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'Simulated Assassination' gone awry?


Lee Forman

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I tried to run some of this stuff down, but I came a bit too late, and Gareth Weans passed away in July of last year.

I was attempting to establish the connection between the Warren Report phone numbers pulled for Kathy Kay and Harry Olsen, and a phone number registered to the Oxnard, CA - City Hall - I kept stumbling on the most bizarre stuff, and I thought maybe I'd share it, as I have arrived at a bit of a dead end.

There's been quite a bit of debate as relates to the California connection - Roselli, Cohen, Hollywood, Los Angeles, etc., as well as Las Vegas to some of the money that funded the operation in Dallas. I was chasing after Karyn Kupcinet - again - trying to figure out how Penn Jones could have made a connection in terms of Karyn and a mysterious death, with so little to go on. While it remains open to debate, it appears that there was a call placed some 20 minutes before the assassination from Ventura County - Oxnard area. Whether Karyn got crossed lines at the CO and overheard something she should not have, no clue. Karyn lived some 50 miles from Oxnard at that time.

A telephone company executive said that 20 minutes before President Kennedy was assassinated a woman caller was overheard whispering:

"The President is going to be killed."

Ray Sheehan, manager of the Oxnard division of General Telephone Co., said the caller "stumbled into our operator's circuits," perhaps by misdialing.

Sheehan said the woman "seemed to be a little bit disturbed." Besides predicting the President's death, he said, she "mumbled several incoherent things."

Sheehan said the call was reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Los Angeles, but not until after the President had been shot. Until then, he said, it appeared to have been just another crank call.

Sheehan said there was no way to trace the call. All he could say was that it originated in the Oxnard-Camarillo area, some 50 miles north of Los Angeles.

The FBI in Los Angeles declind to comment.

Sheehan said one telephone supervisor called another onto her line to verify what she was hearing. He said both supervisors heard the woman say the President would be killed.

Sheehan said the call was received at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time. The President was shot in Dallas shortly after 10:30 a.m. Pacific time.

Sheehan said he doesn't think the caller was ever connected with another party. He said she may not have known she had the supervisors on the line and may have been just talking to no one in particular.

I checked with the Oxnard police Department, and although they admitted hearing of the story, had no one around who could give any further information on the incident. I enquired after the dispatcher from 1963, who is pictured on their website, but no one knew who she was.

Henry Oxnard was a successful sugar beet king. He was Oxnard's founder in 1903.

Now for some reason, he can be found associated with Lee Harvey Oswald with a RIF at NARA. I haven't gotten around to pulling it. If anyone is heading for NARA anytime soon.... :(

AGENCY INFORMATION

            AGENCY : HSCA

      RECORD NUMBER : 180-10033-10038

    RECORDS SERIES : FBI INVESTIGATIVE FILE ON LEE HARVEY OSWALD.

AGENCY FILE NUMBER : 105-82555-639

DOCUMENT INFORMATION

        ORIGINATOR : FBI

              FROM : [No From]

                TO : [No To]

              TITLE : [No Title]

              DATE : 11/30/1963

              PAGES : 12

      DOCUMENT TYPE : MEMORANDUM.

          SUBJECTS : OSWALD, LEE; OXNARD, HENRY

    CLASSIFICATION : UNCLASSIFIED

      RESTRICTIONS : OPEN IN FULL

    CURRENT STATUS : OPEN

DATE OF LAST REVIEW : 05/24/1993

          COMMENTS : Box #:6.  Folder Title: Section 30.

I also found this small reference to a Dr. Oxnard, which I found quite interesting.

Transcript of executive session of the President's

Commission on the Assassination of

President Kennedy of January 22, 1964

Boggs: The fellow Butler, who works for the profit organizations that Dr. Oxnard heads to disseminate and tie Communist propaganda to Latin America, is the one who confronted him on the streets in New Orleans. I know Butler. He is a very fine young man. It was . . . Butler says that this w the first time that they established that he had been in Russia and that he had defected at one time and then returned. You have that undoubtedly in your files, that film, that tape that was made and borrowed in New Orleans?

A. Yes.

Continuing on, I happened across a paragraph, which seemed to genuinely solidify the connection between Oxnard, the phone call about the assassination, and some leads as to who may have been involved.

Gary Weans claimed:

Only a matter of hours after Det. Sgt. Ed Patton and I gave RFK documents in Oxnard, California, RFK was dead. These documents were phone records. They revealed a phone call had been made from Federal Commissioner Ben Nordman's and Ventura Superior Court Judge Jerome Berenson's law office over twenty minutes before JFK was assassinated that "he was going to be killed." RFK was also given the names of the persons making the phone call.

Nordman and Berenson did have a law firm at that time, and William H. Hair, who would have had to have known Gareth Weans, wrote up a nice piece called:

The Ventura County District Attorney's Office

in the Early Sixties

By William H. Hair

William H. Hair became a Ventura County Deputy District Attorney in 1959. In 1962, he left the District Attorney's Office for the firm Nordman, Berenson & Lewis.

I joined the District Attorney's Office in October of 1959 following the fall bar exam. Because there was no position for an attorney "in waiting," I was hired as an "investigator."

I believe that I was about the 11th on staff at the time. Roy A. Gustafson was D.A., Bruce A. Thompson was Assistant D.A., Julien Hathaway was Chief Civil Deputy and Woodruff Deem was Chief Criminal Deputy. The office functioned as County Counsel as well as District Attorney, all under the flag of the D.A.

The other deputies, as I recall, were James Basile, Elwood Walls, Stanley Cohen, George Taylor, Robert Shaw, Robert Soares and myself when I was admitted to practice in January 1960.

Roy Gustafson was a real taskmaster—a perfectionist. Every piece of paper that went out of the office went across his desk and could be the subject of a public rebuke at the weekly staff meetings that were held each Friday afternoon in the library of the main office (5th floor, 501 Poli Street). We also had a branch office in the old City-County Building at 242 West 2nd Street in Oxnard. I was assigned to this office shortly after I was hired. We were staffed with Bob Soares in charge, myself, Investigator Dick Robbins and a secretary, Nona Papageorge.

In addition to having regular civil clients assigned to us, Bob and I were responsible for handling all cases in the Oxnard-Port Hueneme Municipal Court (Judge Clarence Pecht), the Moorpark-Camarillo Justice Court (Judge Ben Ruffner), the Fillmore Justice Court (Judge Phillip West), the Santa Paula Justice Court (Judge Edwin Beach), and regular Superior Court felony cases.

There were three departments of the Superior Court in 1960 occupied by, as I recall, Judges Edward Henderson, Perry Churchill and William Reppy. The other Municipal Court was in Ventura with Judge Richard Heaton. In Ojai, there was a Justice Court staffed by Judge Richard Love.

In the fall of 1960, I believe, Roy Gustafson decided to challenge Ed Henderson for the Superior Court. Ed was always a little "long in the tooth" and I forget what Roy's other reasons were. As a result of this Roy resigned as D.A. and Bruce Thompson was appointed by the Supervisors to replace him. Woody Deem became the Assistant D.A. and Elwood Walls became the Chief Criminal D.A. Roy lost the election and started a private practice in South Oxnard with Stan Cohen (Gustafson & Cohen).

About this time, it was decided to expand the Oxnard office and Bob and I were joined by Edwin Osborne, and later Lee Cooper and Preston Hill.

In 1961, Bob Shaw, Bob Soares and Julien Hathaway left the office to form the firm of Hathaway, Soares & Shaw and I became the Deputy in charge of the Oxnard office. Also in that year the local state senator, James McBride, died and there was a special election. Bruce Thompson decided to run as one of two democrats against Robert Lagomarsino, the sole republican. Needless to say, Bob won and Bruce lost and the rest is history. Bruce had resigned to run and after the loss, he joined Roy and Stan and the firm became Gustafson, Thompson & Cohen.

Woody Deem was appointed D.A. and I finished my career as Deputy D.A. under Woody, resigning in July 1962, to join the firm of Nordman, Berenson & Lewis in Oxnard.

The address listed in the telephone records of Kathy Kay and Harry Olsen, on 5/21/64? was to 242 West 2nd Street in Oxnard. I don't know if there are any calls made from an earlier, pre-assassination period.

The FBI has known of this phone call since shortly after JFK's murder but J. Edgar Hoover ordered silence and it has been covered-up ever since.

Gary Wean worked in Ventura County, where Oxnard is located. He was Ventura counties Chief Investigator.

I began to read Gary's material, and it's difficult to get through. It sounds awfully like General Walker type Zionist anti-semitic bigoted rubbish. However, if you separate the wheat from the chaff, Wean makes some startling claims.

The first edition of There's a Fish in the Courthouse was published in 1987, and tells of an incredible meeting that Gary attended in late 1963.  One of Gary's friends was Audie Murphy, America's most decorated war hero who became a Hollywood movie star.  During World War II, Murphy took on hundreds of German soldiers and six tanks single-handedly near Holtzwihr France, while he was firing a machine gun from atop a burning vehicle filled with explosives.  It stands as one of the most heroic feats from any war.  Murphy suffered from “shell shock” (now called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome) for the rest of his life. 

One of Murphy's friends was Bill Decker, the sheriff of Dallas County.  Decker came to California regularly on business, and when he came to town, Gary would arrange for Murphy, Decker, himself and his partner to dine at the Police Academy.  About two weeks after the JFK assassination, in early December 1963, Decker was in town and they all had lunch together.  The topic of conversation quickly turned to what arms experts across the nation were discussing: how could Oswald have made those shots with that poor shooting position and mediocre rifle to kill John Kennedy?  Nobody at that table thought it was possible for Oswald to have made those shots.  After they arrived at their conclusion, Decker told them that he knew Oswald had not fired the shots, and that a man in Dallas wanted to talk to somebody about it.  Oswald died while being transferred to Decker’s custody.  Decker knew somebody who could set the record straight, and wanted to talk to somebody not connected to Dallas or Washington.  Murphy was interested, and the next week, Murphy, Gary and his partner were flying to Ruidoso, New Mexico to meet Decker and his friend. 

They met at the airport and went to a diner to talk.  The man who came with Decker was named John.  According to John, Oswald was anything but a “lone nut.”  He was a U.S. intelligence agent acting under the direction of E. Howard Hunt.  Oswald had been recruited into military intelligence when he joined the Marines.  His hanging out in an expensive Tokyo nightclub as a private, his learning Russian at the highly sensitive U-2 base in Japan, his defection to the Soviet Union and other oddities were all part of his intelligence career (which probably began even before his Marine days, when he was a cadet in 1955 in David Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol unit.  “Coincidentally,” Oswald began his “fascination” with communism at the same time).  Oswald was developing "communist" credentials for his future activities in infiltrating communist organizations.  It was a fairly normal American intelligence path.[4] 

Oswald was inducted into CIA covert activities and came under Hunt’s direction.  Hunt was a major player in mounting the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and he, as with many others in the military and CIA, blamed Kennedy for the failure (Kennedy refused to call in openly American air support).  Hunt dreamed up the crazy assassination attempts on Castro that the United States tried.  His mission in life was eliminating Castro.  Oswald came into his control, and was thrown into the cauldron of the Cuban exile communities in Miami and New Orleans.  Oswald did not initially know what his mission would be. 

Hunt was paranoid about Oswald's Russian wife, thinking that she might be a Russian spy, so Oswald could tell her nothing about his activities.  Oswald’s joining Fair Play for Cuba and his staged “murder attempt” on General Walker were all part of giving Oswald “credentials” that would make his upcoming performance more believable.  Hunt had concocted the most bizarre assassination intrigue of all time.  Oswald was going to participate in a fake assassination attempt on John Kennedy, and frame Castro for it.  Oswald’s apparent visit to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City was part of laying an elaborate trail to Cuba.  Hunt believed that if Castro could be implicated in an assassination attempt on JFK, the American people could be riled up into supporting an outright invasion of Cuba. 

JFK was not aware of the fake assassination plan, but high-ranking officials in the government and his administration were.  Military intelligence, the FBI and the CIA were all involved.  Oswald was initially leery of Hunt’s plan, but with assurances and after seeing the high-level people involved, he went along with it.  Oswald was to fire his rifle into the air, then go into hiding, and the false trail to Cuba was laid.  He could come home to a hero’s welcome and live a normal life after America had finished mopping up Cuba. 

But something went horribly wrong.  The fake assassination turned into a real one.  Somebody had infiltrated the operation, interposed the mission and killed JFK.  The real assassins tried killing Oswald after JFK was killed, but policeman Tippit was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was killed.  Oswald escaped, to be captured alive. John said that he knew that Oswald would not have shot a policeman under any circumstances. 

At the end of his mind-blowing tale, John handed over a thick manila envelope, sealed with wax with a thumbprint on it, that contained the documents John said would prove his story. 

Murphy, Gary and his partner went back to California.  They knew that the situation was too big and dangerous for them to pursue.  John said that if he went public with his story, he would quickly disappear, never to be heard from again.  A few days after that meeting, Decker called Murphy.  As John was telling his story, the CIA and intelligence community was in shock.  They did not know what to do, paralyzed with fear.  As they recovered from their shock, they saw themselves facing the firing squad if their involvement in the assassination intrigue became known.  The intelligence community decided they would do everything they could to cover their tracks, invoking “national security.”  Decker told Murphy that John had given him the envelope of documents in a moment of panic, and that if Murphy did not give the envelope back, he would be “destroyed.”  Murphy did some fast thinking and told Decker that they had torn the envelope into pieces and threw them out of the airplane as they were flying back to California. 

Mr. Hunt, I'd like to know about my role... :tomatoes

Audie Murphy perished in a plane crash in 1971. Interestingly enough, aside from connections with Hollywood and the music industry [and GWB declaring an Audie Murphy day in Texas], Audie had been written about by Dorothy Killgallen on September 19, 1954 in the Washington Post. He later went on to appear on 'What's my line' in July, of 1955. I have no clue if Audie was a source for Dorothy later on.

But what really strikes me is how well this construct seems to work from numerous angles:

- RFK's reaction and lack of reaction

- Numerous conflicting/opposing organizations/operations coming together to work towards a common goal.

- General Lemnitzer and the destruction of all documents, except the Northwoods which miraculously emerged unscathed.

- A lack of security in the area, as noted by Prouty

- Lack of reaction by the SS, beyond the lingering effect of grain alcohol. Maybe some SAs were expecting some form of security drill.

- The Cuban Military hats

- The sniper's nest in the TSBD

- The Camera crews

- The confusion within the various US Government agencies.

- Maybe 3 'Tramps' that resembled EH Hunt, Frank Sturgis, etc.?

- The burn jobs - not just plausible denial, but blackmail

- Lee Harvey Oswald's IQ and behavior following the assassination?

- John Martino's bizarre 'slip' .."Had Oswald managed to escape to Cuba..."

- etc.

Let's say that some of the folks in Dealey Plaza may have been there expecting a 'simulated' assassination. Perhaps some were given tasks, like making a photographic or film record...only to discover after-the-fact, like what would have also have happened for certain individuals within the original planning group, that they were guilty of being accomplices to treason - what then?

As to those that were contacted/contracted to participate, plausible denial may not have gone far enough, so some had to be whacked, others set-up to burn.

George Michael Evica has a similar strain of thought in his work 'Perfect Cover.'

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/the_critics/e...fect_cover.html

'It's a mystery wrapped within an enigma!"

- lee

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More on this....

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities. The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

James Bamford...

"Although no one in Congress could have known at the time," he writes, "Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge." Even after Lemnitzer was gone, he writes, the Joint Chiefs continued to plan "pretext" operations at least through 1963.
Simulated Assassination

- originally from Time Bomb #2 -

- rewritten for WWW publication -

Perhaps some of you may have heard about David Kang, the Cambodian student who simulated an assassination of Prince Charles of England while the royal twit was visiting Australia. Charles was about to give a droll little speech when Kang leapt over a barricade and fired blanks from a pistol at Charles. The prince's sole official reaction was to raise his eyebrow and adjust his cufflinks, but I'll bet that he immediately wet his pants.

This was not the first simulated assassination. It was not a failed attempt -- indeed, it was more successful that most recent attempts at real assassination, which is not very popular anymore in the United States. No, in these modern times of instant media, we prefer character assassination to cold-blooded murder, a well-placed rumor being much more devastating and more commonly accepted than a hail of bullets. Nonetheless, the innovative David Kang brought a wonderful new method of poetic terrorism into the public eye.

The motive for any given assassin is either insanity (including a pathological desire for media attention) or political extremism. Simulated assassination, as I shall show, is as good as the real thing in the service of the latter motive.

Simulated assassination is much, much more effective than actual assassination for several reasons. Firstly, the subject of a bloody assassination instantly becomes a martyr. In the public eye, or to his/her followers, the untimely death lends even more significance to whatever movement or era the victim represented. Excellent examples in recent American history are quite plentiful -- the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X. In terms of annihilating someone's goals, a political death (public humiliation/defeat and subsequent withdrawal from political/public life) is much more effective than a violent murder, as in the cases of Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. However, reanimation after such political death is frequently possible.

Political extremists usually seek two things: to demonstrate that they are serious and to have their demands met. A real political murder achieves only the first goal, and usually after this first success the extremists must execute several more victims in order to get what they want. It must be noted that terrorists, kidnappers, assassins, etc. very rarely succeed in changing anyone's mind.

By simulating the murder of your enemy, or a figurehead in the enemy organization, you demonstrate your sincerity and you will probably have more attention paid to your demands -- if not by the media, then by the victim of your pseudo-hit. If Kang had actually murdered Prince Charles, attention would be focused on the violent act itself and the personal sorrows of the would-be killer instead of his true motive behind the attempt. The global media consistently divorce terrorist actions from their original purpose, but the boldness and complete safety of simulated assassination could circumvent the media's focus on mindless violence and instead attracts attention to the Cause itself.

Just imagine what would have happened if Dr. David Gunn had been shot at with blanks instead of slain by real bullets. The pro-lifer certainly would have made his point and might even have been permitted to babble some nonsense about the murder of an abortionists being equal to the destruction of an embryo, or whatever. But because of his use of deadly force, the poor pro-lifer is simply viewed as an insane radical (perhaps rightfully so!) and whatever he says will be tainted by this perspective.

The rare non-lethal maneuvers of Hassan i Sabbah's assassins and the practical jokes of the Manson Family also provide a lesson in simulated assassination. The legendary Hassan i Sabbah, also known as the Old Man of the Mountains, was the master of a vast network of hash-smoking killers -- Arabian ninjas -- secret agents of the medieval Middle East. These killers were moles in enemy organizations with deep cover to rival any police force. At the command of the Old Man, the assassins would strike. On occasion, Hassan i Sabbah sought to use his minions as persuasive tools rather than instruments of death. You can't persuade a dead man, Hassan reasoned -- an important lesson to serious students of simulated assassination -- and so he terrorized foreign rulers by demonstrating his power without exercising it. One such ruler laughed at the Old Man's threats until he awoke one morning with a dagger stuck into his pillow. That action is more or less the exact same thing that David Kang did, only more effective because it took place in the victim's well-guarded abode rather than a public place.

The Manson Family claims to have engaged in similar disruptions of a sleeping person's security. During "creepy crawl" missions, as the Family called their simulated assassinations, they would break into homes while the victims were asleep. The furniture would be rearranged, often turned upside down, and knives would be hung over the victim's bed or arranged around its edge. All of this was done in complete silence. When the victim awoke, he or she probably had the same reaction as the victims of Hassan i Sabbah's simulated assassinations: They had the power to kill me in my sleep, but didn't. I better do what they want.

Suppose that your first simulated assassination fails. You leap out of the crowd, fire several blanks from your gun, then are subdued and captured by enemy forces. Although you make your purpose clear during interviews and your trial, your target nonetheless refuses to see things your way. No problem. Once you are free, do it again. If you share your purpose with a larger organization, recruit members of the group to attempt simulated assassination over and over again. My guess is that nobody can withstand the psychological warfare tactic of repeated, simulated death. It will be as if the target has brushed too close to oblivion over and over again. With luck, copycat simulators will also join the fun. In no time, your target will either be pleading for mercy or adopting such draconian methods of self-protecting that he or she will in effect be banned from public appearances. Either way, your point has been made, and you have not committed a single act of violence.

As a postscript, let's think about the legal ramifications of simulated assassination. One cannot be seriously charged with any violent crime or a conspiracy to commit a violent crime, since there is nothing violent whatsoever about simulated assassination. There is only the suggestion that violence is possible, and there is absolutely nothing illegal about that. You can't be charged with assault, but you could be charged with some variant of disturbing the peace, or even with making a death threat. Technically, however, you are not threatening someone with death, but demonstrating that you have the power to deal death if you choose. There is, in my opinion, a distinct legal difference between promising to murder somebody (a death threat) and simulating a murder. For example, it would be illegal to threaten someone with immolation, but it is perfectly legal, even Constitutional, to burn somebody in effigy. It is also illegal to plot against the United States, but it is quite legal (for now) to symbolically destroy the United States by burning a US flag. Threatening to burn somebody is illegal; simulating that person's death by fire is not, and therefore simulation of death by assassination is not specifically illegal, and might even be protected by the First Amendment, even though death threats are indeed against the law.

WHY MARGALIT HAR SHEFI?

by Barry Chamish

Numerous correspondents have asked me for my take on the sentencing of Margalit Har Shefi, so here it is.

The goal of the Shabak's Jewish Department was to remove Jews from areas secretly promised to the PLO, or all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. If the residents wouldn't cooperate by demonizing themselves, the Shabak would create the outrages for them.

The chief outrage maker was Jewish Dept. chief Eli Barak. Before assuming his post, Rabin sent him to the States to learn dirty tricks and covert operations.

The Rabin assassination was supposed to be just another in a long line of such tricks and Amir was supposed to be another patsy like Goldstein, Freidman, the Kahalani Brothers etc... Except there was a doublecross and the staged fake assassination turned into murder.

:o

Let's say that Gary Wean was telling the truth. Oswald was set up as a Patsy to a phony assassination effort, which was constructed through the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, and even had RFK's approval.

Then another group, a faction, within the CIA, that had strong ties to BOP and were die hard anti-Red cold warriors, took it upon themselves to tap into several existing operations, and played a very complicated game. Doublecrossing, creating false leads, implicating a number of groups and individuals, burning trails, etc.?

I find this construct very compelling personally.

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Lee

Absolutely.

A big theory, big enough to explain so many of the enigmas.

Very compelling approach.

Ties in with my "Incapacity of the President" pretext and rationale.

In the Sciences and Social Sciences

we look for good theory, one that is

COHESIVE, COHERENT, COMPELLING, CONCISE, & COMPLETE

This dual track frame and simultaneous cell ambush explains a lot,

but still tends to point up the chain of command to authorities

with Cabinet level authority over security, i.e. Treasury and the Joint Chiefs. Great stuff emerging lately on the threads.

SHANET

Edited by Shanet Clark
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Interesting theory. It might serve to explain a few things. A few facts from the obscure facts file (in my brain) might tie in in some way. One is that Jerry Owen, a man who told the police he'd sold Sirhan Sirhan a horse the day before Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy, gave Oxnard as his location on the night of the assassination but couldn't remember where he was or the names of the people he stayed with. He also said he'd spent part of the day with Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, a former business partner of Mickey Cohen's. (Some think Owen was worried he'd been seen with Sirhan and made the story up to try to cover his tracks; there's no evidence he ever tried to make any money off his story so the theory that he just wanted some attention is unlikely.)

Another fact is that Oxnard was for a long time, and maybe still is, the home to the California Nazi Party.

A third fact which is undoubtedly intriguing is that in Jimmy Hoffa's memoirs he tells of how Audie Murphy, on his own, arranged for Edward Partin to recant parts of the testimony which put Hoffa away, thus setting Hoffa up for a commuted sentence, which he received. Hoffa was deceived, however, and was only given his commuted sentence on the condition that he not resume control of the Teamsters. Hoffa believed this was the work of Frank Fitzsimmons, his successor, who'd been fully co-opted by the mob by that time and who had pledged monetary and political support to the Nixon Administration in exchange for the pardon being conditional. As to Murphy's motive in helping Hoffa, Hoffa says "The movie star, who had been America's most decorated hero of World War 2, was said to want a favor from me, although I never found out what it was. He was subsequently killed in that mysterious plane crash." Hoffa himself would disappear before the book was published and his co-writer was forced to have Hoffa's family sign an affidavit swearing that Hoffa was working on the book with the writer when he died. The affidavit is on the back cover of the book.

Should we add Audie Murphy on to the "mysterious deaths" list?

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Pat,

Another fact is that Oxnard was for a long time, and maybe still is, the home to the California Nazi Party.

Interestingly and coincidentally enough, it also appears to have been the home to Russian Jewish immigrants, and the site for a lot of early Zionist related activity.

Should we add Audie Murphy on to the "mysterious deaths" list?

He's on Mae Brussell's.

http://web.archive.org/web/20020804010515/...eets/357s2.html

A third fact which is undoubtedly intriguing is that in Jimmy Hoffa's memoirs he tells of how Audie Murphy, on his own, arranged for Edward Partin to recant parts of the testimony which put Hoffa away, thus setting Hoffa up for a commuted sentence, which he received. Hoffa was deceived, however, and was only given his commuted sentence on the condition that he not resume control of the Teamsters.

From the Washington Post, Jun 7, 1971, some excerpts from the article by Jack Anderson:

"We now have had access to the evidence submitted to Murphy.  It indicates the witness lied when he backtracked on his testimoney against Hoffa.  Yet Murphy ignored this evidence and sought a second statement from the witness, plugging up some of the inconsistencies in his original statement.

The weird skein of events that weaves together the most decorated WWII hero and the Teamsters boss can be traced back to Hoffas's 1964 conviction for attempting to bribe a Nashville jury.

The key witness against him was Edward Grady Partin, a Baton Rouge, La., Teamsters leader and intimate of Hoffa.  Until this March, Partin stuck firmly to his story that Hoffa tried to bribe the jurors.  But as Hoffa's parole hearing drew near, pressure was brought on Partin to change his testimony.

Friends of Hoffa approached Partin with promises that they could get the Nixon administration to lift federal charges now pending against him.

Murphy's Maneuver

One approach was made by Audie Murphy, who had filed for bankruptcy in 1968 and was strapped for cash.  His associates told us Murphy was hoping to get a Teamster loan to bail out his business interests.

Murphy used all of his Hollywood charm to pursuade Partin to recant his 1964 testimony.  As evidence the Nixon administration might be lenient with him, one of Murphy's associates even produced a letter - believed to be a forgery  :( - bearing the signature of the President and praising Partin for coming forward on Hoffa's behalf.

...Adn Audie Murphy, until his tragic death, was also working to get a more plausible affidavit from Partin although, according to a trusted friend, he was convinced that Partin was lying to get himself off the hook in the case pending against him.

Footnote:  The Justice Department has denied that Partin was ever coached in his testimony against Hoffa."

Interesting. I wonder if that letter is still in existence. Maybe it went something like this:

Dear Mr. Partin,

First of all, I am not a crook. Secondly, holding the PepsiCola convention in Dallas on 11/22/63 had nothing at all to do with why the TradeMart was selected for Kennedy, and why the motorcade route had to be changed. Hoffa is a good man, and we have a lot of dirt on one another...yeah..hahaha...we go waaaaaaay back. So do what you can for him - ya rat bastard. Nixon.

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I came across a little something that big conspiracy believers like John oughta gobble up. Nixon's representative to Audie Murphy's funeral was none other than George H.W. Bush. This might be due to the WWII/Texas connection between Bush and Murphy. But it still makes you kinda wonder.

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I came across a little something that big conspiracy believers like John oughta gobble up.  Nixon's representative to Audie Murphy's funeral was none other than George H.W. Bush.  This might be due to the WWII/Texas connection between Bush and Murphy.  But it still makes you kinda wonder.

Pat,

If I didn't already note this:

    On June 7th, Audie Murphy was buried with full military honors in Arlington National

Cemetery. His gravesite, near the Amphitheater, is the second most visited gravesite

year round. President Kennedy's grave is the most visited.

    In 1996 the Texas Legislature officially designated his birthday, June 20th, as Audie

Murphy Day. On June 9, 1999 Governor George W. Bush, Texas made a similar

proclamation declaring June 20th to officially be Audie Murphy Day in the state of Texas.

- lee

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The construct, and Wean's tale are very interesting...

From the Washington Post, Jun 1, 1971:

"Last January, Murphy was also cleared of charges of illegally possessing blackjacks.  He contended that he was authroized to have the weapons because he was a special officer with the Port Hueneme, Calif., Police Department and a Deputy with the Dallas County, Tex., Sheriff's Office."

Port Hueneme is in Ventura County. Port Hueneme is 4 miles from Oxnard.

Along with Murphy, 5 other bodies were found in the crash.

Reported to have been with Audie were:

Herman Butler was the pilot, from Denver, CO.

Claude Crosby, President of Modular Properties

Raymond Prather, Attorney for Modular Properties

Jack Littleton, who represented a group of California investors.

That leaves one.

I may retype the entire article on Hoffa, Washington Post, Jun 7, 1971, as I still cannot upload files. :(

It is very interesting, to say the least. The 'favor' Murphy wanted, according to the author of the article, Jack Anderson, was a

'Teamster loan to bail out his business interests.' 
Maybe out of the old Pension fund Trafficante and others tapped through Hoffa.

Pure speculation, but Dorothy Kilgallen's alleged contact 'in the music industry' is intriguing.

From Simkin's Spartacus (thanks John!)

Kilgallen was keen to interview Jack Ruby. She went to see Ruby's lawyer Joe Tonahill and claimed she had a message for his client from a mutual friend. It was only after this message was delivered that Ruby agreed to be interviewed by Kilgallen. Tonahill remembers that the mutual friend was from San Francisco and that he was involved in the music industry. Kennedy researcher, Greg Parker, has suggested that the man was Mike Shore, co-founder of Reprise Records.

Shutters And Boards 1962

When The Wind Blows In Chicago 1962

Please Mr. Music Man Play A Song For Me 1962

Foolish Clock 1962

Leave The Weeping To The Willow Tree 1962

The Only Light I Ever Need Is You 1962

Go On And Break My Heart 1963

Willie The Hummer 1963

My Lonesome Room 1963

Elena, Goodbye 1964

Big, Big Day Tomorrow 1964

If There Is A Short Cut To Nowhere (I'll Take It) 1964

Pedro's Guitar 1964

Round And Round She Goes 1965

Rattle Dance 1966

Dusty Old Helmet 1969

Was It All Worth Losing You 1970

http://www.freemason.org/cfo/julyaugust2000/audie.htm

In 1955, Audie Murphy became interested in Freemasonry. Encouraged by his close friend, Texas theater owner Skipper Cherry, Audie petitioned and joined the Masonic Order in California. Later he returned to Texas to conduct his Scottish Rite work and to join the Shrines. Audie remained active in various Masonic events and was a member of good standing at the time of his death.

How bizarre.

_______________________________________________________

Great thread. We all think about the Dallas connections, the Cuba connections, Mexico City, but Hollywood??? Of course he and Sinatra were buds. I always believed Sinatra's son's kidnapping was a fake to get JFk assasination off the front pages. Have seen maybe one thing on this, (perhaps by John here at the forum?) that also finds this a plausible explanation of that whole werid event.

Now I really want to visit LA, Ca, many firends out there ....

What about Las Vaas, Hughes etc, for that matter the damn Morman church??

Dawn

ps:

Check in on the book section on the Tx. connection, questions being answered.

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Dawn and Lee

You two know a lot;

I really like this theory.

Audie Murphy was in the perfect social situation to absorb this kind of

rare authentic material.

this is one of the most plausible or at least, oldest core theories I have seen.

This type of material shows the strenght of the ED/FORUM.

I read two books recently.

Joe Bonnanno and Robert Maheu. Autobiography.

Both of these autobiographies are notable for what they do not narrate.

Neither includes any material from 1963.

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Dawn,

Here is an item for sale on eBay.

JFK Fascinating Original Document re Movies Mafia

Facinating Kennedy item that requires some explaining.In 1988 a large group of letters, checks, tax forms and documents was obtained by a collector. These papers all dated from the mid-twenties to the early fifties, with much of the material concerning such mobsters as Lansky, Genovese, Adonis, Solomon and others. The common thread of all these documents was that they were directly tied to the accounting practice of one Julius Rosengard. This piece at first would garner a casual second glance. Written in pencil, in Rosengard's hand "Columbia Pictures Corp" with eight films listed on the sheet, with 30% of the gross of each film carried over to the right and totalled at the bottom. What makes this piece even more interesting is written on a 6.25 x 9 sheet of John F. Kennedy's personal Congressional letterhead. Teh consignor notes that after an exhaustive search, no other Kennedy material was found. How did this end up in Rosengard's possession? What was the film connection, especially the share calculated for each film? A few tears and some minor wear as shown. Wish we knew more!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...6505432581&rd=1

Another bizarre factoid - the Texas Theatre was running 'War is Hell.' Audie Murphy has 'a dramatic forward' in the film.

Shanet - that's interesting. Worth noting is David Atlee Phillips work of 'nonfiction' ;) - The Night Watch. Apparently 1963 was a boring year for him during his 4 years at the Mexico City Station - he devotes very little to it.

- lee

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Robert Maheu's book was ghosted by Ron Laytner and it has an interesting

anecdote about receiving a call from the Mormon guard surrounding the

defense industrialist, Howard Hughes. It seems Mr. Maheu got a call

from the inner sanctum "who did Lyndon Johnson serve under as Vice President?"

"What, whats this all about?"

"Well, Mr. Maheu, Mr. Hughes is here dictating a letter to President Johnson.

He starts out by saying that he remembers Lyndon Johnson from when

he was Vice President under Harry Truman, and that can't be right, is it, sir?"

(I am paraphrasing), and Maheu says the letter to Johnson was corrected before being sent. Strange glimpse at the Hughes perception of the world...

Hughes Death, like that of J. Edgar Hoover, became the source of a scramble

for documents, and the notebooks (in Michael Drosnin's CITIZEN HUGHES)

tell us quite a bit about Mr. Hughes empire.

Certainly Richard Nixon was very concerned about the limits of Howard Hughes

intelligence resources.....Harry Truman, indeed....

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  • 1 month later...
Elsewhere I've read that Wean eventually admitted that the John in his story was Senator John Tower.  John Simkin should know about that.

Was that after John Tower died? In 1964 Tower was the Republican senator for Texas. When he was elected in May, 1961 (he had replaced LBJ who had to resign his seat because he had been elected as JFK Vice President) he became the first Republican senator elected in Texas since 1870.

This story raises a few questions. First of all, how did he know about this story? What was his relationship with Hunt? Why would he tell Bill Decker, Audie Murphy and Gary Wean about it? Who was Gary Wean’s partner? Is he dead? Did he ever confirm this story?

By the way, George Michael Evica is a member of this Forum but has never posted. Shall I tell him about this thread?

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It's a tempting scenario and one that seems to fit Hunt's personality which makes it an even easier sell - especially considering that Hunt was involved both with Domestic Operations as Covert Ops chief and with the Artime project in 1963.

A couple of things jump out at me though.

First off, we have what would have been a pretty simple plan e.g. get

Oswald to stand in a window and fire a shot in the air and claim Castro

sponsorship. Nice, neat, doesn't require a lot of support. So why bring

all sorts of different agencies into it and risk the confidentiality of the whole

thing? Heck, Hunt or even Phillips could decide to do something like that

all on their own. The more people you tell the bigger the risk of somebody

not approving it or of blabbing. If Oswald asks you tell him everybody

approved including JFK himself.

Second, if somebody was compelled to surface the truth, what a risky way to

do it. Of course anybody knowing the intimate details would be under

surveillance from Friday afternoon on. And warned that they would be....at

minimum.

Third and worse, we have the traditional "thick manila envelope, sealed with wax with a thumbprint on it, that contained the documents John said would prove his story." Do we really think somebody documents a project like this with enough paper trail for a think manilla envelope. Or that if you did John would have been able to walk off with copies and keep them aferwards....back to the warning, surveillance and of course retrieval of any documents he had.

Or does anybody think Hunt is/was to moral and ethical to cover his rear if this were true? If you give your plotters the will and skill to do this sort of thing you pretty much have to give them the ability to do whatever it takes to cover it up.

...not to mention that reportedly Estes is now saying that one of the main players in the Johnson plot was none other than our good Sheriff Decker.....so perhaps this is all Decker disinformation?

All in all its still tempting and maybe true, fellows like Morales and Roselli could easily hijack such a plan. But I just wish that manila envelope complete with thumbprint wasn't in it. And I still keep thinking John would never have been on a long enough leash to carry it as far as the story relates?

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Elsewhere I've read that Wean eventually admitted that the John in his story was Senator John Tower.  John Simkin should know about that.

Was that after John Tower died? In 1964 Tower was the Republican senator for Texas. When he was elected in May, 1961 (he had replaced LBJ who had to resign his seat because he had been elected as JFK Vice President) he became the first Republican senator elected in Texas since 1870.

This story raises a few questions. First of all, how did he know about this story? What was his relationship with Hunt? Why would he tell Bill Decker, Audie Murphy and Gary Wean about it? Who was Gary Wean’s partner? Is he dead? Did he ever confirm this story?

By the way, George Michael Evica is a member of this Forum but has never posted. Shall I tell him about this thread?

Hi John!

Wade Frazier was a colleague/friend of Gary Wean. I have tried to contact him - so far unsuccessfully. He still maintains a website. Wade says that the information concerning 'John' being 'Tower' was released after Towers death. Interesting that Tower was the one that Oswald contacted from the USSR.

Audie Murphy is a very interesting character. He did in fact travel frequently to Ventura County, from what I've gathered, and was a friend of Bill Deckers.

If you could get George Michael Evica to add anything I think it would be great. IMO, however, he creates his own rathole by trying to logically place everyone and everything into certain categories. I don't believe it's so cut and dry.

Someone once told me that 'multiple operations' were going on in Dallas in November of 1963. If we take the latest info provided by GPH to Tim Gratz concerning JB Connally - it's an interesting scenario. Revenge for the Thresher, some rightwing lunatics [Wanted for Treason, Milteer, etc.], the whole Texas Oil thing [mainly meaning DeMohrenschildt here] and a whole other bunch invited to the dance - who would have had the information, resources and intelligence to pull all of these various operations and organizations together simultaneously to leave us with this puzzle? Only someone within the ranks of US Intel, who would have been aware of all of these various activities, IMO - perhaps even sponsoring some of them, or at least having infiltrated them. Still smacks of Phillips, Angleton and Lemnitzer type characters for me.

Here's more on the story as per Wade Frazier. This was from a cached website.

Keep in mind that Wean draws a lot of fire to his own credibility through what appears to be a strong anti-semitic stance. I had to weed through his stuff a lot to separate the fact from the diatribe.

The part about Oswald is interesting, but I don't think he was the one who held a weapon out the window, which makes part of the tale suspect. But his Dear Mr Hunt letter is interesting. Bringing to work a broken down broom handled Mauser and calling it curtain rods is an interesting idea. As is the tale of the receipt in Wisconsin for LHOs stay in a motel there, 40 miles from where Kennedy was visiting, and his purchase of a radio. I wish I could figure out what Oswald really thought he was doing, and what his assignment was on 11/22. I still make him for standing in the doorway of the TSBD at 12:30pm, and then heading up to the lunchroom.

Speculation: Perhaps aside from a fake assassination, Connally was always part of an original plan? A necessary victim of a staged simulated ssassination?

The reason I like this whole theory so much, as I may have already stated, is the large number of cameras I believe many have discovered in Dealey Plaza [not the public ones], the use of Cubans, and what appears to be the use of Cuban military hats - including the beret worn by DCM, and the 2 men seen in Altgens 6 at the DalTex [window and fire escape], for example. Would have made a very nice full length propoganda film, and I'm still hopeful we will see some of them one day.

- lee

 

                        Gary Wean and the JFK Assassination

In early 1989, it appeared as if Dennis had no chance of living to see this side of the bars again.  There were a handful of people trying to save him from life in prison, and probably being murdered while he was in there.  Although our effort was the target of a wide-ranging international conspiracy, Ventura County was also one of the United States’ most corrupt counties, regularly ranking in the top ten most corrupt law enforcement jurisdictions (it has even been ranked number one).  Dennis was far from alone in being raped by Ventura County’s legal system. 

In Ventura County, one person in particular was standing up to the corruption.  Gary Wean was a sailor in World War II and became an LAPD policeman in 1946.  Gary had the kind of career that they make movies about.  He moved back and forth between Ventura County and Los Angeles a couple of times in the 1950s and 1960s.  While in Los Angeles, Gary was at times a motorcycle cop directing traffic, while at others he was a detective.  He worked out of the downtown and Hollywood precincts.  Dealing with the escapades of politicians, celebrities and gangsters was simply part of his job. 

In 1947, he was pursuing an armed robber through the streets of Los Angeles on a high-speed chase.  The suspect crashed his car as it barreled along at ninety miles an hour through LA’s streets.  He tried escaping on foot, and Gary cornered him in the dark.  The suspect begged for his life.  As Gary approached, the man stuck his pistol (which had already killed somebody during the robbery) into Gary’s abdomen and fired.  He fired a second shot that hit Gary in his hand.  Gary then emptied his pistol into the man, while his partner also fired, killing the robber instantly.  Gary’s partner rushed him to the hospital.  Although Gary’s abdomen was in great pain, he did not want to unbuckle his Sam Brown belt (a wide leather belt which held his firearm and other police equipment) as they rushed to the hospital, because he thought it might be all that was holding him together.  When Gary finally took off his belt, his partner saw that the bullet hit the belt and did not penetrate Gary’s skin.[3]  That was a day in the life of an LAPD cop.  Below are images from that day.

  Gary relates many amazing incidents in his book There's a Fish in the Courthouse.  Gary was from the old school: he believed in the ideal of law enforcement, and that through a properly functioning legal system there could be a more just society. 

When I met Gary in early 1989, he gave me the best advice I could get: no organization in America would help Dennis, either governmental or private.  Dennis’ experience was not that unusual.  U.S. judicial gangsterism was normal, but nearly always covered up or misrepresented by the media, as they are an integral part of the system.  Gary's advice kept me from wasting my time seeking somebody in the United States government to help.  Gary’s insight helped lead to Dennis’ miraculous release from jail.  In my hour of need, Gary was generous with his time, sincere, and helpful. 

The first edition of There's a Fish in the Courthouse was published in 1987, and tells of an incredible meeting that Gary attended in late 1963.  One of Gary's friends was Audie Murphy, America's most decorated war hero who became a Hollywood movie star.  During World War II, Murphy took on hundreds of German soldiers and six tanks single-handedly near Holtzwihr France, while he was firing a machine gun from atop a burning vehicle filled with explosives.  It stands as one of the most heroic feats from any war.  Murphy suffered from “shell shock” (now called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome) for the rest of his life. 

One of Murphy's friends was Bill Decker, the sheriff of Dallas County.  Decker came to California regularly on business, and when he came to town, Gary would arrange for Murphy, Decker, himself and his partner to dine at the Police Academy.  About two weeks after the JFK assassination, in early December 1963, Decker was in town and they all had lunch together.  The topic of conversation quickly turned to what arms experts across the nation were discussing: how could Oswald have made those shots with that poor shooting position and mediocre rifle to kill John Kennedy?  Nobody at that table thought it was possible for Oswald to have made those shots.  After they arrived at their conclusion, Decker told them that he knew Oswald had not fired the shots, and that a man in Dallas wanted to talk to somebody about it.  Oswald died while being transferred to Decker’s custody.  Decker knew somebody who could set the record straight, and wanted to talk to somebody not connected to Dallas or Washington.  Murphy was interested, and the next week, Murphy, Gary and his partner were flying to Ruidoso, New Mexico to meet Decker and his friend. 

They met at the airport and went to a diner to talk.  The man who came with Decker was named John.  According to John, Oswald was anything but a “lone nut.”  He was a U.S. intelligence agent acting under the direction of E. Howard Hunt.  Oswald had been recruited into military intelligence when he joined the Marines.  His hanging out in an expensive Tokyo nightclub as a private, his learning Russian at the highly sensitive U-2 base in Japan, his defection to the Soviet Union and other oddities were all part of his intelligence career (which probably began even before his Marine days, when he was a cadet in 1955 in David Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol unit.  “Coincidentally,” Oswald began his “fascination” with communism at the same time).  Oswald was developing "communist" credentials for his future activities in infiltrating communist organizations.  It was a fairly normal American intelligence path.[4] 

Oswald was inducted into CIA covert activities and came under Hunt’s direction.  Hunt was a major player in mounting the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and he, as with many others in the military and CIA, blamed Kennedy for the failure (Kennedy refused to call in openly American air support).  Hunt dreamed up the crazy assassination attempts on Castro that the United States tried.  His mission in life was eliminating Castro.  Oswald came into his control, and was thrown into the cauldron of the Cuban exile communities in Miami and New Orleans.  Oswald did not initially know what his mission would be. 

Hunt was paranoid about Oswald's Russian wife, thinking that she might be a Russian spy, so Oswald could tell her nothing about his activities.  Oswald’s joining Fair Play for Cuba and his staged “murder attempt” on General Walker were all part of giving Oswald “credentials” that would make his upcoming performance more believable.  Hunt had concocted the most bizarre assassination intrigue of all time. Oswald was going to participate in a fake assassination attempt on John Kennedy, and frame Castro for it.  Oswald’s apparent visit to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City was part of laying an elaborate trail to Cuba.  Hunt believed that if Castro could be implicated in an assassination attempt on JFK, the American people could be riled up into supporting an outright invasion of Cuba. 

JFK was not aware of the fake assassination plan, but high-ranking officials in the government and his administration were.  Military intelligence, the FBI and the CIA were all involved.  Oswald was initially leery of Hunt’s plan, but with assurances and after seeing the high-level people involved, he went along with it.  Oswald was to fire his rifle into the air, then go into hiding, and the false trail to Cuba was laid.  He could come home to a hero’s welcome and live a normal life after America had finished mopping up Cuba. 

But something went horribly wrong.  The fake assassination turned into a real one.  Somebody had infiltrated the operation, interposed the mission and killed JFK.  The real assassins tried killing Oswald after JFK was killed, but policeman Tippit was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was killed.  Oswald escaped, to be captured alive.  John said that he knew that Oswald would not have shot a policeman under any circumstances. 

At the end of his mind-blowing tale, John handed over a thick manila envelope, sealed with wax with a thumbprint on it, that contained the documents John said would prove his story. 

Murphy, Gary and his partner went back to California.  They knew that the situation was too big and dangerous for them to pursue.  John said that if he went public with his story, he would quickly disappear, never to be heard from again.  A few days after that meeting, Decker called Murphy.  As John was telling his story, the CIA and intelligence community was in shock.  They did not know what to do, paralyzed with fear.  As they recovered from their shock, they saw themselves facing the firing squad if their involvement in the assassination intrigue became known.  The intelligence community decided they would do everything they could to cover their tracks, invoking “national security.”  Decker told Murphy that John had given him the envelope of documents in a moment of panic, and that if Murphy did not give the envelope back, he would be “destroyed.”  Murphy did some fast thinking and told Decker that they had torn the envelope into pieces and threw them out of the airplane as they were flying back to California. 

That is what Gary says he witnessed, and I believe him.  In the first edition of his book, Gary hid John's identity.  Because John was dead when Gary published the second edition of his book in 1996, Gary revealed that “John” was John Tower, the Senator from Texas and George Bush’s little buddy who he nominated to be the Secretary of Defense. 

Gary wrote his book in the early 1970s.  New evidence keeps coming to light regarding the JFK assassination.  Because of what Gary saw, I knew that Oswald was not a lone nut.  The center of gravity of my research into the JFK assassination has been to see how it correlated with Gary's testimony.  Every piece of credible evidence I have seen supports Gary’s story, and none contradicts it.  Particularly impressive has been the recent revelations of Operation Northwoods, where the U.S. government was going to stage terrorist acts in America to manipulate Americans into supporting an invasion of Cuba.  Gary’s story touches upon many facets of the JFK assassination evidence, including Oswald's military intelligence days, his association with the Cuban exiles, the “Texas Connection,” the “Republican Connection,” the oilman connection, the George Bush connection, the CIA connection, the FBI connection and others.  Up until now (2002), Gary's testimony has been ignored by virtually everybody involved in investigating the JFK assassination.  Gary is the only surviving member of that meeting with John Tower.  Tower and Murphy both died in private plane “accidents” that may not have been accidental.

Gary's career ended in Ventura County when he stumbled into corruption that boggles the mind.  Gary names names, and I knew some of the people he named in his book, and knew of many of the events.  I independently believed his version of some events before I met him.  When he encountered the corruption in Ventura, which ended his career, he fought back and survived a murder attempt himself.  Those who run Ventura County are judges on the Superior Court, real estate developers, politicians and the like.  According to Gary, political murder was common in Ventura County, where judges, lawyers and other people who got in the way or were expendable were murdered, sometimes by private plane “accidents,” mysterious drownings, etc. 

Hollywood has made many movies and TV shows about the police and crime in Los Angeles, especially during the 1930s, 1940s and '50s, such as LA Confidential and Chinatown.  Gary worked out of the downtown and Hollywood precincts during his days as an LAPD cop.  Later in his career, he became an investigator for the LA District Attorney's Office.  In the early days of Gary’s career, he was assigned to keep watch on Mickey Cohen, who ran LA’s organized crime operations.  Cohen, Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky were Jewish gangsters.  Siegel “built” Las Vegas.  Cohen ran the LA crime scene for many years.  In typical gangster style, Cohen’s hangouts were often boxing arenas, racetracks, restaurants, etc.  Gary followed Cohen around as part of his job.  One member of Cohen’s entourage, who Gary saw regularly, was an aspiring lawyer who sat on the Ninth District Federal Court for many years.  I saw his name in the news a few years ago, and he is still a judge, at nearly 80 years of age in 2002.  The man is a gangster, and a federal judge, and the media and establishment has been lavishing praise on him lately, with awards and hagiographic articles. 

The connection between Frank Sinatra and organized crime is one of many in the entertainment field (or the CIA, or George Bush, or Joe Kennedy, or entertainment and law enforcement, such as Elvis Presley and the FBI, or the FBI and organized crime).  Along with good food and pretty women, first-class entertainment is another gangster perk.  Gangsters keep entertainers as their “pets” when they can.  The Las Vegas connection and entertainment is a case in point.  Cohen was deeply involved in the Hollywood scene. 

One of Cohen’s specialties was blackmailing celebrities, such as obtaining compromising photographs of them to use as leverage.  The Mafia had the goods on FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, a transvestite.  Because of their blackmail, Hoover publicly denied organized crime’s existence, and the FBI rarely tried prosecuting them.  When Robert Kennedy prosecuted organized crime when he was Attorney General, he was breaking the unwritten rules. 

One of Cohen's successes involved Lana Turner.  Johnny Stompanato was a good-looking, aspiring Italian gangster, one of the gangster wannabees that filled Los Angeles in those days.  The LA hookers said that the Italian Stallion Stompanato was the best bedroom performer in LA, and Cohen arranged for him to meet Turner.  The romance flourished.  Cohen paid for a deluxe motel suite for the lovers.  The bed was wired for sound.  Cohen got a recording of Stompanato and Turner going at it.  Cohen had two thousand copies pressed of Turner’s squeals of ecstasy.  It became a hit at Hollywood parties.  Some said that it was one of Turner’s finest performances.  It made Cohen a lot of money, as he sold the record for fifty dollars a copy.  Turner’s daughter eventually murdered Stompanato, creating one of Hollywood’s bigger scandals.  That recording became the “must have” item after Stompanato’s death, and Cohen pressed thousands more records, making big money.

As Gary followed Cohen, sometimes putting him under sophisticated surveillance, Gary met members of Cohen’s entourage.  In 1946, Gary saw somebody new with Cohen at the racetrack.  In 1947, he bumped into him at a restaurant he was watching.  The man knew Gary was a cop, yet they had an interesting conversation.  The man introduced himself as Jack Ruby.  His real name was Jacob Rubenstein, and he worked with Mick Cohen.  Ruby openly told Gary that the mob was focusing its operations on New Orleans and Havana, where the action was.  With World War II over, the West Coast was not really the happening place anymore.  Ruby murdered Oswald, and Gary presents intriguing evidence regarding the organized crime connection with the JFK assassination. 

In 1948, the state of Israel was established.  Menachem Begin eventually became Israel's Prime Minister.  Begin was a member of the Irgun terrorist group.  He helped blow up a hotel, killing many people.  When Begin was the Israeli Prime Minister, he could not visit Britain, because he was wanted for murder there.  The people who established Israel were extremely violent.  Mick Cohen became involved with Begin, and became an arms dealer for Israel, which is not surprising to anybody who has done any digging into the CIA’s alliances.  Cohen said that his Jewish blood made him such a fervent supporter of Israel, but he was likely in it for the money, as usual. 

In Israel’s early days, their relationship with the United States was not happy, and was particularly troubled during the Eisenhower administration.[5]  It was not until the war of 1967, when Israel proved itself a murderously aggressive power in the Middle East, grabbing huge chunks of land from its neighbors, that the United States began its massive and unconditional support of Israel, which is the biggest foreign aid project the world has ever seen.  In 1960, the U.S. presidential election was between Nixon (Eisenhower’s vice president) and John Kennedy. 

Kennedy was a legendary philanderer, and Cohen and friends tried exploiting JFK’s proclivities.  According to legend, John Kennedy met Marilyn Monroe through a connection with Frank Sinatra.  Right there is a possible organized crime connection, but Gary says that another member of the “rat pack,” Joey Bishop (who knew Cohen well - Gary says that Bishop even worked for Cohen), came up with the idea of introducing Monroe to JFK, and Gary looked in on Peter Lawford’s (JFK’s in-law) Malibu party where JFK and Monroe were introduced, in 1960, during the Democratic national convention. 

As with Stompanato and Turner, Cohen underling Georgie Piscitelli became Monroe’s lover.  Cohen got a tape of them in bed together and played it for Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster boss who later received cement shoes from the Mafia, and who was then feeling the heat from Attorney General Bobby Kennedy.  They promised Hoffa a tape of JFK and Monroe in bed together (so Hoffa could blackmail JFK into calling off Bobby Kennedy’s efforts), but could never deliver.  Monroe was being used as the world’s highest-class hooker.[6]  Cohen and friends wanted to know what Kennedy's intentions towards Israel were.  Monroe was supposed to elicit it during pillow talk.  Monroe was controlled by mobsters and was kept on all manner of narcotic.  When she became increasingly uncontrollable and potentially dangerous if she publicly talked about what was happening, she was murdered.  Gary had Cohen under surveillance, and caught him and Begin having a conversation in Yiddish in a diner.  They were talking about Kennedy, Israel, how much money Kennedy was wasting on the Peace Corps and other programs. 

Gary's testimony regarding JFK, John Tower, Marilyn Monroe, Menachem Begin, Jack Ruby and Mick Cohen is just part of his amazing tale, which he published at great risk.  The only JFK assassination book I am aware of that even mentions Gary is Final Judgment, by Michael Collins Piper, who heavily relies on Gary’s testimony.  Gary thinks that Jewish gangsters were involved in interposing Hunt’s grand scheme.  That does not mean that Allen Dulles (the CIA chief whom Kennedy fired over the Bay of Pigs, and who later served on the Warren Commission), J. Edgar Hoover, George Bush and others were not also involved in interposing Hunt’s scheme, playing Hunt for a chump.

Piper is a reporter for The Spotlight, which I subscribed to for years.  It has understandably been described as a neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic publication.  The culmination of Gary's book is uncovering a vast Jewish crime organization.  It is different from the Italian Mafia, as its members are judges, politicians and other public figures.  It is a highly intelligent crime organization, using the pen more than the gun to achieve its goals.  The most powerful criminals do not break the laws: they make and enforce the laws, to serve their own interests, not the public’s. 

Gary has suffered greatly at the hands of Jewish gangsters.  Consequently, I believe he has taken his Jewish theorizing a little too far, but it is understandable.  During my days with Dennis and the horror I lived through, I thought policeman and lawyers were among the lowest forms of life.  I have since revised my views, but I understand how brutal treatment at the hands of Jewish gangsters can lead to overgeneralizations regarding the Jewish people. 

The Jewish people have had a very rough ride, especially at Christendom’s hands.  The flocking of Jews to Southern California was just one more chapter in their long journeys, trying to find a place in the Christian world where they would not be discriminated against, or murdered en masse.  Consequently, Jews entered new industries such as the entertainment industry in Hollywood, and some took advantage of Prohibition, just as Italian criminals did.  Cohen, Siegel and Lansky were part of a uniquely American phenomenon.  What Gary ran into, a Jewish underworld where the criminals were bankers, judges, lawyers, politicians and others, is an understandable Jewish variation of organized crime.  The Jewish gangsters also sought “invisibility,” which is also common in corporate and other power games. 

Even though Gary has taken his theorizing about the Jewish people too far, he is correct when he says that Jewish apologists have been using the cry of “anti-Semitism” as a club to prevent anybody from criticizing Israel (and Gary says the same tactic prevents the exposure of Jewish gangster activities).  Noam Chomsky says the same thing about how the cry of anti-Semitism is being used to deflect criticism of the Israeli state.[7]  So does Native American scholar Ward Churchill.[8]  Jewish scholars are definitely guilty of playing up the Jewish Holocaust and its imagined historical exclusivity, to the point where some have denied the Gypsy Holocaust of World War II.  Gypsies were subject to the same extermination policies as the Jews were, dying alongside the Jews in the same death camps.  All the same, the far-right scholarship that argues that the Jewish Holocaust never happened, or was never intended by the Nazis, is, in the words of Ward Churchill, “tripe.”  If one is not familiar with scholarship’s “rules,” the-Jewish-Holocaust-Never-Happened scholarship can appear reasonable.  Far right scholarship on the subject is extremely biased, and is often appallingly bad.  Typically, they use a few “facts” to establish their arguments, but then liberally add rumor, supposition and fabrication into the mix to construct their hypothesis. 

All disinformation has “truth” and “facts” in it (which is what makes it plausible), and to the uninitiated can unfortunately be convincing.  Probably the main reason Gary’s testimony is dismissed is because of his fervent writings about Jewish gangsters, and generalizations about the Jewish people that can easily be labeled anti-Semitic.  In 1998, I submitted a brief essay about Gary’s testimony to a JFK assassination forum, and the only response was to flame me, call my writing a “fairy tale,” call Murphy a “coward” and Gary a “Nazi.”  Yet, Gary’s theories have virtually nothing to do with what Gary says he witnessed.  I believe everything that Gary says he saw, including his meeting with John Tower, and Jews do not come up in the John Tower conversation at all.

The surfacing of the Operation Northwoods documents in 2001, however, may make Gary’s testimony vastly more credible, as Tower’s tale is very similar to the plans as depicted in the Operations Northwoods documents.  I have spent hundreds of hours looking into the JFK assassination evidence since 1989, and I have never seen any piece of credible evidence contradict Gary’s testimony, and evidence has kept appearing during the past fourteen years that keeps confirming it.  The next section will deal Gary’s account of John Tower and JFK, and how it fits today’s evidence. 

 

Assessing the Credibility of Gary’s Story, and How it Fits the Facts

Up until now, Gary’s testimony regarding Tower and JFK has been ignored by, or unknown to, nearly everybody involved in the JFK assassination controversy.  This section is written in the hope that the recent Operation Northwoods revelations will spark more interest in Gary’s tale.  James Bamford, the author who brought the Northwoods documents to American attention in his Body of Secrets (an Australian work, Jon Elliston’s 1999 Psy War on Cuba, first publicly disclosed the documents, but the book was ignored in the U.S.), wrote that the Northwoods plan “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.”[9]  There is plenty of competition for “most corrupt plan” in American history. 

George Washington, probably America’s richest man when he became president, whose fortune was anything but “clean,” designed the blueprint to steal the North American continent from Native Americans, by forcing them to cede their lands in treaties that the U.S. government would never honor.  Washington’s plan was quickly adopted by the Continental Congress, and was U.S. official policy until there were virtually no more native lands left to steal.  Thomas Jefferson told Big Lies to both the British and Spanish ambassadors about U.S. intentions toward North American lands.  The U.S. government during the 19th century was more openly corrupt than in the twentieth century. 

The 20th century began with the U.S. consolidating its theft of the last shreds of Spain’s colonial lands, which began with robber baron William Randolph Hearst whipping up the American people to invade Cuba, to “free them” from Spain (under the false pretense that Cuba sank an American warship in Havana Harbor).  The lie of the U.S.’ “noble intentions” was immediately laid bare when it also seized the Philippines, and then engaged in a genocidal attack against the Filipinos when they tried becoming independent of the new imperial overlords.  To the Filipinos, it mattered little if the overlords were Spanish, American or Japanese.  While the U.S. was still digesting its land grabs from Spain, it engaged in its first experiment in neocolonialism, with the outright theft and fabrication of Panama, separating it from Colombia, and then the U.S. immediately split it with the Panama Canal Zone.  The United States invaded Latin America at will after the creation of Panama. 

Panama was a free nation in name only.  Wall Street lawyer William Nelson Cromwell ran the “free Panama” operation.  He was a founder of the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm.  In the Panama operation, Cromwell ran a syndicate largely bankrolled by J.P. Morgan, and the American taxpayer was ultimately swindled by their subterfuge, in the biggest single payment the American government had ever made, up to that time.  John Foster Dulles inherited Cromwell’s empire.  Dulles became Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, and his brother Allen ran the CIA.  Both men were partners in Sullivan and Cromwell.  Allen and John Foster were particularly fond of Nazi Germany, heavily investing in it during the 1930s.  After World War II ended, Allen quickly “rehabilitated” Hitler’s biggest cheerleaders in German banking and industry, and put them right back into the positions they enjoyed while supporting Hitler’s regime. 

John Foster Dulles’ behaviors while serving as Eisenhower’s Secretary of State added a new word to the dictionary: brinksmanship.  Dulles’ notion of diplomacy with the Soviet Union was threatening it with nuclear attack.  The Cromwell-Dulles empire was quite active in Latin America.  One of Sullivan and Cromwell’s clients was the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit, which “owned” Guatemala.  In 1951, Jacobo Arbenz became Guatemala’s president, and he nationalized some of United Fruit’s unused land, with a plan to compensate them for it.  Arbenz was a fan of Franking Roosevelt, and tried building a New Deal-style economy in Guatemala.  Citing the “international communist conspiracy” fantasy, the Dulles brothers engineered the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954, and the Guatemalan people were treated to a string of brutal U.S.-puppet-dictators for more than the next thirty years, which took hundreds of thousands of lives, while the entire nation (except for the ruling class) lived in misery.  The year before overthrowing the Guatemalan government, the Dulles brothers reacted to Iran’s attempt to nationalize Britain’s oil monopoly by overthrowing the Iranian government.  The U.S. began taking over Middle East oil on behalf of the American oil companies, which “coincidentally” also served Rockefeller interests.  The Shah’s reign was one of the bloodier chapters in modern Middle East history. 

The 1950s also saw the U.S. invasion of Korea, and millions were killed.  Those were also the years of the McCarthy witch hunts and the marketing of industrial waste to Americans as “medicine.”  So, corruption was far from unknown, especially during that era, and far right, anti-communist hysteria was imbedded in America’s psyche as deeply as any catechism ever was.  People such as Ralph McGehee eventually realized what a Big Lie the anti-communist ideology was.  It was a smokescreen designed to disguise and protect imperial/corporate prerogatives. 

When Castro’s boys finally overthrew a U.S. puppet in Latin America in 1959, the super-hawks in the Eisenhower administration could barely contain themselves.  As with most who have been called “communist,” Castro was originally simply an anti-imperialist, and Cuba has long had Latin America’s highest standard of living, ever since the Cuban Revolution (there are no homeless in Cuba, something the U.S. could learn from).  The thought that other Latin American nations might follow Cuba’s example and break free of American domination was intolerable, and in the 1960s and 1970s the U.S. overthrew more than a dozen elected Latin Americas governments and installed U.S.-backed dictatorships, some of which were among the 20th century’s bloodiest regimes.[10]  The official reason why America has named Cuba a pariah nation, and led economic warfare against it for more than forty years, is because of its “human rights” violations.  The American-puppet governments in Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s make Castro’s Cuba appear saintly on the human rights issue.  The same goes for today’s Colombia (earth’s most violent nation), as the Colombian government receives vast sums of arms from the U.S., to “fight terror.”  The rationale used to be to fight “communists,” and then “drug dealers” after the Soviet Union collapsed, and now we are fighting “terror” in Colombia.  What will the next rationale be?  The same peasants are being killed, and the same oil companies are rubbing their hands at the prospects of exploiting the region.

Eisenhower was rather incensed that the Cuban Revolution came during his watch, and asked his military leaders to “think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable” to justify invading Cuba.  Eisenhower even harbored those ideas as a lame duck president, soon before JFK’s inauguration.[11]  Shortly before Eisenhower left office, he appointed a hawk among hawks, General Lyman Lemnitzer, to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).  Lemnitzer thoroughly distrusted civilian politicians, and felt that the military should run the American government.  Ironically, Lemnitzer’s kind may be just what Eisenhower was warning against when he ominously spoke of the growing power of the “military-industrial complex,” three days before he left office. 

The antagonism between the military and CIA goes back to World War II, when Wild Bill Donovan and other Wall Street lawyers and executives founded and ran the Office of Strategic Services (OSS - the direct forerunner of the CIA), and they prevailed in the battle over who ran the U.S. intelligence scene, and quickly hired Nazis to staff the CIA after World War II was over. 

JFK came to office as the CIA was about to mount an invasion of Cuba.  Lemnitzer knew it would be a disaster, but remained silent.  The Bay of Pigs debacle cost Allen Dulles his job, but did nothing to cool the hawks’ ardor.  While E. Howard Hunt, who planned the Bay of Pigs operation (and would later plan the Watergate break-in), was devising plans to assassinate Castro, with plans seemingly out of Maxwell Smart’s spy manual, General Lemnitzer and friends devised plans to justify invading Cuba, and Operation Northwoods was conceived.  Although some caution is warranted regarding the authenticity of the Northwoods documents, they are in step with the times, and what the Joint Chiefs of Staff were thinking in those days.  Not even the establishment-defending mainstream media is disputing the documents’ authenticity.  Only some of the far right fringe is disputing them, to my knowledge, and they have yet to make a persuasive case.  The documents appear genuine, and only came to light when Oliver Stone’s film JFK inspired the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), which was formed in 1994. 

An ARRB member allegedly tipped off Bamford as to the documents’ existence, and they might be the only documents like them to survive Lemnitzer’s document-destroying fervor.  What kinds of plans are in the Northwoods documents?  An early idea was to stage a fake attack on the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.  The Northwoods ideas became increasingly extreme, and one plan was blowing up the rocket that John Glenn was about to fly in, and pin it on Cuba somehow.  They planned plane hijackings and bombings of American cities.  One plan that has received attention from the 9/11 conspiracy theorists was to stage an incident over Cuba with a drone plane made to look like an airliner.  The plane would self-destruct over Cuba, to make it appear as if the Cubans shot it down.  Lemnitzer reported to John McNamara, JFK’s Secretary of Defense.  Lemnitzer increasingly fell from grace in the JFK administration, and a few days after Lemnitzer tried broaching his grand plan to McNamara, JFK told Lemnitzer that there was no chance of the U.S. ever using direct military force against Cuba.  That was in 1962, and Lemnitzer soon lost his job as the JCS chairman, but Bamford wrote, “Even after Lemnitzer lost his job, the Joint Chiefs kept planning ‘pretext’ operations at least into 1963.”[12]

Having the military and government cooking up plans, no matter how insane, bloody or evil they might seem, does not mean they were ever approved or implemented.  When McNamara was confronted with the Northwoods revelations, he denied that Lemnitzer ever showed him the plan, which may have been true.  JFK’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen also denied such a plan, saying that it would have been “illegal” and “unwise.”  Being illegal and unwise has rarely stopped the U.S. government from doing anything, particularly during the current “War on Terror” and impending invasion of Iraq.  Before the Soviet Union set off its first nuclear bomb, the U.S. military had a plan for dropping dozens of atomic bombs on the Soviet Union, and then using the U.S.’ Nazi-allies to finish the job.  Cooler heads prevailed, thankfully.  Similarly, after the U.S. dropped atom bombs on Japan, there were still die-hard Japanese generals who did not want to surrender.  The man who designed the kamikaze attack strategy proposed a post-Hiroshima plan to sacrifice about twenty million Japanese citizens in a special kamikaze attack.  Once again, sanity prevailed.  It is not imprudent to believe that the Northwoods documents are genuine, and that Lemnitzer and friends seriously pondered them. 

Whether the Northwoods plan was ever implemented, or capable of implementation, is not the point of this essay.  The point is that the Northwoods plan was eerily similar to the tale that Gary Wean reported.  The plan that John Tower spoke of seems to have been a CIA parallel to the JCS plan, or perhaps its offspring.  The plans are so similar in aims and means, that to not take Gary’s testimony seriously is to ignore the evidence.  Not only are the plans remarkably similar, with one targeting the America public for “terror,” and the other targeting the head of state, but it is widely recognized that the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 was either exaggerated or fabricated by the U.S. government, in the spirit of the Northwoods plan, something that was not lost on Bamford in his latest book.  I know somebody who worked for the U.S. Navy in 1964, and he told me that some of his work was used by the Navy to fabricate the Gulf of Tonkin incident.  The Gulf of Tonkin incident initiated the devastation of Southeast Asia, which killed several million people, and the U.S. government’s motives were obviously fraudulent.

Fabricating incidents to justify invasion is a very old game.  The United States initiated/fabricated a border incident to justify the huge land grab known as the Mexican-American War.  Hitler probably had his boys burn the Reichstag to “justify” his police state, and Hitler’s lads dressed up concentration camp inmates in Polish uniforms to fabricate a border incident to justify invading Poland, which began World War II.  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was certainly no “surprise” to the American military brass, and there is substantial evidence that the American men in Pearl Harbor were sacrificed to lure the isolationist American people into World War II.  Michael Ruppert and others have presented compelling evidence that the World Trade Center attacks had prior knowledge by many people, and may have been “allowed to happen,” with foreknowledge perhaps extending to the White House.  In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski openly bragged about the U.S. arming and inciting the Afghani “rebels” as a way to lure the Soviet Union into Afghanistan and its “Vietnam.”  Brzezinski’s little plan killed and/or devastated many millions of people, as he played his global chess game.  Thinking that Hunt's alleged plan is "too far out" is to be ignorant of history, and/or falling prey to the myth of American exceptionalism, as every nationalist ideology encourages.[13] 

Gary wrote most of his book during the early 1970s, as he was trying to survive what the gangsters who ran Ventura County were dishing out, and his wife typed it up.  He first published his book in 1987.  Gary’s book is more like a diary than anything else, and is certainly not a work of scholarship.  Because I know Gary a little, and he and I lived in the same milieu for awhile (bearing the brunt of evil dished out by the same people), and I got to see his integrity and helpfulness in action, I have always believed what he reports as his experiences.  Not only did I have experiences like his, I have since come into contact with a man who was a policeman in Ventura when Gary was working there, and he has vouched for some events that Gary described, as he saw them too.  Gary’s theories, particularly about the Jewish mob and Jewish people, I have considerable skepticism about.  True skepticism, however, means pursuing the truth, not dismissing something out of hand, with a priori reasoning, as the “skeptical” crowd has a penchant for.  People who survive Gary’s kind of experiences are not going to publish a book like his in the hopes that it makes a lot of money, or deceives the public, but to tell a story that needs to be told.  In that regard, Gary is like Ralph McGehee, Rodney Stich and Dennis Lee, and he will always have my greatest respect for his courage and willingness to face the dark underbelly of our vaunted system, and try to do something about it.  There are not many like Gary, whatever extremes of theorizing his arduous journey may have led him to engage in. 

Even if Gary’s timing of the Tower conversation is discounted (three weeks after the assassination), or when Gary wrote about it (about ten years later), many details of the Tower conversation did not come into public awareness until after Gary first published his book in 1987.  The Northwoods documents and the plans for framing Cuba have not come into public awareness until relatively recently.  The revelations of what really happened between the U.S. and Cuba during the 1960s did not start becoming public knowledge until the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and documents began coming forward from the former Soviet Union.  Ironically, researchers have often encountered more document availability in the former Soviet Union than they have in the United States.  Some revelations have been chilling, such as the fact that during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when JFK administration hawks wanted to invade Cuba, there were already numerous nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, aimed at the U.S. and ready to go.  The Soviet commander in charge of the Cuban nukes admitted that if the United States had invaded Cuba, he would have fired the nukes.  It is the closest the world has ever come to a nuclear holocaust, and it was only JFK’s overriding his hawks that kept (a very short lived) World War III from happening.  In light of those revelations, a plan to frame Castro to justify invading Cuba is right out of Dr. Strangelove. 

A significant possible connection between Lemnitzer’s plan and Tower’s tale is General Edwin Walker.  Walker was Lemnitzer’s soul brother, Walker being a John Birch Society member, as well as a KKK member.  Walker helped initiate a “race riot” in Little Rock in 1961, and handed out John Birch material to his troops.  Walker’s antics cost him his career, and a pre-JFK-assassination Senate investigation into Walker suspected that Lemnitzer was connected to Walker’s efforts.  Oswald's "assassination attempt" on Walker sure raises more suspicion than it did before the Northwoods documents surfaced, particularly in light of Gary's tale. To top it off, they supposedly let Oswald keep the rifle he "shot at" Walker with, so he could "kill" JFK with it. That is one of many astounding irregularities in Oswald's tale, vis-à-vis law enforcement.

The framing Cuba angle was certainly not in public awareness in 1963 or 1987, and I believe that only with the Northwoods documents, which did not come to American public awareness until 2001, that the framing Cuba angle has become publicly known as government policy.  For cautious researchers, it would be most prudent to compare Gary’s book versus what was publicly known in 1987.  There is plenty of JFK-associated evidence that has come to light since 1987, which further confirms Gary’s tale, but it will be up to other researchers, not me, to nail down what all those pieces might be.  I want to paint a possible picture that accounts for Gary’s reporting, and I have little doubt that the bulk of his reporting of the John Tower conversation is straight as Gary can tell it, with perhaps some minor shading of it, unconsciously, by events that happened after the Tower conversation, and before Gary wrote about it. 

If Gary’s tale is true, many people around the “fake assassination” project were unaware that it would turn into a real assassination, especially Lee Harvey Oswald.  Up until 11/22/63, America was in denial about a lot of things, and the naïveté of Americans back then was fairly astonishing, with about 85% of Americans having “great faith” in America’s institutions (governments, corporations, churches, etc.), a number that is only about 15% today (or even lower, in these “War on Terror,” priest-pedophilia, Enron days).  However, many lived lives of quiet desperation, with American housewives being the biggest customer class of Valium when it was introduced in the 1950s, to keep them doped up so they could try acting the part of June Cleaver; getting the newspaper, dinner, slippers and pipe ready for her husband, as he returned home from the office or factory.

Until the bullets hit JFK, Oswald, Hunt, Tower and quite a few others were probably being played as chumps by whoever pulled off the JFK hit.  The fabrication of Oswald’s trail to Cuba, his “commie” credentials and the like were probably not done as carefully as they would be today.  That is because the American public was so trusting, they would swallow anything that officialdom told them.  Whether that was in fact true, it is reasonable to think that Hunt and friends operated under that assumption.  In Hunt’s designs, the trail to Cuba would not be subject to much public scrutiny, and would only be needed until the Cuban invasion and Castro overthrow was complete. 

Oswald was seen in the book depository lunchroom soon after JFK’s shooting, and the Warren Commission had to construct an involved scenario to explain Oswald’s alleged movements.  The evidence tends to support the idea that Oswald sat in the lunchroom the entire time period surrounding the assassination.[14]  If the mission was interposed, Oswald would have certainly not have been in the “sniper’s nest” as a real assassination was being carried out.  The likeliest series of events was that Oswald was told to go to the lunchroom and await further orders, or perhaps wait for a phone call.  It is hard to say when Oswald realized that he had been set up, but it was probably less than a minute after JFK was shot.  The “fake” plan would have called for Oswald to leave the building anyway, as even a fake hit would have brought plenty of attention onto the book depository.  Because of the Magic Bullet’s wildly improbable tale, I think it likely that people on the real assassination team set up the “sniper’s nest.”[15] 

If Hunt’s operation was infiltrated, it is hard to know just who was on the “inside” and who was not.  Even on Oswald’s “team,” it is hard to know who was really on the inside in Dallas, and who was among Hunt’s chumps.  The story generally agreed upon is that Oswald left the book depository before police sealed the building, and walked seven blocks to catch a bus.  He soon left the bus and took a cab.[16]  Depending on what testimony and evidence is believed, Oswald entered the movie theater before policeman J.D. Tippit was murdered, or soon afterward.  If Oswald was the intelligence operative Tower said he was, he may have had a “double,” and the double may have been in town as part of the real hit team.  Whatever the real events were, according to Tower’s tale, Oswald realized that he was set up, and was doing his best to stay out of jail, and alive.  He always referred to himself as a patsy, which is not the stance one would expect for an assassin. 

If Tower’s tale is true, Oswald’s trail to Cuba may have been fabricated, perhaps including his trip to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City.  The photographic record in his military and CIA files may well be fabricated or altered.  If Tower’s tale is true, there is little information that came from the FBI or CIA that can be relied upon, which includes nearly all the evidence that the Warren Commission considered, because the “investigators” for the Warren Commission were the FBI and CIA.  The Warren Commission accepted at face value the CIA and FBI-produced evidence, with Allen Dulles on the commission (probably a case of the fox watching over the hens). 

When Gary said that Tower spoke of Hunt inventing the “exploding cigar” tactic to assassinate Castro, it could have been a slight mis-remembrance by Gary, or Tower had it slightly wrong (those events did not become public until after the Watergate Scandal and the Church Committee began looking into the CIA’s adventures, which was after Gary first drafted his book), as Hunt tried poisoning Castro’s cigar, not make an exploding one.[17]  That is a minor quibble with Gary’s work.  However, the big picture of Gary’s story - that Oswald was an intelligence agent working for Hunt, to stage a fake assassination attempt to frame Castro - has a rich correspondence with several lines of evidence.  Gary’s story fits startlingly with the main lines of evidence and speculation that has cropped up about Oswald, and there is enough uncertainty regarding various details that I have seen no credible avenue of evidence and theory regarding a conspiracy that Gary’s testimony may not fit with.  With the Northwoods revelations, the JFK assassination community can no longer easily dismiss/ignore Gary’s testimony, as it has been doing for the past fifteen years.  Joseph Milteer’s prediction of the JFK hit has been taken seriously by most JFK researchers, even though he was a right wing, KKK-type of guy.  Gary was a policeman and investigator, with a solid career going until he ran afoul of the gangsters that run Ventura County.  Does him being Audie Murphy’s friend count for anything, as far as his credibility?  If nothing else, the Northwoods documents may end up giving Gary’s tale due consideration. 

Gary’s experiences with Jack Ruby, Mick Cohen and the Jewish mob angle also need to be considered, as Ruby assassinated Oswald, and Gary was there in that milieu, even chatting with Ruby in 1947 about the mob’s plans for New Orleans and Cuba.[18]

There are numerous lines of JFK evidence to pursue, an undertaking that could take the rest of a person’s life.  This essay will deal with just one aspect of the JFK assassination evidence in detail, and people can make up their own minds regarding the truth of the issue, and see if it is worth pursuing further.

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