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Posts posted by Douglas Caddy
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Part 2 is now available for viewing.
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Rare ‘Times Herald’ photos, thousands of Dallas documents related to JFK assassination now online
Dallas News
11:44 am on November 12, 2013 -
Dallas Street closures during JFK commemorations
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/transportation/20131111-street-closures-during-jfk-commemorations.ece
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Cold Case JFK on NOVA on 11/13/2013
Can modern forensic science uncover fresh clues about the assassination?
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John Simkin writes on my Facebook page today: “I believe that Rafael (Chi Chi) Quintero was one of the gunman who killed John F. Kennedy.”
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CIA hit in 1950s mirrors JFK assassination
Neither accused killer lived to tell his story
November 3, 2013
http://www.wnd.com/2013/11/cia-hit-in-1950s-mirrors-jfk-assassination/#lVtxKoR98ijQgFHg.99
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Alan Dale interviews Jefferson Morley
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A Miami police informant, a prophetic racist and fresh questions about JFK’s death
By Dan Christensen, BrowardBulldog.org
November 12, 2013
At 94, former Miami Beach mayor and still active Miami-Dade Senior Judge Seymour Gelber is among the few who remember Miami police informant No. 88, Willie Augustus Somersett.
“Willie was just a garrulous guy,” said Gelber, who worked with Somersett while serving as a top assistant to Dade State Attorney Richard Gerstein in the 1960s. “He’d come in and joke, and (Assistant State Attorney) Arthur Huttoe and I would take his testimony.”
Somersett has been dead 43 years. But in the half-century of assassination lore that’s grown up around the murder of President John F. Kennedy, Somersett has attained a kind of immortality as the man who heard about it first.
You won’t find Somersett’s name in the 26 volumes published by the Warren Commission, the official government investigation that concluded Lee Harvey Oswald was Kennedy’s lone assassin.
Yet 13 days before that dark day in Dallas, Somersett elicited a chilling, police tape-recorded threat from a right-wing racist who talked of how the President would soon be shot “from an office building with a high-powered rifle” and how “they’ll pick up somebody within hours after…just to throw the public off.”
[photo] Miami police informant Willie Somersett, left, and right wing extremist Joseph Milteer
Extremist Joseph A. Milteer, of Quitman, Ga., made the threat against Kennedy in the kitchen of Somersett’s small apartment in downtown Miami. Was it dumb luck or advance knowledge? Milteer’s uncanny prediction remains unexplained to this day.
In the late 1970s, the House Assassinations Committee had experts analyze a photograph taken in Dealey Plaza moments before the first shot of an unidentified motorcade spectator “who bears a strong resemblance” to Milteer. The experts, however, concluded the man was not Milteer, who died in 1974.
But now, a retired FBI agent who says that within hours of the assassination he was assigned to locate Milteer has told BrowardBulldog.org the man in the photograph is indeed Milteer.
“I stood next to the man. I interviewed him and spent hours with him,” said Don Adams, who spent 20 years with the FBI before working as a police chief in Ohio. “There is no question in my mind. As soon as I saw that picture I almost fell off of my feet.”
Is the man in the photo Joseph Milteer? Former FBI Agent Donald Adams says yes.
Congressional investigators never contacted Adams, even though he was identified in several FBI reports as having interviewed Milteer. Instead, the record indicates they relied on a probability study rather than live witnesses who actually knew Milteer to determine what the photograph showed.
Adams, now 82, says he saw the Dealey Plaza photograph for the first time a decade after his 1982 retirement from the FBI. The photograph renewed his interest in the case and ultimately led him to write the book, From an Office Building with a High-Powered Rifle, published last year by TrineDay. His insider’s account raises disturbing questions about the FBI’s investigation of Kennedy’s death.
Events leading to Willie Somersett’s Nov. 9, 1963 recorded talk with Milteer began 21 months earlier after a bomb exploded outside the home of Miami Herald Editor Don Shoemaker. The city’s entire detective force was assigned to the case, according to news accounts at the time.
Somersett, a part-time union organizer with right-wing ties and a track record as a paid FBI snitch, came forward to point the finger. Gelber credits the information he provided with leading authorities to identify and convict the bomber – a Nazi sympathizer who worked as a meter reader for the city of Miami.
Records show the FBI had dropped Somersett for a while as an informant in 1961 “for indiscretions…which threatened to expose a reliable Bureau informant.” By 1963, however, the FBI had given him the code name “T-2” and reports described him as “a source who has furnished reliable information in in the past.”
In the months following the Shoemaker bomb case, Somersett remained on the Miami PD’s payroll as part of a broader investigation into extremist and racist groups suspected of engaging in violence that authorities feared might spill into Miami.
It was at an April 1963 meeting in New Orleans of the Congress of Freedom Party, a confederation of right-wing political groups, where Somersett hooked up with Milteer, an old friend and a representative of the notoriously violent Dixie Klan faction of the Ku Klux Klan.
Somersett saw Milteer again in Indianapolis in October at the convention of the far-right Constitution Party. As a member of that group’s board of directors, Milteer helped formulate “plans to put an end to the Kennedy, (Martin Luther) King, Khrushchev dictatorship over our nation.”
Gelber, the father of former State Sen. Dan Gelber, kept a diary back then about his work as a prosecutor. He wrote, “Somersett frequently uses the expression ‘the most violent man I know’” to describe Milteer. “I am beginning to suspect he is intuitively separating the talkers from the doers.”
Following the meeting in Indianapolis, Gelber suggested police tape-record Milteer during an upcoming trip to Miami.
Detective Everett Kay, Somersett’s police contact, set up a tape-recorder in a broom closet in Somersett’s residence in a building in the 1300 block of North Miami Avenue. Today, the former apartment building is a giant billboard.
What follows is a partial transcript. You can listen to the tape and read the entire transcript by clicking here.
Somersett: Kennedy’s coming here, I think, on the 18th or something like that to make some kind of speech…
Milteer: You can bet your bottom dollar he is going to have a lot to say about the Cubans because there are so many of them here.
Somersett: Yeah, well, he will have a thousand bodyguards. Don’t worry about that.
Milteer: The more bodyguards he has, the more easier it is to get him.
Somersett: What?
Milteer: The more bodyguards he has the more easier it is to get him.
Somersett: Well, how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?
Milteer: From an office building with a high-powered rifle…
Somersett: They are really going to try to kill him?
Milteer: “Oh, yeah. It’s in the working…
Milteer mentions the name of a Klansman who might do the job, someone he claimed had stalked Dr. King, “but couldn’t get close enough to him.” Shortly, the conversation returned to the President.
Somersett: Hitting this Kennedy I’ll tell you is going to be a hard proposition, I believe. Now you may have it figured out how to get him…an office building and all that, but I don’t know how them Secret Service…they’d never cover all them office buildings and anywhere he’s going. Do you know whether they do that or not?
Milteer: If they have any suspicion they will, of course. But without suspicion the chances are they wouldn’t….You wouldn’t have to take a gun up there…take it up in pieces. All those guns come knock down and you can take them apart.”
Before the end of the tape, the conversation returned to Kennedy.
Somersett: Boy, if that Kennedy gets shot we’ve got to know where we’re at because you know that would be a real shake if they do that.
Milteer: They wouldn’t leave any stone unturned there, no. No way.
Somersett: Oh, hell no.
Milteer: Hell, they’ll pick up somebody within hours after, if anything like that would happen, just to throw the public off.
Somersett: Well, somebody is going to have to go to jail if he gets killed.
Milteer: Just like Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh case, you know.
President Kennedy came to Miami on Nov. 18 without incident and attended the Inter-American Press Association dinner at the Americana Hotel in Bal Harbour. In his diary, Gelber wrote that police assured him the Secret Service knew Milteer’s whereabouts.
The 1979 report by the House Assassinations Committee says Miami police intelligence officers met with Secret Service agents on Nov. 12 and provided a transcript of the Somersett recording. The Miami Secret Service case agent forwarded the report and a copy of the recording to headquarters in Washington.
On Nov. 18, Miami Secret Service Agent Robert Jamison of Miami had Somersett call Milteer to verify that he was home in Georgia. He was.
[photo] Joseph Milteer’s former home in Quitman, Ga. Photo: Dan Christensen
But Milteer’s threat “was ignored by Secret Service personnel in planning the trip to Dallas,” according to the House report. Detective Kay and other former police officials said a planned motorcade in Miami was abandoned because of Milteer’s threat, but the House committee later found that was not the case.
Gelber, a senior judge in Miami-Dade’s child support enforcement division, said the FBI, too, was notified.
While it was Gelber’s belief the FBI didn’t immediately follow up, they did. FBI Agent Adams, based in Thomasville, Ga., said Atlanta Special Agent In Charge James McMahon told him about a threat to the president and on Nov. 13 ordered to him to do a “top priority” background investigation on Milteer. Adams says he submitted his report on November 18.
Word of Milteer’s threat may even have reached President Kennedy himself.
In testimony before the Warren Commission in May 1964, former presidential aide Kenneth O’Donnell said the President talked of such an assassination scenario in his Fort Worth hotel room 30 minutes before leaving for Carswell Air Force Base and the short flight to Dallas.
O’Donnell: Well, as near as I can recollect he was commenting to his wife on the function of the Secret Service and his interpretation of their role once the trip had commenced, in that their main function was to protect him from crowds, and to see that an unruly or sometimes an overexcited crowd did not generate into a riot, at which the President of the United States could be injured. But he said that if anybody really wanted to shoot the President of the United States, it was not a very difficult job–all one had to do was get a high building some day with a telescopic rifle, and there was nothing anybody could do to defend against such an attempt on the President’s life.
Five hours after the assassination Atlanta Agent-in-Charge McMahon sent an “urgent” FBI teletype to his counterparts in Dallas and Miami and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover citing a “threat to kill Pres. Kennedy by J.A. Milteer at Miami, Fla., Nov. nine last” and reporting, without attribution, that” Milteer’s whereabouts at Quitman, Ga. this date ascertained.”
[photo] Former FBI agent Donald Adams
Adams, however, says that’s not true. He says he knows because within hours of the assassination McMahon assigned him to locate Milteer for the Secret Service, and by about 4 p.m. he was knocking on Milteer’s door in Quitman. Milteer was nowhere to be found.
Adams spent the next four days canvassing Milteer’s “known haunts” in southern Georgia before locating him in nearby Valdosta, Ga. on Nov. 27. Adams called Agent Kenneth Williams for backup and later that evening the two men stopped and questioned Milteer.
A Dec. 1, 1963 report filed by Adams and Williams says Milteer “emphatically” denied ever making any threat against President Kennedy and denied knowing Oswald or Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer.
The report, and documentation about it, shows the agents never confronted Milteer with his words from the tape-recorded threat. Adams says that’s because his FBI superiors never informed him that a tape of the threat had been made, and limited the scope of the questioning.
Instead of charging Milteer with making a death threat against the president the FBI’s McMahon told Adams to release Milteer “since there was no indication he was involved in the assassination.”
Meanwhile, police in Miami learned that Somersett rendezvoused with Milteer in Jacksonville the day after the assassination before traveling together to Columbia, S.C. for a KKK meeting.
Milteer was jubilant about Kennedy’s death, Somersett told the Miami Police.
“He said, ‘Well, I told you so. It happened like I told you, didn’t it?’” Somersett said, according to one report. “I said, ‘That’s right. I don’t know whether you were guessing or not, but you hit it on the head pretty good.’ He said, ‘Well, that is the way it was supposed to be done, and that is the way it was done.’”
An FBI memorandum sent Nov. 27, 1963 to Assistant Director Alan H. Belmont, the agency’s No. three official, “Milteer reportedly told Somersett he had been in Fort Worth and Dallas as well as other southern cities. He did not indicate the dates of his visits to these cities.”
Somersett last heard from Milteer on Dec. 4 when Milteer called to say the FBI had questioned him and some of his extremist pals about Kennedy. Somersett became fearful, thinking Milteer suspected him of being an informer, and apparently never saw Milteer again
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John Simkin makes Spartacus postings daily on my Facebook page that are fascinating and invaluable.
This one appeared today:
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Phone hacking trial: Kate Middleton's name found in Glenn Mulcaire list
Jury told note seized from News of the World investigator's office also included Max Clifford and Boris Johnson's names
- Lisa O'Carroll and Caroline Davies
- theguardian.com, Tuesday 12 November 2013 07.12 EST
Kate Middleton's name was found in a handwritten note by Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator employed by News of the World who hacked phones of public figures and celebrities, the Old Bailey has been told.
The prosecution showed the jury in the phone-hacking trial a note on Tuesday morning that was seized by police from Mulcaire's premises in 2006 titled "Target evaluation", with a list of 18 names.
The first name was PR agent Max Clifford but the list also included Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge. Other names on the list included Sven-Goran Eriksson, Boris Johnson, David James, Kerry Katona, Tom Parker Bowles and the former Sky presenter Andy Gray.
The court was discussing evidence in relation to the alleged hacking of the phones of Delia Smith and a stunt double used by Angelina Jolie and did not make any further reference to Middleton.
Others on the list included Helen Asprey, now personal private secretary to Prince Harry; Jamie Lowther Pinkerton, former private secretary to Prince William; and a friend of Prince Harry, Mark Dyer. Also featured were model Abi Titmuss and the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, Gordon Taylor.
Earlier on Tuesday the jury was told that Smith had been targeted by Mulcaire following an incident at Norwich football ground when she made an announcement over a tannoy. It was later alleged in the media that she was drunk.
Eunice Huthart worked as a stunt double for Jolie during the making of the Hollywood film Mr and Mrs Smith, where the actor met Brad Pitt, the court heard.
In a statement read to the court, Huthart, who became a stunt actor after appearing on the ITV show Gladiators, said in 2005 she was living in Los Angeles and shared a house with Jolie. "It was well reported in the media that we were good friends," the statement said.
Huthart said she had experienced difficulties with her mobile pin number not working and being unable to access her voicemails. Her statement added: "I had a number of conversations with Vodafone and being frustrated about why my pin number didn't work."
The court heard Huthart's details were found in Mulcaire's notebooks, and phone records showed he had accessed her UVN – unique voicemail number – on four occasions.
Mulcaire pleaded guilty to charges related to phone hacking earlier this year in proceedings that were first reported when the trial opened in late October.
The trial continues.
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The first installment of The American Experience shown last night was breathtaking. It took the viewer from his earliest childhood up to his being elected president in 1960. What a remarkable man JFK was. The whole Kennedy family was remarkable.
The second installment covering his presidency and the assassination will be shown tonight (Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2013). There is no way that I shall miss seeing it.
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Jim Garrison responds to NBC on the JFK assassination
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JFK WHITE HOUSE STAFFERS GATHER TO REMEMBER GOLDEN YEARS
Washington Post
By Melinda Henneberger
November 10, 2013
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JFK Assassination Truth After 50 Years of Conspiracy with Dick Russell
http://thelip.tv/jfk-assassination-truth-after-50-years-of-conspiracy-with-dick-russell/
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Review: PBS' 'American Experience: JFK' is the Kennedy special to see
By Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times Television Critic
November 11, 2013, 5:00 a.m.
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Inconsistencies Haunt Official Record Of Kennedy's Death
by Marcus D. Rosenbaum
November 10, 2013 5:10 AM
www.npr.org
http://www.npr.org/2013/11/10/243981006/inconsistencies-haunt-official-record-of-kennedys-death
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Textbooks reassess Kennedy, putting Camelot under siege
By Adam Clymer
The New York Times
November 11, 2013
http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/textbooks-reassess-kennedy-putting-camelot-under-siege-444562
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JFK was killed 'by a mystery bullet': Nurse claims
Daily Mail
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Overt and Covert
By ADAM LeBOR
The New York Times Book Revied
November 8, 2013
THE BROTHERS
John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War
By Stephen Kinzer
Illustrated. 402 pp. Times Books/Henry Holt & Company. $30.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/books/review/the-brothers-by-stephen-kinzer.html?ref=books&_r=0
Anyone wanting to know why the United States is hated across much of the world need look no farther than this book. “The Brothers” is a riveting chronicle of government-sanctioned murder, casual elimination of “inconvenient” regimes, relentless prioritization of American corporate interests and cynical arrogance on the part of two men who were once among the most powerful in the world.
John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, were scions of the American establishment. Their grandfather John Watson Foster served as secretary of state, as had their uncle Robert Lansing. Both brothers were lawyers, partners in the immensely powerful firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, whose New York offices were for decades an important link between big business and American policy making.
John Foster Dulles served as secretary of state from 1953 to 1959; his brother ran the C.I.A. from 1953 to 1961. But their influence was felt long before these official appointments. In his detailed, well-constructed and highly readable book, Stephen Kinzer, formerly a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a columnist for The Guardian, shows how the brothers drove America’s interventionist foreign policy.
Kinzer highlights John Foster Dulles’s central role in channeling funds from the United States to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Indeed, his friendship with Hjalmar Schacht, the Reichsbank president and Hitler’s minister of economics, was crucial to the rebuilding of the German economy. Sullivan & Cromwell floated bonds for Krupp A. G., the arms manufacturer, and also worked for I. G. Farben, the chemicals conglomerate that later manufactured Zyklon B, the gas used to murder millions of Jews. Of course, the Dulles brothers’ law firm was hardly alone in its eagerness to do business with the Nazis — many on Wall Street and numerous American corporations, including Standard Oil and General Electric, had “interests” in Berlin. And Allen Dulles at least had qualms about operating in Nazi Germany, pushing through the closure of the Sullivan & Cromwell office there in 1935, a move his brother opposed.
Allen Dulles spent much of World War II working for the Office of Strategic Services, running the American intelligence operation out of the United States Embassy in Bern, Switzerland. His shadowy networks extended across Europe, and his assets included his old friend Thomas McKittrick, the American president of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, a key point in the transnational money network that helped keep Germany in business during the war.
The O.S.S. was dissolved in 1945 by President Truman, but was soon reborn as the C.I.A. Kinzer notes that Truman did not support plots against foreign leaders but his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, had no such scruples. By 1953, with Allen Dulles running the C.I.A. and his brother in charge of the State Department, the interventionists’ dreams could come to fruition. Kinzer lists what he calls the “six monsters” that the Dulles brothers believed had to be brought down: Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Sukarno in Indonesia, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Fidel Castro in Cuba. Only two of these, Ho Chi Minh and Castro, were hard-core Communists. The rest were nationalist leaders seeking independence for their countries and a measure of control over their natural resources.
Ironically, Ho Chi Minh and Castro, strengthened perhaps by their Marxist faith, proved the most resilient. But the world still lives with the consequences of bringing down Mossadegh, who might have guided Iran, and thus world history, along a very different path. The 1953 C.I.A.-sponsored coup that brought Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power was seared into Iran’s national consciousness, fueling a reservoir of fury that was released with the Islamic revolution of 1979.
The Iranian section of Kinzer’s book is especially strong. Here he calls attention to the cancellation by the Iranian Parliament of a contract for what was said to be “the largest overseas development project in modern history” with Overseas Consultants Inc., an American engineering conglomerate. But it seems likely that it was the Iranian Parliament’s vote to nationalize the oil industry that sealed Mossadegh’s fate. (Allen Dulles represented the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, one of whose clients was the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.)
The Dulles brothers’ defenders argue that they and their legacy must be evaluated in the context of their era — the height of the Cold War, a time when the Soviet threat was real and growing, when Eastern Europe languished under Communist dictatorships sponsored by Moscow, and China had been “lost” to the Reds (although that term itself implies a curious claim of prior ownership). Moscow’s proxies were advancing in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
The brothers’ Manichaean worldview proved to be a poor tool for dealing with the complexities of the postcolonial era. Leaders like Lumumba and Mossadegh might well have been open to cooperation with the United States, seeing it as a natural ally for enemies of colonialism. However, for the Dulles brothers, and for much of the American government, threats to corporate interests were categorized as support for communism. “For us,” John Foster Dulles once explained, “there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others.” Rejected by the United States, the new leaders turned to Moscow.
The brothers’ accomplishments in the geopolitical arena were not mirrored in their personal lives. Although Allen Dulles was a flagrant womanizer and John Foster remained devoted to his wife, they were, Kinzer observes, “strikingly similar in their relationships with their children. Both were distant, uncomfortable fathers.” John Foster’s three children were raised by nannies “and discouraged from intruding on their parents’ world.” Allen’s only son joined the Marines in a vain effort to impress his father, who “never found him ‘tough’ enough.” He was sent to Korea and almost died when shrapnel tore out part of his skull. He spent years being treated for his wounds. Allen’s older daughter suffered from depression throughout her life. Neither John Foster nor Allen attended the wedding of their “independent-minded” sister, Eleanor, when she married a divorced older man who came from an Orthodox Jewish family.
There are also reminders in Kinzer’s book of dark events in the history of American intelligence. Sixty years ago, Frank Olson, a C.I.A. officer, was reported to have jumped to his death during mind-control experiments “in which psychoactive drugs were administered to unknowing victims.” But last year, Kinzer reports, Olson’s family filed suit, claiming he had actually been murdered after visiting secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe. More detailed archival references here and elsewhere would have been useful. Although Kinzer provides a lengthy bibliography and extensive notes on books, articles and other materials available on the Internet, the references for the primary sources, which should detail archives, collections and precise file numbers, are meager.
Eventually, the United States government tired of Allen Dulles’s schemes. President Johnson privately complained that the C.I.A. had been running “a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean,” an entirely accurate assessment — except the beneficiaries were American corporations rather than organized crime. Nowadays, the Dulles brothers have faded from America’s collective memory. The bust of John Foster, once on view at the airport west of Washington that bears his name, has been relocated to a private conference room. Outside the world of intelligence aficionados, Allen Dulles is little known. Yet both these men shaped our modern world and America’s sense of its “exceptionalism.” They should be remembered, Kinzer argues, precisely because of their failures: “They are us. We are them.”
Adam LeBor’s latest nonfiction book is “Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World.”
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A Guide to All the JFK Television Specials this month
by Andrew Kirell | November 7th, 2013
www.mediaite.com
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/a-guide-to-all-the-jfk-specials-that-will-air-on-tv-this-month/
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the following is from The People's Almanac #2,
David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace (NY: Bantam Books, 1978), pp. 47-52.
THE LAST WORDS OF LEE HARVEY OSWALD
Compiled by Mae Brussell
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Lee Harvey Oswald Was My Friend
By Paul Gregory
The New York Times Magazine
Published November 7, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/magazine/lee-harvey-oswald-was-my-friend.html?hpw&rref=magazine
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TIME: The JFK Image So Awful I Had To Cover My Screen
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
The JFK Image So Awful I Had To Cover My Screen
Time.com,
By Valerie Lapinski
November 12, 2013
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/11/12/the-jfk-image-so-awful-i-had-to-cover-my-screen-two-weeks-with-the-zapruder-film/#ixzz2kZJc9opU