrote of the note’s possible authenticity. As the reader can see, that is not what the Times reported. The HSCA did not make a conclusive judgment about the note because it was a photocopy. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 236) On this point, Ms. Harrison stated that reproductions are often presented in court.

    Most of the Litwin/Holland material was produced by KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin. Making the Mitrokhin case look even worse on this matter is the work of researcher Greg Doudna. Doudna did his best to track down the evidence Mitrokhin had purloined from the KGB showing the note was a forgery. In Mitrokhin’s book, The Sword and the Shield, there is a footnote referencing some original papers at a British university. (Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew, pp. 228-29) Greg got in contact with the curator at Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, and part of the University of Cambridge. To cut to the chase, there is no evidence for this forgery in the Mitrokin collection. All there exists to back up that footnote is a typed draft of the book. This is the kind of scholarship Litwin offered and Quillette accepted. (E-mail communication with Doudna, 11/28/2018)

    Mitrokhin was a former KGB archivist who became a defector. Apparently, neither Litwin, nor anyone at Quillette, ever read Amy Knight’s coruscating review of his role in the wave of alleged Soviet defectors finding their home with Anglo-American publishers and newspapers owned by the likes of Rupert Murdoch. As she points out, when first drafts by these defecting authors were not sensational enough, they were spiced up. And presto! They now included information like, well, how about Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer were giving atomic secrets to the USSR? And Oppenheimer recruited Klaus Fuchs—who actually was a spy—to Los Alamos, the location of the Manhattan Project. Knight, a real scholar in the field of Soviet studies, had some fun with that one. (“The Selling of the KGB”, Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2000) She had more fun with the source for both Holland and Litwin. The idea that an archivist did not have access to a copier for 12 years and therefore had to scribble down notes from documents, instead of copying the documents themselves, this simply strains credulity. But if one sees this new field of exchange as a marketable continuation of the Cold War—with impoverished KGB agents finding a way to make mucho bucks from an American/British Establishment that has a lot invested in the justification of that Cold War—then it makes sense. Somehow, the anti-PC Quillette fails to acknowledge that angle. Which indicates what their political correctness is all about.

    In fact, on the matter of the JFK case, Quillette is Establishment to the hilt—and beyond. On the 55th anniversary of the murder of President Kennedy, they gave Litwin an encore. They ran an echo to his book. One of the editors, Jamie Palmer, penned a piece called “My Misspent years of Conspiracism”. All I can say to Mr. Palmer is that if this was an audition for the big-time MSM, he should be getting a few calls from the Fox network in the near future.

    II

    In Litwin’s book, he says that what originally convinced him there was a conspiracy in the JFK case was ABC TV’s public showing of the Zapruder film in 1975. In Palmer’s Bildungsroman, it was his viewing of the film JFK. But even in describing that experience the reader can see why, as with Litwin, Palmer ended up being a Warren Commission shill. He writes that somehow the Mr. X character in that film turned out not to be credible. That character is based on Fletcher Prouty, and virtually everything he related from his own experience at the meeting in Washington with the Jim Garrison character has turned out to be accurate. That Mr. X/Garrison conversation on a park bench concerning Vietnam has revolutionized our thinking about that entire conflict. It inspired several books that have advanced the film’s thesis even further. Namely, that President Kennedy was not going to escalate the Vietnam quagmire any further, that no combat troops would be sent into theater, and the advisors America had there were going to be recalled. From what I have seen of Quillette, they would not print scholars like David Kaiser or Gordon Goldstein or James Blight. That’s not what they are about. Litwin is.

    Palmer is unintentionally funny when he gets to the turning point of his personal saga. He says that his original beliefs about the case were reversed when he watched the 2003 program on the assassination that was produced by Peter Jennings at ABC and broadcast in England by the BBC. This site carries an entire section consisting of 16 critical articles demonstrating why Jennings’ show was a three-ring circus. From Jennings’ hiring of Gus Russo as his main consultant, to the “computer simulation” of the Magic Bullet, the program was a set up to revivify the corpse of the Warren Report. Our articles expose that agenda in gruesome detail. Somehow, Palmer swallowed it whole. In fact, he calls this program “a masterpiece of methodical argument”.

    Palmer goes on to describe certain parts of that “methodical argument” for an entire section of his long essay. What is incredible about his recitation is that, with one exception, it is all recycled Warren Commission drivel used to convict Oswald in 1964. Are we to believe that in over ten years of his belief that Oswald was innocent Palmer never read any of this material? Not even in books critical of the Commission? For he now says that he sees that Stone was remiss by not including the shooting attempt at General Edwin Walker in his film. Palmer writes, “Oswald had tried to assassinate someone else in April 1963.” The case against Oswald in the Walker shooting has been well examined by, among others, Gerald McKnight in his fine book Breach of Trust. That book is 13 years old, so if Palmer wanted to check up on that incident, he could have.

    First off, the Walker shooting was investigated by the Dallas Police for over seven months and Oswald was never a suspect. Why? For one, the best witness was Kirk Coleman. He ran out of his neighboring house right after hearing the shot. He saw two men escaping, in two separate cars. Further, when he was shown pictures of Oswald by the FBI, he failed to identify him as either man. (McKnight, p. 57) But beyond that, a cursory look at the Warren Report reveals that Oswald did not drive, or own a car. Another witness, Robert Surrey, told the police that two nights before the shooting he had seen two men casing Walker’s house. They left in a Ford. Again, he said that neither man looked like Oswald. (McKnight, p. 58) Tough to go into court when the two eyewitnesses deny the defendant was there.

    But it’s worse than that. The bullet recovered from the scene of the crime, which missed Walker from about 25 feet away, was not the correct ammunition for the alleged Oswald rifle. In newspaper and police accounts it was reported as a 30.06 projectile, not 6.5 mm. Plus, it was steel jacketed, not copper jacketed as was the ammunition used for the Oswald rifle, and therefore was a different hue. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 100) The reason the FBI and the Warren Commission had to pin the Walker shooting on Oswald was because there was next to nothing in his past to connect him to such an outburst of murderous violence as occurred in Dealey Plaza, and later, with the killing of Patrolman Tippit. In the Marines, Oswald accidentally injured himself when a derringer went off as he opened a locker. He then had a dispute with an officer and threw a drink in his face. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 130) What makes that sum total even weaker is that Oswald liked and admired President Kennedy. (Dick Russell, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, p. 206)

    The one exception to his warmed over Warren Commission refuse is contained in Palmer’s final and thunderous J’accuse against Stone. The author concludes his conversion story by praising the ABC-produced Dale Myers computer simulation of the Magic Bullet done for the Jennings program. That simulation was supposed to show the Warren Commission was correct in saying that one bullet went through both John Kennedy and Governor John Connally, making seven wounds, smashing two bones, and emerging from its journey in pretty much unscathed condition, missing only 3 grains of its original mass. There have been several devastating critiques of this simulation. All Palmer had to do was search the web and he would have found them. In our section on this site, we feature three full-scale dismantlings of Myers and his cartoon. The Single Bullet Theory, the sine qua non of the Warren Report, simply did not happen. And when one has to cut as many corners as Myers does in order to create a Rube Goldberg contraption to say it did, then such is the proof of the plot. That Mr. Palmer did not consult any of these critiques says a lot about his personal bias and also his honesty with his readers. He actually writes that he found Myers’ simulation “too convincing to dismiss”.

    Robert Harris showed how easy it was to dismiss. He demonstrated that Myers deliberately misplaced the positions of Kennedy and Connally in the car for ABC. Harris proved this was the case by using actual images from the Zapruder film to demonstrate that Myers had jammed the two victims much closer together than they were, thereby foreshortening the firing trajectory. Myers also changed the position of the two men and altered the image of the car within the same traveling shot. He did this in order to conceal the fact that when placed in their proper perspective, the Magic Bullet comes in way too low to strike Connally in the right rear shoulder. In spite of all this, Palmer concludes this section of his essay by saying that if this same technique would have been used to demonstrate a frontal shot, he would have considered it “decisive and final”. I would like to inform Quillette that by using these techniques, one could simulate a sniper hitting Kennedy and Connally from the top of the Hertz sign in Dealey Plaza. But for Palmer and Quillette, in keeping with Mr. Litwin’s approach, it’s not the accuracy of the presentation that matters, it’s the result. Or to use an old realpolitik adage: the ends justify the means.

    III

    But Palmer has to maintain his whole “personal saga” pretense. So he now shifts gears into the New Orleans aspect of Stone’s film and also to Garrison’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins. But, like Litwin, Palmer refuses to acknowledge an important aspect of the overall calculus: the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Litwin simply misrepresents the discoveries of that body. Palmer simply ignores them. As I noted in my review of Litwin, this tactic is convenient for Warren Report shills since so much of what Garrison was talking about back in 1967 has turned out to be accurate. In fact, because Garrison was correct on much of what he said, the FBI and CIA had to cover up the facts, and the CIA had to launch subversive operations against him.

    Part of the subversion was to launch infiltrators into Garrison’s camp. As Garrison describes in his book, one of them was a man he called Bill Boxley, his real name being William Wood. In Stone’s film, he and co-screenwriter Zach Sklar named him Bill Broussard. Palmer actually calls the character, “a composite of various Garrison staffers” and “is allotted the role of the villain in Stone’s film”. Wrong again. From talking with co-screenwriter Zach Sklar, Broussard was based upon Boxley. And if anything, Stone and Sklar underplayed the damage Boxley did to Garrison. This author spent several pages dealing with the havoc the man unleashed, and also the investigative files he stole—some of which were never recovered. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pp. 278-85) If you can believe it, Palmer actually tries to make the guy some kind of hero. What is even more bizarre is that Palmer also relies upon Tom Bethell, the man who was supposed to be in charge of Garrison’s archive. On the eve of the Shaw trial, Bethell turned over the DA’s trial brief to Shaw’s defense. Through research into the Garrison files declassified by the ARRB, Peter Vea discovered that, unlike what Bethell tried to imply years later, he did not admit this to Garrison. Lou Ivon, Garrison’s assistant, conducted an investigation and found out Bethell was the culprit. According to Peter’s work, Bethell broke down and wept upon discovery. Before Garrison could decide what to do with his case, he fled to Dallas. As stated to this author in a conversation he had with the late Mary Ferrell’s estranged son, for whatever reason, Bethell ended up at her doorstep. With touchstones like this, you can do a lot to downgrade Jim Garrison.

    And Palmer cannot let go of Litwin’s false idea that somehow Garrison’s witness Perry Russo was drugged and fed leading questions to get him to identify Shaw as Bertrand. In my review of Litwin I showed this was not the case. It was a trick set up by Shaw’s lawyers with the aid of compromised journalist James Phelan. They rearranged the two sodium pentothal (truth serum) sessions to make it appear that this is what occurred. When read in their true order no such thing happens. Russo introduced the character of Bertrand on his own without being coached. The two best exposures of this charade are by Lisa Pease (Probe Magazine, Vol. 6 No. 5, p. 26), and Joe Biles in his book on Garrison entitled In History’s Shadow (pp. 43-47). Both have been available for over 15 years.

    But Palmer goes beyond Litwin. He says that Perry Russo flunked his polygraph test according to the administrator. The administrator he is referring to is one Ed O’Donnell. O’Donnell was a policeman who Garrison had tried to draw up on charges for police brutality against African American suspects. Both he and Ray Jacob, another technician used by the DA, were intent on unsettling Russo in order to get the wrong indications on the test. (Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, p. 147) When Russo complained to Garrison about these tactics, Garrison called O’Donnell into his office. He asked him if he had a tape of Russo denying that Shaw/Bertrand was at a gathering at Ferrie’s apartment. The policeman said no he did not. Yet he had told Russo he did. Garrison terminated his services upon hearing this. (Clay Shaw trial testimony of 2/26/69) The proof of who O’Donnell really was is that he ended up being an advisor to Shaw’s defense team at the trial. (Mellen, p. 309)

    If you continually and falsely smear the DA’s investigation, and then assume that Oswald shot Kennedy—which we know today did not and could not have happened—then you can characterize Garrison’s inquiry as “inconsequential”. But you would have to add that the Richard Schweiker/Gary Hart investigation for the Church Committee was also meaningless, and the Richard Sprague/Robert Tanenbaum phase of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was also adrift. The problem with saying that is you are now dismissing two fine senators and two excellent prosecutors. Between them, Sprague and Tanenbaum prosecuted about two hundred homicide cases. The combined record was one loss in well over twenty years. Sprague was the lawyer who prosecuted the famous Jock Yablonski murder conspiracy case and convicted corrupt labor leader Tony Boyle. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 326) According to Tanenbaum, when he was privately briefed on the Church Committee inquiry by Schweiker, the senator told him that, in his view, the CIA had killed Kennedy. He then handed him a research file compiled by his chief investigator Gaeton Fonzi. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 3 No. 5, p. 24) Need I add that this was the same conclusion that Garrison had come to a decade earlier? But Dale Myers and ABC have magically made this information “inconsequential”. And with a stroke of his pen, or keyboard, Palmer has made Schweiker, Hart, Sprague, Tanenbaum and Fonzi all disappear. In fact, from his perspective, they never existed.

    Without that backdrop, and without the relevant discoveries of the ARRB about New Orleans, then you may as well be writing about Jim Garrison from the viewpoint of some MSM hack journalist in 1968. For instance, like Litwin, Palmer wants to discount the fact that we can now prove that the mysterious Clay Bertrand, who called Dean Andrews, was really Clay Shaw. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pp. 385-86) He fails to mention that we know today that it was Shaw and his friend David Ferrie who were escorting Oswald around the villages of Clinton and Jackson 100 miles north of New Orleans in the late summer of 1963. They were trying to register Oswald to vote in a parish far away from where he lived so he could get a job at a mental hospital. (Bill Davy, Let Justice be Done, pp. 101-17) Shaw lied about all these matters: that he knew Ferrie, or Oswald, that he used the Bertrand alias, and that he was in Clinton-Jackson with those two men that summer. Shaw also knew Guy Banister. (Davy, pp. 93-94) Oswald spent many days of that fateful summer of 1963 in Banister’s office preparing his Fair Play for Cuba Committee flyers and pamphlets, with Banister’s address on the early copies. (Davy, pp. 37-42)

    Somehow, Palmer does not understand that it was these activities in New Orleans that summer that were injected into the media within hours of President Kennedy’s murder and did much to convict Oswald in the public mind as the sociopathic communist who killed the president for ideological reasons. It thus makes sense that Shaw would call his acquaintance Andrews to go to Dallas to defend Oswald—not knowing Oswald was going to be killed within 48 hours of his apprehension. Shaw would know that Andrews could be compromised, or be used as an incompetent lawyer.

    This is where, as they say, the plot thickens, and again, Palmer leaves it out. Through the ARRB, we know today that Oswald was not a sociopathic communist. He was very likely working through Banister as a CIA agent provocateur. The CIA had set up an anti-FPCC campaign under the tutelage of David Phillips, who was one of the men running that operation. (Davy, p. 286) Further, a man fitting the description of Phillips was in Banister’s office in 1961 trying to arrange a citywide telethon for the Cuban exile cause. (Davy, pp. 21-24) Phillips’ was also seen in film made of one of the nearby New Orleans CIA training camps, a film which the HSCA temporarily had in their possession. Along with Oswald and Banister, witnesses also identified him as being in the film. (Davy, pp. 30-31)

    With this background now filled in a bit, Palmer may want to ask himself if it explains the curious provenance of Oswald’s pamphlet, “The Crime Against Cuba” by Corliss Lamont. Oswald stamped it with 544 Camp Street, Banister’s address. Oswald’s version of the pamphlet was printed in 1961. It had gone through at least four more printings by the time Oswald was leafleting with it in 1963. Yet his was from the first edition. The CIA purchased 45 copies of the original edition in 1961. Is this how Oswald got the outdated version, perhaps through Phillips who was running the subversive program against the FPCC? To make it all a bit more curious, Oswald wrote about his altercation with the Cuban exiles, which got him arrested and the pamphlet confiscated, before it happened. (Davy, p. 38)

    As the reader can see, these are the provocative questions that Oswald’s activities in New Orleans pose when they are presented with the full information we have today. Much of it was available at the time of the Jennings special. Mr. Jennings was not going to touch it. We explain why in our special section reviewing that very poor and unethical documentary. In a nutshell, in 1984, ABC Nightly News did a report on the exposure of a CIA front company in Hawaii and the Agency’s involvement in a possible murder plot. It was a fascinating two-part installment. CIA Director William Casey was very upset by that reporting. So he arranged to have some of his friends and colleagues at Capital Cities buy the network. Jennings, the host of the program, got the message. After Casey and Cap Cities bought the network, Jennings, who had originally stood by the story, now said he had no problem with the CIA’s denial of it.

    Palmer closes his essay with a reference to Litwin’s book, saying that somehow the technical panels set up by the HSCA on things like forensic pathology, photographic evidence and the rifle tests sealed the deal against Oswald. By now, one really wonders just what Palmer was doing in those ten years he doubted the Warren Commission. He certainly was not reading the journals on the subject. Because if he had been, he would have known that people like Dr. Gary Aguilar, Dr. David Mantik and this author completely took apart these very flawed tests made by the HSCA. And, in fact, the chair of the HSCA, Robert Blakey, also took one of them back, the one he relied upon as the lynchpin of his case against Oswald, namely the Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis (CBLT). He has now termed it junk science. (For a full scale, in-depth analysis, see The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 69-85; pp. 250-91) Those 58 pages simply devastate the so-called findings that Litwin, in four pages, trumpets. And one will find evidence in those pages indicating that the HSCA simply and knowingly misrepresented some of their forensic findings.

    IV

    At the end of Palmer’s article, he sourced a previous piece in Quillette from 2017. This was from one Craig Colgan. Colgan fits right in with Quillette’s agenda. He once wrote an article about the National Museum of African American History and Culture and complained that although there was an exhibit for Anita Hill there was none for Clarence Thomas. Anita Hill was the first woman who actually brought the issue of sexual harassment into national consciousness. The fact that she was an African American testifying against the Establishment-backed Thomas made what she did even more courageous. (See this article)

    The title of Colgan’s November 25, 2017 piece was “Are the JFK Conspiracies Slowly Dying?” He begins his article with a reference to Dylan Avery and his film on 9-11 called Loose Change. He then says that since Avery has backed away from some of his more extreme statements, perhaps those who attack the Warren Report should also. Toward the end of the piece, he says he would allow a kind of Robert-Blakey-inspired Oswald-did-it-with-some help concept. And that is what the JFK critical community should be aiming for.

    I don’t know very much about the 9-11 controversy. But I do know that the official investigating committee issued a report without an accompanying set of volumes of evidence. The Warren Commission issued an over-800-page report with 26 volumes of testimony and evidence. The incredible thing about the early critics is this: some of them actually read those volumes. They came to a clear conclusion: the evidence in the volumes did not support the tenets of the report. The late Maggie Field wrote an unpublished book in which she reproduced pages from the report”s conclusions, then juxtaposed to them extracts from the supporting volumes of evidence that directly contradicted them. One could similarly refer to Sylvia Meagher’s classic study Accessories After the Fact. Unlike with 9-11, then, in the case of President Kennedy’s murder, there is nothing to retreat from. In fact, as tens of thousands of declassified pages have later been released, Field’s book has not just been ratified; it has been shown to be too mild, for we know today certain agencies were concealing evidence that would have indicated how parts of the plot and, even moreso, the cover-up, worked. (For example, see section III of this essay and the discoveries about David Phillips and New Orleans.)

    At this point, one must accentuate the fact that even though Quillette is known as a scientific and technically oriented journal, that is what is completely missing from any of its articles on the JFK case. For instance, Colgan mentions a conversation he had with Gary Aguilar about his critique—co-written with Cyril Wecht—of the PBS special Cold Case JFK which aired at the 50th anniversary of the JFK murder. But he does not devote a single sentence to the total demolition of that series that Aguilar and Wecht performed—in a peer review journal on ballistics! And he does not link to the two-part review. Nor does he note that, although Gary offered to pay for both their flight and hotel accommodations, the father and son team who were featured on that program refused to debate him in public.

    Colgan also notes the decline in the public’s belief that there was a plot behind Kennedy’s murder. This is accurate. At the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s death, Hart Associates did a poll for Larry Sabato’s book, the Kennedy Half Century. It statedthat 75% of the public did not believe the Commission’s lone gunman verdict. This was down from the over 90% during the time that Stone’s film JFK premiered. (Sabato, p. 416) The reason for this is simple to discern. Due to Stone’s film, for about one year—from 1991-92—there was actually an open discussion in the media about Kennedy’s murder. And there were actually programs and front-page stories in magazines that addressed it in an even-handed way. The Power Elite was quite upset by that hubbub. They did three things to counter it. Random House, through editor Bob Loomis and publisher Harold Evans, decided to recruit Gerald Posner and give his book one of the most massive publicity barrages in recent publishing history. We know this from the lawsuit the late Roger Feinman launched against Random House concerning that book.

    Secondly, they decided that there would be no more open debate on the issue in the media—and there has not been. We know this from written communications between researcher Walt Brown and Loomis as well as from Alec Baldwin’s speech in Houston last year at a dinner during the JFK mock trial. Baldwin said he had approached NBC with a proposal for a documentary program on Kennedy for the 2013 anniversary. It was rejected without a hearing, with words to this effect: We have reconciled ourselves to the official version. Another example would be what happened in Dallas at the fiftieth anniversary. With the world’s media on hand, Mayor Mike Rawlings completely controlled and cordoned off Dealey Plaza so that no critic could be heard by them. (See our report on the subject as well as this one at jfkfacts.org)

    Third, virtually every single program since—and there have been more than a few—has endorsed the Warren Report, specifically the Single Bullet Fantasy and the no-frontal-shot concept. The problem with these productions is that each one has falsified the facts of the case. (See this video or read this essay)

    Judging from their articles, Quillette is really more of a politically oriented journal than a scientific or technical one. At that, they should have understood the politics of the Warren Commission. The policies of the most active member of that body, Allen Dulles, were opposed to those of President Kennedy. But from this review, the reader can see that both Litwin and Quillette were more in sympathy with Dulles than JFK.

  • Jim Garrison vs. Fred Litwin: The Beat Goes On (part 2)

    Jim Garrison vs. Fred Litwin: The Beat Goes On (part 2)

    In the field of JFK assassination studies, those who advocate for the Warren Commission have always had a special and personal problem with Jim Garrison. After all, the New Orleans DA was an elected official who did not just challenge the Warren Commission; he actually put together an alternative theory of Kennedy’s assassination. That theory created intense interest and attracted a public following.

    This created a serious problem for the MSM. The press had embraced the Warren Report, all 800 pages of it. Now came an accomplished District Attorney who was saying that their much-ballyhooed report on the death of President Kennedy was rubbish. By doing that, Garrison was not just upsetting the MSM’s apple cart, but also the FBI, the Secret Service and the White House. After all, they had all cooperated and worked for several months on this much anticipated report. Could they all have been so easily taken in by the Dallas Police? Or was there something else at work? Perhaps a deliberate cover-up? If so, why? What could be behind such an evil act and its elaborate concealment?

    By raising these questions, Garrison was upsetting the establishment. Therefore, he was harshly attacked by all elements of the power structure. Almost no one in the media—except the LA Free Press, Ramparts and Playboy magazines—gave him a fair hearing. Every major newspaper, magazine, and TV network discounted or attacked him—none treated him fairly or even handedly. Elements of the government illegally spied on him, sent infiltrators into his camp, wired his office, tapped his phone, and launched subversive operations against his investigative efforts. (See William Davy, Let Justice be Done, Chapter 12) When Garrison complained about these actions, the MSM ignored him. Today, after the disclosures of the Assassination Records Review Board, they cannot be ignored. For the simple matter that the acts of subversion can now be proven with declassified documents.

    There is another important element to the cacophony enveloping New Orleans that has also been revealed. That is the incessant efforts of Clay Shaw’s attorneys to enlist as much help as possible from Washington DC. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 261-78) What makes this secret solicitation so curious is that, for two solid years, the media portrait of Shaw was that he was as clean as the driven snow. If such were the case, then why were Shaw’s lawyers so desperate for help from the CIA and the FBI? And why did the Agency and Bureau give it to them? Was there something that those two executive intelligence agencies knew that they weren’t telling the public? If so, what was it?

    Through the ARRB, we have now discovered that there was a lot to hide about Clay Shaw. And neither the FBI nor the CIA had planned on letting the public know about it. If not for the ruckus created by Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, no one may have ever discovered any of it.

    Now comes one Fred Litwin. Litwin has written two books. They have both publication and thematic similarities. The first was called Conservative Confidential. That book is about his coming out as a gay man and also traveling politically from left to right, eventually emerging as an activist conservative in the gay community in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. What I found interesting about the first book is that, although I had never heard of Litwin, evidently some powerful people had. The book was blurbed by the likes of Conrad Black, and Daniel Pipes. Black is a former international newspaper magnate who was convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice in America and banned from running a company or serving on any boards in Ontario. Pipes is a rightwing veteran of several think tanks who wrote a book labeling almost anyone who believes in political conspiracies as being inherently paranoid. In Chapter 1, Pipes specifically pointed to the African American community. Nice fan base. After making a lot of money in the computer field, Litwin is involved in lecture presentations, music, film festivals and publishing today. (For an example of the people he sponsors, go here)

    Litwin’s second book is called I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak. Like his first, it was published through his own company, Northern Blues. From the title, one does not need much explication as to the similarity in theme. With the JFK case, as with his politics, Litwin has now seen the light. Like St. Paul on the way to Damascus, he had a vision. Except, unlike with Paul, his was not of a vision of a resurrected Christ appearing before him. It was Lee Harvey Oswald firing three shots in six seconds from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository; scoring two of three direct hits to the head and shoulder area of JFK. A feat that, without cheating, no expert has ever been able to duplicate. One of those bullets went through Kennedy’s back, rising upward slightly, even though it was originally traveling downward. Without striking bone, it then went left to right, even though it was fired from right to left. It made a perforating exit from Kennedy’s neck, one that was smaller than its entrance—even though exits are supposed to be larger. It then went through Connally’s body and as it exited his chest it veered right towards his wrist, and then deflected left into his thigh. It emerged from his thigh and was found in the rim of a stretcher, except no one knows whose stretcher it was. (The Impossible One-Day Journey of CE 399; see also Was the CE 399 Magic Bullet Planted?)

    When it was found there was almost no deformation of the bullet, and no blood or tissue on it. After smashing two bones in Connally, it was missing only three grains of its mass. (WC Vol. III pp. 428-30) As Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson have shown, CE 399 was so specious as evidence that the FBI had to lie about its identification. (The Magic Bullet: Even More Magical Than We Knew?) As others have said, to believe all this, one must have had some kind of religious experience. Especially if one did not buy into it at first.

    But there is another oddity about Litwin. The present author has been in this field for going on three decades. I have read a rather large amount of material on the subject. This includes research journals from both America and abroad. I do not recall coming across Mr. Litwin’s name in any of them. Apparently, the man kept his beliefs about a JFK plot rather close to his vest.

    I am not going to deal with the entirety of Litwin’s book. Anyone who can propagate that the evidence for more than one gunman in the JFK case has weakened over time does not deserve extended scrutiny. Neither does anyone who is on friendly terms with the likes of Daniel Pipes. But there is a chapter of Litwin’s book available online. It happens to be his chapter on Jim Garrison. Since that is 16 downloadable pages, it should serve as an example of the quality of his work.

    As I have previously said in dealing with the anti-Garrison crowd, if there was one area that the Assassination Records Review Board did a decent job on, it was in declassifying a lot of interesting documents on the New Orleans aspect of the Kennedy case. In two previous review essays on the subject, I have been critical of the fact that none of these documents were anywhere to be seen in the work under discussion. Specifically, this would include the essay by Don Carpenter at Max Holland’s site (Max Holland and Donald Carpenter vs Jim Garrison and the ARRB), and Alecia Long’s essay at 64 Parishes (Jim Garrison: The Beat Goes On).

    Litwin continues to manifest that revealing trait. In the 16 pages, I could find no evidence that he used even one single piece of declassified documentation. When an author does this, it immediately tells the reader much more about him than the writer’s ostensible subject. That is, Mr. Litwin does not give one iota about the declassified record. He is not interested in what the new information is. He does not want to know what the CIA and FBI knew about Clay Shaw back in the sixties, or why it was deemed so taboo that the public had to be kept in the dark about it.

    Which leaves us with two alternative theorems. Either Litwin does not know about this new information; or he does know about it but does not want the reader to be aware of it. Both explanations are pretty unappetizing. But they tell us much about Litwin and his book.

    By the third paragraph, the author exposes the serious fault lines in his work. He writes that Jim Garrison cracked down on vice in the French Quarter by raiding gay bars. How anyone can write something like that is incomprehensible. Once Garrison became famous through the exposure of his JFK inquiry, many people wrote about this 1962 crusade. Almost ten years ago, there was a book written on the subject by author James Savage. What Garrison was cracking down on was a racket called ‘B girl drinking’. The B-girl would sit with a male customer and, as long as he paid for the liquor, she would entice him with hints of sex to be had. (Washington Post, 2/10/63) The girl’s drinks would be very watered down, and as the mark got inebriated, the host would then shortchange him. Afterwards, the poor guy was taken to a cab to get to his hotel; the house got 2/3 of the take, the girl got 1/3.

    I would like to ask Mr. Litwin the obvious question he is seemingly unaware of: If the racket involved a female employee with a male customer, how could these be gay bars?

    What Litwin does next is as bad as the above. He does all he can to denigrate the value of the information that Jack Martin relayed to Garrison’s office within 48 hours after the assassination. For instance, he does not fully explicate why Guy Banister exploded and pistol-whipped his former investigator/employee Mr. Martin. Martin had made some rather incriminating comments, like implicating Banister in the Kennedy assassination. Martin specifically said: “What are you going to do—kill me like you all did Kennedy?” Martin later said that if Banister’s secretary had not intervened, he thought Banister might have killed him. (HSCA Volume 10, p. 130) After the assault, Banister threw some money at his victim. On his way to the hospital, Martin told an acquaintance: “The dirty Nazi bastards did it to him in Texas, and to me here.” (Affidavit of Martin and David Lewis to Jim Garrison 2/30/68)

    Since Martin was describing events on the day of the assassination, who does Litwin think Martin was referring to when he said, “Did it to him in Texas?” In light of the Martin’s previous comment, it was probably President Kennedy.

    What was the specific reason for Banister’s assault? Again, Litwin does not fully reveal that aspect. As Garrison’s staff later discovered, the FBI in New Orleans—namely agent Regis Kennedy—later thought that Martin might have pilfered Banister’s files on Oswald. (Garrison memorandum from Andrew Sciambra, 10/28/68) In fact, a part-time employee at Banister’s office, Mary Brengel, told the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that she felt that both Banister and his secretary Delphine Roberts knew what was going to happen in Texas that day. (HSCA interview of 4/6/78)

    It was Roberts who rescued Martin. Banister then swore her to secrecy and kept her out of the office after the bloody incident with Martin. (Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, p. 294) So when Garrison interviewed her, she was tight-lipped. Later she did reveal things to the HSCA, specifically to investigator Bob Buras. On his second attempt to get her to talk to him, Roberts told Buras that Oswald was at Banister’s office and had a few private meetings with him. He was allowed to use a second floor room to print up his anti-Castro materials. (HSCA interview of 7/6/78) Reporter Scott Malone later found a corroborating witness for this information. Brengel told him that Roberts said Oswald had been at 544 Camp Street, Banister’s office, that summer. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 111) When this author interviewed another Banister employee, Dan Campbell, he also revealed that Oswald had been in Banister’s office that summer. In a separate interview with this writer, so did his brother Allen. (Destiny Betrayed, p. 112)

    In other words, it makes perfect sense for Banister to have had a file on Oswald and for Martin to be interested in it on the day of the assassination. It also follows that, as Roberts told Buras, Banister was upset when he heard that Oswald had handed out flyers in New Orleans with Banister’s office address of 544 Camp Street on them. (HSCA Buras interview.)

    Litwin’s depiction of David Ferrie is about as limited and dubious as his work on Banister. Litwin writes that when the FBI and Secret Service questioned Ferrie, he denied knowing Oswald, or having anything to do with Kennedy’s assassination. Litwin leaves it at that. Which is rather uncurious of him. For as anyone who reads Ferrie’s FBI statement has to acknowledge, Ferrie lied his head off to the Bureau. And it is hard to buy the argument that they did not know he was lying. For instance, Ferrie said he never owned a rifle with a telescopic sight and would not know how to use one. This, from a man who was a trainer for both the Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Mongoose. (HSCA interview of John Irion, 10/18/78; Davy pp. 28-31; CIA memo of October 1967, “Garrison Investigation: Belle Chasse Training Camp”)

    Ferrie also said that he did not know Oswald and Oswald was not a member of his Civil Air Patrol (CAP) unit in New Orleans. This was another lie that Litwin seems comfortable with. In this case, all the Bureau had to do was question some of the other members of that CAP unit to find out Ferrie was lying. Jerry Paradis, who later became a corporate attorney, told the HSCA that he knew Ferrie and Oswald were members of the same CAP unit because he was also a member and he saw them together at a meeting. (HSCA interview of 12/15/78) Anthony Atzenoffer said the same about Ferrie and Oswald at the CAP meetings. (HSCA interview of 1/2/79) As we all know, in 1993, PBS discovered a photo of Oswald and Ferrie at a CAP cookout and showed it on TV.

    But there is something even more incriminating about Ferrie which indicates that not only was he knowingly lying to the FBI but was also trying to scoop up evidence that would prove his perjury. For in the days immediately following the assassination, Ferrie was looking for that CAP picture of him with Oswald. He called a former CAP member, Roy McCoy, to find out if he had a copy. The FBI had to know Ferrie was doing this. Why? Because McCoy and his wife later called the Bureau and told them about Ferrie’s search for the photo of him with the alleged assassin of President Kennedy. In other words, the FBI was complicit in Ferrie’s cover-up. (New Orleans FBI report of 11/27/63)

    Somehow, Litwin did not think that any of this information about Banister, Ferrie and their ties to Oswald—or the attempts to conceal it—is worth conveying to the reader. Nor does he feel it necessary to note the FBI’s odd reaction to Ferrie’s perjury and attempts at obstruction of justice. This writer would beg to disagree with Mr. Litwin. And again, the fact that he does not reveal it says a lot about his intent as an author.

    Litwin trudges onward with Dean Andrews. Andrews was the New Orleans lawyer who said that a man named Clay Bertrand called him on Saturday, November 23, 1963, and asked him to go to Dallas to defend the alleged assassin of JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald. Again, it takes Litwin about two sentences to descend into travesty. First, he says that Andrews was in hospital and heavily sedated at the time he got this call—which is supposed to cast doubt on the credibility of the claim. Twenty-three years ago, the estimable William Davy checked on this point through the hospital records. Those records indicate that Andrews got the call at least four hours before he was sedated. (Davy, p. 52) Litwin then writes that the call was actually from a man named Eugene Davis. This is also wrong. The name of Eugene Davis did not enter the record until NBC produced its hatchet job on Jim Garrison in the summer of 1967. Davis subsequently denied this under oath. And Andrews was then convicted of perjury. (Davy, p. 302; Jim Garrison’s interview in Playboy,10/67)

    Today there is no doubt who Clay Bertrand was. And through the efforts of British researcher Martin Hay, we now know that Andrews admitted that Bertrand was Clay Shaw. The late Harold Weisberg did some work for Jim Garrison in New Orleans. He developed a friendly relationship with Andrews and talked to him on several occasions. In an unpublished manuscript, Weisberg wrote that Andrews admitted to him that Shaw was Bertrand. But the lawyer told him he was not to say anything about this without his permission. (See the unpublished book Mailer’s Tale, chapter 5, p. 11, at the Weisberg online archives at Hood College)

    Although Andrews’ word would have probative value in this instance, with the work of the Assassination Records Review Board there is simply no question today that Shaw was Bertrand. And, again, the FBI knew this. There are two declassified FBI reports from 1967 in which the Bureau is given information that such was the case. (FBI teletypes of February 24, and March 23, 1967) In a third FBI report of March 2nd 1967, Bureau officer Cartha DeLoach states that they had information about Shaw in relation to the Kennedy case in December of 1963! Somehow, Mr. Litwin did not find that interesting. Many people would disagree. They would also be upset to know that the public had to wait over 30 years to find out that the FBI agreed with Jim Garrison. In light of these revelations Litwin is unintentionally humorous when he writes that the FBI could not find out who Bertrand was. They did know who he was. They did not want to tell anyone because it would support Garrison.

    But Litwin is intent on trying to show that Garrison was somehow deluded by Andrews. So he trots out another discredited tale that is about fifty years old. He says that Andrews made up the name of Manuel Garcia Gonzalez and that Garrison ended up believing him. Again, this tells us more about Litwin than it does Andrews or Garrison. Andrews actually gave Garrison two names: Gonzalez and Ricardo Davis. Both of these were names of real people. (Larry Hancock, Someone Would have Talked, pp. 349-50) And if the reader wants to see just how interesting Gonzalez was, please read this. Dean Andrews was anything but ignorant or dishonest. This is why—as he told Garrison, Mark Lane and Anthony Summers—he was in fear for his life.

    Predictably, Litwin uses an old trick that reporter James Phelan and Shaw’s lawyers originated in the sixties to discredit Perry Russo. Russo told Garrison that he heard Ferrie and Shaw, at a gathering with a Leon Oswald, speak about killing Kennedy. Garrison had Russo undergo both truth serum and hypnosis. By mixing up Russo’s two interviews under sodium pentothal, Phelan made it appear that Dr. Esmond Fatter was leading the witness. But Garrison submitted the two transcripts to the HSCA, and he had them clearly marked and dated in his own files, which this author had access to. When read in their correct order, not backwards, there is no leading of the witness. Russo comes up with the name Bertrand and describes him as the big white-haired guy—which he was—on his own. (See Probe Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, p. 26) Again, this canard was exposed nearly twenty years ago.

    Like Donald Carpenter, Litwin is intent on not revealing the declassified record about Clay Shaw, even though the ARRB did interesting work in that area. It is clear now that, as declassified CIA documents reveal, Shaw was a valuable and well-compensated contract agent from the fifties. Joan Mellen prints the declassified document that proves this in her book about George DeMohrenschildt, Our Man in Haiti, on pp. 54-55. That book was published six years ago. Is there any reason for Litwin not to refer to it? That document also explains why Shaw committed perjury on the stand when asked about this issue. (Davy, p. 185) When you add in Shaw’s covert security clearance for the project QK ENCHANT and his probable clearance for ZR CLIFF, then it is obvious why the CIA considered him a valuable agent. It also helps explain why, as the ARRB discovered, the CIA destroyed Shaw’s 201 file. (ARRB Memo from Manuel E. Legaspi to Jerry Gunn, dated 11/14/1996) The internal lie about Shaw by the CIA—that he was only part of Domestic Contacts like 100,000 other businessmen—shows the lengths they felt they had to go to in order to construct a cover-up about their prized employee. Like the FBI, the last thing the Agency wanted to admit was that Jim Garrison was right about Clay Shaw—which he was.

    Litwin never acknowledges, let alone confronts, any of these documents. He tries to escape from Shaw’s CIA employment by using the excuse that Shaw’s service with the mysterious European entity called Permindex was a tall tale manufactured under Soviet influence and passed on to a leftist newspaper in Italy, the same excuse the likes of Max Holland uses.

    This is more malarkey. The State Department wrote up memos about Permindex at the time the organization was creating a large controversy in Switzerland. Due to the character and suspected criminal backgrounds of members of its board, the controversy got so disturbing it caused the entity to move to Rome. This information was declassified back in 1982 due to a Freedom of Information lawsuit by Bud Fensterwald. They extend from February 1957 to November of 1958 and Shaw is featured in these cables. Bill Davy and others have used these in their books about Garrison’s investigation of Shaw. Again, the FBI was aware of the CIA role in Permindex and how Shaw figured in it. (Davy, p. 100)

    Canadian researcher Maurice Phillips recently discovered even more interesting memos about Permindex in the Louis Bloomfield archive in Montreal. Shaw had been on the board of Permindex, and Bloomfield was a corporate counsel. It turns out that Permindex was likely operating not just as a CIA shell, but at a level above that. Phillips has discovered memoranda which show that Bloomfield was soliciting funds for the endeavor from some of the wealthiest people in the world, for instance, David Rockefeller and Edmond deRothschild. (Letter from Bloomfield to Dr. E. W. Imfeld of 2/10/60) Phillips also discovered a memo revealing that one of the founders of Permindex, Ferenc Nagy, was a CIA asset. Because of that status, he invited the Agency to use this new “business” entity in any capacity they wished. (CIA memo of March 24, 1967, released in 1998)

    Question for Mr. Litwin: did the Soviets manufacture those State Department cables back in the fifties? And somehow insert the Bloomfield correspondence into his personal papers? Once we dispose of this silliness, the obvious question all this leaves, and which Litwin wants to avoid is: What was Shaw doing in the middle of all this?

    The discoveries of Maurice Phillips were quite detrimental to the cover story about Shaw, Bloomfield and Permindex. So much so that, in violation of Bloomfield’s will, his heirs have now tried to stop any more information from being released from his papers. The totality of the declassified record reveals that the cover-up about Shaw was wide, deep, systematic and is ongoing a half century later. This is how fearful the Establishment was about Jim Garrison’s discoveries and where they would lead.

    And that is the fact that Litwin’s article is meant to divert us from. As noted, I could not find one single reference to a primary source record in the entire 16 pages of his essay. Instead of relying on these newly released documents, who does Litwin choose to trust? Well, how about Hugh Aynesworth? If that isn’t bad enough, then how about James Phelan? It’s one thing to use a discredited reporter; it’s another not to tell the reader that he is provably related to the FBI, the CIA, or both. Also that both men denied those relationships prior to the documents being released showing such was the case. Can one say anything worse about a journalist? But that does not seem to bother Litwin at all. (For Phelan, see Probe Magazine, Vol. 6 No.4, pp. 5 and 32, and FBI memo from Wick to DeLoach of April 3, 1967; for Aynesworth see a Western Union teletype of May 13, 1967 which he sent to both the White House and the FBI.)

    By using his discredited sources instead of the declassified record, Litwin is able to conceal the fact that Shaw committed perjury at least four times at his trial:

    1. He lied about his association with the CIA, as amply demonstrated above.
    2. He lied about his use of the alias Clay Bertrand, as is also amply demonstrated above.
    3. He lied about his relationship with David Ferrie. (Affidavits to the DA of 6/27/67, 10/9/68, FBI teletype of 3/5/67, Probe Magazine, Vol. 4 No. 4, p. 8. The last two sources refer to secretaries who saw the two together.)
    4. He lied about not knowing Oswald. (Interview of attorney Samuel Exnicios by Joan Mellen 1/8/02; Davy, pp. 101-17)

    Do innocent people tell this many lies under oath, thereby risking decades in prison? Shaw had to lie, because if he didn’t it would have exposed him to too many questions that he would not have been able to explain away. Like, “Why did you call Andrews and ask him to go to Dallas to defend Oswald?” And, “Why were you and Ferrie escorting Oswald around the Clinton/Jackson area attempting to register him to vote in a place he didn’t live?”

    In the face of all this—quite relevant—perjury, what does Litwin do? Besides avoiding it all, he runs to another risible source: Paul Hoch. Hoch had been misleading the critical community on New Orleans for so long that, when the ARRB opened its doors, he did not want to be exposed as a charlatan. He therefore stood in front of a crowd of about 300 people in Chicago in 1993 and told them to ignore any new releases that came from the Board about Clay Shaw. I wish I was kidding about that, but unfortunately I was there. For that reason, and many others, Hoch simply has no credibility on the issue today. By following Hoch’s advice, Litwin now has custard pie all over his face. Or as they say in the field of information technology, which both men worked in: garbage in, garbage out.

    Not that it matters. If this excerpt is any measure of his book—and from a preview I saw, it is—then Litwin did not write it to educate any members of the public. Neither did he wish to elucidate any of the issues that have now been accented by the releases of the ARRB. And he certainly doesn’t give a damn about the assassination of President Kennedy.

    What he has done is enhance his status with the kinds of people who backed his first book, that is, Conrad Black and Daniel Pipes. He has become a member in good standing of the Culture Warrior crowd. If one looks at his book from that Machiavellian perspective, then like George W. Bush and his disaster in Iraq: Mission Accomplished.

  • The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK, Part 2

    The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK, Part 2

    Case linkage and patsy casting for regime change operations

    Case linkage, also called linkage analysis or comparative case analysis, is an offender profiling process that helps crime investigators determine whether a series of crimes were committed by the same offender.

    The Warren Commission and the investigative agencies at their service never performed this type of standard research for the JFK assassination.

    In The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK: The Historians’ Guide on how to Research his Assassination published in 2016, I did some data mining from the works of reputable authors and original source documents (mostly from the Mary Ferrell Foundation) which centered on three previous plots (L.A., Chicago and Tampa) to assassinate JFK within the six months that preceded the murder and six potential patsies (Vaughn Marlowe, Richard Case Nagell, Thomas Arthur Vallee, Harry Power, Santiago Garriga and Policarpo Lopez). (Before reading this follow-up, it is strongly recommended that you read the original article by following the above hyperlink.)

    What we can conclude from this analysis is that the peculiarities that one can find in their personas, associations and actions is hardly a haphazard collection of traits and behaviors. I have argued that there is a ZR/Rifle (CIA Executive Action) signature at play that points the finger straight at its signatories and the reliable executors of this regime-change M.O., namely: David Atlee Phillips, William Harvey, David Morales and their long established network of assassins and frame-up artists which includes Mafiosi and Cuban exiles.

    Crucial to this line of inquiry will be the use of data visualization which will play a determining role in a summation phase of our quest to correct history book and mainstream media falsities in their accounts of November 22, 1963.

    In this article, we will push the analysis even further by covering a fourth failed plot, add some information about one of the potential patsies already profiled, and add two more to our already impressive list. We will begin, however by discussing how the use of data visualization should be considered more often by authors in order to help synthesize this complex case.

    Numerical data may be encoded using dots, lines, or bars, to visually communicate a quantitative message. Effective visualization helps users analyze and reason about data and evidence. It makes complex data more accessible, understandable and usable. (Wikipedia)

    In Oswald’s Intelligence Connections: How Richard Schweiker clashes with Fake History, I chronicle some 64 characters (soon to be updated to over 75) that Oswald had touch points with that either certainly (over 30) or plausibly had intelligence connections. They were fluffed off by the Warren Commission instead of being mapped out in a diagram and analyzed for who they really were and who they linked up with—exactly what the Mueller Probe is doing for anyone with a direct or indirect relation with the Trump camp.

    In my CIA and Mafia’s “Cuban-American mechanism” article, the chart below is used to showcase Santo Trafficante’s links with CIA, Mafia and Cuban exile persons of interest. Of particular interest are the persons with their names in red: No fewer than six for certain and two plausibly are directly involved in the Oswald set-up, murder or cover story and also are connected to Trafficante. The Trafficante, Roselli, Harvey, Morales, and Robertson links should also stimulate a lot of research:

    Also in this article, readers can inspect a table that singles out David Atlee Phillips as a person of extreme interest.

    In all, Oswald and Phillips shared 23 touch points—20 of which took place within the year in and around the assassination. It is simply impossible to ignore this number of connections between a CIA officer and a lone drifter!

    The Phantom Plot in Nashville, May 1963

    After reading the Previous Plots article, researcher Frank Cassano sent me information about another plot that failed in Nashville which had been covered by Bill Adams in 1993 for The Fourth Decade:

    Synopsis of Assassination Attempt Against JFK, May 18, 1963, in Nashville TN

    A few years ago I began looking into other assassination sites as well as other potential assassins and potential patsies. I was able to track a potential JFK assassin to the general area (Knoxville, TN) of a planned JFK motorcade in May of 1963. The trip was altered prior to the actual day of the trip and JFK instead made a visit to Nashville, TN. His visit, on May 18, 1963, included several motorcades.

    In early 1992 I was shocked to see a tabloid print a story about an assassination attempt against JFK during the Nashville trip! Congressman Bob Clement of Tennessee had made a startling revelation. He said his father, the late Gov. Frank Clement (governor of Tennessee in 1963) told him of a strange incident while JFK awaited a helicopter after visiting the Governor. The tabloid quoted Congressman Bob Clement of Tennessee as stating, “While the President waited for the helicopter, a man approached with a gun hidden underneath a sack. Secret Service agents spotted him and grabbed him”.

    I called and interviewed the congressman in the early summer of 1963. I also obtained actual Nashville news stories about the congressman’s revelation in January of 1992. As a result of reading the news stories and talking to Congressman Clement, I have been able to piece together the following story:

    President Kennedy arrived in Nashville on May 18, 1963. He rode in a motorcade to Vanderbilt University where he gave a speech outside in the football stadium. JFK left the stadium in another motorcade and drove to the governor’s mansion. Somewhere between the Governor’s mansion and the helicopter landing site at Overton High School, a man approached JFK with a handgun under a sack. It is unclear whether JFK was in his limousine or not at the time. The governor witnessed this event and the subsequent capture of the suspect by the Secret Service. The man was held at the High School for some time. Nothing more is known about the man. The Secret Service asked the governor to keep the event out of the press for fear it would lead to more assassination attempts.

    I have also found some writings about a gun found in a paper bag in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza, however the foundation for this aspect of the story is not solid.

    While this failed plot is by far the thinnest of the four looked into, it is worth noting for the following reasons:

    1. As with the Chicago plot, a suspect was picked up and released without any trace: no names, fingerprints, photos, reports, etc.
    2. The Nashville attempt, as was the case for all of the other failed plots, was revisited by neither the Secret Service nor the FBI after the JFK assassination.
    3. The Secret Service once again took steps to keep media from publicizing it.
    4. None of the four failed plots were known to the Warren Commission.

    Over and above underscoring this pattern of secrecy, it may be worth pursuing whether or not there are still files or witnesses that could shed light on the incident and the suspect. Who were the arresting agents? Are they alive? What can we learn about this suspect? Was he also communist leaning? Was he linked to the FPCC? Did he have Cuban contacts? Why was he let go? Was he at least placed on an FBI watch list? Perhaps an FOIA request would be in order.

    More on Harry Power

    In the “Three Previous Plots” article, the alternate patsy that had the skimpiest profile was Harry Power. Other snippets of information about him have since surfaced.

    Here is how Harry Power was originally covered:

    San Antonio, November 21, 1963

    Because of the code of omertà surrounding the JFK assassination, Harry Power’s story is perhaps the sketchiest of the potential scapegoat cases we will have discussed. But since no stone should be left unturned when investigating a murder, especially a president’s, it is worth identifying and earmarking for more analysis.

    Harry Power was yet another ex-marine who checked in to a Terre Haute House Hotel room in Indiana on November 25, 1963 with a long package. When he checked out, he left behind a rifle … a Mannlicher-Carcanno, according to a retired Chief of Police Frank Riddle … a Mauser, according another unidentified source.

    A United States Government Memo in 1967 describes the allegation. Riddle claimed San Antonio authorities informed him that Power was a member of the Young Communist League and an expert rifle marksman. An ex-co-worker described him as anti-Kennedy. He had held a job in San Antonio Texas in 1962.

    Riddle stated that all information had been turned over to the Warren Commission and that the rifle was taken by Secret Service agents. The Secret Service claimed to have only found out about this incident in 1965. Their key source is none other than the head of the Washington Secret Service, Chief Rowley himself, who you will recall played a key role in keeping the Chicago plot as secret as possible. The FBI did confirm, however, that the Terre Haute Police department had in fact followed up on this lead around when Riddle claimed it happened … which would indicate further Secret Service and Warren Commission complacency.

    According to Dick Russell, Richard Nagell told Jim Garrison that Power was a Trotskyite who had met Oswald.

    Given that JFK motorcaded in San Antonio on November 21 and that Power could easily be linked to that city, it is not a major leap to see similarities between Power, Oswald and the other scapegoat candidates that seem to have been lined up before the assassination. [slightly edited]

    The Indiana Rifle story had received little interest until journalist Sheldon Inkol researched it in 1993 (The Third Decade, Volume 9, Issue 5: “The Indiana Rifle,” by Sheldon Inkol) and updated his findings in 1995 for The Fourth Decade. From his research and FBI file 62-109060 JFK HQ, we can now add the following points:

    1. The rifle found in Indiana was most likely a Mauser and not a Mannlicher-Carcanno.
    2. Because of an NSF check written by Power, we know that at one time he was in New Orleans.
    3. An ex-co-worker of Power’s who was the witness Riddle referred to was Roger Dresch, who also stated that Power was a hunter who sighted a rifle with a scope at a shooting range, that he had been a paratrooper who complained about his father being an alcoholic, and who occasionally talked about becoming a hermit in the wilderness.

    According to Inkol, it is Dick Russell who first revealed the name of Harry Power in The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1992. There had been only small articles about the incident before this. Inkol credits veteran researcher Larry Haapanen, who interviewed Riddle, for having confirmed the name of Power after following up on an article in 1970.

    Dick Russell provided the following to the Harry Power profile:

    A National Archives document about the affair was declassified in 1970 … a file reports that Power had been investigated in connection with the shooting attempt on General Walker in Dallas, a shooting that the WC falsely claimed to have been by Oswald and his Mannlicher-Carcano. Other files associated with the Power rifle claim that it was a 7.65 Mauser. CIA agent Richard Nagell told Garrison investigators in 1967 that Power was a Maoist or Trotskyite and “had known Lee Harvey Oswald and had been seen with him …”

    Inkol adds the following points, based on police investigations:

    1. There were no fingerprints on the Mauser.
    2. Indiana Police indicated that the hotel where the rifle was found was right across from the Democratic and Republican headquarters.
    3. According to Riddle, the FBI tried to link Power’s presence to a political rally going on the night before in proximity to the Terre Haute hotel.
    4. The editor of the Indianapolis News and the NRA, who had found out about the incident, were asked to keep it silent by authorities.
    5. Power seemed to have a troubled marriage.
    6. He had financial difficulties.
    7. He was described as a “Smart Aleck”, “Trouble Maker” and person with a warped outlook on life.
    8. He had failed at one point to get a driver’s license.
    9. He may have been from Chicago.

    According to Inkol, Frank Riddle insisted that Power was a suspect in the attempt on General Walker’s life the previous April—something the Warren Commission tagged on Oswald. In 1964, Secret Service Chief James Rowley confirmed to Riddle that the FBI and the Secret Service had files on Power.

    Inkol tempers Riddle as a source as he points out that some have qualified him as a “blow-hard”.

    Inkol is not convinced that Power was even in the hotel. He argues that the description given (age, height and weight) of the person with the rifle in the hotel is very different from the San Antonio description of Power.

    He believes that one possibility that merits further investigation is that he was being set up as an alternate patsy or part of a subversive pro-communist group intent on attacking the U.S. Government—who could have been pinned as the shooter from the knoll if a front shot had to be admitted to.

    He also points out that had the assassination taken place in San Antonio where Kennedy motorcaded a day earlier, the patsy might have been Power instead of Oswald.

    Inkol ends the first article with a fleeting comment about the Indiana rifle being perhaps linked to a seventh potential patsy according to David Lifton who twice interviewed the next subject we will discuss, but revealed very little to Inkol about him. I decided to contact Lifton to follow up on this tantalizing clue about yet another alternate scapegoat (not to be confused with the famous astronaut), who even without a link to the rifle is, in terms of his profile, an Oswald dead ringer!

    John Glenn

    Unlike most of the other potential fall guys that figure in this analysis, the case of John Glenn and his wife Marcia is quite well documented. This, however, has nothing to do with the FBI, CIA, or Warren Commission’s efforts to scrutinize this Oswald semi-replica.

    According to the WC, Oswald opening an FPCC chapter in New Orleans was a demonstration of his ego trip … period! Fortunately for researchers, the FPCC was under intensive scrutiny by the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

    Through their reports and the writings in 1993 of Jerry Rose (The Third Decade, “Red Summer of ‘63”), we can paint a better picture of Glenn and the role the FPCC came to play in making our cast of puppets easy to frame for the crime of the century.

    The FPCC was characterised as “Castro’s Network in the USA” by the HUAC. Membership within this anti-U.S. organization was described during hearings as an effective door-opener to enter Cuba via the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City and Cubana Airlines.

    Though the HUAC had been seriously rattled by the McCarthy era witch-hunts, Castro was breathing some new life into this outfit for political showcasing of American patriotism.

    One area that got their attention was the travel to Cuba by American students despite a travel ban. On June 25, 1963, 58 students left New York and transited through Russia satellite Czechoslovakia on the way to Cuba where they were apparently well received by the Castro regime. This group had been infiltrated by an informant named Barry Hoffman who had gotten approval from agencies that were tied to the FBI, CIA, and State Department. During hearings in September of 1963, he painted the students as pro-Cuba and anti-U.S.A. and talked about rumors that Cuba had not dismantled the nuclear installations on the island.

    Evidently, he was a poor spy who was not trusted by the other students. He was “number 3 on their fink list”. Numbers 1 and 2 were John Glenn and his wife Marcia.

    On November 18, 1963—four days before JFK’s assassination, the Glenns’ testimony before the HUAC had the effect of smearing the FPCC. Transcripts of the hearings point out striking similarities with Oswald:

    John Glenn joined the U.S. Air force in 1950.

    While in the service, Glenn received training in the Russian language at Syracuse University and became a Russian linguist for Air Force Intelligence, with security clearance for secret, top secret, and cryptographic information. Meanwhile, he continued his regular college studies through night school and correspondence courses. Glenn, while still receiving regular military service pay, including food and housing allowances, returned to full-time studies at the Indiana University where he obtained a degree in business administration in January 1954.

    He then resumed active duty with Air Force Intelligence for 2 more years, including 16 months overseas, before being discharged in January 1956, after reaching the rank of staff sergeant.

    During the summer of 1958, he visited the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Poland for about 40 days as a guide for the Tom Maupintour Associates, an American travel agency. The next summer he toured the same countries, plus Yugoslavia and Rumania, in a similar capacity for another travel organization.

    The witness confirmed information obtained through an investigation by the Committee on Un-American Activities that he had traveled to Mexico in the spring of 1962 in an attempt to get a Cuban visa. He was unsuccessful.

    It was at about this time, the fall of 1962, Glenn told the subcommittee, that he joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He had been a sympathizer of the group much earlier, he said. He admitted having written a letter printed in an Indiana University publication, dated February 10, 1962, in which he said that “the people in Fair Play are willing to argue to anyone who will listen that our government and our press are lying through their teeth [about Cuba].”

    The witness admitted that, without having applied for U.S. validation, he traveled to Cuba with the group of alleged students who departed from New York on a BOAC plane on June 25, 1963. Glenn acknowledged the accuracy of the subcommittee’s information that on the return trip, after arriving in Spain with the main body of U.S. “students” on August 26, 1963, he left the group and traveled to Morocco. He said that after he and his wife had learned they could stay abroad for a while, they had decided to travel to Algeria to observe the political developments there, which were supposed to be similar to what they had witnessed in Cuba.

    When the Glenns arrived in Morocco from Spain, the witness testified, they received an entry permit to Algeria from the Algerian Government. While hitchhiking their way to Algeria, however, they were arrested by the Moroccan police and ordered deported to Spain as undesirables. He said he learned from both the American consul in Rabat, Morocco, and the Moroccan police that the deportation was ordered by the United States Government.

    On October 15, 1963, according to investigation by the Committee on Un-American Activities, Glenn reported to the American Embassy in Madrid, Spain, that he and his wife did not have a ticket for return transportation to the United States. The embassy purchased a ticket for them, and they were flown to the United States on an Iberian Air Lines plane.

    Their landlord testified that the Glenns possessed communist literature, including The Militant, which Oswald also subscribed to, that connected them to the Socialist Worker Party and its affiliate YSA.

    In his article, Jerry Rose speculates that “given the possibility that Glenn was connected somehow with a rifle in Indiana which was believed to be related to the assassination, it is possible as well that Glenn, like Oswald, was being groomed as pro-communist patsy if Oswald for any reason did not work out in the role.” Rose advances that Glenn’s forced return and appearance before the HUAC suggest (but do not prove) control from high places … an interpretation he felt at the time that was worth pursuing.

    David Lifton

    When I first reached out to David Lifton through some of my contacts who know him, I was a bit apprehensive. But after some email exchanges, David Lifton generously shared some of his observations.

    Here are the preliminary questions I sent David:

    1. Can you summarize when the interviews took place, where, how long they lasted, who was present?
    2. What led you to want to interview Glenn in the first place and how did you set them up?
    3. What were the topics covered and what were the main things he had to say and that you observed?
    4. Glenn’s learning of the Russian language, links to the FPCC, the way he entered Morocco and came back. Some point out the similarities to Oswald and the fingerprints of intelligence—what did your interviews (and other research) bring out in this area?
    5. Inkol mentions that you said that Glenn had a link to the Indiana Rifle (which is the one that links to William Power I believe). Can you discuss this?
    6. Do you think Glenn was being set up as a potential patsy?—please explain.
    7. You mentioned you knew about William Power. How? and if you do read my article, you will see that what I have on him is quite thin (I have found a few more bits of information that I will add). If there is anything you can add I would be most grateful.

    Without going into details, David’s preamble to answering my questions deals with how the passage of time and moving his office unfortunately cloud his recollection of his meetings with Glenn. What follows here are his responses:

    So… that having been said, and based on current recollection.

    RESPONSE TO Q1-3: Glenn’s name came up in connection with my embarking on a comprehensive search of all print (i.e., newspaper) coverage of the JFK assassination, using a set of microfilms I purchased from University Microfilms in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

    I believe that it was the San Antonio papers—either the San Antonio Light, or the News—Express (there were only two San Antonio papers) —that carried stories about what happened on 11/21/63. About a “mystery car” parked at a curb, and some remarks made by one of the occupants of that car, to the effect that “He’ll never get through this city.” Something like that. That led to the San Antonio Police dispatcher putting out a call for that vehicle to “call in to your headquarters” or some such thing. Then, 24-36 hours later, after JFK was assassinated in Dallas, this incident (call it the “San Antonio incident”) then resulted in significant “follow-up” coverage, and that led to the name John Glenn and the story of the San Antonio rifle, linked to the Indiana (Bloomington, IN, I think) rifle.

    Anyway, I clipped those stories, then obtained the House (or Senate? not sure) hearings that took place on or about Nov 18, 1963, at which Glenn testified, as I recall.

    With that as background, I then sought contact with Glenn, who—I somehow learned—lived in Venice, California.

    My first meeting with Glenn was at the UCLA Student Union. What I remember is that it was dark outside, and the SU cafeteria was crowded, and that was how I met him.

    I questioned him closely and established—to my satisfaction (again, “as I presently recall”) —that he did not fit the profile of an “alternate” patsy because there was no evidence whatsoever that there was any third party in his life influencing where he was living, or what he was doing, or asking him to do anything.

    Of course, I was disappointed in the result, but that’s what I found.

    Subsequently, when Robert Sam Anson (who I came to know) was writing about the JFK assassination (for Esquire, I think), he wanted to follow-up on this. Again, as I recall. And, again, as I recall, the two of us actually went to John Glenn’s Venice apartment and spoke with him.

    I do not remember the details at all. What I do remember is being in John Glenn’s apartment, and having the sense that he was “just like Oswald,” something like that. I believe I had that sense because he had either a poster of, or paraphernalia connected with, The Militant. Again, I don’t remember. What I do remember is the UCLA Student Union “first meeting” and my sense of disappointment that my

    hypothesis wasn’t panning out.

    RESPONSE to Q4: See answer to Question 1. FYI: I kept a very imperfect “journal” of my daily work; and I would often write letters home, but I don’t believe they would have contained any relevant information.

    Anyway, that material is stored “elsewhere.”

    RESPONSE to Q5: I believe that the “primary source” for these “links” comes from the San Antonio newspaper coverage—again, I was using microfilmed records of the S A Light and/or News Express for the period 11/20 —11/25/1963.

    RESPONSE to Q6: That was my hypothesis, but what I remember is being (very) disappointed that my questioning of him failed to unearth any supporting data. (Could he have been deceiving me? I suppose he “could have,” but I’m pretty confident that I was not being fooled, and that he was who he “appeared to be.”)

    RESPONSE to Q7:

    1. Please send me the link to your article (or anything else you wish me to read) again. I’m not sufficiently “organized” to lay my hands on it at this moment.
    2. As I recall, it all stemmed from my work with the microfilmed records of the two San Antonio newspapers.

    Also, and this may be of interest to you—or maybe not—I think that some of this “San Antonio” stuff may have been covered in the Dallas Morning News in the day or two after JFK was assassinated.

    David followed up shortly after with this following point:

    P.S.  What I forgot to mention in my memo …

    That the San Antonio newspaper (one of them) reported after the assassination of JFK on Friday 11/22/63, that the “mystery car” was a Secret Service vehicle.

    And that’s what made the whole incident so very important.

    Harry Dean

    Harry Dean is one of those characters I put into the category of unreliable witnesses who may have important knowledge, but that have made many statements that are easily contestable and that have had researchers chasing their tails. Unfortunately, in the JFK assassination soap opera—we are faced with a whole slew of personalities who mislead yet can sometimes be decoded to a certain degree. Frank Sturgis and Gerry Patrick Hemming come to mind, as they along with others tried to send HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi and other researchers on wild goose chases. They nevertheless give us a better picture of the decadent setting Oswald immersed himself in.

    When dealing with such characters, without fully dismissing them, it is prudent not to waste much time on them and only go with what can be corroborated.

    Before reading some of Dean’s forum posts, I looked at what other researchers had to say about him.

    For over 50 years, Dean made claims in letters and forums that he had been recruited, selected, and led by American Intelligence forces to take on special missions such as spying on Castro while in Cuba, the John Birch Society, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Only in 2017 would he finally admit that he was not an official FBI informant.

    In a 2005 post on The Education Forum, he came up with the following claim:

    But among the widespread ‘rightist’ movement were assassin-minded persons that would take action to aid in seizing control of the U.S. government if only given the word.

    Even being tight-knit with the individuals involved, except for bits and pieces of confusing information I failed to timely detect a clearer picture of the real and more subtle plot to kill the president … the plan move relentlessly … but a ‘need-to-know’ method of secrecy was being applied among my radical associates.

    When the name of a Fair Play For Cuba Committee communist was broadcast throughout the rightist circuit after the airing of an August, 1963 radio program from Station WDSU, New Orleans, Louisiana, Lee Oswald was ‘selected’ by another of our {JBS} associates, retired U.S. Army General E.A. Walker of Dallas, Texas.

    The subject was chosen by ‘Guy” Gabaldon as ‘the fall guy’ in the secretive plot against Kennedy. None of us objected, and found it humorous to frame a communist. I quietly considered it as goofy as the weird, but hazy, arrangements to kill the president.

    When Kennedy visited Mexico City in late June of 1962, Gabaldon, in league with some rightist Mexican Federal Police Officials, was set to shoot president Kennedy. Only a last minute escape problem aborted that assassination scheme … Two other of our associates … Lawrence John Howard—aka Alonzo Escruido, and Loran Eugene ‘Skip’ Hall—aka Lorenzo Pacillo, were dispatched by Gabaldon to enlist Oswald in {a phony CIA, Central Intelligence Agency set-up} at Gabaldon’s Mexico City area office.

    General Walker did not orchestrate the assassination, nor the framing of Oswald! Nor did the Mafia, the Cuban exiles, Birchers, etc. Walker could not have organized the weakening of security, the botched autopsy, the Mexico City Oswald imposter episode, the Warren Commission failures, the propaganda offensives. The framing of Oswald began before he left Dallas for New Orleans.

    This goes a long way in explaining why some have suggested that I not include Dean in a comparative analysis of potential patsies.

    However, when researching the documentary trail about Harry Dean on the Mary Ferrell site, as well as on forums and websites (see: https://sites.google.com/site/xrt013/harrydean) that provide an in-depth analysis of Dean’s statements and pertinent documents—we can nevertheless find information about the FPCC, Dean himself and other characters that seem to be part of a model:

    A 1962 Los Angeles FBI File reveals the following about Dean:

    LAX advised Chicago FBI office about phone conversation which Harry had with SA William J. McCauley.   During that phone conversation, Harry “confided that he had been an informant for the Chicago Office, having been a Secretary of the Chicago chapter of the FPCC, but that largely because his wife had become very upset over his activities on behalf of the FBI, he had discontinued his informant activities and had come to the LAX area about one year ago, and is now employed as a plasterer operating out of the Union Office on Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles. He added that he has, since his arrival in Los Angeles, had casual contact with Edgar and Marjorie Swabeck, whom he had previously known in the Chicago area, and from them has learned that Marjorie Swabeck is secretary of the LAX chapter of the FPCC at the present time. He said that he otherwise has taken no particular interest in the FPCC, and that while he himself is personally not averse to resuming informant activities in behalf of the FBI, he hesitates to do so because of his wife’s feeling in the matter. The Chicago Office is requested to verify and furnish a brief summary of the subject’s background, particularly his activities as an informant and his reliability while known to the Chicago office.”

    Another L.A. 1962 FBI file goes on further:

    SAC Chicago to SAC LAX

    Dean first called the Chicago Office in August, 1960, to report that he had been elected Recording Secretary, Chicago Chapter, FPCC. He did not divulge his name and address at this time. Later in the same month he called this office, stating his name and advising he was residing at 1540 Central Avenue, Whiting, Indiana, and that he owned his own business, the Whiting Plastering Company. He told of his connections with the FPCC, furnished information concerning the leadership of this organization, and said he would be amenable to an interview with an agent of the FBI.

    The Indianapolis Office conducted an inquiry in Whiting, Indiana, in September 1960. Detective Captain Edward Grabovac, Whiting, Indiana Police Department, advised that Dean, whose real name he believed to be Gordon Hunt and who had used the name George R. Baker, had skipped town and the Whiting PD had a warrant for his arrest on bad check charges. Grabovac said Dean was a self-employed plasterer.

    The Whiting, Indiana PD procured an identification record from the Detroit, Michigan PD under FBI #4657880. This record revealed that Dean had been committed as a mental patient in Canada in 1948 and was sentenced at Chatham, Ontario, for breaking and entering to ‘one year indefinite’. At this time, Dean had one arrest by the Detroit PD for disturbing a religious meeting and two arrests for using indecent and obscene language.

    He was also AWOL from Fort Knox, Kentucky in 1949. In December 1960, Dean again called this Office to report that he had been residing in Detroit for the past two months. At that time he said he was living in Chicago but he refused to divulge his local address. He continued to telephonically contact this office on several occasions until June 1961.

    He furnished information concerning Cuban nationals connected with the 26th of July Movement and on local persons connected with the FPCC. He was last contacted by two agents of the Chicago Office on June 7, 1961, at which time he was told that this office did not desire his assistance. Former CG___-S advised in August 1960, that Dean was a white male, age about 25 (in 1960), stocky build and black hair. While Dean voluntarily furnished info to the Chicago Office over a period of nearly a year, he was never considered a PSI or informant by this Office.

    Even though Dean does not seem like a highly prized asset for the FBI, the paper trail on Dean also confirms the following: Dean had been committed as a mental patient in Canada in 1948 and was sentenced at Chatham, Ontario.

    An OSI file (NARA Record Number: 104-10404-10041) confirms that Harry Dean was in the U.S. Army in 1945 and then again in 1948 using the name George Robert Baker and that the Office of Naval Intelligence has three files on him. It also states that he had been arrested by the RCMP and the Detroit Police under the Registration Act.

    In 1958 he became a member of the 26th of July Movement, a group led by Fidel Castro.

    In late 1959 and early 1960 he received three letters from Juan A. Orta, the Director of the Prime Minister’s Office of Cuba.

    He visited Cuba in June 1960.

    In August, 1960, he had been elected Recording Secretary, Chicago Chapter, FPCC.

    He soon after became a voluntary informant to the FBI (who nevertheless considered him a Fruitcake).

    In 1961, he moved to Los Angeles, where he had casual contact with Edgar and Marjorie Swabeck, whom he had previously known in the Chicago area, and from them learned that Marjorie Swabeck is secretary of the LAX chapter of the FPCC at the present time. (Which perhaps brought him into the realm of Vaughn Marlowe and Richard Case Nagell).

    In 1962 he joined the John Birch Society.

    He also claims to have known Larry Howard and Loran Hall whose names come up with respect to the assassination, and he warned the Los Angeles FBI about a plot to murder JFK that emanated from General Walker which was discussed during a John Birch Society meeting where Oswald was identified as the patsy.

    In one of his posts Dean states that the Swabecks may have been setting him up. The NARA documents do confirm a relationship that would have begun in 1960 when Harry met Edgar Swabeck during his travels to Cuba. According to Dean they played a role in getting him to set up the Chicago FPCC branch.

    By 1961, the Swabecks were now part of an L.A. FPCC chapter when Dean reconnected with them. They tried once again to involve him in the FPCC. It would not be a great leap to conclude that the Swabecks probably knew Vaughn Marlowe.

    Edgar Swabeck’s father seems to have been Arne Swabeck, one of the founding members of the Communist Party in the U.S. In the late 1920s, he was expelled from the party as a Trotskyist and worked together with James P. Cannon and other American Trotskyists to create the Socialist Workers Party. Swabeck visited Leon Trotsky in his exile in Turkey in 1933. He made a cameo appearance in the movie Reds. He was also reference person for The Militant, published by the SWP.

    It is also worth asking: If the murder had taken place in L.A., would a link to the cast of FPCC characters have also caused the downfall of the SWP which was very close to the FPCC management in L.A.?

    Potential patsy analysis: a new perspective

    When I completed the first article, I felt we could deduce that the subjects discussed where being actively groomed to become patsies; in other words, that operatives maneuvered easily discarded freelance assets or other malleable figures into assuming weaponized, pro-Castro and/or communist, anti-Kennedy misfit personas, and placed them in the proximity of the kill zone with abundant incriminating evidence. The string-pullers were also fully prepared to pounce with propaganda initiatives to put the blame of the assassination on Castro! While this seems to fit well—admittedly to varying degrees—in the cases of the first seven subjects profiled, the analysis of our two latest characters suggests something similar but with certain caveats.

    In the cases of Dean (pending more research) and Glenn, we can state that the credentials are also very suspicious, but that certain elements fit less well the claim that they were being groomed to take the fall: Their FPCC links predate when the winning stratagem was being mapped out, which arguably had its origins no earlier than when the ZR/Rifle (executive action) architect and disgraced CIA officer William Harvey met with mobster John Roselli in late Winter 1963. It was after these meetings that definite attempts on JFK’s life began multiplying and that the subsequent incriminating behavior and travels of Oswald, Nagell, Lopez, Vallee, Power and Garriga were too well timed to be considered mere coincidences.

    So how we interpret the profiles of Dean, Glenn, Nagell, and Marlowe with respect to their FPCC links needs to be more nuanced. While we cannot state at this point that they were maneuvered into joining the FPCC in order to be groomed as patsies, their connections to this organization, which was being heavily infiltrated by intelligence, when combined with their other traits, are nevertheless very telling and more in line with the role of informants who had patsy credentials. Some of the other subjects required fine-tuning of their personas and logistical maneuvering in the months leading up to the hit. The analysis of all the candidates on the short list bolsters the case that a cash-strapped Oswald did not leave his young daughter and pregnant wife in the lurch so he could pursue his ideological dream of opening an FPCC chapter in one of the most hostile places imaginable towards this dwindling organization.

    Senator Richard Schweiker of the Church Committee famously stated that the fingerprints of intelligence were all over Oswald. As we can see in the updated chart, Oswald has company!

    • Eight of the nine subjects profiled are connected to cities visited by Kennedy during the six months that preceded his assassination.
    • Each of these cities were territories exploited criminally by Mafiosi of interest in the assassination.
    • At least three moved to the cities and got employment in strategically located buildings along the motorcade route shortly before the planned presidential visit.
    • Seven were ex-military.
    • Eight of them exhibited behavior that can very plausibly be linked to intelligence gathering or Cuban exile interaction.
    • Seven were directly linked to the FPCC. Seven of them had visited Mexico City.
    • Six attempted to visit Cuba, three of them successfully.
    • Seven had links to Cuban/Latino exiles.
    • Six were described as having psychological problems.
    • Seven exhibited anti-Kennedy behavior.
    • None were probed seriously by the Warren Commission.
    • Intelligence services, notably the Secret Service, kept crucial information about these subjects as well as the prior plots totally secret from the Warren Commission.

    Potential alternative patsy comparison chart

    patsies

    More on the FPCC

    In the original article, much was written to underscore just how unlikely it would be for the subjects analyzed to be involved in 1963 with a dying FPCC. The timing was not right, their profiles contrast with the students and intellectuals who were most ideologically attracted to this outfit before the missile crisis, and the opening of chapters in hostile locations like New Orleans and Miami in 1963 can simply be described as mindless … unless, of course, other stratagems were at play: perhaps its infiltration by informants, which was rampant by then, and patsy grooming ploys.

    It stands to reason that the persons in a position to lead the infiltrators and monitor their movements deserve our utmost attention and that the FPCC should be turned upside down by the research community, because when Oswald joined the failing FPCC, he was most likely on a mission.

    In this respect, John Newman’s research into the FPCC infiltration and David Atlee Phillips’ role is worth noting. From his 2013 countercoup article here are some key points:

    • In early 1961, eleven weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA seized an opportunity to become more actively involved in running operations against the FPCC. CIA Security Office and Western Hemisphere elements identified an Agency employee who knew Court Wood, an American student just returned from Cuba under the sponsorship of the FPCC. This opportunity to surveil Court Wood, which developed at the end of January, was irresistible in the judgment of the person in the CIA’s Security Research Service (SRS) of the Security Office who conceived and authorized the operation. That person was James McCord, the same James McCord who would later become embroiled in the (Watergate) scandal during the Nixon Presidency.
    • It is fitting that one of the Agency’s legendary disinformation artists, David Atlee Phillips, should have been in charge of the CIA’s CI and propaganda effort against the FPCC. Phillips would reappear in Mexico City at the time Oswald visited there, taking over the anti-Castro operations of the CIA station in Mexico City during the very days that CIA headquarters and the CIA Mexico City station exchanged cables on Oswald’s visit to the Mexican capital.
    • “At the request of Mr. David Phillips” wrote the fortunate CIA employee picked to spy on his neighbor, “I spent the evening of January 6 with Court Wood, a student who has recently returned from a three-week stay in Cuba under the sponsorship of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” The employee said that Court and his father both were pro-Castro and “extremely critical” of American foreign policy. “I’ve been advised by Mr. Phillips to continue my relationship with Mr. Wood and I will keep your office informed of each subsequent visit.”
    • What the operation tells us is that, by 1960, CIA was sufficiently interested in countering the FPCC to engage in an illegal domestic operation. The fact that controversy would follow the two men in charge, McCord in connection with Watergate and Phillips in connection with the Kennedy assassination, cause this page in CIA’s anti-Castro operations to stand out in hindsight.
    • We have in the past utilized techniques with respect to countering activities of mentioned [FPCC] organization in the U.S. During December 1961, New York prepared an anonymous leaflet which was mailed to select FPCC members throughout the country for the purpose of disrupting FPCC and causing a split between FPCC and Socialist Workers Party (SWP) supporters, which technically was very effective.
    • These tactics dramatize the lengths to which the FBI was willing to go to discredit the FPCC, whose chapters in Chicago, Newark, and Miami were infiltrated early on by the Bureau. As we will see in Chapter Sixteen, during Oswald’s tenure with the FPCC, FBI break-ins to their offices were a regular occurrence.
    • According to FBI records, on April 21, 1963, Dallas confidential informant “T-2” reported this letter to the FPCC, in which Oswald said he had passed out FPCC pamphlets in Dallas with a placard around his neck reading HANDS OFF CUBA, VIVA FIDEL.
    • Whether Oswald had stood on a street corner or not, important undercover FBI assets in New York were in motion against the FPCC during the time or shortly after Oswald wrote the letter. As we already know, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was the subject for intense FBI and CIA interest and counterintelligence operations. A major FBI Chicago office investigation of the FPCC appeared on March 8, four days before Oswald ordered the rifle from Chicago. This study was transmitted to the CIA.
    • By picking such an organization to correspond with and carrying out actions on its behalf, Oswald—by default or by design—had insinuated himself into the gray world of the watchers and the watched.

    The SWP

    Because of the Socialist Workers Party’s strong links to the FPCC and with at least four of the subjects we have profiled, and because it published The Militant, the newspaper being clutched by Oswald in his infamous backyard photo, it is worth researching this political outfit which was considered subversive by intelligence agencies.

    In 2005, its national leader between the early 1960s to the mid 1980s, Barry Sheppard, wrote a political memoir about this organization.

    The SWP had its roots in the 1930s and was officially founded in 1938. It quickly became an active supporter of leftist causes and the maligned Labor Movement—a target of Hoover’s FBI. Its existence was marked with volatility and controversy. It was a target of the McCarthy era witch-hunts in the fifties—these flared up again under the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960s, when a certain Lee Harvey Oswald and at least three of the alternate patsies decided to join. The SWP also supported The Nation of Islam and later Malcolm X, The Freedom Riders, Algerian Independence, Peace movements—many of the issues Kennedy haters were boiling mad about!

    It was an enthusiastic supporter of the Castro revolution:

    Reflecting our own growing confidence in the revolutionary leadership, The Militant began to carry speeches by Castro and other Cuban leaders, which were among the best popular explanations of what the revolution was doing. In one of the first speeches we published, Fidel explained that the US-inspired counter-revolutionary fronts would fail because, unlike the guerrillas of the July 26 Movement, they could never build a base in the peasantry with their program of returning the land to the exploiters. Over the next years, others on the US left also came to support the Cuban revolution, but The Militant was always the best and most consistent US source providing truthful news about Cuba and publishing the ideas of the Cuban revolutionaries in their own words.

    The SWP was very involved with the FPCC:

    We came to be part of the leadership of the FPCC partly as the result of a crisis in the organization. The original FPCC leadership was somewhat timid, and shied away from forthright defense of the revolution as it radicalized. In response, Cuban members of the July 26 Movement living in the US blocked with the SWP and some other militants, and took over the leadership of the Committee. It was while he was staying at the Theresa that Castro met Malcolm X. A few years later, I would interview Malcolm for the Young Socialist in his office at the Theresa. The revolutionary Black nationalist was attracted to the Cuban Revolution from the start and supported it until he was murdered in 1965.

    When Castro was refused lodging during his New York U.N. visit in 1960, he received support from the SWP:

    Castro declared that the delegation would camp out in Central Park. Berta Green, a member of the SWP who was also the Executive Secretary of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), got in touch with the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, which agreed the Cubans could stay there.

    Sheppard’s memoir shows that the SWP was much larger than the FPCC when he describes protest mobilization during the missile crisis in 1962:

    We stood up to it. The PC discussed and approved the thrust of a statement to appear in the next issue of The Militant. It ran under the headline, “Stop the Crime Against Cuba!” We alerted SWP branches and YSA chapters that night to mobilize to support the broadest possible actions against the threat. In New York, there were two major demonstrations. One was called by Women Strike for Peace and other peace groups. We joined some 20,000 protesters at the United Nations on this demonstration. Then the Fair Play for Cuba Committee held its own action, more specifically pro-Cuba in tone, of over 1,000 people, also near the UN.

    The following points concerning the July 1963 convention cast even more suspicion around the timing and motives of openings of FPCC chapters in the deep south by Santiago Garriga and Oswald and the continued involvement with the FPCC by the other subjects:

    At the convention, a meeting of pro-Cuba activists discussed the situation in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Cubans living in the United States who supported the July 26 Movement had helped us build the FPCC. Now most of them had returned to Cuba. In most areas, the FPCC had dwindled down to supporters of the SWP and YSA. Since we did not want the FPCC to become a sectarian front group, the meeting decided to stop trying to build it. The FPCC then existed for a while as a paper organization, until the assassination of President John Kennedy dealt it a mortal blow.

    Sheppard’s account of the SWP reaction when the Kennedy assassination was announced is noteworthy:

    We were listening to the news when the announcement came. I said, “I hope it’s not that nut who tried to join the party, that guy who is a one-man Fair Play for Cuba Committee chapter in New Orleans.” Imagine how I felt when it turned out he was the one charged with the act. The SWP and YSA had received letters from a Lee Harvey Oswald, asking to join. His letters, as I remember them, were politically confused, and the photo that was sent with them was strange. In it, the person who was supposedly Oswald held copies of The Militant and the Communist Party’s Worker. He also sported two or more rifles and hand guns sticking out of his belt. A similar picture appeared on the cover of Life magazine after the assassination. Oswald, it turned out, had posed for similar photographs holding the Communist Party’s paper and the Workers’ World Party’s Workers’ World. One look at the picture and everyone in the leadership of the party and YSA thought we were dealing with a nut or a provocateur. Oswald purchased subscriptions to The Militant and Young Socialist. But no one in our leadership thought we should accept him as a member. In any case, our policy was not to accept at-large members in places where there was no party branch or YSA chapter, for the reason that there was no real way of evaluating the applicant. The press featured Oswald’s connection with the FPCC and speculated that Castro or some unspecified “reds” were behind the assassination. We were a potential target because we were well known as supporters of the Cuban revolution …

    … The New York Daily News, attempting to fire up the atmosphere against the left, stated in an editorial: “The fact remains that Oswald was a Marxist and proud of it. The fact remains that the Communist Party continually preaches death to imperialism, capitalism, etc. It is only natural for lamebrains such as Oswald to conclude that this means killing your enemies wherever and whenever you can reach them defenseless. Ideas have consequences.” This was all a pack of lies. As The Militant pointed out a few days later, the editorial was also an attempt to cover up the fanatical hatred that the right wing had for Kennedy, particularly because of the concessions the government was being forced to make to the fight for Black rights. In Dallas during the days before the Kennedy visit, for example, the rightists had posted leaflets displaying a photo of Kennedy and the words: “Wanted for Treason.”

    Dan Hardway’s 2016 declaration

    HSCA investigative attorneys Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez co-authored a section for the HSCA’s Final Report on the CIA and LHO in Mexico City which remained classified in full until 1996. The draft, after further declassification in 2003, was published by the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press as Oswald, The CIA, And Mexico City: The Lopez-Hardway Report, and shed light on missing/ destroyed tapes and photos, Oswald impersonations, lying CIA officials and peculiar behavior by Oswald or a frame-up artist—all completely fluffed over by the Warren Commission.

    In 2016, Dan Hardway prepared a written declaration in a support of a Jefferson Morley Freedom of Information civil action which should really trouble historians who describe JFK conspiracy proponents as flakey opportunists. In his own words, here is who media and historians have chosen to snub:

    From July of 1977 until December of 1978, I was employed as a researcher on the staff of the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). In that capacity I had a top secret security clearance and, during a major portion of my employment, had access to un-redacted Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) records. My primary area of responsibility in research for the HSCA was the possibility of any relationship of any nature between the CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO), with special focus on the CIA’s awareness of, and reporting on, LHO’s activities in Mexico City. Implicit in that focus was the issue of whether the evidence from Mexico indicated any operational connection between LHO and the CIA.

    My research for the HSCA also covered areas related to people of interest, including David Atlee Phillips and William Harvey, among others, and CIA assassination programs. I was also tasked with research and analysis of the response of the CIA’s Mexico City Station LHO’s trip to Mexico City and to the assassination.

    The following are some of the most damning statements made in this very important affidavit:

    • Beginning in May of 1978, the CIA assigned George Joannides to handle liaison with Edwin Lopez and me. In the summer of 1978, Mr. Joannides began to change the way file access was handled. We no longer received prompt responses to our requests for files and what we did receive no longer seemed to provide the same complete files that we had been seeing. The obstruction of our efforts by Mr. Joannides escalated over the summer, finally resulting in a refusal to provide unexpurgated access to files in violation of the Memorandum of Understanding previously agreed to by the HSCA and the CIA.
    • I did not do any research aimed at George Joannides, or his activities in 1963, because, while working for the HSCA in 1977-1978, I was not informed that he had had any involvement with any aspect of the Kennedy case and I had no basis to even suspect that he had. In researching possible connections between post-assassination stories about LHO and David Atlee Phillips, I did little, if any, research that I recall into the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE) because, among other reasons, the CIA had firmly represented to the HSCA that all ties between the DRE and the CIA had been terminated prior to 1963.
    • … to review CIA 201 files on many of the individuals who had been sources for stories that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the assassination tying LHO to Castro or the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. I was able to establish that most of the sources of the stories were, or had been, agents or assets used at one time or another by David Atlee Phillips.
    • Before our unexpurgated access was cut off by Joannides, I had been able to document links between David Phillips and most of the sources of the disinformation that came out immediately after the assassination about Oswald and his pro-Castro proclivities. I confronted Phillips with those in an interview at our offices on August 24,1978. Phillips was extremely agitated by that line of questioning, but was forced to admit that many of the sources were not only former assets that he had managed, in the late 50’s and early 1960’s, but were also assets whom he was personally managing in the fall of 1963. Mr. Phillips was asked, but could not explain, why the information that came from anti-Castro Cuban groups and individuals pointing to Cuban connections all seemed to come from assets he handled personally, but acknowledged that was the case. Mr. Phillips also acknowledged that back-channel communication methods existed, but denied that any were used in Mexico City.
    • We have, since 1978, learned that George Joaimides was running the propaganda shop at the CIA’s Miami JMWAVE Station in 1963. It is extremely unlikely that Mr. Joannides could have occupied that position and not have known, and worked with, David Atlee Phillips. In addition, in 1963, as we now know, George Joannides was the case officer handling the DRE. In 1977 the CIA specifically denied that DRE had a case officer assigned when asked that question by the HSCA.
    • One possible inference from the known data, at this point, is that the CIA brought someone out of retirement who knew where to not let us look and he impeded and, eventually, shut down our research. His specific work in regard to my research was commended by his superior in his annual performance review from 1978.
    • In addition to being a primary source of stories about LHO in the days after the assassination, the DRE also had a highly visible encounter with LHO in New Orleans in September 1963. George Joannides’ s performance evaluation dated July 31,1963, reports that Joannides has “done an excellent job in the handling of a significant student exile group which hitherto had successfully resisted any important degree of control.”
    • David Phillips recruited a group of students in Havana to work against Castro while Phillips was serving under deep cover in Havana in the late 1950s. At the time, the group was known as the Directorio Revolucionario, or DR. Phillips was the DR’s first case officer. When the DR’s leadership fled Cuba in 1960, William Kent, who was very close to Phillips and worked with him, organized them into an effective organization in Florida, known as the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil, or DRE.
    • In August, 1963, LEO had an encounter with DRE representatives in New Orleans. That encounter resulted not only in widespread publicity in New Orleans at the time, including newspaper articles, television coverage and radio interviews, it also resulted in the first reports trying to tie LEO to Castro after the assassination of John Kennedy. DRE released their information the day of the assassination and it was covered in both the Miami Herald and the Washington Post the next day.
    • The CIA never told the Warren Commission about their support of, and work with, the DRE in 1963. The CIA never told the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the “Church Committee”) about it. The Assassinations Record Review Board (ARRB) asked the Agency about DRE. The CIA initially told the ARRB the same thing they told the HSCA: the Agency had no employee in contact with DRE in 1963. The ARRB, however, in examination of Joannides’s CIA personnel file, discovered its clear indication that Joannides was the DRE case officer in 1963.
    • In the early 1960’s, David Phillips was working at Headquarters where he, along with Cord Meyer, developed the first disinformation operations aimed at the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
    • To summarize what we now know: the DRE originated as the DR under the tutelage of David Phillips in Havana in the late 1950’s. William Kent took over running the group, now known as the DRE, once they had fled from Havana to Miami. In his position, he was responsible to Phillips. Crozier came in to assist Kent with his workload. Kent and Crozier were not too successful with the hard-to-control group and Richard Helms gave the DRE an officer responsible directly to him, which officer was Joannides. But Joannides’s performance evaluations indicate that his immediate supervisor, prior to October 1963, was Kent. We do not know what working relationship Joannides had with Phillips either directly, or indirectly through Kent. It is unlikely that Phillips did not continue to be involved in, or at least kept apprised of, operations of a group that he had started and nurtured, both directly and indirectly, which continued to be directly active in his primary area of responsibility: anti-Castro propaganda. Indeed, it would be in keeping with what is known if he used that group in operations against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, or that he continued to be involved in disinformation operations aimed at the group, having designed the first one.
    • After David Atlee Phillips testified a second time before the HSCA in Executive Session on April 25,1978, several staff members, myself included, sought to have the Chief Counsel recommend to the Committee that it refer Mr. Phillips to the Justice Department for prosecution for lying to Congress.
    • On September 16, 1963, the CIA informed the FBI that it was considering action to counter the activities of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FFCC) in foreign countries. In New Orleans, on September 17,1963, Oswald applied for, and received, a Mexican travel visa; on September 27, Oswald arrived in Mexico City. On that day, and the following day, Oswald, or someone impersonating him, may have visited the Cuban Consulate. On those same days, the Mexico City CIA Station was testing an impulse camera in their photo surveillance operation aimed at the door of the Cuban Consulate. Sometime in late September Phillips left Mexico City on a temporary duty assignment at CIA Headquarters. It is at this time that Phillips was promoted to chief of anti-Castro operations in Mexico City—the Cuba desk. On October 1, the Mexico City Station sent bulk materials to Headquarters.

    Dan Hardway’s state of mind can be inferred by the open-ended questions he poses near the end of his declaration:

    • Were the promotions rewards for a successful disinformation operation aimed at the FPCC in New Orleans, an operation that the Agency thought it could export to Mexico? While TDY, did Phillips meet with Kent at HQ? Did he meet with Joannides in Miami? Did they review the results of a disinformation and “dangle” operation they had just run in Mexico City?—their first attempt to export the successful domestic anti-FPCC disinformation operation? Did they review the production from the impulse camera? Was that camera’s production the “bulk material” in the pouch? We don’t know the answers because the questions were never asked; George Joannides shut down the HSCA investigation into this area before this level of detail could be discovered and connected. Given all this, a reasonable researcher has to ask whether the Oswald visit in Mexico City was part of an intelligence operation that had both counterintelligence and propaganda purposes? It also, in this context, becomes appropriate to ask whether there has been an active cover-up and whether George Joannides’ undercover assignment to work with the HSCA was part of that cover-up.

    Hardway’s concluding remarks do not give the impression that he believes that Oswald was simply a drifting malcontent or a pro-Castro ideologue, and that Joannides and Phillips could be counted on for knowing what really happened:

    • In regard to the issues of 1963 there would be great public benefit to knowing whether LHO had been involved, wittingly or unwittingly, in an intelligence operation. Even without settlement of that ultimate question, additional information about what George Joannides was doing in 1963, in particular with the DRE in New Orleans, would go a long way to providing insight into that ultimate question. Similarly, being able to explore the relationship between David Atlee Phillips and George Joannides would benefit the public by either confirming or disproving vital aspects of the events of 1963.

    Conclusion

    Dan Hardway’s declaration is recent, blistering, and completely demolishes the history books’ stenographic claims that Oswald the Lone Nut killed JFK. Hardway underscores many disturbing observations that cannot be explained by mere happenstance. His position is nevertheless soft-pedalled compared to what Schweiker and Gaeton Fonzi have stated. It is now possible to go a lot farther in our deductions.

    Case comparison analysis of the potential patsies and prior plots to assassinate JFK would bring investigators to study common traits, behavior patterns, entity links, chronological sequences in order to develop a profile of the offenders. The perpetrators in this case were able to:

    1. recruit dreamy, malleable ex-marines or Cuban exiles who were drawn to the world of espionage;
    2. have access to a network of Mafiosi and Cuban exiles who shared regime change objectives and could work in proximity with the potential patsies while providing layers of separation for the decision-makers;
    3. use propaganda to create pro-Castro, anti-Kennedy, misfit, violent, and dangerous personas;
    4. lead the subjects into joining left-wing, subversive organizations, visiting Mexico City, and trying to enter Cuba;
    5. move some of them near the kill zones and cause them to behave suspiciously in visible, controversial, and timely manners;
    6. ensure a weak investigation and keep incriminating evidence secret;
    7. place the blame on communists or Castro himself with the help from friends in the media.

    Only a select few had the means to carry all this out.

    They wrote up the technique in a playbook called “ZR/Rifle” and applied it, or versions of it, a number of times in foreign countries. Some of them hated Kennedy so much that it is quite plausible that they went rogue. A few of them even admitted the existence of a conspiracy, their involvement, or their knowledge of it.

    William Harvey’s links with other CIA persons of interest, Johnny Roselli and Santo Trafficante and their network of Mafiosi, Jack Ruby and Cuban exiles who hovered around Oswald during the last months of his life, his links to the FPCC infiltration programs, travel to Dallas shortly before the assassination and role in ZR/Rifle tactics qualify him as a person of extreme interest in the coup.

    Visual data shows how David Atlee Phillips’ universe overlaps with Oswald’s through over 20 common touch points involving Cuban exiles, propaganda tools, the FPCC, Mexico City, Oswald babysitters, etc. Case linkage shows that no fewer than six of the eight alternate patsies were also marked as pro-Castro with their bizarre FPCC links, the very organization Phillips was turning inside out in his plots to counter Castro sympathizers. Throw in his lies, quasi-confessions, and his being thrown under the bus by colleague E.H. Hunt, and we have a strong case to make about who some of the leading plotters were.

    If we accept that these are some the fingerprints of intelligence that Richard Schweiker referred to, the offender profile suggests quite strongly that at least a few of the fingers the prints came from belonged to David Atlee Phillips and William Harvey! In the late 1970s, after the HSCA asked the Justice Department to re-open the case, these two suspects, and their networks of assassins, operatives and propaganda assets who have been discussed in previous articles, should have been rounded up, and would have been in a normal murder investigation. The fact that this one was presidential seems to have lowered the bar of diligence and motivation. It should still be done posthumously, for the sake of correcting what is related to unsuspecting high-school history students, and of preventing future attacks on a democracy.

    The next question we can ask ourselves, is who provided the brains and handled upper management tasks for the Big Event? The entity link diagram and a chronology analysis point so far to a group of like-minded, discarded and/or disgruntled CIA officers who were all loyal to a disgraced Alan Dulles who, after being removed from his functions by the victim, remained committed to his worldviews, well connected and a man on a mission. Stay tuned!

    Go to Part 1

  • Jim Garrison: The Beat Goes On

    Jim Garrison: The Beat Goes On

    Would Jim Garrison have been forgotten if Oliver Stone had never met the late Ellen Ray? If the reader is unaware of who Ellen Ray was let me inform you of her importance in history. (her obituary)

    Ellen Ray was the wife of Bill Schaap. They ran a publishing company called Sheridan Square Press. Sheridan Square did not just release books. They also published magazines like the illustrious Covert Action Information Bulletin and Lies of our Times. If our readers do not know about those two periodicals, it is their loss. The first dealt with the Central Intelligence Agency and its allies; the second was concerned with media analysis. They were well done and important journals.

    Ellen Ray had known Jim Garrison a long time—going all the way back to his original investigation of the John Kennedy murder in the late sixties. She always thought highly of him and his work. So when Garrison thought of writing a book on his inquiry in the eighties, Sheridan Square was one of the houses he thought of releasing it through. But before that, Garrison had had an offer from a much bigger publishing house. That deal did not go through since the proofreader the house assigned to the book was Sylvia Meagher. Now as everyone knows, this site is a sincere admirer of Meagher and her fine book, Accessories After the Fact. But as most insiders also realize, Meagher was one of the early critics who developed a phobia—some would call it a mania—about Jim Garrison and his inquiry. (The others would include Josiah Thompson and Paul Hoch.) Even someone like Jerry Policoff, who was a close friend of Meagher, once said that Sylvia should not have been assigned to review Garrison’s book: “My God, she contributed money to Clay Shaw’s defense!”

    Well, predictably, Meagher’s analysis contributed to Garrison returning his advance. But that may have been fortunate, because now he turned to Ellen Ray and Sheridan Square Press. They assigned him Zachary Sklar as his editor. Zach was a distinguished journalism professor and contributor to Sheridan’s two publications. It was a fortunate pairing. Originally, Garrison had written his book from a third person point of view. But when he met Zach, the editor convinced him that since the DA was an actual participant in the story he was telling, it would be more effective if he wrote the book as a first person narrative. I think most people today would say that was a good choice.

    On the Trail of the Assassins sold about forty thousand copies when it was originally released in hard cover. The thoroughly annotated book revealed many new things about Garrison’s investigation that most outsiders did not know about. It also exhibited Garrison’s firm grasp on the entire evidentiary record of the JFK case and also Kennedy’s place in history. Overall, it was a real contribution to the library of books on the assassination of President Kennedy.

    But what happened later was probably even more significant. At a film festival in Havana, Ellen Ray met up with Oliver Stone. She told him words to the effect: “Have I got a book for you!” Stone read Garrison’s book and decided to bring it to the big screen. He did so in December of 1991.

    But this was the JFK assassination. And it was Jim Garrison. As the DA noted in his book, there were many media critics of his inquiry. And they struck at him in what can only be called a vicious and personal manner. Some of them hid their relationships with the intelligence community, e.g., James Phelan, Walter Sheridan, and Hugh Aynesworth. Even more buried was the cooperation between these men and Clay Shaw’s lawyers. (See Destiny Betrayed, second edition, chapter 11 for an analysis of this nexus.) That sixties wave of media critics was not going to let Oliver Stone bring back Jim Garrison and the JFK case in any kind of fair or salutary manner. So they decided to do a preemptive strike on Stone’s film.

    In what was probably an unprecedented campaign in the history of American cinema, the MSM attacked the film JFK seven months in advance of its release. In fact, Ben Bradlee and the The Washington Post sent George Lardner to Dallas to write a story as the film was being shot in Dealey Plaza.

    Lardner’s article began with one of the truly snarky remarks in recent journalistic history. In watching a rehearsal of the Dealey Plaza sequence, Lardner noted that Stone had ordered up five shots in the assassination sequence. The reporter then wrote: “Five shots? Is this the Kennedy assassination or the Charge of the Light Brigade?” Through their acoustical testing, the House Select Committee on Assassinations had concluded that there were four shots fired. But as researcher Donald Thomas revealed at Cyril Wecht’s Duquesne Conference in 2003, those same sound technicians told Chief Counsel Robert Blakey that they detected five shots. Blakey told Thomas that he did not think it was possible to sell that many shots to the committee, so their report only analyzed and accepted four. In other words, this was a political decision, not a scientific one. There is real evidence that there were five shots, but somehow that did not matter to Lardner. After all, it’s the JFK case.

    Lardner’s article was the first volley in a seven-month MSM campaign that was intended to make sure that the reception of JFK was jaundiced in advance. Many of the same people who attacked Garrison back in the sixties were brought back to do so again, like Aynesworth and Edward Epstein. The fact that neither of these men was at all credible or objective on the subjects of the Kennedy assassination or Jim Garrison was irrelevant. The goal was to savage the film before it had a fair hearing. That is how radioactive this subject was, even thirty years later.

    In spite of this assault, JFK did well at the box office, both at home and abroad. It was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture. But to show the reader just how nutty the anti-JFK crusade was, consider the following. On the eve of the Oscars, an anonymous author bought an ad in the trade journal Variety. The ad asked that no voters cast their ballot for the film as Best Picture. Researcher Rich Goad did some detective work and found out that the ad was paid for by the late Warren Commission counsel David Belin.

    Besides bringing the Kennedy assassination back into the limelight, JFK was the main cause for the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). For at the end of the film, Stone added a subtitle revealing that the files of the House Select Committee were being kept secret until the year 2027. This created a sensation in Washington. Tens of thousands of citizens now called their representatives, sent them letters or faxed them in order to do something about this travesty. It worked. The Board was created. It was a unique agency that was made up of private citizens appointed by the president. That agency had a staff that read and researched documents that were now to be declassified. If an intelligence agency objected, that agency had to show why the document should be kept secret. This reversed the previous Freedom of Information Law, which put the burden of proof on the requester, who had to show why it should be declassified. But even today, twenty years after the ARRB closed its doors, the government is still maintaining secrecy over thousands of documents.

    That Board has a decidedly mixed record of achievement. But it did do some good work on the Garrison angle of the JFK case.   In fact, the Board even went to court with then New Orleans DA Harry Connick to salvage a file cabinet full of documents remaining from the Garrison investigation. After being shown up in the press, Connick resisted turning over the materials. But the Justice Department eventually secured the documents. The Garrison family also turned over thousands of pages that the late DA had in his personal effects.

    Garrison had always insisted that, for various reasons, he was never able to reveal most of the evidence he had secured from 1967-69. After authors like William Davy, Joan Mellen and myself went through what the ARRB attained, we had to agree. The Garrison files in the Archives today hold an abundance of utterly fascinating material on a wide array of subjects dealing with many aspects of the JFK case. Does the MSM reveal any of this to the public? Nope. One of the most embarrassing aspects of the three-week binge that the media went on last year in anticipation that the JFK files were finally going to be completely declassified was this: No one chronicled what the ARRB had already released. Which was significant. It was about 2 million pages of material that opened up new vistas on subjects like Rose Cheramie, Kennedy and Vietnam, and the medical evidence in the JFK case. Guests like Larry Sabato, Phil Shenon and Gerald Posner did not want to discuss those topics. Nether did their hosts like NBC stooge on JFK, Rachel Maddow.

    It is easy to understand why this would occur. As Upton Sinclair once said: It is hard to make journalists understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it. Contrary to popular belief there is no such thing as a liberal media. In the twentieth century, and up until today, the American media has been controlled by an oligarchical class. Some authors call this class the Eastern Establishment. Some call it the Power Elite.   As sociologist Donald Gibson explained in his fine book Battling Wall Street, President Kennedy was not a part of that group. He never joined the Council on Foreign Relations; he did not join any secret societies at Harvard; he didn’t like working intelligence during World War II. He got transferred out to the South Pacific and served with a bunch of Joe Six Pack guys on what were close to suicide missions. As this author demonstrated in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed, both in the Senate and in the White House, Kennedy was opposed to much of what this Power Elite was doing abroad, especially in the Third World. (See Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 21-33) After his death, the progress that he did make in the White House was largely halted, and then reversed. (pp. 367-77) Due in part to the ARRB, we know much more about these changes, especially regarding Indochina.

    Jim Garrison was probably the first critic of the Warren Commission who understood this matter. And it is probably one of the reasons the MSM decided to smear him beyond recognition. This goes on to the present day. In a recent article in a regional journal called 64 Parishes, a writer named Alecia Long decided to pick up the infernal and eternal anti-Garrison cudgel. The New Orleans Times Picayune has always liked to go after Garrison and so they are now carrying it on their web site.

    To anyone who is familiar with the territory, the first reaction is, “Oh my aching back!” The ten-page article is simply a compendium of every MSM caricature of Garrison and his Kennedy case that one can imagine—except Long does not even mention the ARRB. She only alludes to what they did in about a half a sentence. As we shall see, this was a wise choice on her part.

    The preposterous thesis of her essay is that somehow, by his clever use of the media, Garrison was able to advance his case, his cause and his reputation. She uses Garrison’s 30-minute talk on NBC as proof of this. She even opens her article by asking why NBC agreed to give the DA this platform. She does not answer her rhetorical question until several pages later. There, she finally says that in June of 1967, “NBC ran an hour-long special sharply critical of Garrison’s claims and the methods used by his investigators.” This is an understatement. Most objective observers considered the Walter Sheridan production a straight-out hatchet job. But she tries to bolster the program’s credibility by adding, “The special featured several witnesses who claimed to have been offered bribes in exchange for providing testimony damaging to Shaw.”

    What she does not note is that these so-called “witnesses” were later exposed, either in court, or by their own confessions, as being bogus. (DiEugenio, pp. 239-43) And more than one witness—for instance, Fred Leemans and Marlene Mancuso—testified as to the unethical and threatening tactics used by Sheridan for the program. It was Sheridan who fabricated these phony on-air statements by threatening and intimidating Garrison’s witnesses. Mancuso did not succumb to his bullying, so she was not on the show. Leemans did and went on the program. But both of them signed affidavits revealing the extent to which Sheridan and his cohorts would go to in order to flip Garrison’s witnesses. For example, Leemans was told, “… if I did not change my statement and state that I had been bribed by Jim Garrison’s office, I and my family would be in physical danger.” (DiEugenio, p. 240) Somehow, Long missed those statements, which gravely undermine her thesis because logically, they explain why the Federal Communications Commission decided to grant Garrison the time to counter Sheridan’s handiwork. But even at that, the FCC only gave Garrison a half hour, compared to Sheridan’s full hour, which contradicts the idea of equal time embedded in the now defunct Fairness Doctrine.

    She also questions why, when granted the time, Garrison did not answer Sheridan’s charges in more specific terms. As the DA stated throughout his Playboy interview, if he had done that, it would have given Shaw’s lawyers a pretext to move to get his case thrown out of court, since it would prejudice prospective jurors.

    With the release of Garrison’s files by the ARRB, the idea that Garrison did not have a factual basis for his case against Shaw is revealed to be utterly false. There is no doubt today that Shaw used the pseudonym of Clay Bertrand. The declassified files contain over ten witnesses who stated this was the case. It is further revealed that the FBI knew this as well. And finally, attorney Dean Andrews knew it—and lied about it.   As a consequence, Garrison never got to ask Shaw the key question: “Why did you call Andrews and ask him to go to Dallas to defend Oswald?” (DiEugenio, pp. 387-88)

    It is also now shown that Shaw lied about his association with the CIA. That association has turned out to be a long service and a lucrative one. Not only did Shaw lie about it at his own trial, the CIA continually lied about it, and Robert Blakey fell for it. In the HSCA volumes, Shaw is referred to as part of a large businessman’s contact program in the Agency. Not true. Shaw was a well-compensated contract agent from at least the fifties. (Joan Mellen, Our Man In Haiti, pp. 54-55) In the sixties, he had a covert security clearance code name that was the same as Howard Hunt’s. (DiEugenio, pp. 383-87) The CIA tried desperately to cover up these facts, even going as far as altering Shaw’s files. (William Davy, Let Justice Be Done, p. 200) The ARRB later discovered the CIA had gone even further and destroyed Shaw’s 201 file.

    (or open in a new window.)

    As the late Yale educated attorney Allard Lowenstein once said regarding the Robert Kennedy assassination: in his experience as a lawyer, people who have nothing to hide don’t hide things. Somehow, Long does not think any of this new material is relevant to any discussion of Jim Garrison today.

    In addition to this secrecy about Shaw, which hurt Garrison’s case, Long does not detail any of the other methods of obstruction that the CIA and the FBI used against Garrison. Nor does she elucidate any of the meetings that Shaw’s lawyers had in Washington soliciting this kind of aid, which ended up being bountiful. The declassified files of the ARRB contain literally scores of pages on this subject. This features interference with the serving of Garrison’s subpoenas. And further, the setting up of a special committee within the CIA to survey actions to take against Garrison before, during, and after the trial of Clay Shaw. At the first meeting of this super-secret group, James Angleton’s assistant, Ray Rocca, said that he felt that Garrison would convict Shaw in the Kennedy case. (DiEugenio, pp. 269-74) Perhaps in their quest to stop that from happening, on the eve of the trial, at least three prospective witness for the prosecution were physically attacked before they testified: Richard Case Nagell, Clyde Johnson and Aloysius Habighorst. None of these men ended up testifying. (p. 294)

    As mentioned previously, one of the most bizarre statements that the author makes is that Garrison was proficient at using the media and manipulating them for his own benefit. How anyone can make such a statement today is simply inexplicable. As authors like William Davy and myself have shown, the media utterly destroyed Jim Garrison. Before Garrison took on the Kennedy assassination, he had a promising career ahead of him as a Louisiana politician. Many thought he could have been governor or senator from the state. (DiEugenio, pp. 172-74) That career was utterly wrecked by the two-year roasting he took in the press from almost every outlet imaginable: CBS, NBC, NY Times, Life Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, to name just a few. Garrison was eventually defeated in his District Attorney re-election bid due to two sets of phony pinball kickback charges, which he defeated at trial. But the publicity weakened his position and strengthened his opponent Harry Connick, who defeated him in a close election in 1973. (See chapter 19 of Garrison’s book.) To most legal observers, Connick turned out to be a very poor DA compared to Jim Garrison.

    After Garrison was retired from the DA’s office, it took him years to recover from the ordeal he went through. At that time, people who visited him in New Orleans said he had a small office that he rented from a larger firm. This is the man who likely would have been residing in the governor’s mansion if not for the JFK case. That media manipulation Long describes did the DA a lot of good, didn’t it?

    Long is so utterly biased that she actually credits Judge Herbert Christenberry. This is the judge who threw out Garrison’s attempt to try Shaw on perjury charges after his acquittal. Today, there is little or no doubt that Shaw lied numerous times at his conspiracy trial. For instance, about his employment by the CIA, about his friendship with David Ferrie, about his use of an alias. And according to Garrison assistant Steve Jaffe, this time Garrison was not going to make the same mistake he did at the conspiracy trial. He was going to use every witness he had against Shaw.

    Judge Herbert Christenberry should never have presided over this hearing. Moreover, there should have never been a hearing in the first place. As Garrison notes in his book, the idea of a federal judge inserting himself into a state case was quite unusual, since there was a law against it. But that is what happened. Shaw’s lawyers moved to have a state case considered in federal court. (Garrison, p. 253)

    Why did they do this?

    Because Christenberry’s wife had written a letter to Shaw after his acquittal. This was also after Garrison filed the perjury charges. The letter uses the plural pronoun “we”, so it clearly describes both husband and wife’s sentiments. The Christenberrys congratulated Shaw on the outcome of the trial. They sympathized with him over what the DA had done to the poor man. They continued by saying how much better the proceedings would have been if the case had been allotted to federal court and Judge Christenberry. But unfortunately, Caroline Christenberry could not voice these sentiments during the trial for risk of being labeled prejudiced in advance. (Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p.315)

    If there was ever an attempt to solicit a case, this was it. That letter is in the National Archives today. It appears Long has never heard of it.

    This article proves the very worst about the JFK case. Everyone hoped that the declassification of the files would aid in the public’s understanding of what that case was really all about, what impact it had on the personages involved and also on American history. That will not happen with people like Long. At the end of her original essay as published in the periodical 64 Parishes, it is revealed that her piece is part of something called the “Democracy and the Informed Citizen Initiative”, which is sponsored by the Federation of State Humanities councils. The Andrew Mellon Foundation was part of the support for that initiative. In other words, the Power Elite Kennedy opposed is still thriving.

    But further, as Anthony Thorne discovered, Long made up her mind about this matter without looking at any documents. She said, “I don’t want to dig through CIA and FBI documents for the rest of my life.” She then gave the back of her hand to the myriad books on the JFK case: “I find the basic premise of many these books to be problematic and would then note [sic] take those as seriously as historical studies.”

    The books don’t matter. The documents don’t matter. Typical MSM historian on the JFK case.   Which is why her article is worthless. It is the vacuity and speciousness of work like this that helps drive readers to the likes of Alex Jones. Perhaps unbeknownst to her, Long is adding to his minions.

  • Analyzing the New JFK Revelations: Review of New CIA and FBI Documents That Change Cold War History

    Analyzing the New JFK Revelations: Review of New CIA and FBI Documents That Change Cold War History

     

  • 2017 & 2018 JFK Releases: Progress, Issues, Recommendations

    2017 & 2018 JFK Releases: Progress, Issues, Recommendations

     

    (Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)

  • JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 7

    JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 7

    Part 6

    Part 5

    Part 4

    Part 3

    Part 2

    Part 1

    The 2017 release of JFK assassination files has shown that the national security agencies are not subject to the JFK Records Act (1992) and we, the people, have no right to know their secrets, but must settle for mostly or entirely redacted and even illegible materials. An accessory to the fact is the mainstream media, whose willful deception would have us believe that “there’s nothing here” or, if there is something, it should be a Red conspiracy.

    The History Channel did its bit by extending the infamous series JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald 1 with a seventh part that is an in-your-face flipped bird to the public. The ineffable Bob Baer reentered the game of deception as “one of the most intelligence minds in the world.” He boasted about having his own network of former CIA and FBI agents who “can tell me what I should be looking at and what to dismiss” within the complex milieu of the newly declassified JFK files. Poor Bob. He needs to set up his own front group to mislead the global media audience about a crucial American tragedy. The Warren Commission critics going through each and every document can’t be trusted.

    Foreknowledge?

    Among the stories indicating awareness of the coming JFK assassination2, Baer purposely picked the blatant lie of Cuban defector Florentino Aspillaga3 and a dubious phone call trickily turned into an explosive discovery in the light of a memo from Jim Angleton, CIA Counterintelligence Chief, to FBI Director Hoover. It was dated on November 26, 1963 (NARA 104-10079-10262) and the gist reads thus: “At 18:05 GMT [12:05 Dallas] on 22 November [1963] an anonymous telephone call was made in Cambridge, England, to the senior reporter of the Cambridge News. The caller said only that the Cambridge News reporter should call the American Embassy for some big news and then rang off.”

    Baer’s discovery is a trick since both Angleton’s memo and the original CIA cable of 23 November 1963 from London (NARA 1993.07.22.14:03:15:250530) were already available to the HSCA forty years ago. Moreover, the British Security Service (MI-5) has never revealed the identity of the reporter, if any, who picked up the phone. The story itself has been neither published by the Cambridge newspaper nor even addressed as a topic of conversation by its staffers.4

    Since there is no quantum of proof for discerning within the range of possibilities5—from a prank with coincidental timing to a conspiratorial move—Baer’s mix of the Cambridge uncertainty with Aspillaga’s falsehood is likely the worst approach to understand who would have been behind Kennedy’s death.

    A Missing Link?

    In the fourth part, “The Cuban Connection,” Baer and his partner, former police officer Adam Bercovici, dealt with Antonio Veciana’s6 account of having seen Maurice Bishop with Oswald in Dallas in the late summer of 1963. Bercovici blurted out: “There’s your co-conspirator. He [Oswald] had on-the-ground assistance in Dallas.” Nonetheless, they withheld the critical info that Bishop was David Atlee Phillips, a covert action officer running anti-Castro operations at the CIA Station in Mexico City by that time.7

    In the seventh part, they avoid keeping track of Phillips and resort to a “document [that] alone could destroy any conversation about Oswald being a lone wolf.” Not all that much, Bob. Your document (NARA 180-10141-10191) reduces to a handwritten note from October 2, 1967, by Bernardo de Torres, the first CIA agent to infiltrate D.A. Jim Garrison’s office.8 The note merely states that some Rene Carballo, a Cuban refugee living in New Orleans, “thinks head of training camp at [Lake] Ponchartrain was ‘El Mexicano’ [who] accompanied LHO to Mex[ico] City.”

    This note was also available to the HSCA, so Baer should have used it earlier, but he even missed the primary source: the main FBI Headquarters file [62-109060] on the JFK assassination. It contains a teletype from May 11, 1967 (Section 131, pp. 19-20) about Carlos Bringuier9 advising the FBI in New Orleans that Carballo “was conducting his own investigation into the death of President Kennedy and had determined that Richard Davis was not actually in charge of the anti-Castro training camp near Lake Ponchartrain, but it was actually run by a man known as ‘El Mexicano.’ Carballo opined it was this man, ‘El Mexicano,’ who accompanied Lee Harvey Oswald to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City.”

    The Cuban refugee Francisco Rodriguez-Tamayo, a.k.a. “El Mexicano” [The Mexican],10 is a delusional choice for both an Oswald companion11 in Mexico City and a head of a training camp elsewhere. No “fellow traveler” has been identified in the alleged Oswald’s route from New Orleans to Mexico City or during his stay there. Likewise, Richard Davis comes across the story because of the training camp at Lacombe, set up in 1962 for the Intercontinental Penetration Force (INTERPEN) and operated in the summer of 1963 by an amorphous anti-Castro group.12

    Baer had already plunged into confusion during the third part, “Oswald Goes Dark,”13 trying to shed light on him as an ex-Marine engaged in paramilitary exercises with Cuban exiles. Baer and his team went to the training camp at Belle Chasse, headquarter of the CIA operation JM/MOVE, run by Higinio “Nino” Diaz (AM/NORM-1) in 1961. In those days, Oswald was living in Minsk (Belarus).

    As leaders of the training camp at Lacombe, the Garrison probe identified Davis, Laureano Batista (AM/PALM-2) and Victor Paneque (AM/RUG-5), but in no way “El Mexicano.”14 Although any sensible citizen would prefer Garrison over Carballo, Baer recklessly keeps on forging his missing link to Oswald by attributing to “El Mexicano” a dual nature of professional assassin and Castro agent.

    For the former, Baer musters an FBI report from June 28, 1968 (NARA 124-90158-10027) about an informant saying that “El Mexicano” had been arrested in Caracas, Venezuela, “on a charge of an alleged assassination attempt against an unknown individual.” Baer doesn’t give a damn about the additional info. There was “no sufficient evidence to prosecute the case (…) except that [“El Mexicano”] had apparently entered the country illegally.”

    For the latter, Baer applies the same clumsy rule of evidence. He deems as “smoking gun” a CIA internal memo from March 19, 1963 (NARA 104-10180-10247) about the following intel furnished by “an untested source.” In El Principe prison (Havana), the source spoke briefly with death row inmate Roberto Perez-Cruzata, who asked him to tell the U.S. authorities that “El Mexicano” was “a paid agent of the Cuban government in Miami.” Perez-Cruzata added he had learned it from Major Efigenio Ameijeiras during an interrogation. Ameijeiras also told him that his anti-Cuban government activities had been reported by “El Mexicano.”

    Baer does not seem at all to be intrigued by the curious case of Major Ameijeiras, chief of Castro’s National Revolutionary Police (PNR), burning a Castro agent before a Brigade 2506 prisoner under interrogation.15 Nor did he pay attention to the follow-up by CIA, FBI, and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Instead of remaining under a cloud of suspicion as Castro agent, “El Mexicano” was reported talking about bombing a ship bound for Cuba, delivering silencers along with Luis Posada-Carriles (AM/CLAVE-15) and even trafficking drugs with Ricardo “The Monkey” Morales (AM/DESK-1).

    A Russian-Cuban Probe?

    With the preconceived idea that the KGB and the Cuban Intelligence Services (CuIS) worked in tandem to kill Kennedy, and that the FBI Director Hoover covered it up to avoid a nuclear WW III, Baer continues his far-fetched story about KGB officer Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov—who served at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City under the official cover of vice-consul—in order to pass off an ill-founded allegation as the greatest worry: “The fact that Oswald is essentially being handled by Kostikov.”

    Since the first two parts, “The Iron Meeting” and “The Russian Network,” Baer had been trying to present the Kostikov-Oswald connection as emerging from hitherto little known evidence. Yet in 1964, the Warren Report identified Kostikov as KGB officer (page 309) and established that Oswald “had dealt with [him]” (page 734). Moreover, the CIA informed the Warren Commission that “Kostikov is believed to work for Department Thirteen (…) responsible for executive action, including sabotage and assassination (Commission Document 347, p. 10).

    As a somehow sparklingly brand-new item, Baer shows a CIA memo of 23 Nov 1963 (NARA 104-10015-10056) that was partially, but well enough declassified in 1995. It was prepared by the acting chief of the CIA Soviet Russia Division, Tennent “Pete” Bagley, who linked Kostikov as officer of “the KGB’s 13th Department” with Oswald as “a KGB agent on a sensitive mission [who] can (sic) be met in official installations [as the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City] using as cover (…) some sort of open business [like requesting an entry visa in the Soviet Union].” Baer again has simply left the audience in the dark.  Both of these assumptions led straight to a Red conspiracy theory which has long been discredited and may be deemed defunct.

    For the sake of argument, let’s accept Kostikov was “head of Department Thirteen”, as Baer affirms and stresses with a flashback scene from Oleg Nechiporenko’s interview in part two. Baer conveniently forgets that his interviewee—who met Oswald as well in his capacity of KGB counterintelligence officer under official cover of vice consul—rebutted Bagley’s assumption about Oswald, which presupposes he would have been recruited before meeting Kostikov. Nechiporenko not only emphatically denied this,16 but also demonstrated that the two very brief Oswald contacts with Kostikov did not add up to agent handling. They were nothing more than the coincidental meeting of an American visa applicant with a competent Soviet consular official.17

    Both the FBI and CIA were tracking Kostikov before Oswald showed up in Mexico City, but by June 25, 1963, Angleton assured Hoover that the CIA “could locate no information” indicating he was an officer of Department Thirteen.18

    If there had been any serious concern about Oswald meeting Kostikov, Langley would have advised strengthening surveillance on both after receiving this piece of intel from the CIA station in Mexico City: “American male who spoke broken Russian said his name LEE OSWALD (phonetic), stated he at SOVEMB on 28 Sept when spoke with consul whom he believed be Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov” (MEXI 6453, 8 Oct 1963). Quite the contrary, Langley abstained from giving such an instruction and even omitted any reference to Kostikov while providing ODACID (State Department), ODENVY (FBI) and ODOATH (Navy) with the intel (DIR 74673, 10 Oct 1963).

    The following month, Oswald broke the news as prime suspect of the JFK assassination without having been grilled by the FBI, the CIA or the Secret Service about his travel to Mexico. In tune with Bagley’s allegation, Angleton changed his mind about Kostikov to deflect the attention from a CIA failure to a KGB plot. On February 6, 1976, however, Angleton recanted before the Church Committee: “There’s never been any confirmation [that Kostikov] was 13th Department.”19

    The connection between Kostikov and Oswald surfaced in a phone call to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City on October 1, 1963. The call was taped by the CIA operation LIENVOY and made—according to its transcriber Boris Tarasoff—by “the same person who had called a day or so ago [namely Saturday 28th of September] and spoken in broken Russian:”20

    • Caller: Hello, this LEE OSWALD speaking. I was at your place last Saturday and spoke to a Consul, and they say that they’d send a telegram to Washington, so I wanted to find out if you have anything new? But I don’t remember the name of that Consul.
    • Soviet guard: KOSTIKOV. He is dark?
    • Caller: Yes. My name is OSWALD.

    Baer ignores the proven facts that since Oswald spoke fluent Russian and the FBI deduced it was not his voice on the tapes, Oswald was impersonated during both phone calls, and that CIA officer Anne Goodpasture, dubbed “the station’s troubleshooter” by Phillips, made up a fake story—which has passed into history as “The Mystery Man”—about Oswald at the Soviet Embassy, as well as hid from Langley Oswald’s visit to the Cuban Embassy. This series of facts lead immediately to the debunking of Baer’s and all other Red conspiracies. Based on the newly declassified November 24, 1963 FBI report about Oswald’s murder by Ruby (NARA 180-10110-10104), Baer emphasizes that Hoover covered up after the assassination; but the whole series deliberately overlooks that—before the assassination—the CIA had already engaged in a cover-up that had nothing to do with fear of nuclear war.

    Ironically, Baer’s suspect Fidel Castro posed the most immediate and critical challenge to Hoover’s decision to close the case after Ruby killed Oswald:

    As if it were a matter not of the President of the United States, but of a dog killed in the street, they declared the case closed with 48 hours. The case was closed when the case was becoming less closeable, when the case was becoming more mysterious, when the case was becoming more suspicious, when the case was becoming worthier of investigation from the judicial and criminal point of view.21

    Baer tries to muddle through somehow by doing a pathetic pirouette. The Soviets “hand off Oswald to the Cubans” after he showed up in Mexico City as “an opportunity” that the KGB couldn’t seize, “because there was no plausible deniability.” Sure Bob, sure. The KBG offloaded Oswald on Cuban G-2 knowing the latter had no plausible deniability either, since Oswald had visited the Cuban Embassy, which was under CIA surveillance as heavy as at the Soviet Embassy.

    So, far removed from common sense, Baer repeats the same old and silly song from Part Three22 about Mexican consular clerk Silvia Duran being a CuIS agent who met American visa applicant Lee Harvey Oswald outside the Cuban Consulate at a twist party … to put him up to killing Kennedy! Baer simply replaced the original mouthpiece for this story, the late Mexican writer Elena Garro, with her nephew Francisco Garro, as if a false allegation might come true by repetition.

    A Self-Destructive Production?

    Unwilling to delve into the body of evidence, Baer misses the chance to prevent extremely botched scenes like the discussion around Kostikov. After the voice-over narrator notes that his CIA Personality File [201-305052] “had never been released,” the telephone rings.  A 167-page portion (1965-1975) of the Kostikov 201 file (NARA 104-10218-10032) has been finally declassified, although the camera focuses on a different file number [201-820393]. Baer brought former FBI analyst Farris Rookstool III to dig deeper into the lack of coordination between the FBI and the CIA, but Kostikov was in fact under well-coordinated surveillance by both agencies. Kostikov was handling a German national living in Oklahoma, Guenter Schulz, who was a double agent codenamed TUMBLEWEED by the FBI and AEBURBLE by the CIA. Bagley’s allegation that Kostikov worked for Department Thirteen was indeed based on the intel that—together with Oleg Brykin, “a known officer” of said department—he had been “pinpointing objectives for sabotage” to Schulz. Instead of the travels to Oklahoma City listed in the index of the referred volume, Rookstool points out the travels to San Diego and Baer makes up from who knows what information that Kostikov had been there planning “some sort of assassination or sabotage.”

    In order to suggest that the KGB and the CuIS may have engaged in “massive coordination”23 to kill Kennedy, Baer brought in another media puppet, The Guardian (U.K.) foreign correspondent Luke Harding, who broached a false analogy with a joint operation by the KGB and Bulgarian State Security.  On September 7, 1978, the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was mortally wounded in London by a ricin-filled pellet shot from a silenced gun concealed inside an umbrella. The problem is that this so-called “Umbrella Murder” was a far cry from the highly unlikely assassination of a Western official by the KBG and its allied services,24 and even less similar to Castro’s strategy against the U.S. dirty war. Thanks to his system-centered thinking style, Castro prevailed by carving out an ironclad personal security against the CIA assassination plots and infiltrating to the core both the CIA and the Cuban exile community.

    In this seventh part, Baer utters: “I’m not doing this for the camera.” He’s damn right. Not so much due to poor TV production, but essentially because it is self-evident that he is just muddying the waters, even at the humiliating cost of lingering over the soft-headed folly that Castro wasn’t aware of an obvious fact:  that killing a sitting U.S. President wouldn´t solve anything25—for by 1963, Operation Mongoose had been terminated—while it would surely risk everything.

    Since 1963, the CIA has been trying to blame the Kennedy assassination on Cuba.  Each time the claim has been exposed to scrutiny, it has collapsed.  It is disheartening to see that, on the occasion of the final declassification of the JFK files, 54 years on, Baer is still beating that dead horse.

    NOTES

    1 See the six-part review on this website.

    2 Some of these stories are plausible, as the tape-recorded prediction by right-wing extremist Joseph Milteer in Miami, or the incidents related to Silvia Odio in Dallas and Rose Cherami in Louisiana.

    3 See “An Apocryphal Story as Baer’s Cornerstone” in JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 6.

    4 Cf. “Did Cambridge News reporter really take a call before the JFK assassination?,” Cambridge News, 27 Oct 2017.

    5 See Mark Bridger’s analysis, “Foreknowledge in England,” Dealey Plaza Echo, Vol. 9, Issue 2, pp. 1-16.

    6 For a biographical sketch, see Antonio Veciana: Trained to Kill Kennedy Too?

    7 On November 3, 2017, four of Phillips’ files were released. His 358-page Office of Personnel file has neither the fitness reports from 1956 to 1965 nor a single record from 1961 to 1965. The other three may be operational files, but they are so heavily redacted that no relevant data is to be found.

    8 De Torres was a private detective who worked under David “El Indio” Sanchez Morales for the CIA Station in Miami (JM/WAVE). He served as Chief of Intelligence for the Brigade 2506 and was captured during the Bay of Pigs invasion. After being released, he resumed work in the private sector. Early in the Garrison probe, he offered help dropping the name of Garrison’s friend and Miami D.A. Richard Gerstein. Shortly after Garrison asked him to find Eladio del Valle, the latter was found murdered inside his car in Miami. Garrison eventually realized De Torres was undermining the JFK investigation and working for JM/WAVE.

    9 Bringuier was a Cuban exile affiliated with the CIA-backed Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE – AM/SPELL for the CIA). On August 9, 1963, he confronted Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans. Shortly after, he debated with Oswald on radio WDSU about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). He was instrumental in the first printed JFK conspiracy theory. On November 23, 1963, a special edition of DRE’s monthly magazine Trinchera [Trenches] linked Oswald to Castro under the headline “The Presumed Assassins.”

    10 On December 14, 1959, Castro lashed out against “El Mexicano” during the trial of Major Hubert Matos (AM/LIGHT-1): “Who was the first to accuse us of Communists? That captain of the Rebel Army who was arrested for abusing and getting drunk, known as ‘El Mexicano’ (…) He came to Havana, entered a military barrack, conferred on himself the rank of captain again, and as soon as he realized that his situation was untenable, he left for the United States and made the first statement of resignation from the army because the revolution was communist.” On June 25, 1959, “El Mexicano” told Stanley Ross, editor of the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario de Nueva York, that Castro had embezzled 4.5 million Cuban pesos raised for the revolution.

    11 Baer is not the first to entertain this canard. In autumn 1964, a certain Gladys Davis advised the FBI that a “El Mexicano” had brought Oswald to her former marital residence in Coral Gables, Florida, “about August or September of 1959 or possibly 1960.” “El Mexicano” replied he never had contact with Oswald. The case was put to rest because Mrs. Davis was lying in an attempt to get FBI help in a custody dispute against her former husband. Cf. FBI 105-82555 Oswald HQ File, Section 220, pp. 95 ff.

    12 “Playboy Interview: Jim Garrison,” Playboy Magazine, October 1967, p. 159 (NARA 104-10522-10109).

    13 See “Rocking the Refugee Boat” in JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 3.

    14 Cf. Garrison Investigation – Volume I, pp. 43 ff. (NARA 1994.05.06.08:43:35:150005).

    15 Perez-Cruzata was a former PNR sergeant sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for killing Dr. Rafael Escalona Almeida on January 10, 1959, while the latter was under arrest. Perez-Cruzata escaped from La Cabana prison on July 1, 1959, and took refuge in the U.S. His extradition was denied (Ramos v. Diaz, 179 F. Supp. 459 / S.D. Fla. 1959). He ventured to return to Cuba with the Brigade 2506 and after a summary trial in Santa Clara (central Cuba), he ended up being one of the only five prisoners executed by a firing squad on September 9, 1961.

    16 The CIA should have known it since the defection of KGB officer Yuri Nosenko on April 1964. He claimed having seen the KGB files compiled on Oswald during his stay in the Soviet Union and found Oswald was neither recruited nor used as agent. However, Nosenko’s chief handler, Pete Bagley, suspected he was a plant to convey false intel. The newly released file (NARA 104-10534-10205) about the case study on Nosenko shows he was “a bona fide defector [who was not] properly handled, [since] the variety of techniques used (…) did not conform to any generally accepted sense of the term methodology.”

    17 Cf. Nechiporenko’s book Passport to Assassination (Birch Lane/Carol Publishing, 1993, pp. 28-29, 66-81). On September 27, Kostikov promptly handed off Oswald to counterintelligence officer Nechiporenko, right after checking his documents and learning he was a re-defector from the Soviet Union. On September 28, Oswald was attended by consul Pavel Yatskov. Kostikov just walked in and briefed Yatskov about Oswald’s previous visit. Then Nechiporenko arrived, but did not take part in the meeting. The scene dramatized with Oswald at a table before three Soviet officials is simply a botch job.

    18 Admin Folder-X6: HSCA Administrative Folder, CIA reports LHO, p. 51 (NARA 124-10369-10063).

    19 Testimony of James Angleton, pp. 62 f. (NARA 157-10014-10003).

    20 Since the Mexican security police known as DFS was the CIA’s partner in the wiretapping operation, the transcripts of this and four more CIA taped calls related to Oswald are available in Spanish and some in English (NARA 104-10413-1007).

    21 Cf. live speech by Castro at the University of Havana on November 27, 1963 (Commission Exhibit 2954).

    22 See “The Twist Party” in JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 3.

    23 Both agencies did engage in massive coordination precisely in Harding’s homeland, after around 100 KGB officers under diplomatic cover were expelled from London in September 1971. The CuIS took over some KGB operations in the UK, but none related to assassination of foreign leaders. Cf. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, “KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operation from Lenin to Gorbachev”, Sceptre, 1991, p. 514.

    24 Cf. “Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping” (NARA 104-10423-10278). Rather than killing statemen, the KGB did its best to encourage the idea that the CIA had been involved in the JFK assassination and even that its methods to kill Castro had been taken into consideration against other foreign leaders. Indira Gandhi, for instance, became obsessed with it.  Cf. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way, Basic Books, 2005, p. 18.

    25 In 1984, Castro ordered that President Reagan be advised about an extreme right-wing conspiracy to kill him. CuIS furnished all the intel to U.S. Security Chief at United Nations. The FBI quietly proceeded to dismantle the plot in North Carolina. Cf. Nestor Garcia-Iturbe’s account in “Cuba-US: Cuban Government Save Reagan’s Life.”

  • Max Holland Says Enough!

    Max Holland Says Enough!

    holland naraOn December 12th, Max Holland unleashed another volley in his gaseous but incontinent war against all those who remain doubtful about the official version of President Kennedy’s assassination. That is, those who do not buy the Warren Commission Report. What was the occasion for this sallying forward on his black horse? Holland didn’t like all the attention that the media had been paying to the JFK case. There had been a recent two-week debate on whether or not—in keeping with the congressionally passed law—all the documents left over from the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) should finally be released to the public in complete and unredacted form. What disturbed Holland is that this debate extended over into the MSM. Exaggerating only slightly, Holland’s complaint was that he was not allowed to dominate the press and air waves for that two-week period.

    It does not take long for the maestro of misinformation to get to his polemical point. In paragraph five he says the newly released documents tell us nothing we did not already know. Therefore, in the cozy comfort of the pages of the Weekly Standard, he can pronounce that this whole national cacophony has been, in Max’s terms—borrowing from a famous English playwright—Much Ado about Nothing.

    Which, right off the bat, tells us that Holland is up to his old tricks. The main one he uses is this: he does not reveal anything new or important to his readership, so he can then make ersatz pronouncements, like the above. In fact, his web site, Washington Decoded, specializes in this technique when dealing with the JFK case. Let us take some examples to show just how blindfolded Holland is.

    Most objective observers would say that the revelation that Mayor Earle Cabell of Dallas—brother of Deputy Director of the CIA Charles Cabell—was a CIA asset would be of some importance. Especially since President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas under rather suspicious circumstances. Another document released a few weeks ago says that an electronics store owner told the FBI that Jack Ruby had been in his shop a couple of weeks before the assassination. Ruby’s companion at the time was Lee Oswald. Ruby told Oswald to write down the proprietor’s name for a complementary pass to his club. Needless to add, the Warren Commission concluded that Ruby and Oswald did not know each other. A third revelation is one that corrodes the Warren Commission mythology of Oswald being in Mexico City. The CIA had two informants inside the Cuban Embassy there. That embassy was supposed to have been visited by Oswald more than once while the alleged assassin was in Mexico City. The two informants told the CIA that neither one of them had seen Oswald at all while he was supposed to have been in that domicile. Again, this raises the most serious doubts about the Commission and its inquiry into Oswald and Mexico City. And this was an important part of the Commission’s indictment of Oswald since they used this information to portray Oswald as a communist, trying to get to Russia through Cuba. But if Oswald was not there, and in fact was being impersonated, this would alter that portrait in a 180-degree manner.

    One last example: it turns out that Jim Garrison was correct about Clay Shaw. The latest documents, even before this last release by NARA, revealed that Shaw was a highly valued and compensated CIA contract agent, a fact that the Agency had done all it could to conceal from the public. (Joan Mellen, Our Man In Haiti, pp. 54-55) It now turns out that the internal deception by the CIA about Shaw appears to have gone even further. One of the ARRB releases from when it was active, 1994 to 1998, revealed that the Agency had destroyed something called Shaw’s ‘Y’ files. It now appears that the destruction of Shaw’s files extended even further, into his 201 file. (See this ARRB memo) As I have written about this matter previously, this trail of mangled files concerning Shaw affirms something that the late Gordon Novel wrote about back in the seventies. Namely that in 1964, while the Warren Commission was in session, the CIA began a cover-up about Shaw’s true Agency status that would continue through the days of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, 15 years later.

    But further, some of the new releases have been enlightening about the rôle of the media in going along with this cover up. There have been fascinating revelations about the New York Times, CBS, and NBC acceding to the demands of the official story, in some cases, even after concluding the official story was wrong! Does it get much worse than that? How does one maintain a democracy when the press decides it will not pursue the facts about the murder of a president? (See “The Newly Declassified JFK Assassination Files” )

    Therefore, right at the start, as he usually does, Holland fails the smell test for any responsible journalist: He is not being candid with the reader.

    From there, Holland goes into a mini history/summary of what the ARRB did in its four years of active existence. Holland broaches the comical when he writes that, in its dealings with intelligence agencies, the “Secret Service was probably the most difficult agency, in that it actually tried to classify documents in an effort to keep some information secret.” As more than one reporter has documented, the Secret Service actually destroyed documents from a crucial period of time—1963—while the ARRB bill was being enacted. (See ARRB Final Report, p. 149) According to Doug Horne, who worked for the ARRB, this caused a significant disturbance within the Board as to how public they should make what they considered a deliberate defiance of the law.

    Holland then concludes that many of the still classified CIA documents fall under the rubric of NBR, or “Not Believed Relevant”. The insinuation here seems to be that critics are confusing that category with those “Postponed in Full”, and thus are exaggerating the number of documents the ARRB deemed relevant but which have not yet seen the light of day in fully unredacted form. NBR was a curious designation that the ARRB accepted as a reason for maintaining secrecy. But Holland’s assertion is not correct. The NBR documents clearly constitute a separate group, a fact which anyone can figure out by just looking at how many exist. According to Freedom of Information attorney Jim Lesar, they run into the tens of thousands. And surprisingly, according to John Newman, the Cabell document mentioned above was originally classified as NBR. The latter has always been distinguished from those the ARRB “postponed”, and their counts understood to be separate.

    Another dubious point the author states is that if the ARRB had stumbled across any fact that challenged the official verdict, the release would have been instantly approved. The curious point about this statement is that it comes from David Marwell, the former ARRB Executive Director. As everyone who followed the ARRB knows—but Holland does not reveal—Marwell did not endure the entire four years of the ARRB. He left after something more than two years and was replaced by Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn. But while Marwell was there, he struck up friendly relationships with the likes of Gerald Posner, Gus Russo and, of course, Max Holland. (Doug Horne, Inside the ARRB, p. 13) In fact, Holland quotes Marwell as having been disappointed in the splurge of coverage during the October 26th period, because according to Holland, Marwell thought the goal of the ARRB was “not just preservation and transparency but closure.” If Marwell really said that, it shows why he was meeting with those three authors.

    On the other hand, Gunn was less cordial with these types of authors, and he was more critical of the official story, especially the medical aspects of it. In fact, the work Gunn and Horne did on this part of the assassination is one of the most enduring legacies of the ARRB. And, in and of itself, in Marwell’s terms, it challenges the official verdict. But as Horne explains, Marwell is what the Board wanted:

    There is no doubt in my mind that had David expressed concern about even the possibility of any kind of conspiracy or cover-up in the Kennedy assassination during his job interview, he would not have been hired by the Board members as their staff Executive Director, no matter what kind of archival or administrative experience was in his resume. (Horne, p. 13)

    As Horne observed, the majority of the ARRB staff thought the Warren Commission had gotten the story correct. They therefore looked upon their function “as simply an exercise in restoring public trust in government by opening sealed records.” (Horne, p. 13) The most important evidence indicating that attitude was in relation to the above point. Most objective commentators would say that one of the most important achievements of the Board was its inquiry into the medical evidence. Just the new evidence Gunn surfaced concerning the mystery surrounding Kennedy’s brain was worth that effort. But as Horne tellingly wrote, “Not one Board member attended one medical witness deposition, and I was reliably informed by Jeremy Gunn that not one Board Member read the transcript of any medical deposition during he active lifespan of the ARRB.” (p. 17)

    As more and more shortcomings of the ARRB become evident over time, this essential problem that Horne first exposed becomes rather important: Did the Board perform a zealous inquiry into pursuing its mandate, and was it equipped by law to do so? When one considers the cases of Terri Pike and the Air Force One tapes, the verdict would appear to be in the negative. (See “The Railroading of LCDR Terri Pike” and “ARRB Search for AF1 Radio Tapes”) And, in fact, one achievement of the 2017 effort at declassification is that some commentators are now reconsidering their original verdict on the ARRB in light of the newly declassified record.

    One of the silliest parts of Holland’s silly essay is when the tries to use the Board’s work as proof that the Warren Commission verdict was left intact. Because the way he does this is, as is his technique, to ignore what the Board did. Or to assume that either Marwell or the Board would be cognizant of each and every document that the Board declassified. We know, however, that they did not read the vast majority of those 2 million pages. Take this example: he writes that the Board never found any evidence that anyone but Oswald fired the shots in Dealey Plaza. Yet during the ARRB session, Noel Twyman found a receipt for a 7.65 Mauser shell recovered from Dealey Plaza. This ties in with the first identification of a rifle found at the Texas School Book Depository being a 7.65 Mauser rifle. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 92) Did Oswald have two rifles, and did he fire them both that day?

    Holland goes on to further embarrass himself by saying that nothing the ARRB discovered indicated more than two shots entered Kennedy, or that they entered in any direction except from behind. If anything shows that Holland, in addition to Marwell, did not read the records of the Gunn medical inquiry, that statement does. The results of Gunn’s inquiry have given birth to both books and critical essays that prove just those points. To offer one example, Dr. David Mantik entered the Kennedy case after Oliver Stone released his 1991 film JFK. Much of his work is based upon the newly declassified ARRB records and the Gunn inquiry. In 2015, he published a valuable e-book on Kennedy’s head wounds. I would recommend that book to anyone interested in the case. The evidence in it contradicts both of Holland’s silly shibboleths. In fact it reduces them to nonsense. (See David Mantik, John F. Kennedy’s Head Wounds: A Final Synthesis, available at amazon.com)

    But since no one edited this piece at Weekly Standard, Holland was allowed to continue in his nonsensical vein. He then goes on to say that there was never any evidence of involvement by Oswald in any conspiracy; that Oswald never worked for the FBI or CIA; and neither agency had any evidence that should have landed Oswald on the Secret Service’s Security Index prior to the assassination (which would have removed him from the Dealey Plaza area on the day Kennedy was killed).

    Now, one area that the ARRB did a decent job in was the collection of the records of the late New Orleans DA Jim Garrison. Those records go beyond anything that was in Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins. They caused the writing of Bill Davy’s book Let Justice be Done, Joan Mellen’s book A Farewell to Justice and the revision of this author’s book, Destiny Betrayed. In the light of those documents, the associations of Oswald with Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, and David Ferrie—who all worked with the CIA—are simply undeniable today. That activity, teamed with the aborted plot to kill Kennedy in Chicago, and what Oswald allegedly did in Mexico City, all of these should have brought Oswald to the attention of the Secret Service. But there were certain odd things that prevented that from happening. Like, for instance, the FBI removing their FLASH warning on Oswald’s file on October 9, 1963, just after Oswald’s alleged return from Mexico City to Dallas. That warning had been in effect since 1959. The Warren Commission expressed no curiosity as to its removal. In fact, they did not report its removal at all. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 356)

    But, beyond that, consider this as to a relationship between Oswald and the CIA. Pete Bagley was an assistant to CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton for many years. British researcher Malcolm Blunt became friends with him a few years before Bagley died in 2014. In an email communication with this writer, Blunt conveyed something that seems of the utmost importance to this question. Bagley asked Blunt to map the routing of the first cables about Oswald as they went through the CIA. When Bagley asked Blunt if a pattern like that betrayed whether or not Oswald’s defection to Russia was witting or unwitting, Blunt said he was not sure; but he guessed unwitting. Bagley said he was wrong. A routing pattern like that, around all the places the files should have gone, betrayed that Oswald’s defection was witting—meaning the CIA expected it and was planning in advance. So much for there being no connection between Oswald and the CIA.

    Holland then writes that the excessive coverage on October 26th betrayed a logical inconsistency. He says that since there had been plenty of time to go over the paper trail, why would the federal government ever release documents on the Kennedy case; why not just destroy them? Again, Holland discloses no such inconsistency, he just ignores that this appears to be what the CIA did in regards to Clay Shaw. (For other destroyed records, see “What you won’t find in the final JFK assassination records”)

    To show the reader just how extreme Holland is, he acknowledges that he did not like many of the so-called experts the MSM used at the time in question. Many other people did not appreciate it because these talking heads showed that they knew very little about what was still being withheld, and what had already been declassified. A good example of this would be the large amount of material that the CIA was still leaving classified about assassination suspect David Phillips. (See “The Intelligence Community Flips Off America”) Dan Hardway, who worked for the HSCA, did a nice article on this issue. He should know, since while working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he drew up a bill of indictment for perjury in relation to Phillips’ patently false testimony. Yet this was not mentioned on any broadcast this viewer saw. (Hardway revealed the fact of this indictment at the Cyril Wecht Conference in Pittsburgh in 2013)

    But Holland does not object to the commentators on those grounds. He actually states that any criticism of the CIA, the FBI or the ARRB was unwarranted. In other words, the idea that Philip Shenon—a very popular guest at the time—tried to propagate, that the CIA somehow screwed up by not reporting Oswald to the Secret Service, not even that is merited by Holland. In Holland’s solipsistic universe, historian Michael Beschloss is irresponsible when he says there are still mysteries about the JFK case and documents in the files can explain them. Holland does not even think that anything Oswald said or did in Mexico City amounted to an intelligence failure by the CIA or FBI. As John Newman wrote in his book Oswald and the CIA, even former CIA employees—like Jane Roman— admitted such was the case. But this is the second CIA employee ignored by Holland, since they both defeat his argument.

    Consider what Holland is saying: Oswald was a former defector to Russia who returned to America with a Russian wife, whose uncle was in the Soviet NKVD. Oswald then goes to Mexico City seven weeks before the assassination. There, he reportedly talks to the alleged KGB head of assassinations in the Western Hemisphere, Valery Kostikov. While there, Oswald arranges for a visa that would take him from Cuba to Russia. He then returns to Dallas and gets a job on the President’s parade route about a month in advance of Kennedy arriving there. And somehow, none of that should have been reported by the CIA to the FBI or Secret Service. Even though the CIA had about seven weeks to process it before the assassination. With this, Holland resembles the late Leslie Nielson as Lt. Frank Drebin, telling the spectators, “Nothing to see here!” as the building behind him explodes in flames.

    But we would not be dealing with Max Holland if something written by him did not mention the late Mark Lane. Holland found space to actually repeat his ridiculous charge about Lane’s volunteer Kennedy research group being funded by the KGB. If anything shows just how irresponsible Holland is, this phony charge does, because it was effectively demolished by Lane himself. (See “How Max Holland Duped the Daily Beast”) But Holland then extends this to say that it was Earl Warren who decided to take the ideological charge out of Kennedy’s murder by saying Oswald was only a lonely communist and there was no Cuban or Russian control.

    Even for Holland, this is pretty bad. As anyone who has read the declassified record of the Warren Commission, it was President Johnson who told Warren that he had to remove Oswald from any sphere of influence by Cuba or Russia, or else nuclear holocaust was threatened. After that pronouncement, Warren was reported leaving the White House in tears. Warren was effectively neutralized after this. He did not want the Warren Commission to perform any kind of active investigation at all. He even ventured that maybe they should not even call any witnesses. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 359) As recently revealed by Bill Davy at a talk at VMI, Warren told a judicial colleague at a conference in Florida that he bitterly resented what Johnson had done to intimidate him. He admitted that the Commission had been a cover-up, and he was ashamed of it. (See “Bill Davy at the VMI Seminar”) One should add that to Gerald Ford’s later conversation with French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1976, where Ford revealed that there was an organization that killed Kennedy. We already knew that Warren Commissioners John Sherman Cooper, Hale Boggs and Richard Russell publicly defected from that original verdict within just a few years. In fact, as Gerald McKnight revealed in his book, they had to be duped into going along with it in the first place. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pp. 317-20) Which means that of the original seven members of the Warren Commission, five of them were either intimidated or conned into going along with the 1964 verdict. This leaves Holland siding with the likes of Allen Dulles and John McCloy, because they are the only two who are left today.

    Because of his rigorous use of censorship, Holland can close with both an unwarranted assumption and a large crevice in his argument. Concerning the latter, he does not detail the fact that even to this day, NARA is issuing documents that are heavily redacted, sometimes illegible, with many containing pages that are completely blank, as well as issuing cover pages that have no accompanying report attached. If Holland was not going to detail all of this, then what was the point of his article?

    Secondly, he now says that the two-week publicity binge given to the issue was so unwarranted that it reveals something has gone a bit mad with the country. This idea seems swiped from Kurt Anderson’s historically phony article that made the cover of Atlantic Monthly from September 2017. (See “How The Atlantic Monthly and Kurt Andersen Went Haywire”)

    To somehow blame the state of America today on the still classified state of the record in the JFK case tells us very little about the former. But it tells us a lot about Max Holland’s JFK mania.

  • The Newly Declassified JFK Assassination Files

    The Newly Declassified JFK Assassination Files

    October 26, 2017 was supposed to be the last day for secrecy in the John F. Kennedy assassination. After 54 years, all the files on that case were finally supposed to be open to the public. In fact, President Trump actually tweeted about this occasion twice, saying how much he looked forward to it. This was a good indication that all the files would now be declassified, since only the president could halt that process.

    But on October 26th, President Trump gave in to last minute pleas from the CIA and FBI. He decided not to declassify everything. He now said that he would delay things until April of 2018 so that only very small bits of information like an agent’s real name or address would be concealed. The media then told us that only 300 documents would be deferred until that new release date of April, 2018. As we shall see, this often quoted 300 number is simply wrong and vastly understates what is still being withheld.

    Richard Helms

    The mainstream media (MSM) has been guilty of futher distortions. On a few occasions, they have reported old information as if it were new: for instance, regarding a memorandum written by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about convincing the public that Oswald was the lone assassin (see further below); or the transcript of then Ambassador to Iran Richard Helms’ testimony to the Rockefeller Commission which is supposedly cut off just as he is responding to the question of whether Oswald was a CIA asset. In both cases, this information has been known for some time; in the latter, the full document providing Helms’ response (in the negative) has been long available. As much as one might be inclined to excuse journalists for not being deeply familiar with the case, and thus unaware that they were inappropriately sensationalizing, it is hard to pardon the smugness with which the media asked us, for the most part, and without adequate knowledge, to accept their word that there was not anything really interesting in these releases. Like Lt. Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun, they were telling us, “Move on. Nothing to see here.”

    Having actually reviewed many of these documents, I would respectfully disagree. One might ask, for instance, why the following (old) information, which has resurfaced through the release of either previously unseen documents, or of documents which have had previous deletions removed, was not mentioned. Might it possibly be because some of it concerns the mainstream media—specifically, how they cooperated with the FBI, the Warren Commission, and perhaps the CIA, in order to uphold in the public eye the dubious tenets of the Warren Report?

    Consider the following previously withheld documents:

    • In an FBI document dated 2/1/67, it is noted that information received from the CIA reveals that The New York Times had lost faith in the Warren Report and was working on a full-scale exposé of its tenets, which it did not consider reliable anymore. That information was attained by talking to an informant of that Agency (the former head of the FPCC, Richard Thomas Gibson) who knew a reporter on the Times. We have actually had this information in nuce for a while: see the original memo from the Director of Plans to Hoover, in which the informant’s name is redacted, but in which the source at the Times, reporter Peter Khiss (misspelled ‘Kihss’ in the documents) is revealed.
    • An FBI teletype dated 12/11/63 reveals that NBC was preparing a program on the JFK case, but the producer’s policy would be to televise only “those items which are in consonance with” the FBI report.

    Then, there are the following documents which were re-released but with redactions now filled in:

    • A document which contains the minutes of a meeting on December 6, 1963, between LBJ and CIA Director John McCone; while the missing information which has now been filled in is of much interest (there were discussions at this point about the banning of underground tests, and the situations in Cambodia and Malaysia), one bit of “old” information contained here, and which again has gone largely unnoticed, is striking: a highly reliable CIA source reported that Russian intelligence was trying, through an Indian intermediary, to prod LBJ, RFK and Earl Warren into a thorough investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination.
    • A CIA memorandum which was actually classified as OPEN IN FULL and already figured in the 1995 ARRB releases, but which has oddly received little attention, reveals that on November 23, 1963, Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms wrote the FBI that voice comparisons of calls made to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City had indicated the caller on September 28 was the same one as the caller identifying himself as Oswald on the October 1 call. This clashes with the story coming out of Mexico City by then, which was that no voice comparisons had been done because the recording of the 9/28 call had been destroyed before the second call on 10/1. But what is even more curious about this memo is that by November 23rd, the FBI already knew that the voice on the tape claiming to be Lee Oswald was not the same as that of the man in custody in Dallas.
    • Making the above document even more interesting is a CIA Mexico City cable from just three days later. This information has also been available for some time. The Agency had two informants in the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. Neither recalled Oswald being there at any time. Yet the Warren Report said he was there on three occasions. Was he or wasn’t he? Again, if the MSM does not tell you about these reports, then that question cannot be raised. (In the re-released version, John Whitten’s name, formerly not visible, now appears, but the identities of the two assets, whose cryptonyms were LITAMIL-7 and LITAMIL-9, had already been deciphered.)
    Roger Feinman

    These five documents alone raise some troubling questions. One being, how can we uphold a democracy when broadcast agencies like NBC collude with intelligence agencies to spin the facts about the murder of the president? Or when the New York Times decides that it does not believe the Warren Report, but then goes on to say that it does? What happened to that full-blown exposé of the Warren Commission that the Times was planning? Well, perhaps the same as what happened to a CBS special critical of the Warren Report. We know through the late CBS employee Roger Feinman that CBS reporters wanted to do a special critical of the Commission. But due to pressures from above, the reporters were discouraged from that, and CBS decided to do a four-night segment supporting the Warren Report. (See “How CBS News Aided the JFK Cover-Up”)

    CBS correspondent
    Eddie Barker

    What happened at CBS is further elucidated in another declassified teletype from the FBI recovered by researcher Bill Davy (available prior to the current releases in Section 30 of the FBI Warren Commission HQ Liaison File 62-109090). This memo reveals that as early as January of 1967, CBS had decided to slant its upcoming late June multi-night documentary into, quite literally, a hatchet job. CBS was going to take books critical of the Warren Commission, like Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment, and, as the memo, says, “tear them apart”. The informant providing this information to the Bureau was Eddie Barker, a local Dallas CBS correspondent who would appear on the CBS program. Barker, quite naturally, requested anonymity. But he added that the documentary would not be critical of the FBI and would support the Warren Report. Barker understood that the executives at CBS had already been in contact with members of the Warren Commission. He specifically mentioned Warren Commissioners John McCloy, Allen Dulles, and former Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin. It was his opinion that they would cooperate with the production, which had not actually begun yet. One would think all this would be an interesting question for members of the so-called New Media like Rachel Maddow, or Josh Marshall, to address. But as we shall see, they did not.

    Media specials and articles in places like Politico have also recently recast the spotlight on Oswald’s alleged visit to Mexico City. Ever since 1964, there have been serious issues with the way the Warren Report treated this supposed trip. One problem is that the CIA, which had covert multi-camera photo surveillance on both the Cuban and Russian embassies Oswald visited, could not produce a single photo of alleged assassin Oswald entering or exiting either building—even though he made a total of five combined visits to both places. That would mean the Agency should have ten pictures of Oswald in Mexico City. But as early as November 23, 1963, the CIA reported that it could find no picture of Oswald entering either place.

    Noteworthy in this regard is the original rough draft of Warren Commission lawyer David Slawson’s report on the Warren Commission visit to Mexico City, which has also been re-released (it was previously released with restrictions in the 90s). Present in this version is a description of the meeting that Slawson, William Coleman and Howard Willens had with station chief Winston Scott. They inquired if Scott had a photo of Oswald at either the Russian or Cuban embassy. Scott replied in the negative. He said this was due to lack of manpower, funding and proper lighting supplements (see both the previous and current releases at pp. 25-26). There is no way to characterize that reply as less than a deception. From the declassified Lopez Report, however, we know that the CIA had full-time coverage of both embassies during operating hours, and that Oswald did not enter either embassy at night (see Oswald, The CIA and Mexico City: The Lopez-Hardway Report [Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2003], esp. pp. 12-46). This information tends to bring Scott into the web of the cover-up about Mexico City, the CIA and Oswald.

    David Phillips
    Anne Goodpasture

    The two documents referred to earlier deepen this mystery. On November 23, 1963, CIA officer Richard Helms forwarded the above-mentioned memo to the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. In it Helms wrote that voice comparisons made of phone intercepts at the Russian Embassy in late September and early October indicated that these conversations are “probably the person who identified himself as Lee Oswald on 1 October 1963.” There are two serious problems with this statement by Helms. First, the CIA officer in Mexico City, David Phillips, would later tell the HSCA that no voice comparisons were made, since the tapes had routinely been destroyed within seven or eight days of their origination. (Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 354) This is, in fact, what the first cable [MEXI 7023, 11/23/63, para 2] from Anne Goodpasture suggested, at least for the 9/28 recording. Goodpasture then followed this with another cable [MEXI 7025, 11/23/63, para 4] suggesting that it was the translator (Boris Tarasoff) of the two calls who connected the two speakers, i.e., that he “recognized” the 10/1 caller to be the same as the 9/28 one. Tarasoff, however, testified to the HSCA that he did no voice comparisons per se (see further Oswald, The CIA and Mexico City, pp. 164-167).

    Boris Tarasoff

    But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the FBI had already discovered on the day they got the Helms memo that the voice on the tape was not the same as that of the man held in custody in Dallas. In fact, Hoover had already memorialized that fact in a memorandum, and also in a phone call with President Lyndon Johnson. (Destiny Betrayed, p. 357) So where did Helms get his information from? And what was it based on? And why in heaven’s name is the MSM reporting that it was Oswald in communication with the Russian embassy, when the FBI determined that the voice on the tapes was not him? But further, the other document shows us that the CIA informants inside the Cuban embassy had told the Agency they had no knowledge of a visit by Oswald at any time. These kinds of evidentiary problems have led some to believe, with justifiable cause, that Oswald was impersonated, both at the consulates and on the phone, in Mexico City. But if the public is not informed of the facts in these documents then they cannot even begin to comprehend that thesis.

    Nikita Khrushchev with JFK
    Washington correspondent
    Drew Pearson

    Or the following fact: the CIA knew that Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev did not believe the official story about Oswald and, in fact, was quite dismissive about it in discussions with Washington reporter Drew Pearson. Pearson and his wife had met Khrushchev and his wife in late May, 1964, while on vacation in Cairo. Pearson met with the CIA station chief there afterwards and told him about their conversations on the subject and how Khrushchev did not believe American security forces could be so inept. Pearson added that he could make no headway at all trying to change the Russian couple’s understanding. The Russian leader thought a right-wing coup had taken place. Apparently, Khrushchev felt this way from the start, since there is the previous report from December 6, 1963, that the KGB was trying to tell President Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Attorney General Robert Kennedy that no stone should be left unturned in their inquiry into Kennedy’s assassination. This report joins others on Charles DeGaulle, Fidel Castro, and Achmed Sukarno, adding to the list of world leaders who did not believe the lone gunman solution to the assassination.

    DeGaulle, Sukarno and Castro all questioned the lone gunman explanation

    Let us step back now a moment to review how we have arrived at our present state of knowledge. In 1998 the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) closed its doors after four years. It had been created due to the uproar over Oliver Stone’s film JFK. At the end of that film, it was revealed that the files of the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)—the last inquiry into Kennedy’s death—were classified until 2029. Few people knew about this massive classification, or that the HSCA had concluded that Kennedy was killed as a result of a probable conspiracy. Assaulted by thousands of phone calls and telegrams due to their exposure to these facts, Congress created the ARRB to begin to declassify two million pages of Kennedy assassination related documents.

    John Tunheim and members of the ARRB meet with President Clinton

     

    It is clear today that the Board had neither the lifespan nor funding to properly complete its assignment. That assignment was not only to declassify all federal files, but also to search other repositories and seek out hidden pieces of evidence that could elucidate the circumstances of Kennedy’s murder. For the last three weeks—actually longer—we have been watching the leftover residue of their work, which results from the fact that the enabling legislation for the Board said there should be nothing still withheld 25 years after the law was passed in 1992. This clause in the legislation is what this furious debate has been all about.

    The MSM did an unsatisfactory job in covering the four-year life of the Board. There were some rather sensational discoveries unearthed by that body. Some authorities would state that this new information altered the calculus of the Kennedy case. But the public never heard of it because the MSM either did not know about it, or they did know about it and failed to make it public. (See “The State of the JFK Case 50 Years Out”)

    That poor prior performance has been repeated for the last three weeks. It spiraled upward into a paroxysm of chattering nabobs on Thursday, October 26th. The congressional legislation that gave birth to the Board allowed them to, at their close, grant what they called “postponements” to certain documents: that is, a document’s release would be delayed for say two years or ten years. The most sensitive documents would be given the longest postponement, which would be 25 years past the signing of the legislation, i.e., October 26, 2017. The most commonly based exemptions were if a document endangered an agent’s identity, or if it could cause the exposure of an ongoing operation. The usual numbers given for such 20-year postponements are 3,571 documents withheld in full, and approximately 32,900 still redacted in part. This past July, Martha Murphy, who is running the release project at the National Archives, declassified 441 documents in full. On October 26, contrary to what was commonly passed off in the media, there were only 52 of those documents released to the public. In the two releases since, there have been very few added to that sum. As of today, there are still over 2,700 JFK classified documents that the public has never seen!

    Rex Bradford

    These numbers come from Rex Bradford at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, and Gary Majewski, who has been a consultant on this project at the kennedysandking.com website. They have been confirmed by Jim Lesar, a Washington Freedom of Information Act attorney. One reason that the public was so misinformed is that none of the TV hosts consulted with Lesar or Bradford, who know much more about the subject than anyone the MSM used as authorities. In other words, only 52 of the “withheld in full” documents were declassified on Thursday, October 26th; and only 2,800 of the over 28,600 documents “released with deletions” were re-released on that day. What this means is, that amid all of the media hoopla, about 2% of the former, and less than 10% of the latter were finally released. And here we are, 54 years after Kennedy was killed. Twenty years after the Board closed down. In retrospect, what President Trump did was probably about the worst thing he could have done. Because if he had followed the law, it is very likely that everything would have been declassified on that day.

    Jim Lesar

    What makes that failure even more important is another aspect of that Thursday release. Shockingly, several of the 52 withheld in full documents still contained redactions! For instance, a 1975 CIA document describes an Agency training camp set up outside of New Orleans in advance of the Bay of Pigs invasion. In scanning over the document, I have discovered there are easily 25 deletions still in it. The reason the document may be important is that Oswald’s New Orleans friend David Ferrie was one of the trainers at this base, and CIA officer David Phillips—a suspect in the JFK murder—was in charge of sterilizing it after the invasion. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, pp. 30-31)

    But on top of that, many of the released documents are not just redacted; they contain many pages that are completely blank. And the CIA is getting very good at doing this. Now they do not even black out, or white out pages. It looks like they just photocopy a blank page over and over, or cover the entire document page with a blank sheet, so one cannot decipher anything. For example, one CIA document on Jim Garrison is supposed to be 11 pages long. Yet 8 of those pages are blanked out completely.

    In addition to that lengthy redaction, there is a fascinating memo from the internal email messages of the ARRB about even more extensive concealment. In a message dated November 14, 1996, the Board is describing its approach to the CIA about documents concerning Clay Shaw and the New Orleans CIA station. In its final paragraph, it is revealed that the Board intended to ask for information about the destruction of Shaw’s 201 file. If this is accurate, then it is something that no one has ever revealed before. The closest anyone has come to it is the discovery in Bill Davy’s book Let Justice be Done that a certain “Y file” of Shaw’s had also been destroyed (p. 200). If both statements are true, and both of these refer to separate files, then they lend credence to what Gordon Novel wrote to researcher Mary Ferrell in a letter during the House Select Committee proceedings in 1977. He stated that during the Warren Commission hearings, the CIA had deliberately concealed Shaw’s true status with the Agency. Novel would appear to be a good source since he was hired by Allen Dulles to infiltrate Garrison’s office (Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pp. 232-33).

    Beyond the outright concealment of pages or destruction of files, there are documents that the National Archives admits are simply illegible. But they declassify them anyway. Calling them illegible does not do justice to how bad they really are (see this example). Even if one scanned them using OCR software, that would not improve readability, since there is so little to recognize in them.

    Another way the law is being circumvented is that in some of these releases the cover sheet describes a report, giving the reader the originating agency, the author and the subject, and listing a page count. But it does not then include the report itself! This has been done several times (see, for example, this CIA file).

    Earle Cabell, CIA asset
    and mayor of Dallas on 11/22/63
    Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko

    There is still another category of documents that has not been discussed by the MSM. This category was labeled by the Board as “NBR”, Not Believed Relevant. It is fairly clear today that this rubric was abused. For instance, one of the most fascinating July releases was on Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas in 1963. It was revealed that he was a CIA asset at the time of the assassination. According to former intelligence analyst John Newman, that document was previously classified as NBR. How anyone could deem such information irrelevant is unfathomable. Lesar told this author that files on Yuri Nosenko were also deemed irrelevant. Nosenko was the Soviet defector who arrived in America in 1964 and said that the KGB had never recruited Oswald while he was in the USSR for approximately three years. CIA officer James Angleton then more or less had him imprisoned and tortured for nearly 36 months to try and make him admit he was sent over to mislead the CIA about Oswald. Author Edward Epstein, an Angleton idolater, wrote a book—Legend—endorsing Angleton over Nosenko and portraying Oswald as a communist spy. Again, it is extremely puzzling to think Nosenko documents would be labeled as irrelevant. Luckily, Murphy declassified many of the Nosenko documents and the Cabell document. But, according to Lesar, there are tens of thousands of these NBR documents that the Review Board allowed to be deferred. They must be located and declassified.

    In its vapid coverage of the JFK releases, the MSM largely ignored things that were new and important, and focused, as we have already mentioned, on papers which had been released before in whole or in part. Two of the worst examples of this kind of presentation were by representatives of the so-called New Media, i.e., cable television and online journalism.

    Rachel Maddow
    Tom Pettit

    Rachel Maddow reran a segment that had been filmed back in 1993 featuring deceased newsman Tom Pettit. Pettit visited the National Archives on the first day of the ARRB declassification. He apparently did not understand the difference between documents that were declassified and ones that were already among the exhibits of the Warren Commission, that flawed 1964 investigation into President Kennedy’s assassination, because he pointed to documents in the latter as if they had been newly declassified that day. (See this full report on that segment)

    Nicholas Katzenbach

    On October 27th, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo discussed an 11/24/63 memorandum written by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (alluded to above) in which he stated that he was concerned that something must be issued in order to convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin. That document is a forerunner to the famous and long ago declassified document which would be typed the next day by Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who Hoover had talked to the night of the 24th, after Oswald had been shot. Marshall then said that this did not necessarily indicate that Hoover had any doubts about the case and that it was not incriminating of his investigation.

    Josh Marshall

    Apparently, Marshall was unaware of one of the keystones of the JFK case, namely the Single Bullet Theory, aka the Magic Bullet. Hoover never bought into that dictum. Which is why the original FBI report on the JFK case was not included in the Warren Commission volumes. The Warren Commission’s shooting scenario maintains that one shot, aimed at his skull, killed Kennedy; a second shot went through both Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally, making seven wounds, and smashing two bones in the two men; and one shot missed the limousine by 200 feet, hitting the curb on a different street, and dislodging the concrete upwards, cutting the face of bystander James Tague. Hoover rejected this and said all three shots hit both men in the car. How did he manage to bypass the shot that ricocheted upward and hit Tague? He quite literally erased it. He had it carved out, pasted over and shipped back to Washington. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 252) In other words, Hoover tried to make his verdict stick by altering the evidence. A rather important point which Marshall either is unaware of, or does not want his readers to know about.

    The two men who know the state of these documents best, Bradford and Lesar, were nowhere to be seen on the domestic MSM. (Although Bradford did get on abroad.) Instead, we had people like Gerald Posner, Larry Sabato, and Philip Shenon, who conveyed none of the important information that would have explained what was really happening, or what was in the new documents.

    Media darlings Gerald Posner, Larry Sabato & Philip Shenon

    But there is an even larger story here about the pernicious effects of secrecy and how it has worked in the JFK case. And it’s one that no one has written about. Ramon Herrera is a computer information technology expert with a strong interest in the JFK case. He decided to clone the entire records database of the online JFK collection at the National Archives. He used some revolutionary “scraping” software he developed together with a friend from abroad. The process lasted a week and he repeated it four times, then wrote programs to compare the results, record number by record number, to make sure they were identical. With this exact copy in hand, he then extended the capability which NARA provides by making the field “Current Status” searchable. That allowed him to count the number of records for each of the three categories: “Postponed in Full”, “Released with Deletions” and “Open”. Herrera came up with a remarkable discovery. His number of records classified “Postponed in Full” is over three times as large as the official number: 9,718. One reassuring aspect of his work is that his number of “Released with Deletions” documents is very close to NARA’s. This would seem to indicate that either the Archives records on the JFK case are wrong, or Martha Murphy has not updated her database to insure a proper count of what has been released and what is being withheld.

    What all of this reveals is that the ARRB process was, in large part, subverted. The Review Board did some good and valuable work. But as Lesar told this writer, Congress wanted to get rid of the public pressure, but they also wanted to do it fast and cheap. But when one is dealing with a subject that strikes at the heart of the national security state—as the JFK case does—there is no fast and cheap way to approach it. For the simple reason that the executive intelligence agencies understand the technique of waiting an opposing agency out; that is, the CIA knew it was going to be with us long after the Board left. In fact, British researcher Malcolm Blunt found an Agency internal document which contained words to that effect. Written in late 1995, the author wrote that the Agency considered the Board not so much a releasing agency—but as one setting dates for future review: in other words, as a review and postpone apparatus. In many ways, that seems to have been the case, so the Agency packed in as many postponed documents as they could. It also appears that with what President Trump did on October 26th, there will be a lot of court hearings for Jim Lesar to attend to clean up the mess that Trump and the media made of this momentous occasion.

    But as Lesar informed me, there might even be instances that he cannot salvage. While trying a case directly related to the ARRB process, the attorney was advised to visit a sitting general. The general told him that after the Board disbanded, there were a lot of burning parties going on in Washington. That is how deep the secrets of the JFK case go in the capital. Which is why the MSM has never been able to deal with the subject.

  • The Intelligence Community Flips Off America

    The Intelligence Community Flips Off America

    “The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.”

    ~Frank Zappa

     

    © November 4, 2017

    James Angleton set the strategy in 1964. “Jim would prefer to wait out the Commission,” as one CIA memo about Warren Commission inquiries put it.[1] They are still doing that as well as running their propaganda campaign against anyone who questions the lone-nut theory, their “best truth” according to David Robarge.[2]

    I recently published an article about the delay in releasing records under the 1992 JFK Records Collections Act. In that article I explained the CIA’s play to discredit those who question their lone-nut theory best truth and suggested that their historian, David Robarge, has told us what to look for in the documents that are still being withheld.[3] In that article I suggested we should look for information regarding covert operations against Cuba that would “circumstantially implicate CIA in conspiracy theories” – Mr. Robarge’s words.[4] While I doubt the existence of a “smoking gun,” the circumstantial evidence we might look for in the delayed files could show a correlation between Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities in New Orleans and Mexico City in the late summer and fall of 1963 and CIA covert operations that were occurring at that time.[5] I specifically suggest that we look to files on operations involving George Joannides, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (“DRE”) and David Phillips. These are files, or at least some of them, that are in the JFK records that were scheduled for release.

    On October 26, 1992, the U.S. Congress passed S. 3006, with only one amendment and very little, if any, opposition. The Senate bill, introduced by Senator John Glenn of Ohio, was signed the same day by the President George H.W. Bush and became Public Law 102-526, (“JFK Records Act”). Among other things the JFK Records Act provided for the collection, preservation and eventual release of all records related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy with minimal exceptions. It mandates, in clear and unambiguous language, “[e]ach assassination record shall be publicly disclosed in full, and available in the Collection no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of enactment of this Act.” The Act allows an exemption to this explicit mandatory requirement only if the President “certifies” that the release of each withheld document “is made necessary by an identifiable harm to” either 1) military defense; 2) intelligence operations; 3) law enforcement; or 4) the conduct of foreign relations and “the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”[6]

    NARA released some of the files that I have been waiting for yesterday, November 3, 2017. The Excel spreadsheet listing the released files include four files referenced to David Atlee Phillips and one file referenced to the DRE.[7] Of the files referencing Phillips, three are of an unspecified nature and one is listed as his Office of Personnel (OP) file. The DRE file is listed as “CIA file on DRE AMSPELL operations.”

    AMSPELL is a CIA cryptonym for DRE, the anti-Castro Cuban group that was run by George Joannides in 1963, that had the encounter with Oswald in New Orleans in 1963, and published the first conspiracy theory blaming Castro in their CIA financed newspaper in Miami on November 25, 1963. The file released yesterday, for such an active group, is a very thin 87 pages of which 61 are expurgated in full. Of the remaining 26 pages, many are largely expurgated. The Phillips files are even worse. The three files of unspecified type may be some of his operational files. These files are even more highly expurgated than the AMSPELL file. Taking the 73 page long file RIF 104-10177-10135 as an example:

    • 3 pages are a confidential notice that the file has been processed and retired which notice is reprinted in full;
    • 3 pages are the file’s routing sheet that has been partially released with redaction of any significant information;
    • 2 pages are a 1975 FOIA request from The Bay City Times, a newspaper in Bay City, Michigan, reproduced in full;
    • 1 page is a “Document Transfer and Cross Reference” form indicating that records of a project apparently named “Furioso C” have been removed from this file and sent to another section of the CIA with a redaction that not only removes the substantive entry but also the name of the space on the form where the entry was made;
    • 2 pages are partially redacted memoranda;
    • 3 pages are Security information forms for Project Furioso C with all substantive information redacted; 2 pages are a Project Financial Data form from 1952 with no substantive information that is not redacted;
    • 6 pages are partially redacted routing sheets for documents, none of which have the routed document attached;
    • 1 page is a partially redacted cable from 1952;
    • 2 pages are copies, unredacted of logs of HSCA access to the file, showing that I saw the file in 1978.

    The remaining 48 pages are redacted in full.

    The file that is listed as David Atlee Phillips’s OP file is not as heavily redacted as the other three Phillips files although many of the documents, mainly personnel forms, it contains have been cleansed of any significant data. That, however, is not the end of the story on this file. The file starts with a few items of post-retirement correspondence between him and the CIA in 1975 and then proceeds chronologically backwards from his retirement in 1975. I have not yet been able to go through the 358 page file to carefully study all the documents, but I have gone through it well enough to note that all his fitness reports between 1956 and 1965 are missing – not redacted, just simply not there. Indeed, so far as I have been able to find, there is no record whatsoever of a document in the file dated between 1961 and 1965 – not redacted, just simply not there.

    There has been no explanation, let alone a presidential certification, that the massive redactions in these “released in full” documents meet any of the mandatory exemptions that allow withholding. No identifiable harm is specified. No rationale is given as to why the secrets protected outweigh the public interest in disclosure. These files are not in compliance with the law no matter what the main stream media says. They are an in-your-face flipped bird to the American public. They basically tell us that the CIA is saying that they don’t have to comply with the law of the land and that they will not tell us their secrets and that there is nothing we can do about it. I’ve been here before. It was in a small room in CIA Headquarters in late 1978. I had been fighting to see a file generated by the CIA debriefing of Johnny Roselli. Scott Breckinridge and George Joannides had just handed me a highly redacted file that violated the HSCA/CIA Memorandum of Understanding mandating unexpurgated access by HSCA to CIA files. They stood by, grinning, as they watched my reaction upon opening the file to find it largely expurgated. They were grinning so hard because they knew they had waited out the HSCA and there was nothing I could do about it. The Angleton strategy still worked. It is still working today.

    This release not only demonstrates that the Angleton strategy is still being applied. It also illustrates the point I have been making about what they are covering up. There may well be nothing we can do about it. It appears our lawmakers are spineless in the face of the intelligence community. Joseph Burkholder Smith, a retired CIA officer, told me and Gaeton Fonzi in 1978, “You represent Congress. What the f*** is that to the CIA? You’ll be gone in two years and the CIA will still be there.” To paraphrase that to fit the situation in which we now find ourselves: “You are the people that Congress supposedly represents. What’s that to the CIA? You’ll forget about it in a few weeks or so.”

    But I won’t. I wrote a letter to my Senator yesterday before I saw the travesty that was the day’s release of JFK documents by NARA. Probably a futile gesture, but one I had to take anyway. Here’s what I told him:

    Please allow me first to introduce myself a bit. While I am your constituent, I do not believe we have ever met. I was born and raised in Webster County, West Virginia, and still reside on the farm my grandfather purchased in the 1940’s outside of Cowen. I am a graduate of WVU – 1976 – and while there got to know some of the members of your family. I had the privilege of running your first cousin Tim Manchin’s campaign for a seat on the WVU student government Board in the mid-70’s. I am a 1980 graduate of Cornell Law School and a former law clerk for Justice Tom McHugh of the West Virginia Supreme Court. I took a year and a half leave of absence from law school to work as a researcher for the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977-1978. My primary area of responsibility in the Committee’s work was to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency and Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City. Most of the work I produced for the Committee remains classified. I am presently registered to vote in Webster County with an Independent affiliation.

    I am aware that the Republicans in this state are trying to mount a serious challenge to you in the upcoming election and I am presently considering whether to become involved in the campaign and, if I do, who I am going to support. In that regard, and in view of your position on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, your position on an issue that is very important to me will influence whether I decide to actively support you in the upcoming election. That issue is the release – or I should say, the failure to release – the records currently held in the JFK Records Collection by the National Archives and Records Administration. While the records, and access to them, is of great interest to me, the real issues raised by the failure to release them are much more fundamental than just access to the assassination records. It is these fundamental issues that I want to explain and upon which I wish to hear your opinion.

    On October 26, 1992, the U.S. Congress passed S. 3006, with only one amendment and very little, if any, opposition. The Senate bill introduced by Senator John Glenn of Ohio was signed the same day by the President George H.W. Bush and became Public Law 102-526 which is codified at 44 U.S.C. § 2107 note (“JFK Records Act”). Among other things the JFK Records Act provided for the collection, preservation and eventual release of all records related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy with minimal exceptions. Among its other provision, the JFK Records Act, at § 5(g)(2)(D), mandates in clear and unambiguous language “[e]ach assassination record shall be publicly disclosed in full, and available in the Collection no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of enactment of this Act.” The Act allows an exemption to this explicit mandatory requirement only if the President “certifies” that the release of each withheld document “is made necessary by an identifiable harm to” either 1) military defense; 2) intelligence operations; 3) law enforcement; or 4) the conduct of foreign relations and “the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.” [Emphasis added.]

    I note that this is a law duly enacted and adopted by the democratic processes of this country in 1992 – a country where we supposedly pride ourselves on being a nation of laws, a nation where the law applies to each and to all regardless of status or position. On October 26, 2017, as I am sure you are aware, President Donald Trump, at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence community members, disregarded the clear provisions of the law and postponed release of ninety percent of the remaining withheld documents in the JFK Records Collection for an additional six months. In doing this, the President made no findings, issued no orders and certified nothing, merely issuing a statement through the press office saying that all documents will be released “with redactions only in the rarest of circumstances” by April 26, 2018.

    The President’s action was not only without authority in law, it was also taken in patent violation of the clear, unambiguous and mandatory terms of a law that your institution passed. In this situation, I would be tempted to file a suit against the President if it were not for the facts that: 1) the Courts have already held that the JFK Records Act does not provide a basis for any private cause of action for U.S. citizens, Assassination Archives and Research Center v. Dep’t. of Justice, 43 F.3d 1542, 1544 (D.C. Cir. 1995); 2) Federal Court litigation is too expensive to allow access to a normal citizen trying to hold his government accountable; and 3) it would take more than six months to get a case through to a decision in Federal Court so the action would represent no type of check or correction to the problem.

    The real problem that this presents is that it is showing to the nation that the intelligence agencies of our nation are not subject to the laws of the nation. They are effectively above the law. At their request, or pressure, the President of the United States will violate the clear mandates of enacted legislation. And, to date, the reaction of our elected representatives in Congress seems to reinforce the fact that no one is willing to stand up to such blatant disregard of the clear provisions of the duly enacted laws of the nation. I understand that it is the executive branch that is charged with the enforcement of the laws your branch enacts and, in this case, it is the executive branch that is violating the law so there can be little realistic expectation of enforcement from them. But this is the heart of the problem and why it is incumbent upon the Congress to act. At a minimum there should be oversight hearings. At a minimum the Congress should not be seen to willingly acquiesce in executive contempt for the Legislative branch of government and the law of the land.

    This action on the part of the intelligence community, the National Archives, and the Executive is only the latest in a long string of actions that disregard the provisions of the JFK Records Act that also subvert and cover up the information related to the assassination of our 35th president. Those other actions are beyond the present scope of this letter, but are things about which I would be glad to speak with you if you have any interest, so I will not go into them here.

    To my knowledge there has been no coverage or explanation of why the intelligence community has requested this delay of the President. It was made in secret. What reason have they given for the delay? What kind of pressure have they brought to bear? How can they force a president to so blatantly disregard the law? If they can do this in regard to disclosure of fifty-year-old records, in what else can they exercise a like secret influence that corrupts the laws of the nation? What affect does the existence and use of such secret power have on our democracy? If these things – not just the documents but the method of influence – remain always secret, then how can a citizenry be sufficiently informed so as to exercise their franchise to any real purpose? How can we have faith in our democracy, let alone our government, if this kind of practice is allowed to continue unchallenged? These are the questions that I would like to have answered. But, to make it easier for you, I note you are in a unique position in regard to these issues due to your membership on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Are you at least going to call and press for public hearings on any of these issues? Or are you going to join the vast majority of our representatives and once again cower before the intelligence agencies? Will you stand up for your constituents’ right to participate in their government on an informed basis? Will you stand for holding our government to a standard of open honesty before its citizens and against allowing the real affairs of state to be conducted in secret and in disregard of the laws enacted by the peoples’ representatives?

    I anxiously await your answer.

    The questions I asked Joe Manchin in that letter are even more pressing today. I don’t know if he’ll even answer, let alone do anything. Maybe like Chuck Grassley, he’ll send out an apparently frustrated tweet. Or maybe, like the main stream press, he’ll tout the release of the documents, hoping no one will look to see what a travesty the “release” is because of the massive redactions. At this point all I can do is try to tell the truth about this whole state of affairs. I also encourage you to not take this insult to your intelligence and ability to govern yourselves without reaction. Do something. If nothing else, circulate this article to everyone you know. Refuse to accept the cancer of secrecy that destroys our liberty and ability to govern ourselves. Get involved. Get informed. Stay informed. Read and follow http://2017jfk.org/home/ and http://jfkfacts.org/. Join the AARC at http://aarclibrary.org/aarc-membership/. Join CAPA at http://capa-us.org/membership/. If those who exercise the power in this country have such blatant contempt for the law, then the time for serious peaceful civil disobedience may be upon us. Get the word out. Don’t be silent any longer. This is not an issue of the left or the right. Do something. Say something. And don’t stop until you are heard.

    Notes

    [1]. Raymond Rocca to Richard Helms, Memo Re Response to Rankin, 5 Mar 1964, NARA Record No. 1993.06.24.14:59:13:840170, available at https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=98075#relPageId=1&tab=page

    [2]. David Robarge, “DCI John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” Studies in Intelligence, (Vol. 57, No. 3, 09/2013), Approved for Release and declassified, 09/29/2014, at page 20. Available at http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB493/docs/intell_ebb_026.PDF. Robarge wrote: “The DCI was complicit in keeping incendiary and diversionary issues off the commission’s agenda and focusing it on what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’: that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.” For my commentary on the CIA’s “best truth”, see “Thank You, Phil Shenon,” available at https://realhillbillyviews.blogspot.com/2015/10/. Note that the “best truth” was conditioned by “at the time” leaving open the real possibility that alternative cover stories may have to be brought to play in the event that time undermined what the Agency considered to be the best truth for them.

    [3]. Dan Hardway, “What Were They Hiding and What Should We Look For,” 30 Oct 2017, available at https://realhillbillyviews.blogspot.com/2017/10/what-were-they-hiding-and-what-should_30.html

    [4]. Robarge, n. 2 above, at p. 9.

    [5]. This is addressed in more detail at JFKFacts, Exclusive: “JFK investigator on how CIA stonewalled Congress,” http://jfkfacts.org/hardway–declaration–cia–stonewalled–jfkinvestigation/; Declaration of Dan L. Hardway, Morley v. CIA, CA # 03-02545-RJL, D.C.D.C. 11 May 2016, Docket No. 156.

    [6]. 44 U.S.C. § 2107 note § 5(g)(2)(D). Emphasis added.

    [7]. https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/2017-release, RIF Nos. 104-10176-10121, 104-10177-10135, 104-10177-10134, 104-10194-10026, and 104-10170-10121.