William Kelly
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[...]
Sometimes you don't know if anybody is listening.
More to come,
B. Kelly
____________________
Bill Kelly...
Nice to see you here, Bill.
Will be back up and running by the 7th of December
Will drop you a note then....
Hope you having a nice set of holidays -- miss your muses re the Jersey shore....
David Healy
HELLO DAVID, GOOD TO HEAR FROM YOU. CURRENTLY HOLDED UP AT THE FAMILY LAKE HOUSE IN THE JERSEY PINES. OCCASSIONALLY (LIKE LAST NIGHT) GET DOWN THE SHORE. HERE'S SOMETHING TO MUSE OVER. BK
The 1929 Atlantic City Organized Crime Convention
By William Kelly
Atlantic City has been known as a convention town for a long time, especially since the opening of the Convention Hall in 1929, but the most significant convention the city has ever hosted didn’t meet at Convention Hall or even conventionally, and certainly didn’t abide by Roberts Rules of Order.
Before the new boardwalk hall was finished, in May 1929, organized crime bosses from around the country met in Atlantic City in what was probably the most significant conference ever held, not only because of it’s effect on the future development of the town, but because of the national impact the decisions made there had on society, not only then, but over time, up to and including today.
At the time Atlantic City was considered a “wide open” town, a place where gangsters could go to make private, if sometimes illegal investments and for sit-down mob meetings. There were a few other “wide open” cities - Miami, Las Vegas and Old Havana, but Atlantic City was special and convenient.
Atlantic City was run by one man - Enoch “Nuckey” Johnson , the local political boss who ran the town as his private domain. Like “Commodore” Lou Kinley had before him, Nuckey got a percentage of practically every business in Atlantic City, especially illegal businesses, and as the 1929 meeting took place during Prohibition, the most lucrative business at the time was the importation of smuggled liquor.
Lonnie Zwillman of North Jersey controlled most of the bootleg market, once the cases of booze from the Caribbean and Canada were transferred at sea from mother ship transports to small Chirs Craft speedboats. Once brought ashore the booze was put on waiting trucks to be transported throughout the rest of the country. It was later estimated, by the Kefauver Committee, that Zwillman’s outfit had a 65% market share of all illegal booze in North America.
But there were also illegal casinos in Atlantic City at the time, all operating openly and open to the public. And Big Time confidence men like Charlie Gondorff (of The Sting fame) were allowed to run Big Store Con games, as long as long as they only hit on transients and didn’t make marks of any local citizens. The cops were on the take, the booze flowed, gambling proliferated openly and Atlantic City was like Port Royale of the Pirate’s Caribbean. Booze, casino gambling, the boardwalk and beach, it didn’t even seem like there was a Depression going on.
Things appeared quite normal on May 12th, 1929 when newlyweds Meyer and Anna Citron Lansky checked into one of the city’s finer boardwalk hotels. They were assigned the Honeymoon Penthouse with it’s panoramic view of the ocean and boardwalk.
Which hotel they checked into is not recorded for history, but you can be sure it was one owned by Jewish businessmen, as all the first class hotels at the time were owned by Jews or Quakers, and each served a different clientele. That’s a fact that came into play the very next day when Alphonese “Scarface” Capone stepped off a train and took a cab to one of the city’s classier hotels. Although he entered town unnoticed, and he signed into the hotel under an assumed name, his cover would soon be blown, the city of Atlantic City would be shaken upside down and the nation would rattle with the aftereffects for decades.
Snickering to his lieutenants as he signed the fictitious name to the register, Capone got a smile from Frank Nitti, Murry Humphries, Jake Guzik and Frank Rioi, but the joke quickly turned sour when the somewhat naive and strictly formal desk clerk looked at the name and politely informed Capone that, “I’m sorry sir, but this hotel does not serve those of your persuasion. My I suggest you try the hotel just down the street.”
This was Atlantic City, New Jersey, probably the only place in America where “Scarface” Al Capone could mingle with the masses and go unrecognized. He did however, have a friend in his old pal Nuckey Johnson. Capone had been Johnson’s gracious host two years earlier when Nuckey went to Chicago and was supplied with ringside seats to the Jack Dempsy-Gene Tunney heavyweight fight – the famous battle of the “long count’ bout.
Now Capone was in Atlantic City to meet with Meyer Lansky and other mob bosses. They came to Atlantic City because Nuckey Johnson controlled the town and they were assured they wouldn’t be subjected to the police hassles the Sicilian Mafia guys were subjected to in Cleveland a few weeks earlier.
Although Nuckey Johnson couldn’t protect Capone from some ethnic embarrassment, he did have such tight control over all facets of the city’s operations that, unless they robbed a bank or made a scene, known gangsters from out of town didn’t have to worry about being picked up for questioning by the police. Capone made a scene.
Told by a hotel clerk that he couldn’t check in because he signed his name under a wrong ethnic persuasion, Capone’s famous temper flared, and after a burst of obscenities and the trashing of some lobby furniture, Nuckey Johnson quickly learned that Al Capone was in town. Moving quickly to meet him, Capone and his entourage were heading south on Pacific Avenue when they were intercepted by Johnson’s convoy of dull, black limos heading the other way. They met in the middle of the street, blocked traffic for a few minutes as Capone emerged from his cab, cigar in hand, and gave Nuckey an obscenity laced public verbal lashing, letting off steam from the hotel desk incident.
Once appeased by Johnson, always the gracious host, they hugged and patted each other on the back and adjourned to the back of Nuckey’s limo. After seeing that Capone and his people had proper accommodations at the right hotel, Johnson and Capone were later seen taking in the tourists sights together and strolling down the world famous boardwalk.
Johnson and Capone then had dinner in the Italian “Ducktown” neighborhood, not far from the recently completed Convention Hall - the new auditorium which was then the largest of its kind in the world, with the biggest stage and the largest pipe organ as well. While it established Atlantic City as a major convention town on the East Coast, it’s facilities were not to be used by the guys who started checking in behind Lansky and Capone.
From Cleveland came Al “the Owl” Polizzi, one of the Sicilians hassled by cops at the earlier regional sit-down a few weeks earlier. Also from Cleveland was Moe Dalitz of the Mayfield Road Gang and his bootleg companions, Morris Kleinman, Sam Tucker and Louis Rothkopft. Other gangsters who have been identified as having attended the Atlantic City meeting include Charles “King” Solomon from Boston, Joe Bernstein from Detroit, and Joe Lanza from Kansas City, all of whom came with their henchmen in tow.
From North Jersey there was Abner “Longie” Zwillman, who controlled most of the New Jersey bootleg shipments. Philadelphia was well represented by Harry “Nig Rosen” Stromberg, Max “Boo Boo” Huff, Sam Lezar and Charles Schwarts. By far, the biggest delegation came down from New York, and consisted of Frank Costello, Author “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Joe Adonis, Salvadore “Lucky” Luciano and Meyer Lansky.
Anne Citron Lansky got angry the next morning when she read in the morning newspaper that Al Capone was in town, and knew that it had to more than just a coincidence. Her new husband couldn’t even go on his honeymoon without having business to take care of.
Born Maier Suchowljansky in Grodno, Poland in 1902, young Meyer came to the United States in 1911 with his mother, sister and younger, but bigger brother Jake. Like so many other arrivals, his birthdate was noted by immigration officials as July 4th, and he took quickly to the American dream.
Later telling Israeli journalists Uri Dan that he took to gambling early, relating an incident that occurred when he was a young boy walking down Delancy Street in Manhatten on an errand for his mother. Coming across a sidewalk craps game he quickly lost his mother’s nickel, an event that had a profound affect on his life. “What troubled me more than anything else,” Lansky said, “was that I had been a loser, and that night….I swore to myself that one day I would be a winner.”
Going back to the sidewalk craps game young Lansky watched and studied the gamblers intently, and learned when to place his bet with a sure winner. “Then I began to notice,” he said, “that the men who actually ran the dice games were only pawns…of other well dressed and prosperous men,” who he also noticed seemed to be all Italians who in turn were “servant” who were “collecting the money for somebody bigger. So it must be a very big business, gambling with nickels and dimes on the sidewalks of the Lower East Side.”
After graduating from Public School #34 in 1917, Lansky worked as an auto mechanic, and first came to the attention of the police when he was arrested for fighting with Charles Luciana and Benjamen Siegel. That was the first time he was known to have officially used the name Lansky, and after the judge listened to their story, he decided that the boys had “bugs in their heads,” which temporarily gave Lansky the nickname “Meyer the Bug,” but Siegel could never shake the name “Bugsy.”
The three boys became fast friends and developed business associations, while Luciana rose in the ranks of the Italian Mafia allied under Joe “the Boss” Masseria. They were perennially at war with another New York gang run by Salvatore Maranzano, whose henchmen picked up Luciano and took him for a ride to Statin Island where they shot him a number of times and left for dead. Luciano miraculously survived, earning him the nickname “Lucky” Luciano.
Lansky, Siegel and Luciano formed a life-long alliance with each other and established themselves on the Lower East Side as a competent and efficient guns-for-hire entrepreneurs that became known as “The Bugs and Meyer Mob,” which also included Joseph “Doc” Stacher, Joe Adonis, Abner “Longie” Zwillmen and Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer. They either escorted Zwillmen’s bootleg liquor or they hijacked any competitors who tried to muscle in on their rackets in their territory.
Philadelphia gangster “Waxy” Gordon was especially upset at the Bug and Meyer Mob for hijacking some of his truck shipments and, as with the Capone-Moran feud in Chicago, there was tension between gangs. Since Capone actually controlled only certain sections of Chicago, other Chicago gangsters also came in to the Atlantic City meeting, including Joe “Polock” Saltis and Frank “Machine Gun” McEarlane, complete with violin cases under their arms.
Other than Capone, these were mostly new names and faces in the underworld of 1929, but before long they would make their mark and become household names. The old-guard “Mustache Petes” who ran the big city rackets for the previous few decades, referred to these new, young gangsters as “The Young Turks,” but they in turn, were considered too old fashioned, narrow-minded and set in their ways to mingle with the gangsters of other nationalities and neighborhoods. The “Petes” were not even invited to this meeting.
To some, Luciano was thought to represent the New York capo de capi Guseppi “Joe the Boss” Masseria, but in retrospect, Luciano had Masseria murdered and replaced him after the protracted war that was wagged between Masseria and the other New York rackets boss Salvadore Maranzano. Masseria and Maranzano were from the Old Order and were on the way out, and The Young Turks knew it.
One member of the old school who was invited and did attend the Atlantic City conclave was John Torrio, who was born in Naples and was one of the first immigrants to leave the notorious “Five Points” section of Brooklyn to go to Chicago, where he ran his uncle’s whorehouse. After killing his uncle and setting up his own numbers racket, Torrio brought in Al Capone from the old neighborhood to be his enforcer.
Torrio, who didn’t drink or smoke, was Capone’s mentor and one of the oldest and wisest of the delegates at the Atlantic City convention. He would play a significant role by making key policy decisions concerning the promotion of other vices, most notably gambling.
While there would be other, more notorious meetings of mobsters – Havana, 1946, the 1957 Apalachin, New York meeting that was broken up by local police, a New York restaurant sit down that was also busted by the cops, the 1929 meeting in Atlantic City was most significant because it established a new policy of inter-city-gang cooperation on a nationwide basis.
It was not a question of who was at Atlantic City, but who was not there. Besides the Mustache Petes from the Old Order of things, Bugs Moran was the most notable big name absentee. He was left back in Chicago to lick his wounds and regroup his forces after the disastrous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
As the most blatant gangland mass murder in history, the massacre called attention to the mobsters and put pressure on them from the public, the press, politicians and the police. It became the most influential factor in persuading the factional mob leaders of the necessity for a meeting to hash things out. Rather than let the situation get completely out of hand and reach a level of violence that would force the authorities to take action, the gangsters decided to sit down at the same table for the first time, discuss their mutual problems and arrange for an agreeable solution like normal businessmen.
Although most of the published sources place the main gathering of gangsters at the President Hotel on the Boardwalk, the large number of delegates made it necessary for them to meet in smaller caucus to discuss the topics on the agenda. Pushed along the boardwalk in wicker-rolling chairs, they didn’t talk in front of the push cart operators, but at the end of the boardwalk, like other tourists in from the big city, they took off their shoes and socks, rolled up the cuffs of their pants and waded in the shallow surf like any normal day-tripper. With their conversations muffled by the sounds of the surf breaking, the mobsters plotted strategy and began the long term planning that would control organized crime activities for the next fifty years.
Since minutes of the meetings were not transcribed for posterity, legend has it that the order of business was basically two fold. For one, they had to agree on an amiable solution to the conflicts that erupted into mob warfare, primarily geographic turf battles. Secondly, since by then it was obvious that Prohibition would not last forever, they had to get involved in legitimate businesses as well as devise an alternative source of illegal income once Prohibition ended.
As for mob warfare, since such violence hurt everyone’s business, they decided to end such conflicts by adhering strictly to the territorial spheres of influence, with each gang controlling particular rackets in each area. They also agreed to work together in setting prices, sharing warehouse space and coordinating the wholesale distribution of liquor.
The Atlantic City accords were a radical departure from pervious mob practices because they also agreed to form an executive committee to oversee and arbitrate all disputes, denote the degree of punishment to all violators and to set policy for the governing of all future illegal operations.
The creation of the Board of Directors of the National Syndicate of Organized Crime was as big as the founding of the United Nations. Although it’s very existence would be kept hidden from the public for decades, and spy novelist Ian Fleming would ridicule them with his fictional Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion – SPECTRE, it would become generally known as “The Commission.”
As for the second item on the agenda, they decided to explore gambling as a replacement for the lucrative illegal liquor profits after prohibition. With the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933, gambling became the main preoccupation of the local mobs until 1946, when, after the Havana meeting, the French Connection became the primary source of the drugs and narcotics that would become the Syndicate’s primary source of revenue other than gambling.
The Federal Bureau of Narcotics concluded, from information provided from undercover informants, that the Atlantic City convention established the basis for the Syndicate that carved the nation into specific territories, developed a system of kangaroo courts that provided the gangsters with their own quasi-judicial system, and protected the hierarchy of the local mafia families.
Arrangements were also made to invest in a multi-million dollar slush fund to bribe law enforcement officials, ensure the election of certain politicians, hire the best attorneys and pay for the educational development of promising young men who could serve their interests in the future.
The hallmark of the meeting in Atlantic City was the centralizing of particular powers with an executive committee, like the board of directors of a blue chip industry, an exceptional and extraordinary concept that was not immediately acceptable to many of the ethnic oriented gangsters like Massaria and Marrassano, who were dinosaurs that had to go the way of the buffalo.
The dissentions of the still primarily ethnically Italian gangsters was overcome in a power-play move when Lansky nominated the Mafia’s own Johnny Torrio as Chairman of the Board, a motion that quickly won the endorsement of most of the mobsters present. Torrio was also the only one who could take care of Capone, whose violent ways were causing problems for all of them.
With the Commission in charge, Torrio at the helm and business completed, the final item on the agenda was Capone, and what to do with him. While the Chicago rackets were combined, and Capone was the nominal boss, he had to take a vacation, or he was going to be thrown to the wolves. He was given the option of dieing right then, or taking a sabbatical from the business for a while. The newspapers had all reported that Capone was in town and one of the William Randolph Hurst newspapers even ran a faked composite photograph of Capone, Knucky Johnson and Meyer Lansky walking down the boardwalk, all of which had the pubic clamoring for Capone to be busted for something.
Although they put an APB - All Points Bulletin out for the man who was seen all over town – throwing chairs in a hotel lobby, screaming obscenities on Pacific Avenue, having dinner in Ducktown, riding in a wicker-walker and strolling down the boardwalk with Johnson, suddenly, Capone couldn’t be found anywhere.
According to local legend, when the heat was turned on, Capone slipped out of Atlantic City and retreated to a local private country club, either the Atlantic City Country Club in Northfield or Seaview in Absecon, where he played bad golf and good cards until the heat was off a few days later.
On May 16, 1929, a week after Lansky’s wedding, Capone showed up at the train station but missed the train by minutes. With a police motorcycle escort to the edge of town, Capone’s entourage drove to Philadelphia, where he again just missed a train to Chicago. Going to a movie on Market Street with his bodyguard Frank Rio, Capone emerged from the theater to be confronted by Philadelphia Police Detective James “Shooey” Malone.
Malone flashed his badge, they talked quietly for a moment and Capone calmly volunteered his .38 caliber revolver and was promptly arrested by Malone. Rio momentarily balked, but Capone smiled and urged him to surrender his weapon too.
Philadelphia’s Director of Public Safety Major Lemel B. Schoefield accepted praise for the arrest of the nation’s number one crime czar, though it later became apparent that Det. Malone had met Capone the year before at Hialeah racetrack in Florida, and Capone had arranged for his own arrest. Besides taking the heat off the rest of the Syndicate, in the secure hands of the law he also acquired sanctuary from a vengeful Bugs Moran.
In the custody of the Philadelphia authorities, Capone was forthcoming about the Atlantic City Sit Down, emphasizing the decision to end mob warfare. “I told them,” Capone said, reciting a line from one of Lansky’s lectures, “there is enough business to make us all rich, and it’s time to stop the killing and look on our own business as other men look on theirs.”
When asked about the purpose of the meeting, Capone said, “It is with the idea of making peace among the gangsters that I spent the week in Atlantic City and got the word of each leader that there will be no more shooting.”
But Capone also told them he, “…had to hide from the rest of the racketeers,” who weren’t at the meeting. They had a vendetta against him. It seems that there comes a point in every gangster’s career when, despite all the power and money they have accumulated, life is suddenly vulnerable to one professional contract killer. John Torrio thought that prison was the safest place, Sam Giancana, who would later take over the Chicago mob, fled to Mexico and South America, Joe Bonnano had himself kidnapped. Capone chose jail.
Philadelphia Criminal Court Judge John E. Wash sentenced Capone harshly for such a petty crime of being a suspicious person and carrying a concealed deadly weapon, the maximum of one year at Holmesburg Penitentiary. After a short stint there however, Capone was transferred to the more relaxed confines of Eastern Pen, where he served out the duration of his sentence under the lenient warden Herbert B. Smith, who furnished Capone’s cell with lamps, a library, radio console and lounge chair and gave him access to his private office telephone.
With Capone in jail, the Syndicate began the process of getting rid of the old Mustache Petes and preparing to engage in Big Time gambling activities on a very large scale.
In Hoboken, New Jersey, Lansky’s new father-in-law permitted him to use his Molaska Inc. as a front for a number of his illegal businesses, one of which was the largest distillery in the state. Molaska took its name from molasses chips, a necessary ingredient for the making of rum, which became more profitable than smuggling it.
Molaska rum business took Lansky to Cuba, where he met with Sgt. Fugencio Batista, the strong-arm coup leader who twice took over the reins of Cuba. The first time he was in power Lansky made a deal with Batista to allow him to open a legal casino in Cuba, much like the illegal casinos he operated in Florida, New York and New Jersey. In order for the Syndicate to control casinos in Havana, it was arranged for casinos to operate in hotels with 500 rooms or more, and since the Syndicate controlled Hotel National was the only hotel in Havana with 500 rooms, the Lansky mob owned the only casino in Cuba.
The second Havana hotel to qualify for a casino was owned by Santo Traficante, who hired Atlantic City native John Martino to run his electronics and security operations.
Two weeks before Castro came to power Lansky and the Syndicate sold the National Hotel-Casino to Mike McLaney and Carroll Rosenbloom, both of whom would loose their shirts in the deal. While Mike McLaney’s brother William owned the land near New Orleans where anti-Castro Cuban commandos trained – and reportedly the Magazine Street house where Lee Harvey Oswald lived, Lyndon Baines Johnson would be Rossenbloom’s houseguest in Atlantic City during the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
In 1976 New Jersey law allowed for legal casinos in Atlantic City hotels that had 500 rooms or more, - the Havana model, with only one hotel in the entire city that qualified – Resorts International, a Lansky-Syndicate controlled company. The second and third Atlantic City casinos – Bally and Caesars, were also Syndicate controlled companies, following the policies, delineating the strategies and continuing the traditions laid out at the 1929 Convention.
The federal government did not officially recognize the existence of the syndicate until May 1, 1951 when Estes Kefauver, Chairman of the Senate Crim Investigating Committee, visited Atlantic City, New Orleans, Chicago and New York before determining and reporting that, “a nationwide crime syndicate does exist in the United States,…and behind the local mobs which make up the national crime syndicate is a shadowy, international criminal organization known as the Mafia.”
Even after that, the FBI refused to place a priority on the Mafia or organized crime until years later, when local police broke up a major mob meeting in upstate New York.
The records of Kefauver’s investigation were then promptly and routinely locked away for 50 years as “Congressional Records,” which are exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests.
In 1998, the Assassination Records Review Board refused to release the records of the Kefauver Committee investigation by declaring them “assassination records” because they claimed they were not related to or considered relevant to the assassination of President Kennedy, even though the second chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) believes that the President may have been the victim of a mob hit.
The Kefauver Committee records were scheduled for release in 2001, but are being systematically released after being reviewed by request.
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Conspiracy Theories
Decades after that trip to Dallas, some writers still have grave doubts about the Kennedy assassination.
Reviewed by Jefferson Morley
Sunday, November 27, 2005; BW04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...5112302089.html
ULTIMATE SACRIFICE
John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK
By Lamar Waldron with Thom Hartmann
Carroll & Graf. 912 pp. $33
A FAREWELL TO JUSTICE
Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History
By Joan Mellen
Potomac. 547 pp. $29.95
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains the great unsolved mystery of American politics. With dozens of books in print on the subject, the case of the murdered commander in chief now seems to attract more interest from the publishing industry than from journalists or historians.
The fascination with a shocking crime is not hard to understand. On Nov. 22, 1963, the president was shot in the head during a motorcade through Dallas. Police arrested an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, who proclaimed himself a "patsy." Two days later, a Dallas strip-club owner, Jack Ruby, shot Oswald dead on national TV. Not until the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, would the American people experience such a bewildering, sudden and painful loss.
Why official Washington has seemingly lost interest in the story in recent years is harder, though not impossible, to figure out. The JFK story remains an enduring symbol of popular mistrust. Public confidence in the federal government was somewhere near its high-water mark in 1964, the year the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald, for no discernible motive, killed Kennedy alone and unaided. Confidence declined steadily over the next three decades. Rejection of the Warren report was not the only or even primary cause of that decline (think of Vietnam and Watergate), merely a vivid indicator.
So while a new crop of JFK assassination books blooms every November, the Washington press corps, confident in its own ability to uncover wrongdoing, tends to see the JFK story as a black hole of misinformation and irrationality. That viewpoint has gotten plenty of support over the years from ludicrous conspiracy theories positing that Kennedy was killed by a gunman lurking in a sewer, by a bystander wielding a dart-shooting umbrella or (my favorite) by an accidental gunshot from a Secret Service agent. After the fierce debate over Oliver Stone's controversial 1991 hit movie "JFK," which portrayed the assassination as the work of a sinister CIA-Pentagon cabal determined to kill Kennedy lest he pull out of Vietnam, much of the Washington press corps never rejoined the discussion of his murder. Most (but not all) historians and journalists scorned Stone's scenario as unfounded, wild-eyed and destructive. But a CBS News poll taken two years later found that far more respondents thought the CIA was involved with JFK's murder (49 percent) than thought that Oswald acted alone (11 percent). This impasse fuels the industry of new assassination books.
The case that Oswald acted alone was most persuasively restated by the investigative reporter Gerald Posner in his 1993 bestseller Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK . His success prompted furious rebuttals of his reading of the evidence.
Beginning in 1994, the Assassination Records Review Board declassified thousands of once-secret JFK records. They generated yet more JFK books but also (mercifully) eliminated some of the least plausible theories. First to go was the claim that Oswald had acted on behalf of the Soviet Union, a claim effectively debunked by the new U.S. records and records from the former communist spy agencies.
The Board also dispatched the far-fetched claim that the U.S. government had altered Abraham Zapruder's famous home movie of the assassination to hide evidence of a conspiracy. David R. Wrone, a historian, refuted this bogus theory in his 2003 book The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK's Assassination . The unaltered film, Wrone concluded, shows that Kennedy was hit by gunfire from two different directions.
Another leading theory -- that the Mafia killed Kennedy -- has endured in the memoirs of people close to top organized-crime figures. But reams of recently released FBI surveillance records do not provide any corroboration. Nor has Oliver Stone's malign vision of murder-by-military-industrial-complex found any substantiation.
The new records have bolstered other scenarios, however. Gus Russo's 1998 book Live by the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK resuscitated the lone-gunman theory by giving it what it had long lacked: a motive. Russo, an investigative reporter, argued that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's secret efforts to overthrow Castro in 1963 were much more extensive than had previously been known. He suggested that Oswald, acting out of leftist conviction, killed JFK in defense of Castro's revolution, perhaps with Havana's help.
The Board's documents arguably enhanced another popular scenario -- that CIA operatives manipulated or framed the pro-Castro Oswald. In his 1995 book Oswald and the CIA , John Newman, a former military intelligence officer, demonstrated that senior CIA officials gave pre-assassination reporting on the itinerant ex-Marine far more attention than they ever admitted. Newman refrained from passing judgment on whether Oswald was involved in an authorized, still-classified CIA operation with a legitimate purpose and no apparent connection to Kennedy's assassination. He noted that the agency had not released all of its JFK records, which remains true in 2005.
The rational reader is confronted by the paradox that while plenty of wacko theories circulate on the Internet, a good-faith parsing of the evidence can still yield reasonable doubt. After all, many people in high places concluded that JFK had been ambushed by his enemies. Lyndon B. Johnson, for one, never believed that Oswald acted alone; he suspected Cuba's Fidel Castro had retaliated for CIA efforts to kill him. House Speaker Tip O'Neill said that JFK aide Kenneth O'Donnell had told him in 1968 that "he had heard two shots" from the "grassy knoll." Conspiratorial fears found support in 1979 when the House Select Committee on Assassinations, led by former federal prosecutor G. Robert Blakey, concluded that JFK had been killed by unidentifiable conspirators. Former cabinet secretary Joseph Califano, intimately involved in JFK's Cuba policy, wrote in his autobiography that he had "come to share LBJ's view" that Oswald was not a loner.
In 1997 it was revealed that Bobby and Jacqueline Kennedy believed there was a conspiracy in Dallas. In their book on the Cuban missile crisis, "One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964, historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali reported that the president's widow and brother sent an envoy to Moscow in late 1963 to tell a Soviet intelligence officer that they believed JFK had been killed by what the authors called a "large political conspiracy" originating in the United States. The grief-stricken widow and brother wanted the Kremlin to know that RFK would resume his brother's policy toward the Soviet Union as soon as he became president himself. This rather startling revelation deserved more attention in Washington than it got at the time. Inside the Beltway, the idea that serious political players believed that JFK's murderer got away with it was somehow inadmissible. Elsewhere, the strange circumstances of the Dallas tragedy make Jackie and Bobby's suspicions seem almost commonsensical. Conspiracy theories endure. Yet, as two new JFK assassination books illustrate, there is still no compelling case to explain who the alleged conspirators were, if they existed at all.
In Ultimate Sacrifice , researchers Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann propose a novel variation on the Mafia conspiracy theory. They report that Bobby Kennedy sought to orchestrate a "palace coup" in Havana on Dec. 1, 1963 -- which the authors refer to as "the Kennedys' C-Day plan," "a name entirely of our own invention" that they use alongside actual terms from the time, doing their credibility no favors. Mafia crime bosses, they contend, learned of this plan and killed Kennedy, using Oswald as their patsy, knowing that the crime could not be investigated lest it reveal Bobby's secret scheme.
Their exhausting, massive account, grounded in new CIA and Army records, valuably fleshes out Russo's portrait of RFK's secret campaign to oust Castro. But their theory about how that ties into the assassination itself is conjectural. They inflate tenuous links between Oswald and organized-crime figures and presume that the Mafia had a bureaucratically savvy leadership. To attribute the gunfire in Dallas and the alleged subsequent cover-ups to the ingenuity of thuggish crime bosses like Jimmy Hoffa, Johnny Roselli and Santo Trafficante Jr. has the feel of a deus ex mafia , wrapping up a complicated story too neatly.
Joan Mellen's brisker A Farewell to Justice retells the story that Stone mythologized in "JFK." In 1967, Jim Garrison, district attorney for the city of New Orleans, sought to investigate Kennedy's assassination by indicting businessman Clay Shaw on conspiracy charges. Mellen, a biographer (of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, among other literary figures) and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, shows beyond a reasonable doubt what the CIA denied for years: that Shaw was a sometime agency informant from 1949 to 1965. She persuasively argues that Oswald was neither a loner nor a nut and may well have associated with Shaw. But Mellen's insistence that any contact between Shaw and Oswald proves an assassination conspiracy is a stretch, to say the least. Ultimately, her assertion of a New Orleans-based plot depends on two witnesses whose credibility is far from certain.
And so the JFK jury remains out. Those who say there is no proof of a conspiracy are correct, and those who say the preponderance of evidence indicates that Oswald did not act alone also have a strong case. Those who want a decisive answer to the question of who killed John F. Kennedy 42 years ago will have to await new books -- and live with the disturbing thought that we still don't know.
Jefferson Morley is a staff writer at washingtonpost.com. He is writing a biography of Winston Scott, a former CIA station chief in Mexico City.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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Bill wrote:
David Ferrie’s telephone records reflect that in the weeks before the assassination he made frequent calls from the New Orleans law office of G. Ray Gill to the Belcher Oil Company of Dallas, Texas, the company that was the listed owner of the Rex.
Interesting, Bill. (I think you have Gill's middle name misspelled.) Do you remember the source for this information? Can you actually find dates of the calls? Do you know for a fact Ferrie was calling? Any idea who the recipient of the calls was?
Thanks!
Hi Tim, Yes, G. Wray Gill, Pierre Marquette office building in downtown New Orleans, 17th floor, just down the hall from oil geologist Vernon Main, Jr. , Jim Braden's buddy.
Garrison obtained some of the phone records, the most significant of which documented a September 24th, '63 phone call to the apartment building in Chicago that was home to Jean Asie (aka West), Larry Meyer's companion.
The list of Ferrie's calls that I obtained came from Peter Whitmey in Canada, who did a story published in Jerry Rose's Third/Fourth Decade magazine, which included phone calls to the Belcher Oil Company of Dallas, Texas.
Now I haven't been able to substantiate that the Dallas Belcher is the same as the Florida Belcher, a large, family owned company, still in existence, who supply fuel oil for ships - ocean liners, etc. , which was listed as one of the owners of the Rex, having purchased it from Somoza's of Nicaragua.
According to Chauncy Holt, he was pals with "Buddy" Belcher and Jim Braden, both of whom were in New Orleans in the summer of '63.
I never intimidated that Ferrie actually made any of the calls, Garrison does that in Heritage of Stone. I don't think it matters whether Ferrie made the calls or Gill or whoever, the fact that they were made establishes a documented record linking the Gill's office and Belcher Oil. A proper investigation would identify the callers.
Bill Kelly
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Bill:
Of course this was NOT directed at you. You had quotes from "The Kid?, Gratz, and these were continuations of the bullxxxx about Bohning !! So what if a news scribbler has a "201 File", or better yet, a "cryptonym", e.i. "AM/CARBON-69" ??!......
The ONLY current debate I might have with you is: Exactly how to proceed with a multiple grand jury operation on these matters [JFK, RFK, MLK. Jr., et al.] -- and why in the end you might face some situations that have never appeared in public heretofor, and are of current interest with regard to the Geneva Protocols, detainees, The Rules of Land Warfare, International treaties, and why our Contitutions forbids specific compacts with foreign nations, yet permit "pre-emptive military actions !!
Let me know if you are interested. Leave the diatribe to be absorded by those antagonist who have posted absolutely NADA, and just are here to xxxxx !!
Chairs,
Gerry
GERRY,
I KIND OF LIKE THE KID. HE'S GOT WISDOM BEYOND HIS AGE AND EXPERIENCE.
AND I'M SURE I'M GOING TO FIND MYSELF IN SOME SITUATIONS IF MULTIPLE GRAND JURIES PROCEEDINGS SUCCEED, BUT GRATZ WILL PROTECT MY REAR.
BK
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YO! GERRY, YOU TALKIN' ABOUT ME HERE?
....You, who have made the CIA [and other Intel/Community agencies, law enforcement, and the military] "your personal & preferred enemies"
IF SO, YOU GOT ME PEGGED WRONG. I'M NOT OUT AGAINST THE CIA, SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE NAVY SEALS, I PERSONALLY KNOW F-16 PILOTS WHO WENT UP ON 9/11, AND I LIVE NEXT TO FORT DIX/MACGUIRE AFB/LAKEHURST, THE FIRST ARMY/AF/NAVY SUPERBASE, WHERE ALMOST ALL OF MY NEIGHBORS AND FRIENDS WORK, AND MY FATHER WAS A CAMDEN, N.J. POLICE DET./LT./WWII 8TH AF VET, SO MY PWERSONAL AND PREFERRED ENEMIES ARE NOT CIA, ITEL, LAW ENF. OR MIL., SO GET THAT STRAIGHT RIGHT OFF THE BAT.
-- will go no further than the gullible masses!! This is especially so for those who have made Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Mohammed. Hubbard, Smith, Manson, Jones, or some rock or tree "their personal Savior"!! You will fail miserably in your endeavors, and thereafter that will be the case with your repetitive and continuing "realizations".
WHILE I CAN'T THINK OF ANY PERSOANL SEAVIORS, MY MENTORS ARE MORE HUMAN - PETER DALE SCOTT, BILL TURNER, TONY SUMMERS, VINCE SALANDRIA, JOHN SIMPKIN....
You will be reduced to the existance of frustrated and "nay saying", self-appointed gadflies
I NAMED THE FIRST UNDERGROUND NEWSPAPER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON THE GADFLY - SO YOU GOT THAT RIGHT
; destined to sink ever deeper into paranoia,
I'M NOT THREATENING ENOUGH, YET, TO BE PARANOID. WHEN THAT COMES I'LL NOW I STRUCK A NERVE AND AM ON THE RIGHT TRACK.
and ultimately to "burnout". As was the case with Whitaker Chambers, Koestler, et al.!! ARTY KOESTLER? I'M HONORED THAT YOU MENTION HIM IN THE SAME THREAD AS ME.
The "fortunate? amongst your ranks
MY RANKS? WHO ELSE IS WITH ME? I DON'T KNOW OF ANYONE WHO HAS SIGNED ON TO MY MISSION.
will: And without a doubt, jump the seeming "vast-crevasse" to the opposite polarity, and thereafter join with the neo-con right-wing "whackos"!!
Unfortunately, and far too often, I have "witnessed" these trials & tribulations over the last 40+ years. Yet, even today -- I feel empathy for those close colleagues who: On a daily basis, habitually look over their shoulders, into the rear-view mirror, listening for clicking sounds on their telephones,
I DON'T CARE IF MY PHONE IS TAPPED - MAYBE THEY - WHOEVER THEY ARE, WILL LEARN SOMETHING.
giving one another "code names" ["handles"]; and wondering all-the-while: Why their physicians are prescribing even more analgesics, palliatives, and intestinal remedies.
WHOSE GOT GOOD DRUGS AND ARE HOLDING OUT?
Typically, you have an urgent need and desire for: "Enemies", because any effort at trying to "live" without the "self-inventing" of a few "Hostile Entities", you are forced to grapple with the grim reality that:
I DON'T CONSIDER THOSE WHO KILLED JFK ENEMIES. MY GOAL IS TO SLIP UP TO THE BAR NEXT TO THOSE WHO I SUSPECT AND CONFRONT THEM AND ASK THEM WHY THEY DID IT, NOT TO MAKE HOSTILE ENTITIES.
[A] You are a "Nobody", and in even with the drastic reduction in the circle of your "friends/associates" you inevitably are forced to face the realization that -- you are NOT an essential factor in "anybody's" life; and,
MAYBE SO, AND I KIND OF LIKE BEING A NOBODY BUT MY CIRCLE OF FRIENDS/ASSOCIATES HAS BEEN GROWNING QUIETLY AND I'M CONFIDENT THAT THEY WILL BE THERE WHEN WE ARE READY TO MAKE A MOVE.
You continue, on a daily basis, to have "encounters-of-the-3rd-kind" -- with the reality that : Not only were you never "a contender" -- but that in NOT having the guts to enter "The Ring"; you have forfeited the "Right" to even be a "Spectator" in, what you have foolishly attempted to make into a game of "SPORT" !!
Get a "Life"!! It is never too late.
NOW YOU'RE HITTING BELOW THE BELT, WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING WHO I AM OR WHAT I'M ABOUT. I MAY NOT BE IN THE SAME RING AS YOU ARE, BUT I'M KEEPING SCORE AND I HAVE A GOOD MEMORY, AND I DON'T PREJUDGE PEOPLE BEFORE I GET TO KNOW THEM.
AND THANKS FOR BEING SO UP FRONT AND FORTHRIGHT, INSTEAD OF HIDING LIKE THE OTHER RATS IN THIS GAME.
BK
BKJFK3@YAHOO.COM
Chairs,
Gerry Patrick hemming
__________________________
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Well the last word has yet to be written on Mad Max Holland.
Is Mel still a member of this forum? Holland does nothing what is attributed to him.
I first saw Max at a Nation Mag sponsored symposium at New York City's Town Hall, re: Stone's JFK, and Stone was part of the panel, that included Max and the only rational voice - Nora Ephram.
Meeting Max for the first time at the DC Warren Commission symposium last November, I got his book The Assassination Tapes, and David Talbot's request for a review, but I'm now putting the book in its proper context, that includes the Nation and Holland's other published pieces.
As for the edited transcripts of the AF1 radio tapes, that Holland edits even further, I transcribed my own version of the same tapes, and mine is different than his, or the LBJ official library transcript, which misidentifies the origin of some of the transmissons.
As for whether he is a certified CIA asset or not, if you follow the money, and the non-profiot "philantropic" foundations who fund his "research" you will find some interesting ABLE DANGER type assocations. It's quite clear who is paying his freight; not the Nation.
And don't forget that it was the Nation that published Jean Daniel's original report of having been with Castro when he was informed that JFK was dead, and what Castro's reaction was, "This is very bad...."
BK
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An unwitting asset? An oxymoron if I ever heard one.
Is not a "CIA asset" a journalist who is pledged to do the bidding of the CIA regardless of anything?
How can one be a CIA asset and not know it?
I suggest there is a difference between a "CIA asset" and a journalist whose views are generally sympathetic to the position of the CIA.
And I think it reasonable for a historian to check with a person before writing that he is a "CIA asset". Would you agree, Owen?
A CIA media asset isn't pledged to do whatever the CIA tells them. The CIA is satisfied that they will report in the way the CIA wants them to and feeds them information accordingly. The issue of whether or not Bohning was being paid by the CIA or whether or not his editors knew and approved of his CIA contacts is pretty irrelevant. Bohning had a cryptonym (AMCARBON-3), Covert Security Approval, and was DDP approved. If this doesn't make someone at least "CIA linked" (which is the actual word Mellen uses) or "CIA sponsored" (the original word), I don't know what does.......I too would welcome more information from Mellen, however.
Owen, thanks for your reasoned responses re: CIA media assets.
When I was checking out the source of numerous CIA leaked stories thru Scripps-Howard, I found a recent one in which the reporter couldn't believe that the CIA had leaked a report through them - they must consider SHNS a virtual pipeline, except the report said the Al Quada suicide bombers were getting better from experience, which if not an oxymoron is something eqilivant.
As for more info from JM,
I emailed Joan Mellen, requesting a formal, on the record interview, and she's agreed, but needs to wait a few weeks until school is out, as she is a prof (Teacher of the Year, 2004). While she is still promoting her book and keeping up teaching duties, I hope she can check in with this forum in the meantime.
Bill Kelly
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John Abt: Wasn't that the name of the attorney LHO keep requesting to speak with, or have represent him?
Yes, that is who he asked for. I spent years trying to find him in the early 70's thru mid 80's. Called ACLU all over, including NY where he was allededly out of. But never could find him. I wanted to ask HIM why he thought Lee was asking for him, if he ever learned this, and what his response whould have been.
Anyone here ever manage to track him down and ask those questions?
Dawn
Hello Dawn,
John Abt did testify before the Warren Commission, one of the shortest testimonies on record, quick hello, who are you, why are you here? Okay, Goodbye, perfunctory interviews, just to say that they did it.
More important is the book I Led Three Lives, which gets into the types of cases that Abt handled, at least the cases Oswald was familiar with. I hope somebody got to Abt and asked him the right questions because I think he's dead, though I could be wrong on that count.
And Dawn, I wanted to say that I think the topic of this thread is probably the most important one on topic at this point in time, and hope we can get back to it sometime.
Bill Kelly
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GPH,
Many thanks for the quick and interesting response.
I wonder with Hunt, as with Ian Fleming,
how much is fiction and how much real ops?
And
Gerry, how do you type with an accent,
faster than you can talk?
BK
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On October 31, 2004 the New York Times Review of Books printed a review of Max Holland's book "The Assassination Tapes". The review was by Thomas Mallon, author of Mrs. Paine's Garage. In the review, Mallon states that forty years after the publication of the WCR there is still no compelling reason to believe that Oswald was anything other than a lone nut seeking a place in history (words to that effect).
Tim, Here's my review of Mallon's Garage.
BK
THE ANNOTATED GARAGE - Bill Kelly’s Review of Thomas Mallon’s “Mrs. Paine’s Garage.”
There's Ghosts in the Attic, Skeletons in the Closet and Here's the Best of What’s Left Out of "Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Assassination of President Kennedy", by Thomas Mallon (Pantheon Books – Random House, 2001) By Bill Kelly. bkjfk3@yahoo.com
The answers to the most outstanding questions concerning the crime of the last century aren’t in Thomas Mallon’s book, "Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Assassination of President Kennedy," though they say that the primary evidence and the main suspect were at one time lodged in her house, where there’s still ghosts in the attic and skeletons in the closet.
Of those still outstanding, the first question that comes to mind is why Ruth and Michael Paine - the patrons and sponsors of the family of the man accused of killing President Kennedy - how come they weren’t primary witnesses before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) or the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB)? Certainly their testimony under oath should be on the public record, and the public shouldn’t be left with their lame Warren Commission questioning and now, this book by a would-be novelist on a foundation scholarship who got his facts right but the story wrong.
Mallon wanted to write this book as a fictional novel, and while some literature often comes closer to the truth than the most factually detailed history, this story isn’t one of them. It is to Mrs. Paine’s credit that in order to obtain her cooperation she insisted he write non-fiction, but somebody should have explained to Mallon that in writing such a thing he should use footnotes, document his sources and include an index. While Mallon is more comfortable writing fiction, this case is not myth or legend, nor even history yet, as in the lifetime of living contemporaries it remains an unsolved homicide, and the contents of the Paine’s garage are not historical artifacts, but are legally considered to be evidence in a murder case.
What became of the evidence and the contents of the garage is interesting and that the major questions still go unasked, let alone unanswered, is typical of the attitude exhibited by Mallon, a conspiracy denier who divides the world into two camps – the Conspiracy Theorists (CTs) and the Lone Nuts (LNs). Mallon is a LN, along with Ruth and Michael Paine, so he has sympathy with their plight, which is mitigated by the general belief that if there was a conspiracy, the Paines too must have been involved.
That the ratio of those who know there was a conspiracy to those who believe in the Lone Nut thesis is 80% - 20% in favor of conspiracy doesn’t make this truth a democratic decision. Mallon’s book may be comforting to the LNs who want to believe Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy on a “spur of the moment decision,” as Mrs. Paine puts it, but the evidence is supportive not only of the understanding of most rational people that there was a conspiracy, but that the assassination was a well planned and successfully executed coup d’etat.
Alas, the world is not so simple as to be divided into just two camps, as there is also a third group that includes those who keep an open mind about such things as who is responsible for shooting the President of the United States in the head, and they try to approach the case as a homicide detective would. As with the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, whose killer was convicted some thirty years after the crime, and the Birmingham bombings, the Mississippi Freedom Rider murders, the York, Pennsylvania race riot killings and other political crimes of the 1960s that are only now being resolved, the murder of President Kennedy still may eventually receive belated, but necessary justice. The truth, it seems, is even harder to come by, but a lot of it, they say, was at one time in the Paine’s garage.
THE TRAIL TO IRVING
How the police obtained the address of the Paine’s at 2515 W. Fifth St., Irving, Texas home is itself confusing. The Army Intelligence file on Hidell/Oswald that was being shared with the FBI had an old address, while FBI agent Hosty, who had been to the Paine’s house on two occasions in early November, obtained the address from the New Orleans FBI office. They in turn, learned of it from the New Orleans Post Office, which had received a change of address form for Oswald with the new Irving address on October 11. The problem here is that Oswald left New Orleans and was in Texas at the time, so someone else must have filled out this form.
Roy Truly, Oswald’s supervisor, said that he suspiciously noticed Oswald was missing almost immediately - within fifteen minutes of the assassination, obtained the address from Oswald’s employment application, wrote it down and gave it to Capt. Fritz. When Fritz got back to his office at the DPD, he ordered his men to obtain a search warrant and go out to Irving and bring in Oswald, who he was then told, was sitting right there in front of him, under arrest for the murder of a policeman.
According to Mallon’s account, Marina Oswald and Ruth Paine were watching the news accounts of the assassination on television when, “…there was a knock at the door. Ruth answered it and discovered a whole group of law-enforcement officers, including men from the Dallas County sheriff’s department. She surmised that they were there to serve papers in connection with the divorce, until one of them announced that Oswald was in custody for shooting a policeman. When the officers asked to come in, she managed to inquire if they had a warrant. They didn’t, but assured her they could get one right away. She did not pursue the point: ‘That’s okay,’ she said. ‘we’re all upset. Come on in.’ Ruth thought ‘they’d come in an sit on my sofa and talk to me.’ Instead, ‘six guys spread out all over the house right away, like water.’ They asked whether Lee owned a gun, and Ruth said no. She then translated the question to Marina,…”
“ ‘Yes, Marina responded, to Ruth’s astonishment; Lee did have a gun. Marina then led the way to the garage…”
When the authorities came to her house with a search warrant the next day, Mrs. Paine did what every red blooded American housewife would have done, she went shopping while the cops rooted through her garage and bedroom for evidence, taking out boxes of belongings, which according to a neighbor, made Mrs. Paine madder than he had ever seen her before.
If Mrs. Paine was subjected to the same justice that the Military Tribunal dished out to those who assisted John W. Booth in his flight from Ford’s Theater after shooting President Lincoln, she would have been hanged, whether she was part of the conspiracy or not. As Mallon points out the coincidence that when detectives searched Mary Surratt’s boarding house, where Booth had lodged, “they found that Mrs. Surratt’s daughter, Anna, had hidden a daguerreotype of Booth behind a picture…within three months her mother would become the first women ever hanged by the federal government…”
Indeed, as Philadelphia attorney Vincent Salandria has said, if there was true justice in this case, Ruth and Michael Paine would have been indicted for complicity rather than treated as victims, and truth, if not justice, would have been better served.
In the pursuit of truth, Mallon’s book adds little, other than what it doesn’t tell us, which if examined closely, leads us closer to the full truth for those that want to go there. Hopefully, justice will eventually follow. While most of the facts in “Mrs. Paine’s Garage” are correct, the best parts are left out, and the Big Lie is the Big Picture that portrays the alleged assassin’s family being taken care of by the generosity of Ruth Paine the Quaker, whose role as a Good Samaritan was a coincidental accident of history. If Marianne Sullivan’s Kennedy Ripples: A True Love Story is the Harlequin Romance version of the assassination, then Mrs. Paine’s Garage is the “Days of Our Lives” or “As the World Turns” Soap Opera rendition, with the murder of the President unintentionally being hatched in Mrs. Paine’s kitchen over a cup of coffee.
The lie is laid out clearly in the dusk jacket notes: “Nearly forty years have passed since Mrs. Ruth Hyde Paine, a Quaker housewife in suburban Dallas, offered shelter and assistance to a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife Marina….Mrs. Paine’s Garage is the tragic story of a well-intentioned women who found Oswald the job that put him six floors above Dealey Plaza – into which, on November 22, he fired a rifle he kept inside Mrs. Paine’s house. But this is also a tale of survival and resiliency: the story of a devote, open-hearted women who weathered a whirlwind of investigation, suspicion, and betrayal, and who refused to allow her enmeshment in the calamity of that November to crush her own life. Thomas Mallon gives us a disturbing account of generosity and secrets, of suppressed memories and tragic might-have-beens, of coincidences more errie than conspiracy theory…”
COINCIDENCE vs. CONSPIRACY
Rather than just throw every ironic coincidence into the pile, as Mallon tries to do, let’s at least try to determine the difference between the actual happenstance and the contrived incidences that are the earmarks of a covert operation and conspiracy. The idea of Six Degrees of Separation actually works, and anybody can make a connection between any two people through six or less connections, but there is a point when such connections are closer and less of a coincidence. While it may have been a coincidence, or rather, as Mallon puts it, “a little cosmic conjunction” that Mrs. Paine’s friend from Philadelphia, Raymond Entenmann, was at her home on Kennedy’s election night and was the last person to receive a telephone call from Kennedy before he was shot, it’s certainly more than a coincidence that Michael Paine’s mother was best friend and traveling companion with Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles’ agent and mistress who had been involved in a previous assassination plot and coup d’etat.
To paraphrase Allen Dulles himself, “The intelligence profession does not encourage one to accept coincidence as an explanation for events,” and as Ian Fleming once noted, there is a clear difference between coincidence, happenstance and “enemy action,” and we too, must be able to make that difference in order to understand these events.
So the lists of Lincoln-JFK assassination connections are merely coincidences of fate, while the purchase and movement of the alleged murder rifle was not. That Ruth Paine’s daughter lives within two miles of Caroline Kennedy is a coincidence, that the Oswalds lived with the Paines was not. That Michael Paine was talking about assassinations at the time of the murder may have been a coincidence, but that he was at work at Bell Helicopter was not. That George DeMohrnschildt was related to Jackie Kennedy is a coincidence, while the positioning of Oswald with the opportunity to kill the President was not. That the Paines lived across the street from members of Jack Ruby’s band was a coincidence, though Ruby’s murder of Oswald was not.
OSWALD – ASSASSIN or FALL GUY?
The entire premise of Mrs. Paine’s Garage rests on the assumption that Lee Harvey Oswald is the assassin of the President, but what if it can be convincingly demonstrated that Oswald didn’t shoot anybody that day, and the alleged murder weapon was purposely left at the scene to implicate him in the crime? It doesn’t make any sense for him, as many LNs contend, that he killed the President to make a name for himself in history, but then denied the deed. Why buy weapons through the mail with an alias and a traceable identification when you can walk into any gun shop or department store in Texas and buy a gun off the shelf without any i.d. or traceable paperwork, unless you intend to establish a paper trail? When the evidence is looked at more closely than Mallon sees it, it’s more than likely that Oswald was framed for the crime and was exactly what he claimed to be – “a patsy.”
But rather than take away the importance of Mrs. Paine’s role in the affair, “The Patsy’s Garage” makes its contents and owners even more significant, as only your friends can set you up and frame you for a crime you didn’t commit. Which brings us back to Michael and Ruth Paine, at whose home the accused assassin spent the night before the murder, and where the rifle, said have been used in the crime, was kept in the garage, even though no one ever admitted to ever actually seeing it there.
Although George Lardner of the Washington Post said in his review of Mallon’s book that the Paines weren’t questioned by the HSCA and ARRB because everyone was “satisfied with their Warren Commission testimony,” literally dozens of major issues remain unresolved, and the most frequent question the public asks Judge John Tunheim, the former chairman of the defunct Assassination Records Review Board, is why the Paines weren’t deposed and questioned under oath. Both Tunheim and Mallon try to answer this question, Tunheim’s being that the ARRB, like the HSCA, just didn’t have the time, while the real answer is that the government doesn’t have the institutional willingness to ask the questions that it doesn’t want answered.
That doesn’t prevent us from asking them however, and the list of questionable issues regarding the Paines is long, but one day they may be answered.
For beginners, to believe the Lone Nut thesis, you must assume that Oswald killed the President himself for his own perverted psychological reasons, that Oswald and his Russian wife met the Paines quite coincidently at a social party, that the Paines agreed to let Oswald’s family move into their home and obtain room and board and driving lessons in exchange for Russian language lessons, that Ruth and Michael Paine never knew anything about a rifle even though Ruth transported the gun in her car from Texas to New Orleans and back again and Michael packed and unpacked the car on both occasions, and that Oswald got the job at the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) quite innocently through Mrs. Paine’s morning neighborhood coffee klatch.
Of course the entire Lone Nut scenario falls apart if any one of these “coincidences” can be shown not to be so coincidental, and in fact all of them can be proven to be contrived.
OUTSTANDING QUESTIONS & SERIALS
In order to address the most important issues I’ve set them up as Serials and placed them in the chronological order in which they occurred so we can better understand what is at stake, which is the bare bones, basic nature of democracy, truth and justice in America.
You would think that the first question would be how the Oswalds met the Paines, which was at a February 22, 1962 party [serial #1 – The Party], first suggested by George DeMohrnschildts to Volkmar Schmidt [Neither of whom appear in “Mrs. Paine’s Garage”] because DeMohrnschildt thought that it would be interesting for Lee Harvey Oswald to meet Michael Paine, both of whom were interested in discussing “ideology.”
DeMohrnschildt and Schmidt, were both oil geologists with an interest in politics and psychology. Schmidt worked for Magnolia Oil Co., as did most of those who attended the party at Schmidt’s house, which he shared with Everett Glover and two other men - son of Radio Free Europe director Norman Fredricksen and Richard Pierce, both of whom worked for Magnolia Oil and are also missing from Mallon’s “Garage.” Nor would Mallon be expected to know the interesting tidbit that the widow of the founder of Magnolia Oil married Jim Braden’s best friend, and Braden would be taken into custody as a suspicious person at Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination].
The odd thing about the party is that the host, Schmidt, and one of the guests of honor, Michael Paine, were no-shows, but Ruth Paine met Marina Oswald and they enjoyed talking together in Russian, setting up their relationship.
But there are at least two instances on record suggesting that there was a connection between Ruth Hyde Paine and Oswald before they met at this party, the first being Ohio police reports of Oswald attempting to enroll at Ruth Paine’s alma mater Antioch College, before he had a high school diploma. [serial # 2 Antioch]. The second instance is the Russian pen pal program that Ruth participated in [serial #3 Pen Pal]- Nina Aparina], a program that was monitored by the intelligence agencies and is said to have included others participants that knew of Oswald’s defection to Russia after he was discharged from the Marines. Then there’s Mrs. Marie Hyde [serial #4- Marie Hyde], who either is or is not related to Mrs. Ruth Hyde Paine, and who met Oswald in Russia twice, in a matter of a few days in two different cities, and was photographed with Oswald, a photo that ended up in the CIA photo archives.
[serial #5 Ruth Hyde’s family background] – Ruth’s father William Hyde, was an Ohio insurance executive who also worked for the government’s AID - Aid for International Development, for which DeMohrenschildt was associated and served as a notorious CIA cover agency, while her sister Sylvia was also affiliated with the CIA, and her brother, a doctor who lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, home of Antioch college, where Oswald is reported to have tried to enroll before joining the Marines.
But it really isn’t Mrs. Paine we should be interested in, it’s her husband Michael, who owned the house and garage and is the principle character worth writing a book about.
Michael Paine’s family [serial #6 Paine family] the Forbes and the Cabots, go back generations to the American revolution, with one ancestor who signed the Declaration of Independence and another who was President Taft’s governor of the Philippines. His grandmother, and primary benefactor, had two brothers, one of whom was the President of United Fruit and the other an important State Department official 1948-1954 when U.S. covert action in Guatemala [OPERATION PB/SUCCESS] would set the pattern for what the CIA would later carry out successfully in Iran and unsuccessfully at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba.
Michael’s father, George Lyman Paine, would be at the other end of the political spectrum and help found the Trotskyite political party in the U.S. Somewhere in the middle, Michael would flunk out of Harvard and drift to Philadelphia, where he attended Swathmore, a Quaker college, and meet Ruth Hyde at a folk dance. Michael Paine and Ruth Hyde would become protégés of Michael’s mother, Ruth Forbes Paine Young and her husband Arthur Young, the inventor of the Bell Helicopter.
After spending time living in the Young’s barn (Where I’ve also spent some time), Michael and Ruth moved to Texas where Michael worked for Bell Helicopter. This company, founded by Michael’s stepfather, also employed former German Army Gen. Dornberger, who worked on the Nazi V-2 missile program with Weiner Von Braun. They were brought into the U.S. under the CIA’s PROJECT PAPERCLIP, which attempted to utilize the German scientific advances against the Russians during the Cold War. Arthur Young himself sported Quaker ideals, and was proud that his Bell 47b – the MASH helicopter, was used for medical evacuation, while at the same time developing interests in esoteric arts like mental telepathy and ESP. Ruth and Michael Paine also maintained their close ties to the Youngs and Micahel’s family on his mother’s side – the Forbes, as Mallon’s book attests.
Since Michael Paine didn’t meet Oswald at the previously arranged party, Ruth set up a dinner engagement for them to get acquainted, and since Oswald didn’t have a car, Michael drove from Irving to the Oswald’s apartment in Oak Cliff, Dallas, to pick them up. Although he didn’t mention it to the Warren Commission, a major bone of contention, Michael Paine did admit on a CBS TV special and to Mallon that he knew about the rifle from the first day he met Oswald because Oswald showed him the famous photo [serial #7 –Photo] later found in the Paine garage, of Oswald with the rifle, pistol and two communist publications, one “The Worker,” the official publication of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party.
Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the 1917 revolution and founder of the Communist Party in Russia, was exiled to Mexico City and executed there by Soviet trained assassin Ramon Mercader. Issac Don Levine, the epitome of the psych-warrior and Life magazine executive who bought the Zapruder film and the rights to Marina’s story, wrote the book on Trotsky’s assassin and exposed him as a Soviet agent. With Oswald however, he went the other way, and purposely failed to expose Oswald’s intelligence connections, branding him a lone-nut although for awhile, they were prepared to label him a Communists as well.
When Oswald and Michael Paine discussed this “Trotskyite” publication, Paine quoted Oswald as saying, “You have to read between the lines to understand what they want you do.” Well you have to read between the lines of Mallon’s book too, if you want to learn the truth, as I will try to fill in the blanks he leaves out.
That Michael Paine and Lee Oswald would talk about communist ideology is a given yet, it is inconceivable to me, that while talking about such “ideology,” as George DeMohrenschildt and Volkmar Schmidt expected them to do, [serial #8 –George Lyman Paine] Paine didn’t bother to tell Oswald, the self-proclaimed “Trotskite,” that his father – Lyman Paine was the founder of the Trotskite political party in the United States.
Both DeMohrenschiltd and Volkmar Schmidt, who met Oswald at another Magnolia Oil party, and Michael Paine, talked to Oswald about shooting General Walker [serial #9 – Walker Shooting], Schmidt before and DeMohrenschildt and Paine shortly after someone – ostensibly Oswald, took a pot shot and barely missed killing Walker.
After that incident Oswald decided to relocate back to his hometown New Orleans. When Mrs. Paine drove the family to the Dallas bus station, Mrs. Paine suddenly suggested that Marina and the baby stay with her until Oswald got settled with an apartment and a job and then she would drive them there, which was quickly agreed upon. Because Oswald didn’t take the rifle [serial #10 – Rifle] on the bus with him, Mrs. Paine must have drove the rifle to New Orleans, and then back again the following October, while Oswald went to Mexico City.
With her kids in the Chevy station wagon, Ruth Paine took a long cross country jaunt in the summer of 1963 [serial #11- Ruth’s Summer vacation & The Quaker Connections], visiting Quaker friends, spending time at the Forbes family island off Woods Hole, Mass., and visiting Michael’s mom and her husband Arthur Young, as well as her own family in Ohio. She wrote to Marina, asking her to come live with her in Texas, and asked Marina to respond by writing to her in care of Arthur Young, Paoli, Pa., a letter that ostensibly got through because Ruth stopped in New Orleans and picked up Marina, the baby and the Oswald’s belongings, including the rifle, and took them to Texas while Oswald went to Mexico.
In Mexico City, Oswald was seen with another American, “Steve Kennan,” a Quaker student from Philadelphia [serial #12 – Steve Kennan] , who also wanted to go to Cuba, and who drove Oswald around town on the back of his motor bike. Now one thing Mrs. Paine and her Quaker friends have yet to be asked is whether they told Oswald about the Quaker hostel in Mexico City where Oswald met this fellow, or if anyone else knew him as well.
Michael Paine packed the car for the trip to New Orleans and unpacked it when they returned, yet testified he didn’t know there was a rifle among the effects, saying that he thought the gun wrapped in a blanket was “camping equipment,” which was kept stored in and frequently moved about the garage.
Mallon’s book has one photo – on the dust cover jacket – of Mrs. Paine, Marina Oswald and two children and Oswald’s mother Marguerite in the Paine kitchen, a nest of domestic tranquility amidst a scene of total national chaos, and where, if the Lone Nut thesis is correct, the plot was hatched to give the assassin the opportunity to kill the President of the United States. This was how the Paine’s neighbor, Lillie Mae Randle, over a cup of coffee, said that there was a job opening at the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD), where her brother worked. So Mrs. Paine called there and talked with Roy Truly, the same guy who would turn over Oswald’s name and Irving address to Capt. Fritz within fifteen minutes of the shooting.
A photo of the Paine garage shows how cluttered it actually was. One of the Paine’s three cars, a 1955 Chevy station wagon with a luggage rack on the roof, was kept parked in the driveway in front of the garage. [serial #13- Oswald’s Driving & cars]. Although it is often claimed Oswald didn’t drive, Mrs. Paine’s Warren Commission testimony is quite clear on this – she gave him lessons, he knew how to drive, he knew where she kept the keys to the car and he did drive, much to Mrs. Paine horror, sans insurance.
Among the other evidence found in the garage was [serial # 14 - Blanket] the blanket that that rifle was supposedly kept wrapped in, another photo of Oswald with the guns and magazines, and [serial #15 – Minox Cameras] a Minox camera, which Michael Paine later claimed as his own. In the house were other items of evidence, including a [serial #16 – Ruth’s typewriter] typewriter that Oswald used to write a letter to the Soviet Embassy, a book that contained [serial #17 – Letter] a letter Oswald wrote to Marina with instructions on what to do if he was caught after the Walker shooting incident, and one of three of [serial #18 – Wallets] Oswald’s wallets.
Then there’s what Mallon appropriately calls “The Limbo Hour,” between the time of the assassination and the apprehension of Oswald, to which Mallon only devotes a few paragraphs, but which actually deserves a book length treatise.
At some point in the proceedings Michael Paine is overheard talking on the telephone with either his father or his wife, and someone says that they know Oswald didn’t do it and know who is REALLY responsible, but we are left in the dark as to who that responsible party is. Mallon wants us to believe they were talking about the Soviets. Yea, right.
THE RIFLE
In a review of the evidence against Oswald, it’s apparent that it comes down to the rifle.
Although no one has said that they actually saw the rifle in the garage (except Marina who only saw a wood stock and couldn’t identify the alleged assassination weapon), the blanket the gun was supposedly wrapped in was mentioned by Michael Paine, Ruth Paine, Marina and the cops who searched the garage, but for some reason it wasn’t photographed before it was picked up “and fell limp” without the rifle or camping equipment. What should have caught the attention of homicide investigators, but isn’t mentioned in the Warren Report is the fact that the well oiled and greased gun that was wrapped in the “dusty” blanket for months not only didn’t have any clear fingerprints, but it didn’t have any microscopic fibers from the blanket, a practical impossibility.
If you read the Warren Report on the fiber evidence, they found ONE single fiber on the stock of the rifle that DID NOT match the blanket, even in color, but the FBI forensic lab specialist testified COULD HAVE come from the shirt Oswald had on at the time of his arrest. It’s just a shame he changed his shirt after the shooting so that wasn’t the shirt that he had on when JFK was shot. To me, that’s a plant, as the FBI didn’t know Oswald changed his shirt at the time.
While the photo of Oswald, the rifle, blanket and Oswald letters to Marina and the Soviet Embassy are discussed in Mallon’s book, the Minox cameras, multiple wallets and other mysteries and questionable points are ignored completely.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
Nor does Mallon bring out the full character in the slew of interesting characters that populate this story, beginning with Ruth and Michael Paine, Michael Paine’s father Lyman Paine and mother – Ruth Forbes Paine Young, her friend and traveling companion Mary Bancroft, Michael’s main mentor, step-father and Bell Helicopter inventor Arthur Young, Marina’s biographer Priscilla Johnson McMillan, and their joint association with the World Federalists. Anyone interested in these people would also want to learn more about the founder of the World Federalists, Cord Meyer, Jr., who became head of the CIA’s domestic contacts division and later International Organizations Division chief under Alan Dulles.
One thing Mallon’s book is quite clear on is that both Ruth and Michael Paine looked towards Michael’s mother Ruth Forbes Paine Young and her husband Arthur Young, as mentors for advice and guidance. Though you can’t find the Youngs listed in any of the assassination books, other than one line in Gerald Ford’s Portrait of the Assassin, [An example of Peter Dale Scott’s “negative template” hypothesis in which the least mentioned are the most significant], the Youngs directed much of the Paine’s critical actions, from moving from Philadelphia to Texas to work at Bell Hell, taking in Marina and Oswald’s family to the proper way to handle the spin on affairs after the assassination. It is Michael’s mother who helped establish the Philadelphia chapter and supported the World Federalists and the International Peace Academy at the UN, about which there has been little research done and where much of the backchannel JFK-Castro intrigue took place. Also among those whose post assassination advice Ruth Paine obtained was from Norman Cousins, the editor who they knew, according to Mallon, from the World Federalists.
The bottom line is that if JFK was killed by a lone, deranged nut case, then the President’s death would be an accidental, unconnected anomaly and unrelated to the policies, politics and character of the man or the office of the Presidency. We have such killers in our history – such as Howard Unruh, who snapped and killed 13 neighbors in a killing spree, and others, but Oswald isn’t one of those type of killers, as Ruth and Michael Paine and practically everyone who knew him has acknowledged.
If the accused assassin is Lee Harvey Oswald – the former Civil Air Patrol cadet, USMC radar operator trained in electronics, interrogation techniques and the Russian language, the guy who owned a Minox camera, defected to Soviet Russia, lived there for two years and returned with a Russian wife, went to Mexico City and knew exposed covert operators like David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, George DeMohrenschildt, Carlos Bringuier, Volkmar Schmidt, took a pot shot at General Walker and killed President Kennedy - all before he was 24 years old, then the assassination MO – modus operandi was that of a clear and clean cut covert operation conducted by an state controlled intelligence network. If Oswald had anything at all to do with the assassination, he fits the Operational Profile and could not and did not commit the assassination on his own, as all intelligence analysts knew from the moment they learned his background.
As Ruth Paine herself briefly suspected, and as she testified to the Warren Commission, Oswald didn’t “live” on Neeley Street, but like an agent, he was “operating from a base at 214 Neeley Street,” and posed the question herself: “I may say, also, I wondered, as I had already indicated to the Commission, I had wondered, from time to time, whether this (Lee Harvey Oswald) was a man who was working as a spy or in any way (was) a threat to the nation, and this thought,…I am interested to know if this is a real thing or something unreal. And I waited to see if I would learn anymore about it. But this thought crossed my mind.”
I too am interested to know if this is a real thing or something unreal, and would like to learn more about it, as this same thought has crossed my mind, and I look forward to having Michael and Ruth Paine help answer the important outstanding questions. But since the answers aren’t in Mallon’s book, we’ll have to look for the truth somewhere else.
LNs vs. CTs.
It’s not only the lack of the really pertinent information that makes Mallon’s book bad, but I also take exception of his characterizations of people who know there was a conspiracy. He doesn’t like those who recognize that Mrs. Paine is as much a pawn as Oswald, and are thus suspicious of her, including those who are so easily disparaged such as Oswald’s mother Margurete, who he never met, and his brother Robert, who wouldn’t talk with him, and Sue Wheaton. Wheaton is an American citizen who knew Ruth Paine in Nicaragua and objected to her keeping track of those who attended certain meetings in a country that was torn by revolution and civil war. While Mallon tries to paint Wheaton as a CT by calling her “an American aid worker in Central America who had been influenced by the writings of A.J. Weberman – co author of Coup d’Etat in America…” she’s just an American citizen seeking social justice in a third world country who read a book, and felt threatened by Paine and her associate, who identified himself as affiliated with the ubiquitous Antioch College. Paine’s excuse is, “I tend to take photographs and try to remember names…And that made them extremely nervous.” Indeed.
While I take odds with Mallon over his slipshod treatment of sincere citizens who feel threatened by Mrs. Paine and her Antioch cronies, I take offense at Mallon’s attitude and description of the independent researchers, many of whom are my friends and associates who have kept this case alive today. To develop this attitude Mallon checks in with John McAdams, a Marquette professor who “sees most CT’s playing a ‘kind of parlor game’ that American democracy is ‘robust’ enough to put up with.” Instead of trying to solve the murder the government refuses to, and attempt to restore a lost democracy as well as reveal how the coup took place so it can’t happen again, McAdams and Mallon believe we are merely playing a game of “Clue.”
Well, in serious academic and research circles “Professor” McAdams is clueless, he’s a conspiracy denier who is looked upon as a quack, and his web site of disinformation is a source no one in their right mind would use, even for a term paper. McAdams once tried to “infiltrate” a Coalition On Political Assassination (COPA) conference in Washington D.C. “posing” as a CT, but was exposed when a Washington Post reporter decided to interview him as a typical attendee. Talk about cosmic coincidences.
Mallon takes his readers to a JFK assassination conference, a JFK LANCER conference in Dallas which he characterizes as like a (Star) - “Trekie” convention. There, he manages to disparage the closest witness to the assassination, the late Jean Hill, put down retired English police officer Ian Griggs, who “rises for an almost heroically irrelevant presentation,” Anna Marie Kuhns-Walko for her “exceptionally rangy performance,” and he takes on Larry Hancock, “who brings out the Mafia theory.” Then there’s Carol Hewett, who is not “so friendly as she appears, with her short frosted-blonde hair and small-businesswomen’s manner.”
Well Jean Hill, as a school teacher and a real hero to her students as well as to many of the students of the assassination, spoke the truth as she knew it, a concept Mallon fails to grasp. Ian Griggs [see: web sites re: garage photos, Ruby strippers, et al.] has explored many of the most significant aspects of the assassination from a police officer’s perspective, and has repeatedly broken new ground in filling in the empty blanks left by official investigators. Anna Marie was one of the first researchers to actually go to the National Archives JFK Assassination collection, ask for and read the documents released under the JFK Act, and through informative articles in research publications such as The Fourth Decade, she revealed what she found and taught other new researchers who followed her the correct rules and procedures.
Larry Hancock is just now completing a new manuscript on John Martino, the mob and CIA associate who had foreknowledge of the assassination and knew of the role the anti-Castro Cubans played in setting up Oswald, but I’m sure it won’t be as easy for Larry to find a publisher as it was for Mallon, even though Hancock actually uses footnotes and cites his sources.
And finally, though others feel slighted that Mallon didn’t disparage them too, there’s Carol Hewett, Esq., a Florida attorney, who has spent the best part of the past decade researching the background of Ruth and Michael Paine with a small group of other researchers, including Barbara LaMonica, Steve Barber and Bruce Adams. The bottom line of the Paine Project report, published in part in various research publications (i.e. Probe ), is that there’s more to the Paines than meets the eye, and they’ve yet to come clean on the whole affair of their involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy. And Mallon’s Garage doesn’t even scratch the surface.
If any one of those truly independent researchers mentioned and disparaged by Mallon had received a grant or fellowship from Guggenheim as he did, we would have a much better understanding of the assassination of President Kennedy. Personally, I would like to receive such a grant to study how the CIA funded it’s covert operations through funneling millions of tax dollars through the private foundation system that included the San Jacinto Fund, the Catherwood Foundation, the H. Smith Richardson Foundation that are connected to the assassination of President Kennedy, and other such similar entities like Guggenheim, that now apparently continue to fund such half-truth propaganda as Mallon’s Garage.
THE PAINES : CLEAR BEACONS TO THE KILLERS
Mallon has some unkind words for Philadelphia attorney Vincent Salandria, who he can’t seem to mention without linking to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, even though Salandria began writing about the assassination before they even issued the Warren Report. And while Garrison did call and question Ruth Paine before a Grand Jury, as they did before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and the Warren Commission, they too failed to ask, let alone answer, any of the outstanding questions we are still waiting to be asked.
If Mallon really wanted to learn something about the assassination, he could have went to the November, 1998 COPA conference in Dallas. The Coalition On Political Assassinations is not a group of “Trekies,” but rather an association of doctors, lawyers, journalists and ordinary citizens who have continued to research and investigate the assassination of President Kennedy, as well as other political assassinations. Three board members of COPA – Professor Phil Melanson, former FBI agent William Turner and Dr. Cyril Wecht have been interviewed by CNN as professional specialists shortly after the September 11th terrorists attacks. The 1998 COPA conference, on the 35th anniversary of the assassination, took place not far from Dealey Plaza and included a keynote speech by Salandria in which he called for justice and the indictment of Ruth and Michael Paine. [Nov. 20, 1998; See: Fair Play].
In his speech Salandria said: “…Oswald’s family was brought to the Dallas area by Ruth Paine. Ruth Paine had been instrumental in getting Oswald a job at the Texas School Book Depository. The Manlicher Carcano, the alleged murder rifle, had supposedly been stored in a garage at the Paines. Following the assassination, Ruth Paine was called by Oswald during his detention to have her obtain a lawyer for him, a task which she failed to complete much to the benefit of the assassins.”
“Once a conspiracy was deemed to exist, the Paines had to be viewed as having been involved in it. An assassination Gestalt with the patsy serving as a lightning rod, cannot be successfully completed unless the patsy is delivered to the scene of the killing. Ruth Paine accomplished the crucial twin assassination tasks of getting Oswald into the Dallas area and arranging him to get him a job in the Texas School Book Depository building. Therefore the Paines, albet on a need-to-know basis, were involved in the plot.”
“In whose service were the Paine’s?… Ruth and Michael Paine could not have been Soviet, Castro or Mafia agents. They had to be agents of the killing force, our U.S. intelligence. If they had a been Soviet or Castro agents, an innocent government would have swooped down on them and seen them as clear beacons leading to the killers. Our government did not cause them any trouble. The Paines are criminal co-conspirators to the killing of President Kennedy and would and should now be prosecuted by a guiltless government.”
“There is no rational manner in which we can strip away the guilt…The government’s consistent criminal pattern of ignoring a whole series of data indicating conspiracy and constantly twisting the meaning of the evidence to suggest a single assassin scenario compels the conclusions that the U.S. national security state killed John F. Kennedy….The effect of the government’s deceit has been to create a confused and extremely protracted debate designed to hide the simple truth…The government has served on us, the people, who have always by a large majority disbelieved the Warren Report, a notice that we are powerless….We cannot consider ourselves a free and democratic people until we understand and address the evil nature of the …power that murdered President Kennedy. We can no longer afford to shield ourselves by asserting that the murder of JFK is a mystery. There is no mystery regarding how, by whom and why President Kennedy was killed…”
Now we need a Congressional hearing or an independent Grand Jury to subpoena the Paines and other important witnesses that have yet to be properly deposed, place them under oath and ask them reasonable and responsible questions that the Warren Commission, Mallon and everyone else has failed to ask, let alone answer.
William E. Kelly, Jr. is a freelance journalist, co-founder of the Committee for an Open Archives, member of the Coalition On Political Assassinations, and author of two regional history books, 300 Years at the Point and Birth of the Birdie. His research on the assassination of President Kennedy is supported in part by a grant from the Fund for Constitutional Government Investigative Journalism Project.
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Yes, clearly reviews in newspapers of great circulation like the "Times" and the "Washington Post" would be helpful.
The "Times" did publish last year a review of Holland's "The Assassination Tapes" by Max Holland. The review was by Thomas Mallon and it it he reargued the LN POV.
As you may recall, Mark Howell and I sent a letter to the "Times" replying to Mallon's review. I suspect it also received other critical letters. But it did not publish any letter in response to the review.
TG, Do you still have a copy of Mallon's review of Holland's book? Or know if it is on line?
Is this the same Mallon who did "Mrs. Paine's Garage?"
I'd also like to read your letter in response.
Also check out the Wasington Post's story on the DC conference, by Walter Pincus, the guy who replaced George Lardner in covering the spooks and assassination.
BK
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Tim G., after my post of the Scripps-Howard CASTRO PLOT TO KILL REAGAN bogus news report, asked if I had any evidence that Hinkley's attempt to kill Reagan was a conspiracy. Here's an article I wrote a few years ago on HINKLEY & COMPANY - BK
“Minds are malleable, but not self-malleable, a condition politicians and PR men use to sinister advantage.”
-William S. Burroughs.
After John Hinkley shot President Reagan, he said, “The movie isn’t over yet!”
And indeed it isn’t. Political assassinations and coup d’etats are the most frequently used methods of changing governments and controlling power, and we shouldn’t expect that to change.
Now we hear from Hinkley every few years or so when he exercises his right to seek release from St. Elizabeth’s hospital, where he is incarcerated. Hinkley is in a hospital, rather than a prison, because of a quirk in our judicial system that says he is not responsible for his actions. If that is the case, then who is responsible for Hinckley’s actions?
After the assassination of President Kennedy the murder of a president was made a Federal, rather than a local crime, so a Federal investigation would take precedence over local police, courts and authorities. Unlike the Hinkley-Reagan affair, the assassination of President Kennedy was successful and the government changed hands, minds and policy, while Hinkley’s attempt on Reagan failed and the constitutional powers did not change.
Because we still haven’t determined exactly who was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy, or the attack on Reagan, we certainly haven’t seen the last of political assassinations in our society. We haven’t heard the last of John Hinckley, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan B. Sirhan or Mark David Chapman, the seemingly unimportant people who unexpectedly rise from the masses to take a monumental action that makes a mark on history and changes the course of our times.
As Hinkley said, the movie isn’t over yet. Hinkley failed in his mission, but created an important case study that helps us understand the ongoing implications of assassination in our society.
War dawns slowly as a political hot spot becomes unmanageable and a limited conventional war gets out of hand, though we know the crisis is coming, but assassination, as a political incident, happens suddenly and often unexpectedly, except to those who intend it to happen. Since Hinkley shot Reagan, Sadat of Egypt, Aquillo of the Philippines, Ghandi of Inida, and dozens of other world leaders have become victim of assassins. Of all political avenues, assassination is the most likely, but least expected to happen.
“Well, it seems, you know, that there was this…there was this thing I had to do, the moment I had been heading for all my life, like going through that door, as I say, the door to someplace.” – Taxi Driver
John Hinkley came crashing through that door on a lazy springtime afternoon in March, 1981, just outside a side door of the Washington Hilton Hotel. It’s now nicknamed the Hinkley Hilton since Hinkley jumped out of a crowd of newsmen to shoot President Reagan, his press secretary James Brady, a secret service agent and a security guard.
Hinkley’s alleged motive, a psychological, rather than political one, is that he shot the President to impress movie actress Jody Foster. Hinkley had repeatedly seen the movie, “Taxi Driver” in which Foster plays the role of a prostitute protected by a crazed taxi driver who stalks a politician with the intent to kill him, but then kills a pimp and a drug pusher. Rather than being sent to prison, he is declared a hero.
While the facts of Hinkley’s life were being investigated and disseminated by the news media shortly after the attack, John Wright of Lansing, Michigan was arrested and charged with threatening the life of then Vice President George Bush. Wright had bragged, “that he could be more famous than Siran Siran or Lee Harvey Oswald.”
As news of Hinkley’s actions spread through the media, Edward Michael Richardson, Michael Vandewehe and possibly other “copy cat” assassins, as they came to be called, went through the Taxi Driver door on the heels of Hinkley. And like Hinkley and Wright, they found themselves in jail, charged with threatening the life of or attempting to assassinate the President of the United States.
On April 9, 1981, less than two weeks after the shooting at the Hinkley Hilton, Edward Michael Richardson was charged with two counts of threatening the life of the President. The first count stemmed from a letter Richardson wrote and delivered to Jody Foster Yale dormitory, while the second charge related to a letter found in Richardson’s hotel room in which he stated that he was going to Washington D.C. “to bring completion to Hinkley’s reality.” Richardson was arrested in New York City with a loaded pistol while getting on a D.C. bound bus.
From Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb, Richardson had spent some time in the
military and was once a student of the Reverend Carl MacIntire’s Shelton College, a fundamentalist religious school with campuses located in Cape Canaveral, Florida and Cape May, New Jersey.
Within days of Richardson’s arrest, the Secret Service charged Michael VandeWehe of Wildwood, New Jersey, with threatening the life of the President. VandeWehe was considered a threat even though he was then incarcerated in the Cape May County jail at the time. The Secret Service said that he wrote and mailed a letter from the jail that made a “direct threat against the life of the President.”
Before Reagan was shot, the Secret Service had commissioned a study by a panel of 27 experts to prepare a report on the methods of predicting violent acts. The Secret Service also compiles files on thousands of citizens that are potential threats to the President, and some 400 individuals are considered a serious enough threat to be kept under periodic surveillance. Neither Hinkley, Wright nor VandeWehe were considered to be a threat to the President before March, 1981.
Hinkley’s case also made its mark in the legal journals as a precedent to be cited because of Hinkley’s insanity plea, and attempts by the victim’s attorneys to make Hinkley’s psychologists responsible for his actions if he was not.
If Hinkley and the copy-cats were acting on psychological impulses, rather than on political, ideological or mercenary motives, then someone else could be held responsible for their behavior if it can be shown that they were conditioned or acting as an agent of others.
Rather than acting as a deranged lone-nuts on primitive instincts, perhaps one or even some of these assassins were psychologically conditioned or brainwashed by scientists with a more sophisticated motive – and fit the archtypical Manchurian Candidate model.
If Hinkley was conditioned by the film “Taxi Driver,” it might not have been just be environmental and social circumstances, but rather by design. Using drugs, hypnosis and multimedia programming techniques, individual subjects have been programmed to kill with a high degree of predictable response, so it is a possibility that deserves further investigation.
THE ANCIENT ORDER OF THE ASSASSINS
The U.S. Government, the military in particular, conducted psychological experiments on human subjects years, decades ago, and today, anyone with the knowledge and the tools could be in the business of privately programming and training assassins and terrorists.
We know coup d’etats and political assassinations occur routinely in third world countries and so-called “Bananna Republics,” but our own system of government is equally vulnerable and more likely targeted for such manipulation. Until President Reagan, who survived the attempt on his life in the first weeks of his presidency, none of the previous five presidents actually served out their full two terms, eight years of office, since President Kennedy was assassinated.
Men with pistols, rifles, bombs and even samurai swords have been arrested at the White House gates, where guards have been on the lookout for suicide bomb trucks and remote control kamikaze airplanes.
The Secret Service, a branch of the Treasury Department, is responsible for the security of the president and thus keeps the files on thousands of people who are potential threats. Some are violent prone suspects, others religious fanatics, ideological demagogs, professional hit men, espionage agents and trained terrorists. Others are just plain nuts.
Their common name – assassins, comes from the Arabic word Hashshishin, which means, “users of hashish,” the euphoric drug, but their legend stems from a secret society that began in the 11th century Persia as a religious order. Their leader, it is said, “carries the death of kings in his hand.”
Most of Western civilization first learned the tales of the Assassins from Marco Polo, who passed through Persia in 1273 enroute to China. Polo reported that the Shek of the Assassins lived in a fortified valley between two mountains, which is probably the fabled, impenetrable fortress at Alamut. There the Sheik had a beautiful fruit bearing garden “watered with streams of wine, milk and honey.” Drugged and taken to the hidden garden, young impressionable recruits were courted by dancers, musicians, magicians and beautiful women. They were inebriated in ecstasy, then drugged again and brought before the Sheik. Having experienced paradise, they became slaves to its pleasures, and the Sheik’s whim. “Away they went,” Polo said, “and did all that they were commanded. Thus it happened that no man escaped when the Sheik of the mountains desired his death.”
The role of the order of the Assassins, while they have passed into mythology, is still relevant, not only linguistically, but in regards to a contemporary understanding of assassination as a political weapon in our own society. In the 1000 years the term assassins has been used, assassins are still programmed and conditioned in ways similar to their ancient counterparts, but by much more sophisticated and predictable ways.
As the victim of an assassin President Lincoln became the last casualty of the Civil War. In 1900 Theodore Roosevelt assumed power when President McKinley was shot and killed by a “glassy-eyed anarchist.” Assassins sparked Word War I by killing Archduke Ferdinand as he rode in a motorcade, and the Reichstag fire that herald Hilter’s rise to power was allegedly started by a “lone-nut.” French Admiral Darlin was assassinated by a British trained assassin in North Africa, while Hitler was the target of a failed assassination-coup attempt in 1944. After the war Leon Trotsky was targeted, stalked and eventually assassinated in Mexico City by Soviet agents.
The assassination of President Kennedy precipitated two decades of political unrest that included the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and the wounding of Presidential candidate George Wallace, all by assassins who fit the archtypical assassin prototype – James Earl Ray, Siran Siran and Arthur Bremmer. Richard Nixon’s handpicked successor, Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, served on the Warren Commission inquiry into President Kennedy’s assassination before assuming that office himself. As President he dodged bullets from two attacks, one from Sara Jane Moore, and FBI informant, and the other from Squeaky Frome, one of Charles Manson’s disciples.
Assassins in the United States have not confined themselves to presidents and presidential contenders, but have also killed Union officials, foreign diplomats, journalists and cultural figures. United Mine Workers union president Tony Boyle was convicted of ordering the murder of his union rival Jock Yablonski, Chilean secret police agent Michael Townley turned states’ evidence in admitting his participation with renegade Cubans in the Dupont Circle bombing assassination of former Chilean ambassador Leitter in downtown Washington D.C., and one-time fan, Mark David Chapman shot and killed former Beatle John Lennon.
By March, 1981 America and the world had been numbed by the accustomed ring of the assassin’s gun when Hinkley opened fire on the President’s entourage. Had he been successful, Hinkley would have made George Bush president of the United States with the flick of his finger and altering the course of history. The possibility that Hinkley was programmed or conditioned to shoot the President may have been privately evaluated, but has not been analyzed in a public forum.
STATE-OF-THE-ART ASSASSINS
The U.S. government has learned much about the psychological makeup of assassins, not by studying the profiles of subjects, but by attempting to create them. The state-of-the-art of conditioning assassins has advanced considerably sincethe days of the Hashshishin and the garden fortress at Alamut.
From 1949 until 1974 the U.S. CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense conducted sophisticated mind and behavior control research, using students, agents, soldiers and prisoners as human guinea pigs in a number of experiments that used drugs, hypnosis, audio[visional and electronic programming techniques.
One such project, called ARTICHOKE, began using drugs for investigating interrogation techniques, which stemmed from attempts to understand brainwashing procedures used on American prisoners of war by the Chinese in North Korea. Eventually the program became directed towards finding “whether a person could be secretly induced to commit an assassination against his will.”
One CIA contract agent, Jessica Wilcox (aka Candy Jones), a model and radio personality, was programmed to commit suicide by her CIA psychiatrist (See: “Candy Jones,” by Donald Bain, Playboy Press).
Although both the CIA and the military claim that their research ended in 1974, there are indications that the mind control programs merely became “operational” when the “experimental” stage ended, and techniques for programming assassins were secretly blended in with the normal routine of clandestine and military affairs.
The discovery of a CIA handbook in Central America that gave guidelines on developing criminals as agents to eliminate selected government officials is evidence of this, along with the fact that it was used in Vietnam, supports the contention that the U.S. government uses assassination as a tool of foreign policy.
OSLO NATO CONFERENCE & THE NAVY NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL LAB
In the summer of 1975, a year after the government claimed it halted such research, Dr. Irwin Sarason organized a conference in Oslo, Norway for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which addressed the topic of “The Dimensions of Stress and Anxiety.”
Dr. Sarason had produced a film which showed the success of school students who asked questions, and presented the film to a group of juvenile delinquents, who learned how to ask questions and showed marked improvement in their studies.
The U.S. Office of Naval Research offered to fund Sarason’s work, provided it was classified, so it could be used by the Navy psychiatric lab in San Diego, California, where “spys were being trained to resist interrogation.”
Peter Watson, a former psychologist and a reporter for the London Sunday Times attended the Oslo conference and participated in a seminar conducted by U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Thomas Narut, a psychologist then assigned to the U.S. Navy Regional Medical Center in Naples, Italy.
Lt. Commander Narut gave a talk on “The Use of Symbolic Models and Verbal Intervention in Inducing and Reducing Stress.” He claimed his work involved teaching “combat readiness units” to cope with the stress of killing.
After his general discourse, Watson talked privately with Narut, who told the London Times correspondent that he had done his doctoral dissertation on whether certain films provoke anxiety. Narut said that he studied whether forcing men to do irrelevant tasks while watching violent films made them cope better with anxiety associated with violence.
Narut also told Watson that the U.S. Navy programmed assassins on an assembly line basis, and that he personally worked with men whom he referred to as “hit men and assassins,” who were involved in commando type operations and placed in U.S. embassies abroad. These men, Narut told Watson, were on call to kill selected victims when necessary. The U.S. Marine Corps, which is in charge of protecting embassies abroad, comes under the Department of Navy, and much of the advanced training for the Marines takes place at its bases in San Diego, California.
Narut said that drugs and hypnosis were no longer necessary, and that such conditioning was accomplished by a standardized behavior modification process called audio-visual desensitation. Subjects were desensitized to mayhem and carnage by viewing films of people being injured and killed in different ways, with mild bloodshed being succeeded by progressively violent scenes. They became acclimated to the brutality and eventually dissociated their feelings from the violence.
Narut was quoted as saying the best killers were classified as having “passive-aggressive” personalities, or men “with strong drives that were usually kept under tight control.” These types he said, “were usually calm, but from time to time would exhibit outbursts of temper during which they could literally kill without remorse.” Men with these “qualities” could be identified through psychological testing, using the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory test, which is used in schools, businesses and corporations, as well as the military, and can measure hostility, depression and psychopathy.
After subjects with the right psychological qualities were selected and recruited they were sent either to the Naples Medical Center or the Navy Neuropsychological Lab in San Diego, California, where according to Narut, they were audio-visually desensitized by being strapped into a chair with their head clamped in such a way that they couldn’t look away from the screen and their eyelids prevented from closing.
After Watson’s story about the conversation with Narut was published in the London Sunday Times, Narut called a press conference to say that he had been talking only in “theoretical” and not “practical” terms.
HINKLEY’S MOVIE
“You see, I had this plan to make myself somebody at last, a celebrity. To go down in history. Had this plan I was working on, though, in the meantime, I needed to stay as real with myself as I could. Because when you think of all those other guys, Oswald, Booth and Arty Bremer, the lot, if it’s one thing about them marks them out as real losers is they got a little unreal sometimes…” – Taxi Driver
There has been much discussion on the effects the media has on people and whether it can instigate action, but the question shouldn’t be whether or not the film “Taxi Driver” had a mental impact on John Hinkley, but whether the conditioning was coincidental or deliberate. Are Hinkley, Richardson and VandeWehe really “lone-nuts” acting on their own perverted psychological motives, or were they deliberately programmed by the government, military, the CIA or some sinister psychologists who specializes in such behavior modification?
John Hinkley’s father was a wealthy oil man from Dallas, Texas, where Hinkley grew up and went to school. Hinkley bought his gun at a shop on Elm Street, not far from the Dealey Plaza intersection where President Kennedy was ambushed.
Hinkley’s family moved to Evergreen, Colorado, where they were living in March, 1981. John W. Hinkley Sr. owned Vanderbilt Oil Company, and was active in a number of religious and charitable organizations, although he has more recently been devoting his time to promoting a foundation for mental health research.
Although Hinkley’s main problem seemed to simplyl be finding direction in his life, his parents recognized some mental disturbance in him, and Hinkley saw no less than three doctors about his mental condition in the year before the shooting. In Lubock, Texas, Hinkley saw a Dr. Rosen, who prescribed an anti-depressant called Serentil, and valium, a tranquilizer.
Hinkley also saw Dr. John Hooper, who gave him biofeedback treatments. His father is also quoted as saying, “I made arrangements with a psychologist by the name of Durrell Benjamin, our company psychologist, to see John.”
This doctor told Hinkley’s father that, “John was immature and that we needed to work out a long-range plan to make John self sufficient.” Hinkley wanted to attend a writer’s school at Yale, and Benjamin recommended that he do so. Yale is where Jody Foster was attending school at the time.
They had Hinkley draw up a written agreement – contract that read: “I will receive the sum of $3,000 in checks, taken from my stock,…to last from September 17 to February 1st…and I do pledge to try to make the coming weeks and months as productive as possible. It is now or never. Thanks for the money and one more chance. John Hinkley, Jr.” The next day he left for New Haven, Connecticut and Yale, but he never enrolled in the writer’s school.
“I worked so hard for it. Swallowed pill after pill, wrote all night long,…making calculations and learned to make myself comfortable to the feel of these guns.” – Taxi Driver
Hinkley had seen a number of films with Jody Foster in them, some repeatedly, and in the month of August that year, he saw some on television. According to one report, “It was his feeling that the movies had been put no TV to excite him into action.”
Returning to his parent’s home in Colorado briefly, Hinkley went back to Lubbock, Texas where he purchased some weapons, the same caliber pistols bought by “Travis,” the hero of “Taxi Driver,” who he emulated. From Texas Hinkley went to Washington, D.C., Columbus, Ohio, and then to Dayton, Ohio, where he stalked then President Carter, who was making a campaign stop. Hinkley then went back to New Haven to see Jody Foster, then went to New York city where he sought out young prostitutes.
Traveling to Lincoln, Nebraska, Hinkley contacted one of the leading activists in the American Nazi party, and fraternized with rightwing military types, before going to Nashville, Tenn., where Carter was campaigning. Picked up at the Nashville airport where his guns had registered on a metal detector, Hinkley was arrested with unregistered weapons in a city where the President was visiting, yet he was never considered a threat to the President and placed on the “watch” list, as thousands of other Americans routinely are “red flagged.”
After paying a fine Hinkley went back to New Haven where he checked into the Colony Inn Hotel before moving to the Sheraton Park Plaza, never in need of money. Returing to Texas, Hinkley purchased two more handguns and then traveled to New Haven, Washington and Colorado, where he saw Evergreen psychologist Dr. John Hooper.
In an effort to make Hinkley relax, Hooper prescribed a series of biofeedback treatments. According to an account in Rolling Stone Magazine, “He was given earphones similar to those he wore in the nearby pistol range when he was practicing shooting at human silhouettes. An electrode was attached to his forehead. But while he was supposed to be relaxing, he was actually fantasizing about assassination and Jody Foster.” Dr. Hooper however, said at the time he had never even heard of Jody Foster.
Towards the end of 1980 Hinkley went to Washington D.C. where he was on December 8, when Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon. Hinkley then began stalking Ronald Reagan, and posed for pictures in front of the Ford Theater, where Lincoln was assassinated.
After seeing Dr. Hooper again in January, 1981, Hinkley went to New Hampshire in February, then to D.C. where he got a room at the Capitol Hill Quality Inn and visited the offices of Sen. Edward Kennedy, but Kennedy wasn’t in. He then visited the White House before going to New York where he planned to commit suicide at the Dakota, where Lennon was killed.
Returning to Colorado once again, on February 19th he left his parents a note saying, “Dear Mom and Dad; Your prodigal son has left again to exorcise some more demons.”
In New Haven, Conn. Hinkley stalked Jody Foster, delivered her a note, and then traveled to New York, from where he called home at 4:30 a.m. on March 6th. Hinkley’s father contacted Dr. Hooper, who advised him to give his son $100 and say goodbye. A friend of Hinkley’s father gave him the money to fly home, and on Saturday, March 7, Hinkley’s father picked him up at the Denver airport.
Staying at the Golden Hours Motel in Lakewood for a week, Hinkley moved to the Motel 6 in Lakewood rather than stay at home. He registered under the name of “Travis,” like his “Taxi Driver” hero. On March 25th his mother drove him to the airport and put him on a plane to Hollywood, California, where he stayed for less than a day. After four days on a bus, Hinkley arrived in New Haven, via D.C., then went back to D.C. and got a room at the Park Central Hotel, less than two blocks from the White House. There he watched TV, ate fast foods and read a Washington Star newspaper that contained the President’s itinerary.
After writing a letter Hinkley picked up a John Lennon button, which he put into his left coat pocket, then put his .22 in his right pocket and proceeded to the Hilton Hotel where the President was making an appearance.
As Hinkley was shooting the president, quite by coincidence, his brother Scott Hinkley was at the White House with his good friend, the son of Vice President George Bush. Bush’s daughter reportedly arranged dates for Scott Hinkley, and Ms. Maureen Bush, a niece of George Bush, is said to have been photographed at a Nazi rally with John Hinkley. The ironies were compounded however, when Michael Richardson was arrested in New York.
In the two weeks after Hinkley’s attack on Reagan, the Secret Service investigated over 300 threats against the life of the President, and Richardson was the most interesting of the copy-cat assassins.
MICHAEL RICHARDSON
From Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, Richardson was arrested on April 7, 1981 at the New York City bus terminal with a loaded .32 cal. Pistonl. He had been in New Haven, where he left a note in his hotel room saying he was leaving for Washington “to bring completion to Hinkley’s reality.”
“Our duel realities merged into a single vision,” wrote Richardson, and indeed their trails had previously crossed. Unlike Hinkley, Richardson had briefly served in the military. He was trained at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, from January 4 to March 31, 1977, and received an early honorable discharge after three months of basic training, but the reasons for his discharge were not disclosed. At his arrangement in New York however, U.S. Attorney John Martin said Richardson stabbed someone during his brief military stint.
After attending Delaware Community College in Pennsylvania in 1979, Richardson started school at the Rev. Carl MacIntire’s fundamentalist bible school, Shelton College, near Coca Beach, Florida. He also reportedly went to Cape May, New Jersey, where he spent the summer at MacIntire’s school there, earning extra money by helping to paint Macintire’s Christian Admiral Hotel on the beach. After two semesters, Richardson left Shelton and moved to Lakewood, Colorado, where he move in with his two sisters in December1980.
Hinkley’s parents lived in Evergreen, Colorado, near Lakewood, and Hinkley had stayed at the Golden Hours motel in Lakewood in March 1981.
Richardson left Colorado in mid-March, Hinkley on March 25. In a letter mailed from Grand Junction, Colorado on March 25, and received by the Evangelist Magazine the day Reagan was shot, someone warned, or mysteriously predicted that Reagan would be shot and the country “turned to the left.”
Richardson’s family attorney, Joseph F. Moore, Jr. said that the connections were only “cosmic,” and not evidence of conspiracy. No one however, inquired as to whether Richardson underwent any psychiatric treatment while in Colorado, or looked into whether or not Hinkley’s doctors, particularly Dr. Hooper, also treated Richardson.
Besides their joint fixation with Jody Foster and guns, and their “cosmic” Lakewood, Colorado connections, Hinkley and Richardson were both affiliated with evangelical ministries. Richardson, a student of the Rev. Carl MacIntire, pastor of the Bible Presbyterian Church in Collingswood, N.J. and Cape May, and president of Shelton College, was the founder of the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC).
MacIntire was also a close, personal friend of J. Edgar Hover, who shared MacIntire’s fanatic anti-communist fervor. MacIntire has frequently condemned the competing World Council of Christian Churches (WCCC), which includes parishes from Communist countries. MacIntire’s radio show, the 20th Century Reformation Hour, was broadcast behind the Iron Curtain and called for a Christian crusade against communism.
John Hinkley’s father, who sponsored a philanthropic foundation that ran a Denver soup kitchen for the poor and homeless, and where his son sometimes dined, was also on the board of directors of World Vision, and ran the World Vision center in Denver.
Both MacIntire’s ICCC and Hinkley’s World Vision are members of the ecumenical federation called the Evangelical Foreign Missions Assocation (EFMA) of Evanston, Illinois. One of the main functions of both ICCC and World Vision, which has its headquarters in Redwood Valley, California, is to operate refugee camps, especially refugee camps that attend to those who have fled communist countries.
According to John Judge, in the June-July issue of The Continuing Inquiry magazine, “World Vision is an evangelical, anti-communist missionary operation that works around the globe…and administers refugee camps in Ghana (where the Jonestown massacre occurred), and at Sabra and Shatilla camps in Lebanon where the Isralie massacre occurred.” Judge says that World Vision also operated along the Honduran border where CIA mercenaries fought Nicaraguan Sandinistas and El Salvadorian revolutionaries and that Alpha 66 and Omega 7 anti-Castro Cubans terrorists were hired to run some of the camps. One such camp also employed Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman, who worked at the Haitian refugee camp at Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas.
The CIA first began interviewing refugees from communist countries in East Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s as part of Reinhard Gehlen’s Operation Wriger, and the practice continued through the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and religious organizations like the ICCC and World Vision. Providing food and shelter in exchange for intelligence information is only the basis for the cooperation, and CIA evaluation of the refugee intelligence indicated that children were the most reliable of sources. Some of the foreign missionaries not only accepted money and assistance in exchange for intelligence information, but provided access to select refugees so they could be recruited and trained as assets, operatives and agents.
It is purely speculative whether or not Chapman, Hinkley or Richardson were targeted, recruited, trained or conditioned because of their association with these ministries, but the possibility is there.
Besides these associations, there is Hinkley’s bizarre association with the Islamic Guerilla Army (IGA). On December 16, 1981, Jack Anderson reported, “…Hinkley is widely believed to have acted out a crazy desire to impress actress Jody Foster. It’s an explanation that has gained credence by its very absurdity…But there is a possibility that Hinkley became associated with some Iranian terrorists who call themselves the Islamic Guerrilla Army (IGA)…In January 1981 an informant told the FBI and Secret Service that the IGA planned to assassinate Reagan sometime between Mid-March and early April, and that one of the assassination teams had the code name of ‘Hicks’ – a student who had been arrested in Nashville in October for illegal possession of firearms…Another informant, a government undercover agent, identified Hinkley as theman he saw at the Denver airport in 1979 with leaders of the Earth Liberation Movement (ELM), a communist backed group with ties to the IGA.”
John Hinkley’s father said that, “(Conspiracy) is one of the first things we looked at. The government looked into it and didn’t find anything. There’s absolutely no truth, no substance to conspiracy. John is very ill; he is a sick person. He did this for a vary pathetic reason.”
MICHALE VANDEWEHE
Like Richardson, Michael VandeWehe also served in the military, where something strange happened to him. VandeWehe was charged with threatening the life of the president after Hinkley’s attack on Reagan even though he was already incarcerated in the Cape May County jail at Cape May Court House, New Jersey.
Born in Cooperstown, New York, VandeWehe grew up in the Chelsea section of Atlantic City. His brother Richard died in a motorcycle accident in 1975 while stationed in Okinawa as a Marine. Michael joined the Marines in 1978. His father noted, “He felt he had to take his brother’s place.”
After basic training Michael was transferred to Iceland, where he was stationed for two years. But something happened there that forced him to be sent to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, where he was treated in the psychiatric wing in May, 1980.
As for his stay in Iceland, his father said, “Something happened there, but we’re not sure what.” Released from the hospital in June of 1980, VandeWehe was discharged from the Service and returned to his parents home in Wildwood, New Jersey. Not permitted to move in with his parents, who stayed at the Sandman Towers senior citizen complex, named after former Congressman Charles Sandman, Michael got a room at a local boarding house.
When he missed a rent payment, he was locked out of his room and his belongings confiscated by his landlord. Arrested for burglary, theft and criminal mischief for taking merchandise from a burnt out Wildwood bar, VandeWehe was released and then rearrested and charged with aggravated assault for striking his landlord, who attempted to prevent him from removing his clothes from his room.
“You can’t take a young boy like this right from the hospital and put him out on the street,” his father said at the time. A week after Hinkley shot Reagan, VandeWehe wrote a letter from the Crest Haven jail that the Secret Service said, “made a direct threat against the life of the President.”
Although VandeWehe’s home inWildwood is only a few miles from the Rev. Carl MacIntire’s Christian Admiral Hotel and Shelton College in Cape May, there does not appear to be any known association between VandeWehe and MacIntire or Richardson and their proximity seems only a coincidence. Much like the Lakewood, Colorado proximity between Hinkley and Richardson.
What is interesting however, is the last chapter of the book “The Parallax View,” a novel about a reporter who investigates and penetrates a private network of programmed assassins for hire. Although the screenplay of the movie based on the book, which stars Warren Beaty, was altered to provide for a different ending, the suspense novel ends on the two mile long coastal road that runs between VandeWehe’s Wildwood and Cape May, where MacInire and Richardson were at the Christian Admiral.
Also unlike the movie, in which a commission concludes there was no conspiracy in a political assassination, the book ends with a suspicious local policeman investigating an automobile accident, and concluding it is a murder.
“The movie isn’t over yet” – John Hinkley, Jr.
Xxxyyyzzz.
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Hello Gerry,
How ya doin?
I wanted to get back to you on the Somoza visit to Port Norris, but first I have a question for you about Frank.
Now Frank Forini was born in Philadelphia, and then his mother married a guy named Sturgis, and then Frank joined the USMC, right?
And your mutural friend E. Howard Hunt wrote a pulp fiction novel, Bimini Run? in which a character like Frank is named Forini, is that right?
I appreciate your experiences and first hand knowledge on all this, and as I have made all of the typical researchers' mistakes over the years, I'm still trying to keep it straight and get it right.
Thanks,
Bill Kelly
bkjfk3@yahoo.com
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Great information, Bill. Your participation in this Form is exceptional and we are fortunate you are a member!
Gee Tim G., it's really nice to meet all you people too, and for me to hook up with some old friends.
And it certainly would appear that the forgeries are professional.
You know, these types of forgeries are not difficult to track down, if anybody really wants to do it.
I was trying to figure out what the ZIPPER docs were all about when they put Dealey Plaza Danny Rather through the wringer over the fake docs re: Bush guard service, and thought that they were done in a very similar way and how come they fired Dan and the producer who just wrote a book, and never went after the person who actually fordged the damn documents. That was the crime, not reporting on them.
Like the Ruby/Oswald scuffle arrest report from the DPD, these types of forged records are professionally done, and is a crime.
BK
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Bill...The book's name is "Arthur Collins: Radio Wizard". It's written by Ben Stearns and it's described as "outlining his career" and "..history of Collins Radio under his leadership". It has 26 picture pages and you can order it online if you want. Hope this helps. Jason
THANKS JASON, THAT'S A NEW ONE ON ME. I'LL HAVE TO GET IT.
HERE'S AN ARTICLE I DID BASED ON ONE OF MY COPA PRESENTATIONS ON THE COLLINS RADIO CONNECTIONS, JUST SO EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT.
BK
THE COLLINS RADIO CONNECTIONS to the Assassination of President Kennedy
By William E. Kelly – Revised from report originally published in Backchannels magazine and presented as an abstract at the national conference of the Coalition On Political Assassination (COPA), October 10, 1994.
If the assassination of President Kennedy was the result of not only a conspiracy, but a covert action and coup d’etat, as many people believe, there should be evidence of this from both the scene of the crime(s) as well as from the highest echelons of power among those who took over the government. This would be especially so if the assassination was not a foreign attack by Cuban or Soviet intelligence service sponsors, but an internal manipulation of policy and control, an inside job.
As Edward Luttwack describes in his “How-To” book Coup d’etat – A Practical Handbook (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968, p. 117), “Control over the flow of information emanating from the political center will be our most important weapon in establishing our authority after the coup. The seizure of the main means of mass communication will thus be a task of crucial importance.” Rather than the mass communications of televison, radio and newspapers, as would occur in a normal coup, the control of primary communications after the assassination depended on only the control of Air Force One radio communicaitons.
At the scene(s) of the crime, eyewitness testimony is always suspect. Homicide detectives prefer more solid leads that provide documented evidence that can be introduced in court, such as fingerprints, telephone and automobile license records.
There are a number of automobile license records of significance in regards to the assassination of President Kennedy, including the tampered photo among the possessions of Lee Harvey Oswald of the license on 1957 Chevy in General Walker’s driveway, plus the license numbers of cars seen in Dealey Plaza photos immediately before and after the assassination.
Most significant however, is the Texas plate PP4537, which was jotted down on a piece of paper by an elderly Oak Cliff mechanic T. F. White, who on November 22, 1963, shortly after the assassination, noticed a man acting suspiciously behind the wheel of a 1958 two tone Plymouth sedan. The car was parked behind a billboard in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant, with the driver, like White, watching the flurry of Dallas police cars racing down the street with sirens blaring, called to the nearby scene of the shooting of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit.
White walked across the street to get closer and exchanged glances with the man who quickly drove away. White wrote down the license tag PP4537 on a piece of paper and forgot about it until later that day when he saw Lee Harvey Oswald on television and recognized him as the man he saw acting suspiciously in the Plymouth earlier that afternoon.
A few weeks later, when Dallas radio reporter and later mayor of Dallas Wes Wise gave a talk at the Oak Cliff restaurant, the owner of the garage where Mr. White worked mentioned the suspicious Plymouth to Wise, who then met White, who reluctantly told his story. “Do you have the piece of paper with the license number on it?” Wise asked, and sure enough, White had it right there in his pocket. PP4537.
Wise later said that he had to use all of his reportorial persuasions to convince White to hand over the paper with the number on it to him, that it was the patriotic and right thing to do and promised White that he wouldn’t get in trouble with the law. White said nobody knew who or what was really behind the assassination of President Kennedy and he really didn’t want to get involved, but he handed over the paper to Wise, who passed it on to the police and FBI.
A quick check of the Texas plate #PP4537 indicated that it was assigned to Carl Mather, of Garland, Texas. When the FBI went out to the listed Garland address they found the two tone 1958 Plymouth right there in the driveway and knocked on the door. Mrs. Mather answered, acknowledged the car belonged to her husband, who was then away at work at Collins Radio. When asked where her husband and the car was on Friday, November 22, 1963, she said that the car was in the parking lot at Collins Radio until sometime in the afternoon when her husband returned home and picked up the family to go to the Tippit residence to pay their respects to the widow and family of their good friend who was murdered that day.
Instead of going out to Collins Radio to interview Mather however, the FBI go to Mr. White, who Wes Wise had promised wouldn’t be involved, and took additional statements from him, changing his story for the official reports and exchanging the two tone Plymouth to a red Ford Falcon. CBS News made a polite inquiry years later, leaving Carl Mather of the documentary program they aired but listing Mrs. Mather in the programs credits. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) briefly looked into the affair, granted Mather immunity from prosecution to testify and then failed to question him under oath, and published a short report they titled “The Wise Allegation,” when in fact Wes Wise made no allegations, and merely followed up on his reporter’s instincts. He came up with an automobile license plate number that was scene near the murder of a Dallas policeman that was traced to one of the victim’s best friends, Carl Mather, whose alibi is that he was at work at the time, at Collins Radio.
Documents later released under the JFK Act indicate that Mather was questioned by investigators and claimed that he worked on electronics at Collins, his specific job being the installation of the radio equipment aboard Air Force Two – the Vice President’s plane.
That this lead was not properly investigated, and remains uninvestigated today, is because such leads actually do lead to the heart of the plot to murder not only Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit, but as many believe, is tied directly to the assassination of President Kennedy, and the Tippit murder may be the “Rosetta Stone” that could explain the mysteries of both murders.
The significance of the Collins Radio connections becomes apparent with a quick review of the published record, and that :
1) On November 1, 1963 the New York Times published a photograph of the ship the Rex, which Fidel Castro identified as the boat that dropped off a team of assassins in Cuba a few nights previous. The Rex was docked at Palm Beach, Florida, near the JFK family compound, and the Rex’s Halloween eve mission was in clear violation of President Kennedy’s March 1963 edict that no para-military raids against Cuba were to originate from U.S. shores. According to the article in the NYTs, the Rex had been sold by the Somoza regime in Nicaragua to the Belcher Oil Company, its dock fees paid by the CIA front company Sea Ship Inc., with the ship then being leased to the Collins Radio Company of Richardson, Texas.
2) Founded by Arthur Collins, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Collins Radio first made news headlines when young Collins was an amateur radio buff with the only, home made radio receiver who could pick up the radio communications of Navy Commander Richard E. Byrd from his polar exploration expedition. [Richard Byrd is the cousin of the founder of the Civil Air Patrol and owner of the Texas School Book Depository building].
3) Collins Radio became a major defense contractor during World War II, and following the war, participated in Operation Paperclip, hiring Dr. Alex Lipisch, the former Nazi scientist who developed the Delta I glider and ME 163 Komet jet fighter. For Collins, Lipisch was assigned to the boat development program that worked with General Dynamics in attempting to build a sleek, swift speedboat that could be used for Cuban infiltration missions like the Rex mission.
4) David Ferrie’s telephone records reflect that in the weeks before the assassination he made frequent calls from the New Orleans law office of G. Ray Gill to the Belcher Oil Company of Dallas, Texas, the company that was the listed owner of the Rex.
5) In the week before the assassination, a reservation was made at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club for a large party of Collins Radio employees.
6) The Dallas P.D. Intelligence Division maintained a paid informant who worked at Collins Radio and reported on fellow employees who appeared suspicious or subversive, including one who subscribed to the leftist I.F. Stone Weekly.
7) When Lee Harvey Oswald returned to Texas from Soviet Russia, George DeMohrenschildt introduced him to retired Navy Admiral Chester Bruton, an executive at Collins Radio, with the idea of Oswald getting a job there, as he had worked in a radio factory in Minsk, USSR.
8) At the time of the assassination Adml. Bruton was working on a top-secret nuclear submarine communications project, with the Navy’s nuclear sub radar and communications HQ being based at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
9) In 1963 Collins Radio began receiving large military contracts including one for the construction of a microwave communications network in Southeast Asia, specifically Vietnam.
10) After Oswald was murdered while in Dallas police custody by Jack Ruby, his widow Marina P. Oswald married former Collins Radio employee Kenneth Porter.
11) In Miami, Florida, a Cuban exile, and former executive of Collins Radio, was murdered, assassinated in a still unsolved homicide.
12) Collins Radio supplied and maintained the equipment used by the Voice of America, all manned NASA space flights, the Strategic Air Command (SAC), as well as all equipment used for the CIA’s Guatemalan and Cuban operations. Most significantly, Collins Radio was responsible for installing and maintaining all radio equipment aboard Air Force One, Air Force Two and the Cabinet’s plane.
13) According to the Collins Radio Annual Report to stockholders for 1963-64, Collins Radio not only installed and maintained the radios aboard most military and executive branch planes, they also operated the station known as “Liberty” at their Cedar Rapids, Iowa headquarters, which served as a relay station for all radio communications between the White House, the Pentagon, Air Force One, Air Force Two, the Cabinet plane and Andrews AFB in Washington.
[This “Liberty” station is misidentified on most transcripts of the edited version of the radio transmissions from Air Force One on 11/22/63. “Air Force One, the Presidential airplane, was placed in service in 1962 using communications equipment developed and manufactured by Collins. The aircraft…was modified to meet special requirements…In 1962, the station many remember as “Liberty” was opened and operated from the new communications building…(in Cedar Rapids, Iowa)…Collins had a contract with the Air Force to serve as either the primary communications station or as a backup whenever Air Force One, the presidential aircraft, and other aircraft in the VIP fleet carried cabinet members or high ranking military officers. Over the airwaves the station’s call word was ‘Liberty.’” – From Collins Radio – the First 50 Years.]
In his book The Making of a President – 1964, Theodore H. White wrote: “There is a tape recording in the archives o the government which best recaptures the sound of the hours as it waited for leadership. It is a recording of all the conversations in the air, monitored by the Signal Corps Midwestern center ‘Liberty,’ between Air Force One in Dallas, the Cabinet plane over the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs’ Communications Center in Washington….On the flight the party learned that there was no conspiracy, learned the identity of Oswald and his arrest; and the President’s mind turned to the duties of consoling the striken and guiding the quick.”
According to the analysis of E. Martin Schotz and Vincent Salandria (in History Will Not Absolve Us, 1996), “And yet the White House had informed President Johnson and the other occupants of Air Force One, all of them witnesses to the hail of bullets which had poured down on Dealey Plaza, that as of the afternoon of the assassination there was to be no conspiracy and that Oswald was to be the lone assassin. If White’s report were correct this would mean that federal officials in Washington were marrying the government to the cover-up of Oswald as the lone assassin virtually instantaneously. This could have occurred only if those federal authorities had had foreknowledge that the evidence would implicate Oswald and that he would have ‘no confederates.’ An innocent government could not have reacted in such a fashion internally.”
Unfortunately, there is no longer “a tape recording in the archives of the government,” as the original, unedited, multiple tape recordings of the AF1 radio transmissions cannot be located despite an Act of Congress, the request of the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) and numerous Freedom of Information Act requests. Our government seems to have simply lost the recordings, with no records being kept of their whereabouts or destruction, if in fact they were destroyed.
The Final Report of the ARRB (p. 116) notes:
“6. White House Communications Agency.
“WHCA was, and is, responsible for maintaining both secure (encrypted) and unsecured (open) telephone, radio and telex communications 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 of, in the 1970s, the LBJ Presidential Library released edited audio cassettes of the unsecured, or open voice conversations with Air Force One, Andrews AFB, the White House Situation Room, and the Cabinet Aircraft carrying the Secretary of State and other officials on November 22, 1`963. 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 versions of the tapes contain 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 sketch 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.”
At the time I delivered my report on “The Collins Radio Connections” to the National COPA Conference in Washington in October, 1994, the Washington Post had just then exposed the true occupant of a new, mammoth, suburban Virginia building. It was not the headquarters for Collins Radio/Rockwell International as had been previously reported, but they had just been the cooperating cover company for the super secret National Recognisance Office (NRO), just as Collins Radio had served as a cover for the CIA in the operation of the Rex in Cuba in1963.
[Note: Former ARRB investigator Doug Horne, who led the effort to find the unedited AF1 tapes, discussed these issues at his presentation at the JFK LANCER confernce in Dallas.
Also, in the October, 1998 issue of John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s George Magazine, - David Wise reported on how the NRO had “lost” $6 billion in U.S. taxpayer’s money, and specifically mentioned the fiasco surrounding the construction of the HQ building, or which Collins/Rockwell served as a cover company. ]
William E. Kelly is a freelance journalist whose research into the assassination of President Kennedy is partially sponsored by the Fund For Constitutional Government Investigative Journalism Project.
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DURING INTERMISSION OF THE COPA CONFERENCE IN DALLAS IN 1998, [sEE VINCENT SALANDRIA'S STURRING SPEACH ], I TAPE RECORDED THE SPEAKERS AT DEALEY PLAZA AND LATER TRANSCIBED WHAT THEY SAID, AN EVENT THAT THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA TOTALLY IGNORED. I HOPE SOMEBODY GETS SOMETHING OUT OF ALL THIS.
The Event That Never Happened
DEALEY PLAZA MEMORIAL SERVICE - Sunday, 11/22/98 THE 35TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ASSASSINATION
OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY. Edited and transcribed by William Kelly
"Build the news upon the rock of truth and righteousness. Conduct it always upon the lines of fairness and integrity. Acknowledge the right of the people to get from the newspaper both sides of every important question." - George Bannerman Dealey, publisher of the Dallas Morning News.
CNN news reported that for the first time in 35 years there was to be no memorial service at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1998, the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
CBS News with Dan Rather reported that the Final Report of the JFK Assassinations Records Review Board "did find enough evidence to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only gunman," while the Final Report never concluded any such thing.
Then the Associated Press (AP) reported from Dallas on November 22 that, "JFK assassination hype fades" and that "other than the usual handful of curious people milling about Dealey Plaza, the day was expected to be uneventful..."
Bob Porter of the Fourth Floor Museum told a reporter that nothing was scheduled to happen at Dealey Plaza that day, even though, if he looked out his office window, he could see hundreds if not over a thousand people gathering around the Grassy Knoll for a memorial service in honor of the slain president.
Well, what actually occured was that from noon until 1pm, the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) took a break from their fifth annual conference at Union Station, two blocks away, to hold a memorial service that was attended by a sea of people who filled the both sides of the street of the entire plaza. Participants in the JFK LANCER conference, also held in Dallas that weekend, also attended, as well as ordinary tourists, interested citizens and passersby.
COPA is an organization composed of three independent groups - the Assassination Records and Research Center (ARRC) of Washington D.C., the Committee for an Open Archvies (COA) and the Citizens for the Truth about the John F. Kennedy Assassination (CTKA). They are professional associations interested in developing the truth about the assassination, that lobbied extensively for the passage of the JFK Assassination Records Review Act and have met with Cuban officials in the Bahamas to obtain information about the assassination from Cuban sources.
In an address before COPA the previous day, the chairman of the Assassinations Records Review Board, John Tunheim reiterated the Final Report's first paragraph that it "will not offer conclusions about what the assassination records released did or did not prove," and that significant documents were missing and some were even destroyed by federal agencies after the board began its business of identifying and releasing records to the public.
Others who spoke at the COPA conference included Philadelphia attorney Vincent Salandria, history professor John Newman, former FBI agent William Turner and others who have been instrumental in reviewing the recently released documents and attempting to make sense of what the government wants to maintain a mystery.
At noon on Sunday, November 22, 1998, COPA board member, and Washington D.C. attorney Dan Alcorn began the memorial service at Dealey Plaza.
Dan Alcorn : The federal board - The JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) discovered that many of the records have been destroyed, and we do not have a complete record. Yet we have a much more of a documentary record than we have had ever before.
There's a memorial down on the street that has a quotation from the bible: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."
That quote is also inscribed on the wall of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in McLean, Virginia, so there is a commonality of thought there. Many of us are here today because we have never believed that the government has told us the truth about the assassination, and we believe that unless we know the truth, we are not free.
Unless we know the truth about these events we are not a free people and we have not been a free people as long as we have been lied to about the events that occured here. The spirit of our commemorative event is to take those words to heart, and until we know the truth and the full truth of what occured in the street before us today on a day very much like today, a clear, sunny day in the fall of 1963.
On behalf of our organization I will make a challenge to you. Everyone here must be here because you care very deeply about the meaning of this event and what it means to our history as a nation. I will make the challenge to you to join us in our efforts in seeking the full truth about the assassination of President Kennedy. And not just the truth as pieced together by citizens who put in the time and effort to this, but to actually cause the government to tell the truth about this event, and for the government to come forward and give us a full and truthful accounting of what happened here in 1963. Otherwise, we in fact are not the free people we want to be, have been and we should be as a nation.
You know, it is a crime for a citizen of this country to tell a lie to a federal investigator, but it is not a crime for your government to lie to you. And we feel this is an unfair relationship. If it's a crime for us to lie to our government, it should be a crime for us t o lie as well.
It is in that spirit of investigation and of honest inquiry that our organization has worked closely with the Assassinations Records Review Board to get materials out. They ran into an obstructive wall of secrecy at the federal agencies. They told us that they ran into a Cold War system of secrecy that refused to relent on the documents and information as it related to this event. And this was thirty-five years after the event occured, and after a federal board was set up by the Congress to try to get information released about what happened here.
So we call on you to join us in our efforts. We think that great nations and civilizations cannot survive the kinds of doubt and turmoil that have been raised by the events that happened here. If you study the history of great civilizations you will find that when they lost their way in terms of truth, self-governing, democratic and republican institutions began their decline and was one of the reasons for their ultimate collapse. We do not want the decline and decay of our public and political system. We want to be a part of a healthy revival of those institutions.
We have experienced a decline in the public's trust in government since November,1963, a blimp in the charts that notes the significance of these events. Today a majority of people don't even bother to vote. The largest turnout of voters in American history was in 1960. The decline in public confidence in the government began with the ambush at Dealey Plaza and has continually declined since then. These trends are very troubling.
So we ask you to join us and support the effort we have started to try to pursue the truth of these events, to try to pursue credibility, honesty and openness on behalf of our governmental institutions. And by that effort to try to turn our nation in a healthy direction, to build stronger democratic institutions, to build a stronger faith between the pubic and its government. We feel that is essential, and we call on you as free citizens of this nation to join us in that effort.
I'm going to introduce to you a series of speakers who have been very involved in this issue and can give you the benefit of their experience as well. The first is Mark Lane, one of the earliest researchers in this case who did tremendous ground-breaking work, recorded much of his work for posterity and has written extensively about this case.
Mark Lane: I remember coming here thirty-five years ago and there were no crowds on the grassy knoll. But now, after all of these years, although they have a museum over there on the 6th Floor, which is a museum dedicated to a place where nothing happened. They don't have a plaque over here, on the grassy knoll, and they should.
Thirty-five years ago today the Dallas Morning News published a full page ad with the sarcastic heading: "Welcome To Dallas Mr. President," and then went on to practically call him a communist and a trator. That was then.
Today's Dallas Morning News has an editorial: "Kennedy's Legacy - The Time Is Ripe For Idealism," with no references to him being a communist or a traitor. Now he's a great man. They'll tell us everything about John Kennedy, everything, except who killed him. Because look at the rest of the Dallas Morning News, thirty-five years later, when every survey in America shows that 75 to 95% of the people are convinced that there was a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy, here we go in the guise of a book review in today's Dallas Morning News: Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy, Oswald Alone Killed Tippit, One Man Two Murders, they're sticking with the same story. I have but one word for the Dallas Morning News:
Shame. Shame on you, you are discracing the city of Dallas, and it is not fair to do that.
I'll tell you where there should be plaques in this city. There were a number of brave, courageous residents of this city, longtime residents of Texas, who had the courage to speak the truth to power in the face of intimidation and threats. Right over there was Jean Hill, and she's still there thirty-five years later, one of the first to tell the truth that shots came from behind that wooden fence. And they attacked her and ridiculed her. There should be a plaque over there commemorating her right on the spot where she is standing...
The Grassy Knoll should be called "Lee Bowers Memorial Park," the railroad bridge should be the Holland-Dode-Symmons Underpass - that's the monuments that should be named after the people of this state, people who had the courage to come forward with the truth, while the Dallas Morning News lied thirty-five years ago and continues to lie thirty-five years later.
This is the place where our leader was murdered. This is hollowed grown, and the people of this country know it. It is supose to be the largest tourist attraction in Dallas. There's people here all the time, at the grassy knoll, nobody looks for the truth from the 6th floor of the Book Depository building, because the people of America know the truth, even though the Dallas Morning News is unwilling to share the information with us.
That day in Dallas, in this city, at this location, when the government of the United States executed its own president, when that happened, we as a nation, lost our code of honor, lost our sense of honor. And it can only be restored when the government of the United States - and it will not do it without us insisting, and marching and fighting and voting, and putting this matter on the agenda,...but when that day comes that the government of the United States tells us the truth and all the factual details about the assassination, including their role in the murder. When that day comes, honor will be restored to this nation. Thank you.
Dan Alcorn: Our next speaker is a member of the Board of Directors of COPA, a medical doctor from San Francisco who has researched this issue and has written about it in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Columbia Journalism Review, Dr. Gary Agular.
Dr. Gary Agular: It's hard to follow such a powerful speaker as Mark Lane and I certainly can't hope to match his eloquence, wit or command of this case, but what I can share with you is evidence...that autopsy photos are missing. This is something that you will not read in the Dallas Morning News, Time or Newsweek, but is something that is very clearly established, the ARRB releases are very clear on the point, the autopsy pathologists have described autopsy photographs that are missing. One of them defiantly stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which was supposed to tell us the truth about the assassination...which not only did not report that, it wasn't released until the ARRB came along.
There is enormous evidence in the forensic, in the medical area alone that indicates there was more assassin, but what is most shameful of all is the government's willingness, even in subsequent investigations, to lie about that evidence. Thank God there was an Assassinations Records Review Board, thank God they did the work they did, because now we no longer have to rely on government appointed authorities to tell us that we can trust the government's original conclusions, because we know we can't.
We know they've destroyed evidence, not only in the medical-autopsy area, not only among photographs, we know that witnesses have been intimated, and it is ashame that you won't read about that. No credible journalist will touch the story. It is a story not unlike the story of the CIA and crack cocaine, which led to the downfall of Gary Webb, before two volumes of the CIA Inspector's Report that confirmed much more than what Gary Webb even alleged about the CIA's complicity in the cocaine importation. But you won't read about that in the Dallas Morning News. You barely get a small column about it in the New York Times after they devote many, many column inches defamined journalists who talk about the subject.
I think it is important that those of you who are here today continue to insist that your government is accountable to you and does not conduct its operations in secrecy, that it does not deny you the evidence that is collected in its investigations and that it be as accountable to us as it insists we be accountable to it.
I hope you will continue to work with us to force the government to be responsible and admit the full truth about the assassination of President Kennedy.
Dan Alcorn: Our next speaker is a member of the Board of Directors of COPA, a professor at Dartmouth, and the author of a number of books about the assassination, Dr. Phillip Melanson.
Dr. Phillip Melanson: Thank you. As we commemorate the 35th anniversary of this terrible political tragedy that so negatively affected our lives, our policies, our political system and our faith in our own government, we should remind ourselves that the tragedy of the President's assassination is compounded by a separate but related tragedy - the failulre of our law enforcement institutions, the failure of our political institutions and the failure of the media to affectively discover the truth of who killed President Kennedy and why. And until that happens, and it is never too late to find the truth if the citizens demand it, and until that happens the original tragedy will be compounded like a bad political debt into the next millenieum, and the faith in our political system will continue to erode.
I think also the failure to come to grips with who killed President Kennedy and why is related to the other assassinations in the 1960s, and that's why Martin Luther King's is begging the Justice Department to look for justice in that case, and we hear from Siran's lawyer in the case of Robert Kennedy.
If we had come to terms with what happened here at Dealey Plaza, discovered the truth and admitted it, the whole history of the 1960s would be different.
If the vast majority of the public believes this case is an unsolved conspiracy, who are the minority in officialdom to deny us the truth and to cling to the lone-assassin theory like it was an absolute religion in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Thank you.
Dan Alcorn: Our next speaker is an acclaimed author and professor of history at the University of Maryland. His books include JFK and Vietnam and Oswald and the CIA, Dr. John Newman.
Dr. John Newman: I would like to say a few words about the media, and a couple of new developments for all of you gathered here. When I come here at this time of the year, I remember another place, a place connected to this place, and without the events that happened here, the other place would not exist, and that's the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C., which is like no other war memorial in the world. I've been to other war memorials in Russia, China and Germany, and people frequent those memorials, they eat lunch there and talk and its a nice place to be. I don't how many of you have been to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C., but nobody hangs out It's a very, very somber place because there's still something going on there, something deep, something that's still in our psyche, and our culture and it connects directly to Dealey Plaza. And I think most people know that.
I'm not going to give a speech on the Vietnam War, but I think it is clear now that John F. Kennedy was on his way to pulling us out of Vietnam when he died, and the events that happened here catapulted us to that devistating debacle called the Vietnam War.
I'd like to echo what Mark Lane said about the media. I just heard that CNN this morning said that for the first time in all these years there were no events planned for Dealey Plaza on this day. So you are not here, this gathering does not exist. Furthermore, the evening before last, none other than Dan Rather, the major icon of the network television, made the announcement that the Review Board had conducted this very large investigation and looked at all these millions of pages of documents and had discovered that the lone-nut hypothesis was true, which was attributed to Judge Tunheim. Judge Tunheim was here in Dallas and refutes this story, and all of you who have followed this story know that the Review Board has taken no such position.
But it never ceases to amaze me how the media can twist and turn and obfuscate and block this mass movement to find the truth. Let me close by giving you a few examples of the information that is flowing out of these new files, and I think these are appropriate because of what happened here at Dealey Plaza. I am thinking particularly of a tape recorded conversation between President Johnson and Senator Russell, one of the Warren Comissoners. At great length they were able to save the situation and preserve the lone-nut hypothesis with that wonderful, sine qua non - CE399, the magic bullet that broke seven bones and came out prestine on a stretcher.
The newly released tape is very interesting because Sen. Russell calls the President to explain to him what this single-bullet theory is, and at the end of it he says distinctly, "I don't believe a word of it." And President Johnson said, "I don't either."
And I think that is appropriate thing to share with you the types of things that are coming out of the files. Then there is the galley proofs of the Warren Report where our estimed President Ford moved the bullet hole up, and these are the types of things that are in the newly released documents, but the mainstream media is not there to put them on page one.
Occasionally they get noted, but its like ships passing in the night. I am heartened to see by the turnout here today, that with respect to the American people, this is not passing in the night and I hope as we stand here today and think about the events that happened here, we pass the torch to a younger generation, which we are doing, our movement and our desire for the truth in this case carries on. Thank you very much.
Dan Alcorn: We are approaching the time in our program which is a memorial to the events that happened here thirty-five years ago, so for that purpose I'd like to introduce to you the executive secretary of COPA, a man who has devoted himself for a number of years to working on the projects we have as an organization, but has also done his own independent research on the assassination. I think that those who have had the experience of working with John Judge know of his serious and sincere commitment to investigating the issues that are at stake here and to his contribution that he has made to the the history of the investigation of the assassination. He has really been the heart and soul of the work we have done through COPA. He has put in a tremendous volunteer effort and sacrificed and suffered a great deal for the efforts he has made, which have gone largely uncompensated. So let me introduce to you the executive secretary of COPA, John Judge.
John Judge: It is interesting to see such a large crowd. For the better part of the last 25 years, I have come out here every year, usually with only five or six people, often in worse weather than this, with researcher and newspaper editor Penn Jones, who some of you know as having done work on the death of the witnesses, who passed on this year.
From the inception of the national security and military-intelligence state in the late 1940s, the history of this country has been a commodity that has been owned by that state. The people who don't own their own history are a conquered people.
Much of the effort I put in has to do with the idea of taking our own history back, of owning it ourselves, since much is still locked up in government vaults and hidden from us and we are really the only ones who can restore it. 35 years ago, in my view, there was a coup d'etat here in Dealey Plaza, and the government has not recovered in any significant way, towards democracy, since that day. Kennedy began to represent for many people, hope and change and a response from the top level of government to the popular movements at the time for civil rights, for arms limitations, for an end to the Cold War, and Kennedy was responding to popular movements in a way that presidents after him rarely have. So what was assassinated here that day was not just a particular man or a particular president, but a sense of hope by the American people. And I think that the government has let us know over the years, fairly consistently, that they did kill the president, and they killed him from a very high level, and that if they can kill the president and get away with it that they can kill anyone of us that they would like to and that we should sit down and shut up and get out of the way.
But I'm hoping that there is enough decency left in people in America, and I see evidence of that all the time, that we can understand that there are more of us, and that we can think, and we can take back our own democracy, if we want it.
It is now 12:30, and 35 years ago President Kennedy was assassinated here, so lets have a moment of silence.
[Two minutes of silence]
Thank you.
Peter Dale Scott, a researcher who could not be with us here today, sent an e-mail in which he said a few interesting things. He said that we've come into a new era in that one of the major tasks ahead of us right now is to focus on getting the government documents that are still locked up on the Martin Luther King assassination. The other thing he noted was a government statute that makes it illegal for a citizen of this country to lie to the government, and he suggested that a similar statute be passed that would make it illegal for the government to lie to its people.
I hope you will take this topic seriously and continue to act to get the full release of the files and to get the truth, and you are welcome to join us at COPA in fulfilling the remainder of our agenda and what is to be done in the future. You are welcome to join us and take your democracy back.
Dan Alcorn: We have a few other speakers here, including former FBI agent William Turner, whose books have been translated into Russian, German, Japanese, French and Spanish. He is currently working on a new book entitled: "Rearview Mirror - Looking back at the FBI, CIA and Other Tails.
William Turner: Thank you Dan. It's been exactly 35 years ago and two days that I came here on assignment for a national magazine to do an article on the breakdown in security that resulted in the assassination being successful. I was assigned to it because of my background as a former FBI agent. I can tell you that when I arrived the mood was really somber, the floodlights were on, reporters from all over the world were converging, people had left floral wreaths along the curbstone where the shooting took place, and it was very erry. The headquarters of the Dallas Police Department was a feeding frenzy of reporters trying to find out what happened. I was on a very tight deadline, I could only contend with the security breakdown issue at the time, which was that Oswald had worked as an informant for the FBI and that was the reason they had not furnished his name to the Secret Service prior to the presidential visit.
One thing I remember was talking to a Dallas patrolman named Malcolm Eugene Barnett who had been posted in front of the School Book Depository for crowd control at the time of the assassination. He told me that a women came running from the grassy knoll who told him that shots were fired from here. That being the case, I became very critical of the Warren Commission and when it's report came out I read it and realized it was pretty much a fairy tale. I am proud to say that I was associated with District Attorney Jim Garrison in New Orleans who tried to reopen the investigation into the assassination. Jim was a great American and was on the trail of the assassins, as his book says, when he was destroyed by the media at the Clay Shaw trial. The Garrison investigation paved the way for what we know today, and I believe that we know to a good degree of journalistic certitude what happened.
First the motives were piling up, John Kennedy had supposidly with held air cover for the Bay of Pigs, motive number one. John Kennedy had failed to invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, motive number two. John Kennedy had promised to withdraw from Vietnam, motive number three. Motive number four is that John Kennedy, at the time he was assassinated, was on a second track, which was to secretly carry on negotiations with Cuba to bring about a detente. These motives piled up to the point where it became necessary to assassinate him. And I think it is very obvious with the compilation of information that we have today that the whole mechanism of it came out of the allegiance between the CIA and the rabid Cuban exiles and the Mafia, who already had an assassination apparatus set up to kill Castro. They switched targets and hit Kennedy.
And I hope you will join us, in recognizing the significance of the events that happened here, and try to do something about it. Thank you.
[Tape runs out]
Hal Verb: The saying on the wall at the CIA: "Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free," is wrong. When you know the truth, the truth makes you MAD!"
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FWIW from page 430 of Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay, by Thomas M. Coffey:
"Everybody old enough to remember can tell you where he was when he heard the news (of the assassination). Curt LeMay recalls that he was in Michigan on vacation, but hurried back to Washington in time for the funeral."
Thanks for that tid bit Ron,
and as Larry notes, it does jive with the Andrews Log, as far as LeMay's itiniery that day.
I still don't understand why we don't have photos of the autopsy room and a list of people who were there. I've been to Bathesda, and it is a very high security navy hospital, that you have to sign in and to come and go, so there must be a record somewhere.
And Larry, arel there or will there be abastracts, videos, tapes or transcripts of the LANCER presentations available?
Many Thanks,
Bill Kelly
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Bill,
I also like your approach and ideas. In your opinion, how should people who claim involvement in the assassination be handled? Should they be called upon to testify under oath in a civil court or government setting? I ask this because there are many people who claim to have been involved in the assassination. Most of who I personally dismiss as publicity seekers but there is one person on this site who seems somewhat creditable.
ONLY ONE?
HI TOM, thanks for the comeback. It's good to know somebody is reading this stuff. My approach and ideas have been developed over time, and after many frustrations. In my opinion, the assassinaton of JFK, like that of Medgar Evers, Jock Yablonski/Tony Boyle, the Birmingham bombings, the Phila. Miss. murders and other civil rights murders of the 60s, is a crime that can be solved, despite the institutional unwillingness to do so.
That doesn't mean we, as independent researchers, investigators, historians and computer technicains, can't do it. We can, and are doing it, without the resources of the government. One thing that is imperative is that we get new testimony, under oath, As Soon As Possible - because of the attrition rate of witnesses and suspects. The list gets shorter ever day, though new witnesses seem to emerge over time.
Ruth and Michael Paine, Larry Craford, SAIC SSNO John Rice, Paul O'Conner, Harry Dean, Carl Mather,....the list of living witnesses is still there for the calling. Neither the HSCA nor the ARRB, despite repeated pleadings, refused to interview the Paines, though you can call them on the phone and talk with them if you want.
The difference between sworn testimony under oath and someone like Joan Mellen or Tony Summers siting in living room or kitchen with a witness or a suspect and then telling what they said, is the ability to bring perjury charges against those who lie under oath.
Now perjury isn't conspiracy, treason or homicide, but it is a crime, as Bill Clinton and Chaney's aide have discovered.
I know a federal prosecutor who wants to subpoena the Paines and ask a grand jury if they could be subject to the Pinkerton Act, which would certainly get them to answer the questions they were never asked by the Warren Commissioners (ie. How did Michael Paine's mom meet Mary Bancroft, Alan Dulles' agent and mistress?).
Testifying under oath quickly separates the publicity seekers and those with the real deal.
The circumstances of the testimony could also be different: Congressional Hearing, Civil Libel Trial, Federal Grand Jury, local grand jury, etc.
As you say:
Sometimes I get the feeling that the assassination investigation has turned into game where people are pumping up their egos. Would forcing a person to testify help bring us closer to the truth?
Those with something significant to say probably wouldn't say it unless they are required to by the law and the threat of jail.
When ELEMINATION is the motive, as it is with the JFK case, investigators and prosecutors who are actually trying to solve a case, use the weakest link in the conspiracy chain, and in return for their testimony, go light on the loose link (aka rat), someone like David Ferrie, Larry Craford or someone who can tie the need to know network together, like Able Danger did with Al Quada.
In any case Tom, fI now have a computer question for you. How can I get articles I have in my old Mac G3 and convert them to Word for my iinternet computer?
Bill Kelly
bkjfk3@yahoo.com
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So far, I've only been able to come up wtih three published reports on any of the three conferences last weekend, all about DC - Walter Pincus in the Wasington Post, Andrew Bridges of AP and Lisa Pease for Consortium News - [ http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/112205A.html ], the last of which is the best and most accurate, IMO.
Here's Bridges, quoting Nicola Longord of the TSBD muse, "To my knowledge, there have not been any new developments," sounds very similar to Bob Porter of the TSBD a few years ago, saying, "Nothing is happening and nothing is planned" for the anniversary, when outside his window there were thousands of people and a host of speakers marking the occassion that I tape recorded and transcribed, and have around here somewhere.
November 21, 2005
JFK Assassination Debate Lives On
By ANDREW BRIDGES
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) - In the 42 years since the assassination of President Kennedy, here's what has been agreed on by those who still pursue one of the most sensational crimes in history: very little, if anything.
After the release of millions of pages of documents, and more than four decades of probes by professionals and amateurs, there is no consensus among those who toil in the conspiracy theory industry.
Some see the fingerprints of the Mafia, others the CIA. For some it was the Cubans, the Russians, Jimmy Hoffa or just about everyone who was anyone on or about Nov. 22, 1963.
No theory tying together disparate characters or events is too outlandish: Remember the Maine? Some even link the explosion that sank the U.S. battleship in Havana harbor in 1898 to the shooting of Kennedy 65 years later, the belief being that both marked trumped-up pretexts for American intervention in Cuba.
Interest comes to a head each year around the time of the assassination anniversary, which is Tuesday.
"To my knowledge, there have not been any new developments," said Nicola Longford, the executive director of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where Kennedy was shot. "It's just part of the enduring myth and reality of this intoxicating story. It's just a continuing fascination with solving a mystery."
The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman and squeezed off just three shots at Kennedy's motorcade from the Texas School Book Depository overlooking the plaza. A 1979 report by the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded Oswald probably did not act alone - a contention supported by a majority of Americans polled in 2003, the 40th anniversary of the assassination.
A conference dedicated to "Cracking the JFK Case" recently drew roughly 100 people to a Bethesda, Md., hotel. Sessions covered everything from the CIA's monitoring of Oswald in the months prior to the assassination to what a Dallas police audio tape may - or may not - prove about the numbers of shots fired.
Former Sen. Gary Hart reminded participants that his own investigative foray into the case, as a member of the Church Committee that met in 1975 and 1976, revealed both the Mafia and the Cuban exile community had ample reasons to want Kennedy dead.
"It's an understatement to say there were some very, very unhappy people in both those camps," said Hart.
Jim Lesar, a Washington, D.C., attorney who helped organize the conference, said the three-day meeting was dedicated to the proposition that Kennedy's death remains an open investigation.
The move was in part a ploy to rekindle interest in JFK. Lesar cited last year's reopening of the investigation into the slaying of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy murdered in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, as an example of what he'd like to see done with the Kennedy assassination.
"The Department of Justice is showing no inhibitions in dealing with 40-year-old civil rights cases, but the JFK case is being left to languish," Lesar said.
On the private side of the equation, he added that the lack of documents that could prove or disprove many theories hampers ongoing investigative efforts. "There is still a load of information we need to accurately and completely understand what happened," Lesar said.
Meanwhile, the cadre of conspiracy theorists is growing older and grayer and sources are dying off, further slowing progress, conference participants said.
"The case seems frozen now, perhaps more than it's been for a number of years," said David Talbot, the founder of Salon.com, who is writing his own book on the case.
--
LISA'S REPORT
consortiumnews.com
The Enduring JFK Mystery
By Lisa Pease
November 22, 2005
Editor’s Note: The assassination of John F. Kennedy was one of the darkest moments in modern American history. But one of its most pernicious legacies has been the notion that average Americans must be shielded from what really happens on matters of national security, even something as important as the murder of a president.
Since the Warren Commission probe of the JFK assassination, other investigations of serious government wrongdoing, one after another, have been truncated – CIA abuses, Iran-Contra, Contra drug trafficking, Iraq-gate, misuse of Iraq War intelligence, Abu Ghraib – supposedly because the full stories would undermine morale or otherwise not be “good for the country.”
Ultimately, of course, this loss of a true history is corrosive to the concept of a democratic republic, and it has been one of our goals as a publication to flesh out the facts of those failed investigations. In that light, we are publishing a report from JFK assassination expert Lisa Pease on a recent historical conference in Washington:
Forty-two years ago, on Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, Texas. In Bethesda, Maryland, this past weekend, a group of distinguished journalists, historians, scientists and others gathered to discuss and debate the evidence of conspiracy in the JFK case.
While the research community has often slammed the mainstream media for not covering the facts of the case, the blame must go both ways. The conference organizers offered no handouts, no summaries of what is new in the case this year, or any hook upon which a journalist might hang a story.
As one of the reporters said in a panel discussion, this is a story without an ending, and how satisfying is that?
But that is a tragedy, in light of the Downing Street Memo and other evidence that the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq was built on a false platform. The common thread throughout the weekend was that secrecy and democracy cannot safely coexist, that the more we have of the former, the less we have of the latter.
The credentials of the speakers this year was more impressive than in previous conferences. Featured speakers included former presidential candidate Gary Hart, author James Bamford, journalists Jeff Morley and Salon founder David Talbot, and historians David Wrone and John Newman (who was a military intelligence analyst), and the former head of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, G. Robert Blakey.
Former Sen. Hart, a Colorado Democrat, recounted his experiences on the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, more popularly known as the “Church Committee” after its leader, Sen. Frank Church.
Hart began with a disclaimer saying he didn’t read the assassination books, hadn’t reviewed his Church Committee files, and warned that everything he said should be prefaced with, “as I recall.”
Little Interest
According to Hart, there was little interest among Committee members in seriously investigating the intelligence community. There had been little oversight of the CIA since its creation 28 years earlier. Reviewing the CIA’s operations seemed both a gargantuan and ultimately unnecessary task. The Vietnam War was in its last days, and there was the sense that poking around in Agency business might undermine morale.
The Committee members also realized that if there was even one leak, their work would be over. That’s one of the reasons there was so little oversight in the years up to that point. Simply put, the CIA did not trust Congress to keep its secrets. So they implemented strict security.
One day, CIA Director William Colby asked for even more security than ever before. He wanted the room swept for bugs before they began. Colby also insisted only members, not their staff, attended.
At that session, Colby presented Committee members with the 600-page Inspector General report on Agency abuses, a document popularly known as the “family jewels.” Included in that document were tales of drug experiments on both witting and unwitting subjects, the wholesale opening of mail, bugging operations, and plots to overthrow governments including -- “with almost demented insistence,” Hart said -- the attempts to kill Fidel Castro.
The Committee members were shocked. And significantly, Hart said that only a few items from that report have ever made it to the public, begging the question of what other abuses occurred. How can we measure the success of Congressional oversight if we don’t know if any of those other abuses were successfully handled?
Hart recounted an episode where he had the chance to meet one of the CIA’s top contract assassins, known only as QJ/WIN. After a long series of instructions, Hart arrived at the location, only to find QJ/WIN did not want to talk to him. Hart wrote about that episode in fictional form in the novel Double Man (co-written with William Cohen).
When Hart ran for president, he said he was frequently asked what he would do about the Kennedy assassination. He promised if elected, he would reopen the investigation. But then he was caught with Donna Rice on a boat in Florida. “If you’ve seen the movie ‘Bullworth,’ you know that now we can assassinate people with cameras,” he said.
Few Theories
Most of the speakers did not offer theories as to who killed Kennedy, but presented instead the context of the event within the framework of the Kennedy administration during the Cold War.
On that point, there was considerable agreement that John and his brother Robert Kennedy found themselves increasingly isolated within their own administration. They were at war with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA over Cuba and Vietnam.
Bamford discussed documents from Operation Northwoods, a plan that called for a wave of terrorism inside the United States that falsely would be blamed on Fidel Castro and become the justification for invading Cuba.
At one point, all the Joint Chiefs had signed off on these plans. Kennedy stood alone in opposing this, and one is left wondering if that was one of the prime motives for his murder.
Professor Blakey’s hands shook slightly as he spoke to the group gathered for dinner on Saturday night. He confessed that he had trusted the CIA too much.
CIA Director Stansfield Turner showed Blakey a letter in which Turner admonished CIA people not to lie to the committee members. Blakey believed that was enough. He finds now that was not the case.
Blakey denied that his long background dealing with organized crime was the reason he chose to focus on the Mob as the conspirators in the Kennedy assassination. He said when he looked for a group that could connect both Oswald and Ruby, the choice seemed clear that the Mob fit the bill. He said if proof surfaced that Oswald had been framed, that would indicate conspirators other than the Mob, which did not have that capability.
CIA Obstacles
Blakey spoke specifically about George Joannides, a CIA psychological warfare expert and the focus of several of Jeff Morley’s articles about the case. Joannides had been in charge of the anti-Castro Cuban student organization known as the DRE.
Carlos Bringuier of the DRE fought verbally with Oswald in the streets of Miami, which led to the arrest of Oswald just weeks before the assassination, and later put Oswald on the air in a DRE-sponsored program in which Oswald said he was a Marxist.
During the House investigation, Blakey assigned two of his young law school student assistants, Edward Lopez and Dan Hardway, to the CIA. They were set up in an office at CIA and given great freedom to request documents.
The Agency was forced to comply. But when Lopez and Hardway started pressing for more of the DRE documents, Joannides, who had been brought back from retirement to oversee the investigation, went to Blakey and complained that Lopez and Hardway were too aggressive, that they were pushing too hard.
Blakey said at the time, he believed the CIA. Now he wished he had backed up Lopez and Hardway.
In addition, Blakey had originally used the Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA), a method for testing metal composition in bullets, as the basis for saying that – despite the acoustical evidence of conspiracy – Oswald had fired the fatal shots. Now, in light of the exposes about the inaccuracies of NAA, Blakey called that “junk science.”
Blakey’s mea culpa met with mixed reaction from the crowd, who asked him several questions, including why he had not continued with the effort in effect to file perjury charges against senior CIA official David Atlee Phillips after he was caught red-handed lying to the Committee. (Blakey claimed not to know anything about that effort, which was in essence shut down upon his arrival.)
The crowd did applaud him, however, for being the first public official to go on record saying there was a probable conspiracy in the assassination. He based that on the acoustical evidence.
The Dictabelt
In regards to the acoustical evidence, two presenters spoke back to back on Saturday about the Dictabelt tape – a tape a motorcycle cop made inadvertently during the shooting of Kennedy in Dealey Plaza.
The House assassination committee hired two different companies to evaluate the evidence and both agreed the tape showed five distinct shots. Blakely only asked the Committee to evaluate the evidence for four of the shots, one of which purportedly came from the “grassy knoll.” (Blakey did not see the point in looking at five shots when four was enough to prove conspiracy and a knoll shot.)
Richard Garwin, whose program biography did not include his work for the CIA (which he acknowledged during the Q&A), presented an opaque argument that the sounds on the Dictabelt tape came a minute too late to have been any of the shots in Dealey Plaza. Presenting charts and graphs that confused most people in the audience, and fumbling over his sound files, Garwin was not well received.
Garwin was followed by Donald Thomas, who had written an article on the acoustical evidence for the well-respected British publication Science & Justice (2001 – see http://www.forensic-science-society.org.uk/Thomas.pdf).
Dr. Thomas presented a stark contrast to Garwin. Thomas began by asserting that the number on the tape Garwin tested was not the number of the tape the House assassination committee tested. He also pointed out that there is a difference in recording speed and playback speed, and that Garwin’s team had applied one which made the shot sounds no longer line up with the House committee analysis.
Thomas provided slides that made clear the points he was making. One could feel the change in the room. People now felt they could follow along as Thomas lined up each sound with the motorcycle’s probable position, and then showed us pictures from the Zapruder film and others that confirmed that the motorcycle cop, Officer H.B. McLain, was indeed in those positions at those times.
Lone Assassin?
Former military intelligence analyst John Newman was the only speaker willing to speculate about a potential conspirator, based on the documentary record.
Professor Newman reviewed how CIA reports of Oswald’s trips to the Cuban and Soviet embassies was a key factor in getting President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Warren Commission members to go with the Oswald as lone assassin line.
Newman described how the reports in essence created a “World War III” virus, such that after the assassination, no one wanted to look too closely at who Oswald served, lest it touch off a nuclear war with the Soviets or the Cubans.
Newman traced how false information that helped promote this WWIII virus got into Oswald’s file and concluded that the person who controlled the file at those points was Ann Egerter, one of the six or so hand-picked operatives working in James Jesus Angleton’s CI/SIG unit – the Special Investigations Group within the larger 200-man Counterintelligence group at CIA.
Newman also pointed out how many in the Agency feared Angleton, feared for their lives if they crossed him, and suggested Egerter would not have manipulated Oswald’s file on her own, but only under express instructions from Angleton himself.
The U.S. 'Empire'
Virginia lawyer Dan Alcorn spoke of the parallels between George Washington’s farewell address, in which he warned against the danger of maintaining a standing army, and Eisenhower’s admonition to beware the Military-Industrial complex.
“I think what’s at stake is the identity of our country and what kind of country we want to be,” Alcorn said. “The world ‘empire’ has been thrown around. I can’t believe people around Washington have seriously discussed describing themselves as an empire.
“But we were not founded to be an empire. A free republic cannot be an empire. I think people have lost touch with the ethic of the country and what the country should be. [We’ve converted ourselves into] a global domination state…
“If morality doesn’t concern us, practicality should. The reason we’re a free republic is that it’s a self-sustaining system on an ethical basis. Lessons of history are that empires do not succeed.”
Kennedy’s consistent refusal to allow America to become an empire, and his desire to avoid a “pax Americana” may have been key motives for his assassination.
The topic of the Iraq War and the lies that took the nation to war was a frequent sub-theme at the conference. To many of the 135 people gathered, history is one long through line. By not confronting the lies we were given about the assassination and demanding government accountability, we essentially agreed to look the other way, empowering government to lie to us about other events.
To study the assassination is to peer into the yawning chasm between what we are told happened, and our true history. Information empowers us to take corrective action. Disinformation – or a lack of information – keeps us out of the loop, unable to make appropriate choices for oversight. Nowhere has that point been brought home more strongly than in the buildup to war in Iraq.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified one of the speakers as Don Thompson, rather than Thomas.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lisa Pease began studying the Kennedy assassination in 1992 after observing how the raw evidence from the Warren Commission’s investigation was misrepresented in the mainstream media. Some of her writings can be found in the anthology, The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X. Her Web site is www.realhistoryarchives.com.
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I can't get a better resolution Bill. Perhaps someone with more expertise on this may be of assistance. Good luck. Jason
Thanks Jason,
You mentioned its from a book on Art Collins? Is it a biography, or the history of the company?
BK
-
Mark, based on what John Williams did present which included an Andrews tower log for that day
and testimony from one autopsy participant....LeMay did indeed arrive (relatively late)
for the autopsy and later chose not to acknowledge that fact in his own comments.
Why LeMay would go there rather than stay in a command and control position given the
posibility of a Soviet attack (contingency plans clearly spelled out that the elimination
of American leaders and breaking the chain of command was anticipated as part of
any Soviet strike) is unclear. However the same question can be asked of the Joint Chiefs
who also seem not to have left a meeting in progress when they heard of the death and
moved into active command of their services.
Three are a number of other elements (missing AF1 channel traffic, the rewrite of the
Emergency Airborne Command Center aircraft log of the day) that suggest we may
not see the sort of national security response that did/should have occured - sort of like
sweeing away the original conspiracy charges prepared in Dallas.
But as John says, this area is definitely a work in progress... Larry
Hi Larry,
I hope all well in Dallas. I'd like to get an abstract or transcript of John William's talk as well.
I surmise that the autopsy participant who identifies LeMay is technician Paul O'Conner, who tells the story of one of the doctors ordering someone to tell whoever's smoking a cigar to put it out or leave the room, but when told its LeMay, recinds the order.
As for the Andrews Tower Log - the ARRB obtained a 9 page, hard bound ledger log from Andrews, which was said to have been retreived from the trash dumpster by one Chuck Holmes, who saw a tv show about the ARRB and their quest for JFK assassination records. When I was at the NARA I requested the ledger, photocopied the 9 pages, and retyped the handwritten notations as best I could.
This log, which appears NOT to be an official Andrews Tower Log because it makes no mention of all the other air traffic that day, and also includes a few pages of log notations for when they flew the body of RFK to Andrews from California. It is very peculiar that this log only has references to those two incidences, years apart, and there was an attempt to dispose of it, an obvious historical record. I tried to locate Chuck Holmes, who reportedly still works at Anrews, to learn more, but haven't hooked up with him yet. I wanted to give him a medal for saving such an artifact.
The references to LeMay are the fact that at the time of the assassination he was Canada, possibly in the air between Toronto and Wairton, from where he departs for Andrews 1625 - (4:25pm).
Perhaps GPH or someone who knows air traffic terminology can translate some of the abrivations.
BK
[ANDREWS LOG AS TRANSCRIBED BY BILL KELLY]
Andrews Log
RIF: 161-10002-10000
USAF
SPECIAL ANDREWS AFB DUTY OPERATIONS LOG FROM NOV 22-25, 1963 AND JUNE 5-6,
9 pages.
SUBJECTS: JFK ASSASSINATION; RFK ASSASSINATION; AIR FORCE ONE; GENERAL LEMAY.
DOCUMENT TYPE: LOG BOOK, TEXTUAL DOCUMENT
UNCLASSIFIED
OPEN IN FULL
COMMENTS: Special Log of Events found by Air Force civilian employee, Mr. Chuck Holmes, and transferred to ARRB by USAF. Cover stamped 1254 ATW Command Post.
COVER REMARKS:
Special Unclassified
J.F.K. Assassination - 22 Nov. 63 & RFK Assassinations 5 June 68.
1254th ATW Command Post
Return to Chuck Holmes.
RECORD
MAINTAIN IN LOCAL TIME
7530-222-3523 Federal Supply Service ICPO
UNCLASSIFIED
ALL IN LOCAL TIME
Page 1
LOCAL Death of J.F.K.
Time 22 Nov 63 (FR.)
1400 [2 pm-bk] Col Hornbuckle Heard News Report on the President being shot at Dallas.
Put Wing on Alert & Told Maint To Put Act T intoo. (C P Maintaining acft status)
Notified 98 & 99 To Alert Crews (Received Aircraft Availability Status)
Notified Air Police To Alert Flight Guards.
Notified Air Team.
D2Col Schwikert Concurs in Above Actions
1405 [2:03pm] Notified To Dispatch: 0912488 Plu Boston, Drop Dallas
1420 [2:20] 092488 & 2493 CANX. 4197 Set-up
To Dept To Plu Gen Lemay at Toronto, Canada. Trip #1602
1446 [2:46] =094197 Dept for Canada. ETA 1546
Received word from 86972 - Returning To HIK, Min 6nd Time, Direct Dallas.
092489 inbound To Whitemn with ulsec McMillian Advised to Standby there for further instructions.
1450 Set up MSN #1617 12490 To Take Sen Kennedy To Otis.
Crossed out ione line. Undecipherable
Change Gen Lemays Plu from Torento To Wawirton Canada 44.45N 0981.06W
END OF PAGE ONE
Page 2
Local
Time
1500 [3pm] (C.F.) - WashARTC called with Flight Plan on AF1. ETD Dallas 22
1515 Hi. ALT to ADW, 2 + 10 ENROUTE
1505 [3:05] Contacted 24197 (UHF) to change Destination to Wairton.
1510 [3:10] Patch w/86972 EST ADW 23/0100
1515 [3:15] Change 12490 Destination Otis to Barnstable.
1525 [3:25] 912492 & 12493 Patrick to Ramey (Cong Group)Returning To ADW ETAs 1650 & 1700
1530 [3:30] 0912490 (Sen Kennedy Departed For Barnstable. Crew ABD ACFT
when He arrived Sgt Pshney AFLP stated that the S.S. will Take Care of Body At ADW
1535 [3:35] =09=0912499 u/sec MsMillian Returning ADW
1540 [3:40]=09=0924200 OUT of Commission For TOC=D5s To FAR into PE.
Missions 1572/27 & 1573/01 CANX.
1545 [3:45] 96000 Returning ADW, Mr Johnson ABD ETA 1725 (Returning as AF-1) Body & Mrs. Kennedy ABD
1547 [3:47] =09=09AF 1 Dept DAL, ETA ADW 1805
1600 [4:00pm] =09Quiet Hour 1745 To 1830.
1609 [4:09] =096972 Dept AIK ETA 00240
END OF PAGE 2
Page 3
Local
Time=20
1625 [4:25pm] 24197 Gen Lemay Dept Wairton 1604 ETA DCA 1715, Driver & Aide at DCA ETA charged 1710, Secy Zuckert Will Meet Lemay at ADW. (notified AC f t )
1650 [4:50] =09=09Call From 26000, need steps FWD Door, FWD Gally Door & Lift Truck AfT Pax Door, Body in Rear.
1700 [5:00pm] =09Gen Lemay Will land DCA NOT ADW.
1700 Alert Posture From Burleson: Immediate Alert till 1830 HR Alert till 1830 - 200 HR Alert 2000 - Till Advised Left Jetstar on 1 HQ
96000 Requested Ramps & Press Fence
1710 [5:10] =09=09Call From Duty Off @ Torrejon C.P. Requesting info on Sam
P/U of =09=09=09=09=09V.P. of Spain - None Sked By 1254th.
1712 [5:12] =09=094192 Gen Lemay ARR DCA.
1715 [5:15] =0912491 w/Cong Price at Burbank Alerted For Possible P/U ofLawford Family to Return ADW.
1730 [5:30] 096972 ETB A ADW 0030 . 32 PAX.Notified Mr Jackson – Home 9929-1298 For Transport Etc.
1735 12491 Possible Plu of Lawford Family CANX. Notified Alc @ Burbank. Maj Chappelle Advised thaat He is Returning ADW via FFUTT with Cong Cohelan.
END OF PAGE 3
Page 4.
Local
Time
1740 [5:40 pm] AF1 Reg Four A.P. Cars, 2 FWD & 2 ft of AcFt on Ramp Confirmed.
1800 [6:00pm] AF1 ARR ADW, 12489 Slowing Down To ARR After ADW Opens, 42816 Still Holding
1830 [6:30]=09=0986970 ARR ADW
1841 [6:41] =0942816 ARR ADW
1852 [6:52] =09=0912489 ARR ADW
2108 [9:08pm]=0912490 ARR ADW
2145 [9:45] From Col Burleson - AT 39 #493 will Dept Love Field arond 2345 ETA ADW 0230 W/ A CAPT & 2 PRESS. Arrange a car To Take Them To The White House immed - Confirmed w/TFC.
2324 09T39 ETA ADW 0136 - given To TFC.
0923 NOV 63 (Saturday)
0037L [12:37am] =0986972 ARRIVED ADW with Scc Rusk, etc.
0950 [9:50am]=09Per Sgt Geiser - Gen Eisenhower to arrive at DCA at 1030L on a CBS Gulfstream.
Crossed out Line
1400 [10:00am] Per LCOL Burleson - Set up #1618 C131 42815 Drop Father Cavanaugh Barnstable. 09TRAF - RS 091299 - Johnson - Dec_____CAMRON – BECK SSC – RBC T/OPS - Hornbuckle W.H. - Po_le
END OF PAGE 4
Page 5
23 NOV 63
Local
Time
1200 [Noon] =09Per LCol Burleson SET UP MSN 1619
=09=09=09VC140 12490 PU VICE PRES SPAIN
=09=09=09MENOS GRANDES RTN TO ADW
Johnson – Deceasre
TFRAF - HP
CAMERON - BECK
SSC - RBC
DET 3 – LARSON’09T/OPS - HORNBUCKLE
W.H. -
1248 [12:48pm] =09SGT LARSON CONFIRMED GATE #21 (1AB Terminal) will be available for arrived MSN 1619.
1700 [7:00pm]=09MSN 1619 DELAYED ARRIVAl at Idlewild Due to Weather at Destination 2490 Landed. IDL 1645L Departure 10L 1756 L RTA ADW 1834 2490 Blocked in 1842
Notified Col Burleson
Col Hornbuckle
MX Beck
DET 3 Larson
Spanish Embassy
1710 [7:10] Sgt. Griser - Cx Mission # 1585
Baggage P/U at Patrick Henry
Wg Ops Col Hornbuckle
Maj. Hefner
MX Harding
T/C Wade
1825 [8:25] =09=09Per Sgt Griser Set up Mission #1621 VC - 140
P/U Prince Bernhard at IDL Drop ADW
Set up Mission #1620 C-131 42815
Drop Gen Fol__sc_ IDL wgOps. Col Hornbuckle
99th Maj Hefn
Mx. Beck
TFC Wade
Det. 3 - Sgt Larson
END OF PAGE 5
Beginning of Page 6
Local
Time
0900 [9:00am]=09Per Col Burleson - Mission # 1604 A/C 80608 will divert To Nellis AFB To P/U Mr Conlon after DV Drop at Hamilton. - 98th
Maj. Tul_ Wg Ops. -
2300 Per Col Burleson - Mission #1604 will also wait at Hamilton no longer than 24/1800- for P/U of Congressman Shelly and Return ADW via Nellis.
24 NOV 63 (Sunday)
1330L [1:30pm] ACFT 80608 MSN # 1604 DIV To TRAVIS Due Hamilton WX will pu MR/CONLON At Nellis Per Col Tueful, Mr Conlon ARR Commercial
1436 [2:36pm] Per Col. Burleson - Set up Mission # 1622 VC-140 ADW To
IDL =09=09=09=09=09drop Prince Philip - To connect with BOAC Flight #500 For
London Det 3 - Larson
MX. - Beck=
99th - Bartels
SSC - Henry
TFC - L D
WH - Chance
1645 [4:45] 80610 Mission # 1367 Enroute From Naples To Lajes diverted To Lisbon Due to shorted plugs on Rt x Lt side of #2 cyl #4 Eng. Possible Cyl. or Eng change - will advise after inspection
ETA Lisbond 24/17102 Per Col Burleson set up Mission # 1623
VC - 09137 86902 To Lisbon To P/U Gen. Hamlet on 80610 ETA AD
W=20
0924/1800L
998th Mangold
Wg. Ops.
Col. Hornbuckle
SSC – Green
MX Harding
TFC Lynn
END PAGE SIX
Begin Page 7
Local
Time
1827 [8:27pm] Per Col Burleson CX. Mission #1623
986972- Wg.Ops Col Hornbuckle
998. - Mangold
MX. Harding
TFC Lynn
SSC MAY
2000 [10:00pm]Per Col Burleson - Set up Mission # 1624 VC-140 Pick up President Truman at DCA and drop at Kansas City.
Wg Ops Col Hornebuckle
MX. Harding
TFC Wade
SSC Grlla
99th Parker
1750 [7:50pm] 24197 called UHF and advised DV request 4197 make additionaltrip to Boston after Drop at Otis - Request approved - Sgt.Geiser
1845 [8:45] Chg OF ACFT ON MSN 1622 INST PANEL LIGHTS OUT D4ACFT 92490 Chg To 2493 approved - Col Hornbuckle
25 NOV 63 (Monday)
0930 [9:30am] Per Col HornBuckle Set Up MSN #1433 C140 To Take MRS Rose Kennedy To Cape Cod ETD 25/1500L
WG - Cesarid
MX - CN
SSC-Parish
99 - Bartels
TFC-JP
END
END OF PAGE 7
Page 8 Re: DEATH OF R.F.K. 05 JUNE 68=20
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Thanks for your recolections. It would be nice if as many members as possible posted, after all for many of us it was the start of a 40+ year's search.
Interesting side note, my father was a great sports fan, and would often wake me up to watch games, matches, fights beamed in via the new (1960's) satellite technology, on one such occasion we got up at one in the morning to watch the Ali- Liston second fight 1964, we both loved the fights, and had been looking foward to this one for weeks. Anyway to cut it short Ali wiped the floor with Liston in under one round and Dad made some hot chocolate, to help us sleep, we both had a moan about the poor show Sonny had put up, and chatted the way Boys do with their dads,when out of the blue he said, "There's no way Oswald could have made those shots" we chatted a bit about the assassination, and went to bed. Funny thing is, despite my abiding interest in JFK, I cant recall us ever talking about the subject again.
Hi Steve, Good idea for the day.
I've been in Dallas and DC on this day most years in the past few decades, but today I'm at my family's lake house in the Jersey Pines, looking out to the ducks on the lake in the rain.
I was in my hometown of Camden, New Jersey, ranked "The Most Dangerous City in the USA" two years in a row - back to back - the sign of a true champion. I was 12 years old in 1963, and our sixth grade class got out of school early because of the assassination, and I was home playing in the backyard when my father, a Camden policeman, called on the phone.
My mother worked at a school so I was home alone, and I remember my father saying, "Don't leave the yard, stay at home, we don't know what's behind this assassination." And I remember thinking, how could the president's assassination have any affect on me, playing in the backyard in Camden, N.J.?
Five years later I remember my father waking me up to tell my that "They killed Bobby Kennedy."
When Martin Luther King was assassinated, the first of a series of riots pretty much burned down the city, which resulted in the staus of the community today - #1 most dangerous, worse than Baghdad. Now I understand how a political assassination thousands of miles away can have an affect on a kid in Camden.
BK
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I've got something Bill, you probably have seen it. I was reading somewhere that they "closed down the fishbowl" in 1966 but it might be the wrong street address. It's Rockwell-Collins now I guess. Jason
Hi Jason,
It is most definately Rockwell-Collins now and they did close down the Fishbowl.
Can you give me the caption on the first photo you sent - not the Collins hanger. The type blurrs when I enlarge the pix.
Thanks!
Bill Kelly
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Castro has been ranting internationally for months about the Posada case (specifically about Posada being protected by the Bush regime, lest he be tortured somewhere, which as everyone knows the U.S. government does not allow).A federal law-enforcement source said it was a ''pure coincidence'' that Alvarez's arrest occurred the day after a Cuba-based group ran a full-page ad in The New York Times denouncing Posada. The official said the timing of Alvarez's arrest had nothing to do with Castro or any pressure he was trying to exert on the U.S. government.
Friday's NYT (Nov. 18) has a full page ad (p.25) SHOULD THE UNITED STATES HARBOR AN INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST? Open Letter tot he families of the victims of 9/11 from the Committee of Families of the Victims of the Cuban Airliner Bombing in Barbados @: www.FamiliesForJustice.cu
Then that would be CFVCABB?
It's an appeal to the 9/11 famlies, ie. Jersey Girls, et al., who lobbied successfully for the 9/11 Commission, then denounced them for not answering their most significant questions, not holding anyone accountable and for covering up the Able Danger tip off. The CFVCABB want the 9/11 families to take up their cause.
BK
JFK Monthly - A New Magazine
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
I GOT TEN TO ONE THEY DON'T PUT OUT 12 ISSUES.
GUYS LIKE THESE COME AND GO. REMINDS ME OF THE MEN ON THE GRASSY KNOLL, BOB VERN, WIM ET AL, CARNIVAL HAWKERS.
GIVEM' YOUR MONEY ON A BUNCH OF GLOSSY PROMISES. FOR WHAT THEY'RE PAYING TO PUT OUT ONE GLOSSY THEY COULD PRINT A HUNDRED THOUSAND B&W BASIC NEWSPRINT TABLOID AND GAVE THEM OUT FREE TO SCHOOL KIDS AND CONGRESSMEN.
THAT GARY AG HAS BEEN 'HIRED' BY THESE GUYS AND THEY'RE GOING TO SOLVE THE CASE FROM KANSAS CITY STRETCHES CREDULITY.
AS A BOARD MEMBER OF COPA GARY HAS BEEN A BIG SUPPORTER FOR THE ORGANIZED EFFORTS WE'VE TRIED TO DO IN THE PAST, AND IS A GOOD DEBATER AND FRONT MAN, BUT THIS LOOKS LIKE A HAIRBRAINED SCHEME.
WITH THE DEMISE OF THE THIRD/FOURTH DECADE, PROBE AND OTHER SIMILAR PUBLICATIONS, IT WOULD BE NICE TO HAVE AN OUTLET FOR SERIOUS RESEARCH, BUT I DON'T THINK A CONSPIRACY-LIFE IS THE WAY TO GO.
ANY TAKERS?
BK