JFK: AN AMERICAN COUP D’ETAT

 

Colonel John Hughes-Wilson

London, John Blake Publishing, 2013

SOURCE NOTES

 

Note: References in bold are to original sources; where only an author is cited (e.g. ‘Benson’, Summers’, etc,) it indicates books that are mentioned frequently or are listed in the bibliography. (NB Some frequently cited book titles have been abbreviated for convenience.)

This book was written primarily for the interested general reader and not as an archive for dedicated Kennedy Researchers. This is not a textbook nor a PhD thesis; there are quite enough of those around already.

These notes are explanatory; and if the reader goes to the major sources quoted in them by subject, then a host of other primary and secondary sources becomes available.

The literature on the murder of the 35^th President of the United States is vast. On a subject as complicated as the Kennedy assassination it is only too easy to drown in the flood of authoritative – and sometimes not so authoritative – sources and references from every quarter. However, if more detail or further reading is required, then I have found the following books and other references, both primary and secondary, to be especially useful or interesting.

Many of these sources of information can be found nowadays on the numerous Internet websites. Although I have not listed every site’s complete ‘http://www.address’ in mind-numbing detail, for the interested reader a trawl through using any good Internet search engine and  key words will reveal many of the references below, plus many, many more. For example, to see precisely what Colonel Fletcher Prouty, the White House Special Forces and CIA liaison officer at the time of JFK’s killing, said about the fishy timing of the Christchurch New Zealand Star’s article on the JFK assassination, in reply to a query from the interested researcher Alan Pitman, all we have to do is type in:

‘prouty pitman letter’

. . . and the original correspondence is there for all to read.

The Internet archive and its accompanying websites now includes so many primary source documents that ‘the web’ has become as important a research tool as any university library: and with a greater retrieval capability than most. The field and the literature is enormous. For example, there are no less than 162 key figures, 77 direct eyewitnesses, 164 alleged conspirators and no less than 201 published journalists, authors and researchers listed among the reputable sources. Only the Internet can make this wealth of information accessible quickly.

However, as with any library, archive, book, or database, the potential drawback is that false information can find its way in too, and the saga of JFK’s assassination has attracted more than its fair share of duff, forged and misleading documents so, as in all these things, caveat lector – ‘let the reader beware’. There are a lot of websites (just as there are many books) on the subject of the Kennedy assassination that are opinionated, misleading, desperate to make some nutty political point, and, more often, just plain wrong.

Nonetheless, to be able read, in the original, exactly what the CIA or FBI said in an internal secret memo at the time, as opposed to what they claimed they said they did or told the Warren Commission, is of huge significance when trying to cut through the fog of what really went on, whether the telegram in question happens to be on an Internet website or in some dusty archive. Many of these primary documents are now recorded on the Internet. The original FBI letter of 23 November 1963 that names George Bush senior as a member of the CIA, and the District Court of Washington DC affidavit of his namesake George Bush of 1988 that literally swears that he was emphatically not the Bush referred to by the FBI in 1963 is a very good example.

However, this does assume that the CIA and FBI have not filleted their records or worse, redrafted them in an Orwellian attempt to mislead and to rewrite the past. There is some evidence of that, which risks making nonsense of some of the relevant notes and references. Which is, of course, exactly what such forgeries are intended to do.

            I have also included some seminal television productions as primary references. While a diminishing number in the academic community deride modern media (and particularly television) as a ‘real source’, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to accept the on-camera oral testimony of someone who is recording his or her memories of events as a primary source. Of course, ‘old soldiers’ do sometimes forget or embellish their stories. It is not unknown either for politicians – and even academics – to polish their recollections of events in order to reflect themselves in the best light and distort the facts.

            To maintain, however, that such visual recordings are somehow inferior to the written word strikes me as a conceit, and a misguided one at that. It implies that books and written documents are the ‘only true record’, as if written records of meetings, telegrams, policy documents and position papers are somehow never ‘polished’ by their authors, corrupted, or are guilty of omissions or embellishments. Anyone who has ever worked in a bureaucracy will know immediately how unlikely that is.

            Finally, I agree with my colleague Max Hastings that over-lengthy bibliographies are sometimes put forward as evidence of some kind of academic ‘virility parade’ rather than presented as any real help to those looking for sensible guidance for further reading. For this reason I have confined myself only to those books and sources that I felt had most to offer, rather than every single possible reference.

            Life, and the reader’s attention span (let alone the reader’s budget) are just too short .

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Other JFK Sources:

There are numerous serious JFK Assassination websites of varying quality.

A useful selection is:

 

1. The US National Archives’ Kennedy Assassination Records Collection has a search engine that allows locating documents in the Archives’ massive holdings. The Assassination and Records Collection, Washington DC.
2. US National Archives, nara.gov/research/jfk.
3. The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas has its own web page, JFK.org.
4. History-matters.org, containing detailed transcripts of some key original testimony and evidence.
5. The US NSA Archive is available online and reveals some formerly secret signal intelligence. I can be accessed at National Security Agency Central Security Service >>.JFK documents index .
6. The JFK Assassination Files  is a goldmine of original documents, many of them FBI correspondence about the assassination.
7. Britannica, Wikipedia – For locating primary sources, these online encyclopaedias are invaluable, as one website alone (Wikipedia) identifies and lists no less than one hundred primary source references in just one article on the JFK assassination. Such online resources are invaluable guides to tracking down and gaining ready access to many original source documents.
8. The Wim Dankbaar website at JFKMurderSolved is a positive goldmine of information on many matters concerning the JFK killing. The site is a valuable primary resource as it contains numerous first-hand accounts, original source material and at least one confession.
9. The Mary Ferrell Foundation.
10. Spartacus. Spartacus and the Education Forum are the best ‘first stops’ for general  information on the assassination and its background, with good, crisp biographies. They link closely with Dankbaar’s JFKMurderSolved site, which includes numerous original interviews.
11. The Education Forum.
12. JFK Lancer Research.
13. JFK.fr.
14. The Texas Monthly’s Dealey Plaza Revisited.
15. The Houston Chronicle.
16. John F. Kennedy Assassination Information Center.
17. John F. Kennedy Assassination Homepage, from Germany.
18. The Real Issues Home Page.
19. The Academic JFK Assassination Site reflects an educational course on the JFK assassination given by the University of Rhode Island.
20. Lisa Pease’s Real History Archives.
21. A site featuring Probe Magazine is a project of Citizens for Truth in the Kennedy Assassination.
22. The Assassination Web is a source for the extensive collection of essays attacking Gerald Posner’s book Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (New York, 1993).
23. Probable Cause Australia is a multinational site with an extremely good chronology.
24. Henry and Patsy May’s site JFK Assassination Links/Photos/Audio.
25. Deanie Richards’ JFK Place.
26. Dale Myers’s JFK Files website shows Myers’s computer modelling of the shooting in Dealey Plaza.
27. David Perry’s John F. Kennedy Assassination pages.
28. Clintbradford.com.
29. The Nook, featuring large databases of original Warren Commission Documents, Warren Commission Witnesses, etc.
30. JFK – Dallas, November 22, 1963 is on the website of the Dallas Morning News.
31. Fair Play was formerly an online magazine.
32. Gerald Posner’s (author of Case Closed) home page.
33. Denis Morissette’s web page is strong on interviews with witnesses, government documents, and early news accounts.
34. The Cuban Information Archives.
35. The Dealey Plaza UK Home Page.
36. JFK Resources Online.
37. The Men on the Sixth Floor is a website promoting a book of the same name.
38. A Carcano Homepage is a useful source for the rifle, as is Remington’s on the Fireball rifle.
39. The John F. Kennedy Memorial Page is a general JFK page with a large collection of JFK photographs.
40. The Smoking Gun is a large site with a corner dedicated to original JFK assassination documents.
41. The unfortunately named Jew Watch and the various anti-Freemason sites have a wealth of detail and allegations about the JFK assassination, but need careful reading.
42. The Dallas Historical Society.
43. Who Really Killed President Kennedy?
44. JFK Assassination Presidential Limousine SS100X is a site dedicated to the car in which Kennedy was riding when he was shot.
45. Richard Vizzutti’s Kennedy and Beyond has a series of photos of the Three Tramps.
46. The JFK Assassination Conspiracy Soundboard.
47. NameBase is a remarkable tool for drawing the links between individuals: a sort of online ‘who knew whom’.

A

END NOTES & COMMENTARY, 2010

Dallas – Who Shot JFK?

ACOUSTICS

In the absence of any written confessions in the JFK Assassination case, there are three ‘Rosetta Stone’ pieces of evidence: the truth about the mysterious Lee Harvey Oswald (see below); Abe Zapruder’s film of the assassination; and any acoustic evidence which could indicate the exact number of shots fired.

The best brief summary of the much disputed acoustics evidence, and the testimony of the various ‘earwitnesses’, is summarised in the article in Benson’s Encyclopedia of the JFK Assassination.

For an understanding of the science and the arguments behind the Dealey Plaza acoustic evidence, the all important primary sources are listed in Wikipedia and similar encyclopaedias. All have comprehensive and understandable explanations of the various scientific claims. See also the House Sub-Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) Record 180-1020 -10025 Committee Briefing of Dec 1978, especially pages 22–23.

The Dallas Police Dictabelt of 22 Nov 63 was first analysed in 1964 by a Bell telephone acoustics scientist called Larry Kersta. He identified at least six ‘non-voiced acoustic events’ (i.e. ‘bangs’) on the tape. The Warren Commission Report suppressed these unpalatable facts. (This can be read in full online: see US National Archives, all 26 Volumes for the ‘Report’ and the ‘Testimony’) (See also the 1978–79 HSCA Report for more detail) The article in the New York Times of 20 Nov 1988 by D. Belin, one of the attorneys involved, strongly challenges Warren’s failure to follow up on the expert acoustic evidence.

Kersta’s testimony was backed by the testimony of J. E. Barger PhD of BBN Acoustic Science Laboratories, who analysed the police Dictabelt and testified to the HSCA in 1976 that the open microphone which accidentally recorded the sound was behind the president’s car. This pinpointed Dallas Police H. B. McLain’s motorcycle (see the full BBN Report on ‘Dealey Plaza Acoustics’, # 3947 of Jan 1979 in the HSCA Report) as the likely culprit. (The report can be read online at the ‘jfkassassination.net’ with a number of follow up primary references.)

The BBN analysts insisted that the scientific evidence showed that there were at least four shots – if not more.

This finding blew the Warren Report out of the water and gave the HSCA a serious problem. Four gunshots in the timeframe were impossible from a single gunman with a rusty old Mannlicher Carcano rifle. (See ‘An analysis of recorded sounds relating to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy’, Dept. of Computer Science, Queens College, New York, 1979, and the PBS live television broadcasts of his testimony to the HSCA.)

Weiss and Aschkenazy did further acoustic analysis for the HCSA and refused to back down when later challenged by Professor Ramsey’s lofty dismissal of their findings. (See US National Academy of Sciences report and the New York Times, 28 March 1992.)

Donald B. Thomas’s own challenge to the acoustic evidence can be found at ‘Echo Correlation Analysis and the Acoustic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination Revisited’, in Science and Justice, Volume 41(1), 2001.

For a discussion of Thomas’s findings on ‘Acoustics and the JFK murder’ see the Daily Telegraph, ‘Who did shoot President Kennedy?’ dated 23 April 2001. See also the Washington Post article by Geo. Lardner of 26 March 2003 which explains the scientific arguments of the acoustic evidence in layman’s terms.

Thomas’s rebuttal of the 2003 Sensimetrics Report, which claimed that the apparent sound of shots from the Grassy Knoll could be explained ‘as pure chance echoes’ (see ‘The Court TV channel’ for the Sensimetrics Report) can be found in ‘Impulsive Behavior: The Court TV – Sensimetrics Acoustical Evidence Study’ by D. B. Thomas (2003)  and his original article ‘Hear no Evil?’ 17 November 2001.

Thomas highlighted two glaring errors in Sensimetric’s analysis of the gunshots. They played the Dictabelt at the wrong playback speed; and they failed to run all the test sounds. See also ‘Echo Correlation and the Acoustics evidence in the Kennedy Assassination’ (D. B. Thomas) Science and Justice #40, pp 21– 2, 2001.

The FBI’s official position is in their FBI Record 124-10006-1053, of 18 Feb 1983.

The blue-chip National Academy of Sciences Ramsey Committee hit back in a series of papers, the latest in 2005. The argument continues.

One little known curiosity in the acoustic evidence was the discovery of a ‘V for Victory’ in Morse code, recorded on one of the JFK assassination tapes held by J. C. Bowles (the Communications Supervisor of the Dallas Police Dept) when he retired in 1981. Bowles insisted that this was a pure coincidence attributable to ‘hetrodyning’. (See Benson)

 

ADDISON’S DISEASE

For a brief layman’s description of Addison’s Disease, its symptoms and its dangers, see Dr Tracy Shuman’s authoritative article on the medical site ‘WebMD’ 2005.

There is an excellent summary of JFK’s general medical condition in the transcript by R. E. Gilbert available at the JFK Kennedy Presidential Library. This spells out his exact condition and the various medications he used. (Gilbert is the author of The Mortal Presidency: Illness and Anguish in the White House, Fordham Univ Press, 1993.)

There are even reports that the Kennedy family kept a reservoir of cortisone and other steroids in safety deposit boxes around the country so that Jack would have ready access to these medications wherever he travelled. (See JFK Museum Archives) One of his closest aides recounts that John Kennedy:

‘. . . used (and carried with him around the country) more pills, potions, poultices and other paraphernalia than would be found in a small dispensary.’

 

ADVERTISEMENTS IN DALLAS         

The advertisement in the Dallas papers was paid for by the Texas millionaires H. R. Bright, Nelson Lamar Hunt (son of H. L. Hunt) and Edgar Crissey. (See Warren and Benson.) It was designed and written by Larrie Schweim, an ultra-rightwing activist, helped by three friends all of whom had served together in the US Army in Germany. They all had links to General Walker.

            See also the Warren Report, Forgive My Grief by William Penn Jones Jr (1966),

and the poster itself which can be seen on Google.

 

AFTERMATH

The idea that all the shocked spectators rushed to the TSBD or the Grassy Knoll immediately is wrong and can be shown to be so by the photographic evidence. The photograph of the press bus in front of the Grassy Knoll must have been taken at least 27 seconds after the shooting (the bus hadn’t even turned the 120º corner hard left into Elm Street when the shooting began). In that photograph, very few people have even started moving.

The photographic record of the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination is available in numerous books, the various JFK research sites and on Google images. See in particular: The Photographic Whitewash of the JFK Assassination by Harold Weisberg.

 

ANGLETON, JAMES JESUS

For a detailed description of the life of this obsessive CIA spook see the biography, Cold Warrior by Tom Mangold (Simon and Schuster), Mark Lane’s Plausible Denial;  Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets That Destroyed Two of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents by David C. Martin, and his biography on the various encyclopaedias.

Angleton’s (far too close) links with Israel’s intelligence services are well explored in Michael Piper’s Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Controversy.

Angleton’s exploits are detailed in the presidential Church Committee Report of 1976. (US Congress, Wash DC. Govt Printing Office, 14 Volumes) especially vol 7. See also the full (PDF) transcripts available online from the Assassinations Archive and Research Centre. The US Assassinations Records Review Committee (ARRC) provides an online public library with the Mary Ferrell Kennedy Research Trust and provides original FOIA documents through the History Matters research site.

For detailed primary references to Angleton’s life and times see the list of primary sources at Wikipedia, as well as the books by Seymour Hersh, Mangold and Martin.

            James Angleton kept secret his full relationship with Israeli intelligence (Mossad) from the leaders of the new CIA or the Executive Branch because of State Department fears that public cooperation with the Israelis would complicate Arab and British relations. According to a former CIA officer who served as chief of station in Tel Aviv, no one at the State Department or CIA was anxious in the beginning to have an open relationship with Israel. (The Secret History of the CIA, by Joseph Trento, p.80)

In 1985, Angleton told author Joseph Trento, ‘I realize how I have wasted my existence, my professional life.’ . . . ‘You know, the CIA got tens of thousands of brave people killed . . . We play with lives as if we owned them. We gave false hope. We – I – so misjudged what happened.’ (Trento, pp. 478–479)

Angleton’s obituary is in the New York Times of 12 May 1987.

 

ALEMAN, JOSE

Aléman was a well connected Cuban exile who acted as an FBI informer. He met Santo Trafficante at the Byron Hotel in Miami in September 1962 and it was there that Trafficante made his threat that, ‘. . . mark my words, this man Kennedy . . . will get what’s coming to him . . .’  (See HSCA V; Spotlight #80; Benson, and Summers.)

 

ALTGENS, ‘IKE’

James Altgens was an Associated Press photographer who took the first still photograph of JFK being shot. (See the Warren Commission Report, Benson, and Photographic Whitewash by Harold Weisberg.)

‘Ike’ Altgens’ photographs reveal an interesting detail about the Secret Service: the agents in LBJ’s car are visibly reacting seconds before JFK’s own Secret Service team even begins to move.

 

ANDERSON, JACK

Jack Anderson was a famous investigative journalist with a long list of intelligence and security ‘scoops’ which were widely syndicated. He had close links to Frank Sturgis, and in fact bailed the ex-CIA man out when the latter was arrested for his part in the Watergate break-in a decade later.

Anderson claimed that he had been told by Mafia man Johnny Roselli that a CIA agent calling himself ‘Maurice Bishop’ had been bribing a number of people to say they had seen Oswald in Mexico in September 1963.

The September 7, 1976 issue of the Washington Post contains one of Mr Anderson’s articles entitled ‘Behind John F. Kennedy’s Murder’. This puts forward the idea that Oswald was merely a decoy and a scapegoat for others who did the killing. This was put to Mafia man Trafficante at the HSCA. Verbatim, it read:

‘Mr Trafficante, I want to read to you just two portions of the article I have just referred to, after which I will ask for your comment.

‘According to Mr Anderson and Mr Whitten in this article, it says: Before he died, Roselli hinted to associates that he knew who had arranged President Kennedy’s murder. It was the same conspirators, he suggested, whom he had recruited earlier to kill Cuban Premier Fidel Castro. By Roselli’s cryptic account, Castro learned the identity of the underworld contacts in Havana who had been trying to knock him off.

‘He believed, not altogether without basis, that President Kennedy was behind the plot. Then over in another section, it says: “According to Roselli, Castro enlisted the same underworld elements whom he had caught plotting against him.” They supposedly were Cubans from the old Trafficante organization. Working with Cuban intelligence, they allegedly lined up an ex-Marine sharpshooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been active in the pro-Castro movement.

‘According to Roselli’s version, Oswald may have shot Kennedy or may have acted as a decoy while others ambushed him from closer range. When Oswald was picked up, Roselli suggested the underworld conspirators feared he would crack and disclose information that might lead to them.

‘This almost certainly would have brought a massive U.S. crackdown on the Mafia. So Jack Ruby was ordered to eliminate Oswald making it appear as an act of reprisal against the President’s killer. At least this is how Roselli explained the tragedy in Dallas.’

            See JFK exhibit F-409, 28 September 1978

Anderson had very good sources inside the Federal government and on Capitol Hill, and was even the subject of death threats. (See the HSCA Report, High Treason by Groden and Livingstone, Benson, and The Plot to Kill the President by Blakey and Billings.)

 

ANDREWS, DEAN

Dean Andrews was a New Orleans attorney. One of his clients was mobster Carlos Marcello, and he also knew David Ferrie. Shortly after the assassination, Andrews received a phone call from Clay Bertrand, who wanted him to be Oswald’s lawyer. See Testimony of Dean Adams Andrews, Jr., Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 11, p. 331.            Andrews was later questioned by Jim Garrison at the trial of Clay Shaw about his Warren Commission testimony in which he had mentioned a man named ‘Clay Bertrand’ having called him shortly after John F. Kennedy‘s assassination to represent Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas. See On the Trail of the Assassins: My Investigation and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy by Jim Garrison, Sheridan Square Pubns, 1988.

After Clay Shaw’s acquittal, Andrews was found guilty of perjury in a 1967 trial. Andrews at first told a grand jury that he could not say whether Shaw and Bertrand were the same person, then stated that they were definitely different men. A five-man New Orleans jury (legal in Louisiana) found him guilty of having committed perjury three times during District Attorney Jim Garrison’s bootless investigation into the Kennedy assassination. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison. See Time Magazine, 25 August 1967.
ARMS THEFTS

The theft of arms from a Federal armoury is alleged in Ultimate Sacrifice by Lamar Waldron, where a government-sponsored raid on their own armoury in Fort Hood is described as a deniable way of supplying arms to dissident Cuban groups. Jack Ruby appears to have either had knowledge or been involved; see FBI Dallas’s telex 29 November 1963.

See also Oswald Talked: The New Evidence in the JFK Assassination, R. and M. La Fontaine, (Pelican, 1996)  pp 207 and 286

See also the claims made by the Cuban government in their official lawsuit against the USA on the Havana, GRANMA site.

 

ARMY INTELLIGENCE

Although there is very little hard evidence, it is clear that Army intelligence was involved in the security of both the motorcade and the immediate follow-up. Selected Army intelligence personnel were seeded into the Dallas Police in Dealey Plaza on the day, as was normal, and were later active in the police dealings with Marina Oswald.

It was a Lt Col. Jones of 112 Military Intelligence Group who was telephoned at 1515 on 22 Nov and asked if 112 MIG had any records of an ‘A. J. Hidell’. Jones claimed that he looked it up in the files and discovered that it was an alias linked to one, ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’.

One MI officer has some interesting links. A Sam Kail of Army Intelligence, Texas and Dallas, had worked closely with Guy de Mohrenschildt, ‘Maurice Bishop’ and Alpha 66 on anti-Castro operations. (See Benson.)

            Military Intelligence may have been identified at the Grassy Knoll. ‘After the assassination, several witnesses stated they had seen or encountered Secret Service agents behind the stockade fence situated on the grassy knoll area and in the Texas School Book Depository.’ See HSCA Report p. 184.

            Testimony of Lt Col. Robert Jones, 112 MIG.    Any study of Army intelligence in Dealey Plaza must note the testimony of Lt Col. Jones before the HSCA. Jones in 1963 was Operations Officer of the Military 112th Intelligence Region.  There were strong allegations that Military Intelligence personnel may have identified themselves as Secret Service agents on the grassy knoll.

Colonel Jones  ‘. . . told the committee that from 8 to 12 military intelligence personnel in plainclothes were assigned to Dallas to provide supplemental security for the President’s visit. He indicated that these agents had identification credentials and, if questioned, would most likely have stated that they were on detail to the Secret Service.’

The committee sought to identify these agents so that they could be questioned. The Department of Defense, however, reported that a search of its files showed ‘no records . . . indicating any Department of Defense Protective Services in Dallas’. The committee was unable to resolve the contradiction. (HSCA Report, p. 184.)

Jones told the HSCA that if the President, or Vice President, or anyone for whom the Secret Service has responsibility was scheduled to arrive in the area, they would contact the MI Group Headquarters or their Regional Headquarters and ‘the MIG would augment their force, if necessary to provide some type of physical coverage, that is, a man on the street, or an observation of people, vehicles, communications, or any other information or support that we could provide.  But in every case, to my knowledge, our people were under the control and supervision of Secret Service. We never assumed responsibility for the President’s protection.’

Jones assured the Committee that they would have not have been carrying Secret Service credentials. ‘They would have been identified with some type of sign, or something on their lapels, or some code or communication that could be identified in the crowd.’

            See Executive session testimony of Col. Robert E. Jones, April 20, 1978, House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Colonel Jones later contacted the FBI offices in San Antonio and Dallas and gave those offices detailed information concerning Oswald and ‘A. J. Hidell’, Oswald’s alleged alias, from the Army Intelligence files. The HSCA felt this information suggested the existence of a military intelligence file on Oswald and, most significant of all, raised the possibility that he had intelligence associations of some kind. (112 MIG was directly responsible for military counterintelligence operations, background investigations, domestic intelligence, and any special operations in a five-state area.) See HSCA Report, pp. 221-222.

However, when the Oswald military intelligence file was requested by the House Committee, the Department of Defense relayed that they had ‘destroyed the file as part of a general program aimed at eliminating all of its files pertaining to nonmilitary personnel’. (HSCA Report, p. 223; Letter from Department of Defense to House Select Committee on Assassinations, June 22, 1978, p. 6.)

The Army appears to be very much ‘the dog that didn’t bark’, which, given the events and the 13th MI Group’s earlier ‘warning off’ from Washington, appears highly suspicious. Suspicion is not proof, however . . . See also Peter Dale Scott’s Deep Politics and the Death of JFK.

 

ARNOLD, GORDON

Arnold was the soldier on leave who claims that he was warned off the Grassy Knoll by someone who flashed Secret Service credentials. (See Dallas Morning News archive, 1977, and the interview in Reasonable Doubt  by Henry Hurt.)

Although some attempts have been made to discredit Arnold’s claims, modern digital enhancements of Mary Moorman’s Polaroid photographs support his version of events and show the police-uniformed figure known as the ‘Badgeman’ at the picket fence. (See also Benson and Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy

by David Scheim.)

 

 

 

ARRB

The Assassinations Records Review Board was set up by an act of Congress in 1992 to collect and release all official US records relating to the murder of JFK. The ARRB reported in 1998, having interviewed witnesses as well as chasing documents.

However, there are still nearly a million government documents un-released (2011). The CIA and Secret Service have been less than helpful in revealing all their records. The ARRB Report is dated Sept 1998 and there is a complete list of testimony available on the relevant websites.

For more details of the ARRB, see also:

• Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board, September 1998
• Medical Testimony Before the Assassination Records Review Board
• CIA Personnel Testimony Before the Assassination Records Review Board
• Persons Testimony Before the Assassination Records Review Board; Washington D. C. 10-11-94; Boston, Massachusetts 3-24-95; New Orleans, Louisiana 6-28-95; Los Angeles, California 9-17-96; Washington D. C. 4-2-97

For the CIA’s ‘Mr Fixit’ on the ARRB see also ‘Ioannides’ below.

 

AUTOPSY

David Lifton’s Best Evidence is by far the best source for full medical – and other – details of the autopsy. He gives full accounts of events based on personal interviews with the individuals concerned.

For Dr Humes burning his original draft of the autopsy notes, see Best Evidence p.158. There are numerous other first-hand accounts, including his own admissions on oath to the Warren Commission (Vol. 2, p.348) the HSCA and Dr Finck’s confirmation to the ARRB, 1994.

Retired FBI Agent James W. Sibert was present at the Bethesda autopsy and he explains how he saw the medical evidence was rigged on JFKMurderSolved website. See also Best Evidence and Benson.

There are some other curious features about the autopsy, especially the photographic record. For example, Earl McDonald of the National Archives, who was actually trained in autopsy photography under the original autopsy photographer James Stringer, listed a number of things that should appear in the JFK autopsy pictures but are missing:

 

• There are no autopsy tags visible in any of the photographs.
• There are no whole body photographs in the collection.
• There is no photograph of the brain (at autopsy) immediately following removal from the cranium.
• There is no photograph of the inside of the skull following brain removal showing its condition.
• There is no photograph of the reassembled skull.
• There is no photograph of the chest cavity.
• There is no extreme close-up of the back wound.
• There is no wide-angle and/or medium-field view of the cranium viewed from the outside.
• In the autopsy photographs of the back of the head, this area of the head is intact. However, numerous medical professionals and federal agents who saw Kennedy’s body have stated there was a large hole in that part of the skull. These witnesses include the following:

 

– Audrey Bell, a nursing supervisor at Parkland Hospital.

– Diana Bowron, Parkland Hospital nurse. Nurse Bowron actually cleaned the

large defect and packed it with gauze squares in preparing the body for

the casket. She vividly remembers that the large head wound was in the

right rear part of the skull.

– Dr Kemp Clark, Parkland Hospital.

– Dr Charles Crenshaw, Parkland Hospital.

– Dr Richard Dulaney, Parkland Hospital.

– Dr John Ebersole, Bethesda Hospital radiologist.

– William Greer, Secret Service agent, who drove the presidential

limousine.

– Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who was taken to the morgue for the

express purpose of viewing the President’s wounds and who was also in the

Parkland trauma room when the President was being treated. It was Agent

Hill who climbed onto the back of the limousine to get Jackie Kennedy to

return to her seat. Hill testified that as he was lying over the top of

the back seat ‘I noticed a portion of the President’s head on the right

rear side was missing and he was bleeding profusely.’ Hours later, when

Hill was taken to the morgue for the express purpose of viewing the

President’s wounds, he again reported seeing a large defect in the right

rear area of the skull.

– Patricia Hutton (now Patricia Gustaffson), a nurse at Parkland Hospital,

who placed a bandage against the wound in the back of the head.

– James Curtis Jenkins, a Navy lab technician at Bethesda Hospital who was

present at the autopsy.

– Dr Robert Karnei, Bethesda Hospital, who was present at the autopsy.

– Roy Kellerman, a Secret Service agent who was present at the autopsy.

– Dr Robert McClelland, Parkland Hospital.

– Doris Nelson, a chief nurse at Parkland Hospital. Nurse Nelson, who got

a very good look at Kennedy’s head in the trauma room at Parkland

Hospital, and balked when shown the alleged autopsy photos of the back of the

head.

– Aubrey Rike, an ambulance driver and funeral-home worker in Dallas. Rike

was called to Parkland Hospital soon after the shooting and assisted in

placing the President’s body in the casket. Rike could actually feel the

edges of the large wound in the back of the head.

– Tom Robinson, the mortician who had the job of putting the President

back together after the autopsy in case the family wanted to take one last

look at him. Robinson, of course, had to spend a good part of his time

handling the President’s head. He saw and felt the large wound in the

right rear.

– Jan Gail Rudnicki, a lab assistant at Bethesda Hospital who was present

at the autopsy.

– Roy Stamps, a Fort Worth newsman who saw Kennedy lying in the limousine

before he was moved into Parkland Hospital: ‘I rushed up and

saw Kennedy lying in the car . . . The back of his head was gone’ (Marrs

p. 362).

 

Another problem is that the autopsy photos were supposedly taken at the morgue of the Bethesda Naval Hospital. However some of those who worked there – and who also took part in the autopsy – have claimed that the background to the pictures is not Bethesda morgue.

For example, the instrument tray shown in the Warren F7 top-of-the-head photo is not the kind of tray that was used at the Bethesda morgue. Another photograph shows a black phone on the wall beside the table.  There was no phone at that position at the morgue.

There is also evidence that the colour photographs have been faked. See the comments of professional photographer Steve Mills:

 

‘In the color versions of the right-profile and top-of-the-head pictures,

there are three large bloody red stripes hanging down on top of Kennedy’s

hair, giving the appearance of a severe wound at the top of the head.

However, in the black and white reprints of these photos the stripes are

WHITE OR LIGHT GRAY. This is a photographic impossibility, if

orthochromatic film was used. With such film, red turns to black, not to

white or light gray.

Orthochromatic film, unfiltered, records blue very lightly and red very

darkly. It is common to use ortho film in forensic photography to show

differences and details in red and blue areas. But this is no proof. The record

declares one type of film, and the photos declare either another or fraud.’

(See Groden and Livingstone, High Treason, p584)

 

Mills believes that the official autopsy photographs are frauds.

See also:  1968 Panel Review of Photographs, X-Ray Films, Documents and Other Evidence Pertaining to the Fatal Wounding of President John E Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, at Kennedy Assassination Home Page

B

BADGES.

Chauncey Holt – who worked for both Carlos Marcello and the CIA – claimed that he helped to set up a false CIA company called LASSCO in Los Angeles as a manufacturer of Police badges and IDs. LASSCO is alleged to have received an order for 12 new ID sets, including Secret Service IDs and badges in early November 1963.

Holt claims that he was ordered to deliver the IDs and badges to the Cuban exile called Homer Echevarria at the Cabana Motel, Dallas on 21^st November. (In a 1995 ARRB/FOIA release, the FBI confirmed part of this story.)

On 30 November 1963, Dallas FBI reported to J. Edgar Hoover that, according to an earlier Secret Service source, Echevarria was preparing to be involved in an anti-Castro operation, but only ‘Just as soon as we’ve taken care of Kennedy’.

Holt’s family have produced ample evidence to support their father’s story, including genuine correspondence with his CIA controllers. (See the JFKMurderSolved website and the Mary Ferrell Foundation’s JFK assassination research website.)

 

BALLISTICS

Ex-US Army Staff Sgt John Richardson, a ballistics expert and gunsmith, cuts through many of the false claims about the guns and the wounds, in his original testimony on the JFKMurderSolved site.

The 6.5mm bullet produced as Exhibit CE 99 for the Warren Commission was fired from a 6-groove gun barrel. Lee Harvey Oswald’s supposed Mannlicher-Carcano has only 4 grooves (or ‘lands’ to give them their correct name) and a right-hand twist. For an exploration of multiple guns on the day, see Carol Hewitt’s technical ballistics article in Probe, November 1995 (Vol 3).

The Mannlicher-Carcano passed to the US Army’s Edgewood Arsenal as ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’s’ was defective. It had a misaligned ’scope, a defective firing pin and the bolt action was jammed by rust. (See the Warren Commission’s Reports from the US military proving grounds and the FBI reports.)

A Kennedy researcher called Walt Cakebread confirmed that the murder weapon and the backyard photo rifle had differently mounted sling swivels.

            Neutron-Activated Analysis of the metal content (silver, lead, antimony, copper traces) of the ‘magic bullet’, exhibit CE-399 and some fragments of the alleged fatal shot do not match.  CE-399’s lead core had a higher silver content and therefore cannot have been made by Winchester Western, the makers of the fragments recovered. (Winchester-Western lead-cored bullets are distinctive, as the lead – of US extraction – is very pure.) The lead core of the 6.5mm bullet presented as evidence to the Warren Commission is of a different, European origin.

To further confuse the issue, the spent 6.5mm cases ‘discovered’ on the sixth floor of the TSBD cannot have been fired from Lee Harvey Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, as they are in fact 6.5 x 54 mm rounds and so will not fit in the breech of ‘the Oswald rifle’. (For fuller technical details, see The Kill Zone: A Sniper looks at Dealey Plaza by Lt Col Craig Roberts, an ex-USMC Sniper, which gives a thoroughly professional analysis of the gunfire in Dealey Plaza.)

The clinching evidence of a ballistics fraud comes from Ballistician, Master-Machinist, and Gun-Smith, Staff Sergeant John Ritchson, late of the 499th TC USATC HG US Army, whose professional evidence is worth quoting:

 

‘ . . .   The unfired cartridge represented as (Warren Commission) Item-6 of

      Exhibit CE-738 more closely resembles an L.B.C.936, 6.5x 54 mm MC Italian GI

cartridge, than it does an American made WCC 6.5x 52 mm MC Cartridge.(note)

Virtually all American bullets are jacketed with “Gilders Metal” which is an

alloy of copper and zinc, with a distinct brassy appearance. The color photos of

the unfired cartridge show a bullet that is distinctly silver in color,  consistent with

the cupra-nickel alloy used by European bullet makers.

The MC Cartridge possesses a shoulder width of .160’ and a shoulder bevel

of 25 degrees. This is an extremely critical point as measurement of the

spent cases show a shoulder width of .186’ and a shoulder bevel of 24

degrees, for a difference of .026’ in shoulder width and 1 degree of angle

in the bevel.

Conclusion:  That the spent cases more closely resemble a 6.5 x 54 mm

Mannlicher-Schoenauer (MS) Cartridge then they do a 6.5x52 mm MC cartridge.

The distinction made in the above conclusion, if it holds up, is an

important one, as the Austrian designed MS rifle is prized for its smooth

action, magazine efficiency, chambering characteristics and accuracy as

opposed to the dismal performance of the MC rifle.’

 

See his full report in JFKLancer: ‘The Unfired Cartridge’, 26 Nov 1997.

 

 

BAKER, BOBBY

Bobby Baker is on record as saying that ‘most politicians are unusually horny’, and that according to Anthony Summers in his biography of J. Edgar Hoover, JFK said that Ellen Rometsch ‘gave him the best oral sex he had ever had’. (See also the revelations in American Mafia.com, ‘Rometsch and Bobby Baker’ (Spartacus Education) and Michael Beschloss’s The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963.)

For a full brief account of the Bobby Baker scandal, see Life and Time, November 1963. Details of Baker’s Serve-U Corporation and its links to organised crime can be seen in R. E. Luker’s article of 12 July 2005, on the History News Network and its sources. Baker’s autobiography, Confessions of a Capitol Hill Wheeler Dealer (1978) is a useful primary source for his own version of events.

The Bobby scandal first surfaced in Sept 1963. That the Senate Rules Committee had a good idea where it might end up is obvious from their October 1963 statement: ‘We are starting with the Bobby Baker case . . . where that spreads from there, we do not know.’

When the Baker scandal began, LBJ fled to his Texas ranch and stayed there through much of the autumn of 1963. He knew that the Baker affair would scupper any chance of his running again as Vice President on any Kennedy ticket in 1964. Even if he avoided jail, his political career was over. See N. Kotz’s Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America (Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

 

BANISTER, GUY

Banister’s full biography is at Spartacus and in Summers’ Conspiracy (revised editions of which were published under the title Not in Your Lifetime).

.           Ex FBI man Banister was implicated in a 1961 raid on a munitions depot in Houma, Louisiana ‘. . . in which various weapons, grenades and ammunition were stolen . . . which were reportedly seen stacked in Banister’s back room by several witnesses.’ (544 Camp Street and Related Events, House Select Committee on Assassinations – Appendix to Hearings, Volume 10, 13, p. 127.)

The New Orleans States-Item newspaper reported (New Orleans States-Item, April 25, 1967) that Banister served as a munitions supplier for the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion and continued to deal weapons from his office until 1963.

Banister’s pistol whipping of Martin can be found in New Orleans Police Report #K-12634 dated 22 Nov 63 – recorded from Martin’s hospital bed.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations reported that witnesses ‘. . . indicate Banister was aware of Oswald and his Fair Play for Cuba Committee before the assassination.’ (‘544 Camp Street and Related Events’, House Select Committee on Assassinations – Appendix to Hearings, Volume 10, 13, p. 128.)

Banister’s secretary Delphine Roberts told author Anthony Summers that Oswald ‘. . . seemed to be on familiar terms with Banister and with [Banister’s] office.’ Roberts said, ‘As I understood it, he had the use of an office on the second floor, above the main office where we worked . . . Then, several times, Mr Banister brought me upstairs, and in the office above I saw various writings stuck up on the wall pertaining to Cuba. There were various leaflets up there pertaining to Fair Play for Cuba.’   (See Not in Your Lifetime, Anthony Summers, Marlowe & Company, 1998, p. 229.)

The House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated Roberts’ claims and said that ‘the reliability of her statements could not be determined’. (544 Camp Street and Related Events, House Select Committee on Assassinations – Appendix to Hearings, Volume 10, 8, p. 129.)

Banister’s partner, Hugh Ward, died in a plane crash only ten days after Banister’s sudden and fatal heart attack.

According to Banister’s widow, she cleared boxes of Oswald’s ‘Fair Play for Cuba’ pamphlets out of her husband’s office after his death.

 

BAY OF PIGS

There are very full accounts of the Bay of Pigs in the now declassified ‘Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-63’, Vol. 10 (Cuba); Vol. 11 (The Missile Crisis) and Vol. 3 of the Official ‘CIA History of the Bay of Pigs Operation’ (NARA and CIA).

Robert Kennedy obviously learned about the plan to mount a fake attack on the US Guantanamo base during the Bay of Pigs operation. He advocated the same idea during the Cuban Missile Crisis as a pretext to invade. See McCone’s Memos in ‘CIA Documents concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis’ 21 and 23 August 1962. (FRUS Vol X doc #385.)

There are numerous books on the Bay of Pigs. Hinkle and Turner’s 1997 Deadly Secrets: The CIA–Mafia War Against Castro gives a good overview of the whole tangled relationship between the CIA and Castro. Other good sources are the National Security Archive at George Washington University’s  ‘Bay of Pigs, 40 Years on’;  Jean Edward Smith’s, ‘The Unanswered Questions’ in The Nation, 13 April 1964; L. G. Lynch’s Decision for Disaster: Betrayal at the Bay of Pigs (2000) and the documents in the JFK Library especially the exchanges about the cancelled airstrikes. See also the US DoD memo for Gen Maxwell Taylor of 9 May 1961.

 

BECKER and THREATS TO THE KENNEDYS

Becker was a private investigator and reported Marcello’s threats against RFK to the FBI a year before the assassination and later to the HSCA in 1979. (See HSCA testimony, Benson, as well as Summers, Spartacus and Contract on America.)

 

BEN GURION, DAVID

Ben Gurion’s involvement in the events of 1963 can be found in the Arab Studies Quarterly (Vol. 18, 1996) and in the critical article by Frank Weltner on the JewWatch site as well as the comprehensive article on the John F. Kennedy website’s  Mossad and the JFK Assassination.

The biography of Ben Gurion in Wikipedia is comprehensive and accurate and, like all Wiki entries, gives a valuable list of primary sources.

See also ‘Ben Gurion: A Political Life’ by Peres and Landau (Schocken, 2011).

Ben Gurion was notoriously duplicitous and ruthless in what he saw as Israel’s interests. For example, after an IDF attack on an Arab village, Quibyam on 19 October 1953 by IDF Special Forces which massacred sixty-nine Arabs, two thirds of them women and children, and destroyed forty-five houses, a school, and a mosque, Ben-Gurion publicly asserted that the raid had been carried out by Israeli civilians – although he had personally ordered the IDF attack. In what was a barefaced lie, he said on radio:

‘None deplores it more than the Government of Israel, if . . . innocent blood was spilled . . . The Government of Israel rejects with all vigor the absurd and fantastic allegation that 600 men of the IDF took part in the action . . . We have carried out a searching investigation and it is clear beyond doubt that not a single army unit was absent from its base on the night of the attack on Qibya.’ (Statement by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, ISA FM 2435/5)

 

In his book The Jewish Paradox, Nahum Goldmann recalls a late night conversation he had with Ben-Gurion in 1956 about ‘the Arab problem’. Ben-Gurion’s views on ‘his people’s rights’ were unequivocal:

‘Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their [the Arabs’] fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?’ (Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox: A Personal Memoir of Historic Encounters that Shaped the Drama of Modern Jewry, Grosset & Dunlap, 1978, p. 99.)

 

BEWLEY, T.

Bewley’s witnessed the aftermath of the Tippet murder. His watch said ‘1.10 pm’ when he drove by the scene.  Assuming it was correct (it probably was, as the witness Mrs Markham was leaving her house to catch the 1.12 pm bus to work) that would place the timing well before Oswald could have reached the scene on foot from his lodgings, and at least five minutes before the DPD logged the incident – unless someone gave Lee a lift. (See Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment and Summers.)

 

BLOOMFIELD

The CIA document on Canadian lawyer Louis Mortimer Bloomfield is FOIA Case Reference 820 10 20, US Dept of State.

Louis Bloomfield’s brother Bernard gives a good description of his more prominent brother and describes his activities – including spying and gun-running – in his Israel Diary (1950). A less-than-admiring version of Bloomfield’s career is to be found in Salvador Astucia’s article on the web, The Opium Lords.

Bloomfield received the prestigious ‘Histadrut Award’ from Israel. The honour spawned a number of articles about him and his exploits. See Montreal newspapers (various) 1967 for details plus the Toronto Globe and Mail, which also carry his 1984 obituaries.

Bloomfield’s legal office in France was Phillips and Vineberg, who opened their Paris office in 1961. Details can be found on both the Canadian and the French Legal Directories for the time. See also: Phillips and Vineberg. Source: LEXPERT – Canadian Legal Directory – Goodman Phillips & Vineberg, http://www.lexpert.ca/firms/goodmanphil.html (2000)

For allegations of the Montreal connection, see Le Devoir of 16 March 1967; ‘Will Garrison’s Inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination Lead to Montreal?’

In Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal (1970) William Torbitt claims that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was organised by Bloomfield and Permindex. Also involved included Defense Industrial Security Command, organised by J. Edgar Hoover and William Sullivan. Torbitt claims that Bloomfield was in control of the operation. DISC agents included Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jack Ruby.

Bloomfield, who donated his papers in 1978 to the Canadian Public Archives, under the condition that they were to be released 20 years after his death (i.e.: in 2004, since he died in 1984), was the Montreal lawyer involved in Permindex’s finance and development. His archives contain hundreds of pieces such as cables and letters documenting the activities of the organisation.

The legal case of Bloomfield’s secret archives is in Elizabeth Thompson’s article in the Canadian Gazette, 27 Jan 2007. Details of the court case can be followed in the various Canadian Court reports. At the time of writing it still remains bogged down in the Canadian courts.

 

BOGARD, AL

The unfortunate car salesman who let ‘Lee Oswald’ test-drive a Mercury Comet at high speed was later found dead in his car with a hose from the exhaust near his home in Louisiana in February 1966. It sounds very much as if he was ‘suicided’. (See Summers, Mortal Error by Bonar Menninger; Benson, and the very detailed investigations in Armstrong’s  Harvey and Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald  and the website Harvey and Lee.)

            See also Warren Commission Hearings Vol. X, p. 346.

 

BOLDEN, ABRAHAM

The travails of the first black Secret Service Agent on the Presidential detail are well described with detailed references in Ultimate Sacrifice. Bolden warned of the danger in Chicago on 2 November 63  (see HSCA 180-10070-10273) and later went to jail for six years on what was later admitted to be a rigged entrapment charge.

He surfaced 44 years later in November 2007, telling his story to the American media. (See ABC reports (various) and the widespread news coverage, for example Chuck Goudie, Chief Investigative Reporter, ABC 7 Chicago Newsroom, of 21-22 November 2007.)

See also ‘Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden of Chicago served President John Kennedy as the first African-American on the White House security detail’. Chicago Tribune. Turner Rice, Dawn (18 January 2010).

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-01-18/news/1001170163_1_secret-service-agent-white-house-security-detail-kennedy-compound.

 

BOWERS, LEE

 The testimony of Bowers and the deaf mute Hoffmann is too close to be explained away as coincidence. See the Warren Commission Hearings, vol. 6, p. 284, Testimony of Lee E. Bowers, Jr., April 2, 1964. and hearings for the original principal sources, plus the references in Rush to Judgment, Conspiracy, The Plot to Kill the President, et al. For even more details look at JFK Online, YouTube, JFK files and the Education Forum.    Bowers’s story is well covered in Benson.

Bowers’s interview was first published by Dale K. Myers in 2004. See the Testimony of Lee Bowers, Jr. in Dale K. Myers, ‘Secrets of a Homicide: Badge Man’ —The interview transcript is among the papers of De Antonio at the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives.

 

BOWRON, DIANA

Nurse Bowron remarked on the single gaping wound at the back of JFK’s head when he first arrived at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. (See Warren Commission Hearings and Testimony.)

 

BRADING, EUGENE

Under the alias ‘Jim Braden’, there is no doubt that this individual was close to the action in Dealey. (See the Warren Commission testimony and also the wealth of evidence in Summers, Blakey, Kantor, Benson and Contract on America.

Online, Brading-Braden gets a lot of attention: see the various allegations and references, eg, Spartacus and the NameBase Proximity websites.

More details of Braden/Brading’s proximity to the murder of Robert Kennedy can be found in The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Turner and Christian (Thunder’s Mouth, 1993) and in the Lisa Pease articles in the New History Archives.

 

BRONFMAN, SAM

In 1903 Samuel set up shop as a alcoholic beverages distributor, founding the Distillers Corporation in Montreal in 1924, specializing in cheap whiskey. See Samuel Bronfman: The Life and Times of Seagram’s Mr Sam by Michael R. Marrus, published by Brandeis University Press of New England, 1991.

The Bronfmans took up bootlegging to Boston and Chicago during the Volsted Act  Sales were boosted during the United States’ abortive experiment with prohibition, and Bronfman was able to stay within the confines of both Canadian law, where prohibition laws had been previously repealed and American law, while dealing with unsavoury characters such as the Chicago Outfit of Al Capone.

See Peter C. Newman, Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World (1978; US title: King of the Castle: The Making of a Dynasty).

Bronfman’s Distillers Corporation acquired Joseph E. Seagram & Sons of Waterloo, Ontario, from the heirs of Joseph Seagram in 1928. Bronfman eventually built an empire based on the appeal of brand names developed previously by Seagram.

See The Seagram Company Ltd.: Company Profile, Information, Business Description, History, Background Information on the Seagram Company Ltd.  Details of Bronfman’s well-timed oil investments (and much else besides) can be found at ‘Power Brokers’ (Chapter 8) on the Internet. Michael Marrus’s biography of the Canadian multi-millionaire, Samuel Bronfman, goes into some detail on the Bronfman family’s fortune – and how it was amassed. It also – along with Piper’s Final Judgment – documents his extremely close links with Israel and Louis Bloomfield.

See also Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs, pp. 276–277; the Houston Chronicle and Google Group alt.conspiracy.jfk. Wikipedia has a good concise biography of the successful immigrant from Russia and has a list of solid primary references to follow up, including Marrus’s biography.

Bronfman’s very close links with Israel and its governments are documented on the Canadian Jewish Congress website and on the Samuel Bronfman Foundation publicity. See also, Christopher G. Curtis, ‘Bronfman Family’, The Canadian Encyclopedia: Year 2000 Edition (1999).

The Bronfman family are openly members of the pro-Israeli lobbyists group of North American billionaires known as the ‘Magnum Group’.

 

BROWN, MADELEINE

Madeleine’s story and claims are difficult to assess; she was plugging her book (Texas in the Morning) and wanted maximum publicity – however, she had undoubtedly been LBJ’s mistress and had borne his child, so had much inside information.

Brown’s story about the gathering the night before JFK’s murder gets some confirmation from an unexpected, if discredited, quarter. See Robert D. Morrow’s First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated in the Cia-Mafia Murder of President Kennedy,

 in which the man who claims to have been a CIA agent not only supports her account of a meeting on the eve of the murder, but – if he is to be believed – says that Nixon and Hoover specifically discussed their future careers if (when?) JFK was assassinated.

Before her death on 22 June 2002, author and lecturer Robert Gaylon Ross had the opportunity to conduct an 80-minute interview with Madeleine Duncan Brown and from that lengthy discussion, her version of exactly who was behind the assassination of JFK was exposed.  Brown said that the plan to kill JFK had its origins in the 1960 Democratic Convention, at which John F. Kennedy was elected as presidential candidate with Johnson as his running mate, where H. L. Hunt, an American oil tycoon, and Lyndon Johnson hatched the assassination plot. Some key extracts are:

‘When they met in California Joe Kennedy, John Kennedy’s father, and H .L. Hunt met three days prior to the election – they finally cut a deal according to John Currington (an aide to H. L. Hunt) and H.L. finally agreed that Lyndon would go as the vice president . . . this came from the horse’s mouth way back in 1960. When H.L. came back to Dallas I was walking . . . with him . . . .and he made the remark, “we may have lost a battle but we’re going to win a war,’ and then the day of the assassination he said ‘well, we won the war”, said Brown.’

Brown said that in the immediate aftermath of the convention Hunt and Johnson mapped out a strategy to kill Kennedy.

‘It was a total political crime and H.L. Hunt really controlled what actually happened to John Kennedy – he and Lyndon Johnson,’ said Brown.

‘They had this lodge . . . outside of Dallas and they would meet there . . .  he chose different people to do certain things for him and I’m sure it went on about two years prior to the assassination of John Kennedy.’

Brown was in Dallas in the day of the assassination but just as the parade for Kennedy was beginning she left and began driving towards Austin, first stopping off to have a haircut. Upon entering a hair salon she saw the news that Kennedy had been shot and immediately thought to call Lou Sterret , who was an Austin media mogul. ‘I said, my God what has happened Lou?  And he said “well they just shot that S.O.B”’

‘It was a political crime for political power,’ said Brown as she highlighted how people who were set to testify against Johnson for indictment proceedings related to illegal kickbacks Johnson was receiving from agriculture programmes before the assassination, were mysteriously set-up in homosexual scandals or found dead having allegedly shot themselves five times in the head.

‘Had the assassination not happened the day that it did, Lyndon Johnson would have probably gone to prison – they would have gotten rid of him – he was so involved with some of this,’ said Brown.

Having had her own (and LBJ’s illegitimate) son and nanny ‘disappeared’ by Johnson’s hitmen after the assassination, and upon hearing of the strange deaths of many other people connected to the events in Dealey Plaza, Brown felt that she was safer out in the light and decided to let the world hear her story.

For a dispassionate assessment of Brown’s claims, a trawl through various Internet sites will help the reader to make up his or her own mind. (See Spartacus, History Channel, YouTube, Video Google, etc.)

 

 

BULLETS

The Warren Commission made the bullet, exhibit CE 399, central to their findings and the single-bullet theory.

A ballistics expert at the Edgewood Arsenal called Alfred Oliver was tasked to prove that the ‘Magic Bullet’ could hit seven times and remain undamaged. He fired at animal carcasses and, finally, in desperation even at soft blocks of gelatine. In every case the Mannlicher Carcano bullets emerged deformed. (See the Warren Report and hearings and Mortal Error.)

Not everyone signed up to the Magic Bullet theory. See for, example, Bethesda autopsy witness Lt Col. P. Finck’s testimony to the Warren Commission, where he points out that the CE 399 could not be the bullet that struck JFK and Connally, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that the bullet fragments, plus the pristine bullet itself, meant that the bullet had ‘grown’ after being fired. They ignored him. (Compare the Warren Commission Hearings with the Warren Commission Report and Jim Bishop’s The Day Kennedy Was Shot. For websites see AP’s JFK’s documents raise questions  of 9 November 1998.)

See also Douglas Herman’s Count the Bullets: Blow Away All Arguments of 28 June 2005.

Herman, an avowed ‘conspiracy freak’, has nevertheless some sound evidence on the number of bullet strikes in Dealey Plaza.

Wayne and Edna Hartman were standing on the South East corner of Dealey Plaza and noticed two small mounds of freshly turned soil on the grass. They asked a policeman what they were and were told that they were ‘fresh bullet strikes’. (See JFK Assassination Symposium, Dallas 15 November 1991.) The bullet tracks pointed back – towards the area of the grassy knoll.

The ‘Magic Bullet’ caused serious difficulties for the HSCA too. A ballistics expert called Vincent Guinn testified that it was ‘highly likely’ that CE399 had caused all the injuries and tried to blind the Committee with scientific mumbo-jumbo about neutron activation analysis of the metal. The problem was that the fragments he claimed to have used were not the fragments recovered from Dallas and used as evidence for the Warren Commission: their ‘scientifically correct’ weights were completely different. See the Warren and the HSCA Reports and Testimony and High Treason by Groden and Livingstone.

 

BRINGUIER, Carlos

Carlos’s Bringuier’s pavement confrontation with Oswald in New Orleans may well have been contrived and a set-up event. (See his primary source testimony to the Warren Commission for more details, the HSCA, Benson and Anthony Summers.)

 

BURKLEY

Admiral George Burkley was JFK’s personal physician. He was the only doctor present at both Parkland in Dallas and Bethesda in Washington DC.

He took control of many aspects of the Bethesda autopsy, on the grounds that ‘the Kennedy family wouldn’t like that’. When the death certificate eventually burst into print in 1975 it contradicted the testimony that he had signed off on at Bethesda, and placed the back wound where it really was, low on the shoulder blade, not high up near the neck as Warren and the Autopsy Report claimed.

Burkley’s death certificate for the dead President was a misleading model of accuracy, clarity and brevity: it said merely that JFK had been ‘struck in the head’. (See the Warren Report 60-68, and the detailed discussions in Best Evidence, High Treason and Bishop’s The Day Kennedy Was Shot as well as JFK Lancer and various other research websites.)

 

BUSH, Sr GEORGE H. W.

The claims of links between Bush Sr,  the Bay of Pigs (Operation Zapata) and a CIA man on 22 Nov 1963 are widely published. (See the photographs outside the TSBD, the FBI official letters and the proliferation of conspiracy theories and claims in dozens of books and websites.)

            Bush Sr and the Bay of Pigs:  This is based on the original testimony of Fletcher Prouty (the Liaison Officer between the Pentagon and the CIA at the time of the Bay of Pigs), who knew the deepest secrets of the whole operation. He specifically names George Bush and Zapata as being involved. See his: ‘Military Experiences, Part III: Ch 1, 1961-1963:   ‘Experiences of and Perspectives on the Bay of Pigs’, where he says:

 

‘They asked me to see if we could find – purchase – a couple of transport

ships. We got some people that were in that business, and they went along the

coast and they found two old ships that we purchased and sent down to

Elizabeth City and began to load with an awful lot of trucks that the Army was

sending down there. We deck-loaded the trucks, and got all of their supplies

on board. Everything that they needed was on two ships.

‘It was rather interesting to note, looking back these days, that one of the ships was    called the ‘Houston’, and the other ship was called the ‘Barbara J’.

Colonel Hawkins had renamed the program as we selected a name for the Bay of

Pigs operation. The code name was ‘Zapata.’

‘I was thinking a few months ago of what a coincidence that is. When Mr   Bush   graduated from Yale, back there in the days when I was a professor at Yale, he

formed an oil company, called ‘Zapata,’ with a man, Lieddke, who later on

became president of Pennzoil.   But the company that Lieddke and Mr Bush   formed   was the Zapata Oil Company. Mr Bush’s wife’s name is Barbara . And Mr Bush  claims as his hometown Houston, Texas.  Now the triple coincidence there is

strange; but I think it’s interesting. I know nothing about its meaning. But

these invasion ships were the ‘Barbara J’ and the ‘Houston’, and the program

was ‘Zapata.’  George Bush must have been somewhere around.

 

Bush Snr as CIA Man in Dallas: There are numerous claims that George Bush Sr was present in Dallas as a CIA representative on 22 November 1963 and even some photographic evidence that needs to be checked out carefully.

FBI Chief Hoover quite clearly identified a ‘George Bush of the CIA’ in two contemporaneous letters immediately after the JFK assassination. (See below)

                         

 

• One is a Memorandum from FBI director J Edgar Hoover to the State department, describing a meeting, one day after JFK’s murder, between FBI and CIA officials talking about the reaction of the Cuban exile community to the Kennedy Assassination.
• The last paragraph states that the ‘the substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to us and George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency’.
• In the other November 1963 memo, discovered in an FBI memorandum in 1988, Hoover said the bureau had briefed ‘Mr George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency’ on the reaction of Cuban exiles in Miami to the assassination. See  Agent Kitchel’s memorandum in the  National Archives and Records Administration Agency File Number : 62-109060-1396 Agency : FBI Record Number: 124-10264-10221 Records Series: Ho Agency File Number : 62-2115-6

 

Bush Sr, when under pressure from an investigative journalist from The Nation Magazine, later claimed that it must have been ‘another’ George Bush working for the CIA. However, the only other ‘George Bush’ employed by the CIA (as a lowly GS5) at the time then swore a legal deposition – which has never been challenged – that he had nothing to do with it.

A transcript of his affidavit is available from  United States District Court  For The District Of Columbia, Civil Action 88-2600 GHR, Affidavit of GEORGE WILLIAM BUSH against the CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY in which he swears on the 21st day of September 1988 that:

 

‘I, George William Bush, a resident of Alexandria, Virginia do hereby state under oath as follows:

1 . My name is GEORGE WILLIAM BUSH. I reside in Alexandria, Virginia.

2 . From September 1963 until February 1964 I worked at the CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY headquarters. My job responsibility was as a junior watch officer. . .

. . . 4 . I have carefully reviewed the FBI memorandum to the Director, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State dated November 29, 1963 which mentions a Mr George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency (attached hereto as Exhibit 1.) I do not recognize the contents of the memorandum as information furnished to me orally or otherwise during the time I was at the CIA. In fact, during my time at the CIA I did not receive any oral communications from any government agency of any nature whatsoever. I did not receive any information relating to the Kennedy assassination during my time at the CIA from the FBI.

5 . Based on the above, it is my conclusion that I am not the Mr George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency referred to in the memorandum.’

C

CABELL, CHARLES
After his dismissal from the CIA, Dallas-born General Charles Cabell worked for Howard Hughes. (See Cabell’s full biography at the Spartacus Educational, and the official USAF Maxwell sites.) He was an expert on air reconnaissance and air intelligence matters. Despite his dismissal from the CIA, he prospered under President Johnson and went on to a senior position in NASA.

See also: ‘Gen. Charles Cabell Dies, Former CIA Deputy Director’, the Washington Post, May 27, 1971, p. B7: Brown, Alexander (1895), The Cabells and Their Kin: A Memorial Volume of History, Biography, and Genealogy, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company:  ‘Will Retire’, the Washington Post, Jan. 23, 1962, p. A2.:  ‘McCone Is Confirmed for C.I.A.; New York Times, Feb. 1, 1962, p. 9; and,  ‘Garrison Planned to Link General to JFK Slaying’, Washington Post, Sep. 16, 1973, p. E10.

 

CAMP STREET, 544

There is clear evidence of a number of conspiracies, Cuban and otherwise, emanating from Guy Banister’s office at Camp Street in the summer of 1963. (Banister was running a network of student on-campus informers on behalf of the US intelligence agencies.) See also the account of David Lewis in the New York World Journal Tribune of 22 Feb 1967, in which he claims that there was a plot as part of his contribution to Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw.

Lewis also claims (See Plot or Politics’ James and Windlaw, Pelican, 1967) that he met an Oswald impersonator while drinking coffee with Banister’s secretary, Delphine Roberts, and the man was introduced to him as ‘Leon Oswald’. Lewis later told the New York Post on 20 Feb 1967 that he was telling Garrison what he saw, ‘because the FBI hadn’t asked him…’

See also HSCA Report; High Treason; Crossfire; Weisberg’s Oswald in New Orleans; Garrison; Summers’ Conspiracy, and many others.

 

CAMELOT

For a vivid description of the realities of life in the Kennedy White House, see Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot, 1997. Hersh claims that the Kennedys were ‘dangerous, corrupt, dishonest, vindictive and megalomaniacal’. His description clashes strongly with the golden image projected by JFK’s uncritical admirers.

 

CARTRIDGE CASES IN THE TSBD

A WFAA-TV cameraman called Tom Alyea filmed Captain Fritz holding the three empty shell cases in his hands immediately after the find and then dropping them back on the floor. That means that the ‘official’ photographs of the spent shell cases are wrong. (See also the Warren Commission Report (2594),  Photographic Whitewash and Benson.)

 

CARR, DICK

Carr saw three men hurrying away from the back of the TSBD and getting into a ‘gray Rambler station wagon’ and later tried to tell the Warren Commission. They ignored him. (See the good description of what happened to him after that in Benson and also Crossfire.)

 

CASTRO/JFK

Castro’s latest biography is the autobiographical My Life with Ignacio Ramonet (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2007.)  As a primary source it is unreliable as it leaves out a lot of detail, and unsurprisingly borders on admiring hagiography.

Better and more revealing sources are widely available via the Internet, eg, Amazon’s accessible El Commandate DVD, Britannica, Wikipedia and their lists of primary sources.

See also; Spartacus/Education Forum, and the websites of the Universities of Texas, Florida and Duke University.

            See also: Fidel Castro: From Student to Revolutionary, History Television, Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc;  Hugh Thomas: Cuba: the Pursuit of Freedom (1971).

Jean Daniel was present in Castro’s office at 1300 on 22 November 1963. The French journalist had flown in on 20 November from a private meeting with JFK in Washington DC on 19 November.  Daniel was part of JFK’s ‘twin track’ strategy over Cuba: negotiate openly for a diplomatic rapprochement with the Castro regime while at the same time planning a secret coup to kill the Cuban leader. (See Ultimate Sacrifice and the ‘Spartacus Educational’ article.)

Castro: Attempts on his life

Accounts of the various silly and not-so-silly attempts on Castro’s life are plentiful. Ultimate Sacrifice and Hinckle and Turner’s Deadly Secrets: The CIA–Mafia War Against Castro (formerly The Fish is Red) are useful. (For a flavour – and just who was involved – see the entry on the CIA man Sheffield Edwards in Benson.)

            See also: ‘638 ways to kill Castro’, The Guardian Unlimited (3 April 2006);

Steve Holland and Andy Sullivan’s ‘CIA Tried to get Mafia to kill Castro: documents’. Reuters News Service, 26 June 2007.

 

CHARAMIE, ROSE

Charamie’s real name was Marcades. Fuller details of her life and story are in Oglesby’s Who Killed JFK? (1992) and on the JFK online and PROBE V6N5 sites. A full discussion is at di Eugenio and Pease’s, The Assassinations. Rose Cheramie was found under the wheels of a car on 4 September1965.

Although her death certificate claimed that she was ‘DOA’ at the hospital, surgeons worked on the supposedly dead patient for eight hours, and her medical records show a ‘deep puncture wound’ in her forehead, consistent with a gunshot wound.

 

CHE GUEVERA

For Che’s subsequent career and death see The Fall of Che Guevara by H. B. Ryan. For a full account of this complicated man, see his biography on the Biography Project (the ‘popsubculture’ site), which includes a comprehensive list of references about this iconic figure.

There are numerous books on Guevara. An even-handed account is Anderson’s 1997  Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, which cites many primary sources and is an objective analysis. Wikipedia leads the pack, listing no less than 127 primary sources, plus over 50 interviews and first-hand accounts.

            See also: The Che Guevara Reader,  Ocean Press, 2003, 2012; and  The Diary of  Che Guevara: The Secret Papers of a Revolutionary,   Amereon Ltd, 2009.

 

CHICAGO

See Lamar Waldron’s (the author of Ultimate Sacrifice) interview by Paul Constock, 13 February 2006, California Literary Review and the many references to the Chicago mob and its involvement with the plan to kill JFK in Ultimate Sacrifice itself.

 

CHRONOLOGY

Probable Cause Australia runs a continuing research enquiry into the JFK assassination. It has a useful timeline from the Bay of Pigs to Ruby’s death.

            Ira Wood has compiled an excellent chronology of the JFK assassination including many useful primary references for researchers. See Assassination Research – Volume 2, Number 1 (2003); See also Ira David Wood , The JFK Assassination Chronology: 19 January 1961 to 21 November 1963; also  The JFK Assassination Chronology at http://www.assassinationresearch.com and the Education Forum.

Selected milestones in the Presidency of JFK can be found on the JFK Presidential Library and Museum site along with many other details of JFK’s life and Presidency.

 

CIA

The CIA’s less-than-glorious performance is dissected with clinical precision by Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (Allen Lane, 2007.) As demolition jobs go it is a classic and buries any idea that the CIA was either cost-effective or a force for good. Weiner’s strength lies in his massive array of primary and oral sources on the CIA’s activities.

            James Bamford’s Body of Secrets looks critically at the CIA’s Cuban Operations. The CIA’s Florida base was large and well equipped, but the Agency was so sure of its own power that its organisers scorned to allow even an NSA representative as part of its team. This proved a serious failing, as the CIA lacked the cold critical analysis of independent and well-informed SIGINT officers and tended to view things Cuban as they wished them to be and not as they really were.

There are many claims that link the CIA to organised crime. According to the ‘Covert Action Information Bulletin’ of Sept 1990, Sam Giancana’s chauffeur Myron Billet claims that he drove Giancana to an upstate New York meeting between CIA officers and Mafia chiefs in early 1968. Billet says that he heard the CIA offer a million dollars for the murder of Martin Luther King, to which Giancana allegedly replied, ‘Hell no, not after you screwed up the Kennedy deal like that…’

For details of CIA drug running etc. see Dark Alliance: CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion by Gary Webb and Maxine Waters, Seven Stories Press, 2003,

and Rolling Stone Magazine 20 May 1976. (See also Benson, and the testimony of various CIA senior officers – including their own Inspector General – to the several Capitol Hill committees over the past thirty years.)

The CIA’s links with journalism both overt and clandestine (‘Operation Mockingbird’) are discussed in Daniel Brandt’s article ‘Journalism and the CIA – The Mighty Wurlitzer’ (NameBase NewsLine, No. 17, April-June 1997). (See also Mary Louise’s Operation Mockingbird: The CIA Media Manipulation (2003), seanscreenplays and Carl Bernstein’s exposé in Rolling Stone of 20 Oct 1977.) According to dedicated researchers Mockingbird has not been closed down but still operates under new cover. (See the allegations of Kangas, McKenzie and Constantine listed on the Spartacus JFK  Research site.)

Specific allegations about CIA involvement in the JFK murder are plentiful. See: Ultimate Sacrifice for a detailed listing of primary sources.

That the CIA specialised in undercover operations and dirty tricks is no secret. That they were not above using philanthropic foundations as the most effective conduit to channel large sums of money to Agency projects without alerting the recipients to their source is well documented. During the Cold War the CIA used numerous foundations and organisations for cover. See ‘The Ford Foundation and the CIA: A documented case of philanthropic collaboration with the Secret Police’ by James Petras, Rebelión, 15 December 2001, which states:

‘From the early 1950s to the present the CIA’s intrusion into the foundation field was and is huge. A U.S. Congressional investigation in 1976 revealed that nearly 50% of the 700 grants in the field of international activities by the principal foundations were funded by the CIA [Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders, Granta Books, 1999, pp. 134-135]. The CIA considers foundations such as Ford ‘The best and most plausible kind of funding cover’ [Ibid, p. 135]. The collaboration of respectable and prestigious foundations, according to one former CIA operative, allowed the Agency to fund ‘a seemingly limitless range of covert action programs affecting youth groups, labor unions, universities, publishing houses and other private institutions’ [p. 135]. The latter included ‘human rights’ groups beginning in the 1950s to the present.’

 

CIA DRUG TRAFFICKING IN VIETNAM

There are three key sources for this, and all are worth a look in detail.

1. By far the most illuminating brief version is Peace Magazine vol. 4 number 3, p10: ‘The Secret Team, Part IV: Visiting Vietnam’, By John Bacher.

This alleges inter alia, that ‘Operation Haylift’ was an American plan intended to fly agents into North Vietnam. It ended up as a cover for opium smuggling. George Robert, chief of the U.S. customs advisory team, complained in 1967 that it was impossible to distinguish between ‘honest actions and dishonest ones’.

According to Peace Magazine, the CIA pressed hard to expand the drug trade. With the Vietnam war reaching its peak of escalation in 1968, Theodore Shackley was transferred from CIA Chief of Station, to the same position in Saigon. Shortly after his arrival he arranged a meeting with his former Cuban associate Mafia Chieftain Santo Trafficante and a Laotian trafficker called Van Pao, which led to Trafficante’s becoming the most important distributor of heroin in America.

1. The definitive book on the subject is The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred McCoy with Cathleen B. Read(2003), a landmark work documenting the interactions between the CIA and drug cartels in Southeast Asia. McCoy’s principal thesis is that, following the effective suppression of the heroin trade in America during World War II and the subsequent decision to stamp out opium growing by Turkey – which had been one of the main sources of raw opium – crime organisations in America and Europe collaborated in a wide-ranging conspiracy to establish new centres of opium production, heroin refining and distribution in Southeast Asia, and that their efforts were greatly facilitated by the Central Intelligence Agency and the ongoing Vietnam War.

He points out that the French Connection found its basis on the control of the opium production in the Golden Triangle by the French SDECE military intelligence agency, who financed its covert operations during the First Indochina War (1947-1954).

 

McCoy wrote, ‘American involvement had gone far beyond coincidental complicity; embassies had covered up involvement by client governments, CIA contract airlines had carried opium, and individual CIA agents had winked at the opium traffic.’ The CIA’s actions were more specifically described by him thus: ‘the CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provided its drug-lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection.’

1. The third source is the various CIA Inspector General reports to Congress over the years, which document a long history of the CIA trading in drugs.

See also: Whiteout: CIA, Drugs and the Press by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair; and Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall’s Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America.

.That the CIA was out of political control in the early 1960s is no great revelation. The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s, according to declassified documents posted in 2009 by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. However the sheer breadth and admission of their wider crimes and exploits is still extraordinary. For example, the Top Ten Most Interesting ‘Family Jewels’ of CIA operations (released by the CIA to the National Security Archive, 26 June 2007) are:

1) Journalist surveillance – operation CELOTEX I-II (pp. 26–30)

2) Covert mail opening, codenamed SRPOINTER / HTLINGUAL, at JFK airport (pp. 28, 644-45)

3) Watergate burglar and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt requests a lock picker (p. 107)

4) CIA Science and Technology Directorate Chief Carl Duckett ‘thinks the Director would be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program’ (Sidney Gottlieb’s drug experiments) (p. 213)

5) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic US dissent) reflecting Agency employee resentment against participation (p. 326)

6) Plan to poison Congo leader Patrice Lumumba (p. 464)

7) Report of detention of Soviet defector Yuriy Nosenko (p. 522)

8) Document describing John Lennon funding anti-war activists (p. 552)

9) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent) (pp. 591–93)

10) CIA counter-intelligence official James J. Angleton and issue of training foreign police in bomb-making, sabotage, etc. (pp. 599–603)

Plus a bonus ‘Jewel’:
Warrantless (i.e., illegal, domestic wiretapping by CIA’s Division D, pp. 533–539)

 

CIVELLO, JOSEPH

Civello was Carlos Marcello’s Dallas underboss. His associate, Campisi, with responsibility for discipline visited Ruby in jail the day after Oswald was killed to tell him that his friends would not desert him but also to remind him of the Mafia’s ‘code of conduct’.

The Mafia’s unusual code of ‘Rules’ can be found in the Daily Mail – and many other newsmedia – articles of  November 2007, following the arrest of Italian Godfather Salvatore Piccolo.  See also: Mafia’s ‘Ten Commandments’ found, BBC News (9 Nov 2007).

 

CLARK, ED

For a devastating assault on Ed Clark and the whole saga of LBJ’s various iniquities see Barr McClellan’s Blood, Money, and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK. Billy Sol Estes and others have, since Baker’s death, attempted to expose his role as LBJ’s Mr Fixit.

            Judge Jack Roberts was placed in office 1946 by Clark and LBJ. (All now deceased.) For details of the finagling to get Schofield an IRS appointment, see Blood, Money and Power, p.57/8. See also the LBJ Library Archives in Austin Texas.

            For Attorney Harris’s story about doing a dossier on the protection of Vice President for Ed Clark and Harris’s suspicions, see Blood, Money and Power p.253.

 

CONNALLY’S WOUNDS

Audrey Bell was the supervising nurse in the Trauma Room at Parkland and removed ‘four or five bullet fragments’ from Governor Connally’s wrist, ‘the smallest the striking end of a match and the largest at least twice as big.’ She was adamant that she put the fragments into an envelope and handed them over to ‘government agents’. Remembering the size and number of the fragments she ‘couldn’t see how it (CE 399) could be the bullet the fragments came from . . .’ (Warren Commission, Lifton and others.)

In a grisly end to the whole affair, the FBI asked the Connally family if they could examine the body during the funeral of Governor Connally on 17 June 1993. Unsurprisingly, the angry Connally family refused in fairly terse language. The FBI wanted to check the remaining bullet fragments in the dead man’s body from the shooting thirty years earlier.

 

CONSPIRACIES

It is a curiosity of our age that the prevailing metropolitan and academic view seems to be that conspiracy theories are somehow infra dig for serious thinkers, even when hard evidence of dirty work at the crossroads is shoved under their noses.

This rather lofty attitude to conspiracies as possible culprits is well exemplified in Thomas Powers’s otherwise admirable collection of essays, Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda (2004), in which he openly dismisses any evidence of any conspiracy as a ‘desert . . . just the odd “fact” surrounded by thorns’.

There is an extremely useful review of all the physical evidence at The Death of JFK – Physical Evidence of a Conspiracy by Michael T Griffiths, 2002.

Professor Peter Dale Scott analyses the common threads of conspiracy in his 2007  lecture, ‘9/11, JFK and War – Recurring Patterns in America’s Deep Events’.

 

CORBITT, MICHAEL

Mike Corbitt was a corrupt Chicago Police Officer, who before his death in 2004, confessed to being on the payroll of Mafia boss Sam Giancana.

According to his manuscript for a book called Double Deal, Corbitt claimed that Marshall Caifano bragged to him that he, Caifano, was in Dealey Plaza ‘when history was made’. (See the JFKMurderSolved website.)

 

COVER-UPS

The evidence of a coordinated and well-prepared cover-up is long.

For example:

1. Lee Harvey Oswald’s description was out on the police radios before he got home.

2. Newspaper stories had been prepared in advance.

3. There are no official interrogation records of Lee Harvey Oswald’s questioning.

4. The Oswald backyard rifle photos are faked.

5. Some TV anchormen appear to have been prepared.

6. JFK’s body was stolen from Parkland Hospital.

7. The Bethesda autopsy was rigged.

8. The wounds were different at Parklands and Bethesda.

9. The ‘Magic Bullet’ is obviously false.

10. Both the CIA and FBI have lied to official enquiries and are still concealing evidence.

11. There appear to have been two ‘Lee Harvey Oswalds’.

 

See David Talbot’s ‘The Mother of all Cover-Ups’, (Salon, 15 Sept 2004) and Joel Skousen’s convincing checklist of actions carried out in his home.subscribe article.

Michael Parenti has a spirited attack on the ‘secret state’ and its cover up of the JFK conspiracy in Dirty Truths (City Lights Books, 1996) He claims that there is a ‘secret state within a state’ that ensures that the status quo is maintained on behalf of the real power centres.

Armstrong’s Harvey and Lee documents the double identities of the man who could be in two places at once.

Even the President’s own brother, RFK, told his biographer Evan Thomas that the Warren Report was just ‘a PR exercise to reassure the public.’

Senate Leader Tip O’Neill revealed in his 1988 autobiography, Man of the House that two Kennedy aides, O’Donnell and Powers, had admitted to him that they lied to the Warren Commission.

Billy Byers (Jr) and Hoover. When asked by young Byars about the JFK murder: ‘Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald did it?’ Hoover actually said; ‘If I told you what I really know it would be very dangerous for this country. Our whole political system would be disrupted.’ (Summers and many others.)

 

CRAIG, ROGER

Dallas policeman Roger Craig appears to have genuinely shot himself. Considering what he had endured since that day in Dallas it is not surprising.

 

CRUMP, RAYMOND

The supposed killer of Mary Pinchot Meyer was a simple black worker called Raymond Crump. There was no gun, no robbery and Crump was half drunk, having fallen in the canal after drinking beer. He was acquitted.

(See Benson; Oglesby’s Who Killed JFK? and the detailed websites at Spartacus, the Education Forum, and the review of the case in the New York Times of 20 Dec. 1998.)

 

CUBAN COUP

For a comprehensive account of the Kennedy’s highly secret ‘Coup in Cuba’ (‘AMWORLD’) with numerous details, see Ultimate Sacrifice by Larry Waldron, which gives numerous primary references.

See also: DoD, JCS Appreciation, 13 May 1963, ‘Courses of Action Related to Cuba’. Doc number: 202-10002-10018. (Declassified July 1997)  and the ‘Summary of a Plan for Coup in Cuba’ (13^th revise) of 26 Sept 1963 (Califano Papers).

 

CUBA /OSWALD

The Cuban Consul in Mexico City in September 1963 was Eusebio Azcue. He heard the row between Oswald – or his double – and Sylvie Duran, and intervened to stop the argument, pointing out that  it would take at least a week to get a visa and that ‘the Revolution didn’t need this kind of trouble’.

He claimed that ‘Oswald’ then produced a Communist Party ID card; which is odd, because the real Lee Harvey Oswald was never a signed-up member of the Communist party. (See Summers, the Warren Commission Report, Benson, HSCA and the numerous websites.)

When the Azcue was later shown a photograph of the real Lee Harvey Oswald by the HSCA, he said emphatically that it was NOT the ‘Oswald’ that he threw out of the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City. (See HSCA documentation and report.)

See also the Mexico City chapter from John Armstrong’s Harvey and Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald (Quasar Press, Texas 2003) with its astonishing list of 255 primary references for just that single chapter.

 

CURRY JESSE

Police Chief Curry later wrote an account of the murder (see ‘The JFK Assassination File’, American P&P Co. 1969).

 

CUSAK DOCUMENT FRAUD

This AP news release of 1999 tells the story of the fraud :

‘NEW YORK (AP) A man was found guilty Friday of selling salacious, but forged documents claiming President Kennedy paid hush money to keep secret an affair with Marilyn Monroe.

         ‘Lawrence X. Cusack III, who made a fortune selling hundreds of Kennedy-linked documents he claimed came from his father, was convicted on 13 mail and wire fraud charges.

‘Cusack, 48, of Fairfield, Conn., faces up to five years in prison on each of the 13 fraud counts, and a maximum $250,000 fine on each count when he is sentenced in July.

‘When Judge Denise Cote announced the guilty verdict on each charge, Cusack’s jaw dropped. He stared, eyes narrowed, at the jurors, then he shook his head repeatedly and dropped his face into his hands.

            ‘Cusack produced letters that he said were written between his late father and the slain president. The documents appeared to prove rumors about Kennedy and Miss Monroe, the Mafia and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

            ‘According to the papers, Kennedy had set up a trust for Monroe’s mother to buy silence about the rumored affair between the president and the actress.

‘Prosecutors said Cusack swindled investors out of about $7 million between 1993 and 1997 by selling the phony documents, including letters bearing Kennedy’s forged signature.

‘But he made key mistakes, prosecutors said. One letter purportedly signed by Kennedy includes ZIP codes, which did not exist at the time the letter was dated. And the typeface used in many of the letters came from a typewriter that was not manufactured until the 1970s.

‘Defense attorney Robert Katzberg told jurors that while a handwriting expert concluded the president’s script had been simulated or traced, it could not be proved his client did it. But the government said the evidence was ‘overwhelming’ that Cusack was ‘the person responsible’ for the forgery.’

D

DALLAS/BRADLEY

Garrison’s investigation turned up one Edgar BRADLEY as being present in Dealey Plaza. Bradley had served in the US Navy, was closely tied to intelligence, had connections to right-wing groups and knew David Ferrie.

Mark Lane later tied him in with the events in Dealey Plaza but without conclusive proof that Bradley was involved in the shooting. (See the Los Angeles Free Press, week 3-9 May 1968. Bradley later admitted involvement. See also Benson and Flammonde.)

 

DALLAS/BRENNAN

Howard Brennan was an unlikely witness; he had bad eyesight and was at ground level. Nevertheless he testified that he had clearly seen Lee Harvey Oswald up at the sixth-floor window of the TSBD and the Warren Commission gratefully accepted his evidence. (See Warren Commission Hearings and Report, Benson, plus the details on the websites. See for example, the pithy denunciation of Brennan’s value on  JFK-fr, among others.)

 

DALLAS – UNTOLD EVIDENCE

Jerry Coley’s (a Dallas Morning News advertising executive) odd story about the mysterious pool of blood near the Pergola between the Grassy Knoll and the Texas School Book Depository (TBSD) is backed by three other witnesses who noticed it too. The FBI told them to ignore it, adding, ‘It never happened; you didn’t see it…’

However, at 2.21 CST Reuters reported; A SECRET SERVICEMAN AND A DALLAS POLICEMAN WERE SHOT TODAY SOME DISTANCE FROM WHERE PRESIDENT KENNEDY WAS ASSASSINATED.

This was the first newsflash to mention any dead Secret Service agent. The newsflash is timed at 2021 (that’s 8.21pm GMT – 2.21pm CST).

The story is told in full in Benson’s Encyclopedia of the JFK Assassination and also in Vincent Palamara’s Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect President Kennedy (2013). See: Assassination Research, 2006 Vol 4, #1. See also: Unsolved Texas Mysteries by Wallace O. Chariton.)

One interesting sideline is the story told by the Dealey Plaza greenkeeper, Emmett Hudson. He testified to the Warren Commission that he had been standing on the steps leading up to the Grassy Knoll – which can be seen in the various photographs – and was accompanied by two young men, neither of whom have ever been identified.

When the shooting started he lay down, and was initially adamant that the firing was coming from behind him, i.e., the Grassy Knoll. However in his interview by the FBI he said that he heard only three shots and that they came from the TSBD. The Warren Commission ignored his testimony. See FBI Dallas Interview 89-43 by Agents Thompson and Peden, dated 26 Nov. 1963 and Warren Commission Document 5, ‘Gemberling Report’ of 30 November 1963, p. 30.

 

DANKBAAR, WIM

Wim Dankbaar is a Dutch businessman who has made extraordinarily lengthy and detailed researches into the JFK assassination.

His website – which is a positive goldmine of information on many matters concerning the JFK killing – is at JFKMurderSolved Reward, and there is a revealing 2003 interview worth reading in full (Hanna Wagenfeld, Groningen, NL).

The site is a valuable primary resource as it contains numerous first-hand accounts, original source material and even a confession.

Dankbaar’s views were broadcast in a public presentation at the Hotel Krasnapolsky, Amsterdam on 13 November 2005.

 

DEALEY PLAZA

The source for the ‘bullets in the grass’ is the Garrison testimony that a photographer called Jim Murray of the Black Star Photo Service took pictures of a man in a suit and DPD Officer Buddy Walthers picking a bullet out of the grass on Elm Street immediately after the shooting. (See photographs in Benson’s Encyclopedia.)

The nearest witness to the shooting outside the car was a man called Maurice Orr, who was standing on the grass just below the Pergola. He says that he was interviewed by an unknown man and said that he had heard at least five shots. Orr was never contacted again and did not give evidence to the Warren Commission. (See Summers.)

Deputy Roger Craig’s account of a white male jogging across the grass from the TSBD to a lightacoloured Nash station wagon after the shooting is corroborated by a witness called Marvin Robinson. (See Warren Commission and HSCA evidence)

A couple called Arnold and Barbara Rowland made a very detailed statement about the two men that they had seen on the upper floors of the TBSD just before the shooting. See the Warren Commission report.

An off-duty policeman called Tilson may well have seen one of the gunmen fleeing and even chased him in his car. (See the Dallas Morning News of 20 August 1978 and Jim Marrs’s Crossfire.)

 

DECKER, BILL

Decker was the Dallas County Sheriff and is on record as warning his men not to get involved in the security for the motorcade. (See the Warren Commission evidence; Summers; Kantor, and in particular Elmer Gertz’s Moment of Madness: the People Vs. Jack Ruby (1968). More details of the security and Sheriff Decker’s involvement are at Google Group’s alt.conspiracy, Spartacus and many other sites as well as the numerous Secret Service live interviews.)

 

DICTABELT

The Dallas Police Dictabelt (Acoustics above) was eventually bought by Mary Ferrell, a dedicated JFK researcher, and she was the individual who brought it to the HSCA’s attention.

She also interviewed Police Chief Curry, who told her that LBJ had called him with the message, ‘You’ve got your man. The investigation is over.’ (See Summers and the comprehensive primary sources on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website.)

 

DINKIN, EUGENE

It is difficult to assess the Private Dinkin allegations. His extraordinary tale can be found at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website supported by some heavily redacted cables which clearly indicate that someone in Washington did take Dinkin very seriously indeed; the White House, CIA, FBI, and State department don’t send each other telegrams and warnings about real flakes and obvious nutters.

See: CIA Dinkin Cable of Nov 1963. This redacted pre-assassination cable appears to relate to the search for the missing Dinkin before the assassination.  CIA Cable from Bern to Director. A 26 Nov. 1963 cable discusses filing of the Dinkin story by Time-Life stringer Alex Des Fontaines  and CIA out teletype NO. 85770 of 29 Nov. 1963 is sent to alert the White House, State Department, FBI, and Secret Service to the Dinkin story.

Clearly, Dinkin and his allegations were a matter of serious concern even after the assassination as  Dinkin’s Dossier is in the US National Archives (still) filed under ‘Top Secret – WCD 943’.

On balance the most probable assessment is that Pte Dinkin saw some warning cables passed between senior military officers as part of his special top-secret cryptographic operator duties. If that is the case then it raises some disturbing questions.

 

DULLES, ALAN

The Wikipedia biography is accurate and unbiased. It contains a list of useful primary sources. See also, Weiner, Tim, Legacy of Ashes (2007) and the Allen Dulles Papers in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.

            Career: Dulles was a lawyer and diplomat and served with distinction in WWII in the Office of Strategic Services in Europe. The wartime OSS was dissolved in October 1945. The Central Intelligence Agency was created by Congress with the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, signed into law by President Harry S. Truman. In 1953 Dulles became the first civilian CIA director.

Under Dulles’s direction, the CIA created MK-Ultra, a top-secret mind-control research project. Dulles also oversaw Operation Mockingbird, a programme which influenced foreign and domestic media companies, and the design and use of the U2 spy plane which was initially operated by CIA pilots. Its introduction into operational service in 1957 greatly enhanced the CIA’s ability to monitor Soviet activity through overhead photo surveillance.

Dulles is considered one of the essential creators of the modern United States intelligence system and was an indispensable guide to clandestine operation during the Cold War. He established intelligence networks worldwide to check and counter Soviet and Eastern European communist advances as well as international communist movements. See Allen Dulles: Master of Spies by James Srodes (Regnery Publishing Inc, Washington DC, 2000).

When President Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed Dulles as one of seven commissioners of the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of the US President John F. Kennedy, the appointment was criticised by some observers, who noted that Kennedy had fired him, and that Dulles was therefore unlikely to be impartial in passing the judgements charged to the Warren Commission.

Investigative authors John Loftus and Mark Aarons in The Secret War Against the Jews : How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People’ (St Martin’s Griffin, New York, 1997) described Dulles ‘as one of the worst traitors in American history, an economic version of Benedict Arnold’. They claim that together with his brother, John Foster Dulles, and St John Philby (father of the British traitor Kim Philby), Dulles established an international financial network among Nazi corporations, American oil interests, and Saudi Arabia for the benefit of the Third Reich.

An interesting sidelight on these allegations, and on Dulles’s position as Head of the CIA, comes from James Jesus Angleton, Head of CIA Counter Intelligence and long-term Israeli sympathiser, if not agent: ‘You know how I got to be in charge of counterintelligence? I agreed not to polygraph or require detailed background checks on Allen Dulles and 60 of his close friends. They were afraid that their own business dealings with Hitler’s pals would come out.’ (Trento, The Secret History of the CIA, p. 478)

 

DURAN, SILVIA

Sylvia Duran’s story is important to the claims that at least one of the Oswalds in Mexico must have been an impostor. Her revelations are extensively explored by Anthony Summers and many others, as well as the HSCA Report.

Duran was a Mexican employee in the Cuban consulate in Mexico City. The Mary Ferrell Foundation website has leads to extensive documentation and primary source material.

For a full account of the story of, see Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA  (Kansas UP, 2008, 2011). It is a murky tale.

On 27 September 1963, a man claiming to be Oswald told Duran that he wished to travel to the Soviet Union via Cuba. Duran told him he would need to visit the Soviet embassy to get the necessary paperwork. Oswald then returned to the Cuban consulate and after a brief argument left. Oswald passed the security camera six times.

On Monday, 30 September, one Anne Goodpasture recorded details of Oswald’s visits to the Cuban consulate and passed them to the CIA Head of Station, Win Scott, who minuted her report, ‘Is it possible to identify?’

It later emerged that the CIA station in Mexico was already monitoring Silvia Duran.

Soon after the JFK assassination, Win Scott asked the Mexicans to arrest Silvia Duran and that ‘she was to be held incommunicado until she gave all details of her contacts with Oswald’.  Duran was ‘interrogated forcefully’ (she was badly bruised).

Duran was ‘completely cooperative’ and made a detailed statement. She described the man who visited the Cuban consul’s office as being ‘blond-haired’ and with ‘blue or green eyes’. Neither detail fits in with the authentic Oswald. However, these details had been removed from the CIA statement by the time it reached the Warren Commission.

The CIA wire taps indicated that Duran made another call to the Soviet embassy on Saturday, 28 September, and had put an American on the line who spoke ‘incomprehensible Russian’. This could not have been the real Oswald, who spoke the language well.

Duran was then rearrested and questioned about her relationship with Oswald. Despite being roughed up again she denied having a sexual relationship with Oswald. However, Duran later admitted to a close friend that she had dated Oswald while he was in Mexico City.

After the assassination, June Cobb, a CIA informant, confirmed Oswald’s presence at a party at the Cuban consulate in September 1963.  She also had been told that Oswald was sleeping with Duran. Win Scott reported this information to CIA headquarters but never got a reply (page 241). Why? Was there an unofficial CIA operation involving Duran and Oswald? To be more correct, someone posing as Oswald?

Duran was interviewed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. This testimony is still classified. However, in 1979 Duran told the author Anthony Summers that she told the HSCA that the man who visited the office was about her size (5 feet 4 inches). This created problems, as Oswald was 5 feet 9 inches tall. When Summers showed Duran a film of Oswald taken at the time of his arrest, Duran said: ‘The man on the film is not like the man I saw here in Mexico City.’

Win Scott died on 26 April, 1971, while he was negotiating with the CIA about publishing his memoirs, which included an account of Oswald’s time in Mexico. Scott told Director Helms that he would not be talked out of publishing the book.

When CIA officer Anne Goodpasture heard the news of Scott’s death she warned Jim Angleton that Scott had been holding classified tapes and photos of Oswald in his home safe. Angleton flew immediately to Mexico City and took control of this material which has now disappeared.

 

EPILEPTIC FIT

Jerry Belknap’s epileptic fit, seen by many in front of the TSBD, is well described in Jim Marrs’s Crossfire.  Belknap worked for the Dallas Morning News and appears to have known Jack Ruby.

E

EISENHOWER

Details of Ike’s life can be found on the Eisenhower Presidential Library site and the numerous biographies. Also useful are the Dwight D. Eisenhower Papers at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University; the Annotated Bibliography for Dwight D. Eisenhower from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues; and Dwight D. Eisenhower: A Resource Guide from the Library of Congress.

            Eisenhower: Soldier and President by Stephen E. Ambrose (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1991) is as good a one-volume biography as any.

His dealings over oil and Alton Jones are available in the Eisenhower Collection at the University of Texas. (See also the Spartacus Education website.)

For more detail of the Eisenhower farm allegations, according to Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson (The Case Against Congress, New York, 1968):

‘In 1950, Eisenhower had purchased a small farm for $24,000. Several oil millionaires, including W. Alton Jones, B. B. Byers and George E. Allen, began acquiring neighboring land for Eisenhower. Jonathan Kwitny (Endless Enemies) has argued that over the next few years Eisenhower’s land became worth over $1 million: “Most of the difference represented the gifts of Texas oil executives connected to Rockefeller oil interests. The oilmen acquired surrounding land for Eisenhower under dummy names, filled it with livestock and big, modern barns, paid for extensive renovations to the Eisenhower house, and even wrote out checks to pay the hired help.”’

 

EUINS, AMOS

Euins was a 15-year-old black boy and was clearly terrified by the Dallas cops and the FBI. (See the Warren Commission report, Rush to Judgment and Garrision’s, ‘On the Trail of the Assassins.’)

Euins detailed story can be found in Belin’s Final Disclosure and Bishop’s, The Day Kennedy Was Shot.

 

ENQUIRIES.

There have been at least six official enquiries into the assassination:

1. The Warren Commission (1964)

2. The Ramsey Panel (1968)

3. The Rockefeller Commission (1975)

4. The Church Committee (1976)

5. The House Sub Committee on Assassinations (1979)

6. The Assassination Records Review Board (1994)

 

The first three all blamed Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. Senators Schweiker and Hart identified Lee Harvey Oswald as a government agent as part of a wider condemnation of the Warren Commission for the Church Committee’s Select Investigation into Intelligence Operations.

In 1979 the HSCA reluctantly conceded that Lee Harvey Oswald had been part of a larger conspiracy by recording that there had been at least four gunshots, not three.

All these reports, plus detailed commentaries, can be read online. See also Frank Smist: Congress Oversees the US Intelligence Community, 1947-89  (1990).

 

EXNER, JUDITH

Judith Exner was the woman who claimed to be the mistress of US President John F. Kennedy and Mafia leaders Sam Giancana and John Roselli. She was also known as Judith Campbell Exner.

She gave a revealing interview to People Magazine in 1988, in which she confessed to her role as a go-between for her lover JFK and the Mobsters Giancana and Roselli.

The alleged affair between Exner and Kennedy is said to have ended in 1962 when J. Edgar Hoover supposedly informed Kennedy of the FBI’s knowledge of the relationship. In a 1996 Vanity Fair interview, Exner said that she terminated a pregnancy resulting from her relationship with Kennedy. She also asserted to have carried money payoffs from California defence contractors to the Kennedys, including Robert F. Kennedy.

Her involvement was revealed in 1975 during the investigations of the Church Committee and first published by William Safire in the New York Times.

She told her story in her book Judith Exner: My Story (1977); and, after her death, in an obituary article for the Washington Monthly, (Dec 1999) M. O’Brien wrote a dispassionate and moving account of the way she had been used by powerful men.

            See also: ‘Judith Exner is Dead at 65; Claimed Affair With Kennedy’. Eric Pace, New York Times, 27 Sept 1999.

F

FBI AT THE AUTOPSY

The evidence of the FBI agents at the autopsy taking possession of a ‘missile’ removed from JFK’s body is backed by the testimony of a Treasury Agent, Bob Bouck, who signed the receipt for ‘one missile’. It has since disappeared. (See Bouck’s entry in Benson and also the more detailed accounts in Lifton, Summers, plus the JFK-Lancer and other research sites.)

Full details of the FBI involvement are to be found in Best Evidence which identifies the contradictions with the autopsy report and the omission of FBI evidence from the Warren Report.

 

FBI WARNING TELEGRAM

The FBI warning telegram was sent on 17 November 1963 by a William S. Walter from the FBI New Orleans office. Thanks to Mark Lane’s action under the FOIA it is available. See the HSCA report, and Benson.

 

FDR AND OLD JOE KENNEDY.

The PBS ‘American Experience’ film The Kennedys (2003) is an excellent source, containing much original material, including live first-hand coverage of ‘Old Joe’.

Kennedy Sr supported FDR in 1932, lobbying, raising funds, and persuading William Randolph Hearst to use his newspapers to support FDR, thereby ensuring FDR’s nomination.

Kennedy hoped that his support would encourage FDR to appoint him Treasury Secretary. However, the appointment went to William H. Wood and in 1934 FDR asked Kennedy instead to head the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission, rebuffing criticism of the appointment by saying openly that he was ‘setting a thief to catch a thief’.

Although Kennedy did well at the SEC and was praised for his enforcement of securities regulation, he resigned a year later, to return to private business, allegedly to cash in on his new insider knowledge of Wall Street. In 1937, FDR asked him to return to the administration and chair the first Maritime Commission, aimed at reviving the American shipping industry.

            Although Kennedy successfully lobbied FDR to appoint him ambassador to Great Britain in 1938, they fell out once the war started. FDR thought America might have to come to the aid of Britain if Hitler conquered Europe; Old Joe was adamant that Britain would go under to the Nazis. Churchill was furious. Eventually FDR withdrew Kennedy after complaints from Whitehall that America’s envoy was a problem. (See Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (1997); Ronald Kessler The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded (1996), and Thomas Maier, The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings: A Five-Generation History of the Ultimate Irish-Catholic Family (2004).

See also the correspondence in the F. D. Roosevelt Library, and for an account of Kennedy’s elevation as ambassador to London, the article and website Joe Buys into Politics extracted from Kessler’s, The Sins of the Father.

            See also Ted Schwarz’s, Joseph P. Kennedy; Richard Whalen’s The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy : A Study in Power, Wealth and Family Ambition (1993);  and Maier’s The Kennedys.

            For Old Joe’s views on the Jews, see also, ‘Joseph Kennedy and the Jews’ by Edward Renehan, George Mason University’s History News Network, 29  April 2002.

 

FEINBERG, ABRAHAM

Details of Feinberg and his Jewish funding for JFK can be found in Final Judgment  (p.35) and Edward Tivnan’s The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy

(New York, 1987).

See also Seymour Hersh’s story (The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House 1991): on p. 36, ref. JFK’s outburst to Charles Bartlett about Feinberg’s $500,000 bribe the night before.

 

FEDERAL RESERVE

Britannica, Wikipedia and the other encyclopaedias have comprehensive brief accounts of the Federal Reserve Bank and its enabling statute, plus many useful primary references. Griffin’s 1994 The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve has an excellent account of the secret meeting of the world’s top bankers and much else besides.

The Secrets of the Federal Reserve (1952) by Eustace Mullins has useful background. See also Flaherty’s  ‘A Brief History of  Central Banking in the US’ (University of Groningen, NL), Whitehouse’s ‘Warburg’s Crusade to Establish a Central Bank in the United States’, published by the Fed itself (the Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota website) and Preston Martin and Lita Epstein’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Federal Reserve (New York, 2003).

Executive order 11,110 can be read in full at the official JFK website and library.  For a painstaking examination of the whole Federal Reserve Affair and Executive order 11,110, see the Christian Law Fellowship’s researches at ‘Lawgiver.org’

Anthony Sutton, Professor of Economics at California State University sums up the Fed: ‘Warburg’s revolutionary plan to get American Society to work for Wall Street was astonishingly simple . . . the Federal Reserve System is a legal private monopoly of the money supply, operated for the benefit of the few under the guise of protecting and promoting the public interest.’

 

FERRIE, DAVID

Garrison’s first-hand description of the weird-looking David Ferrie cannot be bettered. (See On the Trail of the Assassins.) For a good overview of Ferrie’s involvement, see Benson. As well as the many book accounts, there are numerous websites with a lot of detail on Ferrie: see the Spartacus JFK Research site, Wim Dankbaar’s JFKMurderSolved and the list of primary sources in Wikipedia.

Ferrie was accompanied by two friends on his sudden dash from New Orleans on a ‘hunting trip’ to the Houston ice-skating rink in Texas on the night of 22 November 1963 in the middle of a torrential thunderstorm. They were Alvin Beauboeuf and Melvin Coffee. However, the would-be hunters had neither guns nor ice skates. (See Summers, Blakey, Forgive My Grief, the Warren Commission and HSCA reports, as well as Crossfire and Mark North’s Act of Treason: The Role of J. Edgar Hoover in the Assassination of President Kennedy, New York 1991.)

Ferrie later claimed, in his cups, that his real task was to pick up any fleeing assassins needing a good pilot for a quick getaway. (See The Kennedy Conspiracy: An Uncommissioned Report on the Jim Garrison Investigation by Paris Flammonde, New York, 1969.)

According to Raymond Broshears’ 1965 statement to the Garrison investigation and other sources, Ferrie often boasted of his involvement with the assassination. (See for example, the New York Free Press, 15 August 1968.)

In 1967, just as Garrison prepared to indict him, Ferrie was found dead in his apartment. He was lying on a sofa with a sheet pulled over his head. Two typed ‘suicide’ notes were found. Ferrie’s name was typed, not signed, on each note. New Orleans Metro Crime Commission director Aaron Kohn believed Ferrie was murdered. But the New Orleans coroner officially reported that the cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage.

            Garrison’s investigators had learned that Ferrie – shortly before the JFK assassination – had deposited $7,000 in his bank accounts and had taken over a profitable gas station – a gift from Marcello. (See ‘Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of President Kennedy’, Crime Magazine,  16 October 2006.)

Ferrie’s death just before he was due to testify to DA Garrison inspired more controversy. According to the journalist Edward Lardner, who interviewed him on the morning of the day he died, Ferrie was still alive when he left at 0400 on 22 February 1967. The coroner, however, estimated that Ferrie died at 0300 and of natural causes: yet Garrison’s investigation later discovered two suicide notes. (See Benson, Summers and article by John S. Craig, ‘The Mystery of David Ferrie’, on the JFK place–acorn research site.)

 

FETZER, JAMES H.

Fetzer is an American academic who has made a life study of the JFK assassination.

He maintains that John F. Kennedy was assassinated as the result of a well-planned and precisely executed conspiracy, which included altering the autopsy X-rays, substituting another brain, and recreating the Zapruder film using sophisticated techniques of optical printing and special effects. He has edited three collections of studies on the assassination, run four conferences on the subject, and continues to make numerous talk-show appearances on the topic.

In January 2009, in collaboration with Jack White, he published a new study of the Moorman photo and the Zapruder film of the assassination: ‘Moorman In The Street – Revisited’ (JFKresearch, Assassinationresearch sites).

Fetzer has observed that presuming its authenticity functions as the backbone of the cover-up, since it becomes impossible to reconstruct the actual sequence of events in Dealey Plaza on the basis of a fabricated film.

 

FILES, JIM

Most of the Jim Files story and his claims to have fired the fatal shot is available on Wim Dankbaar’s JFKMurderSolved site. There are numerous critics of Files’s claims and all can be found on the various sites. Files himself testified (on video) on 22 March 1994.  Files claims that the contract on JFK came from Giancana and his lieutenant Tony Accardo of the Chicago Crime Syndicate.

Files (who was aka ‘Jim Sutton’) claims he left a spent .222 bullet – he is very specific about the calibre – casing at the scene, crimped with his teeth. In 1987 a metal detector operated by a Dallas workman called John Rademacher, discovered two such fired cartridge cases, just 3 inches under the soil on the Grassy Knoll. An orthodontist later testified that the open end was oval and that human teeth had indeed caused the indent. (Rademacher’s full account can be found on JFKMurderSolved.) A furious row has since erupted as to whether the cartridge case was manufactured before or after 1971. Clearly if it is 1971 then it has nothing to do with the JFK assassination.

The former Warden of Stateville Prison Illinois, Tony Godinez, interviewed his inmate Jim Files many times and believed his story. He claims never to have caught Files out in a lie and revealed that Files asked to be put into protective custody ‘because of the Government’. See his first-hand interview at JFKMurderSolved.

Files claimed to have signed a secrecy agreement with the CIA and has refused to provide much information about his CIA activities other than stating that he worked for the CIA from early 1961 to 1979 when he was arrested and sentenced to prison for running a Mafia ‘chop shop’.

James Files’s story has, unsurprisingly, come under prolonged and vigorous attack. The controversy increased after the screening of Files’s claims in a TV programme called Hard Copy in September 1996. Two hitherto unknown researchers, J. R. Stockwell and J. McAdams, promptly set up a website attempting to debunk Files’s story. Curiously, both turned out to be ex-CIA officers.

Hard evidence of some attempt to cover-up Files’s evidence can be found in his claim that he was a soldier in the 82^nd Airborne Division in Laos during the Vietnam War. Government records claimed that they had no trace of Files or Sutton and it was assumed that he was lying.

However, when the official historian of the 82^nd Airborne Division began to dig further, he was contacted by the Secret Service asking why he was talking to Files, ‘as he was considered a threat to national security’. The military records did prove that Files had served with the 82^nd. Files claimed that the Army ‘had turned him into a killing machine during the war in Laos.’

Files was also threatened by a lawyer on behalf of the Mafia. (See the Wim Dankbaar interview with Files.)

He was arrested in 1979 by FBI Agent Zack Shelton who later claimed that he suspected Files and the Chicago Mafia of complicity in the plot to murder President Kennedy.

 

FINCK, DOCTOR

Dr FINCK assisted Humes at the autopsy. Afterwards Finck’s autopsy notes went missing:

‘In an affidavit [to the Assassination Records Review Board],  Leonard D. Saslaw (PhD), a biochemist who worked at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda, Md., said that at lunch in the week following the assassination he overheard one of the autopsy doctors, Pierre Finck, “complain that he had been unable to locate the handwritten notes that he had taken during the autopsy” … Dr Finck elaborated to his companions, with considerable irritation, that immediately after washing up following the autopsy, he looked for his notes, and could not find them anywhere.’    (See ARRB testimony ‘MD #1’.)

Finck testified to the HSCA and to the ARRB that he had taken measurements and written notes himself, and that both his notes and measurements ‘were turned over to Dr Humes’. Those documents have vanished.

See also Best Evidence, which gives Finck’s story extensive coverage (25 references).

 

FRAZIER, BUELL WESLEY

This friend of Oswald’s is an enigmatic character and may have had a wider involvement with the events in Dallas. He drove Oswald in to work on the day of the assassination – the only time he ever gave Lee a lift on a Friday. Frasier was accidentally arrested – as opposed to being ‘brought in for questioning’ – by an over-enthusiastic DPD Officer called McCabe in the confusion after the assassination.

See the Warren Commission hearings and Report and the very many accounts of his activities in, for example, Summers, Rush to Judgment, Crossfire, etc. Websites are plentiful: see Washington Decoded, Spartacus, Wikipedia, REOPEN JFK CASE and various Time Magazine articles.

The only other witness to the ‘brown paper bag with curtain rods’ was Linnie Mae Randle, Frazier’s sister. She testified that the bag was far too short to have concealed a rifle – even disassembled. FBI examination has shown that a disassembled Mannlicher-Carcano rifle is too long to be carried ‘vertically’ under Oswald’s arm as Frazier is supposed to have attested.

Unfortunately for the FBI version of events the brown paper bag in which Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly transported the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to his place of work showed no trace of gun oil or grease, even microscopically. Brown paper absorbs oil, even minute amounts. That bag cannot have been used to conceal a rifle. (See Warren Commission, HSCA, and Bishop’s The Day Kennedy Was Shot.)

 

FRITZ, JOHN WILL

The Dallas PD captain’s evidence is both sparse and raises more questions than it answers. He claims not to have kept proper notes of Lee Harvey Oswald’s several interrogations, and disappeared halfway through the investigation to have a secret meeting with Sheriff Decker. He was the man who found the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle in the TSBD. The Mary Ferrell Foundation’s JFK Research site has much on Captain Fritz.

He also claimed that LBJ had telephoned him personally telling him after the arrest of Oswald to call off the investigation, as ‘You’ve got your man’. (See also the many references in the Warren Commission Report and the extensive documentation in Penn Jones’s Forgive My Grief series.)

 

GARRISON, JIM

‘Big Jim’ Garrison was the District Attorney for New Orleans at the time. He was always suspicious of the Warren Commission’s report and is especially important because he  brought the only prosecution against an alleged murderer of JFK in 1976, naming Clay Shaw of Permindex as a conspirator.

He was memorably portrayed by Kevin Costner in the film JFK in 1991. His book On the Trail of the Assassins is a valuable source and there is a full biography with solid first-hand references in Britannica and Wikipedia.

One of the men who made a false claim against Garrison was a convicted criminal in the Louisiana State Penitentiary called Torres, who claimed that Garrison had offered him a free holiday in Florida and some heroin if he would swear that Clay Shaw and Bertrand were the same man. (See the NBC Programme, The Case of Jim Garrison June 1967.) Torres was sentenced – later – for perjury.

That Garrison’s case was deliberately sabotaged is in little doubt. See the 19 June 1967 memo from his Assistant DA bringing him up to date on the revelations of Perry Russo, one of David Ferrie’s boyfriends, who alleged that senior NBC executives and magazine editors had been prepared to pay him money to give false testimony at the Clay Shaw trial.

Garrison’s views on why and how his case was wrecked can be found in his Playboy magazine interview of October 1967.

One of the curiosities about the Oliver Stone movie JFK is the way it was even rubbished and attacked long before it was released or shown to the public or critics. There was a well-organised national campaign to denigrate the film, which inevitably raises the questions, ‘Who?’ and ‘Why?’

Not everyone has warmed to the Jim Garrison or his investigation. (See for example the savage denunciation of the New Orleans DA by David Lifton in his email to fellow Kennedy researcher Gary Aguilar of 6 Aug 1995.)

            However Garrison has a plethora of sources. See Mortal Error by Menninger; Summers, and the numerous references in Flammonde,  and The Assassinations : Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X edited by James DiEugenioand Lisa Pease

(Los Angeles2003) plus many more.

See also:William Davy, Let Justice Be Done: New Light on the Jim Garrison Investigation (Virginia, 1999); James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case (New York, 1992);  Jim Garrison, A Heritage of Stone (New York, 1970) and On the Trail of the Assassins (New York, 1988); Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York, 2000); Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the

Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, DC, 2005) ;Oliver Stone JFK: The Book of the Film (New York, 1996).

G

GIANCANA, SAM

Double Cross by Chuck and Sam Giancana goes into considerable detail on the Mafia/CIA association and especially the Chicago Mob’s extremely close links with Old Joe Kennedy.

It also exposes the Mafia’s role in getting Jack Kennedy elected, naming names, identifying locations of key meetings and making the point that the Kennedy clan would ensure that JFK would be ‘Giancana’s Man’ once he got into the White House. (See the numerous websites and books on the Mafia and the Crime Commission. Wikipedia has a useful list of primary sources and references for further reading on both Giancana and the Mafia in general.)

See especially John Morgan’s Prince of Crime (New York, 1985),  David Talbot’s Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (New York, 2007)  and William Brashler’s Don: The Life and Death of Sam Giancana (1977).

Giancana paid off Hoover by fixing horse races and passing the big tips through Walter Winchell to the FBI Chief. That way J. Edgar Hoover could legitimately claim that he never directly accepted Mafia cash (see Double Cross and Summers). It is a matter of record that Hoover was, however, remarkably successful at the races . . .

Giancana was executed on 19 June 1975, Mafia style; a .22 bullet in the back of the head and then a neat circle of bullets round his mouth after death. (See also, ‘Double Cross: The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America,New York, 1992, by  by Giancana’s half-brother Chuck and nephew Sam, as well as the Spartacus and crimelibrary websites for more details.)

 

GLADIO

For more details of Gladio, see Reuters, 13 Nov 1990, ‘Secret Cold War Network Group Hid Arms’, ‘CIA Ties with ex Nazis Exposed’, Washington Post 7 June 2006, Hill Norton’s articles in The Guardian, 14 Nov. and 5 Dec. 1990, Intelligence and National Security, Dec.  2005 and Daniele Ganser’s Les Armées Secretes de l’OTAN, Paris , 2007.

The Gladio revelations were greeted with marked consternation in the various NATO Special Forces headquarters, and caused much hasty removal and destruction of certain Top Secret NATO files held in the ‘Special Projects’ office at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. (Private information.)

 

GOLDMANNN, NAHUN

Goldmann was the founder of the World Jewish Congress and its president in 1963. He was an extremely powerful figure in worldwide Jewry.

He is a controversial figure as the WJC has been the central umbrella organisation representing – and arbitrating  between – many different parties and groups since its inception in 1936. The following is the WJC’s description of itself from its website:

‘The World Jewish Congress (WJC), established in 1936, is an international federation of Jewish communities and organizations. As an umbrella group it represents Jews from the entire political spectrum and from all Jewish religious denominations. Serving as a diplomatic arm of the Jewish people to world governments and international organizations it tries to preserve the principle of unity in diversity and always seeks consensus. …’

(from WJC website, http://www.wjc.org.il/wjc/what_is_the_wjc.html)

The WJC’s description of itself is strikingly similar to that of the ancient Sanhedrin. The following is an excerpt from the Encyclopedia Britannica’s article about the Sanhedrin:

‘According to the Talmudic sources, including the tractate Sanhedrin, the Great Sanhedrin was a court of 71 sages that met on fixed occasions in the Lishkat La-Gazit (‘Chamber of the Hewn Stones’) in the Jerusalem Temple and that was presided over by two officials (zugot, or ‘pair’), the nasi and the av bet din. It was a religious legislative body ‘whence the law [Halakha] goes out to all Israel.’ Politically, it could appoint the king and the high priest, declare war, and expand the territory of Jerusalem and the Temple. Judicially, it could try a high priest, a false prophet, a rebellious elder, or an errant tribe.’

(from Encyclopedia Britannica: Sanhedrin)  Some conspiracy theorists believe that this similarity between the WJC and the ancient Sanhedrin is not coincidental. For example:

Extracted from Salvador Astucia, Opium Lords:

‘It is my contention that the WJC is the modern-day equivalent of the ancient Sanhedrin but on a worldwide scale. As head of that organization in 1963, Goldmann was the only central figure who could issue a decree to have a head of state executed if that person was viewed as a threat to Israel and worldwide Jewry.  . . .

‘Secondly, the conspiracy was extremely widespread, particularly within the American news media. This means that it did not occur by spontaneous combustion. It must have been heavily orchestrated and planned with meticulous detail. For something like that to occur, it requires that a decree first be issued by a powerful and influential person. . . ’

For more details see (online), Nahum Goldmann, Statesman without a State, ed. Mark A. Raider (2009).

 

GONZALES

Gonzales’s story of receiving a note is corroborated by a friend, Harold Roberts, who had the paper shoved under his door by mistake and then watched a ‘nervous’ Gonzales rush out to a pay phone. (See his interview in the Dallas Morning News, 6 June 1979.)

 

GRANATA, Joe

A close associate of Nicoletti called Joe Granata admitted that Nicoletti had boasted that ‘he [Nicoletti], Marshall Caifano, Johnny Roselli and Jim Files were all on the hit-team in Dealey Plaza . . . ’ and ‘blew his fucking brains out . . .’ Granata is believed to be still in an FBI witness-protection programme.

See the transcript of his 11 Nov 2003 evidence at JFKMurderSolved,

 

GREER, Bill,

JFK’s limo driver slowed down when the shooting started. See interview 6 May 1991, Dave Powers at JFK Presidential Library. See also Summers, Conspiracy, Vince Palamara’s interviews with the Secret Service agents, plus Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas ; A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination (New York, 1968). The Zapruder film makes the point very clearly too.

 

GUNMEN

According to Mafia sources their gunmen were:

TSBD: Nicoletti and Cain

Grassy Knoll: Jack Lawrence and Charles Harrelson.

Johnny Roselli was in Dallas on 22 Nov.

James Files/Sutton had confessed to the shooting.

E. Howard Hunt claims that Sarti was involved.

An ex-Colonel William Bishop also claims to have been a CIA assassin and present in Dealey Plaza. (See the accounts in |Russell’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Benson.)

According to various boasts, confession and other hearsay, the Chicago gunman ‘Marshall Caifano’ is reputed to have been a gunman in Dealey Plaza too.

 

GRESHAM’S LAW

Gresham’s law is that, ‘bad money drives out good’ – or, more precisely, ‘when there is a legal tender currency with two different types of money with the same alleged face value, then the less valuable money drives the good money underground and out of circulation.’ It is named after Sir Thomas Gresham, an English financier in Tudor times.

The theory is that any circulating currency that includes both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ money quickly becomes dominated by the ‘least valuable’ money. This is because people spending money will always try to get rid of this ‘bad’ money first, and hold on to the good money for themselves.

But Gresham’s law works in reverse, too, and economists argue that bad money often puts holding ‘good’ money at a premium rather than driving it out of circulation. The experiences of countries with weak economies and currencies switching to black economies and using US dollars or euros as a parallel currency on the street prove the point. (For example, Eastern European countries after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, or South American countries generally.) Here Gresham’s Law can be seen to have operated in its reverse form, since although the dollar was not theoretically the legal currency, it became sought after as the currency of choice and money that could be trusted.

These examples show that in the absence of enforced legal tender laws, given the choice of what money to accept, people will try and hold on to what they see as the ‘best’ money. J J Saxon and JFK were bargaining on just that and that the American people would prefer to hold Treasury ‘Silver Certificate’ notes to Federal Reserve notes, thus driving demand for the Federal Reserve printed notes down. The private bankers who make up the Federal Reserve were not happy.

See Selgin’s ‘Gresham’s Law’ University of Georgia (EH.net)  2013 and the Journal of Political Economy, 1986, Edn 94.

H

HALL, LORAN

The three men who visited Sylvia Odio were Hall, Seymour (Oswald impersonator) and Lawrence Howard, according to the Warren Commission Report and George Michael Evica’s And We are all Mortal (Cambridge, Mass., 1978) .

See also Dallas Morning News, 17 Sept. 1978, HSCA Report, and Ch X and XI. See also Rush to Judgment, Summers.

 

HARGIS, BOBBY

According to eyewitnesses, DPD Officer Hargis on his motorbike behind Kennedy, was ‘splattered with blood’. Hargis was hit so hard ‘he thought he’d been shot’.

Hargis gets particular coverage in the HSCA Report as well as Summers and Best Evidence and High Treason. See also the testimony of Roscoe White’s son.

 

HARRELSON, CHARLES

Harrelson was an admitted and convicted hitman. He boasted on several occasions of having assassinated John F. Kennedy, and claimed to be one of the ‘Three Tramps’ hiding in a box car on the railroad tracks behind Dealey Plaza just after the shooting. (He also denied these claims on other occasions.) See also John Harlow, ‘Secrets of Woody’s Hitman Father’, The Times (UK)  8 April 2007.

A biography of Woody Harrelson’s murderous father can be found on the various ‘Harrelson’ websites.

For more details see High Treason, Marrs’s Crossfire and Davis’s Mafia Kingfish (1988)  and the Times interview of  8 April 2007 ‘ Secrets of Woody’s Hitman Father.’

 

HARRISON, BLACKIE

Dallas Policeman ‘Blackie’ Harrison is accused of complicity in Ruby’s murder of Oswald in Seth Kantor’s Who Was Jack Ruby? (New York, 1978). There are, however, numerous other Dallas policemen who have been accused of owing Ruby a favour: sixty, in fact, according to the testimony of Officer Revill and others of the DPD.

These can be found in detail on the McAdams website JFK Info in great detail under  ‘Possible associations between Ruby and the DPD’. See also Michael Benson Who’s Who in the Assassination of JFK, p.174, for the charge that (like so many of the Dallas Police) Blackie Harrison knew Jack Ruby too well.

 

HARVEY, BILL

A full biography of CIA agent Harvey’s background is at the Spartacus Educational site.

He was replaced as Director of Cuban Ops by Desmond Fitzgerald, who took on much of the planning for the Kennedys’ scheme to start a coup in Cuba (‘AM/LASH’) (See HSCA testimony and Report and Ultimate Sacrifice).

See also Belin’s Final Disclosure, Evica’s many references to Harvey in And We Are All Mortal, and Summers.

Veteran JFK researcher John Simkin links Harvey and Mafiaman Roselli:

‘ . . . columnist Jack Anderson submitted a secret report to President-elect George Bush in which he provided more details about his initial 1967 disclosure of the anti-Castro assassination plots and Robert Kennedy’s links to them.  Anderson informed the President [sic] that his sources included not only Johnny Roselli, but the CIA’s William Harvey, as well as other high-ranking Agency officers. Anderson also admitted that he was provided with copies of “two memos from the CIA’s most sensitive files, which summarize the whole operation”.

‘The disclosure of Harvey as a source comes as no surprise, because, according to the CIA’s own documents, Harvey was professionally associated with the law firm of Rosselli’s attorney, Ed Morgan.’

This secret Anderson report to President-Elect Bush is found on pages 444-445 of Live By the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK, by Gus Russo, Baltimore, 1998.

 

HICKS, JAMES

Hicks claims himself to have been in Dealey Plaza: see Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination. (See also Hicks’s testimony to Garrison investigations and Bethell’s diary recording Hicks’s claims.)

Jim Hicks is believed by many researchers to have been the radio man for the assassins. (See Benson, Spartacus and gov.archives.) Interestingly, he was the one who pointed out the bullet hole in the ‘Stemmons Freeway’ road sign. Hicks openly boasted of his involvement in the shooting. See High Treason, The Kennedy Conspiracy, and the claims and their follow-ups at the JFK.fr research site.

 

HIDELL

The ‘A. J. Hidell’ identity alleged carried by Oswald  when arrested is challenged by the curious fact that there is no record of any such ID being found and reported by Officer Bentley of the DPD when he first searched Oswald outside the Texas Theatre. See the DPD official police logs, 22 Nov. 1963.

Later claims that he and Sgt Hill radioed the Hidell ID in from the police car are not substantiated by the DPD radio logs. (See Benson and the Warren Commission testimony.)

When Marina Oswald was first interrogated by a Russian-speaking Federal agent called Gpoadze immediately after the assassination she said that she had never heard of ‘Alek Hidell’.

By the time she had been coached in the FBI’s ‘protective custody’ and appeared before the Warren Commission she’d changed her story, claiming that she now remembered Lee using the alias, and that she had also signed documents for him using that name. (See also Marina’s interview on the Oprah Winfrey programme 22 Nov. 1996 and the re-issued editions of the Warren Commission report.)

See also the Army Intelligence notes for confirmation of the ‘A. J. Hidell’ alias.

 

HILL, JEAN

Jean Hill’s account of harsh treatment by (now Senator) Specter has – predictably – been attacked, but for 15 years she maintained her story.

Hill’s evidence gets extensive coverage in the Warren Commission, as well as Crossfire, Weisberg’s little-read Photographic Whitewash, Lane’s Rush to Judgment, Summers, and Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins.

In 1991 she addressed the 1991 JFK Symposium in Dallas, which attracted considerable media coverage, before co-authoring, with Bill Sloan, JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness (1992). See also Peter R. Whitney on the JFK in site and its links.

See also the obituaries in, for example, the Washington Post 11 Nov. 2000.

 

HOOVER  J.  EDGAR

There are so many references to J. Edgar Hoover that it is hard to be selective. The Wikipedia biography is a good start, listing as it does so many primary sources.

Hoover’s claim that he was not aware of a plot to assassinate the President defies belief, given the evidence to hand of both of the man and his methods. For a detailed exploration of this most corrupt and venal, out-of-control Secret Policeman, see Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential and his Conspiracy, plus Mark North’s explicit accusations in Act of Treason and the many websites on both Hoover, the assassination and the cover-up.

For additional reading see also: Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York, 1991); Max Lowenthal, The Federal Bureau of Investigation (Westport Conn., 1950), and Richard Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover(New York, 1986).

Bobby Kennedy believed that 60% of the ‘American Communist Party’ were in fact paid FBI informants. FBI documents released under the FOIA confirm this: nearly 6,000 of the 10,000-strong Party worked for the FBI and J Edgar Hoover.

Hoover and the Mafia: Hoover’s view of organised crime was astonishing, to say the least. As late as January 1962, Hoover denied its existence in the United States. He stated that ‘No single individual or coalition of racketeers dominates organized crime across the nation.’ It was not until gangster Joe Valachi was brought to Washington by Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department to testify before the Senate that Hoover was forced to admit that his opinion about organised crime in American needed some serious re-thinking. (See Peter Maas, The Valachi Papers, New York, 1968.)

Hoover told the Warren Commission that he had forwarded every FBI agent’s notes on Oswald. He lied. He kept back the affidavit of Special Agent Milton Kaack who was the FBI agent who carried out the initial background checks when the Oswalds returned for the USSR. (Compare the Warren Report, the HSCA and Summers’) 

For an objective discussion of his supposed sexuality, see, ‘J. Edgar Hoover: Gay marriage role model?’ in Salon, 1 May 2000.

            For an interesting analysis of Hoover’s life and career, see the article by Mel Ayton of 19 July 2005 in Crime Magazine.

For Hoover, see also: Athan Theoharis, ed., From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover (Lanham, Md, 1991); Assassination Records Review Board – Final Report: 1998,  and Zpub.: ‘J. Edgar Hoover – The Biography’.

 

HOFFA, JIMMY

The Teamsters Union website has a biography as do several TV production companies. The US Encyclomedia and other sites have good biographies of Jimmy Hoffa too. See also Ultimate Sacrifice; the HSCA Report;Conspiracy;The Kennedy Conspiracy; ‘Who Was Jack Ruby?’, Act of Treason et al.

The biography at Wikipedia lists good primary sources, for example his influence on the unions. See Hoffa and the Teamsters: A Study of Union Power, by Ralph James and Estelle James (New York, 1965);  Arthur Sloane’s ‘Hoffa’ (Cambridge, Mass., 1991) is the standard biography.

There is a good account of the Justice Department’s deliberate targeting of Hoffa in The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa by Walter Sheridan (New York, 1972). As a result, Hoffa’s views on Robert Kennedy (many of them unprintable in a family book) can be found in his Hoffa, The Real Story (as told to Oscar Fraley) (New York, 1975)’

The Mob lawyer Ragano recorded a meeting with Jimmy Hoffa at his office in July 1963 where Hoffa said, ‘something had to be done, and soon, about Robert Kennedy’. He suggested that Ragano should talk to his friend ‘Santo T’ about killing the President in order to achieve this. The following day Trafficante and Ragano were lunching in a restaurant with someone else present.

Ragano brought up Hoffa’s conversation of the previous day and got the distinct impression that he should not have mentioned it in public. (See Ragano’s autobiography, Mob Lawyer: Including the Inside Account of Who Killed Jimmy Hoffa and JFK.) In 1979 one of Hoffa’s lieutenants in the Teamsters called Ed Partin testified on the record to the HSCA that Hoffa had openly discussed killing RFK. (See the HSCA Report.)

Hoffa’s presumed role in the JFK murder is explored in Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, by John H. Davis  (New York, 1989)

In 2001 US police forces confirmed that traces of Hoffa’s DNA were in Charles O’Brien’s car, but were unable to bring charges. The search for Jimmy Hoffa’s body continues without success. A convicted killer, Richard Powell, claimed that Hoffa was drugged, then murdered in Michigan. Attempts to locate his body have been unsuccessful.

See also: Hoffa’s autobiography, written with Donald I. Rogers,  The Trials of Jimmy Hoffa (Chicago, 1970).

            Contract Killer: The Explosive Story of the Mafia’s Most Notorious Hitman Donald ‘Tony the Greek’ Frankos, by William Hoffman and Lake Headley, looks at Hoffa’s disappearance, and The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians and the Mob, by Dan Moldea (second edition, New York, 1993)  shows how Hoffa rose to power.

HOFFMAN, ED

The deaf and dumb Ed Hoffman’s remarkable eyewitness account can be followed up in High Treason, plus the various websites – Spartacus Educational, which has his biography and discloses that his father warned him not to inform the authorities of what he had supposedly seen – and a brief account in Benson as well as Sloan’s 1993 JFK: Breaking the Silence.

Hoffman’s official FBI statements after he finally came forward are in the FBI Reports of June and July 1967.

His tale comes in for a serious rubbishing on the mcadams.pos.mu edu site, which staunchly attempts to downplay any suggestion that there was more to Dealey Plaza than the Warren Commission’s official version.

 

HOLT, CHAUNCEY

See the Wikipedia biography and its list of sources. Holt was a freewheeling adventurer who worked as a pilot, an accountant and a Mafia associate as well as claiming to have been a contract operative for the Central Intelligence Agency. He served organised-crime figures and, in 1953, was employed by Lansky as an accountant for the International Rescue Committee which, according to Holt, was a front organisation for the CIA.

Holt worked for Meyer Lansky and Peter Licovoli. (See Benson and the various Holt biographies)

However Holt’s story is disbelieved by some; for example, Waldron and Hartmann in Ultimate Sacrifice.

Holt is best known for his confession of involvement in the JFK assassination. He testified that he drove with mob hitmen Charles Nicoletti and Leo Moceri to Dallas from the Grace Ranch in Arizona. The ranch was owned by Peter Licavoli and allegedly served as a base for CIA operations, drugs and gun smuggling.

Holt was also carrying forged secret service badges and lapel pins to Dallas, on orders of his CIA contact Philip Twombly. Holt delivered the lapel pins and badges to anti-Castro Cuban exile Homer Echevarria. He also delivered handguns and IDs to a convicted hitman, Charles Harrelson, on the parking lot of Dealey Plaza behind the grassy knoll.

After the assassination, Holt, Harrelson and Rogers were supposedly apprehended from a boxcar in the railroad yard and detained by the Dallas Police. They were released the same afternoon. While they were escorted over Dealey Plaza, seven pictures were taken by press photographers. The subjects of these pictures became known in history as ‘the three tramps’.

Holt related that during the Warren Commission, he and other CIA operatives involved in the Kennedy assassination stayed in a luxurious CIA safehouse in Acapulco, owned by attorneys Frank Belcher and Joseph Ball – the latter just happened to be a Senior Counsel to the Warren Commission.

(See Holt’s confessions on the AOL video interview freely available on YouTube and DVD.)

Chauncey Holt’s old friend CIA agent Jim Bartell confirmed that he was recruited by Holt to help organise ‘contract killings’ for the CIA. He confirmed Holt’s close links with both organised crime and the CIA.

Holt’s daughter taped her father’s story before he died. According to her ‘my father wanted to vindicate Lee Harvey Oswald’. She also says that her father said just before his death that the American public should know the real truth.

 

HOSTY, FBI AGENT JAMES

According to the Dallas FBI receptionist, Nancy Fenner, Oswald stormed in on 6 Nov. 1963 with a note for Hosty, warning him off. Hosty later admitted to ‘flushing it down the toilet’ after the assassination.

Hosty’s name was in Oswald’s notebook when he was arrested. An FBI agent called Bob Gemberling deleted it from the list he submitted in evidence to the Warren Commission. (See the Warren Commission Evidence and Report and Don Moore’s interview for the Sun-Herald of 16 Nov. 2003.)

 

HUMES, JAMES

Commander Jim Humes USN was the lead autopsy surgeon/pathologist at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington. He had never done a full autopsy before and had no experience of bullet wounds. Nonetheless, as a competent doctor Humes had serious doubts about the corpse and thought that someone had tampered with it, but he was browbeaten by senior officers into doing what they said. See his testimony to the Warren Commission.

He originally had problems with the throat and the back wound, but after a little ‘attitude adjustment’ from the senior officers and Federal intelligence agents present, changed his mind to call the throat wound an ‘exit wound’ and moved the back wound 5 inches up JFK’s body.

He later admitted to burning his original notes and substituting them with a more acceptable set. It is an interesting point that Humes was technically committing a serious Federal crime. (See the Warren Report and compare it with the detailed work in Lifton’s Best Evidence.) See also Humes’s later testimony to the 1997 ARRB; Summers; Menninger’s Mortal Error and Lane’s Rush to Judgment. Edward Epstein’s The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot and Legend (New York 1996) quite clearly charges that the autopsy report was changed for political reasons.

The original source material comes from the testimony at the three Federal enquiries: the Warren Commission, the HSCA and the ARRB. These run to over 1,000 pages (at least) of sometimes highly detailed medical testimony on oath.

The extracts from Humes’ sworn public testimony are of considerable importance in establishing the allegation that there was a major cover-up over the autopsy.

 

Extracts From the Testimony of Cdr James J. Humes, Md, Us Navy

Before the Warren Commission, 1964 (at which the evidence about the ‘magic bullet’ and Cdr Humes’ autopsy notes are discussed):

. . .  Mr SPECTER: And what is your profession or occupation, please?

Commander HUMES: I am a physician and employed by the Medical Department of the United States Navy.

            Evidence of Direction from Senior Officers

. . .Mr SPECTER: All right.

Commander HUMES: The photographs, to go back a moment the photographs and the X-rays were exposed in the morgue, of the Naval Medical Center on this night, and they were not developed, neither the X-rays or the photographs. They were submitted to the, and here, if I make a mistake I am not certain, to either the Federal Bureau of Investigation or to the Secret Service, I am not sure of those.

Mr SPECTER: Did you submit those yourself immediately after they were taken, Dr Humes?

Commander HUMES: Again, one of the senior people present, I believe my own Commanding Officer, Captain Stover, took care of tuning this material over to these authorities, and receiving a receipt for this information, for this material. It was – I supervised the positioning of the body for various of these examinations but as far as beyond that, I did not consider that my responsibility . . .

The Magic Bullet

. . . Mr DULLES: Could I ask a question about the missile, I am a little bit – the bullet, I am a little bit – confused. It was found on the stretcher. Did the President’s body remain on the stretcher while it was in the hospital?

Commander HUMES: Of that point I have no knowledge. The only—

Mr DULLES: Why would it – would this operating have anything to do with the bullet being on the stretcher unless the President’s body remained on the stretcher after he was taken into the hospital; is that possible?

Commander HUMES: It is quite possible, sir.

Mr DULLES: Otherwise it seems to me the bullet would have to have been ejected from the body before he was taken or put on the bed in the hospital.

Commander HUMES: Right, sir. I, of course, was not there. I don’t know how he was handled in the [Dallas] hospital, in what conveyance. I do know he was on his back during the period of his stay in the hospital: Doctor Perry told me that.

Mr DULLES: Yes; and wasn’t turned over.

Commander HUMES:That is right . . .

. . . Mr DULLES:  Yes. I wonder if there is other evidence of this.

Mr SPECTER: There has been other evidence, Mr DULLES. If I may say at this point, we shall produce later, subject to sequential proof, evidence that the stretcher on which this bullet was found was the stretcher of Governor Connally. We have a sequence of events on the transmission of that stretcher which ties that down reasonably closely, so that on the night of the autopsy itself, as the information I have been developing indicates, the thought preliminarily was that was from President Kennedy’s stretcher, and that is what led to the hypothesis which we have been exploring about but which has since been rejected. But at any rate the evidence will show that it was from Governor Connally’s stretcher that the bullet was found.

Mr DULLES: So this bullet is still missing?

Mr SPECTER: That is the subject of some theories I am about to get into. That is an elusive subject, but Dr Humes has some views on it and we might just as well go into those now.

            Dr Humes’ Autopsy Notes

. . . Mr SPECTER: Now, Doctor Humes, I hand you a group of documents which have been marked as Commission Exhibit No. 397 and ask you if you can identify what they are?

Commander HUMES: Yes, sir; these are various notes in long-hand, or copies rather, of various notes in long- hand made by myself, in part, during the performance of the examination of the late President, and in part after the examination when I was preparing to have a typewritten report made.

Mr SPECTER: Are there also included there some notes that you made while you talked to Doctor Perry on the telephone?

Commander HUMES: Yes, sir; there are.

Mr SPECTER: Are there any notes which you made at any time which are not included in this group of notes?

Commander HUMES: Yes, sir; there are.

Mr SPECTER: And what do those consist of?

Commander HUMES: In privacy of my own home, early in the morning of Sunday, November 24th, I made a draft of this report which I later revised, and of which this represents the revision. That draft I personally burned in the fireplace of my recreation room.

Mr SPECTER: May the record show that the Exhibit No. 397 is the identical document which has been previously identified as Commission No. 371 for our internal purposes. Is the first sheet then in that group the notes you made when you talked to Doctor Perry?

Commander HUMES: That is correct. sir.

Mr SPECTER: And do the next 15 sheets represent the rough draft which was later copied into the autopsy report which has been heretofore identified with an exhibit number?

Commander HUMES: That is correct. sir.

Mr SPECTER: And what do the next two sheets represent?

Commander HUMES :The next two sheets are the notes actually made in the room in which the examination was taking place. I notice now that the handwriting in some instances is not my own, and it is either that of Commander Boswell or Colonel Finck.

Mr SPECTER: And was that writing made at the same time that the autopsy report was undertaken; that is, did you review all of the markings on those papers and note them to be present when you completed the autopsy report?

Commander HUMES: Yes, sir. From the time of the completion of this examination until the submission of the written report following its preparation, all of the papers pertinent to this case were in my personal custody.

Mr SPECTER: Have you now described all of the documents which were present in that 397, Exhibit No. 397?

Commander HUMES: Yes, sir; with the exception of the certification to the fact that I, in fact, detailed them in my custody, and a certification that I had destroyed certain preliminary draft notes.

Mr SPECTER: And those represent all the notes except those you have already described which you destroyed?

Commander HUMES: That is correct, sir.

Mr SPECTER: Now, just one point on the notes themselves. Page 14 of your rough draft, Doctor Humes, as to the point of origin, the notes show that there was a revision between your first draft and your final report.

            Commander HUMES: Yes, sir.

 

Dr Humes’ sworn testimony at the Assassinations Records Review Board (1996)

Cdr Humes again admitted burning his original autopsy notes at home (see below) and under what became a fairly intense cross-examination, admitted that he had no rational explanation for doing so. He also changed his story given at the Warren Commission, 33 years earlier, at which he had claimed that it was because ‘they were stained with JFK’s blood’. However the ARRB drew out of him an admission that some of his material he had submitted was blood-stained anyway and that he had only destroyed the more important contemporaneous notes and draft report, including Dr Finck’s contribution.

 

Humes (again on Oath) at the ARRB:

An interesting excerpt from the later (1996) ARRB testimony is below. Dr Humes had to be subpoenaed to attend and under pressure admits to burning not just his autopsy notes, but the draft autopsy report as well:

Q. (Counsel for the ARRB): Could you explain or describe briefly the process that you went through in drafting the autopsy protocol? So explain the number of drafts that you wrote, for example.

A. (Dr Humes): The decision was made somebody had to take responsibility to write it. We couldn’t do it as a troika. So I took the notes home with me, these, I presume, and the notes that I had made, some of which I had made were stained with the President’s blood. I wrote a little bit about this in that AMA Journal article . . .

Q. Now, I presume that the notes that you took during the autopsy did not resemble in any way the document that you have in your hand now, Exhibit 2.

A. Well, they did, yes. I mean, I didn’t dream this up out of whole cloth.

Q. And I assume that the notes that you made while you were at Bethesda during the autopsy were not written in sentence and paragraph form.

A. No. They were shorthand.

Q. So when you wrote down the information – well, when you were drafting what is now Exhibit 2, would it be fair to say that you had in your hand two or three pages, approximately – of handwritten notes—

A. And I converted the shorthand information there to that document.

Q. Was there any information that was contained on the handwritten notes that was not included in the document that’s now Exhibit 2—

A. I don’t believe so.

Q. Did you ever make a copy that – a copy of the notes that contained the same information as was on the original handwritten notes that was in any form other than the form that appears in Exhibit 2?

A. No.

Q. Have you ever observed that the document now marked Exhibit 1 in the original appears to have bloodstains on it as well?

A. Yes, I do notice it now. These were J’s. I’m sure I gave these back to J. I presume I did. I don’t know where they came from.

Q. Did you ever have any concern about the President’s blood being on the

document that’s now marked Exhibit 1?

A. I can’t recall, to tell you the truth.

Q. Do you see any inconsistency at all between destroying some handwritten notes that contained blood on them but preserving other handwritten notes that also had blood on them?

A. Well, only that the others were of my own making. I didn’t – wouldn’t have the habit of destroying something someone else prepared. That’s the only difference that I can conceive of. I don’t know where these went. I don’t know if they went back to J or where they went. I have no idea. I certainly didn’t keep them. I kept nothing, as a matter of fact.

Q. I’d like to show you the testimony that you offered before the Warren Commission. This is in Exhibit 11 to this deposition. I’d like you to take a look at pages 372 to the top of 373, and then I’ll ask you a question.

A. All right.

Q. I’ll read that into that record while you’re reading it yourself. Mr Specter asked the question: ‘And what do those consist of?’ The question is referring to some notes.

‘Answer: In privacy of my own home, early in the morning of Sunday, November 24, I made a draft of this report, which I later revised and of which this represents the revision. That draft I personally burned in the fireplace of my recreation room.’

Do you see Mr Specter’s question and your answer?

A. Yes.

Q. Does that help refresh your recollection of what was burned in your home?

A. Whatever I had, as far as I know, that was burned was everything exclusive of the finished draft that you have as Exhibit – whatever it is.

Q. My question will go to the issue of whether it was a draft of the report that was burned or whether it was –

A. I think it was –

Q. handwritten notes –

A. It was handwritten notes and the first draft that was burned.

Q. Do you mean to use the expression ‘handwritten notes’ as being the equivalent of draft of the report?

A. I don’t know. Again, it’s a hair-splitting affair that I can’t understand.

Everything that I personally prepared until I got to the status of the handwritten document that later was transcribed was destroyed. You can call it anything you want, whether it was the notes or what, I don’t know. But whatever I had, I didn’t want anything else to remain, period. This business, I don’t know when J got that back or what. . . .

Q. Dr Humes, let me show you part of your testimony to the HSCA [1976]. Question by Mr Cornwell – I’ll read this into the record. It’s from page 330, and it is Exhibit 21 to this deposition.

‘Mr Cornwell: And you finally began to write the autopsy report at what time?’

‘Dr Humes: It was decided that three people couldn’t write the report simultaneously, so I assumed the responsibility for writing the report, which I began about 11 o’clock in the evening of Saturday November 23rd, having wrestled with it for four or five, six hours in the afternoon, and worked on it until 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning of Sunday, the 24th.’

‘Mr Cornwell: Did you have any notes or records at that point as to the exact location of the –

‘Dr Humes: I had the draft notes which we had prepared in the autopsy room, which I copied.’

Now, again, the question would be: Did you copy the notes so that you would have a version of the notes without the blood on them but still notes rather than a draft report?

A. Yes, precisely. Yes. And from that I made a first draft, and then I destroyed the first draft and the notes.

 Q. So there were, then, two sorts of documents that were burned: one, the draft notes, and, two, a draft report?

A. Right.

 Q. Why did you burn the draft report as opposed to the draft notes?

A. I don’t recall. I don’t know. There was no reason – see, we’re splitting hairs here, and I’ll tell you, it’s getting to me a little bit, as you may be able to detect. The only thing I wanted to finish to hand over to whomever, in this case Admiral Burkley, was my completed version. So I burned everything else. Now, why I didn’t burn the thing that J wrote, I have no way of knowing. But whether it was a draft or whether it was the notes or what, I don’t know. There was nothing left when I got finished with it, in any event, but the thing that you now have, period.

Q. Well, the concern, of course, is if there is a record related to the autopsy that is destroyed, we’re interested in finding out what the exact circumstances—

A. I’ve told you what the circumstances were. I used it only as an aide-memoire to do what I was doing and then destroyed it. Is that hard to understand?

Q. When I first asked the question, you explained that the reason that you had destroyed it was that it had the blood of the President on it.

A. Right.

Q. The draft report, of course, would not have had the blood of . . .

A. Well, it may have had errors in spelling or I don’t know what was the matter with it, or whether I even ever did that. I don’t know. I can’t recall. I absolutely can’t recall, and I apologize for that. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles. I didn’t want anything to remain that some squirrel would grab on and make whatever use that they might. Now, whether you felt that was reasonable or not, I don’t know. But it doesn’t make any difference because that was my decision and mine alone. Nobody else’s.

Q. Did you talk to anyone about your decision to—

A. No, absolutely not. No. It was my own materials. Why – I don’t feel a need to talk to anybody about it.

Q. Did the original notes that you created have any information with respect to the estimated angle in which the bullet struck the President?

A. Nothing different than what’s in the final version.

Q. Did the original notes that you took identify the location of the posterior thorax entrance wound with respect to which of the vertebra of the President the wound was closest to?

A. No. The measurements were taken from bony landmarks. As I recall, one was a mastoid process, the bottom of the – behind the ear, and the other was a midline of the vertebral column, not how many vertebrae down it was. So the up-and-down measurement would be the distance from the mastoid process down.

. . . Q. I’d like to show you a document that’s marked Exhibit 6, which appears on its face to be a death certificate for President John F. Kennedy, signed by George Gregory Burkley on November 23, 1963?

A. Right. Never saw it before.

Q. I’d like to draw your attention to the first sentence of text on the second page and ask if you would read that, please.

[Pause.]

THE WITNESS: He’s (Admiral Burkley) sort of mixing his metaphors. He’s mixing the wounds up in here, but I presume when he says the wound was shattering type, it’s the wound of the skull.

BY MR GUNN:

Q. You’re welcome to read as much as you would prefer.

A. Whatever.

Q. It’s just I have a question for you on the first sentence only.

A. Okay.

Q. You see that Dr Burkley identifies the posterior back (wound) at about the level of the third thoracic vertebra. Do you see that?

A. Yes.

Q. Was that correct?

A. I don’t know. I didn’t measure from which vertebra it was. It’s sometimes hard to decide which vertebra, to tell you the truth, by palpation. Maybe you can do it accurately because the first and second – did I say the third? Oh, he says third thoracic. I think that’s much lower than it actually was. I think it’s much lower than it actually – you have seven cervical vertebrae. I don’t know. I mean, he’s got a right to say anything he wants, but I never saw it before, and I don’t have an opinion about it.

Q. Did you ever discuss which vertebra—

A. I never discussed anything about it with George Burkley, period, or anybody else.

I mean, with all due respect, you seem to have come to me from left field. You know, I just – they’re not things of which I’m aware. The measurements I made, as far as I’m concerned, were accurate. You could debate whether they were wise choices to be made or not, but they were accurate.

Q. When did you sign the autopsy protocol that is now marked Exhibit 3?

A. Late Sunday afternoon.

Q. Where was it that you signed it?

A. In Admiral Galloway’s office. His personal – it was decided his secretary was an appropriate person to – she normally wouldn’t do . . . this work for me at all because I had my own people. But I guess he felt that it was – she was a good person to do it. That’s all. It didn’t make a difference to me who did it. It was a mechanical chore, as far as I was concerned.

Q. Who else was in the office at the time that you signed the protocol?

A. Pierre and J.

Q. And they were the only two others there?

A. Mm-hmm.

Q. Was anyone in the room immediately next to where you were?

A. Admiral Galloway was in and out that afternoon. I don’t know if he was there or not at that point, to tell you the truth.

Q. Was he waiting for you to sign the document, or you were just in his office?

A. I can’t tell you what he was doing there. When we were working on it, we made some minor changes in it. He came in and told us that Ruby shot Oswald, which was the shock of the day, of course. And I don’t know how long he stayed, to tell you the truth. I don’t know if he was there when I left or not.

Q. Did anyone at any point, other than Drs Finck and Boswell, make any suggestions to you about the content of the autopsy report?

A. It seems to me that Admiral Galloway made some comments, but I don’t recall precisely what they were, because he was there while we were doing it.

Q. Did he ask you to make any changes in the autopsy protocol?

A. I don’t think so.

Q. Did he ask you to make any changes that would be of any substantive importance?

A. Certainly not. I think he made a suggestion – and it wasn’t a bad one – to insert the word ‘presumably’ a couple of times, because they were presumptions.

We didn’t know who shot who or anything about it, you know. But our conclusions were that this was probably the entrance wound, this was probably the exit wound. I think he thought – he said it would be wise to use that verbiage, and I didn’t have any problem. That’s the only suggestion I recall he made.

Q. After you signed the autopsy protocol, what did you do with it physically yourself?

A. Physically, got a staff car and carried it to the White House.

Q. How many did you take to the White House?

A. I think the original and six, it says. I mean, I don’t keep that number in my mind, but whatever it was.

Q. Original and a few copies?

A. Leaving one in Admiral Galloway’s office, which was subsequently taken there.

Q. Okay. And was there more than one signed original?

A. No.

Q. Was there any draft protocol that you had written prior to that time that had

been signed?

A. Nothing other than what you have.

Q. So the one we have is the only signed protocol?

A. Yes, sir.

 

 

HUNT, E HOWARD

The CIA officer E. Howard Hunt was a long-term senior (rank, GS-15) CIA Clandestine Operations Division (read ‘dirty tricks’) operator and had close links to Richard Helms, General Charles Cabell and many others associated with the JFK assassination, including Frank Sturgis.

In the early 1960s, he worked closely with Dave Attlee Phillips and Dave Morales. Together they ran the Cuban Special Operations group under ‘Wild Bill’ Harvey. His legacy is his memoirs,  American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, published just before his death. He unhesitatingly points a finger at the conspirators.

However, given his past trade (as a disinformation specialist for US intelligence) even a ‘deathbed confession’ from such a source should be taken with a pinch of salt and checked out carefully.

Nonetheless, E Howard Hunt is a serious suspect and his deathbed confession confirms this.

Hunt sued Weberman and Canfield for their 1992 allegation in Coup d’Etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy that he had been in Dallas on 22 November 1963 (although there was a CIA memo asking for this to be covered up) .

He was later heavily implicated in the Watergate affair with Richard Nixon, and also with CIA black operations in Vietnam and Central America. (See the numerous sites and his deathbed autobiography, American Spy.) Hunt effectively blackmailed Richard Nixon into paying him $1million as hush money after Watergate.

The subsequent death of his wife in a mysterious plane crash revealed that she too was on contract to the CIA and was carrying $100,000 at the time. See also Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy (New York, 1974) and Victor Marchetti’s ‘CIA to admit Hunt Involvement in JFK killing’, Spotlight 14 Aug. 1978.

CIA man E Howard Hunt was almost certainly in Dallas on the day: see the admission by CIA officer S. Helperan that he had initialled a CIA memo from Richard Helms assistant that expressed concern that ‘Hunt’s presence in Dallas on 22 Nov would leak out’.

See also the extract from the New York Post of 14 Jan. 2007:
‘HUNT BLAMES JFK HIT ON LBJ

‘January 14, 2007

‘E. HOWARD Hunt – the shadowy former CIA man who organized the Watergate break-in and was once eyed in the assassination of President Kennedy – bizarrely says that Lyndon Johnson could be seen as a prime suspect in the rubout.

‘Only the most far-out conspiracy theorists believe in scenarios like Hunt’s. But in a new memoir, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond, due out in April, Hunt, 88, writes: “Having Kennedy liquidated, thus elevating himself to the presidency without having to work for it himself, could have been a very tempting and logical move on Johnson’s part. LBJ had the money and the connections to manipulate the scenario in Dallas and is on record as having convinced JFK to make the appearance in the first place. He further tried unsuccessfully to engineer the passengers of each vehicle, trying to get his good buddy, Gov. [John] Connolly, to ride with him instead of in JFK’s car – where . . . he would have been out of danger.”

‘Hunt says Johnson also had easy access to CIA man William Harvey, who’d been demoted when he tried to have Fidel Castro poisoned in defiance of orders to drop covert operations against Cuba. Harvey was “a ruthless man who was not satisfied with his position in the CIA and its government salary,” Hunt writes. “He definitely had dreams of becoming [CIA director] and LBJ could do that for him if he were president . . . [LBJ] would have used Harvey because he was available and corrupt.”’

 

 

HUNT, H. L. (HAROLDSON LAFAYETTE)

Haroldson Lafayette Hunt, the boss of the immensely rich Hunt Oil Company of Dallas was not only by far the richest of all the Texas oil millionaires but he is also, and more importantly, the one who hated Kennedy most. H. L. Hunt was also a longtime friend, admirer and financial ‘angel’ of the most prominent Texas politician of the time, Lyndon B. Johnson, the man who was destined to automatically become President of the United States the moment Kennedy died.

H. L. Hunt was a prominent member of the Suite 8F Group and an oil billionaire. He spent a fortune bankrolling ‘anti-Communist’ groups and was a supporter of Richard Nixon. His son Lamar Hunt met both Jack Ruby and Eugene Brading the day before the assassination.

He has been accused of being one of the ‘committee behind the crime’ by LBJ’s mistress, Madeline Brown’

See the usual clutch of research websites, plus the Warren Report, Summers, Lane’s Rush to Judgment, and Coincidence or Conspiracy by Fensterwald and Ewing (New York, 1977).

 

HSCA (House Select Committee on Assassinations)

The HSCA was set up in 1976 to look at the JFK and Martin Luther King assassinations, and reported in 1979 (after RFK’s murder). The HSCA met in secret and was a reluctant government response to the public outcry following the public showing of the Zapruder film and a torrent of books, articles and video commentaries pointing out the obvious flaws and lies in the Warren Commission’s Report.

The HSCA concluded that there had been a conspiracy and that four shots, not three as claimed by Warren, were fired. After the Committee had reported, it was discovered that the CIA evidence had been rigged and that the CIA’s liaison to the Committee, George Joannides had actually been heavily involved with several of the anti-Castro groups in 1963 and may have known – or even run – several of the suspects in the Cuban Exiles DRE group. (See report of the HSCA, 29 March 1979.)

CIA officer Joannides’s dirty tricks role at the HSCA only came to light after his death in 2007; see the Real History Archives of 22 Oct. 2007 and the stories by Gerald Posner in Newsweek of November 2003, and the full exposure by Jefferson Morley in Salon of December 2003.