Homer McMahon Transcript

[Greg Burnham]

It's a PDF.

Thanks Doug...

[Guest Tom Scully]

ARRB Interview Homer McMahon or:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=15387

in JFK Assassination Debate

Started by William Kelly, 31 Jan 2010

Edited May 9, 2012 by Tom Scully

[William Kelly]

Doug also sent around some photos of the poster boards constructed at NPIC now at the NARA.

Can someone post them?

Also, does Peter Janney mention Dino Brugoni or NPIC in his new book Mary's Mosaic?

BK

JFKcountercoup

JFKCountercoup2

[Michael Hogan]

Doug also sent around some photos of the poster boards constructed at NPIC now at the NARA.

Can someone post them?

Also, does Peter Janney mention Dino Brugoni or NPIC in his new book Mary's Mosaic?

BK

JFKcountercoup

JFKCountercoup2

Janney inteviewed Dino Brugioni more than half a dozen times by telephone. He then

visited Brugioni at his home in Hartwood, Virginia to clarify certain things.

So yes, Janney mentions him, and then some.

[William Kelly]

Doug also sent around some photos of the poster boards constructed at NPIC now at the NARA.

Can someone post them?

Also, does Peter Janney mention Dino Brugoni or NPIC in his new book Mary's Mosaic?

BK

JFKcountercoup

JFKCountercoup2

Janney inteviewed Dino Brugioni more than half a dozen times by telephone. He then

visited Brugioni at his home in Hartwood, Virginia to clarify certain things.

So yes, Janney mentions him, and then some.

Thank you Michael.

[Greg Burnham]

Bill,

I tried to upload the NPIC briefing boards, but the EF doesn't accommodate that large a file. Let me try them one at a time.

--Sorry, it only let me do one.

Edited May 11, 2012 by Greg Burnham

[William Kelly]

Bill,

I tried to upload the NPIC briefing boards, but the EF doesn't accommodate that large a file. Let me try them one at a time.

--Sorry, it only let me do one.

Maybe Greg Parker can post them and Doug's transcript and commentary at his website/blog?

BK

[Greg Parker]

Bill Kelly's Document Collection

[Greg Burnham]

Thanks Greg.

[William Kelly]

Thanks Greg!

BK

JFKcountercoup

JFKCountercoup2

[Linda Minor]

Dino Brugoni is mentioned 48 times in Janney's book. Here's one of the first:

Brugioni and his crew weren’t prepared for what they were about to see. The assembled team in the NPIC briefing room gasped in horror. “What grabbed us all were his [JFK’s] brains flying through the air,” Dino told me solemnly. “We counted all the frames in the briefing room and told the two Secret Service agents what we could do, and what we couldn’t.”21 One of the major concerns Brugioni remembered was whether the president had been hit by gunfire while he passed the Stemmons Freeway sign, which blocked the view in the film. “Do you remember seeing the motorcade slowing down or stopping before the fatal head shot?” I asked him. “How many different shots, and from what directions, do you remember discussing or analyzing?” Brugioni said he didn’t remember. Under the vigilant eyes of the two Secret Service agents, the NPIC crew worked through the night, printing various frames on two identical sets of briefing boards. When Director Lundahl arrived at NPIC early next morning, he reviewed the notes that Brugioni had prepared, and took the two sets of identical briefing boards to his meeting with Director John McCone at CIA headquarters in Langley. The Secret Service also left early the next morning, taking with them the film, and a list of all the people who had been present for the night’s work, which included “at least seven support staff” in addition to Dino Brugioni, Ralph Pearce, and Bill Banfield.

He was described in this way:

Prior to entering the intelligence world, Dino Brugioni had distinguished himself as part of a World War II bomber crew that flew sixty-six successful missions. Highly trained and thoroughly competent in all aspects of photographic imagery and analysis, Brugioni regularly accompanied his boss to the White House and all “seventh-floor” classified briefings at NPIC and CIA headquarters.

And his "boss," was described as:

Known as the father of modern imagery analysis and imagery intelligence, Arthur C. Lundahl had been recruited by the CIA in 1953 to head the agency’s Photographic Intelligence Division (PID); he would be designated the first director of NPIC when it was formally created in 1961. Lundahl, in his capacity as NPIC’s first director, expanded the center into a national, multidepartmental component of the intelligence community, hiring over a thousand employees drawn from the CIA and the Department of Defense. NPIC was, indeed, as one former employee referred to it, “Lundahl’s Palace.” Starting with President Eisenhower, Art Lundahl’s presidential briefings became legendary during an era when aircraft such as the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird, and satellite imagery reconnaissance programs were made operational. A “Lundahl briefing” was considered the gold standard by which all other intelligence briefings to presidents were judged. Serving Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, all of whom had nothing but the highest praise for his knowledge and expertise, Art Lundahl retired in 1973, having received a personal letter and a silver memento of the Cuban Missile Crisis from President Kennedy, as well as the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II eventually named Lundahl a Knight of the British Empire.

Then we hear from Janney about a second viewing of a processed Zapruder film on the same night:

Service agent “Bill Smith” told Homer McMahon that he had just come from Rochester, New York, where the 16-millimeter film now in his possession had been “processed” earlier that day at the CIA’s “Hawkeye” facility (sometimes referred to as “Hawkeyeworks”).4 Classified and designated top secret, known for its state-of-the-art “clean facility,” the CIA Hawkeye facility in Rochester required all technicians to wear full body suits of special fabric to avoid contamination. “Hawkeye had the capability to do almost anything with any film product,” recalled Brugioni. While there is still debate among Kennedy assassination researchers as to whether the Zapruder film has been altered, the recent revelations by Dino Brugioni, along with Homer McMahon’s 1997 interview at the ARRB, clearly underscore the likelihood of alteration. That alteration plausibly could have taken place sometime after early Sunday morning, when the original 8-millimeter film left NPIC, and before Sunday night, when some version of the film returned to NPIC in a 16-millimeter format. The CIA’s Hawkeye facility in Rochester was the ideal place, technically superior and capable of such an alteration. “They could do anything,” Brugioni repeated emphatically. Interviewed once on the telephone and twice in person by the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board in 1997, Homer McMahon was blunt, his statements staggering. After reviewing the 16-millimeter film at NPIC that Sunday evening, November 24, with his assistant Morgan Bennett Hunter, he was sure, he told the ARRB, that “about eight (8) shots” had been fired at the president’s limousine. “[As to how many shots were fired] what was it that you observed on the film’s examination, in your opinion?” asked Jeremy Gunn, the chief counsel to the ARRB. “About eight shots,” said the former NPIC employee Homer McMahon in 1997. “And where did they come from?” Gunn further inquired. “Three different directions, at least,” replied McMahon. “I expressed my opinion that night, but it was already preconceived. I did not agree with the analysis at the time. I didn’t have to. I was [just] doing the work. That’s the way I felt about it. It was preconceived. You don’t fight city hall. I wasn’t there to fight them. I was there to do the work.” “Do you remember what [secret Service agent] Smith’s analysis was?” asked Douglas P. Horne, chief analyst for military records at the ARRB. “He thought there were three (3) shots,” recalled McMahon. “He went with the standard concept, that Oswald was the shooter.”24 When I interviewed Dino Brugioni in 2009, he was both shocked and mystified when he heard about the subsequent Zapruder film event that had taken place at the NPIC Sunday evening (November 24). As the NPIC on-call duty officer during the assassination weekend, Brugioni should have been notified. He wasn’t, and for good reason. Why? Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter had assisted in the preparation of a set of briefing boards that were significantly different in size and composition (as well as, presumably, in image content) from those made on Saturday night by Brugioni and his colleagues. When shown photos of the one surviving set of Homer McMahon’s briefing boards made on November 24, Brugioni categorically told me that they were not the briefing boards he had made on Saturday night.25 It appeared that the skulduggery that had taken place was known only at the highest levels, part of a well-organized cover-up, to which even mid-to-upper level CIA officers like Brugioni weren’t privy. In the spring of 2011, I visited Dino Brugioni at his home in Virginia to further discuss the Zapruder film. I showed him a high-resolution image of the one and only frame in the extant Zapruder film that graphically depicts the fatal head shot, frame 313. Dino was incredulous there was only one frame of the head explosion—then repeatedly rejected the possibility, based upon what he had personally witnessed when he had viewed the camera-original Zapruder film on Saturday evening, November 23, 1963. I asked him several times, “Was there more than one frame?” Dino responded unequivocally there was indeed: “Oh yeah! Oh yeah … I remember all of us being shocked…. it was straight up [gesturing high above his own head] … in the sky. … There should have been more than one frame…. I thought the spray was, say, three or four feet from his head…. what I saw was more than that [in the image of frame 313 being shown to him] … it wasn’t low [as in frame 313], it was high … there was more than that in the original…. It was way high off of his head … and I can’t imagine that there would only be one frame. What I saw was more than you have there [in frame 313].”26 Why was it necessary to alter the film and produce a different version of what had occurred? According to AARB staff member Douglas P. Horne, author of the 2009 five-volume Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, “they had to remove whatever was objectionable in the film—most likely, the car [the president’s limousine] stop, seen by over fifty witnesses in Dealey Plaza, and the exit debris which would inevitably have been seen in the film leaving the rear of President Kennedy’s head. They would also have had to add to the film whatever was desired—such as a large, painted-on exit wound generally consistent with the enlarged, altered head wound depicted in the autopsy photos, which were developed the day before on Saturday, November 23, by Robert Knudsen at NPC [Naval Photographic Center] Anacostia.”27 Horne was adamant in his book about the falsity of the photographic record: The brain photographs in the National Archives today cannot be, and are not [Horne’s emphasis], photographs of President Kennedy’s brain. This we now know beyond any reasonable doubt. The purpose for creating this false photographic record was to suppress evidence that President Kennedy was killed by a shot or shots from the front, and to insert into the record false “evidence” consistent with the official story that he was shot only from behind. This discovery is the single most significant “smoking gun” indicating a government cover-up within the medical evidence surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination, and is a direct result of the JFK Records Act, which in turn was fathered by the film JFK.28 Simply put, the conspiracy to murder the president, if it were to succeed, had to be matched by an equal, and perhaps more elaborate, conspiracy to manipulate the evidence to support the contrived narrative of only three shots, all fired from behind the president’s motorcade from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, from one rifle, by one man. While eyewitness accounts in general are often vulnerable to misinterpretation, physical forensic evidence is much less so, and therefore poses a far greater challenge.

Above quotes from: Janney, Peter (2012-04-02). Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace (Kindle Locations 6079-6087). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Doug also sent around some photos of the poster boards constructed at NPIC now at the NARA.

Can someone post them?

Also, does Peter Janney mention Dino Brugoni or NPIC in his new book Mary's Mosaic?

BK

JFKcountercoup

JFKCountercoup2

[Linda Minor]

Footnote 4 to the quoted text from Peter Janney's book, Mary's Mosaic, reads as follows:

16-mm Zapruder film delivered to Homer McMahon by “Bill Smith” was an unslit double 8 home movie which McMahon believed to be the original film. He vividly and independently recalled during his first (telephonic) ARRB interview that this 16-mm wide film (from which he made enlargements of individual frames for briefing boards) contained opposing 8-mm wide image strips going in opposite directions, the precise characteristics of an original film right out of the camera before the A and B sides had been slit to 8-mm width and spliced together. That is, what had been a slit, 8-mm wide original film on Saturday night (November 23) when it had been delivered to Dino Brugioni, had been magically transformed back into an unslit, 16-mm wide double 8 “original” film 24 hours later, when it was delivered to Homer McMahon. The clear implication here is that the courier from the Hawkeye facility delivered to McMahon an altered film, masquerading as a camera original. Since the film had been altered, it had to be handled by a different group of NPIC employees; therefore at the second NPIC event on Sunday night (November 24), Dino Brugioni, who was the NPIC duty officer in charge that weekend, and his crew were never notified of this event. Instead, Homer McMahon and his assistant Ben Hunter were brought in to handle the altered film, and help create a second set of (sanitized) briefing boards.

Janney, Peter (2012-04-02). Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace (Kindle Locations 6570-6580). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[William Kelly]

Thanks Linda,

Some more relevant quotes would be helpfull.

I will get the book soon.

BK

Edited May 15, 2012 by William Kelly