Pat Speer

Widows is worth a read in that it gets into the dirt of intelligence, kind of like Wilderness of Mirrors. I can't say it's particularly illuminating of the JFK assassination, outside the fact it was co-written by Trento and Corson, who testified on opposite sides in the Hunt/Marchetti case. FWIW Ted Shackley's new (and one can assume final) book discusses the CIA's failed attempts to build-up Artime as an alternative to Castro. His words suggest there never were plans for a second invasion, but that they wanted Cubans to think one was coming in hopes it would spur a pro-Artime resistance movement within Cuba. Since this movement never developed, Shackley makes it sound like the CIA just called it a day and took off for Nam. Sorry, Tim. (BTW Larry Hancock says Shackley's a xxxx and we shouldn't believe anything he's written, even from the grave.) While I have no problem with John's speculating, his specualtion should be based as much as possible on the known facts. With this in mind, a few errors caught my eye. 1. The Warren Report was not written by Angleton and Sullivan but by the WC's staff lawyers, with Lee Rankin and Norman Redlich supervising its over-all construction, as I remember. I believe Redlich, who was almost fired by the Commission for his extreme-left views, re-wrote the majority of its text, in order to bring a consistency to its tone and content. 2. Hunt knew Colson before he was hired by the White House. The two men had met years before at a reunion at Brown University. 3. It's doubtful Hunt and Morales would work together. The papers released on the 1954 Guatemalan operation reveal that one paramilitary officer, a Vincent Pivall, reported an intelligence agent for a security breach, when the agent left important papers behind in his apartment after heading back to Washington. As Rip Robertson was Morales' boss, and as Robertson sung the praises of this Pivall in his final report, I believe Pivall was Morales. Phillips' The Night Watch reveals the close relationship between the two men. Similarly, Hunt's Undercover reveals he was pulled off the Guatemalan operation just before it went into action, and was not brought back to celebrate at the Washington party for the operation attended by Eisenhower, Nixon, Dulles, Barnes, Haney, Robertson, and Morales. I suspect the men hated each other.

Tim, as I remember it, Russo says Castro did it without mob help. Is that right? or does he say Trafficante helped Castro in exchange for favors? Anyhow, I was looking through a book by Russo from 2001 on the Chicago mob. In this book, The Outfit, Russo argues that the mob DOES assassinate political leaders, while using false lone-nuts to hide their involvement!!! (So why discount that this is what happened in Dealey???) Even more amazing, he states matter-of-factly that the man who orchestrated the assassination of Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak in 1932 and picked out Zangara as the lone-nut was none other than Jack Ruby's old buddy Dave Yaras!!! OH MY THAT IS A COINCIDENCE!! Like I said, there's just something weird about Russo's reasoning. It feels almost like his life was threatened or something.

It's been awhile since I've read Widows, Trento's book on Paisley, but I don't remember him and his co-writer Corson (Marchetti's source for the Hunt memo) concluding that Paisley was a mole. If Angleton, who knew Paisley and had recommended him for a position working with the White House, had told him this, he would have written it, si? Instead, Trento guessed that Angleton placed Paisley in the White House to keep an eye on Henry the K, who Angleton didn't trust. What I remember from the book is that the man who performed Paisley's very suspect autopsy, and concluded he'd committed suicide, was the legendary Russell Fisher, of the Clark Panel.

Norman, I am intrigued by your statements. I thought Cohen had lost his money and power by 66. Mickey Cohen was also friends with Ruby's attorney, Belli. Sirhan's attorney was involved with fellow L.A. mobster Johnny Rosselli. Additionally, the man who admitted to police that he'd given Sirhan a ride, Gerry Owen, used a business partner of Cohen's as his alibi for the night of the shooting. Coincidence?

That's one of the things I'm working on, Shanet. While there may be anomalies on the x-rays, I believe they represent the identical wounds as those seen on the autopsy photos. They are just very difficult to understand. If you compare the Clark Panel's interpretation versus the HSCA's consultants' interpretations you'll see they don't even match. I don't believe the x-rays are faked, as they DO NOT show remotely what the government or lone-nut crowd would want them to show. It is possible some things were added to the x-rays, but not enough to hide the truth that Kennedy was not killed by a bullet hitting him in the back of the head near the cowlick.

Apologies accepted. I tend to make blunt statements sometimes where I disregard the theories of others without considering that they have put as much time or more than myself into studying the assassination. We should be able to disagree and still be friendly. Which brings up the question: whatever happened to Mel Layton? I thought he was gonna be our resident lone-nutter...

Thanks, David. I do find its wide-spread availability in the sixties to everyone but the American public a wee bit suspicious. You don't suppose Hoover and Clyde showed it at parties, do ya?

Robin I think I answered my own question. The really clean A-P x-ray is on Gary Aguilar's article on the history matters website. He also has a really clean lateral x-tray, but one section is far too bright compared to the other sections, and is hard to read.. I think Dr. Aguilar may have come across these images himself, if you know what I mean. I believe he's viewed the autopsy materials a number of times... Thanks. history-matters.com/ essays/jfkmed/How5Investi..

While I respect Russo's work with Frontline on the "Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald" program, I'm confused by his change of heart. Somewhere online is a presentation he made in the mid-nineties, as I remember, where he was all gung ho about CIA involvement. A few years passed, he met Sy Hersh, who taught him to hate the Kennedys, and suddenly, the whole thing was Bobby's fault. There are some who suspect he merely saw where the bread was buttered and was hoping to be media darling Posner II. I suspect he believes his scenario and has merely blinded himself to its weaknesses.

I recently picked up former CBS producer Leslie Midgley's memoirs. He has a couple of chapters about the creation of CBS' Warren Report special, and its 4-part re-investigation in 67 where Humes lied his butt off. Anyhow, Midgley says they tried to get access to the Zapruder film but Life said no-way, and so they were forced to supply bootleg copies of the Zapruder film to their experts, including Luis Alvarez, to study. Since this was years before Life had the film copied to supply to the trial of Clay Shaw, and long before Groden was to get his copy, the thought occurred: who had the film in 67? Maybe one of the alterationists on this forum knows the answer. While it's possible Midgley merely remembered things wrong, my immediate instinct is to suspect CBS received a copy from the FBI or Secret Service, and that Midgley lied about this because he knew how it would look. Is anyone aware of any private collectors who had the film in 67?

As I understand it, the SBT applies to the theory that one bullet hit Kennedy in the back, exited his neck and created all the wounds on Connally. The "magic bullet" theory expands this into holding that this bullet was specifically CE 399, a bullet reflecting very little damage. While it's possible to have a single-bullet theory involving a different bullet, I'm not aware of any current scenarios. It should be noted, however, that two of the three autopsy doctors, Humes and Finck, as well as at least one of Connally's doctors, all testified they were all willing to go along with the single-bullet theory as long as it didn't include CE 399 as the bullet. Of course, by the time the SBT was touted as gospel by the Johnson Administration, they were all singing its praises.

I noticed when searching online that there is a version of Kennedy's A-P x-ray that seems quite clean. I'm assuming one of the doctors, or Groden, or someone with access took a picture of the actual x-ray and made this available. At the same time, all of the lateral x-rays I've seen seem to be photographs of the pages from the HSCA report. Does anyone know if cleaner versions are available, and if so, could you post it? I'm trying to match the x-rays for a presentation and the difference in image quality between the A-P and the lateral is ridiculous.

Thanks, Robin, I never noticed that Reitzes put all these up. Excellent. The Paschall one in particular is hard to find.

Crossfire is good as an over-view, as is The Killing of The President, or High Treason by Robert Groden. While I disagree with many of the conclusions therein, these will all bring you into the loop on certain elements. I think from there you should go on to read Not in Your Lifetime by Anthony Summers and The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi. Once all that info has been processed, I would suggest reading Larry Hancock's Someone Would Have Talked, which would bring you pretty up to date. At some point it may also be worthwhile to read Case Closed by Gerald Posner, just to see how the lone-nutters think.

John, I saw the last half of the same program and had similar impressions. They really thought they were gonna prove the "magic bullet" and didn't know how to conclude the program when they couldn't, so they mis-represented their findings to the doctor. I do believe the bullet bounced off the thigh and not the wrist, however. Welcome back.

What you're forgetting Tim, is that the purpose of these kind of lies is not to fool the world, but to fool the American people, and as long as there are good Americans out there willing to support mass murder and U.S. supported terrorism in the name of anti-communism or liberty, these lies will be successful. Your holding out for the non-existent WMD's is PROOF. For some reason, you give Bush the benefit of the doubt that you would never give JFK or Clinton. After the lowest point in recent American history, last November's election, I kind of blocked a lot of the Bush bs out of my head, but if you do your research and stop watching Fox Lies Network you'll find that the CIA was very cautious on the reports of WMD's, and the Bush Administration, Cheney in particular, wouldn't take no for an answer. They created their own back door channel of idealogues with no intelligence background to advise Cheney on what intelligence the CIA OUGHT to be providing, and they rode Tenet until he provided it. I believe Wolfowitz and Perle were two of the cheerleaders. Anyhow, they then used this tainted intelligence to pressure Powell into lying at the U.N. (Why do you think he quit?) By all accounts they honestly believed they would find the WMD's once they got there. When they couldn't find them, however, only THEN did they double-check and find that almost all of the reports of WMD's came from Chalabi's intelligence network, and that he fabricated these to encourage us to invade. I believe there is evidence suggesting Perle coached him on how to fool us, telling him which intelligence services throughout Europe he could tell his lies to and have them report these same stories to us as confirming information. Anyhow, Perle skipped out the same week the special prosecutor was hired to investigate the Plame case. Coincidence? You really need to read Richard Clarke's book and Suskind's book on Paul O'Neil; that way you could get the real deal from good Republicans and good Americans who only want to tell the truth. Sorry to be picking on you. It's just that the Discovery Channel whitewash of the magic bullet put me in a REALLY BAD MOOD.

Tim, how can you say this? The Russians had reason to believe that Raul might be easier to control than Fidel. Them killing Fidel makes a helluva lot more sense than Russian intelligence killing Kennedy and framing Oswald--a man whose involvment pointed right back at them--as a patsy. It seems to me you need to stop letting your hatred of Fidel and all things Red control your every thought. Please check on Escalante's age and career status in 1963. I don't think he was even working for the Cuban government at that time; certainly everything he's ever had to say about the assassination has been based on his access to files. I don't remember him ever claiming first-hand knowledge of the assassination, outside of his talks with some of the captured exiles after the fact. If the Cubans were involved, and were deliberately trying to frame the CIA, why the heck did they admit the REAL Oswald paid a visit to their embassy, and supply investigators with pictures of the REAL Oswald, when they could very easily have said the man who visited them was an impostor (and let everyone assume the CIA had put him up to it)? After all, the CIA had no pictures of the real Oswald anywhere in Mexico City. And guess what, Tim? Your friends in the anti-Castro movement who led those penetration teams to liberate the island, blowing up factories and oil refineries, and burning sugar cane fields??? They were terrorists. You can't claim someone isn't a terrorist just because you sympathize with them and expect others to think you're unbiased. "Terrorists" aren't merely people we don't like doing exactly what we do under the guise of police action. How is a terrorist killing innocent civilians any worse than LBJ or GWB dropping bombs on civilian areas, in an undeclared war, in order to frighten (or terrorize) our bad guy enemies into surrender? Take a step back. America is not always right. Powerful men from Texas don't fail to properly investigate the assassination of their predecessors because they're ascared third world badmen might try and hurted them. Only in the kingdom of Tim wants-to-believe. Please find something else to focus on besides Fidel, Fidel, Fidel. Try to pin down Gerry on his story. Ask him about Sturgis and his connections to Hunt. Or Sturgis and his connections to Lorenz and Op 40? What about Bernie Barker? Did Sturgis know Hunt in 63? What about Hall and Trafficante? What was their relationship? And what about Lamar Hunt, Howard Hughes, and Walker? Which Cuban exiles were supported by them? Try to get him to read Larry's book and comment. In sum, Tim, there's a lot you can do besides try and steer every thread towards Fidel.

Robert Groden put out a budget DVD a few years back which includes virtually every film taken in Dealey Plaza. It costs about 10 bucks on Amazon. While it lacks the new digitally restored version of the Zapruder film, which includes the action between the sprocket holes, it does have the Secret Service copy with the frames missing from the Life copy. A valuable research tool. You may want to turn off his overly dramatic narration after viewing it for the first time, however.

Just saw the last segment and it made me sick. They lined up a couple of torsos and tried to replicate the wounds by firing a Mannlicher Carcano from a sixty foot tower. Although the wounds DID NOT line up (the bullet passed below the first torso's clavicle and out of the chest instead of out of the throat, hit the second torso four inches below the armpit, and failed to penetrate its thigh) and the bullet was bent into a "c" shape, they explained it all away by saying the bullet hit two ribs instead of one on the second torso and so therefore the single bullet theory was supported by their experiment. This is utter nonsense. I SCREAMED when I heard their conclusion. I nearly broke something. Obviously, they were too chicken-xxxx to say their test did not support the "magic bullet;" I'm wondering what executive made this decision. If the whole thing was a fraud they would have just faked their results. To make matters worse, they allowed Vincent Bugliosi, who was also featured on a recent episode of Penn and Teller's TV show Bullxxxx! dismissing conspiracy theories, to have the last word, warning people that an obsession with the assassination can be "toxic" Clearly Vince is getting ready for his book release this fall. This whole turn of events really makes me angry. I wrote "Unsolved History" a letter last year offering to help them create a similar program, but one with some credibility, and received no response. Instead they feed us this crap. Well, at least they showed us the tests and that is on the record. I believe I'll be using their test in my upcoming presentation on the medical evidence.

Has anyone seen this? I bet that's the report, probably saying nothing. I went to the library today to photocopy the U.S. News article and found that some jerk had ripped it out of the magazine! I did notice that Newsweek and Time that week both ran articles discussing the autopsy report and that both reported the incorrect FBI version of the wounds. In other words, Hoover's FBI was leaking info to implicate Oswald before the WC was ready to reveal anything, and showed their hand by spreading the wrong info. Oops! The Feebies were the feebles.

That's great, Robin. Rosen was a piece of work. The man was responsible for establishing the physical facts of the assassination, and yet he refused to look at the autopsy report, the photographs or x-rays, and then wrote memos after the fact to try and blame it on the FBI's sensitivity to the Kennedy family. Here we have him following up on a possible hole in the limo, not because it could be important to the case, but because he's scared the WC might ask Hoover about somewhere down the road. Weak. You wouldn't happen to have a memo with the results of the feebie inquiry with the SS, would you? or did Belmont tell him not to bother?

In this photograph one can see clearly that the western entrance to the TSBD, through the shipping department, was wide open. I've noticed this before in some of the films. Even so, I don't remember a single person testifying that that door was ever closed or blocked off. When Billy Lovelady discussed this door in his WC testimony it was clear the WC counsel--was it Belin?--had no idea this door existed, and the discussion quickly changed course. Here was an effective escape route. Walk right out the shipping department into the crowd. A year or so ago I read the WC testimony of every DPD officer who went to the building, and I don't remember one of them discussing this door. If anyone has better pictures of it, or if anyone knows of testimony indicating this escape route was blocked off, I'd appreciate it.

Tim, I hope you know that Max Holland has been an overt WC defender for years. I believe it was his zeal to defend Johnson that led to the creation of the book. However, when I read it, I interpreted it as positive proof of LBJ's involvement in the cover-up, if not the crime itself. As President, it was his JOB to solve the crime, and yet he never got around to asking anyone how many shots were fired and if they were fired at him for a WHOLE WEEK after the assassination(when HOOVER fed him a bunch of nonsense). I concluded from this that Johnson was either involved in the assassination or the weakest excuse for a man I've ever heard of. He simply expressed no interest in honestly solving the crime; every early memo from Hoover or Katzenbach dealt with the political ramifications of the killing--po' lil' Lyndon was all worried that people were gonna think badly of him, whaa, whaa, whaa. The man had a country to run, and he hid behind Hoover and then Warren, Katzenbach and then Clark. I believe he killed Kennedy, knew that Bobby knew it , and then arranged for Bobby's untimely demise. Wouldn't swear by it, but it feels like the truth. Like I said, after reading the tape transcripts the only other possibility for me became that he was just a weak little sister. Ladybird is alive and well, and arranging for TV shows to be banned. I don't think she knew a thing about the assassination. Although she supposedly had the money, this was just ole lying Lyndon covering his trail, as all the brilliant business transactions she made were greased by his connections. As for Nellie and her book, Tim, the book prints her original notes on the assassination from 1963, and then a typed transcript supposedly representing her words word for word. Read the notes: she says Kennedy reached for his neck. Read the typed transcript: it says his hands shot upwards. Consider why the change...well, I'll tell you why...because the Posnerites who helped her create the book for the purpose of re-selling the lone-nut scenario decided that his arms shooting upwards was more in line with Lattimer's fabricated "Thorburn's response." It made me sick when I realized this. Investigating this case would have been a lot simpler if everybody's words and testimony weren't shaped by the interests of third parties.

I agree with Ron. They were three tramps. If they were connected to the assassination in any way, the planners of the crime would have to have been idiots and we would have solved this crime a long time ago. I mean, what kind of an escape plan is "go run out to a train and hope it heads out of town before you're discovered" when you can calmly walk out the back of the TSBD and get in a Rambler or sneak down the back stairs of the Dal-Tex or County records Building? As much as I've enjoyed reading Weberman's website, his obsession with the tramps has crippled the progress of his research. It just amazes me that the same people who blindly accept there were three or more shooter teams, signal men, and radio men in Dealey Plaza, also seem to think these men would try to escape by running off and hiding in a train car. It's just weak. It's a single-bullet theory of the conspiracy crowd--it only makes sense because people want it to make sense. Just because the WC and the Posnerites desperately cling to the idea that Oswald would kill without an escape plan doesn't mean we have to assume the real killers were equally as stupid. I believe the real killers were smart. They got away with it didn't they?

Shanet, I believe Democrats for Nixon was a real group headed by John Connally, who had already decided to switch over to the Repubs but was asked by Nixon to head this group, and thereby create the appearance Nixon was more moderate and Dem-friendly than he really was. In exchange, Nixon told Connally, who'd been his Sec. of Treasury, that he could be Pres. in 76. Haldeman writes about this in his books. Unfortunately for Connally his soliciting of kickbacks from milk producers tied him into Watergate and ruined his career. When one looks at the common links between Johnson, Nixon and Connally, one can find Big oil, the same men who back the current regime, and the current war. This makes me a little uneasy.