Pat Speer

Charlie, the evidence you think makes a "case against conspiracy" in fact proves one. The case will only move forward, IMO, when people stop listening to what the government's experts say the evidence shows, and do original research to see what it really shows. I am not alone in my attempts to look at the prime evidence and understand it. Gary Murr and John Hunt, for example, are doing some great work along these lines and I anxiously await their books. I am currently working on a video series which will prove, one hopes, that the government experts have been misleading the public about the mystery photo since 1967. To do this, I am devoting two segments to the history of the back wound, and how the government orchestrated a series of lies about its location. These segments rely on the autopsy photos as the proof of the lie. I assure you that they will be convincing. Your assertion that these photos support the government's claims therefore makes no sense to me. It's like saying 2 + 2 = 5. It simply does not.

Last time I looked, Pat, even US courts were still relying on such irrelevances as eye-, and ear-witness testimony. If that weren't the case, we would be confronted with an awful lot of unemployed legal types. A not unattractive development, I concede, but hardly the present state of affairs. And as demonstrated above, Elm Street witnesses DID indicate shots emanated from within the presidential limousine. All you have told me so far is you don't like the fact. Nor were they alone: At least four Parkland doctors have expressed an opinion that the head wound was caused by a handgun. Three did so before the Warren Commission. As far back as 1975, Newcomb and Adams offered an eminently sensible explanation for why more witnesses did not offer same: "Self-censorship may exist most strongly when people are confronted with a force capable of killing a very important victim, in broad daylight, with impunity. The odds of their experiencing reprisal would dictate prudence. In short, witnesses' opinion of the political power of the killers would determine their amount of recall," Murder From Within, chapter 3, "Execution." It makes perfect sense if the event depicted on the Z-fraud never happened.Paul First of all, in my original post I screwed up and said Hesters when I meant to say Franzens. Second, are you really saying there was no explosion of the skull? Methinks you're just playing...

Bernice, you seem to imply that Zapruder saw a wound on the back of the head, when his impression that the shots came from behind him, and to the side of Kennedy not front, came from the sound of the shots, (and probably from the location of the wound). There was no visible impact on the back of the head, because there was none at 313. Certainly you've seen Zapruder's on-air interview just after the shots, where he grabs near his temple to show the location of the wound, singular. Not coincidentally, this is the same location pointed out by Newman and Kilduff, and shown in the Z-film and the autopsy photos. But you would rather think they were all wrong, and that the Z-film and autopsy photos are fake, than that the Parkland doctors could be mistaken? Based on what? Half the Parkland witnesses changed their minds once shown the autopsy photos. How many of them will say today that the photos are fake? Even McClelland believes they are legit. The belief that the Parkland witness statements trump all other forms of evidence is irrational, IMO. Your concept that I am stuck in my research is also incorrect. I have continued to study the medical evidence and am still learning. I notice you use the summaries in The Texas State Journal of Medicine to support your belief that the Parkland doctors are credible. If you read their actual statements you'll notice a few things that are quite important. 1) McClelland, the most vocal of the back of the head proponents, originally stated there was an entrance wound on the left side. This is PROOF that his back of the head arguments are a re-construction of his impressions, and not his original impressions. His opinion on this issue should therefore be heavily discounted. 2) Jenkins states that they put Kennedy into the Trendelenburg position to help circulation. The Trendelenburg position is where the patient's feet are lifted 45 degrees above the patient's head. At such time, the top of the patient's head is at the far back of the space of the patient's head. At such time, it would be possible for someone standing at the head of the table to look down into an opening on top of the head, and see the lower back part of the brain, and confuse macerated cerebrum for cerebellum. With Kennedy laying flat on his back, and with a wound on the back of his head, of course, this would be impossible. I am generally a cautious fellow. If I am sure of myself on this issue it's because I've explored the options. We are not camcorders and VCRs. Our impressions are highly liquid, and our memories are highly flawed. You are correct to state that the doctors did not hallucinate. They mis-remembered something in a pattern. As stated, cognitive psychologists study these patterns. There is a well-studied pattern, whereby people have great difficulty mentally rotating faces. You can see a chair from behind and recognize it as a chair. Ditto with a car. But if you see a well-known person's face upside down you'll have great difficulty recognizing them. I believe this offers an explanation for the Parkland mistakes. It has not yet been tested but I will seek to do so in the future.

Vince Salandra said it best in 1975: "I'm afraid we were misled," Salandria said sadly. "All the critics, myself included, were misled very early. I see that now. We spent too much time and effort microanalyzing the details of the assassination when all the time it was obvious, it was blatantly obvious that it was a conspiracy. Don't you think the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear: 'We are in control and no one -- not the President, not Congress, nor any elected official -- no one can do anything about it.' It was a message to the people that their Government was powerless. And the people eventually got the message. Consider what happened since the Kennedy assassination. People see government today as unresponsive to their needs, yet the budget and power of the military and intelligence establishment have increased tremendously. "The tyranny of power is here. Current events tell us that those who killed Kennedy can only perpetuate their power by promoting social upheaval both at home and abroad. And that will lead not to revolution but repression. I suggest to you, my friend, that the interests of those who killed Kennedy now transcend national boundaries and national priorities. No doubt we are dealing now with an international conspiracy. We must face the fact -- not waste any more time microanalyzing the evidence. That's exactly what they want us to do. They have kept us busy for so long. And I will bet, buddy, that is what will happen to you. They'll keep you very, very busy and eventually, they'll wear you down." First of all the "conspiracy community" is far larger and much more diverse than the "single-assassin theorist clique." It's not even close. Many have long ago moved from wounds and ballistics as a proof of conspiracy; in fact many members of this Forum have vastly different takes on what constitutes proof of conspiracy. For Pat Speer to pigeonhole conspiracy believers as equally dogmatic, based upon his "several years of study" sort of speaks like someone who thinks he has found the truth, while nearly everyone else is still searching. I'm sure that impresses everyone. Pat Speer has figured it out while the rest of the "conspiracy community" is mired in dogma. There now, don't some of you that believe in the possibilty of of a knoll head shot feel like a flag-gazing fool? Do you feel sheepish being part of a dogmatic community? Are you tempted to study human cognition? And what about those in the above described "conspiracy community" that have found their evidence or proof of conspiracy outside the realm of the source of the shots? Mike, Vince Salandria is a bit paranoid, don't you think? Who are these powerful forces that secretly manufacture evidence and control our world? I think they look and act like Dick Cheney, which is to say they are not nearly as sneaky and mysterious as Salandria would have us to believe. I agree that some of the best work on the assassination has been done beyond the scope of Dealey Plaza. Larry Hancock and Peter Dale Scott are particular favorites. I apologize if my tirades have disturbed you. I'm getting ready to unleash a 3 year long 600 page website on the internet, in which much new ground is broken, and am fairly certain it will be dismissed by all too many due to my refusal to subscribe to the "grassy knoll head shot/blown out back of the head" myth.

Before we can assume the Z-film has been altered to confuse, we need to look at silent films of other shootings, with multiple hits from a number of possible locations. I suspect they would be equally confusing.

Charlie, have you ever read articles on Cognitive Psychology? There have been many studies where a large group of people have been exposed to an event, sometimes a film clip, and then asked what they saw. Their responses are all over the map, and frequently wrong. Sometimes the testers stumble onto patterns in which the witnesses are wrong. From this they gain an understanding of the human mind. One example of a pattern in which witnesses are wrong is that witnesses exposed to a stressful event almost universally over-estimate the length of the event, by an average of 50%. This is one of the reasons we can be confident that the shooting sequence was not as long as recently theorized by Max Holland. It would be extremely unusual for agent after agent to say the sequence lasted 4-6 seconds when it in fact lasted 11. Another example of a memory pattern is that people put under extreme fear for their life tend to remember things less accurately than less fearful bystanders. The Connallys and Mrs. Kennedy were three of the least credible witnesses, and yet the current crop of lone-nuts take their cue from Posner and pore over Connally's words as if they were the Bible. Another cognitive pattern is that people have trouble reading upside down and sideways, and reading faces upside down and sideways.

********************************** Pat Speer :""When I looked at all the evidence, I saw that the witnesses, the Z-film, and the autopsy photos all complement each other quite nicely. "" The Government was in charge of....all The Evidence, so It would be no surprise that you would find, that your Witness statements , The Zapruder film, and The Autopsy photos would all compliment each other....? If that is what you went looking for.. B.. I went looking for the truth. I read Crossfire, High Treason, Best Evidence, The Killing of a President, etc, and found them a bit disjointed. I then read Case Closed and found it quite coherent...but dishonest. I decided to study the evidence from ground up--to look at the earliest reports, to study gun shot wounds in books and articles on wound ballistics, to study human hearing, to study human cognition. It took me several years. Full time. Probably a waste of time. What I've found since is that the conspiracy community is almost as dogmatic as the single-assassin theorist clique. Just as the lone-nutters keep moving Kennedy's back wound to his neck, no matter the evidence, many conspiracy theorists have this absolute and blinding conviction that all the evidence doesn't add up, or is contradictory, and that this is ALL the proof of conspiracy they need. This allows them to avoid looking at the actual evidence, which is in fact the real proof of conspiracy. What I said in an earlier post is true. As far as I know, I am the only person to study human cognition in relation to this case. Others have studied memory. It's not the same. A Stanford Psychology professor gave me some advice when I first began my research; she told me that the key is not in understanding why a bunch of doctors would remember something incorrectly, but in why they would perceive it incorrectly to begin with. When I stumbled onto studies of the effects of image rotation on facial recognition, I found what I was looking for. It is an accepted fact that looking at an image upside down or sideways has a strongly negative impact on one's ability to perceive relative distance inside the image. It is also a fact that memories can be contagious--that is, that when Clark and Perry began talking about a wound on the back of the head it affected the memories of others--which were specific as to size and nature, but fuzzy about location. Believing that these doctors were mistaken is certainly a lot more logical than believing that the body or the autopsy photos were brilliantly altered to show conspiracy, and then replaced with comically fraudulent drawings, in which the back wound was moved to support that the back wound connected to the throat wound. I mean, why not just fake the back wound in a location that made sense, right? And why change the interpretation of an autopsy photo from its being the back of the head to the forehead, when all they had to do was fake a new photograph? The answer, as is clear by the Z-film and the on-the-air statements of Newman and Zapruder before Kennedy's death was even announced, is that a bullet impacted on the top of Kennedy's head by his ear from behind, at the supposed exit. The autopsy photos and x-rays confirm this. There was no explosion out the back of the head. The back of the head wound witnessed at Parkland was the top of the head wound as seen when Kennedy was laying on his back with his feet up in the air. In short, the grassy knoll head shot is the single-bullet theory of the conspiracy community. It's distracting and discreditied...passed on from generation to generation like a confederate flag waved by some poor fool at Gettysburg.

I agree. We should not forget this memo to another JFK aide who believes that he was not killed by a lone assassin. Arthur Schlesinger, memorandum for Richard Goodwin (9th June, 1961) Sam Halper, who has been the Times correspondent in Havana and more recently in Miami, came to see me last week. He has excellent contracts among the Cuban exiles. One of Miro's comments this morning reminded me that I have been meaning to pass on the following story as told me by Halper. Halper says that CIA set up something called Operation 40 under the direction of a man named (as he recalled) Captain Luis Sanjenis, who was also chief of intelligence. (Could this be the man to whom Miro referred this morning?) It was called Operation 40 because originally only 40 men were involved: later the group was enlarged to 70. The ostensible purpose of Operation 40 was to administer liberated territories in Cuba. But the CIA agent in charge, a man known as Felix, trained the members of the group in methods of third degree interrogation, torture and general terrorism. The liberal Cuban exiles believe that the real purpose of Operation 40 was to "kill Communists" and, after eliminating hard-core Fidelistas, to go on to eliminate first the followers of Ray, then the followers of Varona and finally to set up a right wing dictatorship, presumably under Artime. Varona fired Sanjenis as chief of intelligence after the landings and appointed a man named Despaign in his place. Sanjenis removed 40 files and set up his own office; the exiles believe that he continues to have CIA support. As for the intelliigence operation, the CIA is alleged to have said that, if Varona fired Sanjenis, let Varona pay the bills. Subsequently Sanjenis's hoods beat up Despaign's chief aide; and Despaign himself was arrested on a charge of trespassing brought by Sanjenis. The exiles believe that all these things had CIA approval. Halper says that Lt Col Vireia Castro (1820 SW 6th Street, Miami; FR 4 3684) can supply further details. Halper also quotes Bender as having said at one point when someone talked about the Cuban revolution against Castro: "The Cuban Revolution? The Cuban Revolution is something I carry around in my checkbook." Wow. Hadn't seen that one before. Didn't Sturgis have two case officers, Barker and Sanjenis? I remember when Ray came here for a second. The one question I asked him--if he had any information that Op 40 was designed to kill him and his followers--went unanswered. I suspect this is still a sensitive subject with him.

And your reasonable alternative is that mysterious men using mysterious technology faked a film that still showed conspiracy? Think about it. That makes no sense. Your assertion that I "arbitrarily" ignored the perceptions of a large number of mentally cognizant persons is not remotely true. As far as I know, I am the only person to try and understand how and why the Parkland witnesses could be wrong. And I found dozens of research papers on the strange fact that people--I mean ALL people, including so-called experts--have great difficulty rotating inverted facial images in their minds. People interpret faces differently when they are inverted. They interpret their features individually. In such case, a wound on top of the head in the middle of the hair, when a person is flat on his back with his feet over his head, could easily be mistaken for a wound on the back of the head behind the ear. When we think of people in our minds we almost inevitably think of them standing up. We take portraits standing up or sitting down. The head is always erect. We remember people's faces and bodies with them standing up. It is totally reasonable, perhaps even expected, then, that those viewing a wound on the back of Kennedy's head when he was laying on his back (the top of his head) would mistake it for a wound on the back of his head while standing up. If you'd rather believe that there is a mass conspiracy to deny that the ONE LARGE HEAD WOUND SEEN IN DALLAS, was at the back of Kennedy's head and that the wound on top of the head inf front of the ear, as noted immediately after the shots by Newman and Zapruder, and as captured on Zapruder's film and the autopsy photos, is some sort of fraud, I suppose there is nothing I can say to convince you. But you're wrong. You're choosing to think the world is chaos over admitting that maybe there's a pattern here that you refuse to see. The Zapruder film, autopsy photos, x-rays, and face sheet all demonstrate the strong likelihood Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, once one lets himself look at them.

Nope, it ain't clear. Paul Paul. it's crystal clear. The bullet's impact would make quite a sound. Those closest to Kennedy would see the skull explode and hear this sound BEFORE they heard the gun fire. They might very well conclude from this that the shot came from the car. There is no evidence however for a firecracker exploding in the car. Zilch. None. I think Harry Holmes, watching through binoculars from across the Plaza, thought he saw confetti in the car. Nope. It was Kennedy's head exploding. What makes no sense is that the Hesters would watch the assassination, from as close as they did, and NOT see the skull explode.

When I reached the "but person A said blank and the Zapruder film shows something different" divide, I decided to analyze what was said and correlate it with the other testimony. No one person's words could be taken at face value. When I looked at all the evidence, I saw that the witnesses, the Z-film, and the autopsy photos all complement each other quite nicely. Let's take for example, the Franzens. They described an explosion in the car. No one closer to Kennedy reported this explosion. Some literalists, however, take the Franzen's statements to mean a firecracker exploded in the car, or that Kennedy was killed by the driver. It's clear when one considers where the Franzens were standing, and the statements of those around them, on the other hand, that the explosion they saw was the explosion of Kennedy's head at frame 313. The only part that doesn't fit is the Parkland witnesses' description of a wound on the back of the head. Once I started reading books and magazines on human cognition, this made total sense as well. People DO NOT remember things accurately. We are not video-tape machines. Within our minds we are always forcing shapes and patterns to fit pre-conceived ideas. The wound the Parkland witnesses saw at the back of Kennedy's head was on the top of his head while he was laying on his back with his feet in the air, which put it at the back of the space occupied by his head. In our stubborn refusal to admit our own failure as an accurate recording device, we give undue weight to the recollections of others. A large percentage of wrong verdicts in criminal cases come from the over-reliance by jurors on eyewitness testimony. Prosecutors know eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and highly prone to suggestion, yet use it anyhow because juries fall for it over and over. When one looks at the evidence as a whole, it all fits. Edited to correct my boneheaded mix-up of Franzens for Hesters. Duh.

If you come across any pictures of "Minute Women" wearing a polka dot dress, John, be sure and let us know.

Only recently I came across a newspaper account from 1966 in which Schlesinger called for a new investigation of the assassination. Richard Goodwin did as well. Both supported Bobby in 68. I suspect Talbot's book will get into Bobby's feelings about the Warren Commission and the assassination in general, and state that Bobby, under the influence of Schlesinger, Goodwin, and Mankiewicz, planned on re-investigating the case, if elected.

Pat, can you show me where I said Hudson's statements should be thrown out based upon the FBI report? This is what I wrote: Emmett Hudson's testimony (to the Warren Commission) would have been rendered useless in any court of law. What he told the FBI three days after the assassination differed substantially with his WC testimony eight months later. His testimony was riddled with conflicts and impossibilities. Those are three separate statements. His testimony would be rendered useless in any court, regardless of the FBI report. First of all, Liebler's questions were so leading as to never be allowed but over and beyond that, it was the inherent conflicts and impossibilities (two minutes between the first and second shot!) in his testimony that makes his observations subject to question. Pat, if you are going to put your spin on something I wrote, please be fair enough to quote me. And Pat, when you say "Witness after witness before the commission said they were misquoted in their FBI reports," can you cite a few examples? More than one or two. Remember, witnesses that told researchers don't count. Did Hudson tell Liebler the FBI misquoted him? Mike, as you well know, the Warren Commission was not a court of law. If it had been, the medical evidence would have been examined by experts from both sides. If Warren had then denied the doctors access, there would have been a reversal on appeal. Hudson's statements are not worthless. The credibility of a witness is not determined merely by whether or not he says anything wacky, it's also whether or not what he says is consistent with the bulk of the evidence. Hudson was consistent with the other witnesses. In an actual court of law, the lawyer presenting his testimony would have had him time out the length of the shots, so that any confusion over seconds and minutes could be overcome. If saying wacky things alone was the deciding factor in credibility, the WC would not have accepted the testimony of James Humes, who admitted he had a problem with numbers, and said the bullet entered the back of Kennedy's neck at a 45 degree downward angle while presenting them with a drawing of the supposed trajectory that was but 14 degrees.

Tom, as you know I'm right with you in that the eyewitness testimony is crystal clear to anyone who actually reads it that there was a shot after the head shot. Mike Hogan is incorrect to throw out Hudson's statements based on 1) an FBI report, which in this case amounts to hearsay. (Witness after witness before the commission said they were misquoted in their FBI reports. I believe the vast majority of these FBI mistakes were innocent, e.g. Sibert and O'Neill confusing Kellerman for Greer. Ironically, I believe that the report on Charles Givens was correct, and that the WC deliberately pretended it was incorrect because it was so darned inconvenient.), 2) Hudson's saying 2 minutes... A number of the witnesses said minutes when they meant seconds or demonstrated little grasp of time--that doesn't mean they can't tell which shot hit Kennedy; 3) Hudson's saying Kennedy was hit by the first shot in the FBI report and then later saying the first shot probably missed--the FBI may have twisted his "first shot to hit the President" into "first shot." On the other hand, Hudson may have reconstructed the shooting in his mind after speaking to the FBI, and realized the early sound he heard was indeed a shot. The bottom line is, that Hudson's opinion that the second shot hit Kennedy in the head was shared by Chaney, Brehm and Summers. Holland, Jarman, and John Dolva's favorite post office inspector also made statements indicating the second shot was the head shot Moorman and Hill missed the first shot, but swore there was another shot just after the head shot. . Nellie Connally, Abe Zapruder and Gayle Newman also made statements indicating there could have been a shot after the head shot. And then there's the Secret Service... Roy Kellerman, William Greer, Emory Roberts, Sam Kinney, and George Hickey all made statements indicating that there were two shots fired closely together and that it was difficult to determine which one hit Kennedy in the head. Some of them made these statements, furthermore, AFTER the SS decided on a three shots three hits policy, which would intimidate them from saying for sure that Kennedy was hit by the second shot. My comments, Tom, about the x-rays, did not pertain to the EOP entrance but to the cowlick entrance. If you read the comments of the radiologists, none of them, outside Russell Morgan, of the Clark Panel charade, identifies an entrance...they notice fractures but no entrance, and they place the source of the fractures all over the skull. I have a slide on this in the Re-examining the X-Rays section of my presentation. There was no entrance in the cowlick. A bullet entering the cowlick at frame 313 would almost certainly blow the crown of Kennedy's skull off and leave a large gutter wound. It would not leave the nice elliptical shape seen on the Back of the head photo.

Chris, Tom and I have been around this rosey a few times... and I don't have the energy to get into it just now... but there are some real problems with his scenario. He is right in that the head shot was the second shot heard by the bulk of the witnesses, and he is also correct in that there was an entrance low on Kennedy's head as reported at the autopsy. But much of the rest of it doesn't add up. You may want to check out my presentation at the link below. I spend a couple of hundred pages explaining why I believe that 1) the first bullet probably hit Kennedy and fell out, much as Tom describes, except at circa Z-190; 2) a second silenced shot or shots hit Kennedy and Connally at Z-224, with the Kennedy bullet entering near his EOP and being deflected down his neck; 3) a third shot interpreted by most as the second shot hit Kennedy near his right temple, from behind, and blasted off the top of his head; and 4) a missed shot or firecracker from the right of the motorcade startled the crowd, and led many of them to believe the shots came from the knoll. My problems with Tom's scenario include 1) It seems obvious to me that Connally is hit before the head shot at 313. Every bit of eyewitness evidence and testimony indicates as much, as does the Zapruder film, which shows him wince and collapse at Z-224. 2) The largest jiggle on the Zapruder film prior to the headshot comes after Z-190. When asked by the Warren Commission attorneys where HE thought Kennedy was hit, Connally said Z-190. Phil Willis said he took his picture AFTER he heard the first shot. His picture was taken at Z-202. Several witnesses said Kennedy was waving when the first shot rang out. Kennedy stops waving just after Z-190. This indicates a hit circa Z-190. 3) There was no entrance in the cowlick observed at autopsy. Despite Tom's claims, there is no consensus as to the location of this entrance on the x-rays. Most of the radiologists merely mentioned the fractures on the back of the head, without isolating a bullet entrance. The autopsy photo of the back of the head reveals a small elliptical red spot, not a bullet entrance. I believe that some of the forensic pathologists claiming this to be an entrance are off-base. They have seen so many .22 caliber entrances that this entrance looks normal to them. The entrance of a .25 caliber military jacketed bullet, that explodes upon entry, would be substantially different and larger than the small shape on the back of the head photo. An entrance where a bullet is cut in half, with half the bullet continuing on without entering the skull, creates what is known as a keyhole entrance. In my presentation, I compare the lower margin of the Harper fragment by the temple and reveal it to be the upper margin of a keyhole entrance. There is no impact at the back of Kennedy's head at 313. Sherry G. is quite correct on that. Hope this helps...

I've read through the book, but not studied it. I hadn't realized that Ayers spent so much time investigating Morales. While I've got my doubts about his ID of Morales at the Ambassador, it seems clear that Ayers, someone who knew Morales, believes him capable of almost anything. What with Hunt's doubts about Harvey, and Ayers' doubts about Morales, the old ops ain't exactly hangin together these days. 43 years is long enough.

From The JFK Assassination Debates by Michael L. Kurtz: In several interviews, Hunter Leake provided information that, if accurate, would greatly enhance the intelligence aspects of Oswald's activities. Although the absence of substantive documentary evidence precludes the ability either to refute or confirm Leake's account, his version of events deserves recounting. Leake stated that Oswald came to New Orleans in April 1963 because the CIA office there intended to use him for certain operations.... Leake speculated that his friend Richard Helms, the agency's deputy director of plans, was probably the person who ordered the destruction of the files (on Oswald) because Helms had a paranoid obsession with protecting the "company." Leake asserted, in quite a definitive manner, that Oswald indeed performed chores for the CIA during his five months in New Orleans during the spring and summer of 1963. Leake personally paid Oswald various sums of cash for his services. Again, it is not possible either to confirm or to disprove Leake's story. (In an interview, Richard Helms neither confirmed nor denied Leake's story.) In the conclusion to his book Kurtz states: The witholding of crucial evidence in the Kennedy assassination--the cover-up of the truth--stemmed, I believe, not from an effort to conceal the complicity of unnamed members of a military-industrial cabal behind the president's murder. Rather it arose out of an understandable desire by individuals and agencies to hide their own shortcomings. When all is said and done, I fully anticipate that the current impasse on the Kennedy assassination will continue....We will never know the full truth about what happened in Dallas that day, or who was responsible for Kennedy's murder. There are problems with Kurtz's book. He makes a number of claims and cites his source as interview with (you fill in the blank). Many times he doesn't even offer a date for the interview. Someone on another forum pointed out that his supposed interview with Leake took place before his last book was released. So why didn't he mention Leake's statements in Crime of the Century? I'd like to think Kurtz has tapes or notes from these interviews. Hopefully he'll make them available so that others can better determine his credibility.

Concerning the Weisberg reference to the AEC test results back in 1964 on the Oswald rifle and the blowback that produced positive results on the cheeks of shooters in 10 out of ten test results. I did a little follow up on this and the results are in Weisberg's CA 78--1976 suit. He got results from ERDA in the 1970s. The problem is that ERDA dumped on his some 4 file drawers of documents. He have these at Hood but I will need to go through the entire collection to locate the requesite records. I plan on doing this at my convenience. If you want to come to Frederick and spend a day looking you are welcome. Otherwise, have patience and when I locate them I'll let you know. It is possible that I can short circuit this by locating them in FBI files, but that is over "theory" at this point. Professor McKnight, I have just had an exchange with Professor McAdams on the alt.assassination.JFK newsgroup. He said he doesn't trust Weisberg re the controls Weisberg acquired. If you have been able to locate them and/or can help me figure out how to locate them, it would be most appreciated. (Note: in September 2007 I acquired the Weisberg material from the Hood College Archives. I write about this in chapter 4c at patspeer.com.)

I had the pleasure of having a meal with David Talbot in San Francisco a couple of years ago. I fully expect the book to be dynamite. I agree. Those new to this forum should know that David and Jeff Morley are about the only two journalists open-minded on the conspiracy issue, and interested in pursuing it. David came here a few years back and asked if any of us had hard-core evidence that the CIA was involved. I sent him some info on the HSCA's changing of the titles of its exhibits in order to hide that Sturdivan was testing subsonic M-16 ammo. The M-16 (then known as the AR-15) was being tested by the CIA's Special Forces in Viet Nam on 11-22-63, and was considered a state of the art assassination weapon. I thought then and continue to think that the HSCA's disguising Sturdivan's testimony was no accident. I'm not positive that it's relevant, but it speaks volumes about whether or not the HSCA deliberately hid info which might lead to speculation of a conspiracy (such as the Bethesda back of the head witnesses). Of course, they turned around at the last second and said they suspected a conspiracy... I'm hoping David's book will close the door on the "Bobby believed the Warren Commission was correct" claims by LNTs. We'll see...

As pointed out earlier, Lane changed tactics when he realized how many witnesses were willing to say Hunt was in D.C. on the 22nd, and questioned instead where Hunt was on the 21st. I don't believe Hunt responded to that, which is one of the reasons he lost the case. If I remember correctly, his children testified in his defense in the first trial, but had no recollection where he was on the 21st, and failed to testify in his defense in the second trial. As far as his actual whereabouts on the 22nd, I suspect he told the truth and was in D.C. However, I find it very interesting that, years before he was talking about C-Day, Harry Ruiz-Williams was hawking a story that he was meeting with Hunt and Lyman Kirkpatrick, among others, on the 22nd. If Williams is reliable, and his contributions to Ultimate Sacrifice are to be trusted, then one should figure out whether this story is true, or whether Williams was mis-quoted. If Hunt was the black sheep within the agency many now purport him to have been, there is no way he was was at a high-level meeting on the 22nd. If, on the other hand, his role as covert ops chief for the Domestic Operations Division was not purely a propaganda effort, as Hunt insists in his memoirs, but was instead a high-level "black" position, through which he was trying to turn foreign nationals on U.S. soil into U.S. operatives, his presence at a high-level meeting re Cuba on the 22nd makes perfect sense. If Hunt's role as covert ops chief did indeed entail the responsibility of turning Cuba's ambassador to the U.N., Carlos Lechuga, to a U.S. asset, it is an amazing coincidence that Oswald had purportedly made a bee-line for Lechuga's mistress, Silvia Duran, in Mexico. And had reportedly seduced her. It could very well be that Oswald was a dangle used by Phillips to test Joannides' anti-Castro people, and was "loaned-out" to Hunt to try and turn Duran, as a way of getting at Lechuga. It could also be that some of the anti-Castro people thought Oswald was actually pro-Castro, and set him up as the patsy, not realizing he was CIA. If so, it would explain why some of the CIA pushed that it was Castro, while those higher-up (those in the know) backed off (as they knew Oswald was their guy). Anyhow, the possibilities are endlessly fascinating. What "secrets" Hunt knew went with him to his grave. But I find it fascinating that both Hunt and Phillips made statements towards the end of their lives that they suspected an intelligence agent's involvement in the assassination.

Au contraire, Myra. Hunt was true blue CIA. He went to court to deny his involvement in the Kennedy assassination. For him to belatedly acknowledge that other CIA officers may have been involved, and for him to acknowledge that one of his and the agency's biggest "succcesses", Operation Success in Guatemala, was in the long run a disaster, is quite a confession. As a result, I suspect future historians will put quite a bit of weight on Hunt's final words. It seems to me Myra carefully worded her statement in terms of her perception of the book's value to researchers and/or truth buffs, not future historians. The terms are not always necessarily mutually inclusive, in my opinion. Is the characterization of Operation Success as a "long run disaster" Howard Hunt's? Here is what he told Slate magazine in 2004: Slate: You started the CIA's first bureau in Mexico in 1949. Did you first start working on Guatemala from there? Hunt: In Mexico, I had a few agents from Washington with me, and I had recruited a few others … [including] a young Catholic priest. So the priest came to me one time, and he said, "I'm sending down several young men to Guatemala to get a view of the situation there. It's not good." He said, "My people were beaten up and put into jail, and then exiled from the country." And he sort of sat back expectantly. And I said, "That's certainly not right. I'll let Washington know what's going on in Guatemala." So I retold the story of Guatemala and the treatment of my young Catholic friend. I found that there was a lot of intense interest in what I had to say. Slate: We're talking about the time after 1952, the year Jacobo Arbenz was elected president of Guatemala. Hunt: He was in power then, yes. But his wife was by far the smarter of the two and sort of told him what to do. She was a convinced communist. … I waited for orders [from Washington]. A couple of [CIA and military] officers came down to join me, and it became apparent that there was going to be an effort to dislodge the communist management [laughs] of Guatemala. Which indeed happened. We set up shop and had some very bright guys working against Arbenz, and the long and short of it was that we got Arbenz defenestrated. Out the window. [Laughs] Slate: But President Arbenz ended up in exile—not really out the window? Hunt: Yeah. In Czechoslovakia. With his very bright and attractive wife. Slate: So it seems you were the architect for the Guatemalan operation? Hunt: It was mine because nobody else knew more than I did. I would say that I had more knowledge about it than anybody did. I knew all the players on both sides. Slate: How did you run the Guatemalan operation? Hunt: We set up the first Guatemalan operation/shop at Opa-Locka [airport in Miami, formerly an Army base]. There were three barracks, and we used the airstrip to fly in people from Guatemala and to send our people into Guatemala. These were known as "the black flights." They always occurred at night; they are a secret and officially do not exist as having happened. Slate: Do you think the Guatemala coup went well? Hunt: Yes—it did. (Bold added) And I'm glad I kept Arbenz from being executed. Slate: How did you do that? Hunt: By passing the word out to the people at the airport who had Arbenz to "let him go." Slate: To whom did you give the word? Hunt: It was a mixed band of CIA and Guatemalans at the airport and their hatred for him was palpable. Slate: You were worried they would assassinate him right there? Hunt: Yeah. … And we'd [the CIA and the United States] get blamed for it. Slate: Some 200,000 civilians were killed in the civil war following the coup, which lasted for the next 40 years. Were all those deaths unforeseen? Hunt: Deaths? What deaths? Slate: Well, the civil war that ensued for the next 40 years after the coup. Hunt: Well, we should have done something we never do—we should have maintained a constant presence in Guatemala after getting rid of Arbenz. Slate: Did you ever actually meet Jacobo Arbenz? Hunt: They [he and his wife] were neighbors of mine—years later—on the same street in Montevideo, Uruguay. Slate: What were you doing there? Hunt: I was the CIA chief of station. They had come from [exile in] Czechoslovakia, and nobody in Washington had told me they were coming and so it was a big surprise to me, to my wife and me. We went to the country club for dinner one evening and lo and behold, the Arbenzes were seated a few tables away. Slate: What did you do? Hunt: Well, nothing. I sent a cable to Washington saying, "In the future when we have important arrivals, please let me know." It's the least they could do. Future historians are more likely to rely on declassified CIA documents than the memoirs of Howard Hunt. "After years of answering Freedom of Information Act requests with its standard "we can neither confirm nor deny that such records exist," the CIA has finally declassified some 1400 pages of over 100,000 estimated to be in its secret archives on the Guatemalan destabilization program." http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/index.html Michael, this interview confirms that Hunt had doubts about the "success" of "Success." It's one thing to have a successful coup; it's another thing entirely to achieve a successful result from a coup. Hunt, whose job it was to line up the political basis for long term success, acknowledges in this interview and in his book that in the long term "Success" was a failure. You are correct, of course, that the CIA's declassified documents and internal histories, some of which I have read, by the way, will have much more influence over historians than anything Hunt says. But it is important that men like Hunt and Phillips--men who designed these operations--saw that they were not the unqualified successes the Executive Branch was led to believe. In an ideal world this would cause future administrations to think twice before overthrowing hostile or uncooperative regimes for the "good of its people." Unfortunately, we have Vietnam, Chile, and several other countries as further examples of this... The Cambodian slaughter could probably have been avoided if we hadn't been so hostile to Sihanouk. How many mistakes does it take before the U.S. learns the folly of intervention? I suppose there are numerous "successes," where U.S. intervention led to a happy result. But I, for one, would be curious as heck to read the CIA report and analysis of our multiple interventions, to see if they've bothered to break down which interventions succeeded and why. And then see whether our involvement in Iraq was, by the CIA's own analysis, doomed for failure. I suspect the answer is YES. I'd like to think that these declassified documents, assuming they exist, will crawl out of Langley and become the Pentagon Papers of the Bush Administration. But that's just a fantasy.

Au contraire, Myra. Hunt was true blue CIA. He went to court to deny his involvement in the Kennedy assassination. For him to belatedly acknowledge that other CIA officers may have been involved, and for him to acknowledge that one of his and the agency's biggest "succcesses", Operation Success in Guatemala, was in the long run a disaster, is quite a confession. As a result, I suspect future historians will put quite a bit of weight on Hunt's final words.

Good point, Frank: If you look closely at the first image John posted, as well as the close-up posted here by Frank, you will note a surveyor's "string" in the background that is angled down the window/. This string was "representative" of the angle devised earlier in the day (May 24, 1964) in Dealey Plaza as the SBT solution. I do not have all of the Shaneyfelt work notes in front of me at the moment, but I believe the gist of this particular "garage" rexonstruction was to make sure these two reconstruction trajectories "lined up," so to speak, to the wanted solution. Perhaps John Hunt can enlighten us further. FWIW Gary Murr In my first reply to this thread I indicated that the surveryor's "string" is visible running in a downward angle on both the window and the wall. For some reason the "wall" portion of my description was dropped from the reply post. Sorry Gary Murr Gary, I re-read the pertinent testimony about the re-enactment the other day, and discovered a heap of interesting stuff. One that reached out and grabbed me was Shaneyfelt's testimony. When asked if the presumed SBT trajectory from Connally to Kennedy's throat passed through Kennedy's back wound, he said it "approximated" it. They knew it didn't work and just played word games. Specter's still playing 'em.

Pat, Attached is a computer scan of the original negative in the FBI files at NARA. John Hunt Holy smokes!! Thanks a bunch, John. This picture is classic. But strangely, this is not the picture in Groden's book. There must have been others....