Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: CIA

  • The Good Shepherd

    Watching Robert DeNiro, Angelina Jolie, and Matt Damon discuss The Good Shepherd with Charlie Rose was an interesting experience. They were saying things like:

    “So many good people involved. ”

    “It’s why you want to be in the film business. ”

    “Everybody loved the script. ”

    “Such an interesting story. ”

    The banality of these answers was equaled by the banality of the questions. Rose even tried to relate the film to The Departed, something I still don’t understand. But there was one important point that surfaced. DeNiro had tried to get the film made for eight years. So clearly it was close to him personally. Second, DeNiro apparently liked the script by Eric Roth a lot. I will return to this later since I think Roth and his script are a real problem. In fact, the root of the problem.

    The Good Shepherd was subtitled in its trailer, “The Untold Story of the Birth of the CIA.” This is a real misnomer, since most of the “untold” actual events are immediately recognizable to anyone who has a cursory knowledge of the history of the CIA. In another sense the subtitle is true since the story it tells is very liberally fictionalized. In that sense, it is untold. The main character in the film, Edward Wilson is based upon legendary counter-intelligence chief James Angleton. And there are other characters that are clearly based on CIA luminaries. DeNiro plays a man named William Sullivan who is based on OSS chief William Donovan. William Hurt plays someone named William Arlen, which suggests Allen Dulles. There are two Russian defectors in the film also. One, who Wilson befriends, suggests Anatoly Golitsin. A second one, who Wilson disbelieves, is modeled on Yuri Nosenko. And as in the Nosenko story, we see the CIA handlers torture the second defector on Angleton/Wilson’s orders. This sequence ends with screenwriter Roth borrowing the denouement of another CIA episode. The handlers inject the defector with LSD (why they do is very weakly explained) and he suddenly turns and jumps out the hotel window to his death. This actually happened during the MK/Ultra program with unwitting subject Frank Olson.

    The story follows Wilson from his college days at Yale to his recruitment into the CIA by Sullivan. We then watch him on some of his and his cohorts’ assignments in places like West Germany and South America. These are done in flashbacks, and the recurring present “frame” of the story is the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle. Wilson is charged with investigating “leaks” about that operation. The trail ends up fingering a family member who the KGB has bugged. This leads to a personal tragedy for Wilson and his family: his marriage falls apart; his son’s fiancée is killed. But he gets a higher position at the CIA’s new building, which went up near the end of the Kennedy presidency. The film ends with him walking through the new wing to his new office.

    What Roth has done with this story is not just a mutation of the facts. Its one thing to make up a fiction, like say John Le Carre does, based on experiences, which are intrinsically interesting and also dramatic in personal terms. It is something else to seriously alter real events and actually make them less interesting than they are. And to rely on cheap devices to create drama. For instance, the climactic personal drama in the piece comes from Wilson’s son overhearing a conversation while in the shower through an open door. Roth uses the whole open door motif throughout the film. We are to believe that when someone like Donovan/Sullivan comes to see him Wilson would leave the door to his den open so anyone could overhear. In other words, if the doors would have been shut, as they should have, the film would have no climax. Another Rothian touch: he uses a deaf girl that Wilson liked in college to humanize the rather inscrutable character. They go to bed as youths, but she can’t go through with it. Many years later, they see each other at the theater, a production of Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard. Moments later they are in a bar together. Moments after that, they leave the bar together, presumably never to see each other again. But wait: Roth summons Movieland. She steps out of the taxi she was in, they stare at each other, and Presto! They are in a hotel bed together, except this time, they go all the way. Later, Wilson’s wife Clover (Angelina Jolie) gets photos of this rendezvous. She confronts Wilson with them in public and creates a huge scene at a Christmas party. (Who took the photos, how and why, are never made clear. )

    What Roth does with the Bay of Pigs episode is also done for the purposes of making personal drama. He postulates that the Cubans knew the landing site in advance. In no book or report that I have read is this stated. In fact, the best report I know, the one by CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, states that Castro knew an invasion was imminent because of the CIA leafleting and supply drops made by air in the weeks prior to the landing. So he put his huge militia of over 200,000 men on alert. When the invasion came it was quite noisy and it alerted a regular army detail near the scene. They in turn called out the nearby militia and enough troops and armor got to the front to prevent a beachhead from being established.

    This in turn relates to another point of CIA mythology that Roth uses. He states that Kennedy’s canceling of the so-called “second” air strike doomed the operation. This canard, repeated by such military pedant types as Alexander Haig, has been refuted by Kennedy’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. He told author Noel Twyman that the second strike was not in the original plans, which Allen Dulles would not leave for JFK to study. That the CIA came back to them, after the invasion was in operation, and requested the second strike. Further, as Kirkpatrick notes, what difference would it have made if the second strike had taken place?The bottom line was that you had a weakly supplied invasion force of 1,500 men against a strongly supplied army and militia of over 225, 000 men. When looked at in this way, one sees why Dulles would not leave the plans with JFK. Under scrutiny it would have become clear that the mission could not succeed as planned. In actuality, the Agency had banked on Kennedy caving as the invasion faltered. That he would then order an American invasion of the island to save face. Which he didn’t. He couldn’t, because as the film shows, about seven days prior he had told a press conference American troops would not invade Cuba. Further, near the end of the film, when the Dulles character is fired, it’s because of embezzling funds. In reality, he was terminated because JFK realized he had been duped about the operation.

    All of the above seems to me to be more interesting than what Roth has reduced it to. And in his direction DeNiro does not mitigate much of the heavy handedness. We see Wilson trying to decipher a photo of the man suspected of leaking the invasion. We suspect early that the reason we cannot see the man is because it must be someone close to the protagonist. When Wilson finally realizes the actual location where the leak took place, he personally flies to the location alone. So now we know it must be someone close to him since men in that position in the CIA usually don’t go to far off exotic places themselves. Early on, after Wilson contacts an old college professor in England, he is asked to get the undercover operative to leave the spy service. He must do this by asking the old man to tie his shoe in view of other spies. Which he does. But that’s not enough for Roth. Even after we see this, the Kim Philby type running the operation has the old man killed by drowning him in a river down the street. First we hear the screams, which rise in volume. Then Wilson walks down the street to see the splashing of the old man who is already underwater. Then we watch as his cane slowly disappears beneath the surface and the water subsides. The Philby type says to Wilson, “He knew too much. ” Roth doesn’t have Wilson ask the obvious: “Then why did you have him go through the whole charade of tying my shoe?”This whole scene was done with all the subtlety of DeNiro’s pal Martin Scorsese.

    And that’s a problem with this enterprise. A friend offers his hand to Wilson before going on a CIA operation at a coffee plantation in South America, Wilson tells him he should not be wearing his school ring down there. DeNiro makes sure we see the ring. We then watch the operation go awry. Cut to Wilson in his office and a coffee can arrives on his desk. His assistant then laboriously goes through the process of peeling it open. I’d say half the audience understood what would be inside. But DeNiro shows us a close-up of the severed finger. I won’t even go into the ending. I will only say that I think everyone understood what would happen to the son’s fiancée at least three minutes before it occurred. Eric Roth telegraphs better than the old Western Union. And DeNiro does nothing to lessen his telegraphic powers.

    The really surprising thing about the film is not Roth’s dull script. Since this is the guy who helped bring us things like Ali and Munich, I knew what to expect. The surprise is that DeNiro has directed a cast that is, to be kind, unexceptional. Angelina Jolie brings nothing new or original to a part that has her light and cheery at the beginning, and frustrated and sad at the end. The usually pallid William Hurt is palled again as the Dulles figure. DeNiro himself play the Donovan character as a kind of avuncular long lost relative. He has none of the force, drive, or scalpel mind Donovan had. But the real failure in the cast is Matt Damon as Wilson/Angleton. When Damon has to go out and get a role, as in Good Will Hunting, he does alright. But here, the role is one that is almost completely interior. Most of it takes place as they say, “between the ears”. It’s the kind of acting that is difficult, unappreciated, and rarely attempted by a star since it is completely devoid of glamour and personal appeal. Damon is not up to it. He doesn’t have the kind of subtle imagination and immense concentration a role like this requires. His facial pattern of inquiry and response are neither clear nor interesting. Instead of negating oneself in order to create another, what Damon has done is just the negation part. (If you want to see how an actor can do this kind of role, see Russell Crowe in The Insider, or a much younger DeNiro in The Last Tycoon. )

    The worst part of this disappointment is that there is more to come. DeNiro has said that he made a deal with Roth. He would act and direct in Roth’s script while Roth wrote another one about a similar espionage scene, except more modern. After this, I’m not looking forward to it. If you need to jazz up the Bay of Pigs and still turn it to dross, I’d hate to see what happens with, say, Aldrich Ames. Meanwhile, to see how this kind of story is really done, and done exceptionally well, rent the DVD of Richard Burton’s classic, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Its something Eric Roth could never come close to.

  • Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust

    I was rather predisposed against reading Gerald McKnight’s Breach of Trust. Most of the recent books on the JFK case had been disappointing. Not just the horrible and ridiculous Ultimate Sacrifice, but others like the efforts of Jaime Escalante and Michael Kurtz. In addition, McKnight’s book was on the Warren Commission. So I thought, quite naturally: Who needs another book on that subject in this day and age? But then I saw that writers like David Talbot and Jim Douglass recommended it. So I reconsidered and decided to pick it up. I am glad I did.

    This is an extraordinarily worthwhile effort. What the author has done is not repetitive. He has collated the most up to date information, much of it released by the Assassination Records Review Board, and taken us deeper into the inner workings of the Commission than any other writer I know. Previously, writers like Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher showed us some of the rather odd conclusions the Warren Commission came to in light of the evidence before it. What Breach of Trust does is not just show us how wrong the Commission was, but why and how they did what they did. In this regard, I cannot imagine a future author going much further.

    I

    One of the things Breach of Trust does that is singular in the field is to demonstrate just how J. Lee Rankin was put in place as Chief Counsel, and how influential he really was. Previous authors have noted how Earl Warren had tried to insert his friend and colleague Warren Olney III as Chief Counsel, how certain commissioners thwarted this, and how Rankin was then substituted. But no author has explained at this length and depth just why Olney was so objectionable, how and why he was shot down, and why Rankin was the replacement choice. This part of the book begins on page 41 with a description of the Warren Commission’s first executive session of December 5, 1963. McKnight briefly describes Warren’s professional relationship with Olney from his days in California, showing just how effective and collegial they were in pursuing some of Warren’s progressive goals. In the next paragraph, McKnight provides the transition to the opposition with three pungent sentences:

    As head of Justice’s Criminal Division Olney also had a shared history with FBI Director Hoover that was altogether different. Hoover despised Olney. As one FBI agent remarked, “Olney was the only guy who had balls enough to stand up to Hoover.” (p. 41)

    Among Olney’s sins on Hoover’s scorecard were his public pronouncements about the presence and influence of the Mafia. Second was the fact that he was a liberal on the civil rights issue. It turns out that both Hoover and Nicholas Katzenbach from Justice were determined to strike preemptively so Olney would not take office. Their source for Warren’s plans for chief counsel was the FBI informant on the Warren Commission: Congressman Gerald Ford. (Another achievement of the book is the demonstration of just how big an informant Ford was for Hoover. It is more than what was hinted at before which, in turn, shows how brazenly Ford lied about this in televised interviews.)

    Katzenbach wanted Olney out because he perceived him as a maverick who he would not be able to control. And since he already had written his famous memorandum about convincing the public as to Oswald’s role as lone gunman, he did not want Olney straying off the range on this issue. In fact, as the author notes, Katzenbach was so worried about this possibility that he installed his man from the Justice Department, Howard Willens, on the Commission to keep an eye out if Olney did become counsel. (p. 42)

    It was overkill. Hoover and Katzenbach unleashed a lobbying campaign on the Commission to head off Olney. The point man for Hoover on this was Cartha DeLoach. DeLoach’s prime inside asset for the “Dump Olney” program was Ford. (McKnight does a nice job penciling in the long “give and take” relationship between Hoover and Ford that made them such amiable chums.) Considering what was at stake, there is little doubt as to why this troika went into overdrive to accomplish their mission. For as McKnight states, “Had Olney served as Chief Counsel it is very likely that the Warren Commission Report would have been an entirely different historical document.” (p. 44)

    When Warren tried to push Olney through at the second executive session, it was Ford and John McCloy who joined forces to obstruct him. And McCloy just happened to have a short list of alternative choices on hand, one of which was J. Lee Rankin. An impromptu sub-committee was formed consisting of Ford, McCloy, Allen Dulles, and Warren. In a matter of hours, Rankin became the consensus choice. Warren really had no option in the matter since, as Ford told DeLoach, both he and Dulles threatened to resign if Olney was chosen. (p. 45)

    II

    Why was Rankin an easy choice? In addition to being a friend and colleague of McCloy, he was the opposite of the anti-Christ Olney in one central regard: he was almost as cozy with Hoover as Ford was. As McKnight describes it: “The choice of J. Lee Rankin, a conservative Republican, was greeted at FBI headquarters with elation.” (Ibid) As Solicitor General, Rankin had defended the FBI in court. He was on a first name basis with Hoover. To quote the author again, “Rankin was a supremely cautious bureaucrat, a consummate insider, not a boat-rocker like Olney.” (Ibid) The choice of Rankin was crucial for the FBI and Katzenbach since it greatly improved their chances of having both the initial FBI report on the assassination and Katzenbach’s premature memo validated with little friction or confrontation.

    As general counsel his management style was rigidly centralized. One former assistant counsel complained that staff contact with the Commission members “was all done through Rankin.” All staff contact and communication with the FBI had to be approved or was channeled directly through Rankin’s office… Rankin proved resourceful at every turn…successfully guiding the whole enterprise toward the predetermined destination laid down in the November 25 Katzenbach memo. The heading that Rankin followed for nine months…was lifted right off Hoover’s chart, and it pointed to Oswald…as the assassin. (Ibid)

    As McKnight states, as an evidentiary brief, the FBI report is an embarrassment in and of itself. He writes, “The report was largely a vilification of Oswald.” (p. 27) Since it was done so quickly (submitted to the White House on December 5th), and so haphazardly it can only be called a Rush to Judgment, in the worst sense of that term. For instance, even though it ended up being five volumes long with almost nine hundred pages, it did not describe all of Kennedy’s wounds, list the cause of death, did not mention Governor John Connally’s wounds, and did not account for all the known shots. Incredibly, it devoted all of 10 words to the JFK shooting and only 42 words to his wounds. This was done because the FBI did not have the official autopsy report. The Bureau rejected an offer by the Secret Service to lend it the autopsy protocol, the X rays, and the photos.

    In spite of all these failures, Katzenbach called the FBI report “spectacular”. (p. 27) He then distributed it to high officials of agencies of government. Why? Because it vilified Oswald’s character, named him as the assassin, and stated that he had no cohorts. This had been preordained of course. Orders had been given not to investigate a conspiracy, and evidence of Oswald’s innocence — like the Bronson film — was discarded. (Pgs. 16-18) By November 26th, just two days after Ruby shot Oswald, the FBI had reached its main conclusions. Yet, this was the event that provoked many people to consider thoughts of a conspiracy. McKnight writes that one of the reasons for the headlong hurry was to stamp out “conspiracy allegations” from Mexico City. (p. 25) Hoover sent an agent there to get Ambassador Mann and CIA Station Chief Win Scott “on message, to alert them to the ‘facts’ of the case: that the White House and the FBI were convinced of Oswald’s guilt and that there had been no conspiracy.” (Ibid)

    In a revealing November 29th conversation with President Johnson, Hoover showed that he knew little of what actually happened even a week after the fact. He told LBJ that one bullet rolled out of Kennedy’s head. That CE 399 was found on Kennedy’s stretcher after heart massage. That the alleged weapon could fire three shots in three seconds. (p. 28) These statements were all grossly mistaken. But that did not matter to Hoover or the fate of the Bureau’s report. The FBI began to leak its conclusions to the media anyway. And by doing this before the Warren Commission held its first executive session meeting, the Bureau began to entrap the Commission in its own faulty conclusions.

    But the FBI report differs in some crucial regards from the Warren Report. For example, although the Bureau was aware of the hit on James Tague, it ignored this and said that all three shots struck either Kennedy or Connally. The Bureau also had the shot entering Kennedy’s back at a much steeper angle. At this angle, it would be impossible for the bullet to exit at the throat level. For these and other reasons, the Commission ended up not publishing the FBI report (CD 1) in the 26 volumes. As the author notes, “That the Commission, given its own deplorable record…felt compelled to suppress the FBI report…was a resounding rebuke indeed.” (p. 144) Yet the Commission had to do this or they would be admitting that the government came to two different versions of the same crime within ten months. And the two versions were incompatible with each other. But because the FBI report was not published or released yet, this fact was not evident.

    Actually, it’s even worse than that. Why? Because the Secret Service also agreed with the Bureau’s shooting sequence. (p. 3) Further, in 1966, when the discrepancy between the FBI and the Commission became public, Hoover insisted that his version was correct. (p. 4) But, there was still a third government version of the crime that was not known. Within days of the assassination, the CIA had the Secret Service copy of the Zapruder film. The Agency’s analysis of the film concluded that the first shot did not come from the sixth floor. Second, more than one gunman was involved. (p. 6) In reality, there were three official versions of the crime within ten months. But the public was unaware of any except the Commission’s.

    III

    This was the precarious position that the Commission found itself in essentially from the start. With no independent investigative staff, they were largely at the mercy of the FBI, Secret Service, and CIA for their information. But mostly the Bureau, and the Bureau had already come to their verdict. For instance, to further incriminate Oswald and to show he had a sociopathic predisposition toward violence, the FBI report asserted that Oswald had tried to shoot General Edwin Walker on the evening of April 10, 1963. (When I talked to FBI agent Warren DeBrueys in New Orleans, he told me this was based on the testimony of Marina Oswald and the fact the assailant in both cases aimed at the victims’ head.) But there were serious problems with this second case against Oswald:

    1. The Dallas Police never considered him as a suspect in over seven months.
    2. The evidence indicated more than one man was involved.
    3. The ammunition was steel-jacketed, not copper-jacketed as in the Kennedy case.
    4. Walker was a rightwing extremist who Kennedy had removed from his command for distribution of Birchite propaganda. So the political calculus behind the shootings was confused.
    5. The conspirators had access to a car which, officially, Oswald did not.
    6. The police deduced the weapon was a high-powered rifle, which the Mannlicher-Carcano was not.
    7. Walker and his private investigators suspected a former employee, William M. Duff, as the sniper. (pgs. 48-50)

    But as McKnight shows, the capper in this regard is CE 573, the mutilated remainder of the bullet recovered from Walker’s home. When assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler deposed Walker for two hours in April of 1964, he never mentioned it. This seemed odd since Walker held the bullet in his hands afterwards. Fifteen years later Walker was watching a televised hearing of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Chief Counsel Robert Blakey held up CE 573 for the camera while discussing the firearms evidence in the JFK case. As McKnight notes:

    Walker, a thirty-year career army officer with extensive combat experience in World War II, and with more than a passing familiarity with military weaponry, was stunned. According to Walker, what Blakey represented as the bullet fired into his home bore no resemblance to the piece of lead the police had recovered, which he had held in his own hand and closely examined. (p. 52)

    So there was no real ballistics evidence to connect Oswald to the Walker shooting. This left a mysterious note that Oswald, according to Marina, had left her that night. Even though Marina said she placed the note in a Russian book, it did not show up in the two day DPD search through Oswald’s room or the Paines’ household, where Marian was staying. It was not until November 30th that Ruth Paine sent the book to Marina through the Irving County police. After the police turned over the book to the Secret Service, the note was finally discovered on December 2nd. It was not signed or dated. When FBI fingerprint specialist Sebastian Latona was questioned by the Commission, he was not asked about the “Walker note”. Perhaps because staff attorney Melvin Eisenberg had learned that Latona had found neither Lee nor Marina’s fingerprints on the note.

    McKnight finalizes this section by doing what he usually does. He takes us behind the scenes and shows us what was happening at the Commission and in the field. By doing this he cracks open the superficial front presented by both reports and shows us that in reality, the authorities themselves knew that there were serious problems with what they presented to the public and the media. On May 20, 1964 Rankin had written Hoover complaining that Marina’s testimony on the Walker case “was riddled with contradictions”. (p. 57) FBI agent Gordon Shanklin then assigned two agents to Marina because he agreed that “her statements just don’t jibe.” (Ibid)

    In fact, the report that Shanklin commissioned to resolve Marina’s “contradictions” did nothing but deepen them. The agents, Ivan Lee and Robert Barrett, interviewed two witnesses who both confirmed there were two suspects, that neither resembled Oswald, and they had access to a Ford. Their main witness, Walter Kirk Coleman, never testified before the Commission. What was left in the case against Oswald was the photo found in his possessions of the back of Walker’s home. In light of the above, this now became as suspect as the infamous backyard photographs.

    Yet despite all of the above, the Warren Report states that the Walker episode demonstrated Oswald’s “disposition to take human life” and it “was considered of probative value in this investigation.” (pgs. 56, 58) McKnight explores the Walker case at length and it is one of the best discussions of the incident that I have read. He concludes that it has value not just in and of itself, but that it “was just a microcosm of what was to follow in the government’s investigation into the Kennedy assassination.” (p. 58) He is correct.

    IV

    Three of the most important chapters in the book (Chapters 7-9), deal with the medical and ballistics evidence. The Bethesda pathologists — James Humes, Thornton Boswell, and Pierre Finck — did not see the clothes or photos in preparation for their post-mortem report. Further, as the author details, the autopsy of the century lasted approximately from 8-11 PM. Yet, according to Dr. Michael Baden, it should have gone at least twice that long. And perhaps as long as 8-10 hours. (p. 155)

    One of the arresting aspects of the book is McKnight’s characterization of Humes. Whereas many Warren Commission critics have treated him, and the other two, with a modicum of respect — perhaps in the misguided hope that they would eventually see the light — McKnight is anything but kind. (Since Humes has now passed away, the author may feel that he can take the gloves off.) He exposes as a canard the idea that Humes burned his original autopsy draft and “bloodstained” notes out of respect for the dead president. McKnight writes that this could not have been the case since this draft was prepared in the unbloodied comfort of the doctor’s own home. (p. 165) When interviewed by the ARRB’s Jeremy Gunn on this point, Humes became flustered and angry. He said it “might have been errors in spelling, or I don’t know what was the matter with it, or whether I even ever did that.” (Ibid) Later he added, “I absolutely can’t recall, and I apologize for that.” (Ibid) McKnight suggests that assistant counsel Arlen Specter recognized this problem at an early date and met with the doctors approximately 8-10 times prior to their testimony in March. Subsequently, when Specter elicited the rather startling revelation about burning the first draft, no one batted an eyelash. As the author puts it: “Not a single commissioner was moved to ask Humes what right he had to destroy these papers or even why he felt compelled on his own initiative to consign them to archival oblivion.” (p. 158)

    But with this established, Specter and Humes moved on to a second deception. Namely that Commission Exhibit 397 was the documentary record upon which the official autopsy report was based. This exhibit consisted of a set of notes, and the handwritten revision of the incinerated draft of the autopsy report. One of the note pages was the autopsy “face sheet” (body diagram with wounds marked), and the others were notes of Humes’ talk with Dr. Malcolm Perry of Parkland Hospital about the tracheotomy he had performed on President Kennedy in Dallas. But this cannot be the entire record since the final, single-spaced, 6-page autopsy report contains many facts that are not contained in these documents. After a thorough analysis, McKnight concludes:

    There are, give or take, about eighty-eight autopsy “facts” in the official prosectors’ report. About sixty-four of these “facts” or pieces of medicolegal information (almost 75%) cannot be found in either the published notes or CE 397. Some fifteen of these pieces of information involve measurements and numbers that are not found in the published record. (p. 162)

    So where did these other “facts” come from? The author makes the argument that, contrary to the Humes-Specter fabrication about the burning of the original autopsy draft, this report actually survived. He believes it was around until about November 26th. That it began to be revised and altered in the office of Admiral C. B. Galloway on Sunday afternoon after Jack Ruby killed Oswald. (I should add here that McKnight is not appreciative of the efforts of Jeremy Gunn in what turned out to be the last examination of Humes. He feels Gunn did not press him hard enough.)

    The chapter on the autopsy concludes with a quite interesting discussion of the cipher of Dr. George Burkley, Kennedy’s personal physician. As others have noted, Burkley was in the presidential motorcade, in the Parkland emergency room, with the body on Air Force One, in the Bethesda morgue, and in the ambulance returning the body back to the White House. He was the one physician who was with the body the entire time after the shooting. Hopefully, this would have put him in position to resolve some of the conflicts over the medical evidence, or at least explain how they came about. Realizing his importance, what did the Commission do with him?

    Incredibly, JFK’s personal physician was never called to testify. Commission assistant counsel Specter never interviewed Burkley or asked him to prepare a statement on his observations of the president’s wounds or any information he might have relating to the assassination. The FBI and the Secret Service never mentioned him before or after they submitted their respective reports…to the Warren Commission. (p. 177) One of the reasons that may have given Specter pause before deposing Burkley was the fact that he had signed President Kennedy’s death certificate. This document placed the back wound at the level of the third thoracic vertebra. Which is much lower than where the Gerald Ford-revised Warren Report placed it: at the base of back of the neck. And at this level, a bullet headed downward would not be able to exit the throat. Since Specter’s main function was to enthrone the single bullet theory, the last thing he wanted was to place in the record a debate over this document. What makes the document even more interesting is the point of reference used for the wound placement. It is more accurate than what the pathologists used. Dr. Finck located the point in an odd way. He measured from the mastoid process to the acromin, or tip of the right shoulder. These are not fixed body landmarks. In his ARRB interview, Finck stated that “JFK’s spine, a fixed landmark, was the correct and only point of reference to determine the accurate location of this posterior wound.” (p. 179) Like Burkley did. As the author notes, one has to wonder if Finck’s measuring points were deliberately chosen in order to disguise just where the posterior entrance was. If so, then Burkley was not in on this obfuscatory design. Which made him a most valuable witness. Further, Burkley’s placement is corroborated by much more evidence than the Warren Report’s, e.g. the holes in Kennedy’s shirt and jacket, observations by both FBI and Secret Service agents, the autopsy face sheet, and, as we shall see, the FBI reenactment in Dallas. Ultimately, what the death certificate does is not just call into question the magic bullet theory, but also the number of shots, and whether the back wound exited at all. In sum, it had the potential to scuttle the Warren Report. Which is probably why it does not appear in either the report or the 26 volumes of evidence. McKnight ends his discussion of Burkley by noting that when author Henry Hurt called the doctor to arrange an interview he replied that he felt the Kennedy case was a conspiracy. When the writer tried to follow up this conversation with a full-length interview, Burkley promptly refused.

    McKnight’s two chapters on the ballistics evidence are equally compelling. For months of its existence, the Commission tried to ignore the ricochet hit to bystander James Tague off the curb. Even though they were aware of it, as late as June of 1964, Specter was trying to discount its importance. (p. 185) Tague was not deposed until July 23, 1964. This only occurred because Dallas reporter Tom Dillard asked the U.S. attorney for north Texas a question about Tague during a public appearance. The attorney then sent a registered letter, including a photo, to Rankin. So now, in July, the drafts of the report finally included the curb strike. And now, since he was down to two bullets for Kennedy and Connally, Specter had the unenviable task of stitching together the single bullet theory. As with the medical evidence and Burkley, Specter ignored his best witness.

    Dr. Joseph Dolce had spent three years as a battlefield surgeon in the Pacific Theater during World War II. He retired as a full Colonel. In 1964 he was chairman of the army’s Wounds Ballistic Board. As McKnight describes his stature in the field:

    When the Commission asked the army for its top ballistics man, it sent Dolce. He was regarded so highly as an expert on wounds from high-velocity weapons…that in the event of a serious injury to any VIP in Congress or in the administration, he was to “be called to go over the case.” (p. 186)

    The problem for Specter was that Dolce concluded Connally was hit by two shots. He also stated that the magic bullet, CE 399, could not have shattered the governor’s wrist and remained pristine. Dolce later recalled a meeting with several experts and Commission staff. He said it was Specter who battled hardest for the viability of CE 399.

    Dolce then participated in experiments conducted at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. These were done with Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano, a hundred 6.5 mm bullets, and ten cadaver wrists. Dolce told film-maker Chip Selby that in each and every instance the bullet was “markedly deformed” after firing. (p. 187) Dolce was never called as a Commission witness. And Specter never questioned any of the ballistics experts about the above experiment. (p. 189) Specter then requested a reenactment in Dealey Plaza. Yet on the FBI stand-in for President Kennedy, the chalk mark signifying the back wound is at the point where Burkley described it: the third thoracic vertebra. And this appears in Chapter 8 of the report, photograph 12. (p. 192)

    In his draft report, Specter ignored all of the above. He wrote that “all medical findings established” that a single bullet caused Connally’s wounds. Dolce’s name did not appear in his June 10th report. In fact, the actual report on the Edgewood firing experiments did not appear in the Warren Report or in any of the 26 volumes. It was not declassified until 1972. (p. 197)

    Dolce was upset by what the Commission had done with these experiments. Years later, he wanted to talk to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He wished to testify that the actual report on the experiment had been altered before it was submitted to the Commission. He wanted to share the original report with the new investigating body. He conveyed this wish to his senator Lawton Chiles, who passed it on to a congressional representative on the committee. Yet Dolce was never called as a witness by the HSCA. Dolce has been mentioned before in the literature on the case. But as with other matters outlined above, McKnight goes further in both length and depth about this crucial witness than anyone before him.

    V

    Another major aspect of Breach of Trust are McKnight’s sections dealing with Oswald’s activities that intersected with the CIA and FBI. The author rightly discounts the remarkably feeble Warren Commission report on Oswald in Mexico City. This rather brief essay by David Slawson and William Coleman shrivels like a crushed grape in comparison to the volume prepared by Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez for the House Select Committee. As McKnight notes, the Warren Commission’s given itinerary for Oswald — Mexico City to Cuba to Russia — made little sense. Prior to this, “He had shown no interest in returning to Russia, and by all indications the Soviet state had no interest in allowing the anti-Soviet Oswald back into the country. (p. 61)

    Oswald’s attention and activities had now turned from Russia to Cuba, and he now actually denigrated the Soviet system when asked about it. Also, Oswald had no funds to stay in Cuba for any extended period of time, let alone go on to Russia. He had been out of work for nearly two months prior to going south of the border. As the author notes, the Slawson-Coleman report was based almost exclusively on information originating with the CIA. (p. 63) Because of this reliance, all the intelligence tradecraft in Mexico City — later revealed in the Hardway-Lopez Report — went unnoticed in its predecessor: the false phone calls attributed to Oswald, the missing photos and audiotape recordings, the survey of the infallible surveillance system the CIA had in place, the human sources inside the Cuban consulate, the key but questionable roles played by David Phillips and Ann Goodpasture. And, above all, the question of an imposter posing as Oswald. In relation to all this, the author writes of the Slawson-Coleman Report:

    The Commission must be credited, at least, for correctly reporting that Oswald was in Mexico City from September 27 to October 2, 1963. Much of the rest of the Warren Report’s treatment of Oswald in Mexico City cannot be safely assumed to be an accurate account. (p. 64)

    From here, the book goes on to note all the inconsistencies and oddities in the documentary record that should have indicated to any honest inquiry that something was wrong with the CIA’s story. A story which on 11/23 the CIA was pushing on President Johnson, particularly, “his alleged contact with the Soviet consular official Valery V. Kostikov” who the CIA reported “was a sabotage and assassination expert.” (p. 66)

    At this point the author shrewdly and forcefully points out that there was one person in Washington who had reservations about this tale as early as the 23rd. He was J. Edgar Hoover. McKnight summarizes a phone conversation the president had with the director on that day about Oswald in Mexico City:

    …Hoover admitted that the evidence so far was “not very strong.” Hoover then related some news that must have captured the president’s attention — there was evidence that someone in Mexico City had been impersonating Lee Harvey Oswald, the charged assassin of President Kennedy. (p. 67)

    The Commission’s main investigating arm was on the verge of uncovering an ersatz trail, with all the ramifications that unmasking could entail, including who Oswald was and what his purpose in Mexico really concerned. (Hoover’s doubts about this part of the story grew as time went on. He later scribbled in his famous marginalia that the CIA had handed them a “snowjob” about Oswald in Mexico City.) The CIA now realized it was on thin ice about this aspect and it began to forcefully crowd out the Bureau with the Commission on Mexico City. Director of Plans Richard Helms actually wrote the Bureau and the Commission letters making this clear. And when the Bureau discovered that other CIA reports trying to blame Castro for the murder, e.g. the Gilberto Alvarado tale, were also diaphanous, the Agency now switched its story:

    Eventually the CIA would drop the pretense of any Oswald-Kostikov connection when the White House unmistakably signaled that it was not interested in any “Red plot”, real or manufactured. In July…Richard Helms…disclosed to Rankin that…Oswald met with Pavel A. Yatskov not Kostikov. (p. 70)

    President Johnson was so against the “Oswald as a Red agent” line that he removed a diplomat who was pushing it from office, Thomas Mann, the American ambassador to Mexico. Needless to say, none of this extraordinarily relevant and compelling information made it into the Warren Report.

    The intelligence strand between Oswald and the FBI that gets lengthy treatment here is the infamous Hosty note. This is a written communication left by Oswald in the Dallas FBI office for James Hosty who was attempting to interview Marina Oswald. Reportedly a violent threat, the note was kept by the Bureau and then destroyed after the assassination by Hosty on orders from office chief Gordon Shanklin. The Commission had heard of this note through the testimony of Ruth Paine. (p. 260) Again, this incident should have raised the investigatory antennae of the Commission a few feet in the air. If it was a threat of a violent nature, the FBI should have reported it to the Secret Service. Oswald would then have been passed on to the Protective Research Section (PRS) headed by Robert Bouck. They would have found out he worked along the motorcade route and he likely would have been surveilled or detained that day.

    Yet, as noted here, before 11/22/63, “Oswald’s name was not known to the PRS.” (p. 250) What makes this even more curious is that Hosty was handling the Oswald file in Dallas. (Ibid) Hosty had information about Oswald’s trip to Mexico and his visits to the two communist embassies. Finally, as Hosty revealed later, he believed that Marina was some kind of KGB-planted “sleeper agent” (p. 254) In November, when he attempted to interview Marina, it was about Oswald’s calls to the Soviet Embassy. It was this visit to the Paine household in search of Marina that prompted Oswald to deliver the note to the FBI office. So the Bureau had 2-3 weeks to convey this important information to the Secret Service. They did not. Further, Oswald had written a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington in which he mentioned Hosty and the FBI. (p. 258)

    Finally, Hosty had found out himself that Oswald worked at the Texas School Book Depository on the motorcade route. When the man running the Oswald inquiry at the Bureau, Alan Belmont, learned all this he realized what a blow the note and Hosty’s inaction would be to the Bureau’s image. He relayed his displeasure to Shanklin and Shanklin told Hosty to ditch the note, which he did by flushing it down the toilet. When Hosty was questioned, the Commission did not mention the note or its fate, nor did Hosty volunteer any information about it. Hosty’s testimony, excerpted by Knight, borders on the comical. When asked if he even thought about Oswald in relation to Kennedy’s upcoming visit or the motorcade route, Hosty replied with a simple “No.” (p. 261)

    The author’s discussion of this episode is thorough, detailed, and provocative. In passing, he mentions some clear questions it all poses:

    1. Would someone contemplating killing the president leave a threatening note in the office of the local FBI?
    2. If Hosty suspected either of the Oswalds as communist sleeper agents, why did he not alert the Dallas Police beforehand?
    3. Why did the Commission go along with Hoover’s decision to strike a citation to Hosty in Oswald’s address book?
    4. Was Oswald some kind of informant to the Bureau, and did this explain Hosty’s negligence?

    The author ends this chapter on Hosty by showing how accommodating Rankin was to Hoover. Rankin told the Bureau that the Secret Service was angry with them about this clear lapse. The Bureau went to the top level of the Secret Service and got them to rein in the testimony of Robert Bouck before the Commission. Bouck never mentioned Hosty. (p. 280) The FBI was pleased with Rankin’s efforts. As assistant director Alex Rosen wrote, the Commission seemed satisfied with Hosty’s presentation. (p. 281)

    VI

    The real achievement of Breach of Trust is this: as much of it as I have described, there is still as much that I have left out. To write at length about all of it would make this review much too long. But to briefly mention some samples:

    1. It was Rankin’s idea to classify the executive sessions Top Secret. (p. 89)
    2. The Sibert-O’Neill report on the autopsy was so disturbing that neither of the agents was called to testify. (pgs 91-92)
    3. Hoover and James Angleton discouraged any move toward an independent staff. (p. 93)
    4. McKnight presents the best case for Oswald not being on the sixth floor that I have seen, with corroborating witnesses that I did not recall. (pgs. 115-116)
    5. There is no evidence that the FBI did a cotton swab test to see if the Mannlicher- Carcano was fired that day. (p. 121)
    6. The Commission conspired with the FBI to keep the exculpatory results of the spectrographic tests out of the record. (p.125)
    7. The Commission was so sensitive to the rumors of Oswald’s government agent status that Rankin tried to falsify the record of the January 22, 1964 meeting. (pgs 128-135)
    8. Rankin covered up the information the Commission had that Oswald may have been given a CIA source number. (pgs. 137-140)
    9. According to the FBI analysis of the Zapruder film, the first shot came at frame 170, when the limousine was hidden by the branches of an oak tree. (pgs. 150-153)
    10. Rankin plotted in advance to avoid an accurate stenographic record of the 9/18/64 executive session in order to disguise Sen. Russell’s dissent about the single bullet theory. Thereby falsely presenting it as a unanimous decision. (pgs. 294-95)

    And even this still does not do complete justice to this extraordinary, magisterial book. One that should serve as a model for what can be achieved in the field with the new declassifications by the ARRB. What McKnight has done has deepened our understanding of just how badly the Warren Commission served the public. But by explaining also how and why it happened, he gives us a new version, one in stereo and high definition. At the end of Rush to Judgment, Mark Lane wrote that the Warren Report dishonored “those who wrote it little more than those who praise it.” This book makes you feel the sting of that dishonor more than any other book that I know. But, as with the best work in the field, it helps us transcend that shame with the beauty and power of pure understanding. And with that achievement, this volume joins my list of the top ten ever written in the field.

  • BBC RFK Update

    June 2007

    In David Talbot’s new book Brothers he reveals that both he and Jefferson Morley of the Washington Post Online did a follow up inquiry on the Shane O’Sullivan report with the BBC. The investigation was commissioned by The New Yorker. According to Talbot’s book, the pair traveled widely, “interviewing dozens of relatives, friends and former colleagues” of their principal subjects (p. 397). They discovered that Gordon Campbell “died in 1962, making it impossible for him to have been filmed in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel” (Ibid). In an interview with Rex Bradford Talbot revealed that they had also attained good photos of both Morales and Joannides taken around the 1968 time period. When they were compared to the BBC Ambassador Hotel footage, it was evident that they did not match. Or as Talbot told Bradford, “…it’s simply not the man caught on camera at the Ambassador.”

    Interestingly, the New Yorker decided against publishing an article based on this work. Talbot, as of yet, has not revealed the reasons behind this curious decision.

    The BBC RFK Report

    February 2007

    On November 20, 2006, the British Broadcasting Corporation showed a 15-minute report about the Robert Kennedy assassination. Put together by Shane O’Sullivan, it is supposed to be part of a longer documentary work-in-progress.

    The BBC report began with the late Larry Teeter, former attorney for Sirhan Sirhan, going over the autopsy evidence in the Robert Kennedy case. As most people know, this evidence strongly indicates a conspiracy. The report then used some photographs and films to present the case that there were three CIA officers at the Ambassador Hotel the night RFK was killed. They were identified as David Morales, Gordon Campbell, and George Joannides. All three men are known to have worked out of the infamous Miami CIA station codenamed JM/WAVE in the sixties.

    The basis for the photo identifications were four men who had interacted with the trio in the sixties and seventies. Wayne Smith, a former State Department employee, worked with Morales when Smith was stationed in Cuba in the late fifties and sixties. Ed Lopez, a former investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, interacted with Joannides in the seventies when the latter was the CIA liaison to the Committee. Brad Ayers, who worked out of JM/WAVE in the early sixites, identified Campbell and Morales. And another CIA operative, David Rabern, also identified Morales since he knew him at that same time. Rabern says he was actually at the Ambassador that night and added that he recalled Morales talking to Campbell, even though he did not know who Campbell was at the time.

    The BBC special is designed to give the impression that O’Sullivan discovered these photos and put together this evidence. But if you take a look at the entry for Brad Ayers on the JFK Research Forum on the Spartacus school.net site, you will learn that Ayers told Jeremy Gunn of the Assassination Records Review Board back in 1995 that he had a “credible witness who can put David Morales inside the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night of June 5, 1968.” It seems that Ayers is clearly referring to Rabern here. O’Sullivan does not make it clear that he knew this in advance. He seems to indicate that Ayers led him to Rabern. But if that is the case then Ayers already knew that Rabern would make the ID. Further, Ayers was predisposed to making the Morales ID himself since he found Rabern credible at the much earlier date. The Campbell identification is totally reliant on Ayers, since Rabern did not seem to know who he was in 1968.

    The BBC report also included a short interview with Robert Walton. Walton first appeared in Gaeton Fonzi’s memoir about his HSCA experience entitled The Last Investigation. And for all intents and purposes that book, published in 1993, is where Morales first figured in any significant way in the JFK case. Fonzi mentions Ayers there and talks about some investigatory work Ayers did on his former colleague Morales. Fonzi concluded his section on Morales by introducing Walton. Walton, who did some legal work for Morales, related a story in which he was drinking with Morales one night. President Kennedy’s name came up and Morales exploded in anger at what Kennedy had done to the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. The tirade concluded with the following line: “Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” (Fonzi, p. 390)

    The source given by Fonzi for this quote is Walton. But in the BBC special this quote is now expanded in both length and reference points. Walton now states that Morales said he was in Dallas when “we got that mother fucker and in LA when we got that little fucker.” This is a serious revision of the original comment since it now means that Morales was actually on the scene in not just one place for one assassination but in both. It is hard to believe that Fonzi would not have recorded and printed the much more specific quote back in 1993. But the altered quote does jibe with what the BBC report is now saying.

    Ever since Fonzi’s book came out, the Morales angle has had a strong influence on the literature. For example, Noel Twyman in Bloody Treason spent a lot of time examining what Morales did with the CIA. And Morales is also mentioned a lot in that bloated piece of pap, Ultimate Sacrifice. But this is the first time in a printed or broadcast report that a named witness connected him to the RFK case.

    Ayers has been obsessed with Morales for a long time. As Lisa Pease notes on her Real History blog, he once tried to convince her and myself that Morales was involved in the MLK case. But he did not tell us at the time about Morales and the RFK case and he never mentioned David Rabern. If one believes Ayers, then Morales was somehow involved with the murders of JFK, MLK, and RFK. He told us that he thought Morales actually ran the street operation in Dealey Plaza. But, strangely, it was not for the CIA. Back then he thought it was for Barry Goldwater and he linked this to the notorious 1976 murder of Arizona reporter Don Bolles. It was somehow a way for Goldwater to get elected in 1964.

    An interesting question is why was Rabern at the Ambassador that night? If he was a covert operator, was he from the liberal wing of the CIA who supported RFK? And how does he remember Campbell so clearly talking to Morales if he did not know who Campbell was back in 1968? If one takes this report at face value, there were four CIA operatives at the Ambassador that night. All out in the open in the midst of cameras, film equipment, and tape recorders. And if Rabern recognized Morales, didn’t Morales recognize Rabern? If so, what did he say to him?

    Now, the BBC report has stirred at least two reactions. Mel Ayton, a British anti-conspiracy author, wrote up a reply about a week later, and updated it a week after that. The first part of his response is worthless since it uses the shameful work of Dan Moldea to respond to the points made by Teeter. But he does bring up some notable disagreement with the photo identifications. For instance, Dan Hardway who worked with Lopez at the HSCA did not identify Joannides in the pictures. He said his encounter with him was too long ago for him to venture an opinion on the matter. Ayton says he talked to Grayston Lynch, who also worked out of JM/WAVE and knew Campbell. Ayton writes, “According to Lynch the man in the LAPD film footage is not Campbell.” Ayton also quotes a man named Col. Manuel Chavez who worked with Morales for a period of time in 1964. Chavez says the man depicted in the special “does not look like Dave Morales.”

    Now the above does not mean that the BBC special is wrong, but it does point up the problems with using photo identification as a tool to solve a crime. Tony Summers chimed in on this point by saying, “Photographs and photographic recognition are infamously unreliable, especially coming from witnesses so long after an event.” I should point out that in the JFK case, the photo identifications of the three tramps in Dealey Plaza have been a continual source of error and embarrassment. As has the alleged identification of Joseph Milteer along the motorcade route.

    In speaking with author David Talbot, he and Jefferson Morley were commissioned by The New Yorker to do a follow up story on the BBC report. Talbot has been working for years on a book about Robert Kennedy. The New Yorker got hold of a galley proof of his long-awaited book and they were impressed. They are going to excerpt the book and also do a supplementary report on this alleged identification. This report is scheduled to run in May. Hopefully Morley and Talbot will be able to do more ground work on the matter. Like, for example, finding the three CIA officers next of kin and asking if they were with them on that rather memorable night.

  • David Talbot, Brothers

    With his book Brothers David Talbot has improved as a commentator on both the Kennedy presidency and JFK’s assassination. For those unfamiliar with Talbot’s earlier foray into the field, let me provide some background.

    On March 29,1992, on the eve of the Oscar presentations, Talbot wrote an article on the film JFK for a periodical he edited called Image Magazine, published by the San Francisco Examiner. In the first paragraph (p. 17) he ridiculed Stone’s thesis — that Kennedy was cut down by those in government who were opposed to his goals of peace and social justice– as a “story” that “Stone and company” were peddling (he mentioned others in the “company” as Mark Lane and Jim Garrison). He then offered up an alternative view of the assassination that he wrote “has been quietly gaining credibility. According to this school of thought, Jack Kennedy met a violent end because he was as much a prince of darkness as he was of light.” (Ibid) He then spent seven pages offering up what was basically the idea behind that ridiculous book Double Cross: that far from being an enemy of the Mob, ” John Kennedy’s links with the underworld are well-established.” But this did not stop him from “unleashing his brother … to hound the godfathers of organized crime … The supremely confident Jack Kennedy thought he could have it both ways. He couldn’t, and he paid the ultimate price for his hubris.” (p. 18) Talbot knew a guy who was savvy about the case and would steer his readers straight. His name was Robert Blakey and his book Fatal Hour presented ” a compelling case for a darker interpretation of Camelot.” (Ibid) He also had another talismanic book in hand. It was on Marilyn Monroe and her death: Goddess by Anthony Summers. ( In deference to Summers, part of the article included a defense of the Warren Commission.) Talbot also praised Mafia Kingfish by John Davis and described the three mentioned books as “careful and thorough” and “of a far higher grade than that of the wild-eyed theorists who are grabbing the spotlight.” Just when you thought the piece could not get any worse, it did. Talbot has “intriguing new evidence”, the claims of Mafia lawyer Frank Ragano:

    Blakey … says flatly, “I believe Frank Ragano. He was in a position to know.” Investigative journalist Dan Moldea, whose 1978 book on Hoffa was the first to draw a link between organized crime and the assassination, says, “The Ragano story is the most important breakthrough on the case since the House report.” (p. 23)

    About John Newman’s then important new work on JFK’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam and Stone’s use of it, Talbot quotes Summers thusly: “There is as much evidence that JFK was shot because of his Vietnam policy as that he was done in by a jealous mistress with a bow and arrow.”(p. 24) Blakey further contravenes Stone by saying that both the CIA and FBI “loved Jack Kennedy” since many were Irish Catholics.

    I am not misrepresenting the piece in any way. Quite the contrary. Talbot even gave space to two of the very worst and dishonest Kennedy chroniclers, namely Ron Rosenbaum and Thomas Reeves. But the good news is that in Brothers Talbot has largely reversed field. Today he criticizes people who write like he formerly did about the Kennedys, e.g. Christopher Hitchens. But the bad news is that he can’t quite go the last yard. He can’t quite let go of some of the empty baggage above. And this mars the good work in the volume.

    I

    The book has a neat plan to it. It begins with Robert Kennedy’s reaction to the news of his brother’s death in Dallas. The structure then flashes back to a year-by-year review of the Kennedy presidency. It then picks up again with RFK after his brother’s death, and then follows him forward through to 1968 and his own assassination. It concludes with a summary of the actions taken to try and resolve the issues surrounding both assassinations since 1968. The book takes in a lot of space without being verbose or pretentiously bulky. Which, after the likes of Ultimate Sacrifice, is a relief. Further in this regard, Talbot is a skillful writer. So the book is not at all difficult to read.

    In many ways, the first chapter is the best in the book. It opens with J. Edgar Hoover telling RFK that his brother has been shot. In conversations with two assistants, Bobby immediately refers to the perpetrator of the crime as “they” and not “him”. He instinctively believes that the crime centers around the CIA, the Mafia and Cuba and he begins to question people with access to each group, including John McCone, Director of the CIA. (pgs. 6-9) When the body arrives back in Washington, RFK questions Secret Service agents Roy Kellerman and James Rowley and finds that both believe there was a crossfire in Dealey Plaza.

    Talbot then builds an argument that this early conclusion is what caused Robert Kennedy to take control of the president’s autopsy exhibits, specifically the brain and tissue slides. Further, Talbot adduces evidence that RFK actually thought of taking the limousine also. After Oswald is killed by Ruby, Bobby begins to focus on the Mob and has labor lawyer Julius Draznin submit a report on Ruby’s labor racketeering activities. RFK then told his friend Pat Moynihan to investigate the Secret Service while Bobby interviewed agent Clint Hill himself.

    This chapter closes with a review of William Walton’s mission to Moscow in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination. This extraordinary tale first surfaced in 1997 in one of the two best books on the Cuban Missile Crisis, One Hell of a Gamble. (The other volume being The Kennedy Tapes, published the same year.) Talbot goes into the background of Walton and why he was sent by RFK and Jackie Kennedy to send a secret message via Georgi Bolshakov who the Kennedys had used previously during the Missile Crisis as a back channel. RFK told Walton to see Bolshakov before he even reported to the American ambassador Foy Kohler. Bobby thought Kohler was anti-Kennedy, and a hardliner who could not get anything real done with the Russians. (p. 31) This new message had been presaged by another talk RFK had with the Russian in 1962. At that time Bobby told Bolshakov that Khrushchev did not seem to realize that every step his brother took to meet the premier “halfway costs my brother a lot of effort … .In a gust of blind hate, his enemies may go to any length, including killing him.” (p. 32)

    The new message fulfilled the earlier prophecy. Walton told Bolshakov that the president’s brother and widow believed that JFK had been killed by a large political conspiracy. And although Lee Harvey Oswald was a former defector and alleged Castro sympathizer, they believed the conspiracy was domestic. Further, they felt that Lyndon Johnson would not be able to fulfill President Kennedy’s grand design for Russo/American dÈtente. That design would have to be filled by RFK who would find a temporary political base and then run for president himself. Walton said in this regard that “Robert agreed completely with his brother and, more important, actively sought to bring John F. Kennedy’s ideas to fruition.” (p. 33)

    Talbot sums up the multi-layered significance of this momentous mission this way: “There is no other conclusion to reach. In the days following his brother’s bloody ouster, Robert Kennedy placed more trust in the Soviet government than the one he served.” (p. 34) From here, Talbot launches into a three chapter review of the Kennedy presidency which is meant to demonstrate why RFK felt more comfortable conveying his hidden suspicions about Dallas to the Soviets rather than say to the Warren Commission.

    This chapter is the highlight of the book. It may be one of the most important ever written on either the Kennedy presidency, or Robert Kennedy himself. It basically confirms through much firsthand evidence what many have suspected. First, whatever Bobby said in public about the Warren Commission was only a figleaf. From the beginning, he never believed the lone gunman mythology. He always suspected a powerful domestic conspiracy. Second, he was going to bide his time. He would wait until he was in position to do something about the crime. But he would not jeopardize his path to get to that position by making public comments that would make him a media target in America. As pointed out by people like Jim Garrison and Harold Weisberg, this strategy entailed its own dangers. For enough people knew about Bobby’s suspicions and goals to let the word reach out to others in the power elite. And this is probably one of the chief reasons for what happened in Los Angeles in June of 1968. In fact, both Harold Weisberg and Vincent Salandria predicted that if Bobby won that California primary, and if he remained silent in the interim, he would be killed before he won the presidency. Although Talbot does not go this far in explicit terms, his book is pregnant with that implication. I believe this is the first time that this message, however subliminal, has been contained in a book that reached a mainstream audience. That is a real and salutary accomplishment. In this regard, Talbot deserves kudos.

    II

    The second section of the book is a review of the Kennedy presidency that is meant to explain why RFK felt the way he did at the time of the assassination. This is about 200 pages long and takes up Chapters 2-4. Although generally good, it is much more a mixed bag.

    He opens this with an analysis of the Bay of Pigs debacle. He comes to the conclusion that others have before him: the CIA knew it would fail and they were counting on Kennedy to cave and send in the Navy to complete the job. He quotes the declassified CIA Inspector General Report as saying that the planners actually knew they needed help form the Pentagon in order for the operation to succeed. (p. 48) From this disaster he rightly notes that the die was now cast between the national security apparatus and JFK. He quotes Navy Secretary Arleigh Burke as saying “Mr. Kennedy was a very bad president … He permitted himself to jeopardize the nation.” (p. 50) He then quotes Kennedy as saying, “We’re not going to plunge into an irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in this country puts so-called national pride above national reason.” (p. 51) Arthur Schlesinger told Talbot that after the Bay of Pigs Kennedy dismissed the Joint Chiefs “as a bunch of old men. He thought (JCS Chairman) Lemnitzer was a dope.” (Ibid) It is at this pivotal point that Kennedy began to withdraw from his formal advisers with disdain and turn more to people like quasi-pacifist Ted Sorenson, Pierre Salinger, and his brother Robert. (p. 52) And he actually told Walton, “I am almost a “peace-at-any-price president.” (p. 53)

    Since Talbot correctly sees the Bay of Pigs as a (perhaps “the”) seminal event in Kennedy’s presidency, it is profitable to note his approach to the subject. Although his analysis is skillful, pointed, and shrewd, it is not really deep or detailed. There are many things he leaves out which could be used to strengthen his beliefs about its being designed to fail, and how the CIA was opposed to Kennedy’s plans for its outcome all along. For instance, he does not mention the assassination plans, which were kept from Kennedy. He doesn’t write about Operation Forty, which the CIA designed to wipe out the Kennedy Cubans and their leadership so the CIA/Batista Cubans would prevail in Havana. Although he later writes about Operation Northwoods, he doesn’t write about the Guantanamo provocation part of the Bay of Pigs, which although it was aborted, would have almost insured an American response. In the aftermath, although he mentions Kennedy’s firing of Dulles and Director of Plans Dick Bissell, he leaves out the termination of Deputy Director Charles Cabell. Yet it was Pentagon man Cabell who was at CIA headquarters that night trying to get the analysts to tell Kennedy that the Cubans were using Russian MIG’s to strafe the exiles on the beach. This was utterly false but would have put pressure on Kennedy to send in American planes to knock them down. So although his discussion of the incident is good and correct, I believed it lacks texture and layered depth. I point this out because it is generally symptomatic of how Talbot treats the two other great confrontations of the Kennedy presidency, namely the Missile Crisis and the decision to withdraw from Vietnam. He is deft and accurate in his appraisal of these events, but he leaves out some valuable information that I think would aid his argument and make it more compelling to his reader. For example, although he believes that Kennedy was disengaging from Vietnam he writes that the only White House document that gave some indication of this was NSAM 263. (p. 216) This ignores, among others, the record of the May 1963 Sec/Def meeting which clearly shows that the administration was withdrawing from the conflagration and rapidly increasing the Vietnamization of the war. (Probe Vol. 5 No. 3) It also leaves out the fact that although, according to Doug Horne, the ARRB tried very hard to find a similar record for the famous Honolulu Conference of November 20, 1963, they could not. This meeting resulted in the tentative draft of NSAM 273, which was then pointedly altered after Kennedy was assassinated. These alterations were so serious that in his fine book JFK and Vietnam, John Newman titles his chapter on the subject, “NSAM-273 — The Dam Breaks.” (Newman, p. 445) (Surprisingly, Talbot does not include that key volume in his bibliography.) Another surprise in this section is what I see as an error of omission. The author completely ignores the entire Congo crisis. Which, in my view, is almost an object lesson in Kennedy’s foreign policy thinking versus the Republican-Democratic establishment. Why Talbot would discuss the Dominican Republic crisis, and not the almost epochal struggle of Patrice Lumumba and Kennedy in Africa, is puzzling. And again, it is surprising to me that Talbot does not list in his bibliography Richard Mahoney’s sterling book on the subject, JFK: Ordeal in Africa. It is simply one of the three or four best books on Kennedy’s foreign policy views in existence.

    But there is much to like in this section. There is a fascinating interview with Dick Goodwin in which he describes his long discussion with Che Guevara about a peaceful co-existence agreement with Kennedy. And how when this overture got out, Barry Goldwater called for Goodwin’s head. Talbot describes the infamous meeting in July of 1961 where Lemnitzer and Dulles recommended plans for a nuclear first strike against Russia on Kennedy. Talbot also describes how Kennedy, feeling the heat from the organized opposition to his liberal foreign policy, was forced to demote both Goodwin add Chester Bowles at the end of 1961.

    The book features a good discussion of the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. In this section he is explicit about the duplicity of Richard Helms in attempting to switch the blame for those plots from the CIA to the Kennedys. (pgs 87-88) He neatly notes that Helms had photos of all the presidents he served except Kennedy’s. He even notes that Helms in death, was still deceptive about those plots in his posthumous memoir. (p. 110) A deft stroke by Talbot in this regard is his (further) exposure of Sy Hersh’s hatchet job, The Dark Side of Camelot. He notes how Hersh was so cozy with the CIA in his writing of this book that he trusted covert operator Sam Halpern. Halpern told Hersh that RFK used the late Charles Ford to activate Mafia assets in Cuba to destabilize, and even kill, Castro. Talbot found a Church Committee memorandum by Ford. In discussing his interview with them he explained that his meetings with RFK on Cuba were about “the efforts of a Cuban exile group to foment an anti-Castro uprising, not on Mafia assassination plots.” (p. 123) Talbot properly concludes that Helms and Halpern “fabricated their story about Bobby Kennedy and the Mafia … Officials like Helms and Halpern tried to deflect public outrage over their unseemly collusion by pinning the blame on the late attorney general.” Talbot could have added here that Halpern should have already been suspect to Hersh because he is listed as a witness in the CIA IG Report on the plots, which never mentions any of this material. Further, Halpern was placed in charge of the internal investigation of the CIA’s supersensitive Operation Forty. A report that, to my knowledge, has yet to surface. The man who placed him in that position was Helms.

    There are other good sections in this part of the book. To enumerate some: there is a close-up look — done with a new audio tape– at JFK’s disappointed reaction to the performance of the military during the James Meredith crisis at the University of Mississippi. (And he also reveals that Edwin Walker was on hand to stir up the racists against Kennedy and the military.) There is a long discussion of the character and role of the sad Lisa Howard in the famous Cuban back channel that she was instrumental in during 1963. And Talbot notes that during the Diem crisis in South Vietnam that same year, the CIA moved station chief John Richardson out of town “allowing the agency to cooperate with the South Vietnamese generals behind the plot.” (p. 218) Right before this, Talbot has described the famous reports by journalists John Starnes and Arthur Krock warning how the CIA was running affairs there with no accountability to anyone. And Krock warned the president he had to get control of his administration.

    But as I said, this section has peaks and valleys. Right along with the good and worthwhile work noted above, Talbot writes a section about that serial and certified liar Ed Partin (pgs 120-121). As I explained at length in my review of Ultimate Sacrifice, Partin was exposed by a group of certified polygraph technicians to be lying when he related the “death threats” by Jimmy Hoffa against RFK. How bad was he lying? To the extent that the machine had to be turned down when he was relating these urban myths. Later on, one of Partin’s polygraph operators was indicted and convicted for fraud. Yet Talbot blindly trots out Partin once again, ignoring both these facts, and the man’s past record of crimes. (I chalk this up to Talbot’s swallowing Walter Sheridan whole, an issue I will deal with later.) I was even more surprised when Talbot used none other than Angelo Murgado as another “RFK insider” (pgs. 177-182, 269-270). I dealt with this shady character in my review of Joan Mellen’s book on Jim Garrison, A Farewell to Justice. Talbot even writes that his tale has not been refuted. (p. 180) Apparently he did not read my discussion of Murgado’s tortuous and tendentious revision of the Odio incident in the previous book. But he still buys the Murgado line about RFK using Cubans like Murgado and Manuel Artime as his own private intelligence force. Further, that they knew about Oswald in advance. Wisely, Talbot does not reveal who Murgado’s other pal in the intelligence operation was, namely Bernardo DeTorres. If he had, some readers would have started raising their eyebrows.

    Finally, in this regard, I must comment on the book’s treatment of JFK and Mary Meyer. I was quite surprised that, as with Sheridan, Talbot swallowed the whole apple on this one. As I have written, (The Assassinations pgs 338-345), any serious chronicler has to be just as careful with this episode as with Judith Exner — and to his credit, Talbot managed to avoid that disinformation filled land mine. Before criticizing him on this, and before I get smeared by people like Jon Simkin, I want to make a public confession. I actually believed the Meyer nonsense at one time. In fact, to my everlasting chagrin, I discussed it — Timothy Leary and all — at a talk I did in San Francisco about a year after Oliver Stone’s JFK came out. It wasn’t until I began to examine who Leary was, who his associates were, and how he fit into the whole explosion of drugs into the USA in the sixties and seventies that I began to question who he was. In light of this, I then reexamined his Mary Meyer story, and later the whole legerdemain around this fanciful tale. Thankfully, Talbot does not go into the whole overwrought “mystery” about her death and her mythologized diary. But he eagerly buys into everything else. Yet to do this, one has to believe some rather unbelievable people. And you then have to ignore their credibility problems so your more curious readers won’t ask any questions. For if they do the whole edifice starts to unravel.

    Foremost among this motley crew is Leary. As I was the first to note, there is a big problem with his story about Meyer coming to him in 1962 for psychedelic drugs. Namely, he didn’t write about it for 21 years previous –until 1983. He wrote about 25 books in the meantime. (Sort of like going through 25 FBI, Secret Service, and DPD interviews before you suddenly recall seeing Oswald on the sixth floor.) Yet it was not until he hooked up with the likes of Gordon Liddy that he suddenly recalled, with vivid memory, supplying Mary with LSD and her mentioning of her high official friend and commenting, “They couldn’t control him any more. He was changing too fast” etc. etc. etc. Another surprising source Talbot uses here is none other than CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, the guy who was likely handling Oswald until 1962. Talbot actually quotes the nutty Cold Warrior, Kennedy antagonist and Warren Commission cover up artist waxing poetic about Kennedy being in love with Mary: “They were in love … they had something very important.” (p. 199) This from a man who, later on, Talbot admits loathed JFK and actually thought he was a Soviet agent.! (p. 275). A further dubious source is Jim Truitt, the former friend of Ben Bradlee who used to work for him at the Washington Post and was also friends with Angleton. Consider: Truitt had been trying to discredit President Kennedy while he was alive by saying he was previously married and had it covered up. In fact, he had pushed this fatuous story on Bradlee. And it appears that Truitt then started the whole drug angle of the story as a way of getting back at Bradlee and the Post for firing him. By 1969 he was so unstable that his wife sought a conservatorship for him and then divorced him in 1971. Truitt tried to get a job with the CIA and when he did not he moved to Mexico into a colony of former CIA agents. There he grew and smoked the mescaline-based hallucinogenic drug peyote. This was his sorry state when he first reported to the press about the “turned on” Meyer/JFK romance. He then shot himself in 1981. Here you have a guy who was a long-time Kennedy basher, became mentally unstable, was a CIA wannabe, and was planting and taking hallucinogenics with other CIA agents– and then accuses JFK of doing the same, 14 years after the fact. Some witness, huh? I don’t even want to mention the last major source Talbot uses to complete this rickety shack. I have a hard time even typing his name. But I have to. Its sleazy biographer David Heymann. Heymann wrote one of the very worst books ever published on Bobby Kennedy, and has made a lucrative career out of trashing the Kennedy family. For me, Heymann is either a notch above or below the likes of Kitty Kelley. But when you’re that low, who’s measuring?

    III

    Talbot makes a nice recovery from the Mary Meyer (probably CIA inspired) cesspool with his next two chapters. He now begins to focus the book on RFK. After flashing back from 11/22/63, he now returns us to that point and picks up with RFK as he begins to assimilate himself to the pain of his brother’s death and his now completely altered future. He relates how Jackie Kennedy reaffirmed to Khrushchev via letter that domestic opposition to his quest for Soviet/American dÈtente had killed JFK. A concept which the Russian premier indirectly affirmed in his memoir when he wrote that if Kennedy had lived the two could have brought a peaceful coexistence to the world.

    Talbot quickly sketches in the fact that with his brother gone, Bobby was now under Hoover’s thumb. For example, when he met with Hoffa, to presumably talk about the assassination, RFK had to borrow Jackie’s Secret Service detail for protection. And after a deep period of melancholia, during which he actually wore his brother’s clothes, he decided that he would not give a quest for truth about Dallas. But he felt he could not move while he was slipping from power or, as he said, “there would be blood in the streets.” (p. 268) In addition to Hoover now superceding him, LBJ cut him out of intelligence briefings while, at the same time, Allen Dulles lobbied to get on the Warren Commission. (pgs. 273-274) And when the Warren Report was issued in September of 1964, RFK coyly commented, “I have not read the report, nor do I intend to.” (p. 280) Talbot quotes an aide whom Johnson had charged with reading the report that LBJ didn’t believe it either. (p. 289) Furthering this point about people in power, the author adds to his non-believer list Larry O’Brien, Mayor Richard Daley, and Kennedy aides Fred Dutton and Richard Goodwin. Goodwin specifically pointed to a plot between the CIA and the Mafia. (p. 303) And to further accent the point that neither JFK’s nor RFK’s staff believed the Warren Report, Talbot writes at length about the sad fate of Kenny O’Donnell. Both he and Dave Powers heard shots from the front of the car. Yet the FBI told them both to alter their testimony. In fact, Hoover personally intervened in the case of O’Donnell. (p. 294) As time went on, O’Donnell grew increasingly angry and bitter about the performance of the Commission. He told his son, “I’ll tell you this, they didn’t want to know.” (Ibid) And he added that it was the most pointless investigation he had ever seen. After Bobby was murdered, he acquired a serious drinking problem and died of a liver ailment at age 53. This was paralleled by the ordeal of Jackie Kennedy, who Talbot depicts as having screaming nightmares and maintaining thoughts of suicide. (p. 268)

    One of the more interesting aspects of this part of the book is this observation that Talbot makes: “While the country’s ruling caste — from President Johnson on down — muttered among themselves about a conspiracy, these same leaders worked strenuously — with the media’s collaboration — to calm the public’s fears.” (pgs 284-285) Talbot then twists this via anecdote into a droll kind of humor. When discussing the views of the wife of Arthur Schlesinger about the JFK case, she said she liked Claudia Furiati’s book, ZR/Rifle. Except for the part that pins the plot on Helms. She states: “I can’t believe the part about Dick Helms. He was a friend of ours. We played tennis with him.” (p. 291) Talbot talks to Marie Ridder, a former girlfriend of JFK, and widow of newspaper magnate Walter Ridder. She says that although Angleton was an evil genius, she didn’t think he was involved with killing Kennedy. After all, he used to live next door to her. He had a lushly landscaped house and was a fabulous gardener. She concludes from this, “and a man who is a fabulous gardener is not going to kill off a president, I’m sorry.” (p. 292) So the power elite believes there was a conspiracy. It just could not involve their tennis chums or neighbors.

    RFK delegated the reading of the critical literature to people like Adam Walinsky. (pgs 306-307). As criticism about the Warren Report picked up speed, various critics wanted to talk directly to Bobby. He only met with one, Penn Jones. As part of his own inquiry, Bobby went to Mexico City and did some work on Oswald’s trip down there. (p. 301) As his investigation continued, his enemies began to spy on him. In addition to Hoover, Talbot mentions both Helms and LBJ. (According to Talbot, Johnson greatly feared being challenged by a ticket of Kennedy and King in 1964 .) And clearly, the policy differences over places like the Dominican Republic, South Africa, Latin America, and especially Vietnam all begin to fan Johnson’s fear and paranoia about an RFK run in 1968.

    IV

    The worst chapter in the book, by far, is entitled “New Orleans”. This is allegedly about Robert Kennedy’s reaction to the investigation of the JFK case by local DA Jim Garrison. I have to use the word “allegedly” here because it seems to me that Talbot started this chapter with an assumption in mind and then piled the material in to fill out that assumption — whether it actually did or not. Authors get in trouble when they shoehorn evidence to fit a preordained verdict. And this chapter seems to me to be troublesome from the start.

    One problem seems to be a hangover from the David Talbot of 1992, the man who thought that Blakey was the ultimate authority on the JFK case and Garrison was somewhere between a circus clown and a charlatan. To say the least, the releases of the ARRB have not borne this out. And, to his credit, the author seems to have amended this judgment a bit. In spite of that, he presages his New Orleans chapter by calling it “a gaudy Louisiana legal spectacle” (p. 308). The whole first page of his introduction to Garrison the man is in a similar vein and he plays this off against the standard packaged tourist image of New Orleans pre-Katrina. (p. 319) When he introduces Garrison’s investigation it is essentially more of the same. For instance, about the arrest of Clay Shaw, Talbot writes, “But to Garrison, he was a CIA-linked international businessman. . ..” Today, there can be no “buts” about it. Shaw was not just “linked” to the CIA, he worked for them. We have this not just from the declassified files, but from FBI agent Regis Kennedy, who said, in referring to Shaw’s association with Permindex, that Shaw was a CIA agent who had worked for the Agency in Italy. (Let Justice Be Done, by William Davy, p. 100) To further downplay the importance of what Garrison uncovered, Talbot quotes former RFK aide, Ed Guthman. Guthman was working as an editor for the Los Angeles Times in early 1967. He tells Talbot that he sent his ace reporters to New Orleans and they discovered that Garrison had no evidence for his charges. Guthman calls them “great reporters”. If Talbot would have dug a little deeper he would have found out a couple of interesting things these “great reporters” had done. One of the “great” reporters was Jack Nelson. Nelson’s source for Garrison not having any evidence was former FBI agent and Hoover informer Aaron Kohn. Kohn was, among other things, an unofficial assistant to Shaw’s defense team. Another of Guthman’s “great” reporters was Jerry Cohen. Cohen cooperated with FBI informant Larry Schiller in keeping Garrison from extraditing Loran Hall. This cooperation extended up to flying with Hall to Sacramento to speak to Edwin Meese. Further, Cohen kept up a correspondence with Shaw’s lawyers and even Shaw himself. This is great reporting?

    By page 325, we see why Talbot has set things up this way. And this directly relates to Talbot’s portrait of Walter Sheridan. I was going to write that it is so warm and fuzzy that it could have been written by Sheridan’s family. But I can’t write that because, in large part, it was written by Sheridan’s family. Namely his widow and son. Talbot interviewed the woman five times and uses her profusely and without question. Now if you are going to use people like Guthman, and Sheridan’s family to profess to his good character, it leaves you with a serious problem. You now have to explain all the ugly and unethical things Sheridan did to destroy Garrison. Talbot achieves this in two ways: 1.) By recycling debunked mainstream media deceptions, and 2.) By leaving out integral parts of the story.

    Concerning the former, Talbot tries to excuse Sheridan by saying that Sheridan thought Garrison was ignoring mobster Carlos Marcello. He even goes as far as saying that Garrison gave Marcello a “free pass” and referred to him as a “respectable businessman” (p. 327) This canard has been exposed for years, in fact for over a decade. Garrison busted at least three bars in New Orleans which were run either by Marcello or his associates. (Davy, pgs 154-155) Talbot does not source his “businessman” quote, but it appears he has confused Garrison with one or more local FBI agents. And it is not true that Garrison never investigated the Mafia aspect, he did. (He actually wrote a memo on it.) But he came to the conclusion, as many others have, that the Mob was a junior partner in the crime, not the engine running the machine.

    Talbot then writes something even more unsubstantiated. He says that what really got Sheridan upset with Garrison is that Garrison had somehow discovered the CIA Castro assassination plots, and how they might have backfired against JFK. For one, in the book’s own terms, this is illogical. For this chapter, Talbot now writes that the plots had been “supervised by Bobby”. Yet, he has clearly established previously, and convincingly, that this was not the case. The CIA had done them on their own. Secondly, I have been through a large part of the extant Garrison files. His son Lyon Garrison allowed me to copy them in New Orleans. I then had them shipped to Los Angeles and filed them in chronological and subject order. I found no evidence that Garrison himself had discovered these CIA managed plots in early 1967, which would have to be true if Talbot’s thesis is to hold water. Interestingly, Talbot gives no source for Sheridan’s knowledge of what Garrison was on to or how he discovered it. Even more interesting, he avoids mentioning the famous Jack Anderson/Drew Pearson story, which aired at the time. This story actually did mention the CIA plots, and did say that RFK was involved with them. And considering Anderson’s role as an FBI informant on Garrison, it was probably done to confuse the DA. But there is no evidence Garrison ever took the (false) insinuation of RFK’s involvement seriously.

    Having no factual basis for this concept, Talbot then uses the bare assumption as the excuse for why Sheridan went to the CIA to get their input on Garrison. By this time, I had become quite curious as to why Talbot was cutting Sheridan so much slack. So I flipped a few pages forward and discovered the reason. The book maintains that Sheridan in New Orleans was not acting as any kind of intelligence operative, but rather on RFK’s behalf. He goes on like this for a couple of paragraphs — quoting Sheridan’s reliable wife again–and then comes this stunning statement: “And there is no evidence Sheridan and agency officials did in fact end up joining forces against the DA.” (p. 331) When I read that my eyes popped. Consider: in a legal deposition, among other places, Gordon Novel admitted that he was being paid by Sheridan on a retainer basis for spying on Garrison. Since Novel was writing letters to people like Richard Helms at the time, it’s fair to say he was working with the Agency. Further, Garrison discovered that Sheridan was getting the expense money for people like Novel through a local law firm, which was laundering it for the CIA. And a declassified FBI memo reveals that NBC had given instructions that the special was meant to “shoot him [Garrison] down”. Further in Robert Kennedy and his Times, Arthur Schlesinger quotes Kennedy as saying that it was NBC who sent Sheridan to New Orleans, and further that he felt Garrison might be on to something. (p. 616) As many commentators have noted, including Carl Bernstein — who Talbot uses (p. 390) — the major networks worked with the CIA on issues like defending the Warren Report. And the chairman of NBC at the time, General David Sarnoff, had worked in intelligence during World War II. In a further imbalance, Talbot barely discusses Sheridan’s intelligence background, devoting all of two sentences to it. (p. 330)

    I could go into much more length about Sheridan’s activities in New Orleans, and how they continued even after RFK was dead. And I could point out even more errors Talbot makes on this issue. For instance, he writes that Garrison “turned the tables” on Sheridan and arrested “him for bribing witnesses. (The charges were later dropped.)” (p. 329) Thus he insinuates that it was Garrison who was bribing witnesses and not Sheridan. Which is exactly wrong. (Davy on pgs 135-137 chronicles some of Sheridan’s efforts in this aspect.) Further, the charges were not dropped. Sheridan got an entourage of proven CIA affiliated lawyers for his defense. (Ibid, p. 143) And in a recurrent tactic, they got the charges switched to federal court where they were eventually thrown out. Finally, let me make one more cogent observation about Sheridan. He clearly did not like Garrison’s focus on the CIA in the JFK case. He then worked a lot with the HSCA, Dan Moldea, and Robert Blakey pushing the Mafia/Hoffa angle, which was certainly prominent in the HSCA Report and volumes. Yet on the day the report was issued Marcello’s lifelong friend, lobbyist Irving Davidson, told an acquaintance that he had talked to Sheridan and that he agreed that the HSCA report was a piece of crap too. (Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, p. 1175) So if Sheridan did not believe the CIA was involved, and he thought Blakey’s focus on the Mafia was B.S., what did he believe then? The Warren Report maybe?

    The mystery of Walter Sheridan — who he was, and why he did what he did — is a long, serious, and complex one. Talbot does not even begin to plumb its depths. For that reason, among others, I believe — and I can demonstrate — that every tenet of this chapter is just plain wrong.

    V

    The last part of Brothers deals with RFK’s run for the White House, his assassination, and a final chapter called “Truth and Reconciliation” which attempts to summarize the various attempts to solve both assassinations since 1968.

    Talbot posits that Kennedy’s increasing estrangement from Johnson’s foreign policy, especially on Vietnam, is what provoked his premature run for the White House, which he had originally scheduled for 1972. That and Eugene McCarthy’s good showing in New Hampshire. (Although other chroniclers have stated that the decision to run was made before New Hampshire.) Its a campaign that Jackie did not want RFK to make since, as she told Schlesinger, the same thing would happen to him that had happened to her husband. (p. 352) In keeping with this main theme throughout, Talbot includes RFK telling campaign worker Richard Lubic in San Francisco, “Subject to me getting elected, I would like to reopen the Warren Commission.” (p. 359)

    The night of the great California primary victory Mayor Daley called RFK in his suite and told him he planned on backing him at the convention in Chicago. As the phone call ended, Pierre Salinger said: “Bobby and I exchanged a look that we both knew meant only one thing — he had the nomination.” (p. 365) In the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, where RFK was shot, Lubic recalled seeing Thane Eugene Cesar with his gun drawn. When investigators from the LA police department arrived at his home, Lubic tried to tell them about this. But they cut him off, “It’s none of your business. Don’t bring this up, don’t be talking about this.” (p. 374) Talbot quotes Richard Goodwin on what happened to America afterward: “We’ve been on an endless cycle of retreat ever since the Kennedys. A retreat not just from liberal ideals, but from that sense of excited involvement in the country.” (p. 375)

    The last chapter deals first with first the Church Committee and then the HSCA. In an interview with Gary Hart, the former senator told Talbot he thought that Helms was in on the cover-up. And further that he may have been set up with Donna Rice in 1987 so he could not become president, since he had voiced sentiments into reopening the JFK case if he had won. For his review of the HSCA, Talbot interviewed former Deputy Counsel Robert Tanenbaum who told him of his interest in and confrontation with David Phillips. He also talked to the co-author of the Mexico City report, Dan Hardway. Hardway also presents his suspicions about Phillips and relates how disappointed he was with the HSCA final volumes which cleared the CIA, even though Hardway believed some CIA officers were implicated.

    Talbot takes a strong swipe at the media in this last chapter. He writes, “The American media’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination will certainly go down as one of its most shameful performances, along with its tragically supine acceptance of the government’s fraudulent case for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.” (P. 390) He then interviews Ben Bradlee and tries to press him on why he did not push for a better investigation of JFK’s murder. Bradlee states that he was young and not established, therefore probably afraid for his career since he might be discredited over those kinds of efforts. He then adds that it would have been fantastic if they had solved the case. Although this is further than Bradlee has gone in public before, I still would have asked him about this: Years later when he was literally at the top of the world, why didn’t he do more with the Post’s stories about the HSCA? And in fact, in reaction to the David Phillips as Maurice Bishop story, he had actually given a cub reporter instructions to knock it down. When the reporter, David Leigh, came back and told him he could not knock it down, since it looked true, Bradlee then buried the story. Talbot concludes this section with a quite interesting interview with Frank Mankiewicz who ran the public relations desk for Oliver Stone’s JFK. He says today, “I worked on the film’s behalf because I believed in it. Oliver was the first serious player to tackle the subject.”

    Then, at the very end, he asks Robert Blakey how history will resolve the JFK case. Blakey replies that the Warren Commission will probably win out because it has the virtue of simplicity. (p. 408) Talbot softens this by saying that if Americans want to take back their country they can’t give in to that kind of pessimism. When facing huge national problems, we have to be optimistic. As RFK said, if for no other reason than “You can’t live any other way, can you?”

    Despite its up and downs, overall this is a worthwhile and unique book. Its most important aspect, of course, is the proof of Robert Kennedy’s secret quest for the truth about Dallas. That is an important contribution with which to rebut the opposition’s argument of: “Well, why didn’t Bobby do anything?” We can finally dispose of that question in a truthful and forceful way. The errors and excesses in the volume can partially be explained by the attempt to make it into an acceptable mainstream book, at which it has succeeded. I would hope that its success leads to a documentary — with certain cuts as noted above– on Discovery Channel or Showtime. The book would lend itself well to that kind of format and adaptation. While being a tonic to the upcoming Bugliosi special.

  • Castro blasts CIA over spy papers

    From BBC NEWS, July 1, 2007

    Cuban President Fidel Castro has said recent CIA admissions of illicit Cold War activities disguise the fact the US is using such “brutal” tactics today.

    Last week the CIA published documents called the “Family Jewels,” revealing spy plots and assassination attempts.

    The documents included plans to use Mafia help to kill Fidel Castro.

    Mr Castro, still recovering after surgery last year, said in the official media the US was trying to pretend the tactics belonged to another era.

    “Everything described in the documents is still being done, only in a more brutal manner around the entire planet, including an increasing number of illegal actions in the very United States,” President Castro wrote.

    In an editorial called the Killing Machine, he wrote: “Sunday is a good day to read what appears to be science fiction.”

    Lee Harvey Oswald

    One of the key revelations of the documents was that the CIA tried to persuade mobster Johnny Roselli in 1960 to plot the assassination of the Cuban leader.

    The plan was for poisoned pills to be put in Mr Castro’s food, but it was shelved after the US-sponsored invasion of the Bay of Pigs failed a year later.

    Mr Castro has long accused the US, including President George W Bush, of plotting to kill him.

    In his editorial, Mr Castro also refers to the assassination of John F Kennedy, saying the US president was the victim of the CIA and anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

    Mr Castro says Lee Harvey Oswald could not have acted alone in killing the president.

    “You lose the target after every shot even if it is not moving and have to find it again in fractions of a second,” Mr Castro, himself an expert marksman, says.

    Mr Castro underwent intestinal surgery in July last year but in recent weeks his writings have been appearing more frequently.

    The abuses and illicit activities listed in the CIA report date from the 1950s to the 1970s.

    On Friday Cuba’s parliament passed a resolution stating that: “What the CIA recognises is not old history. It is present-day reality and the facts show it.”

  • Letter to the Editor re: Bryan Burrough’s review of Reclaiming History

    from The New York Times

    June 17, 2007

    J.F.K.

    To the Editor:

    Bryan Burrough’s laudatory review of Vincent Bugliosi’s book on the Kennedy assassination (May 20) is superficial and gratuitously insulting. “Conspiracy theorists” — blithe generalization — should according to Burroughs be “ridiculed, even shunned … marginalized the way we’ve marginalized smokers.” Let’s see now. The following people to one degree or another suspected that President Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy, and said so either publicly or privately: Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon; Attorney General Robert Kennedy; John Kennedy’s widow, Jackie; his special adviser dealing with Cuba at the United Nations, William Attwood; F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover (!); Senators Richard Russell (a Warren Commission member), and Richard Schweiker and Gary Hart (both of the Senate Intelligence Committee); seven of the eight congressmen on the House Assassinations Committee and its chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey; the Kennedy associates Joe Dolan, Fred Dutton, Richard Goodwin, Pete Hamill, Frank Mankiewicz, Larry O’Brien, Kenneth O’Donnell and Walter Sheridan; the Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, who rode with the president in the limousine; the presidential physician, Dr. George Burkley; Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago; Frank Sinatra; and the “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt. All of the above, à la Burrough, were idiots.

    Not so, of course. Most of them were close to the events and people concerned, and some had privileged access to evidence and intelligence that threw doubt on the “lone assassin” version. That doubt remains today. Bugliosi himself this year joined us, Don DeLillo, Gerald Posner, Robert Blakey and two dozen other writers on the assassination in signing an open letter that appeared in the March 15 issue of The New York Review of Books. The letter focused on a specific unresolved lead, the discovery that a highly regarded C.I.A. officer named George Joannides was in 1963 running an anti-Castro exile group that had a series of encounters with Oswald shortly before the assassination.

    This is obviously pertinent, yet the C.I.A. hid the fact from four J.F.K. investigations. Since 1998, when the agency did reluctantly disclose the merest outline of what Joannides was up to, it has energetically stonewalled a Freedom of Information suit to obtain the details of its officer’s activities. Here we are in 2007, 15 years after Congress unanimously approved the J.F.K. Assassination Records Act mandating the “immediate” release of all assassination-related records, and the C.I.A. is claiming in federal court that it has the right not to do so.

    And now your reviewer, Burrough, seems to lump together all those who question the official story as marginal fools. Burrough’s close-minded stance should be unacceptable to every historian and journalist worthy of the name — especially at a time when a federal agency is striving vigorously to suppress very relevant information.

    Jefferson Morley
    Washington

    Norman Mailer
    Provincetown, Mass.

    Anthony Summers
    Waterford, Ireland

    David Talbot
    San Francisco

  • E. Howard Hunt Dies

    E. Howard Hunt Dies

    Everette Howard Hunt, a cold warrior whose Intelligence career spanned three decades, died in Miami on January 23 at the age of 88.

    E. Howard Hunt was a co-founder of the Office of Strategic Services during World War Two. A strident anti-communist, he proudly took credit for orchestrating a 1954 coup against Guatemala’s elected leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz, and the 1967 killing of Fidel Castro ally Ernesto “Che” Guevara. He also organized the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion

    hunt 01

    But Hunt’s most notorious act was as one of the masterminds of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate building in Washington, DC. “I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place,” Hunt said in 1997. “But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it.”

    Hunt, a devoted servant of President Richard Nixon, relied on a circle of militant Cuban contacts from the Bay of Pigs invasion to carry out the break-in. The Cuban burglars rifled campaign files and financial records in search of evidence to back Hunt’s suspicion that Castro had given money to Nixon’s rival, Democratic nominee George McGovern.

    “I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land,” Hunt told People magazine in 1974. “I viewed this like any other mission. It just happened to take place inside this country.”

    Hunt spent 33 months in federal prison for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping, pleading guilty to evade what could have been a 35-year sentence if convicted at trial. Two dozen other men also served time for the bungled break-in. Nixon was forced to abandon his second term on Aug. 9, 1974, becoming the only U.S. president to resign.

    After his release from prison, he devoted much of his time to writing spy novels, which he had begun producing in the 1940s. He wrote more than 80 books. A memoir, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, is due out next month.

    In an interview for Slate magazine in October 2004, Hunt said he had been doubtful of the Bay of Pigs’ prospects for deposing Castro because of State Department interference in the CIA operation and the Kennedy administration’s insistence on keeping it low-key.

    Hunt also was involved in organizing an event that foreshadowed Watergate: the burglary of the the office of the Beverly Hills psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971.

    Many believe Hunt played a role in the Kennedy assassination. In 1978 Spotlight magazine, a publication of the right-wing Liberty Lobby, published an article by former CIA employee Victor Marchetti that linked Hunt to the assassination. Hunt sued for libel and won a settlement of $650,000. That verdict was vacated in 1985. Hunt never received any of the money and declared bankruptcy in 1997.

    Some have put forth the theory that Hunt was one of three so-called tramps arrested near Dealey Plaza shortly after the assassination. Hunt always denied it. “I was in Washington, D.C., on November 22, 1963,” he wrote in a 1975 letter to Time magazine, while he was incarcerated at Eglin Air Force Base’s prison camp. “It is a physical law that an object can occupy only one space at one time.”

    Hunt underwent gall bladder surgery in the late 1990s and had a leg amputated after arteriosclerosis developed, spending his last years in a motorized wheelchair. He lived in a modest home in the Miami area with his second wife, Laura Martin Hunt. His first wife, the former Dorothy Wetzel Day Goutiere, died in a plane crash in 1972.

    Besides his wife, Hunt was survived by six children.

  • CIA Helped Bush Senior In Oil Venture

    By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen | The Real News Project

    A Real News Exclusive

    NEW YORK–Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush’s oil company emerged from a 1950’s collaboration with a covert CIA officer.

    Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a ‘real shocker.’

    But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush’s oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.

    According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush’s original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The ’75 memo describes Devine as an “oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush.” The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.

    “Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil,” the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine’s role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.

    It was while Devine was in his new CIA capacity as a commercial cover officer that he accompanied Bush to Vietnam the day after Christmas in 1967, remaining in the country with the newly elected congressman from Texas until January 11, 1968. Whatever information the duo was seeking, they left just in the nick of time. Only three weeks after the two men departed Saigon, the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies launched the Tet offensive with seventy thousand troops pre-positioned in more than 100 cities and towns.

    While the elder Bush was in Vietnam with Devine, George W. Bush was making contact with representatives of the Texas Air National Guard, using his father’s connections to join up with an elite, Houston-based Guard unit – thus avoiding overseas combat service in a war that the Bushes strongly supported.

    The new revelation about George H.W. Bush’s CIA friend and fellow Zapata Offshore board member will surely fuel further speculation that Bush himself had his own associations with the agency.

    Indeed, Zapata’s annual reports portray a bewildering range of global activities, in the Mideast, Asia and the Caribbean (including off Cuba) that seem outsized for the company’s modest bottom line. In his autobiography, Bush declares that “I’d come to the CIA with some general knowledge of how it operated’ and that his ‘overseas contacts as a businessman’ justified President Nixon’s appointing him as UN ambassador, a decision that at the time was highly controversial.

    Previously disclosed FBI files include a memo from bureau director J. Edgar Hoover, noting that his organization had given a briefing to two men in the intelligence community on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The memo refers to one as “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” and the other as “Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”

    When Nation magazine contributor Joseph McBride first uncovered this document in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush, then vice president and seeking the presidency, insisted through a spokesman that he was not the man mentioned in the memo: “I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late ’63. I don’t have any idea of what he’s talking about.” The spokesman added, “Must be another George Bush.”

    When McBride approached the CIA at that time, it initially invoked a policy of neither confirming nor denying anyone’s involvement with the agency. But it soon took the unusual step of asserting that the correct individual was a George William Bush, a one-time Virginia staffer whom the agency claimed it could no longer locate. But that George Bush, discovered in his office in the Social Security Administration by McBride, noted that he was a low-ranked coast and landing-beach analyst and that he most certainly never received such an FBI briefing.

    It was perhaps to help lay to rest the larger matter of the elder Bush’s past associations that the former president went out of his way during his recent eulogy for President Ford to sing the praises of the Warren Commission Report as the final authority on those days.

    “After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And a conspiracy theorist can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Gerry Ford put his name on it and Gerry Ford’s word was always good.”

    In fact, Ford’s role on the Warren Commission is seen by many experts as a decisive factor in his rise to the top. As a Commission member, Ford altered its report in a significant way. As the Associated Press reported in 1997, “Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford took pen in hand and changed – ever so slightly – the Warren Commission’s key sentence on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy’s body when he was killed in Dallas. The effect of Ford’s change was to strengthen the commission’s conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally – a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman.”

    This modification played a seminal role in ending talk of a larger conspiracy to kill the president. Knowledge of Ford’s alteration has encouraged theorists to scrutinize the constellation of other figures who might have had a motivation to cover up the affair.

    Meanwhile, there is much more to learn about George H. W. Bush’s friend, Thomas Devine. The newly surfaced memos explain that Devine, from 1963 on, had authority from the agency to operate under commercial cover as part of an agency project code-named WUBRINY.

    Devine at that time was employed with the Wall Street boutique Train, Cabot and Associates, described in the memos as an “investment banking firm which houses and manages the [CIA] proprietary corporation WUSALINE.” These nautical names – ‘Saline’ and ‘Briny’ – or, for the Bay of Pigs invasion ‘Wave’ – are CIA cryptonyms for the programs and companies involved.

    George H.W. Bush’s own ties are amplified in the 1975 CIA memo, dated November 29, which makes it clear that he had knowledge of CIA operations prior to being named the new director of the CIA in the fall of that year.

    The 1975 memo notes that, through his relationship with Devine, “Mr George Bush [the CIA director-designate] has prior knowledge of the now terminated project WUBRINY/LPDICTUM which was involved in proprietary commercial operations in Europe.”

    The Bush documents, part of a batch of 300,000 records the CIA provided to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, were publicly released in 1998 as the result of a lawsuit, donated to a foundation, scanned into a database – and only just noticed by an independent researcher.

    Click the following to view original supporting documents [1] [2] [3]

  • Hugh Aynesworth Never Quits

    If you do a search of this web site on the name “Hugh Aynesworth,” you will come up with several matches. None of them are complimentary. Probe magazine did a lot of work on Mr. Aynesworth. We discovered that in regards to the JFK case, to call him a “journalist” was, to be kind, rather stretching the term. As Bill Davy notes in his book Let Justice be Done, even journalists in New Orleans covering the Jim Garrison inquiry questioned his practices (and also those of his friend and partner, the late James Phelan).

    Well, it appears that Hugh Aynesworth is still carrying a torch for Clay Shaw. At a time of life when he could be enjoying retirement, the 75-year-old Aynesworth is believed to be the principal source for a screenplay centering on Jim Garrison’s investigation. The screenplay is now being shopped around Hollywood. But unlike Oliver Stone’s 1991 blockbuster JFK, this version of events portrays Clay Shaw in a favorable light.

    The screenplay was written by one Jim Piddock, a writer and actor who is apparently a babe in the woods on the JFK case. He actually takes Aynesworth seriously. Well, worse than seriously. He trots out this golden oldie: that Aynesworth and a few other intrepid reporters protected the world from the deluded Garrison and helped save the saintly Clay Shaw. (Yawn.)

    Just how under the spell of Aynesworth is Jim Piddock? Piddock calls Oliver Stone’s film “entirely fictional” and a piece of “nonsense.” He actually quotes Aynesworth as saying: “Well, at least Stone got two things right about Kennedy’s death: the time and the date.” There’s an objective source.

    Piddock states that the Garrison case against Shaw has parallels with today. These parallels are “in terms of the abuse of power after a national tragedy and the manipulation of the public by powerful but unscrupulous and corrupt men…” Yeah Jim, just look at the guy you’re talking to.

    When Oliver Stone’s JFK came out, Aynesworth went on one of his patented mini-rampages. He was on one of the news networks claiming that he saw Garrison bribing someone. (The reporter didn’t bother to ask: Who was it and for what purpose?) And he wrote a series of articles that appeared in some Texas newspapers basically recycling a lot of the anti-Garrison propaganda that he had originated years before. Clearly, the Stone film disturbed him since Garrison was allowed to make a lot of his case to the public directly, without Aynesworth and Phelan et al biting him in the back.

    None of Aynesworth’s antics in the early 1990s were much different from his assassination work in the 1960s. In 1964 he wrote a hatchet job review of Joachim Joesten’s Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?, one of the very first books on the Kennedy assassination. “If you would listen to [Joesten],” Aynesworth sneered, “he would have you thinking that Lee Harvey Oswald was a polite little misunderstood youth who just got mixed up in the wrong company … It’s the same old tripe with some new flavoring.” And in a notorious May 1967 Newsweek article, Aynesworth called Jim Garrison’s investigation “a plot of Garrison’s own making.” He alleged the New Orleans DA offered a witness $3,000 “if only he would ‘fill in the facts’ of the alleged meeting to plot the death of the President.”

    Jim Garrison himself said Aynesworth “seemed a gentle and fair enough man” when Aynesworth interviewed him. But the DA found out different. “As for the $3,000 bribe, by the time I came across Aynesworth’s revelation, the witness our office had supposedly offered it to, Alvin Beaubeouff, had admitted to us it never happened.” If the Newsweek article was typical of Aynesworth’s work, Garrison observed, then it was hard to undertand how he kept getting his stuff published.

    With the work of the Assassination Records Review Board, many more pages of documents have been released showing how tightly bound Aynesworth was with the intelligence community. It has been demonstrated that Aynesworth was — at the minimum — working with the Dallas Police, Shaw’s defense team, and the FBI. He was also an informant to the White House, and had once applied for work with the CIA. As I have noted elsewhere, in the annals of this case, I can think of no “reporter” who had such extensive contacts with those trying to cover up the facts in the JFK case. And only two come close: Edward Epstein and Gerald Posner.

    Whatever Hugh Aynesworth and Jim Piddock might say, it is important to remember the simple fact that Clay Shaw committed perjury. He lied to his own defense counsel in open court about his supposed non-relationship to the CIA. And he lied twice in a 1967 interview with the CBC’s Gordon Donaldson. Donaldson asked Shaw if he ever worked for the CIA and whether he had an affiliation with that agency. To the first question Shaw answered: “No.” To the second question Shaw replied: “None whatsoever.” We know better today.

    Jim Piddock has been involved in some of the worst movies put out by Hollywood of late — which is saying a lot. But take a look, if you can, at things like The Man and An Alan Smithee Film. Piddock says that he knows that films like his Garrison/Shaw opus are not easy to get made. Let’s hope that with his track record — and his sources — it doesn’t. What the world needs now is anything but more Hugh Ayesworth.

    Read some more about Piddock’s project.

    Read some more about Hugh Aynesworth.

  • Hugh Aynesworth: Refusing a Conspiracy is his Life’s Work

    Hugh Aynesworth: Refusing a Conspiracy is his Life’s Work

    hugh
    Hugh Aynesworth

    At the time of the assassination, Hugh Aynesworth was a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. He has maintained that on November 22, 1963 he was in Dealey Plaza and a witness to the assassination — although there is no photograph that reveals such. At times, he has also maintained he was at the scene where Tippit was shot — although it is difficult to locate a time for his being there. He has also stated that he was at the Texas Theater where Oswald was arrested — although, again, no film or photo attests to this. Further, he has written that he was in the basement of the Dallas Police Department when Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby. Like Priscilla Johnson, Aynesworth soon decided to make his career out of this event. As we shall see, it is quite clear that he made up his mind immediately about Oswald’s guilt. Long before the Warren Report was issued. In fact, he tried to influence their verdict.

    On July 21, 1964 Aynesworth’s name surfaced in the newspapers in Dallas in a column by his friend Holmes Alexander. Alexander implied that Aynesworth did not trust Earl Warren and therefore was conducting his own investigation of the Kennedy murder. He was ready to reveal that the FBI knew Oswald was a potential assassin and blew their assignment. He also had talked to Marina Oswald and she had told him that Oswald had also threatened to kill Richard Nixon. Alexander goes on to say that these kinds of incidents show the mind of a killer at work. That “of a hard-driven, politically radical Leftist which is emerging from the small amount of news put out by the Warren Commission. If the full report follows the expected line, Oswald will be shown as a homicidal maniac.” Holmes concludes his piece with a warning: If the Commission’s verdict “jibes with that of Aynesworth’s independent research, credibility will be added to its findings. If [it] does not there will be some explaining to do.” Clearly, Aynesworth contributed mightily to the article, had decided Oswald had done it even before the Commission had revealed its evidence, and was bent on destroying its credibility if it differed from his opinion.

    The story about Marina and Nixon was so farfetched that not even the Warren Commission bought into it (Warren Report pp. 187-188). It has been demolished by many authors; most notably Peter Scott who notes that to believe it, Marina had to have locked Oswald in the bathroom to keep him from committing this murderous act; yet the bathroom locked from the inside. Also, as the Commission noted in the pages above, Nixon was not in Dallas until several months after the alleged incident. Further, there was no announcement in any local newspaper that Nixon was going to be in Dallas at this time period — April of 1963. Since Aynesworth was quite close to Marina at this time (he actually bragged to some friends that he was sleeping with her) it may be that he foisted the quite incredible story on her in his attempt to portray Oswald as the Leftist, homicidal maniac he related to Holmes Alexander.

    Aynesworth was also out to profit personally from the tragedy. In late June of 1964, Oswald’s alleged diary from his Russian days appeared in Aynesworth’s newspaper with a commentary by the reporter. Two weeks later it also appeared in U. S. News and World Report. An FBI investigation followed to see how this material leaked into the press. In declassified documents, it appears that the diary was pilfered from the Dallas Police archives by the notorious assistant DA Bill Alexander and then given to his friend Aynesworth. Aynesworth then put it on the market to other magazines including Newsweek. It eventually ended up in Life magazine also. Alexander, Aynesworth and the reporter’s wife Paula split thousands of dollars. Oswald’s widow was paid later by Life since, originally, Aynesworth had illegally cut her out of the deal. In another FBI report of July 7th, it also appears that Aynesworth was using the so-called diary for career advancement purposes. A source told the Bureau that part of the deal with Newsweek was that Aynesworth was to become their Dallas correspondent. As the Bureau noted, Aynesworth did become their Dallas stringer afterward. (It is interesting to note here that the “diary” has been shown to have been not a real diary at all. That is, it was not recorded on a daily basis but rather in two or three sittings.)

    Right after this, in August of 1964, another trademark of Aynseworth’s Kennedy career appeared: his penchant to attack and ridicule anyone who disagreed with him. Aynesworth published a review of Joachim Joesten’s early book on the case entitled Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy. The review is not really a review at all, it is just a string of invective directed at the author for believing such silly notions that Oswald could have been innocent and that he could have been an agent of the FBI and/or CIA. When rumors circulated that Oswald had been an FBI informant, which he apparently was, Aynesworth went to work discrediting them saying that it was all a joke he had made up — even though he was not the source of the quite specific information.

    In December of 1966, Aynesworth surfaced again on the Kennedy case. At this time Life was doing its ill-fated reinvestigation of the murder led by Holland McCombs and Richard Billings. Somehow, probably through McCombs who was a good friend of Clay Shaw, Aynesworth was a part of this investigation. Aynesworth began informing on the intricacies of the probe to the FBI. For instance on December 12th, Aynesworth informed the Bureau that they had discovered a man who connected Oswald with Ruby. Aynesworth turned over a copy of this report to the FBI. He also then told the Bureau that Mark Lane was a homosexual and had to drop his political career because of these allegations. At the end of the interview Aynesworth “specifically requested” his identity and his sources not be disclosed outside the Bureau.

    Billings’ investigation eventually and perhaps inevitably ran into the initial stages of the secret probe being conducted by District Attorney Jim Garrison. And because a mutual acquaintance of Billings and Garrison, David Chandler, was involved, Aynesworth was one of the first people to discover what Garrison was doing. The unsuspecting Garrison actually granted the duplicitous reporter an interview in his home. After the interview, Aynesworth wrote a note to McCombs that they should not let the DA know they were playing “both sides.” Recall, this was the first time they had met face to face! So much for a modicum of objectivity.

    Almost immediately Aynesworth set out to smear Garrison in the national press, to obstruct him by cooperating with law enforcement agencies who were opposed to the DA, and to defeat him in court by extending his services to Shaw’s lawyers. All of the above is readily provable today as it had not been before the releases of the ARRB. It would not be hyperbole to write that no other reporter in recorded history had as much to do in opposing a DA both covertly and overtly as Aynesworth did in New Orleans from 1967-71. Especially when one extends Aynesworth’s actions to connect with his two allies in this effort, namely James Phelan and the late Walter Sheridan. (Significantly, when the ARRB requested the files of Sheridan on the 1967 NBC special he produced, Sheridan’s family sent them to NBC. And the network refused to turn them over.) Aynesworth’s actions are too lengthy to be discussed here but they are recorded in detail in Probe Magazine (Vol. 4 No. 4) and also in the book The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X (pp. 24-29). Aynesworth published an attack on Garrison in Newsweek on May 15, 1967 (about a week after Phelan’s broadside had appeared in The Saturday Evening Post.) The “report” was clearly a venomous hatchet job that had one aim: to stigmatize Garrison and, by doing that, to neutralize his investigation by turning the public’s attention away from his discoveries and toward the controversy being manufactured by Aynesworth, Phelan, and NBC’s special which was to follow the next month. The article depicted Garrison as a modern day Robespierre whose investigation had bribed witnesses into making false claims, whose staff had threatened to murder a witness, and finally that Garrison was so possessed he held the entire city in thrall by terrorist tactics.

    We have seen how Aynesworth informed on the Billings investigation with the FBI. On the Garrison case, he extended his reach. Before his article was printed, he forwarded a copy to George Christian who was press secretary for the White House. But not before he had called him and discussed his inflammatory and deceitful article. The actual telegram he sent is interesting in revealing his psychology. He tells Christian that he is informing because he is aware of what Garrison is up to. What, in Aynesworth’s view, is he up to? He is trying “to make it seem that the FBI and CIA are involved in the JFK plot.” But further, “he can —and probably will — do untold damage to this nation’s image throughout the world.” Finally, he tells Christian that although Garrison wants the government to defy him or to pressure a halt to his probe, that is not what they should do, “for that is exactly what Garrison wants.” Of course, he again asked that his role be kept a secret. These last two assertions imply that Aynesworth would serve as the intermediary to obstruct Garrison clandestinely while claiming to be a reporter so that the government could keep its hands clean as he did their dirty work for them.

    Further insight into Aynesworth’s peculiar psychology came in an interview in 1979 on KERA, the Dallas PBS affiliate. He said there, “I’m not saying there wasn’t a conspiracy. I know most people in this country believe there was a conspiracy. I just refuse to accept it and that’s my life’s work.” In other words, what the facts are do not really matter to him. It’s keeping the lid on a conspiracy to commit homicide that matters. (Wouldn’t it have been interesting if Jennings would have confronted Aynesworth with that statement and asked him to explain his view of journalism in light of it?)

    By the 1990’s Aynesworth’s role had been so exposed to those in the know that he couldn’t appear at research conferences. So he did not show up at them himself — as he may have, for surveillance purposes, earlier. Instead he arranged other conferences to eclipse them, as he did in 1993 for the 30th anniversary of the assassination. At this one in Dallas, someone asked him this: Had he ever cooperated with the government on a story prior to its publication? He denied it of course. Then the questioner read him the Christian memo quoted above.

    Why couldn’t Jennings do the same?