For three months, beginning in November of 2018, Jim DiEugenio did one-hour-long interviews on Dave Emory’s syndicated radio show For the Record. Emory has been broadcasting for 40 years. These 25 programs constitute the longest continuous interview series he has ever done. The subject was a sustained inquiry into DiEugenio’s second edition of Destiny Betrayed. Emory was very impressed by the author’s use of the declassified record excavated by the Assassination Records Review Board and how it altered the database of Jim Garrison’s New Orleans inquiry into the assassination of President Kennedy. This series is also the longest set of interviews DiEugenio has ever done about the book. Emory read the book and took extensive notes, which made for an intelligent and informed discussion of what the present record is on the Garrison inquiry.
Tag: NEW ORLEANS
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Jim DiEugenio’s 25-part series on Destiny Betrayed, with Dave Emory
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JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 7
The 2017 release of JFK assassination files has shown that the national security agencies are not subject to the JFK Records Act (1992) and we, the people, have no right to know their secrets, but must settle for mostly or entirely redacted and even illegible materials. An accessory to the fact is the mainstream media, whose willful deception would have us believe that “there’s nothing here” or, if there is something, it should be a Red conspiracy.
The History Channel did its bit by extending the infamous series JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald 1 with a seventh part that is an in-your-face flipped bird to the public. The ineffable Bob Baer reentered the game of deception as “one of the most intelligence minds in the world.” He boasted about having his own network of former CIA and FBI agents who “can tell me what I should be looking at and what to dismiss” within the complex milieu of the newly declassified JFK files. Poor Bob. He needs to set up his own front group to mislead the global media audience about a crucial American tragedy. The Warren Commission critics going through each and every document can’t be trusted.
Foreknowledge?
Among the stories indicating awareness of the coming JFK assassination2, Baer purposely picked the blatant lie of Cuban defector Florentino Aspillaga3 and a dubious phone call trickily turned into an explosive discovery in the light of a memo from Jim Angleton, CIA Counterintelligence Chief, to FBI Director Hoover. It was dated on November 26, 1963 (NARA 104-10079-10262) and the gist reads thus: “At 18:05 GMT [12:05 Dallas] on 22 November [1963] an anonymous telephone call was made in Cambridge, England, to the senior reporter of the Cambridge News. The caller said only that the Cambridge News reporter should call the American Embassy for some big news and then rang off.”
Baer’s discovery is a trick since both Angleton’s memo and the original CIA cable of 23 November 1963 from London (NARA 1993.07.22.14:03:15:250530) were already available to the HSCA forty years ago. Moreover, the British Security Service (MI-5) has never revealed the identity of the reporter, if any, who picked up the phone. The story itself has been neither published by the Cambridge newspaper nor even addressed as a topic of conversation by its staffers.4
Since there is no quantum of proof for discerning within the range of possibilities5—from a prank with coincidental timing to a conspiratorial move—Baer’s mix of the Cambridge uncertainty with Aspillaga’s falsehood is likely the worst approach to understand who would have been behind Kennedy’s death.
A Missing Link?
In the fourth part, “The Cuban Connection,” Baer and his partner, former police officer Adam Bercovici, dealt with Antonio Veciana’s6 account of having seen Maurice Bishop with Oswald in Dallas in the late summer of 1963. Bercovici blurted out: “There’s your co-conspirator. He [Oswald] had on-the-ground assistance in Dallas.” Nonetheless, they withheld the critical info that Bishop was David Atlee Phillips, a covert action officer running anti-Castro operations at the CIA Station in Mexico City by that time.7
In the seventh part, they avoid keeping track of Phillips and resort to a “document [that] alone could destroy any conversation about Oswald being a lone wolf.” Not all that much, Bob. Your document (NARA 180-10141-10191) reduces to a handwritten note from October 2, 1967, by Bernardo de Torres, the first CIA agent to infiltrate D.A. Jim Garrison’s office.8 The note merely states that some Rene Carballo, a Cuban refugee living in New Orleans, “thinks head of training camp at [Lake] Ponchartrain was ‘El Mexicano’ [who] accompanied LHO to Mex[ico] City.”
This note was also available to the HSCA, so Baer should have used it earlier, but he even missed the primary source: the main FBI Headquarters file [62-109060] on the JFK assassination. It contains a teletype from May 11, 1967 (Section 131, pp. 19-20) about Carlos Bringuier9 advising the FBI in New Orleans that Carballo “was conducting his own investigation into the death of President Kennedy and had determined that Richard Davis was not actually in charge of the anti-Castro training camp near Lake Ponchartrain, but it was actually run by a man known as ‘El Mexicano.’ Carballo opined it was this man, ‘El Mexicano,’ who accompanied Lee Harvey Oswald to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City.”
The Cuban refugee Francisco Rodriguez-Tamayo, a.k.a. “El Mexicano” [The Mexican],10 is a delusional choice for both an Oswald companion11 in Mexico City and a head of a training camp elsewhere. No “fellow traveler” has been identified in the alleged Oswald’s route from New Orleans to Mexico City or during his stay there. Likewise, Richard Davis comes across the story because of the training camp at Lacombe, set up in 1962 for the Intercontinental Penetration Force (INTERPEN) and operated in the summer of 1963 by an amorphous anti-Castro group.12
Baer had already plunged into confusion during the third part, “Oswald Goes Dark,”13 trying to shed light on him as an ex-Marine engaged in paramilitary exercises with Cuban exiles. Baer and his team went to the training camp at Belle Chasse, headquarter of the CIA operation JM/MOVE, run by Higinio “Nino” Diaz (AM/NORM-1) in 1961. In those days, Oswald was living in Minsk (Belarus).
As leaders of the training camp at Lacombe, the Garrison probe identified Davis, Laureano Batista (AM/PALM-2) and Victor Paneque (AM/RUG-5), but in no way “El Mexicano.”14 Although any sensible citizen would prefer Garrison over Carballo, Baer recklessly keeps on forging his missing link to Oswald by attributing to “El Mexicano” a dual nature of professional assassin and Castro agent.
For the former, Baer musters an FBI report from June 28, 1968 (NARA 124-90158-10027) about an informant saying that “El Mexicano” had been arrested in Caracas, Venezuela, “on a charge of an alleged assassination attempt against an unknown individual.” Baer doesn’t give a damn about the additional info. There was “no sufficient evidence to prosecute the case (…) except that [“El Mexicano”] had apparently entered the country illegally.”
For the latter, Baer applies the same clumsy rule of evidence. He deems as “smoking gun” a CIA internal memo from March 19, 1963 (NARA 104-10180-10247) about the following intel furnished by “an untested source.” In El Principe prison (Havana), the source spoke briefly with death row inmate Roberto Perez-Cruzata, who asked him to tell the U.S. authorities that “El Mexicano” was “a paid agent of the Cuban government in Miami.” Perez-Cruzata added he had learned it from Major Efigenio Ameijeiras during an interrogation. Ameijeiras also told him that his anti-Cuban government activities had been reported by “El Mexicano.”
Baer does not seem at all to be intrigued by the curious case of Major Ameijeiras, chief of Castro’s National Revolutionary Police (PNR), burning a Castro agent before a Brigade 2506 prisoner under interrogation.15 Nor did he pay attention to the follow-up by CIA, FBI, and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Instead of remaining under a cloud of suspicion as Castro agent, “El Mexicano” was reported talking about bombing a ship bound for Cuba, delivering silencers along with Luis Posada-Carriles (AM/CLAVE-15) and even trafficking drugs with Ricardo “The Monkey” Morales (AM/DESK-1).
A Russian-Cuban Probe?
With the preconceived idea that the KGB and the Cuban Intelligence Services (CuIS) worked in tandem to kill Kennedy, and that the FBI Director Hoover covered it up to avoid a nuclear WW III, Baer continues his far-fetched story about KGB officer Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov—who served at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City under the official cover of vice-consul—in order to pass off an ill-founded allegation as the greatest worry: “The fact that Oswald is essentially being handled by Kostikov.”
Since the first two parts, “The Iron Meeting” and “The Russian Network,” Baer had been trying to present the Kostikov-Oswald connection as emerging from hitherto little known evidence. Yet in 1964, the Warren Report identified Kostikov as KGB officer (page 309) and established that Oswald “had dealt with [him]” (page 734). Moreover, the CIA informed the Warren Commission that “Kostikov is believed to work for Department Thirteen (…) responsible for executive action, including sabotage and assassination (Commission Document 347, p. 10).
As a somehow sparklingly brand-new item, Baer shows a CIA memo of 23 Nov 1963 (NARA 104-10015-10056) that was partially, but well enough declassified in 1995. It was prepared by the acting chief of the CIA Soviet Russia Division, Tennent “Pete” Bagley, who linked Kostikov as officer of “the KGB’s 13th Department” with Oswald as “a KGB agent on a sensitive mission [who] can (sic) be met in official installations [as the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City] using as cover (…) some sort of open business [like requesting an entry visa in the Soviet Union].” Baer again has simply left the audience in the dark. Both of these assumptions led straight to a Red conspiracy theory which has long been discredited and may be deemed defunct.
For the sake of argument, let’s accept Kostikov was “head of Department Thirteen”, as Baer affirms and stresses with a flashback scene from Oleg Nechiporenko’s interview in part two. Baer conveniently forgets that his interviewee—who met Oswald as well in his capacity of KGB counterintelligence officer under official cover of vice consul—rebutted Bagley’s assumption about Oswald, which presupposes he would have been recruited before meeting Kostikov. Nechiporenko not only emphatically denied this,16 but also demonstrated that the two very brief Oswald contacts with Kostikov did not add up to agent handling. They were nothing more than the coincidental meeting of an American visa applicant with a competent Soviet consular official.17
Both the FBI and CIA were tracking Kostikov before Oswald showed up in Mexico City, but by June 25, 1963, Angleton assured Hoover that the CIA “could locate no information” indicating he was an officer of Department Thirteen.18
If there had been any serious concern about Oswald meeting Kostikov, Langley would have advised strengthening surveillance on both after receiving this piece of intel from the CIA station in Mexico City: “American male who spoke broken Russian said his name LEE OSWALD (phonetic), stated he at SOVEMB on 28 Sept when spoke with consul whom he believed be Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov” (MEXI 6453, 8 Oct 1963). Quite the contrary, Langley abstained from giving such an instruction and even omitted any reference to Kostikov while providing ODACID (State Department), ODENVY (FBI) and ODOATH (Navy) with the intel (DIR 74673, 10 Oct 1963).
The following month, Oswald broke the news as prime suspect of the JFK assassination without having been grilled by the FBI, the CIA or the Secret Service about his travel to Mexico. In tune with Bagley’s allegation, Angleton changed his mind about Kostikov to deflect the attention from a CIA failure to a KGB plot. On February 6, 1976, however, Angleton recanted before the Church Committee: “There’s never been any confirmation [that Kostikov] was 13th Department.”19
The connection between Kostikov and Oswald surfaced in a phone call to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City on October 1, 1963. The call was taped by the CIA operation LIENVOY and made—according to its transcriber Boris Tarasoff—by “the same person who had called a day or so ago [namely Saturday 28th of September] and spoken in broken Russian:”20
- Caller: Hello, this LEE OSWALD speaking. I was at your place last Saturday and spoke to a Consul, and they say that they’d send a telegram to Washington, so I wanted to find out if you have anything new? But I don’t remember the name of that Consul.
- Soviet guard: KOSTIKOV. He is dark?
- Caller: Yes. My name is OSWALD.
Baer ignores the proven facts that since Oswald spoke fluent Russian and the FBI deduced it was not his voice on the tapes, Oswald was impersonated during both phone calls, and that CIA officer Anne Goodpasture, dubbed “the station’s troubleshooter” by Phillips, made up a fake story—which has passed into history as “The Mystery Man”—about Oswald at the Soviet Embassy, as well as hid from Langley Oswald’s visit to the Cuban Embassy. This series of facts lead immediately to the debunking of Baer’s and all other Red conspiracies. Based on the newly declassified November 24, 1963 FBI report about Oswald’s murder by Ruby (NARA 180-10110-10104), Baer emphasizes that Hoover covered up after the assassination; but the whole series deliberately overlooks that—before the assassination—the CIA had already engaged in a cover-up that had nothing to do with fear of nuclear war.
Ironically, Baer’s suspect Fidel Castro posed the most immediate and critical challenge to Hoover’s decision to close the case after Ruby killed Oswald:
As if it were a matter not of the President of the United States, but of a dog killed in the street, they declared the case closed with 48 hours. The case was closed when the case was becoming less closeable, when the case was becoming more mysterious, when the case was becoming more suspicious, when the case was becoming worthier of investigation from the judicial and criminal point of view.21
Baer tries to muddle through somehow by doing a pathetic pirouette. The Soviets “hand off Oswald to the Cubans” after he showed up in Mexico City as “an opportunity” that the KGB couldn’t seize, “because there was no plausible deniability.” Sure Bob, sure. The KBG offloaded Oswald on Cuban G-2 knowing the latter had no plausible deniability either, since Oswald had visited the Cuban Embassy, which was under CIA surveillance as heavy as at the Soviet Embassy.
So, far removed from common sense, Baer repeats the same old and silly song from Part Three22 about Mexican consular clerk Silvia Duran being a CuIS agent who met American visa applicant Lee Harvey Oswald outside the Cuban Consulate at a twist party … to put him up to killing Kennedy! Baer simply replaced the original mouthpiece for this story, the late Mexican writer Elena Garro, with her nephew Francisco Garro, as if a false allegation might come true by repetition.
A Self-Destructive Production?
Unwilling to delve into the body of evidence, Baer misses the chance to prevent extremely botched scenes like the discussion around Kostikov. After the voice-over narrator notes that his CIA Personality File [201-305052] “had never been released,” the telephone rings. A 167-page portion (1965-1975) of the Kostikov 201 file (NARA 104-10218-10032) has been finally declassified, although the camera focuses on a different file number [201-820393]. Baer brought former FBI analyst Farris Rookstool III to dig deeper into the lack of coordination between the FBI and the CIA, but Kostikov was in fact under well-coordinated surveillance by both agencies. Kostikov was handling a German national living in Oklahoma, Guenter Schulz, who was a double agent codenamed TUMBLEWEED by the FBI and AEBURBLE by the CIA. Bagley’s allegation that Kostikov worked for Department Thirteen was indeed based on the intel that—together with Oleg Brykin, “a known officer” of said department—he had been “pinpointing objectives for sabotage” to Schulz. Instead of the travels to Oklahoma City listed in the index of the referred volume, Rookstool points out the travels to San Diego and Baer makes up from who knows what information that Kostikov had been there planning “some sort of assassination or sabotage.”
In order to suggest that the KGB and the CuIS may have engaged in “massive coordination”23 to kill Kennedy, Baer brought in another media puppet, The Guardian (U.K.) foreign correspondent Luke Harding, who broached a false analogy with a joint operation by the KGB and Bulgarian State Security. On September 7, 1978, the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was mortally wounded in London by a ricin-filled pellet shot from a silenced gun concealed inside an umbrella. The problem is that this so-called “Umbrella Murder” was a far cry from the highly unlikely assassination of a Western official by the KBG and its allied services,24 and even less similar to Castro’s strategy against the U.S. dirty war. Thanks to his system-centered thinking style, Castro prevailed by carving out an ironclad personal security against the CIA assassination plots and infiltrating to the core both the CIA and the Cuban exile community.
In this seventh part, Baer utters: “I’m not doing this for the camera.” He’s damn right. Not so much due to poor TV production, but essentially because it is self-evident that he is just muddying the waters, even at the humiliating cost of lingering over the soft-headed folly that Castro wasn’t aware of an obvious fact: that killing a sitting U.S. President wouldn´t solve anything25—for by 1963, Operation Mongoose had been terminated—while it would surely risk everything.
Since 1963, the CIA has been trying to blame the Kennedy assassination on Cuba. Each time the claim has been exposed to scrutiny, it has collapsed. It is disheartening to see that, on the occasion of the final declassification of the JFK files, 54 years on, Baer is still beating that dead horse.
NOTES
1 See the six-part review on this website.
2 Some of these stories are plausible, as the tape-recorded prediction by right-wing extremist Joseph Milteer in Miami, or the incidents related to Silvia Odio in Dallas and Rose Cherami in Louisiana.
3 See “An Apocryphal Story as Baer’s Cornerstone” in JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 6.
4 Cf. “Did Cambridge News reporter really take a call before the JFK assassination?,” Cambridge News, 27 Oct 2017.
5 See Mark Bridger’s analysis, “Foreknowledge in England,” Dealey Plaza Echo, Vol. 9, Issue 2, pp. 1-16.
6 For a biographical sketch, see Antonio Veciana: Trained to Kill Kennedy Too?
7 On November 3, 2017, four of Phillips’ files were released. His 358-page Office of Personnel file has neither the fitness reports from 1956 to 1965 nor a single record from 1961 to 1965. The other three may be operational files, but they are so heavily redacted that no relevant data is to be found.
8 De Torres was a private detective who worked under David “El Indio” Sanchez Morales for the CIA Station in Miami (JM/WAVE). He served as Chief of Intelligence for the Brigade 2506 and was captured during the Bay of Pigs invasion. After being released, he resumed work in the private sector. Early in the Garrison probe, he offered help dropping the name of Garrison’s friend and Miami D.A. Richard Gerstein. Shortly after Garrison asked him to find Eladio del Valle, the latter was found murdered inside his car in Miami. Garrison eventually realized De Torres was undermining the JFK investigation and working for JM/WAVE.
9 Bringuier was a Cuban exile affiliated with the CIA-backed Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE – AM/SPELL for the CIA). On August 9, 1963, he confronted Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans. Shortly after, he debated with Oswald on radio WDSU about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). He was instrumental in the first printed JFK conspiracy theory. On November 23, 1963, a special edition of DRE’s monthly magazine Trinchera [Trenches] linked Oswald to Castro under the headline “The Presumed Assassins.”
10 On December 14, 1959, Castro lashed out against “El Mexicano” during the trial of Major Hubert Matos (AM/LIGHT-1): “Who was the first to accuse us of Communists? That captain of the Rebel Army who was arrested for abusing and getting drunk, known as ‘El Mexicano’ (…) He came to Havana, entered a military barrack, conferred on himself the rank of captain again, and as soon as he realized that his situation was untenable, he left for the United States and made the first statement of resignation from the army because the revolution was communist.” On June 25, 1959, “El Mexicano” told Stanley Ross, editor of the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario de Nueva York, that Castro had embezzled 4.5 million Cuban pesos raised for the revolution.
11 Baer is not the first to entertain this canard. In autumn 1964, a certain Gladys Davis advised the FBI that a “El Mexicano” had brought Oswald to her former marital residence in Coral Gables, Florida, “about August or September of 1959 or possibly 1960.” “El Mexicano” replied he never had contact with Oswald. The case was put to rest because Mrs. Davis was lying in an attempt to get FBI help in a custody dispute against her former husband. Cf. FBI 105-82555 Oswald HQ File, Section 220, pp. 95 ff.
12 “Playboy Interview: Jim Garrison,” Playboy Magazine, October 1967, p. 159 (NARA 104-10522-10109).
13 See “Rocking the Refugee Boat” in JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 3.
14 Cf. Garrison Investigation – Volume I, pp. 43 ff. (NARA 1994.05.06.08:43:35:150005).
15 Perez-Cruzata was a former PNR sergeant sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for killing Dr. Rafael Escalona Almeida on January 10, 1959, while the latter was under arrest. Perez-Cruzata escaped from La Cabana prison on July 1, 1959, and took refuge in the U.S. His extradition was denied (Ramos v. Diaz, 179 F. Supp. 459 / S.D. Fla. 1959). He ventured to return to Cuba with the Brigade 2506 and after a summary trial in Santa Clara (central Cuba), he ended up being one of the only five prisoners executed by a firing squad on September 9, 1961.
16 The CIA should have known it since the defection of KGB officer Yuri Nosenko on April 1964. He claimed having seen the KGB files compiled on Oswald during his stay in the Soviet Union and found Oswald was neither recruited nor used as agent. However, Nosenko’s chief handler, Pete Bagley, suspected he was a plant to convey false intel. The newly released file (NARA 104-10534-10205) about the case study on Nosenko shows he was “a bona fide defector [who was not] properly handled, [since] the variety of techniques used (…) did not conform to any generally accepted sense of the term methodology.”
17 Cf. Nechiporenko’s book Passport to Assassination (Birch Lane/Carol Publishing, 1993, pp. 28-29, 66-81). On September 27, Kostikov promptly handed off Oswald to counterintelligence officer Nechiporenko, right after checking his documents and learning he was a re-defector from the Soviet Union. On September 28, Oswald was attended by consul Pavel Yatskov. Kostikov just walked in and briefed Yatskov about Oswald’s previous visit. Then Nechiporenko arrived, but did not take part in the meeting. The scene dramatized with Oswald at a table before three Soviet officials is simply a botch job.
18 Admin Folder-X6: HSCA Administrative Folder, CIA reports LHO, p. 51 (NARA 124-10369-10063).
19 Testimony of James Angleton, pp. 62 f. (NARA 157-10014-10003).
20 Since the Mexican security police known as DFS was the CIA’s partner in the wiretapping operation, the transcripts of this and four more CIA taped calls related to Oswald are available in Spanish and some in English (NARA 104-10413-1007).
21 Cf. live speech by Castro at the University of Havana on November 27, 1963 (Commission Exhibit 2954).
22 See “The Twist Party” in JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 3.
23 Both agencies did engage in massive coordination precisely in Harding’s homeland, after around 100 KGB officers under diplomatic cover were expelled from London in September 1971. The CuIS took over some KGB operations in the UK, but none related to assassination of foreign leaders. Cf. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, “KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operation from Lenin to Gorbachev”, Sceptre, 1991, p. 514.
24 Cf. “Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping” (NARA 104-10423-10278). Rather than killing statemen, the KGB did its best to encourage the idea that the CIA had been involved in the JFK assassination and even that its methods to kill Castro had been taken into consideration against other foreign leaders. Indira Gandhi, for instance, became obsessed with it. Cf. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way, Basic Books, 2005, p. 18.
25 In 1984, Castro ordered that President Reagan be advised about an extreme right-wing conspiracy to kill him. CuIS furnished all the intel to U.S. Security Chief at United Nations. The FBI quietly proceeded to dismantle the plot in North Carolina. Cf. Nestor Garcia-Iturbe’s account in “Cuba-US: Cuban Government Save Reagan’s Life.”
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William Turner speaks with Hal Verb and Elsa Knight Thompson
Listen to the audio on YouTube.
Moderator
I am in the studio with William Turner, staff writer of Ramparts Magazine, and author of a forthcoming book, Police USA, which will be published by Putnam, Invisible Witness, Bobbs Merrill, and The Garrison Case, Award Books. Mr. Turner is a former FBI agent. He wrote the essay “The Inquest” in June Ramparts, outlining Garrison’s case, and the “The Press Versus Garrison” in the September Ramparts. This is not Mr. Turner’s first appearance in our studio. Quite a number of years ago now, several years ago, Mr. Turner appeared over this station when he was originally in the process of leaving the FBI, and us no more popular with the authorities. And so, he’s been a lot of places, and done a lot of things since then.
The second person we have with us is Mr. Harold Verb, who is a reporter for The Berkeley Barb, and has also been doing some work at San Francisco State, conducting a seminar, I believe, on the assassination of President Kennedy, and the Warren Commission report.
Now, what we’ve asked these two to come and chat with us about is what’s going on in New Orleans, and what role Jim Garrison has played in this, where it is now, and how they estimate its significance, its relevance, is it more than simply a theory that Mr. Garrison is working with? Perhaps you could bring us up to date on some of the facts, Mr. Turner.
William Turner
I’d be glad to talk about Jim Garrison’s case. Actually, Garrison first got into the assassination investigation the day after the assassination. On that Saturday, he called what he termed a brainstorming session of his staff, and they went over any possible New Orleans angles, or persons who were erratic enough to have been involved in a conspiracy. At that time, they came up with the name of David William Ferrie, who you will recall died this year, on February 22nd, after he became involved in Garrison’s current investigation.
Now, at that time, Ferrie had a rather mysterious trip to the state of Texas, leaving the afternoon of the assassination. And on that trip, he went first to Houston by car, where he appeared at an ice skating rink, and according to the owner now, he stood by the telephone for several hours on that Saturday afternoon. He apparently received a call, and then went to Galveston.
Now, Garrison was waiting for him when he got back on Sunday to New Orleans, and picked him up, and turned him over to the FBI for interrogation, because of the very suspicious nature of this trip. In other words, Garrison thought it was a very curious trip, by a curious man, at a curious time.
The FBI released him, and apparently the reason was that, number one, Ferrie had not left on that trip until well after the assassination; say, five or six hours. And also, because they determined that his small airplane was not airworthy at the time, and therefore, he couldn’t have been in on an escape plan. Now, there the matter rested, and as Garrison puts it, he said, “I had confidence in the competency of the FBI.” He himself is a former agent of the FBI. He was in approximately a year. And interestingly enough, he was in the same office that I was in, Seattle.
So, it was not until last fall when he was riding a plane to New York with Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, that his interest was renewed. Apparently, they were discussing the various books that had come out, and Senator Long the statement that he really believed that there was more to it than Oswald. And they conversed on it. When Garrison got back to New Orleans, he went into virtual seclusion, pouring over The Warren Report and its volumes, and he quietly launched his inquiry. And on the basis of the initial returns in this inquiry, he became convinced that, indeed, there was an assassination plot, and that the assassination plot had at least one aspect in New Orleans.
So, that is how he got started on it, and as you know, it’s still going on.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Well in what form is it still going on? Would one of you … How is he proceeding at this point, and where does he intend to … Has it just simply become a private investigation now? There’s nobody up for trial at the moment, is there?
William Turner
Well, yes; there is. Clay Shaw is scheduled for trial. But, let me put it this way, that Shaw was arrested … I believed it was the latter part of February. And through all kinds of legal maneuvering … maneuvering is a word that the judge down there, not mine. It’s been postponed and held off, and a trial date has not yet been set. However, Garrison stresses that he does not believe that Shaw is at the center of any web of conspiracy, that he is a peripheral participant in this. And therefore, he has a motion in open court to speed up the trial of Shaw so that he can sort of clear the decks with his own investigation.
As it is, he was held up with all these legal motions in the Shaw case. He does not have a greatly enlarged staff, and they have their normal criminal case load to handle. And he also has been subjected to attacks from Life Magazine, which insinuates that he is somehow sympathetic to organized crime, which is laughable; because probably of all the district attorneys in the nation, he has done more to clean up organized crime than anyone. By NBC, CBS, the bulk of the national media, the mass media, and therefore, he would like to be able to devote more time to the investigation.
But, he does have an investigation. He’s got main files that are set up somewhat like the FBI’s. He has an archivist to handle the Garrison archives. He has men who are specializing in the Kennedy assassination investigation, and I’ve spent a total of two weeks inside his office down there, and every day, there’s a new angle.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Well, tell me, in as much as there must be quite a few people who wish he would dry up and blow away, can he as prosecuting attorney just sit there and utilize that much taxpayer’s money to follow up on something simply because he believes in it? Is there any chance or possibility of actual either legal or political pressure to make him stop this?
William Turner
There have been all kinds of pressures brought to bear. Now, Garrison was carrying on his inquiry in secret. This is the best way, of course, to carry on an inquiry; at least in its initial stages. Now, the States-Item newspaper in New Orleans checked the disbursements of his office and found that there were what they consider these exorbitant travel expenses. People were going to Miami, they were going to Chicago, San Francisco. And this is the way they got wind of what he was doing, and they broke it in the paper.
Well, Garrison, at that time … Number one, there was a loud hue and cry that he was expending public funds on a wild goose chase. Now, he didn’t want to come out and release all his evidence to substantiate that it was not a wild goose chase. Therefore, they formed a group, businessmen in New Orleans formed a group, called Truth or Consequences, Incorporated; which is privately financing the assassination investigation. They signed up and contributed so much a month, and this is what is really subsidizing his assassination investigation.
Elsa Knight Thompson
But, through the prosecuting attorney’s office, or separate from the prosecuting attorney’s office?
William Turner
Well, through the office. Through the office. Now, you’ve mentioned pressures brought to bear. You get in his office down there, and you almost feel like you’re in maybe a Russian embassy on US soil, the way he’s been treated. For one thing, there is an organization down there called the Metropolitan Crime Commission. An ex-FBI agent by the name of Aaron Kohn is the head of this.
Now, of course, this is again, a privately subsidized operation, and Mr. Kohn has to have organized crime around in order for himself to exist. And it seems that, since Garrison’s investigation has come up, Kohn has been inordinately active in trying to say that there’s organized crime in the parish of Orleans. He’s been called before the grand jury down there several times to try and specify what he means by this, and he’s been unable to do so.
Nevertheless, that is one pressure point. As I mentioned, the national press is another pressure point. Bobby Kennedy’s former investigator Walter Sheridan was down there from the inception of Garrison’s investigation, and he has attempted … There is a legal allegation that he has attempted public bribery in getting to Garrison’s witnesses. It is alleged that Perry Russo, who is a key witness in the Shaw case, was offered some money by Sheridan. Sheridan allegedly told him that, “We’ll get you to California, and they won’t be able to extradite you from there.” And various other types of either intimidation or lures. They’ve been using the carrot and stick down there.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Yes, Hal.
Hal Verb
Yes. One of the things that Bill has mentioned are these different pressure points, and he’s pointed out the press, nationally and locally, has not given the Garrison case a fair shake. We can speak about the local press here. I think the only fair shake that they have given Garrison is that there is no news that is covered in the local press here that gives space to anything he says to counter the charges that are against him. I’ll specifically mention one. For example, when Life Magazine said that Garrison had been connected with the mafia, and this was reported in the press, Garrison had an instant reply to that, and he said, “I don’t even know Carlos Marcello,” and that was the specific individual who Life Magazine had tied him in with. “I wouldn’t even know him if he were sitting right here next to me.”
Now, this thing has never even appeared locally; I doubt if there are a few people here in the Bay Area, or in the whole state for that matter, who even know about this remark. This is typical; NBC, CBS will present their program, giving their version of what they say are both sides of the story, when in fact, it is only one side.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Yes. I believe you had something about some TV coverage that you wanted to talk about. Would this be the time that you would like to go into that a little more fully?
Hal Verb
Yes. There seems to have been what I would regard as a massive attempt to, if not obstruct the investigation, to at least put obstacles in the way of it that would prevent Garrison’s case from really coming to court, or at least having his say, with respect to what he has presented. For example, CBS presented a four part series late in the summer, I think it was the end of June, in which they references specifically to Garrison’s case. And one of the things that they mentioned was the kind of attempts that were by Garrison’s office, allegedly, what they said to bribe and intimidate witnesses.
And, for example, they pointed to a writer for the … This is a quote from one of the transcripts that I have of the four part series. They said there was a writer for the Saturday Evening Post who said he had read transcripts of what went on at those sessions. Now, the fact is that there were never any such transcripts, and this writer had actually seen Sciambria’s notes. And what this writer was trying to show was that this particular person had written a document, or statements, in which he had said that a key witness, Perry Raymond Russo, had lied about what he had presented as evidence.
The fact is that this was never the case, because there were in fact memorandums that were prepared, and that this writer actually was aware of the existence of these memorandums. Now, this did not get into TV coverage.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Well. Where would you like to go from here on this? What is Garrison’s theory? You say that the man, Shaw … Ferrie, is dead. There seem to be an awful lot of dead people connected with the whole situation …
William Turner
The tabulation goes on and on.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Yes. So, Ferrie’s dead, whatever it was he was supposed to be doing. Now, what about Shaw, and what is Garrison’s overall …
William Turner
Well, all right. In broad terms, it is this … And I think that this will also explain the orchestrated attack on him. Garrison believes that Oswald, number one, was a CIA agent, and that he probably had been trained at the Atsugi base in Japan when he was in the Marine Corps. This would have been back around 1957, ’58. Atsugi, reportedly, is a U2 installation. And in the restricted documents … there’s still classified documents in the archives … There’s a very tantalizing one entitled “Oswald’s access to U2 information”.
Now, necessarily, this means that when Oswald went to the Soviet Union, he was a CIA operative. And, of course, there is liberal evidence to back this up; most of it suggestive, rather than direct. But, for one thing, when he came back, he told a fellow employee in Dallas, where he was working in a photographic lab, about the disbursement of Soviet military forces, how they did not intermingle, or armored divisions with infantry. And then, he said, “I didn’t notice any vapor trails over Minsk.” Minsk is where he was when he was in the Soviet Union, for most of his stay.
Now, Garrison believes that Oswald’s leftist activity in New Orleans and Dallas, his attempts to insinuate himself into the confidence of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party USA, was nothing more than an attempt to erect a facade. Such a façade would have given him, perhaps, easier access to communist countries. It would have given him, once in, a freer movement.
Now, when Oswald went to the Soviet Embassy … or, excuse me, the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, he very careful listed all these affiliations with these groups; which, of course, existed only in his own mind. He never was formally accepted into any of them.
Now, who was Oswald then, if he was not really a leftist; who was he? Well, Garrison’s evidence will show that Oswald was affiliated with a group in New Orleans, which was anti-Castro in nature, and was paramilitary in nature, that was composed … down in that area, there is a tremendous cross-pollination of people who are members of the Minutemen, who are Cuban exiles, violently opposed to Castro, who are even members of the KKK. And it was with one of these factions with whom Oswald was traveling.
Now, with that in mind, how does the CIA come into it? Because Garrison believes that CIA is the reason that there is this orchestrated attack on him. Well, very simply, it was the CIA which sponsored these anti-Castro groups, which were supposed to, even after the Bay of Pigs failure, never relinquish their dreams of re invading Cuba. And, as a matter of fact, these groups were very active, and training in the environs of New Orleans. Garrison found one of their bases where one of the founders of the Minutemen had been arrested by the FBI and secretly let go. His name never appeared in the newspapers.
These people became very disenchanted with President Kennedy after what they call all his promises about freeing Cuba, and not coming through. And then, his apparent rapproachment with Cuba, which was in the works at the time of the assassination, was being handled through the Cuban ambassador, Carlos Lechuga and the United Nations, and through an intermediary, an ABC newswoman, who was on very close personal terms … Lisa Howard; very close personal terms with Castro.
So, what Garrison believes is these anti-Castro groups, which had been nurtured by the CIA, one of the factions, a spin off from this group, got out of hand, set up Oswald as the patsy, and assassinated Kennedy in Dealey Plaza. And Dealey Plaza ––
Elsa Knight Thompson
In other words, he doesn’t think the CIA ordered Kennedy’s assassination, but simply that a group that had been involved and financed by the CIA, went its own way …
William Turner
Right. The CIA, by its very nature, is compartmentalized, or cellular … They used to talk about communist party cells, and how one didn’t know the other. And this is exactly the structure the CIA, and it’s very easy for one of these CIA cells to become so involved in deceit, duplicity, assassination, murder, to go off and do something like this. And the operation at Dealey Plaza had all the earmarks of a paramilitary type of ambush. No question about it.
Elsa Knight Thompson
And Ferrie and Shaw were involved in that group? Is that …
William Turner
Now the legal allegations against Shaw are that he conspired, it’s a conspiracy charge, in New Orleans with David Ferrie and Oswald to assassinate the president. Garrison’s legal bill in particular states that a session in which they discussed and planned an assassination … talk, or particulars, culminated in what happened at Dealey Plaza. And, as I said before however, Garrison has gone no farther in his charges on Shaw. However, he has independent evidence to back up Shaw’s identity as Clay Bertrand, as you may know that is a big bone of contention; Shaw says he is not Clary Bertrand. Garrison says he is.
Now, Clay Bertrand comes into this way; immediately after the assassination, a New Orleans attorney, Dean Andrews, who had handled what he calls the “gay swishers” in New Orleans, and also Oswald … Oswald apparently wanted his discharge changed; said that, immediately after the assassination, he received a phone call from this man whom he knew as Clay Bertrand. And Clay Bertrand was a man who had referred Oswald to his office. And he said that Bertrand asked him if he would defend Oswald against the assassination charges. Of course, before anything further could be done, Oswald himself was killed.
Now, as I say, it is part of Garrison’s allegations that Clay Shaw is in fact the man using the name Clay Bertrand; and this he intends to prove in court. Also, the facts of the conspiracy. One of the allegations, and to prove this, is that Clay Shaw met in Baton Rouge with Jack Ruby and with Oswald. And he has a witness that will testify to this. So, this is the case against Shaw, which as I say, is up for … It has not yet been set on the calendar, but will come off late this year, or early next.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Does he have any witnesses who claim to have been a member of this group themselves? Or, is this all inferential evidence? Do you know whether or not anyone within the little right wing CIA, whatever you want to call it, type group that this plot took place in according to him; is there anyone who was a part of that, that he has been able to get as a witness?
William Turner
Unfortunately, no. Because, obviously, these people would be accessories before the fact, at the very least, if not participants, accessories after the fact. And certainly, you talked about the mysterious deaths; these people would not be very prone to talk, knowing what the penalty might be.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Well, but he must have found it out some way. I wondered, if by any chance, it was a question of someone from the group informing even if, for reasons that would be very obvious, that this would be protected.
William Turner
Let me put it this way, then, that there have been people who have been within the group, or on the periphery of it, who have been able to give him at least part of a story. No one has come ––
Elsa Knight Thompson
Well, that’s what I was at. I wasn’t expecting that anyone who had helped to plan the assassination of the president would come along and say, “I was a member of a conspiracy.”
William Turner
Like former Minutemen, for example. Yes, there have been a couple of those.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Because, for example, as far as I know, it’s never been absolutely proven that such a group existed, and that Oswald was a member of it. Well, anybody who had ever been in that group would be a valuable witness to that much.
William Turner
This is true.
Elsa Knight Thompson
I was wondering what the depth was on the witness situation.
William Turner
Yeah. There has been no one, unfortunately, who has been able to tell them that, “Yes, I was in this group. Yes, I was part of the assassination team at Dealey Plaza. Yes, so and so and so and so shot from behind the grass …”
Elsa Knight Thompson
No, I understand that, Bill. But, the point is that sometimes you have a group that might be composed of, say, 10 or 15 people, and that doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be a minority, even within so small a group, that was doing something. But, at least that any one of those 15 people could testify, the people who belong to this group, and who normally came to our meetings were so and so, so and so. And if Oswald, and Ferrie, and Shaw were three of them, then that much would be established. It was that kind of evidence, I was thinking.
William Turner
Right Elsa. There have been a couple of cracks in this little structure. There have been.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Well, that looks as if he’s gotten that far, anyway.
William Turner
Yes, he has.
Elsa Knight Thompson
And with this, does he think this is involved … Well, you mentioned the fact that there was Cuban participation in these groups.
William Turner
Cuban exile.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Yes.
William Turner
Yes, right.
Hal Verb
May I make a point about this?
Elsa Knight Thompson
Yes.
Hal Verb
Very early in the … when the whole case about Garrison’s investigation broke, there were charges that pro-Castro Cubans had somehow been involved. And some of the press had picked up the story that, at first, Garrison ––
Elsa Knight Thompson
This is pro-Castro Cubans?
Hal Verb
This is pro-Castro Cubans.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Yes. This is the, “Was he right? Was he left?”
Hal Verb
Riight. The pro-Castro elements were involved in the assassination, and the press allegedly stated, or stated that, allegedly, Garrison had actually conceived of this as possibly one of the elements in the conspiracy. I’m talking about certain sections of the press. The fact is that, at no time was this a possibility when Garrison launched his investigation. In fact, through all of the investigations that he has conducted, there’s one thing that does stand out, and that is that Oswald, who does play, of course, an important role in this whole case, all his associations during his entire trip, both through New Orleans and Dallas, were with elements that can be considered paramilitary, right wing groups, and that all his associations were primarily of a right wing, extremist nature.
There is no evidence to show that he was, as the press had identified him, as a leftist. This was merely a cover ––
Elsa Knight Thompson
Well, I guess it did come out that he had made approaches to certain left wing groups. But, I remember that, within days, or at least very shortly after the assassination, that there was also a news item about the fact that, at one time, he had volunteered to train people to go in on the Bay of Pigs invasion. In other words, a completely contrary story. Now, that hit the press sometime very quickly after the assassination, and then died. I never saw anything more about that, but I clearly remember this, because it made a great deal more sense in the context of what one knew about Oswald, than the other story. And so, I do remember it.
Hal Verb
Yes. I think what you’re referring to is an incident when Oswald had approached a anti-Castro refugee by the name of Carlos Bringuier, in New Orleans. And, apparently, it’s my belief that when Oswald had done this, he had blown his cover, so to speak, about his connections with the CIA, at this particular point. Because Bringuier had become immediately suspicious of Oswald, that he was a double agent.
Now, while he was in New Orleans, Oswald managed to get himself a lot of publicity. I think this was on the part of an expected cover that he was expected to assume. He got on a program, on radio, WDSU, in which he debated a person who was connected with a group called INCA, which was the Information Council of the Americas Now, this group was connected with right wing, anti-Castro refugees, and had extensive operations in connection with Latin American revolutions.
Now, the thing about this INCA group is that a number of individuals who connected with this particular group, one of them, for example, is a man by the name of Mario Bermudez, who is the man who helped arrange the trip for Clay Shaw when he was here in San Francisco. Now, if you’ll recall, one of the things that Perry Raymond Russo had said in his testimony before the grand jury, was that part of the ploy that was to be executed on the day of November 22nd, when President Kennedy was killed, part of this plot would have to have the principals of the case in other cities at the time, so that no suspicion would be drawn upon them.
It was just curious to see that this man, Bermudez, is arranging a trip for Clay Shaw, the man who has now been charged with conspiring to kill the president. And here is this group, INCA, which manages to arrange this particular debate with Oswald while he’s in New Orleans.
Elsa Knight Thompson
With Oswald taking a view contrary, at that point, to the right wing view. Is that ––
Hal Verb
On this program, he took a view that he was a leftist who identified with the Castro revolution.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Yes. That’s what I mean. Yes. Quite. But, there was … I do distinctly remember seeing the item that he had … In spite of the fact that he was supposed to be on this Friends of Cuba … What was the name of the committee? You know …
William Turner
Fair Play for Cuba.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Fair Play for Cuba, and so on; that he also had been in … had volunteered, at one time, to train people to go in on the Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuban exiles. Which, would be ––
William Turner
This is probably the Carlos Bringuier episode, because he appeared voluntarily at Bringuier office. Bringuier was probably one of the best known of the anti-Castro exiles down there. And, as a sign of good faith, he presented Bringuier with his Marine Corps drill manual, or field manual. And Bringuier felt that he couldn’t be trusted, and maybe was a plant, and had nothing more to do with him. Although, that little altercation, where Bringuier, when Oswald was out in front of the International Trade Mart with his Fair Play for Cuba hand bills, and Bringuier comes up, and his little altercation. And Oswald said, “Well, go ahead; hit me if you want, Carlos.” It almost sounds like it was staged; that Oswald really was trying to say, “Well, I’m on your side.” All the evidence points that way.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Well, everything that one has ever read would give one the impression, certainly, that Oswald, whether by design, and whether on behalf of just himself, or other people, was certainly playing both sides of the street.
William Turner
Oh, yeah.
Elsa Knight Thompson
And so, you therefore have your choice as to which side of the street he was really in the pay of.
William Turner
Well, why would Oswald be associating with a guy like Jack Ruby, and Garrison has abundant evidence to show that he was. Why would he be associating with a man like that, who really is apolitical, on the surface, at least. This isn’t somebody that Oswald would just pick up and associate with, because he didn’t really like nightlife all that much to go to the Carousel Club.
Elsa Knight Thompson
What role does Garrison figure Ruby did play in it?
William Turner
Garrison feels that Ruby was manipulated in this thing, probably by the Dallas police. Now, Dallas police is too general; probably by key people within the Dallas police. And, for example, Hal mentioned Jim Phelan’s article in the Saturday Evening Post, which made Garrison look a little ridiculous. And one of the means of ridicule that Phelan used in this was to quote Garrison as saying that you have to look at this through the looking glass, almost like Lewis Carroll. And this was a source of great hilarity. But, it’s really true; you do have to look at certain aspects of it in the looking glass. You have to look at Oswald in the looking glass. You have to look at Ruby.
His facade was that he would go around in the time between the assassination and his own killing of Oswald, and he’d go down to the postal box, where [Bernard] Weissman’s answers to his advertisement, the black bordered ad, “Wanted for Treason”, President Kennedy, was coming in, and said, “Oh, isn’t that awful?” And draw attention to himself there. He would go out in the middle of the night and call up one of his employees, Larry Crafard, at the club, and go out and photograph the billboard that says, “Impeach Earl Warren” … “Isn’t that awful?” And these tender remarks about Jacqueline Kennedy, about sparing her the ordeal; in other words, this was an attempt to draw attention to the fact that he was really very pro Kennedy, and very incensed that anybody would kill Kennedy, and therefore, it creates a certain illusion. And that’s what Garrison means by the looking glass.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Yes. I can see that. But, where does he think Ruby really was? Does he think that Ruby was a part of this conspiracy?
William Turner
Oh, certainly.
Elsa Knight Thompson
And it’s obvious that if there were a conspiracy, that Mr. Oswald was very definitely the patsy.
William Turner
Yeah. Well, for example ––
Elsa Knight Thompson
Whatever he expected to be, that’s what he was.
William Turner
Yeah. I’ll illustrate by the statement of one witness, sworn statement, in Garrison’s files. I can’t name the man, but it really doesn’t make any difference, he’s evaluated as probably a reliable witness. This man was an artist, sort of a transient artist. He’d go from town to town, and then he got a little bit on the shorts in Dallas, and he went into the Dallas … Or, no; he went into the H.L. Hunts son’s business office, and asked if he could give him a little dough, or something, and H.L. Hunt’s son said, “Well, I don’t give out any … You go down to the Dallas police department, give them your social security number, and they’ll take care of you.”
Now, this man said he went down there, he gave his social security number, the officer fixed him up with some kind of a chit that would get him a full tank of gas, and he was given a little pocket money. And he said, at that point, Jack Ruby came up, and said, “Well, maybe I can get you at least a temporary job.” And he said that Ruby gave him a certain amount of money, a nominal sum, and said, “You go down to Alexandria, Louisiana, and check in the Bentley Hotel there, and somebody’ll contact you further.”
Now, this man, and his wife corroborates this, they went, and the hotel records corroborate it; they went to the Bentley hotel … At least they corroborate that they checked in there fine. His story is that he was no sooner in there, than he was contacted by a man, his phone rang, “Come down to the lobby,” and it was Oswald. And Oswald conferred with him, and made a, what at the time, he considered a very cryptic statement, to the effect that very soon, some Catholic leaders will be killed. Which, he interpreted …
Elsa Knight Thompson
Well, what could Oswald say he was supposed to do, or anything? What did they confer about?
William Turner
He said he’d be contacted further. He was just confirming that he arrived, and then there was no further contact. And after a few days, this guy left. Now, the whole annals of this thing is filled with these kinds of fits and starts, they seemed. But, there was another incident; a man by the name of Donald Norton, who claims that he is a former CIA “unpeople” who worked for CIA on certain assignments, said, number one, that at one time, he was sent to Atlanta, and that he met a man at the Atlanta Airport, who gave him … He was a courier. Norton was a courier. He was to deliver this amount of money to Havana. And this was in ’58, before Castro got to power. And that the man who gave him the money was an Eastern Airlines pilot named Hugh Ferris.
Well, he later identifies Hugh Ferris as being Dave Ferrie, and Ferrie was indeed an Eastern Airlines pilot. He also said he was on another courier assignment to Monterrey, Mexico. And that, in the course of this assignment, he delivered money to Oswald, a man he now identifies as Lee Oswald. This was in September of ’62. And then took documents from Oswald, he doesn’t know what they were, and delivered them to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where a man gave him the password, “It’s a fine day in Tulsa.” And it was an oil firm employee. And he delivered the documents to him. He got paid by the assignment. He said he got $5,000 for that assignment.
Now, again, this man has been subjected ––
Elsa Knight Thompson
You think it all happens on TV, but I guess it doesn’t.
William Turner
I can guarantee ––
Elsa Knight Thompson
I mean, it’s just beyond ––
William Turner
–– that this thing is almost surrealistic. At times, I feel it’s too James Bond-ish to be true. But, the facts are there, and it really is the way it’s turning out.
Elsa Knight Thompson
And he feels, then, that all of this, or at least a good deal of it, can be brought to light during the trial of this guy Shaw, if he can get ––
William Turner
No, he doesn’t. Garrison has made a statement; he says, “I just hope the American people don’t think that the Shaw trial is going to bring out everything. And actually, we can only introduce what is material and relevant.” And, as he said, Shaw is not at the center of this at all. Shaw was off to the side somewhere. Ergo, he won’t be able to tell the whole story at this trial. And I know that he has a couple of other arrests in mind. But, this, of course, as I say, he is so freighted now, with the Shaw trial, and with this attack against him, that he just has to clear the decks.
Elsa Knight Thompson
And he wants to get the Shaw trial over with before he starts on what he considers to be the next step in ––
William Turner
Yeah. He’s made a motion in open court. And again, the attempt to abort the Shaw trial is very evident. And again, Shaw himself seems to have CIA connections. Now, the foreign press has reported this. I have not read word one about it in the domestic press. But, in 1958, Shaw was on the board of directors of a Rome corporation called the World Trade Center. Now, Shaw, through his attorney, admits he was on this board of directors. He said, however, he was merely asked to be on it by his own broad of directors at the International Trade Mart.
Now, on this board of directors are some very strange people. One of them is a secretary of the Italian neo-fascist party. Another is the son-in-law of Nazi finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht. Another is a fellow who is now an executive of the Bank of Montreal, and he’s a former OSS major, by the name of LM Bloomfield. This group was kicked out of Italy, the World Trade Center, because although it seemed to have plenty of money, it never did any ostensible business, and they suspected, the Italian police, that it was a CIA front. It is now headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, under the same name; probably a more friendly climate.
It also had a subsidiary corporation in Switzerland, which likewise, was ousted by the Swiss police, because it was suspected of being a conduit for funds for the OAS Movement; the Algeri-Français movement in Algeria. So, I must say that if Mr. Shaw can explain this in terms of his innocently being asked to go on the board, I will have to say then that the entire board of directors of the International Trade Mart in New Orleans are either extremely naive, or involved with the CIA.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Yes, Hal.
Hal Verb
May I just make this point? Bill has brought up an interesting point, and that is the deeper you get involved in this, the more the connections you see, not only with respect to quasi legal, and also secret groups, such as the CIA, and other operations, but you can see this involves the connections of people who are more or less in a position where they can use people for certain ends.
Now, for example, Clay Shaw, we’ll say, is in a position as director of the International Trade Mart, to oversee operations of the second largest sea port in this country. Now, even Gordon Novel, who was one of the witnesses that Garrison is seeking to extradite from another state, and in fact has had very little success … which, Bill has mentioned that there have been obstructions. One of the things he’s had difficulty in is getting people extradited from different states. There are three states now that have refused to extradite material witnesses in this case.
Anyway, Gordon Novel, who was a very interesting character in this whole case, who also has admitted publicly that he has CIA connections, is reported to have said that Clay Shaw himself probably was connected with the CIA. So, what I’m trying to say here is that you can understand why, then, the Shaw trial would be blocked from coming to court, because the connections that are involved here go very deep within the government, as I see it. This is my belief why that trial is being obstructed. Not only in so far as Shaw’s involvement in the assassination, I think it has a lot to do with connections that the government has set up.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Now, I would think that Mr. Garrison’s life was not worth much on the open market if he proceeds with this. Does he travel with a bodyguard? Does he feel secure? And what motivates this man? Now, you’ve met him, you’ve talked to him; what’s he in this for? You hear the crack, “Well, it’s a lot of cheap publicity. He can’t prove anything. But, it’s putting him on the front pages of all the papers,” and all this kind of thing. I would suspect that it was also, “I want to put him in his coffin.”
William Turner
Well, I believe that this could be the case, Elsa. When I first went down to New Orleans, after his case broke, I really had some reservations about what a Southern prosecuting attorney was going to be like, and what his motives might be.
Elsa Knight Thompson
It did seem a little unlikely, the whole thing, when it first began to break.
William Turner
It did seem a little unlikely. I have now come to the conclusion that Jim Garrison is an unusual man, in an unusual place, at an unusual time. Now, the allegations have been bandied around that he got into this thing for political ends. And I can only say that, if this was his motivation, that he is extremely ignorant of how politicians get elected.
Elsa Knight Thompson
So, I should think it would indicate rather bad judgment.
William Turner
Extremely bad judgment. Now, as I say, I was prepared to meet a Southern prosecuting attorney. I had a stereotype in my mind, which is always bad, but I did. And I ran into a man who was unusual in any region of the country. Garrison was at Dachau, and I think this made an indelible impression on him. Now, before the … He’s also extremely well ––
Elsa Knight Thompson
What do you mean he was at Dachau?
William Turner
With the Allied Armies that came upon Dachau. Yeah, I’m sorry. I should have elucidated a bit on that. And I think that the residual sight there just indelibly impressed him. Because when he wrote an introduction to a very well accepted criminology book, before this whole investigation came up … Now, understand that the very fact that he was asked to write this introduction is somewhat an honor. Before this, he was well known in criminology circles. It is a very sensitive and historically based introduction, and he goes back to Dachau, and the apathy of the German people that permitted this to happen. And he draws a parallel with the Kitty Genovese case in New York, where 36 people watched in their windows as this girl was slowly killed.
And he talks about this lack of commitment, and lack of involvement. And maybe I just read the tail end of this allegory that he brings up at the end of his introduction, and he’s talking about some extraterrestrial being who happens upon our self-destroyed Earth at some future date, and happens upon this human skull, and here’s what Garrison writes in his allegory; he puts the words in the mouth of this being:
“Alas, poor man; a fellow of most infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. Where are your gibbets now? Your thumb screws, and your gallows? Your treasured hates and your cruelties? What happened to your disinterested millions? Your uncommitted and uninvolved; your preoccupied and bored? Where today are their private horizons and their mirrored worlds of self? Where is their splendid indifference now?”
Now, this is Garrison, really, when you talk to the man. We were both in the FBI, and he asks me about a particular weapon that’s in a photograph, and I said, “I don’t know what it is, Jim. Matter of fact, I don’t like guns.” And he said, “Isn’t that funny? I don’t either.” So, he’s a rather unusual prosecutor, and he’s an extremely sensitive man. He told me a year ago, before this whole thing started, he said, “I was, vis-à-vis Vietnam, I was what you might call a mild hawk. I’m really a dove now. This whole thing has changed my thinking.”
Now, if this is a fool, or a knave, or a political opportunist, so be it, but I just don’t believe it. And I think that the press has portrayed him in this light, and they have portrayed him in this light in a very calculated manner. And I think that we have a very definite problem here in New Orleans. As Garrison puts it, “I am probably the only prosecutor, not defendant, that has been convicted in the press prior to trial.” And if they can silence Garrison … And when I say “they”, I mean the orchestrated attack obviously from Washington, obviously involving the mass media; if they can silence Garrison, I’m afraid they’ll be able to silence anyone. If they can portray him in an unfair light, I think they can do it to anyone. And I think that there’s over and above, or maybe parallel to the issue of who killed Kennedy, there is this issue of the press in the United States. And it’s completely slanted coverage of what is going on down there.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Is there anything else you would like to say about what you envisage as the future progress of this, before we close the interview? Either of you? Or, both of you?
William Turner
Well, I think that, as I say, every day, there seems to be a new development in Garrison’s case; not that it makes the papers, but internally. I have seen his evidence, practically all of it, at any rate. Because having researched the Minutemen a year and a half ago, and the Minutemen being involved in this thing, I would suppose that much of the information I have is valuable to his investigation. I would say that he has a very excellent case. It gets better every day. And if … As we both stated, that if we were back in the FBI, and we had 6,000 agents around the country, and we could get on that teletype and mark it urgent, and send out these leads that this assassination conspiracy would be solved inside of three weeks, and the conspirators would be in jail.
But, as I’ve outlined to you, Garrison has very limited jurisdiction, only within the parish of Orleans. He has encountered all kinds of obstructionist tactics from the FBI, from the national press, from the governors of the various states, from people within his own bailiwick, even from an infiltrator in his own organization, who CBS gave national coverage to, and CBS has yet to report that Dean Andrews has been convicted of perjury.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Dean Andrews, I take it, was the man you referred to as having infiltrated the Garrison ––
William Turner
No. William Gurvich is the one who infiltrated down there, and then went on and made some very anti-Garrison statements, and saying that the man didn’t have a case. And CBS interrupted its four part series to put Gurvich on. But, they didn’t interrupt their series the next night to report that Gurvich had been allowed to testify as to what factual material he had before the grand jury in New Orleans, and the grand jury decided that he didn’t have any facts. They didn’t interrupt their program for that.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Well, what about the man who was convicted of perjury? Because I don’t know who he is.
William Turner
Dean Andrews is the attorney in New Orleans who … I originally told you that Clay Shaw is alleged to be Clay Bertrand. Dean Andrews is the attorney who Bertrand referred Oswald to, and he’s the one that got the phone call the day after the assassination, from Clay Bertrand, to defend Oswald. And, at the ––
Elsa Knight Thompson
And did he perjure himself about this?
William Turner
Yes. It was about this. He was very … With no qualifications at all, he told the Warren commission that he could positively identify this Clay Bertrand, and if he ever got his hands on him, he’d drag him right in. So, he’s hauled before some kind of a hearing down there to see whether he can identify Clay Shaw or not as Clay Bertrand, and he says, “I wouldn’t be able to identify anyone as whether it was Clay Bertrand or not.” He’s completely changed his story.
And when Mark Lane tried to interview him, well, this was two years ago; why, first he said, “Yes. Fine. Come on up.” And by the time Mark Lane got to his office, he said, “Gosh, I’m sorry; I can’t discuss anything about it. I called Washington, and they have, in effect, told me that if I say anything, I’ll get a hole in my head.” So, he said, “I’ll take you to dinner, though.”
So, this is the kind of thing that constantly comes up; this intimidation of witnesses, trying to either bribe them, or lure them to tell a different story.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Yes, Hal.
Hal Verb
Yes. Bill mentioned Bill Gurvich. I want to show the very subtle ways in which the press can distort the picture. CBS had presented Bill Gurvich. And, in fact, the press throughout the country had presented Bill Gurvich as Garrison’s chief investigator. Now, the fact is that Gurvich was never the chief investigator. As a matter of fact, if I’m not correct, Bill, isn’t the assistant ranking district attorney the chief investigator for ––
William Turner
Yeah. Garrison’s office doesn’t really have a pecking order there, but Charles Ward is the senior district … But, they have a man, a detective, posted from the New Orleans Police Department who really is the chief investigator. His name is Louis Ivon.
Hal Verb
That’s correct.
William Turner
And he succeeded a man by the name of Pershing Gervais when Gervais resigned a year or two ago.
Hal Verb
Right. Now, CBS, in presenting this, didn’t present Gurvich’s real relationship to this Garrison investigation. He wasn’t on the payroll. He had volunteered his information, or his services. And this, of course, did not come out in the CBS interview. Another curious and interesting thing about this is the timing of Gurvich’s resignation, or declining to associate himself any further with this investigation. When did this occur? This occurred at the end of June of this year, 1967, when at the very time, the Associated Press, and CBS, and NBC were all coming out with their programs. I don’t think that this timing is just accidental; in my own view, I think this was a deliberate timing, to create the impression that Garrison was a totally discredited figure, and that his investigation had no validity to it.
Elsa Knight Thompson
But, I gather from all the detailed information and statements that you have given, and also the overall complexion of what you both had to say, that you feel that Garrison has a case, and that this is a man of high ideals and integrity who is attempting to do something that he believes in. Would that be ––
William Turner
I definitely feel that Garrison is a very committed man, and that he feels that this is very definitely a conspiracy here, and that come hell or high water, it’s his duty to investigate that conspiracy, to bring to justice those who were involved in it, and at least as far as his own jurisdiction in Orleans parish is concerned. And it would have been far more in his own interest, as far as political aspirations, any future aspirations, to have merely said, when Ferrie died, “Well, there goes my chief witness. That’s my case,” and forget it. He would have had a much better chance at becoming Louisiana senator, or whatever these aspirations are supposed to be. And I certainly hope he does have political ambitions, because I’d like to see a man of his caliber in high office.
Elsa Knight Thompson
Well, as I understand it, he says that he’s going to go on with this if it takes him the next 30 years. But, I believe that now our time is up, and I want to thank you very much, William Turner and Hal Verb, for coming in to our studios.
This transcript has been edited for grammar and flow.
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Bill Davy at the VMI Seminar
Alan Dale:
I have the honor of being your host, your emcee. I’d like to begin by introducing our first speaker. William Davy is a longtime researcher and writer, a respected contributor to Probe Magazine. He’s been published as an essayist and reviewer. He’s the author of a monograph on Clay Shaw, which he further developed into his illuminating and much admired work, Let Justice Be Done: New Light on the Jim Garrison Investigation. Please welcome Bill Davy.
Bill Davy:
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, Lee, and good evening everybody. Just give me a second to get settled here and get my eyes on. Okay. All right.
The topic of my presentation tonight are the new documents and the Season of Inquiry. By the Season of Inquiry, I’m talking about essentially the 1970s. It really was a season of inquiry. We have Watergate, of course, the Pike Committee, the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, and House Select Committee on Assassinations. It seemed like at the time the politicians in the country in general were more interested in uncovering the political state. Pardon the term. Present company excluded, of course.
We’re going to go into some of the documentary evidence, but oftentimes when I’ve given talks to, say, a less sophisticated audience, just to start off, I’ve asked the question, “What do you feel is the government’s official position on the JFK assassination?” and people will say something like, “Well, Oswald did it,” or, “That Warren Commission thing.” I say, “No, that’s not the official position at all. The official position of the federal government is that JFK was killed by a conspiracy.”
It’s right there. That is the copy … Or it’s right here. It’s the final report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. God knows there’s all kinds of problems with the HSCA. You can do a whole symposium on some of the in-fighting and backstabbing and so forth.
But that aside, they did some good work, and a lot of that good work found its way into the report itself. I just want to take a quick look at some of the findings of the report. I hate talking at people because everybody can read, but a few of these are worth noting.
First, “The committee believes on the basis of the evidence available to it that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as result of a conspiracy.” Further, “The committee found that, to be precise and loyal to the facts it established, it was compelled to find that President Kennedy was probably killed as a result of a conspiracy.” Compelled to find, pretty strong language, even though they keep slipping the ‘probably’ in there.
We’re talking about the scientific evidence here. The evidence available to the committee indicated that it was “probable that more than one person was involved in the president’s murder. That fact compels acceptance.” Again, with the compelling. “And it demands a reexamination of all that was thought to be true in the past.”
Further, they conclude, “Neither Oswald nor Ruby turned out to be loners, as they’d been painted in the 1964 investigation,” and indeed in the media, ongoing as a matter of fact.
“The committee found that the CIA-Mafia-Cuban plots had all the elements necessary for a successful assassination conspiracy: people, motive, and means; and the evidence indicated that the participants might well have considered using the resources at their disposal to increase their power and alleviate their problems by assassinating the president.”
Again, talking about the scientific evidence. “Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy. Other scientific evidence does not preclude the possibility of two gunmen firing at the president.” They’re talking about the stuck open mic of the motorcycle policeman who essentially recorded the assassination as it happened.
Further, in talking about the photographic evidence, “A fleshtone comparison performed by analyzing measurements of color values,” and this is on Willis photograph number five. “A fleshtone comparison performed by analyzing measurements of color values on an object located behind the west end of the retaining wall,” this is on the grassy knoll, “confirmed that the image perceived was actually a human being.” They found photographic evidence of a human being behind the retaining wall on the grassy knoll.
“The panel did perceive ‘a very distinct straight-line feature’ near the region of this person’s hands, but it was unable to deblur the image sufficiently to reach any conclusion as to whether the feature was in fact a weapon,” but they found a person and they found what appeared to be a weapon behind the grassy knoll.
“During the course of its investigation, the committee developed several areas of credible evidence and testimony indicating a possible association in New Orleans and elsewhere between Lee Harvey Oswald and David W. Ferrie.” I’ll assume most people know who David Ferrie is, so we don’t have to go down that road.
“The committee found that the Clinton witnesses … ” This may require a little explanation. What they’re talking about here is the town of Clinton, Louisiana, which is just outside of Baton Rouge. It was uncovered during the Garrison Investigation and the subsequent Shaw trial that Lee Harvey Oswald was seen in Clinton, Louisiana at a voter registration incident with not only David Ferrie but Clay Shaw as well.
“The committee found that the Clinton witnesses … ,” and there was a whole cross-section of people up there testifying to this. “The committee found that the Clinton witnesses were credible and significant. It was the judgment of the committee that they were telling the truth as they knew it.”
“If the witnesses were not only truthful but accurate as well in their accounts,” they’re talking about the Clinton witnesses, “they established an association of an undetermined nature between Ferrie, Shaw, and Oswald less than three months before the assassination.” “The committee was, therefore, inclined to believe that Oswald was in Clinton, Louisiana in late August, early September ’63 and that he was in the company of David Ferrie, if not Clay Shaw.”
“The committee also found that there was at least the possibility that Oswald and Guy Banister were acquainted.” Banister, Ferrie, and Shaw were a triumvirate of suspects and intelligence operatives that had come into the orbit of the Garrison investigation. Anybody who’s seen Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, certainly knows who these players are. The committee found that there was at least a possibility that Oswald and Banister were acquainted. We’ll show later that that was more than a possibility.
“The committee obtained independent evidence that someone might have posed as Oswald in Mexico in late September and early 1963.” This was the imposter down in Mexico City. Dr. Newman will probably be covering some of that later.
On the Warren Commission, the committee found that it “failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the president”, that it “presented as conclusions in its report in a fashion that was too definitive”. It “overstated the thoroughness of its investigation”, and that “It is a reality to be regretted that the commission failed to live up to its promise.”
A summary of the House Select Committee’s conclusions. President Kennedy’s assassination was the result of CIA-Mafia-anti-Castro conspiracy. A gunman fired from the grassy knoll. Oswald was associated with Ferrie, Shaw, and Banister. Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City. The Warren Commission was a failure. Does that remind you of anybody? The House Select Committee’s conclusions vindicated Jim Garrison.
Further vindication of Garrison comes in the form of the Church Committee. This is a rather misleading title document of Oswald in New Orleans. It’s 155 pages and there’s very little in it on Oswald in New Orleans. Again, this comes from the files of the Church Committee. This is the cover sheet: Oswald in New Orleans. One that’s of importance for us here is this interview with Wendell Roach.
Now Mr. Roach at that time was in charge of the INS in New Orleans. That was the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It’s since become part of DHS, known as ICE and Customs and Border Patrol. But back before 9/11, it was known as INS. Wendell Roache was in charge of the New Orleans office. They interviewed Roach and … According to Roache, the INS’ role was to determine who was an alien and prevent unauthorized border crossings, et cetera. As part of their duties, they had the responsibility of surveilling these various Cuban groups in New Orleans, and there were a ton of them at the time, mainly these anti-Castro groups.
The INS had them under surveillance. Included in the surveillance was the group of nuts, as he calls them, headed by David Ferrie. Roache knew the details of Ferrie’s dismissal from Eastern Airlines, various sordid details of his private life, et cetera. As part of surveilling these Cuban groups, they picked up surveillance on David Ferrie because he was closely aligned with these anti-Castro groups.
As they were surveilling Ferrie and the anti-Castro groups, they picked up surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald. As we can see here, Roache revealed that during the course of their surveillance, they picked up Lee Harvey Oswald going into the offices of Ferrie’s group. The offices of Ferrie’s group was at 544 Camp Street, which was Guy Banister’s office. Oswald had used that address and stamped that address on the literature that he was handing out in New Orleans. He was seen going into the offices of Ferrie’s group, Banister’s office, and Oswald was known to be one of the men in the group.
Here you have an investigative body of the United States government in the person of Wendell Roache admitting that in the course of their surveillance, routine surveillance, they picked up David Ferrie associating with Lee Harvey Oswald, and the two of them going into Guy Banister’s office. Let’s see if we can blow this up a little bit.
He also said that the anti-Castro Cubans have been trained by a six-foot ex-marine out of Lake Pontchartrain. He could be referring to Gerry Patrick Hemming here. Just throw that out there because he mentions … He goes out of his way mentioning a six-foot ex-marine.
His take on Garrison was that Garrison had something: I read his reports in the newspaper, and they were correct. He received good intelligence, whether he was using it for politics or not. Roache noted that Garrison was all eyes and ears in the French Quarter.
Further, he adds a little something extra to the Oswald story. When Oswald was arrested for the street scuffle with Carlos Bringuier in the summer of 1963, he was taken into custody. As the official record shows, the first thing he did he asked for an FBI agent, which was suspicious in and of itself.
But there was an extra part of this story that hadn’t been revealed, at least I’d never heard of it until I found this document, and that is when they took him into custody, Oswald would only speak in Russian. When the NOPD had him, they assumed he was a Russian. They called INS. Of course, they would have responsibility for foreign aliens and so forth.
One of Roache’s associates, this guy, David Smith, went to the police station, and he recognized Oswald as being part of the Banister-Ferrie group and said, “Look, this guy’s an American.” Once Oswald had been outed, he stopped with the Russian. It was then at that point he asked to see an FBI agent, but it was not until the INS guy had come in and said, “We recognize him from our surveillance of David Ferrie and Guy Banister.”
When the Church Committee investigators finally tracked down Roache and they finally got a hold of him, this is what he said: “I’ve been waiting 12 years for you guys. I’ve been waiting for 12 years to talk someone about this.” No one ever bothered to run him down, talk to him. Maybe he didn’t volunteer the information either, but it’s rather shameful that the FBI and the Warren Commission, who were assigned to investigate the New Orleans angle, didn’t even come across this, and this is a representative of the federal government.
As they were interviewing him over the phone, the Church Committee investigator was letting him go on and Roache began talking about Oswald. He said, “I saw him around frequently. I recall that he had an office in … ” As you can see, the interviewer cut him off. I was thinking to myself, “What are you doing?” Oswald was just obviously getting ready to say … I’m sorry. Roache was getting ready to say that they had seen Oswald had an office in Guy Banister’s building. It was obviously where he was going with that, but the investigator cut him off.
Unfortunately that is about it in the files for Roache. I could not find any more follow up from the Church Committee. There was no transition of this evidence over to the House Select Committee. It’s just a shameful lack of follow up on this committees and that we’ve got a body of the federal government, the INS, who had seen Oswald in the company of David Ferrie and Guy Banister. Again, vindicating what Jim Garrison had been saying all along.
Now what I want to do here is shift gears a little bit in that I’ll talk about … Again, this is out of the files of the Church Committee, because I think that’s been an unmined area for a lot of the researchers.
This is the testimony of Scott Breckenridge. Scott Breckenridge was a counsel for the CIA. He had written the inspector general’s report on the CIA assassination plots. It was written by Breckenridge and Greer and signed off by the IG Ehrman .
It came out of a Drew Pearson column that had appeared in The Post at the time. It was in response to a newspaper column by Drew Pearson, which had talked about Castro plots and how they may have backfired on the president, and Bobby Kennedy may be haunted by this. At any rate, the IG began their investigation of the assassination plot against Castro. This is some of what they came up with in the testimony of Breckenridge.
First of all, he states that the only person to have seen that report was Richard Helms. It was written for Helms. Ehrman was the inspector general who signed off on it and Greer was the other author of it. Helms returned the report to the inspector general.
What actually happened was they had one original and one copy. Helms ordered the copy destroyed and the one original got put in Helm’s safe at CIA headquarters. It left one copy of the IG report. For obvious reasons, Helms did not want that getting out.
First of all, Helms didn’t like the report. One of the IG’s conclusions was that they concluded that the elimination of a dominant figure in government will not necessarily cause the downfall of the government. In other words, they’re saying assassination will not necessarily cause the downfall of a government. Helms didn’t like that. He liked assassinations. He thought it could lead to the downfall of a government.
Further on, they’re talking about Phase I and Phase II plots against Castro. Phase I were the CIA-Mafia plots pre-JFK and ended under Eisenhower. Phase II were also CIA-Mafia plots. They began around November ’61, some time between November ’61 and April ’62. This is the William Harvey ZR/RIFLE-type plots.
Some of the earlier plots to assassinate Castro were concurrent with the Bay of Pigs invasion. In other words, at the Bay of Pigs operation, a major component of that was the assassination of Castro. This information was never shared with the president, as it goes on here. Was that ever authorized by the White House, the president, and the Department of Defense? Answer: We have no record for it. Castro assassination plots, with the Bay of Pigs: not authorized. This goes on. This speaks, again, about the Bay of Pigs and the assassination plots.
Breckenridge says, “I don’t think we ever found a clear record of the original authorization.” Senator Baker then asks, “Is it fair to say that Phase I of this operation included a plan for assassination of the leader of a foreign state without any authority from any agency or branch of government outside of the CIA?” Answer: “It is fair to say that our records did not disclose such authority.”
On the question of presidential authority for these plots, as I note in my marginalia here, the answer is unequivocal. There was none. The president did not authorize any of this activity, and this is coming right from the CIA’s own inspector general report. That’s why this is key, I believe.
Further, they’re talking about Sheffield Edwards. This is the briefing of Phase II by Helms and Sheffield Edwards to Robert Kennedy. They told him at the time that phase I was obviously pre-JFK and had stopped and that phase II, they did not notify him about, even though it was an ongoing operation. They told him that there were no current assassination plots.
Then they’re asking who within the CIA approved the making of these false statements to Attorney General Kennedy, making of the false statements to RFK? Sheffield Edwards and Helms knew and approved making false statements to RFK. This would indicate that Colonel Edwards knew and that Mr. Helms knew, and knew that they were making false statements to RFK when they told him that phase I had been switched off and there was no phase II going on. Let’s see who we have here.
This is CIA Director McCone. He had not been advised of any of the CIA assassination plots. In other words, they were worried that he would have stopped the assassination plots had he known, McCone. .. .so they didn’t tell him. It was just the director of the CIA. Helms and Sheffield Edwards and Harvey withheld all this information from the CIA director.
Outside of phase I and phase II, there were other Castro assassination plots. As you can see, Breckenridge says yes in response to that. There was one plot about blowing up an electric plant in Havana while trying to get into position to assassinate Castro. That was an adjunct to these Phase I and Phase II plots, a sort of off the books, off the shelf kind of thing.
There was another CIA plot where there was an assassin who tried three times and didn’t get into Cuba. After the Bay of Pigs occurred, he went on to some other activity. That was all that Breckenridge had, but there were other CIA plots to kill Castro prior to the Bay of Pigs with this one assassin trying three times.
Again, they’re talking about other plots here, dropping in Cuban rifles with silencers to be used to kill Castro, correct. Also talking about the syringe with poison. This was actually a poison pen that was given to a CIA assassin. He was told that he had the approval, the tacit approval, of RFK to proceed with the assassination of Castro. That was Desmond Fitzgerald who was telling this to AMLASH, Rolando Cubela, code name AMLASH.
Here they’re talking about other miscellaneous schemes prior to August 1960. It was when Kennedy wasn’t even in office yet. Again, Castro assassination plots ongoing prior to JFK even taking office.
“We find no evidence of any of these schemesap proved at any level higher than division, if that.” Breckenridge: “That is correct.” There was no approvals as we see. There was no approval by the executive for any of these operations.
This was something I didn’t know about. “Our record is not too conclusive, but when Mr. Colby,” they’re talking about William Colby taking over as CIA director in August of ’63, “instructed that if it had not already been terminated, it should be terminated.” They’re talking about the ZR/RIFLE assassination plots within the CIA.
Apparently, as late as 1973, this was still an ongoing operation. It was still on the books. They didn’t know if it had been switched off or not. We’ll touch a little bit more on ZR/RIFLE in just a second.
One thing I want to mention here, this gets brought up a lot in the context of Garrison and Garrison being mobbed up under the thumb of various mafiosos. They like to cite thi:s that the CIA knew about Garrison talking with Johnny Roselli in Las Vegas, and it was disturbing to them.
First of all, Garrison was investigating the assassination of the president. He should be talking to Johnny Roselli. Certainly, the House Select Committee wanted to talk to him, and they did. After that, his remains ended up in an oil barrel floating outside of Miami. At any rate, what they were disturbed about was not that Garrison was mobbed up, they were concerned that Roselli was probably spilling the beans on the Castro plots to Garrison.
It says here, they’re quoting from another CIA document, “Unhappily, it now appears that Garrison may also know this.” They’re talking about the Castro plots. Garrison may also know it because Roselli was spilling the beans to him. That’s what they were worried about, not that he was mobbed up, which he was not. That’s what they were disturbed about.
They’re talking about Desmond Fitzgerald and the AMLASH plot and the poison pen that was given to AMLASH, and told that he had the assurances of Robert Kennedy, this was approved by RFK. F.A.O. Schwarz Jr., who was a counsel, asks, “There was no approval sought from Robert Kennedy?” Breckenridge: “That is correct.” They didn’t even ask for approval from RFK. They just went ahead and did it.
This goes on to mention that there was a contingency fund of about $100,000 that could be used for these type of operations, off the book-type operations, unvouchered funds that could be used for assassination plots, foreign or domestic, and no one would be the wiser.
This is actually one of the pages from the IG report itself. In the report, they ask, “Can the CIA state or imply that it was merely an instrument of policy?” CIA: “Not in this case. While it was true that phase II was carried out in an atmosphere of intense Kennedy pressure, such is not true of the earlier phase. Phase I was initiated in ’60 under the Eisenhower administration.” Again, phase II was never revealed to RFK or JFK. That’s just the second page of that. I just want to move on quickly.
I mentioned the ZR/RIFLE program. That was the assassination program run by William Harvey. This is a document from the CIA. In 1976, probably as the HSCA was ramping up, they did a review of the ZR/RIFLE file. In so doing, they found these various ZR/RIFLE files, and note the early date pre-JFK. There’s a ZR/RIFLE administrative financial folder dated October 13th, 1960, and they’re talking about using one of their assets QJ/WIN back in 1959. As you can see, the ZR/RIFLE program predates JFK by quite a significant period. That’s just a continuation of that.
Hale Boggs was a member of the Warren Commission. He was a congressman from New Orleans. A lot of people like to cite him as one of the Warren Commissioners who didn’t believe the conclusions, didn’t believe the magic bullet theory.
Well, the FBI released these documents. In 1967, Boggs asked for a meeting with Deke DeLoach, who was J. Edgar Hoover’s right hand, if you will. He met with the Boggs in Boggs’ office. Boggs stated Garrison was making New Orleans and Louisiana the laughing stock of the world. He, Boggs, next praised the FBI and indicated that he had always been completely satisfied regarding the FBI’s thoroughness. He said that he wouldn’t be certain that Garrison had nothing which might bring disgrace upon him, Boggs, and his home state, et cetera.
Here Boggs has reread much of the Warren Commission report just to make absolutely certain there were no loopholes. He stated he had found none. Boggs was no advocate of the Warren Commission and he was certainly no advocate of Garrison as he was informing on him to the FBI.
Further discreditation of Garrison in the critical community came in a 1967-1968 broadcast by CBS. It was hosted by Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, and their Dallas CBS reporter, Eddie Barker. It turns out that Eddie Barker was an FBI informant. “On this date, Eddie Barker, special agent in charge of contact, and news director of KBLD Radio and TV Dallas, advised me confidentially that CBS was planning a five-hour documentary. He stated the primary purpose of this was to take the books which are critical of the Warren report, particularly Rush to Judgment, and tear them apart.”
He indicated in this document that he was not going to be critical of the FBI and, in fact, would support the Warren Report. He requested that this information be kept confidential and that he would give more details at a later date. Very accommodating of CBS.
Finally, I’ll just conclude here something that’s not out of the files, but was actually in Vanity Fair magazine a few years ago. Yeah, 2009 actually. In it, they’re talking about William Manchester who wrote the book The Death of a President. Earl Warren went to Manchester and gave him the first draft of the commission’s report, of the Warren Report, and said, “Here. We’d like you to read it and approve its findings on behalf of the Kennedys.” Now is that any way to run an investigation? You’re having the Warren Report, the report with your name on it, vetted by the family of the murdered president? That’s a disgrace, frankly.
This I apologize for the illegibility of, but this was an article from a magazine called Marin Life in 1977. It was written by a reporter named Richard Raznikov. Jim DiEugenio, who’ll be on later, can vouch, as I can, that if Raznikov dug this up, it’s as good as gold.
What he revealed … It’s a little hard to read; it’s a little hard to read here … Earl Warren had attended a judicial conference in the State of Florida. At that conference, he confided to Raznikov’s source, who was a federal judge and a friend of Warren’s, that he, Warren, was ashamed of himself and of what the Commission had done and that the whole thing had been a whitewash, and he had been coerced into it by President Lyndon Johnson, which we knew.
Again, this is from an unnamed source, but I have every confidence in this report of Richard Raznikov. If he’s got a source that said it, you can be pretty damn sure that he said it. You even have Earl Warren, the man whose name is on the cover of the Warren report, revealing that the whole thing was a cover up, a whitewash, and that he was actually ashamed.
I was reading the inscription on the way in today out there, and it says, “Your services as informed citizens will be necessary to the peace and prosperity of the world.” That really touched me, and I hope that my little presentation tonight has helped you be a more informed citizenry. Thank you for your time. Thank you.
This transcript has been edited for grammar and flow.
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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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JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 4
Written by Frank Cassano and Arnaldo Fernandez
The CIA never recovered from its perfect failure at the Bay of Pigs. It generated a sort of obsession with Castro that led to an ultimate defeat in times of dirty war; but also to a carnivalesque approach to Castroist Cuba. A facet of this carnavalization became manifest in the fourth part of the series JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald. The episode is entitled “The Cuban Connection,” but illustrates how former CIA case officer Bob Baer is disconnected from historical truth.
The Wizard of Ozzie
Baer opened this episode with a memo from HSCA first Deputy Counsel, Robert Tanenbaum,1 about Oswald’s involvement in New Orleans with Cuban exiles—and some non-Cuban soldiers of fortune—recruited and trained by the CIA to overthrow Castro. Thusly, he is setting the stage for a hell of a sleight of hand. Former Marine “Ozzie” Oswald, re-defector from the Soviet Union and pro-Castro activist in Dallas,2 will turn into a leftist wannabe killer of Kennedy.
It’s easy to predict that the conjuring trick will continue with Castro knowing in advance Oswald’s criminal intent, since everything going on in the anti-Castro belligerent milieu in the U.S. was reported to him by the Cuban Intelligence Service (CuIS). On the other hand, the CIA did have the luxury of missing Oswald as a security risk, since it funded the black ops against Castro, but it ran them from afar with “little oversight”. It doesn’t matter that since April 24, 1963, the vey leader of Alpha 66 in Dallas, Manuel Rodríguez Oscarberro, had been reported to the Secret Service as security risk to President Kennedy.3
Big-budget paraphernalia—underwater sonar, a diver, metal detector for canvassing the forest—are displayed again, as if the episode were about artifacts instead of new milestones in the well-known historical trail of the CIA dirty war against Castro. However, Baer forgot to include a crap detector and claimed that nobody else had ever really looked into the connection between Oswald, the Cubans, and the CIA. It would mean that—just for instance—New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison never started an investigation in late 1966 or Harold Weisberg never wrote Oswald in New Orleans: Case for Conspiracy with the CIA (Canyon Books, 1967). But by skipping those authors, Baer does not have to bring up the names of David Ferrie, Clay Shaw and Guy Banister.
The legerdemain with Ozzie included the Tourette’s-Syndrome-style reiteration that he shot Kennedy and he did it “with the same rifle” ordered by mail on March 12, 1963, and used to shoot at General Edwin Walker on April 10. Baer forgot what Tanenbaum stated in his ARRB Testimony (1996): “I don’t think from my experience that Lee Harvey Oswald could be convicted in any courtroom in America.” As it happened, the Warren Commission engaged in acts of evidentiary wizardry to do so:
- The bullet recovered by the Dallas Police Department (DPD) from the Walker shooting was changed to incriminate Oswald as able “to carry out a carefully planned killing of another human being.”4 DPD officers Van Cleave and McElroy described a steel-jacketed 7.62 mm (30.06) bullet in their General Offense Report file the same day of the attack. Those fired against President Kennedy were copper-jacketed 6.5 mm bullets.
- The $21.45 money order for the rifle mailed by Ozzie from Dallas was supposed to have arrived at Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago on March 13, less than 24 hours after it was sent from Dallas. It was then deposited on the same day of arrival at the First National Bank.5
- The 36-inch, 5.5 pound Mannlicher Carcano carbine ordered by Ozzie does not match the murder weapon entered into evidence by the Dallas Police: a 40.2 inch, 7.5 pound Mannlicher Carcano short rifle.6 And there is no evidence of any weapon being picked up by Oswald at the post office in Dallas.7
Down to Miami
Baer evidently wants to travel instead of reading any books on the subject he is addressing in the TV series. As even beginners know, the “key to this whole operation” in New Orleans lies in the Miami CIA station (JM/WAVE). Hence Baer and his team go to South Florida. They track down former CIA contractor Marshall Golnick, who has “inside information” from a half century ago. They also do another archaeological search in Key Largo around a military facility.
Golnick states that the Cuban exiles trained in New Orleans were dropped off by bus in Miami and received money and weapons. They were ready to stage raids into Cuba to destroy any infrastructure in sight; but this all ended with the fiasco at Bay of Pigs (thereby forgetting about Operation MONGOOSE). Golnick then reinforced the historical lie used by Baer himself to justify why Cuban exiles hated Kennedy: The latter ordered the Bay of Pigs invasion, but then withheld air support.
The invasion was a so-called CIA covert operation that was unleashed with a Pearl-Harbor-style air bombing against three Cuban air force bases. Since these bombings were attributed to Castro’s defectors, they could not return to bomb again without destroying the plausible deniability required by the White House to prevent condemnation at the UN.8 And further, as Peter Kornbluh demonstrates in Bay of Pigs Declassified, the alleged D-Day air strikes were not part of the original plan. They were to be launched from an airstrip on the island after a beachhead was secured. The latter never happened.
Finally, Golnick drops his own bomb about Oswald: likely aligned with the most radical fringe groups such as Alpha 66 and Omega 7. It does not matter that Alpha 66 was founded in 1962 and Omega 7 in 1974. According to the program, all these groups wanted to kill Kennedy and so did Oswald. Baer hammers the point home: “Oswald is a pronounced Marxist who praised Communist ideals.” Therefore, he and the radical Cuban exile groups worked together to achieve the common goal of killing JFK. Such a coincidence of contraries was strong enough to prevent the fierce anti-Castro Alpha 66 fighters from reacting to Oswald’s Castroist inclinations. By skipping authors like Weisberg and Garrison, Baer does not have to bring up the names of David Ferrie, Clay Shaw and Guy Banister.
Amid the extremist Cuban exile paramilitary subculture, Oswald flaunted his Fair Play for Cuba Committee [FPCC] militancy in New Orleans from mid-June to late August 1963. But only members of the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE) cadre, Carlos Bringuier and two cohorts, confronted him in a minor fracas at Canal Street on August 9, when Oswald was distributing the sold-out 1961 first edition of FPCC pamphlet The Crime Against Cuba (1961).9 Which had Banister’s 544 Camp Street address stamped on it. Oswald had described the scuffle—including being arrested by the police—in a letter to the FPCC dated August 1st and postmarked August 4th. In other words, before it happened.
The CIA in Limbo
Although all the anti-Castro groups in New Orleans and Miami were CIA brainchildren, Baer and his partner, former police officer Adam Bercovici, do not give a damn about how the CIA wasn’t aware of an Oswald-Alpha 66 common goal. Instead, they do some brainstorming to find Oswald’s deeper motivation. And they discover it. Oswald had an “I’ll show them” mindset.
They also discover, this time on the computer, that the man behind Alpha 66 was Maurice Bishop. But they don’t identify him as David Philips, who in 1963 was playing a CIA dual role: Chief of the Cuban Desk in Mexico City and Chief of Covert Ops against Cuba in Langley. They only resort to the well-known statement by Antonio Veciana about having seen Bishop with Oswald in Dallas in the late summer of 1963. Bercovici concludes: “There’s your co-conspirator. He had on-the-ground assistance in Dallas.”
Back on the computer, they bump into the famous, late September Sylvia Odio incident.10 It’s prima facie evidence of Oswald being impersonated in Dallas while visiting Mexico City, or vice versa. But Baer limits his explanation as to why the FBI didn’t track the event in Dallas: “Because they missed it.” Indeed, they did. On October 9, 1963, the FBI cancelled the security flash on Oswald,11 but on October 10, 1963, Langley omitted in a cable (DIR 74673) to the FBI that “Lee Oswald” had spoken with Soviet Consul Valeriy Kostikov in Mexico City, Baer’s main character of the first episode (“The Iron Meeting”). Such a piece of intel would have been enough to restore the flash. This cable also provided a false description of a presumed American entering the Soviet Embassy and the related photo taken by a CIA site wasn’t Oswald’s. In other words, during these weeks, it was Murphy’s Law that pertained: Everything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong between Oswald, the FBI and the CIA.
In closing the episode, Baer and Bercovici swallow whole Marina Oswald’s testimony about her husband shooting at General Walker. They search the DPD files on the case. Oswald appears to have never been brought up even as a person of interest by the police prior to the creation of the Warren Commission. But they focus in on the two cars seen leaving from the alley behind General Walker’s house, concluding Oswald had likely been driven in and out by accomplices.
The preview of the fifth part, “Scene of the Crime,” showed a re-enactment of the shooting at Dealey Plaza. A rifle is fired from above and behind at a rubber head, which goes backwards after being shot. As in the Walker shooting, Oswald will surely have get-away accomplices.
Notes
1 In a fictionalized account (Corruption of Blood, Dutton, 1995) of his HSCA experience, Tanenbaum referred to a black-and-white silent 8 mm home movie showing military exercises. The viewer can see the pinpoints of fire from rifles and the shimmering gouts of muzzle blast from machine guns. Among the people in the film, Tanenbaum identified David Ferrie in a close-up; Oswald “in his ball cap and black T-shirt;” Antonio Veciana “in civvies this time, holding a .45 and smiling;” and “another guy in civilian clothes,” who Tanenbaum believes was David Atlee Phillips, alias Maurice Bishop (pages 143-46). Jim DiEugenio asked Tanenbaum: “Was it really as you described in the book, with all the people in that film? Bishop was in the film?” Tanenbaum replied: “Oh, yeah. Absolutely! They’re all in the film. They’re all there. But, the fact of the matter is the [HSCA] began to balk at a series of events” (Probe, Vol. 3, No 5, July-August 1996). In fact, the film vanished after Tanenbaum’s departure from HSCA.
2 Shortly before Oswald moved to New Orleans, the FBI office in Dallas received info about him passing out pamphlets of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee [FPCC] on Main Street and wearing a placard around his neck reading, “Hands Off Cuba, Viva Fidel.” It occurred on April 15, 1963. SA Agent James Hosty reported it on September 10. See Warren Commission, Vol. XXVI, CE 2718.
3 Eventually, a CuIS informant furnished the intel Rodríguez Oscarberro had told him that “if his involvement in the assassination was uncovered, he was a dead man, given that he was an Alpha 66 delegate in Dallas and knew too much.” See Escalante, Fabian: JFK: The Cuba Files, Ocean Press, 2000, 170 f.
4 Warren Report, 406.
5 Ibidem, 119. It implies that, in about 24 hours in 1963, the U.S. Post Service picked up the money order from a mailbox in Dallas and transported it to a post office where it was sorted and shipped out to the airport. Then it flew 700 miles to Chicago, was picked up there and driven to the main post office, where it was sorted, placed on a truck and driven to the regional post office. Here it was given to a route carrier who delivered it to Klein’s. After being sorted out again, Klein’s delivered it to the First National Bank of Chicago to be deposited in Klein’s account.
6 Armstrong, John: Harvey and Lee, Quasar Ltd., 2003, 477.
7 DiEugenio, James: Reclaiming Parkland, Skyhorse, 2013, 62.
8 When Eisenhower approved the CIA policy paper A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime on March 17, 1960, he made crystal clear to CIA Director Allen Dulles: “Our hand should not show in anything that is done” (Memorandum of Conference with the President, March 17, 1960. FRUS, Vol. VI, Doc. 486). Kennedy stuck to the script and ruled out an intervention of the U.S. armed forces under any condition, as he clearly stated at a press conference at the State Department on April 12, 1963 (Cf.: Johnson, Haynes: The Bay of Pigs, W. W. Norton and Co., 1964, 72).
9 By that time, the CIA had ordered 45 copies. DiEugenio, James: Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse, 2012 158 f.
10 In late September, Mrs. Odio was visited by two Cubans (Leopoldo and Angelo) along with an America introduced as Leon Oswald. They would be “working in the underground” and looking for her help regarding funds for the Cuban exile group JURE. The next day, Leopoldo phoned Mrs. Odio and discussed Oswald, saying he was an excellent shot and had said that President Kennedy should have been killed after Bay of Pigs. When JFK was murdered in Dallas, Mrs. Odio fainted upon hearing the news and recognizing Oswald. Her account was corroborated by her sister Annie, who had briefly seen the visitors. It reached the FBI and later the Warren Commission, but the latter ultimately dismissed it because its chronology put Oswald on his way to Mexico City on the same dates.
11 Because of that, Hoover disciplined Lambert Anderson, Marvin Gheesling, and sixteen other agents.
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JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald, Part 3
How The History Channel is Tracking Oswald Twistedly
Written by Frank Cassano and Arnaldo M. Fernandez
The History Channel series JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald has been curtailed in the U.S. Maybe the ratings were too low, but History Canada continues airing it on Sundays at 10 p.m. (East). Maybe it had to take a break in the U.S. after two self-contradictory episodes: “The Iron Meeting” inside a bullring in Mexico City should have never happened since “The Russian Network” didn´t care about recruiting Oswald.1 The third part, “Oswald Goes Dark,” starts following in the footsteps of the CIA by trying to link the Mexican consular clerk Silvia Duran and the American visa applicant Lee Harvey Oswald outside the Cuban Consulate.2
The Twist Party
For this purpose, host Bob Baer recycled as “new memo”: the entirely discredited “Thomas Report”3 about Duran and Oswald at a twist party, and this was then exploited by the replacement of the Russian Network—the Cuban Intelligence Service (CuIS)—to put Oswald up to killing JFK. Using a mobile lab, Baer and his team also tracked down a witness, Francisco Guerrero Garro, who had kept his silence for more than half century, but now swears having seen Oswald and even a Cuban consul at a twist party. Oswald could have been invited by his “friend” Duran. However, a false testimony does not become a fact by repetition.
Such a twist party4 was the ludicrous brainchild of Francisco’s aunt, the late Mexican writer Elena Garro de Paz. After having exhaustively interviewed her and her daughter twice in November 1964, the Legal Attaché (FBI) at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City put the case at rest, simply because they “failed to substantiate the allegations.”5
CIA Station Chief Win Scott passed along the info to CIA headquarters at Langley. On the memo, Scott’s deputy Allen White wrote down: “I don’t know what FBI did in November 64, but the Garros have been talking about this for a long time and she is said to be extremely bright.” Scott dismissed White’s remark with a lapidary handwritten comment: “She is also nuts.”6
Garro de Paz drove others nuts as well. The late Charles W. Thomas, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy, talked with her in 1965 and raised her false story with the Secretary of State William Rogers in 1969. Baer has just joined this fruity party. It includes sound effects from the Cold War: “If we can prove that the Cubans were involved, that’s an act of war against the United States.” Thusly he is definitively “scaling the walls of high camp”, like Philip Shenon with A Cruel and Shocking Act (Henry Holt and Co., 2013).7
A Motive to Kill?
Baer applied another nutty scheme to put Oswald up to killing Kennedy. FBI spy Jack Childs (SOLO) managed to talk with Castro and reported to his boss J. Edgar Hoover, who summed up to Warren Commission General Counsel, J. Lee Rankin, that “no further action is contemplated by this Bureau”8 about SOLO’s report. Baer attempts to twist the intel furnished by SOLO into smoking gun evidence of Oswald’s criminal intent.
On May 20, 1964, Jack Childs flew from Moscow to “THE BEACH” [Cuba] in the SOLO Mission 15. He spent ten days there. The gist of his report reads thus:
“Castro said ‘I was told this by my people in the Embassy exactly how he (Oswald) stalked in and walked in and ran out. That in itself was a suspicious movement, because nobody comes to an Embassy for a visa (they go to a Consulate). [Castro] stated that when Oswald was refused his visa at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, he acted like a madman and started yelling and shouting on his way out, ‘I’m going to kill this bastard. I’m going to kill Kennedy’”9
The HSCA nipped the problem in the bud: “Nothing in the evidence indicated that the threat should have been taken seriously, if it had occurred, since Oswald had behaved in an argumentative and obnoxious fashion.”10 By insisting in muddying the waters, Baer misses a proper research problem that John Newman has formulated as a mystery.11
Both Duran and the incoming (Alfredo Mirabal) and outcoming (Eusebio Azcue) Cuban consuls were adamant before HSCA that Oswald didn’t vow such a threat at the Cuban Consulate.12 Two Cuban officials—Guillermo Ruiz and Antonio García—from the Commercial Office, located upstairs, were also eyewitnesses of Oswald’s making a scene at the Consulate and claimed they didn’t hear a threat against Kennedy.
The Lopez Report deciphered the apparent mystery. The Consulate “was in a separate building from the Embassy.”13 In 1963, the Cuban diplomatic compound in Mexico City was at Francisco Marquez Street (Colonia Condesa) with two main entrances: One to the Embassy, on the corner of Tacubaya Alley, and the other to the Consulate, on the corner of Zamora Street. No wonder the CIA surveillance post (LIONION) in a third-floor apartment across Francisco Marquez Street employed an agent—Cesar Rodriguez Gallegos—at one window for photographing the Embassy, while a pulse camera covered the Consulate from another window.
SOLO himself reasonably commented to Hoover that “the Cuban Embassy people must have told Oswald something to the effect that they were sorry that they did not let Americans into Cuba because the U.S. government stopped Cubans from letting them in, and that is when Oswald shouted out the statement about killing President Kennedy.” It goes without saying that Oswald was told to apply anyway for a visa at the Consulate.
Oswald must have entered the Cuban diplomatic compound at the corner of Tacubaya Alley shortly after arriving in Mexico City on September 27, 1963. In fact, there is a clue about it besides Castro’s statement. On January 1964, FBI Special Agent Nathan L. Ferris was advised by Mexican informants that Elizabeth Mora [American-born Mexican artist Elizabeth Catlett-Mora] had spilled the beans about a conversation with Cuban Cultural Attaché Teresa Proenza. The latter confided to Mora “that Oswald walked in ‘cold’ to the Cuban Embassy. [She] was the first person he talked to [and] turned him over to the nearest person higher in rank and who spoke English.” Proenza added that Oswald had come to the Embassy for “a visa to go to Russia.”14
Newman told Jim DiEugenio that the threat “is almost surely a forgery.” The Childs report to Hoover is part of a letter to Gus Hall, leader of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and “this kind of information would not be part of that letter [since] SOLO was too experienced to do that.” Notwithstanding, SOLO also reported “that he later discussed CASTRO’s statements with BEATRICE JOHNSON, the CPUSA representative in Cuba.” A forged report wouldn’t ever include a third party for running the risk of denial.
Rocking the Refugee Boat
From Mexico City, Baer and his well-equipped team switched their focus to Louisiana, where they pretended having uncovered certain gaps in Oswald’s timeline between August and October 1963. During his period, specifically from late August to early September, two key incidents occurred and were finally reported to HSCA.
- Antonio Veciana met David Philips in downtown Dallas earlier than originally planned and Antonio had a brief sighting of a young man who said nothing and left. He turned out to be Oswald.15
- Oswald was spotted in Clinton16, about 130 miles from New Orleans, during a CORE voter registration drive. He was accompanied by the rabidly anti-Communist and partner of hard line anti-Castro exile Sergio Arcacha Smith, David Ferrie, and the New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, a part-time contract agent of the CIA with a security clearance since 1949.
With regard to HSCA, Baer limited himself to telling his partner, former police detective Adam Bercovici, it was “the follow-up investigation to the Warren Commission.” He did not refer to Ferrie or Shaw, much less to Oswald´s close contact with Guy Bannister, head of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean. He was just content to assert that Oswald went off the grid so that it became easier for Baer to detonate an explosive device: The Cuban radical exiles were Oswald´s “accomplices.”
The team drove out of New Orleans to the nearby town of Belle Chasse and reached a remote area, surrounded by swamps and thick vegetation, with some decrepit buildings still standing. They found evidence of it being a training facility and weapon arsenal. A “military-grade operation,” surmised Baer, as if nobody knew the Bay-of-Pigs-related CIA operation JM/MOVE was headquartered there in 196117, while Oswald was working at a factory in Minsk (Belarus).
But let’s give the duo some credit. They raised the issue that Oswald was working with intelligence agencies in a secret government operation and left us with one final, juicy morsel. According to Baer, “the more we get into this the more it appears this guy was not a lone wolf. There’s overwhelming evidence to assume he had accomplices.”
No doubt the fourth part, “The Cuban Connection”, will be breathtaking. Baer surely will twist the facts again. Oswald will appear linked to a belligerent anti-Castro group, organized and backed by the CIA, but Baer will try to perform the analytical piroutte that Castro, not the CIA, learned about Oswald’s intention to kill Kennedy, since the anti-Castro group had been infiltrated by CuIS agents who were reporting everything back to Castro.
Notes
1 See the previous reviews “How The History Channel is Tracking Oswald Non-Historically” and “How The History Channel is Tracking Oswald Pathetically”.
2 At the request of the CIA Station Chief, Duran was arrested by the Mexican Federal Security Directorate (FDS) the day after the assassination. The line of questioning sought her confession of having entrapped and lured Oswald with sexual favors into a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. See McKnight, Gerald: Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, 78.
3 NARA Record Number: 104-10404-10325
4 In 1963, the twist dance craze was sweeping Mexico thanks to Bill Haley and His Comets with Twist Español, Florida Twist and other hits under the record label Orfeon. As cousin of Silvia Duran’s husband, Elena Garro de Paz would have attended such parties within the family circle. She claimed having seen Oswald at the home of her cousin Ruben Duran. Silvia never denied the possibility of being at a twist party in the house of her brother-in-law with Elena present, but always denied having met Oswald after September 27, 1963, much less outside the Cuban Consulate. Silvia agreed to be interviewed by HSCA, while Elena refused.
5 Memo of 27 December 1965 from LEGAT (Nathan Ferris) to the Ambassador (NARA Record Number: 104-10007-10043).
6 NARA Record Number: 104-10404-10320
7 See the review by James DiEugenio.
8 Warren Commission Document 1359.
9 FBI Records: The Vault – SOLO (http://vault.fbi.gov/solo), Part 63, pp. 58-59).
10 The Final Report of HSCA, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979, 122.
11 Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing, 2008, p. 428.
12 See JFK Exhibit F-440 A (Duran) and HSCA Report, Vol. III, pp. 173-78 (Mirabal) and 127-58 (Azcue).
13 Lopez Report, pp. 26 f. [http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/lopezrpt_2003/html/LopezRpt_0025a.htm]
14 NARA Record Number: 124-10003-10386 [http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=61273]
15 Veciana, Antonio and Carlos Harrison: Trained to Kill, Skyhorse Publishing, 2017, 122.
16 Fonzi, Gaeton: The Last Investigation, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, 140.
17 A diversionary force commanded by Nino Díaz (AMNORM-1) was organized, equipped and trained in great haste at Belle Chasse. After all, the mother ship couldn’t reach the intended beach 30 miles east of Guantanamo (Eastern Cuba). Cf. CIA Clandestine Service Historical Paper No. 105 (1961), 22 f.
-
The Abstract Reality of Edward Epstein
Part 1: “Focus on the Media: Edward J. Epstein”
Part 3: “Edward Epstein: Warren Commission Critic?” (Probe vol 7 no 1, 1999)
On his web site, Edward Epstein preserved his article published in The Atlantic in 1993 on Jim Garrison. To my knowledge, that is the only place one can find it since (thankfully) it does not appear to be available at The Atlantic web site. A few months earlier, in late 1992, he had just published a hit piece on Garrison in the ever-accommodating New Yorker. This was written on the occasion of Garrison’s death. Epstein now used the excuse that Oliver Stone was coming out with a double VHS box set of his film JFK to justify a second hatchet job. This allowed him to widen his focus a bit. Now he could include both Stone and his consultant Fletcher Prouty in his machine-gun strike.And make no mistake. That is what these two pieces are, out and out drive-bys. One definition of a hatchet job is that the author ignores the record, distorts the record, or even worse, deliberately misrepresents it. All done in order to disguise what is an act, not of reportage, but of propaganda. As we shall see, there is no evidence that Epstein ever once consulted the original records of Jim Garrison’s investigation for either of these two articles.. These were available to him from three sources at that time. First, there was a collection of them at the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) in Washington DC. Second, co-screenwriter of the film JFK Zachary Sklar had many of them. Third, Jim Garrison had what was probably the largest collection of them at his home. I never heard of any attempt by Epstein to consult these records for either of his two articles.
Because of that, this allows him to say, in the second paragraph of his 1993 Atlantic piece, that the idea that Clay Shaw had participated in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy was based on nothing but the testimony of Perry Russo. So right out of the gate, Epstein commits a faux pas. For Garrison did not make Shaw a person of interest because of Russo. The way that Garrison came to be interested in Shaw was through the testimony of lawyer Dean Andrews in the Warren Commission volumes. There, Andrews said that he had been called by a person named Clay Bertrand within 24 hours of the assassination. Bertrand wanted him to go to Dallas and volunteer to defend Lee Harvey Oswald. That call was corroborated by at least four sources, including Andrews’ secretary and his investigator. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 51) When Garrison talked to Andrews, he refused to reveal who Bertrand was. Just as he had previously refused to reveal the man’s true name to Mark Lane, and he would later refuse to do so with Anthony Summers. He claimed he would be in physical danger if he did reveal the name. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 181)
Consequently, Garrison sent out his investigators to find out who Bertrand was. It turned out to be Shaw. Again, there are plentiful references to this in Garrison’s files, which Epstein did not survey. (DiEugenio, pp. 387-88) But beyond that, even the FBI knew that Shaw was Bertrand. And they knew this as far back as 1963, because his name had come up in their original investigation. (Davy, p. 192) Since he is either unaware of, or wants to ignore, this information, Epstein can 1.) Deny this evidence and 2.) Attribute the whole Shaw/Bertrand case to Russo.
II
Before we begin to address Epstein’s over-the-top attack on Russo, let us lay down some facts, which Epstein does not do. Without these facts, there is no baseline to form any kind of informed discussion. And informed discussion is what Epstein wishes to avoid.
Garrison’s assistant Andrew Sciambra first interviewed Russo in Baton Rouge on February 25, 1967. Russo stated that he had attended a gathering at David Ferrie’s apartment in September of 1963. During this gathering, the talk turned to an assassination plot to kill President Kennedy. Some anti-Castro Cubans were on hand as well as Ferrie, a man Russo called Clem Bertrand, and a man he called Leon Oswald. Sciambra gave Russo photos to identify, and he picked out photos of Ferrie, Shaw and Oswald. Sciambra took notes on a legal pad and marked the photos the witness had identified. He concluded by telling Russo he should come down to New Orleans for further discussion.
In the office on Monday, Sciambra began transcribing his notes. He was in the process of doing this when Russo arrived. Garrison wanted to test his testimony, so he was taken to Mercy Hospital and given Sodium Pentothal (truth serum) and later placed under hypnosis by Dr. Nicolas Chetta. Russo told the same story to Chetta as he did to Sciambra in Baton Rouge. (Davy, p. 121) Chetta told Garrison assistant Alvin Oser that there was no chance one could lie under truth serum; what Russo said had to have happened. (Joe Biles, In History’s Shadow, p. 38) Russo’s story was partly corroborated by his friend Niles Peterson, who had left the gathering early but recalled the presence there of a Leon Oswald. On February 28, Sciambra drove Russo by Shaw’s apartment, where Russo identified Shaw from a parked car. Finally, posing as an insurance salesman, he greeted Shaw at his door. This finalized the identification.
Sciambra then drafted his first completed memo based on the Chetta sessions. In fact, it is dated February 28, the day after the truth serum was administered. Later on he finished a second memo. This related the things outside the scope of that gathering at Ferrie’s, and was the actual second memo Sciambra composed. (See Biles, p. 44) When Lou Ivon typed up a search warrant for Shaw’s apartment, he referred to what Sciambra told him about the conversation he had with Russo in Baton Rouge, which was reaffirmed by the truth serum session. This information is right in the warrant, before Sciambra even typed up his second memo. Ivon could only have gotten the information from Sciambra. And Sciambra could only have gotten it from Russo. (ibid)
What Epstein does to confuse matters is to borrow the same scheme that the late James Phelan used back in 1967. After reporter Phelan met with the DA in Las Vegas, Garrison unwisely let him copy the memos. The DA was obviously unaware that Phelan had been a conduit for the Saturday Evening Post to write government-sanctioned stories. And, in fact, Phelan had three meetings with the FBI about Jim Garrison, urging them to intercede with the DA. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 245) Phelan took his copies of the memos and said that, since one mentioned the gathering at Ferrie’s and one did not, this meant that the one that did not came first, and the one that did came second. Therefore all the information about an assassination discussion was induced into Russo by hypnosis. This is rendered false by both the date on the first memo and by Ivon’s search warrant.
But let us go further with Phelan. Phelan went to visit Russo in Baton Rouge and he took photographer Matt Herron with him. He later said that on this occasion, Russo told Herron and himself that he never mentioned the assassination discussion in Baton Rouge, only in New Orleans. Phelan later told author James Kirkwood that Herron would back him up on this point. When this writer contacted Mr. Herron, this was exposed as a lie. Herron told me that Russo strongly stated that he first mentioned the gathering in Baton Rouge. (ibid, p. 246) Even further, Phelan said he had taped this conversation with Russo. Under cross-examination at the Shaw trial, Phelan admitted this was false also. (Biles, p. 46)
But there was still another fallback position that Phelan and Shaw’s lawyers then took. They said that once you looked at the two sessions done by Chetta with Russo, the reader could see that Russo was prompted by Chetta to recall Bertrand. It turned out that this was another deliberate misrepresentation. Only when the second session is placed first and the first session placed second is that the case. But in Garrison’s files they are properly labeled as A and B. When they are read in this order, it is plainly seen that Russo recalls Bertrand’s name without any prompting. (DiEugenio, p. 247)
Now, at the time Epstein wrote this article, in 1993, he could have discovered all this information on his own. He could have spoken to Matt Herron, Andrew Sciambra, and Lou Ivon. If he wanted written evidence, he could have asked Garrison for the memos and the search warrant. Apparently, he did not think that was important. And he also either believed Phelan, or thought that Phelan’s scheme could not be exposed. Well, it was exposed. This proves that 1.) Epstein did not do on the ground research for his article, and 2.) That he had an agenda from the moment he started writing it.
But further revealing his shabby research methods, Epstein does not even seem to understand that Russo was not supposed to be Garrison’s lead witness. The lead witness was supposed to be a man named Clyde Johnson. Johnson was a preacher turned reactionary politician who told Garrison he had met with Shaw, Leon Oswald, Jack Ruby and a Cuban in a Baton Rouge hotel in 1963. Shaw gave him money for his campaign, two thousand dollars, the equivalent of about $17,000 today. When he went to the bathroom, he heard them talking about “getting someone”, and he became apprehensive. But it turned out they were talking about Kennedy, and using Johnson’s attacks on him to lure him to the south. Johnson had a witness who partly collaborated his story about Shaw’s support. He also had a contemporaneous address book, in which he had made notes about Shaw and Ruby. Johnson did not testify at Shaw’s trial even though Garrison had hid him outside of town. His office was so infiltrated and wired for sound that Johnson’s location was discovered. During the trial he was beaten to a bloody pulp. He was hospitalized and could not testify. (Davy, pp. 72-73) Again, Epstein could have found out about Johnson if he had asked Garrison for documents. He apparently did not think it was important.
III
Building on his foundation of sand, Epstein now decides to jump to a scene from the film JFK. This is a scene that focuses on the man who was Garrison’s chief suspect. The film shows us David Ferrie in a panic after Garrison’s investigation had been prematurely exposed in the local press. He calls Lou Ivon at Garrison’s office and says that this is a fatal development for him. Investigator Ivon, Garrison and a third assistant then go to visit him at a hotel room that Ivon has secured for Ferrie. Now, to be fair, let us grant the screenwriters a degree of dramatic license. In reality only Ivon was there (Davy, p. 66), since he was the one person in Garrison’s office that Ferrie trusted. But in terms of the film narrative, one had to have Garrison there since he is the central character. And contrary to what Epstein said at a debate in New York sponsored by The Nation magazine, Garrison did write about this incident in his book, On the Trail of the Assassins. (see pp. 138-39) Epstein can scream until the cows come home, but there is very little in this scene that stretches the facts about Ferrie. Let us do something that none of Stone’s critics have done. Let us break it down.
Ferrie first says he worked for the CIA. This fact was reported to Anthony Summers by CIA officer Victor Marchetti for his book Conspiracy. Ferrie also mentioned it to at least one of his friends. (see Summers, p. 300; also Davy, p. 28) Ferrie then says that Shaw had a high clearance, and this is also true. Shaw had a clearance for the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division codenamed QK/ENCHANT. This was the same clearance Howard Hunt had. (Davy, pp. 195-96) Ferrie then adds that both the Cuban exiles and Oswald were also associated with the CIA. There is no doubt that Sergio Arcacha Smith, Ferrie’s closest Cuban friend, was a CIA operative. He had been sanctioned as such by Howard Hunt for the local leadership of the Cuban Revolutionary Council. This was a sort of a government in exile for Cuba that the CIA set up before the Bay of Pigs invasion. (ibid, p. 9) Eladio Del Valle, another Cuban exile, paid Ferrie for flights into Cuba. (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy, p. 119)
Ferrie then says that the CIA and Mob had been working together against Castro for years. This is such a commonplace, even back then, that it should not even be noted. But Ferrie was in a good position to know about it since he had a sideline of working for an attorney who represented Carlos Marcello. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 135) And his aforementioned paymaster for flights into Cuba, Eladio del Valle, had ties to Santo Trafficante, who actually was part of the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro. (Summers, pp. 319, 491)
“I have found that the assassination was much more complex than anyone believed, and that a corner of it—I’ve never pretended it was more—existed in New Orleans …. John Kennedy was killed because he was against the war in Vietnam. There is no doubt of that.” ~Jim Garrison
Concerning Oswald and the CIA, the odds are high that, as Garrison wrote, he was acting as a CIA agent provocateur, especially in light of the revelations in John Newman’s book Oswald and the CIA. But even in 1993, with all that was known about Oswald being at Guy Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street through books by Garrison, Philip Melanson, and Anthony Summers, plus Oswald’s visit to the Clinton/Jackson area with Shaw and Ferrie, most objective people would have had to grant this. What else would a “communist” be doing hanging out with so many right-wingers?
When Ferrie mentions that he knows things about Ruby, there is also evidence for that. This comes from Clyde Johnson, as mentioned above, and also Ferrie associates William Morris and Thomas Beckham. (See Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, pp. 79, 124) As far as Ferrie saying that Ruby ran guns to Castro in the early days, there were records that Ruby did do that prior to the Cuban revolution. This was even written about by reporter Earl Golz in the Dallas Morning News. (See August 18, 1978; also John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 177) What this all exposes is not Stone’s flawed writing, but Epstein’s non-existent research.
We now come to the exchange that drove Epstein up the wall. Garrison asks Ferrie, “Who killed the president?” It is clear that he does not mean that Ferrie was in on it. It is simply an exploratory query. Ferrie says he does not know. He says no one knows, not even the assassins. Because these kinds of things are all wrapped up in a layered cover operation. But the odd thing is this. If Epstein had looked, there was evidence in Garrison’s files that Ferrie at least planned an assassination attempt.
Most us know from Garrison’s Playboy interview that Ferrie had a rather rare preoccupation. He measured trajectory angles and distances of shells ejecting out of rifles. (DiEugenio, p. 215) One would not need to do that for guerilla fighting or firefights during Operation Mongoose—which Ferrie was a part of. (Davy, p. 28) But you might need it for a covert operation that included assassination.
Jim Garrison had planted a mole on Ferrie. Actually, two of them. One was named Max Gonzalez and one was Jimmy Johnson. Johnson said that he had gone through some of Ferrie’s documents and come across a folder marked “Files 1963”. In that folder he found a set of papers that looked like a diagram for an assassination plot against Fidel Castro. From the markings on the paper, the plot seemed to have to do with killing Castro from a plane. (DiEugenio, p. 215)
But a different witness found a different diagram in Ferrie’s desk in attorney G. Wray Gill’s office. Clara Gay was a Gill client who knew Ferrie. After the assassination, she called Gill’s office: the word was that Garrison had questioned Ferrie about the Kennedy case. She heard what sounded like some panicky voices in the background. So she went over to Gill’s office. Walking over to Ferrie’s desk she saw what appeared to be a diagram of Dealey Plaza: it depicted a car from the perspective of a high angle with tall buildings around it. When Clara tried to pick it up, the secretary came over and pulled it back. But during the struggle, Clara noticed the words “Elm Street” written on the diagram. (Ibid, p. 216)
Epstein’s idea that Ferrie would somehow be alien to crafting assassination plots is not backed up by the evidence. And clearly, Garrison made a mistake by not listening to Ivon and having Ferrie testify before a grand jury after this tense discussion with him. (Garrison, pp. 139-40)
Once the record is referred to, we can conclude that there really is little or nothing in this scene that cannot be justified by information that the DA had about David Ferrie. Consequently, when the facts are adduced, Epstein’s howls about violations of the record are the equivalent of a stray dog barking in the night. What makes it worse is that there is really no excuse for his journalistic irresponsibility. Because when Stone and co-scenarist Zach Sklar released the volume The Book of the Film in 1992, it included the script’s research notes. On page 88, the text reads that although Garrison’s book refers to this episode in passing, the exchange is actually based on interviews with investigator Lou Ivon. This reviewer called Ivon back in 1993. When Garrison’s investigator was asked if a man named Ed Epstein ever got in contact with him about the Kennedy case, he replied that, back in 1968, yes. I asked him, what about more recently, since Stone’s movie came out? Ivon replied, no, not recently. Epstein thought it was unimportant to consult the primary source.
IV
Epstein couples his howls over this scene with similar complaints about one that shortly follows. After a scene showing Garrison discovering that his office has been wired for sound—which it was—Ivon gets a phone call. (For the electronic surveillance see DiEugenio, p. 232, and pp. 264-65) He is alerted that Ferrie has been found dead. Garrison and some of his assistants rush over to his apartment. As Garrison goes through the place, he discovers an empty bottle of Proloid, which is used for low metabolism. As the photographs taken at the time reveal, there are many other empty pill bottles around. When Garrison had the Proloid drug checked out, his expert said that excessive use of it in someone like Ferrie, who had hypertension at the time, could cause death without a trace. (DiEugenio, p. 225)
What makes this even more suggestive is that two forensic pathologists reviewed the autopsy photos in advance of the film’s release. They both noted contusions on the inside of Ferrie’s mouth. Dr. Cyril Wecht and Dr. Frank Minyard said these could be indicative of someone inserting some kind of tube with the pills in solution down Ferrie’s throat. In fact, one of the cuts is on the inside of the lower lip, where the tube may have been inserted. (DiEugenio, p. 226; Sklar and Stone, p. 102)
There were other oddities about the scene. According to one of the local newspapers, Ferrie’s body was first found by someone who said he did not know Ferrie. He told the police he just happened to wander in, even though Ferrie lived on the second floor. (New Orleans Times Picayune 2/22/67) Ferrie also left two typed, unsigned suicide notes. (Flammonde, on pp. 34-36, features their text) Also, there was the nearly concurrent death of Eladio Del Valle, who was shot and hacked to death within the same 24-hour period. Unknowingly, Garrison had sent CIA infiltrator Bernardo De Torres to find Del Valle in Miami. The note Garrison got back about his death read as follows: “He was shot in the chest and it appears ‘gangland style’ and his body was left in the vicinity of BERNARDO TORRES apartment.” (DiEugenio, p. 227)
Then there was the time of death. First the coroner said that Ferrie had died late in the evening of the previous day. But then reporter George Lardner came forward and stated that he had been with Ferrie until four AM on the day his body was discovered, which was February 22, 1967. (Davy, p. 66) Because of this, the coroner now revised his estimated time of death—by over four hours. This is a real stretch. Most coroners will say that expanding the estimated time of death by four hours is unusual.
Then there were the observations of Dr. Martin Palmer, Ferrie’s physician. He criticized the official verdict of a ruptured blood vessel, or beury aneurysm, as the cause of death. Palmer called the autopsy “slipshod”. He went on to say it was incomplete since they did not open the brain case. Further, there was no iodine test done, and Ferrie’s blood samples were not kept. (Mellen, pp. 106-07)
So why did Coroner Chetta rule as he did, that the cause of death was a natural one, by beury aneurysm? As Minyard told this reviewer, no one could recall a case in which the deceased left a suicide note—in this case two of them—and then died of a seemingly natural cause. (DiEugenio, p. 226) Chetta apparently wanted to play it safe in the face of the tremendous publicity Ferrie’s death had caused. Which included a phone call to him from Robert Kennedy. (Mellen, p. 107))
What Stone and Sklar do in this scene is to contrast Garrison and his staff going through Ferrie’s apartment while picking up some of the odd artifacts, like the two suicide notes, or the empty pill bottles. Stone then intercuts shots of what Garrison was thinking may have happened: some Cuban exiles forcing the drugs down Ferrie’s mouth. The first time we see this, Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) is staring in a mirror; the second time, the coroner literally asks him what he is thinking. These brief cutaways—which include a depiction of the death of Del Valle—are shot in high contrast black and white, as opposed to the actual film, which is in color. In the parlance of film grammar, these are called subjective scenes, since they depict what a character in the film is thinking. Given all the evidence I have presented here, they are completely justified. Epstein ignores it all.
V
Then there are Epstein’s transgressions about the character of Willie O’Keefe, played by Kevin Bacon. Epstein calls O’Keefe a fictional character. This is not accurate. He is a composite character. That is, the screenwriters collapsed certain real life characters into one. This is not an uncommon practice, and most film critics accept it as a way of getting information across while saving time. Again, it is very hard to believe that Epstein is not aware of this, because this information is clearly conveyed in The Book of the Film. This includes the shooting script plus the research notes. It was published in 1992, many months before Epstein’s essay appeared. On page 66 of that book, scenarists Stone and Zach Sklar reveal that O’Keefe is made up of four people: David Logan, Perry Russo, Ray Broshears, and William Morris. Logan was interviewed by assistant DA Jim Alcock. Logan is the source for the dinner at Shaw’s luxurious apartment where a homosexual party follows, which includes Ferrie. Logan’s testimony about Shaw’s sex habits was quite explicit and, if anything, is understated in the film. (Mellen, p. 123) William Morris was in prison when Garrison’s assistant DA found him and talked to him. This is why the first time we see O’Keefe he is in jail. Like Logan, he also knew Shaw as Bertrand. Shaw used him for sexual purposes and he was procured for Shaw by a man who appears to have been Shaw’s pimp, Eugene Davis. (ibid, p. 124) Broshears figures in Garrison’s book and also in the work of author Dick Russell. Except he was closer to Ferrie personally and had only been introduced to Shaw. Broshears said that Ferrie had confided in him what he knew about the JFK assassination. Namely, that he had been marginally involved, was supposed to be an escape pilot and that is what he was doing in Houston on the day of the assassination. (Garrison, pp. 120-21) Somehow we are supposed to believe that Epstein was not aware of any of this.
Epstein ends his hysterical screed with a multiple-page rant against the Mr. X character in the film. This is the former military man who meets with Garrison in Washington. Mr. X, who was originally to be performed by Marlon Brando, is played by Donald Sutherland. This mysterious character is based upon Fletcher Prouty, who was one of the technical advisors on the film. Both Stone and Sklar understood that Prouty did not actually meet with Garrison until after the Shaw trial. But they wanted to convey information to the audience about the reasons for Kennedy’s assassination. And in The Book of the Film, the scenarists actually quote Garrison on this point:
I have found that the assassination was much more complex than anyone believed, and that a corner of it—I’ve never pretended it was more—existed in New Orleans …. John Kennedy was killed because he was against the war in Vietnam. There is no doubt of that. (p. 106)
This is why Prouty is portrayed in the film. Now, in the film, the Mr. X character details his past history in the military. Prouty was the military support officer for intelligence operations and he interfaced with the CIA when they needed arms and munitions they did not have in their supply depots. Therefore he had knowledge of certain of these secret operations, which are briefly described in the film. Since he served until the end of 1963, he had inside knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Operation Mongoose, and Kennedy’s withdrawal plan for Vietnam. And these are the main points he is meant to discuss.
Col. Fletcher Prouty (1917-2001) Incredibly, Epstein pretty much ignores these. Which is kind of shocking, since the climax of the scene is X/Prouty’s participation in Kennedy’s withdrawal plan from Vietnam in the fall of 1963. Epstein deals with this keystone concept in exactly one sentence. And even that is done tangentially. With Epstein, there is no reference to NSAM 263, the Taylor/McNamara report which was the basis for that Vietnam withdrawal memo, nor does he refer to Lyndon Johnson’s NSAM 273, which, after Kennedy’s death, partly reversed that earlier action memorandum. Nor is there any reference to how the latter memorandum opened the door to direct American involvement in Vietnam, something that Kennedy consciously resisted. (See John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 445-49) To ignore all of this is simply inexplicable.
As noted in the film, Prouty was directly involved with the Vietnam plans, along with his friend and colleague, Marine officer Victor Krulak. They were so intimately involved that they understood that the whole McNamara/Taylor report was not written in Saigon, which is where Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor had been sent in the fall of 1963. It was written in Washington by Krulak and Prouty, under the supervision of Robert Kennedy, upon the orders of the president. (p. 401) President Kennedy was not leaving anything to chance about his withdrawal plan. In October of 1963, he was taking control of it himself, even if he had to write it and ramrod it through some reluctant advisors. That ghost-written report, secretly written by Kennedy, would be the basis for NSAM 263. And that memo would begin a withdrawal of American troops that December, to be completed in 1965. This information is in John Newman’s landmark book on the subject, JFK and Vietnam. Again, since that book was published in 1992, Epstein could have found it in those pages. Or he could have called Victor Krulak, who was alive at that time. Apparently, Epstein had no intention of doing either. Because that would have meant the film was correct and Prouty’s information was accurate: Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam, as Garrison had figured out decades previously.
Since he cannot launch a frontal assault, Epstein decides to discredit the information by doing a smear of Prouty. To call it a smear is actually being gentle. Prouty’s career is pretty much well described in more than one source. (Click here) He was a well-rounded, intelligent, candid, curious man. He dealt in banking, military affairs, and education. He wrote both articles and books about his past military experience. And he served as a consultant to several media projects, including JFK. For Epstein to deny some of these things is silly.
Documents pertaining to Colonel Prouty’s service record But Epstein has to contest what Mr. X says about the Secret Service regulations in place at that time. Or else, what the film implies—that a huge Secret Service failure took place in Dallas—would be accurate. Which, as we know today, is the case. So Epstein says that, contrary to what Mr. X says, the Secret Service manual did not demand that all windows on the motorcade route be sealed, or that teams should monitor rooftops, or there should be a constant speed during motorcades. No one knows more about this aspect than author Vince Palamara. He has written two books on the subject and has a third coming out soon. In an email communication to this reviewer, Vince had the following to say about these topics. After consulting with two top-level Secret Service officers, one who authored the manual, he wrote: windows along a motorcade route were to be, at the least, monitored. Building rooftops were to be guarded. And the motorcade route was to be regulated at a top speed of 35 miles per hour. (Palamara email of April 6, 2017) Obviously, these strictures were all disobeyed in Dallas.
Contrary to what Epstein writes, Len Osanic—who knew Prouty for over ten years—related to me that Prouty was not an editorial advisor to the Church of Scientology. They asked him to look at some documents about L. Ron Hubbard. He did and rendered his opinion. There was discussion of a book, but that never materialized. His association with the Liberty Lobby was that they republished his book The Secret Team. He delivered one of his standard addresses at a seminar of theirs, concerning the Kennedy case and the secret team. But Osanic does not recognize the quotes Epstein attributes to Prouty in his article. By including them, Epstein can now inject the rather standard smear of anti-Semitism. (For Prouty’s actual statements concerning the Arabs, Israelis and the price of oil, see chapter 3 of Understanding Special Operations; after clicking here, scroll down to “The Changing Nature of Warfare: From a Military to an Economic Basis”.) Further, contrary to what Epstein implies, Prouty’s meeting with General Edward Lansdale about sending him to the South Pole was not worked out months or even weeks in advance. As depicted in the film, it was a November, 1963 surprise to him. (Phone communication with Osanic, April 7, 2017) Probably no one alive knows more about Prouty than Osanic, and I refer anyone who is interested in the man to his web site, prouty.org.
Epstein concludes his wild rant against Prouty by saying that the colonel thought that Leonard Lewin’s 1967 book Report from Iron Mountain was a work of non-fiction. This is supposed to show that Stone should never have trusted Prouty. He couldn’t figure out fiction from non-fction. But what it demonstrates is how abstract the reality of Epstein’s warped world is. For if one goes to Prouty’s web site, as posthumously managed by Osanic, one can click on the “more articles” tab and scroll down to the bottom. There you will see a link to a 1972 NY Times report of Lewin saying that the book is not a work of non-fiction. It is a satiric novel. Osanic told me that when he was setting up the site, Prouty insisted on this link. If one goes to the Black Op Radio site, and clicks Archived Shows, and scrolls down to Program 825, one will be able to listen to an interview Prouty did with Sean Mackenzie. If one goes to the 49:00 mark, one will hear a discussion of Lewin’s book. Prouty, no less than four times, calls it a novel. But he appreciated the satiric edge of the novel, since many people he knew in the Pentagon talked as Lewin depicted: we cannot abandon the warfare state.
Anyone familiar with propaganda techniques can see what Epstein has done. To distract from the solid information about Vietnam in the film JFK, he has abstracted certain aspects from Prouty’s life to present them under the worst possible light. That The Atlantic printed this hatchet job says a lot about their editorial standards.
But there is a larger issue here. And it relates not to just how bad the media is in America, but also to certain elements of the JFK critical community. Jim Garrison had his secret JFK murder probe exposed by the local media in New Orleans. From there on in, it was crippled, because the larger media decided to zero in on it, just as they would later target Richard Sprague when he took command of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Reporter/agents like Phelan, Hugh Aynesworth and Walter Sheridan created a barrage of smears and phony stories that the MSM ran with, and much of the public swallowed. This now became the paradigm about the Garrison inquiry—even in the research community! There, the largest proponents of this paradigm were Peter Scott, Paul Hoch, and Josiah Thompson. It was not until the ARRB collected and declassified Garrison’s files that we had an opportunity to look at what his real evidence was. That release, combined with memoranda from other sources, has allowed a different paradigm to now circulate. As I have written elsewhere, we will never really know the complete extent of Garrison’s files, because so many of them were lost, stolen or incinerated by his successor, the disastrous Harry Connick. But what did survive reduces Epstein’s weird world to rubble.
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Was Dorothy Kilgallen Murdered over the JFK Case?
The above question is posed by author Mark Shaw in his new book, The Reporter Who Knew too Much. But for anyone interested in the JFK case, the questions about Kilgallen’s death are not new. Investigators like Penn Jones and Mark Lane first surfaced them in fragmentary form decades ago. And according to more than one report, Lane was actually communicating with Kilgallen when the latter was doing her inquiry into the JFK case from 1963 to 1965. This reviewer briefly wrote about her death in a footnote to the first edition of Destiny Betrayed. (See page 365, note 15) With the rise of the Internet, various posters, like John Simkin, kept the Kilgallen questions popping up on Kennedy assassination forums.
Dorothy Kilgallen’s
posthumous bookPrior to Shaw’s book, there had been three major sources about Kilgallen’s life and (quite) puzzling death. The first was Lee Israel’s biography titled Kilgallen. Published in hardcover in 1979, it went on to be a New York Times bestseller in paperback. As we shall later see, although Israel raised some questions about Kilgallen’s death in regards to the JFK case, she held back on some important details she discovered. In 2007, Sara Jordan wrote a long, fascinating essay for the publication Midwest Today Magazine. Entitled “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?”, Jordan built upon some of Israel’s work, but was much more explicit about certain sources, and much more descriptive about the very odd crime scene. For instance, the autopsy report on Kilgallen says she died of acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication. But it also says that the circumstances of that intoxication were “undetermined”. Jordan appropriately adds, “for some reason the police never bothered to determine them. They closed the case without talking to crucial witnesses.” (Jordan, p. 22) A year later, in the fall of 2008, prolific author and journalist Paul Alexander had his book on the subject optioned for film rights. The manuscript was entitled Good Night, Dorothy Kilgallen. Reportedly, one focus of Alexander’s volume was how the JFK details Kilgallen wrote about in her upcoming book, Murder One, were cut from the version posthumously published by Random House. Neither Alexander’s book, nor the film, has yet to be produced. Which is a shame, since the available facts would produce an intriguing film.
I
Dorothy Kilgallen was born in Chicago in 1913. She graduated from Erasmus High School in 1930. At Erasmus she had been the associate editor of her high school newspaper. (Shaw, p. 3) Her father, James Kilgallen, was a newspaperman who worked for the Hearst syndicate in Illinois and Indiana. She spent a year in college in New York City. While there, her father got her a reporter tryout with the New York Evening Journal. She dropped out of college, and this became her lifelong career and position.
While at the Evening Journal, she carved out a place for herself on the criminal courts beat. She especially liked reporting on murder trials, the more sensational the better. For example, one case involved a wife killing her husband by placing arsenic in his chocolate pudding. (ibid, p. 6) Another trial she covered was the notorious Anna Antonio murder for hire case, where the wife hired hit men to kill her husband for insurance money. (ibid, p. 7) In 1935, at the age of 22, she covered the most sensational case of the era: the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son. (ibid) Shortly after this, Kilgallen entered a Race Around the World contest. That race generated tremendous publicity since it involved three reporters for major newspapers. In 24 days, she finished second to Bud Ekins. But, more importantly, she wrote a book about this experience that was then made into a movie. (Jordan, p. 17)
The Original “What’s My Line?” Panel (1952) O. O. Corrigan passed away in 1938. For years, he had maintained a very successful column called The Voice of Broadway. Shortly after his death, Kilgallen was given his position. (Lee Israel, Kilgallen, p. 104) In that column she covered politics, crime and the theater scene in New York. In 1940 she married actor/singer and future Broadway producer Richard Kollmar. They had three children, Richard, Kerry and Jill. She became, in 1950, one of the regulars on the game show What’s My Line? The other regular panelists were actress Arlene Francis, and publisher Bennett Cerf; the host was John Daly.
In 1954, Kilgallen covered another sensational legal proceeding. This was the murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard. In July of 1954, the doctor and his wife were entertaining guests at their lakefront home in suburban Cleveland. While watching a movie on TV, Sheppard fell asleep. His wife Marilyn escorted the guests out a bit after midnight. (Kilgallen, Murder One, p. 238) Just before dawn, Sheppard called the mayor of the town of Bay Village, the Cleveland suburb where he lived. The mayor and his wife came over. Sheppard was slumped over in the den with a medical kit open on the floor. He appeared to be in shock. He mumbled: “They killed Marilyn.” The couple went up the stairs and saw her bloodied body in the bedroom. (ibid, p. 239) Sheppard said he had been awakened by Marilyn’s screams. He ran upstairs to the bedroom and saw an intruder in the shadows. The assailant knocked him out with a blunt object. When he came to, he heard the intruder downstairs on the porch. He ran down, chased him off the property, and he struggled with him on the lakeshore—where he was bludgeoned unconscious again. (ibid, pp. 239-40)
When she arrived in Cleveland, Kilgallen was struck by both the weakness of the prosecution’s case, and by the powerful bias of the media against Sheppard. But in the face of the latter, the judge failed to sequester the jury. In December, after four days of deliberations, the jury convicted Sheppard of murder. Kilgallen was shocked. In her view, the prosecution had not proven Shepard guilty any more than they had “proved there were pin-headed men on Mars.” (ibid, p. 300)
Sam Sheppard & F. Lee Bailey Years later, after Sheppard’s original lawyer, William Corrigan, had passed away, F. Lee Bailey took on his appeal. At a book signing in New York, he had heard Kilgallen speak about her in-chambers interview with the judge in the Sheppard case. He contacted her about this and she gave Bailey a deposition. In that deposition, she revealed that, before the trial began, she was granted an interview with the judge. He asked her what she was doing in Cleveland. She said that she was there to report on the mystery and intrigue of the Sheppard case. The judge replied, “Mystery? It’s an open and shut case.” Kilgallen said she was taken aback by this remark. She told Bailey, “I have talked to many judges in their chambers—they don‘t give me an opinion on a case before it is over.” She continued that the judge then said Sheppard was “guilty as hell. There’s no question about it.” (ibid, pp. 301-02) This deposition was quoted in the final decision of the U. S. Supreme Court which, in 1966, granted Sheppard a new trial.
At the 1966 trial, Sheppard was acquitted. Bailey’s criminologist, Dr. Paul L. Kirk, presented evidence that there was a third type of blood in Marilyn’s bedroom, not the doctor’s or the victim’s. Further, Kirk concluded the blows that killed Marilyn came from a left-handed person. Sheppard was right handed. (ibid, p. 304)
The Sheppard case dragged on for so long, creating so much controversy, making so many headlines, that it reportedly became the basis for the TV series The Fugitive, starring David Janssen. For our purposes, the important thing to recall about it, and the reason I have spent some time on it, is that Kilgallen was correct about the verdict. And further, her role in the case helped set free an innocent man. Although that last act did not occur until after her own death in November of 1965.
II
The first real inquiry into Dorothy Kilgallen’s death was by the late author Lee Israel. This was done for her best-selling biography, titled Kilgallen, a book still worth reading today. Since that book was not published until 1979, this means that neither the NYPD, nor the House Select Committee on Assassinations did any kind of serious review of the case. This is odd since the circumstances surrounding Kilgallen’s demise clearly merited an inquest. But beyond that, and as we will see, there appears to have been an attempt to cover up the true circumstances of her death.
Kilgallen, with Jack Ruby defense attorneys
Joe Tonahill (center) & Melvin Belli (right),
at the Ruby trial (February 19, 1964)Lee Israel did a good job in her book in describing just how much Kilgallen wrote about the failings of the Warren Commission. She also described some of Kilgallen’s extensive contacts with early researcher Mark Lane. It is safe to say that no other widely distributed columnist in America wrote as often, or as pointedly, about the JFK case as Kilgallen did. She flew to Dallas to cover the trial of Jack Ruby in early 1964. While there, she secured two private interviews with the accused. She never divulged what was revealed to her in those interviews. Instead, the notes from these meetings went into her ever expanding JFK assassination file—which more than one person saw since, at times, she actually would carry it around with her. (Israel, p. 401)
From the contacts she attained in covering the Ruby trial, Kilgallen broke two significant JFK stories. First, someone smuggled her the testimony of Jack Ruby before the Commission. After convincing her editors to print the purloined hearing, her paper ran the story over three consecutive days. And they allowed her to append comments and questions to the colloquy. (Israel, p. 389) Her Dallas sources also secured her an early copy of the DPD radio log. With this she pointed out that Police Chief Jesse Curry had misrepresented to the public his real opinion as to what the origin point of the shots were. He had told the public he thought they came from the Texas School Book Depository, but on the log he said they came from the rail yards, behind the picket fence, atop the grassy knoll. (Israel, p. 390)
When documents on Oswald were denied to Ruby’s defense team, again Kilgallen chimed in pungently:
It appears that Washington knows or suspects something about Lee Harvey Oswald that it does not want Dallas and the rest of the world to know or suspect. . . Lee Harvey Oswald has passed on not only to his shuddery reward, but to the mysterious realm of “classified” persons whose whole story is known only to a few government agents.
Why is Oswald being kept in the shadows, as dim a figure as they can make him, while the defense tries to rescue his alleged killer with the help of information from the FBI? Who was Oswald, anyway? (Israel, p. 366)
She also ran a story suggesting that there were witnesses who saw Oswald inside Ruby’s Carousel Club. (Shaw, pp. 66, 67) Based upon that, she once said, “I don’t see why Dallas should feel guilty for what one man, or even 3 or 5 in a conspiracy have done.” (Shaw, p. 68)
When the Ruby case was decided and he was found the sole guilty party—a verdict that would later be reconsidered—Kilgallen, again, wrote about it quite resonantly:
The point to be remembered in this historic case in that the whole truth has not been told. Neither the state of Texas nor the defense put all of its evidence before the jury. Perhaps it was not necessary, but it would have been desirable from the viewpoint of all the American people. (Israel, p. 372)
In fact, as Israel wrote, Kilgallen actually became a funnel for men like Lane and Dallas reporter Thayer Waldo to run information through, in order for it to garner a wider audience. (Israel, p. 373)
She went even further. Kilgallen ran experiments with her husband holding a broomstick to replicate the alleged sighting by Warren Commission witness Howard Brennan. Brennan was the Commission’s chief witness as to a description of Oswald as the sixth floor assassin. She stood approximately where Brennan stood in front of her five-story townhouse. And she told her husband to go ahead and kneel, as the Warren Commission said Oswald was behind a box. She came to the conclusion that there was “no way in the world that such a description could have been accurately determined by Brennan.” (p. 391) She further came to the conclusion that there was a real question as to the type of weapon that was found in the building, a Mannlicher-Carcano or a Mauser. She was also tipped off as to the ignored testimony of witness Acquila Clemmons. Contrary to the Warren Report, Clemmons claimed to have seen two men involved in the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit, not one, and neither resembled Oswald. These stories were mentioned in her newspaper column in September of 1964. (Israel, p. 395)
The FBI visited her to find out how she got Ruby’s testimony before the Warren Commission. She made them tea but told the two agents that she could never reveal how she got that exhibit or who gave it to her. And when the Warren Report was released in September of 1964, Kilgallen made it fairly evident how she felt about it:
I would be inclined to believe that the Federal Bureau of Investigation might have been more profitably employed in probing the facts of the case rather than how I got them …. At any rate, the whole thing smells a bit fishy. It’s a mite too simple that a chap kills the President of the United States, escapes from that bother, kills a policeman, eventually is apprehended in a movie theater under circumstances that defy every law of police procedure, and subsequently is murdered under extraordinary circumstances. (Israel, p. 396)
What she said and did in private on the JFK case was even more extreme than her public actions. After her experience with the FBI she concluded that Hoover had tapped her home phone line. She told Lane that, “Intelligence agencies will be watching us. We’ll have to be very careful.” She decided to communicate with Lane via pay phones and even then by using code names. She then added, “They’ve killed the president, the government is not prepared to tell us the truth, and I’m going to do everything in my power to find out what really happened.” (Israel, pp. 392-93) She told her friend Marlin Swing, a CBS TV producer and colleague of Walter Cronkite, “This has to be a conspiracy.” (ibid, p. 396) To attorney and talent manager Morton Farber, she characterized the Warren Commission Report as “laughable.” She then added, “I’m going to break the real story and have the biggest scoop of the century.” (Israel, p. 397) She made similar statements to another TV producer Bob Bach, and another talent manager, Bill Franklin. (Israel, p. 396) All this, of course, was contra what almost all of her professional colleagues were involved with at the time: namely praising and venerating the fraud of the Warren Report. For instance, in June of 1965, Kilgallen was invited to do an ABC news show called Nightlife with Les Crane. Since Bach had helped arrange the appearance she thought she would be speaking about the Warren Report, so she brought parts of her JFK file with her. But she was informed by one of the show’s producers, Nick Vanoff, that they did no want her to address that subject. He told her it was “too controversial”. (Israel, p. 401)
Between the time of the release of the Warren Report—September of 1964—and her passing—November of 1965—she was in the process of taking and planning flights to both Dallas and New Orleans. (For the former, see Israel, p. 402; for the latter, see Jordan, p. 20) These do not appear to be job related. They appear to be for the purpose of advancing her own inquiry into Kennedy’s assassination. For instance, she told What’s My Line? makeup artist Carmen Gebbia that she was excited about an upcoming trip to New Orleans to meet a source she did not know. She said it was all cloak and daggerish. And she concluded that, “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to break this case.” (Jordan, p. 20)
Marc Sinclaire Marc Sinclaire worked for Kilgallen as her major hairdresser. Many years after her death he revealed that he went to New Orleans with her in October of 1965. Sinclaire went down on a separate plane and stayed in a different hotel. They had dinner together the night he arrived. The next morning he was preparing to go to her place to work on her hair. She called him and said that was cancelled: she had purchased a ticket for him and he was to return to New York. Further, he was not to tell anyone he had been there with her. Her second hairdresser, Charles Simpson, said she used to tell him things about her work, but now things were different. She proclaimed “I used to share things with you … but after I have found out now what I know, if the wrong people knew what I know, it would cost me my life.” (ibid)
III
Two of the problems with the circumstances of Kilgallen’s death are that first, the cause was misreported by her own newspaper, and second, no one can pinpoint exactly when her body was first discovered. Using her father as a source, the Journal American reported that Dorothy Kilgallen had died of an apparent heart attack. (Israel, p. 410) As we shall see, that was not the case. But even more puzzling, there is a real mystery as to when the corpse was first discovered.
The official police record states that the body was found between noon and 1 PM by Marie Eichler, Kilgallen’s personal maid. (Israel, p. 416) But Israel talked to an anonymous source who was a tutor to the Kilgallen children and was there on the morning of November 8, 1965. That source told Israel that the body was found much earlier, before ten o’clock. Sara Jordan later revealed the tutor was Ibne Hassan. Hassan’s information turned out to be correct. From the information on hand today, the first known person to discover Kilgallen’s body was Sinclaire. And his (unofficial) testimony has powerful relevance. He said that he was stunned when he found Kilgallen sleeping on the third floor. Because she always slept on the fifth floor. He found her sitting up in bed with the covers pulled up. He walked over to her, touched her, and knew she was dead. In addition to being on the wrong floor, she was wearing clothes that she simply did not wear when she went to bed. Further, she still had on her make up, false eyelashes, earrings, and her hairpiece. (Jordan, p. 21)
A book was laid out on the bed. It was Robert Ruark’s recent volume The Honey Badger. Yet, according to more than one witness, Kilgallen had finished reading this book several weeks—perhaps months—prior. Also, she needed glasses to read; Sinclaire said there were none present. The room air conditioner was running, yet it was cold outside. Plus the reading lamp was still on. Sinclaire added, her body was neatly positioned in the middle of the bed, beyond the reach of the nightstand. (ibid)
The questions raised by Sinclaire’s description are both obvious and myriad. The setting suggests that Kilgallen’s body was positioned both on a floor she did not sleep on and in a way that was completely artificial. In other words, it was posed. If this was done, it was performed by someone not familiar with her living routine and in a hurry to leave, probably for fear of awakening someone. But this is not all there is to it. Sinclaire said there was also a drink on the nightstand. (As we shall see, there more likely were two glasses there.) When Sinclaire called for the butler, he came running up the stairs, very flustered. Sinclaire then left through the front door. He said that there was a police car there, with two officers inside. They made no attempt to detain him. That morning, a movie magazine editor named Mary Branum received a phone call. The voice said, “Dorothy Kilgallen has been murdered”, and hung up. (ibid)
Charles Simpson When Sinclaire got home he called his friend and colleague Charles Simpson. He told him that their client was dead. He then added, “And when I tell you the bed she was in and how I found her, you’re going to know she was murdered.” Simpson later said in an interview, “And I knew. The whole thing was just abnormal. The woman didn’t sleep in that bed, much less the room. It wasn’t her bed.” (ibid. These video taped interviews were done by researcher Kathryn Fauble. The Jordan article owed much to her research, and so does Shaw. See Shaw, p. 113)
From Sinclaire’s description, there seems to have been a prior awareness of Kilgallen’s passing: e.g., the police car in front of the door. But as of today, Sinclaire is the best testimony as to when the body was actually found. About three hours later, two doctors arrived at the townhouse: James Luke and Saul Heller. The latter pronounced her dead. But the former did the medical examination, which as we shall see, was incomplete.
About a week after her death, Luke determined that she was killed by “acute barbiturate and alcohol intoxication, circumstances undetermined.” (ibid, p. 22) Roughly speaking, this means she died of an overdose, but the examiners could not determine how the drugs were delivered. Usually, the examiner will write if the victim was killed by accident, suicide or homicide. That was not done in this case. The main reason it was not done is because there was no investigation of the crime scene, or of any witnesses who saw and had talked to her in the previous 24-48 hours. For example, phone calls were not traced, her home was not searched for drug containers, and there was no investigation as to how she arrived home that evening or if anyone was with her.
Lee Israel was shocked when she discovered this fact. She was looking through the Kilgallen police file for reports labeled DD 5 and DD 15. The former is a supplementary complaint report that records activities pursuant to a complaint. The latter is a request to the Medical Examiner for a Cause of Death notice. Israel said that, although the investigating detective said he saw this, it was missing from the file. (p. 428) Therefore, there appears to have been no investigation done to determine how the drugs were administered. This was so bewildering to Israel that she wrote that there may have been another, unofficial channel, of communication between the police department and the medical examiner’s office on the Kilgallen case.
There does seem to be cause for such speculation. In her book, Israel mentioned another anonymous source from the toxicology department of the medical examiner’s office. (Israel, pp. 440-41) This man was a chemist under Charles Umbarger, director of toxicology at the NYC Medical Examiner’s Office. This source met with Israel personally and told her that Umbarger believed that Kilgallen had been murdered. Umbarger had evidence that would indicate this was the case but he kept it from the pathology department as part of the factionalism in the office. The idea was to retain this secret evidence in reserve over chief Medical Examiner Milton Halpern and Luke. Jordan discovered this secret source was a man named John Broich. (Jordan, p. 22) Broich told Jordan, as he told Israel, that he did new tests on the glasses, and tissue samples, both of which Umbarger had retained. He found traces of Nembutal on one of the glasses. The new tests discovered traces of Seconal, Nembutal and Tuilan in her brain.
This was an important discovery, for more than one reason. First, the police could not find any evidence of prescriptions for the last two drugs by Kilgallen. Her doctor only prescribed Seconal. Second, no doctor would prescribe all three to one patient at one time since the mix could very well be lethal. (Shaw, p. 116) Third, the prescription Kilgallen had for Seconal had run its course at the time of her death. Umbarger, of course, knew this. When Broich reported back to him about his new chemical discoveries, Umbarger had an unforgettable reaction. He grinned at his assistant, and then said the following: “Keep it under your hat. It was big.” (Jordan, p. 22)
IV
As we have seen, neither the New York Police Department nor the medical examiner’s office was forthcoming or professional in the Kilgallen case. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) only performed a very cursory look at her death. But it appears it was the HSCA that got her autopsy report into the National Archives. (Shaw, p. 277) That cursory look seems odd for the simple reason that the HSCA’s chief pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden, was working in the Medical Examiner’s office at the time of Kilgallen’s passing. In fact, Baden’s name is listed as an observer for Luke’s autopsy report. (Shaw p. 102) Baden was also a source for Israel’s book. In 1978, while the HSCA was ongoing, he told Israel that, from what he could see, the evidence would indicate that Kilgallen had fifteen or twenty 100 mg capsules of Seconal in her system. (Israel, p. 413) Why Mark Shaw did not make more of this point in his book eludes this reviewer. Because Baden’s opinion would seem to be incorrect, for the simple reason that, as stated above, Kilgallen likely would not have had that many Seconals left in her prescription at the time of her death. But a fewer number of Seconals, mixed with the two other drugs, would very likely have produced the fatal result.
Because of the (screamingly) suspicious circumstances of her death, it does not at all seem logical to consider either of the other alternatives—that it was accidental, or she took her own life. How could she accidentally end up in the wrong bed on the wrong floor with the covers pulled up? As per the second option, as stated above, there seems to not have been enough left of her Seconal prescription for her to take her own life. According to her doctor, Kilgallen was prescribed 50 pills per month. There are two reports, one from the police, one from her doctor, but the estimates are that she took between 2-4 pills per night. (Israel, p. 425) Since the prescription was last filled on October 8th, how could there possibly be enough pills available for her to plan her death? The indications seem to suggest this was a homicide.
Kilgallen, Richard Kollmar
& their son, Kerry (1964)If that were the case—and Israel, Jordan, and Shaw certainly seem to agree it is the strongest alternative—then who was responsible? One possible suspect is her husband Richard Kollmar. As Israel and Shaw outline, neither spouse was faithful to the other at this stage of the marriage. Richard was involved in several one-night stands, and Dorothy had a love affair with singer Johnny Ray, which had concluded at around the time of Kennedy’s assassination.
Further, Richard was not doing nearly as well financially as Dorothy was. Israel had direct access to their accountant, Anne Hamilton. And from that interview, it appears that Shaw overstates their wealth significantly. (See Israel, especially p. 356) But there can be little or no doubt that at the time of her death, Kilgallen was the major breadwinner in the family. Therefore, in case of her death, Richard would be in position to inherit a significant amount of money in cash and property, well over a million dollars today. Further, and another point I could not find in Shaw’s book, Richard had his own access to Tuinal. (Israel, p. 438)
But still, there are serious problems with holding Richard as the prime suspect. First, if such were the case, then why would there be such an almost appallingly negligent investigation? Cases of spouses killing their partners must have appeared every week in a city as large as New York. And, if so, how would Richard have the influence to cause such a large system failure—one that took place in the police department, the DA’s chambers, and in the office of the medical examiner? Secondly, no one who knew Kollmar thought he was capable of doing such a thing. Both Israel and Shaw agree on this point. But third, if Kollmar had planned the whole thing, how could he possibly have left as many holes in his plot as he did— many of them wide enough to drive the proverbial tractor through? Could he really have not known where his own wife slept? What she wore when she retired? What book she was reading? That when she read, she wore glasses? And so on and so forth. The case does not appear to be an inside job. Because if Marc Sinclaire had not left that morning, he could have detonated it in about two minutes.
Ron Pataky & Kilgallen Both Israel and Jordan seemed to center their suspicions on a man that the former referred to as the Out of Towner. Israel referred to him by that rubric because he lived and worked in Columbus, Ohio. His real name is Ron Pataky. In her Midwest Review essay, Sara Jordan was explicit about his name and printed a photo of him standing next to Kilgallen. There are several reasons why Ron Pataky’s presence creates suspicion in this case. One has to do with the closeness of his relationship with Kilgallen at the time. After she and Johnnie Ray decided to break up, it appears that Pataky became Kilgallen’s romantic interest. They called each other frequently, saw each other on occasion, and wrote letters and notes to each other. A very odd thing happened in late October on the set of What’s My Line? Before the show began taping, an announcement came on the public intercom. The voice said, “The keys to Ron Pataky’s room are waiting at the front desk of the Regency Hotel.” Quite naturally, this shook Dorothy up. Why didn’t someone just bring her a note? Pataky denied being in New York at that time. If so, was someone trying to tell the reporter that they knew something about her private life? (Jordan, p. 20) On the weekend of her death, Kilgallen had an hour-long call with Sinclaire. During this call, she said her life had been threatened (she later said she might have to purchase a gun). Sinclaire told her that the only new person in her life was Pataky. And she had shared her interest in, and information about, the JFK case with him. He suggested that she confront him with those facts. Two days later, Kilgallen was dead. (Shaw, p. 242)
Both Israel and Shaw discuss interviews they had with Pataky. In more than one place it appears that the subject is being less than candid. For instance, he says that he was never at Kilgallen’s townhouse. But he says that he knew Kilgallen drank and popped pills. When asked how he knew that, he says he saw the pills in a medicine cabinet. Unless Dorothy carried a medicine cabinet with her, how did he know about it if he was never in her home? Pataky also said in 2014 that the New York police talked to him about Dorothy’s death based upon a note they discovered at the home. Yet there is no evidence of any such interview or note in any police file. (Shaw, pp. 239-40) Another example would be one of his alibi witnesses. Pataky has always maintained that he was in Columbus when he got the news of Dorothy Kilgallen’s death. He said fashion editor Jane Horrocks read the notice off the news wire to him. But researcher Kathryn Fauble later talked to Horrocks. She remembered Pataky vividly since they shared an office at the Columbus Citizen-Journal. She also recalled him getting calls from Kilgallen there. But she added on the day the news broke about Kilgallen’s death she wasn’t in the office, she was on assignment in California. (Shaw, p. 237)
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of any interview with Pataky was the one Israel did with him about Kilgallen’s final hours. Sara Jordan, Israel and Shaw have attempted to reconstruct what Kilgallen did the evening before she was discovered dead by Sinclaire. After taping What’s My Line?, she and producer Bob Bach went to the restaurant/bar P. J. Clarke’s for a drink. (Jordan, p. 21) Both Bach and Sinclaire have stated that Kilgallen separately told them she was to meet with someone at the Regency Hotel later that evening. Therefore, after she left P. J. Clarke’s, she arrived at the Regency, which is about six blocks from her home. In a videotaped interview with an associate of Kathryn Fauble, it was revealed that Kilgallen was seen in the corner of the cocktail lounge by a woman named Katherine Stone. Stone had been a contestant on the show that night. (ibid) Press agent Harvey Daniels also recalled seeing Kilgallen with a man at the Regency that night. So did piano player Kurt Maier. (ibid) She left the Regency at about 2 AM. According to Israel, when the news of her death broke, several people working at the Regency discussed her presence there the night before. (Israel, p. 432)
Pataky has always denied he was with her that evening. He has always denied he was in New York that night. The most he would say is that she called him that evening. But Pataky firmly declared that he was in Columbus that evening, not in New York. Israel had taped her call with him. She turned it over to former CIA officer George O’toole. O’toole was one of the leading Agency analysts for the Psychological Stress Evaluator, commonly known as the PSE. This device measures stress in the voice in response to questioning. That measurement may reveal the subject is lying about a sensitive point. O’toole wrote an interesting book on the subject in relation to the JFK case, The Assassination Tapes. In that book he explains in detail how the device works and its reputation for accuracy. An absence of stress in the voice would indicate that the subject is telling the truth. If the stress is high, it may reveal tension due to deception. When O’toole analyzed the part of the conversation in which Pataky denied being in New York that night, he wrote that the PSE hit level F and G gradients. These are the highest levels of stress the machine will measure. When Pataky discusses how he actually found out about Kilgallen’s death, again the machine hit the F level. (Israel, p. 435)
Pataky had designs to be a songwriter. He had confided in Kilgallen about this. The verses of a song are, in many ways, like a poem. So years later, Pataky posted some of his poems online. Both Shaw and Jordan found them interesting. First there is one called “Never Trust a Stiff at a Typewriter”. It reads as follows:
There’s a way to quench a gossip’s stench
That never fails
One cannot write if zippered “tight”
Somebody who’s dead could “tell no tales.”
As to its suggestiveness to the topic, this needs no comment. The second Pataky poem is called “Vodka Roulette Seen As Relief Possibility”.
While I’m spilling my guts
She’s driving me nuts
Please fetch us two drinks
On the run.
Just skip all the nois’n
Make one of them poison
And don’t even tell me
Which one!
Shaw goes on for four paragraphs on this poem. But again, its suggestiveness needs little explication in relation to the subject at hand.
Let us close the discussion of Pataky with another piece of information allegedly supplied by Israel, but which today is in dispute. John Simkin used to own and operate the JFK Assassination Debate forum at Spartacus Educational web site. He had an abiding interest in the Kilgallen case. In a discussion at Simkin’s site in 2005, he enlisted Israel to participate. During this discussion it was revealed that in 1993 a college student in Virginia did what Israel did not do in her book. He actually revealed Pataky’s name. And he further wrote that the management of the Regency Hotel had forbidden its employees to discuss Kilgallen’s presence there that night. But even more interesting, Israel said that she found out that Pataky dropped out of Stanford in 1951 and later enrolled in the School of the Americas in Panama. This, of course, is the infamous CIA training ground for many Central American security forces who were later involved in various kidnappings and assassinations in the fifties and sixties. In the Midwest Today article by Sara Jordan, Israel denied she made this statement. (But Jordan found out that Pataky did drop out of Stanford after one year. Jordan, p. 23) Yet to this day, that statement exists in black and white on that site. It’s kind of a reach to say Simkin invented it. And we know that Israel was sensitive about what she wrote about Pataky, or else she would have named him in her book.
V
After writing all the above I would like to say that Mark Shaw wrote an admirable and definitive volume about Kilgallen and her death. Unfortunately, I cannot do so. One reason is obvious from my references. A lot of the information in Shaw’s book can be found in either Israel’s tome or the Sara Jordan essay in Midwest Today. The interviews with Sinclaire and Simpson were done by the indefatigable Kathryn Fauble. Shaw does a nice job in reporting on the autopsy. And his interviews with Pataky are informative. But some of the book seems padded, consisting of chapters about four pages long. (See Chapter 34) Sometimes, the author repeats information, as with Sinclaire finding the body. And like writers who partake in biography, Shaw tends to exaggerate the achievements of his subject.
This last is done in two ways. He tends to exaggerate Kilgallen’s stature as a journalist. For example, he calls her the first true female media icon. (p. 294) Did the author forget about Dorothy Thompson? Or Adela Rogers St. Johns? They certainly ranked with Kilgallen in popularity and as role models. And Thompson left behind a body of work at least equal in stature to Kilgallen’s and, by any rational measure, exceeding it. Shaw also quotes Ernest Hemingway as calling Kilgallen, “One of the greatest women writers in the world”. I could not find a source for this quote. But on what grounds would such an expansive judgment hold water? And why would Shaw want to use it? Kilgallen wrote two books. She actually co-wrote them. The first was about her trip around the world, which she wrote with Herb Shapiro in 1936. Murder One was published posthumously by an editor based on her notes. This plus her voluminous columns are the sum total of her literary output. Does that compare with the achievements of say Isak Dinesen, Katherine Anne Porter or Rebecca West?
The second way Shaw inflates his subject is by discussing what her impact would have been on the JFK case. This is completely unwarranted and amounts to nothing but pure speculation. For the simple reason that no one is ever going to know what Kilgallen discovered, or what her talks with Ruby were about. Therefore, the database from which to measure her achievement is simply non-existent. But, to put it mildly, this does not hinder Shaw. In a perverse sort of way, it enables him. Near the end of the book he writes that, “If Kilgallen had lived … the course of history would have been altered.” (Shaw, p. 288) Since, as stated above, there is no database to support that statement with, this reviewer is puzzled as to how Shaw arrived at this outsized conclusion.
Which leads to two other related problems with Shaw’s book. First, the author’s footnotes would not pass muster in a sophomore English class. Time after time he refers to newspapers without adding a date to them. Time after time, he refers to books without supplying a page number. This, of course, makes it difficult to crosscheck his work. Secondly, he repeatedly refers to the mystery of how Dorothy’s JFK file disappeared after her death. Yet in Sara Jordan’s essay, she quotes a conversation between the Bachs and Richard Kollmar after Dorothy’s death. They asked him, “Dick, what was all that stuff in the folder Dorothy carried around with her about the assassination?” Richard replied, “Robert, I’m afraid that will have to go to the grave with me.” (Jordan, p. 22) What this means is anyone’s guess. But it could mean that he somehow recovered it and destroyed it.
One of the worst aspects of The Reporter who Knew Too Much is how Shaw’s inflation is somewhat self-serving. For instance, when I saw the author speak at last year’s JFK Lancer conference he made a couple of rather odd statements. He said that since Kilgallen had gone to New Orleans with Sinclaire, this meant that she was investigating Carlos Marcello for the JFK case. Again, for reasons stated above, there is no factual way that Shaw could know such a thing. But further, how does New Orleans automatically deduce Marcello? New Orleans is honeycombed with a multitude of leads on the JFK case. Lee Oswald spent about six months there from the spring to the fall of 1963, less than two months before he was killed. To say that what he did there would automatically lead to Marcello betrays an agenda that is not really dealing with Kilgallen.
That agenda traces back to a book Shaw wrote in 2013. It was called The Poison Patriarch. This reviewer did not critique it since it was simply not worth discussing. But Shaw synopsizes it here in order to attribute what Kilgallen was going to do if she had lived. Shaw’s previous work is a feat of Procrustean carpentry that ranks with the likes of Peter Janney and Philip Nelson. And like those authors, Shaw used an array of dubious witnesses to achieve his feat of alchemy. In short, he said that JFK was killed because Joseph Kennedy insisted on Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General. The father had underworld ties, should have known that RFK was going to do battle with the Mafia, and this caused a revenge tragedy to be performed. To scaffold this utterly bizarre thesis, Shaw trotted out a virtual menagerie of dubious witnesses like Tina Sinatra, Frank Ragano, Toni Giancana, Sy Hersh and Chuck Giancana. The book was a recycling and revision of Chuck Giancana’s science fiction fable Double Cross. (See pages 179-180 of the present book.)
Well, in The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, Shaw pens his imaginary conclusion to Kilgallen’s investigation. He writes that after she made her second trip to New Orleans, the reporter produced a series of articles connecting Oswald, Ruby and Marcello. This series triggered a grand jury inquiry. This culminated in indictments of Marcello for the murders of both Kennedy and Oswald. But Kilgallen’s evidence went further. It also managed to indict J. Edgar Hoover for obstruction of justice, and he resigned his position. As a result, Kilgallen’s disclosures changed the way that the JFK case was discussed in history books.
I wish I could say that what I just described is an exaggeration or parody of what Shaw wrote in his book. Unfortunately it is not any such thing. If the reader turns to page 289, he can read it for himself. To say that such writing is a fantasy really does not do it justice. The idea that Kilgallen was going to take on the entire power structure of the USA and overturn it with a series of newspaper columns is almost too ridiculous to consider. As many authors have proven, the JFK cover-up was interwoven throughout the entire structure of the American government at that time: the White House, the Justice Department, the Secret Service, the CIA, and the FBI. The Power Elite was involved in it through organs like the New York Times, CBS, and Life magazine. The idea that Kilgallen was going to upend this whole colossal structure is a bit ludicrous. As mentioned, she could not even discus the JFK case on Les Crane’s talk show. Which was a harbinger of what was going to happen to Jim Garrison in 1968 on The Tonight Show. I hate to inform Mark Shaw, but the Sam Sheppard murder case is not the Kennedy assassination.
If Shaw would have restrained himself, or if he had an editor who would have pointed out the problems with his design, then this would have been a good and valuable book. It would have been really about Dorothy Kilgallen: who she really was, what we know and do not know about her death. But as shown above, such was not the case. Thus I would actually recommend to the interested party Sara Jordan’s informative and objective essay instead.
The recommended essay can be found here: