Robert Howard

Maybe I am beating a dead horse here, but a generalized summation of the "Paschall Film" history is that some ten-odd years ago the story breaks about Patty Paschall, the media runs with it (a little) and at some point it comes out that Ms. Paschall is trying to sell the film for some incredible amount of money; no takers. She still has the film collecting dust figuratively, it is obvious, (I am conjecturing) that the film is not going to be sold tommorrow or the day after that. Has anyone thought about contacting here and appealing to her to just release the damn thing, and say to hell with the money. I'm just thinking out loud here, but for God sakes, it has been ten years, what is the point?

I am going against my better instincts in mentioning this, as I even have a "loose theory" about government (and Republican Party) attempts to discredit Democratic Presidential Administration's, but that's another story. I certainly would not be surprised if it came out at some point that the CIA or whoever was attempting to discredit Gary Hart at one time, but for what its worth; in 1984 I was an alternate to the Texas State Democratic Convention for Gary Hart (ultimately Walter Mondale was the Dem's nominee). I carpooled with another Hart supporter who'm I believe was an actual delegate, on the way down to Houston we talked about the usual stuff, we knew Mondale would be a disaster against Reagan which is why we were for Hart (besides the fact that his position on domestic and foreign policy was what attracted us to him.) Anyway, the Monkey Business/Donna Rice scandal broke in 1987, but even then I remember us discussing reports of Hart's womanizing and theorizing that he might have a death wish as far as "wanting to be President," not a literal death wish, just that it was said that he didn't seem to have that incredibly intense desire to be President, that I at least, always associate with Presidential candidates. The womanizing was just a rumour at that time. Take it for an anecdotal account of the 1984 Hart Campaign.

Larry: I really appreciate you getting back with me on Emilio Santana. What you mentioned in your response is fascinating to me especially with regards to Santana, moreover I wanted to ask you what is your information source on the "photos which show Ferrie with Sturgis.....taken in the summer of 1962...." Also do you know the identity in the photo's you referenced of "Sturgis' associate." Look forward to hearing back from you. In posting this information I am not implying that it is evidence of complicity of the principals in the assassination of JFK, but I am stating that this information would have fell under the category of "If it hadn't been destroyed we would know if they were actual conspirators or covering-up some very unsavory activities pertaining to CIA Operations." From the ARRB Final Report Destroyed and/or Missing Files b. John McCone ....Within the McCone papers, the Review Board noticed several file folders with notations or sheets indicating documents on a wide variety of subjects which are either missing or were destroyed. Of the missing or destroyed documents, two refer to the Kennedy assassination. One document from a 1963 listing is described as "Date of Meeting26 Nov; ParticipantsDCI & Bundy; Subjects CoveredMsg concerning Pres. Kennedy's assassination." The second document is described as "Date of Meeting19 May 64; ParticipantsDCI, J.J. McCloy; Dinner at ResidenceRe: Oswald." This document is annotated "Destroyed 12872." CIA historians noted that both documents were missing when they reviewed the files in 1986. The Review Board designated as assassination records all relevant documents from the McCone files including the notations on the destroyed and missing records. e. James J. Angleton. Knowledge of the records that James J. Angleton, Chief of Counterintelligence for thirty years, allegedly created, and the probable destruction of those records after his retirement, has generated extensive public interest. In an attempt to satisfy the public's curiosity about Angleton's files, the Review Board asked the CIA (1) to search for any extant records that Angleton maintained, and (2) to account for the destruction of his files or the incorporation of his files into other filing systems. In response, the Directorate of Operations provided three memoranda that document CIA's multi-year review of Angleton's counterintelligence files.14 These memoranda state that CIA reviewed Angleton's records and incorporated a small percentage into the files of the Directorate of Operations. CIA destroyed other records, either because the records were duplicates or because CIA decided not to retain them. The Directorate of Operations did not provide destruction records to account for the Angleton files g. William Harvey. William Harvey was intricately involved in the planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion and the various assassination plots against Fidel Castro. The Review Board received a query from a researcher concerning the possible existence of "operational diaries" that Harvey may have created. CIA searched its Directorate of Operations records and did not locate any records belonging to Harvey. The introduction to the 1967 CIA Inspector General's (IG) report on plots to assassinate Castro notes that Richard Helms directed that, once the IG's office produced the report, CIA should destroy all notes and source material that it used to draft the report. CIA may have destroyed Harvey's alleged diaries in response to Helms' directive. Finally, Review Board staff also asked various CIA reviewers who worked on records relating to the Bay of Pigs whether they had located any operational diaries belonging to Harvey. Despite its efforts, the Review Board did not locate any diaries. Included but not missing info/RLH 4. George Bush A November 29, 1963, memorandum from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the Department of State refers to the fact that information on the assassination of President Kennedy was "orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency." At the request of the Review Board, the CIA made a thorough search of its records in an attempt to determine if the "George Bush" referred to in the memorandum might be identical to President and former Director of Central Intelligence George Herbert Walker Bush. That search determined that the CIA had no association with George Herbert Walker Bush during the time frame referenced in the document. The records that the Review Board examined showed that the only other "George Bush" serving in the CIA in 1963 was a junior analyst who has repeatedly denied being the "George Bush" referenced in the memorandum. The Review Board staff found one reference to an Army Major General George Bush in the calendars of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles. There was no indication if this General Bush could be the referenced George Bush. The Review Board marked the calendar page as an assassination record. 6. White House Communications Agency WHCA was, and is, responsible for maintaining both secure (encrypted) and unsecured (open) telephone, radio, and telex communication between the President and the government of the United States. Most of the personnel that constitute this elite agency are U.S. military communications specialists; many, in 1963, were from the Army Signal Corps. On November 22, 1963, WHCA was responsible for communications between and among Air Force One and Two, the White House Situation Room, the mobile White House, and with the Secret Service in the motorcade. The Review Board sought to locate any audio recordings of voice communications to or from Air Force One on the day of the assassination, including communications between Air Force One and Andrews Air Force Base during the return flight from Dallas to Washington, D.C. As many people are now aware, in the 1970s, the LBJ Presidential Library released edited audio cassettes of unsecured, or open voice conversations with Air Force One, Andrews Air Force Base, the White House Situation Room, and the Cabinet Aircraft carrying the Secretary of State and other officials on November 22, 1963. The LBJ Library version of these tapes consists of about 110 minutes of voice transmissions, but the tapes are edited and condensed, so the Review Board staff sought access to unedited, uncondensed versions. Since the edited version of the tapes contains considerable talk about both the forthcoming autopsy on the President, as well as the reaction of a government in crisis, the tapes are of considerable interest to assassination researchers and historians. Given that the LBJ Library released the tapes in the 1970s, the paper trail is now sketchy and quite cold. The LBJ Library staff is fairly confident that the tapes originated with the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). The LBJ Library staff told the Review Board staff that it received the tapes from the White House as part of the original shipment of President Johnson's papers in 1968 or 1969. According to the LBJ Library's documentation, the accession card reads: "WHCA?" and is dated 1975. The Review Board staff could not locate any records indicating who performed the editing, or when, or where. The Review Board's repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes. The tapes and transcripts of William Manchester's interviews of Robert F. Kennedy and Jacqueline B. Kennedy are subject to a 1967 legal agreement which states that they were not to be made public for 100 years "except... on the express written consent of plaintiff [Jacqueline B. Kennedy]." With Mrs. Onassis's death, her daughter Caroline Kennedy became her representative and is the only person with authority to give consent to open this material. The Review Board recognizes that the interviews have extraordinary historical value and so it pursued this matter with the JFK Library and with William Manchester. After evaluating whether the the court order could be lifted, the Review Board decided to approach Caroline Kennedy to discuss the possibility of having the tapes and transcripts opened at the Kennedy Library. Caroline Kennedy wrote to the Review Board in late August 1998, informing the Board of her decision not to release the material at this time, nor would she agree to allow one of the Review Board members to review the material to determine whether the tapes contained assassination-related material. With regards to the numerous CIA Files on Lee Harvey Oswald "At the time of the assassination, the CIA held four types of records which contained information on Lee Harvey Oswald: a 201 or personality file which was released to the public in 1992; an Office of Security file which nearly duplicated the pre-assassination 201 file; HTLINGUAL records; and records within a general file on U.S. citizens who had defected to another country. i. Security file. CIA's search of its Office of Personnel Security database produced the original Office of Security's subject file on Lee Harvey Oswald (#0351164) established circa 1960. The first volume of the Security file contains 19 documents, similar but not absolutely identical to the pre-assassination volume of Oswald's 201 file. The Review Board identified an additional six documents, which appear to pre-date the assassination, in later volumes of the Security file. Although the HSCA reviewed the Office of Security file in 1978, Congress did not include this file with the other material viewed by the HSCA that it sequestered. Consequently, this file did not end up in the CIA sequestered collection.2 As a result of the Review Board's request, CIA transmitted its Office of Security file to the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFK Collection) at NARA. iii. HTLINGUAL records. HTLINGUAL is the crypt for CIA's mail opening and mail cover program for 1952 to 1973. The CIA reported to the Review Board that it destroyed most of its formal HTLINGUAL records in 1990 at the direction of CIA's Office of General Counsel. The CIA sequestered collection, however, does contain several "soft" or working files on Lee Harvey Oswald and the HTLINGUAL project, including the "soft" file held by the Special Investigations Group of the Counterintelligence Staff (CI/SIG). In response to the Review Board's request for additional information, the CIA located additional references to HTLINGUAL records in archival files of the CIA's Deputy Director of Plans (now the Deputy Director of Operations). CIA processed the relevant records for release to NARA. c. Possible ONI post-defection investigation. The Review Board became aware of an individual named Fred Reeves of California, who was reputed to have been in charge of a post-defection "net damage assessment" of Oswald by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) shortly after Oswald's defection to the U.S.S.R. The Review Board contacted Reeves, interviewed him twice by telephone, then flew him to Washington, D.C., where the Review Board staff interviewed him in person.4 In 1959, Reeves was a civilian Naval Intelligence Operations Specialist.5 Reeves told the Review Board that a week or so after Oswald defected to the U.S.S.R., two officers from ONI in Washington, D.C.,6 called him and asked him to conduct a background investigation at the Marine Corps Air Station in El Toro, CaliforniaOswald's last duty station before his discharge from the Marine Corps. Reeves said that he went to El Toro, copied Oswald's enlisted personnel file, obtained the names of many of his associates, and mailed this information to ONI in Washington, D.C. He said that ONI in Washington ran the post-defection investigation of Oswald, and that the Washington officers then directed various agents in the field. Although Reeves did not interview anyone himself, he said that later (circa late 1959 or early 1960), approximately 12 to 15 "119" reports concerning Oswald (OPNAV Forms 5520119 are ONI's equivalent of an FBI FD302 investigative report), crossed his desk. Reeves said he was aware of "119" reports from Japan and Texas, and that the primary concern of the reports he read on Oswald was to ascertain what damage had been done to national security by Oswald's defection. Reeves reported that he also saw eight to ten "119" reports on Oswald after the assassination, and that he was confident he was not confusing the two events in his mind. In the spring of 1998, Review Board staff members met with two Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) records management officials, one of whom personally verified that he had searched for District Intelligence Office records (with negative results) from the San Diego, Dallas, and New Orleans District Intelligence Offices in 1996 with negative results. This search included "119" reports from the time period 19591964, during an extensive search of NCIS record group 181. The search included any records that would have been related to Oswald's defection. Thus, the Review Board ultimately located no documentary evidence to substantiate Reeves' claims. "

More Here: I found this on http://www.spitfirelist.com/f288.html while doing a search on www.officialfind.com for Bernardo de Torres. 10. “On the day Ferrie died, del Valle was found brutally murdered in his car in the parking lot of a Miami shopping center. Prior to that, Garrison had sent a part-time investigator named Bernardo de Torres to question del Valle. De Torres was a military coordinator for the Brigade 2506 part of the exile landing force during the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was captured by Castro’s forces and detained until Christmas Eve of 1962. He eventually found his way to New Orleans where, according to de Torres, he was approached by Sergeant Duffy of the NOPD and asked to join Garrison's staff. As with many other investigators and volunteers at Tulane and Broad, de Torres’ bona fides are suspect. First of all, it was de Torres who showed up at the D.A.’s office in New Orleans very early in Garrison’s investigation claiming he had important information. He said he was a private detective who wanted to help and dropped the name of Miami D.A. Richard Gerstein as an entrée. Shortly after de Torres was given the assignment to question del Valle, del Valle’s brutalized body was discovered in the vicinity of de Torres’ Miami apartment. It was later determined that de Torres was filing reports on Garrison to the Miami CIA station, JM/WAVE. Not long after he left Garrison’s staff, de Torres went to work for Mitch Werbell’s Military Armament Corporation, a large supplier of weaponry to the CIA. The HSCA developed evidence that de Torres was actually a CIA officer with links to Military Intelligence. A well connected anti-Castro Cuban, Arturo Cobos told the FBI that de Torres was ‘the man to call with contacts on a high level with the CIA in Washington, D.C.’ The HSCA also came into possession of investigative information, which indicated that de Torres may have been in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, and further, that he may have been involved in an assassination conspiracy, charges which de Torres denies. As for Garrison he later came to believe that de Torres was one of his earliest sources of misinformation and recalled that whatever information de Torres provided never went anywhere. In the late 1970’s, de Torres would be linked to the bombing assassination of Chilean leader Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.” (Ibid.; pp. 148-149.) I believe the Ibid reference at bottom is from "Let Justice be Done" by by William Davy; Copyright 1999 [sC]; Jordan Publishing; ISBN 0-9669716-0-4.) Relying largely on documents declassified in the wake of the Oliver Stone film JFK, Davy’s extraordinary book validates much of what Garrison had to say. I don't like getting my hopes up and being disappointed but seeing this makes me even more anxious to read Joan Mellen's book P.S. I will preface this by saying "this is what happens when you are researching the JFK assassination and you can't afford to buy every single book ever written about the assassination." Even though this section doesen't mention de Torres by name; I put it with this post because even though I had heard previously that Lee Harvey Oswald had been seen there, this is the first time that I have ever heard David Atlee Philips mentioned in the same sentence; I suspect I am not the only one. Robt. Footnote 5: The H.S.C.A. appears to have obtained a film of this facility (Lake Ponchartrain) .... which connects some very interesting people. Robert Tannenbaum, recalled that the committee viewed the film.... According to Tannenbaum, depicted in the film among the Cuban exiles were Guy Banister, David Atlee Philips and Lee Harvey Oswald. Inexplicably, the film would later disappear from the Committee’s files.” (Ibid.; p. 30.) For more on this subject, see also: L#3, RFA#12, FTR#188. Also from Peter Dale Scott Deep Politics III (CIA, Drug Traffic & Oswald in Mexico) As Chief of Covert Action in the Mexico City CIA Station, and later as Chief of Cuban Operations, David Phillips oversaw these intercept operations. Simultaneously he held a second operational responsibility in the Special Affairs Staff, which in 1963 was co-ordinating all covert operations (including assassinations) against Castro. Some of these anti-Castro Cuban assets were based in Mexico City, and two of these in particular have been linked to the Kennedy assassination. The first is Isidro (or Eusebio) Borja, the Mexican –born Cuban military chief of the exile group DRE, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil. At the 1995 meeting in Nassau between Cuban and American students of the assassination, the Cubans reported that according to their files Borja was back in Mexico in 1962-63, as an asset of Phillips. This is quite credible, given Borja’s Mexican background, plus the DRE’s role in propaganda activities for the Bay of Pigs, for which Phillips was responsible.[173] The Cubans, who had seen a photograph of Borja also suggested that Borja might have been the alleged Mexican observed in the photographs of Oswald leafleting in New Orleans.[174] More relevant in my view is Borja’s responsibility for the DRE’s military arms procurement program in 1963, which brought the DRE to Dallas and possible contact (according to a book by Ray and Mary La Fontaine) with both Oswald and Jack Ruby.[175] Of particular interest is the fact that arms were being supplied by a Captain of the U.S. Army at Fort Hood (Capt. George Nonte), the army base in Texas which for some reason maintained an intelligence file both on Oswald and his alias “A.J. Hidell.” [176] I shall have more to say about this DRE program, which impinged on the assassination in Chicago as well as Dallas, in Chapters XIV-XVI.### The second of Phillips’ anti-Castro Cuban assets was Bernardo de Torres, the assassination suspect referred to by Gaeton Fonzi as “Carlos.” [177] De Torres also developed close relationships with the DFS and has been accused of smuggling drugs out of Mexico with the knowledge of Nazar Haro. [178] Bernardo de Torres has further been established as a contact of David Sanchez Morales.[179] Morales was a CIA officer and killer who "was well known as the Agency's top assassin in Latin America." He also openly described Kennedy's conduct during the Bay of Pigs operation "as traición (betrayal)."[180] According to a friend, Morales once ended an anti-Kennedy tirade with the words, "Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn't we?"[181] Since the 1950s Morales' career had closely paralleled that of his friend David Phillips: in Caracas, on the Guatemala operation, on the Bay of Pigs, and by 1963 at the JM/WAVE station. Two witnesses have stated that when Morales was stationed at JM/WAVE in Miami, and Phillips in Mexico City, "Morales would frequently travel from... Miami to Mexico City."[182] Two of Morales' friends said that Morales spoke of having taken part in the killing of Che Guevara (1967), and also of "a leader of the government in Chile" (either General Schneider in 1970 or President Allende in 1973).[183] The former assassination at least would have been while under the direction of David Phillips, who was in charge of the CIA's program to prevent Allende from assuming office.[184] But in 1963 Morales was also meeting with the former principals of the ZR/RIFLE plots, William Harvey and John Rosselli, for purposes which are unexplained, and were possibly unauthorized.[185] Rosselli, an associate of Richard Cain from Chicago, had been the principal mob participant in the ZR/RIFLE project to assassinate Castro.[186] But by 1963 Harvey, after infuriating both Robert Kennedy and CIA Director McCone, had been taken off anti-Castro operations and reassigned as CIA Station Chief in Rome. The FBI had Rosselli under close observation in 1963; and allegedly overheard him and Harvey indulge themselves "by saying nasty things about Bobby Kennedy."[187] Another significant revelation is the presence in William Harvey's ZR/RIFLE files of Harold Meltzer, who in the 1940s helped build up the Mafia's Mexico City drug connection.[188] According to Richard Mahoney, In 1975, the Church Committee catalogued Harvey's ZR/RIFLE files and found the dossier of one Harold Meltzer, whom Harvey had described as "a resident of Los Angeles with a long criminal record." What the ZR/RIFLE memo did not say was that Meltzer was a longtime collaborator and sometime shooter for Rosselli. Who, if not Rosselli, would have introduced him and vouched for him to Harvey? It was yet another indication that the alliance between Harvey and Rosselli went far deeper than the one-shot joint venture to kill Castro. What sealed their relationship was a venomous hatred of the Kennedys, and their collaboration in the sensitive art of murder.[189] And what Mahoney does not mention is that both FBN and FBI files linked the Mexican drug connection to Jack Ruby. Ruby's contacts with Mexican drugs are first reported in 1948, but seem to have been reactivated in 1963. At least one old collaborator of Meltzer in the Mexican drug traffic, Paul Roland Jones, contacted Ruby in Dallas just before the assassination.[190] It is clear that throughout 1963, members like David Morales of the CIA’s Special Affairs Staff, designated to co-ordinate operations against Castro (including new assassination projects), maintained contact with Cuban and other enemies of the Kennedys. What has become clear only recently is that David Phillips, when he acquired his second role in the fall of 1963 as Chief of Cuban Operations in Mexico City, now answered in this capacity to the Special Affairs Staff.[191] Phillips was in effect rejoining the officers he had worked with on the Bay of Pigs in 1961, at which time he had been responsible for propaganda operations against the newly-created Fair Play for Cuba Committee.[192] From about October 1 to October 9 Phillips made a quick trip, authorized by the Special Affairs Staff, to Washington and then Miami.[193] On October 1 the Mexico City CIA station also sent a cable directing that a diplomatic pouch, sent on October 1 to Washington, should be held in the registry until picked up by “Michael C. Choaden” (i.e. Phillips) presently TDY (temporary duty) HQS.”[194][195] The date October 1 catches our eye, inasmuch as it is the date of the alleged Oswald-Kostikov intercept. One is also struck by Phillips’ presence in the Miami JMWAVE station from October 7-9. There are reports that Rosselli, who had good standing in the JMWAVE station, met on two occasions in Miami in early October with Jack Ruby.[196] Phillips’ trip coincides curiously with a significant change in the contents and handling of Oswald’s 201 file. Up to late September 1963, incoming documents about Oswald had been referred to the CI/OPS and SR/CI (Soviet Russia/Counterintelligence) desks.[197] But there was a new addressee for the next Oswald document, an FBI Report of September 24 from New Orleans about Oswald’s arrest in August 9 after distributing Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. This was “Austin Horn” of SAS/CI (replacing the usual SR/CI), whose name appears next to the date stamp “8 Oct 1963.” This exclusion of SR/CI, coupled with the initial exclusion of the report (entitled “Lee Harvey Oswald”) from Oswald’s 201 file, helps explain how an unwitting member of the SR/CI staff (Stefan Roll) could clear an outgoing cable that stated, falsely, that “Latest HDQS info [on Oswald] was ODACID [state Department] report dated May 1962 [!] saying ODACID had determined Oswald is still US citizen and both he and his Soviet wife have exit permits and Dept State had given approval for their travel with their infant child to USA.[198] Of the six officers responsible for drafting and signing this important cable, only one, Jane Roman of CI/LS (Counterintelligence/Liaison), had seen the incoming FBI report of September 24 that disproved their text. In Chapter III### we shall investigate the probability that this dishonest cable was part of a CIA/CI operation. Who was this “Austin Horn” who was privileged to see documents on Oswald denied to those who were drafting cables about him? We shall postpone to a later chapter the possibility, as yet still uncertain, that “Austin Horn” may in fact be David Phillips. Whether he is or not, David Phillips is the one man who seems to cover all aspects of the CIA-Oswald operation and cover-up in 1963. David Phillips even had one friend, Gordon McLendon, in common with Jack Ruby. McLendon, a sometime intelligence officer and Dallas owner of radio stations, had known Phillips since both men were in their teens. (The two men would in the the 1970s join in forming the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers.) McLendon was close to two other wealthy men in Dallas who have attracted the attention of JFK researchers, Clint Murchison and Bedford Wynne.[199] What has not yet been explained is why McLendon, whom Ruby described as one of his six closest friends, embarked on a sudden and surprising trip with his family to Mexico City in the fall of 1963.[200] Enjoy!

More Here: I found this on http://www.spitfirelist.com/f288.html while doing a search on www.officialfind.com for Bernardo de Torres. 10. “On the day Ferrie died, del Valle was found brutally murdered in his car in the parking lot of a Miami shopping center. Prior to that, Garrison had sent a part-time investigator named Bernardo de Torres to question del Valle. De Torres was a military coordinator for the Brigade 2506 part of the exile landing force during the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was captured by Castro’s forces and detained until Christmas Eve of 1962. He eventually found his way to New Orleans where, according to de Torres, he was approached by Sergeant Duffy of the NOPD and asked to join Garrison's staff. As with many other investigators and volunteers at Tulane and Broad, de Torres’ bona fides are suspect. First of all, it was de Torres who showed up at the D.A.’s office in New Orleans very early in Garrison’s investigation claiming he had important information. He said he was a private detective who wanted to help and dropped the name of Miami D.A. Richard Gerstein as an entrée. Shortly after de Torres was given the assignment to question del Valle, del Valle’s brutalized body was discovered in the vicinity of de Torres’ Miami apartment. It was later determined that de Torres was filing reports on Garrison to the Miami CIA station, JM/WAVE. Not long after he left Garrison’s staff, de Torres went to work for Mitch Werbell’s Military Armament Corporation, a large supplier of weaponry to the CIA. The HSCA developed evidence that de Torres was actually a CIA officer with links to Military Intelligence. A well connected anti-Castro Cuban, Arturo Cobos told the FBI that de Torres was ‘the man to call with contacts on a high level with the CIA in Washington, D.C.’ The HSCA also came into possession of investigative information, which indicated that de Torres may have been in Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, and further, that he may have been involved in an assassination conspiracy, charges which de Torres denies. As for Garrison he later came to believe that de Torres was one of his earliest sources of misinformation and recalled that whatever information de Torres provided never went anywhere. In the late 1970’s, de Torres would be linked to the bombing assassination of Chilean leader Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.” (Ibid.; pp. 148-149.) I believe the Ibid reference at bottom is from "Let Justice be Done" by by William Davy; Copyright 1999 [sC]; Jordan Publishing; ISBN 0-9669716-0-4.) Relying largely on documents declassified in the wake of the Oliver Stone film JFK, Davy’s extraordinary book validates much of what Garrison had to say. I don't like getting my hopes up and being disappointed but seeing this makes me even more anxious to read Joan Mellen's book P.S. I will preface this by saying "this is what happens when you are researching the JFK assassination and you can't afford to buy every single book ever written about the assassination." Even though this section doesen't mention de Torres by name; I put it with this post because even though I had heard previously that Lee Harvey Oswald had been seen there, this is the first time that I have ever heard David Atlee Philips mentioned in the same sentence; I suspect I am not the only one. Robt. Footnote 5: The H.S.C.A. appears to have obtained a film of this facility (Lake Ponchartrain) .... which connects some very interesting people. Robert Tannenbaum, recalled that the committee viewed the film.... According to Tannenbaum, depicted in the film among the Cuban exiles were Guy Banister, David Atlee Philips and Lee Harvey Oswald. Inexplicably, the film would later disappear from the Committee’s files.” (Ibid.; p. 30.) For more on this subject, see also: L#3, RFA#12, FTR#188.

For the record, Justin, I do not believe in a wide-spread conspiracy to kill Kennedy. I do believe that after the Warren Report was released there developed a vast conspiracy to shut up and shut down the critics, as they were making Americans think uncomfortable thoughts. I believe the mainstream media willingly participated in this. Look at the NBC White Paper or the CBS specials in the sixties. I also believe that both the FBI and CIA determined that the conspiracy community was anti-American and was quite possibly a communist plot, and that they used and perhaps still use their resources to discredit and attack the conspiracy community. I also believe that the agents who participate in this do so out of misguided patriotism, and not because they are trying to protect Kennedy's murderers. That is why Posner, McAdams and Jennings are so powerful--not because they're paid to lie--but because they have a built-in audience for their distortions of the truth. I'll go even further--while I don't believe Posner or McAdams are on the CIA payroll I wouldn't be surprised if it was suggested by someone in the government that they go out and push the lone-nut idea after Stone's JFK turned a few heads. I can almost see the full-court press when Bugliosi's book is released. I've already got my spot reserved at the neighborhood puke-atorium. I may be stating the obvious here, but for the sake of utilizing the talents of all forum members if ANYONE has, knows or has seen a photo (jpeg, newspaper, research article on the internet which contains a photo) of George Joannides from any time period (other than a baby picture), would you please indicate such on this thread, several JFK Forum members including myself are very interested in obtaining one. I have checked the actual obituary notice from the Washington Post appx. 3-14-90 and there was no photo accompanying the obit. Thanks

Larry: I really appreciate you getting back with me on Emilio Santana. What you mentioned in your response is fascinating to me especially with regards to Santana, moreover I wanted to ask you what is your information source on the "photos which show Ferrie with Sturgis.....taken in the summer of 1962...." Also do you know the identity in the photo's you referenced of "Sturgis' associate." Look forward to hearing back from you.

Thanks for the heads up; is that Emilio Santana you are referring to?

You have a valid point in your response, and which in theory I agree. The CIA appears to have left Shaw "hanging in the wind." Note that I say appears. I have not had any success in locating the Blackmer memo, all I have found is a short excerpt. I did not post it because of its short length, as I would rather post the entire memo. I will continue to search for it. To respond to the point you raised that "the theory that the CIA plotted JFK's murder through Clay Shaw is bunk," is obviously not going out on a limb; the material that I have posted on this thread so far, is central to unraveling the activities and what was the motivation of CIA officials and other parties manipulating facts to put a particular spin on Oswald's activities before the assassination; I will be the first to admit that the Garrison trial has more intrigues than a John Le Carre novel, my perception is that Garrison's entire case hinged on proving the Clay Shaw/ClayClem Bertrand alias as well as the credibility of the testimony of Vernon Bundy and Perry Russo and others. Bundy, a heroin addict and the Russo hypnosis issue, together with the ruling that the Bertrand alias was inadmissable killed the case; what is just as obvious is that preceeding the trial people were dying like flies, David Ferrie, Eladio del Valle, Nicholas Chetta, Clyde Johnson, and Albert Bogard. To say that the Clay Shaw trial was not conducted amidst ideal circumstance's for Garrison, is the understatement of the year for reasons I do not feel necessary to elaborate; imagine what could have been resoved had his request for extradition of individuals like Eugene Brading had not been blocked by then Gov. Ronald Reagan or for that matter Sergio Aracha Smith, as well as compelling the testimony of Allen Dulles, Charles Cabell etc. been honored by the govt. Obviously a fantasy scenario, I admit but bits and pieces of evidence have emerged that could have made the investigation more credible such as the fact that apparently Kerry Thornley picked up the FPCC leaflets that Oswald distributed something the FBI knew and deliberately did not follow up on at Hoover's direction and links to Guy Bannister and Tulane University such as Col./Dr. Jose Rivera that were at the time unknown, while all of this is neither here nor there as far as whether Clay Shaw's ostensible participation in a "plot to kill JFK, was part of an official CIA program designed to kill Kennedy" (a conjecture that I myself, do not find credible) it is also not going out on a limb to observe that "a deliberate effort was made to obfuscate and prevent facts from being made known that were relevant to resolving the issue of conspiracy in the death of JFK." I believe as many researchers do, that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, and that there was a cover-up which "may or may not have been executed by the same parties that were involved in the assassination." Indeed, my perception is that IF Clay Shaw, David Ferrie and others) were acting together in a plot to kill JFK, they were not involved as "agents of the CIA" that almost goes without saying as far as I am concerned, the troubling part is that 42 years after the assassination we are still left hanging because our government has no interest in making the truth known. Conspiracy theories flourish in an atmosphere of uncertainty about "what actually happened." Given the current state of the union, that does not bode well for any American who wants to live in a free and open society. My intention in starting this thread is in resolving the gray area between the "conspiracy to kill JFK" and suspicious activities on the part of the CIA before and after 11-22-1963; by the following: James Angleton, Allen Dulles, David Atlee Philips, George Joannides, Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt.

After going back and reading threads that reference the Solares Hill articles, the always fascinating Gerry Patrick Hemming posts, whom I personally am very glad has chosen to join the Forum, I went back to analyze some information that I had previously read specifically the Lopez Report which concerns the HSCA investigation into Lee Harvey Oswald's trip to Mexico City. At the same time I re-read some material by Peter Dale Scott, whom I respect as one of if not the most cerebral of all JFK researchers. As the Joan Mellen book approaches its release I would strongly suggest forum members read or re-read Peter Dale Scott's Deep Politics III which can be found on the web at http://www.history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Overview.htm#_ftn113 The information he presents includes CIA shennanigans concerning false stories concerning Lee Harvey Oswald - attempting to link him to manipulated or outright false stories such as the Alvarado claim that Oswald volunteered in the Cuban Embassy to kill Kennedy and was given $6,500.00 by them to do the job, a claim he later recanted. but was possibly used by newly sworn-in President LBJ to induce Earl Warren to accept the position as head of the Warren Commission. What is even more interesting is that Alvarado's story may have been planted by the CIA; as the FBI regarded Alvarado as a "CIA source." In addition there were cables referencing Alvarado and endorsing his crediblity as a source being sent out by David Atlee Phillips under the pseudonyms M.C. Choaden & L.F. Barker. (As a brief aside, I would compare this to the DRE news story eminating out of Florida in the same time frame spouting Oswald/Fidel as behind the assassination, the DRE dis-information that inspired this article had the approval of George Joannides.) Another revealing tidbit that Scott provides is that the "Oswald" type-written letter as well as the draft version which was addressed to the Soviet Embassy and subsequently conveniently given to the FBI by Ruth Paine (when they came to her house after the asasination) does not appear to be Oswald's after all, at least according to the Soviets and JFK researcher Jerry Rose the latter who has shown inconsistincies between the draft version and the type-written one, mainly that the type-written version was finalized before the draft version, in fact the type-written version contains six mis-spelt words that are nor mis-spelt in th draft version. Scott, standing on solid ground also points out that other items that were taken from the Paine household are considered suspect such as the Edwin Walker note and the pristine Mexico City bus tickets. This portion of the page is verbatim The DFS was involved in the LIENVOY intercept project and probably manned the listening posts. The DFS may have been assisted in this LIENVOY project by Richard Cain, an expert telephone tapper and adjunct to the CIA-Giancana [ZR/RIFLE] assassination connection, when he was in Mexico City in 1962 as a consultant to a Mexican Government agency. Richard Cain at the time was also part of that Dave Yaras-Lennie Patrick-Sam Giancana element of the Chicago mob with demonstrable links to Jack Ruby in 1963, and the HSCA speculated that Cain may have been part of the 1960-61 CIA-Mafia plots against Castro. [Cain's CIA file, according to a later CIA memo, "reflects that...in 1963...he became deeply involved in the President Kennedy assassination case.][163] Since 1995 new releases from Cain’s FBI file have revealed that the file identified Cain not with the CIA or its Bay of Pigs Cuban Front the FRD, but as “a former United States Army Military Intelligence Officer.[164] As a separate item alluding to recent posts concerning Isidro Borja - the Cuban government believes that he may one of the individuals present in the background as Lee H. Oswald is handing out FPCC leaflets in Cuba. And in closing, in Noel Twyman's Bloody Treason he mentions that Bernado de Torres ostensibly "Leopoldo" has been established as a contact of David Sanchez Morales. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> THE THREE OSWALD DECEPTIONS: THE OPERATION, THE COVER-UP AND THE CONSPIRACY by Peter Dale Scott This piece was originally published in: Deep Politics II: Essays on Oswald, Mexico and Cuba (Essay completed April, 1994) Right-Wing Conspiratorial Pressures on the CIA In the preceding two chapters I have argued that, beginning some two or three months before the assassination, events attributed to Oswald were systematically misrepresented in CIA files. These misrepresentations appear to have been part of an intelligence operation, whether one run by the CIA or possibly some other agency. However these misrepresentations need not necessarily have been conscious preparations for the "lone assassin" phase-two account of the Kennedy assassination. One can imagine an alternative version of events, in which some or all of the authors of the misrepresentations are not themselves part of a complex assassination conspiracy (involving a "phase one" story about Oswald and Kostikov), but the victims of such a conspiracy. This alternative version supposes a force outside the CIA, but knowledgeable about CIA operations and procedures, and possibly represented within its ranks. In such a situation someone could embarrass the CIA into evasive procedures, delays, and even falsifications. Let us pursue the hypothesis that the CIA had mounted a counterintelligence operation involving Oswald, or the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, or the Cuban Embassy there. And let us return to the distinction raised by the authors of the Lopez Report, that Oswald visited the Cuban and Soviet Embassies on September 27, but that the man who identified himself as Lee Oswald on October I (and allegedly "spoke with consul whom he believed be... Kostikov") was someone else, an impostor. (1) If so, the second man may well have been part of a plot, launched outside the CIA, to implicate Oswald as the patsy in the assassination. If Oswald was part of a different, authorized CIA operation, then the evasive behavior of Egerter, Roman, et al. would be understandable. The standard CIA procedure of reporting such Embassy contacts to the FBI would have put the authors of the October 10 messages in a bind; they did not want the Oswald-Kostikov link to be investigated, because in the resulting "flap" the authorized Oswald operation would be blown. There are indications that through the immediate post-assassination period the CIA continued to be subjected to embarrassing pressures from "phase one" advocates outside, but close to, the Agency. A long CIA memorandum of 11 December 1963 welcomed the announcement by the New York Times one day earlier that the FBI had found Oswald to be categorically the lone assassin, and not the agent of any foreign government. The memo continued: These disclosures presumably eliminate the possibility of further confrontations with Mr. Robert Slusser. In the event that Mr. Slusser continues to insist that the President was murdered by the Soviet secret police, the following additional negative indications and observations may be of some value. (2) The memo continued for three and a half single-spaced pages to argue against the KGB "phase one" hypothesis, suggesting by its thoroughness that the confrontations with Mr. Slusser had been taken seriously. A published authority on Soviet affairs, Robert Slusser was almost put into a position to lend credibility to his hypothesis. Early FBI reports about Lee Harvey Oswald's brother Robert indicate that at one point Mr. Slusser was about to be hired to write Marina's story. Eventually, after what looks like intrigue, the contract went instead to Priscilla Johnson (later Priscilla Johnson McMillan). Her book, long delayed in its appearance, corroborated the FBI's and Warren Commission's "phase two" finding that Oswald acted alone. (3) Other right-wing sources, often explicitly hostile to the CIA, kept alive the phase-one specter of a link between Oswald and either Soviet or Cuban intelligence. From as early as December 1963, the CIA itself was blamed by such sources, either implicitly or explicitly, for its part in the President's murder. John Martino, an active plotter against Castro with a mob background, surfaced one such story in December 1963. blaming the President's death on Castro's response to a plot between Kennedy and the Soviets to have Castro replaced in Cuba by Huber Matos, a former Castro ally now detained in a Cuban jail. (4) This alleged plot was a veiled allusion to the AMTRUNK plan mounted by the CIA and Robert Kennedy in 1963 to use old allies of Matos to overthrow Castro. (5) But Martino the source is perhaps more interesting than his story. In 1963 he had been receiving support for his own anti-Castro operations from Julien Sourwine, Chief Counsel for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. (6) It was this Committee, the reader may recall, whose phase-one interests were Johnson's reason (or pretext) for setting up the Warren Commission. There was no shortage of such allegations, though they often came back to the same sources. Early in 1964, Colonel Philip J. Corso, a veteran of Army Intelligence and old foe of the CIA, told his friend Julien Sourwine (who in turn told the FBI) that Oswald was tied to a Communist ring inside the CIA. (7) Congressman Michael Feighan, for whom Corso worked as an aide, was reported to be "very curious concerning an intelligence report to the effect that there is a special school for assassins near Minsk, Russia, where Oswald worked in a factory." (8) An article in the journal of the John Birch Society, whose author Revilo Oliver later cited sources among veterans of army intelligence and the FBI, also argued that Kennedy's murder "was part of a Communist plot engineered with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency," and cited the "fake 'revolt'" plotted by Kennedy and Khrushchev to replace Castro with a crypto- Communist "'agrarian reformer.'" (9) Thus the right-wing pressures which forced the Warren Commission into being continued to play on it throughout its existence. And insofar as one can detect a common source for all these stories, that source would appear to be not only outside the CIA but extremely hostile to it. The word "outside" here can however be misleading. Every one of the allegations here summarized drew on inside information. For example John Martino reported in his December 1963 article that Oswald had tried to penetrate the anti-Castro Cuban group JURE: this claim was not generally known at the time but it was later corroborated by Silvia Odio's account of her meeting with Oswald in September 1963. Furthermore the Kennedys and the CIA had a plan (AMTRUNK) to oust Castro, which would have used, among others, the forces of JURE. The plan was still on-going in 1964, and thus extremely sensitive. Above all it planned to install a new government which would be free from mob influence, a detail which was sufficient to incur the hostility of mob allies like John Martino. These so-called "outsiders" knew enough about the ways of government, and specifically the CIA, to embarrass it into cover-up. It seems likely therefore that somewhere they had their spies inside government, and possibly inside the CIA. The Most Likely Manipulator: David Atlee Phillips So far this discussion has focused on those "phase one" stories linking Oswald to Soviet or Cuban intelligence which at the time existed uniquely in government files, and which for a while the U.S. Government took seriously. We have not yet mentioned the veritable blizzard of similar stories which reached the FBI and CIA from external sources after the assassination. After November 24 there were still more "phase one" stories attributing a similar role to Jack Ruby. And to all these anti-Communist stories denouncing the KGB and Cuba one must add those stories with an opposite political spin, linking Oswald and/or Ruby to right-wing Texas millionaires, oilmen, anti-Castro Cubans, the mob, or the right-wing terrorist Minutemen. Most of these leads did not check out. There were so many such false leads that one might be easily tempted to write them all off as meaningless "noise." However House Committee researcher Dan Hardway chose to look closely at all the stories that came out of Mexico City and Miami connecting Oswald with Soviet or Castro intelligence. According to his colleague Gaeton Fonzi, "Hardway's research had indicated that most of the individuals originating the reports" were assets of the Mexico City Station's Chief of Covert Action and Cuban Operations, David Phillips. (10) Hardway had the opportunity to quiz Phillips about this at an informal Committee interview, with Fonzi present. Hardway was armed at the interview with documentation from the Agency to dispute Phillips' claim that these assets had been run by other CIA agents. After the session, Hardway told Fonzi, I'm firmly convinced now that he ran the red-herring, disinformation aspects of the plot. The thing that got him so nervous was when I started mentioning all the anti-Castro Cubans who were in reports filed with the FBI for the Warren Commission and every one of them had a tie I could trace back to him. (11) To date I have been unable to contact Dan Hardway, although another good source has confirmed that he did conduct this research. It is also clear that a number of the "phase one" stories linking Oswald to Cuba did come from a single milieu of anti-Castro Cubans in Miami close to, and in some cases supported by, the CIA's JM/WAVE station there. David Phillips does therefore seem a likely candidate to have coordinated the stories coming out of Mexico City and Miami. For in the second half of 1963 he was cross-posted to both stations, as Chief of Cuban Operations in Mexico City, and as Chief of Psychological Operations (i.e. propaganda) in Miami. (In fact it is possible that David Phillips held down three posts in 1963, and was doubling also as a member of the Special Affairs Staff Counterintelligence (SAS/CI) staff.) A small intelligence-backed "press agency," the Agencia de Informaciones Periodisticas (A.I.P.), was a source for one recurring Oswald story, that he had worked on behalf of Cuban intelligence in the Miami area. (The A.I.P. attracted notice again during the wave of Chilean-financed Cuban terrorism of the mid-1970s, involving many Cuban exile veterans of the JM/WAVE operations, when the A.I.P. was revealed to be an agency by then financed by the Chilean intelligence service DINA). (12) The story was traced by the FBI to Fernando Fernandez Capada of the A.I.P., who told it to Jim Buchanan, a close ally of Frank Sturgis; the story was later publicized by Frank Sturgis and John Martino. (13) Another A.I.P. story, traced to Dr. Fernando Carrandi, spoke of Ruby's travel to Cuba. Those involved in circulating this story included Salvador Lew, p.r. agent for the CIA-backed Comandos Mambises, and Paul Bethel, described by Fonzi as "a close friend of David Atlee Phillips." (14) Yet another Oswald-Cuban intelligence story involved Miguel "Cuco" de Leon, senior adviser to Manuel Artime in the JM/WAVE-backed Operation Second Naval Guerrilla. (15) Any evidence for linking Phillips to these intelligence-tinged stories has not yet been made public. We have however Phillips' own statements that he was involved in the transmission of both of the key "phase one" allegations promoted in CIA cables, the Kostikov story of October, and the Alvarado story of November 25. As mentioned above, it would appear that Phillips' claim to have signed off on the Kostikov cable of October 8 is simply not true. Phillips claimed this in sworn testimony, as part of his effort to rationalize the delay of one week in transmitting the intercepted conversation of October 1. (16) Phillips' admitted role in the transmission of the Alvarado story, that Oswald was paid money in the Mexico City Cuban Consulate to kill Kennedy, is however corroborated by the documentary record. Here too there is a difference between Phillips own account and the cables however. In his autobiography Phillips describes the story he heard from Alvarado's lips as a lie easily seen through, indeed as a "transparent operation." (17) In the cables sent after his interviews with Alvarado, however, the tone is quite different. There we hear that "This officer was impressed by Alvarado ... wealth of detail Alvarado gives is striking." (18) One cable described Alvarado as a "quiet, very serious person, who speaks with conviction;" another, the next day, called him "completely cooperative." (19) Most revealing was the description of Alvarado as a "well-known Nicaraguan Communist underground member," whereas in fact (as he himself revealed later the same day) he was a penetration agent of the right-wing Somoza Government of Nicaragua. (20) (This revelation was quickly confirmed by CIA cables from Managua and Headquarters). (21) Winston Scott, Ambassador Thomas Mann, and the Mexican DFS Assuredly Phillips was not alone in backing the Alvarado story at the time. Ambassador Thomas Mann, together with Station Chief Win Scott and FBI Legal Attache Clark Anderson, sent a Flash cable on November 26 suggesting that Silvia Duran should be rearrested in order to corroborate it: We suggest that the Nicaraguan be put at the disposition of President Lopez Mateos on condition that Lopez Mateos will agree to order rearrest and interrogate again Silvia Tirado de Duran along following lines: A. Confront Silvia Duran again with Nicaraguan and have Nicaraguan inform her of details of his statement to us. B. Tell Silvia Duran that she is only living non-Cuban who knows full story and hence she is in same position as Oswald was prior to his assassination; her only chance for survival is to come clean with whole story and to cooperate completely.... Given apparent character of Silvia Duran there would appear to be good chance of her cracking when confronted with details of reported deal between Oswald, Azcue, Mirabal [the two Cuban consuls] and Duran and the unknown Cuban negro [described by Alvarado]. If she did break under interrogation - and we suggest Mexicans should be asked to go all out in seeing that she does - we and Mexicans would have needed corroboration of statement of the Nicaraguan. (22) Mann on his own went on to recommend the arrest of three Cuban members of the Cuban consulate, and later to argue forcefully that Castro was the "kind of person who would avenge himself " by assassinations. (23) These cables were in defiant opposition to the cooler approach in Washington. Headquarters had already tried to oppose the original arrest of Duran, rightly fearing that the arrest (and interrogation by the Mexican secret police, or DFS) "could jeopardize U.S. freedom of action on the whole question of Cuban responsibility." (24) Headquarters replied again to the new Duran cable, warning the Station Chief that the Ambassador was pushing the case too hard, and his proposals could lead to an international "flap" with the Cubans. (25) Headquarters were absolutely right in their concern that the Mexican DFS were out to "prove" an international conspiracy involving Oswald with Cuba. Silvia Duran later confirmed that in their interrogations of her: all the time they tell me that I was a Communist ... and they insisted that I was a very important person for ... the Cuban Government and that I was the link for the International Communists - the Cuban Communists, the Mexican Communists and the American Communists, and that we were going to kill Kennedy, and I was the link. For them I was very important. (26) In its performance however, the DFS was almost certainly (as Edwin Lopez has since corroborated to me) tightly controlled by the CIA Station. The DFS was part of the Mexican Ministry of the Interior, or Gobemacion; its Minister, Gustavo Diaz Ordiz, was a CIA asset, and also a close friend of Station Chief Win Scott (the best man at Scott's third wedding), as well as of Ambassador Mann - and Lyndon Johnson. (27) Details of Duran's interrogation suggest that the DFS, seeking to prove her conspiratorial involvement, was being fed clues by the Americans. (28) Given the predisposition of the DFS to find a conspiracy, a fact known even in Washington, and given the well-known brutality of DFS interrogation methods (which included torture), it is particularly revealing that Mann and Scott would recommend asking the DFS "to go all out in seeing that she [Duran] ... break under interrogation." Circumstances suggest that the documentary record here is incomplete, in at least two respects: 1) Contrary to the records we now have, Duran had already been tortured, and had already "confessed" to a sexual involvement with Oswald, since expunged from the record. 2) Mann's apparently reckless defiance of official instructions against the arrest of Duran was probably based on unofficial guidance from a very high level in Washington. A Suppressed "Phase One" Story: Oswald's Alleged Sexual Liaison Alvarado introduced a sex angle into his fantastic story about seeing Oswald be paid $6,500 to kill someone. He spoke of a "pretty girl" in the Consulate (whose manners reminded him of a "prostitute") who had given Oswald an embrace and also a home address "where he could find her." (29) In 1967, transmitting an agent's report of an interview with a source who knew Duran, Win Scott commented: The fact that Silvia DURAN had sexual intercourse with Lee Harvey Oswald on several occasions when the latter was in Mexico City is probably new, but adds little to the OSWALD case. The Mexican police did not report the extent of the DURAN-OSWALD relationship to this Station. (30) Scott's choice of words ("fact," "extent") is indicative of earlier events involving Duran that have not hitherto been publicly reported. In fact Scott had both misrepresented what the informant apparently said (reporting sexual relations with Oswald, but not "on several occasions"), and suppressed its most important revelation, that she had been tortured by the DFS until she "admitted that she had had an affair with Oswald:" [Long redaction] XXXX continued that Silvia Duran informed XXXX that she had first met Oswald when he applied for a visa and gone out with him several times since she liked him from the start. She admitted that she had sexual relations with him but insisted that she had no idea of his plans. When the news of the assassination broke she stated that she was immediately taken into custody by the Mexican police and interrogated thoroughly and beaten until she admitted that she had had an affair with Oswald. (31) It is noteworthy that Scott, far from rebutting the torture allegation, apparently accepted it as a fact, and one not worth commenting on. The Lopez Report, in transmitting this interview, commented that "Silvia Duran admitted that the Mexican police had questioned her on this point but denied that she had had an affair with Oswald." (32) This account is confirmed by its cited source, Silvia Duran's interview of June 6, 1978. Cornwell: Did the officers from the Securidad Department ever suggest to you during the questioning that they had information that you and Oswald had been lovers? Tirado [Duran]: Yes, and also that we were Communists and that we were planning the Revolution and uh, a lot of false things. (33) Curious as to why Ms. Duran had not been asked about the torture, I contacted Edwin Lopez, who had translated at the interview. He confirmed that, off the record, Ms. Duran had said that she was tortured badly, and that indeed in recalling this she had broken down and wept. She had however declined to say anything about the torture on the record because, as a citizen and resident of Mexico, she feared reprisal. One hesitates now to make any revelation that would put Ms. Duran at risk. The issue however is an important one. According to the account which Scott accepted as "fact," she was not only tortured on the matter of the liaison, but coerced into admitting it. If Scott's blase comment is true (this "adds little to the OSWALD case"), then the accounts of her confession have probably been altered, to convert a suppressed "phase one" story of a sexual liaison into the innocuous "phase two" version published by the Warren Commission. (34) Lending credence to this hypothesis is the known fact that the published version was censored and rewritten (by the CIA, according to the Lopez Report) on at least one other point, Duran's original description of Oswald as "blonde and short." (35) Were Mann and Scott Backed in Their Defiance of Official Instructions? All this lends dramatic urgency to the question of whether or not Scott and Mann were "acting alone" in their defiant recommendation, against earlier official instructions from Headquarters, that Duran be rearrested by the DFS, and coerced into corroborating the Alvarado story. One interpretation of the known facts is to postulate a real division within the Administration, between "phase one" enthusiasts like Scott and Mann (who wanted to ask the DFS "to go all out") and "phase two" pragmatists like Karamessines, who struggled in vain to prevent the arrest and rearrest from taking place. The chief problem with this analysis is that Scott and Mann drew no disapprobation for their course of action. Scott remained in his post as Chief of Station until his retirement six years later. Mann, far from being rebuked, was swiftly promoted by the new President, Lyndon Johnson, on December 14, 1963, to become the new Undersecretary of State for Latin American Affairs. (Mann's promotion was the more dramatic because unexpected; he had earlier announced, under Kennedy, his plans to retire at the end of the year). (36) A second interpretation of the facts is that beneath the apparent contest of opposing forces, "phase one" and "phase two," a higher authority was manipulating the Alvarado story, backed as it was by Scott and Mann, towards the desired "phase two" outcome of the Warren Commission and Report. I truly do not know whether or not such a higher authority existed. If it did, however, it almost certainly involved Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson was a close personal friend of the soon-to-be-elected Mexican President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, who has been described as the most right-wing (and pro-American) President since Miguel Aleman in the early 1950s. Just as Diaz Ordaz maintained tight control over the DFS (along with his good friend Win Scott), so Johnson was the friend and hope of those in the CIA who thought that Kennedy had been wrong to dismiss Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. As Johnson barely spoke Spanish, he relied in his meetings with Diaz Ordaz on the translating ability of a fellow Texan, Thomas Mann. As Mann later told author Dick Russell, Lyndon Johnson had lines into Mexico that I knew nothing about. He was an amazing man. He didn't speak Spanish, but he was a good friend of [Gustavo] Diaz Ordaz, who became President of Mexico. He used to come down and see Johnson at the ranch several times, and Johnson would have me down to translate. (37) (For what it is worth, former KGB Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko reports that his DFS contact told him that "many in the DFS felt that Lyndon Johnson was responsible" for the assassination). (38) Johnson was not particularly close to the CIA as an Agency. His lack of interest in intelligence estimates has been cited as a reason for the resignation of CIA Director John McCone in 1965, and Johnson's replacement of him by an inept outsider, Admiral William Raborn. (39) In 1966 Johnson did however give the CIA its first Director who was also a career officer, Richard Helms. Helms had been close to Dulles since their days together in Germany with OSS. (40) (Helms later revealed that Johnson had explained to him in 1965 that Raborn was a "temporary measure," and that Johnson would appoint Helms when he had proved himself as Deputy Director). (41) What remains unknown is the extent of the new President's knowledge of the "phase one" rumors which, as he informed Earl Warren, were "floating around." If he had any intimate knowledge of either the Kostikov story or the Alvarado story, he must have known that a true investigation of the case would have to be at arms length from the CIA. Instead Johnson named Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission. Dulles' strategic location was to play an important role in the CIA cover-up that ensued. If there was a conspiracy to ensure such a cover-up, then the naming of Dulles to his new post was almost certainly part of it. (42) However important the personal connection between Johnson, Diaz Ordaz and Thomas Mann, it could never, however, have explained the strange falsifications of CIA messages that occurred at CIA Headquarters. To explain that phenomenon we must look inside the Agency itself. Such a program of falsification and subsequent cover-up could have been coordinated, I shall suggest, by those who were closest to former Director Allen Dulles. The Dulles-Angleton-Hunt-Phillips "Agency--Within-the-Agency" In 1963 the "responsible" press, the New York Times and the Washington Post never commented critically on Johnson's choice of Allen Dulles, the most important official fired by John F. Kennedy, to serve on the Commission investigating the President's murder. Even though one would never expect them to play this critical role, they should have, for Allen Dulles was perhaps the Kennedys' most powerful enemy in the U.S., arguably more powerful even than the new President. Dulles had resented his being made to take the blame for the Bay of Pigs fiasco: "He thought other people should be resigning before he did, and made it clear that he was thinking of one person in particular, Robert Kennedy." (43) Before the assassination, Dulles had fought back in the media, leaking his resentment against the Kennedys to the sympathetic ears of Charles J. V. Murphy of Fortune magazine, part of Henry Luce's Time-Life empire. Murphy's pro-Dulles apologia, "Cuba: The Record Set Straight," was simultaneously a piece lobbying for escalated U.S. involvement in Indochina, just before Kennedy's first major Vietnam decision. (44) In this counter-attack, Dulles had Agency support. Dulles asked to have one of his CIA proteges, E. Howard Hunt, go over Murphy's article in detail; and Hunt was accordingly instructed to do so. (45) If Hunt was close to Dulles, he was even closer to his own protege, David Atlee Phillips. In fact it was probably through Hunt that Phillips became "an active player in a small clique within the CIA hierarchy who were almost autonomous in their operational capabilities," an OSS brotherhood of whom Allen Dulles, inside the Agency or out, was the acknowledged leader. (46) What merits further investigation is that members of this brotherhood played key roles on both sides of the Oswald "phase one"-"phase two" dialectic. The key to Dulles' "agency-within-the-Agency," as Aarons and Loftus have called it, was the power Dulles had conferred on his close friend Jim Angleton. (47) As Counterintelligence Chief Angleton was authorized to spy on the rest of the CIA, and maintain a CI network of assets in other branches. The close connection between Dulles and Angleton endured well beyond Dulles' departure from the Agency. (48) One sign of in-house CIA intrigue over the assassination is that those responsible for falsifying the Oswald-Kostikov story were not punished, or even distanced from the investigation of Kennedy's murder. On the contrary, John Scelso (actually John Whitten) of WH/3, the Mexico desk, and Birch D. O'Neal, the head of CI/SIG, both involved in the falsified October messages from Headquarters, were assigned after the assassination to key roles in the CIA investigation and resulting liaison with the FBI. (49) The man responsible for these assignments was Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms, another Dulles loyalist and OSS brother. It is not clear that Helms' role was conspiratorial. On the contrary, while Scelso may have encouraged the proliferation of "phase one" Oswald stories, Helms appears to have constrained them. (50) What remains to be explored is whether these two apparently opposing efforts were actually part of a single coordinated scenario. Helms's assignment of Scelso and O'Neal to the investigation made the same kind of sense as Johnson's putting Dulles on the Warren Commission. On the Commission, it is generally conceded, Dulles actively covered up the CIA involvement in the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro. (51) The House Committee, in an Appendix to its Report, concluded that Helms himself, "though the main contact with the Commission, apparently did not inform it of the CIA plots to assassinate Castro," and found a further "indication that his testimony before the Commission was misleading." (52) Helms and Angleton designated Angleton's Chief of Research and Analysis, Ray Rocca, to be the CIA's point of contact with the Commission. (53) Angleton clearly hoped by doing so to prevent a number of highly relevant counterintelligence operations from being exposed, such as the CIA's illegal HT/LINGUAL mail-opening program (overseen by Birch D. O'Neal), and the photographic and electronic surveillance of the Soviet and Cuban Embassies in Mexico City. (54) Angleton also visited Dulles on instructions from Helms, in order to learn and prepare for the questions which Dulles thought the Commission might put to the CIA. (55) Angleton's consistent approach was. in Rocca's words, "to wait out the Commission." (56) One might have expected as much from the man who would later tell the Church Committee, "It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the Government has to comply with all the overt orders of the Govemment." (57) Having observed how closely the Dulles-Helms-Angleton network controlled the Warren Commission after the assassination, one is moved to ask about certain pre-assassination personnel movements, presumably authorized by Helms, which affected the Oswald-Kostikov story. One crucial move was the recall in 1963 of Tennant Bagley from Berne to Langley, where he was rapidly promoted to chief of the Counterintelligence Branch of the Soviet Division" (C/SR/CI). (58) This promotion came in time for him to suppress mention of Kostikov in the October messages, and then sound the assassination alarm about Kostikov on November 23. Another move at this time was the temporary duty assignment of David Phillips, the Chief of Cuban Operations and Covert Action at the Mexico City Station, to Washington and Miami, "from at least late September to October 9, 1963." (59) In view of allegations about Hunt's Counterintelligence activities at this time (see below), it is relevant that while in Washington Phillips appears to have been attached to the Counterintelligence Staff of Fitzgerald's Special Affairs Staff devoted to anti-Castro operations. Then there is the much disputed question of whether, as Tad Szulc has alleged, Howard Hunt was assigned to temporary duty in Mexico City for the period of August and September 1963, at the time of Oswald's alleged visit there. (60) Both Hunt and the CIA have strongly denied this claim. It is however supported by the sworn testimony of David Phillips in a libel suit, that he had seen Hunt in Mexico City at the time Hunt denied being there. (61) In a 1973 House Watergate Hearing, Hunt testified how a retired CIA agent "had during the Cuban operation been my inside man in the Embassy when I was outside in Mexico operating as part of the Cuban task force." (62) An even more dramatic allegation, also strongly disputed, is that Hunt was in Dallas on November 22, 1963, at the time of the assassination. According to reporter Joseph Trento, a secret CIA memo of 1966, said to have been initialed by Angleton and Helms, emphasized the importance of keeping Hunt's presence there a secret, and suggested a cover story to provide Hunt with an alibi. (63) According to author Dick Russell, Trento later told him that Angleton himself was the source of the story, and arranged for a copy of the internal CIA memo to be delivered to him, as well as the House Committee. (64) If this is true, Angleton's role is sinister, and apparently part of a cover-up, whether the memo is real (and Hunt was in Dallas), or whether it was disinformation (and Hunt was not). Trento told Russell he understood from Angleton that Hunt was in Dallas because "of a serious counterintelligence problem with the [CIA] Cubans," some of whom were known to be "penetrated by Castro's intelligence." (65) Far-fetched as an explanation to justify Hunt's presence in Dallas, it would make sense of his temporary detachment to Mexico City, where a number of JURE Cubans, suspected by Hunt and Angleton for their left-leaning politics, were preparing to take part in a Bobby Kennedy-backed operation against Castro. It would indeed have been characteristic of Angleton to use a CIA officer like Hunt, not nominally part of the Counterintelligence Staff, to spy on left-leaning CIA-sanctioned operations. And Hunt's animosity against the Cuban Manuel Ray of JURE, conceded by Hunt himself in his memoir Give Us This Day, was well-known throughout the Agency. The CIA itself has said that Hunt's title at this time was Chief of Covert Operations for the Domestic Operations Division headed by Dulles' old friend Tracy Barnes. (66) Szulc however has wtitten that Hunt was asked to assist Dulles in writing a book, The Craft of Intelligence, that Dulles wrote following his involuntary retirement in 1961. (67) Just how long it took to complete the book is not clear; it was however published in 1963. Certainly the book would have given Hunt the opportunity to spend many long hours (presumably on Company time) with Dulles, his former boss. A third person who would presumably have been present would have been Howard E. Roman, Dulles' close friend and alleged collaborator on the book. (68) Another member of the OSS "Old Boy" brotherhood in the CIA, Roman resigned in 1962 before taking up the book-writing job with Dulles (and possibly Hunt). Roman went on to write a total of two books (and two more edited volumes) with Dulles. In that capacity he was with Dulles at the moment, on November 22, 1963, when Dulles heard of the President's murder. (69) Roman's post-war career had been with Soviet matters, but I know nothing to connect him officially with the Lee Harvey Oswald files. The same cannot however be said of his wife, Jane Roman. A CIA official herself, it was Jane Roman who, as noted earlier, was the releasing officer on the falsified CIA cable to Mexico City on October 1963. Conclusion: The "Phase One" Stories Affected History Assuredly the new President was not prevaricating, or being over-cautious, when he spoke to Chief Justice Warren of the risk of war. "Phase one stories" were not just street rumors, they were being promoted energetically and almost conspiratorially, at at least the Ambassadorial level. We need to insist that the promotion of such stories, per se, does nothing to link the proponents to the assassination. It is hardly surprising that opponents of Castro within the Government, along with anti-Castro Cubans in Miami, should seize this opportunity to reverse what they saw, rightly or wrongly, as the Kennedy policy of prolonged inaction. With the pre-assassination Kostikov story, on the other hand, we can be more specific. Unlike the Alvarado and other false stories, the Kostikov story was never exploited to achieve a policy change. It remained a secret in government files, and those who spoke publicly of KGB involvement never referred to it. To say that the falsifications of the October 1963 CIA messages had something to do with the plot to kill the President does not tell us anything about the motives of those falsifying the cables. As said above, they may have been illegal conspirators, or they may have been responding to a potential embarrassment created for them by these conspirators. One can reach one simple conclusion about these two alternative ways of reading the facts: The public has both the right and the need to know which of these alternatives is the true one. The first person one would have wanted to interrogate under oath about these falsifications, and about other falsehoods in his own earlier testimony, would have been David Atlee Phillips. Mr. Phillips unfortunately has since died, as have Win Scott and other relevant witnesses. This only adds to the urgency of securing testimony under oath from those who survive. Notes 1. Lopez Report, 242-50; MEXI 6453 of 8 October 1963. According to the full script, the name of Kostikov was actually raised by "Oswald"'s interlocutor, the Soviet Embassy guard Obyedkov, rather than by Oswald (Lopez Report, 79). 2. Memo of 11 December 1963 to Chief/Soviet Russia from Neil Huntley, C/SRI. "Additional Notes and Comments on the Oswald Case;" CIA Document #376-154. 3. Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Marina and Lee (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 4. John Martino, "Cuba and the Kennedy Assassination," Human Events, December 21, 1963, 3. 5. The chief of these allies were the JURE leaders Manuel Ray, Ramon Barquin, and Napoleon Becquer (10 AH 137; cf New York Times, April 19, 1962). 6. Scott, Deep Politics, 116; 11 AH 65. 7. Scott, Deep Politics, 215. See Chapter VII. 8. The Cross and the Flag, March 1964, 31. The CIA investigated the rumor of a Minsk assassination school early on, and pronounced it to be untrue. 9. Scott, Deep Politics, 215; Revilo Oliver, American Opinion, March 1964; 15 WH 710. 10. Fonzi, 292. 11. Fonzi, 292-93. 12. Magnus Linklater et al., The Nazi Legacy (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), 278. 13. WCD 1020.1-6, 16; 26 WH 424-25; Scott, Deep Politics, 338. 14. WCD 916.2-3. Bethel was also involved in another false story of hit teams dispatched by Castro to kill Kennedy: see WCD 893.1-7; 22 WH 864, Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 60-61. 15. WCD 770.7-9; Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 18, 20. 16. Lopez Report, 127-28; Fonzi, 293. After interrogating Phillips informally on this issue, Hardway told Fonzi that, "based on the research he had done tracking the routing of the cables and the lack of credible answers about them from Phillips, he believed there was a strong possibility the cables were created after the fact" (Fonzi, 293). 17. David Phillips, The Night Watch (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 141-42; quoted in Scott, Deep Politics, 122. 18. MEXI 7104 of 27 November 1963; CIA Document #174-616. 19. Mexico City cable of 26 November 1963 (MEXI 7067?), retransmitted as DIR 85199 of 27 November, WCD 1000B.4; WCD 1000C.2. 20. Memo of 26 November, WCD 1000A; MEXI 7083 of 26 November. 21. MANAGUA cable of 26 November, 262237Z; DIR 85196 of 27 November 1963. 22. MEXI 7072 of 26 November 1963; CIA Document #128-590. 23. MEXI 7104 of 27 November 1963; MEXI cable of November 28 1963, Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, 441. Cf. 3 AH 569. 24. DIR 84916 of 23 November; Lopez Report, 185-86; Schweiker-Hart Report, 25. 25. DIR 85371 of 28 November 1963; Lopez Report, 187; Schweiker-Hart Report, 29. 26. 3 AH 91; Cf. 3 AH 86. Note that the DFS exempted the Soviets from their hypothetical conspiracy, as did Ambassador Mann (Summers, 441). 27. Scott, Deep Politics, 123; Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1975), 274-75; Dick Russell, 454, 457-58. In late 1963 Diaz Ordaz was on leave as the Presidential candidate of the ruling PRI; but his replacement as Acting Minister, Luis Echeverria, was also a CIA asset on the CIA payroll. 28. For example, the Americans knew that Duran's name and the telephone number of the Cuban Consulate, 11-28-47, were in Oswald's address book (16 WH 54). Duran told the House committee that the DFS "asked me I don't know how many times, the way that I used to give my name and telephone number and they made me write and they take the paper out and then again, they ask me, how do you do this, and I write it down, and I give the paper. I think I do this five or six times" (3 AH 102). 29. MEXI 7067(?) of 26 November 1963; WCD 1000B. 30. Dispatch HMMA-32243 of 13 June 1967 from COS, Mexico City, to Chief, Western Hemisphere Division; CIA Document #1094-965. 31. TX-1937 of 26 May 1967, CIA Document #1084-965, reporting interview of informant in safehouse on 25 May, 1967. In 1964 the Station had also heard the allegation of an Oswald-Duran liaison from a dubious witness, Elena Garro, with strong DFS connections (Lopez Report, 207, 220; 3 AH 302). 32. Lopez Report, 254. 33. 3 AH 86. 34. 24 WH 565. 35. Lopez Report, 190; Scott, "The Lopez Report," 6. 36. Scott, Deep Politics, 94. 37. Russell, 454. 38. Oleg Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination (New York: Birch Lane/Carol Publishing, 1993), 181. 39. John Ranelagh, The Agency (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 422-23. Raborn is remembered in the Agency as the man who asked "Who's this fellow Oligarchy?' and who thought that "KUWAIT" was a CIA cryptonym. 40. Burton Hersh, The Old Boys (New York: Scribner's, 1992). 160-61. 41. Ranelagh, 448. 42. Johnson did invoke the threat of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee as a major part of his case for a Warren Commission. As a man with years of Washington experience, he must have known of the on-going collaboration between Eastland and Sourwine of the Subcommittee with elements inside the CIA. 43. Leonard Mosley, Dulles (New York: Dial Press/James Wade, 1978), 473. Although Dulles had offered to resign at the moment of failure, the offer had been refused. He declined to offer his resignation again, after being rebuked in a secret in-house CIA review. Thus he was fired, and without prior warning (ibid.). 44. Charles J. V. Murphy, "Cuba: The Record Set Straight." Fortune, September 1961. Discussion in Paul W. Blackstock, The Strategy of Subversion (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964), 250; Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1972), 19-20. 45. Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974), 95; E. Howard Hunt, Under Cover (New York: Berkley, 1974), 216. 46. Fonzi, 331, 346n. Cf. Scott, Deep Politics, 54, 67, 322. Phillips had not served in OSS; his mentor Hunt had. 47. Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 260, 48. David Wise, Molehunt (New York: Random House, 1992), 39; Scott, Deep Politics, 67. 49. 11 AH 57, 476, 485. 50. Scelso's role is hard to assess. On November 23, 1963, when ordered by Assistant Deputy Director of Plans Karamessines to tell the Mexico City CIA Station to stop the arrest of Silvia Duran, Scelso entered a memo for the record, which said in part, "We phoned as ordered, against my wishes, and Scelso wrote a FLASH cable which we did not then send" (TX-1240 of 23 November 1963; C/WH/3 memo for record; emphasis added). On the other hand, he soon afterward prepared a summary report for Helms which was transmitted to President Johnson. "This report stated that Oswald probably was a lone assassin who had no visible ties to Soviet or Cuban intelligence though such ties could not be excluded from consideration" (11 AH 477). 51. Mosley, 477-78; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 536, 663. 52. 11 AH 58. 53. 11 AH 47, 477-79. 54. 4 AH 215; 11 AH 476, 479, 491; AR 205. 55. 4 AH 232-35. 56. 4 AH 215, 232. 57. Hersh, Old Boys, 317; citing Seymour Hersh, New York Times Magazine, June 25, 1978. 58. Mangold, 170. 59. Lopez Report, 128. 60. Szulc, Compulsive Spy, 96, 99. 61. Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1991), 193. Hunt had made the sworn statement, "I was not in Mexico between the years 1961 and 1970." Phillips testified under oath that he had seen Hunt in Mexico City "sometime between September of 1961 and March of 1965," adding that he "must have seen him once or twice" somewhere in Mexico prior to November 22, 1963. 62. Nedzi Hearing, 518 (June 28, 1973). 63. Wilmington Sunday News Journal, August 20, 1978; reprinted in Lane, Plausible Denial, 152-55; Dick Russell, 474-75. In his book Lane claims that former CIA official Victor Marchetti had told him about this memo prior to the Trento story, citing Marine intelligence Colonel William Corson as his source (Lane, 134-35). Corson was close to Trento. The two eventually were co-authors of the book Widows. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. San Francisco Chronicle, December 31, 1974, 1. 67. Szulc, 95. 68. Mosley, 475-77. 69. Mosley, 477.

After going back and reading threads that reference the Solares Hill articles, the always fascinating Gerry Patrick Hemming posts, whom I personally am very glad has chosen to join the Forum, I went back to analyze some information that I had previously read specifically the Lopez Report which concerns the HSCA investigation into Lee Harvey Oswald's trip to Mexico City. At the same time I re-read some material by Peter Dale Scott, whom I respect as one of if not the most cerebral of all JFK researchers. As the Joan Mellen book approaches its release I would strongly suggest forum members read or re-read Peter Dale Scott's Deep Politics III which can be found on the web at http://www.history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Overview.htm#_ftn113 The information he presents includes CIA shennanigans concerning false stories concerning Lee Harvey Oswald - attempting to link him to manipulated or outright false stories such as the Alvarado claim that Oswald volunteered in the Cuban Embassy to kill Kennedy and was given $6,500.00 by them to do the job, a claim he later recanted. but was possibly used by newly sworn-in President LBJ to induce Earl Warren to accept the position as head of the Warren Commission. What is even more interesting is that Alvarado's story may have been planted by the CIA; as the FBI regarded Alvarado as a "CIA source." In addition there were cables referencing Alvarado and endorsing his crediblity as a source being sent out by David Atlee Phillips under the pseudonyms M.C. Choaden & L.F. Barker. (As a brief aside, I would compare this to the DRE news story eminating out of Florida in the same time frame spouting Oswald/Fidel as behind the assassination, the DRE dis-information that inspired this article had the approval of George Joannides.) Another revealing tidbit that Scott provides is that the "Oswald" type-written letter as well as the draft version which was addressed to the Soviet Embassy and subsequently conveniently given to the FBI by Ruth Paine (when they came to her house after the asasination) does not appear to be Oswald's after all, at least according to the Soviets and JFK researcher Jerry Rose the latter who has shown inconsistincies between the draft version and the type-written one, mainly that the type-written version was finalized before the draft version, in fact the type-written version contains six mis-spelt words that are nor mis-spelt in th draft version. Scott, standing on solid ground also points out that other items that were taken from the Paine household are considered suspect such as the Edwin Walker note and the pristine Mexico City bus tickets. This portion of the page is verbatim The DFS was involved in the LIENVOY intercept project and probably manned the listening posts. The DFS may have been assisted in this LIENVOY project by Richard Cain, an expert telephone tapper and adjunct to the CIA-Giancana [ZR/RIFLE] assassination connection, when he was in Mexico City in 1962 as a consultant to a Mexican Government agency. Richard Cain at the time was also part of that Dave Yaras-Lennie Patrick-Sam Giancana element of the Chicago mob with demonstrable links to Jack Ruby in 1963, and the HSCA speculated that Cain may have been part of the 1960-61 CIA-Mafia plots against Castro. [Cain's CIA file, according to a later CIA memo, "reflects that...in 1963...he became deeply involved in the President Kennedy assassination case.][163] Since 1995 new releases from Cain’s FBI file have revealed that the file identified Cain not with the CIA or its Bay of Pigs Cuban Front the FRD, but as “a former United States Army Military Intelligence Officer.[164] As a separate item alluding to recent posts concerning Isidro Borja - the Cuban government believes that he may one of the individuals present in the background as Lee H. Oswald is handing out FPCC leaflets in Cuba. And in closing, in Noel Twyman's Bloody Treason he mentions that Bernado de Torres ostensibly "Leopoldo" has been established as a contact of David Sanchez Morales.

If there was ever a document that implied culpability to some degree by the Central Intelligence Agency (Clay Shaw's status with the CIA circa 1963 has not been resolved beyond a reasonable doubt, I stipulate), I believe this is at least one of them; If someone as high up on the food chain as Ray Rocca was in the CIA there has to be concrete evidence to that effect. Since the date of this document is September 20, 1967, it can be a valid speculation that "General Counsel's discussions with Justice [Dept.] might have been through Jack Miller - a former Ass't. Atty. General in charge of Justice Department's Criminal Div. who had contacted the CIA General Counsel to "offer intelligengce from within Garrison's office." Meanwhile, the Justice Dept. had by this time concluded that Shaw had not come clean with his lawyers regarding his ties to the CIA's Domestic Contacts Services. It should also be pointed out that Raymond Rocca knew Shaw personally before Garrison's investigation even had begun. But Garrison made, at least as far as linking the CIA to Shaw and hence the Kennedy assassination, one fatal mistake; he went from linking Shaw to the CIA, to Shaw and the CIA in concert with the "military-industrial complex." The rest as we all know is history. Part of the problem was that ostensibly Garrison did not learn the exact nature of Shaw's relationship with the Domestic Contacts Division until after the fact, many of his investigators did not know and lead prosecutor for Garrison, James Alcock was very skeptical of a Shaw link to the CIA. History has tended to blend the perceptions of the Shaw trial into two distinct camps of pro and con regarding CIA complicity. A September 1977 memo written by HSCA staff counsel Jonathan Blackmer concluded: "We have reason to believe Shaw was heavily involved in the anti-Castro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and possibly one of the high-level planners or 'cut out' to the planners of the assassination." At least one of the members of the "Garrison Group," Raymond Rocca is on record as believing that Clay Shaw would be convicted by Garrison in the upcoming trial. I believe the reason that was so is for the following: At the time of the House Select Committee investigation in 1976, inquiries to the CIA about Clay Shaw were coordinated by J. Walton Moore, the former Dallas CIA contact for Oswald's friend George DeMohrenschildt. Another recently-released document connects Shaw to the top secret project ZRCLIFF, which was run out of William Harvey's super-secret Staff D along with the ZRRIFLE assassination program. More to Come.

Robert, No, I wasn't familiar with this story. Is this covered in the Lopez Report (I haven't read it yet)? Ron <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It has been awhile since I read the Lopez Report and I honestly do not remember, It alludes to Oswald possibly contacting students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and I believe that it references LI/ENVOY intercepts in the footnotes, but I don't think it references Larry Kennan or LI/COZY. Hell, when I was perusing the Lopez Report there were parts of it that appeared to demonstrate a lack of effort on both the part of the CIA and the Mexican government to locate individuals that the HSCA wanted to interview, maybe it was because there were so few people that they were able to locate. But then again I trust some of the major players in the "JFK Story" about as far as I can throw a stick. I've talked to Mr Kelly recently and more information may be forthcoming.

Let me keep adding to the list until I get the percentage to look more like it has something to do with an underground movement - which was in some way employed by the CIA because of their orientation and connections. QK/ENCHANT is still something we know very little about - perhaps that is the key. It's also interesting to note how Ferrie apologists use his 'Morals Charge' as evidence for the time frame at which Cubans [Arcacha Smith] sought to distance themselves from Ferrie. Ferrie said he was involved in 'Operation Mosquito' [for which I can find nothing] - it's an odd coincidence that this cable came from JMWAVE on 11/21/63. AGENCY : CIA RECORD NUMBER : 104-10075-10122 RECORDS SERIES : JFK AGENCY FILE NUMBER : 80T01357A DOCUMENT INFORMATION ORIGINATOR : CIA FROM : JMWAVE TO : DIRECTOR TITLE : JMWAVE CABLE REPLYING THAT LAST BROADCAST WAS UNDERSTOOD. DATE : 11/21/1963 PAGES : 1 DOCUMENT TYPE : PAPER, TEXTUAL DOCUMENT SUBJECTS : JMWAVE CABLE; MOSQUITO; BROADCAST CLASSIFICATION : SECRET RESTRICTIONS : OPEN IN FULL CURRENT STATUS : OPEN DATE OF LAST REVIEW : 07/10/1995 COMMENTS : JFK17:F2 1995.07.10.18:30:08:190028: Ferrie needs to go down. - lee <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The homosexual affiliation of possible JFK conspirator's such as Shaw, Ferrie, Ruby, Oswald et cetera is very familiar to me but to be honest I never spent much time on it, but I did run across this today I also found reference to an FBI document which deals with the subjects referenced, which follows. Document # 124-10081-10142 Is a two page document from SAC, Houston to Director dated 9/25/64. Re: Houston airtel to Bureau dated 9/24/64 Enclosed for Dallas are 25 copies each of the following items: FD-302 re interview of Hazel Kingcaid, Operator of Desert Room Lounge, Houston, Texas; FD-302 re interview of Peter Flores FD-302 re interview of Paul Polo Guerrero; FD-302 re interview of Martin Rizo, aka., Marty Rizo, Rachael Rizo; Insert reporting miscellaneous investigation at Houston conducted 9/21, 22/64. It is to be noted that HO [ ]-C (protect Identity), advised on 9/21/64 he never knew of Jack Ruby ever having been in the Desert Room Lounge nor had he ever heard of Ruby's having been there. He did not recall James J. Kneiding or Wayne Craven. He informed that Marty Ruiz, aka., Rachael Ruiz, is probably identical with Marty Rizo, aka Rachael Rizo. He further noted that "Paul" is probably identical with Paul Guerrero and that "Pete" is probably identical with Pete Flores. CI stated these three were frequently in the Desert Room Lounge together. On 9/22/64, HO [ ]-C furnished the whereabouts of Rizo and Flores in Houston, Texas. On 9/21/64, PCI [ ] (Protect Identity), advised that Paul Guerrero resides at 310 Crosstimbers, Houston, Texas, and is a hairdresser at Gulfgate Beauty Salon, Houston.

Ron, are you familiar with this story it seems to provide a dimension to Oswalds Mexico City sojournings heretofore undisclosed. Philadelphia Quakers With Oswald in Mexico City By Bill Kelly -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Of the many Philadelphia connections to the assassination of President Kennedy, few stand out as more interesting or suspicious as Lee Harvey Oswald's Quaker connection in Mexico City. As the story filtered back to the FBI, it was alleged that Oswald was seen at a restaurant in Mexico City with an American who also wanted to go to Cuba. This source further related later that this same American may have given Oswald a ride to the Cuban and Russian embassies on the back of a motorcycle. This American was later identified as "Larry Kennan," a "Quaker from Philadelphia." [Other reports identify this person as "Steve" Kennan, and he will be so referred to in this article.] The first part of this story came to the FBI's attention through the fiancée of Homobono Alcaraz Aragon, and the trail of information contained in FBI reports is somewhat confusing, so I defer to Professor Jerry Rose, as he first published the first part of the story in the Fourth Decade (Volume 5 #4, May, 1998). Rose wrote about the FBI's investigation of The Casa De Los Amigos, a Quaker camp or hostel in Mexico City whose residents apparently had knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald's activities. Prof. Rose wrote: "Given the Bureau's propensity to try to associate Oswald with Friends groups like the New Orleans Council for Peaceful Alternatives, this 'information' aroused the intense interest of headquarters, which conveyed this information along with directives to interview [Alcaraz] and give the appropriate attention to the matter in view of the fact that, 'Mrs. Ruth Paine of Irving Texas, who has befriended Oswald and wife, has been prominently associated with the activities of the Friend's organization.'" The Mexico City Quaker connection was first developed by the San Francisco Bureau of the FBI, whose undercover informant Judith Gordon, notified them on January 15, 1964 that Barrie Milliman, a female student at the University of California (Berkeley), learned of some of Oswald's movements and contacts while visiting her fiancée Homobono Amo Alcaraz in Mexico City. Before they got to Alcaraz however, the FBI interviewed the Acting Director of the Casa del Los Amigos, Von Peacock, who speculated that the "unknown American" may have been Robert Kaffke of San Francisco, who had been one of 58 students who made an illegal trip to Cuba in the summer of 1963. While it was determined that Kaffke was not registered at the Casa De Los Amigos until Oct. 25, 1963, weeks after Oswald had left, he was familiar to the FBI since he was also an undercover informant of the San Francisco FBI office. He was not now suspected as being the "unknown American" seen with Oswald in Mexico City. Kaffke told the FBI that when he stayed at the Casa de Los Amigos in late October 1963 the residents were still talking about Oswald's visit. When Oswald was there he had "a lot of money" and "persons at Casa de Los Amigos are really scared when the name of Oswald is mentioned." [Note that they were scared in October, 1963- before the assassination]. When the FBI caught up with Alcaraz, he verified much of what had been reported by Milliman, through her friend Judith Gordon, which was that he had seen Oswald with an unknown American at Sanborns restaurant and that they were "working together to get visas for travel to Cuba and that they planned to go there together." According to the FBI report, Alcaraz mentioned that Oswald may have been associated with Steve Kennan, identified as a "pro-communist American," who had been in Mexico in 1962 and 1963, although he "stated emphatically," that he had never seen Oswald with Kennan. Then, according to Rose, there is the reference in the FBI reports to an "Arnold," who "begins to assume human shape and identity as 'Steve Kennan' moves into limbo." Arnold Kessler of Detroit had also been at the Casa de Los Amigos (in February), and like Barrie Millman, had attended the University of California at Berkeley. He worked temporarily as a journalist in Mexico City before moving on to Brazil, where the FBI found him. Kessler denied meeting Oswald, but stated that it was Alcaraz who told him that he - Alcaraz had met Oswald. As a former student radical who dropped out of college, and was not an FBI informant, Kessler's draft board was subsequently informed of his circumstances so he could be inducted into the military. The FBI Legat in Mexico then concluded there was "no real basis for inquiry" and "no further investigation is being conducted." But others did investigate, and found out more about the mysterious American Quaker from Philadelphia, Steve Kennan. In Live By The Sword (Bancroft Press, Baltimore, MD., 1998), Gus Russo gives an historically deceiving perspective of Kennedy's murder that still tries to sell the original cover-story for the operation - that Fidel Castro was behind the assassination. There is, however, an interesting footnote under the allegation that there are no photos of Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City because, as Russo would like us to believe, Oswald was possibly accompanied by Cuban agents. The note (from Chapter 19 - 8. p. 579) reads: "In 1994,...[Anthony and Robbyn] Summers also interviewed Homer Bono, who told them that he met Oswald at Sanborns Restaurant outside Mexico City in 1963. Oswald left in the company of a Quaker from Philadelphia named Steve Kennan [sic]. Oswald was a passenger on Kennan's motorbike as the two drove off to the Cuban Embassy to try to secure a visa for Oswald. Kennan has never been found or interviewed." The idea that Oswald could have been ferried about Mexico City on a motorbike by "a Quaker from Philadelphia" is certainly an interesting possibility, especially since the Warren Report makes note of the fact (p. 735): "Although the Soviet and Cuban Embassies are within two blocks of each other, they are some distance from Oswald's hotel. He must, therefore, have traversed a substantial portion of the city on more than one occasion." So, "A Quaker from Philadelphia" with a motorbike would have done very nicely, and could be a valuable witness to Oswald's activities there. Anthony Summers, in Not In Your Lifetime (Marlowe & Co., N.Y., 1998), wrote on p. 441: "In 1994, in Mexico City, the author interviewed Homobono Alcaraz Aragon, a lawyer. His name featured in reports indicating that he claimed he had met Oswald in Mexico City before the assassination. In the 1994 interview, Alcaraz said he had encountered Oswald at Sanborns restaurant, in the company of two or three other American students - all Quakers, like Alcaraz himself. The talk centered on efforts to get to Cuba, and Alcaraz said 'Oswald' eventually left with one of the Americans - whom Alcaraz recalls as being named either Steve Kennan (or Keenan) from Philadelphia. As Alcaraz recalled it, Keenan drove Oswald on his motorcycle to go to the Cuban consulate. Alcaraz seemed sincere, and abhorred publicity. He named a friend, Hector Gastelo (now a farmer in Sonora State) as probably having been present during the encounter with Oswald. (Interview with Alcaraz, 1993; CE 2121; and multiple FBI reports - available at the Assassinations Archive and Research Center, Washington D.C.; Miraba: HSCA III.177)." In a footnote to the footnote, Summers also makes note that, "As this book went to press, the author became aware of information that the CIA ran an agent in Mexico, code named LICOZY - 3, who was a student from Philadelphia (Philip Agee, Inside the Company, p. 530). The plot thickens as Agee reported (Inside the Company, Stonehill, 1975): "The [Mexico City] station double-agent cases against the Soviets, LICOZY-1, LICOZY-3 and LICOZY-5, are all being wound up for lack of productivity or problems of control. One of these agents, LICOZY-3, is an American living in Philadelphia who was recruited by the Soviets while a student in Mexico City, but who reported the recruitment and worked for the Mexico City station. He worked for the FBI after returning to the US - the Soviet case officer was a UN official at one time - but recently Soviet interest in him has fallen off and the FBI turned the case back over to the Agency for termination." [Emphasis added]. Sanborns Restaurant, where Alcaraz and Kennan reportedly met Oswald, is also mentioned by Richard Case Nagell, who (according to Dick Russell in The Man Who Knew Too Much, Carroll & Graf, 1992, p. 354), wrote a letter to his friend Arthur Greenstein referring to Sanborns restaurant as a meeting place. While Sanborns Restaurant is reported in one reference (Russo) to be "just outside" Mexico City, Mary Ferrell's index notes that, (Steve) "Kennan was seen several times in Sanborns Restaurant next to the American Embassy bldg. in Mexico City." [Note: If Sanborns Restaurant is next to the American Embassy, Larry Haapenen questions whether Oswald visited the American Embassy as well as the Cuban and Russian Embassies while he was there.] It seems quite possible, even probable, as Summers' suspects, that "Steve Kennan - a Quaker from Philadelphia," who gave Oswald a ride around Mexico City on his motorbike, could be LICOZY-3, a "student from Philadelphia who was recruited by the Soviets while a student in Mexico City." The whole "Quaker" connection to the assassination reaches right to the heart of the matter of who was behind Oswald's movements and how he was being directed in his clandestine operations - his advocacy of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, his mission to the Cuban and Russian Embassies in Mexico City, his intention to move to Philadelphia, his relocation back to Dallas and his job at the Texas School Book Depository. Central to everything is Ruth Avery Hyde Paine. According to Priscilla Johnson McMillan, in Marina and Lee (Harper and Row, N.Y., 1977, p. 314): "Ruth Avery Hyde grew up in the Middle West, the daughter of parents who felt strongly about the value of education and good works. When she was only thirteen, Ruth spent a summer on a truck farm in Ohio as her way of contributing to the effort to win World War II. The next summer she was with a traveling Bible school, teaching in Ohio and Indiana. At nineteen, as a student at Antioch College in Ohio, she became a Quaker, a convinced Quaker, often the most dedicated kind. She wanted to be a teacher, and by the time she graduated had an astonishing array of jobs. She had taught in elementary schools in the East and Middle West and had been a recreation leader at Jewish community centers in Ohio and Indiana, at a club for elderly immigrants in Philadelphia, and at a Friends' work camp in South Dakota. Whatever the job, Ruth was liked and respected, and was always asked to come back. "She was later a teacher, aged twenty-five, at the Germantown Friends' School in Philadelphia when she met and married Michael Paine...They moved to Texas, and in September 1962, they separated..." Not mentioned in this biography is the fact that Ruth Hyde Paine's father and sister both worked in various capacities for federal agencies that have provided cover for the CIA. (The Fourth Decade, Vol. 3 #4, May, 1996 - "The Paines," by Barbara LaMonica, Steve Jones and Carol Hewett.) Another anomaly is Maria Hyde, an elderly American lady who Oswald met in both Moscow and Minsk, and whose photo of Oswald in Minsk turned up in CIA files, reportedly from the files of the Domestic Contacts Division of the CIA, which routinely debriefs American tourists and business people who travel abroad. [it has never been determined if the Marie Hyde that Oswald met in Russia is in any way related to Ruth Hyde Paine or the international Quaker community. However, it seems to be a question that could be reasonably answered]. According to the Warren Commission, Ruth Avery Hyde Paine was a pacifist harboring Quaker beliefs, who studied the Russian language, wrote letters to pen-pals in the Soviet Union, helped arrange east-west exchange students and became Marina Oswald's guardian. She first took Marina into her home as a guest while Oswald went to New Orleans to obtained work and an apartment. Ruth H. Paine then drove Marina from Texas to the Magazine Street apartment in New Orleans and then notified a local Quaker, Mrs. Ruth Kloepfer, of the Oswald's presence in New Orleans. She requested Kloepfer contact and assist the Oswalds, and Mrs. Kloepfer and her two college age daughters, who were also learning the Russian language, then visited Lee and Marina at the apartment. According to the Warren Report (p. 726): "Ruth Kloepfer was a clerk of the Quaker Meeting in New Orleans whom Ruth Paine had written in the hope that she might know some Russian-speaking people who could visit Marina. Mrs. Kloepfer herself visited the Oswalds but made no attempt to direct any Russian-speaking people to them." [Other than her daughters, who were never interviewed]. Oswald then embarked upon his Clinton, La., pro and anti-Castro Cuban and Mexico City operations in New Orleans, which continued until September 22, 1963, when Ruth H. Paine arrived in New Orleans from Philadelphia. In Philadelphia Ruth H. Paine had spent some time with her husband's mother, Ruth Forbes Paine Young and her husband Arthur Young, the inventor of the Bell Helicopter. Both Ruth F. P. Young (Michael Paine's mother) and Arthur Young were pacifists and directly associated with the Philadelphia Quaker community. Both Ruth and Arthur Young supported the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and personally wrote to President Kennedy to thank him for his support of the measure. In addition, Ruth Forbes Paine Young was a close friend and traveling companion of Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles' mistress and agent. Oswald had told a few acquaintances, including Ruth H. Paine, that he intended to relocate to Philadelphia, and in his notebook are five Philadelphia addresses and the notations: "Philadelphia (sic)/ Russ-Amer. citizenship club 2730 Snyder Av. / Russ. Lan. school 1212 Spruce / Russian Daily (sic) Paper Jefferson Bldg. / Russian Lan. Trn. 216 S. 20 / Russ. _ _ _ _ _ - Ho_ _ Organ. 1733 Spring Grdn. [WC Exhibit 18]. Philadelphia is the headquarters of the world Quaker community, which maintains close ties to nearby Main Line colleges Swathmore College and Haverford where Michael Paine and journalist Priscilla Johnson McMillan matriculated and began their activities in support of the World Federalists, the organization founded by Cord Meyer, who later became head of the CIA's International Organizations and Domestic Contacts Divisions. Also in downtown Philadelphia is the headquarters of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which operates Casa de los Amigos, the "camp" or youth hostel for America students studying the Spanish language in Mexico City, where Kennan stayed. Instead of going to Philadelphia however, Oswald went to Mexico City, while Mrs. Ruth H. Paine took Marina, the kids and all of the Oswald's belongings - including his rifle, to Texas. It is possible that Steven Kennan and his Quaker friends knew Oswald in Mexico City and were associated with Casa de los Amigos, which is still operational today. - [Note: I have initiated an internet email query with all major Quaker organizations and am getting a good response from librarians who are very helpful, including one who knows Ruth H. Paine.] - It is also possible Oswald learned of this Quaker "camp" before he went to Mexico City from either Ruth H. Paine or Ruth Kloepfer, although both would later deny that they knew of Oswald's intention to visit Mexico. It has long been speculated that any CIA photographs of Oswald entering or leaving the Cuban or Russian embassies, on any of ten known occasions, were not made public because of other persons who are in the photographs, which would expose on-going covert operations. In his book Gus Russo speculates that any person photographed with Oswald in Mexico City was possibly Cuban, or at least a Communist agent, but if LICOVEY-3 ferried Oswald around, he was being transported about by a KGB-CIA double agent under the control of the CIA Counter-intelligence unit (James J. Angleton-Win Scott), the same ones who kept the CIA files on Oswald "very close to their vests." (paraphrase of John Newman - Oswald & the CIA). With the Quaker connection, there seems to be an underlying thread of detached financial and administrative assistance from a number of "non-profit" religious oriented charity organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee, the "Red Cross" that subsidized Oswald's sojourn in Minsk, the Russian Orthodox Church in America and the Catholic Cuban Welfare and Refugee Relief organizations. - Some of them were supported financially by the Catherwood Fund, a non-profit foundation established the same month in 1948 as the CIA, and located in Paoli, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia on the Main Line, in the same small town as Michael Paine's mother, Ruth Forbes Young and her husband Arthur Young. - The CIA funding of such organizations has long been established and the roles of CIA officials Tom Braden and Cord Meyer have been widely published, and in light of the Quaker connections, should be reviewed to see if there are any more concrete connections. http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_...ue/quakers.html Thanks to Bill Kelly for the above.

And you probably thought there was only one gap on a tape (ie The famous 18 minute gap on the Nixon/Watergate Tapes) It has been revealed that there is yet another tape with a gap, this has to do with an archived LBJ conversation with J. Edna Hoover that has a 14 minute segment that mysteriously is inaudible during a "critical part" of the conversation. Click on the following URL. http://history-matters.com/essays/frameup/...enMinuteGap.htm This area strikes at the heart of LBJ and Hoover as potential particpants in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy versus cover-up artists extraordinaire. But the key point is made by the article's writer Rex Bradford - "....since the tie-in of Oswald to the Soviets and Cubans was created by an impersonator, the obvious conclusion would be that no such connection really existed, only the purposefully planted appearance of one. Why the need to go to World War III with the Soviets if they weren’t involved?" Why indeed.

Being a devotee of the Internet as a means of quickly identifying Warren Commission, HSCA and ARRB Documents, I also will do searches on individuals whose names come up on the JFK Forum from time to time. While I do not have John Armstrong's "Harvey and Lee" I seem to constantly stumble upon material from it and references to it on other JFK Forums. My point is that some of the material referenced if accurate I think, has a place in JFK Research in general. My overall attitude in researching the assassination is that "nothing should be ruled out" when approaching possible "angles" to the assassination. But Armstrong's premise is even hard for me to swallow. Still I would like to mention that I have read portions of his stuff in other forums, which present IMO valid "leads." For example, On excerpt describes an Oswald impersonator with Ruby somewhere in the New Orleans area prior to November 22, 63, it mentions that this person who claimed to be Oswald had a tatoo on his left arm. I don't believe a JFK researcher should be guilty of "throwing the baby out with the bath water." One does not have to accept Armstrong's premise of a "Harvey and Lee" to utilize the information contained in his research that is credible. Anyone? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> First off, there were in fact two (2) M. Oswald's. Margaret Oswald, who was the first wife of Robert E. Lee Oswald (Sr.), and who did not intitially change her name upon divorce from R.E. L. Oswald (Sr.) & Marguerite Oswald, who was the second wife of Robert E. Lee Oswald (Sr.) Secondly, a little known fact! It was not uncommon practice in the South, and especially in large cities such as New Orleans, where the proprietor actually knew the family, to issue two checks to a person who worked for them. 1 check in the person's name. 1 check in a minor child's name. This was done for a combination of reasons which included: 1. The employer could actually report a lower salary to the IRS for the actual worker, while in fact paying the worker a portion of their salary through the name of a dependent child. 2. Since the child was usually only a "part time" worker, certain tax advantages could be taken advantage of by reporting a portion of the actual workers income as having been earned by a dependent child. And, even if Income Taxes were withheld on the child, they would normally be all returned at the end of the tax year when a return was filed. 3. When "Worker's Compensation" laws came into effect, this arrangement was of benefit to the Employer as the worker was reportedly earning a considerably lower income than was truely the case. Therefore, that "contribution" made by the employer for any worker compensation insurance was lower, based on the reported lower salary of the employee. And, part-time employees were not required to be fully covered under worker's comp. 4. In maintaing a "low income", the worker could frequently qualify for various assistance programs such as the old "commodities" assistance which was given to low income families. Therefore, just because there may be indications of checks made out to Lee Harvey Oswald, when he was or was not there to collect and receive said monies, is not of itself full indication of some giant espionage game. Merely those games that people play in order to avoid giving some of their income to the IRS, as well as still qualifying for various federal subsidy programs. Tom <{POST_SNAPBACK}> At the risk of being patronizing, I dare anyone to read the following information and come to the conclusion that John Armstrong's research should not be looked at carefully. http://home.wi.rr.com/harveyandlee/NID97.htm After looking at it, I believe it has solved the mystery of Dallas Police Documents referring to Oswald's arrest "in the balcony" of the Texas Theatre conclusively when combined with the story of Bernard Haire, who owned Bernies Hobbie Shop close to the Theater. He saw the Dallas Police take a white male, approximately 25 years of age, dark hair, wearing a pull over shirt and dark pants, out the rear of the theater, place him in a police car and drive off. Concession stand operator W.H. "Butch" Burroughs stated that "Oswald entered the theater shortly after 1:00 P.M. but that "someone slipped into the theatre at 1:35." After Oswald had already been arrested and was in custody at Dallas Police Headquarters, shortly after 2:00 p.m. Mr. T.F. White saw a man he later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald sitting in a car, with the engine running, behind a large billboard sign in the El Chico parking lot. This was six blocks from the Texas Theater. As White approached the car, the man sped off throwing gravel with his rear tires. The license plates, whose number White wrote down, belonged a vehicle owned by Collins Radio employee Carl Mather. Mather was the best friend of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit. Mather, unknown to the Warren Commission, was granted immunity and interviewed by the HSCA. His interview remains classified I do not accept Armstrong's premise of his "Harvey and Lee" theory; but having said that his research "appears" to have an impact on almost every major aspect of the assassination including two key areas that now appear in a completely new light. 1. Marita Lorenz's testimony of the "Miami to Dallas caravan" appears extremely compelling for most researchers until she mentions the 'Ozzie' character as being with Sturgis, herself and the others. But what if there was someone who did resemble Oswald strongly enough to be mistaken for him, then the story IMO takes on a different appearance altogether. 2. An example of Marina's questionable integrity and unexplained intentions surfaced recently. Jeremy Gunn, of the Records Review Board, called Marina and requested the release of Oswald' tax returns. Marina replied "I have no problem releasing tax records and I will agree to have them released to journalists who will publish them". Journalists, is she kidding? How can we possibly determine the legitimacy of records of questionable origin casually submitted to journalists? Records Review Board Chairman John Tunheim and Marina were together on the Oprah Winfrey show. When asked Judge Tunheim asked Marina to release Oswald's tax returns, Marina said they were not important and changed the subject. With reference to the last paragraph, is it possible that Marina knows that if Oswald's tax records were "released in toto" that it would blow the lid on the Kennedy assassination revealing that there is a massive discrepancy regarding his lifetime earnings?

Being a devotee of the Internet as a means of quickly identifying Warren Commission, HSCA and ARRB Documents, I also will do searches on individuals whose names come up on the JFK Forum from time to time. While I do not have John Armstrong's "Harvey and Lee" I seem to constantly stumble upon material from it and references to it on other JFK Forums. My point is that some of the material referenced if accurate I think, has a place in JFK Research in general. My overall attitude in researching the assassination is that "nothing should be ruled out" when approaching possible "angles" to the assassination. But Armstrong's premise is even hard for me to swallow. Still I would like to mention that I have read portions of his stuff in other forums, which present IMO valid "leads." For example, On excerpt describes an Oswald impersonator with Ruby somewhere in the New Orleans area prior to November 22, 63, it mentions that this person who claimed to be Oswald had a tatoo on his left arm. I don't believe a JFK researcher should be guilty of "throwing the baby out with the bath water." One does not have to accept Armstrong's premise of a "Harvey and Lee" to utilize the information contained in his research that is credible. Anyone?

My recollection about Connally's daughter is that she was not a suicide, but was shot by her husband in a domestic dispute. Her husband was the son of a former FBI man. Jack <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Love this thread, IMO and based on the statements of Jerry Bruno re: conflicts setting the motorcade route, it appears Connally was much more involved with the fateful decisions about the route than the average researcher realized. I think it is also interesting to mention that Connally left the Democratic Party and became a Republican before his political career ended, as wll as being a member of the Suite 8-F Group and tied to the Johnson tainted vote scandal in Jim Wells County in 1948. But back to the salient points on this thread, regarding the motorcade route and potential other areas which tie-in, I suggest those who have posted to this thread look at the JFK Forum Index listing for Harry Holmes (Postal Inspector)who viewed the assassination through 7 1/2 by 50 binoculars at the Terminal Annex Bdlg and was also an FBI Informant who sat in on Oswald's interrogation. As for the need for a second patsy I think Oswald's friend "Buell Wesley Frazier" got tied up in some sort of "problem" with the FBI regarding a .303 Rifle. My guess is that he was threatened by the FBI to become part of the lone-nut advocate camp, if he didn't want to go down with the ship alongside Lee Harvey himself.

I have my own ideas about "who killed JFK" just like everybody else. While I do have definitive ideas, in this type of format, I would use the term "structural hypothesis" for elaborating viewpoints. The reason being is that I believe the main error people make in researching the JFK assassination is having a concrete idea or belief about the who, what, how and why and "tailoring their exposition of facts to 'fit' that scenario." My main structural hypothesis is that there was a one-time "overlapping" of different groups that all wanted Kennedy dead, not in the manner presented by Oliver Stone's JFK but something similar. Three Dimensional Chess is a pursuit of very cerebral individuals, and I like that analogy for analyzing the assassination. On one level is organized crime; I think the books Contract on America by David Scheim and The Kennedy Contract: The Mafia Plot to Assassinate the President by John Davis prove conclusively that there is extensive evidence that points to involvement by organized crime, the former even providing records of telephone calls by Jack Ruby to the home of Eliz. Matthews ex-wife of Russell Matthews, an associate of Santos Trafficante, and calls to Marcello Lt. Nofio Pecora, Irwin Weiner, Lenny Patrick and Dusty Miller a Teamsters Union Rep.; visits to Johnny Roselli (twice, two mos. before 11-22-63), as well as a visit to Frank Caracci, a Carlos Marcello associate. On the second level are the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, CIA, FBI, Secret Service and individual members such as then Vice-President LBJ and even John Connally. I personally suspect involvement or, at least knowledge aforethought by Dean Rusk, Allen Dulles, E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, Charles and Earle Cabell, George H.W. Bush, McGeorge Bundy, David Atlee Phillips and Ruth and Michael Paine. I do not have factual evidence in naming these individuals, and do not pretend to possess same. This is the most problematic area in solving the case, due to the intransigence of the US Govt. in the name of "National Security." Note I am not implying a massive interlocking assassination conspiracy by all of the above just the potential involvement which circumstantial evidence at least hints at. On the third level are those pesky anti-Castro Cubans, they hang out at Hickory Hill with RFK, they are cavorting with Oswald and preparing for a post Bay of Pig's invasion that never took place. (I do believe that Angel and Leopoldo were an integral part of the process of setting up Oswald and that they were "posing" as Cuban intelligence agents when in reality they were bona-fide anti-Castro Cuban's probably affiliated with either the DRE and/or Alpha 66 whether the "Leon Oswald" at Sylvia Odio's was the REAL LHO or not.) If I were to name names on strictly a conjectural basis as being 'part of the plot to assassinate JFK' the names would be Rolando Masferrer, Angel and Leopodo, Jack Ruby, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, Allen Dulles and some other individuals. I do not feel comfortable mentioning outright. I also believe that research has proven that the CIA was penetrated big-time by Soviet intelligence and that the government "cover-up" may have as much to do with 'embarrassing facts about intelligence-related ineptness as hiding the truth about who killed JFK. Just some food for thought. Naming the shooters is also problematic and the plethora of names speculated indicates such; to me identifying the shooters is secondary to convictions for those who plotted the murder. I have no interest in wasting my time re; the Gerald Posner "faction" and do not care how that makes anyone feel. Last time I looked it was still a free country, but I wouldn't stake my life on it.

I couldn't agree more, it might worth a reminder that Mark Lane successfully defended Liberty Lobby against a lawsuit filed by His Huntliness Himself, the big victory for Lane was he proved that Hunt has lied, changed stories and brought people out of the woodwork that never had testified concerning his whereabouts previously (The subject came up in the Rockefeller Commission Hearings as well) and he still couldn't wiggle off the hook. As an aside, during the hearings Hunt admitted that his own children had issues concerning his whereabouts on 11-22, which is all the more interesting when you consider that THAT WAS HIS MAIN ALIBI for a couple of decades!! P.S. There is a story that Ruth Paine's daughter has "issues" about Ruth's place in the Oswald story which allegedly have caused serious problems in their relationship as well. It makes me think that these people might not be averse to "talking about it" if it was done in the right way.

Can you give any more information on these documents, Lee they're very interesting.

Thanks Tim, as regards your "Quibble"(what a wonderful word!)Your right, but they sure aint gonna talk about it <{POST_SNAPBACK}> My question to Joan concerns whether she has explored the research indicating that when Oswald was in Mexico City that he was in the company of an individual named Steve or Larry Kennan, a Philadelphia Quaker whom Oswald allegedly met and associated with at Sanborns Restaurant next to the American Embassy in Mexico. It has been suggested by a JFK researcher named Bill Kelly that Keenan may be referred to in CIA documents as LICOZY-3 who is thought to have been a Philadelphia student who was recruited by the Soviets while in Mexico City. It is also speculated that the Quaker connection may tie in with Ruth Avery Paine and 5 listings in Oswalds notebook with Philadelphia addresses, which happens to be the headquarters for the Quaker community and which has ties to colleges such as the one's attended by Michael Paine and Priscilla MacMillan, whom also had ties to the World Federalists an organization founded by Cord Meyer- CIA/IO/DCD

John, these are the same historians who are still leaning towards the "Oswald-did-it" scenario. They are by nature conservative. They refuse to believe what was not so hard for the Senators of the intelligence committee--people who actually had dealings with the CIA-- to believe--that the CIA during the cold war was given a free reign to beat the Reds by any means necessary, and that they failed to respond appropriately when Kennedy came along and wanted to bring them under his control. Since the CIA blamed the interference of the White House and State Department for the Bay of Pigs, they just stopped telling the White House and the State Department what they were up to. It's really that simple. The idea that William Harvey would lie to protect Bobby Kennedy's reputation is absolutely ridiculous. By ALL reports, Harvey hated Kennedy with a burning passion. No way in hell would he allow himself and Helms take the heat if Bobby was responsible. It's amazing that someone like yourself who is so willing to consider that men like Helms and Harvey would kill Kennedy is so unwilling to consider that they would refuse to take the blame for decisions He made, as if they considered their highest duty the protection of the Presidency at all costs, while reserving the right to kill the President if need be. I asure you these men placed the CIA and the Cult of Intelligence on a throne much higher than the Presidency. I'm wondering if we're hitting a cultural divide here. The President is not supposed to be a King and all the members of government are not supposed to risk their careers to protect him. The book title "All the President's Men" was intended to point out the misguided loyalties of the House of Nixon. Arthur Schlesinger wrote on this phenomena and called it "The Imperial Presidency." The point is, however, that, outside of McCone, who was kept out of the loop, the Kennedys had no loyal "President's men" in the CIA, only pissed-off cold warriors with an agenda all their own.. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well it turns out that there is yet another "discussion" about assassinating Castro which took place this time and involved some quite interesting people in New Orleans in late May or early June 1962; Seven people - George DeMohrenschildt, Guy Bannister, Gerry Patrick Hemming, Frank Bartes, Larry LaBorde, Luis Rabell and his son-in-law. The discussion on the table was assassinating one or more Cuban high government officials ostensibly Fidel, Raul and Che Guevera. This meeting took place at Rabell's house, with an attache case full of stacks of $100 bills. This information is at http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/hsca...mming_0001a.htm I apologize if this is old news, it wasn't old news to me.

Read at your own risk. Before perusing this article I will mention that it is from the website of one Lyndon LaRouche, who has more than once been called into question regarding the credibilty of his "information" not to mention his views on geopolitical history, still everything I read seems credible. Note - The only reason I posted this is for the bio information on Porter Goss. From Executive Intelligence Review "The Coming Senate Battle: Open the Porter Goss File Part 1 by Jeffrey Steinberg, with Michele Steinberg and Scott Thompson In his damning book on the Bush-Cheney Administration, Worse Than Watergate, former Nixon White House General Counsel John W. Dean reported that Vice President Dick Cheney has been obsessed for decades with the mid-1970s Church and Pike Committees, whose pioneering work led to the first serious Congressional oversight of the intelligence community. As far as the Vice President is concerned, those investigations, and the Congressional oversight committees that emerged from the process, represented a dark moment, in which the powers of secret government were undermined. As Dean put it: "Cheney has long believed that Congress has no business telling Presidents what to do, particularly in national security matters." Cheney's refusal to turn over a shred of paper from his White House Energy Task Force; his secret intelligence organization buried in the Pentagon bureaucracy; and his trips to CIA headquarters to stare down analysts who dared to challenge his Iraq WMD Big Lies, all underscore the Veep's obsession with government-by-secret-cabal. It is no wonder that Cheney's choice as the new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) is Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.). Goss not only presided over a vicious partisan coverup of the Iraq pre-war intelligence fraud—a fraud run out of Cheney's office—through his position as chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Goss's own career as a 1960s-era Central Intelligence Agency Clandestine Service officer is a throwback to the pre-Church Committee, pre-Watergate days, when the intelligence community, under the Allen Dulles/James Angleton legacy, ran amok. Playing Politics With National Security Sources in the U.S. intelligence community and the Congress identify three reasons that Cheney chose Goss for the DCI post, and is now intent on ramming his confirmation through the Senate immediately after Labor Day. First, the White House is desperate to "plug the leaks" at the CIA. The Agency has been scapegoated by the White House and its Congressional toadies, like Goss and California Republican Duncan Hunter, for the 9/11 attacks and for the failure to find the so-called Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Senior career intelligence officers are furious, according to the sources, at the White House's blame game, and they do not intend to sit by and allow this propaganda scam to go unchallenged. The fact that evidence points to Cheney as the culprit behind the July 2003 leaking of the identity of CIA "non-official cover" officer Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak, only deepens the intelligence community's fury at the Bush White House. And Goss's personal role in attempting to prevent an independent counsel probe into the Plame leak just adds to the volatility of the issue. The spy community knows that evidence easily accessible in the public domain reveals that the President, the Vice President, and the Attorney General repeatedly ignored CIA and FBI warnings about an imminent terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the Spring-Summer 2001, including the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing item, talking about al-Qaeda hijacking plots and surveillance of targets in Washington and New York. Likewise, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's recent report documented that the majority of intelligence community analysts disputed the Iraq WMD threat; and former DCI George Tenet told an audience at Georgetown University earlier this year that Iraq "never posed an imminent threat" to the United States—and he told Bush and Cheney that on repeated occasions. When the CIA General Counsel rushed through approval of a book, Imperial Hubris, by a senior Agency counterterrorism analyst, writing anonymously, which tore into the Administration's failed Iraq and Afghanistan policies, Cheney and company moved to pre-empt further damaging material from surfacing from the Agency—by naming Goss. Goss's first mission will be to plug the leaks—at least through November. Second, the Bush-Cheney campaign is growing worried that the President could lose the must-win state of Florida in November, and the Goss nomination is aimed at bolstering enthusiasm among the Cuban-American right-wing community in Miami for a second Bush-Cheney term. Goss is the darling of the southern Florida right wing, and has been, dating back to his CIA days from 1961-71, when he participated in the efforts to assassinate or overthrow Fidel Castro in Havana. Third, and most important for Cheney, Goss is the personification of the rogue spook, serving at the pleasure of the President, and behind the back of the Congress and the American people. In Cheney's warped mind, Goss is going to turn the clock back to the bad-old-days before Watergate and intelligence oversight. JM/WAVE and Mongoose In 1975, the Church Committee investigating the activities of the U.S. intelligence community issued its final report. Among the revelations contained in the multi-volume document were the first unclassified accounts of the CIA's program to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. "United States government personnel plotted to kill Castro from 1960 to 1965," the report stated. "American underworld figures and Cubans hostile to Castro were used in these plots, and were provided encouragement and material support by the United States." Those anti-Castro operations were run out of a large Miami CIA station, under the code name JM/WAVE. At the height of JM/WAVE, the station employed over 200 CIA officers, and ran a network of over 2,200 Cuban exiles. It maintained an armada of boats, for raids on Cuba, and a small fleet of aircraft for other missions. One sub-feature of the anti-Castro efforts, Operation Mongoose, involved assassination plots against the Cuban leader. Porter Goss was a young CIA officer assigned to JM/WAVE. Goss had, by his own accounts, been recruited to the CIA while in his third year at Yale University. His two years of military service were, in all likelihood, actually CIA assignments. In 1961, Goss was officially brought into the CIA and sent to JM/WAVE. He later would continue to participate in the anti-Castro operations, based out of CIA stations in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. Later, Goss was sent to London and then Paris, where he was involved in the infiltration of labor organizations, until he developed a near-fatal infection and was forced, officially, to retire from the spy world. In his role in JM/WAVE, Goss served with some of the CIA's most hardened Cold Warriors, including Miami Station Chief Theodore G. Shackley, later a central figure in the Iran/Contra debacle; Felix Rodriguez, another leading Iran-Contra player; and Frank Sturgis, later of Watergate break-in infamy. Indeed, from the Bay of Pigs and the Operation Mongoose Castro assassination plots of the 1960s, to the Watergate Plumbers Unit of the 1970s, to the Iran-Contra narco-financed insurgency of the 1980s, this circle of right-wing CIA operators and closely allied Cuban exiles, has represented an ugly stain on the American political landscape. Is this what Porter Goss brings to the table? The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence cannot avoid the details of Goss's CIA career, in deliberating on his nomination." Part 2 by Michele Steinberg On Aug. 3, in a strategic study of intelligence reform, released by LaRouche PAC, former Democratic presidential primary candidate Lyndon LaRouche, wrote, "The fact that there are some rather large loopholes in the present organization of the U.S.A.'s intelligence-security-system, is no excuse for the current tendency to plunge, stupidly and recklessly, into rushed efforts to create an intelligence "czar." Idiot! Get your fat foot off that gas pedal! There is no need to rush into surrendering the powers of government to some alleged superman. The U.S. does not need a Heinrich Himmler." "In fact," LaRouche continued, "our nation does not have any need for the re-election of that pathetic George W. Bush who proposes that, he, now, shall create the Great Golem of national security, the man of mud, to save us all.... Better leave the decisions about intelligence reorganization to the leadership of a new President, until a new day, come January 2005, after the completed work of the "9/11 Commission" has dealt with those most crucial issues not yet touched upon by its presently uncompleted investigation." Yet, on Aug. 27, President George W. Bush floored the gas pedal and signed four executive orders governing the CIA and national intelligence collection, which vastly increase the power of the Director of the CIA, creating in effect, an interim National Director of Intelligence—who will be his nominee for CIA Director, Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), the former head of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). Goss has functioned for the past three years as a hit-man for Dick Cheney, in protecting the neo-conservative cabal that runs between the Office of the Vice President and the Pentagon, where it is headed by Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Doug Feith. These new powers make it imperative to block the confirmation of Goss as CIA director. Under the new Bush Executive Orders, Goss would be in charge not only of the CIA, but also of intelligence allocations of the Defense Department's major agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the massive National Security Agency, making him the equivalent of the "intelligence czar." Not only are Washington critics of the Iraq war wary that Goss would continue to mold intelligence to the policy wishes of warmonger Cheney, but they consider Goss's appointment to the position of "national director of intelligence" to be highly dangerous. As the record shows, not only has Goss gone along with Cheney's imperial war plans, he has been an accomplice of the Cheney networks that are responsible for the worst intelligence abuses since the Iran-Contra scandals that forced then-President Ronald Reagan to "clean house," at the National Security Council, and which led to the indictments of NSC chief, John Poindexter, his deputy Robert McFarlane, then-State Dept. Assistant Secretary Elliot Abrams, NSC staffer Oliver North, former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense General Dick Secord (Ret.), and many others. Iran-Contra was the worst set of offenses since Watergate, but President Ronald Reagan, unlike Richard Nixon, made a show of cleaning house. This time around, says John Dean, the former White House counsel who was inside Nixon's Watergate debacle, the Administration abuses that started the Iraq war are worse than Watergate. Could Goss Be Confirmed? Hearings are slated to begin on Sept. 8, according to Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and so far, the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate is headed towards giving Porter Goss a "free pass." It would be as grave an error, and threat to civil liberties of Americans, for Democrats to confirm Goss, as was the confirmation of John Ashcroft in January 2001, when enough votes existed to block the nomination through a filibuster. There is serious opposition to the Goss nomination. Sen. John D. Rockefeller III, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, is opposed to the nomination—for good reason. Rockefeller said in a July 14 article in the popular Washington journal The Hill, that, "We need a director that is ... unquestionably independent.... [A]n individual with unimpeachable non-partisan national security credentials and the stature to bring about a much needed reform of our intelligence agencies." Former CIA Director, George Tenet, has said that any attempt to "rewire" the intelligence community in the aftermath of the report of the 9/11 Commission which found that there were many warnings—before Sept. 11—about a threatened attack by Osama Bin Laden, would only cause more harm to the counter-terrorism effort. And, Sen. Roberts himself, who is now in a mad rush to not only confirm Goss, but to introduce legislation that would rip apart the CIA—the only intelligence collection agency that actually consistently opposed the Cheney cabal's "evidence" that Iraq was an imminent threat—had said, in a July 14 interview with The Hill, that he agreed with Rockefeller that "we ought to be very deliberate and very careful." With more than a half-dozen still incomplete investigations into the misuse of intelligence, the leaking of secrets, and the abuse of power by the Administration in the run-up to the Iraq war, and federal grand juries looking into the leaking of secret information to Iran and to Israel, and another set of grand juries looking into illegal profiteering by Dick Cheney's Halliburton company, and its subsidiary, KBR, this is no time to sweep Porter Goss's complicity in the Cheney coup d'etat, under the rug. Unfit to Serve Appointing Porter Goss as CIA director is bad enough, but allowing him to become the interim "intelligence czar" as well, is an even greater threat to national security of the United States. Most of the intelligence abuses by the CIA and intelligence community, identified by the 9/11 Commission investigation occurred during Goss's watch as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. But not only was Goss an ineffective and dishonest watchdog, he also has been an accomplice in the Cheney-Pentagon cabal's crimes. These include: using deception to terrify the American population and Congress about a danger from Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass-destruction; using Pentagon cubby-holes to set up units that would fabricate through "re-analysis," an accusation that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were behind the 9/11 irregular warfare attacks; using the Pentagon to launch illegal covert operations to destabilize, and begin undeclared U.S. wars against, Syria and Iran; and the latest scandal being investigated—the unauthorized distribution of a top-secret policy discussion paper to agents of Israel. There is no question that Goss is unfit to serve, and the damage he has done to the intelligence community of the United States goes way back—at least 8 years—even before Goss became Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. One of the first areas that should be explored about Goss is his cozy relationship to Newt Gingrich's powerful political action committee, GOPAC, and whether Goss blocked a broad inquiry into Gingrich's financial affairs. In 1996, the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune, Goss's "hometown" newspaper, reported that it was widely believed that Goss had a "conflict of interest" when he became head of the House Ethics Subcommittee, investigating Gingrich's misuse of tax exempt funds. GOPAC, the multi-million dollar organization that was at the center of Gingrich's fascist policy machine, was one of the major subjects of the investigation, and Goss was a GOPAC crony. The Sarasota newspaper reported that in 1994, Goss, a Connecticut "blueblood," had in fact contributed the maximum amount allowed—$5,000, and that Goss had deep family ties to GOPAC's nominal founder, "Pete" DuPont, a Gingrich co-thinker who had run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1992. DuPont's parents are Porter Goss's godparents, and "Pete's" sister, Michelle DuPont, is married to Porter's brother. When calls went out for Goss to remove himself from the Gingrich investigation, he adamantly refused, insisting that his involvement with Gingrich and GOPAC in no way compromised his ability to investigate Newt. Goss also insisted that his ties to GOPAC did not meet the "severe" Congressional test of a true conflict of interest. But the Congressional Accountability Project, a watchdog organization, strongly disagreed; its director, Gary Ruskin, warned that Goss's control over the committee, its staff, and his "power over questioning" would undermine "any confidence" the public could have in the investigation. Gingrich survived the potentially fatal investigation, after the committee chief investigator rejected a petition by then-Congressman David Bonior (D-Mich.) to broaden the investigation into all of GOPAC's activities. Following Newt's unsurprising survival, and in the midst of the Ethics Subcommittee investigation, Gingrich awarded Goss with a high honor: He appointed him chairman of the powerful House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Goss's next claim to fame was a vicious attack, in 1996, on Sen. John Kerry's Senate investigation of the involvement in narcotics trafficking of the Nicaragua rebel force, known as the "Contras." The charges that Kerry had investigated, later resurfaced along with new evidence in 1996, after a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury exposed the fact that convicted California crack cocaine-traffickers had been leaders in the Nicaraguan rebel group, the FDN, and part of Ollie North's and the NSC's secret Contra support operations. Appearing on a CNN talk show hosted by Jesse Jackson, Goss attacked Senator Kerry, and President Bill Clinton, with a vengeance, using two techniques that have become his hallmark: First, he lies that no evidence exists, when it clearly does, and second, he denounces the charges as "partisan," and "politically motivated" electioneering. The transcript of the Sept. 30, 1996 CNN show, "Both Sides," has Goss, backed up by Tucker Carlson, the neo-con clown who writes for the Weekly Standard, jumping down the throat of Prof. John Newman, an historian from the University of Maryland, over the Kerry Committee's findings: Goss: ...Senator John Kerry in the mid '80s conducted quite an expensive investigation and came up with absolutely no evidence. And despite repeated attempts before then and since then, nobody has come up with any hard facts.... Carlson: ...My point is that no evidence has ever arisen that shows the CIA condoned drug dealing of any kind. Newman: That's not true. And furthermore, Senator Claiborne Pell and Senator Lugar, who asked for information from the CIA and from the Justice Dept., were denied that information. That's in the record. You can read it for yourself. Don't trust me. Get the Kerry report and find out for yourself how they were stonewalled.... Goss: You don't have the facts. That's your problem. Newman: I'm not going to prejudge—I have lots of facts. Goss: You have innuendo. You have supposition. You are trying to stretch something that doesn't quite stretch. I would suggest that you look to why the motive and the timing of this now. There are many who say that this is happening because the drug problem in this country is bad. It has gotten worse under the Clinton Administration. And this is just a diversion to take attention away from the failure of the Clinton Administration in the war on drugs. Prof. Newman was right about the Kerry report, "Drugs, Law Enforcement, and Foreign Policy," filed in December 1988, and Goss was dead wrong. The evidence of drug trafficking by Contra members, guerrillas, and pilots is all over the Kerry report's several volumes. Two excerpts from the final report suffice: On July 24, 1986, the State Dept. issued a report to Congress concerning allegations in the press about drug-running by the Contra resistance. The State Dept. said, "...the available evidence points to involvement with drug traffickers by a limited number of persons having various kinds of affiliations with, or political sympathies for, the resistance groups.... "A year later, in August 1987, the CIA's Central American Task Force Chief became the first U.S. official to revise that assessment to suggest instead that the links between the Contras ... to narcotics trafficking was in fact far broader than that acknowledged by the State Dept.... "Appearing before the Iran-Contra Committees, the CIA Central American Task Force chief testified: 'With respect to [drug trafficking by] the Resistance Forces ... it is not a couple of people. It is a lot of people.' "The CIA's Chief of the Central American Task Force went on to say: 'We knew that everybody around Pastora [the leading Contra figure] was involved in cocaine.... His staff and friends [redacted] they were drug smugglers or involved in drug smuggling.' " (pp. 37-38). Another section of the report says: "As DEA officials testified last July before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Lt. Col. Oliver North suggested to the DEA in June, 1985 that $1.5 million in drug money ... be provided to the Contras." The suggestion was rejected by the DEA (p. 41). Goss's denial of such a clear public record is mind-boggling, but his "deny and attack" mode has made him a perfect extension of the neo-conservatives' conspiracy to defraud Congress and the American people. Porter Flip-Flops While Goss was out to prevent an investigation of the Ollie North-Contra drug running in 1996, the following year, in 1997, Goss took the exactly opposite position, opening a bizarre national security investigation into White House mishandling of classified material. Goss claimed that the Democratic National Committee's breaking of contact with Grigory Loutchansky, a wealthy, publicly identified Russian national with reputed organized crime connections, was a case where classified information was misused. The DNC had disinvited Loutchansky from a fundraising event, and Goss demanded to know if secrets from the "intelligence community," or the "U.S. Secret Service" had been used to tip the DNC off about Loutchansky's background. "If this disclosure actually took place, it constitutes a felony," Goss railed. "There has been a pattern of inattention to what I call access to classified information ... throughout this Administration since Day One," adding that his experience as a CIA operative made him "sensitive" to the consequences of mishandling secret intelligence data. Goss explained, "an associate of mine was blown up in a car as a result of an indiscreet comment in Washington." This might be a commendable concern for a candidate to head the intelligence services of the United States, except that in Goss's case, it is completely phony. Compare Goss's zeal against Clinton White House leaks to the protection racket he ran for Dick Cheney in the leak of the identity of Valerie Plame, an agent of the CIA's clandestine services. First, Goss denounced the publicity around the Plame leak as more "partisan politics" than a "worry about national security." He went on to tell the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, in an Oct. 3, 2003 story, that he would only allow a House Committee investigation of a "serious allegation," which he said must be "a willful—and I emphasize willful, inadvertent is something else—willful disclosure [of classified information], and I haven't seen any evidence yet." Returning to his characteristic hatred of Clinton, Goss added, "Somebody shows me a blue dress and some DNA, [and] I'll have an investigation." The truth is that Goss blocked any public investigation of the Plame leak, as he has blocked any investigation of the Abu Ghraib torture scandals in Iraq, and the less publicized torture and killings of prisoners in Afghanistan by the U.S. military. He also blocked legislation that would have authorized an investigation into "U.S. dealings with Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi." Cheney's 'Cheney' Like Dick Cheney, Goss is highly secretive, and crudely relishes political sadism. That is why he has been chosen by Cheney and Bush to be the lead attack dog against Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry on matters of intelligence. On March 10, Goss co-authored an op-ed, attacking Kerry for "leading the way to make deep and devastating cuts" in the intelligence budget after the end of the Soviet Union. On June 1, Goss was asked by the Bush-Cheney campaign to attack Kerry's foreign policy speeches, which he did for the campaign's website. How low would Goss grovel to get the CIA nomination? On June 23, vigorously campaigning to be the new CIA chief after Tenet's resignation, Pinocchio Goss was at it again, attacking Kerry on the House floor, by clownishly holding up a big sign with a quote from Kerry that questioned the growth of the intelligence apparatus after the end of the Cold War. "That was in May of 1997 from the record. I got books full of that stuff," Goss said. "There is no doubt where the record is. The Democratic Party did not support the intelligence community." Another fib by omission: Goss doesn't mention his own 1995 proposal to cut a full 20% of the CIA and intelligence community allocations over the course of 5 years, at 4% per year. Goss's devastating cuts, fortunately, were never passed. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, speaking about intelligence work, said that the truth must be surrounded "by a bodyguard of lies." Goss's profile is that his lies are directed at the American people.