The JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (the “JFK Act”) mandated the final release of all assassination records by October 26, 2017. In October of 2017, President Trump publicly committed to authorizing the release of all records, as mandated by the JFK Act. However, on the eve of the October 26, 2017, deadline, President Trump changed course and issued an executive memorandum authorizing an additional delay of six (6) months. We can only assume that agencies protecting these records (namely the CIA and FBI) pressured Trump at the eleventh hour for more time. We will never know exactly what happened. What we do know is that Trump’s executive memorandum was a violation of the JFK Act. At the very least, President Trump was supposed to issue a document that certified the specific reasons for postponement as required by the JFK Act.
After the six (6) month “extension,” agencies were supposed to provide their final reasons for postponement to the President and the Archivist. Compliance with the JFK Act was to be finally accomplished by April 26, 2018. Inexplicably, President Trump then issued another executive memorandum granting agencies an additional three (3) years to “complete” their review of assassination records. This was on the heels of a twenty-five (25) year mandatory review obligation imposed by the JFK Act and then an additional six (6) month period to complete that review.
In that same memorandum of April 26, 2018, the President required final action from agencies by April 26, 2021. By that date, the President required that all information on declassification of JFK Records be delivered to the Archivist. That would, according to the executive memorandum, put the Archivist in the position of making final recommendations to President Biden by September 26, 2021. After receiving recommendations from the Archivist, President Biden would then be in an informed position to authorize a final release by October 26, 2021. That was the plan, at least designed by President Trump in 2018 with legal advice from the Office of Legal Counsel.
What happened instead? We do not know of any action taken by agencies in the three (3) year period between April 2018 and April 2021. We saw no press releases from the Archivist and the President in April 2021 indicating that agencies (protecting these records) did their jobs. We saw no press releases from the Archivist and the President this summer indicating that they were making serious progress, in anticipation of the artificial “deadlines” authorized by President Trump in 2018.
The Archivist is not to blame here. I sincerely believe that the Archivist wants to see these records released. These records are based on an event that happened in 1963. The problem is that the Archivist is a custodian of records and does not have the authority under the JFK Act to compel the release of assassination records. Only the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) had that power under the JFK Act, but unfortunately the ARRB only had authority and funding through 1998.
Congressional oversight committees had authority to ensure compliance with the JFK Act after the winding-down of the ARRB. Those committees have done nothing that we know of, despite receiving correspondence from lawyers and researchers interested in compliance with the JFK Act. At this stage, President Biden has the authority to ensure compliance. President Biden should no longer entertain continuing and stale requests from agencies to postpone assassination records. In order to do his job under the JFK Act, a federal statute, President Biden needs legitimate and transparent reasons from agencies for continued postponement. If the President receives that information, he can then make an executive decision on continued postponement. If the President authorizes postponement of more records, it must be accompanied by a written and unclassified certification of the reason(s). That is what the JFK Act requires. Vague explanations based on “national security” do not come close to meeting the standards of the JFK Act.
Congress declared that continued classification of records would be warranted in only “the rarest of circumstances.” That was in 1992, almost 30 years after the assassination. We are now almost 30 years after the passage of the JFK Act, and almost 60 years after the assassination itself.
I recently signed a letter and legal memorandum to President Biden expressing the importance of this issue. That document can be viewed here. I strongly encourage you to contact the White House with a simple request. Follow the law. Stop the delays based on unfounded (and undisclosed) arguments from agencies that wish to continue hiding these records.
This effort is not about proving a conspiracy or validating the previous findings of the Warren Commission or House Select Committee on Assassinations. It is about following the law, which was passed by Congress in 1992. It is worth noting that Joe Biden was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when the JFK Act was passed by Congress in 1992. The executive branch recently authorized the release of 9/11 records and it has the same chance to earn trust from the American public by authorizing the release of the JFK records. It should not be a difficult decision. It is what the law requires.
John Newman has finished his third volume on the JFK case. This entry is called Into the Storm. As readers of this site will know, I have already reviewed the first two volumes in the unprecedented series. (Click here for the first review and click here for the second)
In foreign policy, the third volume focuses on the year 1962, up until the Missile Crisis. These events include the initiation of Operation Mongoose in Florida, the submission of the Northwoods provocation plans to Kennedy, the removal of Lyman Lemnitzer as Joint Chiefs chairman, and the assumption of that position by General Maxwell Taylor. These are all important developments. And one can argue that they may have had an impact of what happened to Kennedy in Dallas, but surprisingly the major part of the writing about them comes near the end of the book. And the weight of that description and analysis is outdone by the subjects the author deals with previously. For me, it made for an uneven and, in some ways, puzzling result.
Prior to getting to those rather salient points, the author deals with four major topics at length. These are the activist group CORE and their Freedom Ride demonstrations in the south; the KGB/CIA spy wars over men like Pyotr Popov, Oleg Penkovsky, and Yuri Nosenko; the intelligence career of Cuban exile Antonio Veciana; and, finally, the false accusations of Agency officer Sam Halpern implicating the Kennedys in the CIA/Mafia plots against Fidel Castro.
I
Newman includes two chapters on the outburst of the race issue under the Kennedy administration. These amount to about 55 pages of text in a 400 page book. The vast majority of those pages deal with two topics: Martin Luther King’s arrest in Atlanta during the 1960 election and the Freedom Rides and the accompanying violence they incurred in 1961. This material has been dealt with many times in the past by several different authors. Newman maintains that they are integral to any story about Kennedy’s demise, since JFK would not have been president if not for the Kennedy brothers’ role in releasing Martin Luther King from a Georgia prison before the election. (p. 15)
This may or may not be true. There have been several interpretations about how Kennedy won his narrow popular victory in 1960, which was wider in the Electoral College. This includes Robert Caro’s explanation of Lyndon’s Jonson’s campaigning in the south. But even if one were to grant the author his premise, I don’t see how that necessitates including them in a book that is subtitled “The Assassination of President Kennedy.” If, at the end of his series, Newman convincingly shows us how this racial strife somehow impacted Kennedy’s murder, I will be glad to make amends and thank him for his insight.
In Chapter 2, the author brings up what I think is a more relevant subject, which he does not deal with at the length he does his four main fields of interest. This is the undeclared war of the Wall Street Journal—and all that powerful publication represented—against the introduction of Kennedy’s policy plans, both foreign and domestic. As Newman notes, that newspaper viciously attacked Kennedy right out of the gate, on both his domestic spending plans and level of foreign aid. (p. 39) One reason for this is because Kennedy’s policies posed a juxtaposition with President Eisenhower’s. But secondly, Kennedy had always been concerned about levels of joblessness and the length of unemployment benefits to those who could not find work. He was worried about the cumulative impact of structural unemployment on the economy.
The author briefly deals with the rather controversial appointment of Douglas Dillon as Secretary of Treasury. (p. 43) Many liberals wondered about this, since Dillon had been a mainstay of Eisenhower and worked at three different positions in his administration. Newman then comments on Kennedy’s counterbalancing of the conservative Dillon with the liberal Keynesian Walter Heller at the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA). There can be little doubt that Heller’s ideas worked. The performance of the American economy was remarkable under JFK: in three years Kennedy doubled economic growth and increased GNP by 20 per cent. (See for example, John F. Kennedy: The Promise Revisited, by Paul Harper and Joann Krieg, pp. 169–224; Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, pp. 118–217)
The author also counteracts the accepted CW that Kennedy was unsuccessful at getting his proposals through congress. By late 1961, Kennedy had gotten 35 of his 55 bills passed. (p. 47) He declares that Kennedy had clearly sided with Heller and the CEA and his goals were to keep interest rates and mortgage rates low. (pp. 50–51). None of this success calmed down the attacks by the Wall Street Journal, especially when, recalling Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy began to implement economic programs as a way of dealing with social problems. This meant things like placement services to find jobs for those seeking work and extending unemployment benefits from 26 to 39 weeks.
In summing up Kennedy’s economic achievement, Newman writes that prices remained stable in a way they had not under Eisenhower, while wholesale industrial prices actually declined. Both happened under a rapidly expanding economy. (p. 59) My one complaint about this section of the book is that there was no mention of the rather important figure of James Saxon, Kennedy’s Comptroller of the Currency. It seems clear to me that Kennedy was relying on both Saxon and Heller to effectively counter the innate conservatism of both the Federal Reserve and Dillon. In my online discussions with British researcher Malcolm Blunt, he seemed to agree with me. (Click here for details)
II
One of Newman’s preoccupations, both in this book and in his public appearances, has been his disagreement with the late Cuban exile Antonio Veciana. To anyone who knows anything about the JFK case, I should not have to remind them that Veciana was first interviewed by Church Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi. At that time, Gaeton was working under the Church Committee’s Senator Richard Schweiker. Fonzi was then transferred over to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) by attorney Robert Tanenbaum. Senator Schweiker showed Tanenbaum some of what Fonzi had accomplished under his stewardship and the New York prosecutor was favorably impressed. (Fonzi, p. 431) Gaeton decided to stay on the HSCA even after both Tanenbaum and the first Chief Counsel, Richard Sprague, had left.
There, partnered with another Tanenbaum hire—New York detective Al Gonzalez—the two pursued various leads out of Miami, Dallas, and New Orleans. These are vividly captured in Fonzi’s fine book on the case, The Last Investigation. In that volume, Gaeton described his first meeting with Veciana and then his following relationship with the man all the way through the closing of the HSCA. Fonzi details the difference in his belief in Veciana and the committee’s disagreement with that belief. This includes Veciana being shot at—four times—after the appearance of the HSCA Final Report. (Fonzi, pp. 392–93)
In that book, Fonzi meets up with Veciana as he is being released from prison on what the Cuban believed was a trumped-up drug charge. (Fonzi, pp. 123–24) Veciana had a degree in accounting from the University of Havana. He was good at what he did and ended up working closely with Julio Lobo. Lobo was a millionaire known as the Cuban Sugar King prior to the Castro revolution. Since Veciana became one of the most militant of the exile leaders and was associated with Alpha 66, Fonzi asked him who he was tied in with as part of the American government. This turned out to be a man named Maurice Bishop. At one of their meetings, he said that he had seen Lee Oswald with Bishop in Dallas around the beginning of September, 1963. (Fonzi, pp. 125–26). This became the famous Southland Building meeting, where Veciana had arrived a bit early and had seen Bishop chatting with Oswald. When Veciana approached, Bishop disposed of Oswald rather quickly. Fonzi had a police artist sketch a picture of Bishop along the lines of the description that Veciana had given. Veciana and Fonzi spent hours working on the sketch with the illustrator. When this was later shown to Schweiker, he said it looked to him like CIA officer David Phillips. (Fonzi, p. 158) Later, when Gaeton showed the sketch to a brother of David Phillips, he exclaimed “Why, that is amazing! That certainly does look like David!” His office secretary said the same. Then his daughter, David Phillips’ niece, said “What that’s Uncle David!”(Fonzi, p. 315)
Gaeton then decided to search for sources who had been in the Agency who could confirm that Phillips had used the alias of Bishop on occasion. He ended up finding three such sources. (Fonzi, pp. 308, 364) Former CIA Director John McCone told the HSCA that he did recall a Maurice Bishop who worked for the Agency. (Fonzi, p. 434. The CIA later made McCone walk back the statement.)
It should be noted: throughout The Last Investigation, Veciana never flatly states that Bishop is Phillips. In fact, there are instances where he denied it. (Fonzi, p. 251) This included a face to face meeting between the two. (Which, as Fonzi notes, Phillips lied about. See p. 276) At the end of the book, Veciana admits that, if it was Phillips, he could not admit it without Phillips’ approving it. (Fonzi, p. 396)
Gaeton’s widow, Marie Fonzi, wrote to Veciana after her husband’s death in 2012. She was preparing a new version of The Last Investigation. Marie asked permission from Antonio to quote him about Gaeton’s honesty and dedication in pursuit of truth. He agreed to do so. At this time, Veciana was working as an accountant for his son’s marine supply store in Miami.
The next year, 2013, Marie asked Antonio to identify Bishop. She did not mention Phillips in that request. Veciana’s son typed the letter to her finally saying that Phillips was Bishop. His son asked Veciana if he was sure about what he was doing. Antonio said it was time. Marie alerted journalist Jerry Policoff to this fact and he wrote an online piece, which was picked up by other JFK sites; but got little if any MSM exposure. The following year, Veciana showed up at the 2014 AARC seminar and discussed what he wrote in public. (Email exchange with Marie Fonzi, 9/16/2021)
There is more I could write about Fonzi’s work on Veciana. For instance about the personal profile he assembled about Bishop (pp. 155–56) and Bishop’s ultimate pay off to Veciana as witnessed by his wife. (p. 150) But I would just suggest that if you have not read The Last Investigation, you should.
III
Before beginning any discussion of Newman’s disagreement about the Veciana/Bishop relationship, I think it is important to state what is not in his argument. John never talked to Marie Fonzi or visited her home to look through what she still had left of her husband’s files. Even though Veciana died last year, he had time to talk to Antonio through his daughter who is a professional journalist. As most readers know, this reviewer has shown that Clay Shaw repeatedly lied on the witness stand at his trial. He also lied in public about his relationship with the CIA. This reviewer also believes that Shaw was part of the plot to set up Oswald in the murder of President Kennedy and this is why he called attorney Dean Andrews to go to Dallas to defend Oswald. But in spite of that, I interviewed three of Shaw’s four lawyers. I could not talk to Ed Wegmann, since he had passed on prior to starting the research on my first book.
There are two main areas that Newman finds fault with in Veciana’s statements to Fonzi and others. The first is that, in his initial utterances, Antonio said that he first met up with Bishop in Cuba in 1960. As the author notes, Veciana later changed this to 1959. The first person to find a problem with this was Fabian Escalante. (Newman, p. 67) At the time of Kennedy’s murder, Escalante was part of Castro’s counterintelligence force. He eventually rose to helm Cuban state security forces. Probably no one on the island knew as much about anti-Castro CIA operations and Phillips as Escalante did. According to his information, Phillips had left Cuba in February of 1960. To his knowledge, he did not come back. (Newman, pp. 67–71)
Newman’s other main point of contention is that, contrary to what Veciana told Fonzi, he was not primarily associated with the CIA. After leaving Cuba in October, 1961 Veciana was associated with the MRP. In late 1961, he was approved for CIA use in other operations, but did not like working for the Agency. The reason being that he wanted little or no restrictions placed on him. (Newman, p. 293)
In Puerto Rico, Veciana helped create a group called Alpha 66. And he gained sponsorship from Army intelligence in November of 1962. (Newman, p. 299) The author concludes that, from his timeline, Veciana was working for the Army while he was participating in Alpha 66 activities. And he concludes that when Veciana told the Church Committee that the man behind Alpha 66 strategy was Maurice Bishop, he was being deceitful. (Newman, p. 313)
John has done some good work with this and I think some of it is valuable. And he probably is not done yet. But let me point out what I see as a bit problematic. The author brings out his information about Veciana, Alpha 66, and Army Intel as if it had been buried underground. Yet it was written about as far back as ten years ago.
In 2011, Larry Hancock penned a brief but valuable book called Nexus. In Chapter 11 of that work, he writes about how the success of Alpha 66 had drawn the interest of the Army in October of 1962. The CIA and G-2 then shared what information they had collected on the group’s projects. Cyrus Vance of the Army drafted a proposal for very select missions, but Vance’s proposal is marked “Not Used.” Everyone knows that after the Missile Crisis, the actions against Cuba were greatly slowed down and decreased. And, at Kennedy’s insistence, the little that was left was mostly moved off shore. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 70)
The Missile Crisis concluded as a great success for Kennedy, but the Cuban exiles looked at it differently. The rumor in Miami was that somehow the Russians were lying and Castro was cheating. There were still missiles in Cuba and two defecting Russian officers were there willing to talk. As Hancock mentions both in Nexus and Someone Would Have Talked, the main source for this appears to have been Eddie Bayo of Alpha 66. (Respectively, p. 86, p. 337) If that group was only a G-2 operation at that time, 1963, then why did the reaction to this Alpha 66 rumor turn into a purely CIA project? I am referring of course to Operation Tilt, sometimes called the Bayo/Pawley mission. William Pawley was a zealous sponsor of the excursion into Cuba and presented it to CIA. Dick Billings of Life magazine was involved in this mission on Pawley’s yacht since Life was giving publicity to both the DRE and Alpha 66.
Newman admits that there was a female contact who worked for Veciana, who communicated messages to him from Phillips. (Newman, p. 83) Delores Cao had been Veciana’s secretary and she recalled messages from a man who used the name Bishop. According to Hancock, in 1963, there was another woman who was used for messaging later. Veciana recalled her name as Prewett. This has to be be Virginia Prewett, who Phillips worked with in propaganda operations. (Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, p. 177) John also admits that some CIA agents stayed on the island after the revolution. And Veciana named one of them who appeared to be an associate of Phillips, but he rules out the possibility that Phillips would have ever returned, because he had no diplomatic immunity since he was not under state department cover.
IV
One of the major themes that the author spends many pages on is the controversy surrounding the espionage battles between the KGB and CIA in the fifties and early sixties. This includes figures like Pyotr Popov, Oleg Penkovsky, George Blake, Anatoliy Golitsyn, and Yuri Nosenko, among others. In my discussions with John and in one of the talks I have seen him give, his assessment is going to be contra authors Tom Mangold and David Wise. What he appears to be saying is that there really was a high level mole inside the CIA, Golitsyn was somehow a credible source, and that Nosenko was a false defector.
In 1992, British journalist Tom Mangold published a long biography of James Angleton and his reign over the CIA’s counterintelligence staff for two decades. That reign ended in 1974, when he was forced to resign by CIA Director Bill Colby, who had replaced Richard Helms. Mangold’s book was really the first full scale biography of Angleton. For too many reasons to mention here, it did not present an attractive portrait. In his review of CIA literature, in house historian Cleveland Cram praised the book as being honest and accurate. (October, 1993, Center for the Study of Intelligence, “Of Moles and Molehunters”)
Much of Mangold’s valuable work focused on how Allen Dulles and Dick Helms had allowed Angleton to establish what was essentially his own fiefdom within the CIA, including his personal filing system which was not integrated with the Agency’s system. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that those two men allowed the very rightwing Angleton to more or less run roughshod, with little or no oversight. Another major theme of the book was Angleton’s firm belief in virtually anything that Golitsyn told him. Complimentary to that belief were the monetary rewards that Angleton bestowed on the man—no matter how wrong his predictions turned out to be. And many of them were.
Within a year after Mangold’s book was released, much respected journalist David Wise—who had developed a reputation for dealing with intelligence matters—published his own book dealing with Angleton. This was called Molehunt. Wise traced all the organizational and personal damage to careers that Angleton had wrought in his search for what he thought was the mole in the CIA. This unhinged search was largely based on Golitsyn and the fact that he said the mole’s last name began with a K. To make a long story short, this resulted in the wreckage of CIA officer Peter Karlow’s career; along with Paul Garbler’s and Richard Kovich’s. And by agreeing with Golitsyn’s prophecy—that anyone who followed him would be ersatz—later defectors were either discounted or looked on with suspicion. This went on even beyond Angleton, with a man named Adolf Tolkachev, who later turned out to be a very valuable informant on Russian defense technology. His offer was turned down three times. President Carter later signed a bill called the Mole Relief Act in order to recognize and compensate Angleton’s victims. (Click here for more details)
Nosenko had first tried to defect in 1962, but he wanted to act as an agent in place, so he stayed in the USSR. But after the assassination, he did defect at Geneva in January of 1964. His message was that while he was in Russia, and as part of the KGB, he was responsible for the Oswald file. The KGB had no interest in the Marine defector and little knowledge of his military background. They were still not interested even after Oswald married a Russian girl. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, pp. 316–17)
Today, Newman is convinced that Nosenko was a false defector, to the point that he once told me that Bruce Solie, the CIA officer who helped rescue Nosenko from three years of torture and imprisonment, might have been the mole. What seems odd about all this to this reviewer is that the author also writes that the KGB had nothing to do with President Kennedy’s murder. (Newman, p. 339) Which means to me that, at worst, the Russians were trying to convince the USA that they had nothing to do with turning Oswald while he was in the USSR, or ultimately Kennedy’s murder.
A lot of what the author writes in this section of the book is based on the works of Tennent “Pete” Bagley. An important part of what Newman writes about the longtime CIA officer concerns his relationship with esteemed British researcher Malcolm Blunt. This reviewer has material of value to add to their exchange over Oswald’s file that is not in the book under review.
The Brit Malcolm became friendly with Bagley while the former agent was living in Brussels. By 2012, Malcolm had done some work on the declassified HSCA files of Betsy Wolf. One of her assignments was to investigate the Oswald file at CIA. Betsy was a thorough and conscientious researcher. One of the oddities about Oswald’s file that puzzled her was the fact that no 201 file had been opened on the man after he had defected in 1959. Betsy began to inquire with other CIA officers and to look up certain division charters. She found out that in not opening that file, the Agency was violating its own internal rules.
The other problem she pondered was that Oswald’s files did not go where they should have gone, which was the Soviet Russia (SR) division. Instead, they went to the Office of Security (OS). The more people she talked to, the weirder this situation got. She came to suspect that somehow, someone had rigged the system so that no 201 file would be opened on Oswald. As she dug deeper, she realized such was the case. For OS did not open 201 files. This is why certain outside agencies were sending multiple copies of files on Oswald to CIA, but they were not getting distributed. After months of research work on this, Betsy interviewed the man who was the then present Chief of Security, Robert Gambino. He told her that the office of Mail Logistics is alerted in advance of where certain files should be headed in the system. She concluded that this is what had happened: someone had instructed that office in advance to misdirect Oswald’s files. (Click here for details, plus a diagram of how Oswald files were routed)
Malcolm drew for Bagley the diagram of how Oswald’s incoming files were routed in 1959. That is, not going to where they should have been going, namely the SR division, where Pete had worked, but instead being diverted to OS where no 201 file would be opened. After looking at the diagram, Bagley asked Malcolm if Oswald was a witting or unwitting defector. Malcolm did not want to reply, but Bagley pushed him on the question telling him he had to know the answer. Malcolm said, “Okay, unwitting.” Bagley instantly countered with, “Oh no, he had to be witting!” (Newman, p. 339) What makes this even more interesting is that Bagley thought Oswald had killed Kennedy. So you had, for the first time, a veteran CIA counter intelligence officer—who thought Oswald had killed Kennedy—saying that the man was a witting false defector.
V
I would like to close this discussion on a high point, actually two of them.
Newman’s analysis of how the CIA switched back their plots to kill Castro onto the Kennedy White House is very well done. In fact, it is unmatched in the literature. As the author explicates it, this deception started with Director of Plans Dick Bissell; it was then continued, expanded, and elongated by William Harvey’s assistant Sam Halpern. The author proves that both men knowingly lied about the subject. It is important, because this whole mythology became a way to confuse what had happened in the JFK case. The myth that arose from it was that Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got him. When, in fact, neither clause was true. And neither was the corollary: JFK dug the hole for his own death.
Bissell was the first person who created the chimera that somehow “the White House” urged him to create an executive action capability. (Newman, p. 182) In fact, Bissell first told this story to William Harvey in 1961. But under examination by the Church Committee, Bissell said six times that he could not recall who the person at the White House was who first asked him to do this. Someone in the administration calls you about such a subject and you cannot recall who it was?
But on its face, this was not credible. Because the CIA’s Staff D—which included this function—had already been created by then. Plus the CIA/Mafia plots were already in motion. The former began in October of 1960, the latter in August of 1960. And, in fact, it was Bissell’s idea to reach out to the Mafia. (Newman, p. 187) After doing depositions with Bissell, Harvey, and McGeorge Bundy, the Church Committee concluded that Kennedy had filed no such request with CIA and none had been discussed with him. (Newman, p. 191) In fact, the Church Committee was forced to ask Bissell: If the White House tasked you with that, why didn’t you reply that such actions were already proceeding?
The reason that Bissell wanted to use this fabrication of White House approval was to egg on the Mafia plots in order to salvage the Bay of Pigs operation. This is most likely because he understood from the two designers of that operation—Jake Esterline and Jack Hawkins—that it would not succeed due to the revisions that had been made in their plans. In fact, they wanted to resign, since they sensed a debacle was upcoming. Bissell understood if that happened, he would be left holding the bag, since he was the main supervising officer. (Newman, pp. 191–92).
Halpern took this fabrication and made it his own, with two alterations. First, he switched the pushing of the plots from JFK to RFK and he used a CIA man he knew, Charles Ford, as RFK’s “accessory.” What was quite revealing about the Church Committee inquiry was that Dick Helms did not seem to know much at all about Halpern’s RFK/Ford schemes. And what he did know was through Halpern. (Newman, pp. 237–39)
The giveaway about Halpern was his frequent assertion that RFK deliberately left no paper behind about his dealings with Ford. This turned out to be utterly false. And as the author points out, for Seymour Hersh to have accepted this from Halpern for his 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot, tells you all you need to know about Hersh’s piece of rubbish.
In fact, Charles Ford testified twice before the Church Committee. For whatever reason, we only have his second deposition. But it is clear from the references he makes to the lost first interview that he never did what Halpern said he was doing. That is acting as a liaison for RFK to the Mob for the purpose of killing Castro. Considering Bobby Kennedy’s war on the Mafia, this was preposterous on its face. But as the author points out, we have documents from both sides today—RFK’s and Ford’s—as to what Ford was doing for Bobby. The idea was that he was supposed to check out some American representatives of anti-Castro groups in Cuba and also explore ways to retrieve the prisoners from the failed Bay of Pigs project. (Newman, pp. 260—67). These prove that Halpern was passing gas on two levels.
But the capper about this is that Halpern knew about it, since he signed off on one of Ford’s memos. In fact, Ford was working with Halpern and Harvey in 1961. And since Ford worked under those two men in 1961, within their domain at CIA, he could not have been working under Bobby Kennedy. The Church Committee examined Ford’s testimony afterwards and found it to be accurate. (Newman, p. 276)
Perhaps the sickest statement that Halpern made to Hersh was this: “Bobby Kennedy’s primary purpose is dealing with Charles Ford was to do what Bill Harvey was not doing—finding someone to assassinate Fidel Castro.” As Hersh could have found out through declassified documents available at that time, this was an ugly lie. Harvey had found someone he was working with to kill Castro. That was John Roselli. And the CIA had lied to Bobby Kennedy about the existence of this plot. (Newman, p. 279)
Does it get any worse than that?
VI
The book closes with what is a testament to its title. The author notes that Dwight Eisenhower and his National Security Advisor Gordon Gray had thought of using a false flag operation at Guantanamo Bay in the waning days of Ike’s administration. That is, they would employ Cuban exiles to simulate an attack on the base and that would suffice as an excuse to invade Cuba. In fact, Eisenhower had told Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer that he had little problem with that scenario, as long as they could manufacture something “that would be generally acceptable.” (p. 372)
As the author then writes, it is clear that Lemnitzer recalled Eisenhower’s approval of this concept, since both he and Edward Lansdale, who was running Operation Mongoose, were going to try and push it on President Kennedy. As Newman, and many others have written, once Mongoose—the secret war against Cuba—was up and running in February of 1962, the three men supervising it were not well-suited for each other. That would be Lansdale, William Harvey, and Bobby Kennedy. RFK was there at his brother’s request. Since after the Bay of Pigs, the president did not trust the so-called experts anymore. Lansdale did not like this. He actually asked CIA Director John McCone for complete control over Mongoose. A request that was promptly denied. On top of this, Lansdale and Harvey despised each other and Harvey hated RFK. (Newman, pp. 376–77)
Lansdale was quite imaginative—and deadly—in his plans to shake up things on the island. He thought up outlandish schemes like Task 33. This was a plan to use biological warfare against Cuban sugar workers, but this was only part of an even more wild menu: to create a pretext to attack Cuba. Lansdale now brought back the idea of staging a fake Cuban attack at Guantanamo to provoke an American invasion. There were two other scenarios that Lansdale thought up for this purpose.
As the reader can see, what Lansdale had in mind actually preceded what the Joint Chiefs were going to propose to President Kennedy, which was the infamous Operation Northwoods. The problem was that President Kennedy not only did not want to provoke American direct intervention, he did not even want to hear about it. (Newman, p. 385) But yet, on March 13, 1962 the Joint Chiefs proposed Northwoods to the White House. This was a series of play acted events designed to manufacture chaos in Cuba in order to provoke an attack by American forces. One was a staging of a “Remember the Maine” scenario: blowing up a ship in Guantanamo Bay and blaming it on Castro. Another was to create a communist Cuban terrorism wave on cities like Miami. Kennedy rejected these proposals.
Newman closes the book with Kennedy’s searing disagreements with Lemnitzer over both Cuba and Vietnam. About the latter, Lemnitzer said that Kennedy’s policy would lead to “communist domination of all of the Southeast Asian mainland.” In regard to Cuba, Lemnitzer would not let up on the idea of American intervention. This led to his eventual rebuke by Kennedy in mid-March of 1962. (Newman, pp. 391–94) If there was any doubt that Lemnitzer was leaving—and there was not much—this settled it.
Kennedy did kick him out of the White House, but he sent him to NATO, which, of course, was secretly guiding the Strategy of Tension under Operation Gladio. In other words, the terrorist plan Lemnitzer had been turned down on with Cuba, he was now going to be part of in Europe.
This is chapter four of a book I’ve written concerning the 52 witnesses that appeared and gave public testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Ida Dox gave her very brief testimony, only 11 questions, on September 7, 1978, in the Rayburn House Office Building, though the majority of testimony was given in the Cannon House Office Building.
I tried to do with Ms. Dox, as I did with all of the witnesses, and that was lift out the salient points and update the evidence when necessary.
The name of my book is Hidden In Plain Sight. It is an attempt to demonstrate that a large amount of evidence was obvious early in the investigation of the case. In other words, it was there all the time, but we didn’t see it, sometimes because we weren’t looking for it.
Ultimately, it is a guide that will tour you through the labyrinth of testimony and evidence of the case in 1978 and then updated as the years have gone by.
Chief Counsel Robert Blakey told me in an interview in the late 90’s that these witnesses were a way for the HSCA to present their evidence to the American public.
Ida Dox, September 7, 1978
On September 7, 1978, 9:09 a.m. session, EDT—Room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C., the House Select Committee on Assassinations took testimony from Ms. Ida Dox.
Ida Dox was born on July 8, 1927 in Honduras, Central America and came to the United States in 1947. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Newcomb College of Tulane University in New Orleans in 1950. She obtained her Master of Science degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1954 and her Doctorate of Philosophy from the University Maryland in 1990.
She was a medical illustrator at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington D.C. from1954–1969. She was chosen to be the medical illustrator for the Select Commission on Assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Junior of the United States House of Representatives in Washington D.C. from 1978–1979. She has been a medical illustrator and author, in Bethesda, Maryland, since 1969.
At the time of the public hearings, she was a medical illustrator for the Department of Medical-Dental Communication at the Georgetown University Schools of Medicine and Dentistry. She was also an author of many textbooks on illustrated medical dictionaries, one of which I purchased off of Amazon.
She died on October 18, 2013, at the age of 86. Dox was her maiden name, but her married name was Ida Melloni, as she married John Melloni in 1954.
The HarperCollin’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary
The House Committee on Assassinations contacted the Georgetown Medical School, which in turn recommended Ida Dox as a medical illustrator. She appeared before the Committee to testify in public session. She had been working with the medical panel for some time and was asked to explain her role, working with the autopsy photographs and x-rays, which would demonstrate the location and severity of the bullet wounds.
Before her appearance, Robert Blakey read a list of rumors that had circulated regarding the location and nature of those wounds, specifically to JFK. Amazingly, what he stated was a lot closer to reality than the Humes, Boswell, and Finck autopsy findings.
Blakey then commented on past presidential assassinations, as they related to the specific autopsies. He marginalized the credibility of the Parkland doctors by comparing the comments of Dr. McClelland, “a massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple,” (an obvious misspeak and red herring by Blakey, when he understandably meant right temple) to the wholly different description of neuro-surgeon Kemp Clark, who “observed a large gaping hole in the rear of the President’s head.” Blakey further weakened the import of their testimony by stating that they only worked on the President for a short time and they were trying to save him, which was not a possibility either way.” (I HSCA 142)
If Ida Dox was to malign the rumor department, it would have been binding upon her to testify that she enhanced the wounds in the drawings that she made, especially Fox-3. More about that in due course.
Andrew Purdy, who handled much of the medical aspect of the questioning, was called upon to question Ms. Dox. He began by asking her to expand on how it was determined what to illustrate for the Select Committee. A seemingly fair question. She said, “the committee, the medical panel, and myself…decided that the photographs taken at autopsy should be copied to illustrate the position of the wounds. The photographs that were selected were the ones that best showed the injuries.” (I HSCA 146) Why would a medical illustrator be involved in that decision-making process? She’s an artist, not a doctor. She sketches and traces; she does not slice and cut.
“The photographs taken at autopsy should be copied to illustrate the position of the wounds.” (I HSCA 146) Wouldn’t the photographs illustrate that? This seems to be a wasted step. This has the appearance of an imitation of the Warren Commission, where Commander Humes told medical illustrator Harold Rydberg lies, but Rydberg followed orders, which he argued both strenuously and vociferously against years later. Dox would never argue in that same vein, unfortunately.
The Warren Commission’s excuse was that to introduce the photos into evidence would mean publishing them; did the House Select Committee on Assassinations believe that by using drawings that they could keep the nature of the injuries from becoming public? The Dox drawings are some of the least graphic of the autopsy photos that we know about, but even still, they don’t hide what little graphic nature there is in those prints. The Warren Commission could get away with it, because nobody was going to see the photographs and that was a censuring that remained in place years later, when the HSCA chose drawings, identical to a couple of the autopsy photos, instead of the photos, for their study. Nothing had changed fourteen years after the Warren Commission, as neither the Commission nor the House Committee on Assassinations, and much to their shame, put the autopsy photographs into evidence.
In her testimony of how she made the illustrations, at no time did she give any indication that the results used by the committee were in any way different from the actual photographs themselves. I am sure at some point, someone told Ida Dox exactly what to do with the red spot on Fox-3, the back of the head autopsy photograph. In fact, some of the records obtained from the National Archives do everything, except come right out and say just that. Does this make Ida culpable? Probably. I am sure she was just doing what she was told and may have been told it would illustrate what the medical panel was trying to explain. She is less culpable than Baden, to be sure.
They would never publish the photos and the drawings by Ms. Dox in the same volumes, as it would easily demonstrate the differences between the two. The differences would have been recognized immediately, particularly with reference to the wound in the cowlick, not discernable in the photograph, but manifestly obvious in the drawing.
Mr. Purdy: Ms. Dox, prior to today, did you have the opportunity to review the enlargements of your drawings to ensure that they are accurate?
Ms. Dox: Yes, I did. I looked at them very, very carefully and they are my drawings except that they are photographically enhanced. [my emphasis] (I HSCA 148)
The witness was asked if the drawings are accurate? Her answer was that she compared them to make sure that they were, in fact, her drawings and they had not been rehabilitated in any way. She had to know this wasn’t true, as the documents I received from the National Archives indicate in this chapter.
In two investigations into the murder of the President of the United States, when it comes to medical evidence, the most crucial evidence of all, the deception seems to explode all over the place.
This is a sleight of hand worthy of the Warren Commission, suggesting that the House Select Committee at least had a tutorial in coverups; they agreed for the sake of the Kennedy family’s privacy not to use the actual photos, but to use identical sketches made by a medical illustrator.
I am not sure how that would have put anyone at ease in the Kennedy family. The President’s image was displayed, in death, and on television. Whether it was a photograph or a true rendering by a medical illustrator, it is truly much ado about nothing. The American public had already seen the graphicness of the Zapruder film on national television in March of 1975.
But make no mistake, the autopsy photo that Dox copied of the back of the head and the resulting sketch she made are ages apart. Ida Dox deceptively depicted the rear head entrance wound, exposed as such when the inquiring public was finally allowed to see the actual wounds fifteen years after the event. Who knows what she was thinking, as she did what Dr. Baden told her.
The decision not to use the original photographs was probably made by the Committee members. An arrangement was reached that they would publish the drawings, but only those deemed essential. The Dox drawing of the head wound was withheld from publication and it was not in the hundreds of pages of her file I received from the National Archives.
She also responded to Purdy’s question by stating that “the photographs that were selected were the ones that best showed the injuries.” (I HSCA 146) Ms. Dox said she copied four photographs: the back of the head (Fox-3), the upper back (Fox-5), the side of the head (Fox-4) [not shown during public testimony], and the front of the neck (Fox-1 & 2). Key photos were clearly withheld, some say on grounds of taste. They were examined by the forensics panel and other experts, but not displayed or published. The top of the head photo (Fox-6 & 7) was not chosen. As stated, the side of the head photo drawn by Ms. Dox was not shown during public testimony either. She was asked to draw the head wound photo, but when they saw it, they decided not to publish it. I am not sure what they thought they would see before they looked at it, as they had seen the autopsy photograph on which it was based.
The back of the head photo (Fox-3) was shown during the public testimony of Ms. Dox. The only problem is that the alleged entrance wound in the cowlick area is much more visible in her drawing, than on the original Fox-3 photograph. Conversely, her drawing of the back wound (Fox-5) omits the possibility of an entrance wound that has been alleged by some critics and his back was cleaned up quite a bit. Whether there are other possibilities concerning Fox-5, it should have at least been drawn. It also places the back wound much too high. The autopsy face sheet, as did his suit coat and shirt, as did Dr. Humes, places the back wound in the upper right posterior thorax at about the level of the third thoracic vertebra, which would be approximately five and three-eighths inches below the top of the collar. The Dox wound appears much too high.
When Mr. Purdy asks how she copied the photographs, Ms. Dox stated that she did it by “placing a piece of tracing paper directly on the photograph, then all the details were very carefully traced…so that no detail could be overlooked or omitted or altered in any way.” (I HSCA 147) As noted, the upper entry head wound was altered. Period. Perjury, most likely, but I really believe it is more of being afraid to disagree with Dr. Baden, when he had told her what he wanted. Hard to tell. Things were omitted, especially on the back wound (Fox-5), where obvious detail is missing, and also on the back of the head wound (Fox-3), where the alleged cowlick area wound is much clearer and pronounced in her drawings than in the autopsy photographs themselves, as I stated earlier. Isn’t this really much ado about nothing? Couldn’t all of this have been avoided knowing that the drawings are no substitute for the photos? The original photos should have been available to researchers at least as soon as the Warren Commission closed up shop, but legally they haven’t been released to this day.
Purdy goes on to say that Ms. Dox made other drawings to illustrate the conclusions of the forensic pathology panel. We are not exactly sure what these other drawings are, only to assume they are in the Committee’s files. The release of the Assassination Records Review Board medical materials did not tell us any more on this subject. I don’t recall this issue even being addressed. The truth is, in relationship to Ms. Dox, the ARRB made no difference at all. I’m frankly amazed that nobody at the ARRB asked the obvious question: Why are the Dox drawings and the photographs from which they are exactly made, so different? Sadly, Ms. Dox was not questioned by the ARRB and she could have been, since she didn’t pass away until 2013, but this was never addressed.
In her next to the last question, Ms. Dox says that a frame of “film taken during the motorcade was photographed and the outline of the President’s head was used, so that the…head of the President…in the position that the medical panel decided was necessary.” (I HSCA 147-148) They were probably doing what they thought was adequate, but left themselves open to immense criticism, just as the Warren Commission did.
Ms. Dox worked for the Committee, under the direction of Professor Blakey. In that capacity, she was assigned to assist the Committee by preparing drawings from the autopsy photos for possible publication. She was working under Blakey’s direction and Dr. Baden, or perhaps Andrew Purdy’s, since he guided most of the medical aspects of the case. Ultimately, Dr. Baden made the call on what Ms. Dox drew and, in some cases, how to draw it. As you listen and read the testimony of Ida Dox, you can only reflect about what should have been asked.
I contacted Ms. Dox in October of 1999. I had two conversations with her on the telephone. It all started with a question I had regarding HSCA Exhibit F-302, which was a drawing of President Kennedy’s brain, that was put into evidence during the testimony of Dr. Humes. What followed was both puzzling and frustrating. I will go into detail about what Ms. Dox said about that sketching of JFK’s brain, parts of her testimony that she now denies ever saying, enhancement of the wounds that she drew for the Committee (which has to do with some correspondence between her and Dr. Baden that I requested and received from The National Archives and publish in this chapter), and other sundry matters.
I prepared for my conversations with Ms. Dox by reading documents I received from the National Archives concerning her. There was a sense of discovery, but more so of clarification. I’m not one who looks for a demon under every shingle, nor is it my purpose to attempt to discredit someone who appears on the surface to be a nice lady who was just following orders and instructions. There were some things that did seem a bit odd and other things that I still don’t understand as I write this. The following information is based on those two telephone conversations I had with Ms. Dox.
In the first conversation I had with here on October 14, 1999, I asked her the following questions:
Question #1: How many photographs were you shown?
When I asked Mrs. Dox this question on the phone, she quickly replied, “I can’t remember.” This is intriguing. If she had been shown 75 photos, okay, she can’t recall, but she testified before the HSCA that it was four, at least that is how many she drew. She doesn’t seem to be guessing before the HSCA during her public testimony. I don’t care how many zillion wounds she has illustrated, as one of the first humans on the planet to see those autopsy photos of JFK, you would think she could remember the number. Maybe not perfectly, but certainly not, “I don’t remember.” Even an estimate would have been nice.
Question #2: Were you ever shown a photograph of the brain?
She emphatically stated, “No!” This first surfaced for me when I noticed HSCA exhibit F-302 in David Lifton’s book, Best Evidence. During Dr. Humes’ testimony, exhibit F-302 is introduced, with no data whatsoever. It is said, then, to be a drawing of the brain. There are two kinds of representations in Lifton’s book. In the cases of the actual line drawings, they are represented in full, the throat wound, cropped so as not to show the face. The brain drawing, however, is in mid-text, so that may be why it is different from the others. It also has no signature on it. The other Dox drawings are reproduced in full and have a signature in the lower corner. It may have been a simple matter of a tracing of a tracing, or some sort, so it could be reproduced in text, without going to the photo section, which is different paper.
The only available rendering of the brain, however, absent the photographs, is the drawing/tracing created by Ida Dox and I have already noted my criticisms of her efforts. In her brain illustration, the left cerebral hemisphere is intact, while the right cerebral hemisphere resembles a swirling pattern.
The two lobes of the cerebellum are intact and unremarkable. That flies in the face of the doctors from Parkland, who testified to seeing cerebellum extruding from the large wound in the back of the head and here we are presented with no cerebellum damage and no large wound in the back of the head.
Question #3: Were the wounds enhanced for the sake of clarity?
Her response, “No, of course not.” This is interesting. At Wecht 2003, I asked Dr. Baden about this and was told that Dox was given other gunshot wounds to draw in order to enhance the visibility. You have to look for something even resembling a wound in the Fox-3 photograph. It looks more like a blood droplet, but not a bullet wound.
He told me that Dox had been given other photos (see later in the text for the documents), of other individuals with wounds, in order that she would be able to highlight JFK’s wound, so people wouldn’t miss where the actual head wound was. Other researchers have talked with Dr. Baden about this and received similar responses.
What follows after this paragraph is a copy of the Dox drawing of Fox-3 and the actual Fox-3 autopsy photo and then a few pages of documents I received from the National Archives, both of which were sent to Ida Dox by the HSCA, including “you can do much better, Ida,” from Michael Baden. How can you do “much better” than the autopsy photos you are directly looking at and tracing. Or, is “much better” referring to placing a bullet wound where there isn’t one in the cowlick area? Ida Dox lied to me on the phone, when she said she wasn’t given any pictures to use to enhance what wasn’t there. Here are some of the documents I got from the Archives, after I requested every document they had concerning Ida Dox. Unlike the Ida Dox drawing, the actual wound is not visible in Fox-3 and no other photographs show it either.
Dox drawing of Fox-3Fox-3Ida—“You can do much better”—Michael BadenBullet wound to the head from the pathology book written by Baden, et. al.
The Forensic Pathology Panel of the House Select Committee was so thoroughly caught up in their findings, that the upper artifact, the red spot, and what they said was the actual entry wound, that they failed to realize how badly they had been duped.
This is critical to the ongoing investigation and needs to be considered again. Originally, the HSCA worked from medical illustrations, done by medical illustrator Ida Dox. Unfortunately, Ms. Dox, who was allowed to commit perjury before the House Select Committee, altered the wound that some have identified as simply a red spot or droplet.
Fox-3 (Color)Fox-3 Comparison with Dox DrawingPurdy Asking for Photos of Typical Bullet Wounds(Keep in mind, this is in the Dox materials sent to me from the National Archives)Flanagan to Baden, Asking for Photos of Typical In-Shoot Wounds
Any assessment of the photographs show nothing even slightly comparable to what Dox drew. I often show the autopsy photos to friends or at talks I give at local libraries and they always produce the same shocked reaction. I show them the Fox photo of the back of the head and ask, “Do you see the entrance wound?”
Nobody can ever see the entry. Then I show them the Dox drawing of the back of the head and ask if the wound is visible and unanimously and they say it is. Then I put them side-by-side and there is usually some kind of verbal gasp, as if they were watching the Zapruder film for the first time.
Now they can see up close and personal that something sinister was going on with the medical evidence. The alteration becomes obvious.
Ida Dox was given the autopsy photographs and requested to make sketches for the HSCA, a procedure that, in itself, calls into question the sanity of the people doing it, as a drawing of gore is almost as unpleasant as a photo of gore.
The reader is invited, even strongly urged, to view the photographs in question and then view the same cowlick area in the Dox (Fox-3) drawings. You will be surprised, if you have never done this before.
What is cited as an artifact and is not by any means proof of an entry wound in the photograph, becomes a glaring bullet hole thanks to Ida Dox, who was given additional photos as stated, showing bullet wounds of other people and not of John Kennedy, so that she could highlight and forge the JFK sketches. There is no doubt in my mind that the reason for moving the back of the head wound four inches higher is to explain the massive wound in JFK’s right temporal area of his skull. If you move the wound, then you have a perfect inshoot-outshoot scenario. If not, you have to explain how a bullet traveling downward from sixty feet in the air and behind can emerge on the upper right side of Kennedy’s temporal bone.
The explanation I can assert is what I have already said in chapter one concerning Governor Connally, that a second head shot at c. Z-327, 7/10ths of a second after Z-313, explains this precisely and, if so, then there was no need to invent a head wound in the cowlick area, as Z-327 explains it perfectly. What is disheartening is that chapter one on Governor Connelly documents that the HSCA was suggesting a shot c. Z-327, but then the Committee wasn’t (as it was a Select, not a Standing committee) renewed and the data became inactive.
That alone brings into question the honesty of the entire HSCA investigation and the charge against Dox is not a pointless one. The question then becomes two-fold:
Why, (excepting the necessity to maintain the lone-assassin fiction) was the wound altered in order to make it obvious to any John Q citizen viewing the Dox drawing, when trained pathologists could not and did not identify it from the photograph which Dox claimed she copied exactly?
Whose decision was it to alter the wound and whose decision was it not to make the obvious comparison between the actual photo and the altered drawing during the HSCA hearings? Baden seems to be candidate number 1.
A little background on Baden and the Clark Panel is probably appropriate at this point. In the late 1960’s, the public was screaming for a reinvestigation. David Slawson at the Department of Justice wrote a memo to Ramsey Clark explaining that if they don’t do something the conspiracy fringe will get Congress to reopen the whole thing. It also is happening at the same time as the Garrison investigation, which scared the intelligence community, so they needed to calm the storms in Louisiana. Slawson suggests an investigation limited to the medical evidence and so the Clark panel is born. The Clark Panel relocates all the wounds, four inches higher on the head and four inches lower on the back. Why? If left where they were in the autopsy report, then Oswald didn’t do it. The plan succeeds and the public is quieted. Meanwhile, the prominent pathologists, having been thrown together to make up the Clark Panel, decide together to write a book on pathology. Ramsey Clark writes its forward. A young, inexperienced pathologist named Michael Baden is asked to contribute to the book. It’s not much, but associating his name with theirs launches his career.
Ten years later, Baden is asked to head the HSCA’s medical panel. He insists he not serve on it alone, so that there is no question of impropriety, so he fills it up with friends, save a lone critic named Dr. Cyril Wecht. Before they would ever meet, Baden went in to examine the autopsy materials. He then sat down and wrote a memo which echoes every point made in the Clark Panel report. He moved the wounds and to the exact same points they had chosen.
At the first meeting of the medical panel (Baden is the only panelist to have seen the materials at this point, though Wecht had gotten permission to see them in the early seventies), he presents them with his findings and calls for a vote to see if another meeting of the panel is necessary. Wecht says yes. The record does not reflect how the others voted, but plans for the other panelists to see the materials were not initiated for several weeks.
This brings us back to Dox and Baden. Dox is permitted to see the photos and to make a set of drawings, which she denied to me on the telephone (though this is exactly what she stated in her public testimony in September of 1978). She then leaves them for Baden to approve. Baden sees the drawings and calls Purdy, who writes a memo to himself that says, “get a photo of a typical wound of entry.” (In another memo dated 4/24/78, Purdy states that he needs to remind Baden to get wound comparison photos and X-rays.) The next document in the record is a photocopy of a page out of the pathology book Baden and the Clark Panelists wrote. At the top of the photo of a tiny bullet wound to the head, Baden wrote, “Ida you can do much better.” Again, and as I stated earlier, I am not sure how you outdo the original autopsy photos. So better, in what sense? Location? The wound itself? Quite baffling, if not disturbing.
On October 28, 1999, I called Ida Dox for the second time. She hung up on me at the end our first conversation. This time the conversation lasted a bit longer and was much more detailed. The following questions were asked Ida Dox at this time:
Question #1: Did you see color or black and white photographs?
She quickly said, “Color.” The color photos certainly show the wounds better, but still not as good as the Dox tracing. You would also think that black and white would be better to trace from. The fact that a lay observer can tell in a second that the tracings are accurate, except for the wounds, should raise questions immediately. The aforementioned data, along with the Baden and Purdy memos speak volumes to this point.
Question #2: I asked her again about how many photographs she saw?
This time she got defensive. I simply reminded her that my previous notes stated that she could not recall, but that she had stated in her testimony that she had drawn four. I was seeking clarification and thought, perhaps, there was a possibility she had been shown others. I was very polite and was genuinely not trying to trick her or confront her in any way. She was silent and so I proceeded.
Question #3: I asked her if security was tight while viewing the autopsy photographs in the National Archives?
She indicated that security was very tight. I was reminded that RFK was in a panic that such stuff would go public. It was difficult enough that the Dox drawings went public, but something had to. Her public testimony suggests she had worked from some kind of originals while being watched at the Archives. This led me to the next obvious question.
Question #4: Did she have a set of autopsy photographs made, so as not to take up the Archives’ employees’ time?
At this point she got very defensive, especially when I read her public testimony where she says this is exactly what had transpired. I was lucky the conversation went any further at all, as she was not happy. I was not accusing her of anything, still only seeking clarification. Her testimony, again, indicates she was given knock off copies to use outside the Archives, as she added detail like Humes’ gloves, so as not to keep the Archives busy.
Question #5: I then asked her again if she had drawn F-302, which is JFK’s brain?
She simply said, “I can’t remember.” I don’t care if it has been twenty years plus, you can’t tell me that you wouldn’t remember drawing a picture of the brain, which just happens to be of the President of the United States! The absurdity of this is beyond belief. Exhibit F-302 does come up during Dr. Baden’s testimony. He uses the drawing of the brain, which he says that Ida Dox drew, to show the intact nature of the cerebellum, thus attempting to prove that Dr. Humes et. al. could not possibly be correct in locating the entrance wound to the rear of JFK’s head in the area of the external occipital protuberance. It wasn’t until Dr. Humes’ testimony that F-302 was formally entered into evidence.
During the session at the end of each testimony, when everyone is given five minutes to ask questions if they want to, Mr. Fithian asks about the possibility of metal fragments being in the brain. In Baden’s testimony, he displayed F-302 and says that in the right, front area side of the brain there was an oblong, blue discoloration, but that it was not a metal object. He stated that the Forensic Pathology Panel determined that it was blood vessels that had been sheered away. Baden went on to explain that there were many pictures taken of the brain and that some had toothpicks in the damaged part for identification purposes by the doctors at the autopsy.
It still, however, doesn’t explain why Ms. Dox told me that she never saw any photographs of JFK’s brain, let alone drew them for the committee. Dr. Baden said there were several pictures of the brain and that Ms. Dox drew from them for the committee to illustrate for the Forensic Pathology Panel, that the cerebellum was not injured because of the rear entrance head shot to President Kennedy (I HSCA 304).
Question #6: Did the photographs of JFK’s neck wound show the face as well?
She told me that the pictures did show his face and that there had been some talk of blurring the face. The tracings, however, do not show the face of the President. That was all she addressed with this question.
Question #7: I again asked her if she was shown other photographs of wounds in order to enhance the ones on her tracings/drawings?
She got very defensive and refused to talk any further. In fact, she said, “I don’t think I want to talk about this any further.” I again tried to assure her that I was not attempting to confront her, only clarify what I had discovered from other researchers and documents from the National Archives. This didn’t seem to quell her anger, but she suggested I contact Professor Blakey, which I did. The data from the first conversation has already dealt with this question in full, but nonetheless, I thought I would give her another chance to verify what I had documentation for from the National Archives. I still refuse to believe you would forget doing something like this, especially in reference to the President of the United States. I don’t care how much time has passed, certain events in our lives are indelibly engrained in our psyche. This event would have to at least be up for a possible nomination.
Question #8: I asked if there were any other medical illustrators besides her?
She told me that she was the only one. In fact, she also worked for the Committee on the tracings/drawings concerning Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She received $16,000, not counting $125 per day, plus expenses for services rendered. This also included appearing as an expert during the public hearings. She was not required to write any reports, only that her medical illustrations would appear in the Committee’s final report. She spent 125 and one-half days consulting and providing services. The final tally, financially speaking, would be: $31,625, plus expenses. That’s not bad money for 125 days’ worth of work, especially in 1978.
Question #9: I asked her how long it took to make the illustrations?
She was kind enough to explain that it took a long time, months as far as the entire process, and that it is very tedious work.
There were some things that were missed in her public testimony, that was gone over with her in her practice questions beforehand, which I still have copies from the National Archives. She was supposed to mention that she was to duplicate the autopsy photographs which show the key wound areas, reconstructions of wound areas with internal structures, and illustrate what happens to soft tissue and bones when they are struck by bullets. Most of these can be seen in Volume I of the HSCA Hearings when Dr. Baden is testifying.
She also stated in her practice questions that blood on the skin and blood on the gloved hands were removed, as well as background details. She stated in her public testimony that she worked very closely with the medical panel, especially Dr. Michael Baden. Based on the previously mentioned discoveries from the Archives, her statement was only the tip of the iceberg.
All in all, I found Ida Dox to be somewhat reticent to talk about the issues that I brought up to her. She was kind and cordial, but obviously on edge during the two conversations. I was never aggressive or combative, only attempting to clarify what I had discovered. I was told by one researcher, in reference to my questioning her about whether she drew the brain, that it is hard to believe that something called the Dox drawing and entered into evidence (or at least referred to constantly) during the hearings, that were nationally televised, could now be credibly disclaimed as not being her work. He told me to think about what I was suggesting here. I never suggested she didn’t draw F-302 (the brain), only wondered why she didn’t sign off on it, when she did on every other illustration. I also was puzzled as to why she would deny something like this; I wasn’t implying something sinister.
I was also told that I was probably running into a simple failure of memory, after two decades. I was cautioned not to go down this path and get involved in a hypothesis alleging major forgery of evidence, when all I had was a simple error of memory.
I really did appreciate the words of caution and took them seriously. I generally respect my colleagues in this field and take their words thoughtfully. I wasn’t implying forgery of evidence or even questioning whether she had drawn the illustration of F-302, again, only seeking clarification of the data I had before me. It made me question the integrity of Dr. Baden more than that of Ida Dox. She was merely following orders and protocol; the others, well, I’ll leave that up to each individual researcher to decide.
A Final Comment: The fourteen questions they asked Ms. Dox is nothing but procedural, chain of evidence testimony and makes no statement about that which was under scrutiny, except that it is frightfully dishonest, and certainly Ida Dox had to know it when she was testifying.
The first question that needed to be asked was, Why were so-called exact drawings or tracings necessary to be used in place of the actual photographs?
There is absolutely no rational answer to this question. It does not seem like it was done out of respect for the President or the President’s family, because the drawings are just as graphic as the original photographs in some areas.
Certain background material had been removed from the tracings. In the drawing which shows the circular bone extending from the right-front scalp, the inference from the drawing would be that the photo would have been taken with the President’s body posed, sitting up.
In actuality, the body was laying on its left side. In the photo, one of the pathologists looms up from Kennedy’s side as the pathologist is standing and Kennedy is on his side on the examining table.
If there can be one reason attributed to the use of drawings, it was to certify that which the House Select Medical Panel wanted. I have written elsewhere that a number of researchers have noted the difference between the photographs, particularly the back of the head photo, with its absence of any visible wound, and the Dox drawing, which clearly showed an obvious entry wound in the cowlick.
The difference has to be placed in time perspective. As Dox noted in her testimony, she was under observation all the time while she was working at the National Archives with the originals of the photos. Yet she could have access to copies of those photos, to complete the tracings of the doctors’ hands, or rulers, in HSCA rooms.
In 1978, those photographs had never been seen by the general public and an individual could only get into the National Archives to view them if they were a medical doctor.
Thus, the first time the wounds were truly seen in some manner other than the Zapruder film or the absurd Rydberg drawings, contrived for the Warren Commission, were the Dox drawings.
And therein lies the reason for the drawings. With the Fox photographs in my possession, and other researches too for some time and prints available in quantity, it was clear that the back of the head photo and the back of the head drawing were very different.
From here, it was now a matter of forcing Commander Humes to change his testimony to reflect that the cowlick entry was the correct site and not the original autopsy finding, located four inches lower. Humes refused to change his findings when testifying before the Medical Panel, but he sold out altogether when he was on television in front of the HSCA itself.
He moved both wounds—the head and the back—approximately four inches. Disgraceful.
Operation Dragon, by former CIA Director James Woolsey and the late Ion Mihai Pacepa, is a revealing book. Not for its ostensible subject, the JFK case. In fact, in that regard, it is qualitatively poor and misleading. It’s revealing, because of what it says about the current state of relations between the USA and Russia; and how badly the CIA wants to fan the embers of the Cold War, in order to set it aflame again.
Pacepa was an advisor to the deceased President of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu. At the time of Pacepa’s defection in 1978, he was acting chief of its foreign intelligence service. Once established in the USA, he worked for the CIA in operations against the client states of the former Warsaw Pact. His writings were published on the conservative blog PJ Media and in publications like the Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, The Washington Times, and FrontPage Magazine. He also wrote several books, including Programmed to Kill, which figures heavily in Operation Dragon. I will explain why later.
I
On the very first pages of the book, the authors set the overarching theme of what is to come. Consider the following: “America has always stood against tyranny from any ideological source.” (p. 1) One could argue quite cogently that what Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles constructed in South Vietnam was a tyranny. The Nhu brothers were pretty much a dictatorship and, in our blind obeisance to the strictures of the Cold War, not only did we back other dictators, we actually overthrew democratically elected governments. The most prominent examples being Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973. We went further and cooperated in the assassination of a democratically-elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, in Congo in 1961. It’s quite an achievement to somehow wipe those instances from the pages of history; but in no time flat that is what this book does.
The idea behind the book is to use the same old intel scheme that the CIA has always used. The classic propaganda model is to place white hats on the people the CIA backs and black hats on their perceived enemies, whoever they are. Considering what the authors are going to propose—that somehow Lee Oswald, under orders of the Kremlin killed Kennedy—the idea is to portray the USSR, and today’s Russia, as being the guys with the black hats.
There is something weird about this whole experiment, because Russia is not a communist state anymore and has not been one for decades. Mikhail Gorbachev began the economic reforms of Perestroika back in the 1980’s. When Boris Yeltsin took power after Gorbachev was kidnapped, he introduced the economic Shock Doctrine to Russia under people like his own advisor Yegor Gaidar and the Americans Jeff Sachs and Larry Summers. It is not an exaggeration to write that, as the late Steve Cohen declared, the result might have been the worst thing to happen to Russia since the Nazi invasion, but Woolsey and Pacepa are only getting warmed up. On page 3, the man who many think was one of the finest prime ministers of England, Clement Attlee, is called an undercover Marxist. Need I add that, somehow, Russia caused the 9/11 attacks? (p. 5)
The depiction of Russian history in this book might have been written by the late Richard Pipes. (See, for example, p. 15) Pipes was one of the intellectual godfathers of the neocon movement. He criticized any attempt at détente with the USSR, because the neocons ended up being to the right of the CIA. Pipes’ view of Russia fit in with the likes of Paul Nitze, who revived the rightwing, militaristic Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) in 1976.
That Nitze ended up being wrong on every major point about the threat the USSR posed did not matter. (Article by Fred Kaplan in Slate, 9/7/2004) Accuracy about the military might of the Soviets was not the point, but the revival of the CPD did much to move the Republican Party to the far right—past Nixon and Ford—and set the stage for Ronald Reagan. Therefore, Pipes was on Reagan’s National Security Council in 1981–82. In a very real sense, one can say that the creation of the CPD in 1976, and its almost ludicrous exaggeration of the Soviet threat, marked the complete destruction of whatever was left—and there was not much left—of John Kennedy’s foreign policy.
Reagan’s depiction of the USSR as the Evil Empire owed its dark coloring to Pipes and Nitze. Thirty-three members of the CPD ended up being part of the Reagan administration. With the rise of Reagan and Pipes, the depiction of the USSR grew more and more extreme—with no end in sight. It was due to this that America failed to recognize who Mikhail Gorbachev really was. He was not a disguised apparatchik; he was a real reformer. But partly because of this intentional demonization, both Reagan and George H. W. Bush missed an historic opportunity. One only has to recall the nuclear deal Reagan turned down at Rejkavik in 1986 and Gorbachev’s later peace plans for Afghanistan and Iraq, both also declined, to realize just how badly the neocons had mischaracterized the man. In this author’s opinion, and Cohen’s, the failure to recognize this moment is what eventually caused the fall of Gorbachev and the rise of the disastrous Boris Yeltsin.
Cohen and Pipes bitterly argued about their two views of the USSR. Pipes wrote that Russia had somehow always been destined to be the home of a Marxist tyranny under Joseph Stalin and was, therefore, incorrigible. Cohen disagreed with this view. He argued against it cogently and eloquently in his first book, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. Needless to say, the neocons won. Cohen not only lost, but by the end of his life he had been pretty much vanquished from the public scene. (Click here for more on Cohen)
Today, even though Russia is not a communist country, has let go of virtually all of its former provinces, and NATO has almost advanced to the Russian border, the neocon version of Russia and Vladimir Putin prevails. In other words, the two threats that men like Nitze and Senator Henry Jackson bandied about—communism and territorial expansion—are non-existent. Yet, with very little exaggeration, the continued demonization has not just continued; it has become an industry.
II
The above outline is necessary in order to explain the utter fruitiness of a book like Operation Dragon. James Woolsey was an Undersecretary of the Navy, a negotiator in atomic weapons with the USSR, and he then became President Clinton’s CIA Director in 1993. But, by all accounts, Clinton and the CIA Director were not close. After leaving that position, Woolsey became a member of the infamous Project for the New American Century. He was one of the signatories urging Clinton to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1998. He also became a patron of the Henry Jackson Society. As I tried to explain in my article on the TFX pseudo-scandal, Senator Jackson represented the contrary foreign policy views of John Kennedy within the Democratic Party. And many of the founders and extreme zealots of the neocon movement came from Jackson’s staff (e.g. Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz). (Click here for details) Today, in keeping with that tradition, Woolsey is on many corporate and private interest boards that are focused on national defense and international affairs.
All of the above helps explain what the book states about Attlee, but there is also the bothersome characterization of Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was a brilliant physicist who played a strong role in the development of the Manhattan Project. After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer had second thoughts about what he had participated in. He wanted to control nuclear power in order to halt proliferation and he was against the development of the H-bomb. This led to the loss of his security clearance in 1954. In 1963, President Kennedy awarded him with the Enrico Fermi Award.
The ordeal Oppenheimer went through was not enough for Woolsey. Neither were any of the biographies of the scientist. With the help of Pacepa, the book does with Oppenheimer what it did with Attlee. Oppenheimer now becomes part of a Soviet apparatus to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb. Since the atomic age is his specialty, I consulted with author/historian Peter Kuznick about this. In an email of August 22nd, he wrote to me:
There’s no evidence to indicate that Oppenheimer was the source. He was CP until he began the Manhattan Project, but he was careful to distance himself after that. Others close to him were still in the party. The Sherwin-Bird biography is the best source, though they are agnostic on whether he was ever in the party.
As Peter said to me, the two main sources the Soviets had from the West were Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall. Much has been written about Fuchs, but little about Hall. Yet, he began informing the USSR in late 1944 about both the design of the bomb and who was working on it. His detailed information about the project flowed to Moscow until August of 1945. He was then re-recruited by the KGB in 1948. The National Security Agency (then known as Army Security Agency and, later, as Armed Forces Security Agency) had figured out who Hall was and what he was doing, but the FBI did not prosecute him since it endangered exposure of signals intelligence capabilities. (Kuznick e-mail)
Significantly, and tellingly, Ted Hall’s name is not in this book. Why is Hall, who surely was an informant on the bomb not in Operation Dragon, but yet Oppenheimer, who in all probability was not, is.
This odd selectivity is explained by the presence of Pacepa. He was the first of many intel defectors from the East Bloc and former USSR. This wave of defectors increased substantially with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the USSR, and the reign of Yeltsin. Looking back, it’s fairly easy to see why. When most all of Gorbachev’s reforms and his entreaties to the West failed to create any real détente, his reign collapsed in 1991. This showed just how powerful the neocon faction had become domestically. It was fairly clear that, by then, the Jackson/Democratic Party wing was infected by the neocon philosophy also.
This became rather clear when President Clinton decided to back Yeltsin’s shelling of the Russian White House, the home of the Duma in 1993. (Click here for details) There were hundreds of casualties during that ten-hour siege. Afterwards, Yeltsin ordered arrests and he banned certain political parties and their publications. This did not just reveal what Clinton and the Democratic Party was becoming; it also sent a clear signal to what was left of the Russian apparatus in the intelligence ranks. Yeltsin’s path was what the USA wanted and they would back him in almost any method he used to maintain it. For all intents and purposes, no matter what Yeltsin did, no matter what happened to Russia internally, Yeltsin was Clinton’s boy. (Click here for details)
Seeing that Russia was now crumbling economically, Gorbachev was persona non grata, and Yeltsin was America’s new horse, former intel operatives decided to head west. People like Vasili Mitokhin and Alexander Vassiliev gave up on a crumbling country and were well rewarded for their literary efforts in England and America. As scholars like Amy Wright have noted, the MSM has been all too accommodating to them. (Click here for details)
These men, and others, knew what the British and American intelligence community wanted from them. They delivered the goods in the form of “notes” they wrote down before they left. (As Wright asked: Somehow there was no copying machine in the KGB offices?) Two themes that these defectors realized would be welcome, were that first, there really was a large Soviet spy apparatus in America during the fifties and sixties. In other words, Joe McCarthy was correct; and this explains Operation Dragon’s spin on Oppenheimer. Secondly, that somehow and some way, the Soviets were involved in John Kennedy’s assassination: both actively and as contributing large amounts of disinformation into the press to confuse their true role.
III
To show how eager to please this trade in intelligence was, there have been some claims by these defectors that have been proven to be simply false. For instance, as with Attlee, British Labor Party leader Michael Foot, allegedly accepted funds from KGB agents. Foot sued for libel. Understandably, publisher Rupert Murdoch did not want to appear in court, so he settled in Foot’s favor. (Click here for details)
Mitrokhin maintained that Mark Lane was also supplied with funds by the KGB. One donation was for $1500 and one for $500. Lane kept notes on the contributions he received for his JFK work. He said the only contribution he got that was even close to those amounts came from Corliss Lamont, an heir to the giant JP Morgan fortune. Probably not high on the list for KGB recruiting. Further, although Mitrokhin said the transfer occurred in New York in 1966, Lane was not living there at the time. He was living in Britain, finishing up Rush to Judgment. Finally, the next largest contribution Lane got was from Woody Allen for fifty bucks. (Lane, Last Word, pp. 92–93) In other words, the charges by Mitrokhin were manufactured, but they were what Western intel wanted to hear: Liberals were communists and Warren Commission critics were KGB funded.
Another piece of confection from Mitrokhin, much appreciated by the CIA, dealt with Clay Shaw and the mysterious business entity, Permindex-CMC. Shaw was arrested by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison on March 1, 1967. Three days later, the Italian leftist newspaper Paese Sera began publishing a six part series on the activities of Permindex-CMC in Italy. In an article published in the Daily Beast by Max Holland, the Mitrokhin notes say that the USSR started this disinformation program in Paese Sera that was later picked up in New York. (Daily Beast, April 28, 2017)
Since Shaw’s arrest preceded the publishing of the articles, it is unlikely they had any impact on Garrison’s indictment of Shaw. The late Bill Turner told me that in going over the Italian articles, he told the DA that, since the reportage concentrated on the entity’s business activities in Rome, it would have little relevance to his case against Shaw in the USA. And, in fact, at Shaw’s trial, they were not brought up.
But the real point of the original series is not indicated by Holland or Daily Beast. I have read the articles in English translation. It was a lengthy six-part series which explored the business activities of the CMC in Italy. An investigative series like this would take a team of reporters weeks to research and then days to write and prepare for printing. But what makes the Mitrokhin story even more strained is this: there was every reason for the newspapers in Italy—and it was not just Paese Sera that printed stories—to be suspicious of Permindex. This business enterprise had previously been kicked out of Switzerland, due to there being a long, drawn out controversy over its sources of funding. In particular, one of the banks was rumored to be involved was Henry Schroder’s, which had been directly associated with CIA Director Allen Dulles. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, pp. 96–97) Therefore, the Italian newspapers were wholly justified in investigating Permindex-CMC as a suspicious business entity when it moved to Rome and announced its real estate plans. In fact, with the Swiss example behind it, it would have been irresponsible not to.
But as it turns out, there was nothing for the KGB to create and hand off in the first place, which is what gives the lie to Mitrokhin and shows what a hack Max Holland was and is. Clay Shaw was on the board of Permindex as it moved to Italy in late 1958. He himself noted this in his Who’s Who in the Southwest entry and it was also announced by Permindex and relayed to Washington in a State Department cable. (Ibid, Davy p. 98)
Years later, looking through the papers of Montreal lawyer Louis Bloomfield, researcher Maurice Phillips discovered that the attorney was an important figure in the Permindex scheme. Bloomfield coordinated meetings and elicited investments in the enterprise for the titular leader of the organization, Ferenc Nagy. These contributions were requested from some of the wealthiest men in the world at the time, such as Edmund deRothschild and David Rockefeller. (Letter from Bloomfield to Dr. E. W. imfeld, 2/10/60) There can be no doubt of a CIA angle to the operation due to Shaw’s presence; plus Phillips discovered Nagy was a CIA asset who offered the Agency the use of Permindex in any capacity. (CIA memo of March 24, 1967)
The worst suspicions about Permindex-CMC were pretty much certified in Michele Metta’s book, CMC: the Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station. The brother of Shimon Peres, one Gershon Peres, was on the board of Permindex from 1967. (Metta, p. 114) But further, Permindex shared the same office space with Propaganda Due. (ibid, p. 120) P2 was one of the very worst and deadliest secret societies to exist—not just in Italy—but in all of Europe. When it was led by the infamous Licio Gelli, it was implicated in numerous crimes and murders (e.g. the death of banker Roberto Calvi). With all of this evidence in the record today, we can see the Mitrokhin scheme as being nothing but a made to order distraction. Permindex was for real, and it was what Garrison suspected it was.
IV
All of the above is a necessary introduction to what is supposed to be the heart of the book. In borrowing from Pacepa’s Programmed to Kill, the authors will now state their main thesis about President Kennedy’s assassination, which is this: Oswald was somehow instructed to kill Kennedy by Nikita Khrushchev. (see pp. 62–78) His control agents on the mission in the West were George DeMohrenschildt in Dallas and Valery Kostikov of the Russian Embassy in Mexico City. Somehow the Russian leader changed his mind, but Oswald proceeded anyway with guidance from Cuban agents.
To say there are more holes in this “plot” than a Swiss Cheese is an insult to Swiss Cheese. In fact, this Rube Goldberg contraption actually does the impossible: it makes the Warren Report look somewhat credible.
First of all, to proffer today that Oswald shot Kennedy to any informed person that is simply a non-starter. The overwhelming evidence declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) has all but made that thesis untenable, but Woolsey is so intent on running away from that evidence that he does not even mention it. (see, for example, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today by James DiEugenio, particularly Chapters 5 and 6) One can only conclude that he understands how it would vitiate his “theory.” In fact, one will not find a reference to the ARRB in his index. It is like these declassifications did not occur.
The other problem with this Woolsey/Pacepa confection is the very real doubts today about Oswald being in Mexico City. People like John Armstrong and David Josephs have made lengthy and detailed studies about his not being there. (Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, pp. 614-702; click here for David’s series) For example, if somehow Oswald was interacting with Kostikov at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, why is there no picture of him entering or leaving that structure, when in fact, there should be four of them. (DiEugenio, p. 291)
And beyond that, Oswald’s calls to the Soviet Embassy are, to say the least, puzzling. According to analyst John Newman, they are a mixture of fluent Spanish and broken Russian. (Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 356) Yet as the authors of the Lopez Report maintain, the evidence is the contrary: Oswald spoke broken Spanish and fluent Russian. (Lopez Report, pp. 117, 121) There is also a call to the Soviet Embassy on Saturday, September 28, 1963; this is supposed to be a call by the Cuban consulate aide, Sylvia Duran to the Soviet Embassy. Yet, Duran insisted that Oswald did not call her back after Friday, so this could not be her on this Saturday call. (Lopez Report, p. 190) When the Commission asked the FBI for a picture of Oswald in Mexico City, they got a photo of what has come to be called The Mystery Man. This appears to be a husky, six foot male with a crew cut outside the Soviet Embassy. (Click here for details) When Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez figured out how this picture was sent up to the FBI, they deduced that not only did Anne Goodpasture of the CIA know it was not Oswald, she very likely knew who it really was, likely KGB agent Yuri Maskolev under diplomatic cover. (Lopez Report, p. 179)
Finally, there is another question that the authors of this book do not bring up about Oswald in Mexico City. This addresses the question of what was Oswald doing there in the first place. If one buys the Warren Report, Oswald was there to get an “in transit” visa, which meant that he would go to Russia via Havana. Therefore, Oswald had to visit both embassies, but since he was so ill-prepared with the proper paperwork, he could not get either passport while in Mexico. Again, this is questionable. The State Department had approved his passport to Russia that summer, but had stamped it with a warning that anyone going to Cuba could be prosecuted. If Oswald wanted to return to Russia, he could have just gone the same route he had taken in 1959. But going through Cuba posed a legal problem. (Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 615) Neither of our authors address this or any of the other above problems. Yet Mexico City is a central tenet of their theory.
What about their other chief suspect? As DeMohrenschildt told Edward Epstein, he did not approach Oswald and his wife Marina at the behest of the KGB. He did so at the request of J. Walton Moore of the Dallas CIA office. In fact, Moore had to push George into doing this and Moore did so on three separate occasions. As DeMohrenschildt stated to Edward Epstein, “I would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not sanctioned it.” (The Assassination Chronicles, by Edward Epstein, pp. 558–59) I don’t see how one can make it more clear than that. And since Epstein’s work is used profusely in Operation Dragon, it’s hard to buy that Woolsey and Pacepa did not know this.
The authors place a lot of weight on the letter Oswald allegedly wrote to the Soviet Embassy in Washington shortly after the first week in November. (Woolsey, p. 65) I strongly recommend to the reader that they read Peter Newbury’s excellent analysis of this document. (Click here for details) It brings up all the obvious questions about this letter and the fact that there were three versions of it. And the Warren Commission asked questions about, not the typed version, but the hand copied version which was done by Ruth Paine. (For an examination of the possible role of Ruth Paine with this letter, click here)
V
Woolsey describes the scene in Havana after Kennedy’s assassination with Jean Daniel speaking with Fidel Castro and Fidel getting a call telling him the president was shot. (pp. 141–43) But yet, his description of what was said does not match the one given by Daniel and written about in a famous New Republic article. (The New Republic December 7, 1963) The authors also leave out the entire background of the meeting between Daniel and Castro. Namely, it was the final step of what had begun in January of 1963 with an approach from Castro’s physician to Kennedy administration lawyer James Donovan. Donovan had been negotiating the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners. Rene Vallejo broached the subject with him of normalizing relations between the two countries. Castro had not liked being the centerpiece of an arm-wrestling contest during the Missile Crisis. These negotiations continued through different messengers (i.e. Donovan, Lisa Howard, Bill Attwood and finally Daniel in November of 1963). (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 56–58)
Castro was surprised at how eloquent, empathic, and forceful Kennedy’s final message through Daniel was. He replied by saying, “Suddenly a president arrives on the scene who tries to support the interest of another class…” Fidel was so elated he spent the next three days with Daniel, saying, among other things, that Kennedy could now become the greatest president since Lincoln. (ibid, pp. 85–89) On the third day, he got the phone call about Kennedy being shot and then the announcement he was dead. Like everything in the paragraph noted above, the authors cut out what Castro said to Daniel after he hung up the phone. Daniel described Castro as looking stunned. Fidel sat down and then repeated over and over: “This is bad news…this is bad news…this is bad news.” When the announcement about Kennedy’s death came on the radio, Castro stood up and said, “Everything is changed. Everything is going to change.” That line is also cut by the authors.
So, what do the two ultra Cold Warriors substitute instead? If you can believe it, they say that Castro was really play acting about all this. Who is their source for Castro’s Oscar winning performance? You will not at all be surprised when I write the words Brian Latell. Brian, of course, was a longtime CIA analyst and then professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, which means he was teaching up and coming State Department and CIA officers. He became the Agency’s front man for their “Castro killed Kennedy” propaganda effort. His work has been pretty much perforated and his sources deflated by our own Arnaldo Fernandez. (Click here for details)
But in reality, Operation Dragon falls apart when confronted with a stereo view of Oswald’s defection to Russia, that is, from his arrival in Moscow, and also what happened to his CIA file at Langley.
From the day he arrived, in October of 1959, the KGB did not buy Oswald as a genuine defector. They always suspected he was an intel operative sent from either the CIA or the Navy. They had good reason to suspect this. Quite simply, the number and frequency of American defectors into the USSR had been increasing since about 1958. From single digits per year, it had grown almost exponentially. They were quite suspicious of Oswald, not just for that reason, but because he told his government tour guide he had classified information about airplanes. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 140) He also said he wanted to become a Soviet citizen. When his plea was turned down, he staged a faked suicide attempt and was sent to the psychiatric ward of Botkinskaya Hospital. Upon his release, Oswald was sent to the Hotel Metropole, which was under KGB electronic surveillance. Clearly, they were debating what to do with Oswald, while watching him interact with American reporters on the scene (e.g. CIA asset Priscilla Johnson).
In early January of 1960, Oswald was called to the passport office. He was handed 5000 rubles and sent to Minsk, about 400 miles from Moscow. He was given a rent free apartment by the mayor and a generous salary of 700 rubles per month for his work in a radio factory. (ibid, p. 144) The Russians had decided Oswald was a false defector. They wanted him out of Moscow, but they did not want him to leave yet. So they made life easy for him, while turning the tables on the American. The KGB gave the Oswald case a handler. They then encased Oswald with a ring of human surveillance, including Pavel Golovachev, who worked at the radio plant.
I ask the reader: Does this sound like a person the Soviets would recruit to kill Kennedy? A man they suspected from the start was a false defector meant to spy on them, while working for the other side? We know today that, almost beyond a shadow of a doubt, the Russians were correct on this. Through the work of the ARRB analyst and British researcher Malcolm Blunt, we now know that the Oswald file at CIA was rigged in advance of his defection.
Betsy Wolf was assigned to work on the Oswald file at CIA by the HSCA. One of the things that puzzled her was why Oswald’s 201 file was not opened upon his arrival in Moscow. It took 13 months for that to happen. Wolf could not understand why this was the case. She could also not understand why Oswald’s files went to the Office of Security (OS), instead of where they should have gone: the Soviet Russia Division. According to its own internal rules, Oswald should have had a 201 file opened almost immediately, but Wolf later found out that the OS worked closely with the counter-intelligence division. In other words, knowing that OS would not open a 201 file was likely one of the objectives of counter-intelligence.
It turned out that Betsy learned the system had been rigged in advance. This was done through a mechanism called CIA Mail Logistics. (Click here for details) Only someone who knew the system, and for whom Oswald was a special project, would have known how to do this and wanted to do so. In Oliver Stone’s upcoming documentary, John Newman points to this rigging of the system as proof that Oswald was a witting false defector. His source is none other than Pete Bagley, a veteran Counter intelligence officer of the CIA for 20 years. In the light of that, this book’s tenet that CIA never had any kind of operative connection with Oswald is ludicrous. (p. 137)
Operation Dragon is also risible in that the authors say that somehow Oswald proved he could shoot JFK by his attempt upon General Walker. (p. 138) As more than one credible author has shown, and for solid evidentiary reasons, it is highly unlikely that Oswald took a shot at Walker. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, pp. 48–59)
The authors follow with this, “On April 13th just before Oswald traveled to Mexico to show the KGB what a good shot he was.” I do not think this is an error. I think they actually are saying that Oswald took this early journey to Mexico, but they source this to Epstein’s book Legend. I could not find it there. Epstein seems to align with the late September, early October 1963 dates for Oswald’s Mexico journey.
Finally, the authors blame Joachim Joesten and his publisher Carl Marzani as being responsible for the idea that Oswald was some kind of intelligence undercover agent. And presto, they are now Soviet agents. Naturally this comes from, respectively, Pacepa and Mitrokhin. (pp. 75–76) I don’t have to tell the reader how thoroughly investigated these two men were by both the FBI, State Department, and the CIA or the rather interesting and relevant fact that Oswald was suspected of being an FBI informant as early as January of 1964, and this information was printed in The Nation. In other words, the indications were there for anyone to see. (Click here for details)
Operation Dragon is a complete, fall-on-its-face failure in what is tries to do. It does not in any way achieve its aim of showing that the JFK murder was a Russian/Cuban operation. It is so riddled with errors, constrained by censorship, and marred by unwarranted assumptions that it simply cannot be taken seriously on any level, except as an outdated, slightly humorous propaganda effort.
In the following two posted documents, attorney Larry Schnapf explains what happened to the JFK Act under the Trump administration. As he demonstrates in detail, the law was actually rewritten. We can only assume that somehow the CIA and the FBI put the fear of God into the President back in 2017. He not only went along with further postponement, he got the Justice Department to rewrite certain parts of the 1992 JFK Act. As explained by Larry, what the Gannon Memo did was it relieved the president of writing up individual exceptions as to why he was deferring the release of certain documents. Even though this had been the explicit intent of the law as written and passed back in 1992. It also postponed making a final determination from 2017 until 2021.
What You Can Do:
Please contact President Biden at the White House and let him know that enough is enough: Let us get everything out about JFK’s murder, whether it’s important or not. No matter what, the law should be obeyed. John F. Kennedy was killed 58 years ago. We are in a new millennium. Here is how you can get your message across:
How to contact the White House:
Phone Comments: (202) 456 – 1111
Snail Mail: The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC 20500
E mail: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
(Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)
I have written a series of articles for Kennedys and King regarding the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (the “JFK Act”). The main focus of the previous articles has been the failure of agencies and the Executive Branch to timely release all assassination records by October 26, 2017. That was the mandated date under the JFK Act for final declassification of all assassination records. This article will focus on the actual steps taken by agencies and the Executive Branch to delay the process of declassification since 2017. We will also examine what can be done to ensure compliance with the JFK Act at this point in time.
In recent months, I have been working with a group of skilled lawyers in an effort to determine why, in 2021, the American public still does not have access to tens of thousands assassination records. Let me say that again. In 2021, agencies and the Executive Branch are still classifying tens of thousands assassination records: almost 58 years after the Kennedy Assassination. Even worse, we do not have a valid explanation from the Executive Branch as required by the JFK Act. We will get back to that point later in the article.
Brief Early History of the JFK Act and Declassification Efforts
Congress overwhelmingly passed the JFK Act in October of 1992. Only one member of Congress did not vote in favor. The JFK Act required the formation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB): an independent panel of academics, archivists and/or attorneys to begin the declassification process. In the opening declarations of the JFK Act, Congress made its intent very clear. Congress stated that all assassination records carried an immediate presumption of disclosure, and that only in the rarest of cases would continued postponement be possibly warranted. Remember, Congress declared that in 1992, almost 30 years ago.
The ARRB did a tremendous amount of work between 1994 and 1998. The result was declassification of thousands of assassination records, which was a significant step for American citizens and researchers who seek to understand the history of the Kennedy Assassination. It is worth noting that the “Public Interest” was a compelling reason for the creation of the JFK Act. The JFK Act itself states that the “Public Interest” means the “compelling interest in the prompt public disclosure of assassination records for historical and governmental purposes and for the purpose of fully informing the American people about the history surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”
The ARRB, by Congressional mandate, completed its term by 1998. Congress then left further declassification efforts in the hands of agencies and the Executive Branch. That is where we start to see the problem.
The JFK Act required agencies to engage in a process of “periodic review” after the winding down of the ARRB. Even if the ARRB had initially determined that an assassination record warranted postponement under the evidentiary standards of the JFK Act, agencies were still required to review those determinations from the 1990’s and “address the public disclosure of additional assassination records.” The purpose of the “periodic review” by agencies was to continue the downgrade and the declassification of protected assassination records. Further, for any records initially approved for postponement by the ARRB, agencies were required to deliver to the Archivist (and publish in the Federal Register) an unclassified written description of the reason for continued postponement.
Brief Explanation of the Mandated Deadline—October 26, 2017
Agencies and the Executive Branch were given 25 years to complete the declassification process for JFK Records. As discussed above, this started with disclosures to the ARRB and requests for continued classification. Then, the agencies had between 1998 and 2017 to complete the declassification process through periodic review and additional disclosures to the Archivist. As of October 26, 2017, precisely 25 years after the passage of the JFK Act, only the President had authority to postpone the release of certain individual records, based on specific standards in the JFK Act. Specifically, President Trump was required to certify that 1) continued postponement was made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and 2) the identifiable harm was of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.
What happened instead? On October 26, 2017, President Trump authorized a six (6) month “temporary” postponement for government offices and agencies to comply with final disclosure under the JFK Act. We do not know exactly what President Trump reviewed, or did not review, in terms of actual assassination records that posed an apparent “concern” for agencies. We do know that President Trump did not issue a record-specific certification for each record that agencies and/or the Executive Branch sought to postpone, as required by the JFK Act.
We also now know that a legal rationalization for “temporary postponement” was provided to President Trump on October 26, 2017. That rationalization was in the form of a legal opinion from Curtis E. Gannon, who was then an Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. The rationalization proposed, in contravention of the Act, a delay of only “a few months.” In apparent reliance on the Gannon Memo, President Trump issued an order authorizing a 6-month delay for agencies to complete their review and disclosure obligations and comply with the JFK Act. As explained in this article, the Gannon Memo does not correctly interpret the JFK Act as written and was, from the outset, clearly designed to justify a certain outcome desired by agencies who wish to continue withholding assassination records from the American public.
Brief Review of the “Temporary Postponement” Period
Following the 6-month postponement discussed above, the President should have been in a position to authorize the release of all assassination records. At the very least, the President should have been in a legal position under the JFK Act to certify postponement of a handful of records and with record-specific explanations. That is not what happened. In fact, matters became far worse. On April 26, 2018, President Trump then authorized an additional three year period for agencies to “re-review” withheld assassination records and report to the Archivist on their continued requests for postponement. In that same executive memorandum of April 2018, President Trump established a new deadline of October 26, 2021 for the Archivist and the President (now President Biden) to make final decisions on the release of assassination records. Yes, you read that correctly – October 26, 2021. The 6-month delay, and the multi-year delay, were completely unwarranted under the JFK Act, and mark a clear departure from law.
It is now clear that President Trump’s decisions in October 2017 and April 2018 were based on the October 26, 2017 Gannon Memo. The Gannon Memo concluded that a delay of a “few months” was warranted based on purported concerns of the Archivist in terms of agencies not following the procedural and evidentiary requirements of the JFK Act. The Gannon Memo did not, however, discuss the Archivist’s concerns in any detail, nor did the Gannon Memo provide the complete written report or findings of the Archivist. Regardless, even if the 6-month delay in October 2017 was arguably warranted based on legitimate concerns of the Archivist, there is no legal justification for the President’s decision in April of 2018 for a multi-year postponement of legal obligations under the JFK Act.
The Gannon Memo Explored
Gannon’s analysis is contrary to the provisions of the Act. There is no authority in Section 5 of the JFK Act for a “temporary certification” authorizing postponement. Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act clearly states that all assassination records were to be disclosed in full by October 26, 2017. The President only had authority to postpone release of records past this date with a written certification “as required by this Act.”
The words “as required by this Act,” as cited in Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act, are critical to a proper legal interpretation of the JFK Act and explicitly require that Section 5(g)(2)(D) be read in context with the JFK Act as a whole. Starkly absent from the Gannon Memo is any reference to the applicable provisions in Sections 5, 6, and 9 of the Act, which set forth the specific requirements and standards under which the President may authorize postponement. Specifically, when the JFK Act was enacted in 1992, each Government office was promptly required to: 1) determine whether its assassination records, and particular information therein, were covered by the standards for postponement of public disclosure; and 2) specify with particularity, in an identification aid, the applicable postponement provision contained in Section 6 of the Act. An identification aid is a standard form for identifications or findings for use with each assassination record subject to review under the JFK Act.
In addition to the process referenced in the preceding paragraph, Section 5 of the Act then required a specific reporting action from affected agencies for any continued postponement. Again, this was required in the early 1990’s. In 2017 and 2018, agencies had no basis to request continued postponement without providing written and unclassified reasons for postponement under the Act. Specifically, under the agencies’ periodic review obligations, Section 5 of the JFK Act required:
[A]n unclassified written description of the reason for such continued postponement. Such description shall be provided to the Archivist and published in the Federal Register upon determination.”
In other words, without the unclassified reporting from agencies for each record sought to be postponed, the President was required to release the remainder of the protected JFK collection on October 26, 2017. The “temporary certification” of an unspecified group of records, as recommended by the Gannon Memo, can only be viewed as the Executive Branch acquiescing to last-minute appeals from agencies that did not follow the standards of the JFK Act.
Gannon Memo Prevents a “Premature” Release Based on a “Strong Likelihood of Sensitivities”
Notwithstanding the clear requirements and procedures set forth in Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the Act, the Gannon Memo, twenty-five (25) years after the creation of the JFK Act, speculated that President Trump was somehow authorized to order a “short-term” postponement necessary to avoid a “premature” release of records. It was further supposed that said “premature” release would constitute the “identifiable harm” which would satisfy President Trump’s decision under Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act—although there is no clear evidence that President Trump was even aware of what specific records were being withheld and what the identifiable harm was with regard to such withheld records. A vague presumption of a “premature” release is not a specified identifiable harm under the JFK Act. However, that appears to be the legal justification given to President Trump.
Further, the Gannon memo presupposed a “strong likelihood” that many of the records in question would implicate the kinds of sensitivity about national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs contemplated by the JFK Act.
One searches in vain for any factual or legal basis in the Gannon Memo for such a sweeping presumption. Instead, the unsupported assertion of any such “strong likelihood” that the withheld records pose an identifiable threat stands contrary to both the spirit and letter of the JFK Act.
The Gannon Memo Creates an Escape
Finally, and most notably, the Gannon Memo hypothesized that President Trump could satisfy Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act by determining that a “group” of records somehow warranted postponement, but that the President was not required to articulate record-specific justifications for further postponement of each individual record. Again, a proper reading of Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the Act does not support the “temporary postponement” certification for an unspecified “group” of records.
The JFK Act is void of any authority for a “short-term postponement,” or any postponement at all without the evidentiary findings required by Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the JFK Act. Agencies had an obligation of periodic review starting with the enactment of the JFK Act in 1992, which “served to downgrade and declassify security classified information.” By 2017, according to a tacit admission in the Gannon Memo, each record already had gone through “an extensive and individualized multi-year review process to verify that public disclosure would have been harmful in the 1990’s and would continue to be harmful through October 26, 2017.” The Gannon Memo acknowledges that the ARRB and responsible agencies had already gone through the scrutinizing review process required by the Act, but at the same time the Gannon Memo recommended a “temporary postponement.” Even worse, President Trump in April of 2018 authorized an additional multi-year extension for final compliance with the Act, relying on the same Gannon Memo.
The bottom line is that, by October 26, 2017, the Executive Branch should have had at its disposal anything necessary to certify a record-specific postponement based on clear and convincing evidence and unclassified explanations filed in the Federal Register. Yet, as acknowledged and admitted in the Gannon Memo, there are still approximately 31,000 assassination records (an indeterminable number of pages) withheld in full or in part. The President has an obligation to either release the JFK assassination records or certify the specific reasons for continued postponement, even if agencies did not fully meet their declassification obligations under Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the JFK Act. The evidence for postponement is available to the President based on the findings of the ARRB and a 25-year obligation for periodic review by agencies, and the American public is entitled to an unclassified certification for any records that may warrant continued withholding under the standards of the JFK Act. President Trump, according to the Gannon Memo, had the data necessary in order to issue the proper record-specific certification under Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act. President Biden presumably has access to the same data and the authority to ensure compliance with the Act.
As of the date of this article, we have not seen anything from the White House or Office of Legal Counsel in terms of resolving the purported “significant concerns” of the Archivist. Under President Trump’s executive order of April 26, 2018, all agencies were required to report back to the Archivist by April 26, 2021 on their efforts to properly continue declassification of withheld records. Any such reports’ existence should be a matter of public record. What is of public record, is a letter dated March 26, 2018, from the Archivist, David S. Ferriero, to then President Trump, wherein he clearly stated that, “I further recommend that you only certify further postponements through 26 October 2021, contingent upon any further recommendations for postponement being made in writing, on a document-by-document basis, by 26 April 2021 (to allow sufficient time for review by NARA and consideration by the President).” The Archivist recommended that a postponement certification by the President be contingent on a document-by-document review of a written request. The Archivist’s statement strongly suggests that he had an interpretation of the Act that departed from the conclusions in the Gannon Memo. The Archivist’s statement is the correct interpretation of the Act.
If the agencies did not fully or properly perform what was required under the Act, their neglect (whether intentional or not) should not be rewarded with unwarranted postponements. This in turn places President Biden in the position of having to issue yet another executive order that does not comply with the JFK Act.
Crucial Difference between FOIA and JFK Act
Unlike the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)—and this is a key point—the burden under the JFK Act is on the government offices and agencies to meet their evidentiary burden on each assassination record before continued classification is legally warranted. Regardless of the Gannon Memo’s interpretation of the President’s certification authority under Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act, the American public is entitled to a record-specific and unclassified explanation of the reasons for postponement under the JFK Act. A broad and unsubstantiated assumption that the withheld records could contain sensitive information, is contrary to the historical and legal foundation of the JFK Act. The operative mandate of the JFK Act is that the relevant records are presumed to be declassifiable.
The Gannon Memo concludes, however, that President Trump was authorized, under Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act, to issue a temporary postponement of a “group” of records without record-specific explanations. The rationale in the Gannon Memo is that Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act is “silent” as to whether the President must make a certification regarding each individual record, or whether he may make a certification applicable to a group of withheld records that raise an unspecified identifiable harm.
Again, the rationale in the Gannon Memo fails to account for the entirety of Sections 5, 6 and 9 of the JFK Act. The entire purpose of the Act is to require declassification and public disclosure of all related assassination records based on specific standards. Those standards are set forth in Section 6, and the specific statutory reason for postponement must be in unclassified form and available to the American public even if postponement is properly authorized. Section 5(g)(2)(D) of the Act cannot be interpreted in a vacuum, as was attempted in the Gannon Memo. Doing so would unjustifiably allow the President to authorize postponements in perpetuity based on vague and opaque requests from agencies that seek to maintain secrecy, contrary to the express purpose and provisions of the Act.
An example of the crucial difference from FOIA, and an abuse of the JFK Act by agencies, is found in an identification aid discovered by our group of lawyers. This particular record we found listed section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act as the grounds for postponement. The evidence apparently provided was “Approval by the CIA.” Let that sink in. This is one of the most egregious things I have seen in my research of the JFK Act. What this means is that records have been withheld upon “approval by the CIA.” That is not the legal standard under the JFK Act! Only the ARRB had the legal authority to approve postponements in the 1990’s, and only the President had the authority to approve postponement in October of 2017. And if the President did authorize postponement, such a decision required unclassified written descriptions from the agencies under the JFK Act.
Continuing Effect of the Gannon Memo
In the broader scheme of the JFK Act, it would be completely antithetical to the entire purpose of the JFK Act to simply abandon all of the required grounds for postponement under section 6, and the detailed procedural, reporting and transparency requirements under sections 5 and 9 of the Act. However, that is exactly what the Gannon Memo did. Such a scheme has encouraged the various agencies to wait out the clock on the release deadlines, and then seek to postpone the release of the records on an ongoing basis for perpetuity. This is what happened at the October 26, 2017 statutory deadline, and also the April 26, 2018 and April 26, 2021 “deadlines” authorized by President Trump. Such actions are in flagrant disregard of the general purposes and the specific procedural requirements of the JFK Act, and contrary to the will of the American people as expressed by Congress when the JFK Act was enacted.
Conclusions and Remedies
Congress made its intent very clear in the Declarations of the JFK Act. Specifically, Congress declared that the “legislation is necessary because Executive Order No. 12356, entitled National Security Information, has eliminated the declassification and downgrading schedules relating to classified information across government and has prevented the timely public disclosure of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”
Executive Order 12356 was issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, in the middle of the Cold War. Classification levels included “Top Secret” information, “Secret” information, and “Confidential” Information. Under this Order, the President and agency heads were given classification authority under one or more of these classification levels, all on the grounds of “national security.” A broad assertion of “national security” is not sufficient for classification under the JFK Act. In the JFK Act, Congress clearly declared that historical executive orders have prevented the timely disclosure and declassification of assassination records, and that legislative action was required to ensure proper and timely declassification.
Section 11 of the JFK Act is also crucial for a proper legal review of the President’s obligations under the JFK Act. Specifically, Section 11(a) of the JFK Act states:
When this Act requires transmission of a record to the Archivist or public disclosure, it shall take precedence over any other law (except section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code), judicial decision construing such law, or common law doctrine that would otherwise prohibit such transmission or disclosure, with the exception of deeds governing access to or transfer or release of gifts and donations of records to the United States Government.
In other words, when evaluating the government’s obligations for accounting to the Archivist and disclosing assassination records to the American public, Congress declared that the JFK Act is the law of the United States with only very few and extraordinary circumstances.
The President can and should meet his legal duty to either 1) release the assassination records in full (now almost 60 years from the date of the assassination), or 2) order agencies to comply with the law and certify continued postponement only in the rarest of cases and based on record-specific findings and the “clear and convincing” evidentiary standard in the JFK Act. Failure to do so would be an abuse of power and contrary to the intent and clear language in the JFK Act.
I believe it is appropriate and legally warranted that President Biden rescind any prior executive orders or memoranda issued by President Trump, with respect to the JFK Act, since October 26, 2017. There is clearly a legal basis for rescission of those orders. Regardless, President Biden should take the appropriate measures to release all assassination records without further delay; or comply with the clear and express language of the JFK Act and issue record-specific and unclassified reasons for continued postponement, based on clear and convincing evidence, as required by the JFK Act.
Paris Match | Posted on 07/31/2021 at 5:25 a.m. | Updated 07/31/2021 at 7:08 p.m. From our correspondent in New York Olivier O’Mahony
In 1991, in “JFK”, director Oliver Stone tackled the Dallas conundrum. Today, he relies on declassified documents to revive the thesis of the CIA-led operation. For “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass”, which he just presented at Cannes, he couldn’t find funding in America. He tells Paris Match about his fight to transmit this appetite for truth to young people.
PARIS MATCH: Why go back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, almost thirty years after the release, in January 1992, of your film “JFK”?
OLIVER STONE: Because what happened in November 1963 was a monstrosity that changed America forever. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, reading the book by Jim Garrison, the prosecutor who inspired my film, that I got involved in this investigation. The immense success of “JFK” subsequently led to the declassification of a number of documents. With this new documentary, I do not pretend to achieve the same result, but I hope to inspire the younger generation – to which it is dedicated – to take up the torch.
What more do we learn from this new documentary?
I rely on documents declassified after the release of “JFK”, and on interviews with members of the latest Commission of Inquiry [Assassination Records Review Board, ARRB] charged with revisiting the tragedy. Forty people are reported to have seen JFK’s corpse at Parkland Hospital immediately after the assassination that the official photos shown do not match him, which means they have been tampered with. Forty people! All claim to have seen a gaping wound in the back of the skull, caused by a bullet coming from the front and not from the back. This calls into question the thesis of the lone killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, posted on top of a book depot behind the president’s car …
You say Lee Harvey Oswald may not even have fired a bullet …
Yes. According to the official thesis, he used a sniper rifle he had just bought at the Klein’s store. Except that the one found on the spot, in Schoolbook Depository, does not correspond to the model in question. Oswald’s fingerprints should have been found there as well, but there were none.
What was Oswald’s role in this case?
The documentary sheds light on his personality and behavior on November 22. Lee Harvey Oswald was actually a patriot and admirer of John F. Kennedy. He made contact with pro and anti-Castro circles; he was both on the side of the Communists and on the side of troubled far-right figures like Guy Banister, a CIA agent.
A double agent?
Rather a provocateur, whom the CIA hired in the demonstrations to distribute leaflets …
According to the official thesis, he fled immediately after the assassination.
Except that we found witnesses who said the opposite. Three of his female colleagues, who feature in the documentary, say they were on the stairs right after the drama. However, they did not meet him there. And Oswald always claimed he was on the second floor, not the sixth. Before being killed by Jack Ruby, two days after the assassination, Oswald denied everything. He claimed to be the patsy of the case, the one who was going to be blamed.
Do you believe in this version?
Yes. He was not alone. There were several “Oswalds” scattered all over the United States. We tell that, before Dallas, John F. Kennedy was targeted by at least two failed assassination attempts [one in Chicago, the other in Tampa, Florida] and quite similar from an “operative” point of view, each time with a patsy with a profile strangely resembling that of Oswald. In the case of the Chicago attempt, the person in question was Thomas Arthur Vallee. In Tampa, it was a Cuban exile, Gilberto Policarpo Lopez.
There is also the infamous “magic bullet” which is said to have first hit JFK before hitting John Connally, the governor of Texas, who was also in the limo. Are you questioning this assumption?
This bullet is in direct contradiction with the results of the autopsy, which show that JFK was hit in the third vertebra from the neck. In the Warren Commission report, that same bullet suddenly “shot up” at the back of the neck to match the path you want it to take, through the throat. At the autopsy, it is mentioned that Kennedy was hit at this point by a “penetrating” bullet. In reality, it was an “in” bullet, coming from the front. The Warren report holds that three bullets were fired. I think there were at least five, some coming from the front.
You maintain that JFK’s doctors were asked to be silent after his death…
Yes. I found the testimony of JFK’s personal physician, Dr. George Burkley, who said he was ready to testify, before retracting …
How did you come across him?
After investigating the autopsy. It was the members of the ARRB commission who raised the hare, in particular one of them, Douglas Horne, who testifies with exemplary precision in the documentary. He explains that the autopsy was “made up” and that John Stringer, the official photographer, supposed to have taken the photos of JFK’s brain which are in the file, did not recognize the images that were shown to him, nor even the type of film used … From there, the investigators, intrigued, sought to approach Doctor Burkley, who had seen it all and signed the death certificate. He agreed to cooperate at first, before changing his mind. After his death, his daughter did exactly the same. And this doctor is not the only one. We also bring to mind Dr Perry, who years after the tragedy told a friend of his that he was “absolutely convinced” that the wound in his throat was from a bullet coming in, and therefore coming from the front. He began by testifying in this sense before saying the opposite …
JFK’s nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom you interview, doesn’t believe in the lone killer thesis either.
Yes, just like his father, JFK’s Attorney General, who lost all power in the aftermath of the assassination. The first thing Lyndon Baines Johnson, the new president, does is appoint the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination. Among its members, Allen Dulles, ex-director of the CIA. Fired by JFK after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he had every reason to hate him. Remember that John F. Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs disaster, decided to bring the CIA to heel.
In your opinion, Gerald Ford, a member of the Warren Commission before becoming President of the United States, also did not believe in the Oswald trail.
Indeed, he opened up to Valéry Giscard d´Estaing, which was revealed in 2013. “We were sure it was a set-up,” he said. But we didn’t find out who rode him. ”
You’re clearly pointing the finger at the CIA. On what basis?
It should be remembered that John F. Kennedy, after the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, had decided to bring the CIA in line with, in particular, frank cuts in its budget. All of his foreign policy was against the interests of the CIA.
What do you mean?
JFK was a man of peace. He is the last American president to have sincerely acted in this direction. In this case, we are focusing too much on one question: how could all this be possible? My documentary reveals why it happened. JFK, this veteran, decorated for his acts of bravery during the Second World War, was going to change the world. He had seen the horrors of war, the disastrous role of the CIA in action at the Bay of Pigs, and then that of the US military during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was not impressed by the generals who advised him to attack the Soviet Union or Laos in 1961 or Cuba in October 1962. Not only did he resist their wartime spirit, but he signed, in 1963, an unprecedented agreement with the Soviets. John F. Kennedy did not want a “pax americana” imposed on the rest of the world. He wanted genuine peace. A bit like General de Gaulle who preferred to see France leave Algeria rather than endless conflict, which earned him an assassination attempt by the OAS, possibly supported by the CIA … Everyone claims that JFK started the war in Vietnam; This is not true, he wanted to repatriate the “military advisers”.
You give the CIA a lot of influence!
I note that Lyndon Johnson did the opposite of JFK. He bolstered the CIA and increased American engagement in Vietnam. He did nothing to fight colonialism, which Kennedy opposed. It is also this truth that I wanted to reestablish: everyone claims that JFK started the war in Vietnam; This is not true, he wanted to repatriate the “military advisers”.
How do you explain that your documentary was refused by Netflix?
The country has become very conservative. I had to look for funding abroad, in Great Britain. Already, my film about Edward Snowden, a hero in my opinion, could only be made with money from France and Germany. So I came to the Cannes Film Festival to promote this documentary in a Europe more open to such projects. But I am convinced that I will eventually find an independent platform that will allow me to broadcast it in the United States.
Is this lack of interest due to weariness over an over-rehashed subject or, rather, a truth America does not want to see?
There is no weariness. Simply put, America is a country on the decline and on the defensive. George W. Bush was probably our worst president. Obama was just a transitional president: he did nothing to turn the tide, and Joe Biden is in his wake. Censorship has imposed itself. I’m shocked by the way that social media has silenced Trump. Kennedy was killed by forces which exceeded him and which, since, frightens all his successors.
You have been accused of pro-Russian sympathies for asking soothing questions of Putin in one of your films. Your answer?
I don’t need to hate anyone: I’m a director, I have my own signature. No one scares me. Neither Putin, nor Castro, nor Chavez. In my films, I transcribe what they feel and think. I had no reason to tell Putin, who confided in me his views on Syria, Bush or Iran, among others, that he was wrong. Especially since nothing was wrong …
Do you think the truth about the JFK assassination will ever be known?
But we already know the truth! It was a conspiracy. He was killed by forces which exceeded him and which, since, frightens all his successors. The culprit was a Communist, a typical scenario of a “black op” set up from scratch by the CIA.
Trump had promised to declassify the archives but did not. Are you going to ask Biden to do it?
I should, but it’s a waste of time. If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes the letter for me, it might have more impact. What is certain is that there is nothing more that can be done for the people who still believe in the Oswald Lone-Assassin Thesis. They live in Disneyland!
How does one go about verifying the authenticity of Commission Exhibit 399? That is a very important question. Had Lee Harvey Oswald survived long enough to see a public trial, no doubt one of the most important pieces of evidence against him would have been the nearly pristine bullet found on a stretcher at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital in the wake of the president’s murder. One of the most important aspects of any criminal case is verification of physical evidence which is being presented in a court of law. This high-profile murder case is no exception; therefore the provenance of CE 399 must be explored if we are to make a determination as to its authenticity. This exploration begins through the study of the variety of documentation and witness statements relating to this core evidence. This legal doctrine behind this exploration is termed ‘chain of possession.’ In relation to CE 399, we want to determine:
Who found the bullet?
Who took possession of the bullet?
What documentation and markings exist in relation to the bullet?
What do the witnesses say about the bullet?
The discovery of the bullet is credited to Parkland maintenance employee Darrell C Tomlinson. Mr Tomlinson was in the process of moving a stretcher which was blocking an area in front of an elevator in the hospital’s emergency department. Tomlinson stated before the Commission that:
Mr. TOMLINSON. I pushed it back up against the wall.
Mr. SPECTER. What, if anything, happened then?
Mr. TOMLINSON. I bumped the wall and a spent cartridge or bullet rolled out that apparently had been lodged under the edge of the mat.
(Testimony of Darrell C Tomlinson)
Upon the retrieval and inspection of this bullet, Tomlinson handed it over to Mr. O. P. Wright, who was Parkland’s personnel director. Mr Wright was a retired Dallas deputy chief of police, in charge of patrol division in the 1950’s. Upon close inspection of this bullet, Wright sought out a Secret Service agent. That agent was Richard E Johnson. Agent Johnson kept in his possession the Parkland bullet until he had flown back to Washington D.C. with the slain president’s body. Once in Washington, Johnson handed over possession of the bullet to chief of the Secret Service, James Rowley. In turn, Rowley handed the bullet over to FBI agent Elmer Lee Todd. Todd, who is alleged to have placed his markings upon the bullet, handed the bullet over to Robert Frazier of the FBI crime lab. That is the official explanation as to how the bullet found in Dallas ended up in Washington D.C. on 11/22/63. Let us examine some of the participants in this chain:
Tomlinson appeared before the Warren Commission on March 20th, 1964. Amazingly, Mr. Tomlinson was not shown CE 399 during his hearing and consequently was not asked to ID it as the bullet that he found on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital on 11/22/63. This is strange behaviour from the Commission as Mr. Tomlinson was an important witness to the identification of this key piece of evidence.
According to one memo (Commission Exhibit 2011, p.2), on June 12, 1964, Darrell C. Tomlinson, maintenance employee, Parkland Hospital, Dallas, Texas, was shown Exhibit C1 (CE 399), a rifle slug, by Special Agent Bardwell D. Odum of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To quote from that report, “Tomlinson stated it appears to have been the same one he found on a hospital carriage at Parkland Hospital on November 22, 1963, but he cannot positively identify the bullet as the same one he found and showed to Mr. O. P. Wright.” Did Tomlinson at least concede that CE 399 resembled the bullet he held in his possession that day?
O P Wright
As incredible as it sounds, Mr. Wright was not called to testify before the Commission. According to an FBI Memo which was printed in the Warren Commission hearings (Commission Exhibit2011, p.2), on June 12, 1964: “O. P. Wright, Personnel Officer, Parkland Hospital, Dallas, Texas, advised Special Agent Bardwell D. Odum that Exhibit C1 (CE 399), a rifle slug, shown to him at the time of the interview, looks like the slug found at Parkland Hospital on November 22, 1963. He advised he could not positively identify C1 (CE 399) as being the same bullet which was found on November 22, 1963.” But does the evidentiary record support the notion that Wright conceded that the Parkland bullet looked like CE 399?
In November of 1966, Josiah Thompson visited Tomlinson and Wright at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Thompson later asked Wright to describe the bullet he got from Tomlinson on 11/22/63. Wright described the bullet he obtained as having a “pointed tip.” (Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 175)
In reference to an earlier re-enactment done with Tomlinson, Wright stated to Thompson that the stretcher bullet looked “like the one you got there in your hand,” referencing the .30 calibre projectile used for the re-enactment. (Thompson, Last Second in Dallas, p. 24)
This description from Wright must bring into question Wright’s alleged concession to Odum that CE 399 looked like the bullet he had in his possession that day. When Thompson showed Wright a picture of CE 399, similar bullets from Oswald’s alleged rifle and CE 606, similar bullets from Oswald’s alleged revolver, Wright denied that any of these resembled the bullet Tomlinson found on 11/22/63.
Thompson stated that later, while getting ready to leave Parkland, Wright approached him and said, “Say, that single bullet photo you kept showing me … was that the one that was supposed to have been found here?” Thompson replied “Yes.” Thompson states that Wright “looked right at me, his face expressionless, and said, ‘Uh…huh.’ Then Wright turned and went back to his office.” (Last Second in Dallas, p. 26)
To Thompson, Wright had rejected CE 399 as the bullet Tomlinson handed over to him that day. Tomlinson also could not identify CE 399 as the bullet he found on the stretcher on 11/22/63.
In a declassified document dated 6/20/64 from Gordon Shanklin, SAC Dallas, to FBI Director J Edgar Hoover, Shanklin states: “Neither Parkland’s DARRELL C. TOMLINSON, nor O. P. WRIGHT, can identify this bullet.”
So as of June 20th 1964, the FBI knew that neither Tomlinson nor Wright could identify CE 399 as being the bullet which came from a stretcher at Parkland Hospital on 11/22/63.
Richard E Johnson
Richard E Johnson was another important witness whose testimony the commission neglected to hear. Maybe it is because, contained within the document CE 2011, we find the following information with regard to his identification of CE 399:
On June 24, 1964, Special Agent Richard E. Johnson, United States Secret Service, Washington, D.C., was shown Exhibit C1 (CE 399), a rifle bullet, by Special Agent Elmer Lee Todd, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Johnson advised he could not identify this bullet as the one he obtained from O. P. Wright, Parkland Hospital, Dallas Texas, and gave to James Rowley, Chief, United States Secret Service, Washington D.C., on November 22, 1963. (Commission Exhibit 2011, Volume XXIV, p. 412)
James Rowley SS Chief
On June 24, 1964, James Rowley, Chief, United States Secret Service, Washington, D.C., was shown exhibit C1(CE 399), a rifle bullet, by Special Agent Elmer Lee Todd. Rowley advised he could not identify this bullet as the one he had received from Special Agent Richard E. Johnson and gave to Special Agent Todd on November 22, 1963. (Commission Exhibit 2011, Volume XXIV, p. 412)
Elmer Lee Todd
On June 24th, 1964, Special Agent Elmer Lee Todd, Washington D.C. … identified C1 (CE 399), a rifle bullet, as being the same one he had received from James Rowley, Chief, United States Secret Service, Washington D.C. … on November 22, 1963. This identification was made from initials marked thereon by Special Agent Todd at the Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory upon receipt, November 22, 1963. (Commission Exhibit No. 2011, Volume XXIV, p. 413)
So according to CE 2011, SA Elmer Todd was able to identify CE 399 because of the initials Todd had placed upon the bullet to establish chain of custody.
Well respected Kennedy researcher John Hunt wanted to establish if the bullet which sits in the National Archives today in fact bears the marking of Special Agent Elmer Lee Todd. Hunt “managed to put together anillustration using photographs of CE -399.” He was then “able to track the entire surface of the bullet using four of NARA’s preservation photos.”
As Hunt states in his fine essay on this subject:
There is no question but that only three sets of initials appear on CE -399. There is likewise no question that they have all been positively identified: RF was Robert Frazier, CK was Charles Killion, and JH was Cortland Cunningham … It can be stated as a fact that SA Elmer Lee Todd’s mark is not on the historical CE -399 bullet.” (Phantom Identification of the Magic Bullet: E. L. Todd and CE-399)
We also find further collaboration for Hunt’s work from Dr David Mantik. At NARA in June 1994, Mantik and astronomer Steve Majewski confirmed that Todd’s initials are not on the historical CE 399. In an email communication with me, Mantik stated, “The other initials are precisely as described by John Hunt.”
Robert Frazier FBI
Another of John Hunt’s masterclasses comes in the form of the essay, “The Mystery of the 7:30 Bullet.” Hunt discovered through his examination of Robert Frazier’s detailed notes that the Parkland bullet was recorded as “Reed Elmer Todd, 11/22/63 – 7:30 p.m.” According to Frazier himself, he took custodianship of the bullet from Todd as of 7:30 p.m. on 11/22/63.
However, upon further analysis of the documentation, Hunt came across an envelope which was filled out by SA Elmer Lee Todd upon receipt of the bullet from Chief Rowley. This documentation states:
Question: How could Todd have given Frazier the stretcher bullet at 7:30 p.m. when Todd had not yet received that bullet from Chief Rowley until 8:50 p.m.? This discrepancy further casts the authenticity of the prosecution’s evidence into the most serious doubt.
Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson Track Down Odum
Dr Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson tracked down former FBI agent Bardwell Odum. The following encounter is well documented in their fine essay, “The Magic Bullet: Even More Magical Than We Knew?” (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 282-84)
On September 12th 2002, Aguilar phoned Odum and the two conversed about various things, but naturally the discussion turned to the assassination of John Kennedy. Odum agreed to look over various documents for Aguilar. Mr. Odum was sent three separate documents. The three were CE 2011, which states that Odum had shown CE 399 to Tomlinson and Wright at Parkland, the FBI airtel dated June 12, 1964, and the three-page FBI memo dated July 7, 1964. After a few weeks, Aguilar phoned Odum back. During that second phone call, Bardwell Odum then made the following statements: “Oh I never went to Parkland Hospital at all. I don’t know where you got that?” When Gary Aguilar asked Odum about CE 399, Odum replied, “I didn’t show it to anybody at Parkland. I didn’t even have any bullet. I don’t know where you got that from, but it is wrong.” (The Magic Bullet: Even More Magical Than We Knew?)
Mr. Odum then went on to state that he never even saw CE 399, let alone had it in his possession. What makes it all worse is that Mr. Odum was a personal friend of O. P. Wright. Surely if Odum had at any time taken possession of this important piece of evidence relating to the murder of President Kennedy and presented it to his friend for identification purposes, then Odum would have remembered, would he not have?
Summary
It is pretty clear that CE 399 would have been an evidentiary debacle for a prosecuting attorney trying Lee Oswald. In order for evidence to be ruled as admissible in a court of law, the item must have an intact chain of possession. If a certain piece of evidence does not meet that standard, then this evidence is wide open to serious questioning by a defense attorney. Why would any prosecutor want Tomlinson, Wright, Johnson, and Rowley to testify that CE 399 was not the bullet each of them took possession of that day? Why would the prosecution want Todd testifying that he had indeed marked the Parkland bullet, when the historical CE 399 which sits in evidence today does not bear his marked initials? Why would the prosecution want Frazier to take the stand and testify under oath that he had received the bullet from Todd at 7:30 pm, when the bullet from Dallas wouldn’t be received by Todd until 8:50 pm?
Mark Lane, quoting Mark Twain, summed it up best: “Who so clinging from a rope by his hands severeth it above his hands must fall. It being no defense to claim that the rest of the rope is sound.”
C 2766 Palm Print
Leaving behind CE 399, I now would like to turn our attention to another piece of evidence which is cited against Lee Oswald: the alleged presence of his palm print upon the rifle claimed as the murder weapon of John Kennedy. This alleged discovery of the print was made by J. C. Day of the Dallas police on 11/22/63. Even at that early stage it is alleged that Day had tentatively identified the palm print as coming from the main suspect, Lee Oswald. (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 123) Is there any photographic evidence in existence of the print on C2766? The shocking but unsurprising answer to that question is there is no contemporaneous photographic evidence. Standard practice is to photograph a lift before an attempt at its removal is made. This step is taken to safeguard against the possibility of losing the print. Take, for example, the statements of FBI Fingerprint Expert Sebastian Latona: “Primarily, our recommendation in the FBI is simply in every procedure to photograph and then lift.” (Meagher, p. 123) The absence of any contemporaneous photograph of the print on the rifle is even more dumbfounding when we learn that Lieutenant Day attended an advanced latent print school conducted in Dallas by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (Meagher, p. 123)
There are photographs of other partial prints taken by Day which were found on the exterior of the rifle. These prints were found to be valueless by the FBI. Day claimed that he had taken these photographs around 8 p.m. on 11/22/63.
Day claimed that he did not take a photograph of the most important latent palm print because he was given orders by Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry to “go no further with the processing.” However, prior to his Commission testimony, Day related to the FBI that he received these orders from Curry shortly before midnight. So by his own admission, Day had almost 4 hours to photograph the print he identified as Oswald’s before receiving the orders from Chief Curry. (Commission Exhibit 3145)
Why, then, did he not photograph the latent print? He must have known that this would be important evidence in any trial of Oswald. Not only is there no evidence that the palm print was ever present on the rifle, but when the FBI received the weapon and tested it for prints, they found no evidence of any fingerprint traces and no evidence of a lift ever being performed. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 107) Day testified that “the print on the gun … still remained on there … there was traces of ridges still on the gun barrel.” (WC Vol. 4, pp. 261-62) Which is in stark contrast to the findings by the FBI.
There is also no independent collaboration to Day’s alleged lifting of the print, as Day claimed to be alone when he attempted the lift. (CE 3145)
Day also apparently neglected to inform FBI agent Vincent T. Drain. Drain transferred the rifle to Washington D.C. on 11/23/63. Day said he informed Drain he had indeed found a palm print on the rifle which he believed was Oswald’s. As Henry Hurt wrote, Drain clearly disputes this: he says Day never showed him any such print or left any indication on the rifle where to look for it. (Hurt, p. 109)
Once the rifle arrived in Washington D.C., FBI hair and fibre expert Paul Stombaugh examined it, stating,“I noticed immediately upon receiving the gun that this gun had been dusted for latent fingerprints prior to my receiving it. Latent fingerprints powder was all over the gun.” (Meagher, p. 121)
In Accessories After the Fact, Sylvia Meagher states, “How could powder survive on the gun from Dallas to Washington, but every single trace of powder and the dry ridges which were present around the palm print on the gun barrel under the stock vanish?” (Meagher, p. 122)
Now when Capt. Will Fritz was asked on Saturday, November 23, if Oswald’s prints were found on the rifle, he stated “No sir.” Chief Curry also made no mention of this important discovery to the media. (Meagher, p. 124) In fact, the first mention of a palm print discovered on the rifle was announced on 11/24/63 by Dallas DA Henry Wade. (Hurt, p. 108) This was after the rifle was back in Dallas and after Oswald was murdered. The following is very hard to swallow: Day allegedly informed Fritz and Curry on 11/22/63 that he had found a palm print on the rifle which allegedly was used in the killing of President Kennedy and that he had tentatively identified the palm print as coming from the main suspect, Lee Oswald. (Meagher, p. 124)
With this powerful information in their arsenal, neither Fritz, Curry nor Wade, who were guilty of making many fraudulent and prejudicial statements of “fact” against the accused, offered not once to the assembled media on 11/22 or 11/23 that the existence of Oswald’s palm print had indeed been found on the suspected murder weapon.
The statements emanating from law enforcement officials were so prejudicial against Oswald that they warranted comment from various sources, one of these being Attorney Percy Foreman. According to the St Louis Post Dispatch, Foreman suggested that “authorities are running a serious risk of jeopardizing their case against Oswald by failing to observe his constitutional rights.” He went on to state: “Officials may have already committed reversible error in the case by permitting the accused to undergo more than 24 hours of detention without benefit of legal counsel.” Citing grounds for reversal, Foreman further asserted: “Under recent decision of the United States Supreme Court, Federal procedural guarantees must be observed in state prosecutions. Their abridgment can be grounds for a reversal or even a conviction. This is a new law. They could get a conviction in Texas and get it thrown out on appeal, but it takes a long time for these dim-witted law enforcement officers to realize it.” (St Louis Post Dispatch, 11/24/63)
After Oswald’s murder, all the evidence pertaining to the murder of President Kennedy was transferred from Dallas to Washington for good on November 26th. Day’s alleged lift of the palm print on the rifle did not reach Washington until November 29th. Why did this important piece of evidence not arrive with the others? (Meagher, p. 123)
In his book Reasonable Doubt, Henry Hurt interviewed retired FBI agent Vincent T Drain. Remember, Drain was the man who transferred the rifle from Dallas to Washington in the early hours of 11/23/63. When Drain was asked about the authenticity of the palm print, he replied: “I just don’t believe there was ever a print.” He noted that there was increasing pressure on the Dallas police to build evidence in the case. Asked to explain what might have happened, Agent Drain said, “All I can figure is that it (Oswald’s print) was some sort of cushion because they were getting a lot of heat by Sunday night. You could take the print off Oswald’s card and put it on the rifle. Something like this happened.” (Hurt, p. 109)
From Latona’s testimony it appears that the FBI never did find any of Oswald’s prints on C 2766. Latona confirmed Oswald’s prints from pictures supplied to him by the Dallas Police on November 29th. (WC Vol. 4, pp. 24-25). To put it mildly, any accomplished defense attorney would have moved for what is called an evidentiary hearing prior to any trial of Oswald on both these pieces of evidence. He would likely have had both declared inadmissible. If not, he would have demonstrated to any jury that they were worthless as evidence since no chain of custody existed with either one. Beyond that, people were lying in order to create the illusion of a chain.
Another dispute Thompson had with Vince Salandria was the author’s theory about the small hole in JFK’s throat. On the day of the assassination, Dr. Malcolm Perry said to the public that this appeared to be an entrance wound. Thompson’s idea is that it was a piece of either brain or metal ejected from Kennedy’s skull. And he includes a diagram of this on page 98. The trajectory of this projectile is hard to fathom, especially since it would be traveling through soft tissue. But also, once it went into the throat area, it would be entering into all kinds of small bones and thicker cartilage. So in addition to the trajectory, it found an exit path through that maze?
Thompson takes Howard Brennan at his word. (pp. 98-99) Which he also did in his previous JFK book. I am not going to go into the myriad problems with Brennan as a witness. That would be redundant of too many good writers. Let me say this: today, the best one can say about Brennan is that he was looking at the wrong building. The worst one could say is that he was rehearsed and suborned. As Vince Palamara wrote in Honest Answers, Brennan refused to appear before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Beyond that, he would not answer written questions. When they said they would have to subpoena him, he replied he would fight the subpoena. Does this sound like a straightforward, credible witness? (Palamara, pp. 186-89)
To supplement the dubious Brennan, the author uses the testimony of the three workers underneath the sixth floor. Vincent Bugliosi used one of them in a mock trial of Lee Oswald in England in 1986. I addressed the serious problem with using these men––in Bugliosi’s case it was Harold Norman––in my book The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today. (pp. 54-55) To make a long story short, after they were interviewed by the FBI, their stories were altered by the Secret Service. At that mock trial, Norman could have been taken apart and spat out if defense lawyer Gerry Spence had been prepared––which he was not. (For a long version of how and why this happened, see Secret Service Report 491)
Let me add one key point about this. One of the Secret Service agents involved in this mutation was Elmer Moore, a man who––since the declassifications of the ARRB––has become infamous in the literature. There is little doubt today, in the wake of the declassified files, that Moore was an important part of the coverup. (DiEugenio, pp. 166-69) Therefore, in my view, Thompson missed another pattern––one which could have been indicated to him by Gary Aguilar or Pat Speer, in addition to myself.
The middle part of the book narrates much of the case history from the early to late seventies. For Thompson, this means the first showings of the Zapruder film by Bob Groden at conferences, then the big national showing on ABC in 1975. This was one of the factors that spurred the creation of the HSCA in 1976. Thompson says that he was invited to the so called HSCA “critics conference.” He says this was where he first heard of the dictabelt tape of a motorcycle recording of the assassination. He takes the opportunity to tell us how the HSCA actually recovered the tape. He also explains how it worked and some of the technology behind it. (pp. 147-51) Keeping with his personal journey aspect, in this part of the book he also tells us how he decided to give up his professorship at Haverford and become a private investigator.
From 1979 until 2006 the author tells us he was very little involved with the case. (pp. 182-83) This is kind of surprising when one thinks about it. Thompson all but leaves out the yearlong furor that took place over the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Which is odd, since that was the largest period of focused attention the case got since 1975. All he says is that he was called to testify by the Assassination Records Review Board about their purchase of the Zapruder film. And he testified, properly I think, that once the Secret Service knew about the film it should have gone to Abraham Zapruder’s home and taken possession of it right there as a piece of evidence in a homicide case. (pp. 189-90) About any of the rather startling disclosures of the ARRB, I could detect little or nothing.
He spends several pages on a conference organized by Gary Aguilar in San Francisco which featured Eric Randich and Pat Grant. It was these two men who broke open the whole mythology of Vincent Guinn’s Neutron Activation Analysis, today called Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis. I was at that conference and Thompson does a good enough job summing up their scientific findings. (pp. 190-96). As the author notes, this “junk science” had been important to the HSCA in its findings that somehow Oswald alone did the shooting, and the acoustical second shot from the front missed.
II
In the second half of the book Thompson more or less forsakes the personal journey motif. He concentrates on what he sees as three important pieces of evidence, which he figures are crucial to the case. I will deal with each of these as candidly and completely as I can.
Thompson devotes Chapter 16, well over twenty pages, to the medical evidence in the JFK case. He begins this part of his book by declaring that the JFK autopsy was “botched,” in other words, whatever shortcomings there were in that procedure, they were not by design. I was rather surprised by this supposition, for the simple reason that Dr. Pierre Finck said under oath at the trial of Clay Shaw that the reason the back wound was not dissected is because the military brass in the room stopped them from doing so. He also said that James Humes, the chief pathologist, was not running the proceedings. They were being so obstructed that Humes literally had to shout out, “Who’s in charge here?” Finck testified that an Army general replied, “I am.” Finck summed up the situation like this:
You must understand that in those circumstances, there were law enforcement officials, military people with various ranks, and you have to coordinate the operations accordingto directions. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 300, italics added)
The Department of Justice––among other groups––was monitoring the Clay Shaw trial in close to real time. When Carl Eardley, the Justice Department specialist on the JFK case, heard this, he almost had a hernia. He called up another of the pathologists, Thornton Boswell, and sent him to New Orleans, since they now had to discredit Finck for revealing what had happened. Eardley later thought better of this, probably because by any standard measure, Finck had better qualifications as a forensic pathologist then Boswell did. (ibid, p. 304)
One cannot overrate the importance of this testimony. To give just one indication of its importance: I did a pre-interview with Dr. Henry Lee for Oliver Stone’s new documentary on the JFK case. I asked him this specific question, directly related to Finck’s testimony: Can you figure out a firing trajectory without a tracking of the wound? He said that under those circumstances, it was very difficult to do. Here is a man who has worked about 8000 cases all over the world and is recognized as one of the best criminalists alive.
The same situation applies to the skull wound, except in this case, the situation is more complex. If one talks to Lee or Cyril Wecht they will tell you there is no evidence of a brain sectioning. But the Review Board did an inquiry into this subject, and Jeremy Gunn and Doug Horne came up with some evidence that such an examination may have been done. Under the scope of this particular review, this is not the place to do an expansive analysis of their evidence. Suffice it to say I found Thompson’s excuse for this lack rather strained: the doctors did not have the time to do so such a thing. (Thompson, p. 259) Yet in the Commission’s volumes there is a brain examination, dated 12/6/63. (CE 391) And there is no mention of sectioning; two weeks was not long enough? Yet without sectioning, how can one determine the bullets’ paths? On this matter, Lee was quite animated. He put his right hand up in front of his face and said words to the effect: You have this bullet coming in at a right to left angle: it then reverses itself and goes left to right? The lack of dissection in this instance is even more perplexing because the head wounding was how Kennedy was killed. And this is why Lee’s hand was piercing the air in bewilderment.
III
Thompson wrote something later that stunned me. On page 258 he says that the first time the autopsy doctors learned of a tracheostomy over the anterior neck wound was when they read about it in the next day’s newspapers. That passage is undermined by Nurse Audrey Bell’s 1997 testimony to the Review Board. Bell told them that Dr. Malcolm Perry complained to her the next morning (on Saturday, November 23rd) that he had been virtually sleepless, “because unnamed persons at Bethesda had been pressuring him on the telephone all night long to get him to change his opinion about the nature of the bullet wound in the throat, and to redescribe it as an exit, rather than an entrance.” (See DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 167-68; also this discussion)
In a very late discovery by writer Rob Couteau, Bell’s testimony was both certified and expanded. In the days following the assassination, many reporters were milling around Dallas, and some found their way to Malcolm Perry’s home, for the reason that he and Dr. Kemp Clark had held a press conference on the day of the assassination where Clark said there was a large, gaping wound in the back of Kennedy’s skull, and Perry said the anterior neck wound appeared to be one of entrance. One of the reporters who migrated to Perry’s home was from the New York Herald Tribune and his name was Martin Steadman. He asked Perry about this issue and Perry was frank. He affirmed that it was an entrance wound. But beyond that he said he was getting calls through the night from Bethesda. They wanted him to change his story. He said that the autopsy doctors questioned his judgment about this and they also threatened to call him before a medical board to take away his license. (See further “The Ordeal of Malcolm Perry”) To put It mildly, I disagree with Thompson’s next day thesis on this point.
Another surprising aspect of this chapter is that Thompson agrees with the Ramsey Clark Panel. That panel’s findings were released on the eve of the Clay Shaw trial. They upheld the original autopsy’s conclusions about two shots from behind; but they made about four major changes that were rather bracing. One of them was that they raised the entrance wound in the rear of Kennedy’s skull 10 mm upward, into the cowlick area. (Thompson, p. 248)
The way Thompson mentions this in passing was, again, jarring to the reviewer, one reason being that, in all likelihood, it was Six Seconds in Dallas which caused both the Clark Panel to be formed and the rear skull wound to be raised to the cowlick area. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination, p. 150). As Russell Fisher, the panel’s chief pathologist later said, Attorney General Ramsey Clark got hold of an advance copy of Six Seconds in Dallas. On page 111 of that book, Thompson shows that Kennedy’s head––as depicted in the Warren Commission to illustrate the fatal wound––is not in the correct posture as shown in Zapruder frame 312. The Commission had the film; therefore, all the indications are that they fibbed about this key point.
How did the Clark panel elevate that wound into the cowlick area? Since Thompson does not show the anterior/posterior X-ray, the reader is in the dark about this point. The answer is they largely based it on a disk-shaped white object in the rear of the skull that stands out plain as day on the X-ray. The problem with this piece of evidence is that none of the autopsy doctors, or the two FBI agents in attendance, saw it on the X-rays in the morgue the night of the autopsy; and it is not in the 1963 autopsy report. All of which is incredible, for two reasons. First, it is by far the largest fragment visible; and second, its dimensions of 6.5 mm precisely fit the caliber of ammunition Oswald was allegedly firing. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination, pp. 153-54)
I could go on from there, but I won’t. As the reader can see, I did not find this chapter at all satisfactory.
IV
One of the key points Thompson wants to make in this book is something he has been talking about for a rather long time. It is the work of Dave Wimp on what the author calls “the blur illusion.” In fact, Thompson calls Chapter 14, “Breaking the Impasse: The Blur Illusion.” Since I took Thompson at his word about this, several years ago, at a JFK Lancer conference, I mentioned Wimp and his work. I said the forward bob by Kennedy preceding the rearward head snap did not really exist. Almost immediately after I finished my address, first Art Snyder and then John Costella disagreed with me. Snyder disagreed with me on the mathematical analysis Wimp had done. Costella disagreed on whether or not this was really an illusion. In other words: did Kennedy’s head really bob forward before jetting backward? The two disagreements gave me pause. Why? Because both men are physicists.
Back in the sixties, Thompson first learned of this forward bob between Zapruder frames 312-313 from one of the earliest students of the film, Ray Marcus. (See page 112 of Six Seconds inDallas, footnote 2) The author and Vince Salandria then studied this in combination with the more dramatic and lengthier rearward slam at the Archives. (Six Seconds, pp. 86-87) The issue is one of the most interesting aspects of Thompson’s first book. He goes through a few explanations of how this could have occurred. He then decides on a term that became rather famous in the critical community––the “double hit” or “double impact.” (pp. 94-95) In other words, two projectiles hit Kennedy’s skull almost instantaneously: one from behind and one from the front. The first moved him forward, the second rocked him backward. He then adds that S. M. Holland had told him the third and fourth shots sounded like they were fired almost simultaneously. He backs this up with other witnesses who heard the same thing. Thus the double impact was credible.
Why did Thompson change his tune on this point? There seem to be three reasons for this. The first is that he felt his first thesis allowed for too precise a synchronization of the shots. No firing team could be that well trained. The second and third are complementary: Dave Wimp’s work coincided with his gravitation towards the acoustics evidence.
Since Thompson decided to go with the acoustics, he had to dump the “double hit” he wrote about in his earlier book, because the acoustics evidence allows for only one shot from the front at Zapruder frame 312. The following shot comes from behind at Zapruder frame 328. Dave Wimp aided this new scenario by somehow making the forward bob disappear, being dismissed as an illusion.
But if such was the case, then why did the two physicists disagree with my statement about the Wimp thesis? Snyder objected to it on mathematical grounds. He did not think that Wimp’s work had absolutely proved his thesis. He told me that there was about a 20% chance Wimp was wrong. Snyder turned out to be correct, because in a reply to Nick Nalli’s review of Last Second in Dallas, Wimp admitted his calculations were not correct. He wrote:
That I have a blur illusion hypothesis is the result mostly of people failing to distinguish between what people are saying and what people are saying people are saying, which seems to be a pervasive problem. The issue is not about illusions but rather about bad methodology.
Today, Wimp now seems to admit that Kennedy’s head did go forward by about an inch. Evidently, Thompson oversold this idea to at least one person: me. And since he still insists on it in his book, perhaps others.
Costella explained why Wimp made an error in a more practical, applicable sense:
Wimp has always made a valid observation about trying to measure the position of a single (rising or falling) edge, in the presence of blur. That is fraught, especially in the presence of unavoidable nonlinearities. What he never seems to have considered, as far as I can tell, is that if you have two opposite edges (rising then falling, or vice versa) of an object, then it is quite simple to align the center of mass of the object between any two frames, even if the edges are blurred. You can do this even if the two frames are blurred differently––that’s effectively what all stabilized versions of the film do (including his own!). It’s even simpler if you either deblur the blurred 313 to match 312 (like I did back in the day, per my animation on my website), or else blur 312 to match 313 …. What I never did is put an exact number of inches on the forward head movement. I have no idea if his smaller number is accurate or not, because I didn’t quantify. What is certain, just from the visuals, is that the head moves forward in the extant Z film. (Email of 6/15/21)
How proficient is Costella in his study of the film? After he approached me at JFK Lancer, he took out his cell phone and showed me how he had deblurred Zapruder and the forward head bob was still there. Yes, John is a man who carries his work with him.
G. Paul Chambers, another physicist, probably has the most sensible explanation for this aspect of the case. He has told Gary Aguilar that what likely happened is that the first shot through Kennedy’s back likely paralyzed him. When the car began to brake, his limp body then went forward. (Phone call with Gary Aguilar, 7/18/21)
V
“Jim, there is no motorcycle where the HSCA says there is.”
The above quotation is taken from a phone conversation in 1994 between this reviewer and the late Dick Sprague. I chose to lead this part of my review with it because, as with the head bob, I once believed in the acoustics evidence. So when the famous photo analyst Dick Sprague said the above to me, I was surprised.
Let me explain why I had that reaction. When I visited the now deceased HSCA attorney Al Lewis at his office in Lancaster Pennsylvania, he told me about something his former boss had done in the early days of that congressional committee. Chief Counsel Richard A. Sprague had arranged a day-long study of the photographic evidence in the JFK case. There were three presenters on hand: Bob Cutler, Robert Groden, and Dick Sprague. They went in that order. Before Cutler began, the chief counsel turned to those in attendance and said, “I don’t want anyone to leave unless I leave, and I don’t plan on leaving.” As Lewis related to me, Cutler’s presentation was about 35 minutes. Groden’s was over 90 minutes, close to two hours. Dick Sprague’s went on for four hours. By the end of Sprague’s demonstration, 12 of the 13 staff lawyers believed Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy. (James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, The Assassinations, p. 57)
Such was the photographic mastery of Dick Sprague. At that time, no one had a more expansive collection of films and photos than he did. In that phone call, he told me that Robert Blakey, the second chief counsel, only called him once. It was to ask him if there was a motorcycle where the acoustics experts said there had to be one. Dick spent a lot of time going through his massive collection. He eventually replied that no, there was not. It was Groden who said that there was.
To this day this issue has not been settled to any adequate degree. And there is simply no papering it over. Because the motorcycle has to be at a precise point near the intersection of Houston and Elm for the acoustics evidence to be genuine. Modern experts on the motorcade, like Mark Tyler, insist that Sprague was correct. And Mark argues that point effectively at the Education Forum. (See his post of June 9th) What I found severely disappointing about Thompson’s bookis this: he barely deals with the issue at all. This is what he says about the highly controversial but crucial point: he writes that he and author Don Thomas found the correct motorcycle in the films of Gary Mack. Afterwards, they had a few beers and called it a night. (p. 304)
I could hardly believe what I was reading. I actually wrote “WTF” in the margin of my notes. Somehow, this trio, not experts on the photo evidence, easily accomplished something that Dick Sprague––who was the leading authority in the field––could not do? The cavalier way Thompson deals with this important point––throwing in the phrase “having a few beers and calling it a night”––underscores just how unconvincing his treatment of it is. If it was this easy to locate and demonstrate, then why is there no picture of the proper motorcycle in proper context to accompany the “few beers and calling it a night”––straight out of Sam and Diane at Cheers––motif? I was so puzzled by this carelessness, leaning toward avoidance, that I went back and read up on the acoustics evidence.
These sound recordings first entered the legal case during the days of the HSCA. They were offered up by Texas researchers Gary Mack and Mary Ferrell. Thompson does a good job in explaining the rather primitive technology which the Dallas police used in these recordings. There were two channels being recorded that day, simply labeled Channel 1 and Channel 2. The latter used a Gray Audograph powered by a worm gear which drives a needle into a vinyl disk. (Thompson, pp. 304-06). Channel 1 “was done by a Dictaphone that used a stylus inscribing a groove onto a blue plastic belt called a Dictabelt mounted on a rotating cylinder.” (Thompson, p. 148). Channel 1 was used for basic police operations. Channel 2 was for special events, like Kennedy’s motorcade. Back at headquarters, the dispatcher would announce each minute that passed, and each time the dispatcher spoke to a unit he would announce the time. (p. 149)
The HSCA did two tests of the acoustics. The first was by a company called Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. The main scientist on this was James Barger, who supervised a reconstruction test in Dealey Plaza. After doing this, Barger said that there was about a 50% chance of a shot from the Grassy Knoll. The HSCA then gave those results to another team of acoustic experts: Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy . After examining this data they decided there was a much higher probability, 95%. The HSCA announced this in their final days.
Because he is wedded to this evidence for the finale of his book, Thompson has nothing but scorn for what is today called the Ramsey Panel. The Department of Justice asked the National Academy of Sciences to review the work of the HSCA. They set up a committee named after Harvard physicist Norman Ramsey. Alvarez ended up serving on this committee. Alvarez told Barger that no matter what he said he would vote against him. (Thompson, p. 287) The panel was biased from the start and the author does a good job proving that point. For Thompson, this is why they ended up rejecting the HSCA result.
But I want to note two things about the closing 80 or so pages of Last Second in Dallas and how an author making himself a character in his book is a double-edged sword. Thompson mentions a 2013 debate he did for CNN moderated by Erin Burnett; his opponent was Nick Ragone. (p. 276) If one can comprehend it, Ragone brought up Gerald Posner’s discredited book Case Closed. Thompson says he did not do well since he did not have any new evidence to reply with. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but if I had been there, I would have had a lot of new evidence to throw back. This is how I would have replied:
Nick, that book came out in 1993. Which was one year before the ARRB was set up. They declassified 2 million pages of documents. Have you read them? I read a lot of them, and here is what they said.
When asked the old chestnut, “Well why didn’t someone squeal?”, Thompson could have mentioned Larry Hancock’s book Someone Would Have Talked. He then could have said: “Larry shows that two people did talk, Richard Case Nagell and John Martino. If you don’t know about them, that is a failure of the MSM.” As a point of comparison, when Oliver Stone and I did an interview this past June with Fox, I brought about eight of these new ARRB documents with me. Fox filmed me showing them while I described what they said. They then had me send them in email form. Whether or not they will exhibit them on the show, I don’t know. But I had enough rocks in hand to play David with his slingshot.
VI
But the reason I think Thompson plays up the CNN experience is that he wants to show that if the acoustics evidence had been reexamined, he could have mentioned that. As noted, Thompson harshly critiques the Ramsey Panel, and much of this is warranted. But he only briefly mentions how the Weiss/Aschkenasy ––hereafter called WA––verdict was rather hastily granted a stamp of approval by the HSCA.
What makes this kind of odd is that the author mentions Michael O’Dell more than once in the book. But he does not go into O’Dell’s rather bracing criticism of WA. O’Dell is a computer scientist and systems analyst. O’Dell wrote that the WA conclusion was based upon a motorcycle rider having his Channel 1 microphone button stuck open for a continuous five minute period. This was thought to be H. B. McLain, who first said it was and then said it was not him. What O’Dell was trying to do was to replicate what WA had done, except with much more powerful computer tools, not available back then. He wrote a report called “Replication of the HSCA Weiss and Aschkenasy Acoustic Analysis.” In his report, he found that:
Numerous errors have been found with the data provided in the report, including basic errors involved in the measurement of delay times, waveform peaks and object position. Some of the errors are necessary to the finding of an echo correlation to the suspect Dictabelt pattern. The Weiss and Aschkenasy report does not stand up to even limited scrutiny, and the results it contains cannot be reproduced. (p. 2)
O’Dell revealed that WA had relied on a millimeter ruler and string to map out their bullet paths on a map of Dealey Plaza. O’Dell used Adobe Photoshop to scan the same map as WA and transferred the measurements into pixels after lining them up in Excel. He found multiple critical errors in WA’s work, including those of distance measurement of buildings from other objects like the stockade fence. (See p. 3) O’Dell wrote that the microphone was positioned in the wrong place by WA. (p. 9) There were errors in the original paperwork independent of a transfer to a virtual model. For the buildings list in Dealey Plaza, items 16 and 20 were described as the same object. (p. 4) He also found out that one of the bullet paths was supposed to rebound off of object 23, yet there were only 22 structures WA had listed. (p. 5). There were objects listed in the WA table that O’Dell could not find on the map. (p. 8) But perhaps the most bracing criticism O’Dell made was that
… the values presented in Table 4 for the Dictabelt pattern do not appear to be valid measurements of the peaks in the recording. A test that supposedly identifies a gunshot on the Dictabelt recording must, at a minimum, correctly measure the sound being tested on the Dictabelt. (p. 11)
I could go on. But before anyone comes back at me by saying, “Why would you use something like this after what Dale Myers did with his phony cartoon based on the Zapruder film?” After all, Jim, Myers went on ABC TV and said the single bullet theory was really the single bullet fact. All I can do is reply with the following. I used O’Dell because Thompson used him. In communicating with the man I found out that Thompson had signed him to a non-disclosure agreement about his book. It ended when the work was published.
Another series of problems with this evidence was written about by Charles Olsen and Lee Ann Maryeski in June of 2014 for Sonalysts, Inc. out of Waterford, Connecticut. They stated that although McLain had claimed he had opened up his cycle to a continuous high speed after the shooting, that is not what they determined by placing the sound on a graph: “What Figure 1 shows is a motorcycle that variously speeds up and slows down and idles during this latter period.” (6/6/2014, Olsen and Maryeski, pp. 3-4)
Let me add one other comment. As both O’Dell, and especially Dave Mantik have pointed out, one of the virtues attributed to this evidence is the so called “order in the data.” Or as Don Thomas puts it in his book, the best test matches correspond to a topographic order in Dealey Plaza and with the dictabelt. (Hear No Evil, p. 583) But as Mantik informed me, if one looks at Thompson’s own table, if the HSCA had chosen the bullet sound at the 144.90 point in the tape, they would have had two matches to the School Book Depository that very closely matched the one to the knoll area. (Thompson, p. 155) The same thing occurred at 137.70; the TSBD could have been chosen over the knoll. (interview with Mantik, 6/26/21)
In addition to all the above, Thompson essentially brushes over the issue of heterodyne tones. (p. 296) This is an important point that the Sonalyst report examined. It’s important because it can result in words being scrambled in pronunciation as one listens to them. Meaning that they can sound like one phrase to one person and another phrase to someone else. And this has happened. (Olsen and Maryeski, p. 9)
Even his heralded discovery, that voices saying “Hold everything” and “I’ll check it,” occur around the assassination is odd. First, the object is to show whether or not the bullet echo correlation is real, not the voices. Also, to get a more distinct peak for “I’ll check it,” Richard Mullen, Barger’s protégé, used a narrower sampling PCC (Pattern cross correlation) window of 64. Therefore Thompson concludes this is what should have been used from the start. Yet for “Hold everything,” a wider sampling window of 512 yielded a larger net peak than did a smaller sampling window of 64. Thompson offers no explanation for this seeming paradox. (See Figures 22-6 and 22-7; 6/26/21 interview with Mantik)
If the “Hold everything secure” phrase is at the time of the assassination, then the acoustics is invalid, since this is spoken after the assassination. “I’ll check it” would be around the time of the shots. So the two phrases are in conflict if both were valid. The first phrase is at the wrong time, the latter one is at the right time. So Thompson argues that the “Hold” phrase has been altered and is really an overdub. (Thompson, pp. 345-47)
This has also been placed in doubt by O’Dell. (See Dictabelt Hums and the “hold everything secure” Crosstalk) The “Check” phrase, as has been argued by many, is not really crosstalk at all. The same sound does not appear on both channels. (Email communication with O’Dell, 7/25/21). And further, Sonalysts showed that the spectrograms of the phrase differ on Channel 1 and 2. (Olsen and Maryeski, p. 6)
I could go on. But I think the point has been made. There are simply too many uncertain variables with the acoustics evidence to rely on it as having a 95% probability. Much of this is due to the innate poor quality of the recordings themselves.
When we were making JFK Revisited, producer Rob Wilson asked me to incorporate a section on the acoustics evidence. I recommended against it. I simply noted that with all the above problems with that evidence we would be making ourselves into a bull’s eye on a target range; a whole gallery of persons would take out their bows and arrows and start unloading their quivers on us.
As I said in Part 1, there are good things in Last Second in Dallas. And as a responsible critic I have described them. In my opinion, they are important and valuable and have stood the test of time. But it is also my opinion that there are a lot of things which seem to me to be liabilities, including what the author thinks is the culminating arc of his book––and I have described those deficits also. This is why Last Second in Dallas is a decidedly mixed bag.
Jim DiEugenio speaks with Michael Welch about the four big domestic assassinations of the 1960s, and about the new Oliver Stone documentary (the first two of four interviews).
