Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: ARRB

  • Morley v. CIA

    Morley v. CIA

    Jefferson Morley’s e-book Morley v. CIA is a brief tome, but if one is attuned to the scenario and the political times, it’s a work that is powerful in its overtones. On the surface, it tells the story of a journalist at the Washington Post who got interested in the JFK case. He decided to pursue a certain angle about Oswald’s activities in New Orleans with a certain Cuban exile group. He then filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The end result of that application had two long term results that were both negative for Morley and for the cause of open government and disclosure. They are really the heart of this story. But before we get to them, let us lay in some background.

    Morley was one of the very few MSM reporters who showed a real interest in the John Kennedy assassination. From his outpost at the Washington Post, he became acquainted with John Newman. He and Newman cooperated on what was one of the most fascinating and important discoveries in the early days of the Assassination Records Review Board. This was the interview those men did with CIA official Jane Roman in the fall of 1994. Morley had discovered that Roman had handled cables and communications about Oswald in the weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. Yet she had signed a communication to Mexico City saying that the latest information CIA had on Oswald was a State Department report from May of 1962. This was a key discovery in trying to comprehend what was going on in Mexico City, which the Warren Commission never came close to understanding. (For a fuller version of that incident click here)

    Morley actually got the Post to publish a few stories on the JFK case which were not cheerleading boilerplate for the Commission or slams against the critical community. This was a significant achievement. He has talked about the rather difficult process he had to go through to get the stories published. At times, it was almost a Catch 22 situation. His editors would ask him what theory he was trying to push. He would reply that he was not pushing any theory. They would then ask: “Well why do you want to run the story then?” Consider: Morley was a veteran reporter who had been with The New Republic and The Nation for a number of years prior to the Post. The fact he had to run this gauntlet shows how radioactive this issue was thirty years after Kennedy’s assassination.

    As he began to go through some of the declassified CIA documents, the reporter noted that, contrary to what the Agency had maintained for decades, they had a keen and continuing interest in Oswald. (Morley, p. 9). He was particularly struck by the fact that the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil—the DRE—had participated in a broadcast debate with Oswald. Afterwards, they had called for an inquiry into his group: the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This was three months before the assassination. He was surprised when he discovered that not only did the CIA have a file on the DRE, they had three boxes of materials on that group. After going through the material, he concluded that the DRE was in reality a CIA front. (Morley, p. 10) They were getting a princely sum of $51,000/month to operate both domestically and abroad—the equivalent of nearly a half million today. (Morley, p. 11)

    He then went about tracking down some of the surviving DRE members. They all referred to a man named “Howard” as their contact with the CIA in 1963. In the boxes, there were lengthy monthly reports out of the Miami station on the DRE, yet these did not appear to exist in 1963. (Morley, p. 10) In 1998, the Review Board released a document which stated the case officer for the DRE in 1963 was not Howard Hunt, but George Joannides. (p. 14) The plot thickened when Morley learned that, in 1978, while he was recovering from a heart operation, Joannides was recruited by Scott Breckinridge. Breckinridge was the chief liaison for the CIA with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Unfortunately, when Morley unearthed all of this, he also found out that Joannides had passed on in March of 1991. The Post obituary had described him as a Defense Department attorney. (Morley, p. 15)

    Once he had this information in hand, the reporter contacted Robert Blakey, the Chief Counsel for the HSCA during its last two years of operation. He asked him if he knew what Joannides was doing in 1963. Blakey said he was not doing anything. He had a deal with the Agency that no one operative in 1963 would be working with the committee. In other words, the Chief Counsel had been snookered. (Morley, p. 15)

    Morley thought, quite naturally, that this all added up to an interesting story that the Post should run. Bob Woodward agreed. But the investigative reporting chief ended up vetoing the story. The author’s summary of this episode is notable:

    They just didn’t want to deal with a JFK assassination story, which amounted to prudent careerism manifested by a difference in news judgment. Nobody had ever gotten ahead in Washington by challenging the CIA’s account of JFK’s assassination…The truth was, I had a good story that didn’t serve the newsroom’s collective agenda. (Morley, p. 18)

    It then got worse. The Post, in the person of managing editor Steve Coll, denied his suggestion to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get more documents on Joannides. Therefore, Morley had to publish the story with the Miami New Times, an alternative weekly.

    Though he switched over to the online version of the Post, he did not lose interest in Joannides. Morley ended up joining forces with the very experienced Washington FOIA attorney Jim Lesar. Lesar agreed to take the case, because the precedent in the field was that if the CIA lost, the Agency would have to pay his fees. (Morley, p. 19)

    Prior to working with Breckinridge, since he spoke fluent Greek and French, Joannides had worked as an undercover agent at the Athens station. The author makes clear that Joannides was an operations man, not a desk jockey. (Morley, p. 21) But in 1962, he was sent to the Miami station. At around this time, Deputy Director Richard Helms decided to redo the Agency contract with the DRE. Whoever became their case officer would have full access to Helms. (p. 22) In some documents the CIA gave up, Morley discovered that Joannides took out a second home in New Orleans in 1964, while the Commission was holding hearings there. This may have been important, because Helms never disclosed that the DRE had a CIA code name, AMPSELL, to the Warren Commission. This was the case even though Helms was the key officer controlling CIA relations with that body.

    Lesar filed for the missing monthly reports and the reasons why Joannides was chosen as the HSCA liaison. (p. 26) Dan Hardway became co-counsel. Hardway had worked for the HSCA and had direct contact with Joannides. Recall, when Fletcher Prouty first went to the HSCA for a pre-interview, he saw Joannides there. He immediately realized what had happened. So, he chose to cooperate in only a perfunctory manner.

    In interviews this reviewer did with Hardway, and based on a speech Hardway’s partner Eddie Lopez gave in Chicago in 1993, Prouty was absolutely correct. Up until Joannides coming in, Danny and Ed worked out of the CIA offices in Langley. It was a relatively cooperative and informal arrangement. And the two made good progress on their studies of the CIA and Oswald, and the Oswald in Mexico City mystery. This changed under Joannides. As Lopez said in Chicago, now they were shifted out of Langley to offices at the HSCA headquarters. A huge safe was moved into the office. Ed and Dan had to file formal written requests that were now courier-delivered to a secretary. They then had to sign in and out and also for each batch of documents. They also had to hand in their notes. But further, according to Hardway, they now did not get completely unredacted documents or all the documents under request. This violated the agreement that the HSCA had made with CIA. In other words, Joannides acted as a hatchet man.

    Judge Richard Leon oversaw Morley’s case at the district level. To put it mildly, he did not look upon it with sympathetic eyes. And here, in addition to the struggle at the Post, comes a second sub theme to the book. That is, how the GOP has stacked the judiciary through The Federalist Society. Leon was appointed to the court by George W. Bush and, according to the late Robert Parry, that may have been an appreciative familial gesture. (Click here for details)

    Leon consistently ruled against Morley and Lesar, but, on appeal, Lesar got about 300 pages of newly declassified material. It should be revealed here that, in his interview with Oliver Stone for the director’s upcoming JFK documentary, ARRB chair John Tunheim stated that he was also deceived by the CIA about Joannides. The Agency told the Board that all they had on the former operator was his personnel file. That turned out to be, at the very least, an exaggeration. Tunheim felt that he also had been snookered. For example, Joannides told Blakey that the CIA cut off contact with the DRE in April of 1963. Not accurate. The CIA funding of the DRE went on all the way until late 1966. (Morley, p. 41)

    After the 300 pages—which declassified an award that included his domestic actions, which Morley thinks may have been his work with the DRE—Leon attempted to end the case. This was with about 100 documents still outstanding. (Morley, pp. 43–45). This time, the appeals court—with Brett Kavanaugh on it—agreed with Leon.

    This led to the second part of the suit, which was an attempt to have the CIA compensate Lesar for the work he had done on the filings, hearings, and other parts of the case. Here, Brett Kavanaugh proved crucial. Prior to the Morley case, there had been a four-part test over the issue of compensation. (Morley, p. 47) If the plaintiff prevailed, those four parts came into play. Clearly, Morley had prevailed, since he got hundreds of pages out which had been secret. These benefited the public, since he wrote many articles about it. Further, the JFK case was and is an issue of substantial interest.

    In the end, Kavanaugh reversed his initial vote on the fees. In 2013, he agreed with Lesar. In 2018, he did not. The main issue that changed was that he was now on the verge of attaining his life’s ambition as a member of the Federalist Society. (Morley, p. 55) As the author writes, Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court was sealed with a “decision that can only be described as arbitrary, self-serving, and detrimental to the spirt of the Freedom of Information Act.” (Ibid)

    And that statement is not hyperbole and it is not sour grapes either. The author includes Kavanaugh’s decision along with Karen Henderson’s in his appendix to the book. Henderson dissented and her opinion pretty much takes apart Kavanaugh’s in every way. And make no mistake, this is an important issue, for the simple reason that it is difficult for a private individual to take on the FBI or CIA on his own. And the people who file these cases are usually not those of extreme wealth (e.g. the late Harold Weisberg). This is what keeps the scales a bit more even and what helps secure an open government. But once one gets a judge like Leon, who defers to the judgment of the CIA, and one like Kavanaugh, who saw his future beckoning, past precedents were forgotten. Henderson’s dissent is very much worth reading.

    Morley has written an unusual book. I don’t recall one like it dealing with the JFK case. It seems to me more than just a profile of a FOIA lawsuit. It tells us about problems with not just the JFK case, but through that with the press and our court system. Both of which weighed in on the side of secrecy.

    Joannides must be smiling.

  • The Ordeal of Malcolm Perry

    The Ordeal of Malcolm Perry

    On the afternoon of the JFK assassination, within an hour or two after his death, there was a press conference at Parkland Hospital. Three important pronouncements were made. In fact, they were so important that they should have shaped the case in a permanent manner.

    First, acting press secretary Malcolm Kilduff talked about how Kennedy had died.

    Malcolm Kilduff at Parkland press briefing

    When he did so, he pointed to his right temple and said something like: it was a matter of a bullet through the head. Very shortly after, Chet Huntley said the same thing live on NBC television. On the air, he revealed his source to be Dr. George Burkley, President Kennedy’s own personal physician.

    Dr. Kemp Clark, chief of neurosurgery—the man who actually pronounced Kennedy dead—said he observed a large gaping hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 80) Dr. Malcolm Perry, who cut a tracheostomy across the bullet wound in Kennedy’s neck, said that the wound was one of entrance. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 367)

    Therefore, from these three pieces of evidence, one would have had to conclude that Kennedy was hit from the front. That implication would be almost inescapable. Therefore, some strange things happened with this key press conference. First of all, there is no film available of it today, which is remarkable in and of itself, because, as one can see from pictures and film snippets, there were many reporters in that conference room. It is very hard to comprehend how not one of them called for a film camera to cover the initial public pronouncement of President Kennedy’s death. Second, initially, the Secret Service told the Warren Commission that they did not even have a transcript of this conference. According to former Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) analyst Doug Horne, there are two real problems with the Secret Service saying this. First, according to Horne, the Secret Service went around collecting the films of this press conference. Thus making it disappear. (See Horne at Future of Freedom Foundation conference of May 18th. This is at the FFF web site.)

    But further, the Secret Service lied to the Commission about having the transcript. In responding to Commission counsel Arlen Specter’s request, Chief of the Secret Service James Rowley wrote a letter to chief counsel J. Lee Rankin. He said that he could not locate either the films or the transcript of this press conference. (DiEugenio, p. 367) As the ARRB proved, this was a lie, because they found a transcript of that press conference that was time stamped, “Received US Secret Service 1963 Nov. 26 AM 11:40”. (ibid) Does it get much worse than that? In other words, the Warren Commission’s own investigators were keeping important pieces of evidence from them—and then lying about it.

    As most of us know, Perry was pressured to alter his first day story. By the time of his appearance before the Commission, he now said that the edges of the wound were neither ragged nor clean and that the wound could have been an exit or entrance. Gerald Ford got him to say that the reporting from the press conference was inaccurate. Allen Dulles applied the icing on the cake: he said Perry should issue a retraction—which, of course, he just had. (DiEugenio, pp. 166–67)

    The reason Ford and Dulles could do this is because, in all probability, the Secret Service had absconded with the films and the transcript. But further, Perry had been worked on. As the Church Committee had discovered, a man named Elmer Moore had taken it upon himself to convert Perry to the Commission’s point of view. Moore was a Secret Service agent who was forwarded to work for the Commission. One of his first assignments was to take up a desk at Parkland Hospital and convince the doctors there that they were wrong and the autopsy report was correct. One of his priority targets was Perry. (DiEugenio, p. 167)

    As Pat Speer later discovered, this story about Moore gets even worse. After he performed his assignment in Dallas so effectively, he got a promotion to a longer term one. He became the aide de camp to Commission Chairman Earl Warren. (DiEugenio, p. 168)

    But it was not just Moore—and it was not just a couple of weeks later. As Horne stated during that FFF conference, Nurse Audrey Bell testified that Perry told her he was getting calls that evening directing him to alter his testimony.(DiEugenio, p. 169) This is now backed up by a startling piece of evidence surfaced by author Rob Couteau. Martin Steadman was a reporter at the time of the JFK assassination. Couteau discovered a journal entry by Martin that is online. Steadman was stationed in Dallas for several days after the assassination gathering information. Some of it got in print and some of it did not. From all indications, the following did not.

    One of the witnesses he spent some time with in Dallas was Malcolm Perry. Steadman was aware of what Perry had said at the press conference about the directionality of the neck wound. Steadman wrote that, about a week after the assassination, he and two other journalists were with Perry in his home. During this informal interview, Perry said he thought it was an entrance wound because the small circular hole was clean. He then added two important details. He said he had treated hundreds of patients with similar wounds and he knew the difference between an exit and entrance wound. Further, hunting was a hobby of his, so he understood from that experience what the difference was. And he could detect it at a glance.

    Steadman went on to reveal something rather surprising. Perry said that during that night, he got a series of phone calls to his home from the doctors at Bethesda. They were very upset about his belief that the neck wound was one of entrance. They asked him if the Parkland doctors had turned over the body to see the wounds in Kennedy’s back. Perry replied that they had not. They then said: how could he be sure about the neck wound in light of that? They then told him that he should not continue to say that he cut across an entrance wound, when there was no evidence of a shot from the front. When Perry insisted that he could only say what he thought to be true, something truly bizarre happened. Perry said that one or more of the autopsy doctors told him that he would be brought before a Medical Board if he continued to insist on his story. Perry said they threatened to take away his license.

    After Perry finished this rather gripping tale, everyone was silent for a moment. Steadman then asked him if he still thought the throat wound was one of entrance. After a second or so, Perry said: yes, he did.

    What is so remarkable about this story is that it blows the cover off of the idea that the autopsy doctors did not know about the anterior neck wound until the next day. Not only did they know about it that night, they were trying to cover it up that night.

    But things always get worse in the JFK case. And this issue does also, because, if the reader can comprehend it, that night was not the first time Perry was told to revise his story—or to just plain shut up. Bill Garnet and Jacque Lueth have written, produced, and directed a documentary called The Parkland Doctors. It was shown at the CAPA Houston mock trial a few years back, but only to those in attendance, not to the viewing audience. Robert Tanenbaum is the host of the documentary. He let me see it at his home two years ago. It is a good and valuable film, since it features seven of the surviving doctors at that time, 2018.

    Towards the end of the program, Dr. Robert McClelland made a bracing comment about Perry. He said that as Perry was walking out of the afternoon press conference, a man in a suit and tie grabbed him by the arm. After he got his attention, he forcefully said to Malcolm, “Don’t you ever say that again!” I turned to Tanenbaum and said: “This is about ninety minutes after Kennedy was pronounced dead.” Tanenbaum said, “Jim, they knew within the hour.” At the very least, someone knew that there had to be a cover story snapped on.

    Malcolm Perry was a victim of a large-scale crime. The evidence above indicates that the cover up was planned with the conspiracy. I would love to know who that well-dressed man who accosted him was.

    One last point. When Elmer Moore was asked to appear before the Church Committee, he brought a lawyer with him. (DiEugenio, p. 168)

  • The JFK Records – Will President Biden Obey the Law?

    The JFK Records – Will President Biden Obey the Law?

    If you are interested in the public release of the JFK assassination records, this is a critical point in time. If you have paid a little attention to this subject, the logical questions are: “Weren’t all the JFK records released in 2017 as required by the JFK Records Collection Act?” And, “Why is this a critical point in time?”

    The answer to the first question is that over 15,000 assassination records are still withheld partially or in full by the National Archives. The answer to the second question is that the President, the National Archives, and agencies still withholding these records are facing critical deadlines in 2021.

    You may be asking: “Why is the government facing critical deadlines in 2021, when all records were supposed to be released by 2017?” Here is what happened and I will also explain why the American public should be angry and demand action.

    As I’ve written about previously, the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992 (the “JFK Act”) required the full public disclosure of all assassination records by October 26, 2017. This was not a random deadline. The deadline was precisely twenty-five (25) years following the creation of the JFK Act, which required each assassination record to be publicly disclosed in full by October 26, 2017.

    The only way President Trump could sidestep this complete declassification was through written certification stating that:

    1. continued postponement was necessary because of an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and

    2. the identifiable harm was of such gravity that it outweighed the public interest in full disclosure.

    As investigative journalist Jefferson Morley wrote about last month, some 15,834 assassination-related records are still withheld in full or in part by the Executive Branch and agencies who created these records. You can read Mr. Morley’s excellent article on this subject at the following link: Federal Agencies Face April Deadline on Secret JFK Files (justsecurity.org).

    So, what actually happened in October of 2017? A week before the October 26, 2017 deadline, President Trump tweeted that he was looking forward to the full release of the JFK assassination records and that all records would be released by the deadline. Well, that did not happen. Even worse, Trump and the Executive Branch blatantly violated the JFK Act. On the eve of the deadline, presumably after meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Trump issued an executive “memorandum” giving the federal agencies another six (6) months to comply with their obligations under the JFK Act. There was no mechanism or authority in the JFK Act for President Trump to do this. To justify postponement past October 26, 2017, Trump was required to issue a written certification explaining, for each and every record, why postponement was proper under the clear standards of the JFK Act. I have written in the past in detail about those clear standards. Essentially, Trump was supposed to explain in writing, for each record, why 1) continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and 2) why such identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

    Instead, on October 26, 2017, President Trump issued an executive memorandum stating that he had “no choice” but to continue postponement for an additional 180 days because of concerns over “national security, law enforcement and foreign affairs.” Trump, in regards to an assassination that occurred 54 years in the past, asserted that full public disclosure of the JFK Records would allow potentially “irreversible harm” to the Nation’s security. Trump then ordered all agencies to re-review each and every withheld record over that 180-day period and failing a demonstration from the agencies that a record met the standard for proper postponement under the JFK Act, public disclosure would be required for all JFK Records by April 26, 2018.

    A six (6) month delay was frustrating, but seemed reasonable given that the Executive Branch and agencies in charge of these records seemingly did nothing since the winding-up of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in the 1990’s. So, what happened? On April 26, 2018, based on a recommendation from the (National) Archivist, President Trump issued a second executive memorandum giving agencies an additional three (3) years to review withheld records and make recommendations to the Archivist regarding its intent to postpone disclosure past October 26, 2021. Yes, you read that correctly. October of 2021.

    In that memorandum of April 26, 2018, Trump claimed that all executive departments and agencies had complied with his prior order to review all information within postponed records and inform the Archivist of the specific reason(s) for continued postponement under section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act. He cites the “identifiable harm” standard from the JFK Act discussed above and then broadly states that he “agreed with the Archivist’s recommendation” that continued postponement is necessary under the standards of the JFK Act. He then ordered agencies again to “re-review” any redactions (in the records) or decisions on complete withholding over the next 3 years. While Trump’s April 26, 2018, statement contained the key “buzz words” in the JFK Act for decisions on postponement, this action again did not come close to meeting the standards of the JFK Act for postponement. By October 26, 2017, at the very latest, all government agencies were required to provide to the Archivist an unclassified “identification aid” stating the specific facts, based on clear and convincing evidence, warranting a legitimate postponement decision. Those facts must deal with a threat to current military or intelligence operations, a current living person or agent who would be at risk from disclosure of records, or other current sources and methods that required legitimate protection in 2018. President Trump essentially let the executive branch and other agencies skip over this critical identification step in the JFK Act, meaning that continued postponement past October 26, 2021 is almost a certainty due to a lack of accountability. Was skipping this step just lethargy, or is it a continued attempt to withhold assassination history from the public? The only way we will know is seeing the records.

    There has been no media attention on the most recent deadline, which was April 26, 2021. In Trump’s April 26, 2018 memorandum, he required each agency (that seeks postponement past October 26, 2021) to identify (to the Archivist) the specific basis for continued postponement under the JFK Act. The Archivist is supposed to make recommendations on continued postponement to President Biden no later than September 26, 2021. Then, President Biden will have 30 days to make final decisions on disclosure by October 26, 2021. This is very interesting because, according to Trump’s memorandum, all agencies had purportedly done their jobs by April 26, 2018, satisfied the Archivist, and then Trump supposedly had agreed with the Archivist’s recommendations on over 15,000 records. If this was the case, why did the agencies get another 3 years to do the same job? And how is the Archivist supposed to do the job by September 26, 2021 without the identification aids from agencies? And how in the world is President Biden supposed to finish the job in 30 days when September 26, 2021 arrives? The simple answer is that the President and the Archivist cannot do their jobs, because the executive branch and other agencies have seemingly ignored the JFK Act and Trump’s executive orders. If they are paying attention to the act and presidential orders, and not ignoring them, the clear reason for inaction is that the agencies don’t want the President, the Archivist, and the American public to know what is in the JFK records.

    If the status quo continues, it is easy to see how the President, the Archivist, and various agencies can keep using their “discretion” to continue these unjustified and illegal delays. They will continue postponement by making it appear that they are complying with the JFK Act, but they are really not. The public is entitled to unclassified and specified written reasons for postponement under specific criteria in the JFK Act. If there are legitimate reasons for postponement under the JFK Act, so be it. The law is the law and it is a very good law in terms of public interest and transparency when it comes to the JFK assassination. This article is not aimed at proving a conspiracy in the assassination. It is simply about compliance with the JFK Act and our government offices and agencies following the law.

    Fortunately, experienced researchers and attorneys are paying attention. Attorney Larry Schnapf has sent a letter and legal memorandum to Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Oversight Committee, calling for oversight hearings and enforcement of the JFK Act. That letter can be viewed here: (jfkfacts.org)). I strongly encourage readers of this article to contact these Congressional committees in support of Mr. Schnapf’s excellent and thorough letter. Congressional oversight committees clearly have authority and a duty under the JFK Act to require action from the Executive Branch and government agencies that are withholding these records from the American public. The Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), which advises the President on declassification issues, intends to address the status of JFK Act compliance on May 18, 2021. That is a very good development. Hopefully the PIDB will properly advise President Biden on the clear standards of the JFK Act and the need for compliance.

    If Congress and the PIDB do not collectively act on this important issue, there are also legal remedies. I am working with Larry Schnapf and a group of attorneys to develop a plan for private legal action, should that become necessary. Our hope is that there is enough information before Congressional oversight committees and the PIDB, but considering the unjustified and illegal delays we have seen since 2017, there will be a plan in place to get the federal courts involved.

    The one thing I do agree with in Trump’s April 26, 2018, memorandum is the following statement:

    Any agency that seeks further postponement beyond this certification shall take note of the findings of the Act, which state, among other things, that only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records. The need for continued protection can only grow weaker with the passage of time from this congressional finding.

    The President said this in 2018, when Congress had already declared in 1992 that postponement of records should be rare and that clear and convincing evidence was needed to withhold a record from the public.

    We have to remember that two government bodies concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy. In 1964, the Warren Commission (WC) concluded that Oswald killed Kennedy on his own and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. The WC also concluded that there was no connection to the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) also concluded in 1978 that Oswald killed Kennedy, but that there was a probable conspiracy involving two gunmen. The HSCA concluded in its final report that anti-Castro Cuban groups and organized crime, as a group, did not assassinate Kennedy. But the HSCA also concluded that “the available evidence does not preclude” those possibilities. If one or both of these government bodies’ conclusions are correct regarding the JFK assassination, there should have been no legitimate reason for postponing release of records in 1978. In 1992, Congress then declared that protection of JFK Records was legitimate only in the rarest of cases. In 2017 and 2018, it would seem ludicrous for the President and the Archivist to continue to find proper reasons for postponement, especially when you consider the conclusions of the WC and HSCA. Yet, the Executive Branch and agencies got 3 more years to “re-review” the JFK Records. April 26, 2021, has come and gone with no announcement from President Biden or the Archivist confirming that the work has been done by the agencies. Congress has yet to hold any oversight hearings to ensure compliance. Enough is enough, especially after 58 years.

  • PIDB Receives Letter Regarding the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection

     

  • Federal Agencies Face April Deadline on Secret JFK Files

     

  • Biden, Trump, the CIA: Reflections in a Dark Mirror, Nixon vs. Helms, 1971

    Biden, Trump, the CIA: Reflections in a Dark Mirror, Nixon vs. Helms, 1971

    Come October, President Joe Biden will make a decision on whether to release the remaining 15,834 still-repressed files that were supposed to have been released under the JFK Records Act of 1992.

    The JFK Act required that all the JFK files be made public in their entirety within 25 years, which of course, was 2017.

    But back in October 2017, President Donald Trump caved to the warnings of then-CIA director Mike Pompeo, FBI director Christopher Wray, and the National Security State, and left the remaining 15,834 files either redacted or totally under wraps.

    However, the mercurial Trump then also ordered the withheld files to be reviewed again within four years, perhaps seeking leverage over his adversaries in the intelligence communities.

    Fast forward to present, Trump has been booted from office and the betting is that Biden will also cave before the National Security State, despite the JFK assassination having happened 58 years ago.

    History is full of confounding realities. For all of his weaknesses, Trump was probably the better hope for full disclosure of the JFK records than Biden.

    For Trump was often, perhaps usually, at odds with the National Security State, variously called the “invisible government” or the “shadow government,” and, of late, “The Deep State.”

    In one of his seemingly ubiquitous running battles, Trump in 2019 detailed then-US Attorney General Robert Barr to investigate the nation’s investigative agencies, to ascertain whether elements of the Deep State illegally colluded to first try to prevent his ascendance to the White House, and then to undermine his presidency.

    At present, the criminal investigation into what is called “Russiagate” is led John Durham, now special counsel to the Justice Department and the former US Attorney for the District of Connecticut (2018–2021).

    Durham, originally tasked by Barr in May 2019 to investigate whether the invisible government had it in for Trump, has left the US Attorney’s Office with the advent of the Biden Administration, but has stayed on and is leading the criminal Russiagate investigation, as special counsel.

    Like so many modern-day Washington look-sees, the Durham inquiry promises to be interminable yet inconclusive and spun thereafter by party-based PR machines and media mouthpieces.

    Even a synopsis of the National Security State vs. Trump could consume a book. The famed Mueller investigation ended in a muddle, followed by a December 2019 report by the Department of Justice Inspector General that concluded that the FBI copiously lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, aka the FISA court, to gain permission to spy the former Trump campaign staffer Carter Page during the 2016 election.[1]

    To critics, Trump’s directives to Barr and Durham were the actions of a paranoid, or rank political theater. That could be. To put it mildly, Trump was and is a man of manifest flaws.

    But then, what other aspiring presidential candidate had contemporaneously written about him in the op-ed section of The New York Times, by a one-time director of the CIA: “Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.”[2]

    That line was penned by Michel J. Morell, professional lifer in the CIA, a onetime deputy director, and occasional acting director until his retirement in late 2013. 

    The Morell missive was run in The New York Times even before Trump became President.

    Yet Trump was hardly alone among presidents in his friction with the CIA; Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon all had conflicts and reservations about the intelligence agency. Most famously, Kennedy has been quoted to the effect that he “wanted to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds,” due to the agency entangling his White House into the debacle known as the Bay of Pigs.

    Did someone say “Bay of Pigs?” That expression “Bay of Pigs” brings up Richard Nixon.

    Nixon’s Unsuccessful Struggle With the CIA

    Set the stage in 1971, with President Nixon requesting files from then-CIA Director Richard Helms. Paper files—this was largely the pre-computer days, and totally pre-internet.

    So, 50 years ago, what CIA files did Nixon want?

    “The ‘Who Shot John?’ angle,” Nixon explained to Helms, who was seated for a tête-à-tête in the Oval Office.  Nixon had circuitously outlined to Helms why he wanted to see certain files held by the intelligence agency, evidently to further illuminate the background of the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.[3]

    All but forgotten in the voluminous White House tapes recorded by President Nixon is one of the strangest conversations ever to take place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a verbal tussle between Nixon and Helms on the morning of October 8, 1971.

    In that meeting, Nixon told Helms that he, the President—the Commander in Chief, the Chief Executive—wanted to see the CIA files on the “Bay of Pigs.”

    The end result: President Nixon never got to see those files.

    Helms sandbagged Nixon, confirming a separation of powers not pondered by the Founding Fathers nor by any sensible understanding of democratic institutions. 

    History rhymes, as they say, and Trump had wanted his AG Barr to review and then possibly make public files held by national security agencies, including the CIA.

    One could ponder if Trump, like Nixon, was effectively thwarted, meaning that the intelligence agencies remain essentially immune from Oval Office directives and oversight. 

    The Nixon-Helms Backdrop

    On that October morning 50 years ago, the cagey CIA Director Helms was mute in response to Nixon’s “The ‘Who shot John?’ angle” gambit.

    Nixon then badgered Helms with a bewildering string of questions regarding responsibility or indirect culpability for Kennedy’s death.

    “Is Eisenhower to blame? Is Kennedy to blame? Is Johnson to blame? Is Nixon to blame? Etc., etc.” asked Nixon. “It may become, not by me, a very vigorous issue but if it does, I need to know what is necessary to protect frankly the intelligence gathering and the dirty tricks department and I will protect it.”

    Nixon finished with the flourish, “I have done more than my share of lying to protect you and I believe it’s totally right to do it.”[4]

    Evidently, Helms was not moved by this Nixon soliloquy.

    The ever-scheming Nixon would later ask Helms for CIA help in derailing the Watergate investigation, by having the agency posit to the FBI that the famous Watergate break-in had actually been a CIA operation.

    Nixon advised his right-hand man and White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman this way on June 23, 1973, as recorded on tape:

    Nixon: When you get in these (CIA) people when you…get these people in, say: “Look, the problem is that this [Watergate investigation] will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing…”[5]

    In other words, Nixon was implying, if the Watergate story blew open, so would the JFK assassination story.

    One interpretation of the Helms-Nixon stalemate is that Nixon wanted to know if CIA files had details on the Mafia-Cuban-CIA hit squads that had targeted Cuba-leader Fidel Castro in the late 1950s and early 1960s—efforts which Nixon had helped set up as President Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice President, along with CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, later known as the Nixon White House Watergate burglar-meister.

    Many JFK assassination researchers have concluded the anti-Castro death squads, possibly in cooperation with elements in US intelligence agencies, then turned on Kennedy after the failed CIA-sponsored 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles, in retribution for Kennedy’s decision to not provide air support for the beleaguered invaders. 

    Interestingly enough, arrested at the Watergate, on the fateful night of June 17, 1972, were five Cuban-exile operatives, including Eugenio R. Martinez, who it was revealed later was still on the receiving end of disbursements from CIA paymasters.

    H. R. Haldeman would later author a book and posit that the expression “Bay of Pigs” were Nixon code words for the JFK assassination. Certainly, if Nixon wanted to see the “Bay of Pigs” files to provide background information on “Who shot John,” then Haldeman’s intuition seems likely. To put it bluntly, Nixon was fishing for CIA files pertaining to the JFK assassination.[6]

    That October, 1971 morning, Nixon and Helms engaged in a polite, lengthy discussion about the President’s organizational and operational needs and prerogatives, to which Helms readily assented.

    But talk is cheap.

    Fast forward a year-and-a-half: Helms never coughed up vital Bay of Pigs files and White House tapes from May 18, 1973, reveal Haldeman informing Nixon that there was key memo missing “that the CIA or somebody has caused to disappear that impeded the effort to find out what really did happen on the Bay of Pigs.”

    So, in the case of Nixon vs. Helms, the CIA foiled a Presidential order to turn over files. The director of the CIA, Helms, was not answerable to the duly-elected US President.

    Of course, Nixon and Haldeman would have no way to know if many other “Bay of Pigs” files had also disappeared—national security agencies inherently have a monopoly not only on security information, but also on information about the information. 

    Ehrlichman

    The October 1971 Nixon-Helms conversation followed on the heels of an Oval Office chat between Nixon and John Ehrlichman, then Chief Domestic Adviser and previously White House Counsel.

    Ehrlichman, like Haldeman, explained to Nixon how he had been roadblocked by the CIA in his request for files and “the internal stuff.”

    Both wondered aloud how they could bring the CIA to heel and they discussed firing CIA Director Helms and replacing him with a loyalist. Then the pair discussed E. Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA officer they recently brought on-staff to the White House ostensibly to lead a “Plumbers’ Unit,” and who later organized burglaries, including the infamous Watergate break-in.

    “Helms is scared to death of this guy [E. Howard] Hunt we got working for us, because he knows where a lot of the bodies are buried,” opined Ehrlichman, in suggesting that the White House could intimidate Helms into cooperation by hinting Hunt had switched from the CIA to Team Nixon.[7]

    In the taped conversation, Ehrlichman and Nixon agreed that the CIA was pursuing “self-perpetuation” in keeping files secret—it would protect its image and could threaten that of others, with secret files.  “Helms is a bureaucrat first and he is protecting that bureau,” said Ehrlichman. Nixon retorted, “Well I am the President and the CIA is not, it [the CIA] is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy.”

    President or not, Nixon never got the files he wanted.

    The final irony is that Hunt, of whom Nixon and Ehrlichman chortled was their ace-in-the-hole against the CIA, in truth probably never stopped being a friend of the agency.

    Rob Roy Ratliff, the CIA’s liaison on the National Security Council, in 1974 provided an affidavit to the House Judiciary Committee, when it was weighing articles of impeachment against President Nixon.[8]

    Ratliff swore that Hunt, while ensconced in the White House, had used secure agency couriers to send sealed pouches to CIA Director Helms on a regular basis.

    Rather than being Nixon’s lever against the CIA, more likely Hunt was a mole for the agency, working in the White House. Like the old joke, Nixon’s paranoia did not mean no one was out to get him.

    Trump

    Of course, Trump’s relationship with the intelligence agencies and CIA was much different from Nixon’s, with no shared history in Cuba, Latin America or Iran, no alignment of fervently held ideologies, and no mutually buried bodies.

    Unlike Nixon who reveled in foreign affairs, Trump was no scholar of international relations and instinctually regarded  offshore incursions as entanglements.

    Yet Trump, like Nixon, was deeply concerned with what might be in intelligence agency files and whether the agencies answer to him, or have their own agendas, or even worse, have plans for a presidential demise.

    By many accounts, the US intelligence community and the CIA and their allies in the media strongly resist anyone from outside their sphere rendering judgment on what is secret and what is not.

    And indeed, the mass media in general sang the CIA tune during the Trump Presidency, fretting, as did The New Yorker magazine, that AG Barr would “unilaterally” declassify documents.[9] In other words, the presumption was that a President should only declassify documents if given approval by the National Security State.

    Of course, the intelligence agencies cited the well-worn and sometimes true clichés that they need to protect “sources and methods.”

    Conclusion

    Still, as in the long-ago Nixon White House, the highly politicized circumstances of the Trump Presidency muddied some underlying principles.

    Trump, like Nixon, was embattled and deeply unpopular in some circles and even considered a menace to the nation by some. Both Nixon and Trump hardly had the charm of a President Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, or even the affability of a Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.

    Yet Trump, like Nixon, was institutionally justified in his struggles with the intelligence agencies. As the elected President and Commander-in-Chief, Nixon had every right to view any file in the entire federal government. And Attorney General Barr, as deputized by Trump, had every right to look at and declassify any document at will, at Presidential direction.

    The real question remains: Will the intelligence agencies release all the relevant files to Special Counsel Durham or, like the CIA in the Nixon days, will they unilaterally withhold information?

    More speculative, but worth knowing—did  the CIA or other intelligence agencies have plants in the Trump campaign or in the Trump White House?

    And Biden?

    And looking forward: Will President Biden show the resolve necessary to release all the remaining 15,834 files that were supposed to have been released under the JFK Records Act of 1992?

    The record of Kennedy, and then Nixon, and then Trump, suggests that Biden will be unable to prevail against the National Security State, even if he tries.

    [1] Glenn Greenwald, The Inspector General’s Report on 2016 FBI Spying Reveals a Scandal of Historic Magnitude: Not Only for the FBI but Also the U.S. Media, The Intercept, 12/2/2019.

    [2] Michael J. Morell, I Ran the CIA, Now I Am Endorsing Hillary Clinton, The New York Times, 8/5/2016, see also https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/opinion/campaign-stops/i-ran-the-cia-now-im-endorsing-hillary-clinton.html

    [3] Nixontapes.org. See http://nixontapeaudio.org/rmh/587-007a.mp3. See also Jefferson Morley, JFK Facts, 6/17/2014.

    [4] Ibid. 3

    [5] “Smoking Gun”: Richard Nixon and Bob Haldeman discuss the Watergate break-in, June 23, 1972, Richard Nixon Presidential Library. See also Andrew Coan, Prosecuting the President: How Special Prosecutors Hold Presidents Accountable and Protect the Rule of Law, Oxford University Press, 165–166

    [6] Don Fulsom, Nixon’s Bay of Pigs Secrets, The History Reader, St. Martin’s Press.

    [7] Ibid 3

    [8] Chris Collins, Nixon’s Wars: Secrecy, Watergate, and the CIA, Eastern Kentucky University Encompass, 74.

    [9] David Rohde, “William Barr, Trump’s Sword and Shield,” The New Yorker, 1/13/2020.

  • The Devil is in the Details: By Malcolm Blunt with Alan Dale

    The Devil is in the Details: By Malcolm Blunt with Alan Dale

    This book is an oral history. The interviewer is Alan Dale and the interviewee is Malcolm Blunt—with minor appearances by authors Jefferson Morley and John Newman.

    Dale is the executive director of Jim Lesar’s Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC). He has worked with authors like Newman and Joan Mellen. He is a close friend and admirer of Malcolm Blunt, who is, by far, the major personage in the book. Unfortunately, many people, even in the critical community, do not know who Malcolm is. Why is that?

    That is because every once in awhile there comes a character in the JFK case who isn’t interested in doing interviews, starting a blog, writing books or articles, or getting on the radio. This type of person essentially wants to dig into those 2 million pages that were declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). He or she wants to find out what is and is not in that treasure trove. I was lucky enough to know someone like this back in the nineties. His name was Peter Vea. He was an American living in Japan at the time the ARRB was forming. He said he was returning to the USA, relocating to Virginia and planned on visiting the National Archives to see what had been declassified. He asked if I would be interested in him sending me some of these documents. I said, of course I would. Many of the articles in Probe magazine were based upon the discoveries that Peter made in the archives. And Bill Davy’s fine book, Let Justice be Done, owes much to Peter’s work. But yet, Peter is virtually unknown today.

    Malcolm Blunt took up Peter’s baton. The extraordinary thing about Malcolm is this: he does not live in America. He lives across the pond in England. He travels to America to make long visits to the National Archives. Up to now, he has not written a book. He shares his discoveries with other researchers who he thinks would be interested in the particular subject matter. I know this because I have been the sometime recipient of his largesse.

    In this book, Alan Dale tried to elicit some of the discoveries Malcolm has made in his many visits to the Archives. In that regard, it is an unusual book, since I know of no prior attempt to do such a thing. The volume is made up of ten long interviews done from 2014–18. There is a lengthy back matter section, consisting of 8 appendixes and a penultimate 3-page section labeled as “Afterthought.”

    II

    A ways into the book, on page 321, Malcolm explains why he decided to take this route as his journey of discovery for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He explains that he was disappointed in most of the books he was reading, which he thought were rather theory heavy but factually light. Plus, so many had different ideas as to what happened. He decided to go the alternative route: no theories, just as many facts as he could find in the documents. He started in Dallas at the police archives there and then moved to the National Archives in Washington. There he began with FBI files and then he went into everything else.

    One of the first discoveries he made was rather important. Contrary to what the official story had been, the FBI did not receive the assassination evidence out of Dallas after Lee Harvey Oswald was shot. They were in receipt of it over the weekend and then returned it to Dallas on Sunday. (p. 19) In his testimony before the Warren Commission, FBI employee James Cadigan gave away this information. Since the hearings were closed, Commissioner Allen Dulles had that part of his transcript excised from the record. (p. 20)

    Maybe one reason for doing that is because the Dallas inventory of exhibits differs from the FBI inventory list. One example being that the FBI had turned Oswald’s Minox camera into a light meter. Malcolm also notes that the Minox in the National Archives—there were two shown to Marina Oswald during her House Select Committee on Assassinations interview—is inoperable. It is sealed shut. (p. 23) Malcolm thinks the reason for this is that it would reveal police officer Gus Rose’s initials inside the camera. And that would prove the police picked up the camera on their weekend visit to Ruth Paine’s home. Resisting FBI pressure tactics, Rose always insisted he picked up a camera there and not a light meter. (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 910) This chicanery would indicate that both Dulles and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wished to keep that camera out of Oswald’s hands. They wanted no indication in public that Oswald owned what was considered at that time a rare and expensive spy camera.

    With Jefferson Morley visiting, Malcolm and Alan review what they consider another landmark on the road to discovery about the JFK case. This was the Morley/Newman interview with Jane Roman. (p. 29) In 1963, Jane Roman was a senior liaison officer for the CIA’s Counter Intelligence staff, which meant—among other things—that she handled communications with other federal offices. Morley saw her name on a routing slip concerning documents about Oswald before the assassination. He located her in the Washington area and he and Newman talked to her in the autumn of 1994. Morley had fished out a document that Roman had signed and sent to Mexico City saying that, as of 10/10/63, the latest information CIA had on Oswald was a State Department report from May of 1962.

    Here was the problem: that Oswald cable was clearly false. Because—as was her position—she had read and signed-off on, at the minimum, two FBI reports on Oswald from 1963. They arrived on her desk just a week prior to October 10th and one described Oswald being arrested in New Orleans. Her signature was on both Bureau reports. When presented with this puzzle as to why she had been part of a false declaration to Mexico City, Roman replied that her only rationale would be that the Special Affairs Staff had all the data about Oswald under their tight control. She also added that she was not in on any sabotage aspect as far as Cuba went. She then said that the person in control of the cable to Mexico City would have been Tom Karamessines, who was the right hand man to Dick Helms. Helms was the Director Of Plans in 1963, in other words he was in charge of covert operations. (Jefferson Morley, ‘What Jane Roman Said”, at History Matters.com)

    When Newman pressed her on what this all meant, Roman replied with something that was probably a milestone at the time. She said, “To me it’s indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on a need to know basis.” She then added that there must have been a reason to withhold that information from Mexico City. (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 405) For the first time, someone had an oral declaration from a CIA employee that the Agency had a keen interest, on a need to know basis, about Oswald. This was just weeks before the assassination. And Richard Helms’ assistant was the principal officer on the cable. Later in the book, Malcolm will relate another conversation with a different CIA employee and it will echo this one, except it will be about Oswald back in 1959—before his defection to Russia.

    III

    Blunt now goes into areas that, as far as I know, no one has ever broached before. Everyone knows about the CIA and its 201 files, sometimes called personality files. This was a rather common file within the Agency that had about five different reasons to be opened. Yet I had never heard of a 301 file. These are corporate files held in Record Integration Division (RID) and also in the Office of Security (OS). They included companies, charities, churches, banks, and financial service companies. The CIA had interests in dropping people into these organizations for cover purposes. (p. 354) What makes this even more important is another disclosure Blunt made earlier. That is the CIA had something called an IDN system in place prior to 1964. That system named individuals who had been targeted at their organizations. (p. 289) I don’t have to tell the reader how helpful that combination should have been to any real inquiry into the JFK case e.g. with Reily Coffee Company. And why was IDN dismantled in 1964?

    Malcolm also points out two pieces of internal subterfuge that impacted the inquiry of the Warren Commission. As he was going through the FBI documents at the Archives, he noticed the code UACB on many of them. What that meant in FBI lingo was this: Do not follow this lead. The acronym literally stands for: Unless Authority Communicated from Bureau. (p. 264) Malcolm said that, within the first 48 hours, many of the FBI documents were marked like this in the bottom left hand corner. (p. 118)

    This perfectly jibes with what the late FBI agent Bill Turner once told this reviewer. Turner had been in the FBI for about ten years. He had left by the time of the Kennedy assassination. He had now become a journalist, but he still had ties within the Bureau. In 1964, he was writing a free-lance article on the JFK case. He asked a couple of active agents if he could see some of their reports. He then saw more of these later when the Commission volumes were issued. He immediately recognized something was wrong.

    As Turner told this reviewer, there were three steps in any FBI investigation:

    1. The gathering of all relevant leads
    2. The following out of those leads to their ultimate end, and
    3. The collation of all-important information into a report that did not come to a conclusion.

    He then said if you did not do step two—which clearly the agents had not done in the JFK case—then your report was worthless. But, in spite of that, the FBI had come to a conclusion about the Kennedy case anyway. To him, this was a dead giveaway that the fix was in from above. FBI agents simply did not act like that on their own. These two sources of information on the same key issue dovetail with each other. They help explain why the Warren Commission ended up being stillborn.

    Malcolm then expands on this point—and again in a way I had not seen before. The US Attorney’s office in Dallas had accumulated four boxes of witness statements and sent them to the National Archives in 1965. This included statements from people like Ruth Paine. According to Malcolm, the boxes contained statements that were “excised from testimony; it’d been cut out. It’s what the US attorneys down in Dallas called ‘No Good Testimony’.” (p. 256) When Blunt went looking for it, he found it has been reduced to two small gray boxes, he said there is “a little bit in the first box; not much in the second box.” (ibid)

    Again, one should relate to this something that Barry Ernest discovered. It is what is referred to today as the “Stroud letter.” Marcia Joe Stroud was an assistant US attorney in Dallas. In 1964, she was reviewing some witness depositions from the Texas School Book Depository. One was Victoria Adams and another was Dorothy Ann Garner, Adams’ supervisor at the Scott Foresman bookseller’s office in the Depository. While searching through the National Archives, Barry saw a cover letter dated June 2, 1964. In part, the letter read as follows:

    Mr. Belin was questioning Miss Adams about whether or not she saw anyone as she was running down the stairs. Miss Garner, Miss Adams’ supervisor, stated this morning that after Miss Adams’ went downstairs, she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the policeman come up.” (The Girl on the Stairs, p. 215)

    As Barry writes in his book, the feeling he had when he read this was like getting punched in the stomach. In the entire 888 pages of the Warren Report, one will not see the name of Dorothy Garner. And she was not called as a witness before the Commission. Yet, Stroud had sent this cover letter over Adams’ testimony to the Commission early in June of 1964. The Commission took testimony until early September. (Walt Brown, The Warren Omission, p. 238) This letter certified that after Adams and Sandra Styles went down the stairs, Depository supervisor Truly and policeman Marrion Baker came up the stairs. In other words, the idea that Adams was on the stairs before or after Lee Oswald came up is highly improbable. One has to wonder, was this part of the “no good testimony” that the Dallas US attorneys took? Except this one survived. But it was not discovered until 1999.

    IV

    Malcolm was and is quite interested in Richard Snyder. Snyder was the State Department employee in Moscow who first greeted Oswald at the American embassy after his arrival there via Helsinki. The book certifies the fact that, as Greg Parker and Bill Simpich have also mentioned, Snyder worked for the CIA before he joined the State Department. He was a part of Operation REDSKIN. This was an attempt to recruit students studying Russian at places like Harvard. At this time, Snyder was being supervised by Nelson Brickham of the Soviet Russia Division of the CIA and one of the people he pitched was Zbigniew Brzezinski. Yet, Snyder denied he was working for the CIA at this time. (p. 107) As Parker wrote, when he went to Moscow, at the time Oswald was in his office, there was an assistant named Ned Keenan with Snyder and Ned had been part of the REDSKIN project. (p. 44)

    This circle closes after Snyder left the State Department; he applied for a position in the CIA. As Malcolm notes, they placed him at work for an agency called Joint Press Reading Service. His job there was to read and analyze foreign publications. (p. 280)

    The book also reminds us that Snyder’s colleague at the embassy, John McVickar, somehow knew that Oswald would be placed at work at a radio factory in Minsk. (p. 217) Once he got there, Moscow surrounded him with their agents. According to Malcolm, at one time, the KGB enlisted as many as 20 assets to surveil Oswald. (p. 220) And as Ernst Titovets revealed in his book, Oswald: Russian Episode, this included using spies on buses and also bugging his apartment. (Titovets, pp. 61, 115) In the light of this, the recent book co-authored by former CIA Director James Woolsey about the Russians recruiting Oswald as an assassin to kill President Kennedy is preposterous.

    This all coincides with another genuine find by Malcolm Blunt. He allowed Kennedys and King to use this hidden jewel in Vasilios Vazakas’ fine series, Creating the Oswald Legend, Part 4. (Click here for details) I am speaking here about the stunning discoveries by Betsy Wolf about the creation and routing of Oswald’s file at CIA after the defection.

    We have seen above how the Russians clearly suspected that Oswald was not a genuine defector, to the point that they used an extensive combination of human and electronic surveillance to monitor his every move. What happened at CIA would imply they were correct. There is no trace in the Warren Report or its 26 accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, that they had any hint of what Malcolm uncovered at the National Archives. It was not until over a decade later that the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) began to uncover this troubling but revealing mystery about Oswald. The person who did it was HSCA researcher Betsy Wolf. Yet most of the startling discoveries she made were not detailed or explained in the HSCA report or its accompanying volumes. In fact, as Malcolm found out, much of her work only exists in the form of her handwritten notes. He could not find where her original work product about the Oswald file had been typed into memorandum form. Further, her work was deemed so sensitive that much of it was delayed on a timed-release pattern (i.e. it was not declassified until after the Assassination Records Review Board closed its doors in 1998).

    Since much of what Malcolm discusses in the book is based on Wolf’s notes, I will source most of what follows from those notes as used by Vasilios in his first-rate article. Betsy Wolf was puzzled by the fact that the CIA had not set up a 201 file on Oswald after they knew he had defected to Moscow—in fact they did not do so until 13 months later. What further bewildered here was this: he had offered the Russians secrets of the U2 spy plane. Oswald was familiar with the U2 from his tour in the Far East at Atsugi air base in Japan where the high altitude aircraft was housed. In late October of 1959, the CIA was getting this kind of information through both the Navy and the State Department; the latter since Snyder was a diplomat. This data—plus the fact that there were more than five documents on Oswald at CIA—should have caused the opening of a 201, or “personality file.” In fact, Betsy discovered that four documents on Oswald arrived at CIA the first week after the defection. Yet, in apparent violation of CIA’s internal guidelines, no 201 file was opened.

    This leads to the second conundrum about the routing of Oswald’s original file: its destination. In an interview the HSCA did with CIA Officer William Larson, he said that the Oswald documents should have gone to the Soviet Russia (SR) Division. (HSCA interview of 6/27/78) They did not. These early files instead went to Office of Security (OS). What made that puzzling is that in this same interview, Larson said that OS did not set up 201 files. (Ibid) And Malcolm adds this: there was a bridge between OS and CI/SIG (Counter Intelligence/Special Investigations Group). This was James Angleton’s super-secret compartment which, quite literally, spied on the Agency’s spies. (p. 31)

    Just from the above, this is all rather fishy. Did someone not want a 201 file set up on Oswald? When Betsy interviewed Director of Central Reference H. C. Eisenbeiss, he said that the way documents were funneled into the Agency—called dissemination of files—was governed by written requests from customer offices. (Wolf notes of 9/18/78) This would indicate that someone from OS directed Oswald’s files bypass the general system and go only to OS instead. After all, as Malcolm notes, some of these early documents from State and Navy had multiple copies attached for expected distribution to various departments. In one case, as many as fifteen copies were included. (pp. 344–45)

    Only toward the end of her search did Betsy find out what had happened. Betsy’s notes include an interview with the former OS chief Robert Gambino. According to Malcolm, her handwritten notes are the only place anyone can find anything about this particular interview. (Wolf notes of 7/26/78) Gambino told her that CIA Mail Logistics was in charge of disseminating incoming documents. In other words, someone made this request about the weird routing of Oswald’s files from OS’s Security Research Service. (p. 324) And this was done prior to Oswald’s defection. Malcolm concludes that with what Betsy unearthed, there should now be no question that the CIA knew Oswald was going to defect before it happened.

    An important part of the book deals with Malcolm’s friendship with CIA officer Tennent ”Pete” Bagley. Bagley worked out of the Counterintelligence unit in the Soviet Russia division; he also worked in Europe at, among other stations, Bern and Brussels, where he was chief of station. Malcolm met him after he was retired and living in Brussels. In retirement, Bagley was writing books about his career. They largely focused on the CIA’s battles with the KGB, for example, on whether or not Yuri Nosenko was a plant or a real defector. Bagley thought he was the former.

    While putting together Betsy Wolf’s discoveries about the odd nature of the opening of Oswald’s files at CIA HQ, Malcolm decided to talk to Bagley about it. He told him how his old Soviet Russia division was zeroed out of information about Oswald’s defection for 13 months—even though, at times, the CIA was getting 15 copies of an Oswald document. (pp. 344–45) Malcolm then drew the routing scheme up as he had deciphered the entry path from Betsy’s work.


    Bagley looked at the illustration of the routing path. He then looked up at Malcolm and asked him something like: OK, was Oswald witting or unwitting? Malcolm did not want to answer the question, but Bagley badgered him. He blurted out, “Unwitting.” Bagley firmly replied: Nope. He had to be witting and knowledgeable about how the CIA was using him and, therefore, he was working for them in some capacity.

    In this reviewer’s opinion, what Malcolm Blunt did on this issue— excavating the heroic work of Betsy Wolf, piecing it together part by part, then showing it to Bagley—constitutes one of the keystone discoveries made possible by the ARRB. Its importance should not be understated. It is a hallmark achievement.

    V

    Malcom follows up on this discovery by commenting on it in two ways: one through a comparison, one by creating a parallel. He and Alan note that another defector’s files, Robert Webster, did not enter the system like this. They were normally distributed and went to the Soviet Russia Division. (p. 68) He then says that this almost incomprehensible CIA anomaly with Oswald in 1959 is then bookended by another attempt to rig the system (i.e. with Oswald in Mexico City in the fall of 1963). What are the odds of that happening to one person in four years? (p. 295) He also adds that, to him, the weaknesses in the Mexico City story are the tendentiousness of the alleged trip down and his return. Both David Josephs and John Armstrong agree with that analysis.

    Malcolm’s recovery of Betsy Wolf’s notes also contributed something else that was important about Mexico City. Something that, to my knowledge, no one knew before. Miraculously, Betsy got access to a chronology penned by Ray Rocca. As James Angleton’s first assistant, Rocca cabled Luis Echeverria on November 23rd. Echeverria was the Secretary of Interior in Mexico who would eventually take over the Mexico City inquiry—thereby foreclosing the Warren Commission and getting out ahead of the FBI. Rocca wired Luis about the relationship between Oswald and Sylvia Duran. How did Rocca know that Echeverria would eventually be running the inquiry about Oswald at that early date? At that time, James Angleton was not even in charge of the CIA investigation for the Warren Commission.

    Secondly, on that same day, a CIA agent escorted Elena Garro de Paz to the Vermont Hotel. This is the woman who would try to discredit Duran by saying that Duran was seen at a twist party with Oswald and had some kind of sexual affair with the alleged assassin. Since Duran worked at the Cuban embassy, this implied that somehow Castro was a part of the plot. (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pp. 379–85) How on earth did anyone know about the significance and the opposition of these two witnesses within 24 hours of the crime?

    In addition, there is this nugget of new information. The National Security Agency (NSA) had intercepts on Mexico City communications. The Warren Commission knew about this. So J. Lee Rankin sent a letter to Jack Blake of the NSA about this information, since he knew it was independent of the CIA coverage. (pp. 63–65) There is no evidence today that there was a reply.

    Malcolm explored the papers of a relatively unknown personage who I recently wrote about, Comptroller of the Currency James Saxon. While going through his papers at the Kennedy Library, he came to the same conclusion I did: Kennedy was using Saxon to challenge the suzerainty of the Federal Reserve Board. (Click here for details) In fact, he even goes further than I—and even author Donald Gibson—did in that regard. He tells Alan that Kennedy wanted Saxon to actually attempt to supersede the Federal Reserve as far as its control of the banking system. (p. 269) This was Kennedy’s way of loosening the money supply and injecting a Keynesian stimulus into the economy. (p. 270) This would serve as a complement to his tax cut and would precede his planned capital improvements program. Malcolm also adds that—because of this—the longtime chair of the Federal Reserve—hard money banker William McChesney Martin—was not a fan of Kennedy. (ibid) And for whatever reason, Lyndon Johnson agreed with Martin. The new president did not renew Saxon’s five year term when it expired in 1966.

    Because Malcolm has spent so much time in the National Archives, he is in a good position to alert us as to what is there and what is not—but should be. One of his most interesting discoveries is the fact that the Office of Security file series on Oswald has a rather large hole in it. Since Oswald’s file was originally opened by that department, they later put together a series on the alleged defector. Both CIA Directors, Robert Gates and George Tenet, called for the assembly of all CIA files on Oswald for the Review Board. Yet that series did not come forth until the Board called for it themselves. They did this based on the work that Betsy Wolf had done for the HSCA, this is how they proved it existed. (pp. 327–28) It was supposed to consist of seven volumes. Yet somehow today, it is missing Volume Five. That one does not exist today. Yet as Malcolm notes, Betsy Wolf took notes on it, so it did exist at one time.

    This is only the beginning of a very serious problem about these Kennedy assassination files. As Malcolm and John Newman note, somehow, some way, many of them have simply disappeared. (p. 240) And it’s not just from NARA. Malcolm found out that the papers of author Edward Epstein from his book Legend were housed at Georgetown. Reader’s Digest had financed the rather large budget for that book, which included payment for a fleet of researchers, including Henry Hurt. They then placed much of the documentation under the name of their since deceased editor, Fulton Oursler Jr., at Georgetown. One of the boxes contained many of the interviews done with the Marines who knew Oswald. Some of these subjects were not interviewed by the Warren Commission. These were made off limits to Malcolm and he told Pete Bagley about it. Bagley knew Oursler and got permission for Malcolm to see the interviews. Blunt flew over and requested the box. When he got it, the Marine interviews were gone. (p. 51)

    VI

    There are many other areas that I have not addressed, simply because this review would be twice as long if I did. But I would like to close this discussion of Blunt’s discoveries with the story of Cliff Shasteen. Shasteen was the 39-year-old proprietor of a barber shop who cut Oswald’s hair in Irving, where Ruth and Michael Paine lived. You will not find his name in the Warren Report and the reader will soon understand why. He said that he cut Oswald’s hair about every two weeks, a total of three or four times, while other barbers who worked for him also cut Oswald’s hair. (WC Vol. 10, p. 314) Oswald usually came in on a Friday night or on a Saturday morning. Cliff also recalled a youth, aged about 14, who came in with Oswald, and once by himself—and that was about four days before the assassination. (WC Vol. 10, p. 312) While there by himself, he began spouting Marxist philosophy, shocking the adults in his presence, including Shasteen. (Ibid; see also Michael Benson, Who’ Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 415) As Benson notes, even though Shasteen testified before the Commission, neither they nor the FBI ever found out who the sometime companion was. Shasteen greatly regretted not taking him out for dinner to find out where he got his philosophy from.

    Malcolm and Alan mention this intriguing incident and the testimony of grocery store owner Leonard Hutchison, where Shasteen said he also saw Oswald. (p. 265; see also Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, pp. 364–65) But for many years, the identity of the companion who wanted to put on a show, minus Oswald, was unknown. Thanks to some fine work by Greg Parker, we now have a good idea who the “Marxist” was. His name very likely was Bill Hootkins. (p. 305; also, click here and scroll down) And this is where it all gets rather interesting. In fact, it may explain why the FBI never found out his identity.

    At this time, late in 1963, Hootkins was Ruth Paine’s private Russian language student. Ruth worked with the sons and daughters of the Dallas elite at a private school, St. Mark’s. She had an agreement to tutor them at that facility, so she would pick Hootkins up at his home, drive him to the school, and then return him to his house. What makes this even more intriguing is that Hootkins became a rather proficient and prolific actor, and his career may have started at this time. (Click here for details)

    According to Parker, FBI agent Jim Hosty knew about Ruth’s work at St. Mark’s and later learned about the Hootkins lessons. But as Parker notes, somehow, no one in the FBI put together Hootkins and Shasteen, even though Shasteen’s description fit Hootkins quite well. And Ruth Paine had Hootkin’s contact details in her address book—a point which Ruth tried to brush off. But as Shasteen also noted, he saw Oswald drive up to his shop with Hootkins in a car he described that matched one of the Paine automobiles. (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 582)

    Parker incisively notes the manner in which Ruth answered questions to the FBI about the incident. When asked if she had any idea about who the kid was, she said she knew of no boy of 14 associated with Oswald from the neighborhood. As Greg notes, Hootkins was not from that neighborhood. She also denied ever letting Oswald drive her car alone. Yet, when Oswald drove to Shasteen’s, he was with Hootkins. The answer also leaves open the possibility that it may have been her husband Michael who allowed Oswald to take the car.

    Of the early critics, only Sylvia Meagher ever mentioned Shasteen and Hutchison. But this reviewer finds it interesting that one of the lead investigators on Shasteen was FBI agent Bardwell Odum. (WC Vol. 10, p. 318) As most of us know, Odum was quite friendly with the Paines. In fact, as Carol Hewett points out, Odum cooperated with the Paines to posthumously separate Oswald from his Minox camera. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 238–49) According to Parker, the other two barbers working with Shasteen had their statements “fragrantly altered” by the FBI. “They were specifically told what to add—and what was added had the sole purpose of trying to distance Hootkins from the whole affair.” (3/19 email from Parker)

    Blunt takes this intriguing episode a bit further. It only seems that no one noticed this rather interesting episode. It appears that someone, somewhere actually did notice. During his talk with Shasteen, Oswald was asked where he picked up his yellow shoes. Oswald said he went down to Mexico every so often and that is how he got them. (p. 303) It turns out that Malcolm later discovered that this might be a case of file seeding, that is of an agency planting disinformation in another agency’s files, because it turned out that the CIA began sending materials over to the FBI about one Ramon Cortez. Cortez was in the import/export business and owned a company called Transcontinental, which sent black market vehicles from the USA into Cuba. Cortez owned a shoe factory in Tijuana called Clarice. The CIA began to push the Cortez/Transcontinental documents onto the FBI in, get this, December of 1963, when they had this information in 1961.

    As much file work as Malcolm has done, and for as long as he has done it, he still understands the Big Picture issues. Led by people like Paul Hoch, Tony Summers, and Peter Scott, he addresses what had been the conventional wisdom about Jim Garrison for many years. Namely that there was no there, there. And whatever was there was worthless. Blunt takes issue with that thunderous cliché. He says that Garrison was a patriotic man who was doing his best under the stress of a terrible attack by the CIA. When Malcolm reviewed his materials, he concluded that “the guy did miracles, really.” (p. 378) He then mentions the newest documents on Permindex, which John Newman used for Jacob Hornberger’s ongoing webinar. (Click here for details) About John Kennedy’s assassination, he states that considering who he was and where he was headed—for example in the Middle East—his loss was incalculable. (pp. 273, 384) He sums it up tersely with, “Jesus Christ! What we lost when we lost that man.”

    Let’s all hope we don’t lose Malcolm Blunt.

  • Truth Is the Only Client

    Truth Is the Only Client

    Mainstream media has abandoned the most important murder case in world history. A Hollywood producer has personally told me, “They just don’t want to touch it anymore.” With a plethora of famous crimes being re-discovered by avid Netflix viewers, one might think JFK would be picked up somewhere. It has not. In other words, you have to “do it yourself” now. An example of this is the 2019 self-produced documentary Truth Is the Only Client, which features the surviving Warren Commission staff members. Yes, mainstream media didn’t even pick this one up. It can be watched for free on Amazon Prime.

    The film starts off by resurrecting the late prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, who says the assassination is “the most complex murder case by far in world history. Nothing even remotely comes close.” This is true. But he follows this by saying that “conspiracy theorists” are the reason it is complex. This is not true, not even close. As journalist Jefferson Morley has said, “Suspicions of a conspiracy originated in the circumstances of the crime…It was the facts of the crime that made people think it happened in a different way than the way the Warren Report set forth.” (Jacob Carter, Before History Dies, p. 8) Also, we are researchers, not “conspiracy theorists.”

    Warren Commission assistant counsel Samuel A. Stern then spewed the now common bit of it being “so hard to accept” that a nobody killed a somebody. Nice try, but not the case. Researchers have continually pointed out the holes in the evidence or, back in the sixties, the contextual chasms in the Warren Report. And much later, they began to fill in those chasms with new evidence supplied by the Assassination Records Review Board. For instance, if Kennedy was only hit from the rear, then why did over forty witnesses at both Parkland Hospital and Bethesda Naval Medical Center see a large avulsive hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull? (See Dr. Gary Aguilar’s essay, “How 5 Investigations into JFK’s Medical/Autopsy evidence Got it Wrong,” Section Five) And as Aguilar discovered when the records were reviewed, the House Select Committee on Assassinations misrepresented this fact in its report. (See Volume 7, p. 37) As we shall see, the man who oversaw the writing of those volumes is later featured on this program.

    Assistant counsel Burt W. Griffin declared, “If we could find a conspiracy, we’d all be national heroes!” Well, they did have 58 eyewitnesses who reported a frontal shot—but they buried them in their tens of thousands of pages of appendices and commission documents. They had the Zapruder film showing JFK being thrown to the rear—but they somehow missed that in the Warren Report. And it’s almost certain they saw the Moorman photo that seems to depict the grassy knoll gunman behind the fence—but they never published it. Maybe because as soon as you have a frontal shot, there’s a conspiracy. The staff members buried or omitted this vital evidence and, therefore, were not national heroes. However, first generation researchers Josiah Thompson, Sylvia Meagher, Harold Weisberg, and Mark Lane brought all this evidence to light and did get some national acclaim for their toil.

    Bugliosi then outlines the Warren Commission’s supposed shooting scenario and does so rather nonchalantly, as if it’s absolute fact. What he doesn’t say is that this is not actually the Commission’s shooting scenario, but rather Gerald Posner’s shooting scenario. Assistant counsel Melvin A. Eisenberg claimed Oswald’s “prints” were found on the rifle—but there was only ONE print and the only person to see this print said it was an old print. (Gary Savage, First Day Evidence, p. 108) Assistant counsel Howard P. Willens claimed that “inside the [paper] package were found remnants of the carpet in which it was kept at the Paine garage”—but he apparently forgot that the FBI could not make a positive identification. (WC 4 H p. 81) And by the way, it was a blanket, not a carpet. Bugliosi touted the long-debunked myth that Oswald was “the only worker” missing from the Texas School Book Depository, when really 17 were never in the building after 12:30. (WC 22 H pp. 632–686) Bugliosi nonchalantly says Oswald killed Patrolman J. D. Tippit, but the late researcher Larry Ray Harris showed Oswald was most likely innocent of that crime. (“November 22, 1963: The Other Murder,” Dateline: Dallas, 11/22/93) Bugliosi says Oswald “told one provable lie after another, all of which, of course, show a consciousness of guilt”—but it only shows he was involved in some way and doesn’t mean he killed the President. Bugliosi also said that “six and a half months before,” Oswald attempted to murder Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker—but the alleged bullet could not be linked with the rifle (WC 3 H p. 439) and the two witnesses said the perpetrator was not Oswald. (WC 5 H pp. 446–447; 26 H p. 438) Also, it was actually seven months before, not six.

    The film did a segment on Oswald’s life. The exposition was very similar to the 2003 Peter Jennings program Beyond Conspiracy. Like the 2003 version, this one comes out à la the official portrayal of him as a nobody, which has long been debunked in so many ways. There’s quite a remarkable and emotional interview with Ruth Paine, which, to me at least, helped seal the deal that she was not involved in the plot to kill JFK. But what she did say was striking—“I’ll help these officers in whatever way they need.” That she did.

    The Commission’s Howard Willens (and later Bugliosi) spewed the usual “there was no way for the bullet to go after exiting from the President’s neck other than into Connally”—but of course it is highly unlikely that any bullet exited JFK’s neck. For at the autopsy the back wound was probed and found to not go anywhere. (CD 7, p. 284) The bullet lodged in the back and most likely fell out. (It also would’ve smashed the first rib had it traversed where the measurements place it.)

    Willens then said something incredible:

    Governor Connally insisted then, and until his death, that he had not been hit by the same bullet that hit the President. As I have said, he was the Governor of Texas, he wanted his own bullet.

    This is an absolutely outrageous straw-man argument. In fact, there’s no evidence whatsoever to support this claim. Willens simply made it up. The truth is that, as an experienced hunter, Connally understood from the sound pattern that the bullet that struck Kennedy could not have struck him. He deliberately hid his own conclusions about what had happened and this actually helped the Commission! In 1982, Connally was at a political function in Santa Fe. Reporter Doug Thompson asked him if he thought Lee Oswald fired the gun that killed Kennedy. Without batting an eyelash Connally replied with: “Absolutely not. I do not, for one second, believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission.” Thompson asked him why he then never spoke out against the Commission. This is how Connally responded: “Because I love this country and we needed closure at the time. I will never speak out publicly about what I believe.” (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 418)

    The film next turned to HSCA chief counsel G. Robert Blakey, who insisted Connally’s back wound was “oval…which is an indication that it hit something else”—but Connally’s doctor testified it was a neat entry wound and was oval only after he removed damaged skin. (WC 6 H p. 85, 88) In fact, just simply look at the holes in his suit coat and shirt and they are not oval. Blakey said that, since the left side of JFK’s brain was undamaged, there couldn’t have been a frontal shot—but this ignores the possibility of a tangential headshot. To explain the head snap to the rear, Blakey says this was a neuromuscular reaction—but that only occurs when the nerve centers (at the bottom of the brain) are inflicted and JFK’s were not. The film then flashes across the screen: “No witnesses saw a gunman shooting at the President from the Grassy Knoll.” Well, of course, everyone was looking at the President, not at some random fence in the corner! Snipers are trained to not be seen.

    The film next does something amazing. It shows the apparent forward head movement between Zapruder frames 312 and 313 and acts as if this is the first time it’s being discovered! The Travel Channel had done the same thing a year before. In reality, of course, it was discovered over half a century ago by Ray Marcus. It was first written about in print by author Josiah Thompson, who has since changed his mind and concluded it was actually an optical illusion due to camera movement. (See his new book Last Second in Dallas)

    The narrator tells us, “Clearly there is no evidence of anything striking the President from the front.” This is abominably incorrect. Kennedy was thrown to the rear, the blood went back and hit the motorcycle officers, and nearly 100 eyewitnesses felt the shot came from in front on the knoll. In a panic attack, Jackie Kennedy is seen retrieving a part of her husband’s skull off the rear of the limousine. A flash of light and smoke was seen on the knoll, fresh footprints and cigarette butts were found there—coincidently where a shape appears in the Moorman photo that’s not there in later photos. So that was a person. This is all JFK 101 and none of it is mentioned in the film.

    The film touched a bit on the acoustics evidence, but ignored all the recent work that’s been done on it. Their argument was very dated.

    The film did a segment on Jack Ruby and Blakey laid out what he saw as connections between Ruby, Oswald, and the Mob. But incredibly, the narrator dismissed it all by simply saying, “I disagree.” [!] The rest of the segment is again similar to the 2003 Peter Jennings program—à la the official portrayal of Ruby. There was also an interview with right-winger Bernard Weissman, but heavily downplayed his role all while having a cute fluffy dog in his lap!

    Bugliosi avows that Oswald would’ve been “one of the last people” the CIA or Mob would pick to kill Kennedy—but of course, critics do not believe this. Critics believe Oswald was involved in the plot as a double agent who was double-crossed. Bugliosi also tells us that Blakey and ARRB chairman John R. Tunheim assured him that there was “no smoking gun” in the remaining sealed files, as if conspirators would leave behind a trace for all the world to see! Bugliosi then makes an absolutely disgusting straw-man argument: Critics “love and revere JFK, and yet they’ve devoted a good part of their life desperately trying to exonerate Lee Harvey Oswald, the very person who brutally murdered their hero JFK.” I can’t think of anything more disgusting. Critics are simply in search of the truth, NOT solely “desperately trying to exonerate” Oswald. Warren Commission staff attorney Lloyd L. Weinreb then repeated the common talking point of it being “much more acceptable to believe that there’s a conspiracy.” Staff historian Alfred Goldberg took it even further: “Belief in conspiracies is exciting…That’s what feeds their paranoia.” Again, disgusting. I repeat, people simply point out the HOLES IN THE EVIDENCE.

    In sum, there is nothing new in Truth Is the Only Client. It just repeated the same old same old, while omitting so much more. It has essentially tried to take the modern and improved Oswald-did-it narrative from Vincent Bugliosi and Gerald Posner and then declare the Warren Commission way back in 1964 got it right after all. Sorry, but it does not work that way, folks.

    The film was also way too long and quite frankly very boring. Astonishingly, it has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Yes, you heard me correctly. 100%. To put that into perspective, here is a list of famous films that do NOT have 100% on Rotten Tomatoes:

    – Casablanca

    – The Godfather

    – Gone with the Wind

    – Lawrence of Arabia

    – The Wizard of Oz

    – The Graduate

    – On the Waterfront

    – Schindler’s List

    – It’s a Wonderful Life

    – Sunset Boulevard

    – The Bridge on the River Kwai

    – Some Like It Hot

    – Star Wars

    I think we all know what this is about.

  • James Moore, JFK, and QAnon

    James Moore, JFK, and QAnon

    James Moore is the chief business commentator and a regular columnist for the British online newspaper The Independent. The day before Valentine’s Day, Moore penned an article called “JFK’s assassination greased the wheels for QAnon and Covid-Deniers.” This was the sub-title to this column:

    The same type of thinking fuels the Kennedy conspiracy theories and the venomous fiction concocted by extreme right-wingers, that we see today. It needs to be laid to rest.

    You have to wonder, did Moore crib his column from the piece that Steven Gillon wrote for the Washington Post? Gillon’s was published on the 57th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination and made much the same false equivalency argument that Moore does here. (Click here for my discussion of this)

    Gillon was wrong on every point he made in his faux comparison. QAnon is not something that say, Mark Lane, would have gone within a mile of if he were alive. To compare the arguments in the two cases is simply bizarre. The initial critics of the Commission, like Mark Lane and Harold Weisberg, showed that, although the MSM accepted the Warren Commission’s work, they should not have. Because contrary to what reporters like Tom Pettit of NBC and Walter Cronkite of CBS trumpeted, the Commission had not proven its case that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who killed President Kennedy. Yet, on the evening of the issuance of the Warren Report, both CBS and NBC, with those two reporters, stated to an unsuspecting public that the Commission had done just that.

    So here is the question I would like to post to both Gillon and Moore: How did those two men read 888 pages of the Warren Report—which was not subject indexed—and put together a broadcast show in less than 24 hours? The answer is they could not have. These two programs were in production well before the report was even issued. Therefore, what the rational reader can conclude is that both CBS and NBC were leaked the Commission’s findings well in advance of publication. And they made some kind of implicit or explicit agreement not to challenge those findings in return for the information. In fact, at the end of the CBS program, Cronkite made the stunning statement that it would be hard to imagine that a more thorough inquiry could have been done.

    In fact, it was even worse than that. For we later learned from film director Emile de Antonio and journalist Florence Graves that CBS instructed their on-camera witnesses to parrot the Commission’s conclusions. (Florence Graves, Washington Journalism Review, Sept/Oct, 1978) Documentary director de Antonio saw the outtakes from the 1964 CBS program. When a witness was asked where the shots in Dealey Plaza came from, and they replied with “the knoll area”, they were asked the question again. Only the take where the witness finally said, “the Texas School Book Depository” was shown to the public. De Antonio later told Graves, “The interviewer was more like a prosecuting attorney leading a witness to support the state’s case.” Graves found out that the CBS production was actually months in the making. (Click here for details)

    I would like to ask Mr. Moore: Is this your idea of journalism? Would you go along with such an illicit and unethical scheme to endorse an official story for the British government? Would you instruct a witness to change his story on camera? Would you produce a program endorsing a report months before that report was even published? Because that is what happened with the Warren Report.

    Recall, this was in the early period of the controversy. People like Weisberg were writing that the Commission had not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. It was way before the declassifications of the Assassinations Record Review Board (ARRB). What those declassifications revealed, and what authors like Gerald McKnight proved in Breach of Trust, was that there was no case against Oswald at all. The FBI, Secret Service, and CIA fed the Commission an incomplete and faulty record. The Commission accepted and published it. With the new information available after 1998, critics like McKnight, and several others, could finally prove the fraud in the Commission’s performance—to a legal standard.

    Such is not the case with QAnon. That movement has little or nothing to do with investigatory data or a court room legal standard. QAnon was begun by an anonymous poster at the 4chan website in late 2017. That website was often characterized as being extremist and racist. Who the man who started it really was, we do not know. He claimed to be a high ranking military officer. This person announced that Hillary Clinton was going to be arrested. It was part of a scenario that depicted a grand battle going on: good vs evil. President Trump and his Pentagon advisors were working to take down a global alliance of Satan worshiping pedophiles. That alliance included politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and figures in the media.

    According to QAnon, the battle will end with two great apocalyptic events. The first is The Storm, which will result in mass arrests of thousands of people; it will be a day of reckoning. The second event is the Great Awakening, the day everyone will realize that QAnon was correct. This will be the opening of a new utopian era. (Click here for details)

    Many commentators believe that the birth of QAnon was preceded and perhaps derived from the whole Pizzagate imbroglio. That resulted in an attack on Comet Ping Pong Pizza in Washington DC by a man named Edgar Maddison Welch. This occurred in December of 2016. Welch had a rifle, a handgun, and a shotgun. That fruity incident was based on similar themes: namely that the Clinton campaign was running a child molestation ring right out of the basement of the pizza shop, which had no basement. Promoters of this bizarre scenario were Donald Trump backers like Alex Jones, Michael Flynn, and his son Michael Jr. The motivation probably being that it went after Hillary Clinton. Mr. Welch actually thought she was murdering children. (See Huffpost, story by Hayley Miller, 12/16/2016; Esquire 7/24/20, article by Michael Sebastian and Gabrielle Bruney)

    There is no cognitive/intellectual relationship between what people like Mark Lane, Gerald McKnight, or Harold Weisberg did and Mr. Welch’s beliefs or what the backers of Pizzagate or QAnon do. The latter are mythological concepts. The former are based upon data and evidence. JFK writers can today demonstrate that the Commission was wrong on many key points. What can QAnon show? Another pizza shop with a child porn ring in the basement?

    As I pointed out with Gillon’s rubbish, in its historical origins, again there is no relationship between QAnon/Pizzagate and critics of the Commission. The followers of the former stem from over a decade prior to Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement. The QAnon troop are mostly successors to the anti-government, pro-gun, rightwing militia corps. It was these groups that helped create the John Birch Society and helped found its sister association, the Minutemen. From the election of Ronald Reagan, the GOP has drifted more and more to the right, especially during the Bill Clinton presidency. At that time, party leaders like Rush Limbaugh advocated for every conspiracy theory out there about the Clintons: Whitewater, Vince Foster, the Rose Law Firm. None of which two Republican special prosecutors could convict him over. I might also add that Limbaugh, in February of 2020, dismissed CV-19 as being as innocuous as the common cold. (Rolling Stone, 2/17/2021, article by Bob Moser) This intellectually unmoored, anything-goes attitude eventually allowed QAnon to spread into the modern elected GOP (e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert). In my view, it was this anti-intellectual, ahistorical, politically packed attitude that led to the Insurrection of January 6, over another Limbaugh/Trump myth: a stolen election. As a consequence, eight people died—five were killed, three took their own lives. No such pattern exists for the critics of the Warren Commission, because the critical community is not fundamentally political and not based on a spurious, ethereal, ideological belief system.

    This leads us to the key sentence in Moore’s screed. He writes that “The Kennedy conspiracy has become a respectable conspiracy theory. Almost.” The idea that Kennedy’s murder was caused by a conspiracy is today not a theory. It is a forensic fact. And because of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), we can show that in a number of ways with the so-called “hard evidence” (i.e. the ballistics and the autopsy). We can also demonstrate that previous inquiries were simply wrong in these aspects. And show why they are wrong.

    Moore scores Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK on this point. He does so using a sleight of hand trick. He says that JFK posited a combination of nine different organizations that wanted Kennedy killed. He actually includes groups that, after about six viewings of the film, I still don’t see (e.g. pro-Castro Cubans, the Russians, Hoover’s FBI, and the Mafia). What the film really says is that a combination of the Power Elite and the military schemed to kill Kennedy over his policies in Vietnam and Cuba. Most of the other groups are mentioned in passing, or posited as a part of the cover up.

    But Moore’s kind of trickery obscures the point of the film. The film was trying to show that, almost three decades later, we did not really know who killed Kennedy. As everyone recalls, except perhaps Moore, the end title card to the film said one reason for this was because the files of the HSCA were still classified over a decade after they closed shop. Why? This is a question that Moore does not want to deal with. Neither does he want to deal with what those files revealed once they were declassified. If he did, the problems with his lousy column would be exposed.

    Moore writes something just as bad just a couple of sentences later. He actually states that there is really not much reason for questioning the JFK case. Why? Because the doubts are only “backed by little more than the feeling that one man simply couldn’t have, on his own, changed history as Oswald did.”

    In other words, those 2 million pages of ARRB declassified documents, their inquiry into the medical evidence, the work of scientists and physicians like Dave Mantik, Cyril Wecht, Randy Robertson, Mike Chesser, and Gary Aguilar, all of this new writing, evidence, and analysis amounts to a feeling?

    Moore then doubles down. He now says that with all the declassifications, plus the studies by ballistics experts and physicists, all of these have concluded that the fatal bullet came from Oswald, which exposes him as a charlatan. Does Moore not know that Vincent Guinn’s Neutron Activation Analysis—the test that the HSCA relied upon to seal its case against Oswald—has now been exposed as “junk science”? (Journal of Forensic Sciences, July 2006, pp. 717–28) How about ballistics? Gary Aguilar, Tink Thompson, and John Hunt have shown that the Magic Bullet, CE 399—the Commission’s keystone of their case against Oswald—has no chain of custody to it. Thus, it would blow up in a prosecutor’s face at trial. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp.282–84; and click here) This lack of knowledge further exposes Moore as indulging in ignorant quackery.

    Yet, near the end of Moore’s Comedy of Errors, he again says that both the JFK case and QAnon lead people down the same rabbit hole. Not so. With QAnon, there is no end to the rabbit hole; since it is at best a myth, at worst a hoax. In the JFK case, by following the best that has been written of late, one can find some definite evidentiary conclusions. Moore is either unaware of them or does not want to mention them, since it would blow up his column.

    The column ends the only way it could. Moore endorses Gerald Posner’s “exhaustively researched” book Case Closed. Well, if one wants to read what was essentially a rerun of the Warren Report, fine. But the remarkable thing about that book is that it was written before the creation of the Review Board. So how could it be “exhaustively researched”? The major part of Posner’s footnotes relied on the volumes of the Warren Commission. Meaning it could have been written in 1965 or ’66. Posner endorsed the Single Bullet Fantasy, which we know today did not happen. (Click here for details) We also know that there is a problem with the interviews Posner did. Some of the people who he says he interviewed do not recall talking to him. (Probe Magazine Vol. 5 No. 5, p. 14)

    Further, in the original edition of Case Closed, Posner wrote that there was no credible evidence that Oswald knew David Ferrie, a major character in the film JFK. (See p. 148) In fact, Ferrie had told the FBI he did not recall Oswald. (Commission Document 75, p. 286) Within weeks of the publication of that book, PBS Frontline produced a photo of the two men standing together at a Civil Air Patrol barbecue. In the declassified files of the HSCA, there was further evidence via affidavits of CAP members who recalled the rightwing, CIA associated Ferrie with the alleged communist Oswald at meetings. (Op. CIt. Probe Magazine, pp. 15–16)

    To top it off, we now know through at last three sources that, within days of the assassination, Ferrie was visiting and calling people to recover evidence that linked him to Oswald. (Ibid, p. 17) This included both his library card and the above-mentioned picture. In other words, far from not knowing Oswald, Ferrie was involved in the act of obstruction of justice in order not to incriminate himself in perjury. This is a rabbit hole?

    So much for Mr. Posner. And also Mr. Moore.

  • Fred Litwin, On the Trail of Delusion – Part Three

    Fred Litwin, On the Trail of Delusion – Part Three

    As I have noted throughout, Litwin’s continual reliance on some of the most dubious-in some cases, scurrilous-sources in the literature seems to indicate what his objective was. Hugh Aynesworth has admitted his goal has always been to deny a conspiracy in the JFK case. (Click here for details) As one can see from that linked article, he openly threatened the Warren Commission in order to intimidate them into a lone gunman conclusion. This was months before the Commission’s 26 volumes of evidence were published!

    Hugh wanted the Commission to portray Oswald as a homicidal maniac who was going to kill Richard Nixon. Through his friend and colleague Holland McCombs at Time-Life he learned about Garrison’s inquiry. As one can see, from the beginning, he secretly plotted to thwart the DA. He also became an FBI informant. We previously saw how he attempted to tamper with Clinton/Jackson witness John Manchester. Shaw’s lead lawyer, Irvin Dymond was very appreciative of the huge amount of work Aynesworth did for his client, which went as far as eliminating troublesome aspects to the point they did not surface at the trial.(Columbia Journalism Review, Spring 1969, pp. 38–41) In light of this sorry record, Litwin calls him a “great reporter”. That comment says much more about Litwin than it does the FBI informant who did not want his name revealed to the public.

    Another Litwin source is Harry Connick Sr. Litwin features a picture of Connick in the Introduction to his book and says he was a source for how Jim Garrison operated as a DA. That is as far as the description goes. As with Aynesworth, its what Litwin leaves out that covers both his and Connick’s tail.

    In 1973, in a close election, Harry Connick defeated Jim Garrison for DA. Over time, under Connick, New Orleans became “the city with the highest murder per capita ratio in the US.” (Probe Magazine Vol. 2 No. 5) But that’s not all. Gary Raymond, an investigator on his staff, was asked to check into the case of a local priest suspected of sodomizing children and young adults. Gary did so, and he accumulated evidence, including tapes and affidavits. The investigator recommended Connick prosecute the case. But nothing happened. Meanwhile Gary encountered one of the kids on the tapes. He asked him if he wanted to go on the record. The victim replied that his abuser had threatened his life. Raymond now wrote a three page memo outlining the case. This angered Connick because it created a paper trail. Raymond then encountered the DA at a St. Patrick’s day parade and asked him when the perpetrator would be indicted. Connick placed his finger in Gary’s chest and said, “He won’t be. Not as long as I am the DA. And you can’t do a thing about it.” Raymond had no choice but to go to the press. This began a series on what became the infamous Father Dino Cinel child abuse scandal. (Ibid, based on personal interview with Raymond)

    For obvious reasons, as mentioned throughout, one would think that this sorry episode would be mentioned by the author. As with John McCloy’s failure to intercede with the Nazi extermination program against the Jews of Eastern Europe, you will not find it in the book.

    But that’s not all. Connick was reproached by the US Supreme Court twice for violations of the Brady rule. (NY Times editorial of 2/16/2015; Slate, 4/1/2015, article by Dahia Lithwick) That rule maintains that the DA’s office must turn over any exculpatory materials it has to the defense. The cases were Connick vs. Thompson, and Smith vs Cain. (Click here for details) In the first case, the exculpatory material resulted in the defendant’s eventual acquittal. The ethical abuse in the second case was so bad that the conviction was reversed. Connick’s excuse for sending innocent people to prison for life was, “I stopped reading law books …when I became the DA.”

    This record, and the fact that Connick served as the Washington liaison to the Shaw trial, is rather consistent. Because once he was in office, he went to work setting aflame the evidence Garrison had left behind. That is not figurative language. He carted it to the incinerator. When someone protested, Connick’s reply was “Burn this sonofabitch and burn it today.” (Op. Cit, Probe Magazine) Make no mistake, Connick literally wanted every single file left on the Kennedy case torched. This reviewer is certain of that. For when he visited Connick in 1994, the DA was shown an index to a file cabinet in his office made by the HSCA. Connick called in an assistant to check if it was still there. When he was told it was, his face took on a look of surprise and he said, “We still have that stuff?” Harry Connick is a major reason we have such an incomplete record of the Jim Garrison investigation into the JFK assassination. The excision of these key factors is another instance of Litwin’s plastic surgery practices.

    I don’t know what is worse: if Litwin was ignorant of all the above, or if he knew it and decided not to tell the reader about it. In either case, Connick is in no position to tell any DA how to operate his office.

    II

    With that firmly established, the third part of the book deals with the HSCA, Oliver Stone, Permindex, and people like this reviewer. That is people who have written newer books on the Clay Shaw inquiry.

    Litwin’s chapter on the HSCA is so sketchy that its almost embarrassing. For instance, he writes that the HSCA forensic pathology panel wrote that Kennedy was shot from behind. (Litwin, p. 238) Gary Aguilar, among others, has shown that this was again achieved by the HSCA classifying key information that indicated the contrary. As he has written, “…the HSCA misrepresented the statements of its own Bethesda autopsy witnesses on the location of JFK’s skull defect.” (Trauma Room One, by Charles Crenshaw, p. 209) In other words, with the information now declassified, both sets of witnesses-those who saw Kennedy’s body in Dallas, and those who examined it at Bethesda-were on the record as depicting a rather large blown out hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull, strongly indicating a shot from the front. What makes this worse is that when Gary did some questioning of who was responsible for writing the contrary in the HSCA report, no one would admit to it. (HSCA Vol. 7, p. 37) This would include Chief Counsel Robert Blakey, the lead medical investigator Andy Purdy, and the chair of the pathology panel Michael Baden. (Aguilar interview for the documentary, JFK: Destiny Betrayed)

    After slipping on this banana peel, Litwin now goes ahead and depicts the association of Garrison with the HSCA. He tries to impute this relationship as beginning under Blakey. Which shows he never interviewed Bob Tanenbaum, who was the first Kennedy Deputy Chief Counsel. Tanenbaum is still alive and talks to people on the phone about the JFK case. Apparently, Litwin did not think that step was historically important. This reviewer has talked to Tanenbaum many times. He was the one who approved the HSCA inquiry into New Orleans. It was he who assigned Jon Blackmer as the lead lawyer and Larry Delsa as the investigator. Delsa then recommended Bob Buras, another police detective, as his partner. They then decided to consult with Garrison, who shared what he had in his remaindered files with this team.

    In this chapter, Litwin trots out an old chestnut originated by Jim Phelan many years ago and repeated by Patricia Lambert. Namely that Bertrand’s name was implanted into Perry Russo under truth serum. What Shaw’s defense had done—and Phelan was a part of that team—was mislabel the order of the sodium pentothal sessions. As Lisa Pease noted, when read in their proper order, it’s very clear that it was Russo who brought up the name of Bertrand on his own. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 6 No. 5) This reviewer has shown these transcripts to other researchers from other fields, and once shown them, they agree. (See DiEugenio, p. 413, footnote, 116)

    Litwin concludes this chapter by using a book later written by Blakey and Billings to score Garrison. (Litwin p. 251) In other words, he passes over the origins of the HSCA New Orleans inquiry, skips over Tanenbaum, and then jumps to a “Mafia did it” book-without telling the reader it’s a Mafia did it book. Or that, in 1981, the original title of the volume was The Plot to Kill the President. If you talk to Blakey today he will tell you that there was a second shot from the front of Kennedy. This reviewer knows this since he was in email contact with him while proofreading American Values by Bobby Kennedy Jr.

    In the updated 1992 version of the 1981 book, renamed Fatal Hour, Billings refers to an episode Garrison described in On the Trail of the Assassins. This depicted Billings, the Life reporter who had gone on the famous Pawley/Bayo raid to Cuba, questioning the DA about an organized crime figure in Covington. (Garrison, pp. 163–64) Garrison questioned people in his office and they did not know who the man was. Billings used this lack of knowledge as an excuse to portray Garrison as a lax crimefighter. When Fatal Hour came out, this was now revised to say the name Billings gave Garrison was Carlos Marcello. We are to assume then that somehow Garrison had never heard of Marcello. In the files released by the ARRB, this reviewer found Garrison’s notes to this conversation. The name was not Marcello, not even close. (Personal files given to Bill Davy for an update to his book)

    What this points out is an utterly crucial issue: the sea change that took place with the HSCA after the first Chief Counsel, Dick Sprague, had been forced out. Litwin avoids this entire episode pretty much completely. Sprague and Tanenbaum were going to run a genuine homicide investigation. And both men were very experienced doing that: Sprague in Philadelphia and Tanenbaum in New York. As did Garrison, they both had quite positive records in court. (DiEugenio, pp. 173, 326) Respectively, neither the CIA, nor the FBI wanted this kind of real criminal inquiry into either the JFK case or the murder of Martin Luther King. (Personal interview with congressman Tom Downing, 1993, in Newport News) Therefore the MSM created a faux controversy over Sprague, and he was forced out in rather short order. Tanenbaum became the acting Chief Counsel.

    But the problem was, after what happened to Sprague, no one wanted the job. Sprague’s forced resignation was clearly meant as a warning shot. Or as HSCA photographic consultant Chris Sharrett said to me, “It was Garrison all over again.” (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 59) As Chief of Homicide in New York, Tanenbaum said he understood how false the Warren Report was; and he had been alerted to this first by Senator Richard Schweiker who had worked on the Church Committee. (Speech by Tanenbaum, at Chicago Midwest Symposium in 1993) The three leaders of the first phase of the Kennedy side of the HSCA-Sprague, Tanenbaum and Al Lewis-were all experienced criminal attorneys. None of them bought the Warren Report. With his background as a DA, when Lewis inspected the autopsy materials in the JFK case, he was shocked. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 57)

    Dick Billings was not a criminal lawyer. Yet he helped write the Final Report of the HSCA concerning the JFK inquiry. In and of itself, that helps the reader understand what happened to that committee. This is the story that Litwin, almost by necessity, excludes from his book. Namely that Schweiker, Sprague, Tanenbaum, and Lewis were all on the same page. Garrison was correct, the JFK case was a conspiracy, we are now going to solve it. In fact, Schweiker told Tanenbaum that the CIA was involved in the assassination. (2019 interview with Tanenbaum by Oliver Stone and Jim DiEugenio) And, like Garrison, that effort was crushed. You won’t be able to unfold that rather sad saga if you don’t talk to anyone involved. And you certainly won’t find it in the papers of Sylvia Meagher or Patricia Lambert.

    III

    Litwin spends about 30 pages on the making of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Again, I looked in his references for indications that he talked to anyone of importance in the making of the film. That is Oliver Stone, co-screenwriter Zach Sklar, any of the co-producers, or even an important consultant like John Newman. There was no evidence he did.

    Litwin begins with the writing of Garrison’s book, the early drafts that eventually became On the Trail of the Assassins. He tells the shopworn story of how Sylvia Meagher was hired by a major book publisher to proof Garrison’s original manuscript for publication. She thought it was a worthy effort, but she then objected to his tenet that the motorcade route was changed. This formed a big part of the rejection of Garrison’s book by that publisher. (Litwin, pp. 259–60) As her lifelong fan, the late Jerry Policoff said, due to her innate bias, Sylvia should have never been handed that assignment. But once handed it, she should have never accepted it. (Click here for details)

    Through the valuable work of Vince Palamara, we know today that Garrison was correct on this and Meagher was wrong. The motorcade route was altered. (Vince Palamara, Survivor’s Guilt, pp. 98–108) In fact, the Commission witness who Sylvia used to criticize Garrison, Forrest Sorrels, was one of the two men involved with the change—the other being Winston Lawson. It was then Lawson who stripped back the number of motorcycles riding in the motorcade, especially those bracketing either side. Further, the police were told to ride to the rear of the car. They were puzzled at this direction which was given to them at Love Field. (Palamara, pp. 131–38) As a result of Palamara’s work, the best one can say today about the Secret Service and their performance in Dallas is that it was extremely negligent. As time goes on, it more and more appears that Meagher’s expertise on the case was confined to the textual analysis of the Commission volumes

    Getting to Stone’s film itself, taking out his dog whistle, Litwin calls it a depiction of a homosexual conspiracy. (Litwin, p. 254) Which, again I think is a bizarre statement. Because, after watching the film several times, I don’t see it as that. The plot that I see is based on a military and Power Elite objection to Kennedy’s policies in Vietnam and Cuba, in that order. And, in everything I have seen or read, Shaw and Ferrie were not concerned about Indochina. In fact, this is what Garrison thought. He also believed that what he had uncovered, topped by Guy Banister, was only the local New Orleans level of the plot. In a documentary first broadcast on Pacifica radio in 1988, he said as much. He added that the character he thought was the main hand behind it all was Allen Dulles.

    Litwin must understand this because now he goes after the Stone/Garrison portrait of Kennedy not being a Cold Warrior. But not even that is enough. If the reader can believe it—and you sure as heck can by now—Litwin also says that Lyndon Johnson continued Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam! (Litwin, pp. 270–71) I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this. But, since it was Litwin, I chuckled. The idea that Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam at the time of his death was announced, not just by Oliver Stone, but back in 1997 by the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Both papers had headlines on this ARRB created story: The former said “Kennedy Had a Plan for early exit in Vietnam.” The latter was “Papers support theory that Kennedy had plans for Vietnam pullout.” (Probe Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 3)

    The occasion for this confirmation of the thesis supplied to Oliver Stone by Fletcher Prouty and John Newman was the declassification of the records of the May 1963, SecDef conference. At this meeting in Hawaii, all arms of the American presence in Vietnam-military, CIA, State-offered their withdrawal schedules to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had previously requested them. When he had them in hand, he looked them over. He then looked up and said the schedules were too slow, they had to be speeded up. Kennedy had taken John Kenneth Galbraith’s advice and decided to leave Indochina. (Click here for details)

    But what we have today is even stronger than that. Because again, through the ARRB, we now have Johnson’s opposition to JFK and McNamara: In his own words on tape. (Tape of 2/20/64 phone call):

    I always thought it was foolish for you to make any statement about withdrawing. I thought it was bad psychologically. But you and the president thought otherwise, and I just sat silent.

    It then got worse for McNamara. Two weeks later, Johnson requested that McNamara take back what he said about a thousand man withdrawal plan in December of 1963 as being part of a complete withdrawal by the end of 1965. (Virtual JFK by James Blight, p. 310) I could go on, because it gets even worse. But the point is made. Not only did LBJ know he was breaking with Kennedy, he was trying to cover his tracks in doing so. That is, as lawyers term it, consciousness of guilt. Again, if Litwin did not know this, then he should not be writing about it. If he did know this and he deliberately concealed it then it points to the kind of writer he is and the quality of his book.

    But ignoring this new evidence on Indochina is not enough for Litwin. Again, in defiance of the new work on Kennedy, he tries to say JFK was a Cold Warrior. This is as untenable as there being no breakage in policy on Vietnam. What Kennedy was trying to do in his overall foreign policy was get back to FDR: a modus vivendi with the Soviets and a policy of neutralism in the Third World. The newest research on this subject, by Robert Rakove, Greg Poulgrain and Philip Muehlenbeck has redrawn the map on this point. It has been done so effectively that this reviewer is now convinced that the attempt to cloud that particular issue was done more deliberately than the actual cover up of Kennedy’s assassination. (Click here and here and here for details) The last instance, Johnson changing policies in Indonesia, was proclaimed by Roger Hilsman back in 1967. (To Move A Nation, p. 409) Hilsman resigned the State Department over that alteration and Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War. We are supposed to think that Litwin was unaware of all this.

    IV

    Taking his lead from the late Robert Sam Anson’s hoary article for Esquire, printed back in November of 1991, Litwin goes ahead and assails Fletcher Prouty on just about every score that Anson, and later Edward Epstein, could think of. Including the ridiculous accusation that Prouty did not know that Leonard Lewin’s The Report from Iron Mountain was meant as a satire. With the help of Len Osanic, I have addressed all of these goofy charges as made by Epstein. (Click here and go to the last section for details)

    Prouty was involved in the drafting of the McNamara/Taylor report in Washington. This was the plan that Kennedy was going to use to justify his withdrawal from Vietnam. Prouty’s revelations about this are bolstered by Howard Jones’ book, Death of a Generation. Except Jones states that this was done before the trip to Saigon. Jones writes that the departing party received large binders of material as they boarded the plane, “including a draft of the report they were to write afterward.” (Jones, p. 370) That material included the conclusions they were to present the president, along with statistics. This is a key piece of information. (My thanks to Paul Jolliffe for pointing this out to me.) Needless to say, Litwin does not list any of the new books about the issue of Kennedy, Johnson and Vietnam—either in his bibliography or his references. This makes sense since they rely on new documents and new interviews to further the case originally made by Prouty, Newman and Stone.

    Litwin also uses Fletcher’s interview with the ARRB against him. (Litwin, pp. 271-72) He could have easily called Len Osanic about this matter. Osanic is the web master of the best Prouty web site there is. He knew Fletcher as well as anyone. He visited him at his home in Alexandria, Virginia. When I asked him about the perceived problems the ARRB had with Prouty, he informed me of the full context. (Click here for details) Fletcher had been interviewed by both the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee. He was not happy with either experience. In his interview with the former, dated May 5, 1975, its odd that when Prouty started getting into matters dealing with the CIA, the interviewer wanted to go off the record. (See page four of the interview)

    When Fletcher went in for his pre-interview with the House Select Committee, he was rather surprised. The reason being that George Joannides was there. And it appeared that he was actually taking part in the investigation. Prouty was one of the few people who instantly understood what this meant. He decided he was only going to give a brief statement and not do the interview.

    Which brings us to the ARRB appearance that Litwin likes to use against the man. Prouty understood from the first couple of questions what the agenda was. So he decided to play along and give them what they wanted. He then called Len and informed him about it. Let us just discuss two issues. The first will be the whole trip to the South Pole as depicted in the film JFK. The unusual aspect about that was that Ed Lansdale was the officer who sent in his name for the mission. Lansdale was not his commanding officer. That was Victor Krulak. So why did Lansdale offer his name?

    The other point is about the lack of military protection for Kennedy in Dallas. When asked by the ARRB if he had any notes on this, Fletcher said he did not. (See page 6 of the ARRB summary of the interview) Fletcher did have the notes of the call. And Len Osanic has seen them. Prouty’s informant said that, as late as January 1964, when he reported to the 316th Field Detachment—which was very close to the 112th Military Intelligence Group in San Antonio—there were still arguments between the two commanders about why they were not detached to go to Dallas. (ARRB interview with Col. Bill McKinney 5/2/97) Especially since some of the officers there had been trained in presidential protection at Fort Holabird. McKinney called Prouty about it since Fletcher would likely have arranged the air transportation for the unit. After all, it’s a four drive from San Antonio to Dallas. Also, after the film was released, a daughter of one of the high level officers called Len. She told him that, over the assassination weekend, there was an argument at her home over this particular issue. Namely why there was no military protection forwarded to Dallas. (Interview with Osanic, 2/6/2021)

    Fletcher Prouty was vividly played by Donald Sutherland in the film JFK. During that walk he took from the Lincoln Memorial with Costner/Garrison, for the first time, the American public was given loads of information about what the CIA was doing for decades in the name of spreading democracy abroad. It turned out they were not spreading democracy. They were actually overthrowing democratically elected republics e.g. Iran, Guatemala and Congo. And in the case of Congo, planning assassination plots. This information was all communicated with exceptional cinematic skill. The Powers That Be did not like the fact that Fletcher-an inside the beltway officer-was partaking in such an exercise. And not only was he telling the public that he knew Kennedy was exiting Vietnam, but he had worked on the plans. All one has to know about how valuable he was to the disclosure of the secret government is that James McCord despised him.

    When Fletcher Prouty passed away, he was given full military honors. This included a band with a bugler playing Taps, a 21 gun salute, his body carried to chapel by caisson, and the flag folded up into a triangle and given to his widow. Like Kennedy, he was buried at Arlington. We are all lucky that a man with that standing gave so many insights to the general public. Because no one else at that level ever did.

    V

    Litwin’s book is designed to conceal who Clay Shaw really was. Therefore he does something I have never seen anyone do before; I don’t even recall Gerald Posner doing it. Right in front of the reader’s eyes he changes the spelling of a word—contract to contact—in a long hidden CIA document. He then alters the wording, concerning Shaw’s payments, to make it read as he wishes. (Litwin, p. 289) In other words, J. Kenneth McDonald, the Chief of the CIA’s History Staff, was writing a memo to CIA Director Robert Gates, and with the file in front of him, somehow he got it wrong—but Litwin got it right? (CIA Memorandum of 2/10/1992)

    But it’s worse than that. What Litwin does not tell the reader is that the CIA was so desperate to hide their association with Shaw that, as previously mentioned, they tampered with his file. Bill Davy first discovered this, and then Manuel Legaspi of the ARRB confirmed it and furthered it. (Legaspi to Jeremy Gunn, 11/14/1996; Davy, p. 200) So from what is left of the CIA records we know that Shaw was a highly paid contract agent and he had a covert security clearance for Project QKENCHANT. (For the latter, see Davy, p. 195) All of this discovery has been made possible by the ARRB. In a letter from Gordon Novel to Mary Ferrell in 1977, he revealed that the CIA had been trying to cover up their relationship with Shaw for well over a decade. (Personal Files sent to Bill Davy)

    Another of Shaw’s CIA associations is with the mysterious European entity, CMC/Permindex. This was first revealed back in the sixties, and Shaw actually admitted to it for his entry in Who’s Who in the Southwest for 1963–64. Yet, that was Shaw’s last entry in that rather illustrious series. For whatever reason, his name does not appear after the 1963-1964 edition.

    As most people know, when this organization was announced in 1956 in Switzerland, it was later booted out of the country due to a crescendo of negative newspaper articles. One of the reasons for the adverse reception was the attempt to conceal the main financial backing of the project. The State Department intervened and did some investigatory work. They found out that the true principal funding was through J. Henry Schroder’s, a bank that was closely associated with Allen Dulles and the CIA. In fact, Dulles had worked for the bank as General Counsel. (Davy, pp. 96–97) As Maurice Philipps has revealed, Ferenc Nagy, one of the key organizers of the enterprise, was a cleared CIA source and his file contained several references to his association with the World Trade Center, that is Centro Mondial Commerciale, the parent for Permindex. (Click here for details)

    The project stalled, but the State Department kept up its inquiry, now referring to it as the Permindex “scheme”. John Foster Dulles knew about the “scheme” and made no objections to it. (Michele Metta, CMC: The Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station, p. 114) In 1958, State now said that the model for the company was the New Orleans International Trade Mart. Further, that Shaw had shown interest in the project. (Cables of April 9, July 18, 1958) The enterprise then moved to Rome. Litwin makes reference to a 1959 CIA document saying that Nagy offered to place a CIA agent on the staff. He then says that since Shaw joined the board in 1958, the dates do not match. (Litwin, p. 293) First, placing someone on the staff is not the same as a member of the Board, and I have a hard time believing Litwin does not understand this. Secondly, we don’t know from the document when Nagy first wrote the CIA about the employment offer.

    Phillips made two groundbreaking discoveries. First, as already mentioned, about Nagy and the CIA. Secondly by going through the Louis Bloomfield archives in Canada, he found out that corporate lawyer Bloomfield served as a legal representative of the company and was soliciting funds for Permindex. What made that even more fascinating was, in doing so, he was in contact with the wealthiest families in the world at that time e.g. the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. None of this had been previously disclosed.

    When one adds in the work of Michele Metta, then the mix gets more bracing. Let me say this upfront: in my opinion, Metta’s book is one of the finest pieces of work I have ever read in English on the Italian political scene of the sixties and seventies. Metta discovered that Gershon Peres was on the Board of Permindex from 1967-70. (Metta, p.114; see also article by Paz Marverde, at Medium, 12/12/17) Peres was the brother of Shimon Peres, on and off the Prime Minister of Israel for three years, and then president of Israel from 2007-14. In what is probably the only positive contribution by Litwin in his entire book, he appears to clear Permindex member George Mandel of being in the Jewish refugee racket. (Litwin, pp. 295–97) The problem with this is that Metta shows that Mandel was working with the Israeli spy service for years and years. (Metta, p. 114)

    I cannot begin to summarize all the quite relevant material in Metta’s book. But perhaps the most important, at least to me, is that another CMC member was instrumental in the rise of Licio Gelli, the infamous leader of the utterly fascist Propaganda Due (P2) lodge. But further, CMC and P2 shared the same office space! (Metta, p. 120, see also Marverde) Suffice it to say that with these kinds of revelations, Philip Willan, an expert on Operation Gladio, now entertains the possibility that P2 and Permindex may have been a part of that concealed “stay behind” NATO network. Which puts it above the level of the CIA.

    How does Litwin counter these powerful revelations? First, he barely mentions Metta’s book. Second, he uses Max Holland’s article in Daily Beast to say that, somehow, the Permindex story was all part of a KGB propaganda plot, issued through communist leaning papers in Italy. Holland’s article was published at the height of Russiagate mania, which has now been exposed as being, to put it mildly, a false alarm, to put it bluntly, a hoax. Holland swam right into that wave. Secondly, nothing I have referred to above relies on that material. Obviously, Phillips did not. Metta’s book is well documented and in his discoveries about CMC, are largely original research. Third, the underlying basis for Holland is the Mitrokhin archives. The well paid Russian defector has turned out to be, well, kind of unreliable. Especially on the JFK case. (Click here for details)

    The other way Litwin tries to distract from all of this is by picking up his second dog whistle. His first is homophobia; his second is anti-Semitism. Because Bloomfield was Jewish, he uses that to play the anti-Semite card. I was nauseated at Litwin’s shameless hypocrisy. As I noted in the very first part of this series, what John McCloy did on the Jewish/Nazi issue during and after World War II was unfathomable. Somehow, Litwin did not find any of that even notable. Just as Jim Garrison never said anything about Shaw being a homosexual during the two years of that being a live case, Garrison has never written anything about Bloomfield being Jewish. And although Litwin writes that Bloomfield was not in the OSS, John Kowalski, who has been through the Bloomfield archives, says he did see letters between the legendary World War II Canadian/British intelligence officer William Stephenson and Bloomfield.

    VI

    The last chapter of the book is entitled “Conclusion: The Attempt to Rehabilitate Jim Garrison”. Here, Litwin groups Bill Davy, Joan Mellen and myself under one rubric in order to belittle and attack respectively, Let Justice be Done (1995), A Farewell to Justice (2005) and Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition (2012).

    First he says the three books are incestuous. My book has over 2000 footnotes to it. Less than 2% of the references are to Bill Davy’s prior book. And even less than that are to Mellen’s A Farewell to Justice. The Davy book has about 650 references to it, evens less of his notes apply to my work in any form e.g. including essays I wrote for publication in various journals, particularly Probe Magazine. It’s preposterous to do that same comparison to Mellen’s book. For the simple reason that she employed the superb archives researcher Peter Vea, who was the Malcolm Blunt of his day. Therefore the figures for her are even smaller.

    What Litwin is trying to avoid is this: the three books are based on research, data and facts that became newly available through the ARRB. And how that unprecedented event led to more searches through phone and personal interviews, field investigation, and materials mining at other centers e.g. the AARC. This combined effort, by many more people than he lists, resulted in a plethora of new information on New Orleans. Enough to pen three books clocking in at about a thousand pages.

    Therefore, the idea of “rehabilitation” is demonstrably false. What these volumes do is redefine New Orleans, Garrison’s inquiry and its suspects. To the point that they have made books like Kirkwood’s look like a museum exhibit. And it’s not just those three works. For instance, my book uses John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA, which has important new material in it on New Orleans. It also uses Joe Biles’ work, In History’s Shadow, which did much to reopen the case of Kerry Thornley. In this particular review, I have utilized Michele Metta’s volume, which takes a quantum leap forward with Permindex/CMC. One of the main sources for my book was Probe Magazine, which I used far more than Bill Davy or Joan Mellen. That journal did many articles based upon new archival materials about New Orleans. I could go on, but my point is that Litwin’s attempt to narrow the field is simply not an accurate description as to how the database has been altered geometrically and exponentially on the subject.

    His attempt to characterize the three books as being similar in subject and theme is also inaccurate. Let Justice be Done is narrowly focused on New Orleans and Clay Shaw. So when Litwin writes that all three deal with ending the Cold War, withdrawing from Vietnam and Kennedy ushering in “a new era of peace and prosperity”, that simply does not apply to the text of Davy’s book. (Litwin, p. 311, not numbered) It only relates to the Afterword by a different author, Robert Spiegelman. It was not part of Davy’s research, themes or his ultimate aim. Mellen’s book only deals with the subject of JFK and his policies in one half of one chapter (See Chapter 11) My book is the only one that assays this topic at any length or detail. But the concept that Lyndon Johnson drastically altered Kennedy’s foreign policy is today an established fact. And Litwin can only deny it by not mentioning scholars like Robert Rakove, Greg Poulgrain, Philip Muehlenbeck, Richard Mahoney, Brad Simpson, Gordon Goldstein, David Kaiser, and James Blight—among others. Again, if he knew of this work and did not tell the reader about it, then he is not being forthright. If he didn’t know, then he should not be writing about it.

    In this final chapter, he also tries to deny, as he does throughout the book, that Shaw was Bertrand. As I have shown in the last installment, there is nothing to argue on this point anymore: Shaw was Bertrand. This is a fact. And in all probability Shaw’s defense team knew it. As we have seen, former FBI agent Aaron Kohn later made up one of his fables for the HSCA in order to disguise it. If the Bureau had been aiding Garrison, Shaw would have been decimated on the stand over this.

    In quoting Jon Blackmer’s memo on his interview with Garrison about Shaw being a part of the conspiracy or a “cut out” to the plot, he writes that I did not place it in its proper context. He then adds that it’s not a part of the HSCA Final Report. (Litwin, p. 318)

    This is another Litwin effort at a shell game. What I write about Blackmer’s memo is simple and straightforward, but it’s not part of Litwin’s agenda. And it explains why Blackmer’s work is not only absent from the Final Report, but why he was then absent from New Orleans. What I wrote is that Jon Blackmer did not matter once the leadership of the HSCA changed. (DiEugenio, p. 332) And anyone who knows this case understands that. As Gaeton Fonzi has written, once Sprague and Tanenbaum were gone, the focus shifted from the Cuban exiles and the CIA, to the Mafia. In fact, as Wallace Milam informed me back in the nineties, Blackmer was shifted out of New Orleans and his name was on a couple of autopsy memoranda. As Joan Mellen discovered when she approached him, Blackmer would not talk about his HSCA experience with her. Try and find any of this important material in Litwin’s book.

    Another part of the story that Litwin wants to eliminate in this chapter is the massive interference with Garrison’s inquiry. To show how desperate he is, in the part of my book that deals with Louis Gurvich and his work for the CIA, he says I was writing about his brother, William. He then says my source was a JFK critic and he talked to Gurvich’s niece. (Litwin, p. 318) Again, these are both wrong. My source was a military veteran and he did not say he talked to Gurvich’s niece, and neither do I. (DiEugenio, p. 331) He then says there is no evidence that Gordon Novel was being used by Allen Dulles to spy on Garrison’s office. Anyone can read the sources I use for this in my book. One of them is Novel’s own deposition for his lawsuit against Playboy magazine. There he mentioned his many and long conversations with Allen Dulles. In that sworn deposition he also admitted he communicated by telegram with Richard Helms. (DiEugenio, p. 429) In my footnotes, I also source a police interview in which Gordon admitted he stole pieces of evidence from Garrison’s office.

    Litwin also writes that the CIA did nothing to interfere with Garrison’s inquiry. (Litwin, p. 321) In my book I go into detail with declassified documents showing how the Agency planned and executed this interference. (DiEugenio, pp. 269–78)

    Litwin has to do this because this massive interference-which came on the instructions of no less than Richard Helms-would suggest the Agency was worried about what Garrison would turn up to incriminate them. (DiEugenio, p. 270) I describe how the CIA then prevented subpoenas from being honored; they directed witnesses against Shaw be talked out of their stories; and how Bob Tanenbaum saw documents from Helms’ office that directed Garrison’s witnesses be surveilled and harassed. Which they were. (DiEugenio, pp. 271–98, 294)

    Incredibly, Litwin tries to say that Shaw’s lawyers got no cooperation from either the CIA or the FBI. Perhaps Litwin did not know about the Angleton’s office “black tape” operation, revealed here for the first time. He he also leaves out the fact that Shaw’s lead lawyer, Irvin Dymond, met with the CIA station chief in New Orleans with approval from CIA HQ. (DiEugenio, p. 277) This was apparently done because in the fall of 1967 Ray Rocca, Jim Angleton’s point man on Garrison, predicted that Shaw would be convicted if all proceeded as it was. (DiEugenio, p. 270) After Dymond’s meeting, the CIA sent out memos about how they were now committed to this effort and task forces would be set up, including tasks to be done by the local New Orleans office. (DiEugenio, p. 277) The FBI joined in this by the aforementioned wiretapping of Garrison’s office. And on the eve of the Shaw trial they agreed to help the defense (DiEugenio, p.293) This covert aid is something that Shaw’s lawyers would not admit to. I know because Irvin Dymond lied to me about it in his office in 1994.

    The way that Litwin frantically dodges this issue reminded of the old adage: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it fall? Yes it did. And Litwin can deny it all he wants. But its right there for anyone with eyes and ears to witness.

    At the end of this sorry book, if one knows what really happened in New Orleans, one has to ask: What kind of a mind and sensibility would go to such lengths to camouflage it all? Who today would trust people like Rosemary James or Shaw’s lawyers? What kind of a writer would go out of his way to use the political dog whistles of homophobia and anti-Semitism to the unprecedented extent Litwin does? When, in fact, Garrison never brought up the first, and there was no reason for him to bring up the second?

    Those questions can only be answered by reviewing Litwin’s first book, which is about his political conversion. Looming in the background of that psychic transformation is the figure of David Horowitz. With the dropping of that name, I now understood that Litwin’s work is not meant to be data or research based. It is fundamentally political. Fred Litwin is a culture warrior.

    Click here for Fred Litwin, On the Trail of Delusion – Part Two.

    Click here for Fred Litwin: Culture Warrior.