This first set comprises documents originating from FBI and CIA series identified by the Assassination Records Review Board as assassination records. More releases will follow.
Tag: JFK ASSASSINATION
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The Dual Life of Albert Osborne
In the field of Kennedy assassination studies, Albert Osborne is the stuff of both legend and legerdemain. Much of that is due to the tales told by the man himself. Was he Albert Osborne or, as he tried to maintain, was he John Howard Bowen? Did he sit next to and talk to Lee Harvey Oswald on his bus trip to Mexico City? And why did he leave the country after that mysterious journey? A journey so fabled that the late author Philip Melanson once called it, “Oswald’s Mexican Mystery Tour.”Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico City in late September of 1963 has been the subject of abundant research and controversy. There has been much discussion about whether or not he actually took the trip to Mexico, and if that strange voyage was somehow connected to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The FBI, at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson, investigated the murder of the young president. In public at least, the Bureau and the Warren Commission declared that their probe led to the discovery that Oswald was seen sitting beside a man named John Howard Bowen on a bus bound for Mexico City. The FBI eventually discovered that Bowen was an alias. The man’s real name was Albert Osborne. Their investigation of Osborne, as can be expected, was not complete.1 Because of that fact, a mythos about the strange figure of Albert Osborne sprung to life in assassination literature. Even the late diehard Warren Commission defender Vincent Bugliosi wrote that “many of the questions about Osborne-Bowen remain unanswered.”2
The liveliest piece of disinformation about Osborne was printed in The Torbitt Document, sometimes called Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal. There, Osborne is actually supposed to be in charge of recruiting the assassination team from Mexico. And in October of 1963, he is depicted as having been in New Orleans meeting with Clay Shaw and CIA associated attorney Maurice Gatlin. As is the case throughout that misleading pamphlet, there is no proof provided for any of these claims. But the evidentiary problems about Osborne stemmed from the fact that he was an enigmatic and interesting character who told many lies to the FBI. Furthermore, the man seemed to have no steady source of income to finance his many journeys from Mexico, through various parts of America, and to Europe. But even with all the mystery about his traveling and his identity, the Bureau stopped investigating him in March of 1964 without ever establishing what, or even if, he had a job. It is difficult to place the circumstances of Osborne’s life at that time into any kind of legitimate employment. He himself told stories about what he did for a living, and as we shall see, those who knew him had suspicions he was involved in espionage work.
This article will continue the investigation into the life of Albert Osborne and will also provide a brief outline of the life of the real John Howard Bowen. We will conclude with a short discussion about whether or not the two ever met.
In the Beginning
Albert Osborne began his life in Grimsby, England on November 12, 1888 3 (Appendix 1). He was one of 12 children born to his father James, a fisherman, and his wife Emily.4 He attended St. James Academy in Grimsby until the eighth grade before leaving school.5 He worked as a grocer and served in the militia before enlisting in the British Army on December 12, 1906, at the age of 186 (Appendix 2).7 After joining the army he was sent abroad to serve in different posts in the British Empire. He went to India, Aden and Gibraltar, before been stationed in the British colony of Bermuda.8 His British army service records reveal that his time in the army was uneventful and that he did not participate in any military actions.
His stay in Bermuda would be a short one. He arrived on January 7, 1914 and he resigned from the army on June 29, 1914.9 His timing could not have been better, for on June 28, 1914, the day before he resigned, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia by Gravilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist. This tragic event was the fuse that ignited the powder keg that was European imperial politics, and led to the start of World War I in August of 1914. Albert Osborne would escape the horror of trench warfare, which would become the enduring symbol of this war, by departing for the United States.
Upon his arrival in the United States he can be found in the company of missionaries. The Washington Post reported that a man named Albert Osborne was one of a group of people who participated in a program that illustrated the life and customs of peoples in India, China and other countries. The presentation took place at the Seventh Day Adventist Washington Missionary College that operated missions in foreign countries.10 As we will see later, other newspapers in later years will also write stories about a man named Albert Osborne who gave lectures about his travels in India, and he was the same man who would go by the name of John Howard Bowen.
In 1917 Osborne did something that cannot be explained. By that year World War I had been raging for three years and had killed millions of soldiers in Europe. But this horror did not stop him from enlisting in the Canadian Army, which had been fighting in Europe since 1914. Upon enlistment, he completed an “Attestation Paper Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force” (Appendix 3).11 This document was an army application form. On it he indicated that he enlisted at Toronto, Canada on August 2, 1917 and that his present address was Nashville, Tennessee.12
A comparison of his British and Canadian army application forms reveals that there are some important discrepancies between the descriptions of the man who enlisted in the British Army in 1906 and the man who joined the Canadian Army in 1917. There is a significant difference in his height, the year of birth is not correct and the middle names are different. These differences may suggest that someone other than Osborne had joined the Canadian army using his identity. A more likely explanation is that these differences can be explained, and that the man known as Albert Osborne who resigned from the British army in 1914 is the same man who joined the Canadian army in 1917.13
The most compelling difference between the two application forms is his height. When he enlisted in the British army in 1906 at the age of 18, his height was 5 feet 4.5 inches.14 When he joined the Canadian army in 1917, his height was 5 feet, 9 inches, a difference of 4.5 inches.15 His British army service records provide a clue that may explain this height difference. It states that “After six months service and gymnastic courses” his height was now 5 feet 5.5 inches; he had grown one inch in six months.16 His increase in height may be explained by his age. As he was only 18 when he enlisted in the British army; he may have been young enough to have not reached his full height, as can be seen by the additional one inch he gained in the six months after his enlistment. Unfortunately, his British army service records do not provide his height when he left the army in 1914 at the age of 25, by which time he must have attained his full height; consequently, it cannot be confirmed if he had added 3.5 inches during his tenure with the British army. Both of his British and Canadian military service records also do not include photographs of him that can be compared to determine if they are the same man.
There are two other discrepancies on his Canadian army application form. He stated that he was born on November 12, 1885; his correct date of birth is November 12, 1888. He also stated that his middle names were Victor and Emmanuel.17 These names are not included on his British army application form or on the “Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth” that provides his date of birth and his name when born.18 Osborne’s name can also be found in the 1891 and 1901 English censuses and the only name provided is Albert.19 These two differences suggest that someone else may have acquired Osborne’s personal information, and in the process of doing so did not did not acquire all of the correct data. This theory could be true if the year of birth had been the only personal information that was not correct because a person using his identity would use the date provided, believing it to be correct. This is not so with his middle names, because Osborne did not have any, and a person who had acquired Osborne’s identity would not have had any reason to state that his middle names were Victor and Emmanuel.
Then why alter his year of birth and add these two middle names to his application form? A possible explanation is that it is an early experiment in altering his identity and may also explain the one-year discrepancy in his age on his British army application form. Eventually he would take on a completely new identity, that of John Howard Bowen, and would continue to alter his identity when he saw fit to do so. For example, on his application for a new Canadian passport dated October 10, 1963, he used his real name Albert Osborne but added the middle name Alexander.20
Osborne’s enlistment in the Canadian army, like his stint in the British army, was uneventful. His army service records reveal that he spent the remainder of the war safely on Canadian soil, and he did not travel to Europe to join the fighting there. He did however become ill. His medical records indicate that he was diagnosed with malaria in June of 1918. He told the doctor treating him that he contracted it in Egypt in 1915 but does not state what he was doing there.21 How did he contract malaria? He may have gone to Egypt as he told the doctor treating him or he may have contracted it in Canada while serving in the army. According to an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, malaria was brought to Canada by infected European immigrants in the nineteenth century and did not diminish until early in the 20th century.22
Leaving the Military
On January 31, 1919, he was discharged from the Canadian army, and on his “Canadian Expeditionary Force Discharge Certificate” he said that his address on discharge was Nashville, Tennessee.23 According to an FBI interview given on March 3, 1964, Osborne went to Washington D.C. sometime after the war where he met a Syrian whose name he could not remember. The two of them went into the rug cleaning business and traveled throughout the United States cleaning rugs.24 Osborne did not provide any corroborating evidence to support his claim that he both met the unnamed Syrian and went into the rug cleaning business with him. But there is an advertisement in an Indiana, Pennsylvania newspaper that may shed some light on his story. The Indiana Evening Gazette published an advertisement with the title “A Letter from Mr. Osborne” that was signed by “Albert Osborne” (Appendix 4). The advertisement was placed by T.B. Buchholz & Company of Indiana Pennsylvania. The company’s services included rug cleaning for both oriental and domestic rugs.25 Could the Albert Osborne from this advertisement be the same man that also went by the name of Bowen? It is highly doubtful that Osborne would have used this company’s services. As of April 14, 1943, he was in Knoxville, Tennessee, which is over 500 miles from Indiana, Pennsylvania. Osborne may have vouched for this company’s services even though he had not purchased them; acting as a shill would be an activity that a man using false identities might get involved in. He may have also changed his story from the dubious activity of being a shill to the more lawful job of a rug cleaner when he was questioned by the FBI. The other possibility is that there was a man named Albert Osborne who resided in Indiana, Pennsylvania who had used their services.
While it is doubtful that Osborne worked as a rug cleaner, there are numerous newspaper articles that describe a man named Albert Osborne who gave lectures and acted. On November 19, 1924, The Winston Salem Journal reported that a “Dr. Albert Osborne, who has gained much fame as a lecturer on India …” spoke about his travels in India in Leakesville, Virginia. The same article describes him as a son of American missionaries and a graduate of Oxford University in England, which he added to his biography. The article also mentions that he had been on the Chautauqua26 stage for a number of seasons.27 On February 9, 1925, The Charlotte Observer reported on a Dr. Albert Osborne who had lectured about Christianity in India, Africa and Korea. He is again described as the son of missionaries and an Oxford graduate and is described as “… of Washington, D.C. lyceum and Chautauqua lecturer…” 28 Could this be the Albert Osborne that the FBI found on the Mexican bus manifest? He could lecture on India, as he had spent about four years there when he was in the British Army. Adding the title of doctor to his name and lying about his education and his parents is not beyond what he was capable of. This information is also corroborated by his sister, Ada Amos, who told the FBI in 1964 that he was an actor and lecturer on India.29 As we shall see, this is more credible than the rug cleaning story.
On October 9, 1925, The Knoxville News reported that the missionary Albert Osborne would be traveling to India (Appendix 5).30 Ten years later there is another man in Knoxville lecturing on life in India. His name is not Albert Osborne. It is John H. Bowen, who the newspaper describes as the “… Famous Teacher.” The Knoxville-News Sentinel report dated March 28, 1935 also mentioned that he taught in India for 11 years (Appendix 6).31 On April 14, 1935, the same newspaper said that J. H. Bowen, who had been a missionary in India for a few years, had been lecturing in different Knoxville schools about life in India.32 Is the man who is now lecturing about India and who goes by the name of Bowen the same Albert Osborne who departed for India in 1925? The similarities in the stories about India and being famous, which are mentioned in a previous story about him, are hard to ignore. Though one has to wonder if the newspaper reporters who wrote the stories, both of whom worked for the same newspaper, noticed the discrepancy in how much time he told them he spent in India.
Another interesting question about Osborne is how he could depart Knoxville in 1925 and return to the same city using a different identity without being recognized by anybody. The exact date of Osborne’s arrival in Knoxville after his alleged 11 year trip to India is unknown, but newspaper reports indicate that he was back as early as 1934. The Knoxville-News Sentinel dated October 10, 1937 wrote that on October 12, 1934, J. H. Bowen, F. M. Long, former YMCA Secretary for South America, local businessmen and professionals met with young boys and convinced them to join a new organization called the Campfire Council.33 He was also a member of the First Baptist Church in Knoxville by November 1934.34 Assuming that 1934 is the year that he arrived in Knoxville, then how can Osborne the Indian missionary become Bowen the Campfire Council member who also speaks about life in India, nine years later without being recognized by anybody as Albert Osborne? This is difficult to explain and needs to be explored further. One possible explanation lies in the fact that the 1925 article that placed him in Knoxville stated that he spoke there but did not say that he was a long-term resident of that city. A long-term resident would most likely have had associations with enough people to make it difficult to return without being seen by people who knew him as Osborne. This may explain why he was not recognized when he returned there.
Creating the Campfire Council
In 1934, Osborne, using his alias Bowen, became one of the founders of the Campfire Council. The goal of the Campfire Council as stated in its “Charter of Incorporation” of 1938 by the State of Tennessee was “… for the welfare, aid, and benefit of underprivileged boys and girls …” (Appendix 7).35 The Knoxville-News Sentinel story dated October 10, 1937 read, “Such crime prevention work on the part of the Campfire Council attracted the attention of those keenly interested in the reduction of juvenile delinquency.”36
By all accounts, the Campfire Council was a success. On April 23, 1939, The Knoxville News-Sentinel published an article, “Campfire Council Work Gets High Praise From Official and Committee.” This article painted a glowing portrait of how the Council had helped “Well over 800 underprivileged boys spen[d] their leisure time in the gymnasium and playgrounds, operated by this organization.” The boys were able to participate in events such as woodworking, painting, basketball, softball and other activities. The Council also provided, among other things, free lunches and clothing.37 Campfire Council boys were also awarded prizes. James Thompson and Herbert Sams were awarded a prize of a trip to Bermuda because they were “… outstanding members of the organization.” They were accompanied on the trip by Osborne,38 who had visited Bermuda numerous times.39 The article also mentioned the work done by Osborne: “Mr. Bowen’s work has long passed the experimental stage. During these five years, seventeen juvenile gangs have been won over to a constructive program of good citizenship.”40
The Campfire Council’s success was followed by the creation of another organization: Boysville. Boysville was created to provide aid to delinquent boys and a meeting was planned for April 5, 1940 to discuss plans to create it. The newspaper report also stated that it was “… patterned after the Nebraska institution.”41 The Nebraska institution that was referred to was Boystown, which was founded in 1917 by Father Edward Flanagan and whose mission it was to help destitute boys.42
Osborne’s stellar record with the Campfire Council would soon be marred by an accusation made by Charles M. Pickel who lived in the vicinity of Boysville. He said that a boy at the camp had told a man named George Sharp that Osborne, who was known as Bowen at Boysville, had stomped on an American flag. Pickel accused the boys at the camp of thievery and vandalism, and complained about the noise made by the police dogs at the camp.43 The camp at Boysville had an American flag. A newspaper article written by J. H. Bowen, dated July 28, 1940, in The Knoxville News-Sentinel reported that there was a flag raising and lowering ceremony every morning and afternoon at the camp.44 A Tennessee Highway Patrolman investigated these claims at the request of the FBI but could not find any evidence that Bowen had stomped on the flag. The only complaint that local residents had were in regard to the police dogs at the camp, of which they were afraid.45
Osborne’s reputation again came into question in 1943 when he was accused of making sexual advances to some of the boys at the Campfire Council. This time the charges stuck, since he left the Council. His departure was mentioned in the newspaper, but the accusations made against him were not divulged. This omission would allow him to return to Knoxville in the future with his reputation intact.46
In Canada and Announcing his Retirement
For the next few years there are scattered sightings of Albert Osborne. In a letter to the editor in 1946, Osborne, using his alias John Howard Bowen, writes that he attended a banquet in Laredo that was attended by both Protestant and Jewish congregations.47 In 1947 he spoke at the Knoxville Cavalry Baptist Church where he told his audience that he “… was director of religious education for the Baptist Church …” for the last five years,48 even though he had only left his position at the Campfire Council four years previously. In a 1948 letter to the Knoxville News-Sentinel he refers to himself as “Reverend” and describes how Christmas was celebrated in Huajuapan de Leon Oaxaca in Mexico.49
Osborne also traveled to Canada. A document sent by him to the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) in Ottawa, Canada requesting a copy of his military service certificate indicated that he was staying at the YMCA in Toronto.50 The request made by him is not dated, but was answered on June 4, 1953, which suggests that he was in Toronto sometime before June of 1953. The reason for requesting this document is not known, but on November 12, 1953 he would be 65, and he may have been eligible for veteran’s benefits because of his service in the Canadian army during World War I.
In 1953 Osborne claimed that he retired from missionary work. “Bowen’s” retirement was announced in an article published in The Knoxville News-Sentinel on December 5, 1953.51 The newspaper’s source for this information is a letter it received from Bowen’s successor at the mission. That person’s name is none other than Albert Osborne. Osborne also mentions that Bowen’s 73rd birthday is in January and friends may write to him at Post Office Box 308 Laredo Texas. Why he is now using his real name is not certain, but he must have been confident enough to use his real name without someone in Knoxville making a connection between his real name and his alias, John Howard Bowen.
The Knoxville News-Sentinel was not the only newspaper to publish a story about his retirement. The Knoxville Journal also wrote a story about his retirement and it was published on the same day.52 Comparisons of the two stories reveal that the stories had some similarities and some differences. His successor, Albert Osborne, is not named and the source who told the newspaper that he was retiring is not provided in The Knoxville Journal story. The same Laredo mailing address is provided in both articles, but The Knoxville Journal article invites friends to write to him at Christmas, rather than in January for his birthday. The most important anomaly in the stories lies in the pictures that each newspaper published. The pictures were not the same. The Osborne portrayed in The Knoxville News-Sentinel appears to be heavier and has a receding hairline (Appendix 8). The man portrayed in The Knoxville Journal, is wearing a sun helmet and zippered jacket (Appendix 9). He is slimmer but his hairline cannot be determined because he has a hat on. Patricia Winston and Pamela Mumford, who were allegedly on the same bus as Osborne going to Mexico, were shown the picture in The Knoxville Journal and both could not identify him as John Howard Bowen.53 The pictures may have been taken at different times, which may account for the different appearances. But one has to wonder if Osborne’s friends and associates in Knoxville recognized both men in these two pictures as the man they knew as John Howard Bowen.
Was Osborne Really a Missionary?
Osborne’s retirement from missionary work raises the issue of whether or not he was a real missionary. There are some witnesses that say he was one, but none of them indicated that they actually saw him engaged in this work. In a newspaper report dated September 11, 1954, Claude L. Baker Sr. of Elmo, Tennessee, who knew Osborne as Bowen, stated that Osborne was involved in missionary work in the Mixteca Indian territory in Southern Mexico.54 His statement must be questioned because the article did not say if he met Osborne in Mexico doing missionary work, or if he was told by him that he was involved in it. Reverend Walter Laddie Hluchlan, who knew Osborne as Bowen, said that he gave bible lessons for many years to boys55 who resided at his residence.56 Even though Hluchlan did not say he actually saw him teaching those boys, there could be some truth to his statement. The Osborne who resided in Knoxville spent many years working at the Campfire Council, which catered to young boys. It would not be unusual for him to work with them, so this could be true. Mrs. Virgil Dykes, who was questioned about Bowen by the FBI, told them that she never met him but made contributions to his mission, and did not indicate that she had proof that he was doing missionary work.57 Oddly enough, The Knoxville Journal published a story dated November 28, 1954 in which he said that he had now returned to missionary work. And the story conveniently included a picture of him surrounded by Mixteca Indians (Appendix 10).58 The source for this article is a letter written by Osborne, so the veracity of it must be questioned. The inclusion of the Mixteca Indians could have been an attempt by him to convince his readers that he really was working with them. And the inclusion of his home address can be construed as a way to encourage people in Knoxville to send him money to support his alleged mission. As many who have studied the CIA understand, Allen and John Foster Dulles made extensive use of missionaries and other religious organizations as cover for intelligence agents and operations.59
During their investigation, the FBI confirmed that Osborne had a social security number (SSN) and that the number was 449-36-9745.60 His statement about having a SSN is confirmed by his application to obtain one, dated August 16, 1943, for which he applied using the name John Bowen. As can be seen on his application form, he states that he is unemployed (Appendix 11).61 This concurs with the fact that he lost his job at the Campfire Council in 1943. He also does not know his parents’ names. What is unusual about the application form is the way he spells the name “John”. The way that it is spelled is “Jno”. This spelling matches exactly the way his first name is spelled in the Knoxville City Directory in 1938 (Appendix 12).62
It is interesting to note that in September of 1962 Osborne made a comment about John F. Kennedy’s presidency. He had returned to Knoxville to speak at a rally at the North Glenwood Baptist Church. He told Fred Allen Jr., who was the church’s pastor and who knew him as Bowen, “… that he ‘felt that it is a very dangerous thing for the United States to have a Catholic as president.’”63 He also told Allen that he did not want to stay at his place because he “… ‘didn’t want to risk getting me involved in something.’”64 This statement by Osborne must have aroused Fred Allen’s suspicions about Osborne’s activities, given that he also made comments about Kennedy’s presidency. It is an interesting fact that when the FBI interviewed Allen in 1964 he failed to mention the conversation he had with Osborne in 1962. Instead, he told them that he had received a postcard from him on February 18, 1962.65 His apparent memory lapse is notable because he remembered an innocuous postcard he received from Osborne, but did not recall an actual conversation he had with Osborne, in which he was told that he might be involved in something and had also commented on the danger involved with having a Catholic president. And the purpose of the interview was an inquiry into that president’s death.
Osborne/Bowen, Mexico City, and Oswald
We now come to 1963. In that year, with no visible occupation, Osborne continued his wandering ways. He was still residing in Mexico, but continued to traverse the United States-Mexican border, something he had been doing since 1939.66 It was on one of these trips that the Warren Report said he ended up on the same bus as a man who was either Lee Harvey Oswald or someone impersonating him. Was he on this bus because there was an Oswald impersonator on it, and he therefore would be able to vouch for the impersonator’s presence on the bus?
Lyman Erickson was director of the Christian Servicemen’s Center in San Antonio Texas. This is where Osborne stayed before he died.67 Erickson knew him as Bowen. He said Osborne had told him “… ‘I traveled to Mexico with Lee Harvey Oswald, and I was called in and questioned about it.’” [emphasis added] Erickson did not quote him as saying, “‘I just happened to sit next to Oswald,’ …”68 A statement by Osborne to the FBI, however, contradicts what he told Erickson. FBI agent Bob Gemberling, in an interview with the BBC69 about Albert Osborne, said, “‘He denied he was sitting next to Oswald.’”70 Gemberling also told the BBC that Osborne’s denial about sitting next to Oswald, even though witnesses said they sat together, resulted in the FBI doing an extensive investigation of the man.71 That FBI report is over ninety pages long and features both an index and Table of Contents. (See Commission Exhibit 2195, in Volume 25 of the Warren Commission) It was due to that FBI inquiry that Osborne showed up not just in the Warren Report, but also in many books written about the JFK case. For instance, Osborne is written about by such authors as Jim Marrs in Crossfire, Philip Melanson in Spy Saga, and Anthony Summers in Conspiracy.
The Mexican authorities had disposed of the original and a copy of the passenger list for the Flecha Roja (Red Arrow) bus that Osborne rode in Mexico. Therefore, the FBI used the luggage manifest and immigration records to piece together who was on the bus.72 This is how they found the name of Mr. Bowen. But they could not find Bowen. One problem with finding Bowen/Osborne was that he had tossed out a bundle of tall tales to the people around him on the bus. As the FBI noted in their long report, he told some passengers that he had never been to England, that he was a retired schoolteacher, and that he was working on a book about the Lisbon earthquake.73
In January of 1964, when the FBI finally did catch up with Osborne in Mexico, he gave no clue that it was actually he on the bus. He told FBI agent Clarke Anderson that he was an ordained Baptist minister. He denied there were any English language speaking passengers on the Flecha Roja bus. He said he had not talked to Oswald, nor sat next to him as others said he did. In fact, the man he described as sitting next to him, dark-complected and Hispanic looking, did not fit the description of Oswald. During one of his four FBI interviews he was shown a photo of Oswald. He said he never saw the man before. During that interview, in February of 1964, he denied the FBI had interviewed him in January. (See the FBI report referenced above and Ron Ecker’s online essay, “From Grimsby with Love”.)
It was not until March of 1964, while staying at a YMCA in Nashville, that Osborne finally admitted he used Bowen as an alias. He offered the Bureau the excuse that John Howard Bowen sounded more American to him. Osborne’s lack of steady income, contrasted with his extensive travels, the tall tales he spewed about the Flecha Roja ride, and his use of a dual identity, should have made him a person of interest to the FBI. There is no evidence he was. Nor is there any evidence Osborne was confronted with perjury or obstruction of justice charges in a murder investigation.
The available evidence cannot reliably answer whether Osborne traveled to Mexico with Oswald, or if it was someone impersonating Oswald as part of a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. Some evidence indicates he did sit beside Oswald. Pamela Mumford, allegedly on the same bus as Osborne, was shown pictures of Osborne and she confirmed that he was the man sitting next to him.74 Sitting next to someone on a bus however does not make a person a conspirator. This could have been a coincidence. Any person sitting next to Oswald would have been questioned by the FBI and would have been considered a suspect. But Osborne’s statement to Erickson that he traveled there with him and was not just sitting beside him on the bus cannot be ignored. If the conspirators who planned Kennedy’s murder wanted someone to accompany either Oswald or his impersonator, Osborne would have been a good choice because he could explain his presence on the bus by the fact that he frequently traveled between the United States and Mexico. If possible, more research has to be done on the trip to Mexico. Osborne did not explain to Erickson why he traveled there with Oswald, and it still has not been established to an absolute certainty what the trip’s role, if any, was in Kennedy’s assassination.
After he returned from Mexico, Osborne showed up in New Orleans at the Canadian consulate. He gave an address in Montreal as his permanent residence, saying he had been there since 1917 and that he was a Canadian national. He cancelled his previous Canadian passport and took out a new one. What makes this odd is that the previous passport was only four months old.75
With his new, clean passport Osborne was on the move again in November of 1963. The Knoxville Journal reported that Bowen had departed New York for Europe on November 13, 1963. The newspaper stated that the purpose of his trip was a speaking tour of England, Spain, Portugal and Italy.76 The timing of his trip is an interesting coincidence. The man with dual identities, and who was allegedly on the same bus as the president’s alleged assassin, decided to leave the country on November 13th, nine days before Kennedy was assassinated.
After the Assassination
The FBI spoke to Reverend Walter Hluchlan about Osborne’s European speaking tour. He told them that he received an undated letter from him that stated that he had been on a preaching tour of England, Northern France, Spain and North Africa.77 The letter does not exactly match the newspaper report cited above, as Northern France and North Africa replaced Portugal and Italy. The problem with the letter is that the return address is Mexico and not Europe, so there is no European postal stamp to confirm that he had visited any of these four countries. Mrs. Lola Loving, who knew Osborne as both Osborne and Bowen,78 told the FBI that she had received a letter from him in Spain anywhere from a few weeks to two months ago.79 Her interview with the FBI however did not indicate that she showed them a copy of the letter with a Spanish postal stamp on it.80
We know that he was in England because his brother Walter and his sister Mrs. Featherstone confirmed that he had visited them in Grimsby.81 But this is where the truth ends and fiction begins. Walter Osborne told the FBI that his brother flew to Prestwick, Scotland with scientists who were traveling to Iceland to photograph a volcano. But it was not confirmed if Osborne got off the plane in Prestwick or went with them to Iceland.82 According to the FBI he arrived at his sister’s home by train from Prestwick.83 The FBI was able to determine that he arrived at New York City on December 5, 1963 aboard an Icelandic Airlines aircraft that he boarded in Luxembourg, Belgium.84 Flying on Icelandic Airlines suggests that he made a stop in Iceland. It is unlikely, however, that scientists, assuming that there was a group of them that went there to photograph a volcano, would allow him to accompany them on their trip since he did not have a scientific education.85 Osborne probably made up the story about the trip to Iceland and he flew on an Icelandic aircraft to corroborate his story about being there. He most likely said that he met the scientists in Prestwick because he arrived at his sister’s home from a train and this would add credibility to his story. To this day, his trip to Europe after the assassination is shrouded in mystery, and we do not know where he was on November 22, 1963.
For the wandering Osborne, his final destination was a hospital in Texas. He died at the Medical Arts Hospital in San Antonio on August 31, 1966.86 His “Certificate of Death” attributed his passing to a number of problems, one of which was kidney failure. The person who informed the authorities of his passing was Reverend Lyman Erickson. 87 When the FBI found out about his death they told him not to speak about Osborne’s passing. In an interview with the Knoxville News-Sentinel in 1993, Erickson said he was told by the Bureau “… ‘to forget everything I knew about him, told me to forget I ever knew him, and told me to never to speak of this matter to anyone.’”88 Reverend Erickson complied with the FBI request and asked Roy Akers Funeral Chapel in San Antonio, where Osborne’s remains had been sent, “… not to run notices in paper as FBI requested that it be kept quiet as possible.” (Appendix 13).89 Erickson must have also realized that the man who had been staying with him was enigmatic. He told The Knoxville News-Sentinel that the man he knew as John Howard Bowen owned a kit bag that had a false bottom that contained his Albert Osborne identification papers.90 He too was interviewed about Albert Osborne by the BBC and he quite logically said, “‘I think he was an agent. My problem is, I don’t know if he was an agent for the United States or a foreign government.’”91
John Howard Bowen
John Howard Bowen was born in Chester Pennsylvania on January 14, 1880.92 His parents were James and Nellie Bowen, and according to the 1900 United States Census, his father was born in 1853 and his mother in 1868.93 The census also indicates that they had two sons, Howard J., born in 1880, and Alfred V., born in 1882.94 Not much is known about his early life except for the fact that his father married after his two sons were born. The Chester Times dated May 11, 1886 announced the wedding of a Mr. James A. Bowen to Mrs. Nellie Gillen, both of Chester, in Camden, New Jersey.95 On Bowen’s application for social security (Appendix 14), he indicated that his mother’s name was Edith Montgomery; therefore, Bowen’s father was married prior to 1886 to another woman who bore the children, and then either died or they were subsequently divorced.
Bowen or his parents had some religious inclinations, as he was baptized on January 21, 1897. A record of baptisms from a United Methodist church shows that his brother Alfred Victor was also baptized on the same day.96 On September 13, 1905, Bowen married Fannie Mae Hall, 97 and their marriage produced no children.
In 1910 Bowen was employed as a printer in Camden, New Jersey.98 In 1910 or 1911 he began a career with the YMCA that would last over 20 years.99 He began work with the YMCA in their railroad Department100 in Camden, New Jersey.101 His job required him to move from time to time, and he lived in: Conemaugh, Pennsylvania; Gassaway, West Virginia; and Hamlet, North Carolina, where he remained until his employment with the YMCA ended in 1933.102
Tragedy struck Bowen in 1934 when his wife of 29 years, Fannie, died after being sick for a long time.103 In 1935 he moved to Tampa, Florida where he was employed as a hotel clerk.104 On July 6, 1937, John Howard Bowen applied for a SSN. The SSN number he was assigned was 239-12-4551, and this number can be seen on his application form (Appendix 14).105 Unlike Osborne, he knew his parents’ names and he included his middle name as well, which Osborne said he did not know.106 On his application for social security he also indicated that he was employed by the First National Institute of Applied Arts in South Bend, Indiana.107 In 1938 Bowen returned to Hamlet and began work as a desk clerk at a hotel.108 It may be just a coincidence, but when Osborne was interviewed by the FBI, he told them that Bowen had worked at a hotel in New Orleans.109 In 1947 he took a financial interest in the hotel by purchasing its stock with investors J. T. Capehart of Hamlet and A. A. Capehart Jr. of Washington.110
John Howard Bowen was also the subject of a newspaper article. A Hamlet, North Carolina newspaper, The News Messenger, published a series of articles called “People at Work” (Appendix 15). The article stated that Bowen worked at the Terminal Hotel,111 and the YMCA, and had been involved with the Hi-Y and Kiwanis Clubs, and had been a Sunday School Superintendent.112 On October 16, 1961, while out for a walk, Bowen was struck by a car. He never fully recovered from the accident and died on January 31, 1962.113
When did Albert Osborne begin using John Howard Bowen’s identity and did they know each other?
Osborne told a number of stories about when he began using Bowen’s name as an alias. He told the FBI that he first used it in 1916.114 He then told a different FBI interviewer that he began using it after World War I, when he went into the rug cleaning business with a Syrian man.115 Ada Amos told the FBI that she sent money to her brother in New York in the 1920s using the name John Howard Bowen.116 We cannot rely on Osborne’s account of when he used Bowen’s identity because of his tendency to lie. If we rely on Ada Amos’ testimony, then we know that sometime in the 1920s he was using the Bowen alias, because she sent him money using that name. But we must also consider the fact that both Osborne and his sister were questioned by the FBI about events that occurred over 40 years ago, and that their memories may have failed them.
There is a newspaper article that places both men in the same place at the same time. The Charlotte Observer dated December 24, 1929 stated that “Dr. Albert B. Osborne of India, spoke Sunday morning at the Methodist church here, while the devotional services (were) conducted by J. H. Bowen, general secretary of the YMCA at Hamlet” (Appendix 16).117 As mentioned above, Dr. Albert Osborne had given lectures about India, and it would not be uncharacteristic of him to add the initial “B” to his name. The real John Howard Bowen was a long time employee of the YMCA and at this time he resided in Hamlet, North Carolina.118 So it appears that at this event both Albert Osborne and John Howard Bowen are present. The newspaper article does not mention that they were associated in any way, only that they were at the same event. Without knowing if they had met before or were associated with each other in some way – for example through a fraternal organization – Osborne may have acquired personal information about Bowen prior to this event. If it was at this event that they first met, and Osborne was able to glean enough information from Bowen to begin using his identity, then this may explain how and when Osborne began using Bowen’s identity.
APPENDICES
1. “Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth”3.
2. British Army application form “Short Service (All Arms)”7.
3. “Attestation Paper, Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force”11.
4. “A Letter from Mr. Osborne”25.
5. “C.H.S. Hi-Ys to Hear Knickerbocker Thursday”30.
6. “Sequohay Children Hear About India”31.
7. Campfire Council “Charter of Incorporation”35.
8. “John Bowen Retires as Missionary”51.
9. “Bowen Retires After Years As Missionary”52.
10. Bowen with Mixteca Indians58.
11. Osborne application for a social security account number using his Bowen alias 61.
12. 1938 Knoxville City Directory62.
13. FBI request to keep Osborne’s death quiet89.
14. Bowen’s application for a social security account number105.
16. “Dr. A.B. Osborne is Heard at Aberdeen”117.
NOTES
1 The FBI investigation into the life of Albert Osborne can be found in the Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195.
2 Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007) 751.
3 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.
4 Ancestry.com. 1891 and 1901 England Census, online database, Provo, Utah.
5 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 41.
6 His British army application form states that Osborne’s age was 19 years I month when he enlisted. His correct age was 18 years 1 month as indicated on his “Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth” (Appendix 2).
7 Ancestry.com, British Army World War One Pension Records 1914-1920 for Albert Osborne, online database, Provo, Utah.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 “Picture Life in Far East,” The Washington Post, November 29, 1914.
11 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.
12 Ibid.
13 A copy of Osborne’s Canadian army application form and service records can be downloaded from Library and Archives Canada’s website.
14 Ancestry.com, British Army World War One Pension Records 1914-1920 for Albert Osborne, online database, Provo, Utah.
15 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.
16 Ancestry.com, British Army World War One Pension Records 1914-1920 for Albert Osborne, online database, Provo, Utah.
17 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.
18 Ibid.
19 Ancestry.com. 1891 and 1901 England Census, online database, Provo, Utah.
20 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 16.
21 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.
22 “The return to swamp fever: malaria in Canadians,” J. Dick MacLean, MD and Brian J. Ward MD. Canadian Medical Association Journal, January 26, 1999, CMAJ 1999; 160: 211-2.
23 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.
24 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 41.
25 “A Letter from Mr. Osborne,” Indiana Evening Gazette, April 24, 1943.
26 The Chautauqua Institution as it is now called was founded in 1874 in western New York by Methodists who wanted “… to extend the intellectual and critical capacities …” of Christians. Charlotte M. Canning, The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005) 6. Beginning in 1904, “Circuit Chautauquas” began delivering lectures, musical groups and other programs mainly to rural areas in the United States. Ibid., 1. Plays were added to their repertoire and after 1913 they were a regular part of the Chautauqua experience. Ibid., 14.
27 “Dr. Osborne is Heard on India,” The Winston Salem Journal, November 19, 1924.
28 “Remarkable Lecture at Chadwick Baptist Church,” The Charlotte Observer, February 9, 1925.
29 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 37-38.
30 “C.H.S. Hi-Ys to Hear Knickerbocker Thursday,” The Knoxville News, October 9, 1925.
31 “Sequohay Children Hear About India,” The Knoxville-News Sentinel, March 28, 1935.
32 “What a Place for Housewives – Hindu Women Throw ‘Dishes’ Away After Meal,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, April 14, 1935.
33 “Organization for Underprivileged Boys From Knoxville’s Street,” The Knoxville-News Sentinel, October 10, 1937.
34 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man,” The Knoxville-News Sentinel, Final Edition, November 28, 1993.
35 State of Tennessee, “Charter of Incorporation”, Campfire Council Incorporated, April 12, 1938.
36 “Organization for Underprivileged Boys From Knoxville’s Street,” op. cit.
37 “Campfire Council Work Gets High Praise From Official and Committee,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, April 23, 1939.
38 “Campfire Council Boys Felt as If Bermuda Were Home – They Were Greeted by Boys’ Church Brigade,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, August 20, 1939.
39 The Knoxville News-Sentinel reported that Bowen had made 14 trips to Bermuda. The current one, in which he accompanied two Campfire Council Boys, was financed by a local businessmen’s association. The reason for the previous trips are not explained but were financed by people described as friends. “Campfire Chief To Make 14th Bermuda Trip,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, August 5, 1939.
40 “Campfire Council Work Gets High Praise From Official and Committee.”
41 “Boys’ Home Plan Will Be Discussed,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, April 4, 1940.
42http://www.boystown.org/about/father-flanagan/Pages/default.aspx
43 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 6.
44 J.H. Bowen, “Vesper Services and Raising of Flag Observed by Campers,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, July 28, 1940.
45 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 6.
46 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”
47 John Howard Bowen, Letter to the Editor Letter Box, The Laredo Times, February 17, 1946.
48 “Religious Director To Tell of Travels,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, May 3, 1947.
49 “Former Knox Minister Describes ‘Posadas,’ Which Mark Christmas Season in Mexico,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, December 25, 1948.
50 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.
51 “John Bowen Retires as Missionary,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, December 5, 1953.
52 “Bowen Retires After Years As Missionary,” The Knoxville Journal, December 5, 1953.
53 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 10.
54 “Wants Southern Cooking in Libya,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, September 11, 1954.
55 The following story has more information about Osborne’s life and his work with young boys: “From Grimsby with Love: The Travels of ‘the Reverend’ Albert Alexander Osborne,” Ronald L. Ecker, 2005, http://www.ronaldecker.com/osborne.html.
56 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 57-58.
57 Ibid, 53.
58 Pat Fields, “Once Boys’ Club Backer Missionary In Mexico,” The Knoxville Journal, November 28, 1954.
59 See George Michael Evica’s, A Certain Arrogance, 85 -154.
60 Warren Commission Hearings , Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 22.
61 John Bowen, “Application For Social Security Account Number,” August 16, 1943.
62 Knoxville City Directory, City Directory Company of Knoxville, 1938.
63 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”
64 Ibid.
65 Warren Commission, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 64.
66 Ibid, 42.
67 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”
68 Ibid.
69 The link for this interview can be found at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/yorkslincs/series2/kennedy_conspiracy/index.shtml.
70 Interview with Bob Gemberling, Photo Report BBC Inside Out: Kennedy – The Grimsby Connection, 2003.
71 Ibid.
72 James Di Eugenio, Reclaiming Parkland: Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi, and the JFK Assassination in the New Hollywood (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016) 282.
73 Ibid., 283.
74 Warren Commission, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, pg. 40.
75 John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald (Arlington Texas: Quasar Ltd., 2003) 619.
76 “Bowen Leaves for Overseas,” The Knoxville Journal, November 14, 1963.
77 Warren Commission, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 34.
78 Ibid., 54.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid., 35-36.
82 Ibid. 36.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid., 43.
85 His sister Ada Amos told investigators that he did not have any scientific credentials. Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 38. Osborne told the FBI that he had left school after the eighth grade. Ibid., 41.
86 Albert Osborne, State of Texas, “Certificate of Death,” State File No. 49975, August 31, 1966.
87 Ibid.
88 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”
8989 Letter from Robert Massey to Jim Balloch, post office marked March 1, 1993, The Harold Weisberg Collection, Digital Archive, Hood College, Weisberg Subject Index Files, O Disk, Osborne Albert, Item10.
90 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”
91 Interview with Reverend Erickkson [sic], Photo Report BBC Inside Out: Kennedy – The Grimsby Connection, 2003.
92 Ancestry.com, U.S. World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918, online database, Provo, Utah.
93 Ancestry.com, 1900 United States Federal Census, online database, Provo, Utah.
94 Ibid.
95 “Married,” Chester Times, May 11, 1886.
96 Ancestry.com, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Church and Town records, 1708-1985, online database, Provo, Utah.
97 Ancestry.com, Pennsylvania, Marriages, 1852-1968, online database, Lehi, Utah.
98 Family Search, United States Census, 1910.
99 Bowen’s employment status with the YMCA for the period 1910 to 1933 can be found in the YMCA’s Yearbooks that were published on an annual basis. The YMCA Yearbooks are located at the University of Minnesota’s Kautz Family YMCA Archives, https://www.lib.umn.edu/ymca.
100 The YMCA’s Railroad Department was created in 1877. It offered railroad workers services such as: bible classes, reading rooms and places to exercise. The goal of this department was to reduce industrial unrest by teaching them Christian values. Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Ann Spratt eds., Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City (New York: New York University Press, 1997) 65-66.
101 YMCA’s Yearbooks https://www.lib.umn.edu/ymca.
102 Ibid.
103 “Mrs. J. H. Bowen,” The Charlotte Observer, March 24, 1934.
104 Ancestry.com, 1940 United States Federal Census, online database, Provo, Utah.
105 John Howard Bowen, “Application For Social Security Account Number,” July 6, 1937.
106 Ibid.
107 Ibid.
108 “People at Work,” The News-Messenger, Hamlet, North Carolina, February 11, 1958.
109 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 11.
110 “Eure Charters 14 New Firms,” Greensboro Daily News, September 11, 1947.
111 In 1990 the Terminal Hotel was used to film scenes from the movie Billy Bathgate starring Dustin Hoffman. Mike Quick, “‘Billy Bathgate’ Created A New Set Of Memories,” Park Newspapers of Rockingham, North Carolina, May 2, 1993. In 1993 the hotel was destroyed by fire. “Terminal Hotel: A Collection of Memories,” Park Newspapers of Rockingham, North Carolina, May 2, 1993.
112 “People at Work,” The News-Messenger. In 1925 the Cavalry Baptist Church in Kokomo, Indiana, which is about 130 miles from Gary, Indiana where Osborne’s sister Ada Amos lived (Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 37), had a Sunday School Superintendent named Albert Osborne. “Sunday Services in the Churches,” The Kokomo Daily Tribune, December 12, 1925.
113 “John H. Bowen Dies at Hamlet,” The News-Messenger, Hamlet, North Carolina, February 2, 1962.
114 Warren Commission, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 43.
115 Ibid., 41.
116 Ibid., 38.
117 “Dr. A. B. Osborne is Heard at Aberdeen,” The Charlotte Observer, December 24, 1929.
118 Year Book and Official Rosters of the National Councils of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of Canada and the United States of America, 1928-1929,95 and 1929-1930, 39.
-
JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 6
How The History Channel Did Not Track Oswald
The series “JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald”1 has revealed itself to be a deception, one almost as blatant as the magic bullet, conducted not in six seconds, but over six episodes:
- “The Iron Meeting” that never happened in Mexico City, since …
- “The Russian Network” immediately wrote Oswald off as a nut job;
- “Oswald Goes Dark” in New Orleans—after displaying his pro Castro activism in broad daylight on the streets and even on the radio—to establish …
- “The Cuban Connection” with Alpha 66—a virulent paramilitary group of Cuban exiles organized and backed by the CIA—for the common purpose of killing Kennedy;
- “The Scene of the Crime” is mounted upon junk-science tests aimed at fixing Oswald as the lone gunman, and a far-fetched escape route for cooking up evidence about alleged Castroite Oswald being helped by anti-Castroite Alpha 66; and finally …
- “The Truth” reached by former CIA case officer Bob Baer is just an old CIA deceit about Castro’s foreknowledge of Oswald’s criminal intent.
An Overview of Baer’s First Four Installments
Before commenting on the last episode, let us revisit some of the earlier segments, in order to accent both what was in them and what was missing.
The first episode, about Oswald in Mexico City, was largely based upon a dubious book arranged by American journalist Brian Litman while he was living in Moscow in the late eighties. Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko’s Passport to Assassination seemed designed to counter two sources. First, what CIA officer David Phillips said in a debate with Mark Lane, namely, that when all the records were in, there would be no evidence Oswald was at the Russian consulate. (See Plausible Denial, p. 82) Second, what the Lopez Report describes: namely, that the CIA could provide no tapes or pictures of Oswald at either the Russian or Cuban consulates. The Litman/Nechiporenko book said Oswald was at the Russian consulate anyway. And even more made to order, the portrait it drew of Oswald was one of an unstable, almost suicidal character who fears the FBI is hunting him down. Which, as we know, is contradictory to the actual Oswald who, even under arrest for murder in Dallas, was a pretty cool customer. The Litman/Nechiporenko creation is much more in line with the Warren Commission’s sociopathic portrait. Baer never notes this discrepancy.
What is even worse, in part 2, Baer tells the audience that before he met with the colonel, he had no idea what Nechiporenko knew about Oswald. Are we to buy the concept that Baer never heard of his book? Are we supposed to believe the note of surprise in Baer’s voice when the colonel tells him he met with Oswald in Mexico City? That book was published in 1993, well over twenty years ago. So when, after speaking with the colonel, Baer says, “This puts the case in a whole new light”, what on earth is he talking about? And who does he think he is kidding? Certainly not anyone who knows something about the JFK case.
But further, in his usual portentous tones, Baer constantly compares Oswald meeting with Russian KGB agents in 1963 to someone meeting with ISIS today. As if ISIS had embassies that people can walk into and request information about visa applications. Again, this is so exaggerated as to be ludicrous. When did the KGB ever perform executions on camera? The spy wars back then were more sophisticated, more assiduous and cerebral in their planning and objectives than the war with terror today. That is one reason why it was called the Cold War.
Let us describe another crevice in Baer’s early presentation. One of the very few documents Baer shows the audience which actually was declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board was a transcript of a call between President Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In it, LBJ asks for information about Oswald in Mexico City. The call was made on the morning of November 23rd. Baer does not tell the audience that, as Rex Bradford discovered, there is no tape recording of this call, we only have a transcript. But he also does not tell his viewers that right after LBJ asked for more information, Hoover told the president that the audio tape and the picture they have of Oswald did not correspond to the man the FBI was interrogating in Dallas. In other words, the guy the CIA says was in Mexico City is not the man electronically captured by the CIA surveillance devices. (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 80) Are we to believe that Baer read that transcript but missed that crucial piece of information? Or if he did not, he thought that it somehow was not important?
Let us mention another less-than-candid practice of “Tracking Oswald”. Time after time, Baer intones that he has studied the JFK case for ten years and read the entire 2 million page declassified record of the Assassination Records Review Board. In fact, he (unconvincingly) tries to insinuate that he has scanned the two million pages into his own personal database. Yet, if that were so, why does he show us pages printed from the Warren Commission Report as being redacted? Which they are not. He does this more than once, at least three times. Is he trying to present old, mildewed information as somehow spankingly brand new?
After speaking with Oleg Nechiporenko, Baer decides that his idea from Part 1, that somehow Oswald met with KGB agents in Mexico City in 1963 and they plotted to kill President Kennedy is faulty. Yet the original evidence he based this on was flawed to begin with. Baer said that the FBI got hold of some postcards that Oswald allegedly purchased in Mexico City. One of them depicted a bullfight. Therefore, Baer deduced that Oswald met some KGB agents at a bullfight and planned the killing of JFK. No joke.
The idea that if you buy a postcard with a bullfight on it, then you went to a bullfight is not logically sound. Tourists buy all kinds of postcards in foreign countries concerning places they do not actually go to. It is true that Marina Oswald said that her husband told her that he went to a bullfight in Mexico City. (WR, p. 735) But this is in direct contradiction to the fact that she had previously denied he was in Mexico City to the Secret Service during their first interview. And she denied it twice. (Secret Service report of Charles Kunkel from 11/24-11/30)
Contrary to what the program asserts, the evidence of Oswald in Mexico City—a Spanish-English dictionary, blank postcards, etc.—was not immediately seized and turned over to the FBI. And contrary to what Baer says, the Russians did not give him the postcard in evidence. These pieces of evidence—including the postcards—were adduced into the record a week after the assassination by Marina Oswald’s companion Ruth Paine. (Reclaiming Parkland, by James DiEugenio, p. 344) That Baer relies so much on these postcards without telling the viewer about their provenance tells us a lot about both his honesty and his knowledge base. Or perhaps both. Because the truth is that the Warren Commission had a hard time placing Oswald in Mexico City. Months later, in August, Priscilla Johnson, who replaced Ruth Paine as Marina’s companion, was still surfacing evidence about Oswald’s bus rides in Mexico City. This drove Warren Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler up the wall. (ibid)
Baer also makes much play about Soviet diplomat Valery Kostikov meeting with Oswald at the Russian consulate in Mexico City. At the end of Part One, he tries to proffer it as evidence that hardly anyone ever knew about. If Baer really believes that, then he did not read the Warren Report, because Kostikov’s name appears there on page 734. And he is named as a KGB agent on that same page. In other words, it was open to the public back in 1964.
Once the KGB colonel tells him the Russians had no espionage interest in Oswald, Baer drops that line of inquiry. He now goes back to Mexico City and “discovers” the name of Sylvia Duran in his two million page declassified database. Again, he somehow sounds surprised when he finds the name of Sylvia Duran in there, even though, as anyone could have told him—except perhaps his staff—her name is also in the Warren Report. (See p. 734) And again, he continues in his shocked syndrome with, “This file completely changes the course of this investigation.” Who does Bob think Oswald talked to in the Cuban consulate, Che Guevara? Again, Baer is seemingly stunned when he finds out the Warren Commission did not talk to Duran. Which again shows his lack of knowledge of the real declassified record. The ARRB declassified the Commission’s Slawson/Coleman report in the Nineties. It was very clear from this Mexico City trip report of the Warren Commission that the CIA and FBI kept those two men on a short leash. By never referring to it, Baer escapes this question: Why did the Bureau and the Agency firmly regulate what Commission lawyers David Slawson and Bill Coleman saw and read? And why did the Commission not demand more freedom and access?
Ultimately, what can one say about a program called “Tracking Oswald” that never mentions or details the following names: Ruth and Michael Paine, George Bouhe, George DeMohrenschildt, David Ferrie, Guy Banister, Clay Shaw, or Kerry Thornley? These people largely controlled the last 17 months of Oswald’s life after his return from Russia. The first four did so in the Dallas/Fort Worth area; the second quartet in New Orleans. If you never examine any of those persons then how are you tracking Oswald? And contrary to what Baer says about his (ersatz) access to the ARRB declassified files, there have been many pages released about those people. And there are still pages that will be released on them in October of this year.
Baer’s presentation is so restricted, so empty, and at the same time his approach is so hammily bombastic, that it leads an informed viewer to suspect an agenda. That agenda is to make believe he has consumed 2 million pages of documents for the viewer. Then to present virtually nothing from those pages. After performing this shell game, he tells his audience: Hey, I saw them, and guess what? Oswald still did it.
Sure Bob, sure.
The Final Chapter
The title for the final episode conceals the fact that Baer’s conclusion—Castro knew it—has been drawn from two false premises: (1) Oswald was the lone gunman who killed Kennedy firing both a magic bullet and a fatal shot to the head; (2) Oswald was openly telling his criminal intention to members of Alpha 66, which was riddled with agents of the Cuban Intelligence Service (CuIS) who reported back to Castro.
Since Baer refuses to explain how CuIS moles would have known much more about Oswald than the CIA officers and agents working closely with Alpha 66 since its inception in 1962, let’s make a clean break with his conspiracy theory. There is no shred of evidence refuting Castro’s statement about Oswald during his Radio/TV appearance in Havana the day after the assassination:2 “We never in our life heard of the existence of this person.”
An Apocryphal Story as Baer’s Cornerstone
Shortly before airing the series, Baer revealed to Time magazine staffer Olivia B. Waxman:3 “What really got me into it was meeting a defector from Cuba and one of the best agents the CIA has ever had. He said that on the 22nd of November 1963, four hours before the assassination, he was at an intelligence site in Havana when he got a call from Castro’s office, saying, ‘Turn all of your listening ability to high frequency communications out of Dallas because something’s going to happen there.’”
In front of the camera Baer provides a second-hand version of this story by CuIS defector Enrique García, who affirmed that another CuIS defector, Florentino Aspillaga, had told him such a story. The latter had also given it as an anecdote à la carte for the book Castro’s Secrets (Macmillan, 2012, 2013),4 written by former CIA desk analyst Dr. Brian Latell.
Together with Aspillaga and Latell, García and Baer end up forming a crew who carry the banner “Castro knew Kennedy would be killed.” It’s silly that Castro would have resorted to a radio counterintelligence prodigy or any other means of electronic intelligence (ELINT) in order to learn something that would have been instantly available through the mass media. In 1963, instant info about anything occurring in Dallas during the JFK visit simply meant broadcast reports interrupting soap operas on the three national TV networks and radio stations breaking news furnished by reporters covering the live event.
Pathetically, Baer mounts a charade with Adam Bercovici broadcasting local info from Dallas, Baer himself boosting it through short-wave radio as some Alpha 66 operator would have done, and two guys in a boat picking up the signal in international waters near a Cuban ELINT radio tower. They are unaware that Aspillaga, codenamed TOUCHDOWN by the CIA,5 became a self-defeating storyteller6: “It wasn’t until two or three hours later that I began hearing broadcasts on amateur radio bands about the shooting of President Kennedy.” Radio amateurs must have just been chatting about what the commercial media had already reported. Indeed, a unique witness—French journalist Jean Daniel—had given conclusive evidence against Aspillaga since the very day of the assassination. After a phone call by Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticós, Castro got all the news “from the NBC network in Miami.”7 Plus, we know from Daniel—who was serving as Kennedy’s emissary to Castro on the day of the assassination—that Fidel was utterly shocked when he heard the news that Kennedy had been shot. Later, when Castro got the news that JFK was dead, he turned to Daniel and said—referring to their plans for rapprochement—that everything was going to change. (Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 89-90)
Aspillaga’s story is spurious not only because it’s silly but because, as shown above, its rebuttal can be traced back to Daniel’s on-site account. The crux of the matter is that Aspillaga confided to Latell in 2007 he had previously told the story only to the CIA during his debriefing after defection in 1987.8 Thus, it must have been declassified or withheld under the terms of the JFK Records Act (1992). However, Aspillaga’s story appears neither among the millions of pages declassified by the ARRB nor among the around 1,100 records still withheld by the CIA at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).9
Tracking Oswald Seriously
In Dallas, Baer and his team attempt to reconstruct a planned Oswald escape after the last shot. He imagines having made an unbelievable discovery: there were, get this, six houses of Cuban exiles along the road to a present-day bus stop on a route matching the dubious 1963 transfer ticket found in Oswald’s shirt pocket when he was arrested. Even as simply linking Oswald to a safe house, this evidence is fishy.
Baer absolutely trusts an informant who told the Dallas Police Department (DPD) about seeing Oswald with Cuban exiles in a house at 1326 Harlandale Avenue. It was rented by Jorge Salazar, lieutenant to Manuel Rodríguez Orcabarrio [sic], head of the Dallas Alpha 66 chapter, and served as a meeting place. However, Peter Scott pointed out that Orcabarrio “looked so much like Oswald that he was mistaken for him.”10 A point that somehow, in all his alleged document review, Baer missed. Yet, this was backed up by another reputable JFK researcher. In his book, The Secret Service (Fine Communications, 2002), the late Philip H. Melanson further provided that it was “independently confirmed by the FBI [that Orcabarrio] bore a resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald” (page 83). And Larry Hancock argues that there is some evidence that the information was later negated. A source later “told the FBI Oswald had never been there.”11
Baer ignores all of this and goes on by cherry-picking info out of context. To make it crystal clear that Alpha 66 was deeply infiltrated by CuIS, defector García stated that its Chief of Operations was a Castro dangle. In fact, CuIS officer José Fernández-Santos, a.k.a. “El Chino” [The Chinese], became Alpha 66 Chief of Naval Operations, but just after illegally leaving Cuba in late 1968. To reinforce the image of Oswald obsessed with killing Kennedy, Baer makes use of the Sylvia Odio incident as if it were a prelude in Dallas on the road to Mexico City, instead of a quantum of proof about Oswald’s impersonation here or there.12
Under an illusion about another “explosive discovery”, Baer raves on about Oswald returning from Mexico to fulfil “his promise” and running into people as furious with Kennedy as himself: Alpha 66. Thus, Baer and his team lost the real trail marked by the CIA’s “keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on the need-to-know basis.”13
Three CIA teams never stopped tracking Oswald all the way from Moscow (1960) to Dallas (1963). Info about him—more than 40 different documents: FBI reports, State Department cables, intercepted personal letters and others—usually passed from the CIA Counterintelligence (CI) Special Investigation Group (SIG) to the CI Operation Group (OPS) to the Counter-Espionage Unit of the Soviet Russia Division (CE-SR/6).
- The CIA opened a personality file (201-289248) on “Lee Henry Oswald” on 9 December 1960. His documentary record began with the Halloween 1959 UPI story “An ex-Marine asks for Soviet citizenship.”
- Since May 25, 1960, “Lee Harvey Oswald” appeared in another file at the Covert Operations Desk, based on the report by FBI Special Agent John Fain in Dallas after talking with Oswald’s parents about “Funds Transmitted to Residents of Russia.”
- A third CIA index card for “Lee H. Oswald” was attached to file (100-300-011) about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) on October 25, 1963. FBI Special Agent Warren De Brueys had reported from New Orleans that Oswald confessed being “a member of the alleged New Orleans chapter of FPCC,” a pro-Castro group listed as subversive.
These cards were used in a threesome for making different legends of the same re-defector, who arrived in the U.S. with his wife and their 4-month-old daughter on June 13, 1962, thanks to a $435.71 loan from the State Department. S.A. Fain debriefed him in Fort Worth twice. His final report, dated on August 30, 1962, stated Oswald “agreed to contact the FBI if at any time any individual made any contact of any nature under suspicious circumstances with him.”
Surprisingly, the CIA cable traffic in early October 1963 demonstrates that the Station in Mexico City and the Headquarters in Langley hid from each other their intel about Oswald’s connections with Cuba: His visit to the Cuban Consulate on September 27, 1963, and his pro-Castro activism in Dallas and New Orleans, respectively.
The CIA got shockingly involved in a conspiracy of silence about a former Marine, re-defector from the Soviet Union and self-pronounced Marxist, who was identified by the FBI as a pro-Castro activist in Dallas and New Orleans, spotted by the CIA in Mexico City visiting both the Cuban and Soviet embassies, and finally missed by both the FBI and the CIA as a security risk in Dallas at the moment of truth. A former CIA case officer must be aware of all this, but Baer overlooks the hard facts in lieu of resorting to camouflage with “Castro knew it.”
Castro versus Kennedy
In the interview with Waxman, Baer dragged and dropped that Castro “had every reason in the world” to want JFK dead. In the series, Baer assumes that Castro “was very happy” when his moles in Alpha 66 briefed him about Oswald being set up to kill Kennedy. Since Castro did nothing to prevent JFK’s death, Baer foists a conspiracy of silence on him.
This is an utter distortion of history done for the History Channel. Because Castro had every reason to want Kennedy alive and well. On Christmas Eve 1962, the American lawyer Jim Donovan boarded the last flight with the Bay of Pigs prisoners airlifted to Miami as result of his negotiation with Castro. Just before departure, Castro’s aide Dr. Rene Vallejo broached the subject of re-establishing diplomatic relations. Upon learning of this communication, Kennedy commented “it looked interesting.”14
With JFK’s death Castro was going to gain nothing else than LBJ in the White House, who offered no promise of more favorable U.S. policies toward Cuba. The Soviet bloc’s diplomats in Havana were aware of Castro’s preference. On March 31, 1963, Hungarian Ambassador János Beck set out in a secret report to Budapest that Castro was convinced “Kennedy is the best” option among the possible candidates for the U.S. presidency in 1964.15 Furthermore, ABC newswoman Lisa Howard interviewed Castro in April 1963 and reported he considered a rapprochement with Washington desirable.16 The same message was conveyed in August 1963 by one María Boissevain, wife of a former Dutch Ambassador to Cuba.17
Even so, the CIA was dismayed that Kennedy continued to favor a compromise with Castro. On November 5, 1963, CIA Deputy Director for Plans Dick Helms suggested to “war game” the Castro détente in a meeting of the Special Group.18 Kennedy opted for sending French reporter Jean Daniel as secret envoy to Castro. On November 19, Daniel was already talking with him, while Kennedy was waiting for an agenda proposal by Castro to “decide what to say [and to] do next.”19
On September 7, 1963, Castro had attended a reception at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana. He talked with Associated Press correspondent Dan Harker, who quoted him saying: “U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”20 According to the crew of “Castro sorta did it,” he wanted Kennedy’s death and gratuitously broadcasted his intention to the whole world. In fact, Kennedy had expressed the same idea on November 1961. After meeting with reporter Tad Szulc, who noted him “under terrific pressure from advisors (…) to okay a Castro murder,” Kennedy discussed the issue with his aide Richard Goodwin and remarked: “If we get into that kind of thing, we’ll all be targets”.21
Castro summed up his ethical pragmatism thusly: “Ethics is not a simple moral issue (…) It produces results.”22 If he would have had foreknowledge—from Alpha 66 or any other source—of Oswald or whoever else was threatening to kill Kennedy, he would have reacted just as in 1984 with a U.S. President he deemed much worse than Kennedy. After being advised about an extreme right-wing conspiracy to kill Ronald Reagan in North Carolina, Castro ordered his spymaster at the Cuban Mission to the UN to furnish all the intel to the U.S. Security Chief at the UN, Robert Muller. The FBI quietly dismantled the plot.23
Abuse of History
Baer’s intent appears to be to keep on muddying the waters. He even said to Waxman: “We don’t know exactly what the Cubans told him in Mexico City,” although the CIA did know that they only talked about an in-transit visa. The acting consul, Alfredo Mirabal, was also a CuIS officer, identified by the CIA as “Chief of Intel”24. Before the HSCA, Mirabal adamantly stated having judged Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate on September 27, 1963, as “a provocation.”25
That day the CIA listening post LIENVOY recorded two calls between Cuban and Soviet consular staffers about an American citizen seeking—illegally—an in-transit visa to Cuba on his way to Soviet Russia. On the second call’s transcript, Station Chief Win Scott noted: “Is it possible to identify?”26
This normal reaction was followed by an anomaly. In the LIENVOY operational report for September 1963, Scott referred to “two leads of operational interest:” a female professor from New Orleans calling the Soviet Embassy, and a Czech woman calling the Czech embassy.27 In gross violation of the CIA protocol, the U.S. citizen in Mexico City who was allegedly Oswald was not reported to Langley.
Ironically, the conspiracy of silence foisted in a fact-free manner by Baer on Castro proved to be factually correct in reference to the CIA. With Castro as vantage point instead of the CIA, Baer was not tracking Oswald to articulate a true picture of the past, but to drive the historical truth away.
NOTES
1 After two episodes, the series was cancelled in the U.S., but continued in Canada. The History Channel has informally stated it will come back to the States in a timely fashion.
2 JFK Exhibit F-684.
3 “Former CIA Operative Argues Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cuba Connections Went Deep,” Time, April 25, 2017.
4 See the book review “The End of An Obsession.”
5 After 25 years and 13 medals in the CuIS, Aspillaga defected from his third-rate post in Bratislava [Slovakia] to Vienna in early June 1987. The CIA Station Chief there, James Olson, thought his companion was Aspillaga’s daughter, but she was actually Aspillaga’s girlfriend. The British historian Rupert Allason, a.k.a. Nigel West, made an entry for the case in his Historical Dictionary of Sexspionage (Scarecrow Press, 2009). Anyway, Aspillaga got a deluxe package of resettlement in the U.S. in return for handing over valuable documents stolen from the first-rank CuIS Station in Prague and for being squeezed by CIA debriefers. He furnished the key intel that almost all the Cubans recruits by the CIA from 1960 onward were double agents loyal to Castro.
6 Brian Latell, Castro’s Secrets, Macmillan, 2013, 103.
7 Jean Daniel, “When Castro Heard the News,” The New Republic, December 7, 1963.
8 Instead of taking the road to clarification, the CIA engaged in a conspiracy of silence. The Agency Release Panel responded to a FOIA request on June 28, 2013: “The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence” of JFK-related records in Aspillaga’s debriefing.
9 Neither Aspillaga nor TOUCHDOWN brings any result by searching one after the other, or both, at the National Archives web site. By entering “JFK Assassination” in the search box, the first relevant result would be “About JFK Assassination Records Collection.” By clicking on it, then on “JFK Assassination Records Collection Database”, and finally on “Standard Search”, a “Kennedy Assassination Collection Simple Search Form” appears. After entering the terms “Aspillaga” (first line) OR “Touchdown” (second line), no hit will be retrieved.
10 “The CIA’s Mystery Man,” The New York Review of Books, Volume 22, Number 12, July 17, 1975.
11 The last name is often misspelled as Orcabarrio or Orcaberrio. In the CuIS files, he is registered as Manuel Rodríguez Oscarberro. On the evening of November 22, 1963, DPD detective Buddy Walthers knew about someone looking very much like Oswald going into this house since October because his mother-in-law was living next door. Walthers reported it and the FBI did no more than confirm that Oscarberro and other Cuban exiles had been there and departed. Nonetheless it was noted that a source inside Alpha 66, who later moved to Puerto Rico, had furnished the information that Oswald was not associated with the group in any way and had never been to the house. Since Oscarberro did move to Puerto Rico, it is possible he was the FBI source clearing Oswald.
12 Both occurrences overlapped in time, but left the same trail. Along with two Cuban exiles, a Leon Oswald visited Mrs. Odio in Dallas. The day after, one of the Cubans phoned her and discussed Oswald as an excellent shooter, who believed President Kennedy should have been assassinated after Bay of Pigs. Meanwhile, a Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City and yelled on his way out: “I’m going to kill Kennedy!”
13 As CIA Counterintelligence (CI) officer Jane Roman told John Newman on November 2, 1994.
14 FRUS, XI, Doc. 275, 687 f.
15 Declassified top secret document from the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At Cold War History Research Center Budapest, click on “Archives”, then on “Selected Hungarian Documents on Cuba, 1960-1963,” and finally on “Talks between Cuba and the USA (March 31, 1963).
16 “Castro’s Overture,” War/Peace Report, September 1963, 3-5.
17 NARA Record Number: 104-10310-10244.
18 NARA Record Number: 104-10306-10024.
19 Peter Kornbluh, “JFK and Castro,” Cigar Aficionado, September – October 1999, pp. 3 ff.
20 “Castro Blasts Raids on Cuba,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 9, 1963.
21 Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, Oxford University Press, 1983, p.135.
22 My Life: A Spoken Autobiography, Simon and Schuster, 2008, 211.
23 Nestor Garcia-Iturbe, Cuba-US: Cuban Government Saved Reagan’s Life, June 6, 2015.
24 NARA Record Number: 1994.05.03.10:31:46:570005.
25 HSCA Report, pp. 173-78.
26 NARA Record Number 104-10413-10074
27 NARA Record Number: 104-10052-10083.
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JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 5
For the fifth episode of the series “JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald,” former CIA case officer Bob Baer and his team moved from New Orleans to Dallas seeking to prove Oswald “had help in accomplishing his mission.” Aren’t they putting the cart before the horse by widening the net in search of accomplices before having determined whether Oswald was the perpetrator? They are indeed doing so, because Baer does have a mission: Keeping the CIA out of the picture.
After mixing Oswald with the anti-Castro and CIA-backed paramilitaries of Alpha 66 in a weird pot made of “special intent to kill President Kennedy soup”, Baer keeps on blighting a big-budget TV show by ignoring the body of the evidence. The latter supports the same assessment given by J. Edgar Hoover to Lyndon B. Johnson the morning after the assassination: “The case as it stands now isn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction. ”1
The Warren Commission (WC) has manufactured the case against Oswald with at least a wrong murder weapon (CE 139), a wrong bullet (CE 399), and a wrong shell (CE 543). Instead of weighing the evidence, Baer and his team commit a kind of Only Game in Town Fallacy: If a second shooter is not at hand, then that leaves Oswald as the lone gunman.
Bogus Testing
To throw out the prima facie evidence —in the Zapruder film2— of gunfire from the right front, Baer simply replaces Luis Alvarez’s melon with what they call an encased gel ordinance head. Which goes backwards after being struck by a bullet fired from behind.
A Nobel Prize winner in Physics (1968), Alvarez got involved in a test with a taped-up melon to verify that the backward snap of Kennedy’s head was consistent with a shot from behind due to a jet-propulsion-like recoil.3 But, as Gary Aguilar showed in his reply to Luke and Mike Haag, another test conducted by research physical scientist Larry Sturdivan at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in 1964 proved otherwise. Ten skulls were shot with a Mannlicher-Carcano and all of them moved away from the rifle in the same direction of the bullet. The Commission suppressed these findings and plainly reported that President Kennedy was struck in the head and “fell to the left into Mrs. Kennedy’s lap.” (Click here for that article)
Alvarez’s test was misleading because a taped-up melon has neither the sheer strength nor the thickness close to that of a human skull. By the same token, Baer’s ballistic test is just another rigged attempt to support the discredited WC lone-gunman theory with a childish jet effect. We cannot do better than let Milicent Cranor comment at length on this ludicrous so-called “experiment”.
History Channel – or Saturday Night Live?
By Milicent Cranor
This segment of the History Channel’s special on the Kennedy Assassination seems like a low-budget skit from Saturday Night Live!
An “expert sniper” goes through the motions of recreating the shot to Kennedy’s head. The idea is to prove that one shot from the presumed Oswald location can cause the reaction we see on the Zapruder film: the head moving to the back and to the left.
It’s not clear what they’ve dug up to use for the head. The sniper describes it vaguely as a human head filled with ordinance gel, and throughout his little talk, he refers to that gel. As in “shooting from behind the ballistics gel” and “I’ve got the ballistics gel on target.” Maybe he hopes to convey the impression of a gelatinous brain causing the head to spring backwards.
The demonstration is just amazing. it is far more revealing than the show’s creators realize:
We only get a side view of the action – and are not allowed to see the back or front of the head, not even after the shooting.
The limited view of the head shows no damage whatsoever.
The head moves back, but not to the left. Then it pops right back up to its original position!
Something, possibly vaporized gel, seems to come out of the head (or from a smoke machine behind the head) – but only from the mouth area.
So he looks like a man leaning back with pleasure as he smokes a fine cigar, oblivious to the characters behind him.
The sniper’s explanation for what happened is even more amazing:
“…the bullet enters the back of the head and the terminal ballistics will come here — [indicates area of right eye and forehead] – causing the head to go back and to the left.”
“The terminal ballistics will come here”? Terminal ballistics is defined as “the study of the behavior and effects of a projectile when it hits its target and transfers its energy to the target.”
The sniper can’t explain what happened, but he seems to think that by naming the field of study concerned with such phenomena, the audience will be fooled.
It is especially funny that he points to the area of the right eye: (1) In real life, the bullet is supposed to have exited from the top of the head on the right; (2) the gel-filled head in the demonstration seems to have no damage to that area, and it would show in a right profile view; and (3) all the exiting stuff representing brain matter comes out of the mouth. Neither JFK nor the head in this demo is supposed to have had an exit wound in the mouth.
Conclusion: The creators of this segment must have gel for brains. Or they think their audience does.
THE SMOKING MAN
As the reader can see, this is not a studious, scientific attempt to duplicate the circumstances that befell Kennedy at 12:30 PM in Dealey Plaza, in Dallas. And for Baer to try and pass it off as such speaks very poorly of both him and his show.
But Bob Baer is not done. Not by a long shot. For now he goes on and conducts what he calls an acoustics test. According to him, dozens of ear witnesses4 who heard shots coming from the Grassy Knoll were actually confused due to “the amphitheater effect.” The real sound coming from the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) would have echoed at the so-called triple underpass and other hard structures in Dealey Plaza.
To construct this “explosive theory,” Baer went to the crime scene with sound engineers and equipment that “nobody used before”. He just forgot to adjust the experiment setting to the standards of historical reconstruction.5 Not a single person was placed where a certain witness had been watching the presidential motorcade, and the sounds of the shooting weren’t generated by firing the rifle at the sniper nest. They were recorded elsewhere and played thereafter from near the TSBD. No kidding.
What is kind of shocking about this so-called acoustics test is that Baer completely ignores its far superior predecessor. During the proceedings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, (HSCA) that body did an acoustics test in Dealey Plaza. Except their testing was live and they brought riflemen into the plaza. And from that and their work with and analysis of the 11/22/63 dictabelt recording from Dealey Plaza by a Dallas policeman on a motorcycle, they concluded the following: 1.) Someone fired from the grassy knoll, and 2.) There were five shots fired that day. (Which, as Don Thomas reveals in his book Hear No Evil, for political reasons, Chief Counsel Robert Blakey reduced to four.)
But, if one can comprehend it, Baer completely ignored the HSCA precedent, which included two teams of the finest audio scientists in the country. Among their members was Dr. James Barger of the firm Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. Barger had done acoustical research for the Navy in the field of submarine sonar detection, and had been involved in testing tapes of the 1970 Kent State shooting in Ohio. Barger did scientific testing of the actual sound wave patterns produced in Dealey Plaza at that time. Barger’s findings were passed on to Professor Mark Weiss and his associate Ernest Aschkenasy. They did the final presentation for the committee. To imply, as Baer does, that those three men spent as much time and testing as they did and could not separate an echo from a live shot is ridiculous. But Baer and his program are so agenda driven that it is as if these previous tests never happened. He brings in some audio recordings, some computer programmers, pays them a few bucks and with these stage props he has somehow eliminated the second gunman in the JFK case. Pure and utter poppycock. Baer’s level of science here would not pass muster at a good high school’s Science Fair.
An Inescapable Second Shooter
On December 12, 1963, the Secret Service (SS) did a crude recreation. Its black and white footage plotted three shots on the JFK limousine. The bystander James Tague —wounded by a bullet ricocheting off the curb about 260 feet away from the limousine— destroyed the prior three-shots-three-hits scenario. Then, the magic bullet emerged not from evidence, but as an out-of-the-blue solution engineered to sustain the lone gunman theory.
The FBI-SS reenactment on 23-24 May 1964 was a re-adjustment to preserve the willful closing of the case against Oswald. It also provided the notorious photo (CE 309) of Commission junior counsel Arlen Specter indicating with a metal rod the trajectory of the lie. However, an apparently insignificant detail provides a quantum of proof for demolishing any attempt—including Baer’s—to realign the shoots with the WC Report.
For the 1964 recreation, Specter used the same jacket worn by Governor Connally on November 22, 1963, but he did not use President Kennedy’s. Otherwise he couldn’t have aligned the bullet entrance hole in the back of both Kennedy’s jacket and shirt with the exit wound at his throat.6
The bullet holes are positioned 5 3/8” down from the collar line on the back of the jacket. They are consistent with the JFK death certificate, signed by his personal physician, Dr. George Burkley, who examined a back wound at the level of the third thoracic vertebra, about 4-6 inches below the point where the shoulders meet the neck.
At this level, a bullet coming downward from the TSBD would not be able to exit the throat. But the Commission acolytes do not care about the death certificate7 and dismiss the jacket and the shirt as material evidence with the claim that both bunched up. Let’s connect the dots in a simple test.
- Baer is invited to come dressed in suit and tie, along with John McAdams, Max Holland, Gerald Posner, Phillip Shenon et. al.;
- They will remove their jackets and shirts to mark the position of the bullet hole in Kennedy’s, and will also mark on their bodies the back wound given by the WC;
- They will put on their jackets and shirts, and will take a back seat in a car8;
- They will get their jackets and shirts to ride up until the mark on each one matches the mark of the back wound. This crucial moment will be photographically captured;
- They will compare the photos with the Zapruder film to find not even the faintest resemblance of JFK’s tailored suit jacket and buttoned shirt bunching up as theirs.
They will surely face a dilemma. If the Warren Commission accurately placed the back wound, then JFK’s jacket and shirt were replaced, hence conspiracy; if the jacket and shirt are authentic, then the WC gave a false representation of JFK’s back wound, hence conspiracy or cover-up. There is not one whiff of any of these factors in the entire “Tracking Oswald” series, for if they did present it, the show would have to be called, “Trying to Find who Killed Kennedy.” The Warren Commission did not want to do that. Neither does Baer.
Oswald’s Escape and Another Crime Scene
After surreptitiously taking for granted that Oswald was the lone gunman, Baer applies his on-the-ground field officer expertise to assemble Oswald’s plan of escape with a concealed route, an Alpha 66 safe house, and some anti-Castro Cuban exiles as accomplices. No clue is given about how Oswald could have learned in advance the presidential motorcade’s schedule in order for him to have planned the assassination by firing a rifle with telescopic sight from his very place of employment.9 In that regard, Baer also ignores the following. That morning, Oswald asked fellow worker James Jarman why all the people were assembled in the plaza below. When Jarman replied that President Kennedy was going to pass through in a motorcade, Oswald asked him which way it was proceeding. Kind of wrecks Baer’s idea of Oswald’s planning. Which is probably why he ignores it. (See Syliva Meagher, Accessores After the Fact, Vintage Books, 1992, pp. 37-38)
For all of what follows, Baer relies on the bus ticket found in Oswald´s shirt pocket. The former CIA officer somehow never discerns the difference between getting to and from work, and around the Dallas area, on the one hand, and escaping from the scene of a high profile murder case amid hundred of witnesses on the other. But Baer uses the ticket to infer a getaway route from the TSBD to an Alpha 66 safe house. On the way, Baer loses the evidentiary trail that—since Sylvia Meagher´s research in 1967—has put the ticket and other circumstances of Oswald’s escape under a cloud of suspicion (Accessories After the Fact, pp. 70-93).
Baer deduces that, from his years of experience in the CIA, in a situation like this, the assassin(s) needed to have an escape route planned in advance. Our host does not want to admit that what the Commission says Oswald did after the shooting would suggest that he had no such plan in mind. Or that the latest research on this matter clearly indicates he was not on the sixth floor at all. (See Barry Ernest’s book, The Girl on the Stairs. Click here for a review) For the idea that a man who just killed the president would now search out public transportation to flee the scene of the crime amid hundreds of spectators and scores of policemen is simply not credible. But that is what the official story says. And that is what Baer is supporting.
In any real planning situation one would rely on one of two factors for escape amid a multitude of spectators. The first alternative would be disguise—of which there is no evidence in this case. The other would be speed. That is, the longer one stays at or near the scene, the longer one risks the possibility of exposure and/or capture. Concerning this subject, one could do as Josiah Thompson did at the end of Six Seconds in Dallas. That is, present the testimony of policeman Roger Craig. Craig says he saw Oswald running down the embankment after the shooting. He then jumped into a Rambler driven by a dark skinned man. That would sound like an escape plan utilizing speed. But probably because of that, Baer ignores it. So in his scenario, Oswald boards a bus, gets off the bus, then walks a few blocks, and hails a taxi. But before he enters, he offers it to a little old lady standing next to him. (Meagher, p. 83) With a straight face Baer pronounces this an “escape plan”.
Furthermore, Baer explains that Oswald ended up in the Texas Theater because of the run-in with Police Officer J.D. Tippit on East 10th Street, about 100 feet eastward from Patton Avenue. At that point, the escape plan was supposedly disrupted and Oswald failed to think clearly and rationally. However, as in the case of his alleged shooting of the President, the evidence against Oswald in Tippit’s murder is shoddy.10 And Baer ignores that shoddiness.
The crime scene is almost a mile away from Oswald’s rooming house at 1026 N. Beckley. His landlady Earlene Roberts saw him waiting for a bus at 1:04 PM after he left his room. Temple Ford Bowley arrived at the crime scene when Officer Tippit was already on the ground and some bystanders were milling around the police car. Bowley looked at his watch and the time was 1:10 PM. The Commission ignored Bowley. Why? Because clearly Oswald couldn´t have walked almost a mile in less than 6 minutes. They then reported that Tippit was killed circa 1:15 PM, despite the fact that is the time he was pronounced dead at Methodist Hospital. To keep up appearances, a typed FBI memo stretched out Tippit’s agony at the hospital until 1:25 PM.
This case against Oswald for the Tippit shooting further weakens due to the three-wallets enigma.11 At the crime scene, Channel 8 staffer Ron Reiland filmed a policeman showing an open wallet to an FBI agent. According to FBI agent James Hosty, his fellow Bob Barrett revealed that this wallet contained IDs for both Oswald and Alek Hidell. But Dallas Police Officer Paul Bentley confiscated a second wallet from Oswald after he was arrested at the Texas Theater. And another one was found among Oswald´s belongings at Ruth Paine´s house in Irving. These are all facts. They strongly suggest some evidence against Oswald was planted. They are ignored by Baer.
Let us add another point about the two constant refrains by Baer during the program. First, the continuing assumption that Oswald is the guilty party. This, as we have seen, he achieves only by ignoring the evidence, especially the new evidence declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). And that relates to the second refrain: that Baer has read through the two million pages of declassified documents by the ARRB. Yet this program offers no evidence from that declassification process. For instance, Baer presents a four-decades-old police report that Oswald was seen at an Alpha 66 safehouse in the Dallas area. The other document used in this episode is the famous testimony of Antonio Veciana of him seeing Oswald with Maurice Bishop at the Southland Building in Dallas. Again, that information extends back to the seventies. And it does not at all connect Oswald with Alpha 66. Veciana was arriving to meet with his case officer Bishop at the time. He was early, and he saw Bishop with Oswald. Oswald left shortly after he arrived. In other words, Oswald was there with Bishop, not with Alpha 66 leader Veciana. And as Veciana later admitted—just three years ago—Bishop was David Phillips.
Now if Bob Baer was really interested in furnishing the public with new information, he could have done at least a couple of things with that crucial admission. First, he could have said that the ARRB discovered that Phillips (along with James McCord) was running the CIA’s counter-intelligence programs against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Oswald was the only member in New Orleans. When one combines that with the fact that Oswald worked out of the same building that former FBI agent Guy Banister did, 544 Camp Street; and he printed that Camp Street address on more than one of his flyers, then that meeting with Phillips gets interesting. Why would an alleged communist like Oswald be meeting with a CIA officer and working with a former FBI agent?
The other aspect that could have been made up of new information would have been Phillips running the Cuban desk in Mexico City while Oswald was allegedly there. Baer could have told the public:
The man Oswald was meeting with, David Phillips, told the HSCA that there were no tapes or pictures of Oswald in Mexico City. Yet there was such a tape that FBI agents listened to in Dallas while Oswald was under arrest for murder. Those agents told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that this tape was not the voice of the man in detention. We are going to explore that apparent quandary tonight.
But, of course, Baer could not do that since he began the show by using a lot of questionable material about the Russians controlling Oswald in Mexico City, when the declassified Lopez Report strongly suggests that Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City. So the true identity of Oswald is kept under wraps, and some mythical association with Alpha 66 is now manufactured out of next to nothing.
Coda
More than fifty years and zero evidence after the JFK assassination, Baer is oddly not interested in or ignorant of what has been proven and debunked. He simply pushes back to square one—the lone gunman who shot a magic bullet—by concocting a light version (Castro knew it) of the oldest CIA backstop (Castro did it) through the fact-free hypothesis of Oswald linked somehow to Alpha 66 in the killing.
Notes
1 White House Telephone Transcripts, 23 November 1963, LBJ Library.
2 In his remark to Attorney General Robert Kennedy about two people involved in the shooting, CIA Director John McCone wasn’t speculating. He had been briefed by Art Lundahl, head of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), where leading photo analyst Dino Brugioni and his team examined the Zapruder film, made still enlargements of select frames, and mounted them on briefing boards. See Dan Hardway’s “Thank you, Phil Shenon” (AARC, 2015).
3 Thus, Alvarez joined the crew of dueling experts devoted to defending the WC at any cost, after the Zapruder film was available for the first time to a mass audience on March 6, 1975, thanks to HSCA consultant Robert Groden and JFK activist Dick Gregory, who brought it to Geraldo Rivera’s ABC show “Good Night America.”
4 Baer uses his own statistics, but the most reliable study, 216 Witnesses, by Stewart Galanor, found that 52 heard a shot from Grassy Knoll, 48 from TSBD, 5 from both places and 4 elsewhere. Other 37 witnesses could not tell and 70 more were not asked.
5 The WC acolytes always incur this failure. For instance, it’s well-known since Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgement (The Bodley Head, 1966) that WC’s firearms experts were unable to duplicate what Oswald did, but Vincent Bugliosi replied in Reclaiming History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007) that CEs 582 to 584 “shows two hits were scored on the head” (p. 1005) – only that both were scored using iron sights instead of scope.
6 The FBI Supplemental Report from January 13, 1964, contains Exhibits 59 and 60 showing the bullet entrance holes in the back of Kennedy’s jacket and shirt, respectively. They weren’t included in any of the 26 volumes of Commission Exhibits. The initial draft of the WC report stated: “A bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder to the right of the spine.” WC member Gerald Ford wanted it to read: “A bullet had entered the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine.” After the ARRB declassification, the discrepancy emerged. Ford told reporters: “My changes were only an attempt to be more precise.” (AP, July 3, 1997).
7 Specter neither produced it nor interviewed Admiral Burkley, who as JFK’s personal physician was the only doctor present both at the Parkland Hospital (Dallas) in the emergency room and at Bethesda Medical Center (Maryland) during the autopsy.
8 It could be the Cadillac used by Specter instead of the presidential limousine (Lincoln Continental 1961).
9 For these and other similar issues, see A.M. Fernandez’s “Why the Warren Commission got scared with Castro”.
10 Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, Hightower Press, 2013, pp. 244 ff.
11 James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, pp. 101 ff.
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David Giglio interviews Jim DiEugenio
Visit Our Hidden History for both the audio and a full transcript. Or scroll down to listen to the audio here.
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C-SPAN Announces Schedule for “The National Security State & JFK”
Saturday, July 15, 2017
2:00 p.m. ET
Jacob Hornberger, James DiEugenio , and Oliver StoneAs soon as these air on TV you should be able to find them in C-SPAN’s video library at www.c-span.org/history using the search box up top to search by speaker name.
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Vincent Palamara, The Not-So-Secret Service
The Kennedy researcher and film historian Joseph McBride often cites Penn Jones’s suggestion that one should “find a single aspect of the case, and research the hell out of it.” The living embodiment of that suggestion is Vincent Michael Palamara. Vince has specialized in the Secret Service protection for decades, producing the books Survivor’s Guilt, JFK: from Parkland to Bethesda and now The Not-So-Secret-Service: Agency Tales from FDR to the Kennedy Assassination to the Reagan Era. As a result of his frequent contacts with members of the Secret Service, he has information in his books that cannot be accessed elsewhere.
The first thing to know about this new collection is that it does not solely focus on John F. Kennedy, although much of it reflects on or fills in the historical background of the Secret Service. Palamara, via his correspondence, for example, is able to supply significant first-hand reports about the quality of Presidential protection from an historical perspective prior to 11/22/1963, and the quality of the protection on that day. As is well-known, Fletcher Prouty had referred to the poor quality of the protection supplied on the day of the assassination, pointing out, for example, that there were strict procedural measures that had been ignored. He criticized the route itself, the open windows in the buildings, the slow speed of the parade route, and a few other things (cf. Dave Ratcliffe, Understanding Special Operations, 205-210).
Palamara contrasts the Secret Service performance in Dallas and compares it to a trip taken just four days earlier in Tampa. Why, he asks, did the motorcade not proceed in a wedge formation, with agents physically on the president’s limousine, as was customary? He also points to an interesting article from December of 1963, from U.E. Baughman, a former Secret Service Chief, who also indicates a violation of what he calls “basic, fundamental” rules. (Palamara, 87). Fascinating.
For researchers, perhaps the most important chapter in the book is called “Debunking Agent Gerald Blaine’s The Kennedy Detail.” It’s the longest chapter in the book, and goes into detail to counter Blaine’s book, which—as Palamara points out—has no footnotes and uses the sheen of authority to put forward questionable history. To use just one example, he asserts that Admiral Burkley, Kennedy’s physician, ran late and therefore had to catch the bus rather than riding in a staff car; while Burkley himself stated for the record that it was the Secret Service who put him on the bus. (122) The Kennedy Detail (co-written by Lisa McCubbin, who served the same function for Clint Hill’s series of books), focuses entirely away from “conspiracy theories,” as Palamara observes, largely on the grounds they are disrespectful to the family.
A few words should be said about Lisa McCubbin, both Blaine’s and Hill’s co-author. McCubbin, a journalist by trade, found in Clint Hill both a boyfriend and a new business. Hill had promised he would never write a memoir, but having met McCubbin, he then decided to write three of them: Five Presidents, Five Days in November, and Mrs. Kennedy and Me. “He credits Lisa McCubbin for bringing him out of his ‘dungeon, where he languished for years in [his] emotional prison’ and for helping him ‘find a reason to live, not just exist,’” says the bio on Lisa McCubbin’s webpage: Quite interesting. The major media likes to criticize the “cottage industry” of JFK books; but as usual, it seems like the best supported and promoted works are those with the least interesting content. In addition, Hill’s exit from the “dungeon” and hooking up with McCubbin has also mysteriously coincided with Hill no longer saying anything to upset the defenders of the Warren Commission. In fact, if you want to hear him speak on the subject in your town, all you need is cash.
There is also some interesting background on McCubbin at this AEI site:
In July of 2001, just two months before September 11, Lisa gave up her news anchor chair and moved with her family to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where her husband was being transferred by his company. After September 11, KGET-TV asked Lisa to report as a foreign correspondent with an insider’s view of Saudi Arabia. Her reports from inside the Middle East captivated the southern California audience by providing a personal connection to the Arab world.
In Riyadh, Lisa met Prince Abdullah bin Faisal bin Turki Al-Saud, a great-grandson of the founder of Saudi Arabia. After learning that Lisa was an experienced journalist, Prince Abdullah convinced her to work for the Saudis as a media consultant and trainer. In a country where women are not allowed to work with men, it was extraordinary that Lisa had direct meetings with the prince and his male staff—often held secretly at Prince Abdullah’s private villa. Her rare experiences in Saudi Arabia are the subject of her first book, Undercover in Islam: Spinning the News from Saudi Arabia.
McCubbin is the daughter of Gay and Wyman Harris. Wyman Harris graduated from the USAF, class of ’63. His background can be seen here:
Mr. Wyman C. Harris is a Principal at Harris, Hoimes, Sutton & Allen, LLC. He was the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Executive Officer at Wyndham Foods, Inc. Mr. Harris is a Director of Sagus International, Inc. He served six years in the United States Air Force in Germany and the Pentagon. Mr. Harris completed the Program for Management Development at Harvard Business School and received an M.S. in Industrial Engineering at Purdue University and a B.S. from the United States Air Force Academy. (See this link; a little more can be found here)
Anyway, it’s all a bit interesting.
To return to the main topic, Blaine contends that conspiracy theorists are just nasty people who want to think ill of our government. The trouble is, the behavior of the Secret Service tends to belie that. Palamara gives a full list of the contents of the two boxes that the Secret Service had deliberately destroyed in January of 1995, just a few months after the Assassination Records and Review Board had been established. Those records concerned the Protection of President John F. Kennedy and the Protective Survey Reports from presidential trips ranging from September 1963 right up until November 8, 1963—two weeks before the assassination. As Palamara writes, this cannot be an accident. How did the Secret Service respond to this?
… the Secret Service attempted to wriggle out of its predicament by simultaneously suggesting that perhaps the destruction was really the Review Board’s fault because it was not in receipt of the ARRB’s expanded definition of what constituted an “assassination record” until February 1995, after the records were destroyed …. [Ralph] Basham [the Administrative Director of Administration] also tried to downplay the significance of the missing Chicago protective survey reports for the cancelled November 2, 1963 trip (during which conspirators had planned to assassinate President Kennedy) … (137)
Needless to say, all of these trip reports would be of tremendous significance to any investigative body reviewing the protection of the president during a completed assassination. But the Chicago report is critical because it resulted in the cancellation of a trip and the possible saving of Kennedy’s life. Because there were strong indications that a plot was afoot in Chicago, as first reported by Edwin Black in his landmark essay “The Chicago Plot,” and also supplemented by Abraham Bolden, who later wrote about the incident in The Echo from Dealey Plaza. For the Secret Service to “accidentally” destroy these most important records, just before the ARRB was about to request them, is ever so slightly suspicious.
There is more to be found in the book: for example, I had not heard the story of Thomas Shipman, who was one of three people to drive President Kennedy while he was in office and who died shortly before the assassination. Although not much is known about him, it is certainly of interest.
Overall, there are two great strengths of the book. One is that it is relatively short yet fairly dense with information. Palamara is not selling any particular theory throughout the text (except the general thesis that the Warren Commission was wrong) and this is an excellent feature. The second great strength of the book is the obsession with obtaining direct reports and interviews, and when using secondary sources he reprints many of them right in the book so we can look at them. I was very appreciative of this aspect. The book’s subtitle is “Agency Tales from FDR to the Kennedy Assassination to the Reagan Era,” and that is what it delivers; so there is some information in the book that JFK researchers might regard as trivial. However, much of the material, especially the historical background work that the author has done with the agents themselves, is invaluable. And his persistence in attacking the work of Blaine/McCubbin/Hill is thoroughly admirable, if for no other reason than to continue our collective insurgency against the falsified historical record that the establishment wants to carve into stone.
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How Max Holland Duped the Daily Beast
The year 2017 contains two important milestones in the mystery of the John F. Kennedy saga—one dealing with the man, the other with the mysteries of his assassination. The end of last month marked the centennial of Kennedy’s birth in Brookline, Massachusetts. This was commemorated with glossy news magazine special editions and a few TV programs—at least one with Caroline Kennedy, the last surviving member of the immediate family. There was also an act of Congress recognizing this event.
This October, another act of Congress will be honored in regards to John F. Kennedy. This one relates not to his life, but to his death. On October 17th, the National Archives will release well over three thousand documents relating to the assassination of President Kennedy. In other words, fifty-four years after his murder, 53 years after the Warren Report was issued, the American public will finally be allowed to read what the American government wanted to keep classified for still another 22 years. Because if it were not for Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, most of these documents would have remained classified until the year 2039. But due to the firestorm of controversy created by that film, an act of Congress was passed. That act created a citizens’ panel called the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). From 1994-98 it declassified over two million pages of documents dealing with the assassination of President Kennedy. But there were certain restrictions placed in the legislation that allowed for exceptions until the year 2017. Those exceptions will expire this October.
The secrets already released by the ARRB from 1994-98 were underplayed by the news media, but in fact they were quite bracing. For instance, the records of a meeting in May of 1963 helmed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara showed that President Kennedy did have a plan to withdraw from Vietnam. Under questioning by ARRB chief counsel Jeremy Gunn, Kennedy pathologist James Humes revealed that he had burned both his notes and the first draft of his autopsy report. We learned from declassified records of the Church Committee that INS officers—on the trail of Cuban illegals—had followed David Ferrie to Guy Banister’s office in New Orleans. And they found Lee Oswald there.
On April 28th of this year, Max Holland published an essay on the JFK case in The Daily Beast. Holland brought up a different milestone date. This one concerned the 50th anniversary of a story originally published on April 25, 1967 in the (now defunct) New Orleans States Item. Holland’s article was called “How the KGB Duped Oliver Stone.” Holland stated that the 50-year-old article—titled “Mounting Evidence Links CIA to Plot Probe”—was a triumph for Moscow.
The article describes the arrest of Clay Shaw by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison on March 1, 1967. Holland characterizes the arrest of Shaw for conspiracy in the JFK case as “outlandish and baseless”. He adds that the reasons for Shaw’s arrest had already been reviewed back in 1963 by the FBI and found wanting.
But the arrest of Shaw created headlines around the world. And this led to several articles about Shaw’s work in Rome for a mysterious business entity called Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). One Italian newspaper, which produced a series of articles, Paese Sera, was a leftwing publication that eventually wrote that CMC might have been a creation of the CIA, and a center of funding for illegal covert activities. Jim Garrison received copies of these Paese Sera articles. According to the author, this is how the DA now centered his investigation on CIA complicity in the Kennedy murder. The article then concludes that Garrison was really an unsuspecting dupe of Moscow. How? Because Paese Sera was really a conduit for KGB disinformation. And because Oliver Stone based his 1991 film JFK on Garrison’s memoir On the Trail of the Assassins, Stone was also made a Moscow dupe.
Holland’s source for this? The controversial Mitrokhin archives. Vasili Mitrokhin was a former archivist for the KGB. In 1992 he defected to the United Kingdom. As Russian scholar Amy Knight has noted, the story behind Mitrokhin and his defection strains credulity. But it began a whole new genre of academic studies and books. With a skeptical eye, she surveyed the books in all of their questionable aspects, i.e., the sales and marketing of former Russian intelligence employees who spirit out their notes on KGB files. (See this article in the Wilson Quarterly)
This new area of trade and barter reached its apogee in the instance of Alexander Vassiliev, still another former Russian intelligence officer who defected to England. In that case, it was shown that Vassiliev’s “notes” at times actually distorted the original memorandum beyond recognition.
Once in England, Mitrokhin was furnished with an official in-house British MI5 author. In turn, Christopher Andrew set up a syndication deal with Rupert Murdoch. The subsequent volume was called The Sword and the Shield. In 1995, the political angle behind the barter was accentuated. Based on the word of still another Russian intelligence defector, Murdoch and his subordinates accused former Labor Party leader Michael Foot of accepting funds from KGB agents. Foot promptly sued for libel. Understandably, Murdoch did not want to appear in court, so he settled the case in Foot’s favor.
Mitrokhin’s notes said that the late Mark Lane had been aided by two secret donations from the KGB: one for 1500 dollars and one for 500 dollars. As Lane later replied, the only donation he received even close to those amounts was from the extraordinarily wealthy Corliss Lamont, an heir to the JP Morgan fortune. Not a likely candidate for a KGB agent. Further, according to the Mitrokhin notes, the transfer occurred in New York City in 1966. As Lane has noted, he was living in London that year, finishing up and editing his book Rush to Judgment, which was being published by a British house. (Lane, Last Word, pp. 92-93) Third, the next largest donation Lane got for further research was from Woody Allen. It was for $50. Lane kept records of his donations. In other words, the Mitrokhin charges against him were quite dubious. Consequently, he challenged the veracity of the book in a letter to the author. Andrew never replied. (ibid, p. 96)
II
Which brings us to the pretext for this article. Clay Shaw was arrested on March 1, 1967. Three days later, Paese Sera began publishing its six-part series on the mysterious and suspicious activities of the CMC in Italy. The author tries to imply that there was a cause-effect relationship between the two events. He bases this on one of the notes in the Mitrokhin archive. That note says that in 1967, the Russians started a disinformation scheme in that Italian newspaper that was later picked up in New York. (ibid, p. 73) That is it. In other words, there is no specificity to the accusation. There is no mention in the Mitrokhin note of Jim Garrison, Clay Shaw, the CMC or any New York publication that picked up the story. Realizing how that paucity presents a problem, Holland had once said that there was a mention of the Paese Sera series in the socialist New York weekly the National Guardian. But this was only done because they had a contributor who lived in Rome.
In prior presentations, Holland had realized how thin this case was. So he added the testimony of CIA officer Richard Helms before a congressional committee concerning Paese Sera. The problem with this was that Dr. Gary Aguilar exposed Helms’ testimony as being rather faulty. It turned out that Helms, in order to discredit Paese Sera, used a story in which they said the CIA was complicit in the attempts to overthrow French president Charles DeGaulle. As Aguilar ably pointed out, this story was true. Even a sympathetic CIA author like Andrew Tully admitted this as far back as 1962, after the attempted coup of the French generals over the war in Algeria. The complicity was reported even earlier than that in The New York Times by Scotty Reston. (NY Times, April 29, 1961) More recently, David Talbot hammered the point home with multiple sources in his biography of Allen Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard. (See pp. 412-24)
Another implication of Holland’s essay is that, somehow, the KGB dreamed up the story and gave it to Paese Sera on the occasion of Shaw’s arrest. As anyone in the newspaper business knows, usually the next day’s paper is locked down the night before. Which would mean that the KGB put the story together in about 48 hours. This author had the opportunity to read the six part series in translation. The idea that a foreign intelligence service could put together such a story on such brief notice is hard to buy. Clearly, the quite lengthy, detailed reporting was the result of a weeks-long inquiry into the whole business enterprise of the CMC. So unless this was all made up in Moscow—and it is hard to see how it could be—the idea of a KGB “planting” of the story is simply improbable.
Why would Paese Sera be interested in such a lengthy exposé? Because the CMC was a mysterious business agency with a suspect past. Prior to moving to Italy, the enterprise had been kicked out of Basel, Switzerland in 1957. The reasons were similar to those that Paese Sera complained about: murky financing and the questionable character of the company directors. Which included one George Mandel, who had been accused of working the Jewish refugee racket during World War II. When this unsavory fact surfaced in the Swiss press, Mandel threatened to sue the paper—but he didn’t. The editor was disappointed. He commented, “Too bad. We would have heard some great things at the trial.” (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy, p. 216; State Department Memorandum of April 9, 1958)
But further, as questions about the financing in Basel began to crest, another director of the firm, former Hungarian prime minister Ferenc Nagy, mentioned J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation as a source of funds. He also mentioned J and W Seligman. As William Davy writes in his book Let Justice be Done, Allen Dulles had been general counsel to Schroder prior to becoming CIA Director. When the Dulles brothers law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, was still dealing with the Nazis in the thirties, they used Schroder’s as their conduit. When Dulles became DCI, he opened up a fifty million dollar emergency fund with Schroder’s. It was later reported that Schroder’s served as one of the recurring cut-outs for the Agency to transfer funds. (Davy, pp. 96-97) If one consults the book Millionaires and Managers, a 1969 analysis of the large Wall Street investment houses and legal firms, one will see that both banks—Schroder and Seligman—come under the purview and control of what the author calls the Sullivan and Cromwell/Marine Midland Group. This important back-story in Switzerland is ignored by Holland.
In 1958, because of all the controversy in Basel, the enterprise moved to Italy. This is when Clay Shaw entered the picture. The major board players in Italy were much the same as in Switzerland. But they were augmented by people like a former member of Mussolini’s cabinet, and the son-in-law of Hjalmar Schacht, financial guru of the Third Reich. They represented “a small cross-section of the aging royalists with whom Shaw liked to hobnob on his European jaunts and whose names and phone numbers were kept in his address book.” (Davy, p. 98)
Paese Sera was not the only newspaper that reported on the controversial company. So did Corriere della Sera, Il Messaggero and Le Devoir in Montreal. The latter likely reported on the enterprise because its general counsel was Louis Bloomfield, a Montreal corporate and international lawyer. Looking through what has been released of Bloomfield’s papers, researcher Maurice Phillips has discovered that Bloomfield was an important player in the CMC scheme. He actually coordinated meetings and investments for Nagy from some of the wealthiest men in the world, who were somehow interested in the CMC; e.g., Edmund deRothschild, and David Rockefeller. (Letter from Bloomfield to Dr. E. W. Imfeld, 2/10/60) Phillips has also uncovered documents that show that Nagy was a CIA asset and that he queried the Agency, offering them the use of CMC in any capacity. (March 24, 1967 CIA memo, released in 1998.) Phillips is now involved in a legal dispute with the Bloomfield estate, who wish to cut off any further access to these papers. This, in spite of the fact that Bloomfield’s will said his papers should be opened to the public twenty years after his death, and he passed away in 1984.
Finally, there is information about the CIA and the CMC from FBI agent Regis Kennedy, who, along with Warren DeBrueys, was J. Edgar Hoover’s man on the ground in the Cuban exile community in New Orleans. He reportedly stated that, “Shaw was a CIA agent who had done work of an unspecified nature over a five year period in Italy.” (Davy, p. 100) That description, of course, perfectly matches both the time span and the location of the CMC. Therefore, in two strands of Holland’s sixteen-year old yarn—concerning the CIA and the DeGaulle overthrow, and the Agency connections to the Centro Mondiale Commerciale—it turns out that Paese Sera was right and Holland was, shall we say, obtuse. After all the controversy in Italy, the CMC left and went to Johannesburg, South Africa. Thus the idea that CMC was somehow connected with the Central Intelligence Agency is anything but disinformation.
III
But Holland goes even further here. In defiance of the ARRB declassified record, he conceals from the reader the new documents about Clay Shaw. The author writes that both the Warren Commission and the FBI investigated the true identity of a man named Clay Bertrand, who New Orleans lawyer Dean Andrews said called him to go to Dallas and defend Oswald. Holland writes that the Bureau and the Commission determined that this allegation was false, and that Bertrand was not even a real person.
First, there is no evidence that the Warren Commission itself ever did any kind of search for the true identity of Clay Bertrand. The FBI did investigate the issue. And the results were pretty much contrary to what Holland describes. In 1967, the Justice Department committed a faux pas about it. They admitted that the FBI had investigated Clay Shaw back in 1963. (Davy, p. 191) This announcement caused much consternation at FBI headquarters, because the obvious follow up question would be: Why was the FBI investigating Shaw as part of its original inquiry into the Kennedy murder? J. Edgar Hoover did not want to answer that question. So the Justice Department issued a second announcement: the FBI had not conducted any inquiry about Shaw in 1963.
As the declassified record demonstrates, this was false. In fact, The New York Times actually printed the truth about this on March 3, 1967. They wrote, “A Justice Department official said tonight that his agency was convinced that Mr. Bertrand and Mr. Shaw were the same man … .” Behind the scenes, FBI official Cartha DeLoach admitted that, in December of 1963, several parties had furnished the FBI information about Shaw. (Davy, p. 192, italics added) Before Shaw was arrested, the FBI had multiple sources saying Garrison was correct: Shaw was Bertrand. (ibid, p. 193) The declassified record shows that the Bureau knew this and concealed it.
One of the most questionable statements in Holland’s essay is that it was because of the Paese Sera article that Garrison began to focus on the CIA as his chief suspect in the Kennedy murder. Again, this does not align with the record, or even with what Garrison himself has written. It is very clear what led Garrison down this path: Oswald’s Russian language test in the military, and the flyers Oswald was passing out on Canal Street in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. The former was a strong indication Oswald was receiving Russian language training in the Marines. Which suggests he was being prepared in advance for his defection to Russia upon his early release. As per the latter, some of the flyers Oswald was handing out in New Orleans contained the address: 544 Camp Street. As depicted in Stone’s film, Garrison visited this building. It turned out that Oswald had been seen there at the office of former FBI agent Guy Banister. It turned out that, again, as depicted in JFK, Banister’s office was a clearinghouse for many Cuban exiles, along with Oswald’s longtime friend, David Ferrie. And Garrison later learned that both Banister and Ferrie were involved with both the Bay of Pigs landing, and Operation Mongoose, the secret war against Cuba, also depicted in Stone’s film. Both of these were CIA sanctioned, supplied, and backed. The more Garrison peeled back 544 Camp Street, the more he discovered how residents of the address, like Sergio Arcacha Smith, were related to the CRC. This was the CIA’s anti-Castro Cuban government in exile, created by Howard Hunt. Therefore, the only way to explain Oswald’s presence amid all these CIA agents and Castro haters was that he was an agent provocateur against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which was billed on the literature as being located at that address. Garrison goes through all of this in his memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins. (See Garrison, pp. 22-25 and 34-36)
But another point that caused Garrison to consider the CIA as a chief suspect was the infiltration of his office. And also the fact that suspects and witnesses in his case were being furnished lawyers associated with the CIA. Again, this point has been reinforced with the release of declassified files by the ARRB. Through that process we have discovered that the CIA maintains what they call a Cleared Attorneys Panel in major cities. This panel is called upon when the Agency gets stuck in sensitive situations. The Garrison investigation caused word to get out in the New Orleans legal community about this panel, and soon letters were being sent to CIA Director Richard Helms to volunteer for work on it. (Letter from James Quaid, May 15, 1967)
This directly relates to the article Holland mentions in The New Orleans States Item. The Paese Sera article takes up two paragraphs in the over thirty-paragraph article. The reporting team had talked to one of the witnesses Garrison was trying to extradite back to New Orleans. Gordon Novel had volunteered for Garrison’s probe masquerading as an electronics expert who could ensure his office was not bugged. He ended up doing the opposite. Again, as Stone’s film shows, he wired the office for sound and sold some of the tapes to the producer of an upcoming NBC special. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second edition, pp. 232-34) When Garrison requested Novel testify before the grand jury, he fled the state. As the article reveals, Novel had worked for the CIA since the Bay of Pigs operation. And he planned on using those credentials for his defense—if Garrison ever got him back to New Orleans. Which he did not. In other words, a former CIA operative was ingratiating himself with the DA. He was then wiring his office and selling the tapes to an upcoming negative TV special. And, as Garrison revealed in his October 1967 Playboy interview, one of Novel’s attorneys was being paid by the CIA. Kind of interesting, no? But it is left out of Holland’s story.
IV
As one can see from what I have indicated above, the Mitrokhin Archives represents one notch of a string of former KGB agents who understood an important historical point in time had been reached. That, after the fall of the USSR, and especially after the rise to power of Boris Yeltsin and his disastrous economic policies, the writing was on the wall. One way to escape the oncoming socio-economic crisis was to curry favor with the American State Department, as depicted in the recent film, Ukraine on Fire. Another way was to win over the west with “notes” from the KGB Archives. (Evidently Mitrokhin did not have access to a copier for all those many years he was an archivist.)
But the East/West exchange actually goes back before Mitrokhin. It stems from the relationship of former TV/Radio journalist Brian Litman with the KGB after the USSR began to collapse in 1991. At that time, while working for an American cable TV company, Litman was living in Moscow. It is there that he began a relationship with the KGB and sold the American rights to a book called Passport to Assassination. That book proposed that Lee Harvey Oswald actually did go to the Russian embassy while he was in Mexico City. There, he met with the embassy chief consul and two assistant consuls. This occurred even though no surveillance camera captured Oswald’s image upon entrance or exit; and there was no recorded tape of his voice inside the embassy. Even though the embassy was under multi-camera surveillance and the interior was bugged.
The portrayal of Oswald in this book is that of a desperate man at the end of his rope. He carries a handgun with him since he thinks the FBI is following him around everywhere—even in Mexico. He says ominous things, like, “For me it’s all going to end in tragedy.” Or he breaks down and weeps, because he fears the FBI will actually kill him. This is allegedly due to the fact he wrote a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington over the possibility of returning to Russia. In other words, by actually placing Oswald in Mexico City, this book countered what Mexico City CIA officer David Phillips said in public: namely, that when all the information is finally produced, there will be no evidence placing Oswald inside the Russian embassy. (Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, p. 82) Thus began a long migration of convenient helpers from the KGB who would paper over problems in the CIA’s version of the Cold War—including its difficulties with the Kennedy assassination. For instance, in the Litman/Nechiporenko version of Oswald in Mexico, Oswald (oh so conveniently) pulls his jacket over his head as he leaves the embassy—as if the authors were aware that the CIA surveillance took no photos of Oswald entering or leaving. One wonders, did he also do that upon entering the compound? If so, how did he know about the surveillance?
V
But perhaps the worst part of the essay is the charge that it was Jim Garrison who caused a loss of belief by Americans in the democratic institutions of their government. Because it was not Jim Garrison who provoked serious doubts about the Warren Commission. It was a wave of books, articles, and radio appearances by the first critics of the Warren Report, who preceded Jim Garrison. That is, writers like Edward Epstein, Vincent Salandria, Harold Weisberg, and Mark Lane. By 1967, the Gallup Poll revealed that belief in the Warren Report’s Oswald-Did-It-Alone concept was at about 30%. What drove it even lower—to 11% in 1976—were three major events, which we all know about. They were, in order, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the exposés of the Church Committee concerning the crimes of the CIA and FBI. This all began in 1965—with the first insertion of American combat troops into Vietnam—and continued until the last reports of the Church Committee in 1976.
The unfolding of these three events on national TV, radio, and in daily newspapers, was incessant and, in its cumulative effect, oceanic. They literally dominated all news cycles for over ten years. Has Holland completely forgot about the Tet Offensive and the cover up of the slaughter of civilians at My Lai? What about Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre? Or the indictments of over sixty employees of his administration, and the convictions of over forty of them? Perhaps he missed the Church Committee’s exposure of the attempts by the CIA to assassinate Patrice Lumumba of the Congo? Or J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO programs to infiltrate, disrupt, and sometimes eliminate leftist groups?
It was the tremendous impact of these three events that drove down all belief in government. And anyone can see this by looking at the graph in Kevin Phillips’ 1995 book Arrogant Capitol, which first appeared in US News and World Report. But interestingly, on that US News graph, the drop-off in belief begins in 1964, the year the Warren Report was issued, three years before Jim Garrison’s inquiry was made public. This would suggest that, from the beginning—and without any outside influence—the American public thought something was awry with the official story of President Kennedy’s assassination.
As author Larry Sabato noted in his 2013 book The Kennedy Half Century, there is an underlying reason that Kennedy’s life and death is celebrated on so many occasions. Sabato commissioned extensive polling and focus groups for his book. At the end, he revealed that 78% of those polled thought that Kennedy’s presidency had a deep impact on the USA. Which is remarkable since Kennedy only served two years and ten months of his term. Even more remarkably, 91% of the public believes that Kennedy’s murder changed the country a great deal. The last polling result was that 75% of the public did not believe the Warren Report verdict of Kennedy’s assassination, namely that Oswald acted alone.
The Daily Beast preferred printing this article instead of previewing the upcoming releases of the ARRB in October, or the mock trial of Oswald in November in Houston. Which is somewhat surprising, since those upcoming events are rather singular in more ways than one. Holland’s article is nothing more than a rerun of an essay he started marketing at least 16 years ago. In the Spring 2001 edition of Wilson Quarterly , it was entitled “The Demon in in Jim Garrison”. In 2004, he made a very similar presentation at the Assassination Archives Research Center Conference, which, as mentioned above, was rebutted by Gary Aguilar. In 2007, the piece was printed in the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. Any differences between the versions is marginal. So if The Daily Beast paid Holland, it was like a photographer dusting off photos in his drawer from 15 years ago—easy money. But what makes it worse is that they were all done after 1998—the termination date of the Assassination Records Review Board. As the reader can see, Holland ignored the new information on Clay Shaw and Jim Garrison. Instead, he went with records from an alleged KGB archives which are easily rendered dubious.
For many, many years now Holland has been ignoring the declassified records of the ARRB. Even when he was supposed to be reporting on those files. The fact that he still does so, even on the eve of their final disbursement, tells us all we need to know about him.
See also: Max Holland and Donald Carpenter vs Jim Garrison and the ARRB
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The Deceptions and Disguises of Noam Chomsky
One of the most telling moments in John Barbour’s new film, The American Media and the Second Assassination of John F. Kennedy, is his presentation of Noam Chomsky briefly discussing the JFK case. It’s a scene I will return to later. But along with Barbour’s depictions of Dan Rather and Bill O’Reilly, I thought these formed the most potent scenes in his film. I am glad Barbour depicted Chomsky because it reminds us just how bad the so-called American Left was and is on both the Kennedy assassination and his presidency. I once wrote an essay on this general subject based upon the work of Martin Schotz and Ray Marcus. (Click here for that essay) Like the Chomsky scene in the Barbour film, we will later return to Marcus’ revealing work on Chomsky.
As many of us will recall, at the time of the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, Chomsky, along with his deceased cohort Alexander Cockburn, went on a jihad against almost everything depicted in the movie. Their critiques were as bad, in some ways worse, than those of the MSM. Their campaign was two-pronged. The first angle was to promote the idea that the Warren Commission was correct; that is, Oswald alone shot President Kennedy. In this regard, Cockburn obsequiously interviewed Warren Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler in the pages of The Nation. That interview amounted to a pattycake session, as Cockburn served up softball after softball to his performing seal Liebeler. Their second line of argument stemmed from the first: There was no high level plot because President Kennedy was no different than Dwight Eisenhower who preceded him, or Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon who followed him. So, with both polemicists, there was no political difference between, say, Kennedy and Nixon, Kennedy and Eisenhower, or Kennedy and Johnson. Even back in 1991, this was a difficult dual thesis to uphold. With the releases of the Assassination Records Review Board, it is well-nigh impossible to defend today. And later we will see how new evidence has forced Chomsky to modify his position. (For my discussion of Cockburn click here)
There were so many crevices—actually Florida-sized sinkholes—in their arguments that it became apparent that both men were arguing from a preconceived position.
That position, of course, is the approach to history common to the intellectual or academic Left. One might characterize the general tendency of such Marxist-influenced (or Neo-marxist) sociological analysis as ‘structural’ or ‘system-oriented’, in the sense that it views the actions of individuals as having little import or consequence, that the subject is merely an agent of larger cultural forces that impinge upon it. When applied specifically to the realm of politics, it leads to positing that institutions of power seek to protect and perpetuate themselves in a manner which is nearly blind to the choice or consciousness of the participants, that indeed the very status of the acting subject is suspect as a category of analysis. In its most extreme application, this theoretical perspective leaves no room for flexibility, for the notion that biography—personal background and characteristics—can make a difference, or that innovation from within the system can occur that can benefit many rather than a few. This concept differs somewhat from the “deep state” thesis, as advocates of the latter will allow for exceptions. But they will then note that the Deep State will correct the exception. In President Kennedy’s case, it was a correction by assassination. The former view is more rigid and zealous in its ideology insofar as it denies that there can be any political exceptions. As with extreme upholders of all theories, its proponents must work to erase the evidence that there ever were any exceptions. And as with any kind of inductive reasoning based upon dubious premises, this leads to the making of some thunderous—and pretentious—truisms.
II
Before we address some of Chomsky’s pronouncements on the Kennedy case, it is important to address some of his intellectual background, because it is very hard to adhere to such a system of thought without it leading to some thorny practical problems with specifics. This is simply because theories sometimes do not explain all that happens in the real world. Therefore their practitioners are forced to bend and mold facts and events in order to shape them to fit their doctrine. In the political field, this practice usually leads to questions of how ideology influences analysis. In other words it brings up questions of bias and balance. Chomsky’s career gives us prior illustrations of these characteristics. It is startling to note how Chomsky’s acolytes ignore them.
The first is the fact that Chomsky has been known to butcher quotations for political advantage. A famous example being a quote by Harry Truman which Chomsky altered in his early book American Power and the New Mandarins. This was later exposed by Arthur Schlesinger in a letter to Commentary in December of 1969. Another example would be the misconstruing of the words of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington. Chomsky wrote that the professor said that he advocated demolishing in toto North Vietnamese society. Huntington corrected the record in the New York Review of Books (See 2/26/70)
There are parallels to these kinds of ersatz presentations with Chomsky and the Kennedy case. With Kennedy, Chomsky has tried to insinuate that somehow JFK was involved with the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. This wasn’t possible for the simple reason that Kennedy had not been inaugurated at the time Lumumba was killed. But further, as some have noted, Allen Dulles and the CIA most likely hastened their assassination plots against the African leader for the precise reason that Dulles knew Kennedy would not support them. (John M. Blum, Years of Discord, p. 23) In fact, there is a famous picture of President Kennedy getting the news of Lumumba’s death which shows just how pained he was by Lumumba’s passing.
In and of itself, this photograph nullifies the Chomsky thesis that there was no difference between Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon and Kennedy. For we can safely say that none of those other men would have reacted like this upon hearing of Lumumba’s death. According to the Church Committee, Eisenhower and Allen Dulles ordered the murder of Lumumba. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 326) Lyndon Johnson reversed Kennedy’s policies in the Congo. He ended up using Cuban exile pilots to wipe out the last followers of Lumumba, helping to destroy the first attempt at a democracy in post-colonial Africa, and allying the USA with the former colonizer Belgium to back Josef Mobutu. Mobutu became a dictator who enriched himself and his backers, and allowed his country to be utilized by outside imperial interests. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pp. 372-73) Nixon was Vice President under Eisenhower, and in National Security Council meetings spoke derisively and patronizingly of African leaders trying to break out of colonialism. He once said these leaders had only been out of the trees for fifty years. (Muehlenbeck, p. 6) Kennedy’s attitude on this subject, and Lumumba, was contrary to all these men. I cannot do better than to refer the reader to Richard Mahoney’s landmark book JFK: Ordeal in Africa, and the equally fine volume Betting on the Africans by Philip Muehlenbeck. (Click here for a review)
To show just how pernicious Chomsky’s influence on some Left luminaries is on this subject, consider David Talbot’s last appearance on Democracy Now hosted by Amy Goodman. In discussing his book on Allen Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard, he mentioned the differing views of Lumumba by Eisenhower and Kennedy. Incredibly, Goodman challenged him on this point. Talbot referred to the aforementioned picture of Kennedy as evidence of JFK’s feelings on the subject. But further, as Mahoney’s book demonstrates, the first foreign policy reversal of Eisenhower that Kennedy made once in office was on the Congo. And when Dag Hammarksjold was killed (likely murdered) in a plane crash, Kennedy decided to carry on the UN Chairman’s campaign for a free and independent Congo. (Click here) That any informed person could suggest otherwise shows both a massive ignorance and a massive bias on the subject. Yet, Goodman has hosted Chomsky many times. She reportedly vetoed an appearance by Jim Douglass.
Chomsky has also tried to say that Kennedy approved the action plan to overthrow President Goulart of Brazil. (E-mail communication with Steve Jones, July 20, 2017) Yet, this plan did not occur until over four months after Kennedy was dead. Consider the information in A. J. Langguth’s Hidden Terrors. Although it is true that Kennedy wanted Goulart to broaden the political spectrum of his government, Langguth makes it clear that the actual Brazil overthrow was similar to the action against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. A group of wealthy and powerful businessmen petitioned the White House for help in getting rid of a man they feared would endanger their investments. Langguth describes this group in detail. It was led by David Rockefeller. (p. 104) The author notes that Rockefeller’s coalition had not been accepted at the White House previous to January of 1964. But they were welcomed by President Johnson. And this made the difference. This demarcation is also noted by Kai Bird in his book, The Chairman. For it was John McCloy, the subject of Bird’s book, who was sent by Rockefeller’s group to make a deal with Goulart in February of 1964. When McCloy’s presence in Brazil was detected, it polarized forces of the left and right. (Bird, pp. 550-53) And this triggered the coup operation, codenamed Operation Brother Sam, which McCloy acquiesced in after causing. As Bird notes, Johnson’s willingness to cooperate with Rockefeller and McCloy ended Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress plan: “The Johnson administration had made clear its willingness to use its muscle to support any regime whose anti-communist credentials were in good order.” (ibid, p. 553) Further, anyone who has read Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street would understand the antipathy between President Kennedy and Rockefeller and why such a meeting was unlikely under Kennedy.
III
These two examples are good background for even worse gymnastics by Chomsky. And it brings us closer to Vietnam. In June of 1977, Chomsky co-wrote (with Edward Herman) a now infamous article in The Nation. It was titled “Distortions at Fourth Hand.” There is no other way to describe this essay except as an apologia for the staggering crimes of the collectivist Pol Pot regime that took place in Cambodia after the fall of both Prince Sihanouk and Lon Nol. At that time a book had been published called Cambodia Year Zero by François Ponchaud. It was the first serious look at the terrors that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had unleashed in Cambodia. Chomsky and Herman criticized this pioneering work by saying that it played “fast and loose with quotes and numbers” and that since it relied largely on refugee reports, it had to be second hand. They then added that the book had an “anti-communist bias and message.” In retrospect, those two comments are startling, and again show a remarkable selectivity in an effort to discredit sources. In this same article, the two authors praised a book by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter entitled Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. They wrote that this book presented “a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources.”
In other words, not only were the authors attempting to discredit information that turned out to be true; at the same time, they were crediting information that turned out to be—to put it mildly—inaccurate. The net effect of this propaganda was to distort and conceal the efforts of a murderous regime in killing off well over one million of its citizens in an attempt to recreate a Maoist society overnight. Pol Pot’s was one of the greatest genocides per capita in modern history.
What makes Chomsky’s performance here even worse is that two years later he and Herman were still discounting and distorting the Khmer Rouge in their book After the Cataclysm. They refer to what Pol Pot did as “allegations of genocide” (p. xi, italics added). On the same page they tried to imply that Western media created the mass executions and deaths. They later added that evidence was faked and reporting was unreliable. (pp. 166-77) They again attacked Ponchaud’s book by saying “Ponchaud’s ’s own conclusions, it is by now clear, cannot be taken very seriously because he is simply too careless and untrustworthy.” (p. 274) Later, more credible and responsible authors, like William Shawcross, demonstrated Chomsky’s pronouncements to be astonishingly wrong. They were so bad that Chomsky has never let up trying to minimize what he did. In fact, his whole emphasis on the Indonesian invasion of East Timor has been to try and demonstrate that that slaughter was really worse than what happened in Cambodia! The implication being that if that were true it would then somehow minimize his previous giant faux pas. And even in that he has lowballed the fatalities in Cambodia to do so. (For a complete and thorough expose of this subject, click here)
Why is this important? Besides demonstrating what a poor scholar and historian Chomsky is, it shows that, contrary to his claim of being an anarchist, he went to near ludicrous extremes to soften the shocking crimes of a Maoist totalitarian regime. In any evaluation of Chomsky, this episode is of prime importance. For the simple reason that it clearly suggests that—as Ted Koppel recently said of Sean Hannity—ideology is more important to him than facts.
A second notable aspect of Chomsky’s work is his association with the notorious Holocaust denier Professor Robert Faurisson. When Faurisson’s writing on this subject became public, he was suspended from his position at the University of Lyon. Chomsky then signed a petition in support of Faurisson’s reinstatement. He followed that up in 1980 with a brief introduction to a book by Faurisson. Chomsky later tried to say that he was personally unacquainted with Faurisson and was only speaking out for academic freedom. But, unfortunately for Chomsky and his acolytes, this was contradicted by Faurisson himself. For the Frenchman had written a letter to the New Statesman in 1979. It began with: “Noam Chomsky … is aware of the research work I do on what I call the ‘gas chambers and genocide hoax’. He informed me that Gitta Sereny had mentioned my name in an article in your journal. He told me I had been referred to ‘in an extraordinarily unfair way’.” (This unpublished letter was quoted in the October, 1981 issue of the Australian journal Quadrant.)
Consequently, Chomsky’s later public qualifications about his reasons for signing the petition and writing the introduction ring hollow. He did know Faurisson. He was in contact with him personally, and apparently was encouraging him to defend his work.
When he found this out, author and professor W. D. Rubinstein had a correspondence with Chomsky, which seemed to certify the worst fears about the noted linguist and Faurisson. Chomsky wrote the following: “Someone might well believe that there were no gas chambers but there was a Holocaust … ” (ibid) In defending Faurisson’s writings Chomsky then wrote that anyone who found them lacking in common sense or accepted the established history, was exhibiting “an interesting reflection of the totalitarian mentality, or more properly in this case, the mentality of the religious fanatic.” (Ibid) Rubinstein replied that to hold that there were no gas chambers but there was a Holocaust was an absurd tenet. Chomsky went ballistic. He wrote back that the respondent was lacking in elementary logical reasoning, and he was falsifying documentary evidence. He then said that the Nazis may have worked these Jews to death and then shoveled their bodies into crematoria without gas chambers. He concluded his blast with this: “If you cannot comprehend this, I suggest that you begin your education again at the kindergarten level.” (Click here for this remarkable article)
As Werner Cohn has shown, Chomsky has tried to conceal his friendly relations with a Holocaust Denial group in France. This group included Serge Thion, Faurisson and Pierre Guillame. He seems to have gotten in contact with this group through Thion, another leftist critic of the idea of calling what Pol Pot did in Cambodia a genocide. This group ran a publishing house called La Vieille Taupe, which featured prints of Holocaust Denial literature. The petition that Chomsky signed contained the following sentence about Faurisson: “Since 1974 he has been conducting extensive independent historical research into the ‘holocaust’ question.” The framing of the last two words in that statement should jar anyone’s senses. (For an overview of Chomsky’s association with this group click here; for a specific example of his attempt to cover it up, click here.)
As with his resistance to the Khmer Rouge genocide, Chomsky’s defense and association with Faurisson is startling to any objective person. Which again excludes his acolytes. Today, the low estimate for the fatalities caused by the crimes of the Khmer Rouge is 1.7 million. (see this NYT article from 2017) The idea that there were no mass gassings and crematoria at the Nazi death camps was thoroughly debunked at the trial of David Irving. Irving was a friend and colleague of Faurisson. That court action was instigated by Irving himself. There has been a very good web site constructed from the materials devoted to that trial. I strongly recommend reading the reports given to the court by Robert Jan van Pelt, Christopher Browning, and Richard Evans. They seem to me to be models of what scholarly research should be about.
IV
Before centering on the issues of Kennedy’s assassination and his presidency, it is important to discuss briefly the general issue of the Cold War, if only to place those subjects in historical context. As with many leftist polemicists, Chomsky usually does not do this. And when he does, he almost exclusively centers on what western powers did to cause the Cold War and continue it.
Yet it would seem to most people to be important to review objectively these matters in any historical discussion of American foreign policy from 1945-1991—the obvious reason being that it was the most powerful influence on American foreign policy and world events in that time period. Every president from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush was strongly influenced by it, to the point that almost every major foreign policy issue was colored by it. Therefore, if one is writing the history of this period, or a part of it, one has to factor this into the discussion. If not, then one can be accused of ignoring, or discounting, the historical backdrop.
For to deprive these events of their context is to sap them of some of their meaning. Related to this, another problem with Chomsky—as noted above—is imbalance. The policy of aiding foreign countries in their resistance to communism was spelled out way back in 1947 with the Truman Doctrine. This was then endorsed by Congress, and legislation was passed to carry out the policy. One can argue whether or not the Cold War was exaggerated, whether it was too covert, even whether or not it was justified. But one cannot act as if it did not exist. Or that the communist side had no provocations to it, or had no atrocities done in its name. For how else can one explain the Korean War, Hungary in 1956, or the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968? We can continue in this vein with the Chinese usurpation of Tibet or the crimes of Fidel Castro, or those of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, the latter of which are both mind-boggling.
But as with Pol Pot in Cambodia, these things are minimized, discounted or ignored by people like Chomsky, and the late Alexander Cockburn. Almost all of the critical analysis was and is of the USA. But if things like balance and historical context are left out, then what is this kind of writing really worth?
Which is another way of saying the following: A theoretical approach is only as good as the person who uses it. If that writer is too biased one way or the other, the result will suffer greatly. To make a point of comparison: Michael Parenti is also an advocate of the aforementioned style of analysis we have called “structural” or “systemic”. Yet he understands that there are men and women who occasionally manage to rise above the system and do some good for a great number of people. And Parenti also understands that political conspiracies do exist, and have been proven to exist. To use just one example, the heist of the 2000 election in Florida by Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris.
Even though this crime was done in broad daylight—what with roadblocks set up to hinder people from voting—no person was even interviewed by any law enforcement arm, let alone indicted. The political result of this was horrendous: George W. Bush created a totally unjustified war in Iraq. A war that Al Gore would not have started. Not only do political conspiracies exist, if not addressed, prosecuted, and stopped, they can have terrible results for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people. So to deny they occur is to deny reality. And as Parenti has said, reality is sometimes radical.
A second problem with using this system-oriented approach is that—as we have seen with Cambodia—it tends to sweep all contrary facts or evidence into an ideological whirlpool. That is, facts get discounted, data gets warped, and key events are sometimes omitted. What is important is keeping the model of that oppressive structure intact. If facts or data collide with that model, it’s the facts or data that get discarded or discounted. The theoretical underpinnings of Chomsky and Edward Herman’s writings on Cambodia were to show that American and western media was distorting a communist revolution. Therefore, they repeatedly used phrases like “the alleged genocide in Cambodia”, or they wrote that “executions have numbered at most in the thousands”. (See this article) This last comment was written in 1979, when the Khmer Rouge regime had fallen and some reporters had visited the country to actually see the horrible devastation with their own eyes. At times Chomsky and Herman used Khmer Rouge sources and endorsed books that extensively sourced footnotes to Pol Pot’s government releases. This approach is a serious problem for people who actually care about things like accuracy, fairness, and completeness.
In the wake of Oliver Stone’s JFK, what was so odd about the Chomsky/Cockburn allegiance to a point of view which privileges the critique of institutions as systems is that it disappeared upon their inquiry into Kennedy’s murder. That is, in both men’s comments on the Warren Commission and its presentation of evidence, you will nowhere find any discussion of the lives and careers of the persons who controlled that investigative body. Men like Allen Dulles, John McCloy, Gerald Ford, and J. Edgar Hoover. Yet, those four men dominated the Commission proceedings. (See Walt Brown’s book, The Warren Omission, especially pp. 84-87).
This is odd—in two respects. First, it was these men, not Kennedy, who had played large parts in being ‘Present at the Creation’—that is, in forming and then supporting the Eastern Establishment, which was responsible for setting up and maintaining the structure of American government in the 20th century. Any critic of the way institutions of power function would surely be concerned with this detail, because in presenting that particular case, one does not have to juggle, manipulate, and distort the evidence. There are books on these men in which tons of evidence exist to make that demonstration. These four were clearly responsible for some of the worst American crimes of the 20th century. (See James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, second edition, pp. 234-40, 321-40.)
Secondly, to somehow suppose that those four would not manipulate the evidence in a murder case is simply to ignore the reality of who they were. Yet this is the concept that both Chomsky and Cockburn supported. For instance, as mentioned earlier, Cockburn actually interviewed a junior counsel for the Warren Commission in the pages of The Nation. He never asked him one challenging question. Which is incredible considering the record of that Commission.
Regarding Chomsky, consider an incident from 1994. Two subscribers to Probe Magazine, Steve Jones and Bob Dean, went to a meeting of the Democratic Socialist Club of Reading, Pennsylvania. Chomsky was the guest speaker. Both Jones and Dean were surprised when Chomsky seemed to veer off topic to go into a tirade against President Kennedy. When Jones and Dean tried to approach and talk to Chomsky about Kennedy afterwards, he became “very defensive and dismissive of us, brushing us off by saying that he’d seen all of the evidence.” Apparently, this meant the declassified record, and therefore there was nothing to address. (e-mail communication with Jones, 6/19/2017)
Again, this tells us much about Chomsky’s respect—or lack of—for scholarly practice. Because, at that time, the Assassination Records Review Board had just begun declassifying two million pages of records that had previously been kept secret from the public on the JFK case. Hence no one had seen them prior to this time. Including Chomsky. So what was he talking about? The evidence the ARRB declassified concerning the actual circumstances of Kennedy’s murder make the case against Oswald pretty much insupportable. And in just about every way: concerning Oswald, Kennedy’s autopsy, the ballistics evidence, and Oswald’s alibi. (For the last, see Barry Ernest’s book, The Girl on the Stairs.)
Further, neither Cockburn nor Chomsky seemed to be aware of the transcript of the final executive session of the Warren Commission. Sen. Richard Russell, Representative Hale Boggs, and Senator John Sherman Cooper—who I have previously called the Southern Wing—had planned on expressing their reservations at this meeting about the Single Bullet Theory. The idea that one bullet, CE 399, had gone through both Kennedy and Governor John Connally, smashing two bones, making seven wounds, emerging almost entirely unscathed, and losing almost no volume from its mass. Russell, especially, wanted his objections expressed in the record of this final meeting. Today, we have the record of that meeting. There is no trace of his, or anyone else’s, reservations about the Single Bullet Theory. For the simple reason that there was no stenographic record of that final meeting. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 284) In other words, the Eastern Establishment figures—Dulles, McCloy, and Ford, likely coopted Chief Justice Earl Warren and chief counsel J. Lee Rankin into tricking the other members into believing there would be such a record. In fact, a woman was there masquerading as a stenographer. But the Commission’s contract with the stenographic company had expired three days prior. (ibid, p. 295) As Gerald McKnight writes about this matter, the obvious reason for this charade was to keep the strenuous objections of the Southern Wing out of the transcribed record, and thereby maintain the illusion that the Commission had been unanimous in its verdict on the case. In other words, here was an almost textbook case of the way institutions tend to ensure the survival of belief in the status quo, one made to order for critics on the Left.
But in an unexplained inconsistency, both Chomsky and Cockburn dropped the structural approach in their analysis of the Commission. Even though it would seem to be perfectly suited for that type of analysis. Why? Because if one did explain who these men were and what they did with the evidence, then one could conclude that they covered up the true circumstances of Kennedy’s death, for the simple reason he was not a member of their club. Which is a direction they do not want to go in.
Yet, David Talbot demonstrates this at length in his analysis of the conflicts between President Kennedy and Allen Dulles during 1961. These were centered on Kennedy’s Congo policy, Dulles’ backing of the revolt of the Algerian generals against French President Charles DeGaulle, and ultimately how Dulles lied to Kennedy about the Bay of Pigs operation. (Talbot, pp. 382-417) In other words, in just one year, the CIA Director had come into conflict with Kennedy over three important areas and events. Finally, Kennedy felt he had to terminate Dulles, along with both his Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans Richard Bissell. The first and only time in 70 years that has been done at the CIA. As Talbot also points out, after Kennedy was killed, Dulles lobbied for a position on the Warren Commission (ibid, pp. 573-74)—something that no one else did. As previously referred to, Walt Brown has shown that Dulles then became the single most active member of the Warren Commission. During a meeting with Commission critic David Lifton at UCLA in 1965, Dulles showed utter disdain for any of the evidence that the Commission had ignored or misrepresented to the public, e.g., the Zapruder film frames. (Talbot, p. 591)
Let us use just one other example. Robert Kennedy was the first Attorney General who actually exercised some degree of control over FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The enmity between the two has been well chronicled by more than one author. After JFK was killed, Hoover had Bobby Kennedy’s private line to his office removed. (Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential, p. 315) The Warren Report itself says that Hoover and the FBI were responsible for the vast majority of the investigation. (See, p. xii) Therefore, why would such men—Dulles and Hoover—who clearly had no love for JFK, bend over backwards to find out the truth about his death? The fact is they did not. For example, the day after the murder, Hoover was so concerned about who killed President Kennedy that he was at the racetrack. (Summers, op. cit.) To leave out things like this, and much more, is not writing history. And it is not honest scholarship. It is depriving the reader of important information.
V
Chomsky operates his views of both Kennedy and his murder via inductive, closed-system reasoning. It is both banal and simplistic: since the USA operates in a sick political and economic system, no one can rise above it. Therefore, Kennedy was really no different than Nixon, Johnson, and Eisenhower. The underlying problem—as writers like Donald Gibson and Richard Mahoney have demonstrated—is that when one actually studies the record, Kennedy was not part of the Power Elite, and did not aspire to be part of it. This is why, as Donald Gibson has shown, Kennedy and David Rockefeller—the acknowledged leader of the Eastern Establishment at the time—had no time or sympathy for each other. (See Gibson’s Battling Wall Street throughout, but especially pp. 73-76) The reason Kennedy made his historic 1957 Senate speech on the impending doom of French colonialism in Algeria was because he had been in Vietnam when the French empire there was collapsing. He understood that the Vietnam conflict had not really been about communism, but about nationalism. And he said this many times, and took considerable heat for it. (See Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal In Africa, pp. 14-23)
When Oliver Stone’s JFK came out, Chomsky made numerous statements questioning Stone’s thesis about Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam. He eventually wrote an essay in Z Magazine on the topic. In essence, he denied all the withdrawal evidence as outlined by Fletcher Prouty and John Newman, who advised Stone on that subject. The problem for Chomsky today is that other scholars decided that Prouty and Newman were on to something. After all, Prouty actually worked on Kennedy’s withdrawal plan in September of 1963. John Newman was writing a revolutionary book on the subject entitled JFK and Vietnam, which was published in January of 1992.
Seriously considering that evidence, these scholars then went to work. And today, a small shelf of books exists on the subject. These authors agree with the Stone/Prouty/Newman withdrawal thesis, e.g., David Kaiser’s American Tragedy, James Blight’s Virtual JFK, Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster. One reason these new books are there is that the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) declassified many pages of documents that support the withdrawal thesis. This declassification process occurred in 1997. Any serious scholar has to consider new evidence when it is declassified. Chomsky did not. In 2000, in a book called Hopes and Prospects, in relation to this issue, he wrote: “On these matters see my Rethinking Camelot … . Much more material has appeared since, but while adding some interesting nuances, it leaves the basic picture intact.” (pp. 123, 295)
In other words, the scores of pages of new ARRB documents released on the subject, the recorded tapes in the White House, and the new essays and books published, these amount to “nuances.” The “nuances” include President Johnson confessing in February of 1964 that he himself knows he is breaking with Kennedy’s policy. They include the transcripts of the May 1963 Sec/Def meeting in Hawaii where McNamara is actually executing that withdrawal plan—with no reference to a contingency upon victory. (These and other documents are included in this presentation)
In 1997, that last piece of evidence convinced some MSM outlets, like The New York Times, that Kennedy was planning on withdrawing from Vietnam at the time of his assassination. We can go on and on. But the point is made. To any objective person, these are not “nuances”. They are integral.
To show Chomsky’s bizarreness on this point, let us use two other instances of just how intent he is to disguise the facts and evidence of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan. One of his older excuses was to say that Kennedy’s advisors fabricated the withdrawal plan after the Tet offensive. (Z Magazine, September, 1992) Even for Chomsky, this is ridiculous. What is he saying? That Kennedy’s advisors falsified the then classified record while it was in the National Archives? That they also managed to get a voice impressionist to impersonate Johnson, McGeorge Bundy and McNamara discussing this withdrawal plan?
Chomsky’s latest position is a sort of rear action retreat. He now admits that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara offered up a withdrawal plan. In other words, it was McNamara’s plan, not Kennedy’s. Not so, and let us illustrate why.
In November of 1961, a two-week long debate took place in the White House. The subject was whether or not to commit combat troops into Vietnam. Advisors Max Taylor and Walt Rostow had returned from Vietnam and made that recommendation. From all the accounts we have, Kennedy was virtually the only person arguing against that proposal. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, pp. 275-83) At its conclusion he signed off on NSAM 111 which sent 15,000 more advisors instead.
Kennedy was disturbed that he had to carry the argument virtually alone. So he decided to ask someone who he knew agreed with him to write his own report on the subject. This was Ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith did visit Saigon, and he did write a report recommending no combat troops in theater and a gradual American distancing. (Cable of November 20, 1961, which was followed by a longer report; Blight, p. 72, see also David Kaiser, American Tragedy, pp. 131-32) Kennedy later had this report forwarded to Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara in April of 1962. This was the beginning of the withdrawal plan. We know this because on his trip to Vietnam in May, McNamara told General Paul Harkins to begin a training program for the army of South Vietnam so America could begin reducing its forces there. Harkins was the supreme military commander in Saigon. (Kaiser, pp. 132-34) Also, McNamara’s deputy Roswell Gilpatric revealed in an oral history that his boss had told him that he had instructions from Kennedy to begin to wind down the war. (Blight, p. 371) This culminated with the aforementioned declassified Sec/Def conference in Hawaii in May of 1963. At this meeting, McNamara requested from all departments—State, Pentagon, CIA—specific schedules beginning a withdrawal in December of 1963 and ending in the early fall of 1965. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 126)
The idea that this plan was McNamara’s is another fanciful Chomsky invention. In addition to the evidence stated above—cables, oral history—there is another undeniable fact. In the November, 1961 debates described above, McNamara was asking for the insertion of combat troops into Vietnam. In fact, his proposal was the largest request of all. He told Kennedy to commit upward of six divisions, or about 205,000 men. And he framed the request in pure Cold War terms. If this was not done, it would lead to communist control over all of Indochina and also Indonesia. (Blight, pp. 276-77) The idea that afterwards McNamara had a personal epiphany and reversed himself on his own is simply not credible. Especially when combined with the above evidence. Plus the fact that it was Kennedy alone who was holding out against combat troops in November. And as with Kennedy, there is no mention by McNamara on any tape or any of the Sec/Def documents, or in NSAM 263, that the withdrawal plan would only be completed as the circumstances on the battlefield improve. Chomsky’s arguments against Kennedy’s withdrawal plan exist in a vacuum created by him and his acolytes.
VI
In Barbour’s film, Chomsky is shown at a seminar saying words to the effect that no one should care if Kennedy died as a result of a conspiracy. The problem with this statement is that, at the time of Kennedy’s death, it’s the people who Chomsky tries to stand up for—residents of the Third World—that felt a sharp pang of loss at JFK’s passing. And very few of them felt that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. The president of Egypt, Gamel Abdul Nasser, fell into a deep depression and had the films of Kennedy’s funeral shown four times on national television. (Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, p. 228) Ben Bella, the premier of Algeria, phoned the American ambassador in Algiers and said, “I can’t believe it. Believe me, I’d rather it happen to me than him.” He then called in a comment to the state radio station saying that Kennedy had been a victim of “racialist and police-organized machinations”. (ibid, p. 227) When asked about Kennedy’s assassination in 1964, Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia began perspiring. He then said that he loved the man because Kennedy understood him. He ended the reverie by saying, “Tell me, why did they kill Kennedy?” (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 374) Nehru of India called Kennedy’s murder a crime against humanity. He then said that Kennedy was “a man of ideals, vision, and courage, who sought to serve his own people as well as the larger causes of the world.” (Muehlenbeck, p. 231) Two weeks after Kennedy’s death, economist Barbara Ward visited the office of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. The president had a photo of John and Jackie Kennedy on his desk. With tears in his eyes he said, “I have written her, and I have prayed for them both. Nothing shocked me so deeply as this.” Months later, when the American ambassador presented him with a copy of the Warren Report, Nkrumah turned to the title page. He pointed to the name of Allen Dulles, and returned it to the ambassador with the one word comment, “Whitewash”. (Muehlenbeck, p. 229; Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 235)
But it wasn’t just the leaders of the Third World who were shaken and saddened by Kennedy’s passing. It was also its citizenry. As an editorial in West Africa magazine stated, “Not even the death of Dag Hammarskjold dismayed Africans as much as did the death of John Kennedy.” (Muehlenbeck, p. 229) In Nairobi, Kenya, six thousand people packed into a cathedral for a memorial service. A Kenyan politician said that never in his career had he seen this kind of grief registered over the death of a foreigner. (Muehlenbeck, p. 226) In the Ivory Coast, the American ambassador woke early the day after the assassination. There was someone waiting for him at his office. The man said he ran a small business about 25 miles away. He said he didn’t really know why he was there. But he tried to explain anyway: “I came here this morning simply to say that I never knew President Kennedy, I never saw President Kennedy, but he was my friend.” (Ibid, p. 228) According to author Thurston Clarke, upon learning of his passing, the peasants of the Yucatan Peninsula immediately started planting a Kennedy Memorial Garden.
Were all these people wrong?
But there is one person we can add to this list. His name is Noam Chomsky.
In the time period following Kennedy’s murder, writer/researcher Ray Marcus tried to enlist several prominent academics to take up the cause of exposing the plot that killed President Kennedy. In 1966 he wrote I. F. Stone on the subject. In 1967, he approached Arthur Schlesinger about it. They both declined to take up the cause. In 1969, he was in the Boston area on an extended business function. He therefore arranged a discussion with Chomsky. Chomsky had initially agreed to a one-hour meeting in his office. Ray brought only 3-4 pieces of evidence, including his work on CE 399, the Magic Bullet, and a series of stills from the Zapruder film. Which had not been shown nationally yet.
Soon after the discussion began, Chomsky told “his secretary to cancel the remaining appointments for the day. The scheduled one-hour meeting stretched to 3-4 hours. Chomsky showed great interest in the material. We mutually agreed to a follow-up session later in the week. Then I met with Gar Alperovitz. At the end of our one-hour meeting, he said he would take an active part in the effort if Chomsky would lead it.” (Probe, Vol. 4 No. 2, p. 25) Ray did have a second meeting with Chomsky which lasted much of the afternoon. And “the discussion ranged beyond evidentiary items to other aspects of the case. I told Chomsky of Alperovitz’ offer to assist him if he decided to lead an effort to reopen. Chomsky indicated he was very interested, but would not decide before giving the matter much careful consideration.” (ibid) A professional colleague of Chomsky’s, Professor Selwyn Bromberger, was also at the second meeting. He drove Ray home. As he dropped him off he said, “If they are strong enough to kill the president, and strong enough to cover it up, then they are too strong to confront directly … if they feel sufficiently threatened, they may move to open totalitarian rule.” (ibid)
It is important to reflect on Bromberger’s words as Ray related what happened next. He returned to California and again asked Chomsky to take up the cause. In April of 1969, Chomsky wrote back saying he now had to delay his decision until after a trip to England in June. He said he would get in touch with Ray then. Needless to say, he never did. He ended up being a prominent critic of the Vietnam War and this ended up making his name in both leftist and intellectual circles. Reflecting on Bromberger’s words to Marcus, one could conclude that Bromberger and Chomsky decided that the protest against Vietnam, which was becoming both vocal and widespread, and almost mainstream at the time, afforded a path of less resistance than the JFK case did. After all, look at what had happened to Jim Garrison.
But if this is correct, it would qualify as a politically motivated decision. One not made on the evidence. As Marcus writes, it was with Chomsky, “not the question of whether or not there was a conspiracy—that he had given every indication of having already decided in the affirmative … ” Marcus’ revelations on this subject are informative and relevant in evaluating Chomsky, both then and now. For purposes of our argument, it is important to know what Chomsky actually thought of the evidence when he was first exposed to it. This would seem to be a much more candid and open response than what he wrote decades later, when his writings on the subject were just as categorical, except the other way. In other words, Chomsky did a 180-degree flip on the issue of whether President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. And that first conviction lasted at least until 1976. Because in that year, he signed a petition to form the House Select Committee on Assassinations. That is very likely the reason that, in 1971, as co-editor of the Senator Mike Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers, he allowed Peter Scott to write an essay addressing the question of Johnson’s alteration of Kennedy’s de-escalation plan in Vietnam.
Try and find an interview or essay in which Chomsky admits how close he was to being the chief advocate for a public campaign to find out who really killed Kennedy. Yet, it is a fact. Maybe Chomsky changed his mind. But if that was the case, he has no right to be so smug and snide about others who came to the same conclusion he once did. Or perhaps, as Bromberger let out, he and Alperovitz and Chomsky decided that Vietnam offered an easier path to prominence. Which, undoubtedly, it did. If that was the case, then it was a practical choice, not an intellectual or moral one. And evidently, Chomsky and his friends did not realize that they could have combined the two.
As we have seen, Chomsky’s recurrent posing as a scholar who has assimilated the entire declassified record on the JFK case, and on the Kennedy/Johnson Vietnam policies, is simply an empty pose. And this is part of a persona that, as we have seen in the case of Faurisson and Cambodia, substitutes an extreme and ingrained bias for what is supposed to be scholarly analysis. If there is any hope of reconstituting this nation around a viable set of values and principles, then the issue of the hijacking of America in the sixties through assassinations will have to be honestly confronted. As we have seen, Noam Chomsky refuses to do that—in fact he deliberately avoids it. He then adopts certain disguises and deceptions to conceal the way he once felt about the subject. Which is, in large part, why he is part of the problem, not the solution.
