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Here’s our recent Maverick News Channel marathon 3.5 hour longform interview with JFK researcher and author Jim DiEugenio on the 60th Anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, as well as his latest collaboration with Oliver Stone on “JFK Revisited,” the newly-filed National Archives lawsuit over the JFK Records Act, and much more. Enjoy! James DiEugenio interview

Kennedy nerd since childhood; studying the JFK assassination since 1984. Historian, independent journalist (spent 35 years in the mainstream media but I think I’m fully recovered now. 🤕). Currently an occasional co-host of Maverick News from 6-9 p.m. Eastern nightly. Here’s our recent 3.5 hour long form interview with JFK researcher and author Jim DiEugenio on the 60th Anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, as well as his latest collaboration with Oliver Stone on “JFK Revisited,” the newly-filed National Archives lawsuit over the JFK Records Act, and much more. James DiEugenio interview Been reading this forum for almost 20 years, finally took the proverbial plunge and became a member! It’s an honor to be here with so many Kennedy scholars and I look forward to learning more from you all.

https://kennedysandking.com/news-items/michele-metta-interviews-jim-dieugenio-on-jfk-the-cia-shaw-and-italy Michele Metta is an Italian journalist whose recent discovery of documents concerning Centro Mondiale Commerciale-Permindex has resulted in a number of groundbreaking essays on the interconnections between Italian fascists, US and Italian politicians, and the intelligence communities. MM: Hi, Jim. First, let me say I am honored to interview one of the best experts in the world on the plot that killed JFK. Welcome. An introductory question, just to break the ice: your name suggests Italian roots. Is that so? JD: Yes, both my parents were Italian. MM: Where does your passion towards that fundamental watershed of history, John Kennedy’s assassination, come from? JD: One day, many years after it was published, I picked up the Playboy interview with Jim Garrison. I was really puzzled because the guy seemed to make so much sense to me, much more sensible than the Warren Commission. So it seemed to me that he had been unfairly attacked by the media. So that posed the question as to why he had been attacked. Which meant that the mainstream media was not interested in getting to the bottom of the JFK case. And that has been verified by the new document releases that came out this year. Unfortunately we had to wait fifty years for those documents. MM: You are author of several astonishing books that I strongly recommend to everyone. One of them, Destiny Betrayed, highlights the greatness of Jim Garrison. Would you please explain it to our readers? JD: In the second edition of Destiny Betrayed, we see two things at work. First, how a very small bit of information, the address of Guy Banister on a pamphlet Oswald was handing out in New Orleans, mushroomed into the first real investigation into the Kennedy assassination, three years after JFK was murdered. In other words, the peeling back of Oswald’s true role as an undercover intelligence agent began to rearrange the circumstances of the crime. Second, the massive force used by the CIA, the FBI and the mass media to smear and to squelch Garrison’s investigation was unprecedented on a domestic level at that time. It’s usually the kind of campaign the CIA would use abroad to attack a designated political opponent. That is how seriously they took Garrison as a threat. MM: Why did JFK have to die? JD: In my opinion, this is not just a matter of any one policy issue. Some people say it was over Cuba, some over Vietnam. Kennedy was breaking with the status quo over several issues, both domestically and in foreign policy. And he did it pretty quickly. For example, he changed Eisenhower’s Congo policy within a matter of days after being inaugurated. In Indonesia, he decided to back Sukarno, when the CIA had previously tried to overthrow him. Domestically, he wanted to open up more state banks as opposed to Federal Reserve branches to make it easier to borrow money, and, unlike Eisenhower and Nixon, he really was going to move ahead on civil rights, through his brother Bobby Kennedy. In retrospect, it’s really kind of remarkable how much he did in less than three years to further the liberal ideal of progressive change. And by 1963, the Powers That Be said, “Enough is enough.” MM: What are the biggest bombshells you reveal in your excellent books? JD: In the second edition of Destiny Betrayed, I think it’s the fact that Allen Dulles went to see former president Harry Truman in April of 1964, while Dulles was sitting on the Warren Commission. Truman had written an editorial for the Washington Post, which was published about one month after Kennedy’s death. But he started it about 8 days after the assassination. He said the CIA had gotten out of control and he never foresaw such a thing when he signed the National Security Act. Dulles wanted him to retract that editorial. Truman would not. But as Dulles left, he said words to the effect that Kennedy had not really chastised the CIA for usurping his policy in Vietnam. Meaning, Dulles thought that this is why Truman had written the editorial!Which is a remarkable admission, because no one at that time thought the JFK murder was over the Vietnam issue. The other aspect was the number of infiltrators the CIA sent to obstruct Garrison’s investigation, and the lengths they went to in their surveillance and in misleading him. One of them, Gordon Novel, was hired by Allen Dulles himself to bug Garrison’s office. MM: You do more than write books. You are also the soul of other projects. For example: websites. Do you want to talk a bit about this? JD: Me and a friend of mine, Al Rossi, maintain the website kennedysandking. com, and I think it’s a good site with news and stories and visual essays about the assassinations of the Sixties: both Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The Internet is one of the last bastions of freedom of speech in America. And I think it’s important to take advantage of it while it lasts. Because, with very rare exceptions, the mainstream media does not cover these cases to any serious degree. But yet, they are central to history in my view. Things would have been quite different if those four men had lived. MM: Are you satisfied or disappointed with the very recent release of documents about John Kennedy? JD: I am not satisfied with the way it was done. I do not think President Trump should have yielded to pressure brought upon him at the last minute by the CIA and FBI to thwart the actual letter of the law. This has allowed literally thousands of pages of documents to be released in redacted form, or even with whole pages blanked out. This battle will now have to probably be waged in court because Trump gave in. MM: As you know, I uncovered the CMC documents. Centro Mondiale Commerciale was the Italian branch of Permindex. On the CMC Board of Directors there was Clay Shaw. Thanks to those exclusive documents, I demonstrated the importance of so many Italian characters for a real understanding of what’s behind November 22, 1963. However, to my surprise, on this I met with the hostility of some US researchers. Fortunately, there are excellent exceptions: one is Oliver Stone, who has openly praised my findings. Another excellent exception is you. After taking this opportunity to warmly thank you both, I also want to ask you please to explain the risks of an examination of the JFK Assassination too confined to the US side. JD: I think it constricts the picture. Because what Kennedy was doing was not limited to just the USA. Therefore, his murder had an impact that was worldwide. And the people who were opposed to him were very aware of the things he was doing in his foreign policy. In regards to that shadowy entity called the CMC, the revelations about it are still coming out today, through people like you. And as far as Italy goes, in David Talbot’s book, The Devil’s Chessboard, he shows how Kennedy was pushing for a policy to pull the socialists into the mainstream of Italian politics. A policy opposed by William Harvey, a CIA officer stationed in Italy, and also the publishing family the Luces. In my opinion, after Kennedy’s death, that policy was countered by the “strategy of tension” that began to terrorize Italy. See, it always puzzled me that Clay Shaw said he was a Wilson-FDR-JFK liberal. If so, why did he have the name and address of a member of the Borghese family in his address book?And why was he a part of this Permindex association with so many wealthy, and rightwing, worldwide members in it? Because, as the new documents reveal, Clay Shaw lied on the stand when he said he was not associated with the CIA. He was a highly compensated contract agent, and his role with the CMC was a part of that, according to FBI agent Regis Kennedy. But further, the CIA we now know did all they could to cover up this part of his life, including destroying documents about him that would show how useful he was to them. In my opinion, his association with Permindex in Italy was the key to opening the door on Shaw.

“Mary’s Mosaic”: A litmus test of JFK research integrity Jim Fetzer “There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.” – Anis Nin Some issues within JFK research represent litmus tests that separate the competent from the frivolous, the courageous from the cowardly, and the honest from the dishonest, where some estimates have gone so far as to suggest that as much as 95% of members of the JFK research community are promoting an agenda to sow confusion and uncertainty, even in those cases where the evidence for a conclusion has made the question beyond reasonable doubt, precisely because, once the evidence has been properly understood, no alternative explanation is reasonable. That, I submit, is the case in relation to the fabrication of the Zapruder film and the other home movies, as I have documented over and over again. The 60 witnesses to the limo stop, a series of actions taken by Clint Hill, Officer James Chaney’s motoring forward (none of which are present in the extant film) and the blacking out of the fist-sized wound at the back of JFK’s head in frames after 313(but where the wound itself can actually be seen in later frames such as 374)–serves as a litmus test that differentiates between researchers who are competent, courageous and honest from those who are not. Another now appears to be the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, where the evidence of CIA complicity in her death, as in the assassination of JFK, persuasively presented by Peter Janney in Mary’s Mosaic (2012), is simply overwhelming. I submit that anyone who reads this book is going to be astonished at the depth, the passion and the intelligence with which it has been written–and the rigor and detail with which it explains her assassination by the CIA. Mary was the former wife of Cord Meyer, who began his career dedicated to the promotion of world peace but ended it working for the military-industrial-intelligence complex as the Director of Plans for the CIA. In his “Last Confessions”, E. Howard Hunt confided in his son, St. John, that those who had been responsible for the death of JFK had included Lyndon B. Johnson, Cord Meyer, David Atlee Phillips, William Harvey, David Sanchez Morales and Frank Sturgis, among others. Cord Meyer and John F. Kennedy had both enjoyed enormous success early in their careers, where JFK would enter the political arena as a candidate for office, first as Senator from Massachusetts, later as President of the United States, while Cord would by induced by Allan Dulles to join the CIA. Mary Pinchot was a remarkable woman who fascinated them both, where she would marry Cord Meyer but later divorce him and subsequently become involved with JFK in what was far more than an affair, where she appears to have become enormously important to him as he became a statesman for peace. In the aftermath of his assassination, she became determined to expose those who had been responsible for his death, which led to her death, in turn, which, as Peter Janney explains, involved high-level officials of the CIA, including his own father, Wistar Janney, and James Jesus Angleton (who apparently authorized her murder), but where even Ben Bradlee, who was married to Mary’s sister, helped to cover it up. Mary was found on a towpath adjacent to a pond on 12 October 1964, which she used to walk from her Georgetown home to her artist’s studio, where she had been apprehended and, after a brief struggle, during which she cried out for help, was shot in the left temple. Remarkably, the bullet did not kill her outright. She crawled to a nearby tree and tried to regain her footing, but was dragged back to the path and shot again, this time through her back and into her heart, killing her instantly. Her cry for help had brought Henry Wiggins, who had come to fix a faux stalled Nash Rambler on the roadway above the crime scene, to look over the wall and observe a man standing over her, whom he described (and as was broadcast by the police) as a Negro male wearing a dark baseball cap, light-colored jacket and dark shoes, who appeared to be five feet eight or ten inches tall and weighing about 185 pounds (Mary’s Mosaic, p. 42). When he was apprehended in the vicinity, however, Ray Crump was only partially attired as the person Wiggins had described. He was weighed in at five foot, five and a half inches tall and weighed 145 pounds, which may have been exaggerations, because his driver’s license showed him to be only five foot three and a half inches tall and weighing only 130 pounds (Mary’s Mosaic, p. 51). Subsequently, a man who identified himself as “Lt. William L. Mitchell”, who claimed to have been jogging on the towpath and to have passed by a person fitting the description that Wiggins had provided (but whose name and identity would turn out to be fabrications), likewise described him as a Negro male, wearing a baseball cap, a light-colored jacked and dark shoes (Mary’s Mosaic, pp. 61-62). When Ray Crump was apprehended, soaking wet, with his fly still open (from the sexual escapade he had been engaged in with “Vivian”, a married woman, who confirmed their tryst on the rocks not long before the murder in a sworn affidavit, but was unwilling to testify because she feared her husband would kill her if he found out; Mary’s Mosaic, pp. 95-96), he was wearing neither the baseball cap nor the light-colored jacket, which had been temporarily lost when he had fallen into the water upon awakening on the rocks. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that both Wiggins and “Mitchell” are describing someone other than Ray Crump, who was not only substantially shorter and far lighter in weight than the man Wiggins, in particular, had described, but could not have been wearing the dark baseball cap or the light-colored jacket at the time. As “Vivian” had confirmed, they had been having a sexual dalliance on the rocks. He had fallen asleep and she had departed, where he lost them both in the water when he awakened disoriented and fell into the pond. The police and the DA’s Office realized that they had a weak case, where there was no forensic evidence that tied Ray Crump to the crime: there was no weapon; he did not own a gun; his height and weight did not match; even the jacket, when recovered from the water, had no signs of blood, even though they believed the killer would have been coated with it. While there was a trace of lipstick on his jacket (which was no doubt Vivian’s or even Ray’s wife’s), they did not pursue it–and even acknowledged in a memorandum that their case against Ray Crump “was very weak” (Mary’s Mosaic, p. 398). Nevertheless, they assigned their strongest, most aggressive prosecutor, Al Huntman, Assistant Chief of the Criminal Division, US Attorney’s Office, Washington, DC, to the case. While Ray Crump was defended by a brilliant attorney, Dovey Roundtree, who emphasized the kinds of discrepancies that I have noted here, it is difficult to believe that anyone today, unless they have either an inadequate understanding of the evidence or a powerful bias against truth and justice, would continue to maintain Ray Crump had actually committed the crime (CTKA review). Even then, in the highly impoverished state of the evidence, Dovey was able to create sufficient reasonable doubt that Ray Crump was unanimously acquitted at trial. And, as readers will discover for themselves, the additional evidence that Peter Janney was able to uncover makes the case for Ray Crump’s innocence simply overwhelming and beyond reasonable doubt. I am aghast at the dimensions of the distortions in this review. Lisa Pease, the closest collaborator of Jim DiEugenio, begins her review as follows: “Peter Janney wrote a book entitled Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and their Vision for World Peace. “From the subtitle, researchers can be forgiven for thinking that Janney’s book is a serious contribution to our side, as many of us believe that the CIA killed John Kennedy in part because he was trying to end the Cold War and rein in covert operations. “But Janney’s book is such a frustrating mix of fact, fiction, speculation and unverifiable data that I (Lisa Pease) cannot recommend this book. Indeed, I’d rather it came with a warning label attached” (CTKA review). However, having investigated more than one strange death myself, I (Jim Fetzer) must say that I find these introductory passages both grotesque and irresponsible. Given the consideration that, by the end of Mary’s Mosaic, the actual assassin had actually confessed and explained in detail how it had been done and that Peter Janney has convincingly established the complicity of the CIA–which had to silence Mary Meyer, because she was uncovering its role in the assassination of JFK and was in a position to do something about it–I find her complaints to be virtually incomprehensible. While Lisa Pease does her very best to create the impression that Ray Crump (who had no motive) could actually have committed the crime, the kinds of things she says about Peter Janney’s brilliant book (where Peter had known Mary in his childhood and whose research would lead led him to the agonizing realization that his own father had been complicit), which is a completely unwarranted characterization of Mary’s Mosaic, appear to me to be completely justified in relation to her own review, where I (Jim Fetzer) would fashion a parallel complaint about her review as follows: “Researchers can be forgiven for thinking that Lisa Pease’s CTKA review is a serious contribution to JFK research. Mary’s Mosaic provides ample substantiation that the CIA killed John Kennedy in part because he was trying to end the Cold War and rein in covert operations. But her review of Peter Janney’s book is such a frustrating mix of fact, fiction, speculation and unverifiable data I cannot recommend it. I’d rather that it came with a warning label attached”. Indeed, it is inconceivable to me that anyone who has actually read the book completely to its end, where crucial aspects of what Peter Janney reports there about uncovering the actual plot to murder Mary Pinchot Meyer are presented, could continue to regard Ray Crump as anyone other than the “patsy”. Since those include the detailed confession of the actual assassin, who was the very “Lt. William L. Mitchell”, who explains how it had been done, including the use of spotters and luring the auto repair man to the scene to witness Mary’s screams, I am baffled how anyone could entertain reasonable doubts about it. There is no reasonable alternative explanation for what happened to Mary and, instead of attempting to debunk his landmark research, she and her associate ought to be touting it as a major contribution to JFK research, which I would liken to an insider’s view that confirms the findings of Noel Twyman, Bloody Treason (1997). What also stuns me is that I find a pattern emerging from the work of Lisa Pease and Jim DiEugeio. I have had several encounters with Jim over the years, one of which occurred some time back on an extended thread devoted to Judyth Vary Baker, who has authored Me & Lee (2010). Jim DiEugenio sought to debunk a fascinating report of a woman who remained sitting in a car during the visit of Lee Oswald to State Representative Reeves Morgan–whom Judyth claims to have been herself–whose presence was witnessed by his daughter, Mary, where Mary’s report surfaced during the trial of Clay Shaw. Jim DiEugenio attempted to debunk Mary’s corroborating testimony on the ground that she had later repudiated it, which, as I observed to him at the time, was a violation of the principle that earlier testimony is preferable to later, especially when witnesses have been subjected to pressure to change it. And, in another case, I faulted the biased research of Jefferson Morley and David Talbot related to the presence of CIA officials at the Ambassador Hotel at the time of Bobby’s shooting–he would die the following day–where I had to reprimand Jim for his irresponsible acceptance of their shameless efforts to whitewash the identifications, which was supported by overwhelmingly more evidence than they produced against it. Why Lisa Pease would attempt to cast doubt on Peter Janney’s thoroughly researched and meticulously documented study, which carefully ties together the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, the CIA and the assassination of JFK, is difficult to fathom. But there is a troubling pattern here, which suggests to me that, whatever their motives may be, Lisa Pease and Jim DiEugenio, who has been praising Lisa’s review, appear to be undermining research (and not in this case only) concerning major advances in our understanding of the modus operandi of the CIA in events of this kind.