Tag: FORENSIC EVIDENCE

Part 7

Part 5

Part 4

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

How The History Channel Did Not Track Oswald

The series “JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald”1 has revealed itself to be a deception, one almost as blatant as the magic bullet, conducted not in six seconds, but over six episodes:

• “The Iron Meeting” that never happened in Mexico City, since …
• “The Russian Network” immediately wrote Oswald off as a nut job;
• “Oswald Goes Dark” in New Orleans—after displaying his pro Castro activism in broad daylight on the streets and even on the radio—to establish …
• “The Cuban Connection” with Alpha 66—a virulent paramilitary group of Cuban exiles organized and backed by the CIA—for the common purpose of killing Kennedy;
• “The Scene of the Crime” is mounted upon junk-science tests aimed at fixing Oswald as the lone gunman, and a far-fetched escape route for cooking up evidence about alleged Castroite Oswald being helped by anti-Castroite Alpha 66; and finally …
• “The Truth” reached by former CIA case officer Bob Baer is just an old CIA deceit about Castro’s foreknowledge of Oswald’s criminal intent.

An Overview of Baer’s First Four Installments

Before commenting on the last episode, let us revisit some of the earlier segments, in order to accent both what was in them and what was missing.

The first episode, about Oswald in Mexico City, was largely based upon a dubious book arranged by American journalist Brian Litman while he was living in Moscow in the late eighties. Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko’s Passport to Assassination seemed designed to counter two sources. First, what CIA officer David Phillips said in a debate with Mark Lane, namely, that when all the records were in, there would be no evidence Oswald was at the Russian consulate. (See Plausible Denial, p. 82) Second, what the Lopez Report describes: namely, that the CIA could provide no tapes or pictures of Oswald at either the Russian or Cuban consulates. The Litman/Nechiporenko book said Oswald was at the Russian consulate anyway. And even more made to order, the portrait it drew of Oswald was one of an unstable, almost suicidal character who fears the FBI is hunting him down. Which, as we know, is contradictory to the actual Oswald who, even under arrest for murder in Dallas, was a pretty cool customer. The Litman/Nechiporenko creation is much more in line with the Warren Commission’s sociopathic portrait. Baer never notes this discrepancy.

What is even worse, in part 2, Baer tells the audience that before he met with the colonel, he had no idea what Nechiporenko knew about Oswald. Are we to buy the concept that Baer never heard of his book? Are we supposed to believe the note of surprise in Baer’s voice when the colonel tells him he met with Oswald in Mexico City? That book was published in 1993, well over twenty years ago. So when, after speaking with the colonel, Baer says, “This puts the case in a whole new light”, what on earth is he talking about? And who does he think he is kidding? Certainly not anyone who knows something about the JFK case.

But further, in his usual portentous tones, Baer constantly compares Oswald meeting with Russian KGB agents in 1963 to someone meeting with ISIS today. As if ISIS had embassies that people can walk into and request information about visa applications. Again, this is so exaggerated as to be ludicrous. When did the KGB ever perform executions on camera? The spy wars back then were more sophisticated, more assiduous and cerebral in their planning and objectives than the war with terror today. That is one reason why it was called the Cold War.

Let us describe another crevice in Baer’s early presentation. One of the very few documents Baer shows the audience which actually was declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board was a transcript of a call between President Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In it, LBJ asks for information about Oswald in Mexico City. The call was made on the morning of November 23^rd. Baer does not tell the audience that, as Rex Bradford discovered, there is no tape recording of this call, we only have a transcript. But he also does not tell his viewers that right after LBJ asked for more information, Hoover told the president that the audio tape and the picture they have of Oswald did not correspond to the man the FBI was interrogating in Dallas. In other words, the guy the CIA says was in Mexico City is not the man electronically captured by the CIA surveillance devices. (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 80) Are we to believe that Baer read that transcript but missed that crucial piece of information? Or if he did not, he thought that it somehow was not important?

Let us mention another less-than-candid practice of “Tracking Oswald”. Time after time, Baer intones that he has studied the JFK case for ten years and read the entire 2 million page declassified record of the Assassination Records Review Board. In fact, he (unconvincingly) tries to insinuate that he has scanned the two million pages into his own personal database. Yet, if that were so, why does he show us pages printed from the Warren Commission Report as being redacted? Which they are not. He does this more than once, at least three times. Is he trying to present old, mildewed information as somehow spankingly brand new?

After speaking with Oleg Nechiporenko, Baer decides that his idea from Part 1, that somehow Oswald met with KGB agents in Mexico City in 1963 and they plotted to kill President Kennedy is faulty. Yet the original evidence he based this on was flawed to begin with. Baer said that the FBI got hold of some postcards that Oswald allegedly purchased in Mexico City. One of them depicted a bullfight. Therefore, Baer deduced that Oswald met some KGB agents at a bullfight and planned the killing of JFK. No joke.

The idea that if you buy a postcard with a bullfight on it, then you went to a bullfight is not logically sound. Tourists buy all kinds of postcards in foreign countries concerning places they do not actually go to. It is true that Marina Oswald said that her husband told her that he went to a bullfight in Mexico City. (WR, p. 735) But this is in direct contradiction to the fact that she had previously denied he was in Mexico City to the Secret Service during their first interview. And she denied it twice. (Secret Service report of Charles Kunkel from 11/24-11/30)

Contrary to what the program asserts, the evidence of Oswald in Mexico City—a Spanish-English dictionary, blank postcards, etc.—was not immediately seized and turned over to the FBI. And contrary to what Baer says, the Russians did not give him the postcard in evidence. These pieces of evidence—including the postcards—were adduced into the record a week after the assassination by Marina Oswald’s companion Ruth Paine. (Reclaiming Parkland, by James DiEugenio, p. 344) That Baer relies so much on these postcards without telling the viewer about their provenance tells us a lot about both his honesty and his knowledge base. Or perhaps both. Because the truth is that the Warren Commission had a hard time placing Oswald in Mexico City. Months later, in August, Priscilla Johnson, who replaced Ruth Paine as Marina’s companion, was still surfacing evidence about Oswald’s bus rides in Mexico City. This drove Warren Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler up the wall. (ibid)

Baer also makes much play about Soviet diplomat Valery Kostikov meeting with Oswald at the Russian consulate in Mexico City. At the end of Part One, he tries to proffer it as evidence that hardly anyone ever knew about. If Baer really believes that, then he did not read the Warren Report, because Kostikov’s name appears there on page 734. And he is named as a KGB agent on that same page. In other words, it was open to the public back in 1964.

Once the KGB colonel tells him the Russians had no espionage interest in Oswald, Baer drops that line of inquiry. He now goes back to Mexico City and “discovers” the name of Sylvia Duran in his two million page declassified database. Again, he somehow sounds surprised when he finds the name of Sylvia Duran in there, even though, as anyone could have told him—except perhaps his staff—her name is also in the Warren Report. (See p. 734) And again, he continues in his shocked syndrome with, “This file completely changes the course of this investigation.” Who does Bob think Oswald talked to in the Cuban consulate, Che Guevara? Again, Baer is seemingly stunned when he finds out the Warren Commission did not talk to Duran. Which again shows his lack of knowledge of the real declassified record. The ARRB declassified the Commission’s Slawson/Coleman report in the Nineties. It was very clear from this Mexico City trip report of the Warren Commission that the CIA and FBI kept those two men on a short leash. By never referring to it, Baer escapes this question: Why did the Bureau and the Agency firmly regulate what Commission lawyers David Slawson and Bill Coleman saw and read? And why did the Commission not demand more freedom and access?

Ultimately, what can one say about a program called “Tracking Oswald” that never mentions or details the following names: Ruth and Michael Paine, George Bouhe, George DeMohrenschildt, David Ferrie, Guy Banister, Clay Shaw, or Kerry Thornley? These people largely controlled the last 17 months of Oswald’s life after his return from Russia. The first four did so in the Dallas/Fort Worth area; the second quartet in New Orleans. If you never examine any of those persons then how are you tracking Oswald? And contrary to what Baer says about his (ersatz) access to the ARRB declassified files, there have been many pages released about those people. And there are still pages that will be released on them in October of this year.

Baer’s presentation is so restricted, so empty, and at the same time his approach is so hammily bombastic, that it leads an informed viewer to suspect an agenda. That agenda is to make believe he has consumed 2 million pages of documents for the viewer. Then to present virtually nothing from those pages. After performing this shell game, he tells his audience: Hey, I saw them, and guess what? Oswald still did it.

Sure Bob, sure.

The Final Chapter

The title for the final episode conceals the fact that Baer’s conclusion—Castro knew it—has been drawn from two false premises: (1) Oswald was the lone gunman who killed Kennedy firing both a magic bullet and a fatal shot to the head; (2) Oswald was openly telling his criminal intention to members of Alpha 66, which was riddled with agents of the Cuban Intelligence Service (CuIS) who reported back to Castro.

Since Baer refuses to explain how CuIS moles would have known much more about Oswald than the CIA officers and agents working closely with Alpha 66 since its inception in 1962, let’s make a clean break with his conspiracy theory. There is no shred of evidence refuting Castro’s statement about Oswald during his Radio/TV appearance in Havana the day after the assassination:2 “We never in our life heard of the existence of this person.”

An Apocryphal Story as Baer’s Cornerstone

Shortly before airing the series, Baer revealed to Time magazine staffer Olivia B. Waxman:3 “What really got me into it was meeting a defector from Cuba and one of the best agents the CIA has ever had. He said that on the 22nd of November 1963, four hours before the assassination, he was at an intelligence site in Havana when he got a call from Castro’s office, saying, ‘Turn all of your listening ability to high frequency communications out of Dallas because something’s going to happen there.’”

In front of the camera Baer provides a second-hand version of this story by CuIS defector Enrique García, who affirmed that another CuIS defector, Florentino Aspillaga, had told him such a story. The latter had also given it as an anecdote à la carte for the book Castro’s Secrets (Macmillan, 2012, 2013),4 written by former CIA desk analyst Dr. Brian Latell.

Together with Aspillaga and Latell, García and Baer end up forming a crew who carry the banner “Castro knew Kennedy would be killed.” It’s silly that Castro would have resorted to a radio counterintelligence prodigy or any other means of electronic intelligence (ELINT) in order to learn something that would have been instantly available through the mass media. In 1963, instant info about anything occurring in Dallas during the JFK visit simply meant broadcast reports interrupting soap operas on the three national TV networks and radio stations breaking news furnished by reporters covering the live event.

Pathetically, Baer mounts a charade with Adam Bercovici broadcasting local info from Dallas, Baer himself boosting it through short-wave radio as some Alpha 66 operator would have done, and two guys in a boat picking up the signal in international waters near a Cuban ELINT radio tower. They are unaware that Aspillaga, codenamed TOUCHDOWN by the CIA,5 became a self-defeating storyteller6: “It wasn’t until two or three hours later that I began hearing broadcasts on amateur radio bands about the shooting of President Kennedy.” Radio amateurs must have just been chatting about what the commercial media had already reported. Indeed, a unique witness—French journalist Jean Daniel—had given conclusive evidence against Aspillaga since the very day of the assassination. After a phone call by Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticós, Castro got all the news “from the NBC network in Miami.”⁷ Plus, we know from Daniel—who was serving as Kennedy’s emissary to Castro on the day of the assassination—that Fidel was utterly shocked when he heard the news that Kennedy had been shot. Later, when Castro got the news that JFK was dead, he turned to Daniel and said—referring to their plans for rapprochement—that everything was going to change. (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 89-90)

Aspillaga’s story is spurious not only because it’s silly but because, as shown above, its rebuttal can be traced back to Daniel’s on-site account. The crux of the matter is that Aspillaga confided to Latell in 2007 he had previously told the story only to the CIA during his debriefing after defection in 1987.8 Thus, it must have been declassified or withheld under the terms of the JFK Records Act (1992). However, Aspillaga’s story appears neither among the millions of pages declassified by the ARRB nor among the around 1,100 records still withheld by the CIA at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).9

Tracking Oswald Seriously

In Dallas, Baer and his team attempt to reconstruct a planned Oswald escape after the last shot. He imagines having made an unbelievable discovery: there were, get this, six houses of Cuban exiles along the road to a present-day bus stop on a route matching the dubious 1963 transfer ticket found in Oswald’s shirt pocket when he was arrested. Even as simply linking Oswald to a safe house, this evidence is fishy.

Baer absolutely trusts an informant who told the Dallas Police Department (DPD) about seeing Oswald with Cuban exiles in a house at 1326 Harlandale Avenue. It was rented by Jorge Salazar, lieutenant to Manuel Rodríguez Orcabarrio [sic], head of the Dallas Alpha 66 chapter, and served as a meeting place. However, Peter Scott pointed out that Orcabarrio “looked so much like Oswald that he was mistaken for him.”10 A point that somehow, in all his alleged document review, Baer missed. Yet, this was backed up by another reputable JFK researcher. In his book, The Secret Service (Fine Communications, 2002), the late Philip H. Melanson further provided that it was “independently confirmed by the FBI [that Orcabarrio] bore a resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald” (page 83). And Larry Hancock argues that there is some evidence that the information was later negated. A source later “told the FBI Oswald had never been there.”11

Baer ignores all of this and goes on by cherry-picking info out of context. To make it crystal clear that Alpha 66 was deeply infiltrated by CuIS, defector García stated that its Chief of Operations was a Castro dangle. In fact, CuIS officer José Fernández-Santos, a.k.a. “El Chino” [The Chinese], became Alpha 66 Chief of Naval Operations, but just after illegally leaving Cuba in late 1968. To reinforce the image of Oswald obsessed with killing Kennedy, Baer makes use of the Sylvia Odio incident as if it were a prelude in Dallas on the road to Mexico City, instead of a quantum of proof about Oswald’s impersonation here or there.12

Under an illusion about another “explosive discovery”, Baer raves on about Oswald returning from Mexico to fulfil “his promise” and running into people as furious with Kennedy as himself: Alpha 66. Thus, Baer and his team lost the real trail marked by the CIA’s “keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on the need-to-know basis.”13

Three CIA teams never stopped tracking Oswald all the way from Moscow (1960) to Dallas (1963). Info about him—more than 40 different documents: FBI reports, State Department cables, intercepted personal letters and others—usually passed from the CIA Counterintelligence (CI) Special Investigation Group (SIG) to the CI Operation Group (OPS) to the Counter-Espionage Unit of the Soviet Russia Division (CE-SR/6).

• The CIA opened a personality file (201-289248) on “Lee Henry Oswald” on 9 December 1960. His documentary record began with the Halloween 1959 UPI story “An ex-Marine asks for Soviet citizenship.”
• Since May 25, 1960, “Lee Harvey Oswald” appeared in another file at the Covert Operations Desk, based on the report by FBI Special Agent John Fain in Dallas after talking with Oswald’s parents about “Funds Transmitted to Residents of Russia.”
• A third CIA index card for “Lee H. Oswald” was attached to file (100-300-011) about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) on October 25, 1963. FBI Special Agent Warren De Brueys had reported from New Orleans that Oswald confessed being “a member of the alleged New Orleans chapter of FPCC,” a pro-Castro group listed as subversive.

These cards were used in a threesome for making different legends of the same re-defector, who arrived in the U.S. with his wife and their 4-month-old daughter on June 13, 1962, thanks to a $435.71 loan from the State Department. S.A. Fain debriefed him in Fort Worth twice. His final report, dated on August 30, 1962, stated Oswald “agreed to contact the FBI if at any time any individual made any contact of any nature under suspicious circumstances with him.”

Surprisingly, the CIA cable traffic in early October 1963 demonstrates that the Station in Mexico City and the Headquarters in Langley hid from each other their intel about Oswald’s connections with Cuba: His visit to the Cuban Consulate on September 27, 1963, and his pro-Castro activism in Dallas and New Orleans, respectively.

The CIA got shockingly involved in a conspiracy of silence about a former Marine, re-defector from the Soviet Union and self-pronounced Marxist, who was identified by the FBI as a pro-Castro activist in Dallas and New Orleans, spotted by the CIA in Mexico City visiting both the Cuban and Soviet embassies, and finally missed by both the FBI and the CIA as a security risk in Dallas at the moment of truth. A former CIA case officer must be aware of all this, but Baer overlooks the hard facts in lieu of resorting to camouflage with “Castro knew it.”

Castro versus Kennedy

In the interview with Waxman, Baer dragged and dropped that Castro “had every reason in the world” to want JFK dead. In the series, Baer assumes that Castro “was very happy” when his moles in Alpha 66 briefed him about Oswald being set up to kill Kennedy. Since Castro did nothing to prevent JFK’s death, Baer foists a conspiracy of silence on him.

This is an utter distortion of history done for the History Channel. Because Castro had every reason to want Kennedy alive and well. On Christmas Eve 1962, the American lawyer Jim Donovan boarded the last flight with the Bay of Pigs prisoners airlifted to Miami as result of his negotiation with Castro. Just before departure, Castro’s aide Dr. Rene Vallejo broached the subject of re-establishing diplomatic relations. Upon learning of this communication, Kennedy commented “it looked interesting.”14

With JFK’s death Castro was going to gain nothing else than LBJ in the White House, who offered no promise of more favorable U.S. policies toward Cuba. The Soviet bloc’s diplomats in Havana were aware of Castro’s preference. On March 31, 1963, Hungarian Ambassador János Beck set out in a secret report to Budapest that Castro was convinced “Kennedy is the best” option among the possible candidates for the U.S. presidency in 1964.15 Furthermore, ABC newswoman Lisa Howard interviewed Castro in April 1963 and reported he considered a rapprochement with Washington desirable.16 The same message was conveyed in August 1963 by one María Boissevain, wife of a former Dutch Ambassador to Cuba.17

Even so, the CIA was dismayed that Kennedy continued to favor a compromise with Castro. On November 5, 1963, CIA Deputy Director for Plans Dick Helms suggested to “war game” the Castro détente in a meeting of the Special Group.18 Kennedy opted for sending French reporter Jean Daniel as secret envoy to Castro. On November 19, Daniel was already talking with him, while Kennedy was waiting for an agenda proposal by Castro to “decide what to say [and to] do next.”¹⁹

On September 7, 1963, Castro had attended a reception at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana. He talked with Associated Press correspondent Dan Harker, who quoted him saying: “U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”²⁰ According to the crew of “Castro sorta did it,” he wanted Kennedy’s death and gratuitously broadcasted his intention to the whole world. In fact, Kennedy had expressed the same idea on November 1961. After meeting with reporter Tad Szulc, who noted him “under terrific pressure from advisors (…) to okay a Castro murder,” Kennedy discussed the issue with his aide Richard Goodwin and remarked: “If we get into that kind of thing, we’ll all be targets”.²¹

Castro summed up his ethical pragmatism thusly: “Ethics is not a simple moral issue (…) It produces results.”22 If he would have had foreknowledge—from Alpha 66 or any other source—of Oswald or whoever else was threatening to kill Kennedy, he would have reacted just as in 1984 with a U.S. President he deemed much worse than Kennedy. After being advised about an extreme right-wing conspiracy to kill Ronald Reagan in North Carolina, Castro ordered his spymaster at the Cuban Mission to the UN to furnish all the intel to the U.S. Security Chief at the UN, Robert Muller. The FBI quietly dismantled the plot.23

Abuse of History

Baer’s intent appears to be to keep on muddying the waters. He even said to Waxman: “We don’t know exactly what the Cubans told him in Mexico City,” although the CIA did know that they only talked about an in-transit visa. The acting consul, Alfredo Mirabal, was also a CuIS officer, identified by the CIA as “Chief of Intel”24. Before the HSCA, Mirabal adamantly stated having judged Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate on September 27, 1963, as “a provocation.”25

That day the CIA listening post LIENVOY recorded two calls between Cuban and Soviet consular staffers about an American citizen seeking—illegally—an in-transit visa to Cuba on his way to Soviet Russia. On the second call’s transcript, Station Chief Win Scott noted: “Is it possible to identify?”26

This normal reaction was followed by an anomaly. In the LIENVOY operational report for September 1963, Scott referred to “two leads of operational interest:” a female professor from New Orleans calling the Soviet Embassy, and a Czech woman calling the Czech embassy.27 In gross violation of the CIA protocol, the U.S. citizen in Mexico City who was allegedly Oswald was not reported to Langley.

Ironically, the conspiracy of silence foisted in a fact-free manner by Baer on Castro proved to be factually correct in reference to the CIA. With Castro as vantage point instead of the CIA, Baer was not tracking Oswald to articulate a true picture of the past, but to drive the historical truth away.

NOTES

1 After two episodes, the series was cancelled in the U.S., but continued in Canada. The History Channel has informally stated it will come back to the States in a timely fashion.

2 JFK Exhibit F-684.

3 “Former CIA Operative Argues Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cuba Connections Went Deep,” Time, April 25, 2017.

4 See the book review “The End of An Obsession.”

5 After 25 years and 13 medals in the CuIS, Aspillaga defected from his third-rate post in Bratislava [Slovakia] to Vienna in early June 1987. The CIA Station Chief there, James Olson, thought his companion was Aspillaga’s daughter, but she was actually Aspillaga’s girlfriend. The British historian Rupert Allason, a.k.a. Nigel West, made an entry for the case in his Historical Dictionary of Sexspionage (Scarecrow Press, 2009). Anyway, Aspillaga got a deluxe package of resettlement in the U.S. in return for handing over valuable documents stolen from the first-rank CuIS Station in Prague and for being squeezed by CIA debriefers. He furnished the key intel that almost all the Cubans recruits by the CIA from 1960 onward were double agents loyal to Castro.

6 Brian Latell, Castro’s Secrets, Macmillan, 2013, 103.

7 Jean Daniel, “When Castro Heard the News,” The New Republic, December 7, 1963.

8 Instead of taking the road to clarification, the CIA engaged in a conspiracy of silence. The Agency Release Panel responded to a FOIA request on June 28, 2013: “The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence” of JFK-related records in Aspillaga’s debriefing.

9 Neither Aspillaga nor TOUCHDOWN brings any result by searching one after the other, or both, at the National Archives web site. By entering “JFK Assassination” in the search box, the first relevant result would be “About JFK Assassination Records Collection.” By clicking on it, then on “JFK Assassination Records Collection Database”, and finally on “Standard Search”, a “Kennedy Assassination Collection Simple Search Form” appears. After entering the terms “Aspillaga” (first line) OR “Touchdown” (second line), no hit will be retrieved.

10 “The CIA’s Mystery Man,” The New York Review of Books, Volume 22, Number 12, July 17, 1975.

11 The last name is often misspelled as Orcabarrio or Orcaberrio. In the CuIS files, he is registered as Manuel Rodríguez Oscarberro. On the evening of November 22, 1963, DPD detective Buddy Walthers knew about someone looking very much like Oswald going into this house since October because his mother-in-law was living next door. Walthers reported it and the FBI did no more than confirm that Oscarberro and other Cuban exiles had been there and departed. Nonetheless it was noted that a source inside Alpha 66, who later moved to Puerto Rico, had furnished the information that Oswald was not associated with the group in any way and had never been to the house. Since Oscarberro did move to Puerto Rico, it is possible he was the FBI source clearing Oswald.

12 Both occurrences overlapped in time, but left the same trail. Along with two Cuban exiles, a Leon Oswald visited Mrs. Odio in Dallas. The day after, one of the Cubans phoned her and discussed Oswald as an excellent shooter, who believed President Kennedy should have been assassinated after Bay of Pigs. Meanwhile, a Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City and yelled on his way out: “I’m going to kill Kennedy!”

13 As CIA Counterintelligence (CI) officer Jane Roman told John Newman on November 2, 1994.

14 FRUS, XI, Doc. 275, 687 f.

15 Declassified top secret document from the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At Cold War History Research Center Budapest, click on “Archives”, then on “Selected Hungarian Documents on Cuba, 1960-1963,” and finally on “Talks between Cuba and the USA (March 31, 1963).

16 “Castro’s Overture,” War/Peace Report, September 1963, 3-5.

17 NARA Record Number: 104-10310-10244.

18 NARA Record Number: 104-10306-10024.

19 Peter Kornbluh, “JFK and Castro,” Cigar Aficionado, September – October 1999, pp. 3 ff.

20 “Castro Blasts Raids on Cuba,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 9, 1963.

21 Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, Oxford University Press, 1983, p.135.

22 My Life: A Spoken Autobiography, Simon and Schuster, 2008, 211.

23 Nestor Garcia-Iturbe, Cuba-US: Cuban Government Saved Reagan’s Life, June 6, 2015.

24 NARA Record Number: 1994.05.03.10:31:46:570005.

25 HSCA Report, pp. 173-78.

26 NARA Record Number 104-10413-10074

27 NARA Record Number: 104-10052-10083.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 6

Part 7

For the fifth episode of the series “JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald,” former CIA case officer Bob Baer and his team moved from New Orleans to Dallas seeking to prove Oswald “had help in accomplishing his mission.” Aren’t they putting the cart before the horse by widening the net in search of accomplices before having determined whether Oswald was the perpetrator? They are indeed doing so, because Baer does have a mission: Keeping the CIA out of the picture.

After mixing Oswald with the anti-Castro and CIA-backed paramilitaries of Alpha 66 in a weird pot made of “special intent to kill President Kennedy soup”, Baer keeps on blighting a big-budget TV show by ignoring the body of the evidence. The latter supports the same assessment given by J. Edgar Hoover to Lyndon B. Johnson the morning after the assassination: “The case as it stands now isn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction. ”1

The Warren Commission (WC) has manufactured the case against Oswald with at least a wrong murder weapon (CE 139), a wrong bullet (CE 399), and a wrong shell (CE 543). Instead of weighing the evidence, Baer and his team commit a kind of Only Game in Town Fallacy: If a second shooter is not at hand, then that leaves Oswald as the lone gunman.

Bogus Testing

To throw out the prima facie evidence —in the Zapruder film2— of gunfire from the right front, Baer simply replaces Luis Alvarez’s melon with what they call an encased gel ordinance head. Which goes backwards after being struck by a bullet fired from behind.

A Nobel Prize winner in Physics (1968), Alvarez got involved in a test with a taped-up melon to verify that the backward snap of Kennedy’s head was consistent with a shot from behind due to a jet-propulsion-like recoil.3 But, as Gary Aguilar showed in his reply to Luke and Mike Haag, another test conducted by research physical scientist Larry Sturdivan at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in 1964 proved otherwise. Ten skulls were shot with a Mannlicher-Carcano and all of them moved away from the rifle in the same direction of the bullet. The Commission suppressed these findings and plainly reported that President Kennedy was struck in the head and “fell to the left into Mrs. Kennedy’s lap.”  (Click here for that article)

Alvarez’s test was misleading because a taped-up melon has neither the sheer strength nor the thickness close to that of a human skull. By the same token, Baer’s ballistic test is just another rigged attempt to support the discredited WC lone-gunman theory with a childish jet effect. We cannot do better than let Milicent Cranor comment at length on this ludicrous so-called “experiment”.

History Channel – or Saturday Night Live? By Milicent Cranor This segment of the History Channel’s special on the Kennedy Assassination seems like a low-budget skit from Saturday Night Live! An “expert sniper” goes through the motions of recreating the shot to Kennedy’s head. The idea is to prove that one shot from the presumed Oswald location can cause the reaction we see on the Zapruder film: the head moving to the back and to the left. It’s not clear what they’ve dug up to use for the head.  The sniper describes it vaguely as a human head filled with ordinance gel, and throughout his little talk, he refers to that gel.  As in “shooting from behind the ballistics gel” and “I’ve got the ballistics gel on target.”  Maybe he hopes to convey the impression of a gelatinous brain causing the head to spring backwards.  The demonstration is just amazing. it is far more revealing than the show’s creators realize: We only get a side view of the action – and are not allowed to see the back or front of the head, not even after the shooting. The limited view of the head shows no damage whatsoever. The head moves back, but not to the left.  Then it pops right back up to its original position!  Something, possibly vaporized gel, seems to come out of the head (or from a smoke machine behind the head) – but only from the mouth area.  So he looks like a man leaning back with pleasure as he smokes a fine cigar, oblivious to the characters behind him. The sniper’s explanation for what happened is even more amazing:  “…the bullet enters the back of the head and the terminal ballistics will come here — [indicates area of right eye and forehead] – causing the head to go back and to the left.” “The terminal ballistics will come here”?  Terminal ballistics is defined as “the study of the behavior and effects of a projectile when it hits its target and transfers its energy to the target.” The sniper can’t explain what happened, but he seems to think that by naming the field of study concerned with such phenomena, the audience will be fooled. It is especially funny that he points to the area of the right eye: (1) In real life, the bullet is supposed to have exited from the top of the head on the right; (2) the gel-filled head in the demonstration seems to have no damage to that area, and it would show in a right profile view; and (3) all the exiting stuff representing brain matter comes out of the mouth.  Neither JFK nor the head in this demo is supposed to have had an exit wound in the mouth. Conclusion: The creators of this segment must have gel for brains. Or they think their audience does. THE SMOKING MAN Watch the segment on YouTube

As the reader can see, this is not a studious, scientific attempt to duplicate the circumstances that befell Kennedy at 12:30 PM in Dealey Plaza, in Dallas.  And for Baer to try and pass it off as such speaks very poorly of both him and his show.

But Bob Baer is not done.  Not by a long shot. For now he goes on and conducts what he calls an acoustics test. According to him, dozens of ear witnesses4 who heard shots coming from the Grassy Knoll were actually confused due to “the amphitheater effect.” The real sound coming from the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) would have echoed at the so-called triple underpass and other hard structures in Dealey Plaza.

To construct this “explosive theory,” Baer went to the crime scene with sound engineers and equipment that “nobody used before”. He just forgot to adjust the experiment setting to the standards of historical reconstruction.5 Not a single person was placed where a certain witness had been watching the presidential motorcade, and the sounds of the shooting weren’t generated by firing the rifle at the sniper nest. They were recorded elsewhere and played thereafter from near the TSBD.  No kidding.

What is kind of shocking about this so-called acoustics test is that Baer completely ignores its far superior predecessor. During the proceedings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, (HSCA) that body did an acoustics test in Dealey Plaza.  Except their testing was live and they brought riflemen into the plaza. And from that and their work with and analysis of the 11/22/63 dictabelt recording from Dealey Plaza by a Dallas policeman on a motorcycle, they concluded the following: 1.) Someone fired from the grassy knoll, and 2.) There were five shots fired that day. (Which, as Don Thomas reveals in his book Hear No Evil, for political reasons, Chief Counsel Robert Blakey reduced to four.)

But, if one can comprehend it, Baer completely ignored the HSCA precedent, which included two teams of the finest audio scientists in the country. Among their members was Dr. James Barger of the firm Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. Barger had done acoustical research for the Navy in the field of submarine sonar detection, and had been involved in testing tapes of the 1970 Kent State shooting in Ohio. Barger did scientific testing of the actual sound wave patterns produced in Dealey Plaza at that time.  Barger’s findings were passed on to Professor Mark Weiss and his associate Ernest Aschkenasy. They did the final presentation for the committee. To imply, as Baer does, that those three men spent as much time and testing as they did and could not separate an echo from a live shot is ridiculous. But Baer and his program are so agenda driven that it is as if these previous tests never happened.  He brings in some audio recordings, some computer programmers, pays them a few bucks and with these stage props he has somehow eliminated the second gunman in the JFK case. Pure and utter poppycock. Baer’s level of science here would not pass muster at a good high school’s Science Fair. 

An Inescapable Second Shooter

On December 12, 1963, the Secret Service (SS) did a crude recreation. Its black and white footage plotted three shots on the JFK limousine. The bystander James Tague —wounded by a bullet ricocheting off the curb about 260 feet away from the limousine— destroyed the prior three-shots-three-hits scenario. Then, the magic bullet emerged not from evidence, but as an out-of-the-blue solution engineered to sustain the lone gunman theory.

The FBI-SS reenactment on 23-24 May 1964 was a re-adjustment to preserve the willful closing of the case against Oswald. It also provided the notorious photo (CE 309) of Commission junior counsel Arlen Specter indicating with a metal rod the trajectory of the lie. However, an apparently insignificant detail provides a quantum of proof for demolishing any attempt—including Baer’s—to realign the shoots with the WC Report.

For the 1964 recreation, Specter used the same jacket worn by Governor Connally on November 22, 1963, but he did not use President Kennedy’s. Otherwise he couldn’t have aligned the bullet entrance hole in the back of both Kennedy’s jacket and shirt with the exit wound at his throat.6

The bullet holes are positioned 5 3/8” down from the collar line on the back of the jacket. They are consistent with the JFK death certificate, signed by his personal physician, Dr. George Burkley, who examined a back wound at the level of the third thoracic vertebra, about 4-6 inches below the point where the shoulders meet the neck.

At this level, a bullet coming downward from the TSBD would not be able to exit the throat. But the Commission acolytes do not care about the death certificate7 and dismiss the jacket and the shirt as material evidence with the claim that both bunched up. Let’s connect the dots in a simple test.

• Baer is invited to come dressed in suit and tie, along with John McAdams, Max Holland, Gerald Posner, Phillip Shenon et. al.;
• They will remove their jackets and shirts to mark the position of the bullet hole in Kennedy’s, and will also mark on their bodies the back wound given by the WC;
• They will put on their jackets and shirts, and will take a back seat in a car8;
• They will get their jackets and shirts to ride up until the mark on each one matches the mark of the back wound. This crucial moment will be photographically captured;
• They will compare the photos with the Zapruder film to find not even the faintest resemblance of JFK’s tailored suit jacket and buttoned shirt bunching up as theirs.

They will surely face a dilemma. If the Warren Commission accurately placed the back wound, then JFK’s jacket and shirt were replaced, hence conspiracy; if the jacket and shirt are authentic, then the WC gave a false representation of JFK’s back wound, hence conspiracy or cover-up. There is not one whiff of any of these factors in the entire “Tracking Oswald” series, for if they did present it, the show would have to be called, “Trying to Find who Killed Kennedy.”  The Warren Commission did not want to do that.  Neither does Baer.

Oswald’s Escape and Another Crime Scene

After surreptitiously taking for granted that Oswald was the lone gunman, Baer applies his on-the-ground field officer expertise to assemble Oswald’s plan of escape with a concealed route, an Alpha 66 safe house, and some anti-Castro Cuban exiles as accomplices. No clue is given about how Oswald could have learned in advance the presidential motorcade’s schedule in order for him to have planned the assassination by firing a rifle with telescopic sight from his very place of employment.9  In that regard, Baer also ignores the following. That morning, Oswald asked fellow worker James Jarman why all the people were assembled in the plaza below.  When Jarman replied that President Kennedy was going to pass through in a motorcade, Oswald asked him which way it was proceeding.  Kind of wrecks Baer’s idea of Oswald’s planning.  Which is probably why he ignores it. (See Syliva Meagher, Accessores After the Fact, Vintage Books, 1992, pp. 37-38)

For all of what follows, Baer relies on the bus ticket found in Oswald´s shirt pocket.  The former CIA officer somehow never discerns the difference between getting to and from work, and around the Dallas area, on the one hand, and escaping from the scene of a high profile murder case amid hundred of witnesses on the other. But Baer uses the ticket to infer a getaway route from the TSBD to an Alpha 66 safe house. On the way, Baer loses the evidentiary trail that—since Sylvia Meagher´s research in 1967—has put the ticket and other circumstances of Oswald’s escape under a cloud of suspicion (Accessories After the Fact, pp. 70-93).

Baer deduces that, from his years of experience in the CIA, in a situation like this, the assassin(s) needed to have an escape route planned in advance. Our host does not want to admit that what the Commission says Oswald did after the shooting would suggest that he had no such plan in mind. Or that the latest research on this matter clearly indicates he was not on the sixth floor at all. (See Barry Ernest’s book, The Girl on the Stairs. Click here for a review) For the idea that a man who just killed the president would now search out public transportation to flee the scene of the crime amid hundreds of spectators and scores of policemen is simply not credible. But that is what the official story says. And that is what Baer is supporting.

In any real planning situation one would rely on one of two factors for escape amid a multitude of spectators. The first alternative would be disguise—of which there is no evidence in this case. The other would be speed. That is, the longer one stays at or near the scene, the longer one risks the possibility of exposure and/or capture. Concerning this subject, one could do as Josiah Thompson did at the end of Six Seconds in Dallas. That is, present the testimony of policeman Roger Craig. Craig says he saw Oswald running down the embankment after the shooting. He then jumped into a Rambler driven by a dark skinned man. That would sound like an escape plan utilizing speed.  But probably because of that, Baer ignores it.  So in his scenario, Oswald boards a bus, gets off the bus, then walks a few blocks, and hails a taxi. But before he enters, he offers it to a little old lady standing next to him. (Meagher, p. 83) With a straight face Baer pronounces this an “escape plan”.

Furthermore, Baer explains that Oswald ended up in the Texas Theater because of the run-in with Police Officer J.D. Tippit on East 10th Street, about 100 feet eastward from Patton Avenue. At that point, the escape plan was supposedly disrupted and Oswald failed to think clearly and rationally.  However, as in the case of his alleged shooting of the President, the evidence against Oswald in Tippit’s murder is shoddy.10 And Baer ignores that shoddiness.

The crime scene is almost a mile away from Oswald’s rooming house at 1026 N. Beckley. His landlady Earlene Roberts saw him waiting for a bus at 1:04 PM after he left his room. Temple Ford Bowley arrived at the crime scene when Officer Tippit was already on the ground and some bystanders were milling around the police car. Bowley looked at his watch and the time was 1:10 PM. The Commission ignored Bowley. Why? Because clearly Oswald couldn´t have walked almost a mile in less than 6 minutes. They then reported that Tippit was killed circa 1:15 PM, despite the fact that is the time he was pronounced dead at Methodist Hospital. To keep up appearances, a typed FBI memo stretched out Tippit’s agony at the hospital until 1:25 PM.

This case against Oswald for the Tippit shooting further weakens due to the three-wallets enigma.11 At the crime scene, Channel 8 staffer Ron Reiland filmed a policeman showing an open wallet to an FBI agent. According to FBI agent James Hosty, his fellow Bob Barrett revealed that this wallet contained IDs for both Oswald and Alek Hidell. But Dallas Police Officer Paul Bentley confiscated a second wallet from Oswald after he was arrested at the Texas Theater.  And another one was found among Oswald´s belongings at Ruth Paine´s house in Irving. These are all facts. They strongly suggest some evidence against Oswald was planted. They are ignored by Baer.

Let us add another point about the two constant refrains by Baer during the program.  First, the continuing assumption that Oswald is the guilty party. This, as we have seen, he achieves only by ignoring the evidence, especially the new evidence declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). And that relates to the second refrain:  that Baer has read through the two million pages of declassified documents by the ARRB.  Yet this program offers no evidence from that declassification process. For instance, Baer presents a four-decades-old police report that Oswald was seen at an Alpha 66 safehouse in the Dallas area. The other document used in this episode is the famous testimony of Antonio Veciana of him seeing Oswald with Maurice Bishop at the Southland Building in Dallas.  Again, that information extends back to the seventies.  And it does not at all connect Oswald with Alpha 66. Veciana was arriving to meet with his case officer Bishop at the time.  He was early, and he saw Bishop with Oswald.  Oswald left shortly after he arrived.  In other words, Oswald was there with Bishop, not with Alpha 66 leader Veciana.  And as Veciana later admitted—just three years ago—Bishop was David Phillips.

Now if Bob Baer was really interested in furnishing the public with new information, he could have done at least a couple of things with that crucial admission.  First, he could have said that the ARRB discovered that Phillips (along with James McCord) was running the CIA’s counter-intelligence programs against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Oswald was the only member in New Orleans. When one combines that with the fact that Oswald worked out of the same building that former FBI agent Guy Banister did, 544 Camp Street; and he printed that Camp Street address on more than one of his flyers, then that meeting with Phillips gets interesting.  Why would an alleged communist like Oswald be meeting with a CIA officer and working with a former FBI agent?

The other aspect that could have been made up of new information would have been Phillips running the Cuban desk in Mexico City while Oswald was allegedly there.  Baer could have told the public:

The man Oswald was meeting with,  David Phillips, told the HSCA that there were no tapes or pictures of Oswald in Mexico City. Yet there was such a tape that FBI agents listened to in Dallas while Oswald was under arrest for murder. Those agents told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that this tape was not the voice of the man in detention. We are going to explore that apparent quandary tonight.

But, of course, Baer could not do that since he began the show by using a lot of questionable material about the Russians controlling Oswald in Mexico City, when the declassified Lopez Report strongly suggests that Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City. So the true identity of Oswald is kept under wraps, and some mythical association with Alpha 66 is now manufactured out of next to nothing.

Coda

More than fifty years and zero evidence after the JFK assassination, Baer is oddly not interested in or ignorant of what has been proven and debunked. He simply pushes back to square one—the lone gunman who shot a magic bullet—by concocting a light version (Castro knew it) of the oldest CIA backstop (Castro did it) through the fact-free hypothesis of Oswald linked somehow to Alpha 66 in the killing.

Notes

1 White House Telephone Transcripts, 23 November 1963, LBJ Library.

2 In his remark to Attorney General Robert Kennedy about two people involved in the shooting, CIA Director John McCone wasn’t speculating. He had been briefed by Art Lundahl, head of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), where leading photo analyst Dino Brugioni and his team examined the Zapruder film, made still enlargements of select frames, and mounted them on briefing boards. See Dan Hardway’s “Thank you, Phil Shenon” (AARC, 2015).

3 Thus, Alvarez joined the crew of dueling experts devoted to defending the WC at any cost, after the Zapruder film was available for the first time to a mass audience on March 6, 1975, thanks to HSCA consultant Robert Groden and JFK activist Dick Gregory, who brought it to Geraldo Rivera’s ABC show “Good Night America.”

4 Baer uses his own statistics, but the most reliable study, 216 Witnesses, by Stewart Galanor, found that 52 heard a shot from Grassy Knoll, 48 from TSBD, 5 from both places and 4 elsewhere. Other 37 witnesses could not tell and 70 more were not asked.

5 The WC acolytes always incur this failure. For instance, it’s well-known since Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement (The Bodley Head, 1966) that WC’s firearms experts were unable to duplicate what Oswald did, but Vincent Bugliosi replied in Reclaiming History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007) that CEs 582 to 584 “shows two hits were scored on the head” (p. 1005) – only that both were scored using iron sights instead of scope.

6 The FBI Supplemental Report from January 13, 1964, contains Exhibits 59 and 60 showing the bullet entrance holes in the back of Kennedy’s jacket and shirt, respectively. They weren’t included in any of the 26 volumes of Commission Exhibits. The initial draft of the WC report stated:  “A bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder to the right of the spine.” WC member Gerald Ford wanted it to read: “A bullet had entered the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine.” After the ARRB declassification, the discrepancy emerged. Ford told reporters: “My changes were only an attempt to be more precise.” (AP, July 3, 1997).

7 Specter neither produced it nor interviewed Admiral Burkley, who as JFK’s personal physician was the only doctor present both at the Parkland Hospital (Dallas) in the emergency room and at Bethesda Medical Center (Maryland) during the autopsy.

8 It could be the Cadillac used by Specter instead of the presidential limousine (Lincoln Continental 1961).

9 For these and other similar issues, see A.M. Fernandez’s “Why the Warren Commission got scared with Castro”.

10 Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, Hightower Press, 2013, pp. 244 ff.

11 James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, pp. 101 ff.