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TFX Scandal and the JFK assassination


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In the last few months of Eisenhower’s administration the Air Force began to argue that it needed a successor to its F-105 tactical fighter. This became known as the TFX/F-111 project. In January, 1961, Robert McNamara, changed the TFX from an Air Force program to a joint Air Force-Navy under-taking. On 1st October, the two services sent the aircraft industry the request for proposals on the TFX and the accompanying work statement, with instructions to submit the bids by 1st December, 1961. Three of the bids were submitted by individual companies: the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, the North American Aviation Corporation and the Boeing Company. The other three bids represented team efforts: Republic Aviation & Chance Vought; General Dynamics Corporation & Grumman Aircraft; and McDonnell Aircraft & Douglas Aircraft. (1)

It soon became clear that Boeing was expected to get the contract. Its main competitor was the General Dynamics/Grumman bid. General Dynamics had been America’s leading military contractors during the early stages of the Cold War. For example, in 1958 it obtained $2,239,000,000 worth of government business. This was a higher figure than those obtained by its competitors, such as Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell and North American. (2) More than 80 percent of the firm’s business came from the government. (3) However, the company lost $27 million in 1960 and $143 million in 1961. According to an article by Richard Austin Smith in Fortune Magazine, General Dynamics was close to bankruptcy. Smith claimed that “unless it gets the contract for the joint Navy-Air Force fighter (TFX)… the company was down the road to receivership”. (4)

General Dynamics had several factors in its favour. The president of the company was Frank Pace, the Secretary of the Army (April, 1950-January, 1953). The Deputy Secretary of Defense in 1962 was Roswell Gilpatric, who before he took up the post, was chief counsel for General Dynamics. The Secretary of the Navy was John Connally, a politician from Texas, the state where General Dynamics had its main plant. When he left the job in 1962 he was replaced by another Texan, Fred Korth. He had been appointed by Kennedy after strong lobbying by Lyndon Johnson. Korth from Fort Worth, Texas, was the former president of the Continental Bank, which had loaned General Dynamics considerable sums of money during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Korth later told the McClellan committee that investigated the granting of the TFX contract to General Dynamics “that because of his peculiar position he had deliberately refrained from taking a directing hand in this decision (within the Navy) until the last possible moment.” (5).

As I. F. Stone pointed out, it was “the last possible moment” which counted. “Three times the Pentagon’s Source Selection Board found that Boeing’s bid was better and cheaper than that of General Dynamics and three times the bids were sent back for fresh submissions by the two bidders and fresh reviews. On the fourth round, the military still held that Boeing was better but found at last that the General Dynamics bid was also acceptable.” (6)

Stone goes on to argue: “The only document the McClellan committee investigators were able to find in the Pentagon in favour of that award, according to their testimony, was a five-page memorandum signed by McNamara, Korth, and Eugene Zuckert, then Secretary of the Air Force.”

Zuckert was a close friend of Tommy Corcoran who helped to get him a post with the legal staff of the fledgling Securities and Exchange Commission in 1937. He was also closely associated with John McCone. Zuckert worked with McCone as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s.

McNamara justified his support for General Dynamics because “Boeing had from the very beginning consistently chosen more technically risky tradeoffs in an effort to achieve operational features which exceeded the required performance characteristics.” (7)

During the McClellan's Permanent Investigations Committee hearings into the contract, Senator Sam Ervin asked Robert McNamara “whether or not there was any connection whatever between your selection of General Dynamics, and the fact that the Vice President of the United States happens to be a resident of the state in which that company has one of its principal, if not its principal office.”

McNamara rejected the idea but evidence was to emerge later that Johnson did play an important role in the awarding of the TFX project to General Dynamics. For example, William Proxmire later began investigating the role played by Richard Russell in the granting of the C-5A contract to Lockheed. The C-5A was built in Marietta, Georgia, the state that Russell represented. The Air Force Contract Selection Board originally selected Boeing that was located in the states of Washington and Kansas. However, Proxmire claimed that Russell was able to persuade the board to change its mind and give the C-5A contract to Lockhead.

Proxmire quotes Howard Atherton, the mayor of Marietta, as saying that “Russell was key to landing the contract”. Atherton added that Russell believed that Robert McNamara was going ahead with the C-5A in order to “give the plane to Boeing because Boeing got left out on the TFX fighter.” According to Atherton, Russell got the contract after talking to Lyndon Johnson. Atherton added, “without Russell, we wouldn’t have gotten the contract”. (8)

Several journalists speculated that Johnson and his friends in Texas had played a key role in obtaining the TFX contract for General Dynamics. (9) When "reporters discovered that the Continental National Bank of Fort Worth, was the principal money source for the General Dynamics plant" in October, 1963, Fred Korth was forced to resign as Secretary of the Navy. (10)

Johnson’s role in these events was confirmed when Don B. Reynolds testified in a secret session of the Senate Rules Committee. As Victor Lasky pointed out, Reynolds “spoke of the time Bobby Baker opened a satchel full of paper money which he said was a $100,000 payoff for Johnson for pushing through a $7billion TFX plane contract.” (11)

Burkett Van Kirk, chief counsel for the Republican minority on the Senate Rules Committee later told Seymour Hersh that Senator John Williams of Delaware was being fed information by Robert Kennedy about the involvement of Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Baker in a series of scandals. Williams, the Senate’s leading investigator of corruption, passed this information to the three Republicans (John Sherman Cooper, Hugh Scott and Carl Curtis) on the ten-member Rules Committee. However, outnumbered, they were unable to carry out a full investigation into Johnson and Baker. Van Kirk claimed that Robert Kennedy supplied this information because he wanted “to get rid of Johnson.” (12)

In his autobiography, Forty Years Against the Tide, Carl Curtis gives an insider view of the attempted investigation into the activities of Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Baker, Walter Jenkins and Fred Black. According to Curtis, Johnson managed to persuade the seven Democrats to vote against hearing the testimony of important witnesses. This included Margaret Broome, who served as Bobby Baker’s secretary before the position was taken by Carole Tyler, who later became his mistress. Tyler did testify but refused to answer questions on the ground that she might incriminate herself. Tyler was later to die in an airplane crash on the beach near the Carousel Motel, owned by Bobby Baker.

In his autobiography, Curtis described Baker, Jenkins and Black as “contact men”. He added: “Contact-men existed primarily to obtain for their clients and themselves some share of the vast pool of riches in the possession of swollen centralized political bureaucracies. The more impressive a contact-man’s political connections, the better he and his clients would fare.” (13)

Notes

1. Robert J. Art, The TFX Decision: McNamara and the Military, 1968 (pages 62-63)

2. William Proxmire, speech in the Senate, 24th March, 1969

3. I. F. Stone, The New York Review of Books, 1st January, 1969

4. Richard Austin Smith, Fortune Magazine, February, 1962

5. Robert J. Art, The TFX Decision, 1968 (page 5)

6. I. F. Stone, The New York Review of Books, 1st January, 1969

7. Quoted by Frederic M. Scherer, The Weapons Acquisition Process: Economic Incentives, 1964 (page 37)

8. William Proxmire, Report from Wasteland: America’s Military-Industrial Complex, 1970 (pages 100-102)

9. See “Missiles and Rockets” (11th February, 1963) and Aviation Week & Space Technology (25th February, 1963)

10. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 1993, (page 220)

11. Victor Lasky, It Didn’t Start With Watergate, 1977 (page 144)

12. Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, 1997 (page 407)

13. Carl T. Curtis, Forty Years Against the Tide, 1986 (page 248)

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The TFX case is covered by Clark Mollenhoff's book, The Pentagon (1967). I have just ordered a copy as it seems very interesting:

Mollenhoff, Clark R. The Pentagon. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1967. 450 pages.

Clark Mollenhoff was a Pulitzer-winning reporter who had been with the Washington bureau of Cowles Publications for seventeen years before writing this book. But a comprehensive study of the Pentagon requires more access than either the General Accounting Office or a slew of Congressional subcommittees has ever been able to muster, and is certainly beyond the means of a mere reporter. Instead Mollenhoff presents 35 short chapters, each of which amounts to a brief but suggestive case study of a different tip of the Pentagon iceberg.

After several short chapters that cover War Department corruption and mismanagement from the Civil War through World War II, he then gets into more current issues with chapter titles that include names such as Howard Hughes, Benny Meyers, Harold Talbott, Robert McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric, and Fred Korth. Other chapters concern various weapon systems procurement scandals, the Pentagon's "black" budget, kickbacks for generals disguised as consulting or travel-expense fees, nonprofits such as Aerospace Corporation that contract with the military and suck in huge amounts for questionable expenditures, and the "profit pyramid," where layers of subcontractors each add on their profit margins and pass the bill up to the next level until it finally reaches the Pentagon and the taxpayer.

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I am currently reading Clark R. Mollenhoff’s Despoilers of Democracy. It is the best account I have read on the scandals surrounding Lyndon Johnson at the time of the assassination. It is especially good on providing information on Fred Korth, LBJ’s pal who replaced his other pal, John Connally, as Secretary of the Navy.

Mollenhoff’s interviewed all the main figures in the TFX scandal and attended all the sessions of John McClellan’s Senate Committee that investigated the granting of the contract to General Dynamics.

Mollenhoff points out that as well as being General Dynamics’ banker before becoming Secretary of the Navy, Korth was also a director of the Bell Corporation. Soon after taking the post, Korth granted the X-22 contract to Bell. This was in spite of the recommendation of the Navy Board that the contract should go to the Douglas Aircraft Corporation. Within weeks of taking office he was also overruling the unanimous recommendation by the Navy Board that the TFX contract should go to Boeing.

At the time the X-22 and TFX contracts were given to Bell and General Dynamics, both corporations were on the verge of bankruptcy. They were saved not only by these contracts but by the Vietnam War.

Mollenhoff points out that McClellan’s Senate Committee never issued its report on the TFX scandal. In fact, it stopped meeting after the assassination of JFK. Officially, it was because the report would have condemned JFK as well as Johnson, Korth, Gilpatric, and McNamara.

The main question concerns why JFK and McNamara went along with the X-22 and TFX decisions. If JFK had stepped in he would have had to have sacked both McNamara and Gilpatric. It also explains how LBJ was able to force McNamara into going along with sending combat troops to Vietnam. It was a common tactic of LBJ to involve as many politicians as possible in his various scams. Once they were implicated in these corrupt activities, they became under his control.

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A lot of research has indeed been carried out since 1994 and in a sense the publication of that talk is embarrassing. On the other hand it is quite a good general intro to the story and that is what I thought then; the fact that we change our minds with experience and further reading should embarrass no-one. My current view is that expressed in my Who Shot JFK? The killing was done on behalf of LBJ to keep Johnson's political career alive. Fascinating though all the research into the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, mafia and the entire Oswald-intelligence milieu is, all the trails peter out as we approach Dealey Plaza. JFK was bushwacked in Johnson's backyard; and Johnson was about to go down the pan through various corruption inquiries. The evidence supporting this is persuasive but not conclusive.

It is true that Lyndon Johnson had the best motive for wanting JFK dead. The testimony given by Don Reynolds to the Senate Rules Committee on the day that JFK died would have resulted in the impeachment of LBJ if he had survived. We also know from Evelyn Lincoln that JFK was going to drop LBJ as vice president for the 1964 presidential election. We also know that Carl Curtis, LBJ’s main critic on the Senate Rules Committee, that he was getting his information on LBJ and Bobby Baker from John Williams, who in turn was getting some of it from Robert Kennedy. Once he became president, LBJ was able to control the story by using Hoover and the media to smear his critics and to cover-up the Bobby Baker scandal.

LBJ not only had the motive for arranging the assassination of JFK but also organizing the cover-up. However, LBJ needed help from other powerful people in order to achieve this. We know that LBJ could manipulate Hoover and the FBI over this issue. Hoover, of course, had his own reasons, for covering-up some dubious FBI actions leading up to the assassination.

My problem with the LBJ theory concerns the role of the CIA in all this. We now know from the evidence that has emerged in recent years that senior CIA operatives played a major role in the cover-up (see for example, the testimony of John Whitten and Jeff Morley’s recent book on Win Scott). We also have some very good evidence that implicate CIA officers and contract workers in the assassination, such as David Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, David Phillips, Chi Chi Quintero, John Martino, Tony Cuesta, Herminio Diaz Garcia, etc., who were involved in anti-Castro operations.

My view is that LBJ did not instigate the assassination. However, the people who did, knew that LBJ would automatically take part in the cover-up. To guarantee this they probably planted the Mac Wallace finger-print on the 6th Floor of the Texas School Book Depositary. In my view, Mac Wallace was the last person he would have involved in the assassination as he was the one convicted murderer who could be traced back to LBJ. When LBJ was told that the FBI had the finger-print, he could not allow a full investigation of the JFK assassination to take place. However, the planting of the evidence also meant that LBJ would not be willing to carry out the final part of the plan, the ordering of the invasion of Cuba. LBJ knew that if this happened, there would be calls from all over the world for a full investigation into the evidence that Oswald was working for Castro. Any such investigation would have proved embarrassing for LBJ, the FBI and the CIA. LBJ went for the safe option, “Oswald was a lone-nutter”. The CIA/anti-Castro group was not in a position to argue and had to accept they only got rid of one instead of both of their targets.

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My problem with the LBJ theory concerns the role of the CIA in all this. We now know from the evidence that has emerged in recent years that senior CIA operatives played a major role in the cover-up (see for example, the testimony of John Whitten and Jeff Morley’s recent book on Win Scott). We also have some very good evidence that implicate CIA officers and contract workers in the assassination, such as David Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, David Phillips, Chi Chi Quintero, John Martino, Tony Cuesta, Herminio Diaz Garcia, etc., who were involved in anti-Castro operations.

My view is that LBJ did not instigate the assassination. However, the people who did, knew that LBJ would automatically take part in the cover-up. To guarantee this they probably planted the Mac Wallace finger-print on the 6th Floor of the Texas School Book Depositary. In my view, Mac Wallace was the last person he would have involved in the assassination as he was the one convicted murderer who could be traced back to LBJ. When LBJ was told that the FBI had the finger-print, he could not allow a full investigation of the JFK assassination to take place. However, the planting of the evidence also meant that LBJ would not be willing to carry out the final part of the plan, the ordering of the invasion of Cuba. LBJ knew that if this happened, there would be calls from all over the world for a full investigation into the evidence that Oswald was working for Castro. Any such investigation would have proved embarrassing for LBJ, the FBI and the CIA. LBJ went for the safe option, “Oswald was a lone-nutter”. The CIA/anti-Castro group was not in a position to argue and had to accept they only got rid of one instead of both of their targets.

Do we? I know we have Morales reported as saying - implying - that he was involved; and Martino is said to have known something. But beyond that? Are any of these people reliably reported as being on Dealey Plaza? It may be that as Howard Hunt is reported to have said to his son just before he died that there were several plots, one by CIA people.

It still seems more likely to me that the Mac Wallace story is true; that LBJ's little criminal gang did it; that their little gang was seen by Roger Craig in the immediate aftermath. The idea that the Mac Wallace print was planted is implausible to me. If you are going to implicate him, why not do it with something more substantial? In any case the planted idea sounds like the classic move we all make to avoid having our theories falsified.

Mac Wallace had already got away with murdering Marshall - why would they not think they could do it again in LBJ's backyard?

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My problem with the LBJ theory concerns the role of the CIA in all this. We now know from the evidence that has emerged in recent years that senior CIA operatives played a major role in the cover-up (see for example, the testimony of John Whitten and Jeff Morley’s recent book on Win Scott). We also have some very good evidence that implicate CIA officers and contract workers in the assassination, such as David Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, David Phillips, Chi Chi Quintero, John Martino, Tony Cuesta, Herminio Diaz Garcia, etc., who were involved in anti-Castro operations.

Do we? I know we have Morales reported as saying - implying - that he was involved; and Martino is said to have known something. But beyond that? Are any of these people reliably reported as being on Dealey Plaza? It may be that as Howard Hunt is reported to have said to his son just before he died that there were several plots, one by CIA people.

It is of course extremely difficult, if not impossible, to identify the gunmen in Dealey Plaza. However, I do think that we have enough evidence to construct the conspiracy against JFK.

I believe that the conspiracy is similar to the one described by David Atlee Phillips in his unpublished novel. David Kaiser describes the novel's plot in his book The Road to Dallas (2008):

At some point before his death from cancer in 1988, he (Phillips) wrote an outline for another novel, entitled The AMLASH Legacy, dealing specifically with the Kennedy assassination.

The outline carefully identified the characters with the real figures on which they were based: Mexico City station chief Winston Scott, HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi, Antonio Veciana, long-time assassination conspiracists Mark Lane and Bernard Fensterwald, and Phillips himself, who went by the name of Harold Harrison. The novel focused on Harrison's son Don, who begins looking for his father's journal after his father's death. A Mexican woman who attended his father's funeral gives Don a letter written by his father. The letter explains that Harrison had been one of two case officers who recruited Lee Harvey Oswald, helped establish his credentials as a Marxist, and then attempted to send him to Cuba through Mexico City in order to assassinate Fidel Castro, using a sniper rifle from an upper floor of a high-rise to shoot Castro in his jeep. Harrison does not know whether Oswald was a double agent, the letter continues, but this was the same plan Oswald used to kill Kennedy. Allen Dulles, the letter stated, provided Harrison and the other unidentified agent with $400,000 to set up Oswald after he succeeded in assassinating Fidel.

In the novel, Harrison has the last laugh when is son discovers that his father's posthumous letter is a forgery concocted by the Fensterwald character and a KGB agent whom Harrison had repeatedly outwitted during, their spying careers. The real David Phillips might simply have concluded that since so many others had irresponsibly cashed in on the Kennedy assassination, he might as well do the same.

Yet his outline of this novel was the only document I know in existence before 1998 to suggest that Oswald might have been trying to go to Cuba to assassinate Castro. In that year, I wrote a short article to introduce the idea that - as "Leopoldo" suggested to Silvia Odio a few days before or a few days after Oswald's visit to Mexico City - Oswald's first assassination target may well have been the Cuban premier. We will probably never know whether Phillips was drawing on anything more than his imagination, but the plot of his novel, until the spectacular revelation at the end, tracks key events leading up to the Kennedy assassination almost perfectly.

In the novel the Harrison character states: "I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald... We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba... I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president's assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt."

In 1995 Gene Wheaton approached the Assassination Records Review Board with information on the death of JFK. Anne Buttimer, Chief Investigator of the ARRB, recorded that: "Wheaton told me that from 1984 to 1987 he spent a lot of time in the Washington DC area and that starting in 1985 he was "recruited into Ollie North's network" by the CIA officer he has information about. He got to know this man and his wife, a "'super grade high level CIA officer" and kept a bedroom in their Virginia home. His friend was a Marine Corps liaison in New Orleans and was the CIA contact with Carlos Marcello. He had been responsible for "running people into Cuba before the Bay of Pigs." His friend is now 68 or 69 years of age... Over the course of a year or a year and one-half his friend told him about his activities with training Cuban insurgency groups. Wheaton said he also got to know many of the Cubans who had been his friend's soldiers/operatives when the Cubans visited in Virginia from their homes in Miami. His friend and the Cubans confirmed to Wheaton they assassinated JFK. Wheaton's friend said he trained the Cubans who pulled the triggers. Wheaton said the street level Cubans felt JFK was a traitor after the Bay of Pigs and wanted to kill him. People "above the Cubans" wanted JFK killed for other reasons." It was later revealed that Wheaton's friend was Carl E. Jenkins. Wheaton also named Irving Davidson as being involved in the assassination.

In an interview with William Law and Mark Sobel in the summer of 2005, Gene Wheaton claimed that Carl E. Jenkins and Rafael Quintero were both involved in the assassination of JFK. Larry Hancock's research has shown that Jenkins (a man who had never previously been identified in any book on the CIA) was indeed involved in training anti-Castro Cubans in 1963.

I contacted Rafael Quintero via his close friend Don Bohning. Quintero refused to be interviewed but he did say that Gene Wheaton was telling the truth as "he knew it". His explanation of Wheaton's story was that he and Carl Jenkins had been lying to him when they said they were involved in the assassination. However, Quintero was once quoted as saying: “If I were ever granted immunity, and compelled to testify about past actions, about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the biggest scandal ever to rock the United States.”

Then we have Fabian Escalante's statement at the Cuban Officials and JFK Historians Conference on 7th December, 1995:

Eladio Del Valle worked for two police services - military intelligence and the traditional police. He was in charge of narcotics. He was also a legislature in the government - a representative. He was from a little town from the south of Havana. He was a captain in the merchant marines. In 1958 he was doing business dealings with Santos Trafficante in a little coastal town south of Havana. There he brought in contraband whose destination was Santos Trafficante. When the revolution triumphed, he went to Miami. Eladio Del Valle went to Miami. He settled in Miami, we don't know the address and he allied himself with Rolando Masferrer and other Batista supporters and they formed an organization called the Anti Communist Cuban Liberation Movement. From that moment on, Eladio was involved in many project against Cuba. But as I told you yesterday, we managed to penetrate this organization. And we came to know of a lot of projects, efforts, for an invasion of Cuba in secret. In order to provide arms to internal rebel groups, they needed David Ferrie as the pilot on these flights. In 1962 Eladio Del Valle tried to infiltrate Cuba with a commando group of 22 men but their boat had an English key - a little island. In the middle of 1962. Of course, we knew this. I tell you about this, because one of our agents who was one of the people helping to bring this group to Cuba, was a man of very little education. They talked English on many occasions on this little island with Eladio Del Valle told this person, on many occasions, that Kennedy must be killed to solve the Cuban problem. After that we had another piece of information on Eladio Del Valle. This was offered to us by Tony Cuesta. He told us that Eladio Del Valle was one of the people involved in the assassination plot against Kennedy. As you know, he was taken prisoner and he was very thankful to be taken back - he was blind.

He asked that this information not be public. I am only saying it here, because he is already dead. It is finished. We didn't have any other kind of information to give. There are some things you must respect. He gave us this information and in 1978 we didn't know if it was true or not. In 1978, we were not aware of the participation of Eladio Del Valle. We didn't know who he was. Remember that I explained to you yesterday that when the Select Committee when they came to Havana - they didn't give us any specific information. They just came to question us. We didn't know the relationships.

Dick Russell, who was at this conference with Escalante, wrote about the story in the 2003 edition of The Man Who Knew Too Much:

The most intriguing news to come out of the Nassau conference, however, was Escalante's revelation about what another leader of the Alpha 66 group allegedly told him. As we have seen, Nagell would never reveal the true identities of "Angel" and "Leopoldo" - the two Cuban exiles who he said had deceived Oswald into believing they were Castro operatives. Instead, on several occasions when I prodded him, Nagell had cleverly steered the conversation toward a man named Tony Cuesta - indicating that this individual possessed the knowledge that he himself chose not to express. Cuesta, as noted earlier, had been taken prisoner in Cuba during a raid in 1966.

"Cuesta was blinded (in an explosion) and spent most of his time in the hospital," Escalante recalled. In 1978, he was among a group of imprisoned exiles released through an initiative of the Carter Administration. "A few days before he was to leave," according to Escalante, "I had several conversations with Cuesta. He volunteered, 'I want to tell you something very important, but I do not want this made public because I am returning to my family in Miami - and this could be very dangerous.' I think this was a little bit of thanks on his part for the medical care he received."

Escalante said he was only revealing Cuesta's story because the man had died in Miami in 1994. In a declaration he is said to have written for the Cubans, Cuesta named two other exiles as having been involved in plotting the Kennedy assassination. Their names were Eladio del Valle and Herminio Diaz Garcia.

Shortly before his death in 1975 John Martino confessed to a Miami Newsday reporter, John Cummings, that he had been guilty of spreading false stories implicating Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination. He claimed that two of the gunmen were Cuban exiles. It is believed the two men were Herminio Diaz Garcia and Virgilio Gonzalez. Cummings added: "He told me he'd been part of the assassination of Kennedy. He wasn't in Dallas pulling a trigger, but he was involved. He implied that his role was delivering money, facilitating things.... He asked me not to write it while he was alive."

Fred Claasen also told the House Select Committee on Assassinations what he knew about Martino's involvement in the case. Florence Martino at first refused to corroborate the story. However, in 1994 she told Anthony Summers that her husband said to her on the morning of 22nd November, 1963: "Flo, they're going to kill him (Kennedy). They're going to kill him when he gets to Texas."

Then there is the case of David Morales. This is the passage from Gaeton Fonzi's, The Last Investigation (1993):

It was while sitting in the El Molino one night, that Ruben Carbajal told Bob Dorff and me about the times he and Bob Walton had gone to Washington to meet Morales and about the trip on which they met other high-ranking CIA officials. To obtain more details about those meetings, I suggested we talk to Walton. The next morning, a Saturday, Carbajal called him and Walton agreed to drive down from his home in Scottsdale to meet the three of us at the Holiday Inn.

Walton is in his mid-fifties, a pleasant, ruddy-faced fellow with Irish good looks and an easy, straightforward manner. He remembers their first trip to Washington as being in the spring of 1973. "I had had a coronary in November of 1972 and Rocky and I started talking about getting into business shortly after that. When you're from a dry climate like Arizona and you go back there in the summer you're just sweating like a pig. But I don't remember being uncomfortable, so I think it was early in the spring of 1973."

Walton corroborates the reason for the trip and the meeting with Morales: "We felt, or at least Rocky felt, that he could give us an inside track on who were the people who were for real and who were not. That was a big concern of mine because I had already been on one wild goose chase, spent an expensive week in Nassau waiting for a transaction to close and it never did."

Their evening with Morales, Walton remembers, was both very pleasant and, in more than one way, especially memorable. "We all went out for dinner, which was very nice. It was Rocky and his wife, me and my wife and Rocky's mother and father."

Morales, not someone who trusted strangers or even associates easily, obviously was impressed by Walton's character and, although their commodities business never took hold, he later called on Walton to represent him on a few matters back in Phoenix. It was something Morales said at one of those subsequent encounters in Phoenix that makes Walton put what had happened in Washington in a very special perspective.

"Morales was building a big, new house out near Willcox," Walton says. "Actually, it was in a little town called El Frita, which is about half-way between Willcox and the Mexican border. It's a remote area, I've only driven that road once in my life. It's an agricultural area, they grow the famous jalapenos peppers there. I never got to see the house, but he had just finished it and was describing it to me when he mentioned that he put in it the best security system in the United States. And I remember asking him, thinking he was worried about burglars or being robbed, 'What do you need so much security for? You're still thirty miles from the Mexican border.' And he said, 'I'm not worried about those people, I'm worried about my own.' "

That struck Walton as curious. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"I know too much," Morales said, then quickly dropped it.

Remembering that now, Walton views his first meeting with Morales in Washington as being far more significant than he realized. After dinner, the whole party went back to the Dupont Plaza Hotel. It was late and Carbajal's parents and his wife returned to their rooms and Ruben and Morales returned to the Waltons' room with them. "Didi ended up staying all night," Walton recalls. "My wife went to sleep somewhere around two in the morning and Rocky and I and Didi drank and talked from when we got back from dinner - maybe that was about eleven o'clock at night - until about six in the morning. "

The drinking got heavy. "We had consumed quite a bit of alcohol," remembers Walton. "At one point, between the three of us we had gone through a fifth of Scotch and we had to re-order. It was a real contest." He pauses and smiles. "Ah, my younger days, my misspent youth!" And as the night and the drinking go on, defenses come down and candid truths emerge. "You know," says Walton, "you get in a kind of position where you say, 'All right, I told you everything about me, what are you all about?' "

Morales began with his war stories. Walton remembers him talking about the killing in Vietnam and Laos, about being involved in the capture of Che Guevara in Bolivia, of hits in Paraguay and Uruguay and Venezuela. ("He said his wife was [in the country] with him and they had real trouble getting him out of town. They almost bought the farm on that one.")

The drinking and the talking continued. At one point, Morales began probing Walton for a bit of his own background. Walton had gone to Amherst College in Massachusetts and, as part of his developing interest in political science and politics, he had done some volunteer work for Jack Kennedy's Senatorial campaign. Later, at Harvard Law, Walton was head of a student group which invited then Senator Kennedy to speak at Cambridge.

Walton never got to explain the details of that association. At the first mention of Kennedy's name, he recalls, Morales literally almost hit the ceiling.

"He flew off the bed on that one," says Walton. "I remember he was lying down and he jumped up screaming, 'That no good son of a bitch motherf*****!' He started yelling about what a wimp Kennedy was and talking about how he had worked on the Bay of Pigs and how he had to watch all the men he had recruited and trained get wiped out because of Kennedy."

Walton says Morales's tirade about Kennedy, fueled by righteous anger and high-proof booze, went on for minutes while he stomped around the room. Suddenly he stopped, sat back down on the bed and remained silent for a moment. Then, as if saying it only to himself, he added:

"Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn't we?"

I looked at Ruben Carbajal, who had remained silent while Walton was telling me this. Carbajal looked at me and nodded his head. Yes, he was there, it was true. But, in all the long hours we had spent together and all the candid revelations he had provided, it was a remembrance he couldn't bring himself to tell me about his friend Didi.

All these sources suggest a combined CIA and Anti-Castro Cuban plot. Jeff Morley's new book about Win Scott shows that senior figures in the CIA, including Richard Helms, James Jesus Angleton and David Atlee Phillips, were deeply involved in covering-up the the story of Oswald's time in Mexico City.

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  • 9 months later...

According to David Kaiser's book, Ameican Tragedy: “The Secretary of Defense (McNarmara) was having a difficult spring, but seemed to be riding higher than ever. He was struggling from Congress over his refusal to authorize a new manned bomber, and his award of the contract to build the TFX fighter plane to General Dynamics instead of Boeing had become the subject of a congressional investigation. He had just secured the President’s agreement to relieve Admiral George Anderson as chief of naval operations, apparently because Anderson refused to tailor his TFX testimony to McNarmara’s specifications, and to reappoint Air Force Chief of Staff LeMay for just one year. According to Anderson, McNamara had stated that the TFX dispute was the greatest crisis of his career, and that he had to be proven right, no matter what happened.” (page 201)

Kaiser argues that: “Anderson convincingly argued (in his JFK oral history testimony) that events during the Cuban missile crisis were not the reason he was relieved. According to McGeorge Bundy’s recollection, McNamara wanted to remove both Anderson and LeMay, but had to choose between them.” (page 525)

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  • 2 months later...
The original Boeing model 818 proposal:

BoeingModel818TFX-2.jpg

image014.jpg

image013.jpg

BoeingModel818TFX-1.jpg

One cannot understand the TFX Scandal and the subsequent machinations without being aware of one Robert Bernard Anderson;

Who was Robert B. Anderson?

Before I explain, at first glance adding Anderson's name to the various persons associated with the TFX Scandal, seemingly leaves one completely focused on LBJ as the big fish of the Kennedy Assassination.

There has already been a politically correct treatment of LBJ as the sacrificial big fish, to those familiar with the late E Howard Hunt's 2007 American Spy, replete with a Foreword by William F. Buckley. If that strikes anyone as slightly dubious, it should.

I would not be so naive as to be a defender of LBJ's innocence, far from it. At the same time, those enamored with the idea of the JFK Assassination being solved, in effect with the fingering of LBJ as the man responsible for the assassination, might pause to consider that he had a very real fear for his own safety in the aftermath of President Kennedy's assassination, especially from the right wing extremists. One such incident involved a motorcade where Bobby Kennedy and LBJ were both seated and a man was discovered with a rifle on the route, before the 1964 election.

But to get back to the issue of the TFX Scandal, I would venture that the best treatise on the affair ever written was documented by Peter Dale Scott in his unpublished manuscript The Dallas Conspiracy. In it he documented that although Anderson was not in Dallas on November 22, and there was nothing to link him directly to the shootings, there were ten, repeat ten connections linking him indirectly to Oswald, Ruby and those persons controlling the lives and fortunes of those two.

Robert B. Anderson was a Republican from Texas whom Sid Richardson had installed as Secretary of the Navy and of the Treasury under President Eisenhower. Anderson became a partner of Carl M. Loeb Rhoades and Co. It is also ironic that before anyone heard of AIG, or the Savings and Loans Scandals of the 1980's, there was the collapse of Penn-Central. It has been suggested that had it not been for certain stock investments on the part of Penn Central, the firm would never have imploded. It has also been proven that one of those investments was in Great Southwest Corporation

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,878372,00.html

On November 24, 1963 the new President Lyndon Johnson, had a lengthy meeting with Anderson.

I have had a fear that as the years progress, the initial body of evidence, will become a distant memory, and the focus center exclusively on other areas.

As stated earlier in this thread, there is the point raised that there were several plots active in the fall of 1963, which is why looking at Dealey Plaza in isolation, can be something of a mind-boggling experience.

Edited by Robert Howard
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One cannot understand the TFX Scandal and the subsequent machinations without being aware of one Robert Bernard Anderson;

Who was Robert B. Anderson?

Before I explain, at first glance adding Anderson's name to the various persons associated with the TFX Scandal, seemingly leaves one completely focused on LBJ as the big fish of the Kennedy Assassination.

There has already been a politically correct treatment of LBJ as the sacrificial big fish, to those familiar with the late E Howard Hunt's 2007 American Spy, replete with a Foreword by William F. Buckley. If that strikes anyone as slightly dubious, it should.

I would not be so naive as to be a defender of LBJ's innocence, far from it. At the same time, those enamored with the idea of the JFK Assassination being solved, in effect with the fingering of LBJ as the man responsible for the assassination, might pause to consider that he had a very real fear for his own safety in the aftermath of President Kennedy's assassination, especially from the right wing extremists. One such incident involved a motorcade where Bobby Kennedy and LBJ were both seated and a man was discovered with a rifle on the route, before the 1964 election.

But to get back to the issue of the TFX Scandal, I would venture that the best treatise on the affair ever written was documented by Peter Dale Scott in his unpublished manuscript The Dallas Conspiracy. In it he documented that although Anderson was not in Dallas on November 22, and there was nothing to link him directly to the shootings, there were ten, repeat ten connections linking him indirectly to Oswald, Ruby and those persons controlling the lives and fortunes of those two.

Robert B. Anderson was a Republican from Texas whom Sid Richardson had installed as Secretary of the Navy and of the Treasury under President Eisenhower. Anderson became a partner of Carl M. Loeb Rhoades and Co. It is also ironic that before anyone heard of AIG, or the Savings and Loans Scandals of the 1980's, there was the collapse of Penn-Central. It has been suggested that had it not been for certain stock investments on the part of Penn Central, the firm would never have imploded. It has also been proven that one of those investments was in Great Southwest Corporation

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,878372,00.html

On November 24, 1963 the new President Lyndon Johnson, had a lengthy meeting with Anderson.

I have had a fear that as the years progress, the initial body of evidence, will become a distant memory, and the focus center exclusively on other areas.

As stated earlier in this thread, there is the point raised that there were several plots active in the fall of 1963, which is why looking at Dealey Plaza in isolation, can be something of a mind-boggling experience.

Thank you for this information. I will add it to:

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

Could you list the connections with Oswald?

He has also been discussed here:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=4364

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  • 9 months later...
Regarding the F-111: yes, something definitely stunk with that purchase. Surprisingly though, both the US and the UK had a hand in it. For those who aren't aware of the background...

Back in the 1960s, Australia was considering a replacement for its English Electric Canberra bomber fleet. There were a few contenders but the two front runners were the General Dynamics F-111 swing wing strike aircraft, and the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC, the forerunner of BAe) TSR-2.

Evan, you might want to add comments on this thread.

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On the contrary John, I agree to a large extent. Politics - and dirty politics - do sometimes intrude on what should be a purely military decision.

Regarding the F-111: yes, something definitely stunk with that purchase. Surprisingly though, both the US and the UK had a hand in it. For those who aren't aware of the background...

Back in the 1960s, Australia was considering a replacement for its English Electric Canberra bomber fleet. There were a few contenders but the two front runners were the General Dynamics F-111 swing wing strike aircraft, and the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC, the forerunner of BAe) TSR-2.

TSR2.jpg

The TSR-2 looked like getting the order, but after politicking from the US and a visit to Australia by Lord Mountbatten - who lobbied strongly against the TSR-2 - in 1963 the Australian government decided on 24 x F-111C aircraft. Problems with the wing box (a critical portion of the swing wing assembly) meant that we didn't actually take delivery of the aircraft until 1973 (although we did get 24 x F-4 Phantoms as an interim measure).

The TSR-2 was canceled in 1965 in favour of the UK buying the F-111K... which order was subsequently canceled in favour of the F-4M and F-4K. The debacle cost the UK taxpayer more than it would have cost to develop the TSR-2 (which seemed to have a bright future as a capable strike aircraft). The government went so far as to order the TSR-2 construction jigs destroyed so that the aircraft could not be easily restarted.

The point where I disagree with you John, is that the F-111 did become a very potent weapons platform. Ask the pilots who fly it today (Australia is now the sole operator) and they would prefer it soldier on for many more years. It was so good we expanded our fleet, buying surplus F-111 aircraft and modding them to C standard, and buying the F-111G. Yes, there were upgrades - but the F-111 was considered to be worth the money and I agree.

A telling point is when we bought our B707 (not KC-135) tanker aircraft in the late 1980s. They were equipped for air-to-air refueling, and there were two systems which we utilised: the USN "drogue and probe" system and the USAF "flying boom" method. The USN method had a drogue trailed behind the tanker aircraft, with the receiving aircraft deploying a refueling probe. The receiver flew the probe into the drogue (the basket). Our F/A-18s used this method.

ED07-0089-04.jpg

The F-111, on the other hand, used the "flying boom" method. This involved the receiving aircraft flying into a specific position behind the tanker, and the tanker boom operator would "fly" the boom into the refueling receptacle on the receiving aircraft.

DFST9102447.jpg

When the RAAF got its tankers, the flying boom was specifically not included. Why do you think that happened? Could certain regional nations have felt threatened if the F-111's range could be extended?

Evan you gotta admit that kickbacks and politics has shaped a number pf purchase reasons for many years. I know you disagree with me, but the F111 is a bit suss. Australia is really the only nation who bought it and the costs just kept escalating and the delays necessitating upgrades soon after delivery. ie obsolete pretty quickly, but the committment was locked in. Personally, I think something like what Beazly tried to push through was the way to go.
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  • 1 year later...

Several reports on Spartacus and EF have Don Reynolds testifying before Congress on November 22, 1963.

However, I was recently reading an article from an old Time magazine (The "FBI Report", vol 95, iss 11, 12-Mar-1965), which said that Don Reynolds testified before Congress on 1-Dec-1964. This is an odd discrepancy. Either he testified twice, or the reports have this event off by more than a year.

Does anyone have a clue why this discrepancy exists?

Interestingly, although Time echoes the FBI's doubts about Reynold's allegations, it actually comes down on the side of Reynolds (at the very least, it's very negative on the FBI), The article concludes by implying that the FBI's rebuttal of the allegations was vague and citing the fact that they were not under oath, as were Reynold's statements.

This blog covers the various key dates:

http://johndelanewilliams.blogspot.com/2010/11/don-reynolds-testimony-and-lbj.html

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I do think the key word is General Dynamics was close to bankrupt, and it was a critical US national security industry associated with subs and fighter planes.

General Dynamics started life as Electric Boat, or submaines, they then pick up a Canadian aircraft company followed by the Texas aircraft company associated with old WWII production plants.

The US Mil/Ind Network will find ways to keep various weapons industries alive in the interests of national security. So, they'll pump money with political deals into a high cost overrun F-111 project to keep General Dynamics afloat economically. Then crank up the little Vietnam War to keep feeding the critical national defense weapons systems and developements. US national security in the Pentagon vision has to have a weapons keep alive effort that comes from these various continual wars.

It is interesting to watch the General Dynamics dealings with Netherlands to pull in the Netherland's Fokker aircraft to make parts for the F-16 fighter for the Netherlands. Then the efforts of Lockheed to bribe Netherland's Bernhard on other Texas aircraft contracts.

Then keep in mind that LHO and de Mohrenschildt's big nickname for General Walker is General Fokker.

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