Kennedys and King Test host626

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The Larry and Phil Show, Part 3

On July 25^th of this year, in The Washington Post, Larry Sabato and Philip Shenon co-authored a column in which they both recommended that President Trump not grant any appeal that an agency of government could make to delay any final releases of JFK-related assassination documents. When the Assassination Records Review Board closed its doors in 1998, they allowed that any document that they had exempted from release would have to be declassified in 2017. Included in that legal exemption were documents endangering an agent in place, or an ongoing operation. It was hard to believe 35 years after Kennedy’s assassination such a risk could be run. But the ARRB did allow for a large number of documents to be so withheld. It is well-nigh impossible to think that excuse could exist 54 years later. And it is also hard to fathom that, even if it did, that danger would outweigh the benefits to the public of finally getting to look at what the government had kept hidden from them on the JFK case. After all, many intelligent commentators have held that the secrecy about Kennedy’s death in 1963 provoked a corrosive effect upon the public’s belief in the government’s credibility.

Which is almost the exact argument that Sabato and Shenon used in their July article. They wrote:

We know we speak for an army of historians, political scientists, journalists, and concerned citizens … when we say that it is time for the federal government to release everything …. This is the moment for full transparency about a seminal event that cost many Americans’ trust in their government.

Although Sabato and Shenon got the number of documents released in July wrong, they were correct in saying that the July release was only a partial one. At that time, the National Archives had planned on doing more partial releases until the last day the law allowed for a final release, which was October 26, 2017. The authors advised that the president not listen to any possible appeal from the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service or any other intelligence agency that wished to further delay declassification. They wrote that when it came to JFK’s murder, there were no secrets worth keeping at this late date. As for the necessity of keeping any spy’s identity secret, “logic suggests that almost all those people are now dead …”

Sabato and Shenon closed with their usual two standard trademarks. First, that somehow 21^st-century forensic science has demonstrated Oswald was the lone assassin, and that if there was a conspiracy, Oswald was still the trigger man. But they closed with a request to Trump that he must release these last documents, for if the message is that the USA cannot “tell the truth about the murder of the president, it could not be expected to be honest about anything else.”

About ten days later, the duo printed another article, this time in the online journal Politico. Here they wrote that they had reviewed some of the documents released in July—although the evidence in the article suggested they had only read one. And that release revealed that somehow the CIA may have known that Oswald had killed Kennedy to avenge the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro. The idea that Oswald was inspired by Cuban propaganda to kill JFK is quite old. In fact, there was an entire book written about it in 1970 by Albert H. Newman, a former Newsweek correspondent. In 1984, that hoary idea was then repeated by Jean Davison in her equally bad and error-filled book Oswald’s Game. (See my review) Shenon then repeated the “Oswald was inspired by Castro” premise in his book A Cruel and Shocking Act. That volume was timed for release on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death.

In this new article, the authors again repeated their claim that somehow 21^st century forensic science had proven that Oswald acted alone. More than one person—most notably forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht—has appealed to Sabato and Shenon to please make public their evidence backing up that forensic claim. For the only instance of any such “21^st century” testing was done by the father and son team of Lucien and Michael Haag for the PBS series Nova; it was entitled Cold Case: JFK. That program was literally skewered by Gary Aguilar and Wecht in a twenty-page reply published in a professional forensic journal over two installments. (“NOVA’s Cold Case: JFK – the Junk Science Behind PBS’s Recent Foray into the Crime of the Century”) The Haags were so thoroughly thrashed that they have refused to debate either Aguilar or Wecht in public. Even though Aguilar has offered to pay their air fare and hotel bill. This author knows of no other such 21^st century demonstration.

But the idea behind the August 3rd story, that somehow the CIA only suspected a motive for what Oswald did and had no active role in the cover up, this was also quite questionable. And it was taken up by more than one commentator. (For an example, see “New Files Confirm the JFK Investigation Was Controlled by the CIA – Not ‘Botched’ as Some Pretended”) It is clear today that the CIA was deliberately obstructing more than one attempt to find out the truth about Oswald and the assassination. To name three examples, it has now been shown that they obstructed the Warren Commission, the Garrison investigation, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Nevertheless, Sabato and Shenon did not say anything in this column to revise or retract their previous plea for full disclosure of the ARRB documents.

Just two days ago, however, on October 16^th, they seemed to hit an off-key note. In another co-authored article for Politico, the headline reads, “The JFK Document Dump Could be a Fiasco”. The authors mentioned that the National Archives had altered their original schedule, which was to release the final JFK documents in a staggered schedule over three months. One obvious reason this was done was so the CIA, FBI, Secret Service and other executive intelligence agencies could buy time to convince the White House to grant their appeals for delay.

But the authors criticize the decision on different grounds. They write that “with everything public at once, pandemonium is all but guaranteed, since major news organizations around the world will want to know, almost instantly, what is in the documents that is new and potentially important.” They warn that the result could be that many journalists will “reach overly hasty, cherry-picked conclusions from individual documents.” The other alternative would be for them to “throw up their hands, assuming that the confusion over the documents is simply more proof of why it is impossible to know the full truth about JFK’s death.” What makes that last statement seem a bit prejudicial is the article’s opening sentence. There Sabato and Shenon proclaim, “The federal government’s long campaign to try to choke off rampant conspiracy theories about the November, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy is threatening to end this month in massive confusion, if not chaos.” They then prognosticate the worst nightmare possible for them, especially if Trump decides on further delay: it “will simply help fuel a new generation of conspiracy theories.”

This author does not follow that logic. For the simple reason that with one lonely exception, Sabato and Shenon—over three installments—have never mentioned or reviewed a single document that was released from the July disbursement. So if you always ignore what was disbursed, how can the pattern of disbursement have an impact on the content of the disbursement?

One reaction to their writing would be: Why aren’t Shenon and Sabato actually reviewing the files and describing what is in them? Another would be, why has no MSM outlet done something similar? In fact, the only lengthy discussion of any of the newly released July documents was by this author on Black Op Radio on September 14, 2017. (Click here and scroll down to that date) With the help of researcher Gary Majewski, host Len Osanic and I shared some of these delayed secrets with the audience. Which made for a most appreciative reaction.

But there is also a conclusion about the remaining documents that Sabato and Shenon seem to want to avoid. That is this: contrary to their standard refrain, maybe there is material in those long hidden papers that contravenes their recurring thesis: namely, that there is nothing of real importance there that would alter the tenets of the Warren Commission. Is that not one logical conclusion for continued classification after 54 years? Why, after over a half century, and so much controversy and damage to their reputations, would the CIA, FBI, or Secret Service still want to conceal records on the JFK case? In light of the fact of how much suspicion such secrecy has already created, why not walk down the path described by Sabato and Shenon in their first article: full disclosure? Especially when some senators and congressman have already recommended that path as the only wise one to take.

After the July release, many people complained about a long download time. There seems to be something more than just computer efficiency that made NARA alter their schedule. The evidence would suggest that there are people in high positions who want to maintain the cover-up about Kennedy’s assassination. If so, why? And if Trump agrees with that plea, the public will need to be fully informed as to why he went along with it.

This author would like to say he trusts that Sabato and Shenon will report that possible outcome accurately. But by their past record in all this, he has some reservation about the matter.

October 18, 2017
Oswald’s Intelligence Connections: How Richard Schweiker clashes with Fake History
“We do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere

you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence.”

~Senator Richard Schweiker, The Village Voice, 1975

Introduction

There are many statements from official sources that contradict Warren Commission findings and most history books’ description of the JFK assassination. They are on the record in the numerous reports following other governmental investigations of the JFK assassination or they were captured in interviews and writings of many of those directly involved in them, but Schweiker’s was perhaps the most damning. Not only because of what he said, but also because of who he was.

Schweiker was a well-respected Republican politician who served under President Reagan from 1981 to 1983 as Secretary of Health and Human Services. He served over 20 years as a Pennsylvania U.S. Representative (1961–1969) and U.S. Senator (1969–1981). In 1976, he had an unsuccessful run to become Vice President in Reagan’s losing presidential campaign.

Most crucial for the purposes of this essay, from 1975 to 1976, Schweiker was a member of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Which, in deference to its chair Senator Frank Church, was commonly known as the Church Committee. This famous investigative body issued fourteen reports after interviewing hundreds of witnesses and studying thousands of files from the FBI, CIA and other agencies.

Thanks to its work, this is when most Americans were first told about the infamous U.S. assassination plots against foreign leaders, which were a key component of CIA regime control or “change operations”. Targets included the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro of Cuba, the Diem brothers in Vietnam, General Schneider of Chile and President Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Ex CIA director Allen Dulles’ pact with the mob to assassinate Castro was also part of their findings. This information, which could have had an impact on the Warren Commission investigation, was kept secret by Dulles while he served on the Commission –– something CIA historians now refer to as a benign cover-up.

Under senators Gary Hart and Richard Schweiker, the Church Committee also conducted a focused investigation (Book 5) of the Kennedy assassination, concentrating on how the FBI and CIA supported the Warren Commission. Its report was very critical of these agencies:

“… developed evidence which impeaches the process by which the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions about the assassination, and by which they provided information to the Warren Commission. This evidence indicates that the investigation of the assassination was deficient.”

To say the least, Schweiker was quite vocal in his views. Consider the following instances:

In 1976 he told CBS News that the CIA and FBI lied to the Warren Commission and that the case could be solved if they followed hot new leads. He also claimed that the White House was part of the cover up.

In a BBC documentary, The Killing of President Kennedy, he made the following blistering statement about the Warren Commission investigation:

“The Warren Commission has in fact collapsed like a house of cards and I believe it was set up at the time to feed pabulum to the American people for reasons not yet known, and one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of our country occurred at that time.”

In this revealing documentary, he goes on to say that the highest levels of government were behind him and his committee being mislead. They were continuing the cover-up, and also that Oswald was clearly involved with pro-Castro and anti-Castro groups, which smacked of an intelligence role as a double agent, and that these relationships were not investigated.

In his Kennedys and King article, JFK and the Unforgivable, this author chronicled some thirty examples of other investigation insiders who contradict the Warren Commission’s conclusions about Oswald being a Lone Nut assassin, which is still the basis of what we can find in most of today’s history textbooks.

Donald Trump and the Mainstream Media’s double standard

Since Donald Trump’s election, CNN has featured non-stop coverage of the President and the ongoing probe into Russia’s alleged meddling in the U.S. elections and possible connections to Team Trump. The Washington Post and New York Times are also piling on with a vengeance. Concerning whether Trump and his network of advisors were complicit, the recent quote from Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, kind of summarized the position mainstream media is going with: “We do not have enough evidence to bring to a jury yet but there is enough smoke that warrants an investigation.” And this was before anyone knew of the actual meetings between Russian point-people and Donald Trump, Jr. The smoke that has often been talked about seemed to revolve around six or seven people close to Trump who had contact with Russian persons of interest before the election.

CNN pundits, specialists and reporters are going through each word of each tweet made by the president; each statement made by him and others in his surroundings; and every single touch point between them and the Russians going back for years. At least three separate government bodies are spending millions in investigating the case.

And then, during a rare non-Trump related show on CNN, there it was: on their series The Sixties, re-broadcast in the middle of the Trump cavalcade, we were given their take on the JFK assassination: Krazy Kid Oswald did it alone. It was all explained to us up by their panel of experts: Max Holland, the late Vincent Bugliosi, and Priscilla Johnson McMillan were earnestly telling the audience this discredited tale, in spite of what had been revealed by the Church, HSCA and ARRB investigations. And in spite of what actual participants like Schweiker, Gary Hart, Senator Richard Russell, House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) Chief Counsel Robert Blakey, Schweiker-Hart investigator Gaeton Fonzi, HSCA Deputy Counsel Robert Tanenbaum and many, many other investigation insiders had to say. CNN was doing exactly what Trump has been Tweeting to his cast of fiercely loyal followers: Peddling fake news! Which certainly bolstered historians’ egos around their shameful role in perpetuating fake history about this landmark, trust-breaking event.

In his article The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK: The Historians’ Guide on how to Research his Assassination, this author showed how historians, journalists and investigators could learn a lot by investigating the failed plots that preceded the assassination and no less than six other potential patsies who had many similarities with Oswald. In this article we will try to decode the famous lines that make up the epigraph to this essay, and point out a whole area of investigation that the Warren Commission was almost completely shielded from and that journalists and historians have turned a blind eye to. Namely, the cast of characters Oswald crossed paths with who were plausibly, and in many cases definitely, connected to intelligence. These names originate with the work of some of the very best researchers in the field. We are at a point where we can now take stock of what has already been done, crosscheck work and ask ourselves: What does this mean? This author would like to underline the incredible travails of determined independent researchers who did a lot of the grunt work and represent many of the key sources for this article. Hopefully this will serve as a small testament to what they have accomplished.

If you think that seventy-one-year-old billionaire Trump connects well with Russian meddlers according to CNN and others, wait until you see just who twenty-four-year-old Lee Oswald, the truant/loner/murderer, connects with. It should make serious historians pause and ask themselves if they may have missed something.

Oswald and Intelligence: Odds and Ends

Before getting to who Oswald links up with let us look at general points where we can find fingerprints of intelligence. From Jim Marrs’ Crossfire we can read about how Oswald:
1. Possessed a Minox spy camera.
2. Had a notebook that included microdots.
3. Loved James Bond and the spy program I Led Three Lives.
4. Worked at Atsugi air base in Japan as a radar operator with possible security clearance. This was the base where the CIA’s U2 top-secret high altitude surveillance program was housed.
5. Was discharged from the Marines, entered Russia through a favorite spy-friendly crossing point in the middle of a false defector program, threatened theatrically to give away U2 secrets to the Russians in the U.S. embassy, and returned easily to the U.S. with his Russian wife, who herself had ties to Russian intelligence. All this with financial support in ways that could have only been state-sponsored.
6. Learned Russian in a way which New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, himself an ex-marine, concluded could only have been through special training for an intelligence assignment. He also discovered that Oswald’s base for his Fair Play for Cuba activities was right in the heart of New Orleans’ intelligence establishment, and that he was most probably playing an agent-provocateur role. He grew convinced that intelligence assets were obstructing his investigation into Oswald’s links, something that was confirmed by the HSCA and ARRB releases.
7. Applied, while in the Marines, to a very obscure Swiss college called Albert Schweitzer that appears to be CIA-linked.
Researcher Mae Brussell argued that Oswald’s mission in Russia was to help the Russians bring down Gary Powers’ U2 flight over Russia and therefore sabotage Eisenhower’s attempt at rapprochement with the Russians at an upcoming summit meeting. Others have pointed to those who were convinced Oswald was a spy, including Marines Oswald served with, Gerry Patrick Hemming, Oswald’s mother and others.

According to Gaeton Fonzi, former CIA Director Richard Helms told reporters during recess of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 that “no one would ever know who or what Lee Harvey Oswald … represented.” Asked whether the CIA knew of any ties Oswald had with either the KGB or the CIA, Helms paused and with a laugh said, “I don’t remember.”

According to author and intelligence specialist John Newman, a CIA propaganda associate of David Phillips, William Kent, intimated to his daughter at a family Thanksgiving gathering: “Oswald was a useful idiot.”

It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency … . Right after the President was killed, people in the Tokyo station were talking openly about Oswald having gone to Russia for the CIA. Everyone was wondering how the Agency was going to be able to keep the lid on Oswald. But I guess they did.

~ interview of Jim and Elsie Wilcott, former husband and wife employees of the Tokyo CIA Station, San Francisco Chronicle, “Couple Talks about Oswald and the CIA,” September 12, 1978

Jane Roman, who in 1963 was the senior liaison officer on the Counterintelligence Staff of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, gave Jefferson Morley and John Newman this revealing answer to the following question during a seventy five-minute taped interview in 1994: “is this indicative of some sort of operational interest in Oswald’s file?” This was the key question of the interview, and Roman took it head on. “Yes,” she replied. “To me it’s indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on the need to know basis.”

John Newman is one of the researchers who did the most work in analyzing intelligence files on Oswald, and has uncovered, along with Malcolm Blunt, content and patterns that can only be explained by Oswald being used for intel purposes. This includes the very late opening of a standard CIA 201 file that would have been normally immediately opened upon a defection.

Lisa Pease wrote for Probe magazine in 1997 about Otto Otepka, who was the very competent head of the State Department’s Office of Security (SY) during much of the Oswald saga. He would have been the one who was behind initiating a study of defectors to Russia in 1960. The CIA –– probably James Angleton, who is suspected of running Oswald at this time –– gave instructions not to delve into Lee Harvey Oswald. That may be the reason Otepka was fired a few weeks before the assassination.

By the time Oswald returned from Russia, his days were numbered. However, during the year remaining in his life, the additional traces he would leave linking him to intelligence would be omnipresent: Only later dug into by serious researchers but ignored by mainstream media and historians.

During the summer of 1963, Oswald would ostensibly abandon his expecting wife and young baby to open an FPCC Chapter for which he was the lone member in the very hostile environment of New Orleans. In his previous article (The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK), this author presents the case that Oswald was more likely involved in an intelligence operation to counter this has-been, informant-infested outfit, publicize his Marxist legend and weed out communists. The similarities with six other potential patsies profiled in the article reinforce this notion.

A clue to Oswald’s real loyalties came during a televised interview he gave in August 1963 with a revealing Freudian slip he made when he said he was (while in Russia) “under the protection of the government,” which he quickly corrected –– but it was too late.   The “Hands Off Cuba” flyers that he distributed with the now infamous Camp Street address represented a major gaffe, as it placed him directly in the presence of his anti-Castro friends and blew his cover to people willing to investigate this like Jim Garrison and Senator Schweiker.

Thanks to the HSCA and the ARRB record releases, we know for sure that intelligence networks played very important roles in hiding key facts from the Warren Commission and obstructing the HSCA, Garrison, and ARRB activities which were getting close to linking Oswald to the world of intelligence.

Perhaps the most explicit links came in the form of the Lopez Report written up for the HSCA and kept secret for many years. Because of the diligent work of HSCA investigators Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez, we now know that Oswald was, at the very least, partly impersonated in Mexico City under the watchful eye of CIA operatives there –– who later played starring roles in covering this incident up. Perhaps the most explicit links came in the form of their report, “Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City” (aka the Lopez Report), written up for the HSCA and kept secret for many years.

Oswald’s Intelligence Touch Points

The Warren Commission portrayed Lee Oswald as a lone-nut, Marxist, and drifter who was not on anyone’s radar. The New York Times coverage of the Warren Commission’s Report release includes the following statement:

The Warren Commission also rejected, after complete access to the files of the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency, the claim that Oswald may have been some kind of American undercover agent.

This conclusion of course has today proven to be founded on quicksand. Far from their having “complete access”, it has been confirmed that intelligence agencies played a key role in keeping information about Oswald hidden away from the Commission, for example regarding Oswald in Mexico City. Schweiker’s bombshell assertion clearly advances that Oswald had intelligence connections. The Church Committee and the HSCA both impeached the Warren Commission by unequivocally concluding that, among other inadequacies, it had not properly investigated the possibility of a conspiracy. (For more, see this author’s article on the historical record of Government investigations).

Based on the standards we are currently witnessing with the barrage about Trump and friends in Moscow, let us look at who should have been turned inside out in a serious investigation about a far more serious crime. In the following section we will briefly go over a long list of persons with definite or plausible intelligence credentials/links who crossed paths with Oswald in one way or another. Some of the links are loose, others are solid; of course not all are involved in the assassination. All, however, would merit an in-depth analysis by true investigators. For the purpose of this article we will provide short snapshots. To know more about an individual, the author encourages the reader to follow the links/sources.

If we were to add persons with indirect intelligence connections, Cuban exiles of interest, Mob-related personalities, the number of persons of interest that would give insight into who Oswald really was and what he and others were up to would more than likely double.   Seen in their entirety, we can conclude that if there is smoke around the current Russia meddling intrigue, what we have here is a forest fire and a cover-up that was more than just “benign.”

New Orleans, Atsugi, California, Russia, Dallas

Let us look at who Schweiker could be plausibly referring to when he confirmed that Oswald had intelligence connections. (Next to the name, we will list the source material in the literature.)

David Ferrie (Jim Garrison)

The young David Ferrie

Oswald’s first Intel connection is one of the most important for confirming Schweiker’s assertion. David Ferrie plays an important role in Oswald’s fate during two phases of Oswald’s short life. In 1955, both Ferrie and Oswald were members of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol where Ferrie taught aviation. Author Greg Parker, in Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War, makes the case for the CAP being linked to the CIA’s recruitment activities and Texas School Book Depository’s owner Harold Byrd –– an oil-man known for his deep hatred of JFK and who is connected with many persons of interest, as well as the world of espionage. Ferrie later became a contract CIA agent flying bombing missions over Cuba at the request of Cuban-exile Eladio Del Valle, who was himself intelligence connected and a person Jim Garrison was pursuing concerning the assassination until Del Valle was killed, within 24 hours of Ferrie’s own mysterious death.

During the summer of 1963, Ferrie and Oswald link up once again at 544 Camp Street. This location was an address on some of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba literature. The building was a hub for right-wing, anti-Castro activities centered around the office of FBI- and CIA-connected Guy Banister, as well as intelligence-backed Cuban exiles. During this period, Ferrie was frequently seen in the building and elsewhere, in the company of Banister, CIA agent Clay Shaw, CIA-connected Sergio Arcacha Smith, Oswald and others of this ilk who became key suspects in the Garrison investigation, which was sabotaged by special interest groups. The HSCA and ARRB findings clearly confirm as much. Ferrie confessed a lot about the assassination to Garrison’s investigator Louis Ivon, but died mysteriously before he could be taken to trial.

Gerard Tujague (Destiny Betrayed – JFK: The Cuba Files)

In early 1956, Oswald joined Gerard Tujague’s shipping company. Tujague was also vice-president of the Friends of Democratic Cuba (FDC), which is believed to be a CIA and FBI front that was largely created by Guy Banister and Sergio Arcacha Smith, and was also linked to Clay Shaw. Cuban intelligence identified this organization as a perpetrator of hostile acts against Cuba.

In a strange incident in 1961 while Oswald was in Russia, the FDC used Oswald’s name in an attempt to buy 10 Ford pick-up trucks at the Bolton Ford lot in New Orleans.

Richard Case Nagell (The Man who Knew too Much – Destiny Betrayed – Jim Garrison)

Richard Case Nagell

While in Atsugi, Japan, Oswald met up with Army Intel agent Richard Case Nagell for the first time. Nagell began a CIA career in 1955-56, which eventually brought him into the world of Black ops where CIA people like E. Howard Hunt and Tracy Barnes excelled.

In 1962, he served as a double agent in Mexico City. He hinted to a friend that he knew the CIA’s David Phillips who, as we will see, became a key suspect for many researchers with respect to the Oswald sheep-dipping operations. By October 1962, the Soviets advised him that the violent Cuban exile group Alpha 66 was plotting to assassinate Kennedy. They thought this would be blamed on them. So they hired him to investigate, and possibly abort the plot. His investigations allowed him to identify Arcacha Smith, Ferrie, Carlos Quiroga, Tony Cuesta and a Leopoldo as possible conspirators. In 1963, he tried to convince Oswald he was being set up to be the fall guy. He failed. Nagell eventually faked a bank robbery so as to be in jail when the assassination took place.   His interviews with researcher Dick Russell, his material links to Oswald when he was arrested, and his pre-assassination warnings go a long way in proving his credibility.

Colonel Nikolai Eroshkin

According to what Nagell told Russell, while Oswald was in Atsugi, he met with GRU agent Colonel Eroshkin: a CIA defection target.

Kerry Thornley (Destiny Betrayed)

Kerry Thornley

When Oswald was moved back to California in 1959, few Marines bought into his communist-leaning persona. Also, many described him as quite a poor marksman.   It is here that fellow-Marine Kerry Thornley met him for the first time. He wrote a book about him before the assassination called the Idle Warriors, and then another in 1965. He became the go-to Marine for the Warren Commission in their attempt to paint Oswald as unpatriotic.

In the summer of 1963, Thornley popped backed into the picture in New Orleans where several witnesses saw him with Oswald either in public or at Oswald’s apartment. There is evidence that Thornley picked up Fair Play for Cuba flyers for Oswald. An FBI memo states that Thornley and Oswald went to Mexico together. And despite preliminary denials, he eventually admitted links to David Ferrie, Guy Banister, Carlos Bringuier and Ed Butler –– all intelligence-connected persons of interest who will be covered in this article. He also eventually confirmed his utter hatred of Kennedy. Thornley was actually indicted by Jim Garrison for perjury because of his lies about this association with Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. Further, two witnesses told Garrison that Thornley had said that Oswald was not a communist. Which makes his performance before the Warren Commission quite suspicious.

Rosaleen Quinn (Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War)

In 1959, fellow Marine Henry Roussel set up a date between Oswald and his aunt Rosaleen Quinn, an airline stewardess who studied Russian with a Berlitz tutor for the State Department exam, as she was interested in working in the American embassy in Russia. She is suspected by some as having monitored Oswald’s skills with the Russian language, which she qualified as very good. This coincided with Oswald’s imminent departure from the infantry and the beginning of his Russian adventure. In Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War, Greg Parker underscores an intelligence angle to her that he thinks should be explored.

Gerry Patrick Hemming (Oswald and the CIA)

Gerry Hemming

Hemming has been a difficult nut to crack for many of the researchers who interviewed him. He was someone who seems to have known something about the assassination, but is difficult to read.

Hemming was in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1954 to 1957. He was honorably discharged and became a soldier of fortune who eventually fought for Castro’s revolutionary army with another person of interest, Frank Sturgis. They both came back quickly after feeling disillusioned by Castro. Hemming also spent some time in Atsugi. Though the CIA has denied any relationship with Hemming and Sturgis, this has been contradicted by files that show that Hemming frequently interacted with the CIA. Frank Sturgis’ later association with CIA’s E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, along with Cuban exiles, during the Watergate scandal, further contradicts this claim.

Hemming eventually founded Interpen in 1961. This was a paramilitary exile group that specialized in the penetration of revolutionary forces. Interpen is linked to many people involved in the training of Cuban exiles and persons of interest in the assassination. Interpen set up shop right in the midst of the Miami CIA JM/WAVE station and Cuban exile communities. HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi came to believe that much of the brainwork behind the plot came from disillusioned rogue CIA officers associated with this Miami nexus and involved in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

It is quite possible that some of Hemming’s contacts with the CIA took place in Los Angeles in early 1959 when he would have met Lee Harvey Oswald who, along with his El Toro base friend Nelson Delgado, showed interest in joining the Castro forces before he had become persona non grata in the United States. Hemming claims that Oswald bumped into him at the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles and inquired about joining up with him. Hemming thought of him as a snitch and later met him at the base gate where he confronted him. He says he relayed this information to James Angleton. There is some corroboration of these meetings to be found in CIA files, and from Nelson Delgado, who confirmed that Oswald was at the Cuban consulate for discussions about their project and met a civilian for almost two hours at the base gate at the times Hemming states these took place.

Hemming, in later interviews, went on to express his opinion that Oswald was a patsy.

Gregory Golub (Destiny Betrayed)

The logistics involved in getting Oswald into Russia in October 1959 has been found by many to be perplexing. The nature and speed of his discharge, his financing, his route through Helsinki, his stay in expensive five-star hotels, and finally, the expedient issuing of a visa into Russia within 24 hours of his application –– these all seem too complex for an uneducated former truant. Golub, who issued Oswald’s visa, may have had direct ties to the American State Department.

Here is how the HSCA describes the visa situation:

HSCA Report Findings on the Issue of Oswald’s Visa:

In an effort to resolve this issue, the committee reviewed classified information pertaining to Gregory Golub, who was the Soviet consul in Helsinki when Oswald was issued his tourist visa. This review revealed that, in addition to his consular activities, Golub was suspected of having been an officer of the Soviet KGB. Two American Embassy dispatches concerning Golub were of particular significance with regard to the time necessary for issuance of visas to Americans for travel into the Soviet Union. The first dispatch recorded that Golub disclosed during a luncheon conversation that:

MOSCOW had given him the authority to give Americans visas without prior approval from Moscow. He [Golub] stated that this would make his job much easier, and as long as he was convinced the American was “all right” he could give him a visa in a matter of minutes …

The second dispatch, dated October 9, 1959, 1 day prior to Oswald’s arrival in Helsinki, illustrated that Golub did have the authority to issue visas without delay. The dispatch discussed a telephone contact between Golub and his consular counterpart at the American Embassy in Helsinki:

… Since that evening [September 4, 1959] Golub has only phoned [the U.S. consul] once and this was on a business matter. Two Americans were in the Soviet consulate at the time and were applying for Soviet visas through Golub. They had previously been in the American consulate inquiring about the possibility of obtaining a Soviet visa in 1 or 2 days. [The U.S. consul] advised them to go directly to Golub and make their request, which they did. Golub phoned [the U.S. consul] to state that he would give them their visas as soon as they made advance Intourist reservations. When they did this, Golub immediately gave them their visas …

Thus, based upon these two factors, (1) Golub’s authority to issue visas to Americans without prior approval from Moscow, and (2) a demonstration of this authority, as reported in an embassy dispatch approximately 1 month prior to Oswald’s appearance at the Soviet Embassy, the committee found that the available evidence tends to support the conclusion that the issuance of Oswald’s tourist visa within 2 days after his appearance at the Soviet consulate was not indicative of an American intelligence agency connection. Note: If anything, Oswald’s ability to receive a Soviet entry visa so quickly was more indicative of a Soviet interest in him.

Author’s comment: If this is what it did in fact indicate, why wasn’t a CIA 201 file immediately opened after Oswald’s defection? It was not opened until one year later.

Richard Snyder (Destiny Betrayed)

John McVickar & Richard Snyder

In early November of 1959, Oswald decided to pay a visit to the American Embassy in Moscow to renounce his citizenship. He met with former CIA recruiter Richard Snyder, who was probably working under diplomatic cover as a consular official. He had previously spotted student talent for the CIA who could travel to Russia under operation REDSKIN. Some of his notes while in Russia refer to false defectors. Snyder used well-studied delay tactics to avoid having Oswald fill out the necessary forms to renounce his citizenship. This made Oswald’s re-entry to the U.S. a lot easier and demonstrated Snyder’s knowledge of the fake defector programs in place.

In his exchange with Snyder –– which researcher Malcolm Blunt refers to as theatrical and designed to be picked up by Russian eavesdropping –– Oswald threatened to give away military secrets. This most likely was a reference to the U2 surveillance operations. This makes the opening of a 201 file only a full-year later incredible, as Oswald now should have also been considered a traitor. Unless, of course, something else was going on.

John McVickar (Oswald and the CIA)

While Oswald was going through his charade with Snyder, they were being observed by embassy official John McVickar. He is the one who alerted and then set up intelligence-linked journalist Priscilla Johnson to interview Oswald in his Moscow hotel room. He was then was later debriefed by her. She would go on to make a career out of endorsing the Warren Commission line.

Priscilla Johnson (Oswald and the CIA)

In 1959, Johnson was a correspondent for the North American News Association (NANA). Her November 13th interview with Oswald was the basis for news reports that would publicize Oswald the defector to a U.S. audience. In 1977 she published her book Marina and Lee after building a relationship with Marina Oswald, who by then was still very cooperative with authorities. She went on to become a staple in pro-Warren Commission propaganda and one of the first in a long line of intelligence friendly so-called JFK assassination experts.

Marina Oswald & Priscilla Johnson

Her job and relationship with the U.S. embassy at the time of Oswald’s defection already made her a natural ally for intelligence organizations. She identified propaganda specialist Cord Meyer as one of the CIA recruiters who took an interest in her. Documented cases of her passing on information to the CIA, her access to CIA space and resources, her own writings and her role in hosting star-defector Svetlana Stalin, daughter of Joseph Stalin, in 1967, represent strong evidence of her ties to intelligence. She was even given permission to live with heavily guarded Marina Oswald for months in 1964 while they worked on the book.

The release of intelligence files in 1993 by the ARRB seal the deal, as the following information from a contact report reveals. CIA recruiter Donald Jameson reported this about her in 1962, after a ninety minute interview: “I think that Miss Johnson can be encouraged to write pretty much the articles we want … .”   We also know that the CIA had a 201 file opened on her in the mid-1950s and that she was considered to be knowledgeable about Soviet affairs.

Leo Setyaev (Oswald and the CIA)

Lev Setyaev

According to John Newman, Oswald had a name he could contact while he was in Russia if he needed anything. Leo Setyaev is a name that appears in Oswald’s address book, and, according to Marina, is who Oswald intended to call in 1961 when visiting the American embassy. She also stated that he had met Oswald in the Hotel Metropole in Moscow shortly after his arrival and had helped Oswald get on a Radio Moscow show, where he criticized the U.S. for a Russian audience. The FBI and CIA had files on Setyaev, who was quite possibly an informant for the CIA.

Robert Webster (Destiny Betrayed)

Robert Webster

Webster is another person some researchers suspect was a false defector who entered Russia and returned to the U.S. at around the same times Oswald did. He worked with the CIA-linked Rand Corporation, which was known for its high-tech products, which were of interest to Russia. Oswald, when planning to leave Russia in 1961, inquired about Webster’s status to a U.S. embassy official.

Strangely, Webster had met Marina Prusakova in 1959 before she married Oswald, and Webster’s Leningrad address was found in Marina’s address book after the assassination. It appears Webster spoke English with her, a language she claimed to not understand. All this suggests that Russia was aware of the false defector program and that Marina may have been assigned Russian intelligence tasks to identify some of them. Webster also brought back a Russian spouse some feel was linked to Russian intelligence.

Marina Oswald (Destiny Betrayed – Richard Schweiker)

Marina’s uncle worked for the Russian version of the FBI. Her interactions with both Oswald and Webster and the ease by which she was allowed to leave Russia are among the reasons that some researchers believe Marina was intelligence-linked, and that Oswald’s and Webster’s suspected false defector roles are why she was made to cross paths with them in the first place.

Schweiker was onto this:

The key is why did they let him (Oswald) bring a Russian-born wife out contrary to present Russian policy, he had to get special dispensation from the highest levels to bring his Russian-born wife out, that in itself says somebody was giving Oswald highest priority either because we had trained and sent him there and they went along and pretended they did not know to fake us out, or they had in fact inculcated him and sent him back and were trying to fake us out, but he had gotten a green light no other American had gotten.

Francis Gary Powers (Oswald and the CIA)

Francis Gary Powers

Powers is the U2 pilot whose plane was shot down over Russia while Oswald was there after threatening to give away U2-related secrets. This scuttled Eisenhower’s upcoming summit meeting with Khrushchev and is what probably contributed to Eisenhower’s warnings about the power of the military industrial complex in his farewell address to the nation. There has been some speculation that Oswald was at his trial in Russia. Powers and others have blamed Oswald for his being shot down. Oswald, while in Russia, wrote a letter to his brother, Robert, in which he says that he saw Powers in Moscow.

Spas Theodore Raikin (JFK and the Unspeakable)

Spas Raikin

Since the ARRB cleared the release of a large number of classified documents, a number of CIA files have shed light on the person assigned by the U.S. State Department to greet the Oswald family on June 12, 1962 when they stepped off the ocean liner Maasdam in Hoboken, New Jersey. Raikin was a representative of the Traveler’s Aid Society who helped them pass smoothly through immigration and customs.

Here is how James Douglass describes what the Warren Report did not reveal about him: “Raikin was at the same time secretary-general of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Nations, an anti-communist organization with extensive intelligence connections –– like the American government, an unlikely source of support for a traitor.”

Andy Anderson/Eleanor Reed (Joan Mellen)

The Agency claims that they did not debrief Oswald upon his return to the USA from Russia. On the surface, this seems ridiculous. But he may have been when he went through Copenhagen on his way back to the United States. In 1978, Donald Denesyla told the HSCA that he had in fact received a report about a defector who returned from Russia in 1962 who had worked in a radio factory. This report, written by Andy Anderson, went to Robert Crowley, a close friend and colleague of James Angleton. Crowley also handled the Webster case.

Joan Mellen argues that the actual de-briefer may have been Eleanor Reed.

Further corroboration that the CIA Soviet Russia Division, Soviet Realities, SR6, in the person of Eleanor Reed, debriefed false defectors is contained in a document that I have just discovered that the CIA released “as sanitized” in 1998. The document resides in Robert Webster’s file, is dated 17 August 1962, and is telling for several reasons; the cases of Oswald and Webster are so similar that we can await, with reasonable expectation, that a parallel document of Oswald’s debriefing by Reed (with, perhaps, her frequent debriefing partner, Rudy (“Valentino”) Balaban, may well surface. This document demonstrates beyond doubt that Reed (“Anderson”) was an SR6 debriefer.

In other words, Reed used the Anderson name at times.

John Fain (The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend)

In Dallas, Fain was the first FBI agent who interrogated Oswald in June and then in August 1962. He was interested in finding out if the Russians were using him or his wife. He described Oswald as impatient, insolent and secretive during the first meeting. Though more cooperative during the second, he was still not fully transparent. Fain showed his suspicions around the subject of Oswald wanting to be part of a country that represented the biggest threat to the U.S.

There is more to Fain’s involvement in the Oswald saga than this however, as he is probably the agent that Oswald’s mother Marguerite interacted with while her son was in Russia and he also made certain the FBI was in in sync with the CIA in the administration of Oswald’s files.

George Bouhe, Max Clark and the White Russians of Dallas (Destiny Betrayed)

In the summer of 1962, Oswald settled in Fort Worth, where he was greeted by White Russians. This group was very cooperative with intelligence forces, especially in welcoming anti-communist immigrants to their fold. These are the people our supposed pro-Marxist traitor cozied up with in what Jim Garrison referred to in his memoir as “The Social Triumphs of Lee Oswald”. Of course, the Warren Commission’s curiosity was not even piqued by these relationships of direct adversaries: a communist dealing with White Russians who wanted to overthrow the Red regime and bring back the czar. Probably many in this group had direct contacts with intelligence. Let us single out two: The leader George Bouhe kept files on the White Russians and just happened to be a neighbour of Jack Ruby. It is he who introduced Oswald to Max Clark, a retired Air Force Colonel who Bouhe suspected was involved with the FBI and security work. It was Clark and Dallas CIA Station Chief J. Walton Moore who would connect Oswald with one of his most prominent intelligence contacts …

George DeMohrenschildt (Destiny Betrayed – Family of Secrets – Spartacus – I’m a Patsy)

George DeMohrenschildt

DeMohrenschildt came from a family of Russian nobility; his father was governor of Minsk and director of the Baku oil fields before the Russian Revolution. Some family members became involved in intelligence activities against the communist regime that took over the country and relocated in foreign countries. There is even correspondence between George’s brother Dimitri, a CIA asset in Europe, and Allen Dulles that goes as far back as 1953. It goes without saying that Dulles kept these relations hidden from his Warren Commission colleagues.

George moved to the U.S. in 1938. The British suspected he worked for German intelligence at the time. Through his studies, work in the oil industry and involvement with the Texas Crusade for Freedom and other associations, he came into contact with George H. W. Bush, Clint Murchison, Harold Byrd, H.L. Hunt (all oilmen) and Dallas mayor Earle Cabell. His international travels dovetail with CIA relations for which he received favors.

He is perhaps the person who interacted the most with the Oswalds before Lee’s move to New Orleans. In the fall of 1962, he persuaded Oswald to move to Dallas. DeMohrenschildt helped Oswald gain employment by January 1963 at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. This is surprising, as JCS was a graphics art house that seems to have done some work related to U2 flights over Cuba, and Oswald’s notebook lists it with the words micro dot beside it. While there he showed co-worker Dennis Ofstein photos of Soviet military headquarters he had taken and gave him detailed descriptions of military related observations he was able to make while in Russia. DeMohrenschildt is also the one who introduced the Oswalds to Ruth Paine in February. It has become apparent to many that DeMohrenschildt was a CIA-designated baby-sitter who had numerous meetings with Moore, which Moore tried to cover up. In March of 1963, George got a contract from the Haitian government, which he attributed to his relationship with the CIA. While he probably had nothing to do with the JFK assassination itself, according to Jim Garrison, he did help paint Oswald as a sociopathic communist before the Commission.

In Family of Secrets, Russ Baker chronicles DeMohrenschildt’s relations with George H. W. Bush, who most probably was a CIA operative orally briefed by Hoover shortly after the assassination. In 1976, as the JFK case was heating up again, DeMohrenschildt corresponded with his friend Bush, who was CIA director at the time, asking for help to get the FBI off his back, as he felt he had perhaps spoken too much about Oswald.

In his book I’m a Patsy, he expresses his opinion that Oswald was innocent and incapable of such a violent act. This is pretty much a reversal of what his testimony was before the Warren Commission. On March 29, 1977, just when he was about to be interviewed by the HSCA, he became another person of interest among many to die mysteriously during intense investigative activity.

Ruth Paine and Michael Paine (Destiny Betrayed – Someone Would Have Talked – Spartacus)

By the time they met the Oswalds, the Paines, who were Quakers, had separated but remained on friendly terms. From the beginning, Ruth Paine would be omnipresent in Marina’s life and seemed purposeful in separating her from her husband. After dropping Marina off to join Lee in New Orleans, she corresponded with her throughout the summer of 1963.

Ruth & Michael Paine

Towards the end of the summer, Ruth Paine picked up Marina to be with her when she delivered her second child in Dallas. This is when the Oswalds separated and Marina moved in with Ruth in Irving, Texas. It is in her garage that Lee Oswald stored many of his belongings. Ruth Paine’s roles in Lee Oswald’s demise were varied and numerous. She helped Oswald get his job in the Texas School Book Depository. Her garage became the go-to place to find convenient, and often suspicious, clues linking Oswald to the murder. She would go on to become one of the Warren Commission’s most important witnesses. In fact, she was asked more questions than any other single person.

Michael Paine might have played perhaps as important a role. A suspicious event involving the Paines occurred on the day of the assassination. At 1:00 pm on November 22, 1963, Michael Paine placed a collect call to his wife to discuss Oswald’s involvement in the assassination. While the telephone operator remained on the line, Michael Paine told his wife that he “Felt sure Lee Harvey Oswald had killed the President but was not responsible.” Rather ominously he added, “We both know who is responsible.” (FBI report of Robert C. Lish, November 26, 1963, JFK Document No. 105-82555-1437) The most extraordinary thing about this call is that it took place one hour before Oswald’s arrest. For obvious reasons, the Warren Commission wanted to sweep this little problem under the rug. So when junior counsel Wesley Liebeler questioned Michael about the call, he stated the date of the call as November 23^rd, giving Michael an easy way to deny its implications.

According to a report written by Dallas Deputy Sheriff Buddy Walthers on the day of the assassination, upon searching Paine’s garage, officers found “a set of metal file cabinets that appeared to be names and activities of Cuban Sympathizers.” (19H520). These metal file cabinets did not make it onto the Dallas Police inventory sheets and were never entered into evidence alongside Lee Harvey Oswald’s belongings. By the time the Warren Commission got them, they had been reduced in number and attributed to Ruth Paine. And if Ruth and Michael Paine had a “set of metal file cabinets” containing “the names and activities of Cuban sympathizers”, then they were most certainly involved in the same intelligence activities that most researchers believe Oswald was involved in during the summer of 1963: rooting out “Un-Americans”.

Here is how long-time researcher Jim DiEugenio interprets these findings:

This cinches the case that the Paines were domestic surveillance agents in the Cold War against communism. (Hancock notes how the Warren Commission and Wesley Liebeler forced Walthers to backtrack on this point and then made it disappear in the “Speculation and Rumors” part of the report.)

The Paines were painted as Good Samaritans by the Warren Commission. Kept hidden were their eyebrow-raising associations with intelligence, beginning with their links to Russian expatriates. To begin with, the father of a witness who vouched for their character, Frederick Osborne Jr., was a close associate of Allen Dulles. Allen Dulles’ mistress was Mary Bancroft. Her best friend, Ruth Forbes Young, was the mother of Michael Paine. Forbes’ husband Arthur Young was one of the creators of Bell Helicopter where Michael worked and had a security clearance. Arthur Young also had worked for the CIA-linked Franklin Institute. Michael’s grand-uncle Cameron Forbes sat on the board of United Fruit with the members of the Cabot family. United Fruit was an important client of the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm where the Dulles brothers were partners. Michael’s cousin Thomas Cabot was United Fruit’s former president. Thomas’ brother John exchanged information with attorney Maurice Gatlin (who links up closely with Guy Banister) to help the overthrow of Jacob Arbenz of Guatemala.

In April 1963, some students at Southern Methodist University identified Michael Paine as a person who regularly would visit Luby’s Restaurant, a popular college hangout. While there he tried to root out those with Castro sympathies. In his pitch, he brought up his links to a communist-Marine who came back from Russia with a Russian bride.

Ruth Paine’s father William Hyde had worked for the OSS in World War II and stayed connected with the CIA later on through his work for the Agency for International Development (AID), which was infested with CIA operatives. Before picking up Marina in New Orleans, she had paid a visit to her sister who worked for the CIA. This is something that Ruth seemed intent on keeping from Jim Garrison in her appearance before the Clay Shaw grand jury. Her brother-in-law also worked for AID. Ruth seemed to have a penchant for weeding out communists as, later in her life, she is alleged to have played a role in identifying Americans who opposed U.S. policy when she was in Nicaragua during the Contra war.

James Hosty (Destiny Betrayed – Oswald and the CIA)

James Hosty

March 1963 is when FBI agent James Hosty was asked to monitor the Oswalds in Dallas. He lost track of Lee Oswald when he moved to New Orleans. By November 1^st, he had interviewed Ruth Paine and Marina in order to locate him. When Oswald found out about this, he left Hosty a note in an envelope at the FBI office in Dallas. What was on the note is still unclear. When Oswald was assassinated, Hosty’s boss Gordon Shanklin ordered him to destroy the note and Hosty’s memorandum about the event. Hosty’s name was in Oswald’s address book, something the FBI kept hidden from the Warren Commission.

This created great consternation when it was publicly disclosed in the seventies. Hoover had been very worried that Oswald’s possible role as an informant who infiltrated the Fair Play for Cuba Committee would blow up in the FBI’s face. Based on Oswald’s links to New Orleans FBI agents, which will be reviewed later, this role seems more than plausible.

Hosty was also present during Oswald’s interrogations after Kennedy’s murder. Hosty took heat for the security lapse that allowed someone like Oswald to be present on the infamous motorcade route in Dallas.

Return to New Orleans, Mexico, Return to Dallas

Victor Thomas Vicente

In the article The Three Failed plots to Kill JFK, the author shows how Oswald’s starting a Fair Play for Cuba Committee Chapter in New Orleans was more likely part of a covert operation than his demonstration of bonding with Marxism. By then the FPCC was infested with informants and linked closely to infiltration and sabotage programs overseen by prominent CIA operatives David Atlee Phillips, James McCord and William Harvey.

When Lee Harvey Oswald wrote his first letter to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee HQ in New York in April 1963, he asked for “forty to fifty” free copies of a 40-page pamphlet.

The author of the pamphlets, Corliss Lamont, turned out to be holding a receipt for 45 of these pamphlets from the CIA Acquisitions Division. These pamphlets were mailed to Oswald by FPCC worker Victor Thomas Vicente. Vicente was a key informant for both the CIA and the FBI’s New York office.

Novo Sampol brothers, Tony Cuesta, Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada (JFK: The Cuba Files)

Orlando Bosch

The CIA and FBI were not the only intelligence agencies tapping into Cuban exiles living in the U.S. Cuban Intelligence also had their share of informants. Fabian Escalante was put in charge of Castro’s security and later became Head of State Security. He directed the investigations that the Cuban government carried out at the request of the U.S. Select Committee of the House of Representatives. He also wrote a book called JFK: The Cuban Files. Having read the book, I was struck by how cautious he was in talking about potential leads.

Here are some of the people of interest who met Oswald according their files and analysis. By mid-1963 there was a meeting between Oswald and group of terrorists in a CIA safe house on the outskirts of Miami. Also present were:

Tony Cuesta

Orlando Bosch who among other things participated in the downing of a Cuban airliner, for which he was eventually incarcerated, and the murder of Chilean ambassador Orlando Letellier. He was considered such a threat to JFK that the Secret Service had him under special surveillance during JFK’s visit to Miami in November, 1963. According to Gaeton Fonzi, Antonio Veciana considered him a good friend.

Tony Cuesta was a higher-up in Alpha 66 and a close colleague of Veciana. He was indicated by Richard Case Nagell as a suspect in the assassination. He also confessed to Escalante his role in the assassination after being captured during a failed raid in 1966. He identified Herminio Diaz and Eladio Del Valle (a key suspect of Garrison) as conspirators.

The Novo brothers, Posada and Bosch were all allegedly part of team of assassins called Operation 40.

John Martino (Someone Would Have Talked)

From Larry Hancock we learned about another person who may have crossed paths with Oswald:

John Martino

Martino certainly did have CIA connections in 1963, primarily (David) Morales and Rip Robertson …

John Martino had pre-knowledge of the plan to kill John Kennedy in Texas. John Martino “talked” in a very believable and credible fashion. At first, he talked only to his immediate family, nervously, hesitantly, and excitedly. Shortly before his death, he talked with two long time friends –– part confession and part simply recollection. He made no grand claims, downplayed his own role and limited his statements to things he would have personally come in contact with in playing the role he described with the Cuban exiles whose cause he was demonstrably devoted to at the time. His story is certainly consistent and totally in context with his documented activities and personal associations in 1963.

Martino also admitted observing Oswald during the summer of 1963.

William Monaghan and Dante Marichini (Deep Politics)

Reilly Coffee Co.

During the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, Oswald gained employment at the Reilly Coffee Company, an organization of interest because of its links to Caribbean anti-communist politics. The Reilly brothers backed Ed Butler’s INCA (the CIA-linked Information Council of the Americas which factors heavily in Oswald’s later Marxist PR activities) and the CRC (Cuban Revolutionary Council).

William Monaghan was the V.P. of Finance there who ended up firing Oswald. He was also an ex-FBI agent. He was listed as a charter member of INCA in a 1962 bulletin. He is believed by some to have played a role in the friendly hosting of Oswald at Reilly’s during his covert Intel-linked mission.

Other employees there of interest to researchers included four of Oswald’s co-workers who joined NASA during the summer of 1963. Dante Marichini who was a friend of David Ferrie’s and the neighbour of Clay Shaw was one of these.

Guy Banister (Destiny Betrayed – Jim Garrison – Ed Haslam – Spartacus – How JFK was killed)

FBI investigators did not take Jim Garrison’s suspicions about David Ferrie seriously. Garrison had turned over Ferrie because of his incriminating behaviour on the day of the assassination. The FBI then let Ferrie get away with numerous lies during their questioning of him. If they had not done so, they would have been able to link Oswald to a network of informants, CIA-backed anti-Castro Cuban exiles and other intelligence assets who had in common their hatred of Castro and, by then, Kennedy. This violent, right-wing hub of anti-Castro activity just happened to be where Oswald set up shop for his Fair Play for Cuba Committee office, which became central in his renewed relationship with Ferrie and Thornley and the development of new contacts like Sergio Arcache Smith, Carlos Quiroga, Frank Bartes, Clay Shaw, Carlos Bringuier, Guy Banister and who knows who else. It is no wonder the Warren Commission investigators and pro-lone-nut mouthpieces have felt extremely uncomfortable about Oswald’s flyers with the 544 Camp Street address on them.

Guy Banister

Garrison’s investigation led him to this nest of anti-Castro intelligence activity that was at the antipode of Oswald’s new found pro-Castro hobby. Over and above working in very close proximity to one another and Banister’s close ties to Ferrie, proof that Banister and Oswald were working together is overwhelming:
1. An important number of Banister’s colleagues confirmed seeing Oswald with Banister and other persons of extreme interest.
2. Recall that the Banister-linked organization Friends of Democratic Cuba used Oswald’s name while he was in Russia.
3. There was evidence in Banister’s files that he kept tabs on Oswald.
4. Writer Ed Haslam discovered that Ed Butler, who played an important role in a radio interview of Oswald, kept the deceased Banister’s files hidden. We will get back to Butler later.
Banister’s ties to intelligence are well summed up even in the very early work of Joachim Joesten, How Kennedy Was Killed (1968):

Guy Banister, a former FBI official and onetime assistant superintendent of the New Orleans police department, had had a ‘stormy’ career, according to the New Orleans States-Item of May 5, 1967. After he had left police work officially, if not earlier, Banister was active for years as a top U.S. intelligence agent in the South and in Latin America. His spacious office, at 531 Lafayette Street, in New Orleans, served both as a rallying point for Minutemen, Cuban exiles and assorted right-wing and intelligence operatives and as an arms distribution centre for these elements. This has been brought out with dazzling clarity both by the Garrison investigation and through independent research by the local press.

A close friend and adviser of Banister’s told the States-Item the veteran FBI agent was a key liaison man for U.S. government-sponsored anti-Communist activities in Latin America, the New Orleans paper reported and added: “Guy participated in every important anti-Communist South and Central American revolution which came along while he had the office on Lafayette Street,” the source reported. The paper also stated that Banister is believed to have worked in cooperation with a U.S. military intelligence office here.

What emerges from all of this is that Oswald was assisting Banister, a known communist hunter, in identifying Castro-sympathizers and that Banister was deeply involved in activities supplying weapons to anti-Castro groups like Alpha 66 –– a key organization of interest in the assassination.

Clay Shaw (Jim Garrison – Joan Mellen – Destiny Betrayed)

Thanks to New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, we were introduced to a key person of interest in Clay Shaw. For his profile let me quote from a one of my previous articles:

Perhaps no other person who believed there was a conspiracy was vilified more than Jim Garrison. He has been called a charlatan, a publicity-seeker and crazy, among other things. With time however, many of his claims have been vindicated. While some described his case as a farce, it is often overlooked that Garrison had presented his evidence beforehand to a three-judge panel who concluded that he was justified to bring it to court, and that the subsequent HSCA investigation concluded that Garrison and his office “had established an association of an undetermined nature between Ferrie, a suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy, and Clay Shaw and Lee Harvey Oswald” –– a devastating blow to Garrison detractors. Many witnesses have confirmed this.

Clay Shaw

Other information from later investigations reveals that his efforts were sabotaged by adversaries who infiltrated his volunteer team and weakened his efforts; well-orchestrated propaganda attacking both his case and reputation; refusals to his subpoenas for out-of-state witnesses and the harassment, turning and untimely deaths of some of his key witnesses, including the suspicious deaths of star-witness David Ferrie and the murder of Eladio Del Valle. Other irrefutable documentary evidence that began to emerge showed that Clay Shaw, despite his denials, was in fact a CIA asset and part of a CIA organization of interest called Permindex.

In Destiny Betrayed, Jim DiEugenio underscores other Shaw links with the CRC and with Banister, CIA-cleared doctor Ed Ochsner, and Ed Butler, who are all connected to The Information Council of the Americas which appears to have played a role in the sheep-dipping of Oswald (see Ed Butler). He also shows that Shaw was cleared for a project called QK/ENCHANT during the Garrison investigation. Howard Hunt also belonged to this project , which was part of the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division, according to CIA insider Victor Marchetti.

William Gaudet (Destiny Betrayed)

William Gaudet

Gaudet had worked for the CIA before he crossed paths with Oswald. He most likely continued freelancing for it. He worked virtually rent-free out of Clay Shaw’s International Trade Mart. He told the HSCA that he observed Oswald and Banister talking on a street corner on a number of occasions. Gaudet links up with many in the Banister network.

And then there is this little plum, according to author Anthony Summers: Gaudet … happened to be next in line to Oswald when Oswald applied for his Mexican tourist visa.

It seems plausible that Gaudet played a part in monitoring Oswald, perhaps for the benefit of Clay Shaw.

Dean Andrews (Jim Garrison)

Lawyer Dean Andrews was called by Shaw under the pseudonym Clay Bertrand, and given instructions to represent Oswald, as told by Garrison in his famous interview with Playboy:

A New Orleans lawyer, Dean Andrews, told the Warren Commission that a few months before the assassination of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald and a group of “gay Mexicanos” came to his office and requested Andrews’ aid in having Oswald’s Marine Corps undesirable discharge changed to an honorable discharge; Oswald subsequently returned alone with other legal problems.

Dean Andrews

Andrews further testified that the day after President Kennedy was assassinated, he received a call from Clay Bertrand, who asked him to rush to Dallas to represent Oswald. Andrews claims he subsequently saw Bertrand in a New Orleans bar, but Bertrand fled when Andrews approached him. This was intriguing testimony, although the Warren Commission dismissed it out of hand; and in 1964, Mark Lane traveled to New Orleans to speak to Andrews. He found him visibly frightened. “I’ll take you to dinner,” Andrews told Lane, “but I can’t talk about the case. I called Washington and they told me that if I said anything, I might get a bullet in the head.” For the same reason, he has refused to cooperate with my office in this investigation. The New York Times reported on February 26th that “Mr. Andrews said he had not talked to Mr. Garrison because such talk might be dangerous, but added that he believed he was being ‘tailed.’” Andrews told our grand jury that he could not say Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand and he could not say he wasn’t. But the day after NBC’s special, Andrews broke his silence and said, yes, Clay Shaw is not Clem Bertrand and identified the real Clay Bertrand as Eugene Davis. The only trouble is, Andrews and Davis have known each other for years and have been seen frequently in each other’s company. Andrews has lied so often and about so many aspects of this case that the New Orleans Parish grand jury has indicted him for perjury. I feel sorry for him, since he’s afraid of getting a bullet in his head, but he’s going to have to go to trial for perjury. [Andrews has since been convicted.]

Sergio Arcacha Smith (Destiny Betrayed – Jim Garrison – JFK: The Cuba Files)

Arcacha Smith is considered by many to be one of the leading organizers of the Cuban exiles who probably played a role in the assassination. He is perhaps also the Cuban exile with the most links with suspected participants from the mob, intelligence and business communities. He was sprung from Cuba by New Orleans lawyer Guy Johnson, an Office of Naval Intelligence reserve Officer and friend of both Guy Banister and Clay Shaw. The CIA selected him to be a key leader of Cuban exiles as a representative of the Cuban Revolutionary Council that was created by Howard Hunt as an umbrella organization of many Cuban exile groups such as Alpha 66 and the DRE. It is in this role that he befriended David Ferrie who he worked with in CIA Bay of Pigs training of Cuban exiles. According to Richard Case Nagell, Arcacha Smith, along with his right-hand man Carlos Quiroga, were among those setting Oswald up to take the fall.

Sergio Arcacha Smith

When in New Orleans he associated closely with Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, David Ferrie and Doctor Alton Ochsner. Gordon Novel, who later played a role in sabotaging the Shaw trial, claims that David Phillips participated in at least one meeting where Smith and Banister were in attendance. Arcacha Smith helped found the Friends of Democratic Cuba, the organization that borrowed Oswald’s name when he was in Russia and connects Arcacha Smith to Banister, Shaw and Ferrie. Jim Garrison discovered that this group worked closely in sync with New Orleans FBI agents Regis Kennedy and Warren DeBrueys, who were also monitoring Oswald. Jack Martin, who worked for Banister, claimed that he had been introduced to Oswald in the presence of Arcacha Smith.

Arcacha Smith also interacted with mobster Carlos Marcello and oilman H.L. Hunt, who saw him as a good contact for when Cuba would be won back. Cuban intelligence placed him in the top twelve suspects in the conspiracy.

After David Ferrie’s mysterious death, Garrison tried to extradite Arcacha Smith out of Texas for questioning under oath. This was blocked by Texas Governor John Connally, and the world never heard from one of the assassination’s most important witnesses.

Carlos Bringuier, Carlos Quiroga, Celso Hernandez and Frank Bartes (Destiny Betrayed – The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend – Spartacus)

Bringuier was part of the DRE, a militant right-wing, anti-Communist, anti-Castro, anti-Kennedy group. Bringuier, based in New Orleans, was placed in charge of DRE publicity and propaganda. According to Bringuier, the following summarizes his strange encounters with Oswald:

Carlos Bringuier

On August 5, 1963, Oswald walks into Carlos Bringuier’s shop and starts up a conversation with him about wanting to help in the fight against Castro. Bringuier does not trust him and refuses his help. The next day Oswald drops off a copy of a Marine manual; on August 9. 1963, Oswald, while leafleting FPCC flyers on Canal Street, drew the ire of Bringuier and his Cuban associates Celso Hernandez and Miguel Cruz. Bringuier did the swinging while Oswald tried to block his blows. Within a few minutes all four were arrested for disturbing the peace; Oswald spent the night in jail while the other three were quickly let go; Oswald is then interviewed on a Bill Stuckey show along with Bringuier where his Marxist and FPCC credentials were discussed for all to hear.

Through this episode Oswald’s persona was archived on tape for strategic distribution on the day of the assassination. Bringuier himself wrote up an article that was published the day after the assassination that described this experience which he used as a call to arms against Castro. Oswald had actually described this event on August fourth, before it happened, to the head office of the FPCC, proving that it was staged. Bringuier’s links to intelligence were numerous. According to E. Howard Hunt, the DRE was started by David Phillips, who we will see is the CIA career employee who has the most links with Oswald. The DRE was eventually overseen in 1963 by George Joannides, a fact which was kept hidden from the HSCA when he became the CIA liaison to that committee and directly sabotaged investigation efforts.

Arcacha Smith, Manuel Gil,
& Carlos Quiroga

According to Richard Case Nagell, a Bringuier colleague who played a role in setting Oswald up as a patsy was Carlos Quiroga. A Jim Garrison polygraphed interrogation of Quiroga and other research proved that Quiroga knew Banister and Sergio Arcacha Smith, had met Oswald more than once, and had supplied Oswald with Fair Play for Cuba literature on the orders of Carlos Bringuier. Quiroga was shown to be lying when he claimed to have met Oswald only once in an attempt to infiltrate the FPCC New Orleans Chapter.

One of the Cuban exiles arrested during the so-called skirmish was Celso Hernandez, who may have met Oswald before. According to Bill Simpich’s research, the CIA examined Celso Hernandez as a Castro penetration agent:

There is an intriguing report of FPCC member Oswald being arrested with Celso Hernandez in New Orleans in late 1962. The ID of Hernandez was made years later and is admittedly shaky. The ID of Oswald is more substantive, as he id’d himself to the police as an FPCC member –– but he was living in the Dallas area. The story is that the two men were picked up at the lakefront in Celso’s work truck, owned by an electronics firm that was Celso’s employer.

The most important thing is that right about this time, Bill Harvey –– who worked both the wiretapping side and the Cuban beat for the CIA during 1962 –– was tipped off on 10/1/62 that Celso Hernandez might be a communist. This kicked off an investigation that revealed in the autumn of 1963 that there was a left-wing Celso and a right-wing Celso, and a brother and sister who couldn’t agree on who was who. Oswald and Celso Hernandez were arrested together again in August 1963. What we do know is that throughout this era, Hernandez was under close scrutiny as a possible pro-Castro infiltrator.

While Oswald and Bringuier were in court after their altercation, a sympathizer and friend of Bringuier’s, Frank Bartes showed up to offer moral support. This Cuban exile went on to conduct anti-Castro press relations.

Bartes just happened to be the CRC leader of New Orleans based in a building near Banister. He was suspected of holding meetings later on Camp Street, with perhaps Oswald present and other persons of interest like Sergio Arcacha Smith. While this is mind-boggling enough, in 1993 the ARRB released files confirming that Bartes was an informant to the FBI agent who just happened to be monitoring Oswald, Warren DeBrueys.

(Author’s comment: This takes the cake!)

Jesse Core (Destiny Betrayed)

Core was Clay Shaw’s right-hand man who was present during the incident on Canal Street and Oswald’s leafleting near the Trade Mart. He contacted Shaw’s friends at WDSU TV. He also is the one who warned his team about the blunder by Oswald of placing Banister’s address on some of the literature he was handing out.

John Quigley and Warren DeBrueys (Destiny Betrayed – Joan Mellen – Sylvia Meagher)

After the altercation with Bringuier, it was New Orleans police Lieutenant Frank Martello who questioned Oswald first. The Warren Commission seemed to dismiss his testimony that Oswald: “… seemed to have set them up, so to speak, to create an incident …”.

While under arrest, Oswald made a bizarre request. He asked to see an FBI agent. One would think a true Marxist/FPCC recruiter would want to avoid such an encounter at all costs. It’s more likely that Oswald knew he would be joined by a friendly party he could pass on information to and who might spring him from jail without him having to pay bail. Just as interesting, the FBI sent agent John Quigley, who spent between ninety minutes and three hours with Oswald. It’s safe to say that they were not discussing Bringuier simply being mean to the alleged communist.

Quigley stated that Martello told him that Oswald wanted to pass on information about the FPCC to him. Joan Mellen’s research finds that Oswald actually asked specifically for Warren DeBrueys. DeBrueys, who ran Bartes as an informant, would further nail down the real reason Oswald started an FPCC chapter in a hostile place like New Orleans. William Walter, an employee at the New Orleans FBI office, claimed to have seen an FBI informant file of Oswald with DeBrueys’ name on it.

Warren DeBrueys

Coupled with the communist witch-hunts taking place out of Banister’s office, the FBI and CIA FPCC penetration operations that were in full-swing, and the fact that Quigley’s colleague, Warren DeBrueys, was in charge of monitoring the New Orleans FPCC chapter –– whose one and only member was Oswald –– it is only normal that this event has been interpreted by many as an intelligence officer interacting with an informant. The same informant who was helping Banister and would later give a note to Dallas FBI agent James Hosty that was so provocative that Hosty was asked to destroy it, and which became an explosive topic for the Church Committee.

In his questioning of DeBrueys, Schweiker clearly showed disbelief in Oswald the communist having a Camp Street address for his FPCC activities, something the FBI agent fluffed off by saying that perhaps Oswald had a sense of humor.

Arnesto Rodriguez (Joan Mellen)

The number of links between DeBrueys and Oswald are to say the least impressive. For our next Oswald intel contact let us return to a Joan Mellen essay:

124 Camp Street

Supporting the conclusion that the CIA was behind the Kennedy assassination is the fact that in New Orleans Oswald associated only with people with intelligence connections, beginning with Arnesto Rodriguez, an FBI informant with family members rooted in the CIA’s clandestine services. Rodriguez was one of FBI Special Agent Warren DeBrueys’ informants. One day Oswald appeared at Rodriguez’s office at the International Trade Mart building at 124 Camp Street. He wanted to help the Cubans, Oswald said. He wanted to be part of the training camps. Rodriguez was suspicious. Who had sent Oswald to him? he wondered. How did Oswald know that there was “a training camp across the lake from us, north of Lake Pontchartrain?” It was top secret at the time, yet Oswald knew about it.

Author’s Note: This writer does not agree at this point that this gives evidence that the CIA, as an organization, was behind the assassination. The relationships indicated here show so far that Oswald was linked to intelligence-related covert activities (such as infiltrating the FPCC to discredit it or to identify Castro sympathizers or to gain eventual entry into Cuba.)

Orestes Pena, Joseph Oster, David Smith, Juan Valdes and Wendell Roache (Bill Simpich)

Orestes Pena

DeBrueys’ relationship with Oswald reaches a whole other dimension of intensity according to another one of his informants, Orestes Pena. He also connects Oswald with Customs and the INS. Relying on Church Committee testimonies, Bill Simpich wrote the following in the Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend part 9:

Curiously, the evidence that Oswald collaborated with Customs is stronger than with any other agency. Cuban exile Orestes Pena testified that he saw Oswald chatting on a regular basis with FBI Cuban specialist Warren DeBrueys, David Smith at Customs, and Wendell Roache at INS. Pena told the Church Committee that Oswald was employed by Customs. Informant Joseph Oster went farther, saying that Oswald’s handler was David Smith at Customs. Church Committee staff members knew that David Smith “was involved in CIA operations.” Orestes Pena’s handler Warren DeBrueys admitted he knew David Smith. Oswald was also frequently seen with Juan Valdes, who described himself as a “customs house broker”.

Orestes Pena also claimed that DeBrueys, who admitted arguing with Pena, tried to intimidate him with respect to what he had witnessed.

Ed Butler and Bill Stuckey (Destiny Betrayed – Ed Haslam)

Carlos Bringuier with Ed Butler

Ed Butler was the director of INCA, the Information Council of the Americas, a right-wing, CIA-associated propaganda outfit. Doctor Alton Ochsner and the Reilly Coffee Company were among its chief sponsors.

The Canal Street incident led to Oswald being part of a debate on WDSU reporter Bill Stuckey’s weekly radio program called Latin Listening Post. Later, Butler and Carlos Bringuier were also invited to debate Oswald about his Marxist views on a show called Conversation Carte Blanche. Stuckey claimed that his show helped destroy the FPCC in New Orleans. It is during this show that Oswald let slip that he was under the protection of the government while in Russia.

INCA – WDSU
“Conversation Carte Blanche”

Both Butler and Stuckey were briefed in advance about Oswald’s defection to Russia: Stuckey by the FBI, Butler by the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC). Therefore they were able to ambush Oswald and expose him as a Soviet defector, which compromised his debate position as one who desired “fair play” for Cuba. The records of this show were used immediately after the assassination (through Butler and Bringuier) to paint Oswald as the lone-nut Marxist. In fact, Butler was flown up to Washington within 24 hours to talk to the leaders of the HUAC.

Ed Butler is also the one who helped link Gordon Novel to Arcacha Smith and David Phillips. According to author Ed Haslam, he also became the secret custodian of Banister’s files years after his death.

Leopoldo and Angel (HSCA – Dick Russell – Joan Mellen – Larry Hancock)

Before commenting on our next two intelligence-linked Oswald contacts, let us review how they may have been involved in the Sylvia Odio incident as described by the HSCA:

Silvia Odio

The Commission investigated (Mrs. Odio’s) statements in connection with its consideration of the testimony of several witnesses suggesting that Oswald may have been seen in the company of unidentified persons of Cuban or Mexican background. Mrs. Odio was born in Havana in 1937 and remained in Cuba until 1960; it appears that both of her parents are political prisoners of the Castro regime. Mrs. Odio is a member of the Cuban Revolutionary Junta (JURE), an anti-Castro organization. She testified that late in September 1963, three men came to her apartment in Dallas and asked her to help them prepare a letter soliciting funds for JURE activities. She claimed that the men, who exhibited personal familiarity with her imprisoned father, asked her if she were “working in the underground,” and she replied that she was not. She testified that two of the men appeared to be Cubans, although they also had some characteristics that she associated with Mexicans. Those two men did not state their full names, but identified themselves only by their fictitious underground “war names.” Mrs. Odio remembered the name of one of the Cubans as “Leopoldo.” The third man, an American, allegedly was introduced to Mrs. Odio as “Leon Oswald,” and she was told that he was very much interested in the Cuban cause. Mrs. Odio said that the men told her that they had just come from New Orleans and that they were then about to leave on a trip. Mrs. Odio testified that the next day Leopoldo called her on the telephone and told her that it was his idea to introduce the American into the underground “because he is great, he is kind of nuts.” Leopoldo also said that the American had been in the Marine Corps and was an excellent shot, and that the American said the Cubans “don’t have any guts … because President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and some Cubans should have done that, because he was the one that was holding the freedom of Cuba actually.”

Because this story was corroborated by her sister, and Odio had talked to others about it before the assassination and remained consistent throughout the years, the HSCA concluded that she was credible:

It appears that Silvia Odio’s testimony is essentially credible. From the evidence provided in the sworn testimony of corroborating witnesses, there is no doubt that three men came to her apartment in Dallas prior to the Kennedy assassination and identified themselves as members of an anti-Castro Cuban organization. From a judgment of the credibility of both Silvia and Annie Odio, it must be concluded that there is a strong probability that one of the men was or appeared to be Lee Harvey Oswald. No conclusion about the significance of that visit could be reached. The possibilities were considered that Oswald actually had some association with JURE, the anti-Castro group headed by Manolo Ray, and that Oswald wanted it to appear that he had that association in order to implicate the group, politically a left-of-center Cuban organization, in the Kennedy assassination.

Some researchers interpret the goals of this highly incriminating, Warren-Commission-debunking incident as 1) a further attempt to sheep-dip Oswald as anti-Kennedy and 2) a ploy to link the Cuban exile group JURE that Odio was connected to with Oswald. For the Kennedys seemed to favor this left-leaning organization over others that were much closer to the intelligence networks. Richard Case Nagell revealed that Leopoldo and Angel were war names for two Cuban exiles who had also, in the spring of 1963, looked into the possibility of setting up an executive of the Los Angeles chapter of the FPCC called Vaughn Marlowe.

Joan Mellen’s research has led her to believe that they were Cuban exiles Angelo Murgado and Bernardo De Torres.

Angelo Murgado and a fellow veteran of the Bay of Pigs, in September, were the men who traveled with Oswald from New Orleans to Dallas where they visited Sylvia Odio. (Mrs. Odio testified that the three traveled together although Angelo says that when he and Leopoldo, who drove from New Orleans together, arrived at Sylvia Odio’s, Oswald was already there, sitting in the apartment. That “Leopoldo” and Angelo both knew Oswald, there is no doubt) …

“Leopoldo” was Bernardo de Torres, who testified before the HSCA with immunity granted to him by the CIA, so that he was not questioned about the period of time leading up to the Kennedy assassination, as the CIA instructed the Committee on what it could and could not ask this witness. Both the Warren Commission and the HSCA buried the anti-Castro theme, and never explored what Bobby Kennedy might have known.

Bernardo De Torres

Although her conclusion, to put it mildly, is not shared by all pro-conspiracy researchers, many do consider them –– especially De Torres –– to be persons of interest in the JFK assassination. De Torres’ ties to the CIA were later confirmed by his daughter. Larry Hancock in Someone Would Have Talked identifies other key links: De Torres is known to have associated with several of Hemming’s Interpen members and he was well acquainted with Frank Fiorini/Sturgis. De Torres also had strong operational contacts in Mexico City all the way up to Miguel Nazar Haro in Mexican police intelligence. Haro was later revealed as a key individual in drug trafficking into the U.S. and has been associated with both Sam Giancana and Richard Cain. An FBI report on De Torres from the 1970’s refers to his “high level contacts” with the CIA, but this is otherwise unsubstantiated (unexplained is perhaps a better description).

After the assassination, De Torres infiltrated the Garrison investigation and played a key role in messing up his efforts. In 1977, the HSCA came to believe that he may have played a role in the assassination: “De Torres has pictures of Dealey Plaza in a safe-deposit box,” a HSCA report states. “These pictures were taken during the assassination of JFK.”

Sylvia Duran and Eusebio Azcue (State Secret – The Lopez Report)

Duran worked at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City and received “Oswald” on September 27^th 1963 when he talked about his plans to visit Cuba and then move to the Soviet Union and asked for a visa. She was suspicious of him and instructed him to go through the Russian embassy instead. It is during this episode that the CIA Mexico City station used imposters to create phoney telephone calls between a fake Oswald and workers at the Russian embassy exchanging compromising information that could be used to position Oswald as a communist assassin who had received help from either the Cubans, Russians or both.

Silvia Duran

Suspiciously, the CIA could not produce any photos of Oswald’s five entrances and exits as surveyed by their cameras. They claim that these were all out of order during the two days of Oswald’s visits. David Phillips lied under oath to HSCA Chief Counsel Richard Sprague by claiming that the tapes of these calls had been recycled. It was proven that several investigators had heard at least one recording on the weekend of the assassination. They confirmed that the voice on the tape had survived and was not Oswald’s. This impersonation, followed by the obfuscation, is one of the most important choke points in the whole case.

After the assassination, Sylvia Duran was picked up by Mexican police, on order of Win Scott –– chief of the Mexico City station, and forcefully interrogated. The CIA had been monitoring her and knew she had an affair with Cuban ambassador to the United Nations Carlos Lechuga. Furthermore, through a made-up story by CIA operative June Cobb, Duran was accused of have had a fling with Oswald.

Eusebio Azcue

It is believed that the CIA had perhaps even recruited Duran according to the Lopez Report: “… the circumstantial evidence tends to indicate that Duran had a relationship with Mexican or American intelligence [and] cannot be dismissed.”

Eusebio Azcue, a co-worker of Duran, also met “Oswald” when he was in the office. Curiously, he described him as short and blond, which corresponds to Cuban photograph of the visitor. In State Secret, Bill Simpich makes the argument that Azcue may have been a CIA-linked case officer of another FPCC-related potential patsy called Santiago Garriga who would have penetrated the FPCC for Bill Harvey while David Phillips was running the FPCC monitoring and discrediting project called AM/SANTA.

Antonio Veciana (Dick Russell – JFK: The Cuban Files – Gaeton Fonzi)

For our next person of interest let us refer to renowned researcher Dick Russell, who was one of the first to interview Veciana (From “Interview with an assassin”):

Alpha 66’s Cuban leader Antonio Veciana claimed that at one of his hundred or so meetings with Bishop, Oswald was there. “I always thought Bishop was working with Oswald during the assassination,” Veciana told Russell. Veciana’s cousin worked for Castro’s intelligence service and after the assassination Bishop wanted Veciana to bribe his cousin into saying that he met with Oswald, in order to fabricate an Oswald-Castro connection.

Antonio Veciana

Investigators never established for sure that Bishop and Phillips were one and the same, but descriptions of Bishop’s appearance and mannerisms mirrored Phillips’. Veciana drew a sketch of his old controller and Senator Richard Schweiker, a member of the assassination committee, recognized it as Phillips.

When the select committee’s star investigator Gaeton Fonzi finally brought Veciana and Phillips together, the two started acting weird around each other. After a short conversation in Spanish, Phillips bolted. Witnesses to the encounter swear that a look of recognition swept Veciana’s visage, but Veciana denied that Phillips was his case officer of more than a decade earlier.

Veciana’s reluctance to make the ID, Fonzi theorized, was related to two unfortunate events that had befallen him of late: one, he was convicted of running drugs and suspected that Bishop set him up to silence him; two, he was shot in the head. Veciana’s desire to clear his drug rap and avoid absorbing another bullet may have had something to do with the fact that he would not rat on his old benefactor.

Fonzi was proven right posthumously by a letter Veciana sent to his widow Marie, interviews Veciana gave and a book he has since written confirming that Bishop and Phillips were one and the same. Schweiker did not find Phillips’ denials of knowing Veciana credible; he was unconvinced by this evidence. He found it difficult to believe Phillips would not have known the leader of Alpha 66. Especially as Phillips had been in charge of covert action in Cuba when Alpha 66 was established. Another CIA agent who worked in Cuba during this period claimed that Phillips used the code name Maurice Bishop.

According to Veciana, after the assassination, Phillips tried to convince him to get a relative of his in Mexico City to claim he had seen Oswald receiving money from Castro agents.

(Author’s comment: Because Alpha 66 was the most active and reliable Cuban exile group involved with Castro assassination attempts; because Richard Case Nagell and Cuban intelligence leader Fabian Escalante both fingered Tony Cuesta, another Alpha 66 higher-up, as having been involved in the assassination; and because it is difficult to believe that Phillips would let himself be seen with Oswald by non-participants in a plot; and because of reports of Oswald being present in a Dallas Alpha 66 safe-house, and because of Oswald’s probable links to other prominent people in the Cuban exile community such as Orlando Bosch, this author wonders what other details could be brought forward by Veciana.)

David Phillips

Out of all the CIA-linked people that crossed paths with Oswald, Phillips is perhaps the most important. Because of his rank and the multi-faceted way he links with Oswald beyond the Veciana reports, as well as the government investigators belief of Veciana, this author has reserved a special section to cover this highly revealing relationship that most historians do not even have a clue about. They are not aware of what people like Richard Schweiker came to believe, because they are frozen in the Warren Commission era which set in motion what has been perhaps the U.S.’s worst case ever of perpetuated “Fake News” and Fake History.

Manuel Orcarberrio

Manuel Rodriguez Orcarberrio (JFK: The Cuban Files)

According to Escalante, Alpha 66 opened a chapter managed by Orcarberrio in Dallas in September 1963 on Harlendale Street, where Oswald was seen a few days before the crime by an informant of Dallas Deputy Sherriff Buddy Walthers.

Pedro Charles and friends (JFK: The Cuban Files)

One rarely discussed subject about the assassination are the letters from Cuba sent to Oswald, media outlets and Robert Kennedy which were received or intercepted shortly after the murder. A “Pedro Charles” (probably a fictitious name) signed one of these letters and is referred to in another as a Castro agent. These letters suggested that Oswald was being assisted by Cuban agents. The FBI found that, though different people signed off on some, they were written from the same typewriter and concluded they were a hoax perhaps perpetrated by anti-Castro rebels in Cuba hoping to encourage a show-down with the U.S.

Cuban Intelligence had a different take on this mystery. They found it resembled the Mexico City disinformation tactics used by David Phillips and concluded that it was an intelligence operation. Indeed, the letters refer to Oswald’s travels to Dallas, Mexico City, Houston and Miami which would have been known to very few people at the time the letters were sent (“franked” from November 23^rd to November 30^th). Also analyzed was the Cuban postal system, which presented severe logistical problems around the dates the letters were written, franked and received and were never explained in U.S. investigations.

John Hurt (Dr. Grover B. Proctor, Jr.)

On Saturday night November 23^rd Oswald placed a call that even the head of the HSCA described as very troublesome. Doctor Grover B. Proctor, Jr. wrote a comprehensive article about that phone call. It shows that Lee Oswald tried to make a phone call on Saturday night that the Secret Service did not allow to go through. Proctor then investigated why:

Surell Brady, a Senior Staff Counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), summarized Mrs. Treon’s version of events this way:

Mrs. Treon stayed on the line. She said she was therefore able to hear everything Oswald said and she is sure he asked for the name John Hurt and gave the two numbers. She said that as she listened she wrote the information down on a regular telephone call slip. However, since Mrs. Swinney actually handled the call, Mrs. Treon signed her [Mrs. Swinney’s] name to the slip she intended to keep as a souvenir. She said the notations on the slip of “DA” and “CA” stand for did not answer and cancelled, because the call was never actually put through. Mrs. Treon said she never retrieved any paper from the wastebasket on which Mrs. Swinney supposedly entered the information.

Billie & J. D. Hurt

Had Mrs. Treon not kept the LD call slip that she filled out as a souvenir, this story would be no more than the most minor of footnotes in the tragedy of the Kennedy Assassination. However, years later, when the identity became known of the man to whom Oswald was trying to place a call, its significance would rise to the “very troublesome” and “deeply disturbing” levels ascribed to it by HSCA Chief Counsel Blakey.

Grover goes on to write:

What Mrs. Treon recorded for history on her LD slip is that Lee Oswald requested to call a “John Hurt” in Raleigh, North Carolina. But what would become important is the fact that the John Hurt who had the first phone number on the slip was a former Special Agent in U.S. Army Counterintelligence. In short, Oswald attempted to place a call from the Dallas jail to a member of the American Intelligence community on Saturday evening, November 23, 1963, but was mysteriously prevented from completing the call.

Jack Ruby and Robert McKeown (John Armstrong website)

As we can see, the claim that Oswald was a loner with no ties with intelligence agencies is one of the largest deceptions put forth by the Warren Commission. The description of his murderer by the Warren Commission as another deranged person with no mob ties comes very close. For example, the phone calls that he was part of in the weeks leading up to the murder and that were analyzed by the HSCA revealed a frenzy of communications with known mobsters.
1. His first visitor when he was jailed was Dallas head-mobster Joe Campisi.
2. His idol and acquaintance Lewis McWillie was a mobster who became an associate of Mafia Don Santos Trafficante and Meyer Lansky, leaders in the CIA-mob alliance to take out Castro.
3. There is strong evidence that Ruby visited Trafficante when the latter was in a Cuban jail and that he tried to free him.
The use of known-mobsters by the Warren Commission to vouch for Ruby not being linked to the mob is not re-assuring to say the least.

Ruby’s ties to the mob are what got Robert Blakey, head of the HSCA, to write a book about organized crime being behind the assassination.

Ruby at press conference

Did Jack Ruby cross paths with Oswald before he stalked him during his weekend in jail? According to reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, who interviewed Ruby after he was arrested, at least ten people signed affidavits saying they saw Ruby with Oswald. She claimed that she was going to blow the lid off the case before dying mysteriously.

During a press conference by Dallas attorney Henry Wade, where he claimed that Oswald was part of the Free Cuba Committee, it was Ruby masquerading as a journalist who corrected him by saying it was the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

John Armstrong is the researcher who has done the most investigation on the case of two Oswalds, one he calls Harvey (the patsy) and the other Lee. It is known that Oswald was often times impersonated. He presents the case that while Harvey was in New Orleans, Lee was a frequent client in Ruby’s Carousel Club.

Another link between Oswald and Ruby comes through their interactions with a gun smuggler and friend of Castro. Robert McKeown, who had been jailed for these activities, at one time got a call from Ruby who tried to use these ties in his efforts to convince the Castro regime to free Trafficante. McKeown did not want to get involved.

Robert McKeown

In his website-article, Armstrong describes this stunning event: Robert McKeown watched as a car arrived, parked, and two men got out and walked toward his home. One of the men introduced himself to McKeown as Lee Oswald, and said that he wanted to purchase rifles. McKeown, who was still on a 5-year probation for selling arms, refused to sell guns to Lee Oswald. The two men left but returned a few minutes later and again asked McKeown to sell rifles, but he refused. Lee Oswald’s attempt to purchase rifles from Robert McKeown, who was a very close personal friend of Fidel Castro, was very significant and an obvious attempt by the conspirators to link Lee Oswald to Cuba.

Other than his links with Trafficante, what were Ruby’s links to intelligence? Here are some of the arguments John Armstrong brings forth:

There are indications that Jack Rubenstein, of Chicago and Dallas, may have been hired as an informant for the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) to report on Communist Party activities. A memorandum written by a HUAC staff assistant on November 24, 1947 reads, “It is my sworn statement that one Jack Rubenstein of Chicago noted as a potential witness for hearings of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities is performing information functions for the staff of Cong. Richard M. Nixon, Rep. of California. It is requested Rubenstein not be called for open testimony in those aforementioned hearings.”

As a gun-runner for Cuban revolutionaries, Ruby’s links were monitored by the CIA. Some of his gun-running was done with a CIA operative called Donald Browder at a time when Customs and the CIA were not opposed to Castro’s revolution.

Thomas Eli Davis III

His ties with another gun-runner named Thomas Eli Davis brought forth this interesting connection Armstrong wrote about:

When JFK was assassinated, Davis was in jail in Algiers, charged with running guns to a secret army terrorist movement then attempting to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle. Davis was released from jail through the intervention of the CIA’s foreign agent code-named “QJ/WIN,” who was identified by the top-secret CIA Inspector General’s Report as the “principle asset” in the Agency’s assassination program known as ZR/RIFLE.

After Ruby’s arrest for killing Oswald, his defense attorney (Tom Howard) asked Ruby if he could think of anything that might damage his defense. Ruby responded and said there would be a problem if a man by the name of “Davis” should come up. Davis was later identified as Thomas Eli Davis III, a CIA-connected gun-runner and “soldier of fortune.” In December, 1963 the Moroccan National Security Police informed the US State Department that Davis was arrested for an attempted sale of firearms to a minor. When Davis was searched, the police found “a letter in his handwriting which referred in passing to Oswald and to the Kennedy assassination.” Ruby told Howard that “he had been involved with Davis, who was a CIA-connected gun runner entangled in anti-Castro efforts and that he (Ruby) had intended to begin a regular gun-running business with Davis.” … Tom Howard died of a heart attack within a year at age 48. The doctor, without an autopsy, said that he may have suffered a heart attack. But some reporters and friends thought Howard had been murdered.

The HSCA, under Robert Blakey, was intent on covering up any CIA connection or gun-running activities connected with Ruby and failed to investigate the Ruby/Davis connection. They explained, in typical government prose, “Due to limitations of time and resources … it was not possible to confirm these (Seth Kantor’s) allegations.”

Gerald Ford, in his otherwise uninformative book, Portrait of an Assassin, did reveal that Ruby had been an FBI informant. Before dying, Ruby made the claim that there was a high level conspiracy. The Warren Commission did not even want to question Ruby, when they finally did meet him they were not very probing to say the least!

Synopsis

There you have it folks … sixty-four people with whom Oswald had touch points, and, who also had either plausible, probable, or definite intelligence links. The list could be much longer because this author decided not to include certain witnesses who have not yet convinced enough researchers of their credibility. Furthermore, we do not know about all those who Oswald spent time with learning Russian, acquiring a Minolta camera, were connected to his U2 duties, were in Copenhagen on his return, and possibly in Montreal, and so forth.

In part 2 of his excellent essay “Tokyo Legend? Oswald and Japan,” Kevin Coogan compared the investigation into two genuine defectors who embraced the Soviet Union almost one year after Oswald defected. On September 6, 1960, two former National Security Agency (NSA) employees named Bernon Mitchell and William Martin held a press conference in Moscow. The two mathematician/cryptographers formally announced their defection. As it so happened, the two men had earlier worked at the U.S. military base at Atsugi, Japan.

Contrary to what happened with Oswald, in this case the level of alarm and degree of scrutiny were off the charts: The Mitchell-Martin defection was a tremendous shock to the NSA, which launched an internal investigation that involved speaking to some 450 witnesses. The FBI, the CIA, and military intelligence all worked the case. The inquiry included a microscopic look at both men’s earlier experiences in Japan.

As we can see, not one stone was left unturned in getting to the bottom of what happened, something we are now seeing in the Trump-Russia meddling affair. The underlying assumption here is that all leads must be followed to the end no matter how much time it takes or how much it costs. In the case of the JFK assassination, the opposite happened: A lead’s merit needed to be justified in full in order to be followed up, while respecting budget and time constraints.

Mark Lane found that intelligence’s investigation into Oswald’s defection was very shallow and pro forma. Schweiker added this telling insight: “The most important thing was that the intelligence agencies did all the wrong things if they were really looking for a conspiracy or to find out who killed John Kennedy.”

Two comments from important witnesses further confirm this:

Oswald, it was said, was the only Marine ever to defect from his country to another country, a Communist country, during peacetime. … When the Marine Corps and American intelligence decided not to probe the reasons for the ‘defection,’ I knew then what I know now: Oswald was on an assignment in Russia for American intelligence.

~James Botelho, former roommate of Oswald who would later become a California judge, in an interview with assassination researcher Mark Lane

When Oswald’s commanding officer John Donovan was questioned by the Warren Commission, he noted that they did everything they could to avoid exchanges about Oswald and the U2 program.

In the next section we will explore where investigators should have gone had they followed up on these leads by focussing on one of the most important ones.

Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire

David Phillips (Larry Hancock – Destiny Betrayed)

Concerning the CIA career officer who left the most intel fingerprints on Oswald, let us refer to Larry Hancock, who has written extensively about him, and from whose work we can conclude the following about his potential involvement in the conspiracy:

A) He had the perfect credentials.

David Atlee Phillips

Phillips joined the CIA in 1950. He played a significant role in the CIA coup that removed Jacobo Arbenz, the president of Guatemala in 1954. An ex ad-man and actor, Phillips was a master at propaganda. According to Hancock, Phillips was part of a cadre of like-minded CIA officers that specialized in regime change. Some of the techniques involved featured use of surrogates, putting the blame on a foe, creating a scenario, including paper trails, files and fabrications that could be plausible, and compartmentalized logistics on a need to know basis. This cadre included persons of interest in the JFK assassination: E. Howard Hunt, David Morales, and William Harvey are some of the key names that also figure prominently in many of the assassination writings.

There are reports Phillips worked with David Morales out of the JM/Wave Miami CIA station in attempts to remove Castro. Phillips helped launch Alpha 66, one of the most violent and active anti-Castro Cuban exile groups. He worked undercover in Cuba in 1959-60 when he recruited its leader Antonio Veciana. According to Howard Hunt, he was also involved with the DRE.

B) He had the motive.

He became one of many disillusioned officers who blamed and resented JFK after the failed Bay of Pigs and the firing of their popular chief Allen Dulles.

He demonstrated his insubordination to Kennedy: Phillips’ direction of Alpha 66 to attack Russian targets in Cuba was intended to provoke a direct U.S. –– Russian conflict which would result in the liberation of Cuba. Through Veciana, Phillips independently supported multiple unsanctioned assassination plots against Fidel Castro. Alpha 66, Veciana, Eddie Bayo and Tony Cuesta were not directed by the CIA but personally by Phillips. Phillips specifically told Veciana his goal was to provoke US intervention in Cuba by “putting Kennedy’s back to the wall.”

C) His quasi-confessions.

According to Larry Hancock, the author of Someone Would Have Talked, just before his death Phillips told Kevin Walsh, an investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations: “My final take on the assassination is there was a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers.” (Some books wrongly quote Phillips as saying: “My private opinion is that JFK was done in by a conspiracy, likely including rogue American intelligence people.”)

David Atlee Phillips died of cancer on 7th July, 1988. He left behind an unpublished manuscript. The novel is about a CIA officer who lived in Mexico City. In the novel the character states: “I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald … We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba … I don’t know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president’s assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt.”

In his last conversation with his brother, who suspected him of being a conspirator and was pressing him on it, he refused to confirm his innocence and admitted being in Dallas on November 22^nd 1963.

D) E. Howard Hunt names him.

In January 2004, E. Howard Hunt gave a taped interview with his son, Saint John Hunt, claiming that Lyndon Baines Johnson was the instigator of the assassination (coded The Big Event) of John F. Kennedy, and that it was organized by Phillips, Cord Meyer, Frank Sturgis and David Sanchez Morales.

E) His lies.

He claimed to Fonzi that he had never met Veciana. How could the person who coordinated anti-Castro activities not know the Alpha 66 leader?

He claimed to Richard Sprague (HSCA) under oath that tapes of Oswald had been routinely recycled:

Phillips’ testimony was that there was no photograph of “Oswald” because the camera equipment had broken down that day and there was no audio tape of “Oswald’s” voice because they recycled their tapes every six or seven days. The problem with his story was, we had obtained a document, it was from the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, it was dated November 23rd, 1963, the very next day after the assassination. This document was a memo to all FBI supervisorial staff stating, in substance, that FBI agents who have questioned Oswald for the past 17 hours approximately, have listened to the tape made on October 1st, by an individual identifying himself as Lee Henry Oswald inside the Russian Embassy, calling on the phone to someone inside the Cuban Embassy and the agents can state unequivocally that the voice on the tape is not the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald, who is in custody.

He professed ignorance to Dan Hardway (HSCA) about all the disinformation stories trying to link Oswald to Castro agents that were initiated by his assets.

F) His omnipresence before, during and after Oswald’s demise.

Oswald’s opening of an FPCC chapter in New Orleans when this organization was spiralling out of control and infested with informants and Oswald’s extremely provocative way of promoting his supposed views smacked of an operational ruse overseen by Phillips who was running a program called AM/SANTA that was designed to infiltrate and undermine the FPCC. In the article The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK, this author identified four other potential patsies who were FPCC-linked and who had travelled to Mexico City.

Phillips admitted knowing New Orleans-based FBI agent Warren DeBrueys, who was monitoring the FPCC and most likely using Oswald as an informant. Richard Case Nagell’s FPCC-related activities with Oswald, with another potential patsy Vaughn Marlowe, and a few FPCC chapters, combined with his visits to Mexico City and hints he gave to a friend that he worked with Phillips, add further weight to the Phillips-FPCC-Oswald conduit.

According to CIA-linked electronics wizard Gordon Novel, a person resembling Phillips, masquerading as an employee of the Double-Check Corporation, even attended a meeting along with Guy Banister and Sergio Arcacha Smith in Banister’s offices. Researcher Lisa Pease’s analysis led her to conclude that this person was in fact Phillips and Double-Check was a CIA front.

Banister, Smith and Ferrie at one time helped train Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs near Lake Pontchartrain north of New Orleans on a CIA controlled site. In 1967, while the CIA was trying to keep this information hidden from Garrison, Phillips wrote a memo describing the status of that operation.

Related to these training activities is, according to this author, one of the most mysterious pieces of evidence: a training film that was seen by a few HSCA investigators before it eventually disappeared. According to HSCA Deputy Counsel Robert Tanenbaum, he viewed a film of a CIA training camp in New Orleans. He brought in witnesses to identify certain people in the film. From the work done of it, he said that Oswald, Banister and Phillips were depicted in the film.

E. Howard Hunt claimed that Phillips was a key person behind the DRE. Phillips admitted helping it in its PR efforts. Carlos Bringuier of the DRE got into a fight with Oswald on Canal Street in August of 1963. He wrote a press release that was published the day after the assassination to position Castro as being behind Oswald; the fingerprints of Phillips became even more evident. The fact that George Joannides –– who took over DRE coordination activities from Phillips –– was inserted into the HSCA investigation by the CIA as a key liaison and thereafter started an obvious obfuscation operation underscores this suspicious event. Here is how HSCA investigator Dan Hardway described this situation:

We have, since 1978, learned that George Joannides was running the propaganda shop at the CIA’s Miami JMWAVE Station in 1963. It is extremely unlikely that Mr. Joannides could have occupied that position and not have known, and worked with, David Phillips. In addition, in 1963, we now know, George Joannides was the case officer handling the DRE. In 1977 the CIA specifically denied that DRE had a case officer assigned when asked that question by the HSCA.

Through Ed Butler and the CIA-associated INCA, Oswald’s apparent charade and his televised interview went a long way in painting his leftist persona to the public at large. INCA had been used by Phillips for propaganda purposes during the period leading up to the Bay of Pigs. Butler was quick to send recordings to key people the day of the assassination.

Antonio Veciana, who was Phillips’ go-to guy in the Cuban exile community for some thirteen years also, over time named Phillips. He told Gaeton Fonzi he had seen him talk to Oswald in Dallas in September 1963. Phillips also tried to get Veciana to convince a relative of his in Mexico City to fabricate a story about seeing Oswald taking money from Castro agents.

In October 1963, the CIA monitored the impersonation of Oswald in Mexico City at the Cuban consulate in what appears to be a clear attempt to link him to Castro and the Soviets –– all this right under Phillips’ nose as he was based there. Phillips then was clearly involved with the manipulation of evidence (tapes, photos and transcripts) in the subsequent cover-up.

On November 24 1963, Jack Ruby terminated Oswald, thus sealing his lips. Phillips’ close friend, Gordon McLendon, was a close friend of Jack Ruby.

Right after the assassination, persons of interest like John Martino, Frank Sturgis and Phillips-linked contacts (Bringuier, Butler and journalist Hal Hendrix) began a “Castro was behind it” spin to the assassination.

Following the assassination, it became obvious that Phillips was connected to a number of disinformation stories trying to link Oswald to Castro agents. HSCA investigator Dan Hardway called him out on it:

Before our unexpurgated access was cut off by Joannides, I had been able to document links between David Phillips and most of the sources of the disinformation that came out immediately after the assassination about Oswald and his pro-Castro proclivities. I confronted Phillips with those in an interview at our offices on August 24, 1978. Phillips was extremely agitated by that line of questioning, but was forced to admit that many of the sources were not only former assets that he had managed, in the late 50’s and early 1960’s, but were also assets whom he was personally managing in the fall of 1963. Mr. Phillips was asked, but could not explain, why the information that came from anti-Castro Cuban groups and individuals pointing to Cuban connections, all seemed to come from assets that he handled personally, but acknowledged that that was the case.

Conclusion

So as we can see, the noose was getting very tight around the Phillips’ neck during the Church and HSCA investigations. By following leads as far as they could, investigators like Schweiker, Hart, Fonzi, Tanenbaum, Sprague, Hardway and Lopez were zeroing in on who was behind the plot. These real sleuths brought the ball forward: The Warren Commission was finally fully impeached and the outline of a conspiracy began taking shape.

And just when they had suspects like Hunt and Phillips in their sights, a combination of factors took place that stalled and then stopped all progress. George H. W. Bush became head of the CIA and called the shots so as to protect the integrity of this all-American institution; HSCA leaders Sprague and Tanenbaum were forced out and a collegial working relationship with the CIA was then put in place by its new head Robert Blakey, and George Joannides was installed strategically to sabotage investigative efforts.

Phillips was now off the hook.

Moving forward, we do need to be cautious about how we interpret all of this. One may be tempted to conclude from this article that the CIA as an organization was complicit in killing the President. This in my opinion is highly doubtful and quite different from suspecting persons who can be linked to intelligence. When one goes over the names of the usual suspects, one is struck by their outlier status. It is also easy to imagine implication by someone in a ruse which ended up going in a completely unforeseen direction: For example DeBrueys using Oswald to weed out Castro sympathizers while having no clue that he was being set up to be a patsy could be quite plausible in this author’s opinion. It would be however quite natural for intelligence agencies to want to distance themselves from the assassination and its embarrassing implications.

In 1993, the ARRB began ordering releases of declassified information. That information made all of this obvious to those who looked into the goldmine of new information. It added even more evidence that vindicated the authors who were discredited mercilessly by the pro-Warren Commission propaganda network. Absent from all this data-mining are the historians and journalists who are still frozen in the Warren Commission time-warp –– the same people who are fighting for their lives countering Donald Trump who has accused them of being peddlers of fake news.

On a positive note, Randy Benson spoke with an historian who saw his recent documentary, The Searchers, and who admitted not knowing about all the post-Warren-Commission discoveries, and pledged to change his way of relating the assassination. My bet is that students who read his account will respect him, the way we should all show our respect to Richard Schweiker.
July 29, 2017
NARA has released the first set of JFK documents

This first set comprises documents originating from FBI and CIA series identified by the Assassination Records Review Board as assassination records. More releases will follow.

July 24, 2017
The Dual Life of Albert Osborne
In the field of Kennedy assassination studies, Albert Osborne is the stuff of both legend and legerdemain. Much of that is due to the tales told by the man himself. Was he Albert Osborne or, as he tried to maintain, was he John Howard Bowen? Did he sit next to and talk to Lee Harvey Oswald on his bus trip to Mexico City? And why did he leave the country after that mysterious journey? A journey so fabled that the late author Philip Melanson once called it, “Oswald’s Mexican Mystery Tour.”

Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico City in late September of 1963 has been the subject of abundant research and controversy. There has been much discussion about whether or not he actually took the trip to Mexico, and if that strange voyage was somehow connected to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The FBI, at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson, investigated the murder of the young president. In public at least, the Bureau and the Warren Commission declared that their probe led to the discovery that Oswald was seen sitting beside a man named John Howard Bowen on a bus bound for Mexico City. The FBI eventually discovered that Bowen was an alias. The man’s real name was Albert Osborne. Their investigation of Osborne, as can be expected, was not complete.1 Because of that fact, a mythos about the strange figure of Albert Osborne sprung to life in assassination literature. Even the late diehard Warren Commission defender Vincent Bugliosi wrote that “many of the questions about Osborne-Bowen remain unanswered.”2

The liveliest piece of disinformation about Osborne was printed in The Torbitt Document, sometimes called Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal. There, Osborne is actually supposed to be in charge of recruiting the assassination team from Mexico. And in October of 1963, he is depicted as having been in New Orleans meeting with Clay Shaw and CIA associated attorney Maurice Gatlin. As is the case throughout that misleading pamphlet, there is no proof provided for any of these claims. But the evidentiary problems about Osborne stemmed from the fact that he was an enigmatic and interesting character who told many lies to the FBI. Furthermore, the man seemed to have no steady source of income to finance his many journeys from Mexico, through various parts of America, and to Europe. But even with all the mystery about his traveling and his identity, the Bureau stopped investigating him in March of 1964 without ever establishing what, or even if, he had a job. It is difficult to place the circumstances of Osborne’s life at that time into any kind of legitimate employment. He himself told stories about what he did for a living, and as we shall see, those who knew him had suspicions he was involved in espionage work.

This article will continue the investigation into the life of Albert Osborne and will also provide a brief outline of the life of the real John Howard Bowen. We will conclude with a short discussion about whether or not the two ever met.

In the Beginning

Albert Osborne began his life in Grimsby, England on November 12, 1888 3 (Appendix 1). He was one of 12 children born to his father James, a fisherman, and his wife Emily.4 He attended St. James Academy in Grimsby until the eighth grade before leaving school.5 He worked as a grocer and served in the militia before enlisting in the British Army on December 12, 1906, at the age of 186 (Appendix 2).7 After joining the army he was sent abroad to serve in different posts in the British Empire. He went to India, Aden and Gibraltar, before been stationed in the British colony of Bermuda.8 His British army service records reveal that his time in the army was uneventful and that he did not participate in any military actions.

His stay in Bermuda would be a short one. He arrived on January 7, 1914 and he resigned from the army on June 29, 1914.9 His timing could not have been better, for on June 28, 1914, the day before he resigned, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia by Gravilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist. This tragic event was the fuse that ignited the powder keg that was European imperial politics, and led to the start of World War I in August of 1914. Albert Osborne would escape the horror of trench warfare, which would become the enduring symbol of this war, by departing for the United States.

Upon his arrival in the United States he can be found in the company of missionaries. The Washington Post reported that a man named Albert Osborne was one of a group of people who participated in a program that illustrated the life and customs of peoples in India, China and other countries. The presentation took place at the Seventh Day Adventist Washington Missionary College that operated missions in foreign countries.10 As we will see later, other newspapers in later years will also write stories about a man named Albert Osborne who gave lectures about his travels in India, and he was the same man who would go by the name of John Howard Bowen.

In 1917 Osborne did something that cannot be explained. By that year World War I had been raging for three years and had killed millions of soldiers in Europe. But this horror did not stop him from enlisting in the Canadian Army, which had been fighting in Europe since 1914. Upon enlistment, he completed an “Attestation Paper Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force” (Appendix 3).11 This document was an army application form. On it he indicated that he enlisted at Toronto, Canada on August 2, 1917 and that his present address was Nashville, Tennessee.12

A comparison of his British and Canadian army application forms reveals that there are some important discrepancies between the descriptions of the man who enlisted in the British Army in 1906 and the man who joined the Canadian Army in 1917. There is a significant difference in his height, the year of birth is not correct and the middle names are different. These differences may suggest that someone other than Osborne had joined the Canadian army using his identity. A more likely explanation is that these differences can be explained, and that the man known as Albert Osborne who resigned from the British army in 1914 is the same man who joined the Canadian army in 1917.13

The most compelling difference between the two application forms is his height. When he enlisted in the British army in 1906 at the age of 18, his height was 5 feet 4.5 inches.14 When he joined the Canadian army in 1917, his height was 5 feet, 9 inches, a difference of 4.5 inches.15 His British army service records provide a clue that may explain this height difference. It states that “After six months service and gymnastic courses” his height was now 5 feet 5.5 inches; he had grown one inch in six months.16 His increase in height may be explained by his age. As he was only 18 when he enlisted in the British army; he may have been young enough to have not reached his full height, as can be seen by the additional one inch he gained in the six months after his enlistment. Unfortunately, his British army service records do not provide his height when he left the army in 1914 at the age of 25, by which time he must have attained his full height; consequently, it cannot be confirmed if he had added 3.5 inches during his tenure with the British army. Both of his British and Canadian military service records also do not include photographs of him that can be compared to determine if they are the same man.

There are two other discrepancies on his Canadian army application form. He stated that he was born on November 12, 1885; his correct date of birth is November 12, 1888. He also stated that his middle names were Victor and Emmanuel.17 These names are not included on his British army application form or on the “Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth” that provides his date of birth and his name when born.18 Osborne’s name can also be found in the 1891 and 1901 English censuses and the only name provided is Albert.19 These two differences suggest that someone else may have acquired Osborne’s personal information, and in the process of doing so did not did not acquire all of the correct data. This theory could be true if the year of birth had been the only personal information that was not correct because a person using his identity would use the date provided, believing it to be correct. This is not so with his middle names, because Osborne did not have any, and a person who had acquired Osborne’s identity would not have had any reason to state that his middle names were Victor and Emmanuel.

Then why alter his year of birth and add these two middle names to his application form? A possible explanation is that it is an early experiment in altering his identity and may also explain the one-year discrepancy in his age on his British army application form. Eventually he would take on a completely new identity, that of John Howard Bowen, and would continue to alter his identity when he saw fit to do so. For example, on his application for a new Canadian passport dated October 10, 1963, he used his real name Albert Osborne but added the middle name Alexander.20

Osborne’s enlistment in the Canadian army, like his stint in the British army, was uneventful. His army service records reveal that he spent the remainder of the war safely on Canadian soil, and he did not travel to Europe to join the fighting there. He did however become ill. His medical records indicate that he was diagnosed with malaria in June of 1918. He told the doctor treating him that he contracted it in Egypt in 1915 but does not state what he was doing there.21 How did he contract malaria? He may have gone to Egypt as he told the doctor treating him or he may have contracted it in Canada while serving in the army. According to an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, malaria was brought to Canada by infected European immigrants in the nineteenth century and did not diminish until early in the 20^th century.22

Leaving the Military

On January 31, 1919, he was discharged from the Canadian army, and on his “Canadian Expeditionary Force Discharge Certificate” he said that his address on discharge was Nashville, Tennessee.23 According to an FBI interview given on March 3, 1964, Osborne went to Washington D.C. sometime after the war where he met a Syrian whose name he could not remember. The two of them went into the rug cleaning business and traveled throughout the United States cleaning rugs.24 Osborne did not provide any corroborating evidence to support his claim that he both met the unnamed Syrian and went into the rug cleaning business with him. But there is an advertisement in an Indiana, Pennsylvania newspaper that may shed some light on his story. The Indiana Evening Gazette published an advertisement with the title “A Letter from Mr. Osborne” that was signed by “Albert Osborne” (Appendix 4). The advertisement was placed by T.B. Buchholz & Company of Indiana Pennsylvania. The company’s services included rug cleaning for both oriental and domestic rugs.25 Could the Albert Osborne from this advertisement be the same man that also went by the name of Bowen? It is highly doubtful that Osborne would have used this company’s services. As of April 14, 1943, he was in Knoxville, Tennessee, which is over 500 miles from Indiana, Pennsylvania. Osborne may have vouched for this company’s services even though he had not purchased them; acting as a shill would be an activity that a man using false identities might get involved in. He may have also changed his story from the dubious activity of being a shill to the more lawful job of a rug cleaner when he was questioned by the FBI. The other possibility is that there was a man named Albert Osborne who resided in Indiana, Pennsylvania who had used their services.

While it is doubtful that Osborne worked as a rug cleaner, there are numerous newspaper articles that describe a man named Albert Osborne who gave lectures and acted. On November 19, 1924, The Winston Salem Journal reported that a “Dr. Albert Osborne, who has gained much fame as a lecturer on India …” spoke about his travels in India in Leakesville, Virginia. The same article describes him as a son of American missionaries and a graduate of Oxford University in England, which he added to his biography. The article also mentions that he had been on the Chautauqua26 stage for a number of seasons.27 On February 9, 1925, The Charlotte Observer reported on a Dr. Albert Osborne who had lectured about Christianity in India, Africa and Korea. He is again described as the son of missionaries and an Oxford graduate and is described as “… of Washington, D.C. lyceum and Chautauqua lecturer…” 28 Could this be the Albert Osborne that the FBI found on the Mexican bus manifest? He could lecture on India, as he had spent about four years there when he was in the British Army. Adding the title of doctor to his name and lying about his education and his parents is not beyond what he was capable of. This information is also corroborated by his sister, Ada Amos, who told the FBI in 1964 that he was an actor and lecturer on India.29 As we shall see, this is more credible than the rug cleaning story.

On October 9, 1925, The Knoxville News reported that the missionary Albert Osborne would be traveling to India (Appendix 5).30 Ten years later there is another man in Knoxville lecturing on life in India. His name is not Albert Osborne. It is John H. Bowen, who the newspaper describes as the “… Famous Teacher.” The Knoxville-News Sentinel report dated March 28, 1935 also mentioned that he taught in India for 11 years (Appendix 6).31 On April 14, 1935, the same newspaper said that J. H. Bowen, who had been a missionary in India for a few years, had been lecturing in different Knoxville schools about life in India.32 Is the man who is now lecturing about India and who goes by the name of Bowen the same Albert Osborne who departed for India in 1925? The similarities in the stories about India and being famous, which are mentioned in a previous story about him, are hard to ignore. Though one has to wonder if the newspaper reporters who wrote the stories, both of whom worked for the same newspaper, noticed the discrepancy in how much time he told them he spent in India.

Another interesting question about Osborne is how he could depart Knoxville in 1925 and return to the same city using a different identity without being recognized by anybody. The exact date of Osborne’s arrival in Knoxville after his alleged 11 year trip to India is unknown, but newspaper reports indicate that he was back as early as 1934. The Knoxville-News Sentinel dated October 10, 1937 wrote that on October 12, 1934, J. H. Bowen, F. M. Long, former YMCA Secretary for South America, local businessmen and professionals met with young boys and convinced them to join a new organization called the Campfire Council.33 He was also a member of the First Baptist Church in Knoxville by November 1934.34 Assuming that 1934 is the year that he arrived in Knoxville, then how can Osborne the Indian missionary become Bowen the Campfire Council member who also speaks about life in India, nine years later without being recognized by anybody as Albert Osborne? This is difficult to explain and needs to be explored further. One possible explanation lies in the fact that the 1925 article that placed him in Knoxville stated that he spoke there but did not say that he was a long-term resident of that city. A long-term resident would most likely have had associations with enough people to make it difficult to return without being seen by people who knew him as Osborne. This may explain why he was not recognized when he returned there.

Creating the Campfire Council

In 1934, Osborne, using his alias Bowen, became one of the founders of the Campfire Council. The goal of the Campfire Council as stated in its “Charter of Incorporation” of 1938 by the State of Tennessee was “… for the welfare, aid, and benefit of underprivileged boys and girls …” (Appendix 7).35 The Knoxville-News Sentinel story dated October 10, 1937 read, “Such crime prevention work on the part of the Campfire Council attracted the attention of those keenly interested in the reduction of juvenile delinquency.”36

By all accounts, the Campfire Council was a success. On April 23, 1939, The Knoxville News-Sentinel published an article, “Campfire Council Work Gets High Praise From Official and Committee.” This article painted a glowing portrait of how the Council had helped “Well over 800 underprivileged boys spen[d] their leisure time in the gymnasium and playgrounds, operated by this organization.” The boys were able to participate in events such as woodworking, painting, basketball, softball and other activities. The Council also provided, among other things, free lunches and clothing.37 Campfire Council boys were also awarded prizes. James Thompson and Herbert Sams were awarded a prize of a trip to Bermuda because they were “… outstanding members of the organization.” They were accompanied on the trip by Osborne,38 who had visited Bermuda numerous times.39 The article also mentioned the work done by Osborne: “Mr. Bowen’s work has long passed the experimental stage. During these five years, seventeen juvenile gangs have been won over to a constructive program of good citizenship.”40

The Campfire Council’s success was followed by the creation of another organization: Boysville. Boysville was created to provide aid to delinquent boys and a meeting was planned for April 5, 1940 to discuss plans to create it. The newspaper report also stated that it was “… patterned after the Nebraska institution.”41 The Nebraska institution that was referred to was Boystown, which was founded in 1917 by Father Edward Flanagan and whose mission it was to help destitute boys.42

Osborne’s stellar record with the Campfire Council would soon be marred by an accusation made by Charles M. Pickel who lived in the vicinity of Boysville. He said that a boy at the camp had told a man named George Sharp that Osborne, who was known as Bowen at Boysville, had stomped on an American flag. Pickel accused the boys at the camp of thievery and vandalism, and complained about the noise made by the police dogs at the camp.43 The camp at Boysville had an American flag. A newspaper article written by J. H. Bowen, dated July 28, 1940, in The Knoxville News-Sentinel reported that there was a flag raising and lowering ceremony every morning and afternoon at the camp.44 A Tennessee Highway Patrolman investigated these claims at the request of the FBI but could not find any evidence that Bowen had stomped on the flag. The only complaint that local residents had were in regard to the police dogs at the camp, of which they were afraid.45

Osborne’s reputation again came into question in 1943 when he was accused of making sexual advances to some of the boys at the Campfire Council. This time the charges stuck, since he left the Council. His departure was mentioned in the newspaper, but the accusations made against him were not divulged. This omission would allow him to return to Knoxville in the future with his reputation intact.46

In Canada and Announcing his Retirement

For the next few years there are scattered sightings of Albert Osborne. In a letter to the editor in 1946, Osborne, using his alias John Howard Bowen, writes that he attended a banquet in Laredo that was attended by both Protestant and Jewish congregations.47 In 1947 he spoke at the Knoxville Cavalry Baptist Church where he told his audience that he “… was director of religious education for the Baptist Church …” for the last five years,48 even though he had only left his position at the Campfire Council four years previously. In a 1948 letter to the Knoxville News-Sentinel he refers to himself as “Reverend” and describes how Christmas was celebrated in Huajuapan de Leon Oaxaca in Mexico.49

Osborne also traveled to Canada. A document sent by him to the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) in Ottawa, Canada requesting a copy of his military service certificate indicated that he was staying at the YMCA in Toronto.50 The request made by him is not dated, but was answered on June 4, 1953, which suggests that he was in Toronto sometime before June of 1953. The reason for requesting this document is not known, but on November 12, 1953 he would be 65, and he may have been eligible for veteran’s benefits because of his service in the Canadian army during World War I.

In 1953 Osborne claimed that he retired from missionary work. “Bowen’s” retirement was announced in an article published in The Knoxville News-Sentinel on December 5, 1953.51 The newspaper’s source for this information is a letter it received from Bowen’s successor at the mission. That person’s name is none other than Albert Osborne. Osborne also mentions that Bowen’s 73^rd birthday is in January and friends may write to him at Post Office Box 308 Laredo Texas. Why he is now using his real name is not certain, but he must have been confident enough to use his real name without someone in Knoxville making a connection between his real name and his alias, John Howard Bowen.

The Knoxville News-Sentinel was not the only newspaper to publish a story about his retirement. The Knoxville Journal also wrote a story about his retirement and it was published on the same day.52 Comparisons of the two stories reveal that the stories had some similarities and some differences. His successor, Albert Osborne, is not named and the source who told the newspaper that he was retiring is not provided in The Knoxville Journal story. The same Laredo mailing address is provided in both articles, but The Knoxville Journal article invites friends to write to him at Christmas, rather than in January for his birthday. The most important anomaly in the stories lies in the pictures that each newspaper published. The pictures were not the same. The Osborne portrayed in The Knoxville News-Sentinel appears to be heavier and has a receding hairline (Appendix 8). The man portrayed in The Knoxville Journal, is wearing a sun helmet and zippered jacket (Appendix 9). He is slimmer but his hairline cannot be determined because he has a hat on. Patricia Winston and Pamela Mumford, who were allegedly on the same bus as Osborne going to Mexico, were shown the picture in The Knoxville Journal and both could not identify him as John Howard Bowen.53 The pictures may have been taken at different times, which may account for the different appearances. But one has to wonder if Osborne’s friends and associates in Knoxville recognized both men in these two pictures as the man they knew as John Howard Bowen.

Was Osborne Really a Missionary?

Osborne’s retirement from missionary work raises the issue of whether or not he was a real missionary. There are some witnesses that say he was one, but none of them indicated that they actually saw him engaged in this work. In a newspaper report dated September 11, 1954, Claude L. Baker Sr. of Elmo, Tennessee, who knew Osborne as Bowen, stated that Osborne was involved in missionary work in the Mixteca Indian territory in Southern Mexico.54 His statement must be questioned because the article did not say if he met Osborne in Mexico doing missionary work, or if he was told by him that he was involved in it. Reverend Walter Laddie Hluchlan, who knew Osborne as Bowen, said that he gave bible lessons for many years to boys55 who resided at his residence.56 Even though Hluchlan did not say he actually saw him teaching those boys, there could be some truth to his statement. The Osborne who resided in Knoxville spent many years working at the Campfire Council, which catered to young boys. It would not be unusual for him to work with them, so this could be true. Mrs. Virgil Dykes, who was questioned about Bowen by the FBI, told them that she never met him but made contributions to his mission, and did not indicate that she had proof that he was doing missionary work.57 Oddly enough, The Knoxville Journal published a story dated November 28, 1954 in which he said that he had now returned to missionary work. And the story conveniently included a picture of him surrounded by Mixteca Indians (Appendix 10).58 The source for this article is a letter written by Osborne, so the veracity of it must be questioned. The inclusion of the Mixteca Indians could have been an attempt by him to convince his readers that he really was working with them. And the inclusion of his home address can be construed as a way to encourage people in Knoxville to send him money to support his alleged mission. As many who have studied the CIA understand, Allen and John Foster Dulles made extensive use of missionaries and other religious organizations as cover for intelligence agents and operations.59

During their investigation, the FBI confirmed that Osborne had a social security number (SSN) and that the number was 449-36-9745.60 His statement about having a SSN is confirmed by his application to obtain one, dated August 16, 1943, for which he applied using the name John Bowen. As can be seen on his application form, he states that he is unemployed (Appendix 11).61 This concurs with the fact that he lost his job at the Campfire Council in 1943. He also does not know his parents’ names. What is unusual about the application form is the way he spells the name “John”. The way that it is spelled is “Jno”. This spelling matches exactly the way his first name is spelled in the Knoxville City Directory in 1938 (Appendix 12).62

It is interesting to note that in September of 1962 Osborne made a comment about John F. Kennedy’s presidency. He had returned to Knoxville to speak at a rally at the North Glenwood Baptist Church. He told Fred Allen Jr., who was the church’s pastor and who knew him as Bowen, “… that he ‘felt that it is a very dangerous thing for the United States to have a Catholic as president.’”63 He also told Allen that he did not want to stay at his place because he “… ‘didn’t want to risk getting me involved in something.’”64 This statement by Osborne must have aroused Fred Allen’s suspicions about Osborne’s activities, given that he also made comments about Kennedy’s presidency. It is an interesting fact that when the FBI interviewed Allen in 1964 he failed to mention the conversation he had with Osborne in 1962. Instead, he told them that he had received a postcard from him on February 18, 1962.65 His apparent memory lapse is notable because he remembered an innocuous postcard he received from Osborne, but did not recall an actual conversation he had with Osborne, in which he was told that he might be involved in something and had also commented on the danger involved with having a Catholic president. And the purpose of the interview was an inquiry into that president’s death.

Osborne/Bowen, Mexico City, and Oswald

We now come to 1963. In that year, with no visible occupation, Osborne continued his wandering ways. He was still residing in Mexico, but continued to traverse the United States-Mexican border, something he had been doing since 1939.66 It was on one of these trips that the Warren Report said he ended up on the same bus as a man who was either Lee Harvey Oswald or someone impersonating him. Was he on this bus because there was an Oswald impersonator on it, and he therefore would be able to vouch for the impersonator’s presence on the bus?

Lyman Erickson was director of the Christian Servicemen’s Center in San Antonio Texas. This is where Osborne stayed before he died.67 Erickson knew him as Bowen. He said Osborne had told him “… ‘I traveled to Mexico with Lee Harvey Oswald, and I was called in and questioned about it.’” [emphasis added] Erickson did not quote him as saying, “‘I just happened to sit next to Oswald,’ …”68 A statement by Osborne to the FBI, however, contradicts what he told Erickson. FBI agent Bob Gemberling, in an interview with the BBC69 about Albert Osborne, said, “‘He denied he was sitting next to Oswald.’”70 Gemberling also told the BBC that Osborne’s denial about sitting next to Oswald, even though witnesses said they sat together, resulted in the FBI doing an extensive investigation of the man.71 That FBI report is over ninety pages long and features both an index and Table of Contents. (See Commission Exhibit 2195, in Volume 25 of the Warren Commission) It was due to that FBI inquiry that Osborne showed up not just in the Warren Report, but also in many books written about the JFK case. For instance, Osborne is written about by such authors as Jim Marrs in Crossfire, Philip Melanson in Spy Saga, and Anthony Summers in Conspiracy.

The Mexican authorities had disposed of the original and a copy of the passenger list for the Flecha Roja (Red Arrow) bus that Osborne rode in Mexico. Therefore, the FBI used the luggage manifest and immigration records to piece together who was on the bus.72 This is how they found the name of Mr. Bowen. But they could not find Bowen. One problem with finding Bowen/Osborne was that he had tossed out a bundle of tall tales to the people around him on the bus. As the FBI noted in their long report, he told some passengers that he had never been to England, that he was a retired schoolteacher, and that he was working on a book about the Lisbon earthquake.73

In January of 1964, when the FBI finally did catch up with Osborne in Mexico, he gave no clue that it was actually he on the bus. He told FBI agent Clarke Anderson that he was an ordained Baptist minister. He denied there were any English language speaking passengers on the Flecha Roja bus. He said he had not talked to Oswald, nor sat next to him as others said he did. In fact, the man he described as sitting next to him, dark-complected and Hispanic looking, did not fit the description of Oswald. During one of his four FBI interviews he was shown a photo of Oswald. He said he never saw the man before. During that interview, in February of 1964, he denied the FBI had interviewed him in January. (See the FBI report referenced above and Ron Ecker’s online essay, “From Grimsby with Love”.)

It was not until March of 1964, while staying at a YMCA in Nashville, that Osborne finally admitted he used Bowen as an alias. He offered the Bureau the excuse that John Howard Bowen sounded more American to him. Osborne’s lack of steady income, contrasted with his extensive travels, the tall tales he spewed about the Flecha Roja ride, and his use of a dual identity, should have made him a person of interest to the FBI. There is no evidence he was. Nor is there any evidence Osborne was confronted with perjury or obstruction of justice charges in a murder investigation.

The available evidence cannot reliably answer whether Osborne traveled to Mexico with Oswald, or if it was someone impersonating Oswald as part of a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. Some evidence indicates he did sit beside Oswald. Pamela Mumford, allegedly on the same bus as Osborne, was shown pictures of Osborne and she confirmed that he was the man sitting next to him.74 Sitting next to someone on a bus however does not make a person a conspirator. This could have been a coincidence. Any person sitting next to Oswald would have been questioned by the FBI and would have been considered a suspect. But Osborne’s statement to Erickson that he traveled there with him and was not just sitting beside him on the bus cannot be ignored. If the conspirators who planned Kennedy’s murder wanted someone to accompany either Oswald or his impersonator, Osborne would have been a good choice because he could explain his presence on the bus by the fact that he frequently traveled between the United States and Mexico. If possible, more research has to be done on the trip to Mexico. Osborne did not explain to Erickson why he traveled there with Oswald, and it still has not been established to an absolute certainty what the trip’s role, if any, was in Kennedy’s assassination.

After he returned from Mexico, Osborne showed up in New Orleans at the Canadian consulate. He gave an address in Montreal as his permanent residence, saying he had been there since 1917 and that he was a Canadian national. He cancelled his previous Canadian passport and took out a new one. What makes this odd is that the previous passport was only four months old.75

With his new, clean passport Osborne was on the move again in November of 1963. The Knoxville Journal reported that Bowen had departed New York for Europe on November 13, 1963. The newspaper stated that the purpose of his trip was a speaking tour of England, Spain, Portugal and Italy.76 The timing of his trip is an interesting coincidence. The man with dual identities, and who was allegedly on the same bus as the president’s alleged assassin, decided to leave the country on November 13^th, nine days before Kennedy was assassinated.

After the Assassination

The FBI spoke to Reverend Walter Hluchlan about Osborne’s European speaking tour. He told them that he received an undated letter from him that stated that he had been on a preaching tour of England, Northern France, Spain and North Africa.77 The letter does not exactly match the newspaper report cited above, as Northern France and North Africa replaced Portugal and Italy. The problem with the letter is that the return address is Mexico and not Europe, so there is no European postal stamp to confirm that he had visited any of these four countries. Mrs. Lola Loving, who knew Osborne as both Osborne and Bowen,78 told the FBI that she had received a letter from him in Spain anywhere from a few weeks to two months ago.79 Her interview with the FBI however did not indicate that she showed them a copy of the letter with a Spanish postal stamp on it.80

We know that he was in England because his brother Walter and his sister Mrs. Featherstone confirmed that he had visited them in Grimsby.81 But this is where the truth ends and fiction begins. Walter Osborne told the FBI that his brother flew to Prestwick, Scotland with scientists who were traveling to Iceland to photograph a volcano. But it was not confirmed if Osborne got off the plane in Prestwick or went with them to Iceland.82 According to the FBI he arrived at his sister’s home by train from Prestwick.83 The FBI was able to determine that he arrived at New York City on December 5, 1963 aboard an Icelandic Airlines aircraft that he boarded in Luxembourg, Belgium.84 Flying on Icelandic Airlines suggests that he made a stop in Iceland. It is unlikely, however, that scientists, assuming that there was a group of them that went there to photograph a volcano, would allow him to accompany them on their trip since he did not have a scientific education.85 Osborne probably made up the story about the trip to Iceland and he flew on an Icelandic aircraft to corroborate his story about being there. He most likely said that he met the scientists in Prestwick because he arrived at his sister’s home from a train and this would add credibility to his story. To this day, his trip to Europe after the assassination is shrouded in mystery, and we do not know where he was on November 22, 1963.

For the wandering Osborne, his final destination was a hospital in Texas. He died at the Medical Arts Hospital in San Antonio on August 31, 1966.86 His “Certificate of Death” attributed his passing to a number of problems, one of which was kidney failure. The person who informed the authorities of his passing was Reverend Lyman Erickson. 87 When the FBI found out about his death they told him not to speak about Osborne’s passing. In an interview with the Knoxville News-Sentinel in 1993, Erickson said he was told by the Bureau “… ‘to forget everything I knew about him, told me to forget I ever knew him, and told me to never to speak of this matter to anyone.’”88 Reverend Erickson complied with the FBI request and asked Roy Akers Funeral Chapel in San Antonio, where Osborne’s remains had been sent, “… not to run notices in paper as FBI requested that it be kept quiet as possible.” (Appendix 13).89 Erickson must have also realized that the man who had been staying with him was enigmatic. He told The Knoxville News-Sentinel that the man he knew as John Howard Bowen owned a kit bag that had a false bottom that contained his Albert Osborne identification papers.90 He too was interviewed about Albert Osborne by the BBC and he quite logically said, “‘I think he was an agent. My problem is, I don’t know if he was an agent for the United States or a foreign government.’”91

John Howard Bowen

John Howard Bowen was born in Chester Pennsylvania on January 14, 1880.92 His parents were James and Nellie Bowen, and according to the 1900 United States Census, his father was born in 1853 and his mother in 1868.93 The census also indicates that they had two sons, Howard J., born in 1880, and Alfred V., born in 1882.94 Not much is known about his early life except for the fact that his father married after his two sons were born. The Chester Times dated May 11, 1886 announced the wedding of a Mr. James A. Bowen to Mrs. Nellie Gillen, both of Chester, in Camden, New Jersey.95 On Bowen’s application for social security (Appendix 14), he indicated that his mother’s name was Edith Montgomery; therefore, Bowen’s father was married prior to 1886 to another woman who bore the children, and then either died or they were subsequently divorced.

Bowen or his parents had some religious inclinations, as he was baptized on January 21, 1897. A record of baptisms from a United Methodist church shows that his brother Alfred Victor was also baptized on the same day.96 On September 13, 1905, Bowen married Fannie Mae Hall, 97 and their marriage produced no children.

In 1910 Bowen was employed as a printer in Camden, New Jersey.98 In 1910 or 1911 he began a career with the YMCA that would last over 20 years.99 He began work with the YMCA in their railroad Department100 in Camden, New Jersey.101 His job required him to move from time to time, and he lived in: Conemaugh, Pennsylvania; Gassaway, West Virginia; and Hamlet, North Carolina, where he remained until his employment with the YMCA ended in 1933.102

Tragedy struck Bowen in 1934 when his wife of 29 years, Fannie, died after being sick for a long time.103 In 1935 he moved to Tampa, Florida where he was employed as a hotel clerk.104 On July 6, 1937, John Howard Bowen applied for a SSN. The SSN number he was assigned was 239-12-4551, and this number can be seen on his application form (Appendix 14).105 Unlike Osborne, he knew his parents’ names and he included his middle name as well, which Osborne said he did not know.106 On his application for social security he also indicated that he was employed by the First National Institute of Applied Arts in South Bend, Indiana.107 In 1938 Bowen returned to Hamlet and began work as a desk clerk at a hotel.108 It may be just a coincidence, but when Osborne was interviewed by the FBI, he told them that Bowen had worked at a hotel in New Orleans.109 In 1947 he took a financial interest in the hotel by purchasing its stock with investors J. T. Capehart of Hamlet and A. A. Capehart Jr. of Washington.110

John Howard Bowen was also the subject of a newspaper article. A Hamlet, North Carolina newspaper, The News Messenger, published a series of articles called “People at Work” (Appendix 15). The article stated that Bowen worked at the Terminal Hotel,111 and the YMCA, and had been involved with the Hi-Y and Kiwanis Clubs, and had been a Sunday School Superintendent.112 On October 16, 1961, while out for a walk, Bowen was struck by a car. He never fully recovered from the accident and died on January 31, 1962.113

When did Albert Osborne begin using John Howard Bowen’s identity and did they know each other?

Osborne told a number of stories about when he began using Bowen’s name as an alias. He told the FBI that he first used it in 1916.114 He then told a different FBI interviewer that he began using it after World War I, when he went into the rug cleaning business with a Syrian man.115 Ada Amos told the FBI that she sent money to her brother in New York in the 1920s using the name John Howard Bowen.116 We cannot rely on Osborne’s account of when he used Bowen’s identity because of his tendency to lie. If we rely on Ada Amos’ testimony, then we know that sometime in the 1920s he was using the Bowen alias, because she sent him money using that name. But we must also consider the fact that both Osborne and his sister were questioned by the FBI about events that occurred over 40 years ago, and that their memories may have failed them.

There is a newspaper article that places both men in the same place at the same time. The Charlotte Observer dated December 24, 1929 stated that “Dr. Albert B. Osborne of India, spoke Sunday morning at the Methodist church here, while the devotional services (were) conducted by J. H. Bowen, general secretary of the YMCA at Hamlet” (Appendix 16).117 As mentioned above, Dr. Albert Osborne had given lectures about India, and it would not be uncharacteristic of him to add the initial “B” to his name. The real John Howard Bowen was a long time employee of the YMCA and at this time he resided in Hamlet, North Carolina.118 So it appears that at this event both Albert Osborne and John Howard Bowen are present. The newspaper article does not mention that they were associated in any way, only that they were at the same event. Without knowing if they had met before or were associated with each other in some way – for example through a fraternal organization – Osborne may have acquired personal information about Bowen prior to this event. If it was at this event that they first met, and Osborne was able to glean enough information from Bowen to begin using his identity, then this may explain how and when Osborne began using Bowen’s identity.

APPENDICES

1. “Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth”3.
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2. British Army application form “Short Service (All Arms)”7.
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3. “Attestation Paper, Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force”11.
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4. “A Letter from Mr. Osborne”25.
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5. “C.H.S. Hi-Ys to Hear Knickerbocker Thursday”30.
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6. “Sequohay Children Hear About India”31.
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7. Campfire Council “Charter of Incorporation”35.
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8. “John Bowen Retires as Missionary”51.
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9. “Bowen Retires After Years As Missionary”52.
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10. Bowen with Mixteca Indians58.
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11. Osborne application for a social security account number using his Bowen alias 61.
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12. 1938 Knoxville City Directory62.
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13. FBI request to keep Osborne’s death quiet89.
14. Bowen’s application for a social security account number105.
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15. “People at Work”108.
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16. “Dr. A.B. Osborne is Heard at Aberdeen”117.
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NOTES

1 The FBI investigation into the life of Albert Osborne can be found in the Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195.

2 Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007) 751.

3 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

4 Ancestry.com. 1891 and 1901 England Census, online database, Provo, Utah.

5 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 41.

6 His British army application form states that Osborne’s age was 19 years I month when he enlisted. His correct age was 18 years 1 month as indicated on his “Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth” (Appendix 2).

7 Ancestry.com, British Army World War One Pension Records 1914-1920 for Albert Osborne, online database, Provo, Utah.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 “Picture Life in Far East,” The Washington Post, November 29, 1914.

11 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

12 Ibid.

13 A copy of Osborne’s Canadian army application form and service records can be downloaded from Library and Archives Canada’s website.

14 Ancestry.com, British Army World War One Pension Records 1914-1920 for Albert Osborne, online database, Provo, Utah.

15 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

16 Ancestry.com, British Army World War One Pension Records 1914-1920 for Albert Osborne, online database, Provo, Utah.

17 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

18 Ibid.

19 Ancestry.com. 1891 and 1901 England Census, online database, Provo, Utah.

20 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 16.

21 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

22 “The return to swamp fever: malaria in Canadians,” J. Dick MacLean, MD and Brian J. Ward MD. Canadian Medical Association Journal, January 26, 1999, CMAJ 1999; 160: 211-2.

23 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

24 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 41.

25 “A Letter from Mr. Osborne,” Indiana Evening Gazette, April 24, 1943.

26 The Chautauqua Institution as it is now called was founded in 1874 in western New York by Methodists who wanted “… to extend the intellectual and critical capacities …” of Christians. Charlotte M. Canning, The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005) 6. Beginning in 1904, “Circuit Chautauquas” began delivering lectures, musical groups and other programs mainly to rural areas in the United States. Ibid., 1. Plays were added to their repertoire and after 1913 they were a regular part of the Chautauqua experience. Ibid., 14.

27 “Dr. Osborne is Heard on India,” The Winston Salem Journal, November 19, 1924.

28 “Remarkable Lecture at Chadwick Baptist Church,” The Charlotte Observer, February 9, 1925.

29 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 37-38.

30 “C.H.S. Hi-Ys to Hear Knickerbocker Thursday,” The Knoxville News, October 9, 1925.

31 “Sequohay Children Hear About India,” The Knoxville-News Sentinel, March 28, 1935.

32 “What a Place for Housewives – Hindu Women Throw ‘Dishes’ Away After Meal,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, April 14, 1935.

33 “Organization for Underprivileged Boys From Knoxville’s Street,” The Knoxville-News Sentinel, October 10, 1937.

34 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man,” The Knoxville-News Sentinel, Final Edition, November 28, 1993.

35 State of Tennessee, “Charter of Incorporation”, Campfire Council Incorporated, April 12, 1938.

36 “Organization for Underprivileged Boys From Knoxville’s Street,” op. cit.

37 “Campfire Council Work Gets High Praise From Official and Committee,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, April 23, 1939.

38 “Campfire Council Boys Felt as If Bermuda Were Home – They Were Greeted by Boys’ Church Brigade,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, August 20, 1939.

39 The Knoxville News-Sentinel reported that Bowen had made 14 trips to Bermuda. The current one, in which he accompanied two Campfire Council Boys, was financed by a local businessmen’s association. The reason for the previous trips are not explained but were financed by people described as friends. “Campfire Chief To Make 14th Bermuda Trip,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, August 5, 1939.

40 “Campfire Council Work Gets High Praise From Official and Committee.”

41 “Boys’ Home Plan Will Be Discussed,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, April 4, 1940.

42 http://www.boystown.org/about/father-flanagan/Pages/default.aspx

43 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 6.

44 J.H. Bowen, “Vesper Services and Raising of Flag Observed by Campers,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, July 28, 1940.

45 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 6.

46 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”

47 John Howard Bowen, Letter to the Editor Letter Box, The Laredo Times, February 17, 1946.

48 “Religious Director To Tell of Travels,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, May 3, 1947.

49 “Former Knox Minister Describes ‘Posadas,’ Which Mark Christmas Season in Mexico,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, December 25, 1948.

50 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

51 “John Bowen Retires as Missionary,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, December 5, 1953.

52 “Bowen Retires After Years As Missionary,” The Knoxville Journal, December 5, 1953.

53 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 10.

54 “Wants Southern Cooking in Libya,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, September 11, 1954.

55 The following story has more information about Osborne’s life and his work with young boys: “From Grimsby with Love: The Travels of ‘the Reverend’ Albert Alexander Osborne,” Ronald L. Ecker, 2005, http://www.ronaldecker.com/osborne.html.

56 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 57-58.

57 Ibid, 53.

58 Pat Fields, “Once Boys’ Club Backer Missionary In Mexico,” The Knoxville Journal, November 28, 1954.

59 See George Michael Evica’s, A Certain Arrogance, 85 -154.

60 Warren Commission Hearings , Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 22.

61 John Bowen, “Application For Social Security Account Number,” August 16, 1943.

62 Knoxville City Directory, City Directory Company of Knoxville, 1938.

63 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”

64 Ibid.

65 Warren Commission, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 64.

66 Ibid, 42.

67 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”

68 Ibid.

69 The link for this interview can be found at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/yorkslincs/series2/kennedy_conspiracy/index.shtml .

70 Interview with Bob Gemberling, Photo Report BBC Inside Out: Kennedy – The Grimsby Connection, 2003.

71 Ibid.

72 James Di Eugenio, Reclaiming Parkland: Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi, and the JFK Assassination in the New Hollywood (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016) 282.

73 Ibid., 283.

74 Warren Commission, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, pg. 40.

75 John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald (Arlington Texas: Quasar Ltd., 2003) 619.

76 “Bowen Leaves for Overseas,” The Knoxville Journal, November 14, 1963.

77 Warren Commission, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 34.

78 Ibid., 54.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid., 35-36.

82 Ibid. 36.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid., 43.

85 His sister Ada Amos told investigators that he did not have any scientific credentials. Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 38. Osborne told the FBI that he had left school after the eighth grade. Ibid., 41.

86 Albert Osborne, State of Texas, “Certificate of Death,” State File No. 49975, August 31, 1966.

87 Ibid.

88 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”

8989 Letter from Robert Massey to Jim Balloch, post office marked March 1, 1993, The Harold Weisberg Collection, Digital Archive, Hood College, Weisberg Subject Index Files, O Disk, Osborne Albert, Item10.

90 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”

91 Interview with Reverend Erickkson [sic], Photo Report BBC Inside Out: Kennedy – The Grimsby Connection, 2003.

92 Ancestry.com, U.S. World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918, online database, Provo, Utah.

93 Ancestry.com, 1900 United States Federal Census, online database, Provo, Utah.

94 Ibid.

95 “Married,” Chester Times, May 11, 1886.

96 Ancestry.com, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Church and Town records, 1708-1985, online database, Provo, Utah.

97 Ancestry.com, Pennsylvania, Marriages, 1852-1968, online database, Lehi, Utah.

98 Family Search, United States Census, 1910.

99 Bowen’s employment status with the YMCA for the period 1910 to 1933 can be found in the YMCA’s Yearbooks that were published on an annual basis. The YMCA Yearbooks are located at the University of Minnesota’s Kautz Family YMCA Archives, https://www.lib.umn.edu/ymca.

100 The YMCA’s Railroad Department was created in 1877. It offered railroad workers services such as: bible classes, reading rooms and places to exercise. The goal of this department was to reduce industrial unrest by teaching them Christian values. Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Ann Spratt eds., Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City (New York: New York University Press, 1997) 65-66.

101 YMCA’s Yearbooks https://www.lib.umn.edu/ymca.

102 Ibid.

103 “Mrs. J. H. Bowen,” The Charlotte Observer, March 24, 1934.

104 Ancestry.com, 1940 United States Federal Census, online database, Provo, Utah.

105 John Howard Bowen, “Application For Social Security Account Number,” July 6, 1937.

106 Ibid.

107 Ibid.

108 “People at Work,” The News-Messenger, Hamlet, North Carolina, February 11, 1958.

109 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 11.

110 “Eure Charters 14 New Firms,” Greensboro Daily News, September 11, 1947.

111 In 1990 the Terminal Hotel was used to film scenes from the movie Billy Bathgate starring Dustin Hoffman. Mike Quick, “‘Billy Bathgate’ Created A New Set Of Memories,” Park Newspapers of Rockingham, North Carolina, May 2, 1993. In 1993 the hotel was destroyed by fire. “Terminal Hotel: A Collection of Memories,” Park Newspapers of Rockingham, North Carolina, May 2, 1993.

112 “People at Work,” The News-Messenger. In 1925 the Cavalry Baptist Church in Kokomo, Indiana, which is about 130 miles from Gary, Indiana where Osborne’s sister Ada Amos lived (Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 37), had a Sunday School Superintendent named Albert Osborne. “Sunday Services in the Churches,” The Kokomo Daily Tribune, December 12, 1925.

113 “John H. Bowen Dies at Hamlet,” The News-Messenger, Hamlet, North Carolina, February 2, 1962.

114 Warren Commission, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 43.

115 Ibid., 41.

116 Ibid., 38.

117 “Dr. A. B. Osborne is Heard at Aberdeen,” The Charlotte Observer, December 24, 1929.

118 Year Book and Official Rosters of the National Councils of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of Canada and the United States of America, 1928-1929,95 and 1929-1930, 39.
July 21, 2017
Anatomy of the Second Floor Lunchroom Encounter (excerpts)

Last year at the JFK Lancer Conference in Dallas, Bart Kamp was awarded the New Frontier award. The citation stated that his work in reexamining the second floor encounter of Oswald with Texas School Book Depository foreman Roy Truly and motorcycle officer Marrion Baker utilized “a broad array of new data, including documents and statements of the participants and a variety of TSBD witnesses.” We agreed with this award and the description of the achievement. The second floor lunch encounter is a thread-worn shibboleth of the Warren Report that – like Oswald’s mail order rifle – the first generation of critics simply passed on; the notable exception being Harold Weisberg in his book Whitewash II. In Reclaiming Parkland, I began to question it, largely based on Marrion Baker’s first day affidavit, where the officer does not even mention the episode – or Oswald or Truly. Even though, as he wrote the affidavit, Oswald was sitting across from him in the rather small witness room. In other words, after he had just stuck a gun in his stomach, Baker didn’t recognize him.

But Bart Kamp goes much further than that in his analysis. We are presenting a small part of that long essay here, with a link to the longer version at the admirable group Dealey Plaza UK. The new revised version of the essay, from which this part is adapted, will be posted there soon and we will link to it then. This is the kind of work, daring and original, questioning accepted paradigms with new and provocative evidence, that KennedysandKing.com stands for.

~ Jim DiEugenio

The current, updated version of the full essay can be read here.

If the 2^nd-floor lunchroom encounter did not happen,

then was Oswald encountered somewhere else?

Some researchers think Oswald walked up the stairs inside the first floor vestibule, went through the corridor on the second floor, passed the door, moving from right to left, and got his coke. This is possible, but the news reports and statements, which come in various guises, show Oswald was encountered on the first floor instead, while trying to leave the building. It is even possible that Baker never saw Oswald until he was brought in while Baker was giving the affidavit taken by Marvin Johnson.

Bob Considine of the Hearst Press, for example, was told that Oswald had been questioned inside the building “almost before the smoke from the assassin’s gun had disappeared.” That hardly sounds like an encounter on the second floor does it? It points more to an altercation on the first floor, just where Oswald had claimed to be. Various newspapers made reference to this so-called first floor encounter instead of the second floor lunch room encounter.

Roy Truly was overheard by Kent Biffle, who reported in the November 23 edition of the Dallas Morning News:

“In a storage room on the first floor, the officer, gun drawn, spotted Oswald. ‘Does this man work here?’, the officer reportedly asked Truly. Truly, who said he had interviewed and had hired Oswald a couple of months earlier reportedly told the policeman that Oswald was a worker.”

Biffle mentions overhearing Truly again in the Dallas Morning News, edition from November 21, 2000:

“Hours dragged by. The building superintendent showed up with some papers in his hand. I listened as he told detectives about Lee Oswald failing to show up at a roll call. My impression is there was an earlier roll call but it was inconclusive inasmuch as several employees were missing. This time, however, all were accounted for but Oswald. I jotted down all the Oswald information. The description and address came from company records already examined by the superintendent. The superintendent would recall later that he and a policeman met Oswald as they charged into the building after the shots were fired.”

Ochus Campbell, the vice president of the TSBD, stated in the New York Herald Tribune on November 22:

“Shortly after the shooting we raced back into the building. We had been outside watching the parade. We saw him (Oswald) in a small storage room on the ground floor. Then we noticed he was gone.” Mr. Campbell added: “Of course he and the others were on their lunch hour but he did not have permission to leave the building and we haven’t seen him since.”

Detective Ed Hicks is quoted in the London Free Press on November 23, and in various other newspapers, saying:

As the Presidential limousine sped to the hospital the police dragnet went into action. Hicks said at just about that time, Oswald came out of the front door of the red bricked warehouse. A policeman asked him where he was going. He said he wanted to see what all the excitement was all about.

In addition, from Jack White’s archive at Baylor in a document called “Escape”, city detective Ed Hicks, after intensive investigation of the slaying, drew this picture of the hour surrounding the tragedy:

“As Oswald left the building, he was stopped by Dallas police, Oswald told them he worked in the building and was going down to see what was going on.” [AP, 1:45 a.m. CST]

In the Washington Post of November 23, Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry is quoted:

“As an officer rushed into the building Oswald rushed out. The policeman permitted him to pass after the building manager told the policeman that Oswald was an employee.”

The first officer to reach the six-story building, Lieutenant Curry said, found Oswald among other persons in a lunchroom. New York Times, Nov 24^thDallas, [11/23], Donald Jansen (from Jack White’s archive at Baylor in a document called “Escape”)

The Sydney Morning Herald of November 24 reports:

Police said that a man who was identified as Oswald walked through the door of the warehouse and was stopped by a policeman. Oswald told the policeman “I work here” and when another employee confirmed that he did, the policeman let Oswald walk away, they said.

Henry Wade, during a press conference, which by the looks of it was published unedited in the New York Times on November 26, states:

“A police officer, immediately after the assassination, ran in the building and saw this man in a corner and tried to arrest him; but the manager of the building said he was an employee and it was all right. Every other employee was located but this defendant of the company. A description and name of him went out to police to look for him.”

J. Edgar Hoover, in a telephone conversation with LBJ, states:

“at the entrance of the building he was stopped by police officers, well he is alright, he works here, you needn’t hold him. They let him go.”

In Gary Savage’s book, First Day Evidence, Baker states:

“Shortly after I entered the building I confronted Oswald. The man who said he was the building superintendent said that Oswald was all right, that he was an employee there. We left Oswald there, and the supervisor showed me the way upstairs.”

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Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry’s press conference of November 23, 1963

Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry gave a press conference on November 23, 1963, during which he stated a few things that are very interesting:

At 5:25:

Reporter: Could you detail for us what lead you to Oswald?

Chief Curry: Not exactly except uh in the building we uh, when we uh went to the building, why, he was observed in the building at the time but the manager told us that he worked there and the officers passed him on up then because the manager said he was an employee…”

At 6:41:

Reporter: Did you say chief that a policeman had seen him in the building?

Chief Curry: Yes

Reporter: After the shot was fired?

Chief Curry: Yes

Reporter: uh why didn’t he uh arrest him then?

Chief Curry: Because the manager of the place told us that he was an employee, ‘said he’s alright he’s an employee.”

Reporter: Did he look suspicious to the policeman at this point?

Chief Curry: I imagine the policeman was checking everyone he saw as he went into the building.

At 10:42:

Reporter: And you have the witness who places him there after the time of the shooting.

Chief Curry: My police officer can place him there after the shooting.

Reporter: Your officer wanted to stop him and then was told by the manager that he worked there.

Chief Curry: Yes.

So let’s get this straight: Truly and Campbell, TSBD employees, are recorded by the newspapers while at the TSBD. Various ranking officers of the Dallas police are quoted in the corridors of the DPD. And even Hoover and LBJ discuss it!

Oswald’s alibi given just before and just after the shooting

In the second part of this study I will focus exclusively on the interrogation of Lee Oswald; here I will review the parts relating to the second floor lunch room encounter. These are the notes and reports by Robbery and Homicide Captain Will Fritz, FBI agents James Hosty and James Bookhout, Postal Inspector Harry Dean Holmes (who was an informant for the FBI), and Thomas Kelley of the Secret Service. These people were all present during the interrogations either Friday, Saturday and/or Sunday morning.

Captain Will Fritz interrogated Lee Oswald for roughly a dozen hours. Fritz claimed he took no notes, but in fact there were some (probably kept as a souvenir…); these were submitted anonymously in the mid-90’s to the ARRB after Fritz had died. These notes had been ‘buried’ for more than 33 years; until they appeared, researchers had to make do with Fritz’s statement from November 22 and his Warren Commission testimony.

Fritz’s interrogation notes contain a few gems when it comes to Lee’s location just before, during and just after the assassination:

On page 1 is found:

claims 2nd floor Coke when

off came in

Oswald had a coke from the 2nd floor when the officer came in. Came in where? 1st? 2nd?

to first floor had lunch

Oswald had lunch on the 1st floor.

out with Bill Shelley

in front

Oswald knew Shelley was standing in front of the building. And that is before the shooting, not after! As Shelley had departed almost immediately after the shooting from the TSBD steps.

Page 1 of Captain Fritz’s Notes

On page 3 of the same set of Fritz’s interrogation notes:

says two negro came in

one Jr + short negro – ask? for lunch says cheese

sandwiches + apple

Oswald saw Jarman and possibly Norman come into the Domino Room while he was having his lunch.

Lunch consisted of a cheese sandwich and an apple.

Page 3 of Captain Fritz’s Notes

Looking at both these pages, one thing becomes evident: a new sentence does not always start on a new line, but midway as well. This leaves his notes open to interpretation.

In his report to Chief Curry from November 23, 1963, Fritz says:

“We also found that this man had been stopped by Officer M.L. Baker while coming down the stairs. Mr. Baker says that he stopped this man on the third or the fourth floor on the stairway, but as Mr. Truly identified him as one of the employees he was released.”

The undated draft of Fritz’s report states:

“I asked him what part of the building he was in when the president was shot, and he said that he was having his lunch about that time on the first floor. Mr. Truly had told me that one of the police officers had stopped this man immediately after the shooting near the back stairway, so I asked Oswald where he was when the police officer stopped him. He said he was on the second floor drinking a coca cola when the officer came in.”

Fritz’s Warren Commission testimony:

Mr. BALL. Did you ask him what happened that day; where he had been?

Mr. FRITZ. Yes, sir.

Mr. BALL. What did he say?

Mr. FRITZ. Well he told me that he was eating lunch with some of the employees when this happened, and that he saw all the excitement and he didn’t think, I also asked him why he left the building. He said there was so much excitement there then that “I didn’t think there would be any work done that afternoon and we don’t punch a clock and they don’t keep very close time on our work and I just left.”

Mr. BALL. At that time didn’t you know that one of your officers, Baker, had seen Oswald on the second floor?

Mr. FRITZ. They told me about that down at the bookstore; I believe Mr. Truly or someone told me about it, told me they had met him, I think he told me, person who told me about, I believe told me that they met him on the stairway, but our investigation shows that he actually saw him in a lunch room, a little lunch room where they were eating, and he held his gun on this man and Mr. Truly told him that he worked there, and the officer let him go.

Mr. BALL. Did you question Oswald about that?

Mr. FRITZ. Yes, sir; I asked him about that and he knew that the officer stopped him all right.

Mr. BALL. Did you ask him what he was doing in the lunch room?

Mr. FRITZ. He said he was having his lunch. He had a cheese sandwich and a Coca-Cola.

Mr. BALL. Did he tell you he was up there to get a Coca-Cola?

Mr. FRITZ. He said he had a Coca-Cola.

Although he learned from a conversation with Roy Truly at the “bookstore” [sic] that they met Oswald on the stairway, his own investigation shows it was inside the second floor lunch room instead! It has also only recently come to light that Martha Joe Stroud corresponded with the Warren Commission, relating that Fritz was not happy with his statement and that he wanted it changed. So there seem to be two versions of his statement. I would love to see the difference between the two! (This was recently posted by Robin Unger.)

James Hosty and James Bookhout of the FBI state in their joint November 23 report:

“OSWALD stated that he went to lunch at approximately noon and he claimed he ate his lunch on the first floor in the lunchroom; however he went to the second floor where the Coca-Cola machine was located and obtained a bottle of Coca-Cola ‘for his lunch. OSWALD claimed to’ be on the first floor when President JOHN F. KENNEDY passed by his building.”

This report does not mention the specific location of Oswald on the first floor at the time of the assassination, nor does it mention any encounter involving Oswald, a police officer and Truly.

In the solo report by James Bookhout (dated November 24, after Oswald was dead), things are turned around a bit, but not for the better.

“Oswald stated that on November 22 1963, at the time of the search of the Texas School Book Depository building by Dallas police officers, he was on the second floor of said building, having just purchased a Coca-Cola from the soft-drink machine, at which time a police officer came into the room with pistol drawn and asked him if he worked there.

Mr. Truly was present and verified that he was an employee and the police officer thereafter left the room and continued through the building. Oswald stated that he took this Coke down to the first floor and stood around and had lunch in the employee’s lunch room. He thereafter went outside and stood around for five or ten minutes with foreman Bill Shelley.”

First, he mentions “officers”, when Baker was the only police officer in that building for a fair amount of time (5 to 10 minutes is a reasonable assumption); everyone else on the force was busy in the railroad yard. Or is this an indication that Oswald was in the building much later than he has been credited for?

Second, Oswald had purchased a coke, which from a timing perspective makes it already “interesting” (getting the correct change out, putting it in the machine and waiting for the bottle to appear and to take the cap off). But what is more important is that neither Truly nor Baker saw anything in his hands.

Third, Oswald stood around and had lunch after the shooting, and even stood outside with Bill Shelley for 5 to 10 minutes after having had his lunch. So how long was he in that building? According to this second report, for quite some time, which makes one wonder how the bus-to-cab ride transpired, how he changed his clothes, ‘grabbed his gun’ and walked towards 10th and Patton to blow Tippit away. This is impossible from the timing perspective described by James Bookhout! Plus Shelley left immediately after the shooting and did not come back until at least 5 minutes after leaving.

Hosty writes in Assignment Oswald about an exchange he had with Oswald during his questioning while in police custody. No second floor lunch room encounter whatsoever.

Okay now, Lee, you work at the Texas School Book Depository, isn’t that right?

Yeah, that’s right.

When did you start working there?

About October fifteenth.

What did you do down there?

I was just a common laborer.

Now, did you have access to all floors of the building?

Of course.

Tell me what was on each of those floors.

The first and second floors have offices. The third and fourth floor are storage. So are the fifth and sixth.

And you were working there today, is that right?

Yep.

Were you there when the president’s motorcade went by?

Yeah.

Where were you when the president went by the book depository?

I was eating my lunch in the first floor lunchroom.

What time was that?

About noon.

Were you ever on the second floor around the time the president was shot?

Well, yeah. I went up there to get a bottle of Coca-Cola from the machine for my lunch.

But where were you when the president actually passed your building?

On the first floor in the lunchroom.

And you left the depository, isn’t that right?

Yeah.

When did you leave?

Well, I figured with all the confusion there wouldn’t be any more work to do that day.

Hosty tried to pin Oswald’s location down decades after the fact, based on memory and also probably the interrogation report signed by him and James Bookhout, since it coincides neatly with the so-called recollection above. Oswald has gone for lunch and stayed in the Domino Room after he had gotten his coke from the second floor. Many must have seen him, since the ladies from the office all started to have their lunch at 12:00 upstairs in the second floor lunchroom. Some people will claim that this pins Oswald on the first floor, and that he went upstairs via the front of the building and ended up passing the window in the door leading to the small area in front of the lunchroom, thus being spotted by Baker. But why would he do that? The Domino Room was in the back at the east end, where the infamous back stairs were perhaps a little closer, affording more direct access.

The Secret Service was present too. Forrest Sorrels and Thomas J. Kelley were there during some of Lee Oswald’s interrogations.

Thomas J. Kelley is the only one who supplies an interrogation report that actually goes so far as to claim that Oswald explicitly admitted to not having watched the motorcade. In his First interview with LHO, he states:

“I asked him if he viewed the parade and he said he had not. I then asked him if he had shot the President and he said he had not. I asked him if he has shot governor Connally and he said he had not.”

None of the notes or reports – by Fritz, Bookhout, Hosty or even Harry Dean Holmes, who was actually present during that final interrogation of Oswald alongside Kelley – back up the statement highlighted above.

According to Vince Palamara, Kelley perjured himself during the HSCA hearings.

Finally, Postal Inspector and FBI informant Harry Dean Holmes, on page 4 of his report dated December 17, 1963:

“the commotion surrounding the assassination took place and when he went downstairs, a policeman questioned him as to his identification and his boss stated ‘he is one of our employees’, whereupon the policeman had him step aside momentarily”.

In his statement and his testimony (see below), Oswald is being asked to step aside.

Holmes’ Warren Commission testimony:

Mr. BELIN. By the way, where did this policeman stop him when he was coming down the stairs at the Book Depository on the day of the shooting?

Mr. HOLMES. He said it was in the vestibule.

Mr. BELIN. He said he was in the vestibule?

Mr. HOLMES. Or approaching the door to the vestibule. He was just coming, apparently, and I have never been in there myself. Apparently there is two sets of doors, and he had come out to this front part.

Mr. BELIN. Did he state it was on what floor?

Mr. HOLMES. First floor. The front entrance to the first floor.

And later on during the very same testimony:

Mr. BELIN. Now, Mr. Holmes, I wonder if you could try and think if there is anything else that you remember Oswald saying about where he was during the period prior or shortly prior to, and then at the time of the assassination?

Mr. HOLMES. Nothing more than I have already said. If you want me to repeat that?

Mr. BELIN. Go ahead and repeat it.

Mr. HOLMES. See if I say it the same way?

Mr. BELIN. Yes.

Mr. HOLMES. He said when lunchtime came he was working in one of the upper floors with a Negro. The Negro said, “Come on and let’s eat lunch together.” Apparently both of them having a sack lunch. And he said, “You go ahead, send the elevator back up to me and I will come down just as soon as I am finished.” And he didn’t say what he was doing. There was a commotion outside, which he later rushed downstairs to go out to see what was going on. He didn’t say whether he took the stairs down. He didn’t say whether he took the elevator down.

But he went downstairs, and as he went out the front, it seems as though he did have a coke with him, or he stopped at the coke machine, or somebody else was trying to get a coke, but there was a coke involved. He mentioned something about a coke. But a police officer asked him who he was, and just as he started to identify himself, his superintendent came up and said, “He is one of our men.” And the policeman said, “Well, you step aside for a little bit. Then I just went on out in the crowd to see what it was all about.”

Step aside, which does not point to a second floor encounter, as Baker and Truly did a 180-degree turn after this alleged “lunch date”.

Lee Oswald did not lie when he claimed he was on the first floor when the president passed by the TSBD. Not only did Holmes relay this; so did Fritz in his interrogation notes, as did Bookhout and Hosty in their joint report.

James ‘Junior’ Jarman told the HSCA that Billy Lovelady told him that he had personally witnessed Oswald being allowed out of the front entrance by a policeman shortly after the assassination, and that Truly had said he was alright. (See HERE and HERE.)

This is, of course, hearsay – just as Pauline Sanders’ support for Mrs. Reid’s encounter with Oswald in his t-shirt is equally hearsay. But it is worth mentioning. What also needs to be taken into consideration is that Lovelady left for the railroad yard almost straight after the shooting had stopped, and said he went back in through the side entrance and ended taking police officers up in the elevator. Yet Lovelady is filmed standing outside on the TSBD steps afterwards by John Martin and Robert Hughes at about 12:50. And it looks like he is waiting to get in. Danny Garcia is there, as is Bonnie Ray Williams. Did Lovelady see Oswald leave then? Which would mean he left much later than has been acknowledged. Lovelady was extremely economical with the truth during his Warren Commission testimony as I already pointed out earlier.

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James Earl Jarman and Harold Norman saw Howard Brennan talking to a police officer. This by itself shows how quickly they made their way down from the fifth floor.

According to Harold Norman’s HSCA testimony, he states that after starting their descent from the fifth floor, they stopped on the fourth floor for a couple of minutes, because they saw the ladies looking through the windows at the railroad yard activity shortly after the shooting.

This is during the same interval in which Dorothy Garner stayed behind, after “following” Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles, when they started their descent; Garner was then joined by other women from those fourth floor offices. Norman’s HSCA testimony strengthens Dorothy Garner’s statements and also shows that the three African American men, Williams, Jarman and Norman, did not encounter anyone, not even Truly and Baker while they made their descent. Or did they wait much longer? Baker states in his HSCA testimony that he was spotted by them while they hid behind boxes on the 5^th floor. Norman had no recollection of this during his testimony, and couldn’t attest to when he saw Truly after coming down to the first floor.

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April 14, 2017
Was Dorothy Kilgallen Murdered over the JFK Case?

The above question is posed by author Mark Shaw in his new book, The Reporter Who Knew too Much. But for anyone interested in the JFK case, the questions about Kilgallen’s death are not new. Investigators like Penn Jones and Mark Lane first surfaced them in fragmentary form decades ago. And according to more than one report, Lane was actually communicating with Kilgallen when the latter was doing her inquiry into the JFK case from 1963 to 1965. This reviewer briefly wrote about her death in a footnote to the first edition of Destiny Betrayed. (See page 365, note 15) With the rise of the Internet, various posters, like John Simkin, kept the Kilgallen questions popping up on Kennedy assassination forums.

Dorothy Kilgallen’s
posthumous book

Prior to Shaw’s book, there had been three major sources about Kilgallen’s life and (quite) puzzling death. The first was Lee Israel’s biography titled Kilgallen. Published in hardcover in 1979, it went on to be a New York Times bestseller in paperback. As we shall later see, although Israel raised some questions about Kilgallen’s death in regards to the JFK case, she held back on some important details she discovered. In 2007, Sara Jordan wrote a long, fascinating essay for the publication Midwest Today Magazine. Entitled “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?”, Jordan built upon some of Israel’s work, but was much more explicit about certain sources, and much more descriptive about the very odd crime scene. For instance, the autopsy report on Kilgallen says she died of acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication. But it also says that the circumstances of that intoxication were “undetermined”. Jordan appropriately adds, “for some reason the police never bothered to determine them. They closed the case without talking to crucial witnesses.” (Jordan, p. 22) A year later, in the fall of 2008, prolific author and journalist Paul Alexander had his book on the subject optioned for film rights. The manuscript was entitled Good Night, Dorothy Kilgallen. Reportedly, one focus of Alexander’s volume was how the JFK details Kilgallen wrote about in her upcoming book, Murder One, were cut from the version posthumously published by Random House. Neither Alexander’s book, nor the film, has yet to be produced. Which is a shame, since the available facts would produce an intriguing film.

I

Dorothy Kilgallen was born in Chicago in 1913. She graduated from Erasmus High School in 1930. At Erasmus she had been the associate editor of her high school newspaper. (Shaw, p. 3) Her father, James Kilgallen, was a newspaperman who worked for the Hearst syndicate in Illinois and Indiana. She spent a year in college in New York City. While there, her father got her a reporter tryout with the New York Evening Journal. She dropped out of college, and this became her lifelong career and position.

While at the Evening Journal, she carved out a place for herself on the criminal courts beat. She especially liked reporting on murder trials, the more sensational the better. For example, one case involved a wife killing her husband by placing arsenic in his chocolate pudding. (ibid, p. 6) Another trial she covered was the notorious Anna Antonio murder for hire case, where the wife hired hit men to kill her husband for insurance money. (ibid, p. 7) In 1935, at the age of 22, she covered the most sensational case of the era: the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son. (ibid) Shortly after this, Kilgallen entered a Race Around the World contest. That race generated tremendous publicity since it involved three reporters for major newspapers. In 24 days, she finished second to Bud Ekins. But, more importantly, she wrote a book about this experience that was then made into a movie. (Jordan, p. 17)

The Original “What’s My Line?” Panel (1952)

O. O. Corrigan passed away in 1938. For years, he had maintained a very successful column called The Voice of Broadway. Shortly after his death, Kilgallen was given his position. (Lee Israel, Kilgallen, p. 104) In that column she covered politics, crime and the theater scene in New York. In 1940 she married actor/singer and future Broadway producer Richard Kollmar. They had three children, Richard, Kerry and Jill. She became, in 1950, one of the regulars on the game show What’s My Line? The other regular panelists were actress Arlene Francis, and publisher Bennett Cerf; the host was John Daly.

In 1954, Kilgallen covered another sensational legal proceeding. This was the murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard. In July of 1954, the doctor and his wife were entertaining guests at their lakefront home in suburban Cleveland. While watching a movie on TV, Sheppard fell asleep. His wife Marilyn escorted the guests out a bit after midnight. (Kilgallen, Murder One, p. 238) Just before dawn, Sheppard called the mayor of the town of Bay Village, the Cleveland suburb where he lived. The mayor and his wife came over. Sheppard was slumped over in the den with a medical kit open on the floor. He appeared to be in shock. He mumbled: “They killed Marilyn.” The couple went up the stairs and saw her bloodied body in the bedroom. (ibid, p. 239) Sheppard said he had been awakened by Marilyn’s screams. He ran upstairs to the bedroom and saw an intruder in the shadows. The assailant knocked him out with a blunt object. When he came to, he heard the intruder downstairs on the porch. He ran down, chased him off the property, and he struggled with him on the lakeshore—where he was bludgeoned unconscious again. (ibid, pp. 239-40)

When she arrived in Cleveland, Kilgallen was struck by both the weakness of the prosecution’s case, and by the powerful bias of the media against Sheppard. But in the face of the latter, the judge failed to sequester the jury. In December, after four days of deliberations, the jury convicted Sheppard of murder. Kilgallen was shocked. In her view, the prosecution had not proven Shepard guilty any more than they had “proved there were pin-headed men on Mars.” (ibid, p. 300)

Sam Sheppard & F. Lee Bailey

Years later, after Sheppard’s original lawyer, William Corrigan, had passed away, F. Lee Bailey took on his appeal. At a book signing in New York, he had heard Kilgallen speak about her in-chambers interview with the judge in the Sheppard case. He contacted her about this and she gave Bailey a deposition. In that deposition, she revealed that, before the trial began, she was granted an interview with the judge. He asked her what she was doing in Cleveland. She said that she was there to report on the mystery and intrigue of the Sheppard case. The judge replied, “Mystery? It’s an open and shut case.” Kilgallen said she was taken aback by this remark. She told Bailey, “I have talked to many judges in their chambers—they don‘t give me an opinion on a case before it is over.” She continued that the judge then said Sheppard was “guilty as hell. There’s no question about it.” (ibid, pp. 301-02) This deposition was quoted in the final decision of the U. S. Supreme Court which, in 1966, granted Sheppard a new trial.

At the 1966 trial, Sheppard was acquitted. Bailey’s criminologist, Dr. Paul L. Kirk, presented evidence that there was a third type of blood in Marilyn’s bedroom, not the doctor’s or the victim’s. Further, Kirk concluded the blows that killed Marilyn came from a left-handed person. Sheppard was right handed. (ibid, p. 304)

The Sheppard case dragged on for so long, creating so much controversy, making so many headlines, that it reportedly became the basis for the TV series The Fugitive, starring David Janssen. For our purposes, the important thing to recall about it, and the reason I have spent some time on it, is that Kilgallen was correct about the verdict. And further, her role in the case helped set free an innocent man. Although that last act did not occur until after her own death in November of 1965.

II

The first real inquiry into Dorothy Kilgallen’s death was by the late author Lee Israel. This was done for her best-selling biography, titled Kilgallen, a book still worth reading today. Since that book was not published until 1979, this means that neither the NYPD, nor the House Select Committee on Assassinations did any kind of serious review of the case. This is odd since the circumstances surrounding Kilgallen’s demise clearly merited an inquest. But beyond that, and as we will see, there appears to have been an attempt to cover up the true circumstances of her death.

Kilgallen, with Jack Ruby defense attorneys
Joe Tonahill (center) & Melvin Belli (right),
at the Ruby trial (February 19, 1964)

Lee Israel did a good job in her book in describing just how much Kilgallen wrote about the failings of the Warren Commission. She also described some of Kilgallen’s extensive contacts with early researcher Mark Lane. It is safe to say that no other widely distributed columnist in America wrote as often, or as pointedly, about the JFK case as Kilgallen did. She flew to Dallas to cover the trial of Jack Ruby in early 1964. While there, she secured two private interviews with the accused. She never divulged what was revealed to her in those interviews. Instead, the notes from these meetings went into her ever expanding JFK assassination file—which more than one person saw since, at times, she actually would carry it around with her. (Israel, p. 401)

From the contacts she attained in covering the Ruby trial, Kilgallen broke two significant JFK stories. First, someone smuggled her the testimony of Jack Ruby before the Commission. After convincing her editors to print the purloined hearing, her paper ran the story over three consecutive days. And they allowed her to append comments and questions to the colloquy. (Israel, p. 389) Her Dallas sources also secured her an early copy of the DPD radio log. With this she pointed out that Police Chief Jesse Curry had misrepresented to the public his real opinion as to what the origin point of the shots were. He had told the public he thought they came from the Texas School Book Depository, but on the log he said they came from the rail yards, behind the picket fence, atop the grassy knoll. (Israel, p. 390)

When documents on Oswald were denied to Ruby’s defense team, again Kilgallen chimed in pungently:

It appears that Washington knows or suspects something about Lee Harvey Oswald that it does not want Dallas and the rest of the world to know or suspect. . . Lee Harvey Oswald has passed on not only to his shuddery reward, but to the mysterious realm of “classified” persons whose whole story is known only to a few government agents.

Why is Oswald being kept in the shadows, as dim a figure as they can make him, while the defense tries to rescue his alleged killer with the help of information from the FBI? Who was Oswald, anyway? (Israel, p. 366)

She also ran a story suggesting that there were witnesses who saw Oswald inside Ruby’s Carousel Club. (Shaw, pp. 66, 67) Based upon that, she once said, “I don’t see why Dallas should feel guilty for what one man, or even 3 or 5 in a conspiracy have done.” (Shaw, p. 68)

When the Ruby case was decided and he was found the sole guilty party—a verdict that would later be reconsidered—Kilgallen, again, wrote about it quite resonantly:

The point to be remembered in this historic case in that the whole truth has not been told. Neither the state of Texas nor the defense put all of its evidence before the jury. Perhaps it was not necessary, but it would have been desirable from the viewpoint of all the American people. (Israel, p. 372)

In fact, as Israel wrote, Kilgallen actually became a funnel for men like Lane and Dallas reporter Thayer Waldo to run information through, in order for it to garner a wider audience. (Israel, p. 373)

She went even further. Kilgallen ran experiments with her husband holding a broomstick to replicate the alleged sighting by Warren Commission witness Howard Brennan. Brennan was the Commission’s chief witness as to a description of Oswald as the sixth floor assassin. She stood approximately where Brennan stood in front of her five-story townhouse. And she told her husband to go ahead and kneel, as the Warren Commission said Oswald was behind a box. She came to the conclusion that there was “no way in the world that such a description could have been accurately determined by Brennan.” (p. 391) She further came to the conclusion that there was a real question as to the type of weapon that was found in the building, a Mannlicher-Carcano or a Mauser. She was also tipped off as to the ignored testimony of witness Acquila Clemmons. Contrary to the Warren Report, Clemmons claimed to have seen two men involved in the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit, not one, and neither resembled Oswald. These stories were mentioned in her newspaper column in September of 1964. (Israel, p. 395)

The FBI visited her to find out how she got Ruby’s testimony before the Warren Commission. She made them tea but told the two agents that she could never reveal how she got that exhibit or who gave it to her. And when the Warren Report was released in September of 1964, Kilgallen made it fairly evident how she felt about it:

I would be inclined to believe that the Federal Bureau of Investigation might have been more profitably employed in probing the facts of the case rather than how I got them …. At any rate, the whole thing smells a bit fishy. It’s a mite too simple that a chap kills the President of the United States, escapes from that bother, kills a policeman, eventually is apprehended in a movie theater under circumstances that defy every law of police procedure, and subsequently is murdered under extraordinary circumstances. (Israel, p. 396)

What she said and did in private on the JFK case was even more extreme than her public actions. After her experience with the FBI she concluded that Hoover had tapped her home phone line. She told Lane that, “Intelligence agencies will be watching us. We’ll have to be very careful.” She decided to communicate with Lane via pay phones and even then by using code names. She then added, “They’ve killed the president, the government is not prepared to tell us the truth, and I’m going to do everything in my power to find out what really happened.” (Israel, pp. 392-93) She told her friend Marlin Swing, a CBS TV producer and colleague of Walter Cronkite, “This has to be a conspiracy.” (ibid, p. 396) To attorney and talent manager Morton Farber, she characterized the Warren Commission Report as “laughable.” She then added, “I’m going to break the real story and have the biggest scoop of the century.” (Israel, p. 397) She made similar statements to another TV producer Bob Bach, and another talent manager, Bill Franklin. (Israel, p. 396) All this, of course, was contra what almost all of her professional colleagues were involved with at the time: namely praising and venerating the fraud of the Warren Report. For instance, in June of 1965, Kilgallen was invited to do an ABC news show called Nightlife with Les Crane. Since Bach had helped arrange the appearance she thought she would be speaking about the Warren Report, so she brought parts of her JFK file with her. But she was informed by one of the show’s producers, Nick Vanoff, that they did no want her to address that subject. He told her it was “too controversial”. (Israel, p. 401)

Between the time of the release of the Warren Report—September of 1964—and her passing—November of 1965—she was in the process of taking and planning flights to both Dallas and New Orleans. (For the former, see Israel, p. 402; for the latter, see Jordan, p. 20) These do not appear to be job related. They appear to be for the purpose of advancing her own inquiry into Kennedy’s assassination. For instance, she told What’s My Line? makeup artist Carmen Gebbia that she was excited about an upcoming trip to New Orleans to meet a source she did not know. She said it was all cloak and daggerish. And she concluded that, “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to break this case.” (Jordan, p. 20)

Marc Sinclaire

Marc Sinclaire worked for Kilgallen as her major hairdresser. Many years after her death he revealed that he went to New Orleans with her in October of 1965. Sinclaire went down on a separate plane and stayed in a different hotel. They had dinner together the night he arrived. The next morning he was preparing to go to her place to work on her hair. She called him and said that was cancelled: she had purchased a ticket for him and he was to return to New York. Further, he was not to tell anyone he had been there with her. Her second hairdresser, Charles Simpson, said she used to tell him things about her work, but now things were different. She proclaimed “I used to share things with you … but after I have found out now what I know, if the wrong people knew what I know, it would cost me my life.” (ibid)

III

Two of the problems with the circumstances of Kilgallen’s death are that first, the cause was misreported by her own newspaper, and second, no one can pinpoint exactly when her body was first discovered. Using her father as a source, the Journal American reported that Dorothy Kilgallen had died of an apparent heart attack. (Israel, p. 410) As we shall see, that was not the case. But even more puzzling, there is a real mystery as to when the corpse was first discovered.

The official police record states that the body was found between noon and 1 PM by Marie Eichler, Kilgallen’s personal maid. (Israel, p. 416) But Israel talked to an anonymous source who was a tutor to the Kilgallen children and was there on the morning of November 8, 1965. That source told Israel that the body was found much earlier, before ten o’clock. Sara Jordan later revealed the tutor was Ibne Hassan. Hassan’s information turned out to be correct. From the information on hand today, the first known person to discover Kilgallen’s body was Sinclaire. And his (unofficial) testimony has powerful relevance. He said that he was stunned when he found Kilgallen sleeping on the third floor. Because she always slept on the fifth floor. He found her sitting up in bed with the covers pulled up. He walked over to her, touched her, and knew she was dead. In addition to being on the wrong floor, she was wearing clothes that she simply did not wear when she went to bed. Further, she still had on her make up, false eyelashes, earrings, and her hairpiece. (Jordan, p. 21)

A book was laid out on the bed. It was Robert Ruark’s recent volume The Honey Badger. Yet, according to more than one witness, Kilgallen had finished reading this book several weeks—perhaps months—prior. Also, she needed glasses to read; Sinclaire said there were none present. The room air conditioner was running, yet it was cold outside. Plus the reading lamp was still on. Sinclaire added, her body was neatly positioned in the middle of the bed, beyond the reach of the nightstand. (ibid)

The questions raised by Sinclaire’s description are both obvious and myriad. The setting suggests that Kilgallen’s body was positioned both on a floor she did not sleep on and in a way that was completely artificial. In other words, it was posed. If this was done, it was performed by someone not familiar with her living routine and in a hurry to leave, probably for fear of awakening someone. But this is not all there is to it. Sinclaire said there was also a drink on the nightstand. (As we shall see, there more likely were two glasses there.) When Sinclaire called for the butler, he came running up the stairs, very flustered. Sinclaire then left through the front door. He said that there was a police car there, with two officers inside. They made no attempt to detain him. That morning, a movie magazine editor named Mary Branum received a phone call. The voice said, “Dorothy Kilgallen has been murdered”, and hung up. (ibid)

Charles Simpson

When Sinclaire got home he called his friend and colleague Charles Simpson. He told him that their client was dead. He then added, “And when I tell you the bed she was in and how I found her, you’re going to know she was murdered.” Simpson later said in an interview, “And I knew. The whole thing was just abnormal. The woman didn’t sleep in that bed, much less the room. It wasn’t her bed.” (ibid. These video taped interviews were done by researcher Kathryn Fauble. The Jordan article owed much to her research, and so does Shaw. See Shaw, p. 113)

From Sinclaire’s description, there seems to have been a prior awareness of Kilgallen’s passing: e.g., the police car in front of the door. But as of today, Sinclaire is the best testimony as to when the body was actually found. About three hours later, two doctors arrived at the townhouse: James Luke and Saul Heller. The latter pronounced her dead. But the former did the medical examination, which as we shall see, was incomplete.

About a week after her death, Luke determined that she was killed by “acute barbiturate and alcohol intoxication, circumstances undetermined.” (ibid, p. 22) Roughly speaking, this means she died of an overdose, but the examiners could not determine how the drugs were delivered. Usually, the examiner will write if the victim was killed by accident, suicide or homicide. That was not done in this case. The main reason it was not done is because there was no investigation of the crime scene, or of any witnesses who saw and had talked to her in the previous 24-48 hours. For example, phone calls were not traced, her home was not searched for drug containers, and there was no investigation as to how she arrived home that evening or if anyone was with her.

Lee Israel was shocked when she discovered this fact. She was looking through the Kilgallen police file for reports labeled DD 5 and DD 15. The former is a supplementary complaint report that records activities pursuant to a complaint. The latter is a request to the Medical Examiner for a Cause of Death notice. Israel said that, although the investigating detective said he saw this, it was missing from the file. (p. 428) Therefore, there appears to have been no investigation done to determine how the drugs were administered. This was so bewildering to Israel that she wrote that there may have been another, unofficial channel, of communication between the police department and the medical examiner’s office on the Kilgallen case.

There does seem to be cause for such speculation. In her book, Israel mentioned another anonymous source from the toxicology department of the medical examiner’s office. (Israel, pp. 440-41) This man was a chemist under Charles Umbarger, director of toxicology at the NYC Medical Examiner’s Office. This source met with Israel personally and told her that Umbarger believed that Kilgallen had been murdered. Umbarger had evidence that would indicate this was the case but he kept it from the pathology department as part of the factionalism in the office. The idea was to retain this secret evidence in reserve over chief Medical Examiner Milton Halpern and Luke. Jordan discovered this secret source was a man named John Broich. (Jordan, p. 22) Broich told Jordan, as he told Israel, that he did new tests on the glasses, and tissue samples, both of which Umbarger had retained. He found traces of Nembutal on one of the glasses. The new tests discovered traces of Seconal, Nembutal and Tuilan in her brain.

This was an important discovery, for more than one reason. First, the police could not find any evidence of prescriptions for the last two drugs by Kilgallen. Her doctor only prescribed Seconal. Second, no doctor would prescribe all three to one patient at one time since the mix could very well be lethal. (Shaw, p. 116) Third, the prescription Kilgallen had for Seconal had run its course at the time of her death. Umbarger, of course, knew this. When Broich reported back to him about his new chemical discoveries, Umbarger had an unforgettable reaction. He grinned at his assistant, and then said the following: “Keep it under your hat. It was big.” (Jordan, p. 22)

IV

As we have seen, neither the New York Police Department nor the medical examiner’s office was forthcoming or professional in the Kilgallen case. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) only performed a very cursory look at her death. But it appears it was the HSCA that got her autopsy report into the National Archives. (Shaw, p. 277) That cursory look seems odd for the simple reason that the HSCA’s chief pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden, was working in the Medical Examiner’s office at the time of Kilgallen’s passing. In fact, Baden’s name is listed as an observer for Luke’s autopsy report. (Shaw p. 102) Baden was also a source for Israel’s book. In 1978, while the HSCA was ongoing, he told Israel that, from what he could see, the evidence would indicate that Kilgallen had fifteen or twenty 100 mg capsules of Seconal in her system. (Israel, p. 413) Why Mark Shaw did not make more of this point in his book eludes this reviewer. Because Baden’s opinion would seem to be incorrect, for the simple reason that, as stated above, Kilgallen likely would not have had that many Seconals left in her prescription at the time of her death. But a fewer number of Seconals, mixed with the two other drugs, would very likely have produced the fatal result.

Because of the (screamingly) suspicious circumstances of her death, it does not at all seem logical to consider either of the other alternatives—that it was accidental, or she took her own life. How could she accidentally end up in the wrong bed on the wrong floor with the covers pulled up? As per the second option, as stated above, there seems to not have been enough left of her Seconal prescription for her to take her own life. According to her doctor, Kilgallen was prescribed 50 pills per month. There are two reports, one from the police, one from her doctor, but the estimates are that she took between 2-4 pills per night. (Israel, p. 425) Since the prescription was last filled on October 8th, how could there possibly be enough pills available for her to plan her death? The indications seem to suggest this was a homicide.

Kilgallen, Richard Kollmar
& their son, Kerry (1964)

If that were the case—and Israel, Jordan, and Shaw certainly seem to agree it is the strongest alternative—then who was responsible? One possible suspect is her husband Richard Kollmar. As Israel and Shaw outline, neither spouse was faithful to the other at this stage of the marriage. Richard was involved in several one-night stands, and Dorothy had a love affair with singer Johnny Ray, which had concluded at around the time of Kennedy’s assassination.

Further, Richard was not doing nearly as well financially as Dorothy was. Israel had direct access to their accountant, Anne Hamilton. And from that interview, it appears that Shaw overstates their wealth significantly. (See Israel, especially p. 356) But there can be little or no doubt that at the time of her death, Kilgallen was the major breadwinner in the family. Therefore, in case of her death, Richard would be in position to inherit a significant amount of money in cash and property, well over a million dollars today. Further, and another point I could not find in Shaw’s book, Richard had his own access to Tuinal. (Israel, p. 438)

But still, there are serious problems with holding Richard as the prime suspect. First, if such were the case, then why would there be such an almost appallingly negligent investigation? Cases of spouses killing their partners must have appeared every week in a city as large as New York. And, if so, how would Richard have the influence to cause such a large system failure—one that took place in the police department, the DA’s chambers, and in the office of the medical examiner? Secondly, no one who knew Kollmar thought he was capable of doing such a thing. Both Israel and Shaw agree on this point. But third, if Kollmar had planned the whole thing, how could he possibly have left as many holes in his plot as he did— many of them wide enough to drive the proverbial tractor through? Could he really have not known where his own wife slept? What she wore when she retired? What book she was reading? That when she read, she wore glasses? And so on and so forth. The case does not appear to be an inside job. Because if Marc Sinclaire had not left that morning, he could have detonated it in about two minutes.

Ron Pataky & Kilgallen

Both Israel and Jordan seemed to center their suspicions on a man that the former referred to as the Out of Towner. Israel referred to him by that rubric because he lived and worked in Columbus, Ohio. His real name is Ron Pataky. In her Midwest Review essay, Sara Jordan was explicit about his name and printed a photo of him standing next to Kilgallen. There are several reasons why Ron Pataky’s presence creates suspicion in this case. One has to do with the closeness of his relationship with Kilgallen at the time. After she and Johnnie Ray decided to break up, it appears that Pataky became Kilgallen’s romantic interest. They called each other frequently, saw each other on occasion, and wrote letters and notes to each other. A very odd thing happened in late October on the set of What’s My Line? Before the show began taping, an announcement came on the public intercom. The voice said, “The keys to Ron Pataky’s room are waiting at the front desk of the Regency Hotel.” Quite naturally, this shook Dorothy up. Why didn’t someone just bring her a note? Pataky denied being in New York at that time. If so, was someone trying to tell the reporter that they knew something about her private life? (Jordan, p. 20) On the weekend of her death, Kilgallen had an hour-long call with Sinclaire. During this call, she said her life had been threatened (she later said she might have to purchase a gun). Sinclaire told her that the only new person in her life was Pataky. And she had shared her interest in, and information about, the JFK case with him. He suggested that she confront him with those facts. Two days later, Kilgallen was dead. (Shaw, p. 242)

Both Israel and Shaw discuss interviews they had with Pataky. In more than one place it appears that the subject is being less than candid. For instance, he says that he was never at Kilgallen’s townhouse. But he says that he knew Kilgallen drank and popped pills. When asked how he knew that, he says he saw the pills in a medicine cabinet. Unless Dorothy carried a medicine cabinet with her, how did he know about it if he was never in her home? Pataky also said in 2014 that the New York police talked to him about Dorothy’s death based upon a note they discovered at the home. Yet there is no evidence of any such interview or note in any police file. (Shaw, pp. 239-40) Another example would be one of his alibi witnesses. Pataky has always maintained that he was in Columbus when he got the news of Dorothy Kilgallen’s death. He said fashion editor Jane Horrocks read the notice off the news wire to him. But researcher Kathryn Fauble later talked to Horrocks. She remembered Pataky vividly since they shared an office at the Columbus Citizen-Journal. She also recalled him getting calls from Kilgallen there. But she added on the day the news broke about Kilgallen’s death she wasn’t in the office, she was on assignment in California. (Shaw, p. 237)

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of any interview with Pataky was the one Israel did with him about Kilgallen’s final hours. Sara Jordan, Israel and Shaw have attempted to reconstruct what Kilgallen did the evening before she was discovered dead by Sinclaire. After taping What’s My Line?, she and producer Bob Bach went to the restaurant/bar P. J. Clarke’s for a drink. (Jordan, p. 21) Both Bach and Sinclaire have stated that Kilgallen separately told them she was to meet with someone at the Regency Hotel later that evening. Therefore, after she left P. J. Clarke’s, she arrived at the Regency, which is about six blocks from her home. In a videotaped interview with an associate of Kathryn Fauble, it was revealed that Kilgallen was seen in the corner of the cocktail lounge by a woman named Katherine Stone. Stone had been a contestant on the show that night. (ibid) Press agent Harvey Daniels also recalled seeing Kilgallen with a man at the Regency that night. So did piano player Kurt Maier. (ibid) She left the Regency at about 2 AM. According to Israel, when the news of her death broke, several people working at the Regency discussed her presence there the night before. (Israel, p. 432)

Pataky has always denied he was with her that evening. He has always denied he was in New York that night. The most he would say is that she called him that evening. But Pataky firmly declared that he was in Columbus that evening, not in New York. Israel had taped her call with him. She turned it over to former CIA officer George O’toole. O’toole was one of the leading Agency analysts for the Psychological Stress Evaluator, commonly known as the PSE. This device measures stress in the voice in response to questioning. That measurement may reveal the subject is lying about a sensitive point. O’toole wrote an interesting book on the subject in relation to the JFK case, The Assassination Tapes. In that book he explains in detail how the device works and its reputation for accuracy. An absence of stress in the voice would indicate that the subject is telling the truth. If the stress is high, it may reveal tension due to deception. When O’toole analyzed the part of the conversation in which Pataky denied being in New York that night, he wrote that the PSE hit level F and G gradients. These are the highest levels of stress the machine will measure. When Pataky discusses how he actually found out about Kilgallen’s death, again the machine hit the F level. (Israel, p. 435)

Pataky had designs to be a songwriter. He had confided in Kilgallen about this. The verses of a song are, in many ways, like a poem. So years later, Pataky posted some of his poems online. Both Shaw and Jordan found them interesting. First there is one called “Never Trust a Stiff at a Typewriter”. It reads as follows:

There’s a way to quench a gossip’s stench

That never fails

One cannot write if zippered “tight”

Somebody who’s dead could “tell no tales.”

As to its suggestiveness to the topic, this needs no comment. The second Pataky poem is called “Vodka Roulette Seen As Relief Possibility”.

While I’m spilling my guts

She’s driving me nuts

Please fetch us two drinks

On the run.

Just skip all the nois’n

Make one of them poison

And don’t even tell me

Which one!

Shaw goes on for four paragraphs on this poem. But again, its suggestiveness needs little explication in relation to the subject at hand.

Let us close the discussion of Pataky with another piece of information allegedly supplied by Israel, but which today is in dispute. John Simkin used to own and operate the JFK Assassination Debate forum at Spartacus Educational web site. He had an abiding interest in the Kilgallen case. In a discussion at Simkin’s site in 2005, he enlisted Israel to participate. During this discussion it was revealed that in 1993 a college student in Virginia did what Israel did not do in her book. He actually revealed Pataky’s name. And he further wrote that the management of the Regency Hotel had forbidden its employees to discuss Kilgallen’s presence there that night. But even more interesting, Israel said that she found out that Pataky dropped out of Stanford in 1951 and later enrolled in the School of the Americas in Panama. This, of course, is the infamous CIA training ground for many Central American security forces who were later involved in various kidnappings and assassinations in the fifties and sixties. In the Midwest Today article by Sara Jordan, Israel denied she made this statement. (But Jordan found out that Pataky did drop out of Stanford after one year. Jordan, p. 23) Yet to this day, that statement exists in black and white on that site. It’s kind of a reach to say Simkin invented it. And we know that Israel was sensitive about what she wrote about Pataky, or else she would have named him in her book.

V

After writing all the above I would like to say that Mark Shaw wrote an admirable and definitive volume about Kilgallen and her death. Unfortunately, I cannot do so. One reason is obvious from my references. A lot of the information in Shaw’s book can be found in either Israel’s tome or the Sara Jordan essay in Midwest Today. The interviews with Sinclaire and Simpson were done by the indefatigable Kathryn Fauble. Shaw does a nice job in reporting on the autopsy. And his interviews with Pataky are informative. But some of the book seems padded, consisting of chapters about four pages long. (See Chapter 34) Sometimes, the author repeats information, as with Sinclaire finding the body. And like writers who partake in biography, Shaw tends to exaggerate the achievements of his subject.

This last is done in two ways. He tends to exaggerate Kilgallen’s stature as a journalist. For example, he calls her the first true female media icon. (p. 294) Did the author forget about Dorothy Thompson? Or Adela Rogers St. Johns? They certainly ranked with Kilgallen in popularity and as role models. And Thompson left behind a body of work at least equal in stature to Kilgallen’s and, by any rational measure, exceeding it. Shaw also quotes Ernest Hemingway as calling Kilgallen, “One of the greatest women writers in the world”. I could not find a source for this quote. But on what grounds would such an expansive judgment hold water? And why would Shaw want to use it? Kilgallen wrote two books. She actually co-wrote them. The first was about her trip around the world, which she wrote with Herb Shapiro in 1936. Murder One was published posthumously by an editor based on her notes. This plus her voluminous columns are the sum total of her literary output. Does that compare with the achievements of say Isak Dinesen, Katherine Anne Porter or Rebecca West?

The second way Shaw inflates his subject is by discussing what her impact would have been on the JFK case. This is completely unwarranted and amounts to nothing but pure speculation. For the simple reason that no one is ever going to know what Kilgallen discovered, or what her talks with Ruby were about. Therefore, the database from which to measure her achievement is simply non-existent. But, to put it mildly, this does not hinder Shaw. In a perverse sort of way, it enables him. Near the end of the book he writes that, “If Kilgallen had lived … the course of history would have been altered.” (Shaw, p. 288) Since, as stated above, there is no database to support that statement with, this reviewer is puzzled as to how Shaw arrived at this outsized conclusion.

Which leads to two other related problems with Shaw’s book. First, the author’s footnotes would not pass muster in a sophomore English class. Time after time he refers to newspapers without adding a date to them. Time after time, he refers to books without supplying a page number. This, of course, makes it difficult to crosscheck his work. Secondly, he repeatedly refers to the mystery of how Dorothy’s JFK file disappeared after her death. Yet in Sara Jordan’s essay, she quotes a conversation between the Bachs and Richard Kollmar after Dorothy’s death. They asked him, “Dick, what was all that stuff in the folder Dorothy carried around with her about the assassination?” Richard replied, “Robert, I’m afraid that will have to go to the grave with me.” (Jordan, p. 22) What this means is anyone’s guess. But it could mean that he somehow recovered it and destroyed it.

One of the worst aspects of The Reporter who Knew Too Much is how Shaw’s inflation is somewhat self-serving. For instance, when I saw the author speak at last year’s JFK Lancer conference he made a couple of rather odd statements. He said that since Kilgallen had gone to New Orleans with Sinclaire, this meant that she was investigating Carlos Marcello for the JFK case. Again, for reasons stated above, there is no factual way that Shaw could know such a thing. But further, how does New Orleans automatically deduce Marcello? New Orleans is honeycombed with a multitude of leads on the JFK case. Lee Oswald spent about six months there from the spring to the fall of 1963, less than two months before he was killed. To say that what he did there would automatically lead to Marcello betrays an agenda that is not really dealing with Kilgallen.

That agenda traces back to a book Shaw wrote in 2013. It was called The Poison Patriarch. This reviewer did not critique it since it was simply not worth discussing. But Shaw synopsizes it here in order to attribute what Kilgallen was going to do if she had lived. Shaw’s previous work is a feat of Procrustean carpentry that ranks with the likes of Peter Janney and Philip Nelson. And like those authors, Shaw used an array of dubious witnesses to achieve his feat of alchemy. In short, he said that JFK was killed because Joseph Kennedy insisted on Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General. The father had underworld ties, should have known that RFK was going to do battle with the Mafia, and this caused a revenge tragedy to be performed. To scaffold this utterly bizarre thesis, Shaw trotted out a virtual menagerie of dubious witnesses like Tina Sinatra, Frank Ragano, Toni Giancana, Sy Hersh and Chuck Giancana. The book was a recycling and revision of Chuck Giancana’s science fiction fable Double Cross. (See pages 179-180 of the present book.)

Well, in The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, Shaw pens his imaginary conclusion to Kilgallen’s investigation. He writes that after she made her second trip to New Orleans, the reporter produced a series of articles connecting Oswald, Ruby and Marcello. This series triggered a grand jury inquiry. This culminated in indictments of Marcello for the murders of both Kennedy and Oswald. But Kilgallen’s evidence went further. It also managed to indict J. Edgar Hoover for obstruction of justice, and he resigned his position. As a result, Kilgallen’s disclosures changed the way that the JFK case was discussed in history books.

I wish I could say that what I just described is an exaggeration or parody of what Shaw wrote in his book. Unfortunately it is not any such thing. If the reader turns to page 289, he can read it for himself. To say that such writing is a fantasy really does not do it justice. The idea that Kilgallen was going to take on the entire power structure of the USA and overturn it with a series of newspaper columns is almost too ridiculous to consider. As many authors have proven, the JFK cover-up was interwoven throughout the entire structure of the American government at that time: the White House, the Justice Department, the Secret Service, the CIA, and the FBI. The Power Elite was involved in it through organs like the New York Times, CBS, and Life magazine. The idea that Kilgallen was going to upend this whole colossal structure is a bit ludicrous. As mentioned, she could not even discus the JFK case on Les Crane’s talk show. Which was a harbinger of what was going to happen to Jim Garrison in 1968 on The Tonight Show. I hate to inform Mark Shaw, but the Sam Sheppard murder case is not the Kennedy assassination.

If Shaw would have restrained himself, or if he had an editor who would have pointed out the problems with his design, then this would have been a good and valuable book. It would have been really about Dorothy Kilgallen: who she really was, what we know and do not know about her death. But as shown above, such was not the case. Thus I would actually recommend to the interested party Sara Jordan’s informative and objective essay instead.

The recommended essay can be found here:

Sara Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” (2007)

January 30, 2017
The Assassination of Fred Hampton: 47 Years Later

One of the lawyers in the Fred Hampton civil case reminds of just how bad the FBI Cointelpro program was under J. Edgar Hoover. It snuffed out the life of a young, charismatic Black Panther leader named Fred Hampton – one of the several assassinations of the sixties – and then went on to wipe out the Black Panther Party.

~Jim DiEugenio

December 8, 2016
The Assassination of Fred Hampton: 47 Years Later

One of the lawyers in the Fred Hampton civil case reminds of just how bad the FBI Cointelpro program was under J. Edgar Hoover. It snuffed out the life of a young, charismatic Black Panther leader named Fred Hampton – one of the several assassinations of the sixties – and then went on to wipe out the Black Panther Party.

~Jim DiEugenio

December 8, 2016
Mark the Date: Oct 26, 2017

Rex Bradford discusses some of the files that are being readied to be declassified in October of 2017. This is a transcription of a talk he presented at the Lancer Conference, November 18, 2016.

~Jim DiEugenio

December 3, 2016
Howard Willens and The American Scholar

How far the Warren Report has fallen in public estimation is an almost humorous subject. When it was first issued in the fall of 1964, the report was met with almost universal acclaim as an historically unquestionable document. All branches of the media – the press, television, periodicals and radio – accepted it with almost no reservations. Perhaps because none of the commentators had read the nearly 15,000 pages of accompanying evidence, which was not published until a month later. To show just how strange this reception was, and how lacking in rigor the media examination was, CBS prepared a two-hour documentary on the Warren Report the day it was published! Clearly, this show was being prepared in advance of the release of the report. In other words, CBS had accepted the Warren Report without reading it. Or, someone in the government passed them a copy before anyone else had it.

Yet, this mass propaganda deployment did not hold. Within three years, the majority of Americans now doubted the main tenets of the Warren Report. And that figure has never dipped below a majority in the nearly fifty years since. Which is a tribute to both the work of the critical community and the good sense of the American people. Because the members of the Warren Commission have never let up in their attempts to reinculcate the public with their fallacious verdict based upon, at best, incomplete evidence.

For instance, when Oliver Stone’s film JFK was released, David Belin appeard at the National Press Club to criticize the film. (Click here for that appearance https://www.c-span.org/video/?25215-1/kennedy-assassination-controversy). When the late Dr. Charles Crenshaw, who was in residence at Parkland Hospital in 1963, published his book Conspiracy of Silence suggesting something was awry with the autopsy of President Kennedy, Belin appeared in the pages of the Dallas Morning News to denounce his book. Years earlier, Commission attorneys David Slawson and Wesley Liebeler communicated with the Justice Department to construct a limited medical examination that would hinder Jim Garrison’s investigation in New Orleans. And as Pat Speer has shown, in all probability, before Arlen Specter passed away, he got in contact with New York TImes journalist Phil Shenon to coax him into writing his limited hangout book, A Cruel and Shocking Act. (Click here for our review)

Wesley Liebeler, Arlen Specter and David Belin have all since passed away. So today, Commission counsel Howard Willens is the most active participant in sustaining the verdict of the Warren Commission into the new millennium. In 2013, he wrote an ill-titled volume called History Will Prove Us Right. The review at this site by Martin Hay was so scathing, Willens actually replied to it on his personal web site. (Click here for Hay’s review http://www.ctka.net/reviews/willens.html, and here for Willens’ reply http://howardwillens.com/jfk_history/conspiracy-communitys-response-book/) Willens’ reply was so weak and unfounded that Martin had little trouble demolishing it also. (Click here http://themysteriesofdealeyplaza.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-watchman-waketh-but-in-vain-howard.html) Apparently, Willens did not learn his lesson. Or he is a glutton for punishment. He has sallied forward again. This time he has joined forces with survivng member Richard Mosk.

Attorneys Willens’ and Richard Mosk’s latest defense appears in, of all places, The American Scholar. This essay on their work for the Warren Commission they served on is more notable for what they omit from the official record than what they include. “What the critics often forget or ignore,” they write, “is that since 1964, several government agencies have also looked at aspects of our work” (American Scholar, Summer, 2016, p. 59). As if the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had reviewed and applauded the commission’s work. Indeed, they did look at it. But rather than plaudits, they issued stinging rebukes, principally for the commission’s having been rolled by J. Edgar Hoover, and to a lesser extent, by the CIA and the Secret Service.

“It must be said that the FBI generally exhausted its resources in confirming its case against Oswald as the lone assassin,” the HSCA concluded, “a case that Director J. Edgar Hoover, at least, seemed determined to make within 24 hours of the of the assassination.”1 In essence, the experienced investigators concluded that Hoover had divined the solution to the crime before the investigation began, and then his agents confirmed the boss’s epiphany. The intimidated commission went right along. And with good reason, only part of which Mr. Willens tells.

He admits that the “FBI had originally opposed the creation of the Warren Commission,” and that Hoover “ordered investigations of commission staff members.” But he doesn’t reveal that Hoover deployed one of his favorite dirty tricks to deal not only with lowly support staffers, such as Mr. Willens, but also with the heralded commissioners themselves. “[D]erogatory information pertaining to both Commission members and staff was brought to Mr. Hoover’s attention,” the Church Committee reported.2 (emphasis added)

Willens and Mosk also forgot to mention that Hoover had a personal spy on the Warren Commission, then Rep. Gerald Ford, who tattled on Commissioners who were (justifiably) skeptical of the Bureau’s work. “Ford indicated he would keep me thoroughly advised as to the activities of the Commission,” FBI executive Cartha DeLoach wrote in a once secret memo. “He stated this would have to be done on a confidential basis, however he thought it should be done.”3 At the bottom of the memo, Hoover scrawled, “Well handled.”4 The success of Hoover’s machinations was obvious to subsequent government investigators.

The HSCA’s chief counsel, Notre Dame Law Professor Robert Blakey, an experienced criminal investigator and prosecutor, was impressed with neither the Commission’s vigor nor its independence. “What was significant,” Blakey wrote, “was the ability of the FBI to intimidate the Commission, in light of the Bureau’s predisposition on the questions of Oswald’s guilt and whether there had been a conspiracy. At a January 27 [1964] Commission meeting, there was another dialogue [among Warren Commissioners]:

“John McCloy: ‘… the time is almost overdue for us to have a better perspective of the FBI investigation than we now have … We are so dependent on them for our facts … .’

“Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin: ‘Part of our difficulty in regard to it is that they have no problem. They have decided that no one else is involved … .’

“Senator Richard Russell: ‘They have tried the case and reached a verdict on every aspect.’

“Senator Hale Boggs: ‘You have put your finger on it.’ (Closed Warren Commission meeting transcipt.)”5

Testifying before the HSCA, the Commission’s chief counsel J. Lee Rankin shamefully admitted, “Who could protest against what Mr. Hoover did back in those days?”6 Apparently not the President’s commissioners. The HSCA’s Blakey also reported that, “When asked if he was satisfied with the (Commission’s) investigation that led to the (no conspiracy) conclusion, Judge Burt Griffin said he was not.”7 Moreover, author Gus Russo reported that Griffin also admitted that, “We spent virtually no time investigating the possibility of conspiracy. I wish we had.”8

Thus, despite their clear misgivings, rather than truly investigate, the Commissioners bowed to the notoriously corrupt and imperious Bureau chief. This policy had serious repercussions when the Commission confronted two key issues: published claims that Lee Harvey Oswald had been an FBI informant, and the possibility Jack Ruby had a relationship with organized crime.

“The Commission did not investigate Hoover or the FBI, and managed to avoid the appearance of doing so,” HSCA investigators determined. “It ended up doing what the members had agreed they could not do: Rely mainly on the FBI’s denial of the allegations (that Oswald had been a Bureau informant).”9 Hoover merely sent the Commission his signed affidavit declaring that Oswald was not an informant, and he also “sent over 10 additional affidavits from each FBI agent who had had contact with Oswald.”10 And with those self-exonerating denials, the case was closed.

About Jack Ruby: in 1964 the FBI had his phone records, yet failed to spot Ruby’s obvious, and atypical, pattern of calls to known Mafiosi in the weeks leading up to the assassination. After performing the rudimentary task of actually analyzing those calls, the HSCA determined that, if not a sworn member of La Cosa Nostra, Ruby had close links to numerous Mafiosi.11 Thus the HSCA found that the Commission was wrong in concluding that, “the evidence does not establish a significant link between Ruby and organized crime.”12

The list of Commission shortcomings the HSCA assembled is not short. A brief summary of them runs some 47 pages in the Bantam Books version of the report (pp. 289-336), which outlines what required much of the 500 pages of HSCA volume XI to cover (available on-line).13 “The evidence indicates that facts which may have been relevant to, and would have substantially affected, the Warren Commission’s investigation were not provided by the agencies (FBI and the CIA). Hence, the Warren Commission’s findings may have been formulated without all of the relevant information.”14 The Church Committee said that the problem was that “… the Commission was perceived as an adversary by both Hoover and senior FBI officials.” “Such a relationship,” Committee observed, “was not conducive to the cooperation necessary for a thorough and exhaustive investigation.”15

But the FBI did more than just withhold evidence from the Commission. Although he mentions that the FBI destroyed a note Oswald wrote to Agent Hosty and withheld that information from the Commission, Mr. Willens doesn’t mention that Agent Hosty reported that his own personnel file, and other FBI files, had been falsified.16 Nor that author Curt Gentry learned from assistant FBI director William Sullivan that there were other JFK documents at the Bureau that had been destroyed.17

Although too numerous to explore here, American Scholar readers should understand that legitimate questions persist about issues Messrs. Willens and Mosk consider settled. These include the notorious Single Bullet Theory and JFK’s hapless autopsy,18 to name but two. But if the authors cannot even be completely honest with what the HSCA and Church Committee wrote about them, then should one trust them with those two radioactive issues?

Notes

1 House Select Committee on Assassinations Final Report, p. 128. On-line at: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=800#relPageId=158&tab=page.

2 In: Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, Book V, p. 47, on-line at: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1161#relPageId=53&tab=page. Also cited by: Curt Gentry. J. Edgar Hoover – The Man and His Secrets. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991, p. 549.

3 “Ford Told FBI of Skeptics on Warren Commission”, By Joe Stephens, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, August 8, 2008. On-line at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/07/AR2008080702757_pf.html.

4 See copy of actual memo at Mary Ferrell: http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=61488#relPageId=100.

5 In: R. Blakey and R. Billings. Fatal Hour – The Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime. New York: Berkley Books, 1992, p. 29. This testimony was also published in: Mark North. Act of Treason. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1991, p. 515-516.

6 House Select Committee on Assassinations, Vol. XI, p. 49, on-line at: http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=83#relPageId=55&tab=page.

7 Blakey and R. Billings. Fatal Hour – The Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime. New York: Berkley Books, 1992, p. 94.

8 Gus Russo. Live by the Sword. Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 1998, p. 374.

9 HSCA, Vol IX, p. 41. On-line at: http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol11/pdf/HSCA_Vol11_WC_2_FBI_CIA.pdf.

10 HSCA, Vol IX, p. 41. On-line at: http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol11/pdf/HSCA_Vol11_WC_2_FBI_CIA.pdf.

11 See excellent discussion in: House Select Committee on Assassinations Final Report, p. 148-156, on-line at: http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=800#relPageId=178&tab=page.

12 Warren Report, p. 801. On-line at: http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/appendix-16.html.

13 http://www.history-matters.com/archive/contents/hsca/contents_hsca_vol11.htm.

14 HSCA, Vol. XI, p. 59. On-line at: http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol11/pdf/HSCA_Vol11_WC_2_FBI_CIA.pdf.

15 In: Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations (Church Committee), Book V, p. 47, on-line at: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1161#relPageId=53&tab=page.

16 James P. Hosty, Jr. Assignment: Oswald. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996, pp. 178-180, 184-185, 243-244.

17 Curt Gentry. J. Edgar Hoover – The Man and His Secrets. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991, p. 546, footnote.

18 The Chairman of the Forensics Panel of the HSCA, former New York Coroner Michael Baden, MD, has written, “Where bungled autopsies are concerned, President Kennedy’s is the exemplar.” See Baden, Michael M., Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner. New York: Ivy Books, published by Ballantine Books, 1989, p. 5. See also, Larry Sturdivan, The JFK Myths, chapter 10, “Bungled Autopsy,” St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, pp. 185-220.

October 20, 2016