Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: GARRISON INVESTIGATION

  • Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked

    I have spoken to Larry Hancock on several occasions. I like him and some of the Lancer Group people he is associated with, like Debra Conway. But Hancock’s book Someone Would Have Talked is a decidedly mixed bag.

    From the title, it tries to circumvent the notion that Warren Commission defenders always trot out. Namely: If there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, why has no one talked about such an enterprise before or since? The book enumerates several people who did do just that. But its real aim is to outline the actual conspiracy as he sees it. And he tries to tilt that conspiracy in a certain way. It’s the way he tilts it that I have some major problems with.

    The first chapter focuses on John Martino. Martino was involved with a Mafia-owned hotel in Cuba prior to Castro’s revolution. He was then arrested and jailed by the revolutionaries. Once he was released in 1962 he began to speak out against Castro, joined up with some para-military types like Felipe Vidal Santiago and Gerry Hemming, and was also a speaker on the John Birch Society circuit. He died in 1975. But before he passed away he spoke about what he had heard of the plot to kill Kennedy to a couple of friends and to his wife. One of the friends, Fred Claasen, went to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. According to Hancock, the HSCA did only a perfunctory investigation of the claims. Later on, in Vanity Fair, (December of 1994) Anthony Summers fleshed out the story more fully. Hancock, on page 16, puts the Martino findings in synoptic form:

    1. Cuban exiles manipulated Oswald in advance of the plot and two of them were snipers in Dealey Plaza.
    2. Oswald was a U. S. government undercover operative who was approached by anti-Castro exiles representing themselves as pro-Castro.
    3. Oswald was supposed to meet an exile contact at the Texas Theater. Oswald thought he would help him escape the country, but the actual plan was to shoot him. Tippit’s killing aborted this. Therefore the planners had to have Ruby murder Oswald.
    4. The motorcade route was known in advance, and the attack was planned thoroughly in advance.

    It is interesting to note here that shortly after this, in Chapters 3 and 4, Hancock begins to summarize the story of Richard Case Nagell, another person who had knowledge of the assassination. I think to any knowledgeable and objective observer comparing the two stories, Nagell’s is more compelling. For by 1975, when the Martino story first surfaced, all of the enumerated points above were realized as distinct possibilities or contingencies by most serious researchers. The one exception being the anti-Castro exiles presenting themselves to Oswald as pro-Castro. But this would be the most speculative part also, since the only people who could actually verify it would be Oswald and the Cubans who approached him. And since I have noted elsewhere, most of the Cubans in this milieu are notoriously unreliable, that would leave Oswald.

    I said that by 1975 Martino’s information was pretty well known to serious investigators. But really, as Hancock relates it, it was known earlier than that. For by the end of 1968, all of the points — except as noted — were working axioms of the New Orleans investigation by DA Jim Garrison. To use just one investigator’s testimony, researcher Gary Schoener has said that Garrison was “obsessed” with the Cuban exile group Alpha 66. At one time, he thought they were the main sponsoring group manipulating Oswald, and that they had pulled off the actual assassination.

    One avenue by which Garrison was led to believe this was through Nagell. And one thing I liked about the book was that it summarized a lot of Nagell’s testimony in more complete, concise and digestible terms than previously presented (see pgs. 39-58). In the first edition of Dick Russell’s book, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Nagell’s story wandered and got lost in a 900-page mountain consisting of much extraneous and tangential elements. Although Hancock leaves out some rather important details — which I will mention later — he does a nice job in distilling and relating its basic outlines. Between the two, because of who he was, his first person testimony, and some evidence he had, I believe Nagell’s story easily has more evidentiary value.

    Consider: Nagell actually tried to inform the authorities in advance. When they did not respond, he got himself arrested. He was then railroaded — along with Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden — because of his attempt to talk. He then wrote letters describing his knowledge to friends while incarcerated (see Probe Vol. 3 No. 1). He then revealed to Garrison assistant William Martin his specific knowledge of two of the Cuban exiles who were manipulating Oswald. One he named as Sergio Arcacha Smith. The other who he only hinted at had a last name beginning with “Q”. This could be Carlos Quiroga, or Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero. Since Smith and Quiroga were known associates in New Orleans, I lean toward Quiroga. Nagell actually revealed that he had recorded their incriminating talks with Oswald on tape. Since he — as well as Garrison — did not know that Martin was a double agent, it is not surprising that the FBI later broke into his belongings and absconded with the tape, among other things. (Strangely, or as we shall see later, perhaps not, Hancock leaves this intriguing episode out of his book.)

    Now since Garrison was the first law enforcement authority Nagell confided in directly, and the first person to take him seriously, the DA was clearly interested in the Cuban exile aspect. Especially since Nagell’s information was being reinforced to him from multiple angles. For instance, David Ferrie’s close friend Raymond Broshears was also quite specific with Garrison as to the importance of Sergio Arcacha Smith. And when Garrison tried to get Smith extradited from Texas, the local authorities, under the influence of Bill Alexander and Hugh Aynesworth, refused to cooperate. (It is puzzling to me that Hancock, who is so interested in the Cuban groups, seems to try to minimize the importance of Smith.)

    One thing Hancock makes clear is how Nagell originally got involved in the JFK case. Like many foreign intelligence operatives, one of Nagell’s ports of call was Mexico City. As certified by his friend Arthur Greenstein and an FBI memorandum, Nagell was there in the fall of 1962. And at this time, he began acting as a triple agent: “He represented himself to a Soviet contact as a pro-Soviet double agent, while secretly retaining his loyalty to the United States.” (p. 54) It was in this pose that he became known to the KGB. When they approached Nagell they asked him to monitor a Soviet defector and his wife. The second mission they had was to infiltrate a group of Cuban exiles. The Russians had discovered a group of them in Mexico City making threats against President Kennedy for his actions at the Bay of Pigs. The Russians had garnered that part of the scheme was to blame the plot on the Cubans and Russians. This is something that, in the wake of the Missile Crisis, the Russians were desperate to avoid. From here, Hancock summarizes the stories of both Vaughn Snipes and Garret Trapnell, people Nagell suspected as being considered as pro-Castro patsies by the Cuban group (pgs 56-58). And it was this trail that eventually led Nagell to New Orleans and Oswald.

    II

    It is probably a back-handed complement to Hancock to praise him for his neat and precise synopsis on the man who Garrison called the most important witness in the JFK case. For, as noted above, he seems much more preoccupied with Martino. And with that preoccupation, the middle section of the book uses Martino’s more general information to explore what Hancock calls “persons of interest”. But right before this the author makes a most curious statement. He writes, “Knowing that Martino was part of a conspiracy and was in communication with individuals in Texas on November 22… ” (p. 61) Having read the book closely and written over 14 pages of notes on it, I fail to see how Hancock justifies this statement. As summarized above, the information Martino had could have been communicated to him through several of his Cuban exile friends. None of it connotes Martino being part of the plot. And Hancock advances no affirmative evidence to prove that point. (I should also add that the last part of the quoted phrase is ambiguous. It could mean that, after the fact, he was in contact with people who say they were in Dallas that day.)

    It is statements like this that I think seriously mar the book. It is nothing if not an ambitious book. For instance, right after the above statement concerning Martino, Hancock tries to pinpoint the exact moment in time where Oswald began being manipulated by Cuban agents. He says it is while he was in New Orleans on 8/28/63. He marks this by a letter Oswald wrote to the FPCC about a planned move. He then adds that Dallas was not actually in the assassination plan at this time. He says that at the end of August, the hit was planned for Washington in September. This is based on nothing more than a letter Oswald wrote on September 1st mentioning a possible move to Baltimore which, of course, never occurred.

    Now — and this is important — there are all kinds of things Oswald did in New Orleans that, retrospectively, could be seen as part of his frame-up. Too many to be listed here. And there are others, besides the Cuban exiles, who were involved with his manipulation e.g. Ed Butler, Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw in New Orleans. (Not to mention George DeMohrenschildt and the Paines in Dallas.) For instance, there is the absolutely remarkable journey Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald took to the towns of Clinton and Jackson which occurred about a week before this letter was written. Also, the House Select Committee on Assassinations discovered that Banister either was thinking of, or actually did send, a dead rat to the White House that summer. These things seem to me to be at least as interesting as this letter for marking purposes. But again, the author does not note them. I mention them here just to indicate how difficult it is to make an extraordinary claim like he does, actually trying to pinpoint when Oswald began being manipulated. I really don’t think this is possible. But, as we shall see, it is par for the course in this book.

    From here Hancock begins to explore those “persons of interest” he mentioned earlier. Some of the people he chooses are interesting, some of them are not. A prime example of the latter is Victor Hernandez who he spends two meandering pages on (pgs 64-65). Some others, like Robert McKeown, seem to me to be more relevant. There is also a section entitled “Oswald in the School Book Depository” (p. 69). And in this section and the pages that follow, Hancock deals with the evidence that exculpates Oswald. He does a good job with the gunshot residue testing. He writes that there was nothing to connect either Oswald’s cheek to the rifle or his hands to the pistol. And that upon hearing word of this, the FBI ordered agents not to make those facts available to anyone in order to “protect the Bureau.” (p. 73) Further in this regard, he uses the work of Harold Weisberg to show that on seven occasions the FBI had fired the rifle with the result being the depositing of heavy powder on the subject’s cheeks. (Ibid)

    Hancock caps this section nicely. After proffering up all this probative evidence, he then quotes Cortland Cunningham’s testimony to the Warren Commission. This testimony states in part, “No sir; I personally wouldn’t expect to find any residues on a person’s cheek after firing a rifle … so by its very nature, I would not expect to find residue on the right cheek of a shooter.” (Ibid)

    Another interesting part of the book is how it deals with the experiences of the late Dallas detective Buddy Walthers. This is based on a rare manuscript about the man by author Eric Tagg. Walthers was part of at least three major evidentiary finds in Dallas. Through his wife, he discovered the meetings at the house on Harlendale Avenue by Alpha 66 in the fall of 1963. Second, he was with FBI agent Robert Barrett when he picked up what appears to be a bullet slug in the grass at Dealey Plaza. And third, something I was unaware of until the work of John Armstrong and is also in this book, Walthers was at the house of Ruth and Michael Paine when the Dallas Police searched it on Friday afternoon. Walthers told Tagg that they “found six or seven metal filing cabinets full of letters, maps, records and index cards with names of pro-Castro sympathizers.” (Hancock places this statement in his footnotes on p. 552.) This is absolutely startling of course since, combined with the work of Carol Hewett, Steve Jones, and Barbara La Monica, it essentially cinches the case that the Paines were domestic surveillance agents in the Cold War against communism. (Hancock notes how the Warren Commission and Wesley Liebeler forced Walthers to backtrack on this point and then made it disappear in the “Speculation and Rumors” part of the report.)

    III

    Since Hancock is dealing in the Cuban exile milieu, he spends a lot of time on the infamous characters of Dave Morales and John Roselli. And this is where I need to mention a couple of volumes the author uses, books which I find unreliable.

    One of them is Ultimate Sacrifice, which I have reviewed at length previously. I won’t go through the myriad problems I have with that book. But as a result of that, I was surprised that Hancock seemed to actually take it seriously. Even its most questionable thesis, about a so-called second invasion of Cuba assembled by the Pentagon and CIA (see p. 200). Unfortunately, Hancock leaves out the fact that Director of Plans Richard Helms didn’t seem to know about that invasion. And neither did Pentagon Chief Bob McNamara or National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy.

    The other book relied upon here is All American Mafioso: The Johnny Roselli Story. This is by Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker. This book, like Ultimate Sacrifice, makes extravagant claims about Roselli that I find rather strained and poorly sourced, e.g. his alleged involvement in the death of Castillo-Armas in Guatemala. One of the sources for the Roselli book is Jimmy Fratianno, a noted Mafia informant. If one walks around Los Angeles (where I live) often enough, one will eventually meet someone who knew a friend of Fratianno’s. And that person will tell you a tale Fratianno had not revealed in public before about Roselli’s involvement in President Kennedy’s assassination. I know this for a fact since it just happened to me about eight months ago. Unlike Rappleye and Becker I will not be writing about it. As Michael Beschloss has stated, there is no library with the declassified papers of Sam Giancana. Or in this case, John Roselli. So, in large part, one must rely on the word of people like Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno. And if you wish to aggrandize and sensationalize Roselli, then you will use a character like him. I would place the Becker/Rappleye effort somewhere on a par with John Davis’ tome on Carlos Marcello. So it was not surprising to me that the authors of the gaseous Ultimate Sacrifice were eager to use both of these works. It did surprise me that Hancock used the Roselli book as much as he did. In fact, about half his chapter on Roselli is sourced to it. He even mentions an alleged meeting between Roselli and Ruby in the fall of 1963. Yet he then adds that this is based on FBI reports that no one can produce.

    I had a similar problem with the following chapter on David Phillips. And it started right on the first page (159). Hancock writes, “Phillips was without a doubt a CIA general.” If we consider that word in its normal sense, with normal examples e.g. Eisenhower, Schwarzkopf etc. then I don’t understand it. At the time frame of the JFK assassination, Phillips was an operations officer. A man in the field supervising things getting done and done right. Not a guy behind the lines planning and approving the overall campaign. In his fine book A Death in Washington Don Freed quotes CIA Director Bill Colby (p. 81) as calling Phillips a great operations officer. So if we go by Colby’s rather authoritative account, Phillips was really a Lt. Colonel at the time — parallel to someone like Oliver North in the Iran/Contra scandal. Hancock then goes further. He applies this same spurious hierarchical title — “general” — to Dave Morales. Yet Morales was Chief of Staff to Ted Shackley at JM/WAVE during this period. I would not even apply the word “general” to Shackley at the time, let alone Morales. Or if I did, it would at most be Brigadier General, not a starred one. It was their superiors at Langley, e.g. James Angleton, who were the generals. People like Phillips and Morales were implementers. (Hancock devotes an entire chapter to Morales. Which is part and parcel of the hubbub that has attended the research community since Gaeton Fonzi introduced him in The Last Investigation. As I noted in my review of the documentary RFK Must Die this has reached the point of actually — and unsuccessfully — implicating him in the murder of Robert Kennedy.)

    Hancock uses Philips’ own autobiography The Night Watch for much of the background material on the man. He then uses one of his timelines to take us up to the famous Bishop/Phillips masquerade episode with Antonio Veciana. But surprisingly, he leaves out some of the most intriguing points about Phillips in Mexico City. Especially his work on the fraudulent tapes sent to Washington to implicate Oswald in the JFK case. For instance, Hancock does not even mention the role of Anne Goodpasture, Phillips’ assistant in Mexico City. There is some extraordinary material on her in the HSCA’s Lopez Report. Neither does he mention the utterly fascinating evidence that John Armstrong advances in his book Harvey and Lee. Namely that Phillips sent the dubiously transcribed Mexico City tapes of Oswald by pouch to himself at Langley under an assumed name. Why would he do such a thing? Well, maybe so that no officers but he and Goodpasture would have the tapes from their origin in Mexico City to their arrival at CIA HQ. This mini-conspiracy was blown in two ways. First, when FBI officials heard the tapes as part of their Kennedy murder investigation and concurred that they were not of Oswald. Second, when HSCA first counsel Richard Sprague showed the official transcripts of the tapes to the original Mexico City transcriber. The transcriber replied that what was on those transcripts was not what he recalled translating. It seems odd to me that these very important points would be left out of any contemporary discussion of Phillips. Even more so since Hancock goes into the Mexico City episode less than a hundred pages later (pgs 275-282)

    IV

    The above leads to a structural criticism of this book, namely its uneven organization. There is almost as much jumping around here as in Joan Mellen’s A Farewell to Justice. But unlike with that book, the fault is not in the editing down of a longer work. It seems here to be part of the ambitious, gestalt-like approach. Hancock the theorist is handling many different threads, and assigning them equal weight. It’s a wide grasp, and Hancock the writer isn’t up to the task. The job of Hancock the writer was to at least try and mold all these separate strands into a clean, clear narrative frame that would keep the reader’s attention and drive him forward to a convincing conclusion. To put it mildly, the book did not succeed on that level. It’s a difficult read. It does not really have a chronological organization, or even a thematic one. Which is why Hancock probably uses all those cumbersome and unhelpful timelines. The thematic approach he attempts is also weak. The chapter titles are supposed to suggest a general framework of what to find. Sometimes this works and sometimes it does not. For instance, he introduces the aforementioned Robert McKeown in Chapter 2. But then his story is not filled in until almost 200 pages later (pgs 189-191) Same with Jack Ruby. Details about him are filled in throughout the book. But they seem to me to be incomplete in themselves, and not completing an intellectual or narrative arc. This organizational problem is multiplied by other technical errors in the book’s production. For example the proper rubric to give the introduction to a book is “Foreword,” not “Forward”. In the index, even though he is mentioned prominently, you will not find the name of Robert McKeown. Conversely, my name is mentioned in the index, but it does not appear on the pages listed.

    The above production flaws accentuate the tilt in the book that I noted earlier. Although it’s a bit difficult to discern, the conspiracy I see Hancock postulating here is a kind of rogue, loosely knit, willy-nilly operation. A set of Cubans is at the bottom committing the crime (he points toward Felipe Vidal Santiago). The supervisor of this plot is Roselli, who Hancock terms the “strategist”. Since Roselli has connections to the CIA, the implication is this is where Phillips and Morales come in. To top the machinations as depicted by Hancock — and in a rather original stroke — he brings in Roselli’s friend and super Washington lobbyist Fred Black. He says Black is the guy who saw President Johnson right after he took office and had some blackmail material on him and this is why LBJ went along with the cover-up.

    Where does this information appear to come from? Newly declassified ARRB files perhaps? Nope. It’s from another rather questionable book that the author uses. This is Wheeling and Dealing, by the infamous Bobby Baker. Now again, to go into all the problems with using a book like this and with someone like Baker would take a separate essay in itself. Suffice it to say, Baker had such a low reputation and was involved with so many unsavory characters and activities that RFK pressed then Vice-President Johnson to get rid of him before the 1964 election. The Attorney General was worried some of these activities would explode into the press and endanger the campaign. Liking the protection his position with Johnson gave him, Baker resisted. He then fought back. One of the ways he fought back was by planting rumors about President Kennedy and a woman named Ellen Rometsch. The resultant hubbub, with daggers and accusations flying about, is the kind of thing that authors like Seymour Hersh and Burton Hersh make hay of in their trashy books. (I didn’t think it was possible, but Burton Hersh’s book Bobby and J. Edgar is even more awful than The Dark Side of Camelot. It is such an atrocity, I couldn’t even finish it.) Suffice it to say, Baker was forced out in October of 1963. Researcher Peter Vea has seen the original FBI reports commissioned by Hoover about Rometsch and he says there is nothing of substance in them about her and JFK. I am a bit surprised that Hancock would try and pin the JFK cover-up on information furnished by the likes of Baker and Black.

    This is all the more surprising since the author includes material from John Newman’s latest discoveries about Oswald, James Angleton, the CIA and Mexico City. To me this new ARRB released evidence provides a much more demonstrable and credible thesis as to just how and why Johnson decided to actively involve himself in the cover-up.

    To make his Black/Baker theorem tenable on the page, Hancock leaves out or severely curtails some rather important and compelling evidence. In 1996, Probe published a milestone article by Professor Donald Gibson entitled “The Creation of the Warren Commission” (Vol. 3 No. 4 p. 8). It was, and still is, the definitive account of how the Warren Commission came into being. And it was used and sourced by Gerald McKnight in the best study of the Warren Commission we have to date, Breach of Trust, published in 2005. According to this evidence declassified by the ARRB, there were three men involved in pushing the concept of the Warren Commission onto the Johnson White House. They were Eugene Rostow, Dean Acheson, and Joseph Alsop. (There is a fourth person who Rostow alluded to but didn’t name in his call to Bill Moyers on 11/24. Ibid p. 27) This trio sprung into action right after Oswald was shot by Ruby. And they began to instantly lobby Moyers, Walter Jenkins, Nick Katzenbach, and President Johnson to create what eventually became the Warren Commission. To say that Hancock gives short shrift to Gibson’s seminal account is a huge understatement. He radically truncates the absolutely crucial and stunning phone call between LBJ and Alsop of 11/25. One has to read this transcript to understand just how important it is and just how intent and forceful Alsop is in getting Johnson to do what he wants him to. (The Assassinations pgs. 10-15.) By almost eviscerating it, Hancock leaves the impression that it is actually Johnson who was pushing for the creation of a blue ribbon national committee and not Alsop! (Hancock pgs 327-328) I don’t see how any objective person can read the longer excerpts and come to that conclusion. So when Hancock states (p. 322) categorically that “President Johnson was the driving force in determining and controlling exactly how the murder of President Kennedy was investigated,” I am utterly baffled at how and why he can write this. The sterling work of both Gibson and McKnight show that this is a wild and irresponsible exaggeration.

    V

    But this puzzling aspect of the work relates to other dubious but just as categorical statements that abound in it. On page 298, Hancock writes that the Oswald as Lone Nut story was created after the fact as a damage control device and was not part of the plot. If that is true then why did Shaw and Ferrie try to get Oswald a position at a mental hospital in Jackson, Louisiana in the summer of 1963? When Garrison studied this incident he concluded its goal was to get Oswald into such a hospital under any circumstances. And then announce after the assassination that he had been there as a patient. Presto! You have the officially deranged sociopath the Warren Commission tries to portray. Also, on and dovetailing with this, multi-millionaire Jock Whitney did a curious thing on 11/22/63. He went to work as a copy editor at the New York Herald Tribune — a paper that he owned. One of the things he did was to approve an editorial that suggested that very Lone Nut scenario. (Probe Vol. 7 No. 1 p. 20) Right after making this unwarranted assumption, Hancock writes about how the plotters actually meant to portray the patsy: “The plotters were presenting Oswald as a paid Castro agent associating with Castro operatives.” (Ibid) Two questions I have about this “presentation.” First, who was paying him and how much? In other words, what happened to the money? Second, who were these pro-Castro operatives? I fail to see them in any study of Oswald. This seems to me to be, outside the fantasy world of Gus Russo, a vacuous and unsupportable concept.

    On another occasion the omniscient Hancock states that the conspirators lacked “a Dallas intelligence network.” (p. 379) Well, if your self-appointed plotters are people like Santiago and Roselli, this might be accurate. But if you unblinker your eyes, people like George DeMohrenschildt, CIA chief J. Walton Moore, Ruth and Michael Paine, and the rather large White Russian community — who, among other things, counseled Marina Oswald on her New Orleans Grand Jury testimony — these suspicious characters might serve just fine as an intelligence network.

    Finally, in a rather revealing statement, Hancock writes that if the cover-up had been pre-planned, “there should not have been the glaring problems we now see in regard to the autopsy.” (p. 299) Again, this is a real puzzler. The medical part of this case held quite strongly until the time of the HSCA. In other words for 15 years. When a strong critical movement arose against the Warren Commission in 1967, Warren Commission lawyer David Slawson — then in the Justice Department — started the move toward an official review of the autopsy. From the beginning, his intent — which he actually wrote about — was to stop the critical community in its tracks with an authoritative medical document supporting the Warren Commission verdict. Slawson’s efforts ended up in the formation of the so-called Fischer Panel, an illustrious panel of forensic pathologists selected by Ramsey Clark. They issued their report in 1968 and it predictably certified that only one assassin was involved and all shots came from the rear. This report was then used to batter both the Warren Commission critics and DA Jim Garrison, who was pursuing his case against Clay Shaw at the time. How did it achieve this aim? Because of its Washington based sanction of secrecy. Only the result was announced. The material and methodology used to attain it was kept hidden. It was not until the HSCA report, and the second generation of books on the case which followed it, that this area of evidence began to be seriously addressed. And this was in the late 70’s and early 1980’s. And it was not until the nineties, with the Assassination Records Review Board releases, that so much was finally declassified that the medical aspect began to be sharply skewered from multiple angles. In other words, what went on at Bethesda — a deliberately incomplete and deceptive autopsy conducted under military control — was not fully revealed until three decades later. Which is quite enough time to keep the cover-up intact. From a conspiratorial standpoint, the only other solution to this problem — disguising the true nature of the shots and the assassin — would have been to actually have a sniper on the sixth floor and to have him perform what the Commission actually said he did. But this could not have been done since we know today that the feat is not possible. So what did happen, the federally sanctioned cover-up, was an operational necessity which did the trick.

    These kinds of blanket yet porous statements occur quite often throughout this book. (There are many others I could have listed but, for reason of rhetorical overkill, I did not.) So although there are some interesting and worthwhile aspects to this book, overall I found it really disappointing. It is spotty, pretentious, unconvincing in its overall thesis, and uses questionable sources and witnesses to advance parts of its presentation, while leaving out more credible evidence that works against that particular presentation. It pains me to write like this, since I like Mr. Hancock and think he and his organization have done some good work. But I have to.

    Also read the update to this review.

  • Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

    I

    “Vincent Bugliosi is working on a book, in which he plans to evaluate the most important issues in the JFK case.”

    No, this was not a publisher’s coming attraction blurb posted last book season on Amazon.com. Rather, it was the lead item in Paul Hoch’s newsletter, Echoes of Conspiracy, from October 16, 1987! Twenty years later, famed Manson gang prosecutor Bugliosi and publisher W.W. Norton have delivered a massive, oversized tome. And what it lacks in new (or old) persuasive material it makes up for in sarcasm, invective, and ad hominem attacks directed at critics of the Warren Commission’s findings.

    It may seem unusual to employ Bugliosi’s name in the same vein as Shakespeare’s, but amidst all of his bluster and bombast this reviewer was ultimately reminded of the line from Act 5 of Macbeth. To paraphrase: Reclaiming History is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

    To trace the genesis of this work one has to go back to a mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald sponsored by London Weekend Television over the course of three days in late July of 1986. Copious hours of footage were edited down to four hours and broadcast in 2-hour installments over two consecutive nights on November 21 and 22, 1986 on the Showtime cable channel. (It was broadcast in England and other European countries as well). Bugliosi was selected as the “prosecutor” and Oswald was represented posthumously by noted attorney Gerry Spence. Actual witnesses were called to the stand and the overall production was fairly noteworthy. As one who videotaped the program and watched it several times later, I came away from it feeling Gerry Spence was ill-prepared. (Bugliosi goes to great lengths in his book to dispel this, noting all of the time and resources Spence spent on the case). After deliberating for a day, the mock jury returned a verdict of guilty. As much as Bugliosi likes to remind his audience of this fact in both the book and interviews, he obviously views this as quite the feather in his cap. And he should. For just after the trial, Bugliosi signed a contract with Norton and received a generous advance (rumor has put it as high a $1,000,000) to write about the trial and the case in general. Indeed Bugliosi writes in his introduction that he commenced work on the book following the trial in 1986, bringing the tally on his time card for the project up to 21 years.

    II

    Flash forward several years from the trial and Bugliosi still hasn’t delivered a book. In the intervening years however numerous events have transpired, not the least of which was Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK. Stone’s film electrified audiences with its pro-conspiracy slant and led to the formation of the temporary government body, the Assassination Records and Review Board. After the ARRB closed its doors in 1998, some six million pages of documents had been disgorged from various government agencies and private citizens and placed in the National Archives. Bugliosi, whose mandate was to cover all aspects of the JFK case, now had a daunting task on his hand. Indeed, in the August 18, 1998 edition of the New York Post they announced that “Bugliosi’s Final Verdict Delayed.” (The book’s original title was Final Verdict: The Simple Truth on the Killing of John F. Kennedy). Quoting a spokeswoman for Norton, the article acknowledged that, “Vincent asked for more time with the manuscript and people felt that this was not a book that they wanted to rush into print … It was in the fall (’98) catalog – so we must have thought in April that it was realistic for publication this year.” According to the Post “the book will now be bumped to the spring of 1999.” (Bugliosi was only eight years late). Now, at the 11th hour the tireless senior citizen doggedly combed through the archives, interviewed numerous witnesses, kept up on all of the assassination literature and began writing his magnum opus. (Actually the low-tech Bugliosi dictated his manuscript into a Dictaphone and had a dictation secretary type up his work. Bugliosi would then handwrite edits and inserts on yellow legal paper for further typing). All of this while churning out 3 other books!

    III

    What was ultimately delivered was a bloated, padded defense of the indefensible: the single bullet theory and the other conclusions of the Warren Commission. The book totals 1,612 oversized pages and weighs in at a whopping 5+ pounds. On top of that, it includes a CD-ROM which contains an additional 1,128 pages of source notes and endnotes, requiring the reader to have a computer by his side. (something that apparently Bugliosi doesn’t even have). Indeed, Bugliosi admits that if he had followed standard publishing conventions his work would have totaled 13 volumes!

    What strikes one most upon reading Bugliosi’s work is the amount of ad hominem attacks he launches at the JFK research community. Few are spared Bugliosi’s vitriol. Most are referred to as “zanies” (Bugliosi’s favorite. It’s even used in a chapter title).The Chief Military Analyst for the ARRB is called “insane,” “obscenely irresponsible”, “harebrained” and his theories “mad.” Joachim Joesten, an early critic, is a “communist”. Colonel Fletcher Prouty is a “wacky, right-winger.” Mark Lane – a “left-winger.”

    “Conspiracy theorist” is Bugliosi’s term of choice for JFK researchers and in Bugliosi’s hands it is a pejorative. It is tossed about in the same manner that “commie” and “pinko” were some fifty and sixty years ago.

    Indeed, the most troubling aspect of Bugliosi’s name-calling campaign is the amount of red-baiting in the book. As if stuck in a time warp, Bugliosi trots out such fractured tidbits as “Mark Lane was the slickest and most voluble of the early left-wing group of writers, and the KGB (per copies of documents from KGB files spirited out of Russia by a KGB defector in 1992) even contributed two thousand dollars, through an intermediary whose association with the KGB Lane was probably unaware of, to Lane’s efforts.” Bugliosi devotes a whole chapter to his Lane bashing.

    Bugliosi further smears Lane (as well as Harold Weisberg) by quoting Johann Rush who accuses Lane and Weisberg as being “leftists sympathetic to Marxist ideology.” Bugliosi quotes Rush throughout his book and Rush’s anti-communist screeds make INCA’s Ed Butler sound like FDR. Bugliosi even uses Rush as an “expert” commentator on the acoustic evidence. Right about now the reader may be asking: “Who is Johann Rush?” Well, Bugliosi’s political and scientific expert is the WDSU cameraman who filmed Oswald’s 1963 pamphleteering mission in front of the New Orleans International Trade Mart! As for Joachim Joesten, without a bit of shame Bugliosi presents Joesten’s Gestapo file, intelligence prepared by the Nazi’s, as proof of his communist leanings. (The file was originally requested of the CIA by the Warren Commission as a means of countering Joesten’s early criticism of the lone assassin theory. The CIA was only too happy to oblige in the smear job as evidenced by the comments written by a CIA official on the routing slip; “Let’s really stick it to him!”

    Even this author’s modest effort in the field (Let Justice Be Done) gets a trip to Bugliosi’s wood shed and a look at how he treats my work may give some insight on how he deals with others in the field as well.

    On page 980 of the main text he writes; “Conspiracy author William Davy, who believes Clay Shaw was involved in Kennedy’s assassination, writes, “Curiously, both Somoza and Juan Peron were patients and friends of Shaw’s close associate, Dr. Alton Ochsner … Ochsner is best known for his association with Ed Butler and the Information Council of the Americas, or INCA … INCA was composed of several members of the New Orleans elite. These included … Eustis and William B. Reily. The Reily family owned William B. Reily & Co., makes of Luzianne coffee. It was at Reily’s where Oswald found work as a machine greaser in the summer of 1963″”

    It’s important to note the dots between the sentences in Bugliosi’s presentation above, because what he has done is quote my work from 3 different pages and 2 distinct chapters, separated by 117 pages and then presents it as a seamless narrative. Of course, you would have to check his endnote, inconveniently located on the CD-ROM, as well as my book, to verify this. At numerous points in his book, Bugliosi takes the critics to task for just this kind of conduct.

    Further distortion of the record is on page 824 of the notes section, where Bugliosi writes that, “Conspiracy author William Davy suspects [Leslie Norman] Bradley of possibly being involved in the assassination because on August 21, 1966, a Houston man named S. M. Kauffroth wrote the FBI office in Houston and said that Bradley had told him on November 24, 1963,that after being released from the Cuban prison in May of 1963 it was tough to survive financially but that Clay Shaw was “helping us.””

    I defy any reader of my book to find a passage where I insinuate, imply or anywhere state that Bradley was involved in the assassination. I quote only what is in the FBI document that Bugliosi notes above.

    Bugliosi keeps his dismal track record intact when he states that I wrote that Permindex is a “CIA front.” He then cites pages 95 and 98 of my book. However, on page 95, the CIA isn’t even mentioned and on page 98 it is mentioned only in the context of a quote in the Italian newspapers as to that possibility.

    I could go on, but I’m sure the reader gets the point. One last thing though is his attempted smear of me with guilt by association. On page 543 he writes that Judyth Baker’s allegations of her affair with Oswald and other New Orleans intrigues “looks like any other conspiracy book that could have been written by, well, Harrison Livingstone, or Robert Groden, or Jim Garrison, or William Davy, with all the allegations of conspiracy one would expect to find in these books.” At no point have I ever endorsed (publicly or privately) or even written about Ms. Baker’s Harlequin Romance version of events in New Orleans.

    At this point one has to wonder if Bugliosi even fully read my book.

    IV

    Of course the mainstream media response to all of this can be summarized in one word: predictable. Ever since their rush to judgment in endorsing the Warren Report in 1964, they have been looking for a redeemer to pull their bacon out of the credibility fire. The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Washington Post and many of the cable news outlets have practically tripped over themselves in their ardent endorsements. The Washington Post teased its readers with a blurb on the cover to their Book World magazine that read: JFK’s Murder Solved. Inside, the review was headlined, “Goodbye, Grassy Knoll”. The adoration was heaped on by reviewer Alan Wolfe who, like Bugliosi, couldn’t resist the name calling: Mark Lane is overweening and paranoid, Oliver Stone is irresponsible.

    However, The Post’s review was bush league compared to The New York Times reviewer who urged that anyone who believes in conspiracies should be marginalized, ridiculed and shunned, “the way we do smokers.” The remarks were so strident that it provoked a response in the form of a letter to the editor signed by author Norman Mailer, and journalists David Talbot, Jefferson Morley and Anthony Summers.

    The media love fest seemed to have played itself out early and the book would probably have died the ignominious death it so richly deserves except Forest Gump came to the rescue. Shortly after the book was released Variety announced:

    “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.

    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.”

    “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.”

    With statements like Mr. Goetzman’s, one doubts if Goetzman, Hanks and Paxton really read Bugliosi’s 2,740 pages or any of the critical literature released prior, or subsequent, to Reclaimimg History – especially within a month’s time. (For an example of a book that would make for a much more compelling dramatic narrative, the aforementioned should check out David Talbot’s Brothers.)

    If the readers find HBO’s position as offensive as I do, try cancelling your subscription to their service and let the VPs of the network and Mr. Hanks’ representatives know of your displeasure. It’s your history. Reclaim it.

  • Paris Flammonde, Assassination of America: The Kennedy Coups d’Etat

    The used book scalpers must be a little distraught with the release of Paris Flammonde’s The Kennedy Coups d’ Etat, a mammoth revision of Flammonde’s earlier classic, The Kennedy Conspiracy (Meredith Press: New York, 1969). For years, used copies of that long out-of-print volume were being hawked by book resellers for hundreds of dollars. Now with the release of a revised and massively expanded Kennedy Conspiracy the prices for the earlier work could begin to descend from those stratospheric heights.

    That earlier tome was subtitled “An Uncommissioned Report on the Jim Garrison Investigation,” and indeed was the only contemporary study to portray New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and his assassination inquiry in any kind of positive, objective light. However, calling Flammonde’s newest work a revision of that previous report is hardly doing it justice. Rather, it is an epic three-volume expansion (a fourth volume consisting entirely of an index is on the horizon) modifying his earlier book while collecting new material on the JFK and RFK assassinations to add context. Indeed, in what has to be the longest subtitle in this field, Flammonde’s full title reads: Assassination of America. The Kennedy’s Coup d’Etat. The End of an Era, and Examination of the Jim Garrison Investigations, and the Effects on the Growing Totalitarianism in the Expanding Hegemonic American Empire. Adding further to its already hefty girth, Flammonde has included 30 appendices, covering everything from biographies of the numerous Warren Commission critics to a virtual encyclopedia of major (and some minor) figures in the case. Add in the hundreds of illustrations, documents and photographs and the three books total over 1,400 pages.

    Volume 1 is titled “The Deaths in Dallas” and includes introductions by Cyril Wecht, William Turner and Jim Marrs, numerous chapters on Oswald, Ruby, Tippit and other familiar personae, as well as chapters devoted to the ballistic, medical and graphical evidence. Although there appears to be little in the way of new, primary research directly attributable to Flammonde, he nonetheless makes good use of much of the latest developments and evidence in the case.

    The second volume “The Masques of New Orleans,” is essentially the revision and expansion of The Kennedy Conspiracy, focusing on the Garrison investigation and the subsequent trial of Clay Shaw. As with Volume 1, Flammonde uses much of the latest research in the field (including this author’s) to enhance his previous groundbreaking investigation. Flammonde spent months (years?) in New Orleans interviewing numerous witnesses and principals associated with the Shaw case and doing much “on the ground” (and groundbreaking) research. Indeed, that “older” information still stands on its own and seems remarkably fresh despite the passage of 40 years. For example, Flammonde’s treatment of the shady Swiss/Italian “trade organization”, PERMINDEX/Centro Mondiale Commerciale, was state of the art in 1967. It still stands the test of time today and begs for further research into that firm’s connections to numerous political murders.

    Marshalling all of this new (and old) information, Book 3, “Barren Harvest,” has Flammonde theorizing as to who had the means, motive and opportunity to commit this regicide. As previously noted, this volume closes out with the numerous appendices that cover 30 different subjects — some of the best being a history of the Old Catholic Church (which Ferrie and others had connections to), as well as numerous invaluable reference tools.

    Paris Flammonde, who spent years in radio and television production (he was the longtime producer of the popular, long-running Long John Nebel Show), is part of a vanishing breed — a cultured intellectual whose wit and intellect is reflected in his prose.

    The work is not without its fair share of errors, omissions and typos and could have used a good proofreader. (For instance, researcher and author Jim Marrs is frequently referred to as “Bill Marrs,” and the cover calls the work a “Projected Encyclopedic Narrative.” Since the work is now published, it doesn’t make much sense to call it “projected.”) Also, the aforementioned writing style may put off some of the more academically inclined readers, but these are nitpicks that in no way detract from the overall significance of this fine work.

    All of this notable discourse comes at a cost, though. The hefty price tag of $125 could put off the more budget-minded, but in terms of value received for your money, it’s a bargain.

  • Hugh Aynesworth Never Quits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Read some more about Piddock’s project.

    Read some more about Hugh Aynesworth.

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

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

    hugh
    Hugh Aynesworth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Why couldn’t Jennings do the same?

  • Joan Mellen, A Farewell To Justice

    In the JFK assassination community, few works have been labored over longer or been more keenly anticipated than Joan Mellen’s new volume on the late New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, A Farewell to Justice. Mellen reportedly worked on the book for several years. When it was first announced, it was to be a full-scale biography of Garrison and published by a major university press. But on its long voyage to completion, these terms were altered. If you go through the book and count the number of pages that are purely biographical, it comes to about 25. So it is not in any way a biography. Also, the publisher is not NYU Press but Potomac Books. Reportedly, the book got so long that the original publisher opted out.

    This last brings up my first criticism of the book. Many complain today about the lack of editing in the publishing business. And because of the cost cutting pressures, it has become a serious problem. The Kennedy field is no stranger to bloated, turgid, off-balance books e.g. the original version of The Man Who Knew too Much, Ultimate Sacrifice, and many of the efforts of Harry Livingstone. (Ironically, Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins was beautifully edited.) Mellen’s book is a hardcover edition. Which means it was expensive to produce. To defray costs it appears to have been whittled down. Not with a scalpel, but a carving knife. There is no way not to describe the book as poorly produced even on the simplest level. As many commentators have noted, the footnotes are out of sync with their proper placement. (And beyond that, some rather controversial claims are not annotated at all, a point I will refer to later.) Even the Table of Contents is off. For example, Chapter 13 is listed as beginning on page 204. It begins on page 205. Further, the book, to say the least, is not well written. Consider this sentence from Chapter 12, p. 187:

    Put in contact with Shaw’s defense team by Walter Sheridan, Miller went on to serve as the liaison between Shaw’s lawyers and Richard Lansdale, a lawyer in Lawrence Houston’s.

    That abrupt and startling fragment would make any sophomore English major wince. But further, as Publisher’s Weekly has noted, Mellen’s overall grip on the narrative is something less than controlled, let alone masterly. It confuses an already complex case with “shifting timelines, authorial voices and locations with seeming little cause.”(As we shall see, this is not an unfair criticism.) The net result is that one does not come away from the book feeling as one has looked at a delicately painted mosaic of the Garrison investigation, a burnished portrait. The result to me seems blocky, and oddly, at the same time, amorphous — both in its overall design, and within its chapters. It is true that many books on the JFK case suffer from similar failings. But Mellen is a tenured professor of English, who teaches creative writing and has published many previous books that were better written than this one. So I assume, and hope, the fault was with the editor.

    Before getting to what I see as some of the book’s serious problems, let me list what I see as its clear, and less clear, achievements.

    1. She pinpoints when Garrison’s curiosity was piqued about the JFK case. It was not with the legendary 1966 plane flight with Russell Long. It was when Garrison picked up the 1965 issue of Esquire with the article on the Warren Commission by Dwight MacDonald. Another source was former Warren Commissioner Hale Boggs. This explains why there are so many memoranda in the Garrison files from throughout 1966. (And if memory serves me right, one or two from 1965.)
    2. Her work on the VIP Room incident at the Moisant Airport appears to be quite solid. Added to the previous work of Joe Biles and Bill Davy, it seems to me to be just about an accomplished fact that Clay Shaw signed the ledger of the Eastern Airlines waiting room as Clay Bertrand. Therefore, by his own hand revealing that he used the alias that Dean Andrews said he did when he phoned Andrews and asked him to defend Oswald.
    3. Her discussion of the famous Clinton/Jackson sighting of Oswald, Shaw and David Ferrie is the longest I have seen and contains some new and interesting details. For instance, it appears that Oswald actually did register to vote, but his name was later erased. And the FBI knew about the incident and about his subsequent attempt to find employment at a hospital in the area and they deliberately covered it all up.
    4. Her writing on the September, 1967 hatchet job in Life magazine accusing Garrison of being in bed with the Mafia is detailed and specific. She names Dick Billings, David Chandler, Jim Phelan, Robert Blakey, Aaron Kohn, and Sandy Smith as all cooperating on the slander. She states that the whole purpose of the two-part piece was to slam Garrison. Like Tony Summers and Davy, she produces evidence showing that Sandy Smith was, in essence, an employee of the FBI. And that Life drove a wedge between Garrison and his political ally Gov. McKeithen by threatening to do the same to him unless he gave Chandler a job in state law enforcement, thereby keeping him out of the D.A.’s clutches.
    5. Her elucidation of the things that William Wood (aka Bill Boxley) snookered Garrison into doing is quite instructive. This includes the indictment of Edgar Eugene Bradley (which the DA came to regret) and the near naming of Robert Lee Perrin as one of the snipers in Dealey Plaza. These were prime pieces of misinformation according to Mellen.
    6. Mellen’s work with former HSCA New Orleans investigators allows her to write several illuminating pages on how Bob Buras and L.J. Delsa were deliberately circumscribed by Chief Counsel Robert Blakey into limiting their investigation into the many leads Garrison was willing to provide the HSCA. It also shows how Blakey’s clear bias on the case created divisions in the ranks of the staff.<
    7. The file David Ferrie called “The Bomb” is minutely described by two people who saw it, Jimmy Johnson and Clara Gay. It is hard after reading their descriptions not to conclude that Ferrie had some advance knowledge of how the actual circumstances of the assassination in Dealey Plaza were going to occur. Her evidence is interesting but much more equivocal on a loan Shaw made to Ferrie to fly to Dallas a few days before the murder.
    8. She writes six well documented pages on David Ferrie’s activities with the Civil Air Patrol. As Delsa told me in 1994, it appears that one of Ferrie’s objectives was recruiting young men, including Oswald, for future consideration in the military. Another appears to be referring them to Clay Shaw for both professional and personal reasons.

    The above is certainly an estimable list of achievements. Standing alone, they would be valuable contributions. The problem is they do not stand alone. They are part of a much larger volume. Altogether the above accounts for significantly less than 20% of the book. If the rest of the more than 80% of the work would have been just bland regurgitation from other books e.g. Garrison’s own book, or Bill Davy’s fine work, that would have been one thing, and the book would have still been commendable.

    Unfortunately, that is not the case. The rest of the book seems to me to be sloppily composed, not proofread for errors of fact, loaded with controversial tenets, in large part assumptive, ideologically biased, has many weighty yet unsupported claims, exhibits a trustworthiness that goes beyond naivetè, and (I believe) deliberately leaves out important details to shape people and events in a certain way. These are serious criticisms. I believe they are merited. Especially for a veteran writer who was producing what was supposed to be a definitive book.

    As I noted earlier, the book suffers from a wobbly structure that consists in part of the shifting of time frames, locations, and viewpoints. For instance on pages 60-61 we begin with Oswald’s Canal Street arrest in 1963; we then go to Francis Martello’s testimony about Oswald’s FBI interview while in custody; we then flash forward to 1967 and David Ferrie — who is not in the Martello report — being interviewed by John Volz of Garrison’s staff; then she describes Garrison requesting the FBI file on Ferrie; and then she mentions the FBI wiretapping of Garrison’s office. All of this jumping around in the space of about five paragraphs. At times, with certain characters like Ferrie and Thomas Beckham she actually tries to place us inside their heads, revealing their thoughts, while having them refer to themselves in the third person: “He is sick, Ferrie says. As a result of rumors of my arrest, I’ve been asked to leave the airport, he says.” (p. 103) At other times she presents a decades old interview in the present tense, throwing in bits of novelistic detail. Consider this interview of Carlos Quiroga by Frank Klein:

    “Well, he [Banister] didn’t have anything to do with arms,” Quiroga says. Then he smiles. Klein thinks: He smiles involuntarily or smirks when he is not telling the truth. (p. 99)

    At times she adapts an omniscient viewpoint. On page 98, she has Banister employee Bill Nitschke looking at a picture of a Cuban who he identifies as Manuel Gonzalez. She then writes, “He was in fact looking at a photograph of longtime CIA operative David Sanchez Morales.” The problems here are that 1) She does not reference the photo 2) She does not footnote the conversation so we can crosscheck it 3) She does not indicate the evidence for her being right and Garrison being wrong about the photo identification 4) Morales never came up in the Garrison inquiry. (Morales’ nickname, “El Indio,” did come up but we do not know that it applied to Morales in this context, or if the photo was of him.) Perhaps the assertion is correct, but it would need more backup than she provides. As I said earlier, the careless and inconsistent use of these near-novelistic devices make it hard to follow an already difficult case. The Garrison investigation of the Kennedy murder is not the killing of the Clutter family in Kansas. And Mellen is not nearly the writer Truman Capote was.

    Then there is another organizational problem: the misnamed chapters. Chapter 5 is titled “The Banister Menagerie,” yet it begins with Andrew Sciambra’s interview of Clay Shaw in 1966. Or consider pages 60-62 which discuss David Ferrie’s association with Oswald, the FBI and Jim Garrison, Sergio Arcacha Smith, and informants in Garrison’s office like Bill Gurvich and Tom Bethell. These come at the end of a chapter entitled, “Oswald and Customs.” Chapter 10 is titled “A Skittish Witness” referring to Richard Case Nagell. Yet only five pages of the chapter, less than a third of its length, actually deals directly with Nagell. Chapter 21 is called “Potomac Two Step,” apparently referring to the charade of the 1976-1978 congressional inquiry into Kennedy’s death. Yet, only a few pages of this chapter discuss the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Most of the HSCA material is in the following chapter entitled “The Death of Jim Garrison.” Again, this betrayed to me a writer with a weak grip on her narrative. (In fairness to Mellen, this may have occurred in the editing process.)

    In addition to the book’s clumsy editing, questions arise about the proofreading. Proofreading does not require exquisite expertise. It just means having someone with an affinity for the subject ask pertinent questions. That didn’t happen here. There are too many errors of fact and interpretation. As Patricia Lambert has pointed out, Mellen seems to have misinterpreted CIA files on one John Jefferson Martin with Banister assistant Jack Martin. So Mellen turns Jack Martin into a CIA officer. I have seen these documents and I agree with Lambert: the two are not the same person. On page 92, she says that an FBI informant told Garrison that rightwing segregationist Joseph Milteer had phoned him from Dallas on the day of the assassination. Jerry Rose, who thought Milteer was in on the plot, produced documents showing that Milteer was not in Dallas that day. On page 105, she discusses David Ferrie’s disclosures to Lou Ivon, first conveyed to Oliver Stone’s researcher Jane Rusconi and depicted in his film. But what she lists here goes beyond not just what Ivon told Rusconi, but to my knowledge, what he told anyone else. On page 169, she writes that not just the CIA, but the Special Group Augmented, Task Force W, the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the FBI and the NSA all knew about the Castro assassination plots in the early sixties. This is an amazing assertion. To say the least, there is much documentation to the contrary. On page 181, she writes that David Atlee Phillips died before Jim Garrison could reach him. Phillips died in 1982. Garrison’s inquiry was effectively ended almost ten years earlier. And there is no evidence that Garrison knew about him at that time.

    Mellen seems confused about the results of the HSCA. After relating the famous Victor Marchetti Spotlight story about the CIA cutting loose Howard Hunt in a “limited hangout,” she adds something to twist that story around. She says Marchetti was mistaken. The CIA’s real scapegoat was Shaw. She then offers the HSCA Report as evidence this was so. She writes in her typical mangled syntax:

    The report calls Shaw a “limited hang out, cut out” to play a role in the conspiracy, the very terms Victor Marchetti had been told were being applied to Hunt … Shaw, the Committee decided was “possibly one of the high level planners or “cut out”to the planners of the assassination.” (pgs 355-356)

    This is another amazing assertion. As anyone who has read the HSCA Report knows this language is not found anywhere in that volume about anyone. And definitely not Shaw. The HSCA cooperated completely with the CIA and identified Shaw as a businessman who cooperated with them, as thousands of others did, by consenting to interviews upon their return from abroad. The report even disguises his presence in the Clinton/Jackson incident by at first saying Shaw was there, and then (p. 145) that Ferrie was there with Oswald, “if not Clay Shaw” thereby smudging the identification. A page later the report lists more evidence of relations between Oswald, Ferrie and Banister, with Shaw notably absent. The report also says that they could not relate any conspiracy to the government. What Mellen seems to be doing here is quoting from a document that was declassified many years later. It was written by HSCA counsel Jonathan Blackmer and was not in the report. It was declassified by the ARRB and first used by Bill Davy in his book Let Justice Be Done (1999, p. 202) where he made the distinction clear. It is hard to believe that Mellen did not read that book and its footnotes, especially since she wrote a jacket blurb for it.

    Then there are what I see as failures of omission, or incompleteness. There is very little new offered on the trial of Clay Shaw. Even in the way that the CIA deliberately obstructed the case. Yet there have been many new documents declassified in this regard, some of them very interesting, especially in regards to James Angleton. This was disappointing since it would reveal the extraordinary lengths the Agency was willing to go to subvert the DA and protect Shaw.

    There is no real chapter that concentrates on the role of the media in the destruction of Garrison. Bits and pieces are scattered throughout without any cumulative effect or focus. Mellen once told me she would have a separate chapter on James Phelan. It’s not here. Neither is there any real vivisection of Hugh Aynesworth, or Edward Epstein. Again, I see this as another missed opportunity to show just how threatened the power structure was by Garrison. To be fair to Mellen, it may have fallen victim to the editing knife. I hope so.

    Then there are New Orleans matters which she explores but not to fruition. In discussing the alleged “child molestation”charges aired by Jack Anderson she attributes their circulation to Layton Martens. After doing some work on this issue with Garrison’s son Lyon, I came to the conclusion that Shaw’s lawyers were involved. Mellen does not even mention them. She discusses the book Farewell America and rightly labels it a fraud. But she seems to end that affair with Garrison investigator Steve Jaffe and Herve Lamarre (one of the book’s authors). But the story is much richer and more interesting than that. Garrison eventually discovered that the book was an elaborate and laborious charade that was worked on by more than just Lamarre. And that Lamarre (under the authorial pseudonym of James Hepburn) was basically a front man in a complex shell game designed for the sole purpose of confusing and delaying his inquiry. Which it did. When all the leads are followed — which Mellen does not seem to have done– it is difficult not to detect the hand of James Angleton in the pie. Again, this may have been an editing decision.

    A curious aspect of the book is the author’s insistence on enumerating in detail several sexual anecdotes. From my experience, there is more sex in this book than the entire library of JFK books combined. Jim Garrison always thought that to discuss Clay Shaw’s homosexual escapades would be out of bounds personally and, for him, unprofessional. Though he had more than one report on this in his files, he never used them to violate Shaw’s privacy. Mellen goes ahead and describes them in rather graphic detail (pgs. 119-124). Including an incident with Shaw “and two colored males on the patio naked and using wine bottles on each other.” (p. 119) But that is not all. Very early in the book, by about page 35, we have been treated to anecdotes about homosexual fellatio, orgies, Garrison’s philandering, and the DA’s favorite sexual practices. On page 101, she excerpts a letter Ferrie wrote describing a dirty movie: “…some dude fucking this broad … he got his nuts jerking under her knee, she blew him, he fucked her in the ass twice…” Mellen saves the capper in this regard for the end. On page 382 we get a description, in her words, of “the shape of Garrison’s genitalia.” I don’t understand what these strained and rather tawdry episodes contribute to the book or why the author was so insistent on including them in a volume that is, ostensibly, about the murder of President Kennedy.

    Let’s jump from the low to the high, from the sexual to the scholarly. Mellen has laid out her footnotes, not in the classic, older way of putting them on the page. Nor has she done it in the later, more common way of superscripting a number next to the sentence and then placing the note at the rear of the book. What she has done is put the notes in the back but equated them with a page and a line. As I said earlier, this is problematic for her since by about page 185 the footnotes do not correspond to the page they are referring back to. So one has to work to match the reference to the page and line. But often that work is in vain, since many important pieces of information are not footnoted at all. And when I say many, I do not mean just several. Nor do I mean a dozen. I would estimate that, at least, about 45 major passages are undocumented. For instance, on page 41, she writes that Garrison learned from a source that Ferrie’s library card had been found on Oswald, but that it had been destroyed. On the same page, she writes that Oswald’s cousin, Marilyn Murrett, worked for the CIA. Three pages later, she takes us into Garrison’s mind while the DA is interviewing Ferrie two days after the assassination. Garrison asks himself why a minor homosexual would have a relationship with Jack Wasserman, Carlos Marcello’s attorney. She adds that this was more intriguing since the Warren Commission concluded there was no “real Mafia motive” in the assassination. So in the space of four pages, there are four pieces of rather important information — which includes Garrison’s thoughts — that should have been annotated but were not. And I am not hunting and picking. On page 135, she writes that the mysterious European business association Shaw was tied to, the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, was by our own government’s admission, a CIA front. Again, this is not sourced. And again, I have read a lot about the CMC and I have never seen this particular claim noted, let alone substantiated. About 100 pages later she writes that Walter Sheridan briefed Johnny Carson for his interview with Garrison. Again, this is quite interesting yet there is no source for it.

    I could go on like this for several pages. I am not saying that everything in a book has to be footnoted. But when one is presenting important things as fact, and it is new information, then at least most of that new information should be footnoted just to establish trust and rapport between the author and reader. Especially if the writer is a university professor and knows the rules of scholarly research. This is a serious failing that strikes at the heart of the book’s credibility.

    I want to segue here to what I see as another failing of the book: her judgment about certain important personages swirling around the Garrison investigation. She spends a great deal of time on Walter Sheridan. There is no doubt that Sheridan had an important role in the Garrison case, and is a complex and fascinating figure in his own right. But I believe her portrait of him is shortsighted. She clearly implies (p. 187) that Sheridan’s infamous NBC special was handed to him as an intelligence agent assignment. I thought this at one time also. Exploring the point, I got documents out of the UCLA library that showed that Sheridan worked for NBC for a number of years. That he produced at least seven documentaries, some of them nominated for awards, and some of them themed around rather attractive liberal causes. So while I agree that it is probably true that Sheridan got the assignment through his intelligence ties, it is not as cut and dried as she portrays it. And in another related, recurrent theme she chalks up Sheridan’s eagerness to wreck Garrison to Robert Kennedy. Yet, about 150 pages later, she has Sheridan still trying to wreck Garrison, this time on tax evasion charges. But by this time, Bobby Kennedy is dead. So who was directing Sheridan then?

    The issue of who Sheridan really was and what master he served is not an easy question to answer. But there is a hint of this in an interview New Orleans P. I. Joe Oster gave to the HSCA. In discussing Guy Banister’s early days, he named a curious working partner he had. It was Carmine Bellino, who would later become a chief investigator for Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department. This is a very interesting fact which is not in the book. In her haste to blacken RFK, an issue I will deal with later, Mellen discards things like pointed migrations, complex motivations, and multiple allegiances.

    Same thing with Gordon Novel. Novel was an associate of Sheridan who infiltrated the Garrison inquiry, wired his offices, and then supplied the fruits of his work to NBC. In fact, Novel told the press in advance that Garrison would be disposed of like trash via the NBC special. How close was he to the CIA? He wrote letters to Richard Helms at this time reporting on Garrison’s actions. When Garrison subpoenaed him for the grand jury, Novel fled New Orleans to Ohio where he was safe housed by the CIA and protected by the governor from being extradited back to New Orleans. He admitted under oath that he employed multiple lawyers who were remunerated by government agencies. His superiors then asked him to sue Garrison over the DA’s impressive interview in Playboy. During his deposition, he gave out some very interesting information about his history with the CIA going back to the Bay of Pigs, and his New Orleans association with people like Ed Butler, Sergio Arcacha Smith, and David Ferrie, among others. The CIA gave him a rigged polygraph which Novel then used to smear Garrison to, what he admitted were, CIA associated journalists. He was a friend of CIA arms specialist Mitch Werbell, and his electronic wizardry led him to meet Charles Colson during the Watergate scandal. They discussed Novel creating a degaussing gun that would erase the Watergate tapes that eventually brought Nixon down. Around 1976, Novel reportedly got in contact with the HSCA and wanted to talk.

    Mellen leaves almost all of the above out and introduces Novel, on page 65, as a serious witness to the Garrison inquiry. At times she states that the White House and Sheridan, not the CIA, were actually behind his pernicious and well-protected maneuverings. And what I have synopsized above is not a third of what I could say about Novel. But clearly, it would have an effect on how the reader views him in relation to the Garrison inquiry and the Kennedy assassination. Mellen’s foreshortened version reveals a lack of perspective, curiosity, and insight. And let us be blunt: gullibility. (This last is a compelling issue which I will deal with later.)

    Then there is the use of documents and how they relate to character portraits. I have already mentioned the apparent confusion about Jack Martin. About Kerry Thornley, she has stated in public, and repeats here, that Thornley received training in chemical and biological warfare. When I first heard this at the Duquesne 40th Anniversary JFK Conference Mellen gave it so much weight that I thought perhaps Thornley was part of the MK/Ultra program (something he actually claimed to be later in life). She repeats the charge in the book. But Stu WExler described this doucment to Larry Hancock. Hancock explained that many of his fellow soldiers in the military from that decade of the sixites were given the same training; it was quite common during the Cold War. So much for MK/Ultra. Then there is the document she uses in relation to Thomas Beckham. The document itself is not presented in the book. Instead, she quotes from it and paraphrases it. If taken at face value it says that Beckham received special instruction in espionage techniques, in small arms training, and was given a psychological dossier by a combined intelligence force of the government. But what Mellen does with this document in relation to Beckham, Oswald, Garrison, and the JFK case is, in my view, sheer hyperbole. She says that this document proves that 1) Beckham was to be used as an assassin; 2) he was to be a back-up assassin in case the Oswald-as-patsy scenario did not come off; 3) that it reveals ample foreknowledge of the JFK assassination by the government; 4) It proves that those who plotted to kill Kennedy had been grooming an innocent man for a very long time, and 5) that Garrison had uncovered parts of this plot in the Clinton/Jackson incident. (page 374)

    My reaction to all this, as I wrote in the margin of the paragraph which contains these claims, is a simple: “What the F?” From the way I read this document (combined with what I have learned about U.S. intelligence) I surmised there must have been dozens of men each year who got this kind of training. (Which is beautifully demonstrated in the first part of the David Mamet film Spartan.) How she can directly relate this document to the JFK case, to Oswald’s particular role, to a particular agency in charge of the murder, in a particular time frame, these claims all escape me. (Let alone the Clinton/Jackson incident, since as I can see, Beckham was not a part of that and perhaps not even cognizant of it.) Its not that you cannot make this claim with any documents in this case. For instance, there are certain documents pertaining to Mexico City, which I believe are pretty incriminating about Oswald: what he did there, how he was impersonated, and the CIA’s role in that charade. But I did not see that here.

    This relates to her use of Beckham throughout the book. She has clearly relied on him as the spine of the work. Thomas Beckham has been around for a long time. In fact, his name appears in the first positive study of Garrison, Paris Flammonde’s The Kennedy Conspiracy way back in 1969. Garrison was interested in him because of his relationship with Fred L. Crisman, an utterly fascinating character from the Pacific Northwest who Garrison thought was a high level intelligence operative. At the time of the HSCA Garrison wrote an interesting four-page memorandum on Beckham and his relationship to Crisman. The HSCA tracked him down and he did more than one long interview with them. These interviews were declassified by the ARRB early on and a number of people saw them as early as 1994-1995. Gus Russo tracked him down for the 1993 PBS special on Oswald. According to Russo (who Mellen, as we shall see, trusts in other areas) Beckham took back what he said. He told him that he told the HSCA New Orleans investigators what he thought they wanted to hear. He even told him that he cheated on his HSCA polygraph examination, which is how he passed it. Now he has gone back to his HSCA version for Mellen and she takes him at face value with no questions asked. And further, takes the document he has not just at face value, but exalts it to a degree that is, I believe, unwarranted.

    The point is this: many people were exposed to the Beckham evidence before Mellen (e.g. Larry Hancock). Some of them were specialists in the Garrison investigation. None of them have gone as far as she has with him i.e. to make him the centerpiece of a book on the DA. To take just one reason among many: it is hard to corroborate a lot of what he says. Which does not necessarily mean he is not credible. It just means that a more judicious person would not stake her book on a guy like him. In fact, she is the first. I predict she will be the last.

    Which brings us to Gerry Patrick Hemming. Like Beckham, Hemming has been around for a long time. Unlike Beckham, he has talked on the record to many authors and researchers, some of whom I have had questions about e.g. Gordon Winslow. I would have thought he would have gotten everything out of his system on this matter in the nineties when he talked at length to Tony Summers (for a videotape documentary), John Newman, Mark Lane, and Noel Twyman. (Reportedly, Twyman flew him to his home in San Diego for a three-day marathon interview.) His discussions for those four men included inside information on the relationship between James Angleton and Oswald, musings on the possible role of David Morales in the assassination, Guy Banister’s quest for a JFK assassin, and his slight caviling, but ultimate agreement on the “assassination caravan” story as related by Marita Lorenz to Mark Lane. I, and probably others thought that, after thirty years, Hemming was finally tapped out. I was wrong. He has new bits to tell Mellen. One new angle is information on Sylvia Odio. He says he knows who sent the Cuban visitors to see her (p. 87). Like many things in the book, it is not revealed how he knows this. On page 277, Hemming has more insight into Odio. He apparently had a relationship with her in Cuba. Mellen, unaware she’s swimming with sharks, uses Lawrence Howard as a corroborator on this. This is where I began to get suspicious. Because it reminded me of a tactic used by Wesley Liebeler and the Warren Commission on Odio. Namely make her into some kind of “loose woman”so doubts would be raised about her character and credibility. (Mellen does not note this striking parallel even though the HSCA was fully aware of it.)

    The other untapped line of new knowledge by Hemming is about Bobby Kennedy. According to Hemming, RFK met with Oswald in Florida face to face. (How Hemming could have forgotten to say this previously is a complete mystery.) To offer some sort of credence to a wild story, Mellen adds, “The story recalls the scene in the Oval Office witnessed by attorney F. Lee Bailey.”(p. 201) Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a scene in which Bailey was even at the White House in this book. So in addition to the bald assertion by Hemming, Mellen adds a bald parallel by Bailey.

    And the use of Hemming in relation to Odio and RFK really leads to a much larger issue in this book. Mellen is out to rewrite 1) The Odio incident 2) The history of the Castro assassination plots, and 3) Bobby Kennedy’s apparent reluctance to find out the truth about Dallas. To say that she indulges in a rather questionable revisionist history here is much too mild. This is a radical, sensational revisionism. Let’s analyze her rewriting of the Odio incident as a representative sample of what she is up to.

    The outline of Sylvia Odio’s story is well stated in Sylvia Meagher’s classic book, Accessories After the Fact. (Meagher found Odio and her story so compelling she titled her chapter on it, “The Proof of the Plot.”) The incident was further detailed, with new corroborating evidence, in the nineties by Gaeton Fonzi in his fine work, The Last Investigation. Fonzi investigated Odio for the HSCA and he chronicled a lot of his work in his book. In 1993 PBS, in their aforementioned special, interviewed some of Fonzi’s witnesses on camera. The witnesses, including a priest, all bolstered the story told by Sylvia and her sister Annie. So the incident has not just survived the test of time. For most objective people it has been enriched and fortified by further inquiry.

    But not for Joan Mellen. According to her, for 25 years, Meagher, Fonzi, the HSCA, and PBS got it wrong. First of all, Odio somehow overlooked a rather important and salient detail. Oswald, or his double, did not arrive at her door with the two Cubans. He was already at her house! But alas, if Sylvia Odio was wrong about this, so was her sister Annie who was there. And then so were her four corroborating witnesses including people you usually don’t dissemble with e.g. a priest and her psychiatrist. The logic that Mellen uses to try and enforce her bizarre and baffling revision of this is weird. She says that if Odio was able to identify Oswald, then why could she not identify the two Cubans? Well, maybe because Oswald was apprehended and his face was plastered all over television and the newspapers so she could see it? And the Cubans who were escorting him were not apprehended, were not even really looked for by the Warren Commission who tried to brush the whole thing under the rug? If they were never looked for or found, how could she identify them?

    Why does Mellen reject that rather obvious and simple argument? Because again, she has done what no one else did in forty years. Not Fonzi, not PBS, not the HSCA. Through Hemming, she found out who the two Cubans were who visited Odio. (Odio recalled them as Leopoldo and Angelo.) Hemming introduced her to one Angelo Murgado, a Miami Cuban who loved the Kennedys so much he changed his last name to Kennedy (a curious point I will address later). And Murgado/Kennedy told Mellen who Leopoldo was. Hold on to your hats here. Leopoldo was Bernardo de Torres. Yep, the guy who infiltrated Garrison’s investigation and may have been involved in the killing of Eladio del Valle. The guy who was good friends with CIA arms specialist Mitch Werbell. The man who allegedly had photos of the assassination he once thought of selling to Life. The man who was so in bed with the CIA that he later sold arms to South American countries and reportedly got involved in CIA drug trafficking in the eighties. Now right off the bat, this would seem to be a bit puzzling for an obvious reason. Fonzi and the HSCA had picked out Bernardo as a prime suspect for the assassination and they had a plant in his Cuban circle of friends. They even brought him to Washington for an executive session interview. So clearly, Fonzi was familiar with what he looked like. And clearly, as Fonzi writes, he spent many hours with Odio going over her descriptions of the two men. Yet it never struck that blunderbuss Fonzi that Leopoldo was right there in front of him, ripe for the picking. (In Fonzi’s book, p. 111, the Odio sisters give a description of “Angel.” If you compare it with the Mellen description of Murgado, and the photos and description of de Torres, both here and elsewhere, you will see why Fonzi never had his “Eureka” moment.)

    It would seem to me that what Murgado/Kennedy is trying to do is shift responsibility for Oswald from the CIA backed, right-wing Cubans to the leftist, Kennedy backed Cubans (JURE), of whom Odio was allied with. Mellen apparently shuts her eyes to this so she can then not ask the question: Well, if Odio and JURE were associated with Oswald before the assassination–to the point of him being her house guest–why on earth would Odio identify him? Dodging the questions completely, she can then write that if Oswald was with the Cubans driving to Dallas, or if he was already there at the Odio apartment, “the meaning of the incident remains the same.” (Page 381) If the meaning was the same then why did Murgado/Kennedy make a point of getting Oswald out of the car and into the house? Is Mellen really unaware of the significance of this switch? If she is she either has not done her homework on this important issue or she is incredibly careless with what she writes.

    But Murgado/Kennedy is not done. (Let’s call him MK for short from here on in.) He reveals to Mellen just how he knows all this stuff, and why he was with Bernardo at Odio’s house than night. (Although he never reveals how he has escaped detection all these years. And the uncurious Mellen apparently never asked.) See, he and Bernardo were part of a kind of “special team”of Cubans employed by RFK. For what pray tell? Well MK says that they had a dual purpose. One was to try and kill Castro. The other was to patrol around and be on the lookout for plots to kill President Kennedy. One might then have thought, well they did a Keystone Kops kind of a job since one of the “Kennedy protectors,” de Torres, may have been in on the plot to kill him. And RFK must have been pretty stupid to have people like de Torres, MK, and as MK says Manuel Artime around him to protect his brother. Why? Because all these guys were veterans of the Bay of Pigs disaster. Meaning that, like Dave Morales, they were all dyed-in-the-wool CIA loyalists. Consequently, all of them blamed the Kennedys for that debacle. And all of them stayed in the employ of the CIA afterwards. In fact, Artime was Howard Hunt’s Golden Boy, the man who Hunt wanted to replace Castro if the Bay of Pigs succeeded. Further, the CIA and their hard right Cubans had planned to never let the Kennedy Cubans, e.g. Manuelo Ray of JURE, take any power in Artime’s Cuba. They devised a secret operation inside the Bay of Pigs called Operation Forty, which sponsored death squads to eliminate all the Ray/Kennedy Cubans and then chalk it up to accidents, friendly fire, casualties of war etc. MK and Mellen want us to believe that RFK would not know that the very people he was involved with despised him and his brother for ending their dream of a retaken Cuba. This is especially hard to swallow since RFK sat on the secret Taylor Commission that interviewed witness after witness involved in the planning of that so-called “perfect failure.” Reportedly, he and JFK came to the conclusion that the CIA had designed the operation to fail, that they counted on JFK then escalating it with American forces, and when he did not, they blamed the failure on him, covered up their duplicity in the press, and told the Cubans JFK had lost his nerve. Clearly, when Fonzi describes the outburst Morales has at the drop of JFK’s name, and how Morales mentions the bloody revenge they extracted in retaliation for the Bay of Pigs, this is illustrative of the Cuban veterans resentment of Kennedy.

    How could RFK not be aware of this if, for example, I am? In my earlier research days when I did a lot of interviews, I talked to several Cubans. I decided that I would not talk to any more afterward since in every discussion I had about the Kennedys they all blamed JFK for the failure of the Bay of Pigs. Some of them in quite bitter terms. So it would follow then that the actual veterans of that operation would especially despise the Kennedys. And as de Torres may have done, took the sentiments one step further into an act of murderous vengeance. (So why would Murgado change his name in honor of him?)

    Why does Mellen not ask these obvious questions? Why did she not do her homework on this issue? All this information is in the literature today. In fact, there is one rather slim volume that explains the Bay of Pigs fallout in eyewitness detail. And it is not by a “Kennedy idolater” — a smear term which Mellen likes to employ apparently so she does not have to argue the facts, or defend her rather dubious and comical crew of witnesses. That book is called Give Us this Day. It is written by Artime’s friend and sponsor, Howard Hunt. A man who, like de Torres, is suspected of being involved in the JFK assassination. Hunt details all of his disputes with the Kennedys over the Bay of Pigs, how he disliked Ray and thought if the Kennedys installed him in Cuba, it would be “Castroism with out Fidel.” In other words, Ray was a Communist and the Kennedys were backing another Castro. Does Mellen not think that MK, de Torres, and Artime got that message from the Spanish speaking Hunt?

    Hunt was also involved in setting up Sergio Arcacha Smith in New Orleans as head of the CRC. Like the effortlessly gulled Gus Russo, Mellen believes Smith was also a Kennedy friendly Cuban who was actually buddy-buddy with RFK. This is the guy who worked for the Batista government for decades, who made a fortune in industry, who saw it all come to nothing when Castro took over. A man who was personally jetted out of Cuba by the CIA and set up in New Orleans with CIA allies like Ed Butler and Guy Banister. A man who was later identified as one of the two Cubans who threw Rose Cheramie out of the car as they were driving to Dallas discussing how to kill Kennedy. Who according to Richard Nagell was involved in the setting up of Oswald in New Orleans, and who according to Officer Francis Fruge, may have had maps of Dealey Plaza in his apartment in Dallas where he was living at the time of the murder. It is hard to measure who the better indictment in this case would be against: Smith or de Torres. But according to Mellen and MK, they were both “good friends” of RFK.

    I pondered throughout how Mellen could believe such people without reservation. People who some investigators — like Fonzi, Ed Lopez, and the late Al Gonzalez — have thought were actually suspect in the case. It was not until her last chapter that I began to understand why. Her agenda, in large part, coincides with theirs. Mellen was once married to Ralph Schoenmann. And in fact, when her book came out, her former husband did a three-hour radio interview with her on WBAI in New York. Schoenmann was the man who once wrote that Bobby Kennedy was in charge of the 1965 CIA coup in Indonesia against Sukarno. That he ran the operation from a navy ship off the coast. Since RFK was out of the White House and in the Senate at the time, I noted that this irresponsible charge was almost certainly false. But it is part of Schoenmann’s view of America and the JFK case. He sees no important difference between the Kennedys, the Eastern Establishment, and the Power Elite. To him the assassination was a struggle between the Eastern Establishment and the new oil barons of the southwest, or as Carl Oglesby has termed it, The Yankee and Cowboy War. And Schoenmann, against reams of contrary evidence– e.g. Richard Mahoney’s excellent book JFK: Ordeal in Africa — considers the Kennedys part of the Eastern Establishment. Since Mellen’s book is about Jim Garrison, who ended up rejecting Farewell America, she could not quite view it that way. But, like her former husband, she spares no opportunity to carve RFK — if not JFK– into tiny pieces. Looking through my notes, and then the marginalia I wrote in the book, I have little problem writing this next sentence. The book is a hatchet job on RFK; one aimed right between his shoulder blades. And it is hard to believe that it was not planned that way. Especially since, as noted above, she never doubts anything these Cubans and their allies like Hemming tell her, no matter how wild, no matter how illogical, no matter how unsupported. Any time she can take a shot at him, she does. At one point, she writes that Bobby was always given to hero worship of brutal men (p. 187). Really. Like, for instance, Cesar Chavez? And for her there is never a less than sinister reason why RFK could doubt Garrison, or be uncertain about what to do about the death of his brother: the deep melancholia he sank into after JFK’s death, the humiliations LBJ inflicted on him, the naked disdain Hoover felt for him personally. Incredibly — or rather, with Mellen, predictably — these are never even mentioned, let alone given any consideration. At one point she writes that it was RFK who told the family they should not make waves about a conspiracy to kill JFK (p. 344). Yet according to a man who was at this meeting, Peter Lawford, it was Teddy who voiced that sentiment. Bobby was the one who wanted it out in the open for a family discussion. This episode, which I noted in Probe Magazine, will be expanded upon in David Talbot’s upcoming book about RFK. Which, unlike Mellen’s work, promises to be responsible, balanced, and inductive in method. That is, its conclusions will flow from the evidence, and not vica-versa.

    To exemplify just how far her anti-Kennedy rage reaches, let me cite two egregious examples. She uses the notorious Louisiana right-winger and segregationist John Rarick (p. 173) to relate a story about the sad Kennedy sister Rosemary. Previously, it had been reported that she suffered from mental retardation and the family had her institutionalized. Misdiagnosed, she had a lobotomy. Since then the Kennedys have always been in the forefront of special rights for the mentally afflicted. Well, Rarick says that is all wrong. She was misdiagnosed alright. She really was a kleptomaniac who consistently wrote bad checks. (A Kennedy who was hard up for money?) And instead of sending her to one of the better institutions in the northeast, she was sent to Angola in Louisiana which, by some reports, houses much of the pathological prison population of the area. What does Rarick have to support this story? Records that have now conveniently disappeared. And what on earth does it have to do with Garrison’s inquiry? Then on page 200, she drags in the Bernie Spindel tapes. Spindel was a surveillance technician who worked for Jimmy Hoffa. Previously, the only tapes he ever had about the Kennedys were the mythological Marilyn Monroe tapes, which were investigated by the NYPD and found to be apocryphal. (Spindel was in trouble with the law and he was using this blackmail bluff as a bargaining chip.) Now, Mellen uses Kennedy enemy and proven liar Spindel as having “tapes and evidence about the Kennedy assassination that he wished to make public.”Of course, like the MM tapes, these are never revealed. (I wonder why.). With the use of Spindel and Rarick, Mellen descends into the netherworld of the likes of The Clinton Chronicles. And again, this is a book that is supposed to be about Jim Garrison and his inquiry into the John Kennedy murder. If she had not been so single-minded in her near-pathological obsession with Bobby she could have written more and better stuff about Garrison e.g. the chapter on Phelan or the media. And it would have been a better book. As with the discredited John Davis, if I were to go into every dubious accusation she makes about the Kennedys, that in itself would take a small book.

    So, for me, it’s not surprising that in her (unconsciously satirical) final chapter she willingly uses people like MK and Beckham. They help her fulfill her preplanned double arc, namely to support Garrison, and dig a pitchfork — to the hilt– into RFK’s back. In her eagerness to do so she ignores the facts that 1.) Today, you don’t need Beckham to support what Garrison did. There is an abundance of other evidence in that regard, and 2.) The whole story about why RFK remained inactive about his brother’s death is a subtle, shaded, and complex one. And having the likes of Bernardo de Torres pal talk to you about it after he’s made you dinner is not a good way to approach it.

    In sum, the book was a huge disappointment for me. Reportedly, Mellen spent seven years on it and over 150, 000 dollars. So, quite naturally, like others, I was expecting at least a worthwhile effort. If it was not going to be definitive, it would now be at least the best book on Garrison. But that’s not true. Bill Davy’s book is still the best book in the field. Unlike Mellen’s work it is both clearly written and well organized. Further, he does not make statements he cannot support and does not serve as a willing and eager conduit for disinformation from people with obvious agendas. Like covering up their suspect roles in the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.

  • Letters to The Nation magazine re: Max Holland

    Pennington, NJ

    I’m the author of A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination and the Case That Should Have Changed History, my seventeenth book, whose credibility is attacked by Max Holland. Nation readers might give pause to Holland’s five-year campaign of outright falsehoods about the investigation into the Kennedy assassination by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that have appeared in a range of publications from The Wilson Quarterly, The Atlantic, New Orleans and the Washington Post to, now, The Nation.

    Garrison focused on the clandestine service of the CIA as sponsor of the Kennedy assassination as a result of facts he discovered about Lee Harvey Oswald, specifically Oswald’s role as an FBI informant and low-level CIA agent sent to the Soviet Union by the CIA’s Chief of Counterintelligence, James Angleton, as part of a false defector program. What Garrison had not yet discovered was that Oswald also worked for the US Customs Service in New Orleans.

    Contrary to Holland’s assertions of the innocence of Clay Shaw, the man Garrison indicted for participation in the murder of President Kennedy was indeed part of the implementation of the murder and was guilty of conspiracy. That Shaw was acquitted does not exonerate him for history. New documents indicate overwhelmingly that Shaw did favors for the CIA. On his deathbed he admitted as much. Shaw’s repeated appearances in Louisiana in the company of Oswald demonstrate that Shaw was part of the framing of Oswald for Kennedy’s murder. Shaw took Oswald to the East Louisiana State Hospital in an attempt to secure him a job there, one event among many never investigated by the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).

    Holland’s assertion that Garrison based his conclusion that the CIA sponsored the assassination on a series of articles in an Italian newspaper is also incorrect. Garrison had focused on the CIA long before he learned that Shaw was on the board of directors of a CIA-funded phony trade front called Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), based in Rome. Indeed, the newspaper Paese Sera broke the story of Shaw’s involvement after a six-month investigation into CIA interference in European electoral politics, only to discover that Garrison had indicted Shaw a few days before the first article was to appear. Moreover, the new documents reveal that CMC and its parent outfit, Permindex, were indeed CIA fronts.

    The 1992 Assassinations Records and Review Act has disgorged dozens of documents showing that Shaw was a CIA operative. This is directly contrary to what Holland suggests — that Garrison was a willing victim of “the KGB’s wildest fantasy.” To cite one example, Shaw was cleared for a project dubbed QKENCHANT, which permitted him to recruit outsiders for CIA projects. Shaw was no mere businessman debriefed by the CIA. One document reveals that among those Shaw recruited in New Orleans was Guy Banister, former FBI Chicago Special Agent in Charge running an ersatz New Orleans detective agency whose side-door address (544 Camp Street) Oswald used on a set of his pro-Castro leaflets, until Banister stopped him.

    The former editors of the now-defunct Paese Sera, whom I interviewed, from Jean-Franco Corsini to Edo Parpalione, insisted adamantly that neither the Italian Communist Party, nor the Soviet Communist Party, nor the KGB had any influence on the paper’s editorial policy. Outraged by Holland’s accusations, Corsini said that he despised the KGB and the CIA equally.

    The roots of Holland’s charge that Garrison was a dupe of KGB propaganda may be traced to an April 4, 1967, CIA document titled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report.” In it the CIA suggests to its media assets that they accuse critics of the Warren Report of “Communist sympathies.” In April 1967 Garrison was at the height of his investigation: He is clearly the critic the CIA had in mind.

    In 1961 Richard Helms had already developed the charge that Paese Sera was an outlet for the KGB and for Soviet propaganda. Helms was indignant, but the truth had appeared in Paese Sera: The attempted putsch against Charles de Gaulle by four Algerian-based generals had indeed been supported by the CIA. Holland has merely picked up where Helms, later to become a convicted perjurer, left off — repeating a scenario developed for him by Helms, with the addition of making the accusation of Soviet influence on Garrison.

    My book is hardly a “hagiography of the DA,” as Holland states. I present a flawed man who exhibited great courage in facing down both the FBI and the CIA in his attempt to investigate the murder of the President. Indeed, Garrison family members were dismayed that I did not present him in a more idealized form. I depicted him as an ordinary man who rose to distinction because of his single-minded commitment to the investigation.

    Among the many errors in Holland’s latest diatribe is that Shaw died “prematurely,” as if somehow Garrison’s prosecution hastened his end. In fact, Shaw was a lifelong chain smoker and died of lung cancer. Holland attacks Robert Blakey, chief counsel for the HSCA, for using acoustic evidence to suggest that there was a conspiracy in the Kennedy murder. In fact, the acoustic evidence of at least four shots being fired has been established scientifically by Donald Thomas in the British forensic journal Science and Justice (see also Thomas’s well-documented paper, available online, “Hear No Evil: The Acoustical Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination,” delivered November 17, 2001).

    Blakey certainly can be criticized for his close relationship with the CIA throughout his HSCA investigation. His letters of agreement with the CIA are at the National Archives. The CIA decided how key witnesses were to be deposed, and Blakey acquiesced in all CIA demands and intrusions upon the investigation.

    Before Blakey was hired, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg considered accepting the job as counsel. Knowing that the CIA had at the least covered up the facts of the assassination and at worst been involved, Goldberg telephoned CIA director Stansfield Turner and asked him whether, should he take the job, he would have full CIA cooperation. Silence emanated over the wires. Goldberg, naïve perhaps, asked Turner if he had heard the question. “I thought my silence was my answer,” Turner said. Goldberg declined the job. Blakey took it. It is no surprise that Holland, who has consistently defended the CIA, does not raise the issue of Blakey’s cooperation with the CIA during his HSCA tenure but focuses instead on Blakey’s conclusion, forced by the irrefutable acoustic evidence, that there was a conspiracy.

    It is one thing for Holland to spread his disinformation in the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence. It is quite another for The Nation to allow him continued access without debate to its pages to obfuscate, slander authors like myself and deny evidence fully established — in particular about Jim Garrison and how the new documents establish his credibility and reveal how close he came to the truth, and in general about the Kennedy assassination’s sponsors and accessories.

    JOAN MELLEN

    Charlottesville, Va.

    It began with a CIA document classified Top Secret. How do I know that? A decade after the assassination of President Kennedy, with the assistance of the ACLU, I won a precedent-setting lawsuit in the US District Court in Washington, DC, brought pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. The court ordered the police and spy organizations to provide to me many long-suppressed documents.

    The CIA document stated that it was deeply troubled by my work in questioning the conclusions of the Warren Commission. The CIA had concluded that my book Rush to Judgment was difficult to answer; indeed, after a careful and thorough analysis of that work by CIA experts, the CIA was unable to find and cite a single error in the book. The CIA complained that almost half of the American people agreed with me and that “Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse, results.” This “trend of opinion,” the CIA stated, “is a matter of concern” to “our organization.” Therefore, the CIA concluded, steps must be taken.

    The CIA directed that methods of attacking me should be discussed with “liaison and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors),” instructing them that “further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition.” The CIA stressed that their assets in the media should “point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists.” Further, their media contacts should “use their influence to discourage” what the CIA referred to as “unfounded and irresponsible speculation.” Rush to Judgment, then the New York Times number-one bestselling book, contained no speculation.

    The CIA in its report instructed book reviewers and magazines that contained feature articles how to deal with me and others who raised doubts about the validity of the Warren Report. Magazines should, the CIA stated, “employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics,” adding that “feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.” The CIA instructed its media assets that “because of the standing of the members of the Warren Commission, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society.” The CIA was referring to such distinguished gentlemen as Allen Dulles, the former director of the CIA; President Kennedy had fired Dulles from that position for having lied to him about the Bay of Pigs tragedy. Dulles was then appointed by Lyndon Johnson to the Warren Commission to tell the American people the truth about the assassination.

    The purpose of the CIA was not in doubt. The CIA stated: “The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims” of those who doubted the Warren Report. The CIA stated that “background information” about me and others “is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.”

    With this background we now turn to Max Holland’s Nation article, which states that there was a “JFK Lawyers’ Conspiracy” among four lawyers: former Senator Gary Hart; Professor Robert Blakey; Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans and later a state judge in Louisiana; and me.

    Before I wrote Rush to Judgment I had never met any of the other three “co-conspirators.” I still have not had the pleasure of meeting Senator Hart, and I know of no work that he has done in this area. I met Professor Blakey only once; he had been appointed chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and at that meeting I told him that I was disappointed in his approach and methods. Not much of a lawyers’ conspiracy.

    Each of the other statements as to alleged fact are false and defamatory. Holland states that I am not scrupulous, that I am dishonest and that I spread innuendo about the sinister delay in the Warren Commission investigation, an assertion not made by me but fabricated in its entirety by Holland. As a silent echo of his CIA associates Holland does not point to one assertion as to fact, of the thousands I have made about the facts surrounding the death of our President, that he claims is inaccurate.

    Finally, Holland strikes pay dirt. He uncovers, are you ready for this, the fact that I had asserted that “the government was indifferent to the truth.” I confess. Is that now a crime under the Patriot Act? Isn’t that what The Nation is supposed to be asserting and proving?

    Holland states that the KGB was secretly funding my work with a payment of “$12,500 (in 2005 dollars).” It was a secret all right. It never happened. Holland’s statement is an outright lie. Neither the KGB nor any person or organization associated with it ever made any contribution to my work. No one ever made a sizable contribution, with the exception of Corliss Lamont, who contributed enough for me to fly one time from New York to Dallas to interview eyewitnesses. The second-largest contribution was $50 given to me by Woody Allen. Have Corliss and Woody now joined Holland’s fanciful conspiracy?

    Funds for the work of the Citizens Committee of Inquiry were raised by me. I lectured each night for more than a year in a Manhattan theater. The Times referred to the very well attended talks as one of the longest-running performances off Broadway. That was not a secret. I am surprised that Holland never came across that information, especially since he refers to what he calls “The Speech” in his diatribe.

    Apparently, Holland did not fabricate the KGB story; his associates at the CIA did. There is proof for that assertion, but I fear that I have taken too much space already. For that information, contact me at mlane777@cs.com.

    Am I being unfair when I suggest a connection between Holland and the CIA? Here is the CIA game plan: Fabricate a disinformation story. Hand it to a reporter with liberal credentials; for example, a Nation contributing editor. If the reporter cannot find a publication then have the CIA carry it on its own website under the byline of the reporter. Then the CIA can quote the reporter and state, ” according to…”

    Holland writes regularly for the official CIA website. He publishes information there that he has been given by the CIA. The CIA, on its official website, then states, “According to Holland…” If you would like to look into this matter of disinformation laundering, enter into your computer “CIA.gov + Max Holland.” You will find on the first page alone numerous articles by Holland supporting and defending the CIA and attacking those who dare to disagree, as well as CIA statements attributing the information to Holland.

    A question for The Nation. When Holland writes an article for you defending the CIA and attacking its critics, why do you describe him only as “a Nation contributing editor” and author? Is it not relevant to inform your readers that he also is a contributor to the official CIA website and then is quoted by the CIA regarding information that the agency gave him?

    An old associate of mine, Adlai Stevenson, once stated to his political opponent, a man known as a stranger to the truth — if you stop telling lies about me I will stop telling the truth about you. I was prepared to adopt that attitude here. But I cannot. Your publication has defamed a good friend, Jim Garrison, after he died and could not defend himself against demonstrably false charges.

    You have not served your readers by refusing to disclose Holland’s CIA association. The Nation and Holland have engaged in the type of attack journalism that recalls the bad old days. If I fought McCarthyism in the 1950s as a young lawyer, how can I avoid it now when it appears in a magazine that has sullied its own history? The article is filled with ad hominem attacks, name calling and fabrications, and it has done much mischief. I will hold you and Holland accountable for your misconduct. I can honorably adopt no other course.

    To mitigate damages I require that you repudiate the article and apologize for publishing it. That you publish this letter as an unedited article in your next issue. That you do not publish a reply by Holland in which he adds to the defamation and the damage he has done, a method you have employed in the past. That you provide to me the mailing addresses of your contributing editors and members of your editorial board so that I may send this letter to them. I am confident that Gore Vidal and Bob Borosage, Tom Hayden and Marcus Raskin, all of whom I know, and many others such as Molly Ivins, John Leonard and Lani Guinier, who I do not know but who I respect and admire, would be interested in the practices of The Nation. In addition, I suggest that ethical journalism requires that in the future you fully identify your writers so that your readers may make an informed judgment about their potential bias.

    If you have a genuine interest in the facts regarding the assassination you should know that the House Select Committee on Assassinations (the United States Congress) concluded that probably a conspiracy was responsible for the murder and that, therefore, the Warren Report that Holland defends so aggressively is probably wrong. In addition, the only jury to consider this question decided in a trial held in the US District Court in a defamation case that the newspaper did not defame E. Howard Hunt when it suggested that Hunt and the CIA had killed the President. The forewoman of the jury stated that the evidence proved that the CIA had been responsible for the assassination.

    I have earned many friends in this long effort. Those who have supported my work include Lord Bertrand Russell, Arnold Toynbee, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, Dr. Linus Pauling, Senator Richard Schweicker, Paul McCartney, Norman Mailer, Richard Sprague, Robert Tannenbaum and also members of the House of Representatives, including Don Edwards, Henry Gonzales, Andrew Young, Bella Abzug, Richardson Preyer, Christopher Dodd, Herman Badillo, Mervyn Dymally, Mario Biaggi and, above all, according to every national poll, the overwhelming majority of the American people. I have apparently earned a few adversaries along the way. Too bad that they operate from the shadows; that tends to remove the possibility of an open debate.

    MARK LANE

    Washington, DC

    While many thought the 1979 report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations was the final word on President Kennedy’s murder, it wasn’t. In 1992 Congress passed the JFK Act. As a result, a huge volume of new materials are available for study.

    One significant revelation is the extent to which the CIA was a focus of the committee’s probe. Another is the discovery by Jefferson Morley, a columnist for WashingtonPost.com, that the CIA corrupted the committee’s probe. The CIA brought former case officer George Joannides out of retirement to handle the committee’s inquiries about the relationship between Lee Harvey Oswald and DRE, a CIA-funded Cuban exile organization. The CIA never told the committee that Joannides was DRE’s case officer when Oswald and DRE were in contact. Joannides then thwarted committee efforts to obtain CIA records about the DRE-Oswald relationship. Thus, the last official word on the assassination is that of a Congressional committee that was subverted by an agency that itself was a focus of the investigation.

    These facts raise serious issues. The CIA’s conduct undermined democratic accountability and compromised the integrity of Congressional oversight on a matter of national security. Shouldn’t Congress now investigate to determine why the CIA sabotaged the probe? Was it because, as some former committee staffers have said, an element of the CIA was involved in the plot? Or is there some other explanation?

    In 2004 and 2005 the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) held conferences to discuss the JFK assassination. On the issue of conspiracy, two scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory discredited the last remaining basis for the single bullet theory (SBT), which theorized that both Kennedy and John Connally were hit by the same bullet, fired from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle — the sine qua non for the lone assassin theory. These eminent scientists said that due to scientific advances not only can the SBT not be substantiated but the fragments tested could have come from one — or as many as five — bullets, including a Remington or some other rifle. Holland mentions none of this.

    Holland denounces the acoustics evidence proving there was a conspiracy. He misrepresents acoustics as being the only evidence the committee had of a conspiracy and mistakenly says that it is uncorroborated. In fact, the first acoustics panel was corroborated by the second. Both were further corroborated and strengthened by Donald Thomas’s study. Holland doesn’t mention Thomas, but does obliquely refer to the work of Richard Garwin.Thomas debated Garwin at the AARC conference. But as Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter George Lardner reported, Thomas “upstaged” Garwin, showing “how the noises coincided precisely with frames from the Zapruder film and echoes off buildings in Dealey Plaza reflecting the gunfire.” Lardner also noted that Garwin said he “had not studied the echoes.” Again, none of this is in Holland’s account.

    Holland, winner of a CIA award for Studies in Intelligence, has been working on a book since 1993 defending the Warren Commission. In applying for an Anthony Lukas work-in-progress award in 2001, he said that as a result of his study “the Commission can emerge in a new light: battered somewhat but with its probity and the accuracy of its findings intact.” He also stressed that he had spent a full year researching “the remarkable effort of KGB disinformation on Garrison’s probe.” Holland debated this thesis with Gary Aguilar at the 2004 AARC conference. In my view, Holland lost hands down (a DVD of the conference is available through aarclibrary.org). In advancing his thesis, Holland relies on dubious materials, including the word of former CIA director Richard Helms, who was charged with perjury but copped a plea of withholding information from Congress.

    Holland now uses the AARC’s 2005 conference to theorize that a vast conspiracy of lawyers “less scrupulous” than those at the Warren Commission spread KGB disinformation and convinced Congress and the American people that the Warren Report was wrong. This is a McCarthyite tactic for discrediting the AARC conferences and Warren Commission critics generally. It seems no one ever saw the Zapruder film showing JFK thrown violently to the left rear, no one ever looked at the Magic Bullet and concluded it was so undeformed it could not have done all the damage alleged. No, it was them bloody KGB disinformation lawyers that brainwashed them.

    In 1967 the CIA directed its stations to tamp growing criticism of the Warren Report by discussing it with “liaison and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors)” and “point out that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists.” The dispatch further instructs that stations “employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics,” saying that “book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.”

    Holland’s piece on our conference looks as if it were written to specification. While I had not expected favorable coverage from Holland when I overrode the advice of friends and associates and honored The Nation’s request that he be given journalistic privileges and courtesies, I hadn’t expected an attack of this character. The general opinion of attendees, repeatedly expressed to me personally, was that the 2005 conference was the best ever on the subject. Max Holland echoed this in an e-mail to me: “Having Garwin, Hart and Blakey give presentations made the conference superior to any I’ve attended. I’ll do my best to get an article in.”

    JIM LESAR, president, AARC

    Vallejo, Calif.

    Max Holland has engaged for years in propagating disinformation on behalf of the CIA concerning the investigation of its role in the official execution of John F. Kennedy. Holland’s Nation article expatiates upon his fabricated thesis that Jim Garrison’s evidence of the CIA’s role in the Kennedy murder derived from a series of articles in Paese Sera in 1967.

    I sent those articles to Jim Garrison in my capacity as director of the Who Killed Kennedy? committee in London, whose members and supporters included Bertrand Russell, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Arnold Toynbee, Field Marshall Sir Claude Auchinleck and Lord Boyd Orr. The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, of which I was then executive director, had conducted an extended investigation of the role of the CIA in fomenting and coordinating brutal repression, disappearances and assassinations, which culminated in a military putsch in Greece. Our Save Greece Now Committee unearthed concrete data regarding the role of the CIA and the Greek colonels that helped mobilize the movement for which Deputy Grigoris Lambrakis paid with his life. In the aftermath, our committee and its Greek leader, Michael Peristerakis, led a demonstration of more than 1 million that brought down the regime.

    CIA activity across Europe led Paese Sera to undertake a six-month investigation into the role in Italy of the CIA, with its plans for a military coup. The CIA colonels’ coup in Greece unfolded shortly after Paese Sera’s prescient series. Prominent writers and intellectuals, including Rossana Rossanda, K.S. Karol, Lelio Basso, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, supported Paese Sera.

    This investigation was entirely unrelated to events in the United States or the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was fortuitous that the CIA front organizations in Italy that emerged from CIA plans to overthrow the Italian government included Centro Mondiale Commerciale and Permindex, of which Clay Shaw was a director in New Orleans.

    Jim Garrison was well on the trail of Shaw and his role as a CIA handler of Lee Harvey Oswald before Paese Sera published its series of articles. When I sent them to Garrison, he had already charged Shaw in relation to the murder of Kennedy. Jim found the Paese Sera series confirmatory and important, but the articles were not admissible as evidence in court.

    Holland has written repeatedly that Paese Sera was a “communist” paper and a conduit for KGB disinformation. In fact, Paese Sera was not unlike The Nation before Holland’s infiltration of it as a contributing editor (except Paese Sera was less inclined to defend the leaders of the Soviet Union than was The Nation during the decades since the 1930s). The Paese Sera fiction is real intelligence disinformation arising not from the KGB but from an April 7, 1967, directive by Helms to CIA media assets, “How To Respond to Critics of the Warren Report.”

    What emerged from the investigative work of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and Paese Sera was the full evidence of the forty-year campaign of the CIA in Italy, now known as Operation Gladio, a campaign of terror that included the kidnapping and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the bombing of the Bologna railway station.

    I worked with Jim Garrison for twenty years and sent him many documents, e.g., Secret Service Report 767, which cites the disclosure by Alan Sweat, chief of the criminal division of the Dallas Sheriff’s Office, of Lee Harvey Oswald’s FBI Informant Number S172 and Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade’s citation of Oswald’s CIA number 110669.

    Finally, Philip Zelikow, national security adviser to both Bush administrations and appointed by George W. Bush to his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board immediately after the 9/11 attacks, has endorsed Holland’s specious charges in Foreign Affairs, even as he and Holland were colleagues at the Miller Institute. Zelikow, as head of the 9/11 Commission, has been a point man in covering up the role of US intelligence in the planning and implementation of the events of September 11.

    It is fitting that the very individuals who protect the treason at the top that defines the official assassination of President Kennedy are performing that role in relation to the events of 9/11 — a precise correlative to Operation Gladio, first exposed by the investigative work of Paese Sera, which linked the CIA murder apparatus in Italy to the one that murdered the head of state in America.

    Holland seeks to present the investigators into official murder in America not as people of principle and daring but as disinformation tools of an intelligence service. When it comes to being a pimp for the imperium, Mr. Holland, Physician, heal thyself!

    RALPH SCHOENMAN

    Kirtland, NM

    I commend The Nation for publishing Max Holland’s insightful article. In 1963 I worked in New Orleans as a cameraman for WDSU TV, and I met and talked with Lee Harvey Oswald on three occasions. I also knew Jim Garrison, and I knew the Cuban refugee Carlos Bringuier, who scuffled with Oswald on Canal Street on August 9, 1963. Three days later I photographed Oswald and Bringuier coming out of court after their “disturbing the peace” trial, and on August 16, I photographed Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets in front of the International Trade Mart on Camp Street.

    In 1968 Garrison phoned me in San Francisco, where I was living, and asked if I would sell him a copy of my Oswald Trade Mart footage. I told him I’d gladly give him a copy. Then he went on to tell me a wild story about how the FBI was keeping WDSU and NBC News from providing him with a copy of the film because the bureau had had secret spies or agents with Oswald at the Trade Mart, directing his activities as part of a government “conspiracy.” Garrison said the Feds didn’t want him to see my film, since he might identify the government spooks with Oswald.

    I was so shocked by that story that a day or so later I called a supervisor at the San Francisco FBI office and asked if he would call an appropriate person at the Washington headquarters to see if they would not want me to release the film to Garrison. I indicated that I might not release it if it involved “national security.” My objective was twofold: to find out if Garrison was wrong about the FBI trying to cover up my film, and to find out if he was right. If he was right, that was indeed a big story. But the supervisor called me back a day or two later and said that the guys in Washington didn’t care whether or not I gave Garrison the film. So I sent it to him, and after several months of studying it, the net result was that neither Garrison nor any of his investigators was able to turn up any FBI or other spooks with Oswald in the footage.

    I worked and talked with Garrison many times when I was a news cameraman, and I always thought of him as an intelligent and sensible man. But after he began working on the JFK case and trying to invent bizarre government conspiracies about it, I came to realize the guy was going a bit bonkers and was apparently in the process of having a long, slow nervous breakdown.

    Thirty-seven years after his phone call to me, a retired history professor found in some archives a copy of an FBI memo about my 1968 telephone call to the San Francisco FBI supervisor, and the professor fraudulently referred to it in his JFK conspiracy book as “documentation” that I had worked as an “FBI informant” in New Orleans in 1963!

    Of course I had not, and the memo does not suggest in any way that I did. The professor’s story was simply fabricated, like hundreds of other phony JFK “conspiracy” stories. I was a young liberal/leftist in 1963, and I didn’t have any feelings of ill will toward Oswald at that time, nor did I have any contacts in the FBI. I thought Oswald was a little goofy and something of a crackpot to be handing out pro-Castro leaflets in a conservative Southern city just ten months after the Cuban missile crisis. But I learned in the news business long ago that crackpots do what crackpots think they need to do to modify the world in some way, and Oswald did what he thought he needed to do.

    As I have carefully studied the JFK case myself, I’ve come to the conclusion that Oswald did act alone, and that President Kennedy might still be alive today if he had never made that trip to Dallas, or if Oswald had still lived in New Orleans on November 22, 1963. But the chance event of President Kennedy riding in an open limousine slowly down a street right in front of a building where a crackpot worked, especially a crackpot who owned a rifle with a telescopic sight, was just too much of an opportunity for the crackpot to pass up.

    I’ve also come to realize that so many of these stupid, inaccurate and idiotic “conspiracy” stories are a waste of time and a distortion of history. Every minute wasted on pursuing a 1963 “conspiracy” while ignoring current important ongoing conspiracies is a minute lost.

    And the conspiracy buffs who condemn honest, hard-working journalists like Holland remind me of the old 1950s film clips of Senator Joe McCarthy. I would hate to think that truth in historical reporting might be adversely influenced today by the use of such McCarthyite tactics against journalists like Holland who stick their necks out to report the truth about the JFK case and Jim Garrison’s ridiculous investigation of it.

    J.W. RUSH

    HOLLAND REPLIES

    Washington, DC

    Apparently, a word needs to be said about the article I wrote for Studies in Intelligence, a journal published by the CIA. The first iteration of this story, which exposed the impact of Soviet disinformation on Jim Garrison’s persecution of Clay Shaw, actually appeared in the Spring 2001 Wilson Quarterly. However, the Quarterly, like The Nation, does not run footnoted articles, and I wanted a fully documented version to appear, since I had conducted extensive interviews and research in Italy, and into CIA documents at the National Archives. There are only four English-language journals that print scholarly articles on intelligence (and if one is so inclined, it is a snap to “prove” they are all CIA-connected). Studies is the oldest, and I went there first. That’s the whole story, except that, yes, the article (available online) then also won an award.

    Now to some brass tacks in the space I have available. Both Joan Mellen and Mark Lane make much of a CIA document that sounds very sinister — until you actually read it and put it into context. The document was written in April 1967, the height of the bout of madness otherwise known as the Garrison investigation. As one of the government agencies now being accused of complicity in the assassination, the CIA was very concerned about having such allegations gain widespread acceptance abroad in the midst of the cold war. “Innuendo of such seriousness affects…the whole reputation of the American government,” observed the CIA. So the agency launched a campaign, using its media assets abroad, to counter criticism of the Warren Report by the likes of Mellen, Lane and others. Is that really shocking?

    Joan Mellen’s penchant for accuracy can be summed up in the fact that she cannot even bother to spell correctly (here or in her book) the names of Gianfranco Corsini and Edo Parpaglioni. Ordinarily, this would be nit-picking, but in this instance her elementary sloppiness is as good a window as any into the miasma of bald lies, misrepresentations and truthiness that she calls a book.

    The claim that Paese Sera’s lies about Shaw were the fortuitous result of a “six-month investigation” is a belated fiction embraced by Mellen and other Garrison acolytes. The co-author of the articles in question, Angelo Aver, claimed no such thing when interviewed in 2000, nor did any Paese Sera editors I contacted (including Corsini).

    I find it illuminating that Lane has taken no legal action (not even in Britain!) against the authors (Christopher Andrew and KGB archivist-turned-defector Vasili Mitrokhin) and publishers of the 1999 volume that revealed “the [KGB’s] New York residency sent [Lane initially] 1,500 dollars to help finance his research” through an intermediary. That doesn’t necessarily mean it came in a lump sum. And neither Andrew/Mitrokhin nor I alleges that Lane was a witting recipient, just a useful one.

    All the reliable forensic and scientific evidence developed around the JFK case either positively supports or does not negate the findings of the Warren Report. An explanation of the so-called acoustic evidence can be found at mcadams.posc.mu.edu/odell.

    Jim Lesar has often attempted to impede The Nation’s coverage of AARC conferences when I have been designated to cover them. On this go-round he hinted (before backing off) that a press credential would not be forthcoming unless The Nation guaranteed there would be an article. After the conference, impressed as I was by AARC’s ability to attract the likes of Dr. Richard Garwin, former Senator Hart and Professor Blakey, I wanted to assure Lesar that I would do my best to submit an article that the editors would deem worthwhile, even though it’s harder than ever to get into the magazine when writing about a largely historical subject. That didn’t mean, however, that I had checked my brains at the door.

    MAX HOLLAND

  • William Turner, Rearview Mirror

    Is Bill Turner the most valuable journalist now writing? Is he the most underrated? His new book certainly seems to advance those arguments. Rearview Mirror is a memoir of Turner’s professional career since his enlistment into the FBI as a young man in 1951. It then takes us through his resignation about ten years later and his attempt to expose J. Edgar Hoover’s inefficient and public-relations minded FBI regime. The book then highlights Turner’s journalistic career, first at Ramparts and then as an independent journalist and author. When one looks at the books and articles that have come from that career, Turner’s stature seems to me to be quite high. In an era when the left values such people as Alex Cockburn and right exalts writers like Bill Kristol, Turner seems an undervalued jewel. Consider some of his achievements. Hoover’s FBI was one of the earliest and best exposures of the hollowness of J. Edgar Hoover’s tyranny of the Bureau. Power on the Right was an early look at the then eccentric and relatively sparse religious right that would later, under men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, become a political juggernaut. His book, The Police Establishment, showed how conservative and connected to the FBI your supposedly independent local police force was and is. His two major articles on Jim Garrison in Ramparts were perhaps the two finest short pieces written on the investigation at the time. (And his unpublished book on that probe is also a quite creditable effort.) The Fish is Red (later reissued as Deadly Secrets) is still the best volume on America’s extended aggression against Castro’s Cuba. And his 1978 book The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy is also the finest volume yet produced on that tragically ignored political murder. Can any other living journalist equal such a record of high achievement on so many divergent and important topics? If so, I can’t think of one. And I should add that in my view it is one of the top ten books written on any of the assassinations of the sixties, a comment that takes in a lot of ground.

    And when one considers the fact that most of the volumes above stand independent of Turner’s newspaper/magazine output, his achievement is even more impressive. And I for one cannot ignore the fact that Turner is a fine writer whose phrasing is always smooth, easily digestible, and, at times, quite felicitous. This quality makes the, at times, complex issues he discusses e.g. the Manchurian Candidate aspects of the RFK case, much more easy to understand and even assimilate. In a field where one has to wade through the obstructionist prose of some, to be kind, untalented writers, Turner’s books are like driving on a California freeway at four in the morning. Cruise control.

    Rearview Mirror is structured as a chronological memoir. It begins with his unsuccessful battle to expose Hoover’s hollowness, a battle that secured turner’s eventual departure from the Bureau. Turner was one of the earliest insiders to complain about Hoover’s blindness to the powers and influence of organized crime in America. Turner and a friend of his, Skip Gibbons, did all they could to get a public hearing to air their gripes about Hoover. They tried at a Civil Service Commission hearing, they tried for an audience with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, they tried to get to political stalwarts like Estes Kefauver and Jacob Javits in the senate. Almost of necessity, because of Hoover’s long reach and unseemly tactics, it was fruitless. And because there were no whistleblower laws at the time–laws designed to protect government employees who report malfeasance–Turner left his job, at considerable personal sacrifice.

    And this is where one of the outstanding features of the book appears. For it is not only a memoir. Turner has provided the reader with a stereophonic view of the past. He has decked it out with archival releases that retrospectively illuminate events and actions. For instance, Turner now knows that John Mohr of the FBI discussed his civil service appeal with Civil Service Staff Chief Ed Bechtold. Bechtold told Mohr that they would sustain the Bureau’s discharge of Turner.

    When Turner wrote his 1964 article on John Kennedy’s murder for Saga, Hoover’s assistant Cartha DeLoach monitored his every move both pre and post-publication, and then retaliated through his press flacks like Drew Pearson. Turner also details the attempts by CIA to undermine Ramparts after that now legendary magazine exposed the agency’s use of universities in support of the Vietnam War and the later exposure of its program to infiltrate the National Students Association. Codenamed Operation CHAOS, the program actually seems to have started as an attempt to wreck that magazine although it later spread out to much of the antiwar underground press. CHAOS is another program suspected by Turner at the time, but only confirmed much later.

    Another retroactive perspective is an appearance made by Turner on “The Joe Pyne Show” in 1968. Pyne was an earlier version of the now all too common right-wing yokel who liked to make a lot of noise without generating much light: a sixties Rush Limbaugh. His producer called the local office of the FBI for information to counter the derogatory writing by Turner on the Bureau. The request reached all the way up to Hoover’s desk. Another fascinating episode has Turner penning an article on Hoover’s nonexistent war against the Mob. Playboy was interested in featuring it but they passed it on to Sandy Smith of the Time-Life circuit. Smith took the piece to his pals at the Bureau and then told the magazine not to run the story because it was too error-strewn. How obsessed was the Bureau with Turner? When the author was on tour to push his book Hoover’s FBI, the Bureau faked a phone call as “John Q. Citizen” to an earlier version of the Tom Snyder show.

    For me, and for most of his longtime admirers, the highlights of this distinguished and fascinating book were the chapters on the Garrison inquiry and the one on the Robert Kennedy murder. The first is done as a dual look at both the inquest and the press coverage of it (the latter is appropriately titled The Media’s Circus.) Again Turner has updated his previous work with much newly released material on both Garrison and the press. So the pieces form a good short summary of what we now know about that ill-fated and sandbagged probe. The chapter on the RFK case is basically a truncated magazine version of his extraordinary book (co-authored with Jonn Christian). But as they say at the racetrack, that is an admirable sire. As many have said, the RFK case is a more provable conspiracy than the JFK case.

    Turner closes his book with an overview of developments since 1975. He discusses the CIA/Contra-Cocaine connection. He delves into the fey inquiry into the JFK-MLK murders, the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He updates the King case by noting the pro-conspiracy verdict in the 1999 King family civil lawsuit and the subsequent Justice Department report on that case. Turner warns us of the encroaching and insidious power of “the dark parapolitics of the FBI, CIA, and private intelligence triad.” He needn’t have. He’s a crusader nonpareil who’s been at it for 40 years. Bravo Bill.

  • “Davy Disappoints”: A Rebuttal

    From the November-December 1999 issue (Vol. 7 No. 1) of Probe

    I have to admit I was initially reluctant to respond to this “review” of my book for several reasons. First and foremost, I am averse to feeding into the divide-and-conquer strategy so prominently played out among the critics for too long – a tactic that is ultimately counter-productive. Second, I had never heard of the author of this “critique,” Dave Reitzes, and information subsequently provided to me by colleagues who regularly check the Internet has done little to assign Reitzes even a modicum of credibility. And finally, Reitzes habitually haunts something called the alt.conspiracy.jfk newsgroup on the Internet and his “review” appeared on a Web site run by someone called John McAdams. Given that the combined readership of these two electronic fora probably rivals that of the Eskimo population of Miami Beach, I was even more disinclined to respond. But having waded through Reitzes’ abundant medley of errors and distortions, I felt some response was warranted.

    Reitzes titles his “review”, Davy Disappoints. One thing I can say for Mr. Reitzes is that he does not. In fact he is quite predictable. He begins by complaining that, less the front and back matter, my book is “a skimpy 204 pages.” (He chose not to include the Endnotes section in his count which runs for another 36 pages, but that’s OK). Of these 204 pages, Reitzes writes, “approximately 27 are blank.” It is a standard publishing convention to leave the verso page blank if the chapter ends on the recto page. But the mind boggles at Reitzes’ command of the intricacies of mathematics. Of the 204 pages Reitzes mentions, only 8 chapters end on the recto page for a grand total of (Can you grasp this Mr. Reitzes?) 8 blank pages. Not 27. But it’s a ludicrous argument anyway. Look at some of the literature that has been published on the assassination and related events. Phil Melanson’s Spy Saga is 149 pages (I won’t count footnotes or front and back matter since Reitzes seems to be averse to this). Trumbull Higgins’ volume on the Bay of Pigs, The Perfect Failure is 176 pages. James and Wardlaw’s Plot or Politics? is 167 pages. And Peter Dale Scott’s Crime and Cover-Up weighs in at a mere 49 pages. Yet would anyone deny the contributions made by these slim volumes? On the other hand, one gets weighed down by the gross tonnage of Harrison Livingstone’s, often incomprehensible, output. Apparently, Mr. Reitzes hasn’t grasped the concept of quality over quantity.

    Reitzes dazzles us further with his mastery of math by writing this bizarre calculation, “Davy provides us with an estimated 5 1/2 chapters of new information, or and estimated 67.1 pages (177 divided by 14 chapters total times 5 1/2 chapters). By my estimation, then, only about a fifth of Davy’s book produces the promised new information, while about four-fifths provide what Davy calls context.” Allow me to correct this bit of misinformation. Of the over 700 citations in the Endnotes section, approximately 425 of them have (to the best of my knowledge) never been published in print before. This includes many documents from the intelligence agencies, the HSCA, Garrison’s files (culled from numerous sources), interviews, and miscellaneous other collections. This doesn’t take into account the hard-to-find books and manuscripts I cite including William Turner’s unpublished manuscript, The Garrison Investigation, Arthur Carpenter’s Ph.D. dissertation, Gateway to the Americas, and rare books such as Menshikov’s Millionaires and Managers and Scheflin and Opton’s, The Mind Manipulators. Not even counting those volumes the amount of new material is roughly 64%. Back when I went to school 1/5 did not equal 64%, Mr. Reitzes. His convoluted formulas cause Reitzes to ponder; “One wonders what [Lisa] Pease makes of Bill Davy’s math.” Better yet, one wonders what the reader will now make of your math, Mr. Reitzes.

    Reitzes continues his “review” by acknowledging that the longest chapter in my book is the chapter dealing with the concerted efforts of the media and the intelligence agencies to spread disinformation about Garrison and subvert due process. This chapter is indeed the longest because of the massive amount of supporting documentation affirming the attacks. Reitzes finds this all irrelevant contending that the reason Garrison lost his case “would hardly seem to be related to any alleged resistance from the CIA and/or the media.” His conclusion doesn’t surprise me since I doubt that he has studied any of the documents I cite.

    Later Reitzes asks incredulously why haven’t I read his Internet masterpiece, Who Speaks For Clay Shaw? I know this might be a little difficult for someone like Reitzes to understand, but not everybody spends their life on the Internet. This concept is obviously foreign to someone who apparently spends all of his waking hours on-line. Consider the following usenet post from Jim Hargrove, dated January 10, 1999:

    According to the results a DejaNews “power Search,” posts made to alt.conspiracy.jfk by Dave Reitzes as dreitzes@aol.com totalled [sic] “about 15,000.” Posts made by Dave Reitzes as ERXF03A@prodigy.com SINCE JUST BEFORE LAST CHRISTMAS totalled [sic] “about 14,000” posts. Since DejaNews breaks up long posts and counts then as multiple instances, these numbers are too high. Nevertheless, they are astronomical, and represent abuse of Usenet. [Emphasis in original]

    Hargrove continues:

    But don’t take my word for it. There is a long-established newsgroup devoted to the very topic of spamming and net abuse, and Dave Reitzes is a real fixture there. In just the last two months of 1998, his name appears on 19 different news.admin.net-abuse hit lists.

    Again from Hargrove:

    Switching over to Prodigy on the account of “Marc Reitzes,” Dave Reitzes has also been fingered by news.admin.net-abuse three times since last Christmas.

    Two months later, Reitzes was still at it, causing David Lifton to comment in a March 10, 1999 post that Reitzes is:

    Completely divorced from reality, and, according to DejaNews, posting over 5,000 posts this year (that’s right, 5,000 posts)

    Reitzes certainly gives new meaning to the expression “get a life.”

    Reitzes later complains that I didn’t report that an HSCA document that concludes that Clay Shaw may have been involved in the planning of the assassination, “did not reflect the opinions of its author, but rather the statements of its interview subject: Judge Jim Garrison.” It is true that the title of the document reads “Interview with Jim Garrison in New Orleans” but even a casual reading of the memo shows that it contains more information than what was gleaned from an interview. In fact, the “interview” was actually a series of conferences that ran from July 29th through August 6th, 1977 between Garrison and several members of Team 3 of the HSCA, including Gaeton Fonzi, Jonathan Blackmer, Cliff Fenton, and L.J. Delsa. The subsequent memo contains not just the highlights of the Garrison interviews, but information gained from Garrison’s files and separate research already conducted by Team 3, independent from Garrison. This content was confirmed to me by two of the HSCA staffers involved. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many HSCA people have you interviewed? Since the document concludes “We have reason to believe that Shaw was heavily involved in the anti-Castro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960’s and [was] possibly one of the high level planners or “cut out” to the planners of the assassination,” it is quite apparent that Blackmer is stating his team’s conclusions, not Garrison’s. (Since when does Garrison refer to himself in the plural form?)

    Reitzes also incorrectly claims that I “take on faith” that other Vieux Carre denizens identified Shaw as “Bertrand” and that “these alleged witnesses would not speak for the record.” Wrong. I name two of the witnesses in my book, William Morris and David Logan, both of whom were interviewed by the DA’s office for the record. William Morris is a name Reitzes should be more than familiar with. For months, Reitzes hammered away on the Internet claiming that William Morris never existed and that Garrison invented him out of whole cloth. When confronted by Jim Hargrove’s posting of the July 12, 1967 NODA interview of Morris (an interview that has been available at the AARC or its precursor for almost 30 years, by the way), Reitzes beat a hasty retreat, posting this mea culpa on January 9th; “I did, of course, assert on this NG that Morris never existed, a reckless statement I have fully retracted and for which I apologize.” Apologizing for his inaccuracies is something Reitzes must be quite used to by now. After falsely alleging that David Lifton cribbed Best Evidence from an unpublished manuscript by Newcomb and Adams, Reitzes had to post this retraction on March 11, 1999: “I retract the charge and I apologize for alleging it. It was a cheap shot.” He made another false claim about Harrison Livingstone’s presence during the ARRB deposition of Dr. Humes and once again Reitzes had to atone, writing, “I humbly retract the statement.”

    I won’t rehash Reitzes’ attempted defense of Dean Andrews, since it is simply a regurgitation of Patricia Lambert’s nonsense. However, I would refer the interested reader to my and Jim DiEugenio’s review of Lambert’s book in PROBE Vol. 6, No. 4, as well as the Dean Andrews section of my book. I will comment on one claim made by Reitzes though. He says that my revelation that Andrews was not under sedation at the time of the Clay Bertrand call is not borne out in the December 1963 FBI reports. On the contrary, as anyone who has read my book would know, the December 1963 FBI reports are the source for this revelation.

    Reitzes is right about one point. An FBI report does mention that Metropolitan Crime Commission Director Aaron Kohn was one of the FBI’s sources who had information about Clay Bertrand. But Reitzes finds it suspicious that I didn’t explain why Kohn “would pass along this potentially helpful information – at a time it was common knowledge in the French Quarter that Garrison was seeking “Bertrand” – instead of sitting on the allegedly dangerous stuff.” What Reitzes leaves out is that Kohn countered this revelation with another in which he said he received information that Clay Bertrand is actually a real-estate broker living in Lafayette, Louisiana – clearly disinformation. Maybe I should have included this in my chapter on the disinformation campaign.

    Reitzes’ prosaic attempt at critiquing the final chapter in my book is equally ridiculous. He apparently doesn’t like my choice of titles as he feels it necessary to add his air of incredulity by referring to it as “The Hidden(!) Record.” His emphasis on the word “hidden” is certainly appropriate since approximately 85% of the material in that chapter was suppressed until at least 1993. Regarding a March 2, 1967 FBI memo which Cartha DeLoach wrote to Clyde Tolson stating that “Shaw’s name had come up in our investigation in December, 1963, as a result of several parties furnishing information concerning Shaw,” Reitzes takes on the role of apologist for the FBI asking, “DeLoach couldn’t be mistakenly referring to that FBI report of February 24, 1967 (the Aaron Kohn document noted above), could he?” Let’s see, the number 3 man at the FBI is writing a memo to the number 2 man, knowing full well it will also be read by Hoover, and he gets something like that wrong? I don’t think so. Reitzes thinks he’s really on to something as he writes, “Unfortunately, Davy disdains hunting for primary sources to support his theory when he can simply misquote the anonymous Justice Department informant who told the New York Times that “Bertrand” and Shaw were “the same guy” (Davy, 191).” It’s interesting that Reitzes cites page 191 of my book for the Justice Department “it’s the same guy” quote, because nowhere on page 191 or anywhere else in the book do I mention the “it’s the same guy” quote! Even though that quote is nowhere to be found in my book, that doesn’t stop Reitzes from his pathetic attempt at discrediting. He writes, “What the Justice Department source actually said was, “We think it’s the same guy.”” Reitzes cites the New York Times of March 3, 1967 as his primary source and Lambert as his backup. A quick look at Lambert’s book shows she doesn’t cite the New York Times at all, but rather the New Orleans Time-Picayune of March 3, 1967 and a Washington Post article some three months later. So, does Reitzes’ main source, the New York Times of March 3, 1967 mention the “We think it’s the same guy” quote? Well, I don’t know what edition Mr. Reitzes has, but I have the New York Times, March 3, 1967 article in front of me right now and the Justice Department is quite unequivocal on the matter. I quote verbatim:

    “A Justice Department official said tonight that his agency was convinced that Mr. Bertrand and Mr. Shaw were the same man, and that this was the basis for Mr. Clark’s assertions this morning.”

    And this is precisely what I cite in my book, not the, “it’s the same guy” or “we think it’s the same guy” quotes that Reitzes erroneously attributes to the New York Times and me. Just who is misquoting the Justice Department here, Mr. Reitzes? It is also interesting to note that in his “review” Reitzes tries to downplay the Justice Department conclusion by saying I misquote an anonymous Justice Department informant. As the reader can see, the Times article (and my book) clearly states that it is a Justice Department official making the statement.

    Later, Reitzes incredulously asks “How come none [witnesses linking Shaw to the Bertrand alias] came forward even after the success of Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, which made much of the alleged “Bertrand” alias?” I would expect this from someone who probably hasn’t interviewed a witness in his life. Within two days of my arriving in New Orleans, I located several people in the French Quarter and beyond, who claimed Shaw used the Bertrand alias. But since they wished to remain anonymous I chose not to use them in my book. One of these witnesses was a very credible 30-year veteran of one of New Orleans’ major newspapers, whose name would be recognizable to anyone familiar with the New Orleans aspects of the case. (It was not Jack Dempsey).

    Reitzes continues lowering his batting average when he writes, “Davy devotes a great deal of space trying to prove that Clay Shaw perjured himself when he denied knowing David Ferrie. Again Davy must resort to witnesses that Jim Garrison had, but were clearly not credible to use.” Wrong again. One of the several witnesses I use linking Ferrie to Shaw, is Banister operative, Joe Newbrough – a very credible source. I also quote an FBI report in which they interview Carroll Thomas, a self-described friend of Shaw’s whose funeral home handled the arrangements for the death of Shaw’s father. While being interviewed by the FBI on an unrelated matter, Thomas volunteered that Shaw had introduced him to Ferrie. Neither of these witnesses shared this information with Garrison.

    Reitzes attempts to score me for citing Jules Ricco Kimble as a source for a flight he made to Montreal with Clay Shaw and David Ferrie. Reitzes’ main points for his argument are:

    1. According to Reitzes, “early accounts of Kimble’s story mentioned flying to Montreal with David Ferrie, but did not mention Clay Shaw.” Reitzes cites Flammonde’s The Kennedy Conspiracy, pp. 206-7. A check of Flammonde’s book shows that Flammonde devotes all of one sentence to the Montreal trip that reads, “Kimble also claimed that he had flown to Montreal on what he said was a Minuteman errand.” True, Flammonde doesn’t mention Shaw in his one-sentence summary, but neither is Ferrie mentioned as Reitzes claims.
    2. Reitzes also writes that “Kimble originally claimed the flight to have taken place a year before the assassination, then later moved the date to the summer of 1963, apparently in order to imply a more credible link to the JFK assassination.” And what is Reitzes’ source for this revelation? Some newly released document, perhaps? Or maybe an interview he conducted? No. He provides a web link to a book blurb for a book that hasn’t even been released in this country and is only available in the French language. Assuming Reitzes does not have the book and is not bi-lingual, is this an example of his primary sources? A book blurb?!

    He also wrote in a follow-up post on the Kimble episode that an undated NODA memo about the Montreal trip states “Despite the fact that the original source of this information was JULES RICCO KIMBLE, a man with a record, this lead keeps growing stronger.” He cites a PROBE article by Lisa Pease as the source for this and that’s about the only thing he gets right. He later writes that my book “briefly discusses the Freeport [Sulpher] story, but doesn’t mention that the tale originated with Kimble, even though a discussion of Kimble’s NODA statement directly follows the Freeport material. Davy, in fact, implies that Kimble’s story “corroborates” the Freeport tale.” Allow me to correct you once again (this is getting arduous). Kimble’s statement is dated October 10, 1967. Almost four months prior to Kimble’s statement, the NODA’s office had information from Ken Elliot, a former newscaster, that Shaw and Ferrie had made the flight to Canada on Freeport Sulpher business. This was later corroborated by James J. Plaine, who had been contacted by a high official in Freeport Sulpher and also told Garrison’s office about the Shaw/Ferrie flight and Freeport Sulpher angle. Apparently this was such common knowledge in New Orleans, that both Dean Andrews and WDSU reporter, Richard Townley revealed this information to Shaw’s lawyers. Kimble’s statement was just icing on the cake. And all of this information is laid out quite clearly in my book. As for the undated memo in Ms. Pease’s article, I have a copy of the memo with the date on it. It is one of several memos from the spring of 1969, after the Shaw trial, as Garrison and Assistant DA, Andrew Sciambra were continuing the investigation on a very limited basis. At that point Garrison may very well have believed Kimble was the original source of the Canada trip, but as I’ve shown, the chronicled record indicates otherwise.

    In my book I quote a CIA document that indicates Shaw was cleared for a project called QK/ENCHANT, which Reitzes accuses me of “mangling.” However, the relevant paragraph is quoted in its entirety in my book. Yet Reitzes claims the document says Shaw was an unwitting source. I can assure the reader that nowhere in the QK/ENCHANT document I quote is there any mention of Shaw being an unwitting source. Earlier Reitzes had claimed that another CIA document exists (apparently a different one) that says Shaw was an unwitting source for QK/ENCHANT. In fact, the document in question says no such thing. Both Reitzes and McAdams have been claiming this CIA document exists which clearly states Shaw was used on an unwitting basis. I have obtained a copy of the CIA document and this is what it says: “Subject was granted a Covert Security Approval for use under Project QKENCHANT on an unwitting basis on 10 December 1962.” Lo and behold, the document does say he was used on an unwitting basis. Unfortunately for Reitzes the subject in question is J. Monroe Sullivan, the San Francisco Trade Mart Director, not Clay Shaw. Just who is mangling documents here, Mr. Reitzes?

    Reitzes’ swipe at the Clinton witnesses is old news, but interviewing them could clear up any questions he has about their statements, testimony and veracity. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many of the Clinton witnesses have you interviewed? One witness he obviously didn’t interview is Henry Burnell Clark. Instead he trots out Posner’s attempt at discrediting this prospective “Clinton” witness. Reitzes repeats Posner’s claim that Clark did not place Ferrie and Shaw in town on the same day. Reitzes even provides a web link to Clark’s statement on-line. I’ve heard this allegation before and thought perhaps there was another statement out there I hadn’t read. A click on Reitzes’ link confirmed this was not the case. Just a casual reading of the document verifies that Clark is talking about the same time frame. Consider what Clark says about his Clay Shaw sighting:

    In the summer of 1963, after a period of civil rights demonstration and picketing had ending [sic], and during the attempted registration of Negro voters….” Clark then goes on to describe his sighting of Clay Shaw. Now, here is how Clark describes the time frame in which he saw Ferrie:

    During this same period of time in the summer of 1963, after the conclusion of the picketting [sic] demonstrations and during the attempted voting registration of the Negroes…” [My emphasis] Note that the context is exactly the same as his Shaw sighting. Further, there is no mention anywhere in Clark’s statement about these sightings being on different days. At this point I’m beginning to wonder if Reitzes, McAdams, and Posner even read the documents they cite.

    Reitzes also accuses me of an “uncritical acceptance of such discredited Garrison “evidence” as David Ferrie’s allegedly unnatural death (Davy, 66-7).” Here is exactly what I say about Ferrie’s death: “The coroner ruled Ferrie died from a brain aneurysm, despite the presence of two typed “suicide” notes. (Whether they were suicide notes or not is a matter of interpretation. Ferrie, who knew he was quite ill, probably saw the end coming and decided to compose his own epitaph). Garrison would postulate that Ferrie could have been force-fed a fatal dosage of Proloid, a thyroid medication Ferrie had been prescribed. It is doubtful that Ferrie could have been fed enough Proloid to be fatal…” And from my preface I write, “…Ferrie was found dead in his apartment, apparently of natural causes.” Does this sound like an uncritical acceptance of the “mysterious death” theory? The only thing mysterious about it, which I note in my book, is what Deputy Coroner Frank Minyard concluded about something being traumatically inserted into Ferrie’s mouth.

    Reitzes cites Lambert as a source for Perry Russo’s supposed 1971 recantation of his original statement. His “recantation” was anything but, as he revealed in two lengthy interviews with me. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many times did you interview Russo?

    Reitzes even tries to dispute Oswald’s ties to Guy Banister and 544 Camp Street. He is apparently so confused at this point that he doesn’t realize he’s refuting his own lengthy treatise supporting Oswald and 544 Camp (See Reitzes, Oswald and 544 Camp, Parts 1 and 2, alt.conspiracy.jfk newsgroup posting of November 3, 1998). Reitzes’ main source for his dissertation is Michael Kurtz. The reader may recall that Kurtz authored a book called Crime of the Century in which he cites numerous unnamed witnesses who placed Oswald with Ferrie and/or Banister in 1963. He even promotes his own “Castro did it” theory – a hypothesis long since discredited. Kurtz even claims he saw Oswald with Banister. Yet Reitzes accepts Kurtz’ views uncritically (Apparently, aligning himself with discredited critics is Reitzes modus operandi. He’s also fond of quoting A.J. Weberman, the former “journalist” who used to scour peoples’ garbage cans for material. In the 1970’s, he co-wrote a book called Coup d’etat In America in which he claims Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt were two of the three “tramps” arrested in Dealey Plaza. Dallas Police records have since disproved that bizarre theory. In addition to “Castro did it” Kurtz and the garbage-sniffing Weberman, Reitzes has now found an advocate in Walt Brown, who recently published a Reitzes piece in his journal. Can anyone say, “Mac Wallace?”)

    Lou Ivon’s recollection of Ferrie’s breakdown gets pooh-poohed by Reitzes, despite the fact that Ivon confirmed this personally in my interview with him. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many times have you interviewed Ivon?

    He also claims I say Vernon Bundy was a credible witness. I didn’t say it. William Gurvich and John Volz did! Neither of whom were fans of Garrison’s. Volz confirmed his take on Bundy in an interview with me. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many times have you interviewed John Volz?

    At least Reitzes does provide some comic relief. He rebukes me for claiming “that the major media engaged in a conspiracy to discredit Garrison and interfere with his investigation despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary.” And what is the sum total of Reitzes’ “abundance of evidence?” It is as follows: “Lambert’s discussions of James Phelan and Richard Billings.” Whew! I’m overwhelmed with that “abundance of evidence.”

    Reitzes’ credibility goes even further over the edge when he claims I “attempt to rehabilitate nutball witness Charles Spiesel (Davy 173-4).” In fact, I do no such thing. On the very pages Reitzes cites I list all of Spiesel’s wild, paranoid claims. I criticize his story as being too pat and describe his testimony as “lunatic.” Is this Reitzes’ idea of rehabilitation? It was Judge Haggerty himself who thought Spiesel may have been dismissed too easily and I note that in the book.

    Reitzes then writes “Davy also presents a dubious new theory of his own when he attempts to link the mental hospital in Jackson, where Oswald allegedly was seeking a job, to the CIA’s infamous MK/ULTRA mind control experiments.” No, this was recalled to us by Dr. Alfred Butterworth, one of the East Louisiana State Hospital’s physicians and corroborated by other hospital employees. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many of the Jackson hospital employees did you interview?

    But less commendable, according to Reitzes, is my “acceptance of Daniel Campbell’s assertions that Banister was a “bagman for the CIA” and “was running guns to Alpha 66 in Miami (There is no evidence to support either claim).” I guess Reitzes naively expects a CIA document to appear affirming something like that. While he’s waiting, he may be interested to know that this was confirmed by Dan Campbell’s brother, Allen as well as close Banister associate, Joe Newbrough. Tell us Mr. Reitzes, how many of Banister’s operatives did you interview?

    Reitzes accuses me of being an advocate first, and an investigator second. But who’s the real advocate here? Just look at the title of Reitzes’ magnum opus, Who Speaks For Clay Shaw? and I think the answer is obvious. He also claims that I take all of Garrison’s assertions at face value. Yet in the over 700 citations in my book, only about 20 are from Garrison’s published works.

    So, where has all of Reitzes’ stellar research led him? – He thinks LBJ killed Kennedy.

    And what does the reader get once he/she clicks on the link? An odd treatise called Yellow Roses by Dave Reitzes in which the author claims Johnson was responsible for, or covered-up, a series of murders, including LBJ’s own sister(!) Assisting LBJ in the Kennedy assassination, according to Reitzes, were Texas millionaire, H.L. Hunt, Mac Wallace (of course), and everyone’s favorite boogie-man, J. Edgar Hoover. Reitzes can spin this fantastic yarn because he cites no primary sources. He uses a couple of books (Haley’s and Caro’s books on LBJ and Harrison Livingstone’s Killing The Truth) and an article by Walt Brown and that’s about it.

    Based on the astronomical number of Internet postings provided to me, Reitzes has taken on the anti-Garrison cause with all the fervor of a religious zealot. So, what would motivate someone to take up the fight so vigorously? – He was insulted. That’s right, but don’t take my word for it. Here’s Reitzes’ own words: “…without the nasty personal attacks from Mr. Hargrove and from one Bill Cleere, I never would posted a word on Garrison or Shaw. My interest, after all, is in the Kennedy assassination, not the so-called Garrison probe.” (Reitzes, alt.conspiracy.jfk newsgroup post of January 8, 1999).

    Finally, in the practice-what-you-preach department, Reitzes wrote in March of this year, “I hope that in the future other researchers and I may embrace the things we have in common rather than seize upon our differences.” Instead of heeding his own words, Reitzes seized upon our differences in a manner so inaccurate it can only be described as vicious. How else can one account for the over 16 errors in his 8-page “review?” Using Reitzes’ penchant for math, that’s over 2 errors per page – a dismal record. How does one account for all of these blunders? Are we really to believe Reitzes’ reading comprehension is as bad as his math? Or is he trying to hurt the commercial possibilities of a book he happens to disagree with? There seems to be some support for the latter, as Mr. Reitzes has seen fit to post an abbreviated version of his error-laden “review” on the Amazon.com site selling my book. I guess I shouldn’t complain too much. Controversy sells books and sadly for Mr. Reitzes in just over 11 weeks since the book has been published it is already heading into its second printing. I take particular solace in the fact that the largest volume of orders has come from Amazon.com. Thank you, Mr. Reitzes.

  • Ed Butler: Expert in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare

    Ed Butler: Expert in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare

    carlos ed
    Ed Butler (right) with Carlos Bringuier

    One of the most unusual and, for some people, breathtaking things that Gus Russo has accomplished is to dust off people who had been looked upon with a jaundiced eye, and, with a straight face, produce them for public consumption. Like the Warren Commission he “dusts them off” by not revealing any of their problems as witnesses, or how they would be attacked by an opposing attorney in court. For ABC, one of the witnesses was Ed Butler.

    Edward S. Butler was born in 1934 to an upper class New Orleans family. He went into the Army Management School from 1957-59 at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. When he returned home he took a position as an account executive with Brown, Friedman and Company, an advertising firm. But, according to New Orleans authority Arthur Carpenter, his service in the military affected all his later adult life. Butler wrote that at the time of his service he became interested “in psycho-politics and particularly Soviet applications.” As Carpenter notes, in June of 1960, Butler wrote an article in Public Relations Journal, which became a declaration for his later career as a propagandist. There he wrote about the Communist threat to America and how a spirit of crisis had to be created to resist it; how America had to use propaganda to counter the Soviets’ skill in that field; how public relations experts like himself had to be recruited in this endeavor; and finally how private funds had to be enlisted to finance this war and his efforts. He also proposed that this effort would serve as a complement to the State Department, USIA, CIA, free institutions abroad, and the various legislative committees dealing with trade information, foreign aid and the like. In short, a private adjunct to America’s foreign policy apparatus. The article turned out to be his vocational outline.

    Some of the people Butler recruited in New Orleans to help finance his propaganda efforts were Clay Shaw and Lloyd Cobb of the International Trade Mart and Alton Ochsner, the extremely conservative physician and philanthropist. By 1961 he had become involved in two associations that were meant to fight this propaganda war: the Free Voice of Latin America and the American Institute for Freedom Project. The former had its office in Shaw’s International Trade Mart and through the latter Butler engaged both Ochsner and Guy Banister, who was Oswald’s handler in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. But according to an investigation by Jim Garrison, Butler was so imperious and abrasive within the former group that he was forced out in 1961.

    At that time, Butler began to organize its successor organization, the Information Council of the Americas, or INCA. This was to be, in essence, a propaganda mill that had as its targets Central and South America, and the Caribbean. It would create broadcasts, called Truth Tapes, which would be recycled through those areas and, domestically, stage rallies and fund raisers to both energize its base and collect funds to redouble its efforts. By this time, as Carpenter and others point out, Butler was now in communication with people like Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA, and Ed Lansdale, the legendary psy-ops master within the Agency who was shifting his focus from Vietnam to Cuba. These contacts helped him get access to Cuban refugees who he featured on these tapes. Declassified documents reveal the Agency helped distribute the tapes to about 50 stations in South America by 1963. There is some evidence that the CIA furnished Butler with films of Cuban exile training camps and that he was in contact with E. Howard Hunt — under one of his aliases — who supervised these exiles in New Orleans. Some of the local elite who joined or helped INCA would later figure in the Oswald story e.g. Eustis Reily of Reily Coffee Company, where Oswald worked; Edgar Stern who owned the local NBC station WDSU where Oswald was to appear; and Alberto Fowler, a friend of Shaw’s; plus future Warren Commissioner Hale Boggs who helped INCA get tax-exempt status. Butler also began to befriend ground level operators in the CIA’s anti-Castro effort like David Ferrie, Oswald’s friend in New Orleans; Sergio Arcacha Smith, one of Hunt’s prime agents in New Orleans; and Gordon Novel, who worked with Banister, Smith and apparently, David Phillips, on an aborted telethon for the exiles.

    Two other acquaintances of Butler’s were Bill Stuckey, a broadcast and print reporter, and Carlos Bringuier, a CIA operative in the Cuban exile community and leader of the DRE, one of its most important groups in New Orleans. These three figure in one of the most fascinating and intriguing episodes in the Kennedy assassination tale. In August of 1963 — three months before the assassination — Bringuier was involved in a scuffle with Oswald as he distributed literature for the FPCC, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. As many commentators have noted, Oswald was the only member of that “committee” in New Orleans, and some of the literature he distributed gave as the FPCC headquarters address, the office of rabid anti-communist Guy Banister — further exposing who Oswald really was. WDSU filmed some of these leafleting events. When Bringuier found out about this, he confronted Oswald on the city streets and verbally and physically assaulted him. The police came. Bringuier got off; Oswald was busted for disturbing the peace — even though Bringuier was the aggressor. This event brought Oswald to the attention of Stuckey who had him on his WDSU show, Latin Listening Post, on August 17th. After the show, Stuckey and his friend Ed Butler asked Oswald to return four days later. Oswald continued his leafleting, this time in front of the International Trade Mart. In the interim, through contacts in Washington, they found out about Oswald’s voyage to Russia, his stay there, and his attempted defection. The morning of the program, the 21st, Stuckey informed the FBI that Oswald would appear on the program. Butler and Stuckey used the Washington information to “unmask” Oswald on the show, and thereby discredit the supposedly liberal and sympathetic FPCC as harboring Soviet Communists in its midst. Right afterwards, Butler went over to a neighboring TV station, WVUE, where he was put on the air to announce Oswald’s exposure on the 10 PM news.

    Interestingly, John Newman later revealed in Oswald and the CIA that the CIA had an anti-FPCC program ongoing at the time. It was run by Phillips and Hunt’s friend, James McCord. It may be relevant to note here that a CIA contact sheet with Butler contains the comment that he was “a very cooperative contact and has always welcomed an opportunity to assist the CIA.” Even more revealing as to the true nature of these events, Oswald wrote a letter about the confrontation five days before it happened.

    Butler’s role in the assassination tale now gets even more interesting. For as Time magazine noted in its 11/29/63 issue, “Even before Lee Oswald was formally charged with the murder, CBS put on the air an Oswald interview taped by a New Orleans station last August.” That night, according to New Orleans Magazine, Butler and the INCA staff churned out news releases about Oswald in order to offset the “rightist” and “John Bircher” charges flying about. Then, Senator Thomas Dodd, who ran the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, was called up by Butler. Conservative Democrat Dodd was very friendly with the CIA and was a personal and professional enemy of Kennedy, opposing him on his African anti-colonialism policy in the Congo. Dodd was out of Washington on November 22nd but booked a special flight back and announced to his staff, “I am a friend of the new administration!” Dodd then began to mimic and deride those who were bereaved over Kennedy’s death. He topped it all off with this: “I’ll say of John Kennedy what I said of Pope John the day he died. It will take us fifty years to undo the damage he did to us in three years.”

    Dodd then invited his acquaintance Ed Butler to testify before his Senate Sub-Committee, a kind of parallel to Richard Nixon’s red-baiting House on Un-American Activities Committee. Dodd later wrote of this episode that he was in contact with Butler just a few hours after Kennedy was shot — when Oswald was still alive! Further, Dodd added that Butler’s testimony convinced him and his colleagues that “Oswald’s commitment to communism, and the pathological hatred of his own country fostered by this commitment, had played an important part in making him into an assassin. This important and historical record completely demolishes the widespread notion that Oswald was a simple crackpot who acted without any understandable motivation.” In other words, Oswald really was a communist, and he alone killed Kennedy for that cause. (Hale Boggs was so enamored of Butler that he invited him to serve on the Warren Commission.) Finally, apparently completing Butler’s public relations tour, the tape of the WDSU interview was forwarded by the CIA to Ted Shackley at the Miami station and used in the CIA’s broadcasts into Latin America, furthering the legend about Oswald the communist killing President Kennedy. Declassified files reveal that the label on the box with the tape says, “From DRE to Howard”. This means that Bringuier’s group (DRE) probably gave a copy to Howard Hunt who forwarded it to Shackley who, in spite of later denials, was still funding the DRE at the time of the assassination.

    Could there be anything more to add to the suspicions about Butler? When New Orleans DA Jim Garrison began investigating Oswald’s activities in the summer of 1963, he inevitably came around to Butler, Ochsner and INCA. When word got out about this aspect of the investigation, Butler and Ochsner began to attack Garrison both locally and through national media like The New York Times (12/24/67). According to Carpenter, they began a whisper campaign that Garrison was mentally unbalanced and that his followers, like Mark Lane and Harold Weisberg, were lunatic leftists who wanted America to crumble from within. They became so worried about Garrison that Butler packed up all the files of INCA and moved to Los Angeles where he accepted a job offer from another conservative philanthropist, William Frawley of the Schick-Eversharp fortune. Frawley was one of the early backers of Ronald Reagan, governor at the time, who had failed to extradite two Garrison suspects. Frawley credited Reagan’s success to public disgust over “Niggers, the Watts riots, dirty students, the Cesar Chavez Reds and fair housing.”

    Butler wrote a book in 1968 entitled Revolution is My Profession in which he attacked as communist infiltrators those whose tactics have “been to try to link the CIA with all sorts of crime, especially President Kennedy’s assassination.” (P. 242) In that same year, he himself infiltrated a meeting of Mark Lane’s Citizens Committee of Inquiry and capsized their proceedings. Later that summer he hooked up with two other ultra-rightists, Anthony Hilder and John Steinbacher, to try to sell the idea that Sirhan had been under the influence of the Madam Blavatsky meditation cult, and that she had been a disciple of Stalin. Hilder and Steinbacher even produced an “instant book” on the subject: Robert Francis Kennedy THE MAN, THE MYSTICISM, THE MURDER. (As some commentators have pointed out, there are indications this book was actually put together before the RFK assassination.) Butler was at the press conference to promote the book. Butler then put out a magazine financed by Frawley called The Westwood Village Square which tried to link all three assassinations — both of the Kennedys and King’s — to the Communists. The centerpiece of the article was his testimony before the Dodd committee.

    In the eighties, the Butler-Banister-Oswald story came full circle. A young advertising employee named Ed Haslam was assigned to go over to the revived offices of INCA in New Orleans. At the time William Casey was fighting a not-so-secret war against communism in Central America. INCA was going to use a radio station through the Voice of America to support that effort. Haslam’s company was going to write ad copy for the station. When he got there, Butler showed him around the place. One thing he showed him was the extant files of Guy Banister. Gus Russo knew this story because Haslam revisited the office and Butler in the nineties with him. This intriguing fact never made it into the ABC special. Somehow, the files of the man who handled Oswald in New Orleans in 1963 came into the possession of the man who “exposed” him as a communist, first locally, then to the US government, and then to the world. By not going into any of the above facets, ABC served as a conduit for propaganda analyst Butler to revive his greatest psy-ops triumph.