Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: FILM

  • Pat Speer, The Mysterious Death of Number Thirty-Five

    Pat Speer, The Mysterious Death of Number Thirty-Five

    speer dvdA new video documentary on the medical evidence in the JFK case is raising the bar on Kennedy research productions.

    In The Mysterious Death of Number Thirty-Five, longtime researcher Pat Speer was aided by two skillful technicians, director Braddon Mendelson and music composer Scott Douglas MacLachlan. These two men, especially the former, were very helpful in making Speer’s documentary aesthetically pleasing.

    (One of my pet peeves in the Kennedy research field is that many independent video productions e.g. Shane O’Sullivan’s DVD RFK Must Die! look like they were made in 1965. That is, at about the skill and technical level of Emile D’Antonio’s talking head film of Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment. With all the incredible advances in computer programming we have today, this is completely unnecessary. For a very reasonable price one can put together a slick looking production. And make no mistake, the skill in presentation makes a difference in the effective delivery of the message.)

    In this regard, Speer was well served by his cohorts. This film should serve as a model for how to represent the research community in this digital day and age. It is not in the technical stratosphere of Robert Stone’s Oswald’s Ghost, but 1.) Speer didn’t have Stone’s bucks, and 2.) Speer has actually dug beneath the surface of the Warren Commission pabulum. And what he shows us is stark, black, and even worse, proved that way by their own words and deeds.

    If you have read Part Four of my review of Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History, you can see I used some of Speer’s material in my critique of the former DA’s discussion of President Kennedy’s autopsy. Although Speer has a wider range of interest in the JFK case, he has spent most of his time studying the medical evidence. (Although this may be changing. In a recent appearance on Len Osanic’s Black Op Radio, Speer hinted that he may be doing an essay on the legitimacy of the evidence found at the so-called sniper’s nest.)

    This documentary has five major sections. The first is an examination of some of the work of Dr. Michael Baden for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). The second section deals with how the Warren Commission made the Single Bullet Theory (SBT) work. The third part is about the reaction of the government to the critical works about the Warren Commission, which emerged in 1966-67, and how high officials forced the pathologists to switch their stories and dissimulate in public. Part four deals with the true orientation of the famous “mystery photo” of the autopsy. It is sometimes called the “skull wound” photo. It is a crucial piece of evidence since allegedly it is the only photo taken of the skull with the scalp refracted and a hole evident. The last part of the documentary is a slide show, which Pat uses to discuss various pieces of medical evidence that are quite puzzling when they stand alone. So he places them in context with other exhibits to try and explain their meaning.

    The first section is slightly humorous, in that it shows us an alleged authority tripping up over the evidentiary flip flops necessitated by upholding the official story. Speer shows us some rarely seen House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) footage of Michael Baden up on a stage introducing the “Mystery photo”. One reason the picture is called that is because the photo is posed and shot so badly that it is hard to orient the picture. Therefore it is not easy to orient as part of President Kennedy’s head. Surely, Baden is clueless as to what it represents. When he placed the picture on an easel for public display, instead of placing it right side up, it was upside down. Which disorients top, bottom, left and right. We then watch as he begins to lecture about it, saying that it depicted the front of Kennedy’s skull and the defect on it was a beveled wound of exit. He actually quotes pathologist Jim Humes as saying this. Yet, pathologists Humes, and Pierre Finck both originally wrote – and we see their original typed words on screen – that they could find no exit near that point. We then see how Baden got the HSCA artist to draw an illustration of a bullet exiting at this point – above the forehead on the right side – with no bone above that trajectory. Yet, as Speer informs us, the Ramsey Clark Panel – appointed to review the medical evidence in 1968 – also wrote that there was no exit in the forehead above the right eye.

    Speer closes this section with what made these gyrations necessary. He poses this question: Why all this thrashing about by Baden in 1978? Didn’t the original autopsy team of Humes, Finck, and Thornton Boswell identify what this photo really represented? The answer to that question is: Yes, they did just that. But here’s the problem: Unlike Baden, they said the photo depicted the posterior of Kennedy’s skull. Yep, not the front, but the back. So it was imperative that Baden change the positioning of the photo. If he left it as a posterior photo it would appear as an exit in the back of the head – which meant the shot came from the front. Anything exonerating Oswald was altered by Robert Blakey’s HSCA. And Baden, like Arlen Specter, was eager to make a national name for himself. Therefore, he fumbled with the photo in public. Not really caring if it was right side up, upside down, or sideways. After all, he was just reading a script.

    The second section deals almost exclusively with the Warren Commission and their struggle to make the SBT work – whatever the cost. The night of the autopsy, the pathologists could find no exit for the back wound. And the FBI report dutifully recorded this. But as the story goes – and as I wrote in my Bugliosi review there is reason to doubt it – Humes talked to the Dallas doctors the next day and discovered a tracheotomy incision was made over a neck wound. This now became the exit for the back wound.

    Yet, at the Warren Commission executive session hearing of 1/27/64, Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin exclaimed that the back wound was too low to match the throat wound. Knowing this, the Commission sent Specter into action. Humes and Boswell were sent to meet with a young medical illustrator named Harold Rydberg. Rydberg was supposed to draw illustrations of both the wounds in the head and the wound in the back. There was a serious problem with the meeting. Humes and Boswell came to meet him with nothing: no photos, sketches, measurements. And we know this to be true not just from Rydberg, but as Speer shows, through the notes of his commanding officer, Captain Stover. The doctors now instructed Rydberg to draw a fallacious portrait of the back wound to cure Rankin’s problem. With nothing to go by except the pathologists’ words, he did. Rydberg raised the wound in the back above the wound in the neck. (Speer even shows a Warren Commission internal memo where Specter admits there is a discrepancy between the Rydberg drawings and the actual wound locations.)

    To underline Specter’s perfidy, the film then moves to the Dallas reconstruction of the shooting. Specter later admitted that a Secret Service officer had shown him the autopsy photos that day. (There is a question about who it is. It may be Elmer Moore or Tom Kelley.) As shown in the film, the photo of Specter lining up this reconstruction used by the Commission does not reveal the accurate white dot on the model locating the back wound. But Speer shows us another photo, which does show it. And at this location, from the high sixth floor angle, the trajectory would not have exited the throat. It would have been too low. During his Warren Commission testimony of 6/4/64, FBI agent Lyndal Shaneyfelt was careful to dance around this issue saying that the trajectory “approximated” the entrance wound. But in private, Rankin was much more candid about the Commission’s aim: “Our intention is not to establish the point with complete accuracy, but merely to substantiate the hypothesis which underlies the conclusions that Oswald was the sole assassin.” (Memo of 4/27/64) Note the use of the word “hypothesis”. Rankin knows they never proved their case. Even today, it is still shocking to read something as cavalier as that about the assassination of President Kennedy. Which clearly connotes the irresponsible attribution of murder to a man who was never allowed a defense.

    The film goes on to show just how conscious the dog and pony show was. When Kelley testified before the Commission on 6/4/64, he let it slip that the wound was located in the shoulder area. Specter quickly covered up for him by saying it was actually in the neck. Speer tops this section off by repeating the declassified revelation that Commissioner Gerald Ford then changed the wording of the Warren Report by moving the location of the back wound from the back to the neck. The coda to this segment is the audiotapes of the famous phone call between LBJ and Commissioner Richard Russell. This is where they both admit that they don’t believe the SBT. Which, ipso facto, makes them conspiracy theorists.

    Section Three begins with the tumult caused in 1966-67 by the publication of books by authors who actually read the Warren Commission volumes and found them remarkably unconvincing. Speer here uses the famous memo from former Warren Commission counsel David Slawson, originally discovered by Gary Aguilar. Lawson worked in the Justice Department at the time, and he understood what was at stake – namely the undoing of the entire Commission, and the staff’s pubic disgrace and humiliation. So Slawson wanted to head the critics off at the pass. On 11/20/66 he wrote to Attorney General Ramsey Clark, “If public opinion continues to develop as it has over the past few months, we may soon be forced with a politically unstoppable demand for a free-wheeling re-investigation of all aspects.” Slawson had no intention of risking being tarred and feathered in public.

    So what Slawson and Clark helped plan was a narrowly focused counter-attack. What this consisted of was bringing in the pathologists and rehearsing them on how to address the critic’s points through the media. So in late 1966, Boswell was released from his vow of silence and allowed to talk to the press. And he now magically moved up the wound in the back to the neck so it would correspond more with the Rydberg illustration. Which, of course, it did not.

    But further, the counter-attack fostered by Slawson now also employed his boss, Warren Commissioner John McCloy. In 1966 CBS had planned to air a public debate about the Commission’s conclusions. This would give both sides equal time. But as this idea went up the corporate ladder, the concept was first smothered and then completely skewered. In 1967, McCloy was brought in to be a special, but secret adviser to the now infamous series. This Eastern Establishment paragon flew into Washington and met with people like Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara. Now, Pierre Finck was ordered back from Vietnam to join the two other autopsists for another viewing of the photos and x-rays. In January of 1967, Clark told LBJ that the doctors were defensive about their work and worried about their reputations. But he figured he could get them to sign affidavits in a couple of days. It took more cajoling and arm-twisting than that. It took five days. But by the end of January, the Mystery Photo had been reoriented. It was now rotated from the back to the front of the head.

    Jeremy Gunn of the Assassination Records Review Board interviewed the pathologists about this reversal that took place from 1966 to 1967. To say the least, they were non-committal. They now had hazy memories about how it happened. As they should have. Because the affidavits they signed were not written by them. They were written by the Justice Department. The doctors were now reduced to the level of prop masters. And they reluctantly went along with it.

    The last segment consists of Speer demonstrating through four landmarks in the photo that he has oriented the picture correctly. The autopsists originally had it right. It depicts the rear of the head. And through his study of the photo and the x-rays he believes that two shots hit the president’s head, one from the front and one from behind. The small entrance wound is down low near the base of the skull. The larger exit wound is above it. This idea, originally expressed by Ray Marcus back in the mid-sixties, gets evidentiary back-up here. The film advances evidence concerning entrance and exit holes in the photos, x-rays, and with primary documentation. The fact that the pathologists were forced to retreat by Ramsey Clark, shows them professionally compromised for the third time in just four years. The first time was by the military the evening of the autopsy. The second time was by Specter and the Commission. The third time was by Clark and his preparations for the review suggested by Slawson.

    The appendix to the documentary is a slide show in which Speer presents some fascinating exhibits in the medical evidence. These constitute neat little lessons in certain aspects of the case. In almost every instance, we see how drawings and exhibits were falsified in order to accommodate Oswald as the lone assassin. My favorite is Speer’s critique of the HSCA’s trajectory analyst Tom Canning. And how he had to alter his measurements and drawings in order to accommodate the medical evidence. Even to the point of shrinking Kennedy’s head!

    One of the best aspects of the film is the way the film-makers actually use the words of the investigators themselves to show their true intentions at the time. And this shows that the JFK/Oswald travesty was no accident. It was designed to deceive. Its not an original device by any means. It goes back to Marjorie Field’s aborted sixties book The Evidence. But it’s nice to see it used in a different medium.

    I have two main criticisms of the show. First, I disagree with some of the interpretations of the evidence and testimony. Speer is trying to show how the official story – in and of itself – exonerates Oswald. In other words, he does what he does without questioning the validity of the actual evidence. In courtroom terms, it’s called using your opponent’s evidence against him. As I showed in my aforementioned critique of Reclaiming History, I disagree about the provenance of certain aspects of the evidence. For example, the 6.5 mm fragment that no one can recall from the night of the autopsy. Speer also believes the photos are completely genuine. Even the famous back of the head photo, which looks as if the pathologists reassembled the back of JFK’s head. And afterwards, they then gave him a hair cut and combed his hair. Combed it right over that big hole that upwards of forty people saw in both Dallas and Bethesda. He may be doing this because he really believes it. Or perhaps he sees this as the safest, most acceptable, most mainstream way to challenge the official findings. Either way, in my view, it leaves certain matters unexplained. Secondly, although the documentary is good enough as far as it goes, I don’t think it covered as much as it should have. In other words, it could have been longer and therefore more complete as to the medical evidence. I hope that another installment is issued.

    But in spite of that, it’s worth owning and watching. It has new and fascinating information in it. And it also reveals just how hard the forces of the cover-up must work to keep the autopsy evidence in this case in check. Because with the revelations of the Assassination Records Review Board and the work of people like Speer and others e.g. Gary Aguilar, David Mantik, Milicent Cranor, Randy Robertson, this area has become one of the greatest liabilities for upholders of the Warren Commission. And recall, this type of evidence is usually titled by rubrics like “hard evidence” or “best evidence”. As is shown here, the so-called “best evidence” does the opposite of what the Warren Commission says it did. It exonerates Oswald and indicates conspiracy.

  • William Olsson, An American Affair

    William Olsson, An American Affair

    They finally made a movie about Mary Meyer. And it was directed by a Swede. William Olsson directed An American Affair, which is his first feature. His first problem may have been agreeing to film this script. And I hope his unfamiliarity with American history was the reason it turned out as it did. Because although Olsson’s direction is nothing to write home about, the real problem is the screenplay by Alex Metcalf.

    This is one of those films that is not “based upon” a true story, but is “inspired by” actual characters and events. So although the main character is Mary Meyer, her name in the film is Catherine Caswell. (Get it? MM becomes CC.) Her estranged husband Cord Meyer also appears, except his first name is Graham. James Angleton is titled Lucian Carver. They didn’t have much of a choice with President Kennedy, so his name is the same.

    But the odd thing about the script is that none of these people features as the real main character. The protagonist—Adam Stafford—is a boy in what appears to be about the ninth grade. The film begins with him and it ends with him. The Meyer story is largely told through his eyes. And this is a problem I had with the film. Everything outside the Meyer story, and even a lot within the Meyer/Stafford story, seemed to me to be pretty much banal. It was essentially the teen Coming of Age Tale. And his coming of age is hurried along and impacted by his affection for and experience with the older woman across the way. This concept was not new in the film Summer of ’42. And that picture is nearly four decades old now. And like that film, when all is said and done, this picture does not really comment on the time frame it is based in. It more or less exploits it.

    Adam Stafford attends a co-ed Catholic school in the northeast. (Although I think the setting is supposed to be Pennsylvania, the actual shooting of the film took place in Baltimore.) After the story establishes some of the trite tumult a boy his age goes through—fights in school, Playboy masturbation fantasies—Catherine/Mary moves in across the street. Adam gazes at her sitting in her window one night, and becomes infatuated by her. She has just become estranged from her husband, and is living alone. So, as a way to get close to her, Adam volunteers to do some chores for her in her new house. She accepts and his parents do not find out about it until afterward. When they find out, they try to discourage him from working for her. Why? Since Dad is a journalist, they know something about her oddities. But Adam persists.

    It is through this rather thinly caused association that Metcalf brings in the controversial and hotly disputed details of the Meyer/Kennedy/Angleton tale. (Jim DiEugenio has done a lot of work on his subject. For his most recent take on those details, see his essay elsewhere on the site.) In the Metcalf rendition, Meyer is separated from Cord at the start. At the time we encounter her, the affair with Kennedy is taking place. Yet Cord/Graham is trying to win her back. Mary is an artist who also has other lovers and pot parties at her place. To spice up the plot, Adam accidentally happens to be present during both encounters. One reason Cord/Graham seems to want to get back with Mary is because he understands the diary she is keeping makes the man he works with Carver/Angleton suspicious of her. Why? Because the hint is clear that Carver is in on something having to do with Kennedy’s upcoming murder. In fact, in one of the most strained scenes in the film, Stafford sees Carver and Graham meeting in public with a Cuban named Valle—clearly meant to suggest David Ferrie’s friend and colleague Eladio Del Valle.

    To tie the story together, Stafford’s father is a journalist who is on assignment to Dallas, Texas in November of 1963. And, of course, Carver knows this in advance. Catherine senses something is about to happen and she tries to call and visit the White House to warn JFK. But he will not accept her calls or let her on the grounds. After the assassination, Adam steals the diary from Catherine. Catherine tries to get it back. But just as Adam has arranged to return it, Carver/Angleton visits Adam’s home and gets it from his parents. Adam finds out about this too late. He runs to Catherine’s house and finds Carver reading the diary in front of Catherine’s fireplace. He asks her where Catherine is. Carver says he thought she was meeting him. He runs to their meeting place and finds her dead body at the bottom of a long outdoor stairway. He pushes back her hair and sees what appears to be a bullet hole.

    The coda of the film is Adam receiving a posthumous package from Catherine in the mail. He and his parents open up the box. It is a four-panel painting of Adam.

    To say that Metcalf has taken some liberties with the story is putting it mildly. And a lot of the liberties he takes strain credulity. The idea that a behind the scenes CIA general like Carver would meet with someone like Del Valle in public, and then allow himself to be seen, is hard to swallow. When Catherine goes to Stafford’s house and tells his mother that the boy has something of hers, why does the mother not ask what it is? Why does Mary not tell his Mom to get it for her? The scene where Meyer throws a drink in Carver’s face after he makes a comment about her dead son is not set up enough to explain her motivation. Would Kennedy actually pull up in a presidential limo with Secret Service escort to see Mary at night in a heavily residential area? And smart aleck Metcalf had to throw in that fatuous fairy tale about Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech being a mistranslation for a donut. For a thorough debunking of this urban legend, see this essay.

    Besides the hackneyed story elements, another reason the film never really becomes synoptic of its time is because of that ending I just described. Finishing as it does, the story becomes more about the relationship between Adam and Catherine than any of the historical elements in the picture. And also, that historical aspect leaves us with a question. If Carver/Angleton got the diary from Adam’s parents, why did he have Catherine killed? Which is what the film implies.

    Olsson has directed the film adequately in all aspects. Which means its rather commonplace in that regard. With the exception of Mark Pellegrino—who tries for the heartbreak of an estranged husband who still loves his wife—the acting is what I would call representational. That is, the cast looks like the people they are supposed to be, and they don’t make any blatant false moves. Which is OK for the Norman Rockwell type parents of Adam. But it’s not OK for someone acting the role of Catherine/Meyer and especially Tarver/Angleton. In those roles, the audience has the right and the assumption to expect some real creative acting. Acting of both skill and intelligence that carves the hearts and minds of the characters. To put it lightly, Gretchen Mol and especially James Rebhorn don’t fulfill the expectation. If you can imagine what say, the late Klaus Kinski could have done with the Angleton/Tarver role, you can see how pallid Rebhorn is.

    But alas, Kinski was an artist. Which is what none of the principals in this disappointment are. At least not yet.

  • Shane O’Sullivan, RFK Must Die

    RFK Must Die is Shane O’Sullivan’s new documentary on the assassination of Robert Kennedy. The film, just released on DVD, takes its title from Robert Blair Kaiser’s 1970 book on the case. In almost every major aspect it is a one-man show: O’Sullivan wrote, produced, and directed it. He also narrates it, which is the first of some poor choices, since his voice carries a high-pitched Irish lilt.

    The film is divided into four sections: The Last Campaign, The Investigation, The Manchurian Candidate, and Did the CIA Kill RFK? Before getting to its negatives, let me list what I see as the film’s attributes. Some of the interview subjects, to my knowledge, appear for the first time. Sandra Serrano, the first witness to publicly discuss the famous Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, makes her first appearance on camera in decades. Sirhan’s brother Munir and controversial defense investigator Michael McGowan also appear. And O’Sullivan has unearthed some interesting Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry photos, which appear to show that someone was digging bullets out of the walls. This would indicate that there were more than eight bullets-the limit of Sirhan’s revolver-fired the night of the assassination.

    Vincent DiPierro, a part-time waiter at the Ambassador at the time of the assassination, is also interviewed. He reveals that there was a bullet hole in his sweater that night. Any one bullet found anywhere in the pantry would indicate more than eight bullets were fired, and in turn would mean a second gun was firing.

    O’Sullivan has arranged for that illustrious expert on hypnosis, Herbert Spiegel, to appear on camera. And Spiegel shows us a taped example of him hypnotizing someone, planting a post hypnotic suggestion in that person, waking him from the trance state, and then not having him recall anything he did while under hypnosis. Which is very likely what happened to Sirhan.

    But sad to say, for anyone familiar with the Robert Kennedy assassination, that is about it for the virtues of RFK Must Die. Aesthetically speaking, the film is very simple, straightforward, and, to be frank, kind of dull. I have much more sympathy for O’Sullivan’s views on the RFK case than I did for those of Robert Stone, director of the Warren Commission-apologist Oswald’s Ghost. But technique wise, Stone leaves O’Sullivan in the dust.

    We live in an age where the documentary form has risen to a truly imaginative level of aesthetic approach. This is exemplified by works like Brett Morgan’s and Nan Burstein’s The Kid Stays in the Picture, and Adam Curtis’ The Power of Nightmares. I would say that technically and aesthetically, O’Sullivan’s film is a notch or two above sixties pioneers like Emile de Antonio and the Maysles Brothers. This is saying something, of course, since computer graphics now can be done on line and then switched over to digital video, and at a reasonable price. It would seem to me that from my two viewings of the film, O’Sullivan availed himself of very little of these new technologies.

    Even this would not be so bad if O’Sullivan had any kind of pictorial eye or sensitivity to things like sound and montage to give the film any kind of distinction of form. But if you take a look at the compositions in the interview shots with, say, Robert Blair Kaiser or Vincent DiPierro, you will see the work of a not very gifted amateur. And the use of sound in those shots is equally revealing. O’Sullivan includes himself, either off screen or back to camera in the on-screen dialogue, usually an unwise practice. But this is made even worse since those scenes were not properly wired for sound. So his voice comes in decibels lower and he is harder to hear than the subject.

    I would have been willing to forgive most of the above if the content of the film had some real howitzers in it. For example, the Discovery Times special on the RFK case was not done at a much higher technical level than this was. But it had some pieces of information in it that were new, quite relevant, and which the film used with real force. That cannot be said about this current effort. What can one write about a full-length documentary on the RFK case which does not mention the name of infamous LAPD firearms expert, DeWayne Wolfer?

    If that’s not enough for you, the film fails to mention William Harper. Without Harper there may never have been any critical movement in the RFK case. (For those not familiar with the RFK case, this would be like doing a documentary on the JFK case and leaving out both Mark Lane and Arlen Specter.) There is no mention or interview of Scott Enyart, either. Enyart was the high school photographer who was at the Ambassador Hotel the night of the assassination. He took photos in the pantry while RFK was being shot. Years later he asked to get his pictures back. He never did. In 1996 he ended up suing the LAPD. (See Probe Vol. 4 #1 and #2) He actually won the case in court. Some extraordinary things happened at the trial. New testimony emerged about how the LAPD actually destroyed Scott’s film. About how the LAPD had falsely numbered pieces of evidence in the Sirhan trial exhibit log to hide exculpatory evidence. That even as late as 1995, bullet evidence was being tampered with at the Sacramento Archives. (For actual photo documentation of this tampering see Probe Vol. 5 #3, p. 27.)

    In 1998, Lisa Pease wrote a fine two-part essay on the case. (Probe Vol. 5 #3 and #4). This article is one of the three best long essays on the RFK case that I know. (The other two were by Ted Charach and the late Greg Stone.) In this work, Pease revealed even more mishandling of the evidence. Namely that bullet fragments left the property room of the LAPD and went to a special agent of the FBI for approximately eight days before being returned to Wolfer. And at the instance of their return, Wolfer had them cleaned and photographed for the first time. Why did they leave and what happened to them in FBI custody? Why were no shells from the gun in evidence recovered from the shooting range Sirhan was reported at on 6/4/68? Even though the LAPD recovered over 38, 000 shell casings from the range!

    In her article, Pease incorporated some key findings from Sirhan’s former investigator Lynn Mangan, such as the photographic fakery of Special Exhibit 10. This photo allegedly reveals a comparison of an RFK bullet with a test bullet form Sirhan’s gun. In fact, the comparison is actually with a bullet from another victim, Ira Goldstein, not RFK. Which leaves the question: Could the LAPD not get a positive comparison with Sirhan’s gun and an RFK bullet? Her article also showed a fascinating connection between the mysterious Iranian intelligence agent Khaiber Khan and the man who was probably the third gun in the pantry that night, Michael Wayne.

    Now all of the above is not meant to (solely) show how proficient Probe was in covering the RFK case. But it is to indicate just how much is lacking from this new documentary. And in addition to not interviewing Scott Enyart, there is no interview with Dr. Thomas Noguchi. In fact, I don’t even recall his photo being used. This is the man who, according to Allard Lowenstein, made the earth move under the RFK case when his autopsy results were finally made public.

    What does O’Sullivan offer us instead? Well, he gives us living room reconstructions of the assassination with DiPierro and Kennedy aide Kenny Burns. Yet with only one camera on hand, and shot from ground level, I did not find these very illuminating. To illustrate the illogic of Wolfer’s eight bullet scenario in the pantry, O’Sullivan pans his camera over the LAPD schematic of the bullet trajectories. In 1993, when Tim Tate did his excellent documentary on the RFK case for British television, he used a very clear and dynamic computer graphic for this demonstration. When O’Sullivan plays the tape of the infamous Serrano/Hank Hernandez polygraph interview, he puts it against a rather static background of still photos of the pair. When Tate did this, he showed us a tape recorder only, against a black backdrop with the words flashing on the screen. And the sound was well modulated to catch the incredible harshness, almost brutality of the session. And the excerpts he picked were better chosen to illustrate that brutality.

    O’Sullivan spends a lot of time on the Manchurian Candidate aspect of the case. Some of it is good, but I think he should have spent less time interviewing Spiegel, playing the Sirhan hypnosis tapes, and trying to simulate Sirhan’s walk from the coffee table to the pantry (which does not work very well anyway). What I think would have been better was to trace, with documents, how the CIA developed the program in the first place, how it was kept secret, who destroyed the documentary record, and how certain documents point to the exact circumstances which insinuate Sirhan in this crime. And the guy to interview for that would have been either Walter Bowart (Operation Mind Control) or John Marks (The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.)

    And this would have been, I think, a better conclusion for the film than what O’Sullivan has decided to end it with. He largely repeats what he did for the BBC many months ago, namely, the alleged identification of three CIA officers at the Ambassador Hotel the night of the RFK murder: George Johannides, Gordon Campbell, and, of course Dave Morales. The accent on this Morales story first began in 1993 with Gaeton Fonzi’s book, The Last Investigation. There the clinching quote, through Morales’ attorney Robert Walton, was this: “Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” (p. 390)

    Please note this quote does not necessarily imply that Morales was part of the plot to kill President Kennedy, or that he even had first hand knowledge of it. What it does imply is that Morales knew people who told him they were involved. But now, through David Talbot’s book Brothers and this documentary, the quote has been embellished and expanded in both specificity and quantity. In its current version Walton quotes Morales thusly: “I was in Dallas when we got that mother fucker, and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.” [Emphasis added.] Hmm. From Fonzi’s version in 1993 and hearing about one assassination, now Morales is actually in on both of them. With the way things grow in the JFK case — which is where Morales originated — what will be next? How about: “I was in Memphis when we got that Black Messiah King!”

    In addition to the enlargement of the quote, the photo identifications themselves are also weakened. Talbot discovered two photos of Morales, one from 1967, and one from 1969. They do not closely resemble the man alleged to be Morales in the films from the Ambassador. As for the ID’s of Campbell and Johannides, O’Sullivan reveals that the LAPD identified the two men as, respectively, Michael Roman and Frank Owens. They were both executives for Bulova watch company. Although both are dead today, Roman’s family concurred with the identification, and knew who Owens was. O’Sullivan tries to salvage something from this by saying that Bulova was a recipient of a large amount of Pentagon funding during the sixties. And further that its chairman, Omar Bradley, was a special adviser to Lyndon Johnson for the Vietnam War. He even reaches for the theory that Roman and Campbell may have somehow switched identities. As a fallback, salvage type operation I found this all pretty lame and unsubstantiated.

    So overall, the film is a sad and puzzling disappointment. It could and should have been much better. Considering the state of knowledge in the case, and the state of computer technology, it should have been compelling in form and convincing in content. Unfortunately, it is neither.

  • The Good Shepherd

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

    “So many good people involved. ”

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

    “Everybody loved the script. ”

    “Such an interesting story. ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • HBO, Playtone plan JFK miniseries: Hanks, Paxton set to produce “History”

    HBO, Playtone plan JFK miniseries: Hanks, Paxton set to produce “History”

    By Michael Fleming, Variety Magazine

    HBO is near a deal with Playtone that will turn Vincent Bugliosi’s 1,632-page book “Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy” into a miniseries.

    Ten-parter will debunk long-held conspiracy theories and establish that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

    HBO is wrapping up a deal to finance and air the mini, which will depict Oswald’s journey to becoming an assassin and his subsequent murder on live TV by Jack Ruby.

    the guys
    L-R: Hanks, Paxton and Goetzman

    Playtone’s Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman will exec produce along with their “Big Love” star Bill Paxton.

    The network will make a companion documentary special, with Bugliosi addressing myriad conspiracy theories, including those involving the Mafia, the KGB or Fidel Castro in JFK’s assassination.

    Project was hatched after Hanks, Paxton and Goetzman had a conversation about the shooting. They decided to look at Bugliosi’s book, published last month by W.W. Norton, as the basis for a possible project.

    “I totally believed there was a conspiracy, but after you read the book, you are almost embarrassed that you ever believed it,” Goetzman said. “To think that guys who grew up in the ’60s would make a miniseries supporting the idea that Oswald acted alone is something I certainly wouldn’t have predicted. But time and evidence can change the way we view things.”

    Bugliosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson and wrote the book “Helter Skelter,” was moved to write “Reclaiming History” after prosecuting a mock trial of Oswald for a British TV special. He walked away feeling the Warren Commission got it right and then spent the next two decades gathering evidence to prove it.

    “Many more people will see the miniseries than will read the book,” Bugliosi told Daily Variety. “With the integrity that Tom, Gary and Bill bring, I think that we will finally be able to make a substantial dent in the 75% of people in this country who still believe the conspiracy theorists.”

    Project comes along as Playtone nears a wrap on the seven-part HBO miniseries “John Adams” and preps for an Aug. 27 production start in Melbourne on “The Pacific,” the 10-part WWII mini for HBO that Hanks and Goetzman are exec producing with Steven Spielberg. The Playtone-produced series “Big Love” begins its second season on HBO this Monday.

    Playtone is in the early stages of developing as a series the Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex,” the novel about a 41-year-old hermaphrodite that just became the latest choice of the Oprah Book Club.

    Bugliosi’s deal was made by PMA Literary’s Peter Miller.

    See the original article here.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Bobby: A Review

    It is neatly ironic that Emilio Estevez should release his Robert Kennedy film within several days of the death of storied film director Robert Altman. For in its structure, intent, and effect Bobby is more similar to Altman’s Nashville than any other political film he could have made on the subject. And it bears no relation at all to Oliver Stone’s JFK. And the film is not about Robert Kennedy in the way that Stone’s film was about John Kennedy.

    Although there are many news clips of Kennedy in the film, the main action all takes place at the Ambassador Hotel on the last day of the California primary, June 4, 1968. This was the primary Robert Kennedy had to win in order to win the nomination at the Democratic convention. As in Nashville, there is no main character in the film. The picture episodically depicts a number of people’s lives in that one day as they sometimes interact at that famous, and now perished, hotel. The people who Estevez tracks in the film (he was both the writer and director) are all fictional. And in fact, as we shall see, this fictionalization extends as far as the actual RFK assassination. The characters include: black and Hispanic workers in the kitchen, a fading nightclub singer and her manager/lover, a middle-aged couple having a mid-life crisis, two young Kennedy workers who flirt with a waitress and then go on their first acid trip, a news reporter from Czechoslovakia, a former doorman and his friend, a kitchen manager, his boss and the boss’s wife who has a hair salon in the hotel, two phone operators — one who is having an affair with the aforementioned married boss — and a couple of young RFK managers who hope to get plum assignments when Bobby becomes President Kennedy.

    As the reader can see, Estevez was not interested in the actual events surrounding the RFK murder. In fact, in interviews he has explicitly stated he was not out to make any kind of “Oliver Stone conspiracy picture.” That was his option of course. But what has he given us instead? And what does his film intrinsically achieve on its merits?

    Aesthetically, Estevez does all right. As a director he keeps his camera in the right place most of the time and he understands that given the confines of the story, he needs a camera in motion much of the time to avoid a feeling of stasis. He does this dexterously enough, very seldom did it call attention to itself.

    Primarily known as an actor, Estevez has assembled a large, ensemble, all-star cast including Anthony Hopkins, Helen Hunt, Demi Moore, and his father, Martin Sheen. Considering the brevity and sketchiness of the parts, most of them do OK (although I could have done without Ashton Kutcher as an acid dealer). One performer in the cast who is really extraordinary is Sharon Stone as the hair dresser wife. From her make-up (I wasn’t sure it was her until about halfway through the film), to her voice, demeanor, and her ability to register sharp emotion effortlessly, she reminds us of the special and rare abilities that make the mystery of re-creation possible.

    One of the achievements of Nashville is that it communicated the feeling that the country, in its go-go and hustling egocentricism had itself created — actually demanded into existence — the urban microcosm that Altman was presenting. And one of the ways he did this was the deliberate intersection of the political strands of the story with the entertainment/music/Movieland strands. Altman dramatized this with the culminating assassination, which is not of the politician running for office, but a C&W superstar singer who has been urged to stage a campaign rally for him. (And we see retroactively that this had been planned by political operatives for political purposes.) The underlying message being how shallow and callous — and ultimately demeaning — both the political and artistic culture of America is.

    Although it tries, Bobby never attains that kind of overarching cultural or sociological relevance. Part of this is because the individual stories never really accrue to anything larger than themselves. In fact, some of the situations are simply banal: the philandering husband-manager, the faded, alcoholic Judy Garland-type singer and her entourage, the foreign reporter who wants to get her career-altering interview with the future president. Also, when Estevez tries to strain for some real poetry in the scripting e.g. a situation between a black kitchen worker and a Chicano, or a tender moment between the middle-aged couple, the writing becomes strained. Both in itself, and in the context of the characters.

    Almost as if he realizes his story strands are weak, he tries to give the whole scenario both timely characteristics and a parallel to the present. There are mentions of the two iconic films of the day i.e. Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. (Estevez actually uses “The Sounds of Silence” from the latter’s soundtrack toward the end.) One of the parallels is with a new voting system instituted at the time which has, of course, “chads.” But he mentions these matters, and that is about as far as they go. They never build into an intricate, multi-layered mosaic as the Altman film did.

    And that is surprising, since Estevez took such artistic license with the actual facts he does depict. For instance he has Sirhan entering the Ambassador Hotel as if he was a man on a mission, which is not accurate. He got there that night by serendipity, thinking there was going to be some kind of Jewish rally in the area. Estevez then has him go almost directly to the kitchen pantry. So there is no drinking the four mixed drinks at the bar, and no coffee with the crucial and infamous Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (who is nowhere to be seen here). Then in the assassination scene, Sirhan appears to be wearing an outfit like a kitchen or maintenance worker instead of the actual casual street clothes he had on that night. Which, when added to the other revisions, suggests that Sirhan committed first-degree murder. Further, the other shooting victims besides Kennedy are not the actual people who were shot, but the Estevez-scripted fictional characters. So in addition to the fictional characters the film tracks through the main body of the action, the culminating event also becomes something of a fable.

    Which would be acceptable if it all built to something. For me, it didn’t. After the assassination climax, the film ends with the surviving characters mourning Kennedy and the other victims as they are carried out and then driven out of the hotel by ambulances. As we watch them in various states of emotional disarray, first we hear the Simon and Garfunkel standard. Then Kennedy’s voice comes on the soundtrack and he gives one of his usual idealistic and emotional calls for America to realize its ambitions and promise. The speech goes on for quite awhile, interspersed with black and white documentary footage, and then the film ends. I was puzzled by this rather attenuated, operatic, and didactic closing. (It reminded me of Spike Lee’s similarly simplistic and undramatic ending to another dream project, Malcolm X.) If a film is meant to epitomize an era, if it is going to try and mark a milestone — which Estevez has clearly stated was his intent — then the close of the film has to somehow suggest or delineate the milestone in some clear and potent way. With his wacky assassination gone awry, Altman tried to sum up just how screwed up American had become after Vietnam and Watergate. In Good Night and Good Luck, George Clooney tried to parallel the specter of McCarthyism with today’s similar specter of terrorism. His concluding message, Edward R. Murrow’s prophetic speech, was that television was crippled at its outset from telling the truth about either. In American Graffiti, George Lucas achieved this marking effect beautifully and unforgettably with his final scene of the friends at the little Modesto airport wishing one of the main characters goodbye. After the plane disappears into the sky, we learn through a photo montage what happened to the four friends afterwards, and with that knowledge, what happened to America. And the brevity and understatement of that final denouement made the impact even more emotionally jarring. We realized that what we had really seen was the end of the early innocent sixties, the Camelot Years of President John F. Kennedy. For those of us who had lived through that dreamy era, Lucas’s ending had the impact of a gut punch.

    What Estevez is working with here is the era that followed JFK’s murder: the angry sixties of 1964-68. And clearly, 1968 was the end of that era. Politically, Kennedy’s murder would lead to the destruction of the Democratic party as we knew it, the ascension of Richard Nixon, and the coming apart of America over Vietnam. Socially and culturally, RFK’s assassination would lead to the “psychedelic sixties” of hard rock, grass, and legions of “drop-outs” who sub-consciously realized the last hopes of a great decade had ended at the Ambassador Hotel. This final vestige of the sixties would dramatically assemble itself the following year at the gigantic Woodstock demonstration: the final dying spasm of a generation registering its protest over its loss of control over it own destiny. So clearly, Estevez had a huge and magnificent historical subject. For all the liberties he has taken, and for reasons stated above, he didn’t do it justice.

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    The Ambassador Hotel, scene of RFK’s assassination, was torn down in early 2006. For a lively discussion of the hotel and its fate, check this Ambassador Hotel Blog.

  • Hugh Aynesworth Never Quits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Read some more about Piddock’s project.

    Read some more about Hugh Aynesworth.

  • Oliver Stone vs. The Historical Establishment

    From the July-August 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 5) of Probe

    Nearly a decade later, the vibrations and echoes of Oliver Stone’s film on the Kennedy assassination are still being heard and felt. When JFK first came out in late 1991, the media had prepared the public with a six-month propaganda barrage to doubt the factual accuracy of the film. That barrage began in both the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post with articles by Jon Margolis and George Lardner respectively. The attacks on the film kept up throughout its tenure in the theaters and into the Academy Awards ceremonies where, as researcher Richard Goad revealed, David Belin took out an ad in Variety to deliberately hurt the film’s chances at Oscar time. Looked at in retrospect, this campaign was clearly unprecedented in the history of movies. And Stone himself has admitted that the first attacks totally surprised him. Perhaps they should not have. In his film, Stone took up two issues that the establishment media does not wish to be touched upon in any serious or truthful way, i.e. the Kennedy assassination, and the investigation into that murder by the late Jim Garrison, District Attorney of New Orleans who, four years later, launched the only criminal prosecution ever into the murder of President Kennedy. Stone’s film advocated a conspiracy, and a high level one, into the JFK murder. His film portrayed Jim Garrison and his inquiry in a favorable light. Therefore, the big guns of the media pummeled him for months. The barrage was designed to assassinate both Stone, and the film’s message. The week the film opened both Time and Newsweek featured the film as a major story, the latter placed it on the cover. The idea was to massage the collective public mentality into not accepting the film’s message, or at least to create doubts about both the message and the messenger. Many people in the general public, although convinced the official story was not correct, had doubts about the film’s accuracy and total content.

    The debate over Stone’s film went on for about a year in public. Not everything about it was negative. There were many programs on television that featured a measured debate about the facts of the film and the case in a careful and balanced way. Unfortunately, these programs were not the widely seen ones like a 48 Hours Dan Rather special, which was an awful one-sided attack on Stone and the critics. The following year, in 1993, the media brought out its savior. In the year of the 30th anniversary of the JFK assassination, Gerald Posner jumped out at the public on the newsstands and their TV sets. The man became the darling of the media. It didn’t matter that his book was unbelievably shallow, and in some cases absolutely ersatz. Posner can be considered the second wave of the propaganda blitz against Oliver Stone and his heretic film. Another attempt at playing to the crowd, creating seeds of doubt about Stone and his movie. Posner’s appearance also signaled the beginning of the simplistic, cheap labeling of Stone and his companions as the “conspiracy cabal.” On national television, Posner called Stone’s scenario the “everything but the kitchen sink theory” to the JFK assassination. Thus began the canard that Stone’s movie postulated a conspiracy to kill Kennedy that included the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the Mob, the Pentagon, Lyndon Johnson etc. This, of course, is a wild exaggeration of what the movie actually says, but it tells us a lot about what Posner’s mission was and what his devotion to the truth really consisted of. Ever since, Stone and the critics have been saddled with the rubric that they are paranoid fantasists who see conspiracies in every major crime ever committed. Or when used even more cheaply by people like Noam Chomsky, the critics can be grouped with those who believe in space aliens and Elvis sightings.

    Now comes the third wave. This one is for posterity. As the mass media continues to grow in size, concentration, and power, its outreach into the academic establishment has slowly become more marked. That is, the number of academics and/or historians featured on television has gotten more select and familiar. Also, the publishing industry has gotten to be monopolized also. Today, according to Publisher’s Weekly, approximately 70% of all new books are published by ten houses. This is an amazing shrinkage of the number of outlets and a great increase in control of the number of publishers who can give a book a serious launch in the marketplace. In fact, the original publisher of Jim Garrison’s original hardcover book which Stone based his film on, no longer exists.

    The above information is a way of explaining the response of the historical and academic establishment to Stone and his films. For the debate about those subjects has now reached into that arena. For not only the media, but also academia has generally bought into the Warren Commission myth about the lone gunman scenario as a solution to the Kennedy assassination. There are very few textbooks or historical books in general which give a balanced view of any of the assassinations of the sixties. And most “talking head” historians who pop up on television won’t delve into any conspiracy scenarios in any of these historically significant murders, e.g. David Garrow on the Martin Luther King case. What this says about America is that the rather unexamined world of academia can be seen to serve as an adjunct to the Establishment. Any cursory examination of the rosters of organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations will show a large amount of memberships devoted to two rather surprising institutions: the media and academia.

    As both Michael Kurtz and Robert Toplin write in an interesting new book, Stone lobbed a bomb at this establishment. And it has had an extraordinarily long reaction time. Toplin has edited a new book of essays on both Stone and his films entitled Oliver Stone’s USA. In it nine of his films are examined. Also, Toplin has allowed Stone to respond to the critiques in three long sections. The book is well worth reading for both the controversy and some new information it contains. For example, how many readers knew that Stone was born and raised a conservative Republican and that he backed Barry Goldwater in 1964. Also, Stone reveals here that his proposed film on Martin Luther King was turned down by the studios based in part on the criticism it got in the press when word of the proposal leaked out.

    The general plan of the book is to introduce the topic of Stone’s historical films in general first. So the first part of the book features overviews of Stone and his films by Robert Toplin, Robert Rosenstone, and a co-authored essay by Randy Roberts and David Welky. Stone then responds to these three essays on his image. In the second part of the book, there are nine essays on individual films: Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Heaven and Earth, Natural Born Killers, Nixon. The final section of the book gives Stone an opportunity to respond to these critiques which he does in two parts. The first one is entitled “On Seven Films” and the last essay is devoted to the two most controversial, JFK and Nixon.

    Before getting on to a discussion of the book, let me make a few cogent points first. The entire discipline of history is under debate itself. This debate is raging in the confines of those ivory towers today. That debate is going on with two issues. First, on methodology. Up until this century, most historians believed in the, let’s call it, top-down method of historical reportage. That is, if you told the story of an epoch with what happened at the top levels – presidents, governors, the rich etc. – that would neatly sum up an era and tell you the important events which occurred. With the advent of the so-called New History of the 1950’s, that has changed. Many younger historians are trying to be sociologists too in order to try and depict what life was like for the average American. To bring about that more inclusive picture, the historian has had to avail himself of more tools also. He has had to delve into economics, demographics, statistics etc. And with this new digging has come a second debate: synthesizers versus data-crunchers. Or, is it more important to tell what you can with a limited amount of material or is crucial to concentrate on a small area and dump out every last drop of data you can possibly muster. Some argue for the former by saying that history without any trends or curves becomes formless, meaningless. Historians who side with the latter group say that it is of utmost importance to marshal as many relevant facts as possible before denoting a curve or trend. At the same time these debates are going on, the debate over whether or not history should be studied as an undergraduate requirement at all is also ongoing.

    This is the background that Stone lobbed his bomb into. And with it, whether he knew it or not, he was entering the above debate. Stone clearly entered on the side of the data-collectors against the synthesizers. Few aspects of American history had been so generalized about – erroneously – as the JFK murder. In fact, as many have stated, it is an absolute disgrace what the historians have done with this crucial event. When the debate was raging in the media, Stone would always argue that the problem with the JFK murder is that no one wants to argue the evidence. Which was true since very few journalists or historians had looked at it. That is probably even more true today since the Assassination Records Review Board has now declassified millions of pages of new documents which have been relatively ignored by the press. Nearly all of this new material backs up the contentions of Stone’s film. And in this new book, the only discussion of this new record is by Stone and Professor Michael Kurtz. Clearly, by getting the Review Board created Stone was trying to do the work that historians have always complained about, solving the problem of declassification.

    By making more records available, the historian can now be more accurate in his judgments about the Kennedy assassination. Unfortunately, to be kind, and with the exceptions noted above, that does not happen here. In theory, facts are supposed to be like sunshine, the more there are the brighter the picture. Yet it tells us something about the Kennedy assassination when most of these historians continue to work in the dark.

    Finally, there is one other historical notion that needs to be addressed as background and that is the so-called “mystique of conspiracy”. Excepting for the rare luminary like Carroll Quigley of Georgetown – Bill Clinton’s favorite professor – very few illustrious historians have dealt with the question of conspiracy in history. For instance, even where conspiracy is an accomplished fact e.g. the Lincoln assassination, few mainstream historians address that important event with honesty or thoroughness. In fact, many ignore it completely. So even before Oliver Stone got labeled a conspiracy nut, the academic community was predisposed against him. Of course, if one grants the omnipresence of conspiracies in American history, one could not synthesize very easily at all. One would have to explain deep, dark forces lurking in the shadows which every so often sprung forward and captured an important moment for its own purpose. It would take a lot of work and effort to thoroughly explain these phenomena. It would also then ipso facto be a confession that much of what had been written previously in both the media and in history books about certain events was wrong. This was another bomb lobbed by Stone at the cozy nest of historians’ societies.

    Having said all of this, I think Stone was treated fairly well in this book. The very fact that the editor, Toplin, allowed him ample room to respond is evidence of that. Also, some of the discussions of Stone’s films are appreciative. For example, the esteemed Walter LaFeber – who has written the best overview of American foreign policy in Central America – does a fair and informative job on Stone’s Salvador. David Halberstam is enthusiastic about Platoon. Toplin even let the writer of the book Heaven and Earth do the discussion of that film. David Courtwright writes an interesting essay on that fascinating, extraordinary, towering film Natural Born Killers, perhaps the finest satirical look at a serious American subject since Stanley Kubrick’s great Dr. Strangelove. There is an essay by Randy Roberts and David Welky entitled “A Sacred Mission: Oliver Stone and Vietnam” which is quite interesting. In it, the authors trace Stone’s childhood and young adulthood and seemingly try to portray him as some kind of malcontent. They then describe his tours of duty in Vietnam and his early attempts at getting Platoon made. They then discuss Born of the Fourth of July and Heaven and Earth then conclude with a discussion of JFK focusing on the film’s thesis of Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam. They cogently write, “JFK was a mortar lobbed at the establishment, and it set off a firestorm of controversy.” They then add that the thesis, Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam, “though passionately and eloquently argued … does not stand up to scrutiny.” They argue the rather ancient banality that there was no real difference between NSAMs 263 and 273 and that 263 was only meant as a warning to President Ngo Dinh Diem to shape up and allow for more democracy in South Vietnam or Kennedy would weaken U.S. commitment. This brings one of the issues about the historical debate mentioned above into the forefront. If one is supposed to be writing a scholarly and serious review of a controversial artist and his films for the purpose of examining the historical record he has highlighted, one would think that the writers would acquaint themselves with the latest declassified records on the subject. The documents that the Review Board has declassified on this subject are now definitive. Just two issues ago in this publication, I discussed at length the record of the May, 1963 SECDEF Conference in Hawaii. That record seems to me as definitive as one can get about this subject and it is absolutely clear on this point. (The Review Board tried to get the record of the November, 1963 Honolulu conference, which would have been just as valuable if not more so, but they could not.) So, on this issue, Stone actually comes out looking better than the supposed scholars.

    But, of course, for our audience and this publication, the discussions of JFK and Nixon must take center stage. As they do in the book. Michael Kurtz wrote the discussion of the former film. There are three critiques of the latter. They are by Stephen Ambrose, George McGovern, and Arthur Schlesinger. In a separate concluding section, Stone takes almost 50 pages to respond to these writers. Michael Kurtz is one of the few historians who has actually studied the JFK assassination and he has published a decent book on the subject, Crime of the Century. Kurtz notes the storm of controversy Stone’s film provoked and he adds that many commentators had no qualifications to discuss the Kennedy murder. Which is correct. But yet, Kurtz then seems to repeat the Vietnam canard when he writes that Stone remains vulnerable to criticism on the thesis that “an unidentified cabal of military-industrial-intelligence movers and shakers ordered Kennedy’s assassination because he intended to withdraw all American troops from Vietnam.” Kurtz may be right about the first part of the dual-edged sentence – the identity of the conspirators – but on the withdrawal part Stone was right on. On this part of the film, Kurtz attaches another familiar distortion that the “film intimates that [Lyndon] Johnson himself was in on the plot to kill the president.” Only if one is not watching too closely.

    Kurtz has never been a fan of Jim Garrison, and he continues his attack in this volume. Like most Garrison-bashers, Kurtz deflates the DA at the same time he exonerates Clay Shaw. But Kurtz goes further. He writes, “The movie’s implication that Shaw indeed participated in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy simply has no substantial evidence to support it.” Kurtz now seems to be going beyond the confines of the film into the newly declassified record. There have been thousands of pages of new documents pertaining to Shaw that the Review Board has released. Much of that record has been put together into an invaluable book by Bill Davy, Let Justice Be Done. Kurtz knows of the book since he mentions it in his footnotes (along with my book which he mistitles). Whether he read it is another matter of course. But if he did, he must discount the information in it since Davy makes a fine case for Shaw’s complicity in the New Orleans part of the conspiracy. Also, Kurtz says that Stone “branded” Shaw a CIA-collaborator when Davy has now unearthed documents which clinch the idea that he was much more than that.

    Kurtz also states that Stone’s portrayal of JFK himself is too one-sided and saintly. Granted that Stone’s portrait of Kennedy is not full dimensional, but he is not a main character in the story. He is only referred to. As the editors of this journal have mentioned, we realize the legion of Kennedy bashers out there and between the bashers and Oliver Stone’s version, we think Stone’s is closer to the truth. Also, Kurtz faults Stone for presenting the conspiracy-side of the debate only and not giving the Warren Commission defenders their due. This is silly. How can one make a film of the Garrison story without accenting the DA’s beliefs first? Also, the Warren Commission defenders have their way all the time in the mainstream press (and thanks to people like Alec Cockburn, in the alternative press too). Why not give the critics a well-deserved platform? Also, Kurtz states that no witness who heard shots from the Texas School Book Depository is portrayed, yet there is a witness who points there early in the film.

    Kurtz is the only writer in the volume to give any attention to the discoveries made by the Review Board. Yet, he states that no smoking gun has emerged from these records. This is a matter of interpretation and we beg to disagree. There is a lot in the medical investigation by former Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn that can be classified as such. Also, Noel Twyman’s book shows that there is powerful evidence that the Dallas Police only found two shells at the crime scene and not three. That is a smoking gun if true.

    Kurtz does make some nice comments about the film. He writes that, in the field of historical drama, only Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin has had a greater impact on the public imagination. And he concludes with the following statement, “For all of JFK’s faults and shortcomings, few producers and directors can claim such an impact from their movies, and few historians can claim such an impact from their works.” Yet at the beginning of the essay, he states that Oliver Stone “crossed the line between artist and scholar by combining film with history, by projecting onto the silver screen his highly subjective version of actual persons and events … ” Kurtz would have been on safer ground if he would have added that all artists do this when depicting an historical event. From Sergei Eisenstein in Potemkin to Arthur Penn in Bonnie and Clyde to Brian dePalma in The Untouchables to James Cameron in Titanic artists take liberties with the documentary record. This is called dramatic license. Yet none of these directors was attacked with anywhere near the force that Stone was. As we know, historians and investigators also do the same or academics and journalists would not have backed that great piece of dramatic fiction called the Warren Commission Report. Since Stone is an artist working in a tradition, his liberties are much more excusable than a team of professional investigators supposedly searching without restraint for the truth to be presented as such to the American public. No writer in this volume brought out this important point.

    The two other essays which will be of most interest to our readers are those by Stephen Ambrose and Arthur Schlesinger. Ambrose is the current conservative anchorman for the academic and journalistic establishment. Schlesinger is his liberal counterpart. It is not odd that both agree on the subject of Stone and his two films JFK and Nixon. Ambrose is slightly more virulent than Schlesinger, although not by much. In his opening crescendo words like “fraudulent” and “lies” spill off his pen easily. He even discounts the fact that in Nixon, Stone prefaced the film with a disclaimer which noted that some scenes were “conjectured”. What more clear device could Stone use to show that he was using dramatic license? Yet Ambrose ignores this issue almost completely and hones in on Stone because he is not “factually accurate” throughout. What is surprising about Ambrose is that he then begins his assault on the film with issues that most would consider minor and arguable. Namely the depiction of Nixon as a drinker and pill-popper during the height of the Watergate crisis. The problem with this assault, as even Bob Woodward noted to Ambrose long ago, is that Stone can mount evidence for it from Nixon’s own camp. For instance, in his memoir about his years with Nixon, John Ehrlichman noted that Nixon had a drinking problem in two senses. First he liked the stuff and second, he could not handle it. Before he agreed to work on his campaign, he made Nixon promise to lay off the booze. So to say that Nixon would relapse into an old bad habit under the tremendous pressures of Watergate is eminently probable. As to the pills, in their book The Final Days, Woodward and Carl Bernstein interviewed Alexander Haig, Nixon’s Chief of Staff during Watergate. He told them, during Watergate, he was so worried about Nixon’s mental balance that he gave orders to clear the White House of pills and other things that Nixon could use in a potentially rash act. Again Woodward reminded Ambrose of this fact on national television and asked why such an order would be given if the pills were not there. Ambrose either forgot the exchange or ignored it.

    From here, Ambrose moves on to another rather mild and arguable point: Nixon’s use of profanity. When the film first broke, Ambrose tried to argue that the whole issue of profanity was exaggerated and abused by the film. He was reminded that if that was so, then why were so many words deleted from the Watergate tapes under the rubric of “expletive deleted”? Furthermore, Stanley Kutler’s book Abuse of Power, featuring more declassified tapes, shows this point in more detail. It also shows that Nixon had a penchant for using ethnic slurs. So today Ambrose has resorted to the fallback position of arguing exactly what words Nixon used in his swearing. He also argues that whatever the profanities, they were the same or less than other presidents like Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. As anyone who has read the Kennedy transcripts knows, he is wrong on at least that president.

    Ambrose then admits that these might be minor character points. He calls them peccadilloes. He quickly adds that: “The central piece of fiction is not. It is the creation of a Nixon-Fidel Castro-Kennedy connection. Stone has Nixon involved in a CIA assassination plot against Castro, which somehow played a part in the Kennedy assassination and left Nixon with a terrible secret and guilt about Kennedy’s death.” Ambrose then goes on to argue against almost every contention Stone makes in postulating this scenario. To do so, he ignores, discounts, or misreports evidence. And, of course, he allows for no extension for what has not been revealed yet.

    First, let us note the jumping off point for this thesis and Ambrose’s disagreement. It is the Bay of Pigs operation. Today, with the release of two important reports by the Assassination Records Review Board and other organizations, it can now be stated with certainty that almost every examination of that operation has been incomplete. It can now be stated that at least part of the agenda for the Bay of Pigs was hidden or, at least, not written down. John Newman’s upcoming book, Kennedy and Cuba, will be the most accurate portrait to date on the subject. It will make all previous depictions obsolete and from what Newman has told me it will make all of Ambrose’s writing on the subject seem elementary at best and will do a lot to bolster Stone. Richard Bissell himself, who commanded the operation at CIA, admitted that assassination had been a part of the operation. Howard Hunt has written that Nixon was the officer in charge at the White House. The operation was planned during the Eisenhower administration (and Newman’s work will show that a similar operation was tried at that time). Newman’s previous work has shown that it was Nixon himself who suggested the use of the Mob as agents for the CIA in the Castro murder plots. And when Ambrose writes that no attempts were made on Castro during Eisenhower’s tenure, he is artfully phrasing a nebulous point. Because the CIA report on those Castro murder attempts shows that they began at least in August of 1960 and probably before then. As for actual “attempts” that is something that can never be fully shown. For example, the CIA says they made eight attempts on Castro’s life. Castro’s security forces say it is much higher than that.

    But to continue with the main point of Stone’s credibility and Ambrose’s scholarship, the above mentioned declassified CIA reports on both the Bay of Pigs and the Castro plots reveal that Kennedy was deliberately kept in the dark about both the plots and large parts of the invasion plan. Is it a coincidence that both were in operation at the same time during Eisenhower’s administration and that both went into a kind of remission during JFK’s administration? Bissell admitted in the 1980’s that he had hoped that the Mob assassination plots would make the Bay of Pigs invasion easier for the CIA. Now, if Nixon suggested the use of the Mob at the outset, and those plots were shielded from JFK, this already backs up much of what Stone is theorizing. Trying to prove that the CIA-Mob plots “blew back” and killed Kennedy is more difficult of course. But even Robert Blakey’s House Select Committee wrote that their construction placed all the elements in place for an assassination plot against JFK. And that includes a motive. For as most students of the Bay of Pigs conclude – including me – the operation, as planned, was virtually hopeless. Lyman Kirkpatrick who reviewed the operation at CIA thought this also. Even if the second bombing run had gone off perfectly as CIA wished, Castro had managed to get too much artillery and armor to the beach too fast. This is because there was no surprise, a platoon was in training near the bay, and the bridges to the beach had not been blown. When one adds in simple arithmetic, namely, as Kirkpatrick notes, how the invasion force could surmount being outnumbered by a margin of over fifty to one, one wonders what Bissell was really thinking. Kennedy wondered about it also. He came to the conclusion, as others have, that the CIA thought Kennedy would send in American forces to save the mission, which is precisely what Nixon told Kennedy he would have done. The CIA tried to cloud the fact that the invasion was ruinously planned and to shift the blame to Kennedy himself for his alleged cancellation of the second air strike as the reason for failure. Certainly many Cuban exiles believed this canard and it may have encouraged a role in his murder on their part. It’s hard to imagine that Nixon who – according to Ehrlichman – was trying to get the secret report of the Bay of Pigs, was not aware of a good deal of this.

    Ambrose rejects all of the above. But yet it is Ambrose who also condemns Stone for suggesting that Kennedy was killed for his attempt to remove the U.S. from Vietnam. Yet, that removal, as the Review Board has shown is now not open to debate. As Stone notes, one of Ambrose’s functions, like his journalistic counterpart Chris Mathews, seems to be to elevate and whitewash Nixon and to denigrate and deflate Kennedy. Ambrose, that supposed careful scholar, actually said on a biography show about Nixon, that the late president was quite fair to Alger Hiss. Yet, as Robert Parry discovered, on the newly declassified tapes, Nixon admits that he deliberately leaked all sorts of hazy material on that case to the press so that Hiss would be sure to be indicted by a grand jury in New York and have to stand trial. When the first trial ended with no verdict rendered, Nixon took to the stump and railed against the judge in the case to get him removed from a second trial. How could Ambrose ignore these facts? They are not in doubt and not arguable.

    Schlesinger blasts the “high cabal” thesis of Stone’s film on the assassination. Like so many others, he deliberately distorts it by expanding it beyond the facts of the film. According to Arthur Schlesinger, the conspiracy included the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, the FBI, the military-industrial complex, anti-Castro Cubans, homosexuals, and the Mafia. As I have argued before, this is not what the film depicts. He then goes in for character assassination. He smears Fletcher Prouty as a fantasist. This is poppycock. Prouty’s two published books, as well as his essays, have contributed as much or more to the secret history of this country as almost any author I can think of. There are many things in his work about the Kennedy administration that do not appear in Schlesinger’s book and are invaluable to any accurate portrait of his presidency and his murder. Jim Garrison is termed a “con man”. Some con artist. A man who blows his career in pursuit of justice – with no help from Kennedy’s pals, of which Schlesinger is supposed to be one.

    Schlesinger concludes his discussion of JFK with a puzzling sentence, “Still, except for supreme artists like Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Verdi, and Delacroix, dramatic license should not be corrupted by ideology, as it certainly has been in JFK.” My question is this: Where is the ideology? People of the left, right, and center can all agree that a high-level plot killed Kennedy and that plot was probably based on policy disputes. For many reasons, all the blanks can’t be filled in (but both Prouty and Garrison were trying to do so.) This very fact justifies and necessitates the use of dramatic license. And the importance of the issue as a historical puzzle further justifies that usage. The public deserves to know everything our government did and did not do about and before this murder. Stone’s film helped in that area to an immense degree. I wish Ambrose and Schlesinger had read the Review Board’s declassified files. Further, that they had used them for their work in this volume. Until they do, Stone is completely justified in making these films and therefore keeping the historical establishment honest. Let’s hope, in that regard, the King project is completed and it helps release the government files on that murder.

  • Mind-Control Part 1: Canadian and U.S. Survivors Seek Justice

    From the March-April 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 3) of Probe

    “Curiously, often a classic manifestation of people who are afflicted with certain psychotic disorders is the irrational fear that the CIA and FBI is conspiring to harm them. In this case, the CIA involvement is real and the covert nature of the involvement is not contested.”

    Orlikow v. United States (1988)1

    Gripping survivor-centered accounts of medical atrocities committed by CIA-funded mind-control (MC) researchers during the Cold War are rarely found in traditional U.S. media.2 Neither are they the subject of emotionally powerful TV docu-dramas commonly produced for broadcast and cable television. In January 1998, the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) courageously filled this void, although the blackout on government MC history is near-total in the U.S.

    The Sleep Room, a gut-wrenching four-hour miniseries, depicts the true story of Dr. Ewen Cameron’s secret MKULTRA brainwashing experiments carried out in the late 50s and early 60s at Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. Widespread publicity accompanying this major TV event has empowered many other Canadian survivors of nonconsensual brainwashing experiments in hospitals and prisons to come forward and seek justice in the courts.3

    In Part I of the miniseries, gifted actors dramatize how vulnerable, trusting hospital patients were transformed into virtual vegetables through doses of “electroconvulsive therapy” 30-40 times more powerful than usual, sensory deprivation, hallucinogenic and paralytic drugs, and other psychological and physical tortures. Part II grippingly depicts the successful eight-year U.S. lawsuit of nine survivors, who overcame fear to confront the humiliations and frustrating delay tactics of the CIA lawyers. Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., a legendary Washington civil rights attorney, and his partner James C. Turner eventually prevailed for their clients. In 1988, the U.S. “national security” establishment agreed to an out-of-court settlement of $750,000.4

    This extraordinary CBC drama was based on Anne Collins’ prize-winning 1989 book In the Sleep Room: The Story of CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada. Collins exposed Cameron’s 1930s-1940s history of ethically unsupportable experiments on psychiatric patients. Many of the people methodically abused by Cameron had entered the Institute suffering only from mild disorders such as anxiety and post-partum depression. By the time they were released from the Sleep Room torture chamber, many had decades of memory completely wiped out. Some did not remember their children and even had to relearn bladder and bowel control.

    A U.S. citizen since 1941, the Scottish-born Cameron resided in Albany, New York, from which he commuted to Montreal each week. Before taking on the directorship at Allan Memorial, which is associated with McGill University, Cameron was chair of psychiatry and neurology at a medical school in Albany. He worked closely with Alan Gregg, medical-sciences director of the Rockefeller Foundation, which provided grants to found the Institute in 1943.5 As director from 1943 to 1964, Cameron achieved a worldwide reputation, serving as the first chair of the World Psychiatric Association, as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations.

    In one barely watchable scene of institutional cruelty, Cameron is filmed delivering a speech to psychiatrists about his successes in “curing” mental illness. As he drones on, the camera switches to scenes of terrified resisting patients being captured and restrained by doctors and nurses, forcibly being dosed with drugs and high-voltage electroshock, then put to sleep for weeks at a time in a room full of beds equipped with tape recorders and football helmets.

    Winner in 1998 of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television’s Gemini Awards in best picture and other categories, The Sleep Room touched the raw nerves of Canadian citizens. Not only did they learn their government had been the CIA’s junior consort during the Cold War against Communism, they also discovered it had secretly granted $500,000 to fund the Allan Memorial experiments. The CIA had only given Cameron $69,000 from 1957 to 1964. As the lawsuit dragged on through the Reagan presidency, Rauh was forced to expose the Canadian government’s role in helping the CIA derail the lawsuit, in complete disregard for pain and lifelong suffering of its own citizens.6 In 1992 the Canadian government coughed up $100,000 for 76 Cameron victims. To date 127 of his patients have come forward with their horror stories to seek compensation.

    CIA psychologist John Gittinger initiated contact with Cameron after reading his article on “Psychic Driving” in the January 1956 American Journal of Psychiatry. Gittinger persuaded Cameron to apply to the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a CIA front set up in 1955 to disburse funding for what became a huge MKULTRA network in the U.S., Canada and overseas (in collaboration with branches of the U.S. Armed Forces). The Human Ecology Fund (its name was changed in 1961) operated secretly out of Cornell University in New York City.

    Cameron’s brainwashing grant application proposed to “depattern” patient behavior through the use of mega-doses of electroshock, to reprogram patients’ minds with repetitious verbal messages 16 hours a day for six or seven days, during which time the patient would be kept in partial sensory deprivation. Cameron called this technique “psychic driving.” Brainwashing would be completed by subjecting patients to drug-enforced continuous sleep, sometimes as long as weeks or even months.7

    The Sleep Room portrays two generations of CIA personnel as equally deadly, i.e., the 1950s Human Ecology bureaucrats who approved the funding for what were considered “terminal” experiments on non-U.S. nationals, and the 1980s CIA legal lords who maneuvered on grounds of “national security” to withhold evidence of the agency’s negligence and failure to adhere to the Nuremberg Code. The callousness of the CIA scientists is aptly captured in this fictitious dialog, where the scientists are discussing whether to fund Cameron’s proposal:

    #1: He’s going to fry his patients. I can tell you that.

    #2: Well, we won’t worry about the patients. That’s his problem. I just want to know if he can brainwash them.

    #1: He just might, you know. He’s right about the memory loss with a shock like that. You couldn’t do that to volunteers.

    #2: Well, should we give him the money?

    #1: What have we got to lose? It’s not like he’s doing it to Americans.

    While the tone is apt, the misleading impression that neither the CIA nor Cameron were experimenting on U.S. citizens (witting or unwitting) during this era is the miniseries’ biggest flaw. According to the March 15, 1995 testimony of Claudia Mullen before the President’s Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), Ewen Cameron was the high-voltage expert in a secret team of CIA doctor-brainwashers. Mullen and Chris DiNicola Ebner told a visibly shaken group of scientists that memory-erasing electroshock, among other horrors, was regularly used on physically healthy American children in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.8 Unlucky enough to be delivered into CIA/military custody by abusive or uncaring parents, children as young as eight years old were subjected to trauma-based mind control (MC) programming to mold them into “Manchurian Candidate” spies, assassins and sexual blackmailers.9 ACHRE’s final report documented more than 4000 experiments, and anywhere from 16,000 to 23,000 unwitting victims!10 The numbers run past 200,000 when if one includes the GIs deliberately exposed to radiation from atomic bomb testing.11

    During this same era, U.S. psychiatric patients were also victimized. Harold Blauer, a patient in the New York Psychiatric Institute, died in 1953 shortly after being injected with a highly toxic dose of methyl-diamphetamine (MDA), a derivative of mescaline. Blauer had entered the hospital suffering from depression after a divorce. He had made progress solely with the talking cure. Blauer did not know that his psychiatrist, Paul Hoch, was a CIA consultant secretly under contract with the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal chemical/biological warfare lab. This contract was negotiated through the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, which allowed trusting hospital patients to be used as part of the Army’s search for “potential chemical warfare agents.”

    The MDA was not administered for any therapeutic reason. Blauer was scheduled to be released from the hospital in a few weeks. His objections to the series of injections, which were causing him great pain and discomfort, were overridden by manipulative hospital personnel. Blauer was threatened before the fourth nonfatal dose that if he didn’t give his consent, he would be moved out of the Institute to hospital settings that displeased him. The fourth dose caused a violent reaction. The fifth killed him. The Army began its cover-up immediately, the sordid details of which are recounted in the 1987 court decision awarding the Blauer estate $707,044. The court affixed blame for Blauer’s needless death totally on the U.S. government.12

    The Blauer case reveals a direct lineage between Nazi research projects and the MKULTRA program. Mescaline was tested on concentration camp inmates during the Third Reich’s search for a “truth serum.”13 These and other Nazi experiments were intensively studied by U.S. military scientists in occupied Germany. Under the CIA’s Operation Paperclip, 1600 German and Austrian scientists were secretly brought to the U.S. Some had worked for I.G. Farben perfecting Zyclon-B gas for the extermination of Jews and other doomed prisoners. Many were being investigated for war crimes when they were rescued by a government intent on using their knowledge and expertise in the Cold War against the Communist Eastern Bloc. Hundreds of chemists and other scientists were given jobs at Edgewood Arsenal, which supplied the drugs, chemicals and poisons for the CIA’s counterespionage and assassination programs during the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as covert interventions in the affairs of many Third World nations.14

    Though the Cold War is over, the U.S. military/CIA bureaucracies still invoke “national security” and “plausible deniability” to hide a vast arsenal of sophisticated mind-control and psychological warfare technology.15 All of these weapons had to be perfected by means of human experimentation. Psychiatrist Colin Ross found that many areas of brain research heading in the direction of MC suddenly went “black” in the 1960s.16 His long-awaited book, Building the Manchurian Candidate: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists, will soon be published.

    A hint about mind-control research first surfaced in the aftermath of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. When J. Edgar Hoover testified before the Warren Commission in 1964, he raised the possibility President Kennedy had been killed by a programmed assassin dispatched by the Soviet Union. Alarmed, the Commission requested the CIA to produce information on Soviet brainwashing. The resultant CIA memo (so controversial it wasn’t declassified until 1974) cryptically asserted the Soviets did not have any MC techniques or drugs “not available in the West.”17 However, neither Hoover nor the CIA told the Commission that the U.S. had an operational program of Manchurian Candidates up and running since World War II!18

    The term “brainwashing” was first coined in 1950 by Edward Hunter, a CIA employee operating undercover as a journalist, purportedly to explain how American POWs in Korea were being coerced into confessing they used biological weapons.19 Newspapers played up fears that the Soviets, the Chinese and North Koreans were using a secret psychological weapon against allied soldiers. This “brainwashing” scare was a successful CIA disinformation strategy used to build support for an unpopular war.20 It also helped insulate military and university researchers from accountability for violating medical ethics and criminal laws.

    The prevailing anticommunist hysteria that grew to justify the MKULTRA program and its unambiguous violations of the Hippocratic Oath, the Nuremberg Code and many international human-rights covenants was aptly summarized in 1954 by former President Herbert Hoover:

    It is now clear we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination…. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto accepted norms of human conduct do not apply…. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of fair play must be reconsidered… We must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, more effective methods than those used against us.21

    The MKULTRA program began with a proposal by Richard Helms, then the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director for Plans, to fund “highly sensitive” research and development using chemical/ biological substances to alter human behavior. It was approved by CIA Director Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953 and was overseen by chemist Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD). The first MC programs, called Bluebird and Artichoke, were subsumed under the MKULTRA umbrella. This program came to embrace an octopus-like network with names like MK-Search (1963-1973), MK-Delta and MK-Naomi (assassination programs carried out by the Army 1953-1970).22 Between 1953 and 1963 the TSD operated 149 subprojects in 80 U.S. and Canadian universities and medical centers, and three prisons, involving 185 private researchers, 15 foundations and numerous pharmaceutical companies.23

    In 1973, with the Watergate scandal looming, outgoing CIA Director Helms ordered all MKULTRA records destroyed. He testified before the Senate’s Church Committee two years later that Gottlieb:

    “…came to me and said that he was retiring and I was retiring and he thought it would be a good idea if these files were destroyed. And I also believe part of the reason for our thinking this was advisable was there had been relationships with outsiders in government agencies and other organizations and these would be sensitive in this kind of thing but that since the program was over and finished and done with, we thought we would just get rid of the files as well, so that anybody who assisted us in the past would not be subject to follow-up questions, embarrassment, if you will.”24

    Fortunately, 8,000 pages of mainly financial data escaped the CIA shredder, and were declassified pursuant to a Freedom of Information lawsuit in the 1970s filed by the Center for National Security Studies. Though woefully incomplete, these documents nevertheless became the bedrock of John Marks’ groundbreaking 1978 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control.25

    All branches of the military sponsored MC research in collaboration with the CIA.26 Most civilian subjects were unwitting; even CIA employees and Army recruits who consented to drug and hypnosis experiments were not properly informed as to their dangers. MKULTRA clearly violated the Nuremberg Code requirement that subjects give “informed consent” to participate in scientific research: “This means that the person involved should have the legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other form of constraint or coercion.” This Code was established in 1948 by the same U.S. Military Tribunal that tried 24 Nazi doctors for deadly experiments on concentration camp inmates. It was binding on the U.S. as of February 26, 1953.27

    How do we explain the hundreds of thousands of human guinea pigs callously sacrificed during the Cold War?28 As Paperclip researcher Linda Hunt concluded, “…we used Nazi science to kill our own people.”29 Perhaps survivor stories can help us understand what went wrong and why our secular democracy allows huge bureaucracies of unsupervised, supersecret warriors guided only by the cult-like religion of “national security” and the obsessive search for “enemies of the state.” The death of communism as a military threat has not dented the religious zeal that still inspires the military/intelligence establishment.

    James Stanley, a career soldier, suffered soul murder as an Army lab rat. He was given LSD in 1958 without being warned of its dangers, as were 1000 other “volunteer” soldiers. Stanley suffered hallucinations, memory loss, incoherence, and a negative personality change. Fits of uncontrollable violence destroyed his family, and restricted his ability to earn a living. And he never knew why until 1975, when the Army invited him to participate in a follow-up study on “volunteers who participated” in LSD testing. In United States vs. Stanley,30 the Supreme Court majority decided against Stanley’s claim for damages. However, Justices Brennan, Marshall and O’Connor dissented, asserting their belief that the Nuremberg Code’s standard of informed consent applies to soldiers as well as civilians. In 1996 James Stanley finally wrangled a $400,000 settlement from the government, but no apology for having ruined his life.31

    Unacknowledged civilian wreckage from unimaginably cruel brainwashing experiments continues to bob to the surface from a vast sea of still-classified, cold-war experiments. Survivors of ghoulish medical tortures or the families of deceased victims are turning up in Canadian and U.S. courtrooms today demanding compensation for a lifetime of suffering. Some Canadian plaintiffs appear to have a slight advantage over their U.S. cousins, who are severely hampered by the 1973 Helms/Gottlieb destruction of MKULTRA records. Fortunately for these survivors, paper trails are being unearthed in government, hospital and prison archives. The eminently freer Canadian press also helps build public support for MC survivors’ lawsuits.32

    Gail Kastner, now in her 60s, did not discover Ewen Cameron’s experiments were the cause of her “wasted life” until reading a newspaper story in the Montreal Gazette in 1992. She sued the Canadian government and Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital in 1999 after the government rejected her claim for damages. A “brilliant student whose domineering father checked her into the institute for depression,” Kastner says that Cameron’s electroconvulsive “depatterning” treatments and insulin-induced comas for five weeks at a time are responsible for a life of screaming nightmares, recurring seizures, loss of memory, and long-term regression to an infantile state. Her husband, son and twin sister could not tolerate her bizarre behavior, i.e. “wetting the living-room carpet, thumb-sucking, babytalk and wanting to be bottlefed.” Abandoned by her own family, she was rescued from homelessness by the Jewish Family Service.33

    During the era of Cameron’s brainwashing regimens, psychiatrists and psychologists in other Canadian institutions were using similar methods to “treat” people haphazardly diagnosed with depression, schizophrenia or, in prisons, what was perceived as “antisocial” conduct. Dorothy Proctor was a rebellious 17-year-old when she entered the Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario on a three-year term for robbery. Primed first with sensory deprivation and electroshock, she was administered LSD in 1961 by a prison psychologist, then locked into “The Hole” to endure what for her was “Dante’s Inferno.”

    Proctor, a Native and Black Canadian from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, calls this “mind rape.” She says she was singled out for such “Nazi-style science” because she had twice escaped from the prison, bringing unfavorable publicity to the authorities there. Proctor asserts that the steady prison diet of LSD and other experimental drugs led her down the path to drug addiction for 24 years. After publishing Chameleon: The Life of Dorothy Proctor in 1994, this articulate and determined woman launched a complaint with the Corrections Service of Canada (CSC), saying she suffered permanent brain damage and hallucinations haunting her to the present day.

    “I was reduced to a lab rat, a monkey in a cage,” she told the Ottawa Citizen (7/21/98), which has been covering the Proctor and other Canadian human experimentation cases for a number of years. A government inquiry turned up documentation (including clinical notes) that Proctor was not the only victim of involuntary prison experimentation 1960-1963. At least 23 other women prisoners were also used as human guinea pigs. Only four of these women have been found to date. And instead of complying with the CSC’s recommendation of an apology and financial compensation to Proctor, the Canadian government commissioned an “ethics study” at McGill University. Meanwhile Proctor hired lawyer James Newland and filed suit for $5 million in damages from the Canadian government, George Scott, MD, the prison psychiatrist, and Mark Eveson, a psychologist affiliated with Queen’s University.34

    While the emotional shock of The Sleep Room still electrified Canadian airways, the Ottawa Citizen published an expose drawn from interviews, archives, scientific journals and correspondence between doctors and prison officials. It found that hundreds of federal prisoners throughout Canada were used for pharmaceutical trials of untested drugs, sensory deprivation, and pain and electroshock studies. It uncovered a 1968 trial during which defendant Christine Bauman claimed that she suffered terrifying personality changes after being given LSD in 1961 at the Institute for Psychotherapy, not far from Kingston Prison where she had been incarcerated.35 Furthermore, archival materials released through the Proctor lawsuit indicate that some abuses may have begun as early as March 24, 1949, when a new electroshock machine arrived at Kingston Penitentiary. Electroshock has a history of being used as punishment in Nazi Germany and against Blacks in apartheid South Africa.36

    By late 1999, additional Canadian women and men came forward to claim they were used in prison and hospital experiments in the 1960s and 1970s. A class-action suit against the prison system was filed anonymously by “Jane Doe,” a 75-year-old grandmother who realized after reading newspaper stories that she was one of the 23 women who were given LSD and other terrifying “treatments” without their consent while in prison . Her lawsuit charges Scott and Eveson with assault, intentional affliction of mental suffering, and negligence. Her access to the Eveson’s clinical notes, released as a result of the Proctor suit, helped her recognize what had been done to her 38 years ago.37

    Less documented, however, are the connections of these prison experiments to U.S. mind-control funding sources. Canadian newspaper stories usually include the caveat that although prison use of LSD and “shock therapy” coincided with CIA “brainwashing” experiments at Allan Memorial Institute, no evidence has been found to link the programs. However, Allen Hornblum, author of Acres of Skin: The Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison, said on a 1998 CBC radio show that some of the experiments conducted in U.S. prisons during this era were sponsored by the U.S. Army and the CIA. And he pointed out that shortly after seven Nazi doctors were hung at Nuremberg for horrific experiments on inmates at Bergen Belsen, Auschwitz and Ravensbruk, U.S. doctors were injecting plutonium and uranium into unwitting hospital patients.38

    Activist Lynne Moss-Sharman does not rule out a hidden connection between the Canadian prison experiments and CIA/military brainwashing research. Moss-Sharman is the Canadian contact for ACHES-MC (Advocacy Committee for Human Experimentation Survivors – Mind Control), and is herself a survivor of brainwashing experimentation during her childhood.39 The Canadian military had a close relationship with Edgewood Arsenal during the years it funded MC experiments in hospitals and prisons.40

    Moss-Sharman has been organizing support for federal prisoner Richard Carlson, who filed a civil claim in October 1998. Carlson says his use in covert brainwashing experiments from 1968 to 1974 in several Kingston-area prisons caused a lifelong psychiatric disability. According to Moss-Sharman, the authorities retaliated against Carlson going public about the prison brainwashing experiments. They unsuccessfully tried to change his status to “dangerous offender,” which would have carried a mandatory life sentence for the bank robbery charge, which he is also appealing.

    Three people connected to Carlson have died under mysterious circumstances since he launched his brainwashing claim. They include Tony Vaitelis, the second male inmate to make claims similar to Carlson’s, an unnamed former hospital orderly and potential witness to prison brainwashing, and Carlson’s 30-year-old son. Moss-Sharman says Carlson is dangerous to Correctional Services Canada because he can name the inmates who died during the prison experiments and can describe what happened in the experimental units.41

    “Insulin shock therapy” was frequently used on Ewen Cameron’s patients at Allan Memorial. In 1999 the widow of Yuan Woo (Jean-Paul Martineau), a former Royal Canadian Air Force radar technician, went public with the story of how her deceased husband had been the unwitting subject of “insulin shock therapy” experiments in Queen Mary’s Veterans Hospital in 1953. Martineau curiously changed his name to “Juan Woo” after being discharged. As a result of medical mistreatment, Ms. Woo says, her husband developed such a morbid fear of physicians, he postponed going to the doctor until he was near death from cancer in 1996.42

    In the U.S., MC survivors and their families are hard-pressed to secure files documenting their claims, if indeed such records escaped the shredder years ago. Since 1985 all litigants have been hampered by C.I.A. vs. Sims,43 a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that undergirds the CIA’s refusal to name its contract institutions and individual researchers on grounds of “national security.”44 Only 59 CIA/military contract institutions and a handful of researchers consented to be publicly named in the 1970s when the MKULTRA program was exposed.

    The most well-publicized U.S. victim of the MKULTRA experiments is Frank Olson, a biochemist who worked at the Army Chemical Corps’ Special Operations Division at Ft. Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. On November 18, 1953, Olson was given a drink of Cointreau secretly laced with LSD. He immediately became agitated and severely paranoid, a condition that lasted for days. Olson was said to have committed suicide nine days later by jumping 13-stories to his death through the closed window of a New York hotel. Members of his family did not learn he had been drugged until 1975 when the MKULTRA behavior-control program was exposed. They later received an apology from President Gerald Ford and a $750,000 settlement.

    However, after studying documents declassified in later years, Eric Olson believed his father may have been pushed out the window. He had the body exhumed in 1994. A group of private forensic researchers announced on the 41th anniversary of Olson’s death that both forensic and other evidence were “starkly suggestive of homicide.”45 A second skull fracture (missed in the initial autopsy) means Olson may have been hit on the head before his body went through the window. Also the lack of cuts on Olson’s body would appear to rule out the official CIA story of his “suicide.”46 Armond Pastore, the hotel night manager who kneeled beside the dying Olson back in 1953, said, “I never heard of anybody jumping through a closed window with the blind down.”47 Last year a New York grand jury was looking at this new evidence.48

    The first CIA brainwashing case to go before a jury took place in 1999. I learned about this civil trial through two articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer.49 This civil trial centered on the tragic life of up-and-coming artist Stanley Glickman, who says that in 1952 in a Paris cafe, MKULTRA czar Sidney Gottlieb had brought him a drink laced with LSD. Gottlieb denied doing this, despite admitting he had spiked the drinks of other unsuspecting people in the 1950s. Glickman suffered a psychological breakdown from which he never recovered. After collapsing he was rushed to American Hospital where he claimed doctors there administered electroshock therapy “via a catheter up his penis” as well as more hallucinogenic drugs.50

    After learning about the CIA’s LSD experiments on unwitting subjects in the 1970s, Glickman sued in 1983. His identification of Gottlieb was based on remembering that the strange man in the bar had a club foot. Using the same delay-and-attrition tactics heaped on the nine elderly Canadians in Orlikow, the CIA was able to delay the trial for 16 years. Glickman died in 1992 but his sister Gloria Kronisch continued the lawsuit. Dominick L. DiCarlo, a conservative chief judge “on loan” from the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York City, presided.

    What happened next will some day be the stuff of high drama in a Sleep Room-type teleplay exposing the CIA’s 50-year history of crimes against humanity. Finally being called to account in a courtroom for overseeing a quarter-century of U.S.-style Nazi science, Gottlieb becomes ill, causing postponement of the February trial. On the eve of the March date, he unexpectedly dies. Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times obituaries report that the Gottlieb family refuses to disclose the cause of his death. The online WorldNet Daily, however, reports that Gottlieb, 80, died after a “month-long bout with pneumonia.” According to this story, he was admitted to the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesburg on February 14, and “lapsed into a coma” on March 5 “from which he never recovered.”51

    Are we overly paranoid to suspect the CIA of foul play here? Did life boomerang on the aged Dr. Strangelove? Was this enthusiastic harvester of exotic poisons and inventor of bizarre assassination delivery systems somehow silenced by same to prevent his spilling the CIA’s dirty secrets in a court of law?52

    Anyway, the trial goes forward in late March, with the Glickman estate suing the Gottlieb estate (the claims against Helms and the CIA had been thrown out). As the lawyers near their final summations, Judge DiCarlo, 71, suddenly drops dead of a heart attack while exercising in a federal gym located next to the court. His New York Times obituary makes no mention of the controversial CIA trial (nor does the Times even cover the trial).53 However, the New York Daily News, with more guts and pizzazz, reports that DiCarlo’s death “created a surreal scene as paramedics and a priest called to give last rites mingled with jurors preparing to decide one of the strangest cases being heard in the city.”54 Goosebumps and paranoia strike again. Was this Reagan-appointed judge a victim of the CIA’s long-rumored, untraceable method of inducing heart attacks? Or was it the stress of a CIA trial that killed him?

    Almost on cue, Federal Judge Kimba Wood was assigned to take DiCarlo’s place, a move prejudicial to the plaintiff since she had thrown out this case in 1997. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuit in 1998.55 After closing arguments, the jury deliberated for seven hours before ruling against the Glickman estate.

    But the evidence of foul play goes way beyond the spiking of Glickman’s drink. His Paris hospital records show that two of his doctors had been engaged in LSD research at the time. Also, CIA files from 1952 reveal a special interest in the heightened effect of LSD on people with hepatitis. One of Glickman’s American Hospital doctors had previously treated him for hepatitis, making this once-promising young artist “the ideal guinea pig.”56

    I would like to thank Lynne Moss-Sharman, Kathy Kasten, Eleanor White and Blanche Chavoustie for providing news articles and other research materials for this series.

    Endnotes

    1. 682 F. Supp. 77, 94 (D.C. 1988) (Civ. No. 80-3153). For a summary of the federal court cases cited in this article , see “The Law and Mind Control: A Look at the Law and Government Mind Control Through Five Cases”” by Attorney Helen McGonigle (http://members.aol.com/smartnews/fivecases.htm)

    2. Survivor testimonies, however, can be found on the Internet: (http://morethanconquerors.simplenet.com/MCF/)

    3. MacLean’s, 4/21/97 (p. A3) and 1/12/98 (P. 66); The Gazette (Montreal), 3/13/97 (p. A3) and 1/11/98 (p. C9); Toronto Star, 1/10/98 (p. SW10) and 1/11/98 (p. B7); Toronto Sun, 1/11/98 (TV 3); Ottawa Citizen, 1/10/98 (p. H4); CBC broadcast, “Fifth Estate,” 1/6/98

    4. For a history of Orlikow, see “Anatomy of a Public Interest Case Against the CIA,” by Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. and James C. Turner, Hamline Journal of Public Law and Policy, Vol. II (2), Fall 1990. (http://www.radix.net/~jcturner/anat-tofc.html)

    5. Collins, In the Sleep Room (Key Porter Books, 1998), pp. 94, 101-104.

    6. Joe Rauh’s lifelong history of defending victims of government abuse was postumously rewarded in 1994 when President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rauh had died in 1992, the Canadian case against the CIA having been his last hurrah.

    7. Rauh and Turner, op. cit.

    8. A videotape of the ACHRE hearing is available from Missoulians for a Clean Environment, P.O. Box 2885, Missoula, MT 59806 (Phone: 406-543-7210). A transcript is posted at http://morethanconquerers.simplenet.com/MCF/ckln07.htm. Tape 14: “Giving testimony regarding survival as a government mind-control victim: My testimony and the backlash,” Mullen’s presentation to the 1997 Believe the Children (BTC) Conference can be ordered from BTC Repeat Performance, 2911 Crabapple Lane, Hobart, IN 46342. This tape also includes the BTC presentation by therapist Valerie Wolf, BCSW, ACSW, BCD, “Assessment and treatment of survivors of sadistic abuse.”

    9. Rappaport, Jon, Mind Control Experiments on Children, self-published book containing the supporting documentation produced by legal and medical professionals for the 1995 ACHRE hearings. (http://home.earthlink.net/~alto/index.html)

    10. Final Report of President’s Commission on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), 1996 (http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ohre/roadmap/achre/index.html)

    11. ACHRE Report, ibid., Chapter 10.

    12. Barrett v. U.S., 660 F.Supp. 1291 (S.D.N.Y. 1987). See Hunt, op. cit., pp. 170, 235 for details on the Blauer case.

    13 Lifton, R.J., The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books, 1986), pp. 289-290.

    14 See generally, Hunt, L., Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

    15 “Wonder Weapons: the Pentagon’s quest for nonlethal arms is amazing. But is it smart?” U.S. News and World Report, July 7, 1997.

    16 Ross, Colin, “The CIA and Military Mind Control Research: Building the Manchurian Candidate.” A lecture given at the 9th Annual Western Clinical Conference on Trauma and Dissociation, April 18, 1996, Orange County, California. Transcript and/or audiotape can be ordered from CKLN-FM, 380 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5B 1W7 (phone 416-595-1477; fax 416-595-0226). Transcript is posted at http://morethanconquerers.simplenet.com/MCF/ckln01.htm.

    17. Russell, D. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Carroll & Graf, 1992), pp. 673-674.

    18. Ross, op. cit. See also George H. Estabrooks, PhD, “Hypnosis comes of age,” Science Digest, April 1971, pp. 44-50.

    19. Russell, Dick, op. cit., pp. 193-194. According to historians Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare (Indiana University Press, 1999), the U.S. did use germ weapons in Korea.

    20. Scheflin, A. & Opton, Jr., E.M., The Mind Manipulators. (Paddington Press, 1978), p. 107.

    21. Secret report to the Eisenhower White House, quoted in Hunt, Linda, op. cit., p. 263.

    22. “C.I.A. Documents Tell of 1954 Project to Create Involuntary Assassins,” New York Times, February 9, 1978, p. 17.

    23. New York Times, August 2, 1977, pp. 1, 16.

    24. Foreign and Military Intelligence, Book I, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities [the “Church Committee” report], U.S. Senate (April 26, 1976), pp. 403-404. Quoted in Russell, op. cit. p. 775 (Note 12).

    25 Online version of Marks’ book: http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm

    25. Ross, op. cit.

    27. Orlikow, op. cit., at 82.

    28 Sea, G., “The Radiation Story No One Would Touch,” Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1994 (http://www.cjr.org/year/94/2/radiation.asp)

    29. Hunt, op. cit., p. 268.

    30. 483 U.S. 669 (1987)

    31. March 6, 1996 article provided by Lynne Moss-Sharman (newspaper not identified)

    32. Some examples from the Ottawa Citizen: “Debate over prison experimentation emerges from shadows,” 9/28/98; “Minister demands answers on prison experiments: Solicitor general upset by Citizen account of inmates used as guinea pigs,” 10/1/98; “LSD trials on inmates ‘unethical’: Ignore proposal for compensation, McGill study says,” 10/31/98; “Military tested LSD on civilians: Canada funded Cold War probe into mind control,” 12/7/98. From CBC Radio, “Secret experiments on Canada’s convicts,” 11/9/98. From the Toronto Star: “Prisoners used for ‘frightening’ tests, new papers show,” 12/18/99.

    33. CBC Montreal (Ivan Slobod), 1/5/00; “Woman suing over CIA experiments,” Globe and Mail, 1/6/00; ‘Hell for my family,’ Montreal Gazette, 1/11/00; “Shock treatment victim supports suit,” The Daily Miner (Kenora), 1/21/00.

    34. CKLN Radio (Toronto) “Shrinkrap” interviews Dorothy Proctor and lawyer James Newland, August 1998; “Inmates subdued with drugs, shock therapy, report says,” Globe and Mail, 10/31/98; Ottawa Citizen: “Burden of proof on LSD inmates: Government won’t compensate women without more proof that tests caused harm,” 2/3/98; “LSD tested on female prisoners,” 2/28/98; “The case for prison’s LSD tests,” 3/1/98; “Pay LSD victims: Reform (Party): Law and Order Party calls experiments on inmates ‘sickening’,” 3/2/98; “Privacy an issue in LSD probe,” 3/20/98; “LSD experiments ‘good research back then’,” 7/10/98; “MPs demand inquiry into prison tests,” 9/29/98; “Minister demands answers on Citizen account of inmates used as guinea pigs,” 10/1/98; “Scott stalling LSD report, critics charge,” 10/15/98; “LSD trials on inmates ‘unethical’,” 10/31/98); “Government accused of withholding files on prison LSD testing,” 12/8/99;

    35. ” ‘I was in a very bad state’- LSD guinea pig says form inmate underwent dramatic personality changes,” Ottawa Citizen, 9/26/98.

    36. Eastgate, J., “The Case Against Electroshock Treatment,” USA Today (Magazine), November 1998, p. 28.

    37. “75-year-old guinea pig wants to sue,” Ottawa Citizen, 12/9/99.

    38. “This Morning,” CBC Radio, Nov. 9, 1998. Interviewers: Avril Benoit and Rosie Rowbotham.

    39. In a 1997 interview on CKLN radio, Moss-Sharman recounts her own nightmare as a child victim of CIA/military brainwashing experiments. (http://morethanconquerers.simplenet.com/MCF/ckln16.htm). Also see “Mind Games: Another woman comes forward to claim the CIA used her as a guinea pig in hideous experiments,” Ottawa Citizen, 9/13/97 (posted at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~alb/misc/ ottawaMindControl.html)

    40. “Military tested LSD on civilians: Canada funded Cold War probe into mind control,” Ottawa Citizen, 12/7/98.

    41. Chronical Journal (Thunder Bay, Ontario): “Carlson gets access to prison file,” 5/1/99; “Carlson case adjourns,” 10/27/99; “Convicted bank robber Carlson launches appeal bid,” 2/2/00. Two letters to the Canadian Human Rights Commission re: Carlson (11/9/99 from Moss-Sharman and 12/30/99 from Patty Rehn, U.S. contact for ACHES-MC) are available from the author upon request.

    42. ” ‘The nightmares are real’: Widow blames military for man’s suffering,” Ottawa Citizen, 10/11/99; “Was Canuck in CIA experiments? Widow wants to know why hubby suffered,” Sun Media, 10/12/99.

    43. C.I.A. vs. Sims., 471 U.S. 159, 85 L.Ed.2d, 105 S.Ct. 1881 (1985).

    44. A revealing account of the difficulties U.S. citizens encounter in making claims against the government can be found in Budiansky, Goode, Gast, “The Cold War Experiments,” U.S. News and World Report, January 24, 1994.

    45. Philadelphia Inquirer, November 29, 1994, B6.

    46. Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1994, A4

    47. The Independent (London), June 4, 1994, p. 8.

    48. Baker, R., “Conspiracy: In 1952, Stanley Glickman was a promising young painter studying in Paris. Then one night he shared a drink with some fellow Americans, and his life fell apart. Did the CIA spike his drink with LSD? The Observer (Guardian Newspapers Ltd.), February 14, 1999.

    49. “Case against CIA that began with ’52 encounter winds down,” 4/30/99, and “Jury rejects suit alleging ’52 drugging,” 5/1/99.

    50. Baker, op. cit.

    51. New York Times, 3/10/99 and Los Angeles Times, 4/4/99. See http://www.sightings.com/ufo2/ gottlieb.htm for the 3/11/99 WorldNet Daily obituary.

    52. Regarding Gottlieb’s bizarre plans to assassinate Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, see Impact International, April 1999 (http://www.africa2000.com/IMPACT/gottlieb.jpg)

    53. “Judge Dominick L. DiCarlo, 71, Narcotics Fighter Under Reagan,” New York Times, 4/30/99, C21. A 3/10/99 Gottlieb obituary written by Tim Weiner also makes no mention of the Glickman trial.

    54. Daily News, April 28, 1999, p. 2.

    55. Kronisch v. U.S., 150 F.3d 112 (2d Cir. 1988). Posted on New Jersey Law Journal website: http://www.nylj.com/nyljcontent/072298dd.htm.

    56. Baker, op. cit.

  • Nelson, Hall and Graff: The Review Board’s Public Comments

    From the January-February, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 2) of Probe

    Although Probe has attempted to keep its readers informed of the actions of the Review Board, it has been awhile – Vols. 1 & 2 to be exact – since we chronicled some of the comments made for public consumption by the Board members. In 1995 and 1996, enough has seeped into the record for us to issue another report on this important aspect of the Board’s public function.

    At the recent Review Board hearing held in Los Angeles, there was an interesting colloquy between Eric Hamburg and Board member Anna Kasten Nelson. Before commenting on this interesting aside, let us review how both people came to be involved in this hearing. As no less than Kermit Hall has stated, the ARRB is a direct result of Oliver Stone’s 1992 film JFK. At the time of the film, Hamburg was working as a Democratic staff member on Capitol Hill. One of the last things he did was to work on the completion of the 1992 JFK Act, which George Bush originally agreed to and then had second thoughts about. Bush sandbagged the process by not appointing a Review Board. When Clinton took over, the Board apparently was not a top priority with him. He waited until September of 1993 to appoint a Board which was not sworn in until April of 1994. The law stated that Clinton’s choices had to be considered from lists recommended by the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the Society of American Archivists, and the American Bar Association. It is important to note that although Clinton was supposed to consider appointments form these lists, he was not bound by them completely. For instance, Henry Graff (about whom we will comment shortly) was not on any of the lists. Stone submitted a list to the Chief Executive that was totally ignored in the selection process. Nelson was chosen from a list compiled by the ABA, as was Chairman John Tunheim. Since the creation of the Review Board, Hamburg has left Washington to become, first an attorney for Stone and then the co-producer of Nixon and editor of the book that accompanied the film. Nelson is an occasional contributor to the periodical Chronicle of Higher Education. In the uproar that ensued over the release of Stone’s film, Nelson wrote an article for that publication entitled “Open the Nixon Papers”. Much of the piece is fine and well-intentioned. She basically chronicles the disputes over the collection of Nixon’s papers that have not been made available to the public and pleads the case for full disclosure.

    But in her opening two paragraphs, Ms. Nelson seemed to join in the reflexive, and as we shall see, uncalled for mugging of Stone and his film. Let us consider some of her comments. She first states that “Stone’s version” of Nixon is a “paranoid, foul-mouthed alcoholic”. By labeling this portrait as “Stone’s version”, she implies that Stone took liberties with the record to create this portrayal. This is not so. To call Nixon “paranoid” is fully justified in almost any sense of that word. Nixon called himself a “basket case” over leaks in the White House. This is, of course, what led to the creation of the so-called “plumbers”. In recently declassified tapes, the Los Angeles Times (12/8/96) has shown that Nixon pushed for tax audits of wealthy Jewish contributors to his Democratic rivals in preparation for the 1972 election. Another reveals his participation in the planned but not executed plot to firebomb the Brookings Institute in order to get files on the authors of the Pentagon Papers. As for Nixon’s drinking, this was revealed in Ehrlichman’s Witness to Power back in 1982. What Stone implies is that the drinking was intensified under the pressure of the Watergate scandal. This is backed up completely by the release of the tape of Nixon’s call to Bob Haldeman after his April 30, 1973 speech in which Nixon announced both his and Ehrlichman’s resignations. The first line of the story in the L.A. Times (11/30/96) analyzing this tape reads: “The president seemed to be sloshed”. Later the story states, “It was plain from his slurred syllables that he’d been drinking.”

    In the same paragraph, Nelson writes that “Stone wears the mantle of the historian in this movie”. This is not so. The first frame of the film reads as follows, “This film is a dramatic interpretation of events and characters based on public sources and an incomplete historical record. Some scenes and events are presented as composites or have been hypothesized or condensed.” At the end of the film, Stone’s voice-over makes the same complaint that Nelson does in the body of her piece, namely that the historical record is incomplete since very few of the Watergate tapes have been declassified. We should add here, that the debate over this film, as with JFK, helped in that process.

    Nelson also repeats a charge that many in the media unleashed at the time, when she talks about “Mr. Stone’s obsession with the idea that a government conspiracy linked Nixon to the Kennedy assassination.” Let us examine this charge as it relates to the completed film that Nelson saw. The viewer will note that at about 47 minutes into the film, Nixon is in Dallas the day before the assassination. This is a matter of historical record. At the gathering that follows, with Nixon’s political plans being discussed, there is a hint that the wealthy people there know what will happen the next day. There is no hint that Nixon knows. About two hours and twenty minutes into the film, there is a quick scene in which Haldeman and Ehrlichman discuss this “Bay of Pigs” thing that Nixon has brought up. Haldeman offers to explain it by saying that it is an encoded reference to the fact that “We went after Castro and in some crazy way it got turned back on Kennedy.” Note that this is Haldeman speaking and not Nixon. Haldeman’s words in the film are completely backed up by his passage in The Ends of Power (pp.37-40) where he discusses this idea in depth. About 18 minutes after this, Nixon is listening to a tape in which the CIA’s Castro assassination plots are being discussed. On tape, he says “Those guys went after Castro 7-10 times.” Then, in replaying the tape, he hears the words “Whoever killed Kennedy came from this thing…” This is the only clear reference to what Nelson is inferring. But the whole point of this scene is to show that Nixon, about to resign under threat of sure impeachment, is mentally deteriorating, almost delusional. This is indicated by his seeing the ghost of his mother twice in the room, and his shouting, “Go away!” Then he talks back to the tape and says, “I never said this stuff.” Stone also inserts subliminal shots, of his brother dying for example, that are run in reverse to indicate Nixon’s instability at this moment. To say that Nixon was not a divided man at this time, that his basic insecurity – which even Haldeman notes in his book – was not magnified under pressure is, I think, illogical. But for those who need proof, on another recently released tape from May 1, 1973 (Newsday 11/19/96) Nixon is heard to be seriously contemplating resigning but is talked back into staying by Alexander Haig. This is one year before he actually quit. Again, Stone was on solid ground with both the portrayal of Nixon and Haig.

    To be fair to Nelson, in the last 20 years of his life Nixon relentlessly attempted to rehabilitate his public image. After initially resisting, the media, and a large part of the public acquiesced in that campaign. This included a series of gassy and fatuous books like The Real War, The Real Peace, and Leaders, which no matter how unenlightening, sold well with the public. By the time of his death in 1994, it had succeeded to such an extent that even Bill Clinton, who worked for McGovern in 1972, spoke rather glowingly at his funeral. But in our view, there was enough in Nixon’s career before 1960 to mark him as a complete opportunist, a firm believer in polarization, and a man without enough principle to rein in his large dark side. So the 20 years of rehab didn’t take with us.

    The year before Nelson’s remarks appeared, Kermit Hall spoke for the record in Ohio State Alumni Magazine, of March 1995. Apparently, Hall’s view of the assassination had modified very little since his March 1994 remarks to Randy Krehbiel in the Tulsa World. Hall does give Stone credit for the JFK Act by saying that the law might as well have been called the Oliver Stone Law. He also adds that the Board’s mission is to make the record as full as possible, thereby giving it credibility. But he also adds comments like “Americans have a penchant for conspiracy.” He goes after the Kennedys by saying they were “playing fast and loose” with foreign governments, and that “They were engaged in doing things out of hubris.” This, of course, paves the way for him to postulate that because of the CIA’s efforts to get rid of Castro, Oswald may have seen himself as helping Fidel by killing JFK. (Interestingly, this is along the lines of what Haldeman outlines in his book in the aforementioned passage.) He furthers this argument by adding that if the government had been more open about Operation MONGOOSE, people would have had a better understanding of the assassination long ago.

    Hall goes on to give a false presentation of what the polls have said about the public’s belief in the lone gunman theory. He implies that it was Stone’s film that turned the tide in favor of a conspiracy. The tide had turned long before Stone’s film. But he adds, “I think we’re at the end of the age of secrets.” He says that the Freedom of Information Act and the ARRB will allow greater disclosure and therefore better government. He also states that the lone gunman theory is “satisfactory”.

    In the current edition of Penthouse (January 1997), Nelson, William Joyce, and Henry Graff all get on the record. In a long article by John Wallach these three plus numerous unnamed sources inside the ARRB give comments for the record about the progress of the ARRB. Much of the gist, or spin of the piece can be summed up in a quote by Nelson:

    The sense you get in reading all of these documents is that the CIA and FBI were primarily concerned with covering up other kinds of operations. Hoover helped damage the credibility of the Warren Commission to protect these operations and their [the FBI’s] general modus vivendi when the CIA and FBI operated together. It was part of the Cold War culture.

    Wallach himself says early on:

    The major reason for the cover-up was to protect the FBI’s own clandestine connections to potential suspects in the Kennedy assassination who were involved in plots to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

    Again, these comments remind the reader of Bob Haldeman. They also remind us of the articles written by Walter Pincus and George Lardner in the Washington Post, and Newsweek, at the time of the 30th anniversary in 1993 that basically tried to say that Oswald’s links to Cuba and Russia may have set off a holocaust in the context of the Cold War climate. This theme is underscored by a penultimate comment by Graff:

    I have found nothing to suggest there was anything but a single gunman. What put him up to it and whether this was just one of those random acts of history, I don’t think we’ll ever know.

    Wallach didn’t ask Nelson or Graff why, if the FBI tried to cover up something, does the FBI autopsy report show that the bullet that hit Kennedy in the back – not the neck – didn’t penetrate? This fact so puzzled FBI agent James Sibert that at the time of the autopsy, he called FBI HQ to ask if these bullets were “fragmenting” type bullets (Harold Weisberg, Never Again p. 485) Why did the Warren Commission, which relied on those reports, change that finding in order to create the single-bullet theory? One may also ask, as Lisa Pease shows elsewhere (p. 27), if Oswald was a KGB or Cuban agent, why did he have a CIA file in James Angleton’s mole-hunting unit at the time of his defection to Russia? Why was the file classified “restricted” and why are there indications that the date it was opened was misleading? (See John Newman Oswald and the CIA pp. 48-51, 57-59). These hard questions go to the heart of the patent assumptions made in this article.

    We still back the ARRB. We also understand from our sources there that Kermit Hall is one of the most vociferous voices for full disclosure on the Board. We should also note that Anna Kasten Nelson wrote a good article for Chronicle of Higher Education in March of 1995, asking for further openness on the part of the CIA and more participation in that process by people other than intelligence community alumni. But as Eric Hamburg appropriately noted to Judge Tunheim, there are strictures that one should follow when one is sitting in judgment of a proceeding case so as not to indicate one’s bias. But there is also something else the members should consider. If, after disclosing all these documents and in their official garb, they make these pronouncements to the public, the underlying message is that they have read all these secret documents and it doesn’t matter. Oswald still did it. As we have noted above, that judgment does not fit the facts, or their own experience. As one familiar with the process knows, thousands of pages of documents have been declassified without Board review, i.e. voluntarily. We doubt very much that the Board has read all of these pages. Finally, Probe knows that at least some of the ARRB staff, as opposed to the Board itself, do not share their views. The ones who have voiced opinions, always off the record, are unanimous in thinking that the official versions are fiction.

    We hope the Board, like its much less lucratively paid staff, will exercise more professional discretion in the future. That can only help their standing in the research community’s mind after the Board’s mission is completed. It is that community which will be writing in judgment about the Board’s performance – and public utterances – long after the Board is gone.

    ~ Jim DiEugenio