Kerry Thornley

[Lee Forman]

Similar to George Demohrenschildt, I didn't notice a thread on Kerry Thornley.

Interesting that he was in Japan at Atsugi - like GPH and LHO - New Orleans, California with the First Unitarian Church, and lived for a time in Mexico City.

I wonder if the First Unitarian Church is in any way related to the churches associated with the JBS? Thornley admits [later] to having been right-wing, anti-Kennedy, anti-Communist. Did he have any association with Loran Hall? Was he some form of CIA agent as Garrison suspected? Was he really in New Orleans on 11/22/63? Did he provide only lies and half lies, and then later in life begin to soften?

I wonder what the heck this one is...

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Anyway, Thornley's bizarre Warren Report testimony can be found here: He sounds to me like a xxxx. He certainly did lie, if his later story [link pasted in a bit]had any truth to it.

http://jfkassassination.net/russ/testimony/thornley.htm

The book he wrote, after allegedly learning of Lee's defection in 'Stars and Stripes,' concerned a fictional character that was disillusioned with the US, and was a communist sympathizer. Sounds like a very odd coinidence.

Convinced that the "Idle Warrior" experience played a key role in Lee's disillusionment with the United States . . ." Oswald become one of the key characters in Thornley's original manuscript. There he appears, under the fictional name of Johnny Shellburn.

The David Lifton piece of the story, relating to his interviews with Thornley, and the Garrison investigation:

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/lifton1.htm

You get the feeling from Lifton that Thornley is clueless, which is not what Kerry would have us to believe later on.

I found an interesting interview that he had given shortly before his death.

http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma/plword.htm

The man seems to have run through a life very similar to T. Casey Brennan. The two make very similar claims. The part I found the most interesting was Thornley's discussions concerning EH Hunt, or a 'Gary Kirsten.' Anyone have something on that? The only Gary Kirsten I can find is apparently a famous Cricket Player in South Africa.

This actually surfaced while I was looking into some more info on Demohrenschildt.

W.C.H.: Do you think Oswald was set up from day one?

K.T.: Sure he was! I think they were out to set up one of us. I had a whole lot of talks with a guy I now feel was Howard Hunt. Ever since Watergate I've been ranting and raving about this everywhere, getting very few people to pay any attention to it. When I was in New Orleans after I got out of the service, I met a man who looked exactly like Howard Hunt, except he was bald. And he told me his name was Gary Kirsten and claimed he was a Nazi and had come from a family of Nazi's in the Mid-West. He talked at great length about assassinating Kennedy...I just thought: this guy's nuts, you know? But, his idea of reality was very different from mine...As it turned out, mine was very naive! (laughs) The last thing he ever said about Kennedy--2 weeks prior to the assassination--was, "The only remaining question is, who to frame?" I said, "Why do you have to frame somebody?" "People need answers". His idea was to frame a "jail bird". I said, "Why do you want to frame a jail bird?" "Because criminals who are so stupid as to get caught, shouldn't be allowed to breed. They should be locked up, so they can't produce offspring." So I said: "I don't think you should frame a jailbird," and he asked, "Who should I frame?" And he knew what I was going to say, 'cause he was smirking so hard he couldn't look me in the eye. I said, "Why don't you frame some communist." He was setting me up. He knew then that he was going to kill J.F.K. Because one of the first things he ever said to me was, J.F.K. was a menace to the country and ought to be assassinated. Since I was into "AYN RAND" at the time--very right wing and very anti J.F.K.--I agreed with him, and we shook hands on it. My only problem was, I didn't find him very credible. What he was probably hoping for is that I would name Gary Kirsten to the Warren Commission. And that way, if they insisted Oswald had an accomplice, they would accuse this alleged Nazi from the Mid-West, who in reality was probably a KGB agent or something. I'm certain though it was Hunt or someone that looked like him--to thoroughly confuse the issue.

W.C.H.: And the final payoff was the continuation of The Vietnam War?

K.T.: Yes. His thing was, he didn't want a war with Cuba, because Castro was a "White Man". And he felt if there was to be another war against communism, it should be against an Asian country.

W.C.H.: Who felt this? Johnson?

K.T.: No, Hunt.

W.C.H.: E. Howard Hunt?

K.T.: Yes.

W.C.H.: I didn't think he had that much clout.

K.T.: I think he's an enormously powerful man. He had other people with him like Charles Cabell, John Connally.

W.C.H.: Kennedy had a lot of enemies, especially after the attempt to dissolve the C.I.A., and the plans to pull out of Vietnam.

K.T.: Well, according to Oliver Stone...I think what Stone left out was the Nazi angle.

W.C.H.: Nazi angle?

K.T.: Right. In the movie, "Mr. X" was Fletcher Prouty. Prouty is buddy buddy with Willis Carto. Carto is a raving anti-semitic who publishes the SPOTLIGHT. He also publishes some of Mark Lane's stuff and the C.I.A. renegade, Marchetti...That's the one thing that Stone did not touch upon. Mike Paine--husband of Ruth Paine, with whom Marina Oswald lived with in Sept. '63--was working for a Nazi at the time at Bell aircraft, General Walter Dornberger. There were all these ex-Nazis over here. According to Mae Brussell, there was a goddammed "WEREWOLF TEAM", a Nazi commando team. Known members of the famous Nazi werewolf commandos were in Dallas two weeks before the assassination. George DeMohrenschildt's wife admitted--when he died--that he had been a Nazi agent during World War II.

Below is the summary of his bio from John Simkin's Spartacus.

Kerry Wendell Thornley met Lee Harvey Oswald while in the United States Marines in 1959. Later that year Thornley was transferred to Atsugi in Japan.

In 1962 Thornley wrote a novel called The Idle Warriors about a disgruntled marine who defects to the Soviet Union. The book was based on Thornley's knowledge of Oswald. The following year Thornley moved to New Orleans where it was claimed he associated with Guy Banister, David Ferrie and Clay Shaw. Oswald was also living in the city at that time but Thornley insisted that the two men never met during this period. The two men were also both in Mexico City in September 1963.

The FBI were aware of Thornley's novel and so after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy he was asked to testify before the Warren Commission.

Jim Garrison later claimed that Thornley and Lee Harvey Oswald were involved together in covert CIA operations. He also argued that Thornley had impersonated Oswald between the years 1961 and 1963. In his book On the Trail of the Assassins (1988) Garrison insists that Thornley was friends with another possible conspirator, Johnny Roselli.

In 1992 Thornley appeared on a television programme, A Current Affair. He confessed that he had been part of a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. However, he did not give the names of his fellow conspirators.

Kerry Wendell Thornley died in 1998. He had been working on a book with the journalist Sondra London. The book, Confession to Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK was published in 2000.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Kerry Wendell Thornley, Warren Commission (1964)

Oswald asked, "What do you think about Communism?" "I replied I didn't think too much of Communism" and he said, "Well, I think the best religion is Communism." And I got the impression at the time... he was playing the galleries... he said it very gently. He didn't seem to be a glassy-eyed fanatic by any means... I did know at the time he was learning the Russian language. I knew he was subscribing to Pravda... All of this I took to be a sign of his interest in the subject, and not as a sign of any active commitment to the Communist ends... I didn't feel there was any rabid devotion... His shoes were always unshined... He walked around with the bill of his cap down over his eyes... so he wouldn't have to look at anything around him... to blot out the military... It was well-known in the outfit that... Oswald had Communist sympathies ... Master Sergeant Spar, our section chief, jumped up on a fender one day and said, "All right, everybody gather around," and Oswald said in a very thick Russian accent, "Ah ha, collective farm lecture," in a very delighted tone. This brought him laughs at the time...

Every now and then we had to give up our Saturday morning liberty to go march in one of those parades ... (and) to look forward to a morning of standing out in the hot sun and marching around, was irritable. So, we were involved at the moment in a "hurry up and wait" routine... waiting at the moment... sitting. Oswald and I happened to be sitting next to each other on a log... he turned to me and said something about the stupidity of the parade... and I said, I believe my words were, "Well, come the revolution you will change all that." At which time he looked at me like a betrayed Caesar and screamed, screamed definitely, "Not you too, Thornley." And I remember his voice cracked as he put his hands in his pockets, pulled his hat down over his eyes and walked away... and sat down someplace else alone... and I never said anything to him again and he never said anything to me again. This happened with many people, this reaction of Oswald's and therefore he had few friends... He seemed to guard against developing real close friendships.

(2) Kerry Wendell Thornley, Oswald (1965)

When news of Oswald first began to appear, I wondered how any man could have changed so thoroughly in a few short years. A national news magazine called him a psychopath, a schizoid, a paranoid, and probable homosexual - all in the same single column of print. Suddenly I was reading that he was constantly fighting with his fellow Marines and that in the service he displayed a conspicuous yen for physical violence. I observed no such traits. That an appendix of the Warren Report had to be devoted to speculation and rumors is in my mind argument enough that a good deal of fabrication and exaggeration was involved somewhere along the line. While Oswald had his psychological problems, I doubt that he would have been found legally insane had he lived to face a jury.

(3) Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins (1988)

Thornley had told me that he returned from his summer in California by way of Mexico City. This happened to be very close to the time that the Warren Commission said Oswald was in Mexico. By November 1963, according to his own account, Thornley was living in a New Orleans apartment he rented from John Spencer.

We located Spencer, who turned out to be a friend of Clay Shaw's. As he described it, sometimes Spencer visited Shaw, the director of the International Trade Mart, and sometimes it was vice versa. Spencer told us, however, that Shaw never came by while Thornley was living at his place.

Several days after the assassination. Spencer told us, he came to his house and found Thornley gone. In Spencer's mailbox was a note from Thornley saying, "I must leave. I am going to the Washington, D.C. area, probably Alexandria, Virginia. I will send you my address so that you can forward my mail." Spencer said it was quite unexpected because Thornley had at least a week left in the month before his rent was due. He went to Thornley's apartment, number "C", and found that paper had been left over the entire floor, torn up into small pieces like confetti. Before being torn up, the paper had been watered down so that the ink was blurred, making it unreadable. Spencer said he had some conversations with Thornley about his book The Idle Warriors and that Thornley had asked him to read a copy of the manuscript, which had been turned down by several publishers before the assassination. Spencer never did get around to reading it. After the assassination Thornley told Spencer that he was going to be a rich man because of the coincidence of Oswald having been the subject of his book.

I later sent Andrew Sciambra to the Washington area, where he traced Thornley's path. Thornley had wound up at Arlington, a Washington suburb, and had moved into Shirlington House, a first-class apartment building where he worked as doorman. Thornley stayed at Shirlington House for six months, until he testified before the Warren Commission. Oddly enough, his salary was less than the rent of his Shirlington House apartment.

In the mid-1970s when I was in the private practice of law, Thornley sent a lengthy, almost biographical, 50-page affidavit to me describing, among other things, evidence he had encountered in New Orleans of "Nazi activity" in connection with President Kennedy's murder. It was apparent that even though I no longer was D.A. Thornley wanted

to assure me that he had not been involved in Kennedy's assassination in any way.

Although it did not accord with reality, as I recalled it, the affidavit had, in retrospect, one interesting feature. Purely gratuitously, it mentioned how Thornley had left Washington following his Warren Commission testimony and ultimately returned to California, where he and John Rosselli happened to become friends. The affidavit was mailed to me before Rosselli's name surfaced during the Senate's 1975 investigation of the C.I.A.'s assassination practices. Rosselli, it turned out, had been one of a number of mobsters with whom the Agency had developed a relationship during its pre-Castro activities in Cuba.

(4) Kerry Wendell Thornley, Confession to Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK (2000)

During most of my life I have been inclined to reject conspiracy theories of history. Notwithstanding my willingness to admit that conspiracies exist, I felt that a grasp of political events depended upon an understanding of the power of ideas. In my view, conspiracies were insignificant. My tendency was to challenge the motives of conspiracy buffs when I did not, as was more often the case, question their mental health.

Balancing my occasional doubts was a fear of becoming paranoid. When Oswald was accused of assassinating Kennedy, my first hunch was that he was innocent and had been blamed in a misunderstanding that would soon be cleared up. When the media continued to insist there was ample evidence that Oswald, and Oswald alone, shot the President, I quickly changed my mind.

Two years later, when a Warren Report critic confronted me with the many discrepancies between the conclusions of the Warren Commission and the testimony and exhibits contained in the Twenty-six Volumes, I could no longer hide from myself the probability that either Oswald was innocent or he had not acted alone.

Yet even then I did not want to think an elaborate conspiracy was involved. Maybe Lyndon Johnson or some of his Texas friends had arranged to kill Kennedy and perhaps it had not occurred to the Warren Commission to probe that possibility. A more complicated theory would seem paranoid.

Above all else, I did not want to seem paranoid.

One year elapsed between the time I began doubting the lone-assassin theory and the beginning of tribulations in my own life suffered at the hands of a man most journalists insinuated was a paranoid. First, District Attorney Jim Garrison made a bizarre attempt to recruit me as a witness for the prosecution in his probe of a New Orleans-based conspiracy to assassinate John Kennedy. When I expressed my unwillingness to cooperate, he accused me of working for the C.I.A. and summoned me to appear before the grand jury.

After asking me what seemed like a lot of irrelevant questions, he charged me with perjury for denying, truthfully, that I had met with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans during the months previous to the assassination. I had not seen Oswald in person, nor had I communicated with him in any other way, since June of 1959 - at the latest.

(5) Kerry Wendell Thornley, Confession to Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK (2000)

Needless to say, I was jubilant at the news of Kennedy's death -- something I made no attempt to conceal from anyone, much to the annoyance of most of the Bourbon House regulars. Besides that, I was extremely proud of Oswald for getting himself accused -- although I suspected he was innocent, since in the service he had displayed a talent for getting blamed of things.

As for me, I felt betrayed by most of my French Quarter friends, who were obviously grief-stricken. Hadn't they laughed in the past at my anti-Kennedy jokes? Where was their integrity? Here I had been thinking they were potential converts to the Objectivism of Ayn Rand and, instead, they were all turning out to be a bunch of whim-worshipers.

Then, Sunday morning, I learned that Oswald had been murdered. I was horrified. Irrational violence had won out over good sense once again. Why would anyone want to kill a pathetic little guy like Lee? Now everyone else was smug and I was in mourning.

Both the Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been to the restaurant by then to question me. A poll appeared in the evening paper indicating that most Americans now thought the assassination was the result of a conspiracy. As I moved about the French Quarter, it seemed to me I was being tailed by middle-aged men in suits.

I decided to go to the F.B.I. office and volunteer my services in luring out the real assassins of John F. Kennedy. They could say Oswald had confided in me and use me as a decoy to trap the people who had silenced him. I spoke to an FBI agent in the Federal Building who kept pretending he didn't understand what I was talking about. Among his questions, and typical of most of them, was, "This Oswald - was he a homo of any kind?"

In the days that followed I quarreled with virtually every one of my friends to a greater or lesser extent. Mildest among these disputes were disagreements about questions of taste. Couldn't I have at least been silent, instead of offering to buy drinks for everyone in the Bourbon House? In the worst disagreements, tempers flared and fist fights almost resulted.

[Lee Forman]

Was Ayn Rand recommended JBS reading? Sorry to seem so ignorant. Looks as if the answer is an unequivocal 'yes.'

Since I came across that other piece concerning 'A Texan looks at Lyndon' being handed out by the JBS for free by the boxload, I did a quick google search. Found plenty, so I thought I'd limit it to this one, below, and a nother link to Kerry Thornley.

http://thorny.synchro.net/kerry.txt

In this link he provides more information which makes Thornley makes it appear that he was involved at a very low level in the assassination plot, and one of the primary motives was the selection of a Patsy, and the unpublished manuscript that he had written, which everyone seemed to know about?

http://www.nationalreview.com/10mar03/bramwell031003.asp

From the March 10, 2003, issue of National Review
How the Right Was Won

Getting It Right, by William F. Buckley Jr. (Regnery, 311 pp., $24.95)

By Austin W. Bramwell

William F. Buckley Jr. is a controversialist with the soul of a peacemaker. In reading his last five novels — The Redhunter, Spytime, Elvis in the Morning, Nuremberg: The Reckoning, and, now, Getting It Right — one almost forgets that their author made a career of rupturing so many Establishment spleens. Not only do they collectively paint one of the most loving recent portraits of America, they even show the author reconciling himself to his erstwhile enemies — the opponents of Senator McCarthy in Redhunter, rock-’n’-roll music in Elvis (against which this reviewer wishes he had held out longer), and, in Getting It Right, John Birch Society founder Robert Welch and Atlas Shrugged author Ayn Rand.

Well, almost. Both Welch and Rand gave momentum to the centrifugal forces threatening in the early 1960s to pull the conservative movement apart. Rand, a Russian émigré, decocted free-market ideology until any moral sentiment had evaporated from the self-interest. Welch, a successful businessman, explained all the vicissitudes of world events according to the axiom that the Communist conspiracy lay behind them. Both demanded fealty from their followers; both put themselves at loggerheads with Buckley’s National Review.

In that sense, and with characteristic cheek, Getting It Right’s real protagonist is the author himself, and one happily roots for him throughout. The story begins with Woodroe Raynor, a Mormon from Utah who upon finishing Princeton becomes a spokesman for the John Birch Society. Along the way he meets comely Leonora Goldstein, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, who earns a job doing paperwork for Ayn Rand after reading Atlas Shrugged four times. Becoming disenchanted with their respective idols, they fall out of favor with Welch and Rand, fall in with the National Review crowd, and also fall in love, thereby joining anti-Communism and libertarianism in romance just as NR did in politics.

Interest in the genesis of conservatism in America has grown in recent years, even among liberals — the bibliography lists some of the most influential texts — but Getting It Right is surely the most entertaining account of that genesis. All the giants of conservatism’s heroic age are here: Barry Goldwater, sporting dungarees and an Aztec belt; Frank Meyer, abusing the telephone lines at midnight; Murray Rothbard, deducing the charisma of anarchism, proving the superiority of anarchism; L. Brent Bozell, furtively ghostwriting Conscience of a Conservative; Harry Jaffa, penning Goldwater’s line “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice . . .”; not to mention Welch and Rand themselves.

Buckley has an exceptional ability to empathize with the figures he depicts. He manages to capture Rand’s “Objectivist” idiom nearly perfectly: She and her acolytes speak of “the primacy of reason” and of the “mysticism of the mind,” and one young Objectivist hangs a photo of the Pill in her living room. (“Why have a photograph of the Statue of Liberty?” she asks rhetorically.) There are even historical figures constructed without materials furnished from personal acquaintance: JFK and Earl Warren come memorably to life.

As a work of history, Getting It Right nicely illustrates historian George Nash’s observation that modern American conservatism wore, in various degrees, libertarian, anti-Communist, and traditionalist guise not without some degree of discomfort. In the early Sixties the former two were running amok in the persons of Rand and Welch. To complete the triune symmetry, Getting It Right tells the story of Revilo Oliver, a brilliant philologist who could write in any of twelve ancient languages without typographical error but who later in life formulated an anti-Semitic blood-and-soil nationalism so febrile as even to reject Christianity. His work is a hideous testament to genius gone mad.

Rand, Welch, and their followers make easy targets for ridicule; Getting It Right never descends into lampoon. The novel shows the virtues that caused their success as much as the vices that precipitated their undoing. For Leonora, Ayn Rand had given philosophic voice to the reasons that her parents had uprooted their family to come to a land of boundless opportunity — Rand’s distaste for surnames redolent of Judaism notwithstanding. (Florence King has observed that in the Randian imagination those heroic individuals must all be WASPs.) For Woodroe, Robert Welch had fearlessly analyzed the Communist conspiracy Woodroe had witnessed firsthand as a missionary in Eastern Europe.

Finally, however, Welch’s and Rand’s exaggerated sensitivity to lèse-majesté alienated both Leonora and Woodroe, and most of their other followers as well.* Each would rather have devoured his progeny than seen them grow into independence.

To winnow the kookiness out of right-wing politics required not just philosophic moderation but a great deal of tactical dexterity. One cannot help thinking, after learning from Getting It Right how some libertarians received Whittaker Chambers’s famous review of Atlas Shrugged, that — whatever the faults in Rand’s magnum opus — his attack was somewhat premature. Chambers, for whom history compelled a stark choice between God and man, freedom and tyranny, civilization and barbarism, perhaps did not know quite what to make of Rand, as fierce an atheist as an anti-Communist. He was closer to the truth when he described Atlas Shrugged as a “remarkably silly book” than when he accused it of uttering the subtextual command, “To a gas chamber — go!” A somewhat milder denunciation might have made libertarians less fractious constituents of the conservative movement.

On the other hand, Getting It Right shows that National Review handled the John Birch Society deftly. To blast the Birchers prematurely would have risked alienating anti-Communist patriots; to do so too late would have risked discrediting the entire movement. National Review dissevered the JBS from conservatism just as the moment was ripe; as proof, Welch’s legion of followers joined the mainstream conservative fold as soon as the choice was presented to them.

Despite the early victories of the conservative movement, Getting It Right nonetheless never encourages the conceit that the wisdom of its leaders made those successes inevitable. If JFK’s assassin — as nearly everyone assumed at the time — had leaned right rather than left, Goldwater would probably never have won the GOP nomination for president. Readers will share Leonora’s relief when she exclaims, after learning of Lee Harvey Oswald’s obsession with the Soviets, “My God! It was one of them.” Another historical accident, unflinchingly explored in this novel, is the coincidence of opposition to the growing power of the federal government and opposition to the civil rights movement. However unfairly, many people to this day cannot listen to an argument for federalism or judicial restraint without hearing a defense of segregation.

Salting the narrative throughout is the urbane wit of which Buckley remains the undisputed master when engaged in this mode. Sly allusions to Buckley’s previous novels — one of them involving “the sovereign bedroom of the queen of England” — abound. The instinct for le mot juste — the 1964 Republican National Convention finds the Goldwater loyalists “triumphing over morganatic contenders with impure bloodlines” — never falters. Most pleasantly of all for the reader, Getting It Right shows again the author’s knack for engaging, straightforward plotting. This is a book that does not leave one feeling guilty for having finished it in a single sitting.

If the reader can have one complaint about the book, it is that we never quite see the qualities that made Ayn Rand, when all is said and done, such an enduringly popular writer. She did produce some quite novel and interesting insights. Her essay on why a rational woman would never want to be president, for example, shows as keen an understanding of romantic love as one will find. If it will not ever find its place beside Plato’s Symposium, it nonetheless remains a provocative read.

In the end, however, the most rewarding feature of Getting It Right is not its intellectual or historical insights, or even its wit, but rather the author’s unclouded generosity of spirit. Buckley delves into the bitterest controversies in recent American history — the career of Joe McCarthy in The Redhunter, Sixties-era upheaval in Elvis in the Morning, the civil rights movement in Getting It Right — and leaves one feeling more confidence than ever that America is a good country and Americans a good people. In Willmoore Kendall’s phrase, they carried the Western tradition in their hips.

Perhaps future biographers and critics will refer to Getting It Right and its four predecessors as the “America Novels” of William F. Buckley Jr. They lend themselves to such a reading, each depicting a nation struggling with itself in the Cold War; each alludes to the others (Elvis and McCarthy appear several times in Getting It Right); and, most importantly, they form together a testament to one American’s love for his country. As Leonora’s mother tells her, the “biggest thing that’s happened in your life” is “that you were born in America.” The sentiment is pure Americana, but one senses that the author shares it. We hope that Getting It Right will merely add to, and not complete, the series.

— Austin Bramwell is a third-year student at Harvard Law School

.

This is the story of an individual who hit rock bottom, and was looking for help through AA. His sponsor seemed to want to handle him.

I wonder who Kerry Thornley really was involved with. Who is Syliva 'Bortran,' whose husband lived in Cuba, for example?

http://www.idyllopuspress.com/meanwhile/?p=290

Whose portrait was on the wall just inside the door? I don’t remember. But it was some author’s portrait and that had reassured me as whoever it was was a well-known author, and I thought, gee, wonder why I’ve never heard of this bookstore, because I knew them all at that time, every bookstore in the city and almost every weekend was searching through the stacks in the used bookstores.

There wasn’t a lot of choice of reading material actually. Curious, I thought, a bookstore without much of a choice of reading material. I was still kind of fuzzy at the edges and it slowly occurred to me there was a lot of Ayn Rand, lots of copies of Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged, the Fountainhead.

And some book on something called the tri-lateral commission. Book with a vaguely political cover. I picked it up and glanced through it. Hmmm, what was this. Names like William Buckley. I looked at the other political-looking books. Slim volumes.

Everything political I’d read to date had been mainly on fascism. I had spent several years reading almost every book on fascism and its rise and its workings Germany and Italy and in central and south america that I could get my hands on. Some books that never made their way back to the library as, being on the road, the previous few years I had been losing them left and right in motel rooms all across the southeast, arriving at gigs sober enough to read, and leaving several days later totally not sober and unaware I’d brought along any books at all and not remembering I had for a couple weeks.

These were little slim books with the kind of covers I would never have picked up. But that’s all there was and I browsed through.

And I realized.

At some point.

My sponsor had spirited me into a John Birch bookstore.

I looked back up at the portrait of the well-known author and realized, oh XXXX, that’s a portrait of John Birch to the right of the author, 3 by 4 foot big on the wall.

My god, what in the hell was I doing in a John Birch bookstore.

I tried not to look surprised, my sponsor’s eyes on me, watching.

I thought over all our conversations and wondered just who my sponsor thought I was.

But she knew what my politics were or she wouldn’t have been eyeing me with such curiosity, watching for my reaction.

The librarian-bookshop keeper watching me out of the corner of her eye.

Betray no expression, I figured that was the thing to do. This was my sponsor, the woman I’d for several months been calling at 3 am in the morning saying, “Tell me what I need to do to stay sober”, and she had done it and I had stayed sober, except for one slip after the first month.

I had no ******* clue what was up.

They continued to chit-chat, eyeing me as I flipped through the books. My sponsor didn’t take a look at a single one. She only stood and spoke with the shopkeeper.

Well, I figured I would never in my life find myself in anther John Birch bookstore. So I chose out a couple of books that looked like they’d tell me a lot of what John Birchers thought. And when my sponsor said she was ready to leave I approached the librarian-bookkeeper with my books and she looked like she was trying to suppress some surprise, and my sponsor was smiling but looked like she had not expected things to go this swimmingly well, and I purchased the couple of books.

We didn’t say anything going back to the car. Then in the car she asked me, “So what did you think?” or something like that.

I said, “Interesting.”

She said something like she hadn’t expected me to buy anything.

I said something like I liked to know what people thought, so I read.

She said she knew I was the curious type.

That was all. She never said anything else about the bookstore. I never said anything about it. She never mentioned the words “John Birch”. I never mentioned them. I went home and read through the couple of Ayn Rand books (Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) that I’d picked up in college but had never been able to get through the first few pages. I read them thoroughly, despite the bad writing, her romance novels for free-capitalists, in light of having seen how John Birchers liked her.

[Lee Forman]

I've been reading through Kerry Thornley's stuff - very interesting, and peculiar.

He maintains that the first Patsy selected for the assassination was Gary Kirstein. He also implies that a man whom he knew, that was very well connected to the conspiracy, resembled EH Hunt. He goes on further to add that the man that resembled Hunt, used both the names Gary Kirstein and Martin Brooks Gatlin, as false identities. Martin Brooks Gatlin appears to have been a real person, and has a great set of credentials - as legal counsel to the Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean. Gary Kirstein may have also been a real person. Kerry knew the man resembling Hunt through a friend whom he knew as Slim Brooks. Later, Kerry was under the impression that 'Slim' was not his real name, and that he was a former minuteman names Jerry Brooks. Jerry Brooks is mentioned by Garrison in exactly this capacity. Garrison also mentions Gatlin.

http://scribblguy.50megs.com/garprobe.htm

The dilapidated building at 544 Camp Street is on the corner of Lafayette Place. Shortly after news of Garrison's investigation broke, I went to 531 Lafayette Place, an address given me by Minuteman defector Jerry Milton Brooks as the office of W. Guy Banister, a former FBI official who ran a private detective agency. According to Brooks, who had been a trusted Minutemen aide, Banister was a member of the Minutemen and head of the Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean, assertedly an intermediary between the CIA and Caribbean insurgency movements. Brooks said he had worked for Banister on "anti-Communist" research in 1961-1962, and had known David Ferrie as a frequent visitor to Banister's office.

Banister had died of an apparent heart attack in the summer of 1964. Brooks had told me of two associates whom I hoped to find. One was Hugh F. Ward, a young investigator for Banister who also belonged to the Minutemen and the Anti-Communism League. Then I learned that Ward, too, was dead. Reportedly taught to fly by David Ferrie, he was at the controls of a Piper Aztec when it plunged to earth near Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, May 23, 1965.

The other associate was Maurice Brooks Gatlin Sr, legal counsel to the Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean. Jerry Brooks said he had once been a sort of protege of Gatlin and was in his confidence. Brooks believed Gatlin's frequent world travels were as a "transporter" for the CIA. As an example, he said, Gatlin remarked about 1962, in a self- important manner, that he had $100,000 of CIA money earmarked for a French right-wing clique that was going to attempt to assassinate General de Gaulle; shortly afterward Gatlin flew to Paris. The search for Gatlin, however, was likewise futile: in 1964 he fell or was pushed from the sixth floor of the El Panama Hotel in Panama during the early morning, and was killed instantly.

This is baffling.

- lee

            BULLETIN #10

KULTCHA 1986

Q. Who is this Brother-in-law guy you keep ranting and raving about?

A. Slim Brooks, who introduced me to him shortly after the Bay of Pigs

invasion, in New Orleans in 1961, used to call him Brother-in-law. He was

supposed to be Slim's brother-in-law and was supposed be named Gary

Kirstein. But then Slim Brooks was supposed to be Roderick R. Brooks

whereas in fact I now think he was a former Minute Man named Jerry

Milton Brooks.

  In the middle seventies when I first began talking about Gary Kirstein I

began to sense something weird in the way people responded. There was a

Gary Kirstein still living in New Orleans listed with information. A

reporter told me he found Gary Kirstein's name in the registers of some

gun clubs. A magician in California investigating snuff films and other

illegitimate practices among occultists said Gary Kirstein's name had

turned up. I noticed that whoever I spoke to about him who seemed

knowledgable usually mentioned the Trilateral Commission, as if to hint.

  Anyway, it eventually became pretty obvious to me that whoever I had

met in 1961 in New Orleans had probably been using Kirstein's name in

order to set him up. Brother-in-law had in fact hinted at the time that he

was "really more like a mad scientist" than the Nazi Kirstein was supposed

to be and on one occasion he spoke emotionally of a scientist named Tom

Miethe. So in 1977 and early 1978 I assumed I had been dealing with

Miethe undercover as Kirstein. I found that Miethe was one of Hitler's

rocket scientists who wound up working for AVRO in Canada after the war.

I met two individuals who claim they knew him as a teacher of nuclear

physics at Georgia Tech in Atlanta in the middle sixties. Still, people

kept treating me like I was joking or crazy or trying to frame Miethe.

  Then in 1978 somebody furnished me with what seemed like a hot tip

that my man in New Orleans had actually been neither Kirstein nor Miethe

but a Canadian businessman named Mortimer Bloomfield -- mentioned in

Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal as one of John Kennedy's

assassins. Since assassinating J.F.K. had been one of our chief subjects of

discussion, that seemed at least possible.

  Then, that same year, an assassination buff in California expressed the

opinion that I had been talking to the Watergate burglar, E****d H. ****

(name withheld). So I read his autobiography, Undercover. Not only did he

mention being involved in a number of C.I.A. projects that the man I knew

as Gary Kirstein discussed with me, a 1959 photo of  him in that book

exactly resembles the man I knew as Kirstein -- except that Kirstein was

a bald and **** at that time, wasn't. So for the past many years I've been

more or less convinced I was dealing with **** in disguise.

  So I call him Brother-in-law, in case I'm still wrong.

                                                    -- Kerry Wendell Thornley

c 1986 Kerry W. Thornley

[Gary Buell]

For more on Kerry (including scans of many of his newsletters and flyers):

http://www.rehistory.com/

And for a book about Kerry, The Prankster and the Conspiracy, see:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...=books&n=507846

[John Simkin]

Similar to George Demohrenschildt, I didn't notice a thread on Kerry Thornley.

This has now been added to the index.

This is the Namebase entry for Thornley:

http://www.namebase.org/main3/Kerry-Wendell-Thornley.html

Back Channels 1992-SP (18-9)

Fensterwald,B. Coincidence or Conspiracy? 1977 (465-8)

Garrison,J. On the Trail of the Assassins. 1988 (47, 66-7, 70-8)

Keith,J. Secret and Suppressed. 1993 (43-56)

LaFontaine,R.& M. Oswald Talked. 1996 (60)

Marrs,J. Crossfire. 1990 (108-10)

Melanson,P. Spy Saga. 1990 (10)

Russell,D. The Man Who Knew Too Much. 1992 (142-3, 177)

Scott,P.D... The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond. 1976 (289)

Thomas,K. Popular Alienation: A Steamshovel Press Reader. 1995 (43, 53-6, 109-10)

Vankin,J. Conspiracies, Cover-ups, and Crimes. 1991 (3-18)

[Robert Howard]

At the risk of being redundant, I would like to mention that I know that many of us are waiting for our copies of Joan Mellen's book to come out, I have pre-ordered my copy as well. In the meantime I have been going over some of the teasers for the book and exploring some of them. One of the things that I have discovered is an angle on Kerry Thornley that is attributed to the late Harold Weisberg's research, this may or may not be in Mellen's book; The story is during the Garrison investigation after Weisberg decided that Garrison was going in a direction that he didn't feel was the way to go, Weisberg followed a lead concerning Oswald and the picking up of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets in New Orleans from Jones Printing Co. According to the story, Weisberg showed the owner over 100 photos of individuals other than Lee Harvey Oswald (apparently he had discovered that Oswald wasn't the person who picked them up.) When the owner picked the individual out of the photos, Weisberg contacted him and told him he needed to get an attorney as he was about to be indicted for perjury; at this point in a taped interview Kerry Thornley admitted committing perjury and admitted that he had been the one to pick up the FPCC leaflets. When Weisberg informed Garrison about this he declined to pursue it because it didn't have anything to do with his chief suspect Clay Shaw. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the story but it has appeared on one of the JFK Forum's other than this one. It should also be mentioned that the FBI was aware of this and declined to investigate it, ostensibly per Hoover himself.

Edited September 19, 2005 by Robert Howard

[John Simkin]

At the risk of being redundant, I would like to mention that I know that many of us are waiting for our copies of Joan Mellen's book to come out, I have pre-ordered my copy as well. In the meantime I have been going over some of the teasers for the book and exploring some of them. One of the things that I have discovered is an angle on Kerry Thornley that is attributed to the late Harold Weisberg's research, this may or may not be in Mellen's book; The story is during the Garrison investigation after Weisberg decided that Garrison was going in a direction that he didn't feel was the way to go, Weisberg followed a lead concerning Oswald and the picking up of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets in New Orleans from Jones Printing Co. According to the story, Weisberg showed the owner over 100 photos of individuals other than Lee Harvey Oswald (apparently he had discovered that Oswald wasn't the person who picked them up.) When the owner picked the individual out of the photos, Weisberg contacted him and told him he needed to get an attorney as he was about to be indicted for perjury; at this point in a taped interview Kerry Thornley admitted committing perjury and admitted that he had been the one to pick up the FPCC leaflets. When Weisberg informed Garrison about this he declined to pursue it because it didn't have anything to do with his chief suspect Clay Shaw. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the story but it has appeared on one of the JFK Forum's other than this one. It should also be mentioned that the FBI was aware of this and declined to investigate it, ostensibly per Hoover himself.

It might be worth your while asking this question on the thread concerning Joan Mellen's book.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5015

I have never taken Kerry Thornley's claims very seriously. However, this passage from Jim Garrison's book, On the Trail of the Assassins, is interesting

Thornley had told me that he returned from his summer in California by way of Mexico City. This happened to be very close to the time that the Warren Commission said Oswald was in Mexico. By November 1963, according to his own account, Thornley was living in a New Orleans apartment he rented from John Spencer.

We located Spencer, who turned out to be a friend of Clay Shaw's. As he described it, sometimes Spencer visited Shaw, the director of the International Trade Mart, and sometimes it was vice versa. Spencer told us, however, that Shaw never came by while Thornley was living at his place.

Several days after the assassination. Spencer told us, he came to his house and found Thornley gone. In Spencer's mailbox was a note from Thornley saying, "I must leave. I am going to the Washington, D.C. area, probably Alexandria, Virginia. I will send you my address so that you can forward my mail." Spencer said it was quite unexpected because Thornley had at least a week left in the month before his rent was due. He went to Thornley's apartment, number "C", and found that paper had been left over the entire floor, torn up into small pieces like confetti. Before being torn up, the paper had been watered down so that the ink was blurred, making it unreadable. Spencer said he had some conversations with Thornley about his book The Idle Warriors and that Thornley had asked him to read a copy of the manuscript, which had been turned down by several publishers before the assassination. Spencer never did get around to reading it. After the assassination Thornley told Spencer that he was going to be a rich man because of the coincidence of Oswald having been the subject of his book.

I later sent Andrew Sciambra to the Washington area, where he traced Thornley's path. Thornley had wound up at Arlington, a Washington suburb, and had moved into Shirlington House, a first-class apartment building where he worked as doorman. Thornley stayed at Shirlington House for six months, until he testified before the Warren Commission. Oddly enough, his salary was less than the rent of his Shirlington House apartment.

In the mid-1970s when I was in the private practice of law, Thornley sent a lengthy, almost biographical, 50-page affidavit to me describing, among other things, evidence he had encountered in New Orleans of "Nazi activity" in connection with President Kennedy's murder. It was apparent that even though I no longer was D.A. Thornley wanted to assure me that he had not been involved in Kennedy's assassination in any way.

Although it did not accord with reality, as I recalled it, the affidavit had, in retrospect, one interesting feature. Purely gratuitously, it mentioned how Thornley had left Washington following his Warren Commission testimony and ultimately returned to California, where he and John Rosselli happened to become friends. The affidavit was mailed to me before Rosselli's name surfaced during the Senate's 1975 investigation of the C.I.A.'s assassination practices. Rosselli, it turned out, had been one of a number of mobsters with whom the Agency had developed a relationship during its pre-Castro activities in Cuba.

Garrison involvement with Thornley came at a time when Dick Billings (a CIA asset) was trying to persuade him to look at the Mafia's involvement in the assassination of JFK. I believe Garrison was right to believe that the CIA was doing this because they feared he was getting close to obtaining some important information. In my view Thorney was playing a similar role to that of Billings.

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

[Jeanie Dean]

Kerry Thornley's role is one of the most bizarre elements in the JFK debate.

Did Kerry Thornley know David Ferrie?

Garrison seemed to think they were implicated together.

Is there evidence linking Kerry Thornley and David Ferrie?

Now here's a joke --- Are there pictures of Thornley in Dealey Plaza?

My first question is genuine. Comments on Thornley & Ferrie?

[David Andrews]

Not to push this into absurdity - but folksinger Phil Ochs claimed he was in Dealey, I believe while serving in the military. Has he ever been identified in photos?

[Bernice Moore]

Not to push this into absurdity - but folksinger Phil Ochs claimed he was in Dealey, I believe while serving in the military. Has he ever been identified in photos?

jim there is a thread on phil ochs being in dealey on houston street i believe .with photos by jim glover do a search you may find it..i cannot....b

Edited December 23, 2009 by Bernice Moore

[Don Jeffries]

Kerry Thornley is one of the most intriguing characters connected to this case. If any of you have read the classic 1970s sci-fi trilogy Illuminatus, (which deeply influenced my own novel The Unreals), written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, you may not realize how important Thornley was to the authors. The whole concept of discordianism-a baffling political philosophy invented by Thornley-permeates this award-winning book. Author Wilson later wrote several more books on the Illuminati and conspiracies in general, and mentioned Kerry Thornley often. Wilson grew very friendly with LSD guru Timothy Leary, and I believe Thornley was close to him as well.

I don't necessarily share Wilson's favorable view of Thornley. I'm quite skeptical of his WC testimony, which was so different from the testimony of the other marines who served with Oswald. You also have to be deeply suspcious of anyone who was writing a book about Oswald BEFORE the assassination. Whatever his motivation, whatever his connection to Oswald and the events in Dallas, Kerry Thornley was unique and fascinating.