Bill Simpich

I think it is really important to look at people who were trying to solve the JFK case from the very beginning. Let's focus - for a minute - on the journalists studying the JFK assassination and who died within a couple years after 11/22/63. For a number of reasons, most journalists steered away from trying to solve the case. Journalists have little control over their lives. Their main function is to follow the story and move on. But four journalists tried to solve the case in 1964. I believe the fate of these journalists chilled other Dallas reporters from taking a hard look at the evidence. Most of them were content to go along. Three of those journalists in Dallas were Jim Koethe, Bill Hunter and Thayer Waldo. I went through Marguerite Oswald's files last week at TCU in Fort Worth - and found out that Waldo was working with Koethe and Hunter. I did not know that before, and I had been studying all three of these men for years. Thayer Waldo was in the police basement on 11/24 and identified Lt. George Butler (unlike other sources) as the man who was really in charge of security at the time of Oswald's transfer. He observed how nervous Butler was in the final moments before Oswald was shot. Penn Jones reported that Butler was the head of the KKK in Dallas, many of the Dallas police were Klan members - he even tried to recruit Penn Jones into the Klan Butler was H.L. Hunt's driver. To this day, the Dallas Police Administration building is named after George Butler. You can find it right outside the Lorenzo Hotel in Dallas. Waldo testified to the Warren Commission in 1964. He was the victim of a dirty trick by Secret Service man Mike Howard and his local police brother Pat Howard. Mike was the local SS man - assigned to Jackie Kennedy - he escorted the Kennedys to their rooms In Fort Worth the night of 11/21/63. The Howard brothers told Waldo that Charles Givens - the African American janitor who had provided alibi evidence stating that LHO was not on the sixth floor at noon - had actually seen Oswald shooting at JFK from the sixth floor window. Waldo printed the story in the Dallas Morning News. This caused Givens to change his story - now saying that he didn't see LHO shooting but that he did remember LHO staying up at the sixth floor at noon. Givens was used as the principal witness against Oswald even though he had changed his story. I believe Don Thomas writes about this in his book Hear No Evil, and I have researched it myself. Mark Lane got Waldo to tell him that his source was the Howard brothers. Lane immediately outed the Howard brothers at Waldo's source in the National Guardian during May 1964. Unfortunately, it was a one-minute scandal. The Howard brothers were questioned - they said that Waldo and Lane were lying - and that was the end of any official investigation of the Howard brothers. But the Givens story was used by the Warren Commission and others to seal the tale of Oswald's guilt. Waldo's career in Texas was destroyed. He returned to working in Latin America, where he continued to study the case and aided Garrison during 1967. Koethe and Hunter returned to working on their book. In late 1964, Koethe was killed in his home by someone, allegedly with a karate chop as he was exiting from the shower. All of his notes to the book were missing. The District Attorney Henry Wade actually indicted a local bad-guy named Larry Reno for the killing of Koethe. Long-time Dallas researcher Betty Windsor has been working on this case for the last 60 years. What got her involved was that she and her husband were good friends with Jim Koethe. She told me that the reason Wade indicted Reno was because the uproar in the journalism communities was so great that "he had to pick up somebody". In a very unusual circumstance, the grand jury refused to indict Reno. In 99.9999% of all cases, the prosecutor can get the jury to indict a ham sandwich. Why didn't it happen here. Betty told me why. She said that she interviewed one of the grand jurors after the dismissal. She said the grand juror told her that Henry Wade told the grand jury after the completion of the presentation of the evidence and told them not to indict the defendant Larry Reno. He told them that it was his belief that Larry Reno had nothing to do with it. Betty told me that she agreed with Wade - that Reno had nothing to do with it. The DA had to pick up somebody. They picked up Reno. Reno was arrested a few months later for another burglary, and did significant time. Reno was just a fall guy, to get the journalistic community to back away. Bill Hunter moved to Long Beach, California. A few months later, two cope were horsing around with their weapons while Hunter was conducting an interview in the police station.. One of them had an "accidental" misfire that killed Hunter. The officer had a brother in the Dallas Police Department. The offending officers got a slap on the wrist. I don't know if Hunter had any notes left to steal. One other journalist comes to mind - Dorothy Kilgallen of New York City. She had exclusive interviews with Jack Ruby. She was working hard on the case and believed that she had cracked it. The circumstances of her death are so suspicious as to border on the absurd - Mark Shaw has written good books on the subject. No one could find her notes, either. The notes were believed to be in the possession of her colleague Mrs. Earl Smith. Smith died two days after Dorothy.

Thanks to all who weighed in - here is the last section of the Cover-Up chapter - all comments appreciated. November 24: The cover-up goes into high gear after Oswald is killed The CIA’s Cuba division said it had no duty to conduct an investigation The next day, November 24, Angleton learned from Win Scott that Cubela had met with Kostikov at the Soviet consulate back in late 1962.[ 92 ] Angleton said that FitzGerald would only provide Cubela’s 201 biographical file. FitzGerald relied on his divison’s autonomy and refused to provide the Cubela operational file to Angleton’s staff or to the Warren Commission. The story is that FitzGerald did not want to be subjected to an Angleton molehunt.[ 93 ] With all the interest that both the FBI and the CIA had in Cubela over the years, Angleton’s claim that he did not know about Cubela’s background is not credible.[ 94 ] Equally incredible is Helms’ and FitzGerald’s testimony that they did not “ask” Cubela to assassinate Castro.[ 95 ] FitzGerald knew that Cubela was insecure, and that he had a problem. From the moment of the assassination, FitzGerald was concerned that the assassin came from the ranks of the anti-Castro Cubans. FitzGerald was close to JFK, and wept when Oswald was killed, saying, “Now we’ll never know.”[ 96 ] FitzGerald died in 1967. His executive officer testified that the Headquarters Cuban desk was not asked to conduct any investigation into the Kennedy assassination. Shackley did not feel he had any duty to investigate the assassination. "I was just told to watch the island." said Ted Shackley. "The mainland was the FBI's territory." [ 97 ] Similarly, no one from Shackley’s JMWAVE station in Miami conducted any serious investigation on the assassination. Individuals who allegedly gave orders to do some investigating were JMWAVE C/FI Warren Frank, Tony Sforza, and the former LIENVOY chief Charles Anderson III. Anderson was told by Sforza that he had received specific instructions from Shackley about how the AMOT service was to go about aiding in the investigation. Anderson said that the CIA had limitations on its “right to conduct investigations of persons residing in the USA, whether they were alien residents or US citizens.”[ 98 ] I am unaware of any documents created as a result of these probes. Another officer said that when he spoke to his agents in meetings in Miami, Tampa, Nassau and Mexico City about the murder of JFK, his briefing was strictly oral and contained no written questions.[ 99 ] JMWAVE said little on the subject other than that the Cuban exiles were in grief despite their policy differences with JFK.[ 100 ] When Angleton was asked about it many years later, he explained that the WAVE materials were under Western Hemisphere chief J. C. King, that the Headquarters materials were under FitzGerald, and that CI did not have access to their information “as far as it related to the Kennedy assassination or to the leads on the Cubans.” The FBI’s Nationalities Intelligence conducted no investigation Hoover had his own derelictions to hide. There was no good reason to Hoover to abruptly pull Nationalities Intelligence off the case after their avid work on the FPCC and Oswald. Hoover did not want the record to reflect the depth of the anti-Castro exiles’ anger at JFK. Nor did Hoover want to know what Nationalities Intelligence chief Ray Wannall knew about the FPCC and Oswald before November 22. The FBI men in Dallas certainly did not want Hoover or the public to know that Oswald had worked at the Jaggars photographic firm and had assisted the Army Mapping Service, an agency that was analyzing maps of Cuba obtained by U-2 flights during the height of the Cuban missile crisis.[ 101 ] Ann Egerter claimed months later that she had no way of knowing whether Oswald had ever worked for the Jaggars firm. In the first days after 11/22, Ray Wannall, repeatedly provided the FBI with essential background on Oswald, including but not limited to letters that Oswald had written to the FPCC in New York City and turned over to the FBI by agent T-3245-S*, who was almost certainly FPCC staffer Victor Vicente. Vicente was the same man that Anita Potocki and the joint CIA-FBI team had inserted into Cuba in the AMSANTA operation during the summer of 1963. Wannall and his Nationalities Intelligence division were cut out of the assassination investigation.[ 102 ] A flow chart details those in charge of the espionage aspects of Oswald’s case involved the espionage chief Bill Branigan of the Domestic Intelligence Division and his men: Burt Turner, Lambert L. Anderson, Marvin Gheesling, and Charles Brennan. The department not included on this flow chart is Ray Wannall’s Nationalities Intelligence Division, and its Cuban section.[ 103 ] This is no accident. The FBI’s approach to the Oswald file was to label it as a “dual-captioned” matter prior to the assassination. Oswald’s defection and his ongoing contacts with the Soviets had been the terrain of Bill Branigan’s Espionage Section since 1959, while the Cuban side of the Oswald file was handled by Ray Wannall and Nationalities Intelligence.[ 104 ] Ray Wannall testified to the Church Committee that Nationalities Intelligence was within the Counter-intelligence Branch and handled matters relating to countries other than the Soviet Union, Soviet Bloc, and Communist China.[ 105 ] Ray Wannall's deposition is absolutely devastating. Just about the first question is: "Do you know Vince Nasca?" Wannall had known Nasca well, and since 1951.[ 106 ] Wannall then stated who were the FBI’s top experts on Cuba during 1963: "Anti-Castro would be Vince Nasca, and pro-Castro I guess would be Ray Mullens, not certain. Coordinated by Richard Cotter, unit chief, most outgoing flowed thru him, not ingoing. As section chief, I had pretty good knowledge of this material."[ 107 ] Nasca received copies of Oswald’s exploits right after his defection to the Soviet Union – he signed for these documents with his initials VHN. Nasca and Wannall were kept in the loop on discussions about assassinating Castro even after JFK’s death. Nasca, who was the FBI’s absolute expert on the Cuban exiles, told the Church Committee during the 70s that he was given no investigative tasks regarding the JFK assassination. If they kept a heavy hitter like Nasca away from the investigation, it’s a sure thing that Hoover had zero concern that Castro was involved in killing Kennedy. But that’s not all. Wannall admitted that his entire Nationalities Intelligence division was kept out of the JFK investigation. "(T)he investigation of the assassination was not in the Division and I wasn't privy to any of the discussions." "Were you at any time tasked with any requirements in that investigation or any people under you tasked?" "I can't recall that we were, because even the phases of it that spilled over into our Division were handled in another section." "Which section was that?" "That was the Espionage Section." "Was that Branigan's section?" "Yes".[ 108 ] Richard Cotter, who was Wannall’s #1 man between 1962 to 1965, described Branigan's section as "the Soviet section". Cotter is very clear that "if the Bureau was involved in exploring a Cuban involvement in the assassination, it almost certainly would have been run out of our section, yes." He agreed that Nasca, Wannall and himself was the go-to guys on Cuba. He agreed with Wannall that there were never even any discussions about whether any Cubans were involved in the JFK assassination. Cotter admitted that the obviousness of such a possibility "looks like two and two today, but apparently it didn't look like two and two then". Unlike Wannall, who looks like a straight shooter until you review his interview, Cotter comes across as a truth teller. Cotter told with some pride the aforementioned story about a COINTELPRO action that successfully turned FPCC leaders Richard Gibson and Berta Green against each other, and said that he got mail about Oswald visiting both the Soviet and Cuban consulates before the assassination. The Cuban angle was the reason the Oswald case came to his desk. Going back to Cotter's boss, Wannall admits over and over again that he was cut out of the investigation of JFK's murder and did nothing, although his section housed the experts on the subject. Wannall finally speculates that maybe his section questioned informants, only to be confronted with a memo saying such a practice was "Not desirable. Would serve to promote rumors." signed by Cotter. Finally, in utter frustration, the interrogator Paul Wallach – the most thorough of all the attorneys in this case - let Wannall have it: "What I'm getting at very frankly, Mr. Wannall, is that we have an investigation where a heck of a lot of Bureau evidence, your agents did thousands of man-hours of work tracing down every possible piece of physical evidence, every possible ramification in certain areas, whereas in the Cuban area it seems very frankly that almost nothing was done, and what I'm trying to get a grasp on, what the Senators are concerned about, is why?" Since Wannall had no answer, he went off into an anecdote. Wallach, undaunted, went at it again: "it appears to me as a layman that we have this huge counterintelligence machinery that was never called into play in the Cuban area...” Again, Wannall did not deny it. Wallach ended by confronting Wannall with a story about Johnny Roselli’s lawyer, Edward P. Morgan. Morgan recounted how Castro was ready to retaliate about the assassination attempts on his life, that the FBI was notified in an "eyes only" memo that Morgan knew where Castro's purported JFK assassins were living in New Jersey, and that the FBI did no follow-up. Wannall had nothing to say. Wannall’s boss William Sullivan made it clear that Hoover should not have brushed Morgan’s revelation aside.[ 109 ] It seems plain that Hoover did not want to know who killed JFK, whether the assassins came from the left or the right. The FBI’s Soviet experts didn’t want to know about the Cuban evidence A veteran agent, Kenneth Raupauch, revealed that the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division kept the evidence regarding the "so-called Cuban faction" strictly to themselves. The FBI’s Soviet experts Gheesling, Turner, Brennan, and Lambert L. Anderson kept close control of any information involving Cuba. Turner was the one who held the assignment card for Oswald prior to the assassination. The focus for these men was "Oswald and security". Turner was considered the most brilliant by everyone, but he was not top dog. Turner answered to supervisors Branigan, Lenihan, John Stokes, Leonard Linton, and Gheesling. Lenihan's responsibility was New Orleans and Oswald generally. This came directly from Hoover, and included Oswald's FPCC contacts in New York. Stokes was Mexico City. Gheesling was Dallas. Lenihan is very careful to say any Cuban leads would be for "Cuban section of our division", without saying who that is. It was Lambert Anderson. Lambert L. Anderson was an intriguing character, as he was with Nationalities Intelligence, had the FPCC file, and he was "the new guy" at the Cuban desk. He answered to Branigan and Robert Lenihan, who were the case supervisors of the Domestic Intelligence Division.[ 110 ] He only served with the Cuban section for a short period of time, for a few months in 1963. FBI supervisor Richard Cotter said Anderson was “fairly new…I wouldn’t consider him an expert on Cuba, but he did have this case.” [ 111 ] Hoover’s reaction to Oswald’s death was to focus on him as the lone assassin Right after Oswald was murdered on November 24, Hoover told White House aide Walter Jenkins in a phone call “the thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.”[ 112 ] At 4 pm that afternoon, Al Belmont called Shanklin to say that he was sending two of his investigators, Richard Rogge and Fletcher Thompson, down to Dallas to essentially wrap the case up. This memo is written with absolute authority, by a man who had been the head of counterintelligence for the FBI over the years and was clearly more in command than Hoover himself. This is hours after the shocking murder of Oswald that made most people in America sit up and wonder how many people were involved in the JFK assassination. Belmont calmly remarked, “We will set forth the items of evidence which make it clear that Oswald is the man who killed the President.”[ 113 ] On the next day, November 25, assistant attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach wrote a devastating memo to LBJ aide Bill Moyers stating that “the public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin, that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.”[ 114 ] Curiously, Katzenbach said shortly before he died that “I’d almost bet on the (anti-Castro) Cubans” as being in on the assassination – probably because he was no longer worried about triggering a war with the Soviets.[ 115 ] Also on November 25, Lyndon Johnson let columnist Joe Alsop know that he thought that Texas officials should resolve the case with the aid of the FBI, which would avoid any suggestions of “carpet-baggers”. Alsop pushed for non-Texan jurists to aid a national scope to the effort, but LBJ was wary of Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department people “lobbying them against the President”.[ 116 ] LBJ, like most politicans, wanted an investigation that he could control. On November 26, Belmont emphasized that it was important for the FBI to get out its report on the assassination as fast as possible. The emphasis was to ensure the public that they got the right man, and to get out their insight on Oswald’s background. Again, there was no concern about the shocking manner of Oswald’s death. “This report is to settle the dust…” I believe Belmont wanted everyone to go back to sleep, now that JFK was buried. Belmont emerges during this time as a key decision-maker, maybe even more than Hoover himself. Nov 23: Alan Belmont, the FBI's #3 man, had a big to-do list on the Oswald case Nov 24: As the country reeled in shock after Oswald's shooting, Belmont calmly wrote "we will set forth the items of evidence which make it clear that Oswald is the man who killed the President." Nov 26: Belmont explained that an FBI report would be promptly completed in the next week "to settle the dust…” David Phillips and other provocateurs convinced Johnson that a blue-ribbon commission was necessary to avoid the threat of war Other forces still wanted to whip the nation into the mood for war. Months later, when David Slawson met with Win Scott in Mexico City, Slawson made a point of citing the provocations of three men during the first two weeks after the assassination: Nicaraguan double agent Gilberto Alvarado, pre-Castro’s Cuba military intelligence chief Salvador Diaz Verson, and credit agency inspector Oscar Gutierrez Valencia.[ 117 ] Because of space limitations, I will only briefly discuss the Alvarado provocations, and will write a separate article about them in the future that is in greater depth. (Also see Rex Bradford’s articles on the subject at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website). I believe that these provocations were done in coordination with intelligence operatives aimed at sabotaging the investigation, and that much of it is the work of covert action chief David Phillips. HSCA counsel Dan Hardaway was convinced that Phillips was in charge of the disinformation passed on during the cover-up phase.[ 118 ] I believe that Phillips had to improvise the provocations on the spot, which is why, for example, the Alvarado story did not succeed in putting the US on a war footing against Castro. It played a big role, however, in forcing LBJ to form the Warren Commission. On November 26, CIA officer John Whitten sent a cable saying that he and Mexico City CIA station director Win Scott had uncovered evidence that Castro had paid Oswald to assassinate Kennedy. This was the information that came from the Nicaraguan agent Gilbert Alvarado, who also appears to have been working for US intelligence as he pointed the finger at the Cuban government as the cause of the assassination. Scott had told the Mexican president the previous day that he suspected Cuban involvement. On November 27, a conversation between CI/SIG chief Birch O'Neal and FBI liaison Sam Papich reveals that further analysis of Department 13 led them to believe that Kostikov is probably not a modern-day Antichrist. O’Neal said that he will call “Pete.”[ 119 ] This phone call was transcribed, and O’Neal wrote his own memo summarizing the call.[ 120 ] Pete Bagley, chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Russia station, modified his claim of four days earlier. Bagley now admitted that although Kostikov was KGB, the claim that he was with Department 13 was based solely on Kostikov’s involvement with TUMBLEWEED.[ 121 ] LBJ told his mentor Richard Russell that a relucant Earl Warren was finally convinced to head the Commission when "I just pulled out what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City..." Over the days from the 25th to the 29th, the phony Alvarado and Kostikov evidence forced President Lyndon Johnson to change his mind about Texans leading the assassination investigation. Johnson knew that Alvarado’s information was explosive and could send the US into a war with Cuba, which could drag in the USSR. The Kostikov evidence, shaky as it was, could also mean war with the Soviet Union. Reversing course, Johnson announced the formation of a blue-ribbon panel now known as the “Warren Commission” on November 29. With no advance notice to Johnson’s friend Senator Dick Russell, LBJ announced that Russell would be one of the commissioners. Always the dealmaker, LBJ reassured Russell that “all you’ll do is evaluate the Hoover report he has already made.”[ 122 ] For weeks after the assassination, the agencies were buried with phony evidence tying Oswald to a Soviet assassination team and Red Cuban plots. Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy probably knew little about the tapes, but acquiesced to the cover-up rather than run the risk of a war on Cuba which might include the USSR. This story explains why LBJ was so insistent that Chief Justice Earl Warren chair the investigating commission and prevent the possibility of "40 million dead Americans", and why the Warren Commission was denied access to the investigators, witnesses and documents needed to solve the case. To win over Warren, LBJ said that “I just pulled out what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City.” Immediately after this panel of chieftains was chosen, the Alvarado story was revealed to be a hoax. As seen above, it would take longer for the Kostikov story to be completely discredited. However, now the story of the assassination would be carefully massaged by men who knew how to work with evidence. After Hoover released CD 1, Whitten was stunned when he reviewed it After the FBI had the opportunity to review the Dallas crime evidence for 72 hours, they sent it back to Dallas. After the Dallas police created a belated inventory on 11/26/63, the evidence was provided to the FBI for a second time. This time, the evidence went to Wally Heitman, the Spanish-speaking Dallas FBI agent. Other writers have said that this sifting exercise was done to enable the FBI to review troublesome evidence such as Oswald’s wallets, as well as suppress problematic evidence such as Oswald’s Minox camera which was better known as a spy camera. In my mind, that’s right. Any other conclusion would require someone coming up with a full inventory for November 22. On November 26, Belmont gave the go-ahead to Dallas chief Shanklin to send this material to Washington, DC, acting as though they were seeing all of it for the first time. In the days ahead, Hoover was furious at Curry, refusing to work with the Dallas police for years afterwards. I think it was either because of Curry’s admission that the evidence was originally sent to Washington on the night of the assassination, or Curry’s continual refusal to agree that the assassination was caused by Oswald acting alone. In any case, Hoover followed Belmont’s advice – he bore down and produced a mammoth report on December 1 that claimed to address all the major issues of the assassination. As the report was based on the assumption that Oswald was the assassin and acted alone, the conclusion was predictable. This document is now known as Commission Document 1, or CD 1, and became the foundation for the Warren Report. Hoover promptly leaked it to the press to ensure everyone heard the FBI’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone and unaided. When Whitten got a look at CD 1 on or about December 6, he discovered “details of Oswald’s political activity in the United States; the pro-Cuban activity; …and so on.” Whitten said that the possible involvement of the Miami station did not emerge until he read CD 1 and learned more about Oswald’s pro-Castro activities in the US. The “basic source materials” can be seen in the carefully drafted packages put together during Whitten's short tenure by supervisors Manning Clements, Warren de Brueys, and Robert Gemberling. These were men that knew how to put together reports that eliminated most of the evidence that the Bureau didn’t want to hear about. Whitten emphasized that “I did not know anything about the CIA’s assassination plans against Castro. If I had, my investigation would have been entirely different. We would have had the Miami station kick off the full investigation.” Whitten also felt that the Cubela story was an “absolutely vital factor in analyzing the facts around the Kennedy assassination.” Unfortunately, most people did not know about the CIA’s plans to assassinate Castro until about 1975, despite the best efforts of journalists like Jack Anderson and a handful of others. At the same time, Whitten was apparently willing to go along with a plan to keep any information about the Mexico City tapes out of the general discussion, as shown below. After getting a look at CD 1 on December 6, Whitten wrote a memo to CIA Director McCone and other higher-ups stating, “There was absolutely no mention of the CIA in the report.”[ 123 ] Wittingly or unwittingly, Whitten’s action let anyone who knew the truth know that the Oswald imposter story – which is probably what the Mexico City station was referring to years later as “the Identity Case” – was not currently in consideration by the FBI and that it was probably safe to omit it from the investigation.[ 124 ] Meanwhile, Whitten couldn’t understand why the FPCC revelations in the report had been held back from him for two weeks, especially since Oswald’s FPCC ties were all over the newspapers. Whitten mentioned that “Oswald’s correspondence with American communists and with the Fair Play for Cuba committee is recorded in original letters.” The only thing that seemed to surprise him was Marina’s story that Oswald shot at General Edwin Walker. Marina was in a tough spot. It was reported that she said she would cooperate with the FBI if they could give her “some concrete assurances” that she could stay in the U.S. On that same day, someone at the CIA completed his own preliminary biographical study of Oswald.[ 125 ] The study has nothing about the incident with General Walker, but several references to Oswald’s FPCC activities in 1963.[ 126 ] Whitten’s report was not yet completed. Helms reassures Whitten that he can hold on to the investigation Whitten wrote a memo to Helms on 12/11/63 stating what his plans were for the investigation. Helms initialed his responses to each paragraph, including agreement to give Whitten leave from his present job as WH/3, which Whitten described to Helms as “a branch with 45 people in headquarters and well over 100 in seven Central American countries”.[ 127 ] Whitten never made any waves about the tapes or the difficulty the witnesses had in identifying Oswald in Mexico City, but he did flag the concern that CD 1 might reveal the phone tap operations in Mexico “because the Soviets would see that the FBI had advance information on the reason for Oswald’s visit to the Soviet Embassy”.[ 128 ] What Whitten meant in this passage illustrates the importance of being able to interview key witnesses while they are still alive. What did the FBI know about why Oswald was going to visit the Soviet Embassy? It sure looks like FBI supervisors knew that Oswald was wittingly or unwittingly part of an intelligence operation – such as the Tilton-Anderson anti-FPCC operation. It’s clear why Whitten cared if the Soviets would see that the FBI knew in advance that Oswald wanted a visa – because it might reveal the Mexico City wiretap operations. As Whitten was mulling over the next stage for the investigation, the new Warren Commission members and counsel were not impressed by the FBI’s work in the preparation of CD 1. CD 1 simply placed all the blame on Oswald, and displayed little investigative zeal other than placing a lot of raw reports between two covers. Sullivan told the Church Committee that Hoover then leaked the contents of CD 1 to the press in order to “deliberately pre-empt the Warren Commission’s findings”. On December 16, Chief Justice Earl Warren and chief counsel J. Lee Rankin discussed the problem and decided that they would need “some investigative staff” of their own when they reach a “tender spot” because they had no reports from the CIA or the State Department and “the (FBI) report has so many holes in it…it just doesn’t seem like they’re looking for things that this Commission has to look for.”[ 129 ] Whitten proceeded to expand an earlier 11/24 memo, entitled “We Discover Lee Oswald in Mexico City”.[ 130 ] Right about the same time, Whitten’s supervisor J.C. King wrote him a memo about the investigation to date, saying that matters have focused on Mexico City because of the Station’s superb job. He adds that “your analyses were major factors in the quick clarification of the case, blanking out the really ominous spectre of foreign backing.”[ 131 ] On about December 17, Whitten circulated this “Lee Oswald” memo and asks for corrections from Birch O’Neal and other CIA counterintelligence officers. Whitten’s memo ignored the role of the twin 10/10/63 cables, but it did suggest that the tapes survived the assassination. Angleton makes his move right before Christmas Whitten claimed that he had no idea about Oswald’s FPCC escapades and the rest until just hours before a major meeting with Helms about Whitten’s report in December. Whitten wrote that this initial draft would change when he obtained new information from the FBI, and sent it to McCone, Helms, Angleton, O’Neal and Murphy.[ 132 ] A note on a still-partially redacted routing slip indicates that SR/CI was to play a role in editing this initial draft of his report on Lee Oswald.[ 133 ] By December 20, Whitten had expanded his first draft into a second draft. The new draft says “our Mexico City station was given full background information on Oswald in a cable”.[ 134 ] It seems to me that Whitten had bought the faulty description of Oswald, even though it had his name as “Lee Henry Oswald” and no photograph. I don’t think Whitten was hiding any guilty knowledge. At the 12/24 meeting, Whitten said that “Angleton started to criticize my report terribly - without pointing out any inaccuracies, it was so full of wrong things, we could not possibly send it to the Bureau, and I just sat there and did not say a word. This was a typical Angleton performance. I had invited him to comment on the report and he had withheld all of his comments until he got to the meeting whereupon Helms turned the operation, the investigation, over to Angleton’s staff.”[ 135 ] Helms turned the case over at Angleton’s request, based on its counterintelligence ramifications. Whitten said that he went along and “suggested that it be turned over because of the Soviet angle that had now been discovered, (because of) the disclosure about his biographic information about his stay in Soviet Russia, which was obviously very important.”[ 136 ] Whitten felt that “Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was in bed with the FBI, and I was not and Angleton was.” After the meeting, Whitten circulated a memo asking for feedback because of its “inaccuracies and policy errors”. Whitten describes what he has done as a “working paper for those who prepare the final report”.[ 137 ] A note on the memo states: “On January 8 or 9, I discussed Whitten’s draft with him, told him Mr. Rocca was to write the report I was and he would be called upon for verification of statements in it no doubt and I did not have time to edit or comment on the treatment of various aspects. He said he would be in contact with Mr. Rocca, and I later learned he was.” [ 138 ] Ray Rocca, Angleton’s Chief of Research and Analysis (CIRA) became the liaison between the CIA and the Warren Commission. Rocca’s version places the date of the shift from Whitten to himself on 1/12/64.[ 139 ] Rocca, however, gave a pass to the CIA’s Miami station during the Warren Commission’s investigation. As Angleton testified, Rocca was “the point of contact except on matters pertaining to WAVE…If WAVE has thousands of operations going on, I’m not going to use my liaison people doing their business when they could have direct contract (sic) with the Bureau.”[ 140 ] Whitten on Bill Harvey: "He was too young to have killed McKinley and Lincoln." In attempting to justify Angleton’s takeover of the investigation, Angleton’s successor George Kalaris inadvertently made a startling admission. Kalaris mused that CI Staff was the most logical candidate to lead the investigation, as they were the CI liaison with the FBI and the Secret Service, as well as a source of information related to the protection apparatus for senior US officials.[ 141 ] The implications of this revelation will be discussed further in the final chapter. Years later, Whitten said that “I didn’t know about the assassination plans of the CIA against Castro. This was not disclosed to me. Had I known that, my investigation would have been entirely different.” Whitten said that he would have started the investigation in Miami. When asked about why Bill Harvey asked his wife to burn all of his papers, Whitten’s response was that “He was too young to have killed McKinley and Lincoln. It could have been anything…I think Harvey was a man who did great damage to the Agency. I told the Senate Committee – I went out of my way to tell them in my emphasis that assassinations and things like that are something really abhorrent to all the rank and file of Agency officers. It is unthinkable.” The deepest reason Jack Whitten was taken off the Oswald case I believe that the deepest reason Whitten was taken off the case can be found in a Whitten memo, DIR 89366 - this is a priority memo to Mexico City dated 12/16/63, seeking an immediate response. Whitten asked “For our analysis of this case, can MEXI shed light on who Aparicio is, whether he has that number (author’s note: The phone number 14-12-99, quoted by Duran in a passing reference to Aparicio at the beginning of the 9/28 call), and what this might have to do with our case...please have monitors make every effort to identify voices of various Soviets to whom Oswald spoke on the telephone or who dealt with his case with Sylvia Duran". Whitten took pains to write that his request was being made pursuant to "direction of Helms”. Whitten labeled it as a priority memo. We saw in Chapter 3 Aparicio’s fascinating history as the case officer for double agent AMKNOB-1. I believe that Raul Aparicio was not only the Cuban embassy’s cultural attache and main press contact, but he was also a double agent working on behalf of the United States. The reference to Aparicio in the September 28 call was not only a signal to the Mexico City station that LIENVOY was compromised. It was also a signal that the operation with Aparicio was compromised. It looks like Aparicio may have had some kind of relationship with Spanish-speaking CIA agent Daniel Flores. His stepmother was born in Mexico. Flores was approved to work on a special project by a CIA sigint (signals intelligence) officer. A sigint matter would indicate that Flores was working with Staff D. When HSCA counsel Ed Lopez went to Mexico City in 1978, he conducted an interview with “Daniel Flores aka Luis Aparicio”. Many baseball fans will remember the famous Chicago White Sox shortstop Luis Aparicio during the 1960s. Lopez asked Duran during her interview if she saw “Luis Aparicio” at a twist party in Mexico City. Was “Luis Aparicio” a momentary lapse by Lopez, did “Luis” have a relationship with Raul Aparicio, or did the CIA have a real live CIA officer inside the Cuban embassy? I have the feeling that this won’t take too much longer to figure out. Whitten’s December 16 request may have been the deepest reason that Whitten was taken off the JFK case as lead investigator. It may explain why Angleton invented a fight at Whitten on December 24, and Helms asked for Whitten to step down the same day. The problems raised by Whitten’s December 16 memo are legion. Most importantly, by asking the monitors to compare voices of people that spoke with Oswald or Duran during his visit, Whitten is assuming at this late date that the tapes were still in existence, just as he did many years later when questioned by the HSCA. Another problem was his query about Raul Aparicio. If Whitten’s questions had been fully answered, it would have focused attention on the 9/28 memo, that Aparicio's line 14-12-99 was tapped, and that Aparicio was at the Cuban Consulate during the Oswald visit. Scott did not want any additional scrutiny about this 9/28 call. Scott also wanted to avoid Whitten's other questions - Can MEXI shed light on who Aparicio is? Is 14-12-99 his phone number? Is it relevant to our case? Scott knew who Aparicio was, and that David Phillips knew the details. This memo, received on the 16th, went from Scott to White to Goodpasture to Phillips to back to Scott. Scott scribbled a note on the memo, saying, "That's Raul Aparicio, Cuban embassy official, get Dave to give details...he was on lienvoy 9 dec...close to ambassador...” After four days without a response to his priority memo, Whitten must have sensed that Scott was disturbed. Whitten thought he knew what the problem was. Whitten wrote a follow-up memo to Scott, providing him with the assurance that “our present plan in passing info to Warren Commission is to eliminate mention to telephone taps in order protect your continuing ops.” Unwittingly, Whitten then put his foot in it. “Exact detailed info from REDACTED (two names) on just what Silvia Duran and other officials said about Oswald’s visits and his dealings would be valuable and usable corroborative evidence. Request you requestion them carefully on these points, attempting get as much authentic data as possible, without mixing in what they knew from newspapers. Pls cable summaries and pouch detailed statements.” It’s obvious Whitten wanted Scott to quiz the CIA’s informants at the embassy and “requestion them carefully”. A review of the file shows that is precisely what needed to happen. But it never did. By the 24th, Angleton and Helms took the case away from Whitten, and never followed up on this memo. Only on December 27, after Whitten had been deposed as the chief of the JFK investigation, did Scott come up with any kind of response. It was another lie. "141299 is home number of Raul Aparicio Nogales, cultural attache of embassy. Doubt any connection with GPFLOOR (the Oswald investigation) as Aparicio was on sick leave during significant period...no further info because tapes have been erased.”[ 142 ] Goodpasture suppressed any mention of this detailed request in her chronology. Scott had told a whopping lie to Whitten. Whether or not Aparicio was on sick leave (which I doubt due to lack of evidence, although we have indications he was a diabetic), the CIA’s own log shows that Aparicio was at the Cuban Embassy at 9:25 am on Sept 30. That date was certainly within the significant period of the Oswald visit. September 30 is included within the “significant period” surrounding the Sept 28 call where Aparicio’s name is mentioned! Once Angleton had control of the investigation, he decided to “wait out the commission”, while he chased every Soviet angle in sight. Angleton had Rocca write the aforementioned key memo linking the September 28 phone call with the “assassin” Kostikov. Meanwhile, Helms prevented the Warren Commission from seeing the actual October 10 documents and others – only provides paraphrased documents. See David Wise’s article from back in 1968, that shows how frustrating this situation was. When staffer David Slawson got persistent about wanting to go deeper into the Mexico City matter, Scott and White actually played the tapes for Slawson and his colleague William Coleman on April 9, while swearing them to secrecy.[ 143 ] Now there was no more risk of the story of the tapes being blown. The Warren Report was hurried out the door by late September, ostensibly to avoid influencing the 1964 presidential election. The findings relied heavily on the FBI’s initial product pushed out the door in early December – Oswald was the assassin and acted alone. In the final chapter, we will review who might have been in on the assassination itself, and I will offer some thoughts on how to approach resolution and justice in the JFK case. At this point in the story, did the government have any concern that the impersonation might have been done by the Soviets or the Cubans? Apparently not on the part of the CIA. A CIA memo states that “following a thorough review and study of all available material, the Agency was unable to prove that Oswald had been acting under direction of the KGB”. The same finding was made regarding Cuba. We will take a look at the domestic front.

Paul, I think Newman is going in the right direction. I don't see him as moving towards a Soviet plot to kill JFK. I think he is right that Solie was a mole. I am not an expert on Bagley, and I have been cautious about him in the past, but he appears to me at this point as one of the good guys. He concluded, among other things, that LHO was a "witting" defector in the USSR. I think McCord is now in Newman's sights. Let's see where it goes.

I don't know why no one picked up on Gil's work here - here are my notes supporting him for the most part. Gil's work would explain why most researchers believe that officer with call number #279 still has not been identified. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=16237#relPageId=24&search=griffin - Sylvia Meagher figured out 40-50 years ago that 279 is J. T. Griffin Lawrence Ex 2 - Copy of personnel assignments for the Presidential motorcade made by Perdue W. Lawrence, dated November ... Personnel assignments confirm this - Purdue Lawrence https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1137#relPageId=510&search=%22j._t.%20griffin%22 https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=217812#relPageId=401&search=%22j._t.%20griffin%22 A good question I haven't resolved here is whether J. R. Mackey should also be considered, who allegedly also used the #279 radio call sign. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=16253#relPageId=14&search=279_and%20griffin 1. The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond, pg 88 (1976) Found in: JFK Books The Warren Commission did none of those things, although it is easy enough, simply by studying its own exhibits, to determine that No. 279 was J. T. Griffin of the second platoon, Traffic Division, Dallas Police. (Lawrence Exhibit 2, p. 2; Batchelor Exhibit 5002, p. 14) The second platoon consists of 12 three-wheel motorcycle officers, including J. T. Griffin.

Michael - the phrase "that was not true, either" was to emphasize that Oswald was neither the Mystery Man or the 5 foot 10/165 pound man. The analysis of memos 74673 and 74830 is a centerpiece of the book. The 74673 memo describing LHO as the stocky "Mystery Man" was disseminated to "your representatives in Mexico City". The 74830 memo describing LHO as the 5'10/165 pound man was disseminated to the national headquarters of the agencies. That resulted in the "Egerter-created clash between the agencies' headquarters and the local agencies' offices." When that kind of clash occurs, people get to talking - loose lips lead to people having information they should not have - and that can fuel a molehunt. Again, I appreciate the civil discourse with Sandy and Jim. I am aghast, however, that they continue to critique a book that they have not read and that MIGHT challenge their belief systems. Sandy and Jim have been very up front in saying they didn't read my book because they didn't agree with its premise. My response: 1. Jim thought I didn't consider the possibility that Oswald was a spy. But I did. You didn't know that because you didn't read the book. If you had read the book, you would see that I said that it is more useful to first assume that Oswald was a "wannabe spy" or a "useful idiot" before automatically assuming that he was a spy. That does not mean that I don't think that Oswald was a spy - I do, at least at certain times, and for certain agencies. What I think and I can 100% prove, however, are two different things. It's useful to begin a premise by pointing to what you can prove without speculation. 2. When you read an analysis that challenges your premise - you may learn something that supports your premise. That's why it's important to read analyses from a variety of viewpoints. 3. One of the best things any of us can do is to read material that challenges our assumptions. It is the failure to do so - and the refusal to do so - that has led the USA to its sorry state today.

Sandy, I wish you would take a few minutes to read at least my chapter 5 so that we have a similar data base. I think you would find that although you believe LHO was a CIA agent and I think he was a spy wanna-be (at least as of 1963, I think he was a puppet on a string), and although we disagree about "the Oswald Project" our thinking about this case is similar. I am just more conservative about concepts that I don't think I can prove.

I again want to give my appreciation with Sandy Larsen for starting this thread - and setting up this as a discussion, while admitting that he had his own opinion on the subject and didn't know much about molehunts...I do question why he refused to read my book State Secret while he critiques it? The other day, Sandy posted the following: "So, why is it that the CIA's October 10, 1963 cable to the State Department, FBI, INS, and Department of Navy did the following: Gave the wrong name, Lee HENRY Oswald, for the man who had visited (KGB Assassination chief) Valeriy Kostikov? Gave a completely wrong description for the man who had visited Kostikov? Made it sound like the CIA was unsure of the identity of the man who had visited Kostikov? I believe that the answer is that the CIA didn't want to raise any red flags regarding Lee HARVEY Oswald, who would be working in a tall building located along the future path of President Kennedy's motorcade." Let's look at it a little more specifically - when Sandy writes "CIA" - the person he is referring to is Charlotte Bustos, who wrote both of the 10/10/63 letters. If Sandy had read my book State Secret, he would realize that Charlotte Bustos' prime source was Ann Egerter, Jim Angleton's analyst at CI-SIG. Egerter had been closely monitoring Oswald during his time in the USSR years earlier, and she was one of the two officers who was involved in the draft of the cable. It is documented that Egerter handed Bustos the file that Bustos relied on to write her two cables. CI-SIG was described by Egerter as "the office that spied on spies". Molehunts were CI-SIG's specialty. As Paul Garbler, the CIA’s first station chief in Moscow, told a researcher: “You know what CI-SIG was? Find the mole. That’s all they had to do.” After the Mexico City station found out a man calling himself Oswald was in Mexico City, a decision was made at the HQ level for the Mexico City station to make no reference to Oswald’s visits to the Cuban consulate. All of Mexico City’s references to the Oswald case would use the LCIMPROVE indicator of an operation designed to counter the Soviets, rather than the TYPIC indicator that would refer to Cuban operations. Oswald’s biographical file (known as his “201 file”) would be stripped of any reference to his pro-Cuban activities, as well as any reference to any attempt to obtain a visa. These documents were removed from the 201 file and placed inside Oswald’s FPCC 100-300-011 file tightly held by CI-SIG.[ 24 ] As a result, Bustos didn't know much about Oswald, other than what Egerter told her - Egerter had all the important Oswald documents in her FPCC file - what John Newman has called "the smoking file". Bustos' own file lied to her about the story of Oswald. Many documents still bear this original FPCC file number today, crossed out and replaced by the 201 number. This was done to create a plausible reason to prevent FitzGerald’s Cuban desk at HQ and Shackley’s Miami station from receiving any cables or dispatches about this molehunt. The Cuba operations officers had access to the August 1963 FBI report about Oswald based on his real name Lee Harvey Oswald, his actual slender build of “5 foot 9, 140 pounds”, and his current status as a US resident; as you will see, they would have known that the molehunt descriptions of Oswald were inaccurate. One question Sandy posed was why one of Charlotte Bustos' cables gave the wrong name "Lee Henry Oswald"? A number of us have made the case that the phrase "Lee Henry Oswald" was bait for the molehunt. Egerter had named Oswald's 201 file "Lee Henry Oswald" when she created the file in December 1960. That was no accident. Sandy didn't mention that Bustos' other 10/10/63 cable described him as "Lee Oswald", not "Lee Henry Oswald". There's a reason why - molehunts are designed to see who takes the bait and uses it in another post. Many times, a clerk is the culprit. But it could be an agency official. In either instance, the molehunter finds out the identity of the leaker. Another question Sandy asked is why the memo "gave a completely wrong description of the man who had visited Kostikov?" The memo Sandy focused on was the 10/10/63 memo that described Oswald as "six foot, athletic build" when seen on October 1. (It relied on a 10/8/63 memo where Barbara Manell relied on Ann Goodpasture's description of the photo log as portraying the man who met with Kostikov as "six foot" and with an "athletic build". As shown below, the six foot man with the athletic build was "the Mystery Man". The question Sandy should have asked is why Goodpasture said that the photo of the Mystery Man was taken on October 2 when the call from the man calling himself "Lee Oswald" was clearly on October 1. The reason is that Goodpasture wanted people to believe that she and Barbara Manell believed that the man who called on October 1 was the Mystery Man. For what reason? I think it was a molehunt, to try to figure out who had faked the voices of both Oswald and Silvia Duran in the Cuban consulate on Sept. 28. Duran was militant in declaring that such a meeting never happened. Silvia Duran was never questioned by the Warren Commission. If it happened, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Ray Rocca, Angleton's right-hand man, wanted Duran to be questioned - like many other people - in his case, because he wanted proof that Castro's Cubans had killed Kennedy! I do not think these two memos of 10/10/63 were written to "patsify" Lee Oswald as the shooter of JFK. I think it was to kill the CIA's ability to conduct an effective investigation into Oswald, because the agency did not want its employees to lose their jobs, their families to be harmed, their agency to be discredited and maybe even shut down. If you think about it, Sandy didn't offer any evidence. Evidence of a molehunt and a cover-up is what I am offering here. If you look at the photo log for October 1, there are no entries, but look right underneath it for October 2 is a six minute sighting of the "UAM" (Unknown American Male) - that was the Mystery Man - clearly not Oswald. Look at the photo of the man photographed during those six minutes on October 2: Clearly the Mystery Man. You can even see a note on the memo Sandy read (probably from a CIA officer): "As I recall, this description (athletic build, about six feet tall, with a receding hairline) was of the individual in Helms' affidavit of 7 Aug not Oswald! Wrong!" The August 7, 1964 affidavit of Helms cites Warren Exhibit No. 237 - a photo of the Mystery Man - that the photo was furnished by the CIA to the FBI on "November 22, 1963", and then states "the original photograph was taken outside of the continental United States during the period July 1, 1963 to November 23, 1963." Helms then writes that this photo is the same photo given to FBI supervisor James Malley - and Malley explains that this photo was then trimmed to remove the background and shown to Marguerite Oswald by Special Agent Bard Odum on November 23, 1963. Odum affirmed this story, adding it was "almost dark" on the 23rd when he showed it to Marina. What I do agree with Sandy about is that at least two people decided to lower the "security flash" on Oswald - one day before the October 10 cables were sent out. Those two people were FBI supervisor Marvin Gheesling, who placed the original security flash on Oswald four years earlier in 1959, and Lambert Anderson - the "Nationalities Intelligence" desk man who covered Cuba. If you wanted to look at two people who certainly lowered the spotlight on Oswald and may have kept him off the Security Index - which might have put the spotlight on Oswald on Nov. 22 - Gheesling and Anderson would be your men. Hoover was angry at them, and they were two of the 18 agents that he disciplined. (FWIW, I think Gheesling and Anderson were manipulated by more powerful forces - a separate discussion). These two FBI officers turned off the security flash on Oswald. That's a far cry from saying - as Sandy did - that "the CIA didn't want to raise any red flags regarding Lee HARVEY Oswald, who would be working in a tall building located along the future path of President Kennedy's motorcade." Sandy, you do good work and I don't want to pick a fight with you - but I put a lot of work into my thinking in this matter. Next time, could you name your sources and read the book before you challenge it? And I think we all agree that "the CIA" is not a monolith. I think we are dealing with a powerful network of forces from several different entities that took out JFK - what some have called a "gray alliance".

Jim Hargrove posed this question: "Is it your honest opinion that all the FBI/CIA disinfo about “Lee Harvey/Henry Oswald” on Oct. 10, 1963 was about a “mole hunt?” Or …. Wasn’t it more likely about turning off the federal spotlights on LHO and setting him up a patsy for the JFK assassination?" Let me start off by asking the reader to note that there were two Oct. 10, 1963 letters written by CIA Mexican desk officer Charlotte Bustos - relying on information from Ann Egerter and her colleagues at CI-SIG. One of these letters described Oswald as 5 foot 10/165 pounds (identical to the description of Navy defector Robert Webster) and the other letter described Oswald as "6 feet, athletic build" (identical to the description of the Mystery Man in Mexico). Oswald had a slight build. He was 5 foot 9, 140 pounds. How could the same author, relying on the same sources, send two letters on the same day with such different descriptions? One went to the higher-ups, the other went to the ground troops. It was guaranteed to spark discussion. Let me offer my hypothesis of the Mexico City solution. When CIA chiefs discovered that Oswald had been impersonated in Mexico City (at a minimum, on the phone calls of Sept 28 and Oct. 1), they conducted a molehunt to try to figure out who was responsible; - which in turn created a paper trail that tied the key investigative agencies firmly to the Oswald story in the last weeks before 11/22; - which in turn created a "poison pill" causing these agencies to reflexively engage in a cover-up that successfully hid the key "Oswald in Mexico City" documents from the Warren Commission and the world. No one wanted to expose their jobs, their families, and even their agencies to the devastating fallout. Nor did we know about the roles of Jim Angleton, Win Scott, Ann Egerter, Charlotte Bustos and many others in this until the late 90s. From Chapter 5 of my book State Secret. I include a link below to Peter Dale Scott's wonderful "The Hunt for Popov's Mole" - for any of you who want more descriptions of molehunts in this case & in history. I can include more later, but I don't want to overwhelm the reader. Here's my thinking on this. My hypothesis of the Mexico City solution It looks to me like CIA Cuba operations officers were among the prime suspects in an October 1963 investigation designed to figure out who impersonated Oswald and Cuban consulate secretary Sylvia Duran on the telephone call to the Soviet consulate on September 28. In this investigation, the CIA officers went to great pains to omit from their memos any reference to any Oswald visit to the Cuban consulate, any reference to Oswald’s membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and any reference to his attempts to get a visa. Why was any reference to Cuba omitted? I believe it was done to prevent the rank and file of the Cuba division of the CIA from knowing about the details of the investigation. If there was no reference to Cuba in this investigation of Oswald, then there would be no reason to include the Cuba division in the discussion. The Cuba division included both Harvey’s successor Desmond FitzGerald and the Special Affairs Staff (SAS) at Headquarters, as well as the forward operating base in Miami for tactical operations on Cuba known as JMWAVE and run by Ted Shackley and David Morales. Here’s the center of the intrigue. It looks like someone in Cuba operations was a prime suspect in an investigation of the impersonation of Oswald. It had to be handled carefully, as SAS had several of its officers embedded at the Mexico City station under Scott’s command. Another prime suspect was the Mexico City branch of the FBI. Even the CIA’s Mexico City station itself could also have been the source of the mole. It is important to note that not only the FBI, but the Navy and the State Department were also included in the investigation. This was because all three of them had responsibilities for Oswald, and hence all three of them had to be examined for signs of penetration by enemy spies. Under the Delimitations Agreement, the FBI and the Navy were charged with investigating and tracking an ex-Marine like Oswald once he had returned to the United States, and the State Department had a potential interest as well.[ 1 ] Furthermore, the State Department had done this work while Oswald was in the Soviet Union. This meant that these agencies were in charge of any debriefing of Oswald after his return to the United States. I believe that John Fain’s interviews with Oswald in 1962 constituted the actual debriefing. In the real world, these three agencies had continuing responsibility for Oswald during 1963. I believe that the impersonation of Oswald was done to plant a poison pill within any attempt by the CIA or the FBI to investigate the role of Oswald in the assassination of the President. I believe that after Oswald was impersonated, CIA investigators tried to capture the perpetrator. After an unsuccessful attempt, would those investigators be willing to have their futile efforts become public knowledge in the wake of the assassination? No way. The investigators would be threatened with the loss of their jobs and livelihood. I offer the hypothesis that the impersonation of Oswald was an inside job and a key aspect of a plan to assassinate President Kennedy. The plan was for the Oswald call to be picked up by the CIA’s wiretaps in Mexico City. That alone would be a significant roadblock in any investigation of Oswald, as the CIA considered the Mexico City wiretap operation one of its crown jewels. The CIA hierarchy wanted as few people as possible in the CIA to know about this operation, let alone the FBI and other US agencies. The notion of unveiling the Mexico City wiretap operation to the general public was a nightmare. Paul Garbler, CIA staffer: "You know what CI-SIG was? Find the mole. That's all they had to do." This nightmare was heightened by using Oswald to entice the Agency to start a molehunt to find out who made the call. After all, a molehunt had been done with the Oswald file in the past, using Ann Egerter at Angleton’s “office that spied on spies” at CI/SIG. Molehunts were standard operating procedure for CI/SIG – its bread and butter. As Paul Garbler, the CIA’s first station chief in Moscow, told a researcher: “You know what CI-SIG was? Find the mole. That’s all they had to do.” Bringing Ann Egerter into a molehunt that relied on Oswald’s biographical file meant that those trying to figure out who did the impersonation would use the Oswald legend in a paper trail that stretched into several US agencies and would be impossible to destroy later. It’s hard to think of any reason to bring Ann Egerter back into the Oswald story in late 1963, other than to design a molehunt to find out if someone was trying to penetrate the CIA. That’s how Egerter earned her salary as a CI/SIG analyst. That was the role of CI/SIG itself. Whoever imitated Oswald on the telephone in Mexico City knew that such a paper trail would be a powerful way to blackmail the involved CIA and FBI officers after November 22 into deep-sixing any serious investigation of the assassination – even an internal inquiry that could be hushed up on the grounds of “national security”. If it went public that these officers had used the Oswald legend for a molehunt prior to the assassination, the result would be not only embarrassment or a security breach, but suspicion that they were involved in the assassination itself. At a minimum, it would mean the end of the careers of these officers. The impact on their families and their agencies would be devastating. What got me thinking about a Mexico City molehunt was Peter Dale Scott’s analysis of molehunts conducted by Egerter and others, some of which I discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, the Double Dangle. The Mexico City station was a very powerful station, and its abilities should be acknowledged even though I am incensed by their deeds. For the life of me, I couldn't understand why the station would create a paper trail that made them look suspicious and incompetent at the same time. I think I have figured out the answer. Due to the September 28 phone call and the calls that followed, the Mexico City Station was duped into embarking on a molehunt to find out who impersonated Oswald and Duran in the phone call. In the process of conducting that molehunt, the paper trail of memos that followed compromised both Headquarters and the Mexico City station, making an honest investigation impossible. Of course, there's a number of possibilities of who knew enough inside ball to get the Station to play itself out of position. I lean towards David Sanchez Morales, the paramilitary chief at the CIA station in Miami. Morales had been the founder and the intelligence chief for the AMOTs. The AMOTs were the shadow intelligence service designed by the CIA to take over after Castro was overthrown. The AMOTs were highly trained intelligence officers whose primary language was Spanish. As discussed below, the September 28 conversation was in Spanish, broken Russian, and probably broken English. The September 28 call was probably made by two Spanish speakers, and it wouldn't surprise me if one or both of them were AMOTs from the CIA's Miami station. CIA officer William Sturbitts testified that AMOTs often worked inside the listening posts of audio intercept stations. Whoever made the calls knew that the Mexico City station would be surprised by the call, and that a paper-driven molehunt was the logical response. Morales had spent considerable time at the Mexico City station visiting David Phillips in the early sixties, and knew how Win Scott ran his shop. If Morales needed any help in knowing what it would take for the Mexico City station to convince Angleton’s people to conduct a molehunt - a doubtful proposition - he would have picked up some tips from Bill Harvey. It’s documented that Harvey knew how to run a molehunt, not to mention how to conduct an operation without writing anything down. As Harvey’s executive officer said, “…you think I was tight lipped. He could run rings around me.” Morales, Roselli and Martino worked together for years in efforts to assassinate Castro. All three men made damaging admissions about their own involvement in the assassination of JFK, as detailed at length in Larry Hancock’s Somebody Would Have Talked. Harvey's people in CI and Staff D - Neill Prew, the Potockis, Lou DeSanti, "Thomas Urquhart" (the possible pseudonym of the new staff D chief Alex MacMillan) - hover over what I consider most of the important events. Some or all of these officers may have been unwitting, but they passed along reports that provided very important information about the wiretap system, key Cuban informants, and targets for disruption such as Cuban consul Eusebio Azcue and press attaché Teresa Proenza. Someone wanted to use the Oswald tapes and the ensuing paper trail to blackmail the leading players in US intelligence after JFK was shot. They wanted a cover-up, and they got one.

Thanks, Ron, I have studied Hill's "unknown witness" of a 5 foot 10, 160-170 pound man and consider Hill's identification equally suspect as Sawyer's. Both of those Dallas police officers were bad apples. Sawyer was fired by 1967 and left in disgrace. Sandy, thank you for creating a site for the molehunt discussion. I will address Jim Hargrove's thoughts on the subject there. Here is my follow-up for the fourth of the fifth subchapters. I think the events of Nov. 23 illustrate how the tapes were a "poison pill" that caused everyone to cover up whether they were part of the plan to kill JFK or not. The internal correspondence also shows that neither the FBI or the CIA believed the notion that Soviet official Valeriy Kostikov was part of any "assassination bureau" - Angleton's contribution to the cover-up - and he knew better: November 23: How the Tapes Became a State Secret a. Nov. 23 was the day the tapes became a state secret November 23 was the day that the tapes became a state secret. Scott had decided to take a secretive approach with the tapes that supposedly contained Oswald’s voice. Keep in mind that transcriber Boris Tarasoff and others had discussed the importance about any call made by an American to an “enemy” embassy, and that Scott had a separate file set aside for all Americans who visited representatives of a Soviet bloc embassy. (See Chapter 5) Such a tape was not likely to be erased. The plane arrived at Love Field in Dallas at 2:47 AM CST on the morning of the 23rd. Dallas FBI chief Shanklin mused in his report that Hoover’s right-hand man Alan Belmont had told him that “we have on file practically all the information on Oswald down there in Mexico City except the fact that CIA had secured some information that this individual very probably called from the Cuban Embassy to the Russian Embassy.”[ 42 ] An October 16 memo to the FBI had tipped off the Bureau that Oswald had personally met with Kostikov on September 28, but did not mention the phone call later that day. The call on the 28th was the hot topic of concern that terrible night, with the CIA unwilling to firmly commit that the caller was Oswald. Goodpasture testified in 1995 that she recalled a reference that Rudd hand carried the tape dub to Laredo. If this is true, it would mean that the tapes were literally taken by Rudd from Dallas and down to the Mexican border. The importance of the sending of the tapes to the FBI cannot be overemphasized, for two reasons. First, by sending the tapes, Scott was sending the most powerful evidence about Oswald. As we will see, this evidence was covered up almost immediately and denied under oath for many years. Secondly, the following officers swore under penalty of perjury that the tapes did not exist by the time of the assassination: David Phillips (twice), Ann Goodpasture, Robert Shaw, and Deputy Chief of Station Alan P. White.[ 43 ] We know that Goodpasture lied; she was not just mistaken. Goodpasture said that it was her understanding that Rudd was given a tape to take to Texas and that Scott had a copy “squirreled away in his safe”.[ 44 ] Assuming that Phillips was in on the molehunt, then he lied as well. White’s credibility in this affair is low - Warren Commission staffers David Slawson and William Coleman admitted in a 2003 interview that White was the one who actually played the Oswald tape for them in Mexico City during April 1964.[ 45 ] Slawson had promised the CIA during the Warren Commission investigation that the report would say nothing about the wiretaps, before Slawson and Coleman admitted the existence of the tapes to researchers Tony Summers, Peter Dale Scott, and finally the Assassinations Records Review Board in the early 90s. Goodpasture then changed her testimony from “denial” in 1978 to “admission” in 1995.[ 46 ] John Whitten is the only CIA official I know of who admitted under oath that the tapes existed at the time of the assassination before Goodpasture finally admitted the truth in 1995.[ 47 ] Whitten wrote in the days after the assassination that "the actual tapes were also reviewed" and a copy of the Oct 1 "intercept on Lee Oswald" was discovered after the assassination. At 9:15 am EST, Gordon Shanklin (left) told Alan Belmont (right) that Oswald was impersonated on the September 28 call. The Church Committee staff refused to accept the FBI’s assurances that the tapes had been destroyed. What the staff missed, unfortunately, was a report from Alan Belmont. (Since the action largely shifted from Dallas to Langley, events will be described using Eastern Standard Time.) At 9:15 am EST, Shanklin told Belmont that Oswald was impersonated on the September 28 call. “The Agents who spoke to Oswald have listened to the tape provided by the CIA of the call allegedly made by Oswald to the Soviet embassy, and they do not think that the individual was Oswald, as his voice is different and he spoke in broken English.”[ 48 ] Angleton himself had the highest praise for Belmont’s acumen. "In the old days, Oswald's return to the US after his redefection would have been the highest priority for the counter-intelligence community. However, when Al Belmont left the bureau, its CI (internal security) operations fell apart."[ 49 ] At 10 am EST, Hoover and LBJ discussed how the Mystery Man photo and the tape did not match with Oswald’s appearance or his voice – and how there may have been two people in Mexico City that day. Incredibly, this presidential phone call has been erased. Because the existence of the Mexico City tapes was treated as a dark national security secret, the HSCA reported the stories of these tapes in a deceptive manner, saying in their reports that no "recording of Oswald's voice" was ever "received" or "listened to" in the United States.[ 50 ] Peter Dale Scott suggests that “this language is a lawyer's subterfuge: what was received and listened to was precisely not a recording of Oswald's voice.”[ 51 ] At 10 am EST, Hoover and LBJ discussed how the Mystery Man photo and the tape did not match with Oswald’s appearance or his voice – and how there may have been two people in Mexico City that day. Hoover also admits in private the opposite of what he has said in public: “The evidence against Oswald is not very very strong.” The entire tape of this approximately fourteen minute conversation has been mysteriously erased, while the transcript somehow survived. b. After this critically important Hoover-LBJ call, things happen very quickly At 11:45 am, someone at CIA contacted FBI liaison Sam Papich and told him about the impersonation of Eldon Hensen in Mexico City back in July. Belmont told Tolson that he called Shanklin at 11:50 am EST. This was at least their second conversation that morning about the agents and the tape. Years later, the Church Committee was fascinated by Belmont’s story: "Inasmuch as the Dallas agents who listened to the tape of the conversation allegedly of Oswald from the Cuban Embassy to the Russian Embassy in Mexico and examined the photographs of the visitor to the Embassy in Mexico and were of the opinion that neither the tape or the photograph pertained to Oswald, I requested Shanklin to immediately send a photograph of Oswald to our Legal Attache. This will be done by Agent Rudd who is returning to Mexico City by air. CIA in Mexico should check the photograph of Oswald against visitors to the Soviet and Cuban embassies to see if they can identify him." Right after talking to Tolson about Shanklin, Belmont got on the phone with Shanklin’s deputy Kyle Clark at 12 am EST. Belmont asked Dallas deputy chief Clark about the Hidell name, and whether one or two people had Hidell identification. Belmont asked Clark to explore all angles of the Hidell story, as well as any embassy visits by people who may be identical with Hidell in Mexico City. A big to-do list was created after this call. c. Goodpasture, O’Neal and Helms suggest a change in the narrative While Belmont was talking with the Dallas FBI office, Anne Goodpasture made an incredible statement in a memo at 11:59 am: “In view Oswald in Sov Union and fact he claimed on 1 Oct LIENVOY to have visited Sov Emb 28 Sep, Subject…probably Oswald. Station unable compare voice as first tape erased prior receipt of second call.” Those calls were made three days apart. The protocol was to destroy no tapes for at least two weeks, and 30 days for tapes on Cuba. According to Tarasoff’s testimony, he would have just returned the tape on or about September 30. It is obvious that Goodpasture was covering up, especially as we see that the Belmont-Shanklin conversation refers to unnamed FBI agents listening to the September 28 conversation. Goodpasture’s testimony in 1995 refers to the October 1 conversation. Perhaps the duplicate of the tapes that the FBI agents listened to contained both conversations.[ 52 ] At 12:10 pm, CI-SIG Birch O'Neal asks Mexico City “are original tapes available?” Author Rex Bradford asks: “(C)an this cable have been anything other than a big hint that a new story about the tapes’ existence (or lack thereof) was desired?” At about the same time, Goodpasture put out a big story. She said that "Douglas J. Feinglass (note: Boris Tarasoff’s pseudonym) who did transcriptions says Oswald is identical to the person para one speaking broken Russian who called from Cuban embassy September 28 to Soviet embassy".[ 53 ] This Tarasoff memo was passed on the same day from Helms to FBI liaison Sam Papich. Helms emphasized that voice comparisons were made and that the call on the 28th matched the call on the 1st. A plan seems to be taking shape. Tarasoff is never sought out for an interview. Instead, Tarasoff and his wife are hidden away from the investigators and treated as non-entities. Even five years later, when Goodpasture wrote a history of the JFK case, she referred to Tarasoff merely as "Transcriber” and said nothing about Oswald’s supposed “terrible Russian”.[ 54 ] While Helms, O’Neal and Goodpasture were going through these machinations, Belmont was still ostensibly in the thick of his investigation. At 12:40 EST, Belmont called the legal attache Clark Anderson to let him know that Oswald's photo is being sent back with Rudd. We have some good stories (see Chapter 5), but no photos of Oswald in Mexico City have surfaced to this day. During this day, Shanklin and Belmont have been the two men at the center of the investigative activities. During the afternoon, we see Shanklin offering a new tune. At about 3:30 pm EST (2030 Zulu), Shanklin tells Hoover "the actual tape from which this transcript was made has been destroyed". Ed Lopez and Dan Hardaway wrote a good memo about this change in the story. I don’t believe the change in the story. With the assistance of his aide Fletcher Thompson, Hoover then wrote a memo to the President, and another to the Secret Service chief Rowley, with both memos saying that FBI agents reviewed the tape and concluded that the voice was not Oswald’s. The Secret Service’s letter was hand-delivered on the morning of the 24th, indicating that the Secret Service and LBJ got the correct story while everyone else got the cover story.[ 55 ] 4. The lone nut/no tapes story is polished throughout the week following the assassination a. The attacks on Sylvia Duran After Scott saw the photos of Oswald on TV the night of the assassination, he informed CIA HQ of his suggestion to Gustavo Ortiz (also known as LITEMPO-2, who would become President of Mexico in 1964) that Duran be arrested. Based on the Duran-Oswald phone call on September 28 from the Cuban consulate, Scott wanted Duran held incommunicado until she provided everything she knew about Oswald. Scott added that “LITEMPO-2 can say DFS coverage revealed call to him if he needs to explain.”[ 56 ] This is another indicator that DFS had its own set of tapes and transcripts from the Mexico City station, and was not forced to rely on CIA largesse. These tapes may still exist today. Duran was taken into custody by the Mexican police on November 23, and released the next morning. The Mexicans told Scott that they would pretend that the decision to arrest Duran came from “Mexican initiative” rather than from Scott.[ 57 ] The official record of Duran’s interview is missing. We have a third-hand version, summarized and translated into English.[ 58 ] We also have reports from “R. L. Easby”, the pseudonym for deputy chief Alan White. The initial report from Easby states that “Echevierra told COS Duran was completely cooperative.” In fact, Duran was abused. This statement indicates that “Easby” may have inspired David Phillips; as we will see, Phillips falsely described the double agent Gilberto Alvarado as “completely cooperative” a couple of days later.[ 59 ] From a conversation she had with Ed Lopez, we know that she said that her interrogators mistreated her during this interview and a second one days later.[ 60 ] The ambassador urged them to “go all out” while questioning her. Duran was interrogated by Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, the same DFS officer who threatened to hang Alvarado by his balls a few days later.[ 61 ] Duran told Joaquin Armas that she was shoved around and her arms had black and blue marks. Significantly, she was asked if she had intimate relations with Oswald. The initial report of her interrogation alludes to this, stating that Duran gave Oswald “on a piece of paper, her name Silvia Duran with the office telephone number but that Oswald was not given her address since he had no reason to have it.”[ 62 ] Historian Gerald McKnight states that “the line of questioning originated with COS Win Scott. The CIA was trying to force Duran to confess to entrapping Oswald, luring him with sexual favors into a Cuban conspiracy to kill JFK.”[ 63 ] That would have created the basis for an invasion of Cuba. There is a mysterious unsigned memo in the files, extremely well written, with details few would know, and with a Spanish phrase sprinkled in it. The writer refers to the Marines as the “Infanteria de la Marina”. Win Scott wrote “read to President the night of 11/25/63”. This was the President of Mexico and not Lyndon B. Johnson. It is designed to spread blame on the Cubans and Soviets, and Silvia Duran in particular. Oswald is described in the very first paragraph as 5’ 10”, 165, with blue-grey eyes. The memo then says that Oswald met with Duran at the embassy on September 28, and falsely states that “no details of conversations Oswald had inside the Cuban embassy are available.” We have Scott repeating a flat-out lie to the President of Mexico – as seen in Chapter 5, the wiretaps of September 27 are filled with details of what Oswald told Duran. The typeface in an adjoining document reveals it was written by the same person who ran the soon-to-be-reviewed Alvarado scam to push the story of a known informant on the Communists. Who was that person? The “adjoining document” about Alvarado reveals the author to be A. C. Plambeck with the State Department’s Office of Security. I assume that Plambeck used the same typewriter in writing both the Alvarado memo and the author of the “5 foot ten/165” memo described above. Plambeck was with Eldridge Snight, a security officer for the State Department but identified by Win Scott as an “officer of this Section”. The memo says that Oswald embraced a woman from “Calle Juarez 407”. That is the address for Luisa Calderon, who the station had been surveilling for months. I believe Calderon was being used here as “embroidery” for the story because Cuban intelligence was questioning her loyalty based on an alleged affair with an American named Oscar Cower from Los Angeles. Calderon had also been unwittingly at the center of the impersonation that Phillips and Shaw had engineered to fool Eldon Hensen (see Chapter 3). Calderon was to become the focus of a CIA-driven wild goose chase with a claim that she had foreknowledge of the assassination. A LIENVOY tape revealed that when Calderon was asked if she had heard the news, Calderon had joked, “Yes, of course, I knew almost before Kennedy.” The CIA did not provide documents to the HSCA showing that Calderon’s initial response prior to the alleged “foreknowledge” was her surprise and a statement that the news had to be “a lie”. b. The FBI and CIA admit that there is no proof that Kostikov was ever part of any “assassination bureau” – Angleton’s contribution to the cover-up Statements made by the Soviet consuls many years later (see Oleg Nechiporenko’s Passport to Assassination) indicate that Oswald personally met with Kostikov, Yatskov and Nechiporenko on the morning of the 28th, although we can’t prove that Oswald’s visit was known to the Mexico City station until much later. What we do know is that the Mexico City station claimed on the day after the assassination that it was very concerned about the October 1 phone call from “Oswald” to the Soviet Embassy, asking for Kostikov. If Kostikov was such a dangerous man, why wasn’t the CIA on top of Kostikov on a daily basis after the October 1 phone call was translated? The answer is that no one was worried about Kostikov until after the assassination. Before that, the emphasis was in trying to recruit him to the American side – see, for example, the REDCAP memo for September 27. Right after JFK was killed, Angleton received a call from Anatoliy Golitsyn, a Soviet defector that had become Angleton’s most trusted source. Golitsyn told Angleton that “the modus operandi with any defector from anybody’s army to the Soviet Union required that he go through processing by the 13th Department of the KGB.”[ 64 ] This is why much ado was made on the day after the assassination about a claim made by counterintelligence chief for the Soviet station, Tennent (Pete) Bagley. Bagley insisted there was strong proof that Kostikov was a member of the KGB’s 13th Department in charge of assassinations.[ 65] The CIA’s belief that Kostikov was a member of Dept. 13 was based solely on a “clandestine contact.”[ 66 ] This contact was a double agent known as TUMBLEWEED. Kostikov made it possible for TUMBLEWEED to get together in the US with Oleg Brykin, a KGB member of the 13th Department. Golitsyn was the source of this information, passed on to Jim Angleton and then on to Bagley.[ 67 ] However, as stated in Chapter 3, Angleton had told the FBI as recently as June 1963 that Kostikov had nothing to do with the 13thDepartment. The FBI’s response to Golitsyn’s claim was that neither agency could be certain that Kostikov was part of the 13th Department.[ 68] Bagley’s strong opinion, however, was a force to be reckoned with. Bagley was the chief counterspy for the Soviet Russia division, and had been stationed in Switzerland (eventually to become station chief) during the time that Oswald was due to attend Albert Schweitzer College.[ 69 ] Bagley had been transferred from Berne to Langley where he gained a rapid promotion to become C/SR/CI. Like Angleton, Bagley believed in Golitsyn’s theory of the “Monster Plot” – that the entire Sino-Soviet split was a fake maneuver designed to lull the West into dropping its defenses and making itself vulnerable to the Communist menace. Bagley went so far as to write in his November 23 memo that “one of Harold Wilson’s principal scientific advisors is Captain Ian Maxwell, who has a long Soviet intelligence background. This may shed new light on (Golitsyn’s) report, i.e., that Harold Wilson may be a Soviet agent.” Like Bagley, Mexico City station chief Win Scott was a “Fundamentalist” – one who subscribed to Angleton and Golitsyn’s school of thought about a monolithic Communist threat – and it’s no accident that Scott’s pen name for his Mexico City memoirs was Ian Maxwell. Scott did not want Maxwell to be forgotten. There has been speculation that Bagley may have played a role in suppressing Kostikov’s name from the twin October 10 memos. Kostikov could have been the centerpiece of discussion, since Mexico City’s memo of October 8 said that Oswald was trying to reach Kostikov on October 1. Many people believe that the absence of Kostikov’s name in these memos was very important and helped “dim the lights” on Oswald prior to November 22. That may be true, but I think there’s a more important insight here. My thinking is that the alleged Kostikov-Oswald conversation was no secret. Kostikov’s name was flagged in the aforementioned Mexico City memo to the FBI on October 16, with no expression of concern by either the letter-writer or any of the numerous recipients. The October 16 memo said that “Lee Henry Oswald” had talked with Kostikov on September 28. Written by Barbara Manell from Mexico City’s Soviet desk, she directed a copy of the October 16 memo to the extremely anti-communist Ambassador Thomas Mann. Bert Turner at the FBI and key people at other agencies also received this information. Yet no one lifted a finger of concern.[ 70 ] Manell could have toned it down by mentioning that Oswald and Kostikov were talking about a visa. Instead, she wrote that there was “no clarifying information”, which was not only untrue but added an unnecessary level of intrigue. When challenged on this point, Manell made it clear that “they had no need to know all those other details.” Similarly, Manell claimed that she did not know that the September 28 transcript mentioned the Cuban consulate, or she would have included that information in her memo. But she told the HSCA that she “had rechecked the transcripts by this time, as otherwise she would not have used such certain language.” The memo also indicates that it was Manell herself who figured out that the officer who spoke to Oswald was Kostikov. Nothing in the record explains how she came to that conclusion. When interviewed, she didn’t remember anything except she knew a lot about Kostikov, and “I probably decided that it was Kostikov”. Again, I do not see a hint of concern by anyone about Kostikov, Department 13, or anything else. In regards to all of these items, Manell maintained that “we were told what to send and that is what we sent…I did what headquarters asked me to, to the best of my knowledge.”[ 71 ] Golitsyn played a role in sparking the conversation about Department 13, as he called Angleton on the day of the assassination and told him that “the modus operandi with any defector from anybody’s army to the Soviet Union required that he go through processing by the 13th Department of the KGB…which is called their Affairs for Executive Action. And this was the SOP on the dealing with military defectors.”[ 72 ] The FBI did not want to let Golitsyn see their intelligence, saying that it was against their policy to provide such material to defectors.[ 73 ] By December 20, Win Scott wrote his superior that the CIA wasn’t even sure whether Kostikov was KGB or GRU (Soviet military intelligence), which meant that Scott was uncertain whether Kostikov was part of KGB’s Department 13.[ 74 ] A similar conclusion was drawn by FBI counter-intelligence head Bill Branigan, who told Division 5 chief William Sullivan that there was “no indication that Lee Harvey Oswald was ever recruited or trained by Department 13.”[ 75 ] Nonetheless, Angleton’s assistant Ray Rocca wrote a damning report by the end of January, telling the Warren Commission that Oswald was mixed up with Kostikov, who worked with the Soviet assassination specialists at Department 13. Rocca added that Department 13 analyzed every military defector to the USSR “to determine the possibility of utilizing the defector in his country of origin.” A report on “Soviet assassination and kidnapping” was presented to the Warren Commission on 2/17/64.[ 76 ] It focused on attacks on a White Russian official in 1954, Radio Free Europe in 1959, and what was known as “the Stashinsky murders” of the 1950s. The last case cited in the article is 1961, with the last page of the study concluding that “the assassination of an Allied official would be highly unlikely and probably unprofitable.”[ 77 ] Shortly before the Warren Report went to press, Hoover aide John C. Stokes stated the CIA had “overstated its case” about Kostikov and Department 13. Stokes went to great lengths to point out that the FBI had provided all this information to Angleton before the assassination, and Angleton’s response had been to write a memo on June 25, 1963 saying there was no information in the files to support the claim that Kostikov was part of Department 13.[ 78 ] By 1976, Angleton testified to the Church Committee that there was never any confirmation of the Department 13 story.[ 79 ] CIA counter-intelligence chief David Blee admitted in 1982 that the CIA was never able to prove that Kostikov was part of Department 13, and that the last known assassination attempt conducted by that agency was in 1959.[ 80 ] There was never any good reason to believe that Kostikov was a member of Department 13 or any “assassination bureau”. It was made up from whole cloth after the assassination. It was a provocation, designed to distract the investigators. It’s entirely possible Golitsyn believed it, but Angleton used the Department 13 story to drive the cover-up. The CIA’s psychiatrist Charles Bohrer told the head of the Soviet Russia division that Golitsyn was offering much the same picture as he had when he defected to the USA, “dangling before the Agency very enticing and intriguing statements in exchange for acceptance, entrée, support and control…re Gaitskill, Wilson, Penkovsky, the Communist split, wild, crazy – the product of a sick mind?” Bohrer was stunned by Golitsyn’s contention that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent. Golitsyn had been seen a year earlier by another CIA psychiatrist, Dr. John Gittinger’s, whose 1962 report was much the same as Bohrer’s in 1963. Gittinger said that “our tests showed Golitsyn was clinically paranoid. I know I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could throw a bomber. I find it amazing how much of what he said was accepted. It remains incomprehensible to me…He suffered from a form of megalomania.”[ 81 ] For Jim Angleton to rely on Golitsyn’s speculation - while ignoring his own pre-assassination written statement saying that Kostikov was not a Department 13 official - is strong evidence of cover-up. c. Jack Whitten was appointed as chief of the CIA’s investigation into the JFK assassination On November 23, Helms appointed Jack Whitten as the chief of the CIA’s investigation into the JFK assassination. The period of Whitten’s leadership role has been described as the “GPFLOOR phase” that focused on the cable traffic around the world and the focus on Oswald’s activities in Mexico City.[ 82 ] Rocca describes Whitten and J. C. King (C/WHD) as the two Washingtonians in charge; Win Scott in Mexico was responsible, and Phillips was also “knowledgeable”.[ 83 ] Whitten believed that one of the reasons he was given the case was that Angleton was so close to the FBI. There was “initially the possibility that the FBI was in some way derelict or involved or something like that...Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was not in bed with the FBI, and I was not and Angleton was." Given that Angleton’s source Golitsyn had made such a wild charge that contradicted the FBI’s belief about Kostikov being harmless, that may have been a factor as well. Jack Whitten spoke for much of the Agency when he said that Angleton’s view of the world was bizarre and over-suspicious. Helms may have been decided to keep Angleton under wraps, at least initially. Helms had to have known about the molehunt and how badly Angleton was compromised in that affair. I see no proof that the FBI figured out prior to the assassination that the twin 10/10/63 memos were part of a molehunt. However, the FBI did know that there was a big problem with the Mexico City tapes not containing Oswald’s voice. What was Helms going to do about the FBI? I think his successful game plan was to convince Hoover to hold back on exposing the tapes. Both Hoover and Helms wanted to weather this disaster. When supervisors Sullivan and D.J. Brennan were discussing the CIA’s plans to open new domestic contact offices in the US a couple months later, Hoover reminded them, “OK, but I hope you are not being taken in. I can’t forget CIA withholding the French espionage activities in USA, nor the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico City, only to mention two of their instances of double dealing.”[ 84 ] I believe Hoover’s frustration was about the tapes. Whitten believed that another reason he was chosen as chief investigator in the JFK case was because Mexico was part of his bailiwick as the chief of the Central American desk, and that Helms knew him as a successful investigator of big cases and a polygraph operator. I think the biggest factor was that Bustos had written the 10/10 letters as Whitten’s subordinate, and Whitten had signed off on the letters without realizing that they were part of a molehunt. If Whitten remained in that state of mind throughout the investigation, that secret would be kept safe. d. Instead of being informed about Cubela, Whitten is offered Ramon Cortes as a Castro-did-it suspect On Whitten’s first day as chief of the JFK investigation, Angleton’s people immediately sent him off on a wild goose chase. No one ever stepped forward and told Whitten anything about the Castro assassination plots, or anything about how closely the Cuba division was working with Rolando Cubela in the days before November 22. Instead, the files reveal a very different story, encapsulated in a handwritten note to Whitten from Ray Rocca during the late night hours of November 23. Rocca intoned that “here is the assembled file”, and added that these documents were too sensitive to be shared with the FBI.[ 85 ] The key documents cited by Rocca expound the theme of Oswald’s Soviet connection, and the importance of following Kostikov everywhere. “Priority” was given to the possibility that Duran might have been exchanging information for sexual favors – this lead never went anywhere, but an unfounded rumor that Oswald and Duran had sexual relations has persisted in CIA circles ever since 11/22/63.[ 86 ] The purpose of this rumor has been to make Duran look untrustworthy. The attachments to Rocca’s note point right to links between Castro’s mistress and aide Celia Sanchez with Dallas import-export agent Ramon Cortes discussed in Chapter 3. Both Sanchez and Cortes were close to Maria Witoski, also known as AMKIRK-1. Witoski was the estranged wife of Rene Vallejo, Castro’s closest aide who had been negotiating the possible rapprochement between Castro and JFK for the last several months. Rocca provided a backgrounder of Celia Sanchez, stating she was the head of intelligence in late 1958 before Batista was overthrown, and how she was presently the political officer for the Communist Party as well as Fidel's secretary and mistress. He then turned to three pages on the Saavedra family, and how Cuban interior minister Raul Saavedra was married to Nenita Sanchez, a close relative of Celia Sanchez. The final page recited five of the greatest hits from the file of the double agent Ramon Cortes, much of which was discussed in Chapter 3. All five hits point to Cortes’ close relations with Cuba, while ignoring his covert relations with the American government. The last two hits point to Cortes’ relationship with Witoski/AMKIRK-1; as discussed earlier, she was close friends with Celia Sanchez. During 1962, June Cobb, a major source of information on the FPCC, was accepted by the CIA as a contract agent. Rocca’s last memos focus on how Witoski wrote June Cobb and accepted her invitation to come to Mexico, while saying how much she’d like to see Cortes again.[ 87 ] By early December, CI-SIG chief Birch O’Neal confirmed that a French diplomat outside of the US was saying JFK was killed due to a joint plot by the Chinese government and Castro, with Cortes and Saavedra in the middle of it all. O’Neal also admits that the tips from the French diplomat “have proven to be not too reliable”. It is third-hand information from “a source” to the French diplomat “Unstar”, and then to WAVE staffer Dudley Jentons aka J. Deering Danielson.[ 88 ] On the 10th, Cortes was questioned by the FBI. He admitted that he was friends with Witoski and her boss, Castro’s disloyal secretary Juan Orta. (Orta was the man who received from a courier sent by Sam Giancana and the CIA the poisoned pills to kill Castro shortly before the Bay of Pigs.) Cortes denied ever meeting Castro’s mistress Celia Sanchez, but remembered Witoski telling him about her friendship with her.[ 89 ] Cortes’ story was that he had "beat the Cuban government out of $80,000," and that he was now seeking protection from Dimas Figueredo, his former shoe factory partner and operative in Mexico City’s Gyrose Debriefing Unit. After months of reports on Cortes that wasted precious time, the case simply faded away. Cortes received criminal immunity in return for his continued cooperation about the Cubans.[ 90 ] The CIA agreed not to provide the sources in the Cortes investigation to the FBI.[ 91 ] Besides leading Whitten and the FBI on a wild goose chase, the Cortes story is probably included in the “French espionage activities” that had Hoover so mad at the CIA’s double-dealing.

Robert, I don’t think any of us can seriously evaluate the role of Oswald without evaluating the mole hunts that occurred using his file. In 2012, I spoke to Peter Dale Scott, who wrote The Hunt for Popov’s Mole” in the 1990s, an analysis of the various mole hunts conducted using Oswald’s file. Peter’s article walks through all the inaccurate information carefully inserted into his file by highly intelligent people - “Lee Henry Oswald” “5 foot 10, 165” “Robert Edward Oswald” just three of many - I told him that several of us thought it was the most important article ever written about the assassination. He sighed and said, “yes, and no one has ever reviewed it”. That has finally changed. John Newman’s latest book is “The Hunt for Popov’s Mole”. But you know what? The comments on this forum focus primarily on what happened in Dealey Plaza, which is fine and has its place. However, although Newman and Scott (to name just two) have provided well-documented analyses that mole hunts were conducted with Oswald’s file… …in the JFK critical community it seems like no one cares. No one criticizes Scott or Newman for discussing the mole hunts conducted with Oswald’s file. Instead, they simply shy away from a serious discussion of mole hunts and the Oswald file. Why? In my opinion, because it is not as exciting as trying to figure out who fired the guns in Dealey Plaza. One of my favorite quotes: “They want to have their dessert without eating their vegetables.” So I am pleased that Robert “doubts” my contention that Fain made up a tiny portion of his report. I just wish he had said why he doubts it. Then we could have a real discussion. In that vein, I wish someone had commented on my long analysis of how the 5 foot 10/165 description of the defector Robert Edward Webster entered into the Oswald file. Or how the 5 foot 10/165 pound description of the Dealey Plaza shooter went out over the radio 15 minutes after the assassination. It was called in by detective Herbert Sawyer, who later said he got the description from a witness - he couldn’t remember his name. When asked to describe this key witness? “He wasn’t too young, he wasn’t too old.” What happened to the witness? Sawyer turned him over to a deputy sheriff. Who was he? Sawyer didn’t know. Did any of the investigating agencies ever comment that the shooter description ever matched the intelligence agencies’ faulty description of Oswald? Hell no. Did anyone in the JFK critical community besides Peter Dale Scott and myself ever comment on the importance of this 5 foot 10/165 description? To my knowledge, only Robert Morrow. That’s to his credit. So I will broaden my request - any analysis about the coverup or the molehunts gratefully appreciated. Thanks.

It was great to meet Jim Gochenaur at CAPA in 2018. He made major contributions in moving this case forward and exposing bad apples like Elmer Moore.

Again, thank you very much for the insightful comments. To avoid de-railing this thread, please send any comments or questions not addressing the text to me by private message. This is the third posting of the five sub-chapters promised. This third posting will be the first part of a three-part chronology of the cover-up - starting with November 22. The other two parts will address November 23, and November 24 and the aftermath. This early draft focuses mostly on the national security cover-up, but offers the outlines of the planners' cover-up. After your feedback, I will add more details on the planners' cover-up. With appreciation, Bill Simpich A Chronology of the Cover-Up November 22: The planners' cover-up and the national security cover-up The planners' cover-up began when Jerry Hill "found" three spent shells on the sixth floor at 12:55 and immediately ran off towards Oak Cliff. Tippit died about 1:07 in Oak Cliff, with the final shot to the head as a coup de grace. Jerry Hill did his best to take control of the Tippit crime scene. Tippit was in the middle of a hunt in Oak Cliff - after monitoring the Trinity River viaduct and failing to find his quarry, he ran inside the Top Ten and tried to place a phone call, finally resorting to stopping and searching a car in the middle of the street moments before his interaction with his killer. The Tippit killing was done to enflame the Dallas police and the populace. In the moments after Tippit's death, TSBD manager Roy Truly and deputy chief George Lumpkin put their heads together and identified Oswald as the key person "missing" from the book depository. (ALL OF THIS WILL BE GREATLY EXPANDED) By 1:30 pm, the national security cover-up began when Secret Service had wrestled JFK's body away from the custody of Dallas medical examiner Earl Rose. Whether or not LBJ gave the Secret Service orders to take such action, the result was pre-ordained. No forces in the executive branch were willing to entrust the autopsy in the hands of the Dallas authorities in the middle of a national crisis. JFK's body was going to immediately return to Washington - period. What went wrong was when Oswald wasn't killed in the theatre 45 minutes after Tippit. Oswald played it smart, waiting till the very minute to punch the cop and got into a clinch where it was impossible to shoot him, shouting "I protest this police brutality". Oswald wasn't supposed to live. Now what? Two different sets of decisions were going on - the national security cover-up and the planners' cover-up. To me, the interesting thing is simply that the federal government controlled the autopsy and determined that evening that one man killed JFK. Why? Because Hoover and Bundy had both already decided by 4 pm that Oswald acted alone. Why? For the same reasons above - the executive branch did not want a destabilizing situation to develop. Between 2 pm-4 pm, that decision was made by those two government actors in coordination with LBJ's people and immediately became the government's party line. I love Vince Salandria. I just don't agree with him - as much as I would like to - that McGeorge Bundy was the Great Satan in this affair. He was an apparatchik. When Bill Alexander tried to introduce "the Communist conspiracy" the night of Nov. 22, LBJ's aide Cliff Carter got on the line with Henry Wade and immediately slapped that down. The role of the Planners in the cover-up will be greatly expanded - the remainder of this sub-chapter will focus on the National Security cover-up. a. At Parkland Hospital, the Secret Service’s first response was to wash blood and brain debris off the presidential limousine I would say that the most important items of evidence are the President's body, the autopsy of the President's body, and the fate of the crime scene within the President's limousine. (In that context, Connally's wounds are also critical, and will be addressed at a later date). Shortly after the presidential limousine pulled into Parkland Hospital, a bucket of water was used by a Secret Service man to wash blood and brain debris from the vehicle. Before the convertible top was put back up and the limousine was driven away, people reported seeing holes emanating right through the front of the windshield and elsewhere that did not match up with the holes that were documented on the following day. The controversy over the fate of the windshield is contested and continues to this day. The limousine was then loaded on a cargo plane and taken to Washington before the Dallas police evidence unit was able to conduct an inspection. The limousine was then driven from Andrews AFB to the White House Garage, causing its contents to shift and thus causing further damage to the integrity of the crime scene. Only by 1 am on November 23 did an FBI evidence team arrive, nor was any diagramming of the evidentiary items begin prior to this time. We will never know the true status of the evidence offered by the limousine.[ 20 ] b. In Langley, CI/SIG chief O’Neal’s immediate response was to hedge During the afternoon of the assassination, the first thing that CI-SIG chief Birch O’Neal did was to lie to the FBI’s counterintelligence man in Washington, Courtland Jones. O’Neal was Ann Egerter’s boss. O’Neal had to know about the lead role Egerter played in preparing the twin 10/10/63 memos. When Jones asked O’Neal what was in the file, O’Neal responded that “there is nothing in CIA file regarding Oswald other than material furnished to CIA by the FBI and the Department of State.”[ 21 ] As discussed in Chapter 5, Oswald’s biographical 201 file had been stripped of all references to the pro-Cuban Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), as well as other FBI memos that were dated after May 1962. Those memos were tucked away inside the FPCC file – what John Newman calls “the smoking file” – the file that had the good stuff about Oswald and Cuba. Anyone who read Oswald’s stripped 201 file would not know about Oswald’s pro-Castro background, or that he had even returned to the United States. Once Oswald was captured, Whitten said that the “effect was electric” on the top CIA officials in Langley – many of them knew who Oswald was. O’Neal’s immediate instinct was to hide from the FBI any personal knowledge of the CIA’s memos about Mexico City and the transcripts and tapes of Oswald’s adventures during that time. O’Neal also had to be thinking about the routing sheets for documents that showed how the CIA had monitored Oswald throughout his time with the Soviets, during his time with the right-wing White Russians and the left-wing Paines in Texas, as well as the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the Cuban exiles in New Orleans. ...Once he learned about the shooting, O’Neal knew that a plan had to be made about how to deal with the Mexico City evidence. As the head of CI/SIG and Egerter’s immediate superior, O’Neal should have known about the molehunt. c. Hoover immediately wanted to declare Oswald as the lone assassin At 6 pm on 11/22/63, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade was telling the world: "Preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting. The electric chair is too good for the killers." Hoover made it clear to Bobby Kennedy by 3 pm CST that he believed the Dallas police had captured “the man who had killed the President”. This was in stark variance to what Dallas, District Attorney Henry Wade was telling the world at 6 pm: "Preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting. The electric chair is too good for the killers.” LBJ’s aide Cliff Carter got on the horn and made sure that the D.A. did not charge Oswald with conspiracy.The Johnson team had been nervous about a military attack all day, and did not want to give any signals that could lead towards a conflict with the Soviet Union. Hoover knew that the Bureau was compromised dealing with Oswald as the assassin, and that the enormous blowback might spell the end to the FBI’s future. We have seen the record that revealed show Hoover’s fears that Oswald might have been impersonated while he was a Soviet defector back in 1960. Hoover probably knew that the Mexico City wiretaps had picked up Oswald, and he certainly knew the national security implications of having to reveal the existence of the wiretaps. Hoover’s response was to demand that the Dallas police turn over their evidence to him. Dallas officer J. C. Day delivered two of the three alleged hulls to the FBI by 2:15 pm CST on November 22, even though Hoover admitted that he had no jurisdiction over the case until after Johnson landed in Washington about 5:00 pm CST. (Fritz held on to the third hull for several days.) Dallas police chief Jesse Curry told the Warren Commission that due to FBI insistence, on “Friday night we agreed to let the FBI have all the evidence and they said they would bring it to their laboratory and they would have an agent stand by and when they were finished with it to return it to us.” Curry was upset about the chain of custody problems.[ 23 ] Dallas FBI chief remembered the intensity of the effort to get the evidence to Washington DC by Saturday morning. The only inventory for 11/22/63 that I can find contains the rifle, the pistol, bullet fragment, shell casings, a blanket, Oswald’s shirt, prints, and paper and tape samples. An evaluation of the above evidence was sent from the FBI Laboratory to the Dallas police chief the next day. A few other items came in separately during the first 24 hours, but not many. I can’t find an inventory for the “four or five hundred” other evidence items that the FBI evidence technicians received during the initial twenty-four hours – the lack of an inventory would break the legal chain of custody for all of these items.[ 24 ] How was the Dallas district attorney going to get a conviction against Oswald, who was still alive at this point? The evidence technician James Cadigan affirmed that it was “many, many items…a very large quantity of evidence that was brought in.” Cadigan also testified that “time was of the essence and this material, I believe, was returned to the Dallas police within two or three days.” Someone drew lines through the original transcript of Cadigan’s deposition and wrote “delete”.[ 25 ] This portion was excised from the official transcript, in an ultimately-futile effort to hide this original transport of evidence during the evening of November 22. The public was informed by the media that Tuesday the 26th marked the beginning of the transfer of evidence to Washington.[ 26 ] As journalist Jim Marrs put it, rather indelicately, “Wouldn’t any criminal be delighted if he could have complete, secret, and unsupervised control over all the evidence in his case for two full days?” d. In Mexico City, Win Scott’s immediate response was to hedge During that fateful afternoon, Mexico City chief Win Scott wrote a memo saying that he would “forward soonest copies of only visitor to Soviet Embassy 28 Oct who could be identical with Oswald.”[ 27 ] Trained as a mathematician, Scott prided himself on being exact in all matters of substance. Why did Scott blend the two dates of the Oswald calls of September 28 and October 1 into “October 28” at a critical moment like this? Like O’Neal and Dallas homicide chief Will Fritz, Scott was hedging his bets while feigning ignorance about Oswald. Like O’Neal and Fritz, Scott was buying time to figure out what his story about Oswald was going to be. A CIA analysis states that “the Agency and its field stations, particularly Mexico City and Miami, were not unmindful of the possibility that Oswald did not act alone.”[ 28 ] While Mexico City was on the move, there were no sudden moves in Miami. e. During the evening of November 22, the Mexico City station sent the Mystery Man photos and a wiretap transcript to the Dallas FBI and to CIA HQ In the moments after the assassination, Mexico City chief of station Win Scott asked Ann Goodpasture for the station’s information on Oswald, as she understood the tape and phone set-up better than anyone.[ 29 ] For many years, Goodpasture went to great lengths to deny that she gave a tape of the man who called himself Oswald to Scott, even at deposition. Goodpasture finally admitted in 1995 that she gave Scott a duplicate tape of the Oct 1 conversation, the last of the Oswald phone calls.[ 30 ] She claimed that the master tapes were erased. "I don't know what happened to the tape after I brought it in. I think I...gave it to the (deleted)". I surmise that the nine-letter deletion says “FBI legat”, which would mean that she gave the tape to the FBI legal attaché Clark Anderson. What we don’t know is when she gave it to him. We also don’t know if the tape made it onto the airplane to Dallas. We know the Mystery Man photos and a wiretap transcript made it on the plane. Before any discussion about the transcript, take a look at how the photos were handled. We know Goodpasture provided Scott with photos of the Mystery Man, who gave them to the legat Clark Anderson. CIA HQ sent a message at 7:36 pm CDT and asked for the photos to be sent on the next available flight. Anderson called Alan Belmont and told him that the photos were coming by airplane to Dallas with his aide Eldon Rudd. This raised two problems for Goodpasture. The first problem was that Goodpasture had led everyone to believe that the Mystery Man was Oswald, as seen in the October 8 memo to CIA HQ. I am convinced that Goodpasture originally chose the Mystery Man as fodder for the October molehunt, not to convince anyone that the Mystery Man was Oswald. The Mystery Man’s description was useful for the molehunt. Like Oswald, the Mystery Man looked like an American. The Mystery Man was also similar to the “5 foot 10, 165, 35 years old” Webster-like description that the CIA had been using for Oswald since 1960. Now she was stuck with this story. The second problem was that Goodpasture had also led everyone to believe that the Mystery Man photos were taken on October 1 at the Soviet embassy, when they were actually taken on October 2.[ 31 ] Since she also had available photos of the man taken on the 4th at the Soviet embassy and the 15th at the Cuban embassy, Goodpasture tried to obscure this second problem by giving Scott photos of the Mystery Man on all of these dates. The evidence indicates that at the request of Ambassador Thomas Mann, Win Scott sent the Mystery Man photos of “October 1” and October 4 during the evening of November 22 with the naval attache and the FBI legat’s aide Eldon Rudd for the FBI to review. Did either Rudd or the naval attache carry the tape? Rudd denies it, but I see no record about whether the naval attache who was flying the plane might have had it. That would have been good compartmentalization. Rudd had no need to know. f. Scott needed to get the bad news about the Mystery Man out of the way Scott needed to send the Mystery Man photos to Washington, DC and get them out of the way. Given the Mystery Man description of Oswald that Goodpasture provided to Whitten’s office back in October, it was time to get the bad news out there.[ 32 ] I do not think that Whitten knew about the molehunt, even if his subordinate Bustos did. By the time the plane left off Mexico City, photos and TV footage of Oswald had been disseminated throughout the world. Any reasonable station officer would have realized that the Mystery Man was not Oswald. Like Goodpasture, I believe that Scott knew that the Mystery Man was not Oswald back in October. Oswald was arrested shortly before 2 pm CST, and his picture was all over the television in the USA by 4 pm CST. Mexico City and Dallas were in the same time zone. Before Scott sent the Mystery Man photos to the USA, all he had to do was pick up a telephone and ask someone to describe what Oswald looked like. Mexico City admitted seeing Oswald on TV the night of 11/22 and “obvious photos sent to Dallas were not iden with Lee Oswald held Dallas”.[ 33 ] Eldon Rudd left with Scott’s package at 10:00 pm CST, with the naval attache flying the plane.[ 34 ] Probably for reasons of security, the photos were mailed to WH chief J. C. King from Dallas – there was no hurry, an accompanying memo showed Scott telling King the photos were of “a certain person who is known to you”. Whitten sent a post at midnight CST saying to send a staffer with all photos Oswald to HQ on next available flight and to call him upon arrival.[ 35 ] This was immediately countermanded in the next post sent moments later by “PWO”, saying “No need send staffer with photos. We have asked Navy for photos again, but Mexi can see Oswald’s picture sooner on the press wire.”[ 36 ] But it was too late to stop the delivery of the Mystery Man photos to the USA. The photos were already enroute. Dallas FBI chief Shanklin’s colleague Kyle Clark then sent on the photos to Hoover’s office during the early hours of the 23rd, saying the photos were of the individual “known as Lee Oswald as obtained from confidential source” In any case, the best thing for Scott was to get the Mystery Man photos that he had supposedly relied on in October to all of his bosses at CIA HQ right away. The pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald were all over the world by 4 pm Central Standard Time. g. Was the tape flown to Dallas, or did someone phone it in? FBI agent Wallace Heitman was the Spanish-speaking agent in Dallas and was close with counterintelligence chief Bill Branigan. Heitman wrote a report about how Eldon Rudd picked up the package and proceeded to Dallas in the naval attache’s plane. Look how everyone mentions the transcript but Heitman: Heitman’s memo mentions the photos, but no transcript. Rudd’s memo mentions photos and a transcript.[ 37 ] Heitman’s partner Bob Odum reported that Heitman handed Rudd a transcript as well as photographic material.[ 38 ] The legat Clark Anderson wrote that Rudd delivered transcripts as well as photos.[ 39 ] Dallas FBI chief Gordon Shanklin said that Mexico City legal attaché Clark Anderson gave Rudd a transcript to bring. People have wondered if Anderson also gave Rudd or the naval attache a tape, or if a tape was played for the FBI agents in Dallas.[ 40 ] Another indication that the tapes may have been on the plane to Dallas can be found in a memo written by Bureau supervisor Burt Turner to the legal attaché Clark Anderson in Mexico: “If tapes covering any contact subject [Oswald] with Soviet or Cuban embassies available forward to Bureau for laboratory examination. Include tapes previous reviewed Dallas if they were returned to you.”[ 41 ] Burt Turner was considered one of the very best FBI agents of that time. When Hoover tried to demote Turner, Turner successfully faced Hoover down. How often did that happen? Turner’s memo indicates that Heitman sent “tapes” as well as photos with Rudd to Dallas. In any swearing contest between Turner and Heitman, Turner would win. No contest.

Michael, I have problems with Jack Tatum too. My focus is simply the head shot. My understanding is that the head shot came last, and separate from the first three shots to the body. Alaric Rossman offers a good analysis that the head shot split Tippit's brain stem, and would have rendered the other three shots superfluous, among other points.

Yes, Sandy, I do believe that LHO was lured to work at the TSBD before 11/22 in order for him to become the designated patsy. Your question is an important one, and I don't have a full answer, but this is what I think. My conclusion is that there are three balls in the air - Buell Frazier's sister Linnie Mae Randle passed on a tip in to Ruth Paine that there was a job opening at the TSBD which Ruth passed on to Lee; Robert Adams' subsequent tip to Ruth Paine about a more-profitable job at another location which it appears Ruth may or may not have passed on to Lee (we see Adams' phone number in Lee's phone book); and indications that Lee may have been spying on Joe Molina at the TSBD. (I mentioned more about this in my previous post, which I edited for clarity.) I think, but can't prove, that Roy Truly was one of the planners of the 11/22 operation and enticed Linnie to pass the tip on to Ruth. Similarly, I think Lee was enticed to take the TSBD job because he could gain some extra cred by spying on Molina. I do renew my request for questions about the cover-up text that is the basis of this thread to be asked here, and for other questions about the case to be directed to my email or as a message here. Thanks.

Thank you, Paul. I appreciate the communications and the questions. To keep the thread coherent, I ask that questions focus on this "feedback on the cover-up" text that is where I am seeking scrutiny. Any other off-thread questions? Please feel free to send me a private post.