Jim Root

From the "Education on the Internet & Teaching History Online" "Yuri Nosenko was deputy chief of the Seventh Department of the KGB. His main responsibility was the recruitment of foreign spies. In June 1962 Nosenko made contact with the CIA in Geneva. He said he was in urgent need of money and was willing to sell secrets to the West. He added he did not want to defect because he was unwilling to leave his wife and children behind in the Soviet Union." "In January 1964 Nosenko contacted the CIA and said he had changed his mind and was now willing to defect to the United States. He claimed that he had been recalled to Moscow to be interrogated. Nosenko feared that the KGB had discovered he was a double-agent and once back in the Soviet Union would be executed. Nosenko also claimed that he had important information about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He insisted that although Lee Harvey Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union he was not a KGB agent." WC Page 760: "The Commission therefore concludes that Lee Harvey Oswald had not expatriated himself by any acts performed....and concurs in the opinion of the State Department that his passport was... properly reissued in May 1962." WC Page 758 "...the passport problem was finally concluded on May 24, 1962, when the Embassy renewed Oswald's passport for 30 days, stamped it valid for direct return to the United States only and handed it to him. A week later he used it to return to the United States." Within days of Oswald's departure from the Soviet Union, Norsenko makes contact with the CIA. Nosenko is the first KGB agent to contact the CIA from the "Seventh Department" that just happens to be the department that monitored Oswald. Nosenko then lies about his need to defect, and successfully defects, within days after the assassination of JFK, and has the information necessary to show that Oswald was in no way connected with the KGB. (Although he only read the first file, Epstein interview) If James Jesus Angleton had been monitoring Oswald and had used him in a counterintel operation, Angleton's actions in the Nosenko episode are easily understandable. In the whole cover-up senario Angleton is tied to Golitsyn and Nosenko is believed (Posner, Case Closed), Oswald was not a KGB asset, just a "lone nut." John Simkin is always asking why (the Kennedy family in particular) groups were so willing to attach themselves to the Warren Report? If Oswald was monitored and his movements feared by those at the top of "the food chain" (because of the importance of his role in the U-2 affair) of both countries the "cover-up" becomes easier to understand. Jim Root

Shanet Being at the top of the food chain allows you digest the most infromation....and to choose your meals. Jim Root <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Al That photo seems to indicate more security than what is seen in Dallas pictures. Jim Root

Tim Are there any contempory pictures showing the open windows etc. in Key West you could share? Jim Root

Whoever was Lee Harvey Oswald's handler. On November 5, 1963 FBI agent Hosty reported to the State Department where LHO was working. On Nov. 8, 1963 the route past the TSBD was decided. Whatever else we may believe, Oswald had to be there for the assassination to be pulled off as it was. Access to the information was available only "IF" Oswald was more than what the Warren Commission portrayed him to be. Find the handler and you will find the key....I suspect that Maxwell Taylor would be a prime candidate. Jim Root

Thank you Larry for your prompt reply. I've read several accounts about the press corp that evening. The seminars prompted me to reread the WC Summary dealing with Ruby. I do not believe Kantor or any others have identified who those two men with Ruby were (please correct me if I am wrong). I understand that Ruby told people that he was an interpetor and even arranged interviews with the DA for a radio station. I've also read that Ruby spoke some Yiddish and it was implied that he was working with some members of the Isreali Press. The fact that he was between the two when they got out of the elevator indicates that they knew each other and I believe they were referred to as foreign press. Anyone with more info about this event please help? Jim Root

When Jack Ruby was first seen getting off the elevator the night JFK was assassinated he was standing between two men with press credentials. Does anyone know who they were? Jim Root

The timming of the launch of the TIROS I Satellite on April 1, 1960 and the downing ot Francis Gary Powers on May 1, 1960 has intrigued me for many years. Were the two events connected? If they were connected, the defection of Lee Harvey Oswald to Russia in October of 1959 and any information he may have provided the Soviets could place Oswald at the center of a highly classified intelligence operation dealing with the WS117L Program. The Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) was an organization formed by the United States Army on February 1, 1956 (While Maxwell Taylor was Chief of Staff of the Army), at Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama, taking over what was previously the Guided Missile Development Division, to develop the Redstone and Jupiter ballistic missiles. Its first commander was Major General John Mendaris. In July 1960 ABMA’s buildings and staff, including Wernher von Braun, were transferred to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, which remains in the midst of the Redstone Arsenal. The transfer of ABMA to NASA was one of the many disappoinments that led to Maxwell Taylor's distaste of the Eisenhower Administration. Tiros I was built by the Army, and launched by an Army Redstone Missle for a, supposedly civilian project (I cannot accept this point). In a local publication printed in Kerr County, Texas (Edwin Walker's home) in 1958 it states that Walker is working with "guided missiles." Nohing in Walker's military record supports this although the Arkansas Military District (integration of schools in Little Rock) where Walker was stationed at the time and the Redstone Arsenal are in close proximity. http://www.met.fsu.edu/explores/Guide/Tiros_Html/tiros1.html http://www.stratmag.com/issueJune-15/page03.htm http://www.peterson.af.mil/hqafspc/50th/Timeline.asp http://www.fas.org/spp/eprint/origins/part09.htm http://www.zianet.com/jpage/spysats/surveillance/samos.html http://www.zianet.com/jpage/spysats/earlywarning/midas.html http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/dsh/artifa...S-discover.html Jim Root

Pamela Thank you for helping out while I was traveling. Jim Root

I have a few differing opinons on why Oswald was helped into the Soviet Union that may all tie together (just because we may have wanted to kill several birds with one stone). 1) The downing of the U-2 in many ways weakend Khrushchev position in Moscow. While a triumph could be claimed in bringing the U-2 down the Soviets were at the same time admitting that they had been unable to do this for years.....the US was ahead of them in technology. (Challenging the stability of the Khrushchev regime, a stated US policy goal) 2) If Oswald had contact with a Soviet Intelligence cell in Japan that had been infiltrated by the US the credibility of that organization (ie our agent in place) would be enhanced by providing information that led to the successful distruction of a U-2. (Oswald going to Russia and being questioned by KGB who would come to the coclusion that he could not be an agent would make information that he had provided to agents in Japan easier to believe) 3) The WS117L program was in full swing and the technology of the U-2 was outdated anyway. I find the launch of TIROS I on April 1, 1960 the most intriguing piece of my thread. 4) The cancellation of the Paris Summit (would the Soviets sign anything anyway without an agreement on Berlin) 5) Support in electing John F. Kennedy to the Prescidency or reversing the policies of Eisenhower and MAD, however you may want to look at that. Oswald was so important or so well watched by both countries that when he bagan his departure from Russia the careers of two men were sacrificed by, I believe, their govenments. When the State Department alerted the US embassy in Moscow that Oswald had maintained his citizenship and would be allowed back into the US, General Edwin Walker's Pro Blue Program became a newsworthy subject that led to his resignation from the Army (distancing him from the Kennedy Administration, read plausible deniability) If Walker had met Oswald on Oswald's way into Russia he could be being returned to the US to embarras the US Government. When the Soviet Union informed Oswald that he would be allowed to leave Russia, Norsenko (sp) makes his first contact with the CIA. It just so happens that he is the man that has infromation on Oswald and can show that he has never been an agent of the Soviet Union thus, I believe, protecting what is thought to be a very effective intelligence cell in Japan. I find it most distressing to find that two men, one Russian and one American, who have strong intelligence links within their oun countries would play such an important role in distancing Oswald from the administrations of both. Was Oswald that important? As it turns out, in history, yes! Jim Root

Tim, Shanet Perhaps this will help: William H. Draper, Jr. had joined the Bush team in 1927, when he was hired by Dillon Read & Co., New York investment bankers. Draper was put into a new job slot at the firm: handling the Thyssen account. We recall that in 1924, Fritz Thyssen set up his Union Banking Corporation in George Herbert Walker's bank at 39 Broadway, Manhattan. DILLON READ & CO.'s boss, Clarence Dillon, had begun working with Fritz Thyssen some time after Averell Harriman first met with Thyssen -- at about the time Thyssen began financing Adolf Hitler's political career. Jim Root

I have come to believe that the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the U-2 incident are tied closely together. I believe this to be true, if for no other reason, than because Oswald can be tied to both incidents. Perhaps this article will be helpful to some who may feel the same. THE SABOTAGING OF THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY by L. Fletcher Prouty In 1960, the Secret Team, terrified that President Eisenhower was coming to terms with the USSR, resolved that there must be no peace. A surefire plan was needed to destruct the upcoming summit conference. What better way to show American bad faith than by arranging for a US "spy" plane to be forced down over the USSR on the Russian's most important national holiday. More than one-third of all the Federal Taxes you and I pay goes into something called "Defense"; yet, we have almost no defense at all. We do have some offense, though, and that offense is supposed to operate on a "fail-safe" system. How safe is fail-safe? What happens when fail-safe fails? Within the chambers of Government there are channels. Underground, moles burrow from agency to agency and in and out of the White House. They are master bureaucrats who know their way around blindfolded. While Congress and the President work at controlling the Government by manipulating the Budget, these bureaucrats benefit from what our tax money buys. Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, and Eisenhower had their power as President jerked out from under them by these underground forces. Nixon was the victim of a piece of tape on a Watergate door; Johnson lost to the runaway madness of the Vietnam War; Kennedy was wiped out by the hired guns of Dallas; and Eisenhower was broken down by a secret team who launched an unauthorized U-2 flight. The power of the Presidency is elusive and Presidents are never sure when they really have it. Momentous acts, presumably carried out with Presidential knowledge and approval, can in fact be committed without the President's authorization. In many cases, the presumption of authorization is standard operating procedure for action. After a lifetime of Government service, President Eisenhower went to bed on the night of April 30th, 1960 secure in the belief that he, Macmillan of Britain, DeGaulle of France, and Khrushchev of the USSR would meet in Paris on May 16th in a summit conference that would seal agreements for peace throughout the world. Eisenhower was believed to be a powerful world figure whose dedication to this Crusade for Peace would succeed. But as he slept, fail-safe failed. Three or four moles in the Pentagon, doing the bidding of their masters, flashed coded signals across the world to send out a lone U-2 plane on one of the longest and most impossible missions ever attempted by a U-2 -- a 3,900-mile journey from Peshawar, Pakistan across the Soviet Union to Bodo, on the northern tip of Norway. These men's actions neatly bypassed the entire ultra-secret system and launched a plane that had been rigged to come down in the heart of the USSR on one of its most important holidays, May Day. Thus were destroyed the summit conference and Eisenhower's Crusade for Peace. New information, including recently obtained Congressional testimony, has come to light that uncovers details of this monstrous scheme. In 1944 when General Dwight D. Eisenhower threw the armada of the West against the Nazi stronghold on the French beaches of Normandy, even Hitler's army could not stop the onslaught. But in 1960 when President Eisenhower launched his Crusade for Peace to bring about a lasting detente with the Soviet Union, one U-2 airplane, one pilot, and the invisible enemy shattered his dream. That U-2, flown into the USSR on May 1, 1960 by Francis Gary Powers was not on a spy mission as had been alleged. It was launched for the sole purpose of destroying whatever chance there was for peace. It was the weapon of the war lovers -- the missile of the industrial complex. Ike learned what other world leaders have learned: it is easier to wage war than to make peace. In war the enemy is visible, and he is usually on the other side. For years the U-2 and everything about its clandestine operations for the CIA had been cloaked in a mantle of such secrecy that very few people knew anything about the plane or its missions. When the U-2 was lost over the USSR and then claimed by Khrushchev to have been shot down, few people knew what was true and what was not. The whole world was caught off guard. It was not difficult to believe the contrived NASA-CIA cover story that a plane had been lost while on an upper-atmosphere research flight. However, that cover story was a lie -- twice over! During the past few years, information about this very special flight has begun to trickle down from various sources, and the muddy waters are becoming clearer. Some of the facts surrounding the U-2 incident, coincidental or otherwise, are shocking. On September 24, 1959 secret aircraft came to a belly landing on a tiny Japanese glider field near Atsugi.[1] That airplane was a CIA, civilian-piloted U-2 spy plane. On May 1, 1960 that same U-2, serial number 360, having been rebuilt at the famous "skunk works" at Lockheed, flew over the USSR and landed at Sverdlovsk, changing the course of history. Recently, the top secret transcripts of the May 1960 hearings held before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate became available. These transcripts had been obscured by an ambiguous title: Hearings Regarding Summit Conference of May 1960. Neither the title nor the index page give any clues to the casual researcher that the transcripts might have anything to do with the U-2 incident. These hearings took place right after the U-2 went down, before Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of that plane, went on trial in Moscow. In other words, they took place before we had learned the Soviet side of the story and before Powers came back from prison. Few people even knew about these super-secret hearings. Those in attendance were, in addition to the full Committee and their staff: Allen W. Dulles, then the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and his Deputy, General S. Warner, and Ed Enck, all from the CIA and the U-2 program. Interestingly, the ostensible director of the U-2 program, Richard Bissell, was not there. Representing the Secretary of State was William B. Macomber; representing the Secretary of Defense was a Navy man, Captain L. Patrick Gray, the man whom Richard Nixon appointed to head the FBI, and later of Watergate fame. Although there were a large number of Air Force officers operating the U-2 program, not a single Air Force man was there. A few months after the release of the transcripts in 1975, an obscure but authoritative journal, Military Affairs, published for the American Military Institute by the history department at Kansas State University, appeared with the paper, A Fragile Detente: The U-2 Incident Re-examined, by James A. Nathan, a member of the history department at the University of Delaware. This scholarly treatise might have gone unnoticed, except for the fact that the editor of Military Affairs received an angry letter from Francis Gary Powers dated February 6, 1976. In it Powers stated: "Normally I do not comment on articles written about the U-2 incident," but the usually taciturn Powers wrote a rambling, fourteen-page letter. Perhaps someone wrote it for him. That letter is remarkable; the Nathan article is remarkable; the Senate Foreign Relations Committee document, all 195 pages, is astounding; and the whole U-2 affair is unmatched in recent history. It is one of those keystone events that shaped the course of our lives for years afterward. Contrary to all reports, that U-2 was not on a spy mission. It was not even flown by a spy. Powers' identification papers -- and he was loaded with them -- proved to his captors that he was a pilot working for the U.S. Air Force. He carried no CIA documents. With his Air Force ID and his uniform, military-type pressure suit, there was no evidence to indicate he was a spy. He looked like any other Air Force pilot. Why then was he promptly labeled a spy? What was Powers doing over the heart of the Soviet Union on May Day, and just before the most important summit conference of all? In 1960 the directive NSC 10/2, published by the National Security Council (NSC) required that any clandestine operation must be operated so that if it failed or was compromised in any way, this country would be able to plausibly deny the existence of the operation. In CIA jargon, the plane and the pilot had to be "sterilized." The CIA and the Department of Defense (DOD) had spent millions of dollars sterilizing aircraft and equipment used in clandestine operations, so that anyone who might uncover an operation would be unable, under reasonable circumstances, to trace it positively to its true origin. Why then did Powers carry ID, and why did this U-2 carry so many identifying marks and decals? I was the properly designated military officer in the Pentagon for a period of nine years -- including 1960 -- responsible for exactly this function of supporting the clandestine activities for the CIA. Under my direction many aircraft, many items of equipment, and many personnel were properly sterilized and "sheep-dipped" prior to use in secret missions. The U-2's were no exception. As a matter of fact, the entire U-2 program was supposed to have been made sterile from production on up. I must say I knew the CIA to be meticulous about deniability. On regular clandestine overflights to China Tibet, Indonesia, Burma, and other places, they did their best to conform with and obey the NSC directive. The identifying evidence included in Powers' flight violated the NSC mandate. If this was a spy mission, the violation was clearly planned to wreck the upcoming summit conference. It was normal DOD-CIA practice that pilots engaged in clandestine operations don pressure suits which contained no identification of any kind prior to takeoff. In the process, the pilot was required to strip, and all identity and personal items were removed by the officials in charge of that flight. Not only was this standard procedure a matter of great care, but in important cases, two or three aircraft and two or three pilots would be readied for each flight. The pilots would not know which plane they might fly, and no pilot would know his mission until the final briefing. Powers' U-2 had been flown from Turkey to Peshawar, Pakistan on April 30, 1960 just a few hours before Powers took off for the USSR. He had been flown to Pakistan by transport and given only two and a half hours' warning before the flight. He has written: "I did not see the plane at close range." For some unaccountable reason Powers took off on this, the longest USSR overflight ever planned, and in the seat pack of his parachute was every identification imaginable. If Powers was supposed to play the role of a spy, then in accordance with the script that has historically been passed down, he would be nameless, faceless, a man without a country. He was none of those things. Why not? And who saw to it that he was none of these things? Powers had in his kit one of the old World War II silk "escape-and-evasion" flags. On the margin of this flag was written, among other things, "I am an American. I need food, shelter. I will not harm you. You will be rewarded." Does a spy carry such identity? And how about the cover story that he was a military pilot who unaccountably got lost and flew over the Soviet border? If he hadn't intended to fly over a "hostile" country in peacetime, then why the escape-and-evasion kit? None of the official stories made the slightest bit of sense. Yet, as soon as the news of Powers' discovery in the USSR became known, he was declared by both the Soviets and the Americans to be a spy. He was tried as a spy. What was even more incriminating was the fact that Powers had his DOD identification card listing him as a member of the Air Force. He had forty-eight gold coins, four expensive watches, seven gold rings, and a pocketful of paper currency of many nations, including the USA and USSR. Powers had nineteen other forms of identity, including his Social Security card, 230-30-0321, a Lodge card, his USAF medical card, a driver's license, and two copies of his instrument cards, earned by all Air Force pilots for weather-flying qualifications. During the Senate hearings, Allen Dulles said: "He [Powers] was given the various items of equipment which the Soviets have publicized and which are normally a standard procedure and selected on the basis of wide experience gained in World War II and in Korea." What experience was Dulles talking about? Military? CIA? Certainly Dulles knew that true spies are nameless. On top of this, Dulles told the Senators: "He [Powers] would acknowledge that he was working for the CIA. This was to make it clear that he was not working for any branch of the armed services and that his mission was solely an intelligence mission." At another point in the hearings, Senator Fulbright said to Dulles: "You made a point of being very careful to have these planes disassociated from the military force. I mean you saw that the pilot was." [author's emphasis] Dulles replied: "That is correct. We made every effort to disassociate this so that any incident that might occur would not rub off on the Defense establishment or the Air Force." That is an out and out lie! A case can be made that Allen Dulles, like President Eisenhower, did not know that the U-2 flight had gone out. This ordeal with the Senate Committee may have been thrust upon him by those who had the power to send out the U-2 flight without the knowledge of the proper authorities. As an indication of Mr. Dulles' confusion before the Committee, when Fulbright asked him another question, Dulles replied: "Yes, which lie . . .," then quickly corrected his goof by saying: "Which page . . . ?" He knew he had been telling lies all day long. Allen Dulles didn't know the facts. It is true that uniformed military personnel on military missions are given identity and an escape-and-evasion kit. Military personnel are always in uniform, and there are Geneva Convention agreements which govern their care. Powers was in a USAF military-type flying suit. His ID said he was an Air Force pilot. In sworn testimony Allen Dulles contradicted himself and lied frequently to Senators Fulbright, Green, Mansfield, Gore, Wiley, Carlson, and Lausche. Dulles could not have it both ways. A spy is a spy, or he is not a spy. As the hearings progressed it became even clearer that Dulles was uninformed about this critical U-2 operation. Considering his position as Director of the CIA, this ignorance is astounding. That he should lie, however, is not astounding. In 1964, Dulles told the Warren Commission that he would expect J. Edgar Hoover to lie about Lee Harvey Oswald's possible connection to the FBI and that he, himself, would lie to anyone about the CIA, its operations, and its agents. When pressed, he conceded that he "might tell the truth to the President." Dulles knew what he was talking about; he was lying like mad to these Senators in May 1960. He had to! How did Dulles expect "to make it clear [to the Soviets] that Powers was not working for any branch of the armed services" if he knew Powers had all the ID with him? It seems that Allen Dulles might well have been set up for these lies. He didn't know Powers had gone with that ID, and it may well be that Dulles did not even know about the flight until it was done. It is not hard to prove that Powers was neither a spy nor a lost military pilot. Now, was the U-2 on a spy mission? At 5:36 A.M. Moscow time, on May first, the unnumbered U-2 penetrated the border of the Soviet Union at a point fifteen miles southeast of the remote town of Kirovabad in the Tajik Republic and proceeded into Soviet territory. It continued for 1,343 miles to the vicinity of Sverdlovsk. There it landed shortly after nine o'clock in the morning. The questions remain: Why did it come down? Was it shot down? Khrushchev reported that the U-2 had penetrated Soviet territory at an altitude of 20,000 meters (65,000 feet) and that the plane was "brought down by a rocket . . . when it was at an altitude of 20,000 meters." During his trial in Moscow in August 1960, Powers steadfastly maintained that he had been flying at 68,000 feet. In his February 1976 letter Powers still held to 68,000 feet as the altitude at which he said he was shot down. It is important to note that on May 31, 1960, Aviation Week, the authoritative aviation source, reported that the U-2 could fly above 100,000 feet. Despite Dulles' denials, Aviation Week was correct. That very special engine could push the U-2 above 100,000 feet. The latest model, the U-2R, is being flown even now. It is much larger, has about the same configuration, and does a superb job of peacetime clandestine reconnaissance. During his testimony Dulles told about U-2 operations: "They [the Soviets] have gone through four years of frustrations in having the knowledge that since 1956 they could be overflown with impunity, that their vaunted fighters were useless against such flights, and that their ground-to-air capability was inadequate." Dulles sounded as if he, too, could not believe one had gone down. "It was only after he [Khrushchev] boasted, and we believed falsely, that he had been able to bring down the U-2 on May first by a ground-to-air missile, while the plane was flying at altitude, that he has allowed his people to have even an inkling of the capability which we have possessed." Here Dulles denies Khrushchev's claim to have brought the U-2 down with a missile. Later during the same testimony, Dulles was even more explicit: "The question of course arises as to what actually happened to cause this aircraft to come down deep in the heart of Russia." Dulles went on: "Our best judgment is that it did not happen as claimed by the Soviets; that is, we believe that it was not shot down at its operating altitude of around 70,000 feet [recall he had earlier said 80,000] by the Russians. We believe that it was initially forced down to a much lower altitude by some as yet undetermined mechanical malfunction." The Senators were concerned about this part of Dulles' story. Senator Aiken of Vermont asked: "Your best theory is that something forced him down to an altitude where he came within range of either the Soviet fighters or guns on the ground?" Dulles replied: "That is our best theory. . . . It is obvious to us that the plane was not hit. If the plane had been hit by a ground-to-air missile, in our belief, it would have disintegrated." If that plane had been hit at 68,000 or 80,000 feet, it is highly unlikely that Powers would have come out alive. If he had been blasted out of that plane without life-support gear, or with that gear damaged, he could not have survived the fall. Powers contradicts Dulles' story by saying he rode the plane down for a long time and then bailed out. Dulles, however, was categorical; the plane was not hit. Yet in 1976, sixteen years after this incident, Powers still claimed: "I have from the first stated that I was shot down, even to the Russians. I will only say that I was flying above 68,000 feet, the 68,000 feet being the altitude I told the Russians was the maximum for the U-2." [Note how he is backing off of that 68,000-foot story.] Carter And The Secret Team The U-2 testimony provides a record of how a Committee of the Senate listened to a lot of lies and never did anything about them. This is what President Carter faces. The secret team is there. It will be up to Carter to show who is boss. According to a highly placed source, his first test with the secret team is at hand. President Carter has recently obtained the long-hidden CIA files on the Kennedy assassination at the cost of firing the Deputy Director and the top-echelon, clandestine services staff of the CIA. What they contain is so earth-shaking that it will not only totally reverse the old Warren Commission fable of the single assassin, but will threaten Carter's own administration and perhaps his life. A top-level, high-powered cabal planned and paid for the liquidation of John Kennedy and has retained much of that power. It has engineered the massive coverup of that murder which persists to this day. That power center can strike again, today and any time. Carter's biggest problem today is what to do about this explosive information, how to break it to the world, and how to help Admiral Stansfield Turner in the CIA. Turner's finger is in the dike, but he is all alone. An able man, he has shaken up the agency and has fired many of the old clan; but that leaves a vacuum from which he can learn little. Turner has no one who really knows how the Agency works and where all of its most clandestine operatives are. The old clan won't tell. The generation-long cellularization in the Agency has produced an octopus which no one can tame. The loss of Ted Sorensen and the apparent inability to get former Deputy Director Lyman Kirkpatrick on board has done irreparable damage to the Carter team. Carter must get that experience. His team, especially Brown, Vance, Schlesinger, and Califano all have had a lot to do with the Agency, but none of them, including its former Director Schlesinger, really know it. Carter must find a way to get Kirkpatrick on board, or someone his equal, if such a person exists. If you are going into the catacombs, you had better go with an experienced mole. Meanwhile, watch for an explosion in the JFK murder story and for its tremendous impact on the Carter Presidency. The greatest danger will come if Carter cannot get this story out to the public. If he is forced to bottle it up, as the CIA has been doing, it will consume him. In another vital part of the testimony, Dulles reports: "We have photographed various [soviet] fighter planes vainly attempting to intercept the U-2." Thus by Dulles' own sworn statement, the best Soviet fighters with their airborne rockets could not bring the U-2 down when at altitude. In the Military Affairs article, J.A. Nathan discusses the possibility of a flame-out; yet in the Powers letter, Powers ignores the idea of a flame-out and denies he ran out of fuel. If fighters and missiles couldn't reach him, if he didn't flame-out or run out of fuel, then why did Powers come down? The question of flight altitude is very important. The U-2 was designed, developed, and purchased because it could fly higher than any Soviet aircraft and could fly above the combat ceiling for Soviet missiles. Dulles said the plane could fly at "fifteen miles," about 80,000 feet altitude. Actually, it could fly above 100,000 feet. Therefore, if the plane was at 80,000 feet or higher, it could not be hit. Dulles told the Senate Committee that the plane was not hit; Eisenhower says Powers radioed a flame-out; the Soviets say they shot it down; and Powers repeats the same thing in court and in his 1976 letter. Dulles knew; the U.S. Air Force -- General Kenneth Bergquist and his National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) staff knew; Lockheed knew; and the whole U-2 program operational staff knew. The U-2 could not be shot down at 80,000 feet and higher. Only three weeks earlier, on April 9, 1960, a U-2 had flown on a similar operational flight over Russia. It flew high and was not hit. Thus, the first indisputable fact is that the plane was not shot down at 80,000 feet. But our second fact is that it did come down and did not disintegrate, as Dulles said it would have done if hit. Let's look at Eisenhower's flame-out idea in Waging Peace: When the U-2 was being designed it was known that it would have a very special engine with titanium buckets, i.e., compressor blades. That big J-75 was a very special engine. It ran well, at high altitude, with military specification MIL-F-25524A fuel, and it carried the plane on many a successful mission. But the U-2 had been plagued with flame-outs (like a blow-torch popping out) and at that extreme altitude there is no way in the world a pilot could restart the engine. There is so little oxygen up there that it simply will not support combustion. So when the engine goes out the pilot must let the big "glider" float down and hope that no one will notice him while he gets low enough, into more dense air with more oxygen, to rekindle the engine. Coming down to lower altitude made the U-2 vulnerable to fighter aircraft and to rockets and sometimes the engine would not restart anyway, and the pilot would have to bail out or make the best landing he could. This is what Powers may have had to do. He says he bailed out, but many pilots I know who are familiar with that harrowing experience, made critical by the thin air at high altitude, have questions about his account of how he managed to do it. The chances are that after his flame-out he may have ridden that plane to the ground where he was then captured after a typical U-2 belly landing. Witnesses who were in Sverdlovsk that day have reported, for whatever it is worth, that Soviet MIG's were flying around like bees around honey. They would have been scrambled to make sure the U-2 landed and did not relight and climb back to the safety of high altitude. Powers disputes the Eisenhower note about his flame-out broadcast while over the central USSR. In his 1976 letter he says: "It would have been impossible to make an engine flame-out transmission, as all U-2's at that time were equipped with only standard Air Force UHF sets. They were far from capable of transmitting the necessary 1,200 nautical miles." This is the kind of goof that makes me believe the letter from Powers was a bureaucratic attempt at coverup by continuing the lies of 1960. The U-2 had a very good U.S. Air Force ARC-34 radio with twenty pre-set channels. And it had the radio-frequency information card. (Powers' letter plays games with geography. Sverdlovsk is 1,200 miles from Pakistan, but it is no more than 700 miles from CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) ground listening posts in Turkey and Iran. Powerful devices are there to listen to the daily air traffic of Soviet planes. Also, the huge U-2 support program was equipped with high-altitude EC-121 aircraft. These aircraft kept in constant touch with the U-2 during its flight. It is impossible to believe that a signal transmitted by Powers could not be picked up by ground or air listening posts. The CIA, the U.S. Air Force, NASA, NSA, NRO, and Lockheed, to name a few, have available the most advanced technicians. Through my own long- standing work with the CIA, I know of electronic techniques that could have informed the CIA not only of a U-2 flame-out, but also if Powers' heartbeat had flipped.) The flame-out is simply a logical explanation for Powers' descent from his invulnerable 80,000-foot perch. And, it is consistent with Eisenhower's and Dulles' statements. When work with the special modification of the J-75 engine for the U-2 began, it was realized that the U-2 would be operating in a hostile environment. At very high altitude the engine can't breathe, and it needs help. It must have some air-mass intake to support combustion. During experiments, it was discovered that a trace of hydrogen introduced into the fuel-air mixture would support combustion and would virtually assure reliable operation of the burner at very high altitudes. Only those very close to the operation knew that the U-2 engine needed and had this hydrogen capability. Thus, the U.S. Air Force had an elaborate, ultra- secret program, directed from the aeronautical center at Dayton, Ohio, which provided cryogenic (super-cold) liquified hydrogen to the U-2 program all around the world, just before each planned mission. A rare photograph of four badly damaged U-2's on display in Peking (photo obtained from Francis Gary Powers). In his letter of February 6, 1976 Powers wrote: "I am enclosing a photograph which shows the wreckage of four U-2's on display in Peking, China. All of them were shot down by SA-2 missiles. All of them are damaged to the same or lesser extent than my plane was damaged." This is an amazing statement for what it says, and for what it omits. What about the four pilots? Were they American? Were they Chinese? Or, is Powers trying to have us believe these planes were shot down when in reality they were drones with no pilots? We know that if they had been flying at U-2 altitude and with all systems "go," they would not have been shot down by SA-2's. Powers did not include any additional information, but left the door to other mysteries wide open. Now we begin to find the Achilles heel of the entire U-2 program, and perhaps the single link that gave someone the power to ensure the success or failure of any go-for-broke U-2 mission. Here was a way to demolish the Eisenhower-Khrushchev peace talks. Consider the scenario. A tiny group of top-level technicians with access to this hydrogen lifeline is charged with the responsibility of getting it to the Powers U-2. However, someone has arranged for less than a full cannister to be installed in the U-2 just before takeoff. The preflight check shows "Hydrogen-OK" because the preflight inspection only shows that the cannister is there, not how much hydrogen is in it. The pilot has no way of knowing that there is not sufficient hydrogen in the cannister for 3,900 miles because there is no gauge on his instrument panel. So, the 24,000-pound aircraft takes off, accelerates to 114 knots, and begins the long climb to altitude. Everything appears to be perfectly normal. The engine runs fine. All equipment functions. Then, at precisely the predetermined time, the hydrogen runs out. The plane is as high as it can fly because it must make the longest flight it has ever made. At that great height, the pilot hears a slight rumble, typical of a flame-out, and his engine goes dead. One way or another, he lands. Persuaded none too gently by the Soviets that the rumble was in reality a near-miss rocket strike, he goes along with the story. Why shouldn't he? It's plausible. He says he was shot down. Allen Dulles, who knows better, says he was not hit. And there is the case. Someone preplanned for that U-2 to come down by arranging to starve it of hydrogen. That is when Powers radioed, or the telemeter radioed, a flame-out. There were certain upper-echelon officials in research and development who knew about the U-2's special characteristics and could easily have arranged for the flame-out to occur. When it was discovered that the U-2 had not completed the trip but had gone down, a group at NASA began the unpleasant task of getting out the canned cover story to account for that flight. On May 5, 1960 high-level experts working within the framework of an approved scenario issued a story which had the U-2 taking off from Turkey and crossing the Soviet border inadvertently. But then they said other things that were very strange. They stated that the U-2 was a "plane chartered from Lockheed by NASA" and that it was being flown at the time by "a Lockheed employee." Furthermore, they said the plane was "marked with `NASA' and the black and gold NASA seal," and that the pilot "had reported having oxygen difficulties." These were all official U.S. Government statements. They were flashed all over the world, even though other men in the Government knew they were lies. To those familiar with the intricacies of preparing cover stories or canned lies, the above may not seem crucial. But here were top-echelon officials putting out an important public release affecting national policy matters, and they caught themselves in a trap. Telling Khrushchev that the plane left from Turkey when Khrushchev had the plane, the pilot, the navigation maps, and the camera with all its film was just plain stupid. But the trouble was not stupidity. That NASA cover-story team did not know what some others hidden away in the Government did know -- that the plane had left from Pakistan, that it did not have "NASA" and the gold seal painted on it, and that the Lockheed employee had Air Force identification and orders from Dulles (according to Dulles) to declare that he worked for the CIA. It became obvious that President Eisenhower did not know those things either. It was not in his interest to have approved the release of such lies. Knowing that it might have to use the NASA cover story someday, the CIA worked with that agency to provide a cover story. Sometimes U-2's did fly for NASA. The CIA had even placed a high official (who used to be in the CIA's ultra-secret air division) in NASA at a high-level job to have him there for just such an eventuality. But no one had told him the facts of the operation; or if they had, he did not tell his NASA associates. Yet he worked in NASA's public affairs department. The May fifth cover story was so unbelievable that Khrushchev burst forth a day later with his own story about having the pilot and the plane, and he demolished the official lies of the U.S. Government. Then came the challenge to Eisenhower. Did the President, who had worked so hard and so long to prepare for the ultimate summit conference and for his Crusade for Peace, direct that U-2 to overfly the USSR on May Day -- the day of its most important celebration? The idea was absurd, and Khrushchev knew it. Later Khrushchev gave Eisenhower every opportunity to admit that others in the U.S. Government had sent out that flight to sabotage the conference, stating that such an admission would salvage the meeting. At this point, chances for world peace hung tenuously between the two men who liked and understood each other. Khrushchev said: "These missions are sent to prevent peace." He was ready to accept Eisenhower's innocence. Khrushchev played the whole event with great patience. When he first announced the downing of the plane, he gave out very little information, waiting to see what our side would say. Then he displayed pictures of a heap of metal which he claimed to be the U-2, but was obviously some other junk. He kept drawing us out. This was the period when some of the Government's media lackeys groped for ways to cover up the episode. In a strange editorial in its May 7, 1960 edition, The New York Times said that the U-2 flight was an "accidental violation," as several other border crossings may have been. They challenged Khrushchev's statement that the plane had no identification. The Times quoted NASA's report saying the plane had "NASA" and the NASA black and gold seal on it. Both NASA and the Times were wrong. The Times was repeating NASA's lies. Next the Times said: "Khrushchev said American militarists sent the plane, whereas it was just a NASA flight." The Times must have known better by May seventh. After everyone had been thoroughly taken in by Khrushchev's traps and the U.S. Government's lies, the big news broke on May eighth. The Times, caught flat-footed, came out with a big headline: "Russians Hold Downed Pilot as Spy." Who determined that a man carrying a number of U.S. military identifications was a spy? At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, Senator Capehart asked Dulles: "Why did you have to admit that we were spying?" This is the point. Who was covering what? Was the CIA providing a cover story, "the Powers spy gambit," to hide the real purpose of this flight? The stark Times headline almost made it look as if it was the Soviets' fault. Then they quoted Khrushchev saying: "I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and well," and with amazement, Khrushchev added: "How many silly things they have said." He picked up one point which had been in the cover stories. NASA had intimated that most likely Powers' oxygen supply had failed and that he had flown out over USSR territory unconscious on automatic pilot. Khrushchev quickly replied: "The oxygen did not fail." Then he pointed out that if the oxygen had failed, Powers could not have performed as skillfully as he had. He had performed perfectly until his engine failed, and the developed film from Powers' cameras proved it. Miles of clear photos were in Khrushchev's possession. Here is one of the most unusual facets of this operation, a key point which it has been possible to piece together from recently discovered evidence. How could Khrushchev know Powers had performed his mission skillfully as far as Sverdlovsk? Khrushchev knew because he had the U-2's camera, the film, and the pictures. These pictures clearly showed rows and rows of Soviet aircraft on a military airfield and industrial installations. Khrushchev declared that he had been able to accurately determine the actual altitude of the U-2 from the results of that photography -- 65,600 feet. This immediately raises the basic question of why Powers wasn't at his maximum and safest altitude, above 80,000 feet (a point brought out by Allen Dulles' testimony.) The camera the Russians recovered from Powers' U-2 was a military-type, 73B, serial number 732400. With wide-angle capability, it took pictures of a 125-mile-wide strip. The film was twenty-four centimeters wide and two thousand meters long, capable of shooting four thousand paired aerial pictures. That camera was not the one routinely used by the CIA spy U-2's. This U-2 had been doctored in Japan by someone who was willing to give away the plane but unwilling to reveal the technology of the newer U-2 camera. This was skillful deception from the inside. Dr. Ray S. Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA, wrote in his book, Secrets, Spies and Scholars, "The invention of the U-2 high-flying aircraft and the camera capable of taking pictures from 80,000 feet, pictures that would permit analysts to recognize objects on the ground with dimensions as small as 12 inches . . . this technical miracle revolutionized intelligence collection."[2] The pictures Khrushchev showed to the public and to newsmen gave away the ruse. The industrial installations and the rows of aircraft exhibited were tiny dots on regular film, and even with the best enlargement, they would never have met Dr. Cline's criterion of twelve inches from 30,000 feet. This is a crucial point. The U-2 incident was a clever and sinister deception. Its perpetrators intended for the Russians to find the U-2 and to think Powers was doing a spy's work. Yet, these perpetrators were far enough up in Government circles to know that it was the technology of the camera which must not be given away. Eventually, President Eisenhower took the blame for the whole thing, and his dream of a summit conference, trip to Moscow, and an around-the-world Crusade for Peace was shattered. Certainly he had the U-2 double-cross in mind when he delivered his famous "military-industrial complex" speech at the end of his term of office. Nixon played a significant role in all of this. All clandestine activities must be directed by the National Security Council. The law requires that the NSC direct the CIA. To perform these most sensitive activities quietly, the NSC established a small and very powerful group for this purpose. That special group, 5412/2 as it was known then (later the 303 committee and the 40 group), was chaired by the Vice President. Its key members were the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, or their designated representatives. In the spring of 1960, that group consisted of Nixon, Christian Herter, and Thomas Gates. Since these were very busy men, they generally appointed a key official to represent them at meetings. Here we get to the most important point of the entire U-2 fiasco. Who authorized it? Who sent it out? Late in the Senate hearings, Senator Gore got right to the point. Gore: You [Dulles] have told this Committee that you received this approval [for the Powers flight] or authority after April ninth. [There had been a previous successful U-2 flight over the USSR on April 9, 1960.] Dulles: That is my recollection. Gore: . . . from whom did you receive this authorization, who were the parties, and was the President one of them? Dulles: Well, we had a group. Gore: Who? Dulles: Well, I don't know that I should go into names, but there was someone in the Department of State, DOD, and someone at the White House to keep general track of the operations, and it was through that little group that we received, after a flight was made, we were given a general clearance to make another flight. [Dulles calls that crucial NSC clearance which is required by law, a "general clearance." Furthermore, Dulles does not mention the Vice President, who had to be there.] Gore: Well, if this hearing is to serve any useful purpose, and I sure hope it will, it seems to me that it can only come through learning of whatever error that was committed, if committed, in order to avoid it in the future, and to improve such techniques. You told us you received your authorization from a group and you have three agencies, the White House -- I don't like to refer to the White House -- I would say the President, the Office of the President, and the DOD, and one from the Department of State. Is that your chain of command? Dulles: My line of command, yes sir, so far as the policy of flying or not flying was concerned. Gore: Who designates these people from these three agencies? Dulles: Well, there was no formalized delegation. This grew up as the best method of handling this, and I just can't answer that. I assume that they were properly authorized. They always seemed to act with full authority. And I don't know whether any formal designation was ever made or not. [This is untrue, and in light of Watergate, it is a fantastic statement. Who in hell is running things? Dulles assumes they were authorized.] Gore: Your authorization, your authority on this particular flight stemmed from this group? Dulles: That is correct. Gore: You do not know, then, whether the man representing the Office of the President was personally designated by the President? Dulles: I assume he was agreeable to the President. Gore: I would, too, but do you of your personal knowledge, do you know whether or not this man was personally selected by the President, or by one of his assistants? Dulles: I assume that he was, but have never questioned that. Gore: Do you know whether he personally reported to the President? Dulles: I assume that he did, but I never questioned him on that . . . Gore: I would assume so too. Here is the most astonishing piece of evidence about the misuse of Presidential authority to come to light, including the Nixon tapes. The powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee was asking the Director of Central Intelligence where he got his authority for this infamous flight, and all Allen Dulles could reply was, "Well, we had a group." Then, when Senator Gore asked if Dulles knew whether the men in that group hat the proper authority to issue such orders, all that the Director of the CIA could say was, "I assume that he did." There is the whole crux of the U-2 flight, the breakup of the summit conference, the chance for peace. Because actual authorization could be bypassed by the assumption of authorization, and this has become standard procedure, illegal acts like the U-2 incident can be committed by those whose motives are to undermine the power and the process of the elected Government. Then, to sum up and to underscore this terrible fact, Senator Gore repeated: "I was only asking you if you knew that he had reported directly to the President with respect to the approval of this particular program." And Dulles replied: "No, I don't know that." What Dulles was really saying was that he really didn't know who had sent out that plane. It is fairly common practice to give some of these approvals by telephone. But how did he know who was on the phone? To verify this procedure I can tell you that I have been called at night by a person who said he was the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, General Thomas D. White. I was told by that voice to go to Allen Dulles' home and follow the Director's orders. I went there and was told that he had immediate need of an airplane for an emergency in Tokyo. Upon receiving this order I had a plane turned around in flight over the Pacific and returned to Tokyo, where it was used for the clandestine mission. The mission was successful, and I received a written commendation from the CIA. The point is that we did this by telephone. I ordered the action across the Pacific by telephone, and, as it happened, that deft move prevented a coup d'etat in a distant country. Of course, I knew General White's voice. But the fact remains that a clandestine operation run as Dulles and Gore described it is evidence of a very feeble method. In this ominous byplay, we see the shadow of hands behind the scenes. If Eisenhower did not order the flight, who did? If Dulles didn't know whether the men whom he said authorized the flight had that authority, who knew? If someone had the inside knowledge to get away with launching an unauthorized flight, who was it? And if those people knew that the cameras must be protected, who were they? By the time you answer those questions, even by the time you ask them, you can draw the strings tightly around that very small group who actually did operate the U-2's in 1960. There were only three or four men able to do those things, and their names are in the Pentagon telephone book of 1960. I will not name names as it is not my intention to jeopardize these men's lives. Later in the hearings the Senators wanted to find out if any orders had gone out suspending overflights because of the summit conference schedule. Dulles waffled that question, so they asked about prior events and learned that flights had been cancelled when Khrushchev met with Eisenhower at Camp David. Later on Gore said: "One of the big questions before the country in millions of peoples' minds is why this flight was undertaken so near the summit." In reply to another question Dulles said: "I think the question could be raised, if it was done without the President's knowledge, as to who was directing the ship of state." [author's emphasis] Now, there it is! This was a most crucial line. Allen Dulles was beginning to have some grave doubts himself about the series of events. His answer supports the notion that he too did not know what really had taken place. Following is a first-hand experience that will prove to even the greatest skeptic that the Director of the CIA does not always know of clandestine activities undertaken by his own organization. I was with Dulles and Bissell the evening they found out that a plane was missing over the Soviet Union. They knew nothing about it, and they had told the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and the President that not a single U.S. aircraft -- military, Government, or commercial -- was missing, as the Soviets claimed. Dulles called me to his house to meet with him and Bissell to see if I could locate a missing plane. I went to the Pentagon Command Center where I was later able to discover and confirm that a plane carrying nine U.S. Air Force men on a CIA mission was shot down over the USSR. It turned out to be Allen Dulles' own CIA VIP airplane! He did not know about that, just as he did not know about the Powers U-2. During the first six months of 1960, I was the focal-point officer assigned by the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force to provide special Air Force support to certain clandestine CIA overflight operations. In April 1960, a member of the Chief's Pentagon office staff was in Thailand overseeing a major series of long-range overflights into Tibet and far northwestern China. Later that spring, orders came down to stop those overflights. The given reason was that the President wanted nothing to interfere with the success of his forthcoming Paris summit conference. Orders were sent from my office to ground the overflights. These same orders applied to the U-2 program. We all took our orders from the same authorities. The U-2's were supposed to have been grounded along with the Tibetan overflights. So, when Allen Dulles himself wonders who was directing the ship of state, it becomes apparent that he did not know who was running the country! The U-2 is nearly forgotten today, and there will perhaps never be any further investigation of this crucial event. Eisenhower and Khrushchev, both old warriors, might have pulled off a real peace agreement. We shall never know. But we do know some things. Many of the top-echelon men who were in the Pentagon during those fateful days of spring 1960 are back there now in the Carter Administration. Others are in top positions throughout Washington. It may be that they know how easy it was to pull the rug out from under Eisenhower, and they know how they could do the same thing again today. _______ At the foot of the northern slopes of Mt Fujiyama, near Tokyo, there is an airfield called Atsugi. During the fire-bomb and A-bomb days of World War II's finale over Japan, American bombers were ordered to stay away from Atsugi. When the war ended, Atsugi was the sole landing ground available for the transport planes that carried occupation forces into and American POW's out of Japan. On the first day of occupation, American pilots discovered that Atsugi was actually a vast underground headquarters. A few years later during the MacArthur dynasty, Atsugi became United States CIA headquarters in the Far East. This camera was developed by a group working under Arthur Lundahl, consisting of geniuses from American industry. Cline went on to say, these miracles "were made possible by parallel development of camera, lenses, and special films for high-altitude photography." The Lundahl system employed eight reflectors and exposed eight films through a single lens at the same time. Jim Root

Shanet The one name you seem to leave out.....William Draper. Jim Root

In November of 1994, L. Fletcher Prouty wrote an article called "The Assassination Hacks" in reply to an article written by Edward Jay Epstein. I find portions of its content suggestive of Maxwell Taylor as a person who would be in a position to have units "stand down." ".... I was in New Zealand when I heard the news of President Kennedy's death. I was having breakfast with a U.S. Congressman. When we were able to find a newspaper, under the banner headline, "KENNEDY SHOT DEAD" it carried a quarter- page radio-photo of the Texas School Book Depository Building, the building from which Oswald is supposed to have fired the "three fatal shots." I noticed immediately that windows were open on several floors directly over-looking the small street where the President's car had been moving at a slow pace. "I turned to the Congressman and said: "There is something seriously wrong in Dallas. The Secret Service and the Military Presidential Protection units must not have been there. If they were not there, they must have been called off. If they had been called off, that would have required word from the highest level, and before the President traveled to Dallas." "That act alone is evidence of a top level conspiracy, not only to assassinate the President; but to take over the U.S. Government via a Coup d'etat. That was obvious, even to a newspaper reader in far off New Zealand. Those windows ought to have been closed, sealed and under constant observation by men with radios and by snipers. They weren't. That photo proved that. How did I know that? "Not too many years before, when I was the Chief of Special Operations for the Headquarters, U.S. Air Force, I had been sent to Mexico City with other military personnel and Secret Service men for the purpose of preparing for a visit there by President Eisenhower. We were there weeks ahead of time, and we completely checked out all the possible danger sites in the city along the planned presidential motorcade route. Working with the senior Secret Service representative, we checked and double-checked all danger spots according to their manual. At the same time we laid out plans for the placement of men on roof-tops, at prominent places where they could observe the crowd, etc. One thing became clear, we made arrangements to have enough men there so that a man could be placed beside someone with an umbrella, someone else with a coat over his arm, others who were carrying newspapers or other packages that might conceal a weapon. Such men would be in civilian clothes to blend in with other bystanders. The whole motorcade route was to be covered. Even man-hole covers in the streets were welded shut...as is done in Washington regularly. (This was not done in Dallas.) "This was up-to-date experience for me. I had been in Cairo during the Cairo Conference in 1943 when the protection of Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek was a war-time military responsibility. Following Cairo, I was at the Teheran Conference when Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek met with Stalin. There the Soviets were in charge of protection, and they went to the extreme of rigging a 10-foot high heavy curtain completely around the center of the city where the conferees and their staffs would meet. Armed soldiers manned every bit of that huge curtained area. No one was allowed in except at monitored entrances....." "....It would have been a little difficult for me to have done that in 1963, for the Kennedy motorcade, because I had been ordered to be the Military Escort for a group of industrial dignitaries who were going to Antarctica to officially dedicate a Nuclear Power Plant at the U.S. Navy Base at McMurdo Sound, during November 1963..... The military services had their own trained men who served in that capacity...regularly. "While clarifying that record, I should make it clear, that had I been in the Pentagon at the time the assignments for Presidential Protection for Kennedy's trip to Dallas were being made, I might very well have been called...as an available and experienced senior officer...when the Commander of the Army unit that ought to have been assigned that task was told his unit was not needed in Dallas on Nov 22, 1963. "As a matter of fact, I was called later after my return from Antarctica by an officer there who knew me, because he and his boss were extremely up-set by that call that told them not to go to Dallas. This was quite irregular, and as most people now know elements of the Secret Service had also been told that they would not be needed in Dallas that day. "These are the important facts of the case,....After all, someone ordered those Protection units to "Stand Down." This is a serious question. We have been subjected to the Cover Story now for more than three decades. The propagation of the Cover Story is the sinister work of the Conspirators even to this day. "It is extremely important to understand that someone in a position of high power had to have made those calls to elements of both the military and the Secret Service directing them that they were not needed on that crucial Nov 22nd of 1963, in Dallas. Few clues relevant to the assassination of the President are more important than that. Political assassinations are committed when the planned victim is unprotected, when his regular guard is down. This is an historical truth." Thoughts, Jim Root

Greg Hope this helps (quoted in part): The Man Oswald Missed - In his last interview, Gen. Edwin Walker defended his place in history by Robert Wilonsky "......It was on April 10, 1963 that Lee Harvey Oswald narrowly missed putting a bullet through Walker's head. Had it not been for a window frame that deflected the 6.5 mm bullet harmlessly onto a stack of papers, the general would have died three decades ago, a martyr for his right-wing cause. As it is, his history is forever intertwined with that of the president he despised. Walker, in his own mind miraculously spared JFK's fate, was left with an obsession with the assassination, convinced that Oswald was part of a communist plot to kill both himself and the president. Walker believed the Warren Commission Report was "85 percent right" and that Oswald alone killed JFK. But he also maintained that not only did the Kennedys know that Oswald shot at him, but that the Dallas Police Department had arrested Oswald the night of the shooting and that Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had ordered Oswald's release from custody. How Oswald could be part of a communist plot to kill a right-wing radical and JFK - and be protected by the president's brother - Walker couldn't quite explain. The FBI claimed it didn't learn of Walker's attempted murder until December 3, 1963, when Marina Oswald, Oswald's widow, told the feds that Oswald had plotted to kill the general. She not only turned over a note from Oswald that instructed her on what to do in case he was captured, but also revealed that when Lee returned home that night, he was "nervous," saying he had just tried to kill Edwin Walker. She also gave the agents copies of surveillance photos Lee had taken of the general's old Turtle Creek mansion. According to a December 26, 1963, letter sent from the Secret Service to Jesse Curry, then the Dallas police chief, Oswald told his wife, "It was best for everybody that I got rid of Walker." The general has spent three decades turning over in his mind why Oswald would have targeted him and Kennedy, two men who, to most people, appeared at odds with each other and at political poles. But Walker figured it differently: he and JFK weren't so different. Both were fairly conservative when it came to matters of foreign policy, Walker said, and he never really saw himself as the right-wing extremist portrayed in the media. "There are similarities in everything," Walker said, laughing. "But I wouldn't make a newspaper article out of it." And, of course, it could have been that Oswald, obsessed in his own way, thought Gen. Edwin Walker was a more powerful, influential figure than he really was. One of the hundreds of theories swirling around the assassination holds that Oswald believed that by killing Walker, whom he considered to be racist and anti-Semitic, he would wreak havoc on the Dallas political scene - the hoped-for effect of the Kennedy assassination on a smaller scale. But for Walker it was simple: The Commies wanted him dead, and the Kennedys didn't much like the general either, so they sent their boy Lee to kill him. History would tell us Oswald's act that April night (and November afternoon) was out of calculated, illogical violence, but Walker would tell you it was part of some grand international scheme to bury the right, to bury God. "I completed 30 years of military service and made my home in Dallas when the president gets shot by a Communist," Walker said. "How do you younger people explain it? The policy was wrong. I couldn't prosecute a communist because he knew Khrushchev and because he knew Kennedy, and in my opinion Oswald was a ward of both states. You know bloomin' well he was a ward of the Kennedy state and a ward of the Khrushchev state." Then, and to his dying day, Walker was convinced communism, whether it finally had been beaten by Jesus or the cash register, had left scars that affect us every day. "Everything's a little off-keel," he said. "A little abnormal. "You know, I can't systematize the whole world, but you can do it one person at a time," he said, perhaps the only time in the conversation when he really reflected on his life's work. "But back then, I had a bit more influence than that. 'Course, you young people don't remember that." Jim Root

“…those with even the smallest speck of cynicism in their hearts will be wondering why the cruel fates lured them into this quagmire of syrup.” Tor Thorsen, REEL.COM, review of the movie Serendipity 2001 Questions need answers. The questions that surrounded the assassination of John F. Kennedy needed, in order to calm a shocked nation, to be answered quickly by the Warren Commission. In the years following the release of the Warren Commission Report some information surrounding the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, has been clarified by researchers, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, independent researchers and through information obtained from previously classified documents. One such question dwelt with Lee Harvey Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union in 1959 shortly after he had been released, approximately three months early, from the Marine Corp. The implications are as obvious today as they were in the hours immediately following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Was Oswald a Soviet agent? Was Oswald and American intelligence asset? Shortly after the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald reporters began to pry open the history of this mans short life. A stunned nation, thirsting for any information, was shocked to learn that Oswald, a former Marine, had been a defector to the Soviet Union. With the death of President Kennedy a reality, both the United States and the Soviet Union had an inherent interest in establishing just what impact the unfolding information about Oswald’s Russian journey and life would have on the investigation that would follow. A tense international situation had been created by this horrid event. Heightened tensions were a regular part of the brinkmanship that accompanied the cold war period of the early 1960’s. Francis Gary Powers and the U2, The Bay of Pigs, the “Cuban Missile Crisis,” Berlin and the Congo had all been recent front-page news headlines. Delicate disarmament discussions were in progress during the month of November 1963 in Geneva. The Soviets and the Americans were once again attempting to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty and trying to prevent the unthinkable, the nuclear destruction of the world. If it were to be proven that Lee Harvey Oswald had been an agent of the Soviet Union or the United States, a cold chill might replace the warming climate for negotiations that were currently in progress. As Lyndon Johnson would say to Chief Justice Earl Warren, there was the possibility of thirty-nine million deaths. Both countries were quick to deny any connection to Lee Harvey Oswald. Any admission by the Soviet Union that Oswald was a spy for them could have, at that time, led to war. And how could the United States ever say, on the one hand, that Oswald was an agent of the United States but was not involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the President. How would the American public react if they were to discover that both countries had a connection to Oswald? In later life, Major General Edwin Anderson Walker, the other man Oswald has been accused of attempting to assassinate in April of 1963, would claim that Lee Harvey Oswald had worked for both the Soviets and the Americans. (interviews) Why would he come to these conclusions? The suspicious nature of the press and the earliest conspiracy theorist were intrigued by the travels of this young Marine who had defected to Russia. Almost immediately two questions were developed from the disclosures of the Warren Commission that provide fodder for researchers. Centering on two bits of information researchers found numerous reasons to ascribe to the belief that Oswald must have received help traveling to the Soviet Union. These “reasons” were laid to rest in the years that followed the assassination and no longer seen to attract the attention of modern researchers. But we might ask, “Have we been misled?” Let’s re-examine the record once again. First: There were no direct flights from London to Helsinki, Finland that would have allowed Oswald to arrive in Helsinki, Finland in time to register at the Torni Hotel by midnight on October 10, 1959 when he did in fact register. There was speculation from Warren Commission critics that Oswald may have been transported by the military or by some means other than commercial carrier. This speculation would suggest that Oswald would have needed the support of either the CIA or some other covert agency to travel to Finland within the known time constraints. Second: Lee Harvey Oswald received a travel visa to enter Russia through the Soviet Consulate in Helsinki, Finland in an unusually short period of time. Originally it was believed that Oswald received his visa in about 48 hours. We now know that it took only 24 hours. The CIA stated to the Warren Commissioners, as represented in their report, the normal processing time for a travel visa to be issued by Soviet authorities during this time period (1959) was usually between 5 and 7 days. Upon investigating these questions I found that both had been answered sufficiently enough to satisfy most researchers. In responding to the requests of the Warren Commission, the CIA stated that they could not identify any direct flight from London to Helsinki that would have allowed Oswald to arrive in Helsinki with sufficient time to check into the Torni Hotel. It took until 1994, thirty-one years after the Kennedy assassination, for researcher Chris Mills to discover that there were two airline flights that Oswald could have selected. The first, via Copenhagen, left London at 8:05 AM and arrived in Helsinki at 5:05 PM, the second left London at 8:50 AM and stopped in Stockholm before arriving in Helsinki at 5:35 PM. Either of these flights would have placed Oswald in Helsinki in time to register at the Torni Hotel. The CIA seems to have been unable to locate this information for publication by the Warren Commission or omitted the information to perhaps protect the name of a person who would have been on one of those other flights. Did the CIA in fact know which flight Oswald was on when he traveled to Helsinki? A close examination of the Warren Report suggests that the CIA did in fact know which flight Oswald used to travel to Finland. Is this odd? Page 257 of the Warren Commission report states: “…his (Oswald) plane fare from London to Helsinki, where he received his visa, cost him $111.90”. There is no footnote for this item given in the Warren Report. If the CIA could not or would not identify the flight, how did they know the exact price of the ticket? If they did know which flight, and the cost, why did the CIA only say, they could not identify any direct flight from London to Helsinki that would allow Oswald to check into his Hotel at the time we know that he in fact did check in? Other expenditures in the same section have commission exhibits as backup documentation or are accompanied by comments such as, “…cost him about…” or “…probably purchased…” and “…was about…” when dealing with his travel costs. Once again, if the CIA and the Commission would not say which flight Lee Harvey Oswald took to Helsinki, how were they so exact about the price of the flight? A new, even greater question has been created by the lack of candor on the part of the intelligence community because they failed to be more precise in their investigation. The new question is: “Why did the CIA neglect to identify these possible flights?” Once again I am mystified by the omission of these details by the CIA and the potential cover up of a sensitive name that may have been on a passenger lists for either of these flights. Is it possible that Oswald meet someone along the way to Helsinki on one of these flights? Is it possible that the person he met would have been Major General Edwin Walker? In early October, 1959 Walker was traveling from Little Rock, Arkansas to Augsburg, Germany. The answer to the second question is even more surprising, when compared to the original information provided by the Warren Commission. The following is taken directly from the Warren Report and should be reviewed before we examine the “new” evidence that deals with Oswald’s ability to receive a visa to enter Russia in less than 48 hours. “On September 4, (1959) the day on which he was transferred out of MACS-9 in preparation for his discharge, Oswald had applied for a passport at the Superior Court of Santa Ana, Calif. His application stated that he planned to leave the United States on September 21 to attend the Albert Schweitzer College and the University of Turku in Finland, and to travel in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, England, France, Germany, and Russia. The passport was routinely issued 6 days later. (Appendix XIII of the Warren Report: Biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, Soviet Union). “Oswald went directly home after his discharge, and arrived in Fort Worth by September 14…(Appendix XIII of the Warren Report: Biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, Soviet Union). “On September 17, Oswald spoke with a representative of Travel Consultants, Inc., a New Orleans travel bureau; he filled out a “Passenger Immigration Questionnaire,” on which he gave his occupation as “shipping export agent” and said that he would be abroad for 2 months on a pleasure trip. He booked passage from New Orleans to Le Harve, France, on a freighter, the SS Marion Lykes, scheduled to sail on September 18, for which he paid $220.75. On the evening of September 17, he registered at the Liberty Hotel. The Marion Lykes did not sail until the early morning of September 20…(Appendix XIII of the Warren Report: Biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, Soviet Union). “The Marion Lykes carried only four passengers. Oswald shared his cabin with Billy Joe Lord, a young man who had just graduated from high school and was going to France to continue his education. Lord testified that he and Oswald did not discuss politics but did have a few amicable religious arguments, in which Oswald defended atheism… No one on board suspected that he intended to defect to Russia. (Appendix XIII of the Warren Report: Biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, Soviet Union). “Oswald disembarked at Le Havre on October 8. He left for England that same day, and arrived on October 9. He told English customs officials in Southampton that he had $700 and planned to remain in the United Kingdom for 1 week before proceeding to a school in Switzerland. But on the same day, he flew to Helsinki, Finland, where he registered at the Torni Hotel; the following day, he moved to the Klaus Kurki Hotel. (Appendix XIII of the Warren Report: Biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, Soviet Union). “Oswald probably applied for a visa at the Russian consulate on October 12, his first business day in Helsinki. The visa was issued on October 14. It was valid until October 20 and permitted him to take one trip of not more than 6 days to the Soviet Union. He also purchased 10 Soviet “intourist vouchers” which cost $30 a piece. He left Helsinki by train on the following day, crossed the Finnish-Russian border at Vainikkala, and arrived in Moscow on October 16.” (Appendix XIII of the Warren Report: Biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, Soviet Union). Oswald needed to be a “frugal” man to have saved enough money to travel to the Soviet Union immediately upon being discharged from the Marines. Are the actual travel arrangements reported in the Warren Commission consistent with the character of Lee Harvey Oswald? Appendix XIV of the Warren Commission Report contains an, “Analysis of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Finances From June 13, 1962, Through November 22, 1963.” Within this analysis we find this quote: “The estimate reflects Oswald’s FRUGAL living habits during this period, as described in chapter VI of this report.” (Emphasis on the word frugal is my own) “In November 1959, Oswald told an American reporter in Moscow, Aline Mosby, he had saved $1,500 (not $1,600) while in the Marines. It is entirely consistent with Oswald’s known FRUGALITY that he could have saved the money from the $3,452.20 in pay he received while he was in the Marines. Moreover, despite his statement to Aline Mosby, he may not actually have saved $1500, for it was possible for him to have made the trip to Russia in 1959 for considerably less than that amount.’ (Warren Report Appendix XII, Oswald In The Soviet Union, emphasis mine) This question has surfaced in my mind: “Why didn’t Lee Harvey Oswald travel from La Harve, France to Paris and then take a plane to Helsinki?” Oswald would have arrived in Helsinki one day earlier by following this route and he would have accomplished his mission of arriving in Helsinki while spending a lesser amount of money. The question of, “How did Oswald receive his visa to travel in the Soviet Union so easily?” also quickly surfaced. The Warren Report answered these queries in this manner: “Rumors and speculations that Oswald was in some way associated with or used by agencies of the U.S. Government grew out of his Russian period… Insinuations were made that Oswald had been a CIA agent or had some relationship with the CIA and that this explained the supposed ease with which he received passports and visas… The Commission has concluded on the basis of its own investigations of the files of Federal agencies that Oswald was not and had never been an agent of any agency of the U.S. Government (aside from his service in the Marines) and was not and had never been used by any U.S. Government agency for any purpose.” (Warren Report, Oswald And U.S. Government Agencies Pg. 659, emphasis mine) It should be noted that after being discharged from the Marines in September of 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald still had an obligation to the Marine Reserve. On September 13, 1960 Lee Harvey Oswald actually received his “undesirable discharge” from the Marine Corps because of his failure to report for his reserve obligation. Technically speaking, until September 13, 1960 Oswald’s actions are exempted from the statement above. Upon closer scrutiny of the words used in the Warren Commission Report Oswald’s duty in the Marines was exempted. “…was not and had never been an agent of any agency of the U.S. Government (aside form his service in the Marines) and was not and had never been used by any U.S. Government agency for any purpose.” I question here the phrase as written. Does this statement allow for the possibility that Oswald was used by an agency of the U.S. Government while he was in the Marines? He was a radar operator in Astugi, Japan (where the U-2 spy plane was operating from) when he first started talking of going to Russia. And he was also considered to be in the Marine reserve until September of 1960 when he received his dishonorable discharge while in the Soviet Union. On August 17, 1963 Mr. William Stuckey hosted a radio debate on Oswald’s activities on behalf of the Fair Play for Cub Committee. Mr. Stuckey recalled that Lee Harvey Oswald said, “…it was in Japan that he made up his mind to go to Russia and see for himself how a revolutionary society operates…” (Warren Report Chapter VII, Lee Harvey Oswald: Backround and Possible Motives, pg. 390) While in Japan, Daniel Powers observed that: “…when Oswald arrived in Japan he acquired a girlfriend, ‘finally attaining a male status or image in his own eyes.’ That apparently caused Oswald to become more self-confident, aggressive and even somewhat pugnacious, although, Powers ‘wouldn’t say that this guy is a troublemaker.’ Powers said ‘now he was Oswald the man rather than Oswald the rabbit.’ Oswald once told Powers that he didn’t care if he returned to the United States at all.” (Warren Report Chapter VII pg. 386) Gerald Posner writes in his book, Case Closed: “His contact with Japanese Communists may have come through a hostess at Tokyo’s Queen Bee, one of the three most expensive nightclubs in the capital. The club was frequented by officers and foreign businessmen who ogled the one hundred beautiful hostesses, some of whom were informants for Japanese and foreign intelligence agencies.” Posner based this information on what he referred to as an “interview with confidential intelligence source.” Posner went on to point out that, “An evening at the Queen Bee cost anywhere form $60 to $100. Oswald made $85 a month and he was extremely tightfisted…That makes it unlikely Oswald bought any dates at the Queen Bee. But some of his fellow Marines saw him with a striking and well-dressed Japanese woman on several occasions, and later during his stay in Japan, he was seen with a Eurasian woman who reportedly spoke Russian.” (Case Closed, pg. 25) Was Oswald “used” by an agency of the U.S. Government while he was in Japan? Did he decide to travel to Russia at this time? Was he helped along the way to Russia? Let’s examine the known facts more closely. If we were to take out a map or by just using a sheet of paper we can chart the course Oswald followed on his trip to Russia. Oswald began his journey by being processed out of the Marines on September 4, 1959. On the same day he applies for his Passport in Santa Ana, California. By September 14 Oswald has arrived in Fort Worth, Texas where his mother lives. Connect the dots and note the dates. Lee Harvey Oswald is known to have been in New Orleans, Louisiana on September 17. He booked passage on the SS Marion Lykes to Le Harve, France on that date. The ship sailed on September 20, 1959 and arrives in La Harve on October 8. Connect the dots and note the dates. Oswald then takes an overnight ferry to Southhampton, England and disembarks on the morning of October 9. He meets with custom officials and declares that he has $700 and will be staying one week and then will continue his travels to school in Switzerland. Oswald then, apparently, travels to London and departs on the same day for Helsinki, Finland. He arrives in Helsinki and the Warren Commission believed he applied for his Russian visa on October 12, 1959, the first business day of the week. The visa was issued on October 14. Connect the dots and then imagine the travel time he would have saved if he would have gone to Paris and then Helsinki instead of the route he followed. We can only speculate on his motivation for taking the circuitous route he did. In 1993 former KGB Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko published his book, Passport to Assassination. Within this publication, Nechiporenko has reproduced a photocopy of Oswald’s 1959 visa application form. To the surprise of most assassination researchers the application was signed and dated by Oswald on October 13, 1959, one day later than had been assumed by the Warren Commission. Lee Harvey Oswald received an entry visa from the Soviet consulate within twenty-four hours. Was he just a lucky fellow that happened to stumble into the one Soviet Embassy in the world were he would receive and immediate visa or was there a “guiding hand” that played into these events? In 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations spent time dealing with the issue of Oswald’s Soviet entry visa. They were able to review the information available to the Warren Commission in 1964 and to supplement it with information that had since been made available. The comments of the Select Committee deserve review: “The relative ease with which Oswald obtained his Soviet Union entry visa was more readily amenable to investigation. This issue is one that also had been of concern to the Warren Commission. In a letter to the CIA dated May 25, 1964, J. Lee Rankin inquired about the apparent speed with which Oswald’s Soviet visa had been issued. Rankin noted that he had recently spoken with Abraham Chayes, legal adviser to the State Department, who maintained that at the time Oswald received his visa to enter Russia from the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki, normally at least 1 week would elapse between the time of a tourist’s application and the issuance of a visa. Rankin contended that if Chayes’ assessment was accurate, then Oswald’s ability to obtain his tourist visa in 2 days might have been significant. “The CIA responded to Rankin’s request for information on July 31, 1964 (more that two months later, my note). Helms wrote to Rankin that the Soviet Consulate in Helsinki was able to issue a transit visa (valid for 24 hours) to U.S. businessmen within 5 minutes, but if a longer stay were intended, at least 1 week was needed to process a visa application and arrange lodging through Soviet Intourist. A second communication from Helms to Rankin, dated September 14, 1964, added that during the 1964 tourist season, Soviet consulates in at least some Western European cities issued Soviet tourist visas in from 5 to 7 days. “In an effort to resolve this issue, the committee reviewed classified information (note that this says classified information) pertaining to Gregory Golub, who was the Soviet Consul in Helsinki when Oswald was issued his tourist visa. This review revealed that, in addition to his consular activities, Golub was suspected of having been an officer of the Soviet KGB. (my note here again) Two American Embassy dispatches concerning Golub were of particular significance with regard to the time necessary for issuance of visas to Americans for travel into the Soviet Union. The first dispatch recorded that Golub disclosed during a luncheon conversation that: Moscow had given him the authority to give Americans visas without prior approval from Moscow. He (Golub) stated that this would make his job much easier, and as long as he was convinced the American was “all right” he could give him a visa in a matter of minutes… “The second dispatch, dated October 9, 1959, 1 day prior to Oswald’s arrival in Helsinki, illustrated that Golub did have the authority to issue visas without delay. The dispatch discussed a telephone contact between Golub and his consular counterpart at the American Embassy in Helsinki, it is reproduced here as recorded in the HSCA record: …Since that evening (September 4, 1959) Golub has only phoned (the U.S. consul) once and this was on a business matter. Two Americans were in the Soviet Consulate at the time and were applying for Soviet visas through Golub. They had previously been in the American consulate inquiring about the possibility of obtaining a Soviet visa in 1 or 2 days. (The U.S. Consul) advised them to go directly to Golub and make their request, which they did. Golub phoned (the U.S. Consul) to state that he would give them their visas as soon as they made advance intourist reservations. When they did this, Golub immediately gave them their visas… “Thus, based upon these two factors, (1) Golub’s authority to issue visas to Americans without prior approval from Moscow, and (2) a demonstration of this authority, as reported in an embassy dispatch approximately 1 month prior to Oswald'’s appearance at the Soviet Embassy, the committee found that the available evidence tends to support the conclusion that the issuance of Oswald’s tourist visa within 2 days after his appearance at the Soviet Consulate was not idicative of an American intelligence agency connection. Note: if anything, Oswald’s ability to receive a Soviet entry visa so quickly was more indicative of a Soviet interest in him.” J. Lee Rankin made an inquiry about Oswald’s travel visa, to Richard Helms, head of the CIA, on May 25, 1964. Helms did not respond until July 31, sixty-seven days later. Helms would not or could not supply the information that was later made available to the Select Committee on Assassination. Abraham Chayes, State Department Attorney, felt that, “Oswald’s ability to obtain his tourist visa in 2 days might have been significant.” The information about Golub and his ability to provide a visa through the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki in fewer than 48 hours was either two highly classified or unavailable to the head of the CIA in 1964. A magician will use slight of hand to deceive audiences into believing what they see is reality. In most cases the appearance of what is called “magic” is, in reality, the mechanics of illusion. Lee Harvey Oswald somehow managed to enter Russia through the one embassy in Europe where an American could receive a visa within 24 hours. This is a reality not an illusion. The information about how this was accomplished easily reappeared in 1978 but had apparently vanished in 1964. In the case of Oswald’s air transportation from London to Helsinki, the information did not appear until 1994. Examined more closely these “new” revelations become even more interesting. First: Lee Harvey Oswald traveled to La Harve, France then, for some reason, traveled West back to Southampton, England rather than directly North and East to Helsinki. The reportedly frugal Oswald then went directly to London and caught a plane, with one stop along the way, to Helsinki, Finland. If Oswald had gone to Paris, instead of taking an overnight ferry ride to England, then traveled from Paris to Helsinki, he would have arrived in Helsinki one day earlier and perhaps more significantly, he would have spent less money getting to Helsinki. Did the frugal Oswald know he was going to Helsinki before he went to England? One could speculate that he, at least at that time, October 8th, was not yet sure how he was going to get to exactly where he was going. The State Department would not have the information needed for entry into the Soviet Union until September 9th. Information which, according to the House Select Committee on Assassinations was classified until 1978. Second: The American Ambassador to Finland sent information to the State Department that outlined the ease with which a visitor could get a visa through the Soviet Consulate in Helsinki. Obviously this information was not common. The information, in fact, remained classified until 1978. Could Oswald have discovered this information on his own? Only the State Department was aware of Mr. Golub’s ability to issue a travel visa immediately from Helsinki. And this information, as we have seen, was classified. Remember that the State Department only became aware of the information on the very same day that Oswald purchased a ticket for a $111.90 that would put him at the only location where he could immediately receive a visa. And it was a ticket that paid for transportation to Helsinki on a plane that the CIA, for some reason, did not identify for the Warren Commission. Third: The two messages sent by the American Embassy in Helsinki were sent on September 4th, 1959 and October 9th, 1959. Both days are significant days in Oswald’s travel from the United States to Finland. September 4th, 1959 was the day that Oswald “was transferred out of MACS-9 in preparation for his discharge.” It was also the day that “Oswald applied for his passport at the Superior Court of Santa Ana, Calif.” The time difference between Helsinki, Finland and Santa Ana, California is 10 hours. If some sort of covert operation was in play that required Lee Harvey Oswald would gain easy entry into the Soviet Union was planned, the information contained in the U.S. State Department message of September 4 could have been forwarded to Santa Ana, California and could have arrived that same day. Was that information actually the guiding hand that began his journey? October 9th, 1959 was the day that Lee Harvey Oswald arrived in England, having diverted from a direct route to Helsinki. London is two time zones from Helsinki. The second message from the American Ambassador to Helsinki not only confirmed the information contained in the September 4th message but added the necessary detail of the need for “advanced intourist reservations” before applying for a visa. Oswald followed these instructions to the letter and received his visa from the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki in less than 24 hours after he applied. Coincidence? Not only did Oswald travel too the Soviet Union, he also returned. Coincidences surrounding the filing of his application and his ultimate departure from Russia may also be significant when we compare his life to the lives of two other players in the Kennedy assassination mystery.

Ian In my paper, to be posted on the 27th, Serendipity, I point out how the intelligence community could have used Oswald as an asset and covered it up with a truthfull statement in the WC Report. Words can be used to deceive while telling the truth (the whole "bodyguard of lies" thing). My own personal belief is that Oswald did not work for an intelligence agency but that he was used by both the US and Soviet networks to unwittingly pass and gain information from. The fact that he wished to defect to the Soviet Union made for a perfect "patsy" to be worked in this way. When he arrived in the Soviet Union they would quickly realize that he was not a "working" agent or an American trained agent, therfore the info he had passed must be true. The US problem came about when he returned....was he then a Soviet agent and how do we then monitor him? Please read http://edwardjayepstein.com/diary/angleton.htm If Oswald figured out that he had traveled from orchid to orchid and had been used to derail the Paris Peace Summit and perhaps help elect John F. Kennedy in so doing, then as you said, "If he was a LNA, with a communist/seditious bent, the same is also true, although one would wonder that if you were of such strong conviction, why not just admit you did it for the cause ? History has shown that most assassins want/take responsibility for their crimes." Which would give Oswald reason to want Abt, the Smith Act Attorney to act on his behalf as he did in fact defend his actions. Just a possibility...... Jim Root PS My first guess for the "someone" remains Maxwell Taylor

Tim Massive retaliation had its place in time. The First Straits of Taiwan Crisis is an excellent example of its use. China was bombarding Matsui and Quemoy (Please excuse any significant errors. I am traveling for the holidays and do not have my notes with me) two islands between mainland China and Taiwan. The US Government authorized the use of Nuclear Weapons to deal with the situation. The Soviet Union, China did not have "the bomb" at the time, was not willing to risk a nuclear exchange on its own territory by supporting China. Without Soviet support, China slowly backed down and withdrew from the island attacks. The threat of nuclear war saved, perhaps, millions of deaths that a more humnanitarian conventional war would have led to. Eisenhowers strategy was successful. By the way, the Armys Chief of Staff was Maxwell Taylor and the point man sent by the Army to handle this delicate situation was General Edwin Anderson Walker. Jim Root

Tim I appreciate the knowledge you all have to share on this site. It is very encouraging for me to be involved with this group. I, for one, give thanks to the cold warriors on both sides of the curtain that we made it past the 50's and 60's without a nuclear exchange. Right or wrong they were at least successful in this field. Jim Root

Shanet Eisenhowers massive nuclear buildup was done at the expense of cutting Army ground forces. That is exactly what alienated Taylor from Eisenhower and led to his book, The Uncertain Trumpet. Taylor wanted the forces that could fight "brush fire wars" and believed that the United States was moving in the wrong direction under Eisenhower. Taylor made his point and got the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (under Kennedy) and his his full blown "brush fire war" after Kennedy's death. Was the Presidency itself next? (Read "Seven Days in May") Jim Root

Shanet Yes, Maxwell Taylor....... I differ with you on Colby slightly. Colby knew Walker from the Norway days in 1945. I think Colby realized what had happened on Nov. 22, 1963 and, although he never revealed anything, did get rid of Angleton and others when he had the chance. Jim Root

"LHO knew of Abt because he (LHO) was either actively involved in, or seeking to involve himself in CPUSA/SWP politics. Since Abt was indelibly linked to both organizations, as was the law firm he worked for - Freedman, Unger, it 's easy to understand why he (LHO) knew of him. IMO, LHO's activities mirrored the kind of anti-communist, etc. activities that the FBI ( thru COINTELPRO and it's precursors ) DOJ, Easterland Committee, CIA etc were engaged in at the time. If one accepts that LHO was an instrument of some gov't sponsored program, and having just realized that he was set up as a patsy by the very organization he was working for, then given his (LHO's ) options ie. ) he was " officially " hung out to dry , he may well have believed that Abt was his only/best recourse." Ian I agree with your post....my point is that the Warren Commission Summary Report did not mention the fact that Abt had worked on Smith Act cases. They asked Abt if he believed that Oswald wanted him because he was an ACLU attorney....Abt pointed out that he was not an ACLU attorney and that was the end of the testimony. The Smith Act cases centered around prosecuting those who were advocating the overthrough of the government. It seems significant that the WC omitted what would be an advantagous fact about Oswald's choice for an attorney and made such a flagrant change to the fact of why Oswald wanted Abt. If, as I suppose, the U-2 incident had been staged to help Kennedy gain the presidency and Oswald was a "patsy" who had been used to stage that event, could he have believed the Smith Act had been violated by persons in power and that he could justify his act in a trial? Jim Root

David Excellent information that goes miles beyond some work that I have done. I have followed the career of Edwin Walker very closely and believe that, rather than being the "right wing extremist" that he is portrayed to be was in fact a government plant to extract information from a right wing that was deemed to be a danger to the government. There are to many indications in Walker's military career that he was connected to the intelligence community. The timming of his "Pro Blue" program and the resultant "Muzzling of the Military" hearings coincides with Oswald's return from Russia. I hold to the belief that Walker may have contacted Oswald while he traveled to Russia (Oct. 9, 1959 being the most likely date). When Oswald began his quest to return to the United States, I believe Walker had to be distanced from the Kennedy administration. The action of Walker in the first hours after the assassination of Kennedy make me believe that he was one of the most surprized people in the world when he saw Oswald's face on TV. Walker reacted like a man who believed he was being set-up to be associated with the assassin and had to provide his own cover (his telephone conversation with a German newspaper the morning following the assassination). Thank you for the great info. Jim Root

Tim You might enjoy reading, The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings by Thomas Maier. In the book Maier gives an account of a visit by Allen Dulles to Joe Kennedy where Dulles assures Kennedy that his son will be the next President. I hold to the belief that if the U-2 incident does not occur on May 1, 1960, John F. Kennedy does not become President! The fact that Oswasld was a radar operator at Astugi, Japan where the U-2's were flying out of at the time and the defection of Oswald to the Soviet Union make for a connection that I just can't get out of my mind. The election of John F. Kennedy, perhaps, would not have occured if Oswald does not defect to the Soviet Union and Francis Gary Powers is not shot down. For me, the connection of General Edwin Walker to Maxwell Taylor and Taylor's rise to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy makes me believe that Taylor may have had advance knowledge of the U-2 incident. Walker's tavel to Europe in October of 1959 coincides with Oswald's defection. Did Walker meet Oswald in Europe? I believe there is a legitimate possibility. Jim Root

John The "Military Industrial Complex" speech by Eisenhower could have referred to the election of JFK after the U-2 event spoiled the Paris Peace Summit in May 1960. Did Eisenhower ralize that the CIA and KGB had the power to influence and direct the leadership of each country? I believe he knew that they did have this ability and how that folded into a Democratic society worried him. Eisenhower's Mutually Assured Distruction was a policy that was leading to serious talks between two super powers because responsible leaders in both countries recognized that man now had the ability to destroy the world as it was then known. The U-2 Incident ended Eisenhower's last chance to move the world toward a greater peace. Both the Soviets and the US had ardent cold warriors that were influenced by their own "right wing" elements. The US elements vowing to never be caught off guard in a Pearl Harbor type event again and those in the Soviet Union that had lived during the Nazi invasion which had killed some 20 million Soviet citizens while the Joe Kennedy's of the world were erging passive support for Hitler. I believe Eisenhower, who had worked with every government and every military leader of the WWII era was keenly aware of the political situation (Military Industrial Complex) that existed in both the East and the West. His later frienship with Kennedy, I believe, came about because Kennedy was realizing that even the President does not control all facits of policy. Jim Root