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Was William Sullivan Murdered?


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I don't understand why LHO was just a "nut" and a "cipher" to the FBI when they must have known that LHO had tried to renounce his U.S. citizenship in Russia and had threatened to tell the Russians certain secrets about the U-2 spyplanes flying out of Atsugi, Japan.

I think the answer is that you can't believe anything Sullivan says. For a guy who was officially investigating these political murders, he sure seemed to be pretty dense.

To his credit he apparently rejected the SBT, but what does he replace it with? He says that Oswald shot JFK twice and hit Connally with the third shot. So what about the wounding of Tague, which was the whole reason for the SBT's existence?

He seems to ignore even the possibility of LHO's intelligence connections. He just calls him a nut, which is asinine. He says he thinks Sirhan acted alone, but makes no attempt to explain (at least in these excerpts) how Sirhan shooting from the front hit RFK point blank behind the ear.

It seems to me that Sullivan was either incompetent or a xxxx. These excerpts have led me to doubt that he was murdered. What for?

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I see that William Sullivan's book, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI, was republished in Japan in June, 2011. I wonder if this edition is the full transcript rather than the heavily edited version by Bill Brown that was published in 1979, after Sullivan was murdered.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKsullivan.htm

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  • 5 years later...
On 8/1/2006 at 1:24 AM, John Simkin said:

William Sullivan carried out the original FBI investigation into the JFK assassination. It was this report that was used by the Warren Commission. You would therefore have thought that Sullivan was a strong supporter of the lone gunman theory. As I pointed out earlier, he was killed while writing his memoirs. These were edited by Bill Brown and appeared two years later. This is what he has to say about the assassination in his book: The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI (1979)

We got going on the case right away. Officially, the Criminal Division was in charge of the investigation, but there wasn't too much to investigate after Lee Harvey Oswald, the only suspect, was killed. On the other hand, over at my shop we had to untangle Oswald's myriad subversive connections. Were the Soviets behind it? Were the Cubans behind it? Was anyone behind it? It grew into a gigantic intelligence operation with over twenty-eight hundred agents working on the case.

Oswald had spent a lot of time in Mexico, so our Mexican office played an important part in the investigation. We also had agents in Canada, Central America, England, and Italy tracking down leads. We even got a note from a man in France who said he had six letters written by Oswald which would solve the case. He offered to sell us the letters for ten thousand dollars, but he turned out to be a well known European con man who didn't have any such letters. He was later arrested and prosecuted by the French police.

We didn't have much on Oswald in our files prior to the assassination. We knew that he had lived in Russia and that he'd come back with a Russian wife, which was unusual for a couple of reasons. First of all, we never found out just why the Russians allowed Marina to leave the Soviet Union at a time when they were not permitting any Russians to come out. Second, she was a woman of extraordinary intelligence, much smarter than Oswald. Oswald had tried to commit suicide while he was in Russia by slashing his wrists, and we developed evidence that the Soviets looked on him as a nut, a nuisance, and were anxious to get him out of the country. This information was not firm, but was reported to us from a number of sources. There were so many other more subversive characters in our files with worse records than Oswald's and we had so little on Oswald that his case was considered a "Pending Inactive" case. Lee Harvey Oswald was really a cipher, a nobody to the FBI. After the assassination, of course, he became our most important subject.

But even after we zeroed in on Oswald, there were huge gaps in the case, gaps we never did close. For example, we never found out what went on between Oswald and the Cubans in Mexico.

Although his Russian connection had alerted us to Oswald in the first place, the bureau really couldn't keep him under surveillance merely because he had been to Russia and married a Russian wife. I can imagine the reaction of the Civil Liberties Union if we had "Can't American citizens go to Russia without being hounded by the FBI?" Oswald wasn't a criminal, just a nut, and the FBI doesn't have the facilities to keep tabs on nuts.

I always tended to doubt that Oswald was a Russian or a Cuban agent because of his unsuccessful attempt on the life of General Edwin A. Walker. Walker was a right-winger, a John Bircher, but basically a nobody to the Russians or the Cubans. It would have been unnecessary for a valuable agent to take the chance of shooting Walker if Oswald had the assignment of killing the president. If I had to guess I'd say that Oswald acted alone, but I was puzzled by the accuracy of his shooting. Oswald didn't have a record of being an outstanding marksman and yet he hit the president with two shots while his car was moving slowly down the road. His third shot hit Governor Connally. I went to the book depository from which Oswald fired at the president and I looked out the window where he was positioned. I've been around guns all my life and I'm a reasonably good shot, but I must say that that would be quite a task for me. It was, tragically, damn good shooting.

On the other hand, it seemed extremely likely to me that Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner who knew a lot of low characters, who was a police buff, and who had a working relationship with the local police, could easily have been a police informer. That certainly could explain Ruby's presence at the jail where he shot Oswald.

This whole excerpt seems like a whole load of hogwash to me. It makes more sense that this was written by someone other than Sullivan, after his death, and without a real grip on the case.

Separately, what do you make of the passage that I have rendered in bold?

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On 9/20/2011 at 10:33 AM, John Simkin said:

I see that William Sullivan's book, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI, was republished in Japan in June, 2011. I wonder if this edition is the full transcript rather than the heavily edited version by Bill Brown that was published in 1979, after Sullivan was murdered.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKsullivan.htm

Has anyone read this updated version?

Edit*** here is the updated link to the Spartacus page 

https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKsullivan.htm

Edited by Michael Clark
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BTW, to my knowledge, there was never any real inquiry into this case except an article in New Times by, I think, Jeff Cohen.

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If anyone has an original paperback copy of Garrison's OTTOTA's, I would be interested how this story is recalled in that book. I have long remembered a different scenario, especially with regard to the location of the murder being in Sugar Hill, NH.

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  • 2 years later...

EDIT

The tape seems to say that Mark Felt wants to "f***ing kill Sullivan" to keep him from becoming head of the FBI, which Nixon seems to support despite his hatred of Felt for leaking to the press.  Haldeman argues that Sullivan (or Felt?) is a "Tom Houston" kind of guy, and "emotional in the right way"? (c. 0:19.00)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huston_Plan

NB that Sullivan outlived the Nixon admin (and Hoover), having his hunting accident in 1977.

Edited by David Andrews
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22 hours ago, David Andrews said:

EDIT

The tape seems to say that Mark Felt wants to "f***ing kill Sullivan" to keep him from becoming head of the FBI, which Nixon seems to support despite his hatred of Felt for leaking to the press.  Haldeman argues that Sullivan (or Felt?) is a "Tom Houston" kind of guy, and "emotional in the right way"? (c. 0:19.00)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huston_Plan

NB that Sullivan outlived the Nixon admin (and Hoover), having his hunting accident in 1977.

Thanks for the explanation. It’s hard to say. It definitely goes to show that there is more work to be done on these transcriptions.

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2 hours ago, Michael Clark said:

Thanks for the explanation. It’s hard to say. It definitely goes to show that there is more work to be done on these transcriptions.

I'm not even sure I'm right.  I'd like to listen from the start with a pair of headphones, to get a feel for the context, and decipher all the unintelligible grumblings.

The "Tom Huston Plan" is, on the surface, more associated with Sullivan than Felt.

Edited by David Andrews
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On 11/26/2019 at 9:37 PM, David Andrews said:

I'm not even sure I'm right.  I'd like to listen from the start with a pair of headphones, to get a feel for the context, and decipher all the unintelligible grumblings.

The "Tom Huston Plan" is, on the surface, more associated with Sullivan than Felt.

At 9:00 minutes, John Dean gives a good account of the status of transcriptions.

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