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William Weston

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  1. The age reported in the obituary is correct. From newspapers.com I found a wedding announcement that said he graduated from Lubbock High School in June 1971.
  2. Elzie Dean Glaze is dead. Below is his obituary published in the Austin American Statesman on December 15, 2019 GLAZE, Elzie Dean Age 66, is celebrated by his family for his compassion, humor and willingness to help family, friends and the world at large. He was an accomplished journalist and author and had worked as a radio engineer in his early career. For many years he assisted organizations that helped veterans, monitored the nuclear power industry, and worked to ensure basic human rights. He had keen interests in history and weather, and much of his writing related to these. He followed environmental concerns and space exploration, and he enjoyed playing and watching sports. He was fortunate to have many travels, including celebration of his 60th birthday in Antarctica. Dean was the son of Elzie L. Glaze and Geneva I. Glaze and was born in Lubbock, Texas. He passed away on November 15, 2019, after a fall causing brain injury. He is loved and will always be remembered by his wife Sylvia Glaze, daughter Hailey Glaze, and sister, brothers, nieces, nephews and friends. He enjoyed giving to others, and loved the companionship of his four dogs. Many notes and gifts, often created by him, are left for us as a tribute to his kindness and love. Below is a copy of his 1989 letter that I got from Larry Ray Harris, who did the highlighting: When I wrote to him in 1999, he sent to me the followng reply: July 14, 1999 Dear Mr. Weston, Received your letter of July 7, 1999. Thank you for your kind words and interest. All that I know – and the attending dead ends – were passed along to a researcher and author in Dallas a few years ago. He is about to publish his book and, as you can understand, friendship and loyalty make me reluctant to discuss this matter with anyone else. It’s perhaps a moot point anyway, because based on what you’ve told me, you now know more than I do. Mine was a happenstance meeting and short, casual friendship with a man who appeared to have fallen through the cracks. Had the seemingly insignificant trail of bread crumbs I stumbled across had not been so avidly guarded, I might never have given it a second thought. My actions were less courageous than they were the result of being naïve. I was up to my neck before I realized it. You may have noticed that at the end of my letter to “Alternative Views” [the Alternative Information Network] I carbon-copied to “my will.” It was intended as a jab at myself lest I get too full of myself rereading it 50 years from now. With that, I pass along my rather tiny candle, plus my best wishes and encouragement. Those generations who were there in 1963 are grateful that people like you are continuing the pursuit and taking another look at events which may have been too shocking for the rest of us to ever fully comprehend. Perhaps that is why I was so unprepared during that brief step into the looking glass. Sincerely, Dean Glaze As far as I know, the book by the unknown Dallas author who got an interview with Mr. Glaze has not been published.
  3. The photo below shows Bonnie Ray Williams and Harold Norman at the same fifth floor window where Walther, Fischer, and Edwards saw a blond or light brown haired man holding a rifle, positioned beside a man wearing a brown suitcoat. The photo was taken by new cameraman Tom Dillard while riding in a car assigned to journalists. He took the picture because fellow cameraman Bob Jackson said "There's a rifle barrel up there." Supposedly Jackson noticed the rifle because he saw two black men leaning out of the window and looking straight up at the window above them. The photo looks like a fake to me. Since I am not an expert in photo fakery, I invite other members to comment.
  4. Claude Barnes Capehart, a hitman for the CIA, was living in Chowchilla, California, when he saw his picture in the Fresno Bee. On July 31, 1978, the newspaper ran a story on the HSCA which included photographs of three men wanted in connection with the assassination of President Kennedy. One picture shows a dark-haired man sitting on a street curb in Dealey Plaza moments after the assassination. The middle picture is a side view of a man wearing a suitcoat. He has light or gray hair, an aquiline nose, and appears to be in his late 40s or early 50s. The third picture shows, according to the UPI article, a “handsome, apparently blond-haired man in his 20s or early 30s. He appears to be wearing a jacket over a dark turtleneck sweater or pullover.” The latter two men were in Mexico City in the fall of 1963 at the same time Lee Harvey Oswald was there. Three days after Capehart saw the article, he fled to Las Vegas, leaving his wife Roberta behind. Frightened and distressed, she went to see Chowchilla Sheriff’s Deputy Dale Fore and showed him the newspaper article. One of the three pictures, according to Fore, was a “dead ringer” for Capehart. A picture of an older Capehart on the findagrave website shows close resemblance to the blonde-haired man. Capehart was absolutely paranoid about having his picture taken. So much so, Roberta said, that even his California driver’s license lacked a picture as required by law. Fore made an inquiry with the Department of Motor Vehicles. Yes, they said, his license lacked a picture, but no one could explain why. Claude told Roberta that he had been “in” on the plot to kill Kennedy and that Lee Harvey Oswald did not fire any of the shots. He said he was inside the Texas School Book Depository at the time of the shooting. According to Carolyn Walther, a motorcade spectator standing on the corner Elm and Houston, a gunman with blonde or light-brown hair, wearing a white shirt, had positioned himself at the open lower part of the window of the fifth floor, not the sixth (as claimed by the Warren Commission). He had a rifle in his hands. Standing next to the blonde-haired man was another man wearing a brown suitcoat. Walther could not see his face, for it was obscured by the closed upper portion of the window. Confirming Walther’s observations were two more spectators, Ronald Fischer and Robert Edwards, who saw a man with light-colored hair and a light-colored open-neck shirt at a window on the fifth floor. Since Capehart had blonde or light-brown hair, he might have been the gunman. The other man wearing a brown suitcoat took an elevator down to the first floor and ran out the back door, running in a southerly direction. Another witness who saw him said he had black hair, was 5 feet 8 to 10 inches tall, 155 to 165 pounds, in his late 20s or early 30s. This could not have been Capehart, who according to his biographical resume in November 1963, was 6 foot 1 inch, 220 pounds, in his late 30s, and had brown hair. Statements by three witnesses that the gunman and his companion were on the fifth floor would mean that James Jarman, Harold Norman, and Bonnie Ray Williams had lied about their presence on the fifth floor. Oswald said that at the time of the shots he was eating lunch with some black employees. Oswald was telling the truth.
  5. Below is a link to an article I wrote for the Jim Fetzer’s blog and the Oswald Innocence Campaign. The topic concerns the Lone Star School Book Depository which set up an alternate ambush site near the Trade Mart in case Kennedy did not take the route that led through Dealey Plaza, where the other schoolbook depository was located. I would like to point out that Ross Carlton of the LSBD emerges here as the number one suspect in the planning and coordinating of the hit squads at both locations. http://oswaldinthedoorway.blogspot.com/2016/07/there-is-new-article-by-william-weston.html
  6. In the interview Steve mentions an important article in Probe regarding Clay Shaw. The article appeared in the Mar-Apr. 1996 issue and was written by Lisa Pease. The title of the article is “David Atlee Phillips, Clay Shaw, and Freeport Sulphur”. In the article Lisa Pease quotes a memo written by Sciambra to Jim Garrison. It said, “A memo in the GUY BANISTER file indicates that there is information which reports that DICK WHITE, a high official of Freeport Sulphur, and CLAY SHAW were flown to Cuba probably taking off from the Harvey Canal area in a Freeport Sulphur plane piloted by DAVE FERRIE. The purpose of this trip was to set up import of Cuba’s nickel ore to a Canadian front corporation which would in turn ship to the Braithwaite nickel plant. The plant was built by the U.S. Government at a cost of about one million dollars.” Mr. White’s name was really Charles A. Wight, and he was a Director and Chairman of the Executive Committee of Freeport Sulphur. Another influential person in Freeport Sulphur was John (“Jock”) Whitney. He was a member of the pro-British, anti-American Pilgrim Society according to Congressman Thorkelson who made some remarks regarding the Pilgrims in 1940. Jock’s father and grandfather were members of Skull and Bones and Jock himself was a knight of St. John of Jerusalem and honorary commander of the Order of the British Empire, according to Prof. Donald Gibson. He also belonged to the Metropolitan Club with Allen Dulles. That Freeport Sulphur is a representative client of Doyle Smith and Doyle highlights the conspiratorial significance of that mysterious law firm.
  7. I interviewed researcher Steve Gaal on August 10, 2010. Like many other researchers Steve says that the conspiracy surrounding John F. Kennedy's death included a coalition of elements within the CIA, the military, and the Mafia. However, an examination of the events in the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, and the people connected to Oswald, has led him to the conclusion that an elite group with possibly British connections were angered by Kennedy's move against the money debt authority of the Federal Reserve and joined the aforementioned anti-Kennedy factions in an already burgeoning plot to kill him. Steve, before we talk about your ideas, let us could talk about your background, who are who, why should we pay attention to you? Nine days before the Robert F. Kennedy assassination, my mother dropped me off at the Ambassador Hotel. I was fifteen at the time, and my mother was always trying to stimulate me. I saw Robert F. Kennedy speak and he kicked off his California campaign. Nine days later I was watching television late into the night, and at the podium I had seen him speak at when I was there at the Ambassador, he said "On to Chicago." It was very late. I turned off my small, black and white television and felt very good. I've already started to go against the Vietnam War and started thinking that maybe the government even lies to us. When I heard that Kennedy was dead, I thought that he was killed by a conspiracy. I had already read Mark Lane's "Rush to Judgment." From then on, on and off, I've studied conspiracy, trying to make sense of it. I think with the deep analysis, the pieces to the puzzle have to fit together. If you are left with a puzzle piece that is a real true fact, and it does not fit into the conspiracy picture, then your theory must be flawed in some way. In my research I have found puzzle pieces that don't fit commonly accepted theories limiting the conspiracy to either the CIA or the Mafia. My analysis leads me to conclude that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy that included powerful men who were over and above the CIA and the Mafia, controlling them both. This elite group, with possibly British connections, was angered by Kennedy's move against the money debt authority of the Federal Reserve and joined an ongoing plot that was already in place to kill him. How did you conclude that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy? The "Rush to Judgment" book made me wonder about the thoroughness of the Warren Commission. If you are investigating a very important event and if there are errors and incompleteness, and you have the full cooperation of all the intelligence services of the United States and you leave things open and unexplored, there must be a reason for that. It doesn't make sense that you would have the most important man in power, political power as well as military power, killed and not have the most thorough investigation, unless you didn't really want the answer. Leaders and kings have been killed before by conspiracies, and governments have been overthrown. The CIA overthrew Mossadegh, and it’s their job to control countries. So if they had a policy difference, it's not impossible to think that they helped kill Kennedy. Can you identify the major players in this conspiracy? Well, the self-professed, best friend of Lee Harvey Oswald was George de Mohrenschildt. His brother wrote a book with the son of the brother of Allen Dulles; John Foster Dulles's son wrote a book with Dmitri de Mohrenschildt. In a note in the six volume phonebooks of de Mohrenschildt is the home phone number of George Herbert Walker Bush, and he uses the word "Poppy" next to the phone number, a nickname which was not known by many people at all but only by close associates. From the work of researcher Bruce Campbell Adamson, de Mohrenschildt may have received $200,000 from Prescott Bush. He left Dallas, went to New York City and possibly met with Prescott Bush. Only a few months before, Prescott had left the Senate, had a small vacation, and then became president of Brown Brothers Harriman. Brown Brothers Harriman gave de Mohrenschildt $200,000. Adamson found a FBI note that states that Brown Brothers Harriman sent a message to the Republic National Bank building asking about de Mohrenschildt. I will address the Republic National Bank building and its owner Lewis McNaughton later. Now Brown Brothers Harriman was a Skull and Bones operation. We have often been told that Skull and Bones was a German operation, but this is really just a cover story. The true originators were British. For many years they kept it funded through a foundation called the Russell Trust. The Russells were an American family who split their opium trade with the British. This is how their trust came under British control. Now going back to the phone books of de Mohrenschildt, he had the number at RCA, and this RCA number was the post-World War II number of Allen Dulles, coordinating things with the OSS. De Mohrenschildt had a stepfather-in-law that was a CIA operative, whose name was Wasserman. Apparently, de Mohrenschildt was an intelligence operative since World War II, though there is a large confusion about what side he's on and what he said he was. If the best friend of Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas is that connected into intelligence, then you definitely have a case of saying that Dulles himself was involved too, since de Mohrenschildt’s benefactor, Prescott Bush, was a personal friend of Allen Dulles. They were very close for many years, even touring the Middle East together in the 1930s. They were very close. You mentioned de Mohrenschildt. Are there any other associations or connections that Oswald had that indicate a conspiracy? From the analysis of Jim Diugenio and Mr. Newman, who wrote the book "Oswald and CIA", there was some type of CIA coordination to Oswald's going into the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City. His travels into Russia indicate CIA assistance. Oswald went precisely to a little known place that allowed him to enter Russia quickly. This enabled him to maintain his cover as a “man on the run.” If Oswald had gone to the more commonly known entry points into Russia, he would have been delayed and lost time, which would enable his pursuers to catch him “on the run.” We hear of the non-conspiratorial explanation of Oswald’s monetary resources which says that he was very frugal and diligently saved his money. This claim that Oswald was extremely frugal is contradicted by the fact that he frequently went to bars in Tokyo, requiring expenditures of money for frivolous purposes that would have depleted his savings. Another indication that Oswald was involved in some type of intelligence operation was his selection of Russia as a place to go to. Professor Rose has written an article about all his records. Going further, every single record that is really important, birth certificate, social security number, times that he was at an orphanage, all these records are incorrect or have inconsistencies. Since Rose wrote his article, additional information has come out that shows even more problems with Oswald's record. A memo that Rankin wrote, which appears on page 199 and 200 of John Armstrong’s “Harvey and Lee” book, a secret memo of the Warren Commission that was not willingly given up by the government, said there were problems with Oswald’s record in the military, specifically his base transfers. Researcher John Newman who minutely studied Oswald’s intelligence files noted numerous inconsistencies. To give you one example, Oswald was not on the NSA letter intercept list, and yet his mail was nevertheless being intercepted. Strangely enough, when Oswald’s name was later put on that list, his letters were not intercepted. Also the U-2 base where he was stationed, that he knew the Russian language on a level of understanding equivalent to someone who was native-born, all indicate Oswald’s connection to intelligence. There’s even evidence of two Oswalds, as John Armstrong wrote about. What connections or associations did Ruby have that would indicate a conspiracy? According to Douglas Valentine, an FBN agent saw Ruby’s file and discovered that he was an FBN informant. The FBN worked very closely with the CIA, worked with them in MK-Ultra events. Valentine goes on to say that the CIA could forestall FBN investigations when one of their assets or sources was using narcotics to support their projects. That would be the most telling thing, that Ruby was an FBN informant. And this was all covered up by the Warren Commission. What about with mobsters? That was covered up too. In the official stories Ruby was a local hoodlum. In the past he might have had run numbers as a child for Capone and that was the extent of his mob connections. But even looking at what the Warren Commission did investigate, you see by his phone records he was calling Lansky people, including the Dorfman mob in Chicago. There were narcotic connections to Ruby that were covered up by misspellings. The Campisi family was deliberately many times misspelled in Warren Commission papers. Even in the FBI internal documents the name Campisi was misspelled. The files that we now have that probably could have been given to the Commission, or that they did have, indicate that he had narcotics connections in Los Angeles with that man Breen that the wife talked about, who said that you had to go through Ruby to get narcotics through Dallas. There’s also the man who said that Ruby showed him a film of a narcotics transaction at the Mexican-U.S. border. That gives more credence to Valentine’s claim that he was a Federal Bureau Narcotics agent. The only people who would make such a film would be the FBN doing it covertly, and Ruby showed this film to someone. So Ruby was not a local hoodlum who ran a strip club. He was much more than that. If we combine Oswald’s associations with George de Mohrenschildt, who was an intelligence operative connected through Prescott Bush to Dulles and the CIA, and Ruby's associations with the mobsters, can we say that the conspiracy was a simple coalition between the CIA and the Mafia? Or was it more than that? In spite of all the publicity given to the Mafia connection to the JFK assassination, it was really only of minor significance. I believe the Mafia played a much larger role in the events following the assassination. They had the task of terminating key witnesses and whistleblowers post-assassination, which required close-range shooting that the Mafia excelled at. While the Rose Cheramine information does place the narcotic side of the Mafia within the events leading up to the actual assassination, yet still this involvement was peripheral. The CIA and the military would not have employed Mafia hitmen, who did not have the expertise to do the kind of long range shooting the Dealey Plaza ambush required. That kind of shooting called for shooters with military training or professional sport training. Fletcher Prouty speculated that the shooters, or “mechanics”, as he called them, came from Greece. Now it just so happens that the former CIA Chief of Station in Athens was with George Herbert Walker Bush on November 22, 1963. So I fully agree with Prouty that the shooters came from Greece. It may be a fruitful line of research to investigate famous Greek marksmen during the period of the 1950s and 1960s. So although the Dallas conspiracy appears to be a CIA rogue operation with some assistance from Mafia hitmen during the cleanup following the assassination, it goes much deeper than that. We see that the conspiracy involved generals and admirals at the highest levels. This can be seen through the problems with the autopsy at Bethesda. There were two brains at the autopsy events. The photographic record was changed at the autopsy. There was some type of film alteration in the Zapruder film itself. We could just go with minor alteration and say that the blob on the head was hiding a second gunman. So neither the Mafia nor CIA rogues could control the outcome of the autopsy or Zapruder film alterations. That required the involvement of the highest levels of the military and the CIA. Fletcher Prouty said that Kennedy made a great error when he thought that Maxwell Taylor, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was loyal to him. In actuality, Maxwell Taylor was loyal to Dulles. Yet beyond what the CIA and the military did, there are still even more anomalies that compel us to go even higher than the highest levels of the military and the CIA. I have an alternative view of history that explains puzzle pieces that don’t fit within the commonly touted theories of the assassination. What are these anomalous facts you think need to be added to the conspiracy puzzle? One of these anomalous facts is the so-called “second plot”, which was a John Birch Society affair involving a man named Gabaldon enlisting Oswald in Mexico. Gabaldon posed as a CIA officer to entice Oswald into a patsy trap. The CIA itself played along with the John Birch Society’s efforts to kill Kennedy. Now you would think that the CIA might have protected themselves by exposing this plot rather than keep it going, but the reason why they did not stop it was because the JBS was a special project of the elites. The JBS had very deep elite connections. The rank and file CIA agents did not know about these elite connections, only the people at the top. Since the reason why the CIA exists is to serve the elite, the people at the top would forestall any efforts by their underlings to shut down the JBS attempt to organize an assassination plot. Another anomaly is Lansky trying to help Castro. Now you would think that Lansky would understand that Castro would have a deleterious effect on his casino operations, which it did. I will explain why Lansky helped Castro later. A third anomaly is Permindex which is connected to Clay Shaw. For a long time, we have known that Clay Shaw was an asset of the CIA, but recently new documents have been found that show that Permindex was connected to Rothschild and British interests. By putting together these anomalies, I believe a better view of the assassination is that the Rothschild and British elites were involved in the assassination plot, but not initially. They knew about it, but early on they were just going to let it happen without committing themselves. Their active involvement in the plot began after Kennedy decided to change the Federal Reserve debt mechanism. He was moving against the British and the Rothschilds who had interests in the Federal Reserve. That’s why they needed to remove him. You have named three anomalies. Are there any more? The Secret Service was part of this conspiracy also, and that doesn’t really fit the mold of having only the CIA be the center of all this with Dulles behind Maxwell Taylor. The participation of the Secret Service in the plot gives more evidence that the elites were involved. The Secret Service’s investigation of the Chicago plot on Kennedy’s life a few weeks before the Texas trip was terminated abruptly and suppressed. The suppression of the investigation was not done locally, but came directly from the Washington headquarters of the Secret Service. A Secret Service man was at the meeting when the Dallas parade route was selected with the 120 degree turn at Elm Street, which was quite unsafe. According to Fletcher Prouty, the Secret Service, through past experience, had regulations in place that the car at most times should not be under 44 miles per hour, yet in an unsafe area with tall buildings and open windows, it slowed down to a crawl to make that sharp turn onto Elm Street. They certainly did not scout out the buildings around the plaza very well. When Kennedy arrived in Dallas, the bubbletop was not put on the car, purposely. On film we see an agent attempting to ride on the President’s car as it was leaving the airport but was told by another agent to get off. Now in earlier motorcades, we see on film agents riding on the car at Tampa and Fort Worth, but not in Dallas. After the assassination, they made sure that the body was taken out immediately and put onto the plane to get away from Texas authorities. So these are indications of conspiracy within the Secret Service. This indicates that there’s something more than just the CIA, and CIA people loyal in the military involved. General Curtis LeMay probably was involved in the conspiracy. There are indications of that, but even a child could have recruited him. He was such a Kennedy hater. So we have four anomalies: (1) Lansky helping Castro, (2) the “second plot” involving the John Birch Society, (3) the Secret Service, and (4) Permindex that connects to Clay Shaw and the Rothschilds. To explain these anomalies, you need an alternative view of history. Let us first look at the JBS. There is a pamphlet called The Belmont Brotherhood, which describes the real founders of the John Birch Society as being elites and possibly British-connected, the Newcomb Society. So the JBS isn’t what it seems, it’s some type of false front. Now the rank and file members of the JBS were true believers, but the people at the very top of the JBS hierarchy were hiding their connections to the very elite that the JBS was supposed to be against. Let us look at a Mormon-JBS connection that exposes how the elites controlled the JBS. The connection that the Mormons had with the JBS was very close. The leader of the JBS, Ezra Benson, president of the Mormon church, became involved with the JBS. His son Reed Benson became involved with the JBS. The Mormon connection to the elites can be seen with Swiss billionaire Robert Vincent de Oliverri, who was part of the Rothschild clan, and the second richest Rothschild in the world. He became a Mormon and sometime later, in 1967, paid off a $500 million debt that the Mormon church owed. In today’s money that is about $4 billion. So the Mormons, the JBS, and the elites are all tied together. Now let us look at the anomaly of Lansky helping Castro. Behind Lansky were the British, who secretly wanted Castro to come to power in Cuba. They did not want the United States to have an accommodation with him, which was what Kennedy was trying to do in 1963. They wanted Castro as a so-called pebble in the shoe to irritate America. Historically, America was isolationist, and the British wanted America to become globalist. Having Castro in power forced America to look beyond its borders and get involved in the affairs of other countries. There is a book called Desperate Deception that I could recommend, which explains how concerned the British were that America was too neutralist. Even though the British lost a lot after World War I, the elites in Britain wanted to have a world domination by centralized banks. To achieve this goal America had to become an internationalist force. They managed to gain control of America through a secret group called the Pilgrim Society which people can look up on the Internet and check out. Through the Pilgrims, the British entrapped America within a military-industrial complex in order to keep its economy going. On the other hand, the British did not want America to become too strong for that would mean it would become too independent and say no to Britain. The means by which they could make America its tool was through strengthening or weakening the dollar. A more globalist policy kept the American dollar strong in the decades following World War II; but since the early 1990s there are many indications that the dollar is gradually collapsing. Just look at the facts and the charts over twenty years, and you see that the American dollar is going down. Now the elites are going to have to massage this weakening, until the world domination is complete. There could be a crisis at a certain point where Americans will accept some type of foreign help with their money crisis if it gives them temporary surcease. So that’s part of my world view. This explains why the British wanted America to become more internationalist than it was. They wanted to use America as a tool to expand British influence. You mention the British using Lansky to achieve their globalist dreams. How did they get Lansky on their side? We have to go back, way back, to 1928, to explain this British-Lansky connection. In China, there were three large triads, or gangs, exporting narcotics. Originally, the Kuo Ming Tang and Chiang Kai Shek supported these people. At the same time they were also fighting a prolonged war with the Communists. So for publicity reasons, and to get them back on the good side with the Americans who could help them in the war against the Communists, the KMT publicly went against the triads. At the same time, they made a secret deal with one of these gangs. There was some financial gain to having this narcotics export into the Far East and America, but where they were located were mostly Chinese areas and they wanted to expand and make more money. The book by Douglas Valentine indicates that a State Department man was involved in the Chinese narcotics trade. Apparently, he and other State Department people thought that helping the KMT with the drug trade was a good thing in stopping the spread of communism. Of course, they soon realized it would not be good if American diplomats and officials were caught with loads of narcotics. So they asked themselves, “Can’t we get someone else to do the job?” That is why they reached out to Lansky to be a major drug distributor. This was in the 1930s. So he was in contact with elites possibly before World War II. There is a story that he was called in to help the ONI and the OSS to protect ports in New York and help with the invasion of Sicily. Well, that’s the cover story, because he was possibly in contact with these people before the war. Before World War II and the creation of the OSS and the CIA, ONI was our major intelligence organization, and very likely they knew about Lansky and what he was doing before the war. That just makes sense. So Lansky was an operative for the ONI, but it is possible that he was more of an operative for the British. This would explain why he helped Castro, which on the surface appears to be against his own interests. But something else was occurring at the same time. He was in contact with the very elites and owners of the Bahamas. Now someone could say that he was just setting that up as a safety valve. But the deeper view is that he knew that Castro was going to win. That’s what his masters, the British, wanted. The British helped him set up his operations in the Bahamas. By the way, in 1961 the British changed their laws on casinos and gambling and by 1964 Lansky had a casino in London. Isn't that amazing? We have now explained the motivations of Clay Shaw with Permindex, and Lansky working for the British to help Castro. Now let me add that in the early 1960s British Guyana was going to go communist, and the British were pulling out. Apparently Kennedy found out that the British weren’t helping set up an anti-communist regime, but they were letting a communist man take the lead in taking over that country. Now you can have more than one explanation of why the British did it, perhaps because they were pressuring Kennedy to help them with their submarine missile technology, but it does indicate that the British did not mind letting a small, Western Hemisphere country go communist. If you read “Deadly Deception” and understood what it meant, the British were just so afraid and angered of neutral America. They wanted America on its side and doing its will. Beyond the scope of this interview, if you look at what the British elite and banking system did with the creation of the Federal Reserve, and their power behind the Morgan group, you see that the British were trying to financially control America. Now let us go into the Secret Service. The Secret Service was penetrated by the elites. The person that founded it, Lansing, a relative of Allen Dulles, was an Anglophile. There were OSS connections to the Secret Service through Scribner. There was a law firm called Scribner, Hall and Casey. Casey and Hall were with the OSS. Casey worked with Dulles both during World War II and in the decades after. Scribner was the head attorney for Treasury Department, and thus also the Secret Service. Scribner’s successor was Gaspar d'Angelot Belin, who belonged to a secret society called Skull and Bones, which had British connections. It is possible that Belin was involved in a conspiratorial luncheon with Mary Bancroft and Allen Dulles. Researcher Richard Bartholomew comments on a passage that Mary Bancroft wrote in her autobiography (which CIA censors had in manuscript form for a year before it was published). She was the lover of Dulles and Luce at one point simultaneously, but in Switzerland she was Dulles’s lover. In the manuscript itself she talks about metalanguage that she and Dulles used. They talked in code in a metalanguage, and in a paragraph within the autobiography possibly getting it through the censorship of the CIA, she said that she and Dulles had lunch at the Bundys’ house with Gaspar d'Angelot Belin, who had married a Bundy sister. Also there was James Jesus Angleton, whom Probe magazine said was probably very central to the assassination. They had lunch and tennis there. She said that in 1963 Dulles was very competitive and would try to let no one beat him in tennis. It must have been quite a surprise for Mr. Dulles, when Kennedy fired him after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Dulles was one of these people toppling governments all over the world and controlling world events and the CIA, and two words from Kennedy and he's gone out the door, hat in hand. So Bartholomew believes, and I agree with him, that that paragraph describing those lunches was metalanguage code for discussions on how to assassinate the president. As a matter of fact, Douglas Dillon, a friend of British elites and British eugenists and other Anglophiles, let Gaspar d'Angelot Belin handle all the affairs between the Warren Commission and the Secret Service. There is a letter that is addressed to Belin, although it was misconstrued, that referred to him as the head of the Treasury Department, by one of the Secret Service people. So that shows you how much authority that Dillon, who is the actual head of the Treasury Department, gave to Gaspar d'Angelot Belin, a man who was supporting Britain more than the United States through his loyalty to Skull and Bones. So both Belin and his predecessor Scribner show that there was a Dulles connection to the Secret Service through the Treasury Department. So that takes care of the Secret Service. There were more connections to the British through a very unusual law firm in New Orleans called Doyle Smith and Doyle. It was an extremely elite-oriented law firm. One of its representative clients was the Kirby family who were involved with the oil company, Atlantic Richfield. The Kirby family was supported by Brown Brothers Harriman, which as I told you earlier was a Skull and Bones operation. Doyle Smith and Doyle also represented Mossbacher, one of the greatest globalists of all time. He was president of the thousand businesses that wanted Congress to pass NAFTA. (The president emeritus of course was Rockefeller himself.) In 1962 Doyle Smith and Doyle had British American Petroleum as a representative client. British Petroleum bought large sections of Atlantic Richfield and turned it into ARCO. Robert Anderson was running Atlantic Richfield in 1966. He started out the company as Hondo. Later on he formed a company called Hondo again, which was the original Atlantic Richfield, that did servicing of properties for ARCO. Anderson was another big-time globalist. William Zeckendorf was another representative client of Doyle Smith and Doyle, but before I talk about him I want to talk about Freeport Sulphur. Freeport Sulphur was a representative client of Doyle Smith and Doyle. It was extremely Skull and Bones and thus very British. It was having problems because Kennedy was going to investigate the company. But that was only a sideline motivation for the assassination. The decision had already been made by the British to kill Kennedy because of him wanting to accommodate Castro. Curiously, after the assassination, Admiral Arleigh Burke joined the board of Freeport Sulphur. At the time of the assassination Burke was chief of naval operations and would have known about any CIA activities involving Marines, specifically the so-called defectors-to-Russia program involving Oswald. Probe magazine printed an important article that connects Clay Shaw to Freeport Sulphur. Shaw also had connections to the Morgan interests as delineated by Professor Donald Gibson. Before we leave Shaw, I just want to mention that in the summer of 1963 Shaw took Oswald to Clinton, Louisiana for some kind of intelligence operation. So Doyle Smith and Doyle was a very important company within the conspiracy milieu. Another important British-connected company was Empire Trust. This company was controlled by the Rothschilds via Kohn and Loeb. Jack Crichton was part of Empire Trust. Crichton was the one who sent a translator to the Dallas police station to aid the police in their interrogation of Marina Oswald. The translator, Illya Mamantov, used the opportunity to implicate Oswald as the assassin. The British-connected Great Southwest Corporation had control of Marina following the assassination. To paraphrase Peter Dale Scott, the Great Southwest provided Marina with a manager, an attorney, and a hideaway. Her manager was James Martin. The lawyer was William Mackenzie, and the hideaway was the Six Flags Hotel. The Great Southwest was made up of British interests, including Loeb Rhoades, and Anglophiles William Zeckendorf, the Rockefellers, and the Murchison family. A little known fact about the Murchisons is that they had dealing with the Suez Canal Company, which was controlled by the British government. The Murchisons also had dealings with the Kirby family that I told you about earlier. A Skull and Bones man named McGeorge Bundy, who was Kennedy's chief national security advisor, played a fundamental role in the Bay of Pigs operation. Bundy cancelled the air support for the Bay of Pigs. He talked to Kennedy, and there is nothing on the record where Bundy said take the safe course and go to the right and conquer Castro. He went along with Kennedy and that kept Castro in power, which is what the British wanted. Bundy is a lead suspect regarding the mishandling of Kennedy’s NSAM directive that would have ended the Vietnam War. He reversed its meaning so that it called for an expansion of the war rather than putting an end to it. Such a change fosters American internationalism, and this is what the British wanted. So Doyle Smith and Doyle was an extremely British-oriented law firm. It had Gulf States Land and Industries which was owned by Mr. Zeckendorf, who had many land deals with the Rothschild-connected Empire Trust. He also had connections to KMT trucking, which indicates a narcotics connection. KMT drugs were often shipped by means of trucks. Zeckendorf had business dealing with Arthur Rubloff, who had investments with Lansky’s casino operations in the Bahamas. Rubloff was also invested in the Great Southwest Corporation. A member of his board on Gulf States Land and Industries was a James R. Stanley. Mr. Stanley worked with D.H. Byrd at Alpha Omega Finance, and he was also a member of Wallace Investments in Dallas. The Dallas Conspiracy with Lansky, the British, and the Rothschilds converge on Wallace Investments. It was a mob-connected, business operation. Mr. Wallace himself, through his investments, connected up to Lansky through the Sands Hotel. The head of Wallace Investments was Eugene Locke. He and his partner, who was also in Wallace Investments, ran a law firm called Locke and Purnell. In the office of Locke and Purnell was the parade route meeting, and if my theory is right, Lansky people were at the parade route meeting. This way they could control any final decisions, if the planning went askew. Kennedy advance man Jack Puterbaugh made investments with Wallace Investments, as did Trammel Crowell. Now both those investments were made post assassination, but it gives indication that they knew Mr. Wallace before. Trammel Crowell constructed the Trade Mart, and he knew where all the nooks and crannies were inside the building. If Kennedy hadn’t been killed in Dealey Plaza, then he would have been killed at the Trade Mart where more shooters could hide in the nooks and crannies. Mr. Crowell was a rich man before the assassination, but he became very, very wealthy after the assassination. He became ultra-rich, as the years went on. Quite likely he had connections with British investment and the Morgan Group in America. Let’s get back to Locke and Purnell, who were both cousins, and who were a part of Wallace Investments. Mr. Purnell was on the board of A. H. Belo, which had many odd things connected to the assassination. Belo had Hugh Ainsworthy who had access to Marina when other people did not have access to her, and he was at the Tippit scene. The man who had a seizure that took away an ambulance from Dealey Plaza was an employee of A. H. Belo, oddly. To show the internationalist slant of the organization, A. H. Belo in the 1980s joined the British-American Society. There were not that many American companies that were part of the British-American Society, but A. H. Belo was. It’s quite possible there were connections through Mr. Purnell, because Lansky and his milieu operated in some type of state-sponsored, narco-business alliance, which was outwardly a business with the narcotics operation underneath supporting it partially financially. At the parade route meeting in the office of Locke and Purnell was Elizabeth Forsling Harris. She later became the money source behind Ms. Magazine. (I would like to add as an aside that Ms. magazine was probably an elite plot against the traditional family, to bring down the number of children born to people belonging to the lower and middle classes.) Now when Harris was at the parade route meeting, she made a phone call to the White House at a time when Bill Moyers was at the White House. Going further, Ms. Harris's brother was the head lawyer for CBS, and he later headed the conglomerate that controlled CBS. This same brother worked for Mr. Paley who was the head of CBS. Paley was in the anti-American, pro-British Pilgrim Society that I mentioned earlier. Closely associated with Paley was Prescott Bush who was a CBS trust member of 30 years. Allen Dulles was a very close friend to Paley. He and Paley would exchange Christmas jam and jelly and visit one another. It is therefore no surprise that CBS was part of the cover-up. It strongly supported the Warren Commission and was an enthusiastic promoter of the lone assassin theory. Now I covered a lot of things here but let me reiterate John Stanley’s connections. He worked as the director of the Great Southwest. His connection to Mr. Zeckendorf puts Stanley within the realm of KMT trucking and British elites. Stanley sat on the board of Wallace Investments, which connects him to the Lansky mob. Stanley was associated with Locke who was the head of Wallace investments. Locke was the head of the law firm Locke and Purnell that finalized the parade route with the difficult turn in front of the Schoolbook Depository. Locke went to Yale, which was the headquarters of Skull and Bones. Locke was appointed ambassador to Pakistan. If any scholar wants to study his record, he may discover that Locke was covertly doing mischief for the British, specifically in regard to the conflict between India and Pakistan. Locke was appointed to the post of deputy ambassador to South Vietnam. If we consider how Locke appears at the center of all these webs of deep politics, I may be permitted to ask: “Was Locke part of a narcotics operation that combined Lansky, KMT, the CIA and Burma?” I don’t think that is a stretch. We have anomalies at the Schoolbook Depository that has been conjectured by you, Bill, as being deeply part of the conspiracy. Oswald, who was an agent of some type, was an employee at the Depository, which in itself is enough to suspect that something was going on in the building. There are so many anomalies in Oswald’s record, that even if they tried to cover these things up, it is obvious that he was some kind of asset. The previous places where Oswald worked at, such as the Reiley Coffee Co. and Jaggers Stovall, all had intelligence connections. Within the Depository building a few minutes after the shooting, the power was shut down, which indicates that Oswald had an accomplice in the building who knew where to be and who had some type of authorization from the Depository management to be in the basement where the power panel was located. Such an accomplice is an indication of some type of conspiracy among the people working in the building. There are indications that a smuggling operation was going on inside the Depository under the guise of schoolbooks, possibly transporting guns or drugs. Researcher Harry Hurt went to the Depository and saw boxes that were so gigantic that they couldn’t have contained books. Such boxes if they contained books should have weighed 400 pounds. With no mechanical means of lifting them such as forklifts and palettes, these oversized boxes were somehow moved up to the fifth and sixth floors. That in itself is an indication that they contained things other than books. Something was wrong with the Depository. One of the boxes that Hurt saw came from Bobbs-Merrill. This is not just an ordinary schoolbook company. One of the people connected to the Mafia and the CIA, William Harvey, became a legal counsel for this company, post-assassination. So if there are boxes that could not contain books coming from a company that had a very high former official in the CIA in it, and these boxes are found in a building managed by people who supported policies that were conducive to the CIA, and this is the building where the shooting occurred, then something is wrong with the Depository. This is a very easy conclusion to make. It's very possible that the smuggling of guns and drugs were part of the Lansky-Wallace Investment milieu, but those connections have not been defined. Now in an article that you Bill wrote called the Spiders Web there is a discussion of how CIA agent William Harvey connects up to Bobbs-Merrill and how Bobbs-Merrill connects to the Depository. I have given an alternative view being that elites were involved because of what Kennedy did against the Federal Reserve, the Rothschilds, and probably other banking interests. That is why Permindex was involved. You have a man named Osborne who was really not a CIA agent, but he wound up in England at the time of the assassination, and it’s very possible there was an anonymous phone call pre-assassination talking about Kennedy being killed in the town where he was located. You have Wallace Investments that was connected to Lansky which I connect to an elite-Lansky conspiracy. You have the Secret Service which has connections to Skull and Bones, and Skull and Bones was connected to the British elite. We think of the OSS as being American but it was really partly British with its heads. Then you have the John Birch Society, which had a separate plot that implicated Oswald, but when you look at the founders of the JBS, they are from elites. Many of the events leading up to the Kennedy assassination can be attributed to the CIA apart from the elites, such as what happened in Mexico City. Yet the elites were definitely involved, as can be seen through Oswald’s friend, Alexander Bouhe, who was an employee of Lewis McNaughton. McNaughton was part of Empire Trust, a firm which we mentioned earlier was connected to the British and the Rothschilds. McNaughton controlled the Republican National Bank Building. Dresser Industries was there in the building, which was directed by Neil Mallon, a Skull and Bones man. McNaughton had de Mohrenschildt in that building. His partner was deGolyer. Degolyer was dead by 1963, but before then deGolyer worked and set up the largest independent firm of oil analysts of all time. DeGolyer worked under Lord Cordray, or Lord Pearson, who was at Amarata before it was Amarata Hess. Now I recently learned that the British government owned a large chunk of Amarata. Lord Pearson was one of the richest British men that ever lived. He owned Mexican oil, and sold it out in 1938, just at the right time, amazingly, before it was nationalized by the Mexican government. He owned railroads in Brazil and the like. That would indicate that deGolyer had many British connections. The odd thing is that McNaughton tried to get my uncle to work for him. Now let us go into my uncle; I can talk about him now, for he is deceased. He worked in gemology, but he also worked in oil. He told his family, myself among them, that he worked for the CIA in a number of adventures. Some of these were down in Venezuela. I suppose he didn’t really tell Venezuela how much oil they actually had there. The media is playing that game today. It is hiding the fact that really the reserves of Venezuela are equivalent or surpassing that of Saudi Arabia, even though it is a thicker crude. So in 1966 my uncle got soil samples from the Gulf of Tonkin, showing that off the coast of Vietnam there was an oil reserve. Look up the 1969 report of the Naval Oceanographic Office which can be found on the Internet. It says that in 1966 the U.S. Navy gave Robert Gaal soil samples from the Gulf of Tonkin that came from the ocean floor. So Mr. McNaughton tried to recruit him. I wonder now, because my uncle was already working for the CIA, that McNaughton was trying to make him work for MI6. We can end this interview with just one other odd story. I landed in Hungary the day that Russia invaded Czechoslovakia. My uncle was also there. He took care of our passports, because when you land in Hungary at that time, you had to take them to the police station and then they check them out and then you’re fine and you can stay in Hungary. You have to do it within a 24 hour period. I went to a farm with my grandmother. He went Russia “to trade rocks and gems with Russian gemologists”. I am sure he was there also to check on the Russian oil industry, something of course the CIA wanted. Oil and the CIA are practically the same word, practically synonymous in some sense. So he was doing something in Russia, but when he came back oddly, he didn’t go to the police station. I don’t know how he forgot. We all knew when we first arrived that it was very important. So when we were leaving Hungary with my grandmother (who reverted to speaking only in Hungarian at that time, which I have no understanding of), a man who apparently was KGB with two Russian soldiers (because they could be at the airport and in the countryside according to the agreement Russia had with Hungary). They took my uncle away, and I was left with my now Hungarian-only speaking grandmother. We boarded an Aeroflot plane. They held it up for 20 minutes and they returned. He just told us it was an error. But I always wondered if it was more than that. The passport was there to help someone else. That could be possible. So McNaughton and Alexander Bouhe were very close, and Bouhe was transporting the Oswald family. At one time he even did some babysitting for the Oswald family. Bouhe was the personal, not the corporate accountant, of Mr. McNaughton at the time he befriended the Oswalds. After the assassination Marina Oswald stayed with Declan Ford who had also worked for McNaughton. Prior to living with the Fords, Marina Oswald and her daughters stayed with the Michael and Ruth Paine. The Paines not only had connections to the CIA, but Michael was a descendant of the Cabot family on both his mother and father’s side of the family. The Cabots have branches on both sides of the Atlantic. One branch of the family was British. Now let’s look at Ruth. She was close to the Forbes family, and during the summer of 1963 she traveled to their compound. Now the significant thing about both the Cabot and the Forbes family is that they worked with the Russell family in the British opium trade. So the poor Oswald family barely surviving on minimum wages had an abundance of ties to extremely rich and powerful families with elitist Anglophile backgrounds. End of interview
  8. Tony Atzenhoffer was in the Civil Air Patrol in 1955 at the Moisant Airport. He knew David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald. He told me that DH Byrd was in charge of the Lousiana and Texas regions of the Civil Air Patrol. He came to Moissant Airport on special occasions such as orientation meetings for new recruits. Thus Byrd knew Ferrie and was part of that New Orleans Civil Air Patrol milieu.
  9. The number WH3-8120 in the 1963 Coles was listed to Laura and Phillip Thomas on 704 Vermont. I believe that the Thomases had relinguished this number and then the number went to the Davis sisters in late 1963. They had moved to Dallas during the autumn of 1963. They left Dallas with their husbands to go to Athens in December 1963.
  10. Jack Ruby saw Leona Lane (nee Miller) when he went to the synagogue on the night of November 22. He told the Warren Commission: "I went out to the synagogue and I went through the line and I spoke to Rabbi Silverman, and I thanked him for going to visit my sister at the hospital. She was in a week prior and had just gotten out. I don't remember the date. Then he had a confirmation--this is the night prior to the confirmation. They serve little delicacies. So in spite of the fact of the mood I was in, I strolled into the place, and I think I had a little glass of punch. Nothing intoxicating, just a little punch they serve there. I didn't speak to anyone. One girl, Leona, said "Hello, Jack," and I wasn't in a conversational mood whatsoever. I left the club--I left the synagogue and I drove by the Bali-Hai Restaurant." Who was Leona? In a March 1985 article titled "Jack Ruby and J.D. Tippit: Coincidence or Conspiracy," Jerry Rose mentioned a link between a Leona, and Barbara and Virginia Davis, witnesses to the Tippit shooting. In the Dallas police records, Barbara and Virginia Davis had the telephone number WH 3-8120. This same number appears in Ruby's notebook as "Leona Miller, WH 3-8120." Leona was a native of Chicago. In 1956 she and her mother, Esther Miller, moved to Dallas, where they became friends of Phyllis and Sam Ruby. In 1959 they met Jack, Sam's brother, at a Passover dinner held in Sam's home. (Commission Exhibits 2282 and 2283). Leona later became a professional photographer in Dallas at Van Gogh Studios. On November 22, Leona, Esther, and Leona's two teenage sons went to the Shearith Israel Synagogue to attend a memorial service held in honor of the late President. After the service was over at 11:00 pm, coffee and refreshments were served in the reception room. It was there that Leona saw Jack Ruby standing alone. Leona had seen Jack about ten or twelve times in the past, but this was the only time she saw him at the synagogue. He looked nervous, upset and depressed. Leona went up to Ruby and greeted him. She introduced him to her mother and sons, reminding him that he had met them once before at Sam's house. After the introductions, Mrs. Lane said how terrible the assassination of President Kennedy had been, and Ruby said, "It is worse than that." Leona and Jack talked about mutual friends for about five minutes, and then they parted. The encounter seemed innocent, yet the telephone link is certainly real. Were the "mutual friends" Barbara and Virginia Davis? In order to make sense of these clues, judicious speculation is in order. Since Leona was a photographer, she may have done some jobs for the Carousel Club. Perhaps the Davis sisters were seeking employment at the Carousel Club. Jack Ruby may have introduced them to Leona Miller to pose for pictures. When the Tippit murder was being planned, Ruby recruited the Davis sisters as planted witnesses who would give an officially approved version of how Tippit was killed. Leona Miller was the go-between in setting them up at the apartment near the corner of Tenth and Patton. An explanation of the Tippit shooting as a well-planned ambush makes sense of the facts we have at hand. It certainly was not a random encounter between a police officer and a desperate fugitive, as Warren Commission proponents claim.
  11. The official time of 1:15 for the shooting of J.D. Tippit is an estimation based on a reconstruction of Oswald’s movements after the assassination. The timeline is exceptionally tight. If the shooting occurred earlier, then another culprit was involved. Presented below is evidence that the true time was 1:00 - a full fifteen minutes earlier than the official time. According to the Warren Commission, Oswald left Dealey Plaza at 12:33 and boarded a bus at 12:40. Four minutes later he got off the bus and went to the Greyhound bus station where he got a taxi cab and went to Oak Cliff. At 12:54 he got out of the cab and walked to his rooming house. At 1:00, he surprised his housekeeper, Earlene Roberts, who did not expect to see him at midday. He went into his room, got his jacket, and rushed out of the house. Through a window Roberts observed Oswald standing at a corner, apparently waiting for a bus. Just as Oswald was getting out of the cab at 12:54, J. D. Tippit radioed his location at the intersection of Lancaster and Eighth. At this time the police dispatcher had broadcasted a description of the suspect of the assassination - slender white male, about 30 years old, 5 feet 10 inches and weighing about 165 pounds, a description that fit Oswald. About twenty minutes later, at the intersection of 10th and Patton, Tippit stopped a pedestrian who supposedly fit the suspect’s description. As Tippit got out of the car, the man pulled out a handgun and shot Tippit at least four times, killing him instantly. Shortly afterwards, at 1:16 a citizen called police headquarters on Tippit’s radio, notifying them of the shooting. If Oswald was the gunman, he had 12 minutes to walk nine-tenths of a mile to reach 10th and Patton, which is barely possible. Evidence that he had less than 12 minutes is provided by Sheriff’s Deputy Roger Craig in a 1971 autobiographical manuscript. While searching the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, Craig was among officers present when someone discovered a rifle. As they examined the rifle, news of the shooting in Oak Cliff arrived. “… At that exact moment an unknown Dallas police officer came running up the stairs and advised Capt. Fritz that a Dallas policeman had been shot in the Oak Cliff area. I instinctively looked at my watch. The time was 1:06 p.m. A token force of uniformed officers was left to keep the sixth floor secure and Fritz, Day, Boone, Mooney, Weitzman and I left the building. …” Given Craig’s professional experience, his 1:06 time is reliable. Nevertheless, two problems arising from his account need resolution. Craig said that the discovery of the rifle had preceded the announcement that a policeman was shot. However, according to the official timeline, the discovery of the rifle occurred at 1:22, six minutes after the reception of the news of the shooting. If true, than it disproves Craig’s account. The solution to the first problem is simple. There were two rifles (at least) in the Texas School Book Depository. The rifle that Craig saw was a German Mauser. Shortly after hearing that a police officer was shot, Craig left the building (along with some other officers) and returned to the sheriff’s office. At 1:22 uniformed officers who remained behind found the Mannlicher-Carcano. The second problem concerns an apparent discrepancy in Craig’s statements. In March 1968, Penn Jones and the Los Angeles Free Press interviewed Craig. In response to a question regarding the time of Tippit’s death, he said “about 1:40.” An excerpt from the interview follows: Craig: Tippit went to Oak Cliff, and subsequently was killed. Why he went to Oak Cliff I can't tell you; I can only make an observation. He was going to meet somebody. Free Press: Do you know what time he was killed? Roger Craig: It was about 1:40 — Penn Jones: No, I think it was a little before 1:15. Roger Craig: Was it? Penn Jones: Yes, Bill Alexander — Roger Craig: Oh, that's right. The broadcast was put out shortly after 1:15 on Tippit's killer, and it had not been put out yet on Oswald as the assassin of President Kennedy. Penn Jones knew that Tippit died instantly. It was therefore correct to say that Tippit was killed “a little before 1:15.” Craig, on the other hand, understood the question as referring to what he heard and saw as he watched events unfold that day. The shooting occurred a little before 1:15, but the news of Tippit’s death does not appear in the police radio transcript until 1:32. The dispatcher was relaying an NBC News Radio report that Tippit was dead on arrival at the Methodist Hospital. This was not an official announcement. More time elapsed before someone from the hospital staff confirmed that Tippit was dead via a telephone call to the police department. The dispatcher did not pass along this announcement because at that time there was heavy radio traffic concerning the pursuit of a fugitive into the Texas Theater. Probably the news arrived at the sheriff’s office via telephone at 1:40. Since Craig’s 1:06 time is accurate, the shooting occurred some minutes before. Evidence that the true time of the shooting was 1:00 is provided by Shirley Martin, a researcher who went to Dallas in February 1964 and contacted a number of witnesses. The following is an excerpt from a letter written to Joachim Joesten concerning an interview of Hugh Aynesworth, Dallas Morning News reporter. “… It has intrigued me that Aynesworth was so convinced in his conversation with me that Tippit had been killed around 1 p.m. Aynesworth is extraordinarily proud of the fact that he is the only reporter in the United States to have been at all four major scenes (the assassination, the Tippit killing immediately after, the arrest of Oswald in the Texas Theater, and the murder of Oswald in the police basement). When I praised Mr. Aynesworth for this and suggested that perhaps he should have been considered for the Pulitzer Prize (rather than Mr. [Merriman] Smith whom Mr. Aynesworth claims does not deserve the prize as another Dallas reporter did all his, Smith’s, writing for him), Mr. Aynesworth modestly admitted to an oversight on the part of the committee, but continued to speak at great length over his four unique experiences. When I asked Mr. Aynesworth how and when he first heard about Tippit, he replied: “I was standing near the Texas Book Building, all the other reporters had gone to Parkland (Hospital), but I felt a story was breaking near the building, when I heard a squad radio blast out that a policeman had been shot in Oak Cliff. This was around one o’clock. I ran to the car and went with it to Patton and Tenth. I had a hunch that the policeman’s murder was tied in with the assassination. I got to the Tenth Street area about 1:05, no later than 1:10 p.m. …” [1] Years later, Aynesworth gave author Larry Sneed additional details. [2] He was at the police command post at the corner of Houston and Elm with Inspector Herbert Sawyer, Sgt. Calvin Owens, Sgt. Gerald Hill, Assistant District Attorney Bill Alexander, and news reporter Jim Ewell. As Gerald Hill urged Sawyer to get the crime lab over to the Texas School Book Depository, the police radio traffic was interrupted: “This is a citizen. A policeman’s been shot! He’s hurt pretty bad, I think!” The citizen then gave the location. If Tippit was shot at precisely 1:00 p.m. and Aynesworth heard the unknown citizen’s call twoto three minutes later, then Craig’s time of 1:06 represents the time that it took for a messenger from the command post on the street to reach the search party on the sixth floor. The unknown citizen’s call at 1:02 or 1:03 does not appear in the transcript of police radio messages. On the audio recording at precisely 1:02 there is 30 seconds of noise, indicating an erasure. About a minute later, at 1:03, the dispatcher attempted to reach Tippit and got no response. After receiving the call, Hill, Alexander, and Owens promptly left for Oak Cliff. Aynesworth went with WFAA-TV newsmen Ron Reiland and Vic Robertson in the Channel 8 cruiser. Reiland drove the cruiser recklessly, making a lot of fast moves to pass other cars and barreling through intersections as fast as he could go, using an illegal flashing light accessory to warn other drivers. These details show how the three newsmen managed to reach the scene of the crime between 1:05 and 1:10. Aynesworth statement to Martin agrees with that of T.F. Bowley who arrived at the scene at about the same time. He noted the time as 1:10 on his watch. Callaway and Guinyard in their affidavits said that Tippit was killed at 1:00. Virginia Davis said Tippit was killed at 1:30, which is impossible unless she was thinking of the NBC News Radio announcement. Helen Markham said the shooting occurred at 1:06, six minutes beyond the time proposed here. It is possible she may have guessed at the time based on her usual routine of leaving her apartment at 1:04. If due to the stress of the day, she left the apartment earlier than usual without looking at the clock, she may have gotten to the intersection by 1:00. Bill Drenas in his article on the Tippit shooting introduces two incidents indicating that the time was not 1:00, but more towards 1:15. Louis Cortinas, an eighteen-year-old clerk who worked at the Top Ten Record Shop, said that Tippit entered the shop and tried to make a call, got no answer, and left in a hurry. Drenas suggests the reason why the dispatcher got no response to his 1:03 call to Tippit was because Tippit was inside the record shop. Cortinas said, “Maybe 10, no more than 10 minutes Tippit had left, when I heard he had been shot on the radio.” The first report of a policeman being shot in Oak Cliff was on radio station KLIF at 1:33 P.M. If Cortinas was correct, than the time of the shooting was 1:23. Obviously, he was inaccurate in his time estimate. This does not mean that his story was untrue. Tippit indeed entered the shop and tried to make a call but it was sometime between 12:30 and 12:54. Another incident concerns James A. Andrews, an employee of American National Life Insurance, who worked briefly with Roscoe White. According to Andrews, he was driving west on Tenth Street about eight or nine blocks west of Patton “a little after 1:00.” Tippit was also traveling west on Tenth. He caught up to Andrews, passed him, and stopped Andrews by cutting in front and parking his squad car at an angle to the curb. Tippit jumped out of his car, ran back to Andrews’ car, and looked in the space between the front seat and the back seat. Without saying a word he went back to the patrol car and drove off quickly. Andrews knew it was Tippit because he saw his nameplate. Andrews never explained why Tippit stopped him. Andrews may have seen Tippit just before he was shot, but his “a little after 1:00” statement does not have the weight to overturn the statements of such time-conscious professionals as Aynesworth and Craig. More likely, Andrews saw Tippit “a little before 1:00.” A 1:00 shooting time solves the apparent contradictions among witnesses at the scene regarding who made the first call to police headquarters. Domingo Benavides, a used car lot mechanic, said that the call was made by his employer, Ted Callaway. “. . .when Ted Callaway got around there, he opened the car door and picked up the phone and called in and told them there was an officer that had been killed. But the officer on the other side of the radio told him to hang up the phone to keep the lines clear, or something of that sort. …” According to Callaway: “… I saw a squad car, and by that time there was four or five people that had gathered, a couple of cars had stopped. Then I saw he had been shot in the head. So the first thing I did, I ran over to the squad car. I didn’t know whether anybody reported it or not. So I got on the police radio and called them, and told them a man had been shot, told them the location, I thought the officer was dead. They said we know about it [from a telephone call?], and to stay off the air, so I went back. …” Since about five or six minutes had passed since Callaway made the first call, and no police had arrived (although the three newsmen had arrived), Benavides decided to try the radio. “… I mashed the button and told them that an officer had been shot, and I didn’t get an answer, so I said it again, and this guy asked me whereabouts all of a sudden, and I said, on Tenth Street. I couldn’t remember where it was at the time. So I looked up and I seen this number and I said 410 East Tenth Street . . . I put the radio back. I mean, the microphone back up, and this other guy was standing there, so I got up out of the car, and I don’t know, I wasn’t sure if he heard me, and the other guy sat down in the car . . . I don’t know what he said to the officer or the phone, but the officer told him to keep the line clear. …” The “other guy” was T. F. Bowley. Benavides was the one who reached the dispatcher at 1:16. Since Benavides seemed to be mishandling the microphone, Bowley was the next to try. He reached the dispatcher at 1:18. The ambulance came about a minute later. Bowley and Callaway helped the attendants put the body in the ambulance. Immediately afterwards Callaway took Tippit’s gun and embarked on a hunt for the suspect with cab driver William Scoggins. Just as the two vigilantes were leaving in Scoggins’ cab, and before even the ambulance had a chance to get underway, the police arrived. Officer Kenneth Croy came first in his own vehicle. He was followed by H. W. Summers and Roy Walker. 1. Joachim Joesten, The Garrison Inquiry (Hills and Lacy, Limited: London, 1967), pp. 102-103. The letter was written on October 29, 1964. 2. Larry Sneed, No More Silence, An Oral History of the Assassination of President Kennedy (Three Forks Press: Dallas, TX, 1998), pp. 292-293.
  12. Hello Tim, Wilcott did not mention TSBD by name. He said Dallas firms. I should have made it clear that TSBD was my own inference. It will be corrected in the version printed by Dealey Plaza Echo. Good catch, thanks. Bill
  13. Hello Greg, Thanks for your thoughtful comments. You raise a very interesting question about the mode of entry for the boxes into the building. I am not sure what you mean by “trolley.” The TSBD did have a pulley operated dumbwaiter, but that was for the clerical staff on the second floor to send paperwork down to the shipping department on the first floor. It was not used to move cartons of books. According to the testimony of Bonnie Ray Williams they had two-wheel hand “trucks”, a picture of which can be seen in Studebaker Exhibit H (see AARC Public Digital Library website). Joe Bergin, Jr. saw boxes four feet square by five feet high on the fourth floor. He told me that he wondered how the workmen got them up there. He subsequently saw a dolly on the floor and assumed they used that. He never saw the workmen moving boxes, since his visits were after work hours. When I pointed out to him that boxes measuring four feet square by five feet high would have weighed a ton, and thus could not be moved by dolly, he acknowledged that this was a problem but he had no answer for me. I discussed the matter of how the Sexton company moved boxes into the building with Mr. Butler, the Dallas regional manager for the company. He said that Sexton cans of food were packed in boxes generally weighing about 30 to 40 pounds, a size that one man can easily lift. Supplies came in by railroad about once every two weeks. A single freight car containing about 1000 cases would be dropped off on a nearby track. Sexton workmen did not have palettes and forklifts; every case had to be unloaded by hand one by one. They were put on four-wheel pushcarts, called “jakes.” A jake had a 4 x 8 flat bed that stood about three feet off the ground. Attached to one end was a vertical metal railing support with a U-shaped handle. When fully loaded with about 40 cases, it took one man to push and one man to pull. They moved the loaded jake into one of the two freight elevators and take the supplies to the appropriate floor. It was a laborious and time-consuming process and it normally took a whole day to complete the job. With the introduction of palettes and forklifts in the early 1950's, multi-story grocery warehouses like the 411 Elm Street building became obsolete. In 1959 Sexton executives made the decision to construct a huge single-story structure in the northwest section of Dallas. Construction for the new building was completed in the fall of 1961, and that was when the Sexton company moved to its new site. As far as I know, the Book Depository warehouse men did not have jakes or trolleys; but even if they did they would not have been able to lift the boxes seen by Bergin and Henry Hurt onto a cart without a forklift. A typical schoolbook box weighed about fifty-five pounds. Judging from photographs of the fifth and sixth floors taken after the assassination, there must have been thousands of these boxes. If my thesis is correct that the TSBD moved in during the summer of 1963, then the warehousemen moved these boxes at a time when the seasonal demand for schoolbooks was falling off. Since the Houston Street warehouse was not being vacated, the reason for this enormous increase in stock remains unknown. This leaves open the possibility that these boxes were mere stage props for the big event on November 22, 1963.
  14. Tim Gratz's ill-tempered rants are a confirmation of the accuracy of my thesis. Below is a reaction from Gary Mack> Bill, I skimmed through your article and was quite disappointed. Too many problems to go into now, but a few are: TSBD moved into 411 Elm early in 1962, not 1963. NO films or photos were confiscated (unless you believe Gordon Arnold or Beverly Oliver) and all original pictures, with the exception of the Nix film, survive to this day. What are the journalism credentials of Elzie Glaze? Here's a link to the Museum's history of 411 Elm: http://tinyurl.com/7f9jl Gary Mack gmack@jfk.org Here is my reply, Hello Gary, I'm sorry you did not like the article. What do you think about the part where Roy Truly said the TSBD moved in during the summer of 1963? See reference note 36. Do you have any sources to the contrary? For the reference regarding the suppression of footage of the limousine completing the turn see reference note 25. For more on Glaze's credentials see The Glaze Letters which I posted on the Education Forum on January 3, 2006. Thanks for your input. Bill
  15. The source for my statement that the TSBD moved into the building during the summer of 1963 is the Nov. 23, 1963 FBI report of Roy Truly who said that the company moved into the building several months prior. See reference note 36. Also see reference note 37 regarding Ted Leon and Thomas Butler. You can get my primary sources regarding Shelley near the elevator by reading The Man in the Dark Suit Coat article, which is available online at the JFKDP web site. The primary sources for the McGown story are FBI reports of interviews with McGown and a handwritten statment made by McGown. I found them in the FBI files available on microfilm since 1977. To get the whole story, contact the Dealey Plaza Echo. I am sure they will be glad to sell you a back issue. Thanks for your questions.
  16. The following is a preliminary copy of an article that will be published in the Dealey Plaza Echo. I invite the readers of this forum to read it and ask questions or make suggestions for improvement before it goes to press. Of all the articles I have ever written on the JFK assassination I consider this one to be the most important. Please consider getting a subscription to the Dealey Plaza Echo (by becoming a member), where you will see not only the updated article with accompanying pictures but also see many other fine articles. Membership enquiries (UK): Francesca Akhtar, 30 Beechwood Avenue, Thornton Heath, Surrey, CR7 7DZ email: francescaakhtar@dealeyplazauk.co.uk Membership enquiries (US): MARK H. ROWE, 11703 Alclad Avenue, Whittier, CA 90605, USA. email: markrowe@dealeyplazauk.co.uk I want to thank Steve Gaal for helping me write this article. The Spider’s Web: The Texas School Book Depository and the Dallas Conspiracy By William Weston There is a very large spider guarding this web of secrecy. I have entered other webs, but this one is different because the spider leaves the web and stalks its prey – sometimes for many years. Elzie Glaze [1] Abstract: Journalist Elzie Glaze compared the Texas School Book Depository to a spider that can leave its web and stalk its prey. This article posits the view that behind Glaze’s metaphor was a weapons and narcotics smuggling operation moving under the guise of schoolbooks. Controlled by ultraconservatives, the depository harbored spies, who infiltrated left-wing organizations. It also had law enforcement agents, who monitored and controlled the drug traffic within the city of Dallas. These operatives acted at the instigation of the national security establishment. When President Kennedy threatened to break up that establishment, a plot developed to assassinate him. The schoolbook workers became involved in the plot, when they relocated into the seven-story building that overlooked a 120-degree turn at Elm and Houston Streets. The turn made the President an easy target, because it slowed his limousine down to a crawl. After the assassination, the victors of the coup imposed extra security measures at the schoolbook depository in order to protect ongoing smuggling activities. Introduction The pilot of a Dallas-bound commercial airliner made an announcement over the intercom: President Kennedy and Governor Connally were hit by gunfire while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. Among the passengers hearing the news was Joe Bergin, regional manager for the Scott Foresman Company in Dallas. His office was in the same building, where Lee Harvey Oswald purportedly fired a rifle from a sixth floor window. On the sixth floor that day William Shelley and his crew of five men were adding new plywood to the old floor. How they failed to notice the lifting and moving of two dozen boxes, each weighing 55 pounds, to make the sniper’s nest at the southeast corner window has never been explained. Also unexplained is an incident after the assassination: Shelley spoke with Oswald just prior to the latter’s escape in a Nash Rambler. A veil of secrecy conceals the company that employed these men. The Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) moved into the seven-story, 411 Elm Street building during the summer of 1963, but exactly when is unknown. Ruth Paine, while driving on the freeway, saw the company name on a four-story warehouse and thought that Lee worked there, not realizing that a larger building, also within her view, was the place where he really worked. [2] Evidently a new sign was added later, but exactly when is unknown. The difficulty of obtaining specific details is of course due to the building’s role as a shooting platform, but there is something else to consider. From clues derived from a variety of sources, company executives used schoolbooks to disguise shipments of firearms and narcotics. Although the picture is still unclear, the story of Joe Bergin adds an important piece to the puzzle. It is a story he never would have told himself, but thanks to his son, it is told here for the first time. Background Born in Alvin, Texas on August 12, 1899, Joe Lyons Bergin was the son of a Methodist minister, John W. Bergin, who in his early years traveled the preaching circuit with his wife and children. After four years as a pastor in Corsicana, John went to Georgetown, where he served as president of Southwestern University from 1935 to 1942. His son Joe went to the same university in the fall of 1918, where he excelled as a football player. After graduation, he taught history and athletics at the Lake Forest High School in Dallas. In 1930 he went to Greenville (50 miles northeast of Dallas), where he became the principal of a high school. Two years later, he won a four-year term as superintendent of the school district. People admired him for his intelligence and courteous manners. He was also a delightful conversationalist. As superintendent, he worked hard to raise the academic standards back up so that its secondary schools could regain their accreditation. For this achievement he won the gratitude of the citizens of Greenville. [3] Joe’s wife Jewell was a strong, confident woman, musically talented with a splendid voice, who loved to sing and play the piano. In the backyard, she kept a beautiful garden with lots of iris, her favorite flower. In 1934, as president of the Eclecta Literary Club, she invited women from twenty-six other clubs to her home in order to found the City Federation of Women’s Clubs, an organization dedicated to advancing music, art, drama, dance, literature, and other cultural endeavors in the city of Greenville. In 1937 she served a one-year term as president of the federation. On top of this busy social life, Jewell had a baby – Joe, Jr., their only child – born on February 10, 1935. Meanwhile, her husband was getting involved in law enforcement. During the Great Depression, many outlaws such as Machine Gun Kelly, Raymond Hamilton, and Bonnie and Clyde were finding Texas a congenial haven. To restore order, Governor Miriam Ferguson augmented the Texas Rangers, which at that time numbered 32 men with 2300 Special Rangers (volunteers who assisted the professionals without pay). Bergin enlisted as a private in the Special Rangers on January 3, 1934. On his oath of enlistment, he described himself as 5 feet 11 inches, fair to ruddy complexion, dark brown hair, blue eyes, 175 pounds, 34 years of age. He re-enlisted on August 9, 1935 and at this point the service records for the Special Rangers in the public domain ends. However, Bergin may have continued as a Ranger, since according to his obituary he was a “veteran of World War II,” and the Texas Rangers functioned as a military unit as well as a state police force. The Drugs and Guns Connection During the latter part of the 1930’s the Rangers shifted their focus from bank robbers to drug smugglers. Drug importation reached record levels, largely because the federal government secretly allowed Nationalist Chinese to import opium. The Chinese needed cash to pay troops and buy weapons in its fight against the Communist Chinese. A two-way traffic developed with guns leaving the United States to supply China, and drugs coming in to pay for them. To protect the Nationalist Chinese from political repercussions, the drug trafficking was blamed on the Red Chinese. According to Joseph Douglass, author of Red Cocaine, Mao Tse-Tung ordered the cultivation of opium on a grand scale. He had two objectives: obtaining exchange for needed supplies and "drugging the white region." [4] However Douglas Valentine, author of Strength of the Wolf, interviewed former Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) agents and gathered a lot of documentary evidence to present a stronger case that the primary culprit was Nationalist China. Information about U.S.-Chinese connivance in the drug trade came out during the Opium Scandal of April 1927. The unhappy wife of Leonard Huser divorced him and revealed a lot of his secrets. She said that in 1924 Huser negotiated a deal whereby he delivered 6600 Mausers from Italy to Chiang Kai-Shek in exchange for $500,000 worth of opium. This was done at the knowledge of the State and War Departments. The affair ended when a judge sentenced Huser to two years in a federal prison. After the communists took over the mainland in 1949 and Chiang Kai-Shek moved his government to Taiwan, Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave his blessing to a diplomatic mission to Taiwan consisting of businessmen and military officers, led by William Pawley, to facilitate the importation of drugs from Burma. Providing most of the funds for this mission was Texas oil man, H. L. Hunt. One of the points of entry for Chinese heroin was across the Mexican border into Laredo, Texas. In a July 1959 report “The Narcotics Situation in South Asia and the Far East,” Garland Williams, a top official in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), accused the Central Intelligence Agency of encouraging the Chinese to produce drugs. According to Valentine, the CIA and its Nationalist Chinese allies operated the largest drug-trafficking syndicate in the world. [5] Towards the end of World War II, Mexico became another source of drugs. In 1945, Eva Ruby and Paul Roland Jones were partners in picking up opium delivered to Dallas from the Durango area of Mexico and sending it to Hyman Ruby in Chicago via shipments of iron pipe. As a volunteer in the Texas Rangers, Bergin would have seen and heard much of the guns and drugs trade. The Schoolbook Companies In 1938, in the middle of his second term, Bergin submitted his resignation to “go into business,” according to a newspaper article. [6] He left the security, prestige, and lucrative salary of a school superintendent in order to go to Dallas and sell schoolbooks for Scott Foresman. If he was seeking a better way to make money, then his career change made little sense. On the other hand, if he wanted to broaden his opportunities in law enforcement, then Dallas was a major step forward. Not only was he moving into a center of organized crime, but he also was getting a job that placed him in a unique position to monitor and control illegal items moving under the guise of schoolbooks. Scott Foresman, the predominant publisher of elementary-level schoolbooks and best known for its Dick and Jane readers, had its headquarters in Chicago. Bergin was the manager of its Dallas office, located on the third floor of the Santa Fe building on Main Street. The staff, virtually all female, ranged from eight to ten employees to as many as twelve to fifteen during the summer when the demand for schoolbooks was high. Bergin’s assistant, Dora Newman, a small, frail-looking woman, yet full of energy, was adept at maintaining harmony and discipline in the office and even had a touch of class. Sharing the third floor were the offices of other schoolbook companies, such as Bobbs-Merrill, Lyons & Carnahan, McGraw-Hill, and Southwestern. In spite of the competition, all the managers had friendly contacts with one another and took turns giving parties. Joe hosted parties with no alcoholic beverages, for he disapproved of drinking. The main occupant of the third floor was the Hugh Perry Book Depository, a privately owned company, incorporated in 1927 and the predecessor of the TSBD. Hugh Perry acted as an independent agency for a group of publishers to warehouse and distribute textbooks to schools in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico. Not far from the TSBD on 707 Browder Street was the Lone Star Schoolbook Depository, a rival company, which also warehoused and distributed schoolbooks. As part of his job, Joe Bergin worked as a lobbyist at the state capitol, where he met with legislators and competed with other publishing companies in the politics of book adoption. In the state of Texas, the legislature had the authority to decide what books schools should have. A different practice was used in Oklahoma and New Mexico, which allowed principals and superintendents to decide what books to get. Bergin went to these states with a carload of books and basically functioned as a salesman. As his responsibilities grew, he hired others to do the business trips while he remained at the office to do the paperwork. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Eighth Service Command took over the Santa Fe building, compelling its occupants to go elsewhere. The schoolbook companies found a crumbling building at 2210 N. Pacific Avenue that used to be a parking garage. In spite of the dreariness of the place, Dora Newman somehow made the Scott Foresman office livable and attractive. On October 29, 1945, Hugh Perry hired a mysterious clerk named William Shelley. [7] According to news journalist Elzie Glaze, who met him in 1974, Shelley said he was an intelligence agent during the war and afterwards joined the CIA. [8] Since his previous job was a brief stint working in defense plants, it is possible that he served as an informant for some counterespionage unit. This undercover work carried over into Hugh Perry, where schoolbooks concealed clandestine shipments of guns and drugs. The second part of Shelley’s statement shows that, after the CIA came into existence in 1947, it took over this operation – and the agents assigned to it. The Activities of Jack Ruby Money generated by the sale of drugs required laundering, and gambling was one way to do that. In November 1946, Paul Roland Jones approached Sheriff Steve Guthrie and promised him a starting salary of $150,000 a year if he allowed his friends from Chicago to bring slot machines and floating crap games into Dallas. Jones said that Jack Ruby was in charge of this operation and that he was due to arrive in the spring of 1947. Guthrie said he would think it over and agreed to another meeting. However, Guthrie was an honest man and turned to the Texas Rangers for help. Led by W. E. “Dub” Naylor, the Rangers made a secret tape recording of the second meeting between Jones and Guthrie. It took a month to gather enough evidence to arrest or drive out these gangsters. Among those arrested was Jack’s sister, Eva Ruby, the owner of a restaurant in Dallas and (as previously mentioned) a partner with Jones in sending opium to Chicago. Victory over these mobsters was short-lived, for Jack Ruby arrived the following year and started various gambling enterprises around the city. As a Special Ranger, Bergin may have participated in Naylor’s surveillance operation. During this same period Jack Ruby was involved in counterintelligence. Officially, he was an aircraft mechanic in the Army Air Corps from May 1943 until February 1946 at various bases in the South. His brother Sam was also in the Air Corps as an informer, keeping an eye on communists and nazis and writing letters to his brother Jack about his observations. Although Sam wrote the letters as if they were to his brother, he actually addressed the envelopes to a counterintelligence officer. [9] On three separate occasions in about summer 1943, early 1944, and early 1947, Ruby went to a union hall in Muncie, Indiana to participate in meetings with communists. The union hall was on the third story of a three-story building, where gambling often happened during evenings and weekends. Ruby met with Russian Jews, some of whom were communists. [10] Additionally, Ruby was an informer for the FBN. After the shooting of Oswald, Mort Benjamin, an FBN agent in New York, found a file showing that Ruby had been an informer since the 1940s. When Benjamin returned to read the file again, it was missing. Apparently, someone had taken every document related to the FBN’s relationship with Ruby. [11] Ruby’s work as an informer is comparable to that of an employee at the TSBD. Joe Molina, credit manager for the TSBD since February 1947, knew Bill Lowery, an undercover agent for the FBI. In 1955 Molina and Lowery became interested in a leftist group called the American GI Forum, an organization that had the goal of fighting injustices perpetrated against people of Mexican descent. Molina and Lowery were among six individuals who formed the Dallas chapter of the GI Forum. The following year Lowery nominated Molina as chairman. [12] In testimony given at a hearing of the Subversive Activities Control Board in 1963, Lowery admitted he was an FBI informant infiltrating the GI Forum. By implication his friend Molina was an informant too. The Dallas police became interested in Molina after the assassination and investigated him as a suspect. They publicized his connections to alleged communists, and as a result Molina lost his job at the TSBD. If Molina was an undercover agent, then he was one of four such operatives in one location. The other three were Shelley, Bergin, and Oswald. Ultraconservatives and the TSBD In 1947, Hugh Perry changed its name to the Texas School Book Depository. Five years later, the schoolbook companies moved into the first floor of the Dal-Tex Building. Clear glass partitions and a hallway separated the companies. Everyone could see what everyone else was doing. The Scott Foresman office had the most desirable spot, a sunlit corner with a view of the County Records building across Elm Street, the Sexton grocery warehouse across Houston, and a white, four-story TSBD warehouse just north of the railroad tracks. During these years, Jewell was an avid enthusiast for Dallas, doing much to beautify the city and enhance its culture. As vice president of a club devoted to cultivating flowers, she led the effort to plant an iris garden in Samuels Park on Grand Street. She was also a member of an organization that sponsored musicians and musical events. This interest in the fine arts, as well as her devotion to Catholicism, led Jewell to become an active volunteer in the 1960 presidential campaign of Senator John F. Kennedy. In supporting a Democratic candidate, Joe and Jewell were unlike the top people of the TSBD. Roy Truly, a shipping clerk, hated Kennedy for fostering domestic policies that led to interracial marriages. [13] Jack Cason, the president, was the commander of American Legion Post 53 in Dallas, a right-wing organization. His wife was an outspoken ultraconservative. According to M. Theodore Taylor, an employee of McGraw-Hill, Mrs. Cason declared in the spring of 1961 at a social engagement that the President was so bad in his liberal policies that someone ought to shoot him. [14] In spite of these political differences, Joe Bergin was a good friend of Cason and Truly and respected their efficiency and promptness in getting out the books. (The ultraconservative ideology was also prevalent at the Lone Star Schoolbook Depository, where Vice President Ross Carlton was a segregationalist, who hated both Kennedy and Johnson for their civil rights policies. [15]) In 1963, Jack Cason decided to get a lease on the 411 Elm Street building. The owner was D. Harold Byrd, an ultraconservative oil tycoon. Byrd was a colonel in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) for Texas and Louisiana. Serving under him as a CAP commander was David Ferrie, a CIA contract pilot. [16] Among Byrd’s cadets were Lee Harvey Oswald and Barry Seal. As a cadet, Seal was a gun smuggler, flying wooden crates filled with guns and ammo from the La Combe airfield in Louisiana. Ferrie paid Seal $400 a week to fly this cargo. [17] Byrd was connected to the Mafia through his employee J. R. Stanley, an associate of E. E. Wallace, who in turn had business dealings with those involved in the aforementioned Chicago syndicate’s invasion of Dallas in 1946. Byrd was a co-director of Dorchester Gas Producing with Jack Crichton, an oil man and member of the Army Intelligence Reserve. [18] Crichton and George H. W. Bush raised funds for anti-Castro Cubans and for Operation 40, a group that upon receiving orders assassinated military or political leaders in foreign countries. [19] Crichton also arranged for key Russians in the oil industry to act as interpreters for Marina Oswald at Dallas Police headquarters. Byrd bought the 411 Elm Street building from the Southern Rock Island Plow Company in 1936 in order to start an air conditioning factory. When that venture did not work out, Byrd leased it to the John Sexton Company, a wholesale grocery firm, which had it for twenty years. For the schoolbook companies to move in, extensive remodeling had to be done. Thoughts of the upcoming move were on Bergin’s mind, when his son walked into his office. He arrived in downtown Dallas on a bus and needed a ride home. As a soldier in the army stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, he spent his time off visiting his parents. Bergin told his son he was not happy about leaving the comfortable setting of the Dal-Tex building, where the routine was established and predictable. Moving to the new building was like starting over. Furthermore, each company had to bear the cost of refurbishing its own office, and as a thrifty man, Bergin worried about the price of everything from light fixtures to window shades. Bergin invited his son on a tour of the proposed site for the new office. They walked across the street, entered the old grocery warehouse through the main entrance, and approached the back of the building. They saw two antiquated freight elevators, which needed an overhaul and so could not be used. Near the elevators in the corner was the staircase, which they used instead. Ascending them was hard for the elder Bergin, who was 64 years old and out of shape. They reached the fourth floor and looked around. It was empty, dark and gloomy and had the appearance of being abandoned for years. As a future site for a Scott Foresman office, it did not look promising. Boxes Too Large for Books About a month or two later, Joe Jr. bypassed the Dal-Tex with its now empty first floor, and went into the newly refurbished building. It was around 6:00 pm, and almost everyone had gone home. He entered a newly installed passenger elevator and went up to the fourth floor. The elevator opened onto a short hallway and across the hall was the entry door for Scott Foresman. Before entering, Joe opened a door to the right and saw an open storage area that took up two-thirds of the fourth floor. He saw numerous cardboard boxes, four feet square by five feet high, filling the storage area. Since no forklifts were on hand, Joe wondered how the warehouse men moved them up there. Four feet square by five feet has a capacity of 80 cubic feet, and a cubic foot of books is about 30 pounds, so 30 x 80 = 2400 pounds. Obviously not containers of books, these oversized boxes may have concealed contraband items – probably lightweight, bulky materials, such as camouflage netting or waterproof tarps. Henry Hurt, author of Reasonable Doubt, met a conspirator named Robert Easterling, who said that the assassin’s rifle, a 7 mm Czech automatic, was smuggled into the TSBD in a wooden box, 36 x 48 x 60 inches, with a false bottom. Hurt doubted that such a large container could be moved into the building inconspicuously, since the largest typical box was cardboard and measured 12 x 14 x 18 inches (and when filled with books weighed 55 pounds). However, while visiting the vacant TSBD in 1983, Hurt went up to the sixth floor and found seven heavy, wooden boxes stamped with the names of publishing companies. They had been left there since the time the TSBD moved out of the building in 1970. One label read Texas School Book Depository, 500 Red Pony books by John Steinbeck, from Bobbs-Merrill. Three boxes appear in a photograph in his book. By comparing the window next to them, which measured 14 inches off the floor, one box was about 15 x 30 x 60 inches, and thus had an estimated capacity of 15 cubic feet. If filled with books it might have weighed 450 pounds – too heavy to move without a forklift. The discovery of these boxes plus a photograph printed as Warren Commission Exhibit 491 showing two large wooden boxes being used as storage bins satisfied Hurt that Easterling was correct about the mode of entry for the assassin’s rifle. [20] Unfortunately, Easterling was a false confessor who may have had a small part in the assassination but who fabricated many of his claims. It is beyond the scope of this article to deal with those claims, yet Hurt’s discovery of large boxes impractical for books yet ideal for smuggling is significant. CIA finance officer in Japan, James Wilcott said that “several different individuals or firms in Dallas had been involved in one way or another with acting as cut-outs for arms shipments to Cuban exiles for the invasion. This we concluded from putting various pieces of information together. I remember hearing about some CIA people who had somehow helped the right-wing Minute Men in Texas to get arms, originally intended for the invasion.” Among the firms that Wilcott was referring to was the TSBD, run by right-wing ideologues. [21] Bobbs-Merrill and the National Security Establishment Hurt’s mention of Bobbs-Merrill is intriguing, because whether he knew it or not Bobbs-Merrill employed a suspected planner and organizer of the JFK assassination. Located in Indianapolis, Indiana, Bobbs-Merrill was noted for publishing intellectual books, mostly biography, history, and literature. It also published law books and schoolbooks. In November 1958, after years of losing money, the publishing house was sold to another Indianapolis firm, Sams Publishing, which at that time was twelve years old. The owner, Howard Sams, got his start by doing repair manuals for Radio Corporation of America (RCA), headquartered in Indianapolis. Sams did not have permission from RCA, so he got the wiring diagrams by taking the backs off radios, photographing the interior, and applying reverse engineering. David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and an extremely litigious man, surprisingly did not initiate a lawsuit. The lack of legal action is an indication that a secret deal was made. RCA was part of the national security establishment. During World War II, RCA along with International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) intercepted telecommunications leaving the United States and turned them over to the military intelligence services. This operation continued after the war, and in 1952 President Truman formalized the arrangement by creating the National Security Agency. After Howard Sams bought Bobbs-Merrill, he started a new line of books with a geopolitical slant. Someone at Bobbs-Merrill contacted Jules Dubois in order to publish a book about Fidel Castro. Dubois was a colonel in army intelligence and a correspondent for the right-wing Chicago Tribune. He played an important role in the 1954 coup of Guatemala. In 1957, he was with Earl Williamson, the CIA agent implicated in the Cienfuegos conspiracy, a plot to assassinate Bautista, during the revolt of the Cuban Navy at the port of Cienfuegos. [22] Bobbs-Merrill rushed Dubois’ book to press and it came out in April 1959 as Fidel Castro: Rebel - Liberator or Dictator? It presented a laudatory view of the Cuban dictator. Dubois took a more cautious approach in September 1959 with a second book published by Bobbs-Merrill, Freedom is My Beat in which he expressed the hope that Castro’s naiveté would not lead him down the road to communism. Bobbs-Merrill published a third book by Dubois called Danger over Panama in 1964 in which the author strongly denounced his erstwhile hero. Shortly after Castro came to power on January 1, 1959, Jack Ruby contacted gun-smuggler Robert McKeown and told him that he was "in with the Mafia and had a whole lot of jeeps he wanted to get to Castro." Ruby also wanted advice on how he could gain the release of a couple of friends imprisoned in Cuba. The deal fell through when McKeown demanded an advance payment of $5,000. During the period of 1958 through 1959, Ruby was heavily involved in smuggling arms to Castro’s forces. He also met with the FBI nine times over the course of the year 1959, presumably to talk about his travels to Cuba. After Castro became a dedicated proponent of communism, the CIA wanted to get rid of him. CIA operative William Harvey, who came from Indianapolis, and his partner Johnny Roselli, a Chicago mobster, plotted to kill Castro. Noel Twyman, author of Bloody Treason, presented evidence showing that these two men were also involved in the planning of the JFK assassination. During the Cuban Missile Crisis Harvey ordered commando raids that were never authorized by the White House. For this insubordination he was removed from his post as head of Operation Mongoose and sent to a lesser post as chief of station in Rome, Italy. This was a humiliation that intensified his already seething hatred for the President and his brother Robert F. Kennedy. It is not clear how much time he actually spent in Rome but he was absent without leave from February through June 1963, when he met with Johnny Roselli in Miami, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Clearly Harvey had the motive, means, opportunity, and the state of mind to get involved in the assassination, and his meetings with Roselli were preparatory steps. [23] Jumping ahead to the late 1960’s, Harvey retired from the CIA and became the law editor for Bobbs-Merrill. [24] Since no one really retires from the CIA but goes from one cover to another, Harvey’s employment at Bobbs-Merrill shows the bond between the schoolbook company and the intelligence establishment. By extrapolation, other schoolbook companies were part of this establishment. Moving into the 411 Elm Street Building In 1963 when the national security people wanted to eliminate President Kennedy, they became interested in a vacant building in Dallas that overlooked a unique 120 degree turn from Houston onto Elm. The turn made the President an easy target, for it compelled his limousine to slow down to a crawl. (After the assassination, the FBI and other government agencies collected every home movie made in Dealey Plaza and suppressed footage of the limousine completing the turn. They wanted to minimize inquiries into why that particular route was chosen. [25]) To set the stage, the conspirators needed a suitable company to move into the building and bring in the patsy. TSBD president Jack Cason became involved in the plot when he decided to take a lease on the old grocery warehouse. He said it was a great bargain, although the building needed extensive renovation, requiring the expenditure of large sums of money. Bergin showed his son around his new office. It was about the same size as the old one, yet far superior in amenities. Heating and air conditioning conduits gave easier temperature control. Illumination was better with fluorescent lights recessed into lowered ceiling panels. Fine-grade carpeting covered the floor. Light tan wood panels covered the walls. Near his desk were custom-made cabinets filled with books. Bergin was quite pleased with the results. After viewing the new office, father and son went downstairs to see the rest of the building. Although they could have used the passenger elevator, they used the newly refurbished freight elevators in order to appreciate their antique character. Although safe and reliable, they were still rickety and screeched loudly whenever they went up or down. The third floor had the offices of other textbook publishers, such as Allyn & Bacon, American Book, Macmillan, and McGraw-Hill. Due to their smaller market share, they had smaller offices than Scott Foresman. (Bobbs-Merrill discontinued its office in Dallas in the early 1950s but it still used the TSBD to distribute its books.) On the second floor just past the lunchroom was a large open area where the TSBD clerical staff had their desks. In the northwest corner was Jack Cason’s office. Few people were allowed inside the office, and earlier in the day, Bergin got permission to show it to his son. Bergin unlocked the door and opened it. The office was modest in size, measuring 12 by 27 feet with two windows that overlooked Houston Street. Dominating the room was a huge, 17th century French desk, resembling an enormous table, magnificently covered with ormolu, or gilded bronze ornaments. It might have looked great in a museum but in a book depository it seemed strangely out of place. Cason and his wife loved French antiques and for many years collected them. The construction of new offices, the installation of a new elevator, and even Cason’s desk required large sums of money. Most of the funds came not from the limited financial resources of the schoolbook companies but rather they came from those who profited from the guns and drugs trade. The Arrival of Lee Harvey Oswald On October 15, Roy Truly hired Lee Harvey Oswald to be an order filler. “He looked like a nice young man,” said Truly, supposedly unaware that he hired an outspoken Marxist, a former defector to the Soviet Union, and a card-carrying member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.[26] “Who is that queer duck?” asked Geneva Hine, TSBD office worker, who wondered why Oswald never smiled or said “hello” or “good morning.” [27] Of course there was more behind the hiring of Oswald than a mere desire to supplement the labor force. The truth was that the conspirators needed a patsy. Yet Oswald was not just another sign-waving protestor lured from a street demonstration. From October 1962 to April 1963 he worked as a cameraman for a typesetting company called Jaggers Chiles Stovall (JCS). Although most of his work was commercial, some of it consisted of top secret projects for the Navy Bureau Materiel and the Army Mapping Service. [28] According to George Carter, a reporter for the Dallas Times-Herald, Oswald was one of the employees that worked on maps of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. While working on sensitive projects, he made no secret of his sojourn in the Soviet Union. He kept up a correspondence with the Russian Embassy in Washington and communist organizations in New York. On one occasion, he wrote a letter to the Hall-Davis Defense Committee (an organization set up to defend two Communist Party leaders), offering to donate photographic services. [29] Obviously JCS would not tolerate such a blatant security risk unless there was a hidden agenda, namely counterespionage. From May to July 1963, Oswald worked for the William Reilly Coffee Company in New Orleans. During this time, he was involved in a lot of pro-Castro activity, such as handing out literature on street corners. Next door to the coffee company was Adrian Alba’s parking garage where the Secret Service, FBI and CIA parked their cars. Oswald often went to the garage and read gun magazines. In reality he was an agent provocateur under former FBI agent Guy Bannister, and Alba saw an agent in an FBI car deliver envelopes to Oswald on two occasions. If JCS and Reilly hid Oswald’s undercover activities, then Oswald’s third place of employment, the TSBD, hid them as well. While at the TSBD, Oswald saw others who were leading double lives including Joe Molina, a friend of undercover agent Bill Lowery and possibly a spy himself; supervisor William Shelley, a CIA man; and Joe Bergin, office manager of Scott Foresman, who was involved with the Texas Rangers. Although the activities of the schoolbook operatives often overlapped those of Jack Ruby, the only verifiable link was Lee Harvey Oswald. There were many witnesses testifying to an association between Ruby and Oswald, but the most credible is Daniel T. McGown. On March 31, 1963, McGown accidentally found a letter at the Carousel Club addressed to “Jake Rubinstein” with a return address from “Lee Oswald,” at 1106 Diceman Street in Dallas. McGown later confirmed that “Lee Oswald” was indeed Lee Harvey Oswald. [30] Planning the Ambush On November 14, in the office of the Locke and Purnell law firm, Eugene Locke presided over a meeting to discuss the motorcade route for the upcoming visit of the President to Dallas. Locke was an associate of E. E. Wallace, serving as chairman of Wallace Investments. The chosen route led through Dealey Plaza underneath the windows of the TSBD, owned by D. Harold Byrd, whose employee J. R. Stanley was an associate of Wallace. The last stop on the route was the Trade Mart, which was built and owned by ultraconservative Trammell Crow. He was an investor and future director of Wallace Investments. [31] Protecting the President were police officers all along the route. Significantly, no protection was arranged for the President from the Trade Mart back to Love Field. The motorcade planning committee decided it was not necessary. [32] Jewell Bergin was excited about the President coming to Dallas. She also looked forward to a dinner party that same evening, at which she planned to wear an outfit that was sure to make an impression. A few days before the President’s arrival, someone at Neiman Marcus told her confidentially that Jackie Kennedy was coming to Dallas wearing a pale pink tweed outfit with a black velvet collar. Jewell bought an exact copy of the outfit. She was quite proud of it and showed it off to her son (who recently got his discharge from the army). It cost a great deal of money, and she apologized to her husband for buying it. Sadly, she never wore that dress. On November 22 while Bergin was flying home from a business meeting in Chicago, his employees were preparing to watch the parade. Avery Davis, Judy McCully, Jane Berry, and Betty Thornton were outside standing in front of the building. Mary Hollies and Betty Foster were on the fourth floor looking out of a window in the stock area between the Scott Foresman office and the west wall of the building. Inside the office were Yola Hopson and Ruth Nelson at a window on the west side, and to their left were Dorothy Garner, Sandra Styles, Victoria Adams, and Elsie Dorman grouped around two more windows. Elsie brought her husband’s movie camera to film the motorcade as it entered Dealey Plaza. [33] As the President’s limousine passed the building, they heard (according to Victoria Adams) three loud booms like cannon fire at a football game, coming from the right and below (the grassy knoll) rather than from the left and above (the sixth floor sniper’s nest). Adams and Styles decided to go outside and see what happened. Running downstairs, they reached the first floor and saw Shelley and Lovelady standing near the freight elevators. Adams said, “I believe the President’s been shot.” The two men did not respond. [34] Their calm and indifferent behavior was suspicious because about a minute or two before Adams and Styles came down, someone in a brown suit coat exited a freight elevator, ran by Shelley and Lovelady, and escaped out the back door. [35] As doctors began treating the mortally wounded President at Parkland Hospital, the Bergins’ maid heard the news over the radio. She sobbingly went to tell her mistress. Overwhelmed with grief, Jewell collapsed, wailing. The maid helped her to a bed. Not long after Joe Bergin came home, members of law enforcement agencies were knocking on the door – not on official business, but in an informal capacity. These visits were frequent and continued into the weeks to come. Joe sometimes introduced them to his wife and son as agents of the FBI or detectives from the police department; other times he declined to introduce his guests. These “informal visits” are puzzling, since Bergin was not a witness to the assassination. Perhaps they were visiting him in his capacity as a Special Ranger. The visits seemed more like discussions among colleagues – going over leads, exchanging information, and sharing ideas and opinions. Extra Security to Protect the TSBD When Bergin went back to work, he saw more such agents. Two agents in a Secret Service car patrolled the immediate area, continuously going around and around the building. A guard stood at the main entrance, and more guards kept watch inside. The agents imposed a lot of rules in the interest of security. They said that all visitors must submit to a screening by Roy Truly and state their business. Informal visits were strictly forbidden. Even Scott Foresman executives from Chicago had to abide by these rules. The agents also told everyone not to discuss the assassination with outsiders, or else they may suffer dire consequences. This was a difficult rule to follow, since curious strangers were constantly pressing them with questions about the assassination. The media soon developed the story that Oswald was the lone assassin. To guard against revelations contrary to the official version, censorship and obfuscation was necessary, especially concerning the time when the TSBD moved into the building. The move actually took place during the summer of 1963. Truly told the FBI on November 23 that the TSBD moved in several months before that date. [36] This statement correlates with city directories and with the memories and records of former Sexton employees who said that the building was vacant for at least a year after the grocery company moved out on November 14, 1961. [37] However, the interval between move and assassination was too short to forestall bothersome inquiries. The solution was to displace the move back several years. On November 24, 1963, the Dallas Times Herald reported that in 1960 the TSBD took a 15-year lease from Byrd. During the Warren Commission hearings Truly contradicted his earlier statement to the FBI. When reference was made to the wooden boxes that were made into storage bins, he said that they were in place for “nearly two years.” [38] O.V. Campbell, vice president of the TSBD, said the move took place five years before the assassination. [39] Spaulding Jones, regional office manager for Macmillan, said it took place around 1958. [40] Mary Lea Williams, an employee of Allyn & Bacon, said three years. [41] Either willingly or unwillingly, these people were part of the cover-up. [42] The new regime of intrusive security agents created tension at the office. Every day, Joe Bergin came home in an agitated state. He acted as if everything was normal, but he could not hide his frustration. One day his son ventured to ask a question about the assassination. Normally a calm and affable man, Bergin flew into a rage. He emphatically told his son to mind his own business and never bring up that subject again. Surprised and chagrined, his son did not trouble his father with any more such questions. Bergin’s health was declining. He lost weight, and he developed a stoop as he walked. His hair and facial features aged rapidly. A problem with his colon required an operation at Baylor Hospital. All this he suffered stoically. One of his few complaints concerned the parking situation. He used to have a parking spot in front of the building, but now he must park his car at a lot several blocks away. Considering his age and poor health, the extra distance was hard on him. Adding to the strain were hate letters that came in the mail. Transient ruffians cruising Gaston Avenue yelled curses at them from the windows of their cars or threw half-empty beer bottles and other trash at the house. At odd hours of the night, a single car double-parked in front of the house for several minutes and then drove away. One time someone stood outside the house shouting angry words. His son went to the door to see who was shouting, but Bergin stopped him and told him not to concern himself with the person outside. The Bergins suspected that their telephone was tapped. Sometimes the phone rang and no one answered. Other times they received anonymous threats. One time Jewell answered the phone and got a death threat. Friends and acquaintances stopped visiting them and snubbed them in public. They had the attitude that it was because of the people at the Book Depository that the shame of the assassination destroyed the reputation of Dallas. One day Jewell came home from a shopping trip, crying. When her son asked her what happened, she only said that she met a woman who used to be a friend. She said that the incident was of no consequence, but it was obvious that she was deeply hurt. There were at least two other times when she came home weeping. Despite the bad treatment, she still retained her affection for the city of Dallas. The Bergins were not the only ones suffering harassment. Dora Newman, Joe’s faithful assistant, became so ill, she went into early retirement. Because of intimidation from “federal authorities,” Roy Truly lived in fear until his death in 1985. [43] One day Jewell answered the phone, and Cason was on the line. He sounded like a man at his wit's end. Tormented by relentless adversaries, he eventually moved out of his home in University Park. Cason used to be a stocky, robust man, but after the assassination he became thin and sickly. Joe, Jr. saw him at the TSBD and could not believe how much he changed. Joe Bergin wanted to retire in 1965, but the company persuaded him to stay until it got through a difficult period. Four years later Scott Foresman and Southwestern moved to a new facility on Gemini Street. At the same time, William Shelley quit his job at the TSBD and went to work for Scott Foresman. [44] Security was just as tight at the new facility as it was at the old. A woman told Glaze that she applied for a clerical job at Scott Foresman in 1969. Her supervisor was Shelley. Shortly after getting the job, she and another employee were approached by two men who showed identification and said they were agents of the FBI. They gave them a written questionnaire asking for opinions on current social issues. After the two employees completed the questionnaire, the two agents asked them point blank if they were members of the CIA. [45] Whether they said yes or no cannot be determined from the skimpy details provided by Glaze, but this odd episode seems to indicate that intelligence operatives controlling Scott Foresman were defending themselves from infiltration, perhaps from rival agents within the CIA. As Glaze investigated the TSBD’s connections to the assassination and heard the above story as well as the fact that Shelley was in the CIA, he was treading on dangerous ground. One day, he heard a commotion outside his apartment. He looked out the window and saw an estimated twenty Dallas policemen pulled up in front. They lingered for nearly an hour, shouting in a highly threatening manner and pointing their pistols at his window. Frightened for his life, he immediately left the city. In a letter written in 1989, he said the TSBD was like a spider that can leave its web to stalk its prey. Aftermath After Joe Bergin retired in 1969, he wanted to move out of the city, but Jewell was too ill to move. The shock of the assassination plus the ongoing hostility broke her health. No longer the confident, fashionable luminary of high society, she became a frightened and reclusive woman. She had to have surgery done to her digestive tract. After the operation, her health grew worse, and she was in and out of hospitals. She died in 1969. One of her last requests was to see her beloved iris garden in Samuels Park. The following year, Joe, Jr. was washing windows on the second floor of the house, when he fell off the ladder and broke his femur and injured his hip. It was a messy accident that left him permanently disabled. Joe Bergin said to a former employee, “I don’t know what my son would do if he did not have a rich father.” [46] Soon after the accident an unexplained incident occurred. One evening when no one was home, someone broke into the house and set it ablaze. The fire was so ferocious that firemen used chemicals to put it out. It was a total loss. Joe Bergin had a hunch that the fire was assassination-related. After the destruction of the house, the hostility gradually diminished, and eventually Joe’s life returned to normal. In 1986 he married his second wife. In the aftermath of the assassination Bobbs-Merrill formed closer ties with the intelligence establishment. In 1966 IT&T (which along with RCA formed the basis of the NSA) bought Sams Publishing, and shortly afterwards, the subsidiary of Sams Publishing, Bobbs-Merrill, published more books of interest to the intelligence services. Seymour Hersh, author of Chemical and Biological Warfare: America's Hidden Arsenal,was a Bobbs-Merrill book published in 1968. Malcolm Browne wrote The New Face of War printed by Bobbs-Merrill, 1968, which detailed the problems that led up to the Diem Coup in 1963. The LaGuardia Report, titled The Marihuana Problem in the City of New York, was not widely available to the public until 1966, when Bobbs-Merrill reprinted most of it as The Marihuana Papers, by David Solomon. Bobbs-Merrill published a book by Harold Abramson called The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism. Abramson worked with CIA mind control expert Pasquale Carone on a study injecting LSD into the crania of goldfish. Pasquale’s brother was Mafia-CIA man, Al Carone, one of the “unofficial” shooters in Dallas (meaning he had a gun handy and fired it at the President during the fusillade of authorized shooters). [47] The LSD provider was drug company Eli Lilly, which like Bobbs-Merrill was based in Indianapolis. George Bush, the head of the CIA during the Ford administration, was a director of Eli Lilly from 1977 to 1979. He sat on the board of directors with Dan Quayle’s father and that is how Dan Quayle became vice-president. Quayle is an important publisher and one of the controllers of Indiana. Indianapolis was a key city in the national security establishment and quite likely in the plot to kill Kennedy. Little is known about William Harvey’s work at Bobbs-Merrill, but apparently he was the one behind the suppression of Peter Dale Scott’s book, The War Conspiracy, which dealt with the CIA, oil companies, and the manipulation of foreign policy to escalate the war in Vietnam. After keeping the book on the shelf for a year, Bobbs-Merrill finally published it in 1972, but only after Scott agreed to the removal of three chapters. Even then, the book still did not get out to the public, because Bobbs-Merrill did not distribute it. Brad Ayers, who wrote The War That Never Was: An insider's account of CIA covert operations against Cuba in 1976 also had trouble with Bobbs-Merrill, which published his book but did not distribute it. Conclusions and Summary Joe Bergin worked for Scott Foresman from 1938 to 1969. Over this period Scott Foresman and other schoolbook companies were involved in a variety of relationships and connections that form a circular dynamic: (1) law enforcement and intelligence services with media assets look for communists at home and abroad in order to suppress them; (2) ultraconservatives sound the alarm against communism and apply political pressure to support dictators threatened by left-wing radicals; (3) gun smugglers deliver military equipment to anti-communist regimes; (4) drug producers and drug smugglers controlled by the Mafia raise the cash needed to pay for weapons and supplies; and back to (1) law enforcement and intelligence agencies monitor and control the drug traffic. The schoolbook industry, as a component in the national security establishment, operated in all four arenas, as can be seen from the following. (1) TSBD credit manager Joe Molina was a friend and possibly an undercover partner of FBI agent Bill Lowery. They were among the six individuals who started the Dallas chapter of the leftist organization GI Forum. (2) Howard Sams, a right wing publisher with connections to the national security establishment through RCA, was the owner of schoolbook company Bobbs-Merrill. The people who ran the TSBD were extreme in their opposition to Kennedy. The man who owned the building, D. Harold Byrd, was an ultraconservative. His building was in a unique location in that it overlooked a sharp turn that forced large vehicles to slow down to a crawl. Highlighting the importance of the building is a negative template within the extant film record of the assassination. Footage of the President’s limousine turning from Houston onto Elm was removed from all films. (3) Joe Bergin, Jr. saw cardboard boxes four feet square by five feet high in 1963. Henry Hurt discovered large wooden boxes stamped with publisher’s names on the sixth floor of the TSBD in 1983. Because of their large sizes, these boxes contained contraband, perhaps sometimes under a shallow layer of books. CIA finance officer James Wilcott said that several Dallas firms were involved in smuggling arms to Cubans. Among these firms was the TSBD. (4) During the 1930’s the Texas Rangers shifted their efforts from bank robbers to drug smugglers. Joe Bergin joined them in 1934 as a Special Ranger. It is possible that his career move from school superintendent in Greenville to schoolbook salesman in Dallas had something to with a desire to advance his opportunities in law enforcement under the cover of schoolbook publisher Scott Foresman. He may have been among the Texas Rangers in Dallas monitoring the drug and gambling activities of Jack Ruby and his friends. Since Jack Ruby was also involved in smuggling arms, the Texas Rangers may have monitored that activity as well. Jack Ruby operated on a parallel track with the schoolbook people. Like Joe Molina, Ruby was infiltrating leftist or communist cells. Like Cason, Truly, and Byrd, Ruby promoted the ultraconservative ideology, mainly by getting people to read the literature of Dallas oil man H. L. Hunt. Given the common milieu within which they operated, some or all of the above probably heard about Ruby and his activities. These were the same people involved in the plot to kill Kennedy. Recently, Wilmer Thomas, a friend of Jim Garrison and a philanthropist in New York who funds the Metropolitan Opera, approached Arthur Schlesinger, historian for the Kennedy administration, and asked him who was responsible for the assassination of the President. Schlesinger replied, “We were at war with the national security people.” [48] When President Kennedy declared that he would break the CIA into a thousand pieces [49], the intelligence community formed an alliance with the Mafia to bring him down. Although Joe Bergin as a Special Ranger was dedicated to fighting crime, his position as a schoolbook office manager drew him into a world of intrigue that compelled him to serve the interests of those who committed the crime of the century. Postscript: Joe Bergin remarried in 1986. On November 2, 1990, he died at the age of 91. Joe Jr. lived alone with his three cats depending for his income on the charity of his father and disability checks. He died on August 29, 2001 at the age of 55. William Shelley retired from Scott Foresman in the late 1980’s. On March 20, 1995 the author called up Shelley, and asked him about Oswald’s attendance at work. Shelley responded that he was there every day. He refused to answer any more questions and referred me to his testimony to the Warren Commission. He said, "Everything that I have to say on that subject is in the public record. You'll have to go with that." He died in Irving, Texas on September 6, 1996 at the age of 70. Assistance in writing this article came from researcher Steve Gaal, who provided valuable information and advice. References 1. Letter by Elzie Glaze to Doug Kellner and Frank Morrow of The Alternative Information Network, dated June 2, 1989. 2. 3H36 (Paine). 3. Profile of Joe Bergin compiled from newspaper articles and obituaries in the Greenville Evening Banner, Greenville Herald Banner, and Dallas Morning News. 4. Joseph Douglass, Jr., Red Cocaine (Atlanta, GA: Clarion House, 1990). pp 1-2, quoted on Mike Sylwester’s Internet posting on the JFK Lancer website as “Jack Ruby and Mob Connections.” 5. Douglas Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, (London, New York: Verso, 2004), p. 3, 12-13, 78, 79, 194-196, 273, 309. 6. Greenville Evening Banner, May 7, 1950, HI:6. 7. 6H327 (Shelley). 8. William Weston, “The Glaze Letters,” The Fourth Decade, May 1999. 9. 14H503 (Ruby). 10. 15H289-321 (Fehrenbach). 11. Douglas Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, pp. 309-310. 12. Greg Parker Internet posting on JFK Forum. 13. William Manchester, Death of a President (Harper & Row: New York, 1967), p. 49. 14. FBI report of M. Theodore Taylor interview by A. Raymond Switzer, June 12, 1964, File No. DL 89-43. 15. FBI report of interview of N. F. Davidson regarding Ross Carlton, dated November 23, 1963 from SAC in El Paso to the Director and Sac in Dallas. 16. Interview of former CAP member Tony Atzenhoffer, July 11 and August 15, 1998. 17. "Barry & the 'Boys'" by Daniel Hopsicker, Internet file, copyright 1998. 18. Peter Dale Scott, Dallas Conspiracy, pp. 2-4, 2-13. 19. Fabian Escalante, The Secret War: CIA Covert operations against CUBA 1959-62, 1995 Oceans Press, p. 42 20. Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985), pp. 359-360, 386-387. 21. Testimony of James B. Wilcott, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, RIF 180-10116-10096, pp.25-26. 22. Peter Dale Scott, Dallas Conspiracy, unpublished manuscript, pp. 3-31, 3-41. 23. Noel Twyman, Bloody Treason (Rancho Santa Fe, CA: Laurel Publishing, 1997), pp. 440-442, 478-479. 24. William Harvey obituary in the New York Times, June 14, 1976. 25. See Harry Livingston’s book The Hoax of the Century: Decoding the Forgery of the Zapruder Film (Trafford, 2004). 26. 3H214 (Truly). 27. 6H394 (Geneva Hine). 28. 10H168-169 (Stovall); 10H191 (Graef). 29. 21H674-677. 30. William Weston, “Jake Rubenstein, c/o Carousel Club,” Dealey Plaza Echo, March 2002. 31. Peter Dale Scott, Dallas Conspiracy, pp. 3-31, 3-41 32. "President J. F. Kennedy's Dallas Visit and Parade" (JFK Exhibit F-679, pp 618-623), dated November 21, 1963, is a plan for policing the parade route submitted by Deputy Chief R.H. Lunday to Jesse Curry, Chief of Police. Duke Lane observed that this report details where everyone will be and who they are, but no officer was assigned to the route from the Trade Mart back to Love Field. Lane made this post on December 9, 2005 on the Education Forum. 33. Affidavits of Scott Foresman workers in Vol. 22 of the Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, 22H633-686. 34. 6H390 (Adams). 35. William Weston, “The Man in the Dark Suit Coat,” JFK Deep Politics Quarterly, May 1996. 36. FBI report of Roy Truly interview by Nat Pinkston, November 23, 1963, File No. DL 100-10461. 37. Interviews of Ted Leon and Thomas H. Butler. The date November 14, 1961 came from Leon, Sexton branch manager in Dallas from 1961 to 1964. He kept his pocket calendars from his years of employment, and he noted when the grocery company moved out of the building. Butler took over as branch manager after Leon transferred to Los Angeles. Butler said that the building was vacant for at least a year after his company moved out. 38. 3H231 (Truly). 39. Interview of O. V. Campbell, March 19, 1994. 40. Interview of Spaulding E. Jones, March 19, 1994. 41. Interview of Mary Lea Williams, April 4, 1994. 42. Joe Bergin, Jr. was not exactly sure when the move took place, but it was after 1960, he said, when he transferred to Fort Sam Houston from a base in Germany. When told of evidence that the move took place during the summer of 1963, he expressed surprise but did not challenge it. 43. Jim Marrs, Crossfire (Carroll & Graf. New York, 1989) p. 319. 44. Interview of Dorothy Garner, August 14, 1999. 45. Elzie Glaze letter to HSCA, Jan. 19, 1978 Record Number 180-10106-10050. 46. Interview of Dorothy Garner, August 14, 1999. 47. Dave Emory interview of Dee Ferdinand Carone, Ray Kohlman, and Mike Ruppert, October 1998, FTR-116. 48. George Noori interview of Joan Mellon on Coast to Coast radio show, November 22, 2005. 49. "CIA: Maker of Policy or Tool?” New York Times. April 25, 1966.
  17. The following was an article that was published in the May 1999 Issue of the Fourth Decade. The Glaze Letters William Weston May 1999 Among the boxes forming the sniper's nest were four that had twenty-eight identifiable prints. Traceable to Oswald were two palmprints and one fingerprint. Twenty-four prints were made by two law enforcement officials, but one palmprint could not be identified. The unmatched print might mean an accomplice. Or maybe someone was innocently moving boxes from one place to another. [1] To settle the matter, the FBI needed a set of prints from everyone employed at the Texas School Book Depository - a total of sixty-nine people. It was a simple procedure, quick and easy, and no one should have had any complaints about disruptions or delays. Notwithstanding, the agency ran smack into an unexpected wall of resistance. In a letter to the Warren Commission, J. Edgar Hoover tried to explain why the Bureau failed to do its job. Mr. Roy S. Truly, Warehouse Superintendent, who has been very cooperative with this Bureau in the past, strongly objected to the printing of all employees as he felt it would seriously handicap the work of his firm. Mr. Truly stated there are about twenty employees who would have had occasion to handle the cartons in question and he desired the printing to be limited to this group. [2] As a result of these objections, the FBI was forced to modify its demand according to the limitation imposed. How could this happen? How could a mere warehouse manager dictate to a law enforcement agency as powerful as the FBI what it could, or could not do, in the investigation of a crime as serious as the assassination of the President? Were Hoover's agents always so timid with people who refused to cooperate? No, for in Jean Hill's book, The Last Dissenting Witness, a Dallas motorcycle officer, J. B. Marshall, was quoted as saying, "The Feds are tearing our whole department to pieces . . . they tell 'em, 'If you don't cooperate, we'll take your badge.' . . . they've been especially rough on all the guys who were on motorcade duty that day." [3] Still another victim was Marina Oswald, who was told that if she did not cooperate, she would be forced to leave the country. [4] These examples demonstrate a stern resolve to squash even the mildest of troublemakers. Why then should the FBI meekly tolerate a slap in the face from someone at the Book Depository? Did the warehouse manager have some clout that even Hoover had to respect? If so, it is difficult to understand where this clout came from. The innocence of anyone working in that particular building was far from certain in the eyes of suspicious investigators. Whatever might be said in the ongoing debate concerning the number of bullets whizzing through Dealey Plaza, it is a fact that the Book Depository was a source location. On the premises was at least one hit team, including a leader, a sniper, a radioman, and two or three watchers to secure the escape route. It was also the staging area of the patsy, who had to be controlled and moved around in such a way that he would be in a credible position to take the blame. To keep the risks of exposure to a minimum, the conspirators had to have complete control over the building. How they managed to accomplish this is a question that remains to be answered. Six years ago I received from Larry Ray Harris a copy of a letter that sheds some light on this issue. Written by a Mr. Glaze to the Alternative Information Network in Austin, Texas on June 2, 1989, this letter mentioned an earlier letter that was sent to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Recently I was able to get a copy of the earlier letter from the National Archives. Through a comparison of the details in both letters, I have been able to produce the following narrative. In late 1974, while working as a journalist in Dallas, Glaze met a woman who began working for the Book Depository in 1969 - six years after the assassination. (She was no longer working there at the time she spoke to Glaze.) Her supervisor was William Shelley. The company, she said, had a strange way of introducing new employees to their duties. She and another new employee were approached by two men, who produced I.D. wallets and identified themselves as "government agents." They were taken to an empty room and given questionnaires to fill out. These exams were full of oddly irrelevant questions, calling for opinions on various topics of the day, especially social issues. Obediently the two employees wrote out their answers. When they were done, they gave the sheets back, and in the short pause that followed, one of the examiners bluntly asked: "Have you been recruited by the FBI or the CIA?" The two employees were stunned. As ordinary office workers, they were only doing minor clerical tasks at low wages. Why would anyone think that they came from the FBI or the CIA? While it was true that the Book Depository had acquired the notoriety of being the place where Oswald shot the President, still by 1969 that should have been ancient history. Yet even more disturbing were the next questions that came to mind. If the Book Depository was just an insignificant, little company, why would it be attracting the attention of the two biggest intelligence establishments in the country? Furthermore, what was the intrigue that was spurring these "government agents" to hunt down unwanted infiltrators? Glaze asked the woman if she and her co-worker were the only ones subjected to this kind of treatment. No, they were not the only ones. Background checks on new employees were done as a routine procedure at the Book Depository. After listening to the woman's account, Glaze decided to check it out. He contacted her former supervisor, William Shelley, and asked to meet with him. Shelley agreed to this request and even allowed the reporter to take notes and use a tape recorder. The meeting took place at the Book Depository warehouse near the intersection of Royal Lane and Interstate 35 on the far northwest side of Dallas. (The company had moved from its old location on 411 Elm Street in 1970.) The information that Glaze was gathering must have been extensive, for the two men had numerous meetings together. Yet only a few disclosures are provided in the letters. The most significant one appears in the 1989 letter: "Mr. Shelley claims to have been an intelligence officer during World War II and thereafter joined the CIA." This extraordinary revelation goes far in explaining the mysteries of the Book Depository, and a discussion of its implications will be given later in this article. Shelley told Glaze that he had been the supervisor of Lee Harvey Oswald. After the assassination, the Dallas police placed Shelley under arrest and formally charged him with the murder of the President. (No mention was made by Glaze as to why Shelley had been arrested, nor did he say what connection this arrest had with the arrest of Oswald.) The charges against Shelley were soon dropped, and he was released. Since that day, at various times, journalists representing several newspapers and magazines approached him with offers of huge sums of money for his personal account of the assassination. These offers were all turned down. When Glaze tried to get permission to quote him in his own article, Shelley refused and insisted that even his name was not to be printed. In spite of this setback, Glaze was not discouraged. He went back to the woman and told her that he was doing a story on the Book Depository. He was going to talk to the FBI and possibly get some more information. When the woman heard this, she was absolutely appalled. The very idea that he was writing an article filled her with terror. She told him that if he persisted in his efforts to publicize this story, she would emphatically deny everything she told him. The prospects for an article irretrievably came to an end, and Glaze had no choice but to go home empty-handed. It was not long after his departure that he felt obliged to speak to the woman again. What he intended to say is not mentioned in his letters, but perhaps he wanted to make an apology. In any case, it was only a few hours after he last saw her that he decided to see her again. When he arrived at her apartment, he was surprised to find it totally empty. It looked as if no one had ever lived there. Glaze knew that she had a husband and a child, and they too were gone. The mystified reporter could not understand how three people could have moved away so quickly. The next day he went to the woman's place of employment and found out that she never showed up for work, and no one knew where she was. Later inquiries revealed that she did not even stop by to pick up her final paycheck. In his quest to find them, the most promising lead Glaze had was the fact that the husband had once been a musician in "The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band." Yet even this fortuitous bit of information got him nowhere. Not one acquaintance or associate had any idea where they could have gone. About the same time as he was conducting his search, Glaze went to get his interview notes and tapes and found that they had inexplicably disappeared. Then one day, he heard a commotion outside his apartment. He looked out the window and saw an estimated twenty Dallas policemen pulled up in front. They lingered for nearly an hour, shouting in a highly threatening manner and pointing their pistols at his window. Frightened for his life, he immediately left the city. On December 12, 1977, while working as a reporter for the Avalanche Journal in Lubbock, Texas, he sent a letter to the HSCA. He wrote that he had some information regarding the assassination of President Kennedy and gave a brief sketch of his investigation of the Book Depository. In the closing paragraphs of his letter, he wrote, "I must admit that my own fear of getting involved in the investigation has prevented me from writing you earlier. I apologize." [5] Whether or not the HSCA had taken an interest in this matter is not known. The only reply it sent was a form letter, which read: "Dear Ms. Glaze [The HSCA had mistakenly thought he was a woman], Thank you for your letter. It has been directed to the Deputy Chief Counsel in charge of the investigation for his review. Your interest in the work of our Committee is appreciated. Sincerely, G. Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel and Director." [6] Eleven years later, Glaze wrote a letter to Doug Kellner and Frank Morrow of The Alternative Information Network. [7] He also sent them a copy of the reply that he got from Blakey. Somehow a copy of both these letters ended up in the hands of Larry Ray Harris. In his own letter to me, Harris wrote: "I don't recall its origins with clarity, but I think it was given to me by a professor at Southern Methodist University here in Dallas. Regardless, it ended up in my files around the time we opened the JFK Center in 1989. I don't know that anyone has ever looked into it. It could be a hoax, but sounds sincere. It would be easy to verify (1) if a reporter named Glaze has ever worked for the Lubbock newspaper; (2) if a journalist named Glaze was living in Dallas in 1974/1975; and (3) if there is/was an 'Alternative Information Network' in Austin, or if Kellner and Morrow are real persons and remember receiving the letter. If it is true that Shelley was affiliated in some way with CIA or U.S. Intelligence, that would be a disturbing and potentially significant development." [8] When I first began my inquiry, I was hampered by a minor problem. The signature at the bottom of the letter was blacked out. Fortunately the salutation "Dear Ms. Glaze" on the HSCA letter was not. I thus had a clue that the first name must be some gender neutral type such as Robin or Terry. In January 1993, I called up the Avalanche Journal and asked for Mr. Glaze. No one by that name was currently employed. Neither were there any records of a Glaze in the files of the personnel department. Yet the absence of records did not necessarily mean he never worked there; it was a regular practice to discard the records of former employees after three years. Was there anyone who had been around long enough to remember a journalist named Glaze? The personnel director said that she had been with the paper for about as long as anyone, since 1982, and she never knew anyone by that name. I next tried to reach either Kellner or Morrow at the Alternative Information Network. Kellner was the one who took my call. I told him who I was and that I had a letter addressed to him and his partner regarding the Kennedy assassination. After I read the contents, Kellner said he never got it. It was odd, he said, that I should have a letter in which he was named as a recipient but he had never seen it. He asked that a copy be sent to his home - not to the business - and after he read it, he would check into it. Two weeks later I made a follow-up phone call and asked Kellner if he found out anything. He said that he showed the letter to Morrow, who said that he vaguely remembered it but could not give any additional information regarding the contents or the author who wrote it. That was as far as I got in 1993. In February 1999, a researcher named Steve Gaal checked the National Archives web site and found that someone named Glaze had written to the HSCA. That was when I finally had the full name of the reporter: Elzie Dean Glaze. A search of the Internet revealed that a man with this same name has a current e-mail address in Austin, Texas. I sent two messages to that address, but so far I received no response. The next lead that had to be tracked down was the identity of the man who had been a member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The band started out in 1966 as a jug band in Long Beach, California. They became known for their unique blend of country western and rock and roll. Among the original musicians were John McEuen, Jeff Hanna, Bruce Kunkel, Ralph Barr, Leslie Thompson, and Jimmie Fadden. After appearing in a movie calledPaint Your Wagon, the band went through some hard times. In 1968 a meeting was held in the manager's Hollywood office, and the group decided to dissolve. Les Thompson ended the meeting with a question: "Does that mean we don't hafta practice anymore?" He then went to Texas to enroll in a bulldozer school. A year or two later, the members of the band, with the exception of Kunkel and Barr, decided to try again. A new member from Philadelphia named Jimmie Ibbotson was added on. This time they achieved commercial success, and in 1970 a song called "Mr. Bojangles" became a top ten hit. Sometime prior to 1974, Les Thompson left the band again. In 1977 the group acquired the distinction of being the first American band to tour the Soviet Union. They are still going strong today, having released a new album called Bang! Bang! Bang! in May 1999. [9] In an attempt to get more information, I sent them a letter, along with copies of the Glaze correspondence. In a follow-up phone call, I spoke with the manager, and he told me that he talked with the two musicians who had been with the band from the beginning. They said that it has been a such long time since they heard from the early members, that they were unable to provide any information as to where they went or what they had been doing. [10] With nothing else to go, I would say that the musician spoken of by Glaze was probably Leslie Thompson. He was the only one who went to Texas, and he might have stayed there long enough to establish long-term ties with some of the people in that state. Having gone as far as I could in checking the authenticity of the Glaze letters, the next thing that needs to be done is to cross-check the information contained in them with what we know about William Shelley. At the time the assassination occurred, Shelley was, according to his testimony, standing on the steps of the Book Depository with Billy Lovelady and Wesley Frazier. [11] The James Altgens photograph of the limousine under fire confirms the presence of Lovelady on the steps but not Shelley or Frazier. About a minute after the assassination, two female employees in the Book Depository came down the stairs and saw Shelley and Lovelady in the back of the building just about in front of the two freight elevators. One lady said, "I believe the President has been shot." Curiously, neither Shelley nor Lovelady said anything in reply. [12] After the two women ran out the back door, Roy Truly and Police Officer Marion Baker rushed in through the front door. They were going up to the roof to search for a gunman. According to Baker's testimony, he saw two white men sitting by the stairs. [13] According to Shelley, he and Lovelady were appointed by Truly to guard the stairs and elevators. [14] In any reconstruction of what was happening with the stairs and elevators, it is obvious that Shelley and Lovelady must have seen the escape of one of the assassins. About a minute or two after Truly and Baker went up the stairs, a witness on the street saw a man in a dark sportcoat running out the back door. This man was no doubt the same one seen at a fifth floor window standing next to a man armed with a rifle. After the shooting ended, the man in the dark sportcoat took an elevator down to the ground floor, while at the same time Truly and Baker were going up the stairs. As the culprit headed for the back door, he would have had to pass Shelley and Lovelady in order to exit the building. [15] About a minute or two after the man in the dark sportcoat dashed out the back door, NBC news reporter Robert MacNeil came in through the front door. In a written account of what he saw, he said that he was surprised to see three men, totally oblivious to the chaos outside, standing by a pay phone. I went immediately into the clear space on the ground floor and asked where there was a phone. There were, as I recall, three men there, all I think in shirt sleeves. What, on recollection, strikes me as possibly significant is that all three seemed to be exceedingly calm and relaxed, compared to the pandemonium which existed right outside their front door. I did not pay attention to this at the time. I asked the first man I saw – a man who was telephoning from a pillar in the middle of the room – where I could call from. He directed me to another man nearer the door, who pointed to an office. When I got to the phone, two of the lines were lit up. I made my call and left. . . . I was in too much of a hurry to remember what the three men looked like. But their manner was very relaxed. [16] MacNeil's amazement at the strange placidity of the three men is indicated by the way he repeated this observation for emphasis. The man using the pay phone was quite probably Shelley, for in an affidavit made out that same afternoon, Shelley said, "I went back into the building and went inside and called my wife and told her what happened." [17] About a minute or two after MacNeil saw the three calm men - between 12:35 and 12:40 - Oswald had a five-to-ten minute chat with the assistant manager. According to an FBI report of the first interrogation of Oswald in the Dallas homocide office: OSWALD stated that [at the time of the assassination] he took this Coke down to the first floor and stood around and had lunch in the employees lunch room. He thereafter went outside and stood around for five or ten minutes with foreman BILL SHELLEY, and thereafter went home. He stated that he left work because, in his opinion, based upon remarks of BILL SHELLEY, he did not believe that there was going to be any more work that day due to the confusion in the building. [18] The timing and location of Oswald's departure from the Book Depository correlates exactly with the appearance of a Nash Rambler on Elm Street driven by a dark-skinned man. Between 12:40 and 12:45, Deputy Roger Craig heard a loud whistle and looked up to see Oswald running down the grassy slope in front of the Book Depository. Oswald opened the passenger side door of the Nash Rambler and got in. The car was last seen speeding towards Oak Cliff, where the shooting of Officer Tippit was to occur twenty to thirty minutes later. If Oswald had been talking to Shelley prior to his departure, then there can be no doubt that Shelley had seen him getting away. Not long after Oswald left the scene, Shelley told Truly that Oswald was missing. (How he came to this conclusion was never publicly disclosed.) A roll call of warehouse employees was made, and it was determined that Oswald was indeed absent. Truly notified Police Captain Will Fritz, who immediately thought that it was "important to hold that man." [19] The above noted actions seem to indicate that Shelley was very close to the conspiracy, if not actually participating in it. Assuming that the police really had arrested him and charged him with the assassination, they certainly would have had ample cause. For one thing, they would have known that Shelley was in charge of a work crew that spent the entire morning on the same floor where the sniper's nest, rifle, and empty cartridges were found. Secondly, the accused assassin had named Shelley as the one who told him he could leave. Thirdly, the police knew about the Nash Rambler story as early as 5:00 in the afternoon, when Roger Craig reported it to them. Finally, Shelley might not have been entirely candid in how he came to realize that Oswald was missing. No doubt Shelley was asked a lot of questions, and it is possible that he was kept in custody until he gave some satisfactory answers. Admittedly, there is no record of Shelley being arrested, but that does not necessarily mean Glaze was wrong. Missing evidence could just as easily be due to the systematic destruction of anything contrary to the official version. The presence of an agent, or an ex-agent, of the CIA at the Book Depository would explain a great deal regarding how the conspirators managed to get their gunmen on the premises. Let us now look into Shelley's background to see what additional corroboration can be shed on this matter. According to statements made to the police and to the Warren Commission, Shelley was born in Gunter, Texas in 1925. During World War Two, he worked "a little bit" in defense plants. On October 29, 1945 at the age of nineteen or twenty he began working for the Book Depository. Eighteen years later, in 1963, he was holding the position of assistant manager of the "miscellaneous department." [20] By 1975, when Glaze talked to him, he had passed his thirtieth anniversary in the company. Such a long career in one place is confirmed in the listings of the city directories. In 1947 he was listed as a clerk at the Hugh Perry Book Depository (the old name for the Texas School Book Depository), and he had a room at 515 Martinique Avenue. In 1960 he was a department manager; his wife's name was Marie; and they lived in a house on 126 Tatum Avenue. They were still living in that house at the time of the assassination. Although the facts are few, the picture is clear. Shelley was a simple desk clerk and warehouse man, content to live out his working life under the roof of one company. He certainly did not fit the image of a globetrotting CIA operative, embarking on secret missions with the latest in high tech weaponry. Even if we can assume that he really had been an intelligence officer during World War Two, it does not seem possible that he could have joined the CIA afterwards. The agency did not even come into existence until two years after Shelley got his job at the Book Depository. It would thus appear that we have an irreconcilable situation; Shelley could not have been in the CIA before his employment at the Book Depository. Yet I believe that a seemingly irresolvable problem might on closer examination yield a solution that brings a deeper understanding of the truth. Let us take a different approach. Let us suppose that the job at the Book Depository was concurrent with a career in the CIA. If we can assume that is true, then the Book Depository itself must have been a front for CIA activities. While it is commonly acknowledged that the agency has too much influence in national affairs, it is still amazing to find its hand in such a wide diversity of organizations and institutions. These include such entities as labor unions, airlines, college student associations, foundations, law firms, banks, savings and loans, investment firms, travel agencies, police departments, post offices, publishing companies, newspapers, call girl services, and mental health institutions. Considering the far-reaching extent of control over so many different areas in American society, it does not seem reasonable to suppose that the CIA would have the moral restraint to make an exception of the Book Depository - provided, of course, that the control of it would further its goals in some way. If CIA operators had been working inside the building in which the Book Depository was located, they would have not been on unfriendly ground. The property itself was owned by a wealthy, right-wing Texas oilman named D. H. Byrd. He was also a colonel in the Civil Air Patrol, which included among its members Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie. That Ferrie and Oswald knew each other was proven in a 1993 Frontline special on Oswald, in which former cadets Tony Atzenhoffer and Johnny Ciravola displayed a picture showing Ferrie and Oswald at a cadet campout near New Orleans. What is not so well known is that the two men also knew Colonel Byrd. Atzenhoffer told this author that Byrd was the "head honcho" of the Civil Air Patrol in Louisiana and Texas, and that he came to Moissant Airport to give speeches on special occasions, such as orientation sessions for new cadets. [21] Since there is no question that CAP members Ferrie and Oswald were associated with the CIA, it would only be logical to assume that their commander was too. Another member of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol who was an associate of the CIA was Barry Seal, a notorious drug smuggler who set up the Mena Airport operation in Arkansas in the early 1980's and later got involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. He was murdered in 1986 by three Colombian hitmen. Seal first got his pilot's license in Baton Rouge on July 16, 1954, when he was sixteen years old. According to a high school friend, Seal was well acquainted with David Ferrie. One Friday evening while we were in high school, I got a call from Barry, asking if I'd like to fly over to Lacombe with him in the morning, a little town on the north shore across Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans. We left about 5:30 and flew over to the little airport there and Barry and I get out of the plane, and here's this really weird-looking guy, dressed all in black, sitting in a director's chair on the tarmac, and he's drilling a bunch of Civil Air Patrol guys that are standing in formation in front of him. They were carrying old M-1s. His name was David Ferrie. He was a captain in the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol. . . . See, Barry was making $400 a week in high school flying for David Ferrie. . . . On the flight back, Barry shouted over the engine. "That weird looking guy? He's got no hair on his body! It's why he's wearing a wig! Get up close, he's even got fake eyebrows, and fake eyelashes, but . . . that weirdo's a big-time pilot and works with the CIA. Seal and his friend also talked about the wooden crates that Ferrie and Seal were examining. They contained guns and ammo, Seal explained to his friend, and he would be transporting this cargo on the weekend. Ferrie was paying him $400 a week to fly this stuff. $400 was a great deal of money in the mid-1950's. [22] If the CIA was using Byrd's chapter of the Civil Air Patrol to transport illegal shipments of guns and ammo, then what could have prevented them from using Byrd's property on the corner of Elm and Houston for the same purpose? Since Dallas was a source of munitions going to New Orleans in the drive to overthrow leftist governments in Central and South America, then a way had to be found to move them secretly. Big, heavy boxes marked "Schoolbooks" would have been a handy way of delivering the goods. Perhaps that was what the "miscellaneous department" of the Book Depository was all about. Working backwards from the fact that an assassination squad could move freely through a building without any fear of interference, there must have been some link between the building and the clandestine organizations that put together the assassination plot. Such a link would enable the conspirators to set up the ambush safely and securely. It is therefore conceivable that the secret history of the Book Depository could extend far into the past - perhaps even as early as 1945, the last year of World War Two. 1. Warren Report, pp. 140-141, 249. 2. Letter from J. Edgar Hoover to J. Lee Rankin, dated June 16, 1964 (HSCA Doc. 62-109090- 26th unrecorded after 2nd 170). By September 1964 the FBI got fingerprints from sixteen employees. These included Roy Truly himself, his assistant manager William Shelley, and all fourteen warehouse employees. None of the prints obtained matched the unidentified palmprint. 3. Jean Hill, JFK, The Last Dissenting Witness (Pelican Publishing Co., 1992), p. 85. 4. 1H79-80 (Marina Oswald). 5. Letter to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA Doc. 004079). Glaze misdated the letter "12/12/74," for the postmark on the envelope had the year 1977. The true date should have been 12/12/77. 6. Blakey's reply to Elzie Glaze dated January 19, 1978 (HSCA Doc. 004741). 7. Letter by Elzie Dean Glaze to Doug Kellner and Frank Morrow of The Alternative Information Network, dated June 2, 1989. 8. Harris letter to the author, dated December 15, 1992. 9. Chet Flippo, "Nitty Gritty Pick & Grin" in the October 14, 1971 issue of Rolling Stone. Also The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band web page from the Internet. 10. Telephone conversation with John Peets, manager of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, May 12, 1999. 11. 6H328-329 (Shelley). 12. 6H390 (Victoria Adams). 13. 3H263 (Baker). 14. 24H226 (Shelley affidavit) and 6H330 (Shelley). Shelley and Lovelady had been inconsistent regarding their actions during the first minutes after the shooting. An entirely different story has them running out to the street island in front of the building to see what was going on. In an attempt to resolve these discrepanicies, I contacted William Shelley on March 20, 1995 and asked him if he would be willing to answer a few questions. His response was an abrupt no. He then added, "Everything that I have to say on that subject is in the public record. You'll have to go with that." 15. "The Fifth Floor Sniper" in the May 1993 issue of The Third Decade. 16. "Robert MacNeil and the Three Calm Men" in the November 1994 issue of The Fourth Decade. 17. 24H226 (Shelley affidavit). 18. The Warren Report, p. 619. 19. See "The Transplantation of the Texas School Book Depository" in the September 1993 issue of The Third Decade and "411 Elm Street" in the May 1994 issue of The Fourth Decade. Also see Jerry Rose's article "Important to Hold That Man" in the May 1986 issue of The Third Decade. 20. 6H327-328 (Shelley). 21. Telephone conversations with Tony Atzenhoffer, July 11 and August 15, 1998. 22. "Barry & the 'Boys'" by Daniel Hopsicker, Internet file, copyright 1998.
  18. As for the veracity of Victoria Adams, I have already made my decision that she is believable. I think you ought to take a stand and decide for yourself, either yea or nay. The reference to the two white men is in Marion Baker's testimony volume 3, p. 263 Senator COOPER. Did you see anyone else while you were in the building, other than this man you have identified later as Oswald, and Mr. Truly? Mr. Baker.On the first floor there were two men. As we came through the main doorway to the elevators, I remember as we tried to get on the elevators I remember two men, one was sitting on this side and another one between 20 or 30 feet away from us looking at us. Mr. Dulles.Were they white men? Mr. Baker. Yes, sir. I look forward to reading the additional comments you said you wanted to make later.
  19. Lane has delivered a defense of Shelley, Lovelady and Frazier that is certainly impassioned but it falls short in addressing the points I raised in my article. I will reiterate those points below. But first I want to say something about this forum, and other forums like it. Those who read and generate messages on this form are like jurors in a jury box. We are also prosecutors, defenders, and judges. We look at the evidence and then evaluate it. If after a fair and impartial assessment of the evidence, any of us deems someone to be guilty in the plot to kill President Kennedy, and I do not care how small a minority such people may be, we should not hesitate to say so. Personally, I have looked at the evidence in I believe a fair and impartial manner, and I say that Shelley, Lovelady and Frazier are guilty, and I do not hesitate to call them murderers in print or in public to their faces. Accusations of libel or slander have no effect on me, nor should they have on anyone else who wants to join me in condemning them. Of course, we do not have the power to mete out the punishment that they deserve, yet we can ostracize them, and at least that is something. How do we determine whether someone is guilty or innocent? The method we use is to see if their stories hold up. If they are innocent, then what they say will be truthful with no inconsistencies. If someone has inconsistencies in their stories or if they say things that are certainly not true, then they are guilty. Truth and innocence go hand in hand, just as crime and falsehoods go hand in hand. Now let us look at the points that Lane has failed to address. According to Victoria Adams, she and Sandra Styles came down the stairs and got to the first floor about a minute or two after the shooting. At the bottom of the stairs she said they saw Shelley and Lovelady. Adams said “I believe the President’s been shot.” They made no response. The commotion outside apparently made no effect on them. Obviously if Shelley and Lovelady were innocent people taken by surprise by the events outside they would want to see what happened. Something else held those two men by the elevators. I believe they had a duty to perform. Their silent indifference to Adams statement is evidence that they were indeed the calm, indifferent men seen by Robert MacNeil. Marion Baker said he saw two white men by the elevators. If they were not the same two men that Adams saw they who were they? Now Shelley said that, “Immediately following the shooting, Billy N. Lovelady and I accompanied some uniformed police officers to the railroad yards just west of the building and returned through the east side door of the building about ten minutes later.” Did Shelley go back inside as Adams’ and Bakers’ statements would indicate or did he stay outside as Shelley’s own statement would indicate? Will Lane call Adams and Baker liars in order to defend Shelley and Lovelady? Or can he reconcile Adams and Bakers’ statements to theirs? If he tries to do so, then that requires time that would keep them inside the building on the first floor until the arrival of MacNeil. I do not dispute that Shelley and Lovelady went outside. Oswald said to the police that he was with Shelley shortly before his departure from Dealey Plaza five to ten minutes after the shooting. Yet Shelley said he did not see Oswald after 11:50. How does Lane reconcile these statements? Some people think Oswald was innocent. Does Lane want to risk the label of libeler to say otherwise? Finally, Frazier has manifested inconsistencies in his statements, yet I think it would suffice at this point to ask Lane if he thinks someone eating lunch all alone in the basement with no windows to view the outside reasonable behavior for someone innocent and totally surprised by the shooting yet had no curiosity to find out what happened. To me suspicious behavior, story inconsistencies, and outright falsehoods indicate suspects guilty of a crime. Shelley, Lovelady and Frazier are guilty, and I will say that as often as I need to.
  20. I made an error with the numbers. My survey came from Commission Exhibit 1381, which had the FBI reports of all those who worked there that day. There were 25 men that worked in the building: Daniel Arce, O.V. Campbell, Jack Cason, Warren Caster, Jack Daugherty, Wesley Frazier, Charles Givens, James Jarman, Carl Jones, Spaulding Jones, Herbert Junker, Roy Lewis, William Lovelady, Joe Molina, Harold Norman, Lee Harvey Oswald, Eddie Piper, William Shelley, Edward Shields, Roy Truly, Lloyd Viles, Troy West, Bonnie Ray Williams, Otis Williams, and Steve Wilson. There were 15 warehouse workers: Daniel Arce, Wesley Frazier, Charles Givens, James Jarman, Carl Jones, Roy Lewis, William Lovelady, Harold Norma, Lee Harvey Oswald, Eddie Piper, William Shelley, Edward Shields, Troy West, and Bonnie Ray Williams. The electrical control panel was in the basement. I believe Frazier was the one turning off the electricity since he went down into the basement after the assassination to “eat his lunch.” I think Loy Factor is a false confessor like James Files.
  21. I am currently working on a new article regarding the TSBD. In that article I make the assumption that the reader has read my previous articles on the TSBD. I do not know how many readers of this forum has read those articles, so I would like to offer an old one here, and possibly more in the future. The following is an article that was printed in the Fourth Decade, Nov. 1994. It contains a section on Shelley, Lovelady, and Frazier that Jerry Rose left out, I guess because he thought it was too slanderous. So here it is, complete. ROBERT MACNEIL AND THE THREE CALM MEN by William Weston It was less than three months after the death of President Kennedy, that William Manchester had taken on the project of writing a book about the assassination. A widely respected, well-established author, Manchester had no intention of departing from the no-conspiracy conclusions of the government. He soon realized that his task was not going to be easy. Lee Oswald, the accused assassin, was a complex enigma, who often defied rational analysis. One of the most difficult challenges the author had to face was explaining Oswald's escape from the Texas School Book Depository. According to carefully tested calculations, Oswald was still in the Book Depository about two or three minutes after the shooting ended. Eight minutes later he was riding on a bus, seven blocks away. The Warren Commission firmly maintained that Oswald simply walked those seven blocks. But it had no way of proving it. Among the thousands of pedestrians and motorists who filled the streets of Dallas that day, not one apparently noticed this purposeful young man striding rapidly along the sidewalks of Elm Street. Whereas multitudes of people were advancing into the chaotic vortex of Dealey Plaza, Oswald was presumably going against the flow in his efforts to get away. This lack of eyewitness confirmation would not have been a serious problem had it not been for the persistence of a credible eyewitness who was sure that Oswald left in a Nash Rambler. Contravening details like these threatened to unravel the whole lone-assassin scenario. A turning point in Manchester's research came when he discovered a document in the files of the FBI. It was a written statement by a news reporter named Robert MacNeil, who worked for NBC News Radio. After studying this report, Manchester was convinced that he had found a witness who could support the official reconstruction of Oswald's escape. He picked up the phone and called MacNeil at his office in New York. Although the latter remembered the incident, he was unable to recall any more details than what he had already given to the FBI. Even more disappointing was his inability to say for certain that the man he spoke to was Oswald. [1] Yet this was not an insurmountable difficulty. Manchester believed that he had enough evidence to make a positive identification unnecessary. In his mind, the encounter between Oswald and MacNeil was an important event, filling a major gap in his narrative of the assassination. Manchester was not carefully reading his sources, for the eminent historian had relied on an incident that was entirely fictitious. Prior to Oswald's arrest, there was never a time when the news reporter or the accused assassin had ever seen each other face to face. Yet Manchester was right about one thing. MacNeil's statement is indeed an important document, not for what it says about Oswald, but rather for what it reveals concerning the conspiracy that resulted in the death of a President. Especially illuminating is the description of three men, calm and relaxed, on the ground floor of the Book Depository. The strange tableau of the three calm men, so unnatural in comparison to the panic and alarm outside, is an indication that these men were involved in the plot to murder the chief executive. This article explores MacNeil's story as it pertains not only to the Book Depository but also to the grassy knoll. WHERE DID MACNEIL SAY THE SHOTS CAME FROM? Robert MacNeil was a reporter on the White House staff, accompanying the President on his five-city tour of Texas. When the motorcade left Love Field in Dallas, MacNeil was riding with other reporters in a press bus about eight cars behind the presidential limousine. [2] As the bus moved down Houston Street, the reporters heard a loud noise which some people interpreted as coming from a firecracker. MacNeil thought it was a shot. Other reporters said "no" or were not sure. A few seconds later, two more explosive noises re¬sounded through the bus. MacNeil stood up and said, "They were shots! Stop the bus! Stop the bus!" The bus was by then turning the corner from Houston Street onto Elm. The driver opened the door and MacNeil jumped out. No one else followed him. Although the presidential limousine was no longer in sight, MacNeil quickly realized that there had been a shooting. The air was fi lied with screams and cries; people on both sides of the street had thrown themselves onto the grass to avoid getting hit. Several police officers and spectators were running up a grassy slope toward a tree-lined wooden fence, apparently in pursuit of a gunman. MacNeil followed them, and ended up at a spot where the wooden fence joined the railroad overpass. There is a photograph of MacNeil standing among the cluster of people, looking over the fence toward the railroad tracks. [3] At the instant the picture was taken, MacNeil was no longer looking over the fence. Instead, he had turned his head to look over his left shoulder. He was undoubtedly scanning the area for some place that might have a phone. He quickly decided to try the building nearest him, which happened to be the Texas School Book Depository. He ran in that direction. By the time he reached the front entrance, about four minutes had elapsed since the shooting ended. He managed to find an unused phone in the building and immediately contacted NBC News in New York. His report clearly demonstrates where MacNeil thought the shots came from: Shots were fired as President Kennedy's motorcade passed through downtown Dallas. People screamed and lay down on the grass as three shots rang out. Police chased an unknown gunman up a grassy hill. It is not known if the shots were directed at the President. Repeat. It is not known if the shots were directed at the President. This is Robert MacNeil, NBC News in Dallas. [4] Coming from an experienced and reputable newsman, this report adds more weight to the evidence that a gunman was shooting at the President from a front-facing position. Almost twenty years later MacNeil made the following comment concerning his initial impressions, "You follow your instincts and mine led me up the grassy knoll. It is one of the personal reasons I have for paying serious attention to those who claim there were shots from there as well as from the Book Depository." [5] After finishing his report, he immediately went outside and made inquiries. He quickly learned that the President had been hit in the shooting and was taken to the emergency room of Parkland Hospital. Realizing that he was stuck in Dealey Plaza, while the story was developing at the hospital, MacNeil tried to think of some ready means of transportation. No cab was in sight, but there were cars moving through the plaza via Main Street. MacNeil ran out to that street and stopped the first car that came along. After explaining his situation to the driver, he offered him five dollars to take him to the hospital. The driver accepted the offer, and MacNeil got into the car. At the newsman's urging, the driver broke speed limits racing to the hospital. Arriving just ahead of the bus that dropped him off at Dealey Plaza, MacNeil paid the driver five dollars and rushed inside. He managed to find an unused pay phone and kept NBC apprised of up-to-date developments. After the departure of Mrs. Kennedy with her entourage and the casket, MacNeil spent the rest of the afternoon keeping up with the news by watching TV with his colleagues. When a picture of Oswald was broadcast, MacNeil had no flash of recognition. [6] Later that night, he observed Oswald as he was being led down the corridor of police headquarters. Looking into his face, MacNeil saw "a strange, frightened smirk." [7] It never occurred to MacNeil that he might have seen this face several hours earlier on the steps of the Book Depository not until a year and a half later, when he received a phone call from Manchester. DID MACNEIL SEE OSWALD AS HE WAS LEAVING THE BOOK DEPOSITORY? Considering the importance of the MacNeil-Oswald en¬counter to the thesis of Manchester's work, it is indeed remarkable that the only mention of it occurs in the chronological section of his book: "12:33 p.m. [Oswald] Leaves Depository by front entrance, pausing to tell NBC's Robert MacNeil he can find a phone inside; thinks MacNeil is a Secret Service man." [8] The above notation treats the encounter as if it were a settled fact; yet behind the facade of historical accuracy is a multitude of uncertainties. MacNeil has never positively stated that he saw Oswald; Oswald never mentioned speaking to a reporter at the Book Depository. What grounds did Manchester have for including that brief chronological entry? In order to understand how Manchester discovered this incident, it is essential to realize that his source is actually a composite of two statements. Both MacNeil and Oswald described an incident in which the central feature was a request for directions to the nearest telephone. Because the time and place of each account were virtually congruent, it is therefore not unreasonable for Manchester to suppose that both men were talking about the same thing. To see how this is possible, let us first examine what MacNeil had to say in his book The Way We Were, copyrighted 1988: I ran to the right and into the first building I came to that looked as though it might have a phone. It was the Texas School Book Depository. As I ran up the steps and through the door, a young man in shirt sleeves was coming out. In great agitation I asked him where there was a phone. He pointed inside to an open space where another man was talking on the phone situated near a pillar and said "Better ask him." I was inside and asked the second man, who pointed to an office at one side. I found a telephone on the desk. Two of the Lucite buttons were lit up. I punched another, got long distance and was through to the NBC News Radio desk in about ten seconds. [9] To identify the young man as Oswald, Manchester had to compare the details in MacNeil's story to some remarks made by Oswald to a member of the Secret Service, Thomas Kelley. The following is an extract from Kelley's report: At the time he (Oswald) asked me whether I was an FBI Agent and I said that I was not that I was a member of the Secret Service. He said when he was standing in front of the Textbook Building and about to leave it, a young, crew-cut man rushed up to him and said that he was from Secret Service, showed a book of identification, and asked him where the phone was. Oswald said that he pointed toward the pay phone in the building and that he saw the man actually go to the phone before he left. [10] The circumstantial similarities that appear in both statements seem to justify the notion that MacNeil and Oswald were indeed together for a brief conversation. These similarities are: (1) MacNeil asked a man on the front steps of the Book Depository where he could find a phone. Oswald was in front of the same building when a man came up to him and asked for the location of a phone. (2) The man whom MacNeil spoke to was young and wearing a shirt. Oswald was 24 years old and had on a shirt. (3) Oswald spoke to a man who must have been wearing a suit and tie as befits a Secret Service agent; MacNeil was wearing a suit and tie. Yet here the similarities end. The differences in the other details bring intractable difficulties upon any attempt to recon¬cile them into a single incident: (1) The man whom Oswald spoke to had a crew-cut; MacNeil's hair was long enough to comb down; (2) Oswald spoke to a young man; MacNeil at the age of thirty-two was older than Oswald by eight years, It is not likely that Oswald would refer to MacNeil as "a young man," (3) MacNeil was wearing a press badge, whereas the man whom Oswald spoke to was not wearing a badge; instead he had a "book of identification" which he had to pull out of a pocket, most likely the inside pocket of his suit coat. (4) The man made a declaration to Oswald that he was a member of the Secret Service; his credentials must have also indicated that he was Secret Service. This one fact alone should dispel any speculation that Oswald spoke to MacNeil. Although superficially similar, the statements of MacNeil and Oswald are actually two separate and distinct descriptions of two entirely different episodes. Under normal circum¬stances, it would have been a remarkable coincidence to find two very similar incidents occurring at nearly the same time at virtually the same location. But the assassination was an event that completely shattered the ordinary routines of daily life. All of a sudden the need to communicate became overwhelmingly urgent, putting a huge demand on every available telephone in the area. There must have been quite a few people criss-crossing through Dealey Plaza in the search for telephones. The Book Depository would naturally have been one of the most obvious places to look. It should not be surprising to find one phone search incident at the Book Depository closely followed by another. DID OSWALD GET ON A BUS AT 12:40? According to the Warren Commission, Oswald was seen at 12:32 by Mrs. Reid on the second floor of the Book Deposi¬tory. At 12:40 he boarded Cecil McWatters' bus and was recognized by a fellow passenger named Mrs. Bledsoe, who used to be his landlady. The Warren Commission reasoned that he went out the front door at 12:33 and walked at a rapid pace to Murphy Street where he boarded the bus. No witnesses have come forward to confirm this mode and direction of escape. Manchester's dubious attempt to strengthen the official version by manufacturing an encounter between MacNeil and Oswald only served to emphasize its weakness. Even more damaging to the government's reconstruction of Oswald's movements is Sylvia Meagher's carefully reasoned analysis of the contradictory statements of the witnesses who supposedly saw Oswald on the bus. [11] While a recapitula¬tion of her analysis is beyond the limits of this article, it is sufficient to say that Meagher came to believe that neither Oswald nor Bledsoe rode on McWatters' bus that day. The accumulating weight of evidence demonstrates without a doubt that Oswald neither took a hike down Elm Street, nor did he get on a bus at Murphy Street; it also reinforces the credibility of Deputy Roger Craig, who insisted that Oswald got away in a car driven by a dark-skinned man. WHO WERE THE THREE CALM MEN? Having thus established that Mac Neil did not see Oswald on the front steps of the Book Depository, we can now return to their statements to see what direction they take us in our quest to discover the truth of the assassination. To supplement the details of the MacNeil story quoted earlier, I am providing below the complete text of the written statement that he submitted to the FBI: Just before the shooting of the President in Dallas on November 22, I was riding in the first press bus of the motorcade, some seven or eight cars behind the President. On hearing the shots I got out of the bus immediately and followed some police officers who were running up the grass slope to the right of the road and which the President was shot. We climbed a fence and I followed the police who appeared to be chasing someone, or under the impression they were chasing after someone, across the railroad tracks. Wanting to phone news of the shooting, I left there and went to the nearest place that looked like an office. It was the Texas School Book Depository. I believe I entered the front door about four minutes after the shooting. I went immediately into the clear space on the ground floor and asked where there was a phone. There were, as I recall, three men there, all I think in shirt sleeves. What, on recollection, strikes me as possibly significant is that all three seemed to be exceedingly calm and relaxed, compared to the pandemonium which existed right outside their front door. I did not pay attention to this at the time. I asked the first man I saw a man who was telephoning from a phone by a pillar in the middle of the room where I could call from. He directed me to another man nearer the door, who pointed to an office. When I got to the phone, two of the lines were lit up. I made my call and left. I do not believe any police officers entered the building before me or until I left. I was in too much of a hurry to remember what the three men looked like. But their manner was very relaxed My New York news desk has since placed the time of my call at 12:36 Dallas time. Robert MacNeil NBC New Correspondent New York November 30, 1963 [12] This account is basically consistent with the recent version, except for one conflicting detail. In the 1988 version, MacNeil addressed his query concerning the location of a phone to a man on the front steps, who "pointed inside to an open space where another man was talking on the phone situated near a pillar." In the 1963 version, MacNeil asked the first man he saw a man who was telephoning from a pillar" where he could call from. The man paused long enough to direct him to a second man who was standing nearby. It is a small, but important point. If the man who said "Better ask him" was on his way out, then it is possible that the man was indeed leaving the building at 12:33. On the other hand if the man who said "Better ask him" was himself on a telephone, then he could not have been leaving until after he finished his cal1, or sometime after 12:33. The main effect of the inconsistency in the 1988 version is to make MacNeil's story more compatible with the official version. Perhaps the best way of explaining this discrepancy is to consider the effects of an aging memory which oftentimes distorts a man's recollections. In any case, we should adopt the standard practice of historians, who select the earliest versions as the most reliable. The most striking detail in the early version is the eerie calmness of the three men he found inside the building. [13] MacNeil's amazement at this strange placidity is indicated by the way he repeated this observation for emphasis. As a group, the three men must have been united by a common purpose. Whatever that purpose might have been, it must have had something to do with the assassination. Any other purpose whether it be business-related or personal would have been swept aside by the crescendo of chaos just outside the front entrance. These men not only had prior knowledge of the assassination plot, but also they were performing some indispensable part in it. Their unexcitable demeanor is a distinctive trademark of disciplined agents trained to carry out a special mission. Thus the question of who the man was who aided MacNeil in his search for a phone broadens to his two companions. Who were these three men? Let us see how far we can narrow the range of possibilities by examining the clues contained in the 1963 statement. One thing that should be noted is the free and casual manner by which the three men occupied their surroundings. They could not have been strangers who had just walked in off the street. Their familiarity with the ground floor of the Book Depository is indicated by their precise and ready knowledge of the location of telephones. Only employees who come to work on a regular basis could have acquired such a comprehensive awareness of incidental details. Therefore the three men must have been workers whom other employees in the building would have recognized. On the 22nd of November there were sixty-nine people who came to work that day. Of that sixty-nine, thirty-six were women and twenty-three were men. Thus our field of inquiry narrows from an infinite range of possibilities to less than a couple dozen. Of the twenty-four men who came to work, nine had gone outside to watch the motorcade. The other fifteen were either the inside the building at the time of the shooting or had gone inside immediately afterwards. Three of these men were management personnel: Steve Wilson, Otis Williams, and Roy Truly. Steve Wilson, the manager of a publishing company, remained in his office on the third floor. Otis Williams was standing on the steps of the Book Depository when the shooting occurred. Immediately afterwards he went inside and headed for the back stairs and climbed them up to the fourth floor in order to see the activity at the Triple Underpass, where he thought the shots originated. Roy Truly went up to the roof with Officer Marion Baker where a gunman was thought to be posted. Thus we can eliminate Wilson, Williams, and Truly as being among those who were on the ground floor when Robert MacNeil came in. The remaining eleven men were all warehouse workers. Eight of these warehouse men were Negroes. Although MacNeil did not specifically mention skin color, we can be sure that he would not have omitted such an obvious characteristic in his description of the three men. Thus the eight black workers can be eliminated from consideration. This leaves five men: Jack Daugherty, William Shelley, Billy Lovelady, Wesley Frazier, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Jack Daugherty could not have been one of the three, for he was up on the fifth floor during the shooting and came down at 12:33 by means of the west freighter. As soon as he came down, he immediately got in a discussion about the shooting with a fellow worker named Eddie Piper, a Negro warehouseman. [13] Daugherty would not have had time to stand with two other men by the pay phone, when MacNeil came into the building. We can rule out Oswald as one of the three men for two reasons. For one thing MacNeil did not later recall seeing Oswald before, when he saw him that same night at the police station. Since MacNeil was close enough to the three men to interact with two of them, MacNeil would most likely have remembered Oswald if he were one of the three. Furthermore Oswald was on the second floor at least until 12:32 or 12:33. He would not have been able to go down the stairs and lounge around with two companions by the time MacNeil came in at 12:34. When taken together, these considerations make a strong argument that Oswald was not one of the three. Thus through a process of elimination, we have remaining three warehouse workers: Shelley, Lovelady, and Frazier. WHERE WERE SHELLEY, LOVELADY, AND FRAZIER? When the shooting occurred at 12:30, a news photographer named James Altgens took a picture of the presidential limousine under fire. In the background, standing on the front steps, was Billy Lovelady. At 12:31, two women, Victoria Adams and a fellow worker, came down the stairs in the back corner of the building. They saw two men near the two freight elevators. They knew them as Billy Lovelady and William Shelley. [15] At 12:32 Police Officer Marion Baker and warehouse manager Roy Truly came rushing in to go up to the roof. Before going up the stairs, Truly paused to tell Shelly to guard the stairs and elevators to make sure no one uses them. [16] At 12:33 a brown suit coat man, who was previously seen by Carolyn Walther on the fifth floor standing next to a gunman, was seen by Worrell rushing out the back door. The brown suitcoat man was seen by another witness named Richard Carr getting into a Nash Rambler driven by a dark-skinned man. [17] In order to get out of the building, he must have used the west freight elevator and passed in front of Shelley and Lovelady. At 12:34 or 12:35 MacNeil came in looking for a telephone. He saw three calm men by the pay phone. From the position where the two women saw Shelley and Lovelady – about five feet east from the east elevator and about twenty feet from the back wall [18] – to the middle of the room where the phone was located, the distance was about twenty to thirty feet. The ground floor was all open space. According to an affidavit that Shelley submitted to the sheriff’s office, he made a phone call to his wife shortly after the shooting ended. [19] The earliest he could have made this call was at 12:33. It would have taken only a few seconds to walk to the pay phone from his location near the east elevator. The latest he could have finished his call would have to be before 12:40. According to an FBI report, Oswald told his interrogators that just before his departure form the scene he had a five to ten minute conversation with Shelley outside the building. [20] Sheriff’s Deputy Roger Craig saw Oswald getting away in a Nash Rambler at a time which was either 12:40 or 12:45. Thus the time when Shelley finished his call would be sometime between 12:35 and 12:40. This corresponds with the time when MacNeil was in the building. Since Lovelady was with Shelley near the stairs and eleavtors, it would be quite natural for him to follow him to the pay phone. As for Frazier, he told the Warren Commission that at 12:00 noon he went out to the front steps with Shelley and Lovelady and stayed “pretty close” to them while waiting for the appearance of the President. [22] When he was asked to account for his movements after the shooting, Frazier siad that he went back inside to a spot near Shelley’s office and “talked with some guys . . . right near the telephone.” [23] The strange calmness that MacNeil noticed in the men he saw would be an apt description for the behavior of Shelley, Lovelady, and Frazier. When the two women came down the stairs to the ground floor, they saw Lovelady and Shelley and announced to them that the President had been shot. They made no reply. [24] Neither did they any move from their spot by the stairs and elevators. They were still there when Baker and Truly came in about a minute or two later. [25] Their lack of activity or comment indicates indifference or else a dedication to some unknown task. Frazier also seemed to have a lackadaisical attitude toward the pandemonium going on outside. After spending a few minutes talking to fellow workers near the telephone, he had the odd notion of going down into the basement to eat his lunch alone. He spent about ten minutes down there. [26] The phone call that Shelley made occurred within a ten minute interval of time separting two improtant events. One was the escape of the brown suitcoat man out the back door of the Book Depository at 12:33. The other was the departure of Oswald at 12:40 or 12:45 in a Nash Rambler driven by a dark-skinned man. Because of Shelley’s close proximity to both incidents, it is likely that his phone call was not an innocent one. Given his key location at the center of conspiratorial activities, it is more probable that the purpose of his phone call was to report the safe departure of the brown suitcoat man and to confirm Oswald’s need for a driver to take him away from the area. Linking Oswald to the brown suitcoat man was the fact that both of them left in a Nash Rambler driven by a dark-skinned man. Linking Shelley to the conspiracy was his close proximity to the escape of the brown suitcoat man and to the escape of Oswald. That Frazier and Lovelady were closely associated with Shelley at this time is an indication of their complicity as well. WHO WAS THE MAN THAT OSWALD SPOKE TO? According to the Warren Report, all Secret Service agents remained at their posts during the race to the hospital. None stayed at the scene of the shooting, and none entered the Texas School Book Depository at or immediately after the shooting." [27] The first agent to arrive in the area came about 20 to 25 minutes after the shooting. There is however a lot of evidence indicating that unknown men were impersonating Secret Service agents. When Ser¬geant D.V. Harkness went to the rear of the Book Depository building at 12:36, he found some agents already there. I didn't get them identified. They told me they were Secret Service agents." Police officer J.M. Smith found a suspicious man in the parking lot behind the grassy knoll, who claimed he was a Secret Service agent and even displayed his credentials. [28] Roger Craig talked to a man on the front steps of the Book Depository who also claimed he was with the Secret Service. [29] Officially there were no agents in the area at the time when Oswald came out of the building. Yet the man whom he encountered said he was one, and even took out a book of identification. Evidently, the man was a conspirator, posing as an agent. WHAT REALLY HAPPENED? The following is a chronology of events [30] which puts the MacNeil and the Oswald incidents within the context of what was happening in the Texas School Book Depository (some of the following times are approximations): 12:25 Electrical power goes out (6H1395, Geneva Hine). The two freight elevators are stuck on the fifth floor. 12:29 The brown suitcoat man is seen standing next to a gunman on the fifth floor. 12:30 Lovelady is photographed by an AP photographer at the front entrance, viewing the assassination. 12:31 Lovelady and Shelley are seen near the freight elevators by Adams and a fellow worker. 12:32 Shelley receives instructions from Truly to guard the elevator. Truly and Baker go up the stairs to search the rooftop. 12:33 Electrical power restored. Brown suitcoat man comes down from fifth floor using west elevator. He leaves by the back door. He is next seen by Richard Carr entering a Nash Rambler. 12:34 Shelley makes a phone call. Frazier and Lovelady are nearby. 12:34 MacNeil enters the building looking for a phone. He sees three calm men. 12:35 Oswald comes down from the second floor; goes outside, where he talks with Shelley for five or ten minutes. On his way out he pauses to help a Secret Service man (?) find a telephone. 12:45 Oswald is seen leaving in a Nash Rambler. The observations of people like Hine, Walther, Adams, Truly, Baker, Worrell, Carr, MacNeil, and Craig are like snapshots of suspicious activities in progress. Looking at any one of these snapshots in isolation does not tell us very much, and in some instances are totally baffling in what they are said to be depicting. Yet when these snapshots are lined up in their proper chronological sequence, they reveal a distinct pattern of conspiracy and how it unfolded at the Book Depository. That concatenation of snapshots leads not to Cecil McWatter's bus; but rather it leads to a Nash Rambler driven by a dark-skinned man. Notes 1. Robert MacNeil, The Right Place at the Right Time (Little, Brown and Co.: Boston-Toronto, 1982), p. 213. 2. MacNeil, Right Place, pp. 198-212. 3. Robert MacNeil, The Way We Were (Carroll & Graf: New York, 1988), p. 195. 4. MacNeil, Right Place, p. 208. 5. MacNeil, Right Place, p. 214. MacNeil's views on the assassination have not been consistent. In 1980 he endorsed the book of pro-conspiracy author, Anthony Summers. In 1988, he was on a talk show supporting the findings of the Warren Commission. See the article "Disinformation: Fun with Bob, Dick, and Larry" by Jan R. Stevens in the March 1989 issue of The Third Decade. 6. MacNeil, Right Place, p. 213. 7. MacNeil, Right Place. p. 214. 8. William Manchester, The Death of a President (Harper and Row: New York 1967), p. 279. Pierce Allman, who was a reporter for WFAA-TV in Dallas, told the Secret Service that he went into the Book Depository in search of a phone. He said Oswald himself directed him to a phone. According to Allman, the incident occurred just as Oswald described it to inspector Kelley. For some reason which I am not aware of, Manchester chose to believe that MacNeil was the man whom Oswald spoke to, and not Allman (CD 354). 9. MacNeil, The Way We Were, p. 196. 10. 24H479. 11. Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 75 82). 12. FBI report by Gerald V. Carswell and James 1. Rogers on 12/3/63, File No. NY 89-75. 13. WR 52. 14. Meagher, Accessories, pp. 25-27. 15. Roger Craig, When They Kill a President, unpublished manuscript. 16. 6H388 (Adams). 17. Shelley affidavit, 24H226. 18. For an analysis of the movements of the brown coat man, see Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas (Bernard Geis, 1967), pp. 237-244. 19. An excerpt from the FBI report concerning Oswald's meeting with Shelley is in "The Transplantation of the Texas School Book Depository" in the Sept. 1993 issue of The Third Decade. 20. 61-1266 (Craig). 21. For more information on the events of this chronology, please see my previous articles in the following issues of The Third Decade: Nov. 1992; May 1993; and Sept. 1993.
  22. I live in California and work as a proofreader at a print shop doing business forms. I have written a number of JFK articles that were printed in The Fourth Decade and the Dealey Plaza Echo. I would like to be part of the forum to share research and get information from other members.
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