Paul Rigby

The latest edition of Lobster, #58, is the first available in toto online. Follow this link to download a copy:

http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/issue58.php

There's a very interesting piece on Simon Dee and the US/CIA backing of pirate radio stations etc. Do read it.

Let me say that Doug Horne has been extremely generous in acknowledging the previous work by Jack White, David Mantik, David Healy, John Costella, and David Lifton, who are those who have made the most important contributions to establishing that the Z-film has been recreated...

A very important pioneer has been overlooked, a critic who got there thirty-five years ago...

"The considered opinions of our two film restoration professionals, who together have spent over five decades restoring and working with films of the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (when visual effects were done optically--not digitally), in that one moment superseded the statements of all those in the JFK research community who have insisted for two decades now that the Zapruder film could not have been altered, because the technology did not exist to do so. Our two restoration experts know special effects in modern motion picture films far better than Josiah Thompson, or David Wrone, or Gary Mack, or Robert Groden, or me, for that matter; and their subjective opinion [better: professional judgment] trumps Rollie Zavada's as well--a man who has absolutely no experience whatsoever in the post production of visual effects in motion picture films. And while Rollie Zavada, a lifetime Kodak employee receiving retirement pay from his former employer, would certain have an apparent conflict of interest in blowing the whistle on Zapruder film forgery if his former employer was involved in its alteration, our three Hollywood film professionals had no vested interest, one way or the other, in the outcome of their examination of the 6Kscans on August 25th of 2009."

...his name was Fred Newcomb:

Fred Newcomb & Perry Adams. Murder From Within (Santa Barbara: Probe, 1974)

Chapter 4: The Filmed Assassination

One of the most important films of the murder was an 8 mm color movie taken by Abraham Zapruder. The Secret Service had first access to his original film, which was then altered in an attempt to cover up the agency’s part in the plot.

Zapruder stood mid-way between the depository and the underpass (1) and filmed the Presidential limousine from the time it turned the corner of Elm and Houston Streets until it reached the triple underpass. His untampered film recorded what occurred inside the vehicle.

A number of copies of the Zapruder film, whose clarity ranged from excellent to poor, including the films and slides at Life magazine and those at the National Archives, were made available to the authors. Each copy was carefully examined and this chapter deals basically with the results of that examination.

A movie is a series of individual pictures, or frames, in consecutive order (2). In describing the film, we refer to numbers assigned to each frame.

Description

The Presidential limousine first appears on available Zapruder film at frame 133, at a point in the street opposite the centre of the depository (3). The President, seated in the back on the right, is waving to the crowd with his right arm. He is hidden from camera view by a freeway sign, beginning at frame 203, and is shot in the throat at approximately frame 207. When he reappears from behind the sign at frame 225, his mouth is open and his hands are raised to his throat. From this point, he starts to lean forward, and to his left, until frame 313, when his head is impacted by a bullet.

Beginning with frame 305, the driver turns around, one hand on the wheel, and faces the President (4), at which point the President’s head is struck by the fatal bullet.

Between frames 313 and 323, the President is slammed backward by the impact of the shot. Between frames 323 and 340, he falls forward, and to his left, into his wife’s lap.

Mrs. Kennedy scrambles out of the limousine, over the trunk, between frames 345 and 375. Her bodyguard, Clinton J. Hill, touches the back of the limousine at frame 345, placing his foot on the car at frame 371, to assist her.

When the Governor reappears from behind the freeway sign at frame 223, he is looking to his right. Then he begins to turn his head forward. Between frames 227 and 230, he raises his hat (the whereabouts of which, possibly containing bullet hole, is unknown) up-and-down in reaction. At frame 233, he starts to raise his left forearm and to turn to his right again. The Governor’s mouth is open. Between frames 255 and 292, he continues to turn his head to the right, exposing his back to the front seat, until he is looking at the President. At frame 285, he is shot. He is then pulled backward by his wife.

After the fatal shot to the President at frame 313, the Governor begins to pull himself up, placing his right hand on the metal handhold on the top of the back of the front seat. At frame 323, he is sitting up, looking into the front seat.

A visible flare on the windshield of the limousine occurs at frame 330 as the result of another shot.

Authentication

For the Warren Commission, an FBI photographic expert numbered each frame of the Zapruder film. The first frame of the motorcade sequence was number “1” and the following frames were counted in order (5).

In its published record of the film, the Commission printed black-and-white photographs of frame 171 through 334. This is just before the limousine disappears behind the freeway sign until just before Mrs. Kennedy begins to climb out of the back seat (6).

The same numbering was used for those available copies of the Zapruder film that the authors examined. Each copy was placed on a viewer that allowed every frame to be seen and counted individually.

The examined copies agreed with the published version. For example, frame 171 of the copies we examined was identical to the published frame 171. The head shot at frame 313 in the copies was the same as frame 313 printed by the Commission.

All available copies were a single, continuous strip of film, without any mechanical splices.

In sum, those available copies matched the film that the Warren Commission viewed.

The original Zapruder film, however, seems to be unavailable.

Cuts

Between the period that Zapruder took his film and the Commission saw it, the film was altered.

Available copies that we examined showed splices present (Fig. 4-3). All splices were photographic, i.e., the mechanical splices of the original were copied onto the duplicates (7).

The following is an inventory of our examination.

Splices in frames 152-159 concern the period after the limousine turned Elm and Houston Streets and before the freeway sign.

Frame 152 is spliced at the bottom of the frame. In the next frame, splices exist at both top and bottom. In addition, the color changes. Instead of the previous warm color, the frames have a bluish cast. A great difference between frames 153 and 152 is indicated by the movement of the limousine: it makes an extremely rapid forward lurch indicating frames are missing here.

Frame 154 has a splice at the top and is bluish in cast. Frame 155 contains a splice at the top third of the frame. Splicing tape marks are present in the foreground of frame 156, which is also bluish; a crude splicing gap appears at the base. A splice may exist at the lower third of frame 159.

The next sequence in which splicing and color change occur is during the that period when the limousine is hidden by the freeway sign.

There is a possible splice in the top eighth of frame 205. Splicing tape adhesive marks are visible on the freeway sign in frame 206. Frame 206 has a bluish cast, as do frames 207-212.

Frame 207 is spliced at the top. A splice may have been made on frame 210 near the bottom. On frame 211, splicing adhesive tape marks are present. Splicing adhesive covers frame 212; a crude cut out is at the base. Frame 213 has a splice at the top; the color changes back to warm hues. At frame 215, a splice line runs across the top fourth of the frame.

Color change indicates that different copies of the film were used to produce one continuous film (8).

A graph, made to show the feet the limousine traveled per frame number, indicates the limousine moved about 20 feet every 20 frames (Fig. 4-4). Between frames 197 and 218, when the limousine is behind the freeway sign, it moved only 10 feet within 21 frames. This means that the limousine either slowed down or stopped between frames 197 and 218. If it stopped then an unaccountable number of frames could have been removed.

Throughout the entire Zapruder film, nothing indicates that frames have been added. What is clear is that frames have been removed. Time has been deleted from the film. With time removed, the film is useless as a clock for the assassination.

Retouching

Retouching has been done with the image of the driver in the film between frames 214-333. It appears after the limousine emerges from behind the freeway sign. Retouching is evident on the front of the limousine windshield on the driver’s side to obscure his movements. The author’s reconstruction film, taken of a car on Elm Street, under similar lighting conditions, on Nov. 22, 1969, at 12:30 p.m., shows the driver’s motions clearly through the windshield.

Retouching may also occur at the top of the freeway sign to obscure the action of the occupants and to hide the shot hitting the President in the throat.

The object in the driver’s hand is barely visible between frames 285 and 297, the sequence of the Governor’s wounds. Between frames 303-317, it is easily seen. The telling feature, especially in the latter sequence, is the action: the driver raises it, seems to aim, and, then, in the frame immediately after the fatal shot to the President in frame 313, brings it down.

Although splicing marks were undetectable about frame 313, it is likely that frames were removed and the remaining retouched. The appearance of frame 313 is vital to the health of the scenario.

Given the forward inclination of the President’s head at the time of the fatal shot (Fig. 4-5), a line drawn through the actual points of entrance and exit is horizontal. If a rifleman fired from above and behind, the line between the points of exit and entrance would be at an angle.

To camouflage evidence of a shot from the front, the actual exit wound at the side of the head (Fig. 4-5) was covered with opaque (Fig. 4-6).

Second, an exploding, bloody halo was manufactured on the film in the area around the President’s head in frame 313 (Fig. 4-6). Significantly, other films of the assassination lack this halo (9). The CBS reporter who saw the Zapruder film two days [error: three days – PR] after the assassination at a press showing made no mention of an exploding head (10). Mrs. Kennedy failed to describe this burst in her testimony (11).

The halo, a cartoon-like, red-orange burst that nearly obscures the President’s head (12), not only confuses the features of the head, but also distorts the actual and less dramatic wounding (Fig. 4-5). Furthermore, the burst occurs for one frame only – an eighteenth of a second – and does not appear in the very next frame. The film should have shown the burst developing and decaying over a sequence of perhaps 18-30 frames. For example, a film made of the effect of a rock hitting a window would require a number of frames to record the moment of impact, the spidering and splintering of the glass, then the shattering effect of the rock, and the outward showering movements of fragments, and their eventual descent to the ground.

The two Secret Service agents in the front seat and both Connallys implied a shot came from the rear by claiming that a substantial amount of debris came forward and down on them (13). No pictorial evidence verifies their claims.

A good indication of removal of frames during the fatal shot sequence is found in the out-of-sequence movements of the legs of a woman running across the lawn in the background. The rhythm of her running is broken unnaturally, e.g., running on her left leg twice, which would indicate frame removal.

Retouching can be seen in a comparison of frames 317 and 321 (Fig. 4-7). The President and his wife appear large in frame 321, even though the dimensions of the two frames are equal in size. Frame 321 was optically enlarged and then reframed. This eliminated material at the right hand side of the picture, such as the driver and the windshield. In addition, it is possible that in frame 321 the windshield was painted-in; it fails to match the windshield in frame 317. In addition, a change in perspective occurs. The line in the back seat in frame 321 has shifted. This means that the limousine has gone further down the street and that an unknown number of frames were removed (14).

Refilming

More evidence of tampering is indicated with the framing of the pictures, especially between frames 280-300. There, the heads of both the President and Connally scarcely appear, and almost disappear from view. This means that the original film was probably refilmed, and reframed, in such a manner as to remove certain material just below their heads.

For example, on the afternoon of Nov. 24, 1963, two days after the assassination, CBS newsman Dan Rather viewed a copy of the Zapruder film in Dallas. His report noted that Connally, as he turned to look back at the President, “…exposed his entire shirt front and chest because his coat was unbuttoned…at that moment a shot very clearly hit that part of the Governor” (15). On available copies, only Connally’s head appears in this sequence.

The possibility exists that the original Zapruder film was refilmed on an optical printer. Modern cinematography laboratories are equipped with optical printing machines that can generate a new negative without the “errors” of the original. Optical printers can insert new frames, skip frames, re-size the images, along with other creative illusions. One hour on the optical printer could eliminate the Connally hit (16).

Deletions

Most available copies, when viewed on a screen as a movie, are slightly jerky, especially in the movement of the limousine. Perhaps the maximum number of cuts was made, the greatest number of frames removed, without making it obvious to the casual viewer.

Certain items could not be altered, such as the President’s head and body snapping backward, without elaborate artwork. But, of those who have seen the film, the cuts are overcome by the way in which people see the movie. The viewer’s focus is usually on the President, not on the other people in the limousine.

Some of the action depicted on the film that was difficult to explain had to be eliminated.

First, the limousine initially appears on available copies some 40 feet down from the top of the street; it literally leaps into view. Yet Zapruder stated that he filmed the limousine as it turned onto Elm St. from Houston St. (17). The copy that CBS reporter Dan Rather saw two days [error: three days – PR] after the assassination apparently had the turn on it because Rather described it (18).

Frames deleted between 152-159 probably showed the decoy shot being fired from the Vice-President’s follow-up car.

Cuts between frames 205-215 likely relate to two areas: reaction to the decoy (first) shot, and the second (throat) shot.

Between frames 207-212, the President seems to swing his head very quickly to his left as if in reaction to the decoy shot. His action would indicate the direction of the Secret Service agent’s revolver as well as sharply contrast with the lack of reaction by those agents in the front seat of the Presidential limousine.

The President’s reaction to the second shot, which hit him in the throat, is missing. Zapruder testified, “…I heard the first shot and I saw the President lean over and grab himself like this (holding his left chest area)” (19). CBS reporter Dan Rather said that “…the President lurched forward just a bit, it was obvious he had been hit in the movie…” (20).

The Commission, which received the film from the Secret Service, published frames 207 and 212, both obviously spliced, but failed to print frames 208-211 (21).

The alterations after the fatal shot probably were concerned with eliminating the limousine stop and the rush by Secret Service agents upon it. Indeed, the Secret Service made an effort “…to ascertain whether any [movie news] film could be found showing special agents on the ground alongside the Presidential automobile at any point along the parade route” (22).

Film Confiscation

In other films of the assassination, activity in the front seat of the limousine is either obscured or absent. All known movie films of the murder (except Zapruder’s) omit the sequence where the President was first hit. Confiscation of film explains this less than random pattern; all would not stop their cameras at the same time.

Fig. 4-8 shows the areas of Houston and Elm Streets covered by nine known, amateur movie cameras, tracking the limousine. All of the professional movie cameramen were too far back to take footage of the action, except one.

One amateur said that his 8 mm color film was lost during processing. When it was finally returned, some frames were ruined, others were missing (23). The assassination sequence that reached the FBI had 150 frames, equivalent to eight seconds (24). The limousine was in the amateur’s view for some 20 seconds, not including the time it was stopped.

Another amateur’s 8 mm color movie film contained 66 frames of the assassination, approximately three and one-half seconds (25).

Two Secret Service agents obtained both of a woman’s black-and-white still Polaroid photographs (26). One photograph showed the motorcade with the depository in the background; the other caught the President a split-second after he was struck in the head (27). When the two pictures were returned, her friend thought “some things had been erased” (28). Her friend recalled that the woman took four or five photographs of the motorcade, including “two or three good ones” of the President (29).

A man turned his photographs over to a Secret Service agent who kept them for about one month before returning them (30). Retouching is apparent on a 35 mm colored slide he took about the time of the first shot (31).

James W. Altgens, a professional photographer, took his still black-and-white photographs back to his office at Associated Press, had the film processed, and put on the wire (32). The Secret Service was unable to intercept these.

Altgens snapped four photographs of the limousine as it approached Main and Houston Streets and turned right into Houston Street heading for the depository building. Then, he ran down across the grass triangle in the center of Dealey Plaza and into the sparsely populated assassination zone. Directly across from a grassy knoll, where Zapruder was filming, Altgens stepped from the curb and took a photograph of the approaching limousine approximately midway in the execution. Returning to the curb, he snapped another one of the limousine when it was two or three car lengths past him. These professional quality photographs were to become the clearest taken that day of the limousine on Elm Street.

Altgens moved approximately 240 feet from Main and Houston Streets to snap his Elm St. photograph of the limousine in mid-assassination. The limousine traveled approximately 330 feet during this time. These distances give some indication of the low speed of the motorcade.

A professional movie cameraman, within range, was referred to by an ABC News Director during a TV broadcast. The Director said:

“A tv newsreel man was following in a car just behind the Presidential motorcade and at that particular moment had the President in the frame of his camera. He had it on close-up and he was panning from the Texas Library building [sic]…As soon as he saw the President fall…he then panned up and he said…”If I have on film what I saw through the eye of my camera, I have the complete assassination.” At that particular point…he was picked up by a Secret Serviceman. The Secret Service impounded the film; it was allegedly 16 mm color” (33).

No such film has been located. Such professional quality film would show not only activity in the limousine, but also an empty “sniper’s nest” (34).

Getting the Zapruder Film

How did the Secret Service acquire Zapruder’s film?

After Zapruder completed his filming, he returned to his office and asked his secretary “…to call the police or the Secret Service” (35). Then he went to his desk where he waited “…until the police came and then we were required to get a place to develop the film” (36).

An inspector with the Dallas Police Dept. was notified about Zapruder’s film. A sergeant told him that Zapruder refused to give the police the film and was waiting for either the Secret Service or the FBI. The inspector sent the sergeant, with two other men, to bring Zapruder and his movie to him. Instead, the sergeant reported back that Forrest V. Sorrels of the Secret Service was with Zapruder. The inspector then told his men to go about their usual assignments because “…since Forrest was already there and talking to him [Zapruder], I knew that that part would be taken care of” (37).

Sorrels first learned about the film from a crime reporter for the Dallas Morning News (38). According to Sorrels, Zapruder “…agreed to furnish me with a copy of this film with the understanding that it was strictly for official use of the Secret Service…” (39).

Sorrels went to the Dallas Morning News in mid-afternoon (40). He found that the newspaper was unable to develop the film, but did learn that the Eastman Kodak Co., in Dallas, could do so (41).

The Kodak Film Processing Laboratory received “…one 8 mm Kodachrome II Film…” on November 22, and claimed they returned it unaltered to Zapruder. Kodak perforated the identification number 0183 at the “…end of the processed film and carrier strip [leader]…”(42).

Sorrels may have advised Zapruder to have three copies made of the film. Kodak was unable to do so. The Jamieson Film Co. of Dallas, however, could make copies if the 8 mm film was in its original form as a 25-foot roll of 16 mm (8 mm is made by dividing the 16 mm and splicing the two 25 foot rolls together). Zapruder, therefore, had Kodak process the film without splitting it, then took it to Jamieson (43).

Jamieson also received the film on November 22. The company asserted the film remained unaltered during the printing operation. Zapruder received three duplicate copies with the identification number 0183, at the end of the original film, printed onto the three duplicates (44).

Zapruder returned to Kodak where he had the three duplicates processed and developed. They were given the identification numbers 0185, 0186, and 0187 (45). What happened to 0184 is unclear.

Zapruder then had a total of four films, one original and three duplicates. He said he gave Sorrels two copies. Sorrels kept one and another was rushed to Washington, D.C., on November 22, by army plane. (46). Yet, according to a note of transmittal from a Secret Service agent to Secret Service Chief Rowley in Washington, D.C., the disposition was different. The agent stated: “Mr. Zapruder is in custody of the ‘master’ film. Two prints were given to SAIC Sorrels, this date. The third print is forwarded” (47).

Also on Friday evening, November 22, Sorrels did a frame-by-frame study of the Zapruder film in his Dallas office. According to Dallas Postal Inspector Harry D. Holmes, who was present, “…we thumbed [through] that thing for an hour or more…push[ing] it up one frame at a time” (48).

The next day, November 23, Sorrels gave a copy to an inspector of the Secret Service who at a later date loaned it to the FBI. The FBI returned it to the inspector, who gave it to Sorrels for the Dallas office of the Secret Service (49).

The FBI was dependent upon the Secret Service for a copy of the film, which it then duplicated for its examination (50). The Secret Service retained the film until the altered version was prepared.

Life

On November 23, 1963, Zapruder made an agreement with Life magazine (51). Two days later, he asked Life to acknowledge receipt of the original and one copy (52). He wrote that the Secret Service had the other two copies, one in Dallas, and one in Washington, D.C. (53).

When did Life acquire physical possession of the film? On November 29, 1963, Life printed some frames. But it only talked of a “…series of pictures…”; it failed to mention that it was a movie and also the name of the man who made it (54).

There are two indications that Life was not in possession of the film. First, the lack of clarity in its reproduction suggests a copy. Second, the magazine enjoyed a reputation for its color printing. The film was in color, but Life’s reproduction was in black-and-white (55).

In its memorial edition of December 13, 1963, Life printed colored reproductions of the film and mentioned “a Dallas clothing manufacturer…[took] pictures with his 8 mm home movie camera: it is from his film that these pictures are taken” (56). Yet three days later, the Warren Commission only saw a series of still photographs made from the film (57). It was not until Feb. 25, 1964, that Life showed its version of the film to the Commission” (58).

It is likely that the Secret Service sanctioned what frames could be printed between 1963 and Sep. 1964, when the Commission issued its report. In the October 2, 1964, issue of Life, which covered the Warren Commission’s report, frame sprockets are missing on the cover and eight frames featured inside (59).

The October 2, 1964, issue of Life appeared in at least six versions (60). Frame 313, with the bursting head, appeared in color in three of the six versions.

Chairman Warren displayed his advance knowledge of the head burst before the Warren Commission on Dec. 16, 1963. “There’s another sequence which they [Life] did not include,” he said, “and it shows the burst of blood and things from his head, blown out” (61). This seems to be the earliest date when certain knowledge was expressed about the manufactured head burst. This frame was not printed in Life until Oct. 2, 1964. CBS reporter Dan Rather, who saw the film in Dallas two days after the assassination, did not mention this dramatic burst. In addition, other movie films of this same sequence failed to record it.

At what point did Life realize that it did not have the original film? It waited until May 1967 to copyright it (62).

Tell-Tale Sign

At some time between Nov. 22, 1963, and Dec. 5, 1963, the Stemmons Freeway sign was re-positioned and raised, invalidating any accurate reconstruction of the crime.

On Dec. 16, 1963, member John J. McCloy commented on it and its significance before a Commission meeting: “You see this sign here,” he said, “pointing to a frame from the Zapruder film, “someone suggested that this sign has now been removed…from the sign you can get a good notion of where the first bullet hit” (63).

It was on July 22, 1964, however, when the Commission interviewed the Dealey Plaza grounds keeper. He commented, “…they have moved some of those signs. They have moved that R.L. Thornton Freeway sign and put up a Stemmons sign” (64).

A photograph taken during the Secret Service re-enactment (Fif. 4-9) on Dec. 5, 1963, when compared to Zapruder frame 207 (Fig. 4-10) shows the following. First, the sign had been moved to the right and raised. Second, the angle of the sign to the camera differs from Zapruder’s. The sign’s new position is also shown when the FBI reconstruction photograph of May 24, 1964, (Fig. 4-11), is overlayed with the Secret Service photo of Dec. 5, 1963. The overlay (Fig. 4-12) was made by matching the tree (A), masonry holes (, and windows © in both.

The FBI apparently tried to have the sign replaced to approximately where it was on Nov. 22, 1963. Note how much of the stand-ins can be seen (Fig. 4-11) as compared to frame 207 (Fig. 4-10). There is also a difference in appearance between the two signs: the sign in frame 207 (Fig. 4-10) has a medium grey tone while that in the Secret Service (Fig. 4-9) and FBI (Fig. 4-11) reconstructions is solid black.

After May 24, 1964, the sign was removed, making any accurate reconstruction of the Zapruder film impossible (65).

Altering Time

The Secret Service produced the first re-enactment tests and surveys. These would be the basis of the information for both the FBI and the Commission, and thereby mislead them.

On Nov. 25, 1963, the Secret Service made a survey in Dealey Plaza to establish bullet trajectories (66).

Two days later, the Secret Service held its first re-enactment. Using a surveyor and the Zapruder film, an agent measured the distance from the eastern window ledge of the depository’s sixth floor to the car. The distance for the neck shot was given as 170 feet, the point at which the view of the car is blocked by the freeway sign. The head shot was stated as 260 feet. He claimed the point where Connally was shot was undeterminable (67).

The Secret Service photographs of its re-enactment show the car at 170 and 260 feet; its map designates these two shots at frames 207 and 375, with frame 330 as the shot for Connally (68).

Again, on Dec. 5, 1963, the Secret Service held another re-enactment. At that time, the car, according to photographs, was positioned at frames 207, 330, and 375. When this was put on a map, they co-ordinated with frames 207, 285, and 330 (69).

A final version of the hits further compressed the time. The Warren Commission stated that the President was first hit between frames 210-225, and Connally was hit between frames 235-240. Frame 313 was the final hit (70).

In short, the timing of the shots was compressed. This solved the problem of time that the film had created. Zapruder’s movie camera ran at 18 frames per second (71). The scenario rifle required a minimum of 2.3 seconds between shots, or 42 frames (72). The difference between the Commission’s designations of the first hit on the President and the hit on Connally was less than 42 frames, exceeding the rifles capability. If one shot hit both, however, then the Commission avoided the problem of having to deal with another gun and a conspiracy.

But the altered film still left major problems unexplained by the single-bullet hypothesis: 1) the lack of reaction by the President’s guards, who were supposed to protect him; 2) the backward movement of the President’s head after he was struck at frame 313; and 3) Mrs. Kennedy’s crawling across the trunk in panic.

Notes:

1) Abraham Zapruder, “Testimony of Abraham Zapruder [dated July 22, 1964],” in Hearings, v. 7, p. 570.

2) Lyndal L. Shaneyfelt, “Testimony of Lyndal L. Shaneyfelt [dated June 4, 1964],” in Hearings, v. 5, p. 139.

3) Calculation by photo triangulation.

4) “…the Secret Service agent…must be able to hit the target under any and all conditions…” (C.B. Colby, Secret Service: History, Duties and Equipment, p. 20.)

According to Merriman Smith, “All [agents on the White House Detail of the Secret Service] are crack shots with either hand. Their pistol marksmanship is tested on one of the toughest ranges in the country. The bull’s-eye of their target is about half the size of the one ordinarily used on police and Army ranges. They must qualify with an unusually high score every thirty days, and if any one of them – or any of the White House police, which falls under Secret Service jurisdiction – falls below a certain marksmanship standard, they are transferred. Agents must also qualify periodically firing from moving vehicles. This accounts for the requirement to shoot well with either hand. A right-handed agent might be clinging to a speeding car with that hand and have to shoot with the left.” (Timothy G. Smith (ed.), op. cit., p. 226.)

In his testimony, Greer claimed he “…made a quick glance and back again,” over his right shoulder, at the time of the second shot. He stated, “My eyes [turned] slightly [to the right] more than my head. My eyes went more than my head around. I had a vision real quick of it.” (Greer, op. cit., v. 2, p. 118.)

One study (1971) of the Zapruder film approximated the direction, clockwise, that the occupants faced in the limousine. In orientation, noon was the front of the car, 6 o’clock was on the trunk, 9 o’clock was the mid-point on the left, and 3 o’clock that on the right of the limousine. Greer was judged to be looking to the right and rear twice. He was in the 4:30 position from frames 282-290, the sequence when Connally is shot; in the 3:30-5 position from frames 303-316, the sequence with the fatal shot.

Another study (1967), made without the film and working only from the frames, estimated Greer to be 40 degrees to his right beginning at frame 240 and extending to 80 degrees from frame 270 through frame 309 (309 was the last frame available to the researcher). (Ronald Christensen, “A Preliminary Analysis of the Pictures of the Kennedy Assassination,” p. 69.)

5) Shaneyfelt, loc. cit.

6) Zapruder film, “Commission Exhibit No. 885. ‘Album of black and white photographs of frames from the Zapruder, Nix and Muchmore films,’” in Hearings, v. 18, pp. 1-80.

According to FBI Director Hoover, in a letter of Dec. 14, 1965, frames 314 and 315 were transposed in printing. Visually, it appears to reverse the direction of the head movement.

7) In a few of the more sophisticated available copies, splice marks were retouched out. A 16 mm version contained evidence of only one splice.

8) In a few of the more sophisticated copies, color change was consistent throughout the film A 16 mm version, in the Life magazine photo library, is of excellent quality, containing consistent color throughout. This copy, however, does contain evidence of a splice between frames 156-157.

9) Nix film. Muchmore film.

10) Dan Rather, loc. cit.

11) She stated, “And just as I turned and looked at him, I could see a piece of his skull sort of wedge-shaped like that, and I remember it was flesh colored with little ridges at the top. I remember thinking he just looked as if he had a slight headache. And I just remember seeing that. No blood or anything. And then he sort of did that, put his hand to his forehead and fell in my lap.” (President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, Report of Proceedings, v. 48, June 5, 1964, p. 6814.)

12) Especially in Life magazine’s 4 x 5 transparency of this frame.

13) John Connally, op. cit., v. 4, p. 133.

Nellie Connally, op. cit., v. 4, p. 147.

Commission Document No. 188, p. 6.

Kellerman, op. cit., v. 2, pp. 74, 78.

In an interview with William R. Greer, Greer said, “…my back was covered with it.”

14) This area also displays optical enlargement, especially between frames 317 and 318 (magnification jumps from 1 to 1.3).

15) Dan Rather, loc. cit.

16) Modern Cinematographer, June 1969, pp. 566, 567, 568.

Note: Connally testified, “I had seem what purported to be a copy of the film when I was in hospital in Dallas.” (Connally, op. cit., v. 4, p. 145.)

17) Abraham Zapruder, Commission Document No. 7 [dated Dec. 4, 1963],” p. 12.

18) Dan Rather, loc. cit.

19) Zapruder, op. cit., v. 7, p. 751.

20) Dan Rather, loc. cit.

21) Zapruder film, “Commission Exhibit No. 885,” op. cit., v. 18, p. 19.

Note: Life magazine later accepted the blame for this. It said that four frames “…had been accidentally destroyed by its photo lab technicians.” (New York Times, Jan. 30, 1967, p. 22.)

22) Commission Document No. 87, p. 434.

23) Interview with Orville O. Nix in film Rush to Judgment.

24) Commission Document No. 385, p. 70. FBI lab report says Nix’s camera was running at an average speed of 18.5 frames per second.

25) Marie Muchmore. Commission Document No. 735, pp. 124, 103.

26) Mary Moorman. Commission Document No. 5, p. 37.

John Wiseman, “Decker Exhibit No. 5323. ‘Supplementary Investigation Report dated Nov. 23, 1963,’ within Dallas County Sheriff’s Office record…” in Hearings, v. 19, pp. 535-536.

“Commission Exhibit No. 1426, ‘FBI report dated November 23, 1963, of interview of Mary Ann Moorman at Dallas, Tex. (CD 5, pp. 36-37),’” in Hearings, v. 22, p. 839.

27) “Commission Exhibit No. 1426,” loc. cit.

28) Interview with Jean L. Hill.

29) Ibid.

30) Philip L. Willis. Commission Document No. 1245, pp. 44-47.

31) Willis slide number five.

32) Altgens, op. cit., v. 7, p. 519.

33) ABC Television, Nov. 23, 9:00 a.m. Tom O’Brian, ABC News Director.

34) Of the amateurs, an 8 mm color film by Robert J. Hughes does show the depository with the limousine directly below the sixth floor “sniper’s nest.” The FBI examined this film and concluded there was no person in the window (Commission Document No. 205, p. 158.) In addition, “Itek Corporation, a photo-optical electronics firm, concluded the object in the window…was not a person.”

(Life, Nov. 24, 1967, p. 88.) A polaroid photo taken by Jack Weaver, who was standing near Hughes at Main and Houston Streets, was also examined by the FBI with the same negative results (Ibid., p. 175).

35) Zapruder, op. cit., v. 7, p. 571.

36) Ibid.

37) J. Herbert Sawyer, “Testimony of J. Herbert Sawyer [dated April 8, 1964],’” in Hearings, v. 6, p. 324.

38) Forrest V. Sorrels, op. cit., v. 7, p. 352.

39) Commission Document No. 1014, “Sorrels memo to S.S. Chief Rowley and S.S. Inspector Tom Kelley [dated Jan. 22, 1964].”

40) Dallas Police Department, “Commission Document No. 705. ‘Channel 2’…” op. cit., v. 17, p. 482.

41) Sorrels, loc. cit.

42) Affidavit of P. M. Chamberlain, Jr., Production Supervisor, Eastman Kodak Co., Dallas, Tex., dated Nov. 22, 1963.

43) Letter of Abraham Zapruder to C.D. Jackson, Publisher, Life magazine, dated Nov. 25, 1963.

44) Affidavit of Frank R. Sloan, Laboratory Manager, Jamieson Film Co., Dallas, Tex., dated Nov. 22, 1963.

45) Affidavit of Tom Nulty, Production Foreman, Eastman Kodak Co., Dallas, Tex., dated Nov. 22, 1963.

46) Zapruder, op. cit., v. 7, p. 575.

47) Commission Document No. 87, “Max D. Phillips, Note of transmittal [undated] 9:55 p.m.”

According to Life’s representative, Richard B. Stolley, the disposition was “…one copy sent off to Washington and another given to Dallas police. Zapruder kept the original and one print…” (Richard B. Stolley, “What happened next…,” Esquire, November 1973, p. 135.)

48) Interview with Harry D. Holmes.

49) Inspector Kelley. Commission Document No. 1014, op. cit.

50) Shaneyfelt, op. cit., v. 5, p. 138.

51) Agreement between Abraham Zapruder and Time, Inc., dated Nov. 25, 1963.

52) Contract between Abraham Zapruder and Time, Inc., dated Nov. 25, 1963.

Record of physical possession is confused. Zapruder’s agreement of Nov. 23, 1963, reads: “You [Life] agree to return to me the original print of that film, and I will then supply you with a copy print.” Life’s agent, Richard B. Stolley, claimed he “…picked up the original of the film and the one remaining copy…” after the agreement was signed. (Stolley, loc. cit.)

53) Ibid.

54) Life, Nov. 29, 1963, p. 24.

Time, Nov. 29, 1963, and Dec. 6, 1963, made no mention of the film although it printed four frames in the latter issue (pp. 33A, 33B.)

55) The issue dated for Nov. 29, 1963, was to have been on sale by Nov. 26, 1963. Although, according to Life, “The editors said that time limitations did not permit reproductions in color,” they also said “…they were unable last night [Nov. 23, 1963] to give precise details as to what the film showed but that they were assured that it depicted the impact of the bullets that struck Mr. Kennedy.” (New York Times, Nov. 24, 1963, p. 5.)

56) Life, Dec. 13, 1963. The Memorial issue is unpaginated.

57) Lifton (ed.), op. cit., p. 72.

58) Shaneyfelt, op. cit., v. 5, p. 138.

59) Life, Oct. 2, 1964, pp. 43-46.

60) Researcher Paul Hoch determined that five versions were issued by Life by comparing the text and captions 3, 5, 6, and 8 on p. 42; picture 6 on p. 45; the text in column 2 and caption of line 3 on p. 47; and 4 captions, lines 1, 9, 13 and 18, on p. 48. Using this method, the authors discovered a sixth version. Vincent J. Salandria noted three versions (“A Philadelphia Lawyer Analyzes the Shots, Trajectories, and Wounds,” Liberation, January 1965, pp. 6-7.)

61) Lifton (ed.), loc. cit.

62) “Motion Pictures and Film Strips,” Catalog of Copyright Entries, Third Series, v. 21, pts. 12-13, no. 1, January-June 1967, p. 19. Though the film is at least 27 seconds in length, Life, on Oct. 2, 1964, described it as “…an eight second strip…” In the Catalog of Copyright Entries, in 1967, it is listed as 10 seconds in length (p. 42).

Life’s representative, Richard B. Stolley, claimed it was “…seven seconds of film” (Stolley, loc. cit.) He also said, “…in the beginning of the film…pictured some children at play…” (Ibid., p. 134), a sequence not shown on any film made available to the authors.

63) Lifton (ed.), loc. cit.

64) Emmett J. Hudson, “Testimony of Emmett J. Hudson [dated July 22, 1964],” in Hearings, v. 7, p. 562.

65) An official use of the film, other than by the Warren Commission, was made by the CIA. It wanted to borrow the FBI’s copy”…for training purposes.” (J. Edgar Hoover, Letter of Dec. 4, 1964.)

66) Dallas Morning News, Nov. 26, 1963, Sect. 4, p. 7.

67) Agent John J. Howlett. Commission Document No. 5, p. 117.

68) “Commission Exhibit No. 585. ‘Surveyor’s plat of the Assassination Scene,’” in Hearings, v. 17, p. 262.

69) Ibid.

70) Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, pp. 105-109.

71) Ibid., p. 97.

Shaneyfelt, op. cit., v. 5, p. 153.

“Commission Exhibit No. 2444. ‘FBI report of FBI Laboratory examination of various items relating to the assassination (CD 206, pp. 45-61),’” in Hearings, v. 25, p. 576.

72) Report of the President’s Commission, loc. cit.

For once I am in complete agreement with Gary Mack, who writes:

quibbling about the time of the Perry-Clark press conference is silly for the simple fact that, as Lifton pointed out in Best Evidence 28 years ago, Perry's watch shows the time of day to be 2:18 when the Star-Telegram photo was taken. I've seen a nice, clear 8x10 print and Lifton was correct.

Someone made a mistake and my guess it was the man who made transcript. He was a White House staffer, which means his watch was likely on EST, but as he sat in Dallas, he typed CST because he knew he was in the Central time zone. Under the stress and shock of what had just happened, who’s surprised?

Further corroboration comes from the timing of Robert MacNeil's phone call to NBC reporting on the press conference. McNeil's call was logged at 2.40 CST, as I recall.

Problems, problems.

The still photograph in question does NOT tell us anything about the commencement time of the initial Parkland doctors' press conference: It merely tells us, assuming the photograph is genuine (and I know no reason to doubt it), that Perry and Clark stood before the press at 2:18 CST. Was this only two minutes into the press conference? How one can positively insist that this is the case on the basis of one photograph is, well, mystifying.

We are still left with the countervailing evidence, none of which has been addressed by Gary Mack, presumably because he can't.

I believe JFK was shot in the throat through the windshield.

Hell of a shot, as Paul Baker has not unreasonably pointed out elsewhere in the thread, and not self-evidently necessary when there were much closer armed men at hand.

Johnson's later disavowing of the Castro animus and any Cuban invasion plans - are they indicative of Cuba being only an impetus to cause persons to kill Kennedy, while not being the determining motive for the hit? Or was the evil sufficient to the day, in the end?

If by this you mean that the anti-Castro Cubans were just scenery and/or patsies, I agree.

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Bernice, thank you for posting these two images and I assume you are saying they were made during the Clark/Perry press conference at Parkland, although I don't see Perry in the picture and don't recognize anyone else.

These images LOOK like stills made from videos, as opposed to still photos, but I am not an expert.

While no television cameras are visible, it certainly looks as though there are microphones present. It also looks like someone is holding a small tape recorder, though I am not sure if modern hand-held tape recorders were available in 1963.

I must admit I am baffled by all this. Is it possible that that the images you posted are from a different press conference?

Gary Mack copied me on an email he sent to Paul Rigby:

The Kilduff announcement was made at 1:30 but it lasted only a few minutes. Cameras and microphones were present. Then, as I explained, the broadcast media left and were gone by 2:16 when Perry and Clark spoke. Is that easier to understand? You are welcome to examine the exact same photographs I did. They are at the University of Texas at Arlington, Texas in their Fort Worth Star-Telegram collection. I studied a few prints and contact sheets. One of those pictures is the same photograph that appears in Best Evidence.

Gary Mack

Jay,

A brief recap is perhaps in order:

1) The timing issue: The transcript I have of the original Parkland doctors’ press conference specifies “3:16 P.M. CST” at its head. So those responsible for its preparation were demonstrably not unmindful of the distinctions between EST, CST etc. I can’t help but note that this mistiming of the conference’s commencement is of considerable utility to those such as Mack who would have us believe the assembled news crews simply packed up during the hiatus and went elsewhere.

2) The Secret Service reported to the WC not that the doctors’ press conference went unfilmed, but, instead, that no recordings survived. Not much doubt in the SS’ mind, then, that the comments of Perry and Clark were filmed!

3) A Fort Worth paper of 23 November listed the commencement of said conference as 1:40 p.m. – much earlier than commonly supposed, but corroborated by the fact that the AP was reporting Perry’s comments at just after 2 p.m. (For sources of both claims, see earlier in this thread.)

4) What Perry initially said, as reported in newspaper editions of 22/23 November, was both strikingly different from the version offered in 1327C, and strikingly similar to Kilduff’s famous comment - attributed, entirely plausibly, to Dr. Burkley - that it was “a simple matter of a bullet through the head.” So what was that crucial observation of Perry’s according to the earliest press accounts? “The entrance wound—which is the medical description—the entrance wound was in the front of the head.” This comment is nowhere to be found in transcript 1327C.

4) The unwieldiness of the camera equipment in use in 1963 is a powerful, perhaps even dispositive, argument against the notion advanced by Gary Mack that the crews who filmed Kilduff simply packed up and moved on at the end of his announcement.

5) To further dispel this curious (and convenient) argument of Mack’s, consider the sheer newsworthiness of a press conference fronted by the medical personnel who attended the assassinated President.

6) The newsmen who filmed, photographed and recorded Kilduff’s announcement requested Hawks bring attending physicians before them to answer their questions. How do we know this? Try the opening to transcript 1327C: “You wanted to talk to some of the attending physicians. I have two of them here, Dr. Malcolm Perry…and then Dr. Kemp Clark.” So were newsmen and their film crews intent upon leaving Parkland after Kilduff’s announcement? Hardly, as we have just seen.

Paul

Not to step on anyone's toes, but this claim by Ashton Gray is incredible--I mean that literally, it is beyond credibility.

"Ashton" undertook the legendary Humes-Boswell manoeuvre - a rescusitation technique of ancient provenance much employed by the Sophists - in an attempt to revive the corpse that is the cover-up of this aspect of the case. No use parsing it for any sense, Jim, just admire the expenditure of so much energy (and mucus, of course) for such absurd ends.

Paul

Gary Mack sent me this email

I don’t think there were ANY recordings of the press conference other than the short hand transcript. Here’s why:

I have seen nearly 20 still photos of the 11/22 press conference and many show wide angle views. Guess what? NO cameras or microphones in sight!

At the time of the conference, Jackie, the body, and the White House photographers had already left for Love Field. I know in his testimony, Perry said there were, but he was mistaken or possibly thinking of Sunday, when there were plenty of both. Several reporters were present, of course, but they apparently were all print people, not broadcast.

The only reason I can think of is that the bigger stories had moved to other locations: Love Field, Dallas Police Department, Oak Cliff, Dealey Plaza, and the TSBD. There simply weren’t enough people and cameras to cover it all.

Having known and worked with reporters for several decades, it would have been an easy decision to leave the press conference to the print reporters, since the comments likely wouldn’t make for compelling broadcast images or sound bites.

Here’s an example of how primitive things were in 1963 compared to today: the local NBC station had a grand total of two sound film cameras – one in their Dallas office and one at their Fort Worth studio.

Gary

Weird, GM, but I could have sworn 1) there were cameras (and film - with sound) when Kilduff spoke in exactly the same room a short time before; and 2) that CBS claimed, in 1967, to have film of Perry/Clark conference, only minus the sound (how very convenient). In order for your version to be true, we must persuade ourselves that the cameras present for Kilduff were removed by the time of Perry and Clark; and that CBS was hallucinating. Now, I can just about buy the latter, but the former...nargh, like a cheap soap, it just doesn't wash.

Nice try, though.

“As the official solution to Dallas was being assembled over the first weekend after the assassination, one major snag required immediate attention. An inconvenient obstacle to Katzenbach’s November 24 imperative that the public be satisfied that Dallas was the act of a lone assassin was the fast-breaking news stories. The one that captured the most national attention was the televised news conference with Drs. Malcolm Perry and Kemp Clark at Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital that took place several hours after Kennedy was pronounced dead,”

Gerald D. McKnight. Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why (University of Kansas Press, 2005), p.166.

It emerged, ostensibly, from the LBJ presidential library, in 1976 (1), and was received by pro-conspiratorialists like manna from heaven. It is not hard to see why. The hitherto elusive transcript, running to nine pages, of the first press conference conducted by Drs. Perry and Clark (2) – the former the attending surgeon responsible for the tracheotomy, the latter Parkland’s chief neurosurgeon - offered first-hand, expert evidence that the anterior, non-fatal throat wound was indeed a wound of entrance.

Question: Can you describe his neck wound?...

Perry: The neck wound, as visible on the patient, revealed a bullet hole almost in the mid-line (p.4).

Question: Which way was the bullet coming on the neck wound? At Him?

Perry: It appeared to be coming at him (p.5).

Question: Doctor, describe the entrance wound. You think from the front in the throat?

Perry: The wound appeared to be an entrance wound in the front of the throat; yes, that is correct (p.6).

Amid the widespread conspiratorialist delight at finding confirmation of what much of the US electronic media had reported at the time – and thus confirming their belief in one (or more) frontal shooter(s) - two inconvenient details were ignored and/or overlooked.

The first and least important of the pair concerned timing. The transcript bore the commencement time, near the head of its first page, of “3:16 P.M. CST.” That timing should have attracted scepticism from the outset because, according to Clark’s testimony before the Presidential Commission, the same first press conference had actually begun at least 45 minutes earlier at “approximately 2.30” (3); while Perry made offered an even earlier starting point, telling Specter that it “must have been within the hour” of the President’s death (4). The doctors, it turns out, were right: The transcript commencement time is at best a mistake, and at worst the product of intentional deceit. The utility of such an “apparent error”(5) to the conspirators is self-evident: It created doubt about the direct correlation between the press conference and the contemporaneous media reports of it, accounts which contained Perry’s repeated insistence that the wound in the front of Kennedy’s throat was one of entrance.

Photographic evidence corroborates the earlier start time offered by the Parkland doctors before the Warren Commission. In the unpaginated photographic section at the heart of Lifton’s Best Evidence, we find snap 14, capturing Clark and Perry – together with White House staff members Wayne Hawkes and “Chick” Reynolds (stenographer) – in the course of the first press conference above a caption-commentary that concluded: “Watch on Perry’s left hand indicates 2:18 P.M.” In the main body of Best Evidence’s text, though not in the Chronology at the book’s rear (6), Lifton was unable – or unwilling – to follow the logic of the evidence he had mustered. We need not be so timid.

The clincher, however, lies in the contemporaneous news reports. As Newcomb and Adams noted in Murder From Within’s fifth chapter, Parkland, citing among other sources, William Manchester’s Death of a President, the Associated Press was reporting Perry’s press conference remarks “just after two o’clock” (CST); and NBC, as confirmed in the company’s own log, no later than 2:36 (CST) (7).

So much, then, for the first, and least serious, of the pair of problems attending transcript 1327C. The second is much more fundamental in nature: It is not a true and accurate record of what Perry had to say. More specifically, it entirely misrepresents what Perry and Clark said at the press conference about the number and locations of the wounds.

According to 1327C, Perry and Clark described only two wounds, the entrance wound in the front of the throat (8), and “a large, gaping loss of tissue” (9) at “the back of his head” (10), “principally on his right side” (11). The questions attributed to the unnamed reporters present reinforces this two-wound scenario, for example, when one of them supposedly asked of Perry, following his pointing to this own throat to show where the bullet had entered, “Doctor, is it the assumption that it went through the head?” (12). So much for 1327C. Now let us turn to the contemporaneous news reports.

Here we find something very different. The Associated Press reported, shortly after 2 pm, CST, that ‘Dr. Perry said the entrance wound—which is the medical description—the entrance wound was in the front of the head’” (13); while WOR Radio, New York, quoted Perry to this effect at 2:43 pm, CST, (14). So, instead of just two wounds, the Parkland duo actually described three – there was, in addition to the entrance wound just below the Adam’s apple on the front of the throat, also an entrance wound “in the front of the head” (15). It is thus not merely a matter of altering a word or two, but, necessarily, considerable portions of transcript 1327C, including the questions attributed to the anonymous reporters.

The mistiming of the press conference’s commencement, together with the removal of the wound in the front of the head, are not the only examples of conspiratorial jiggery pokery with respect to 1327C. Visitors to Rex Bradford’s History Matters website may perhaps be surprised to find that the version of the transcript offered there comprises not nine pages, but ten. And what an interesting tenth page it is, too. It is blank except for an official-looking stamp purportedly representing the Office of the Chief of the U.S. Secret Service, and “1963 Nov 25 AM 11 40” (16). The addition of this tenth page and the stamp it bears is plainly intended to provide legitimacy to the fraudulent 1327C, by dating its production to near the time of the assassination.

An additional measure of the stamp’s legitimacy can be gauged from the failure of the Secret Service to furnish a copy to the Presidential Commission (17). The same organisation, of course, also failed to find a single newsreel or sound recording from among the many cameras and news organisations present in rooms 101-2 at the time of the press conference. This was particularly odd for according to one Dallas source, it was the Secret Service that rounded up as much of that footage as it could find (18).

(1) David Lifton. Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (NY: Signet, Nov 1992), pp.70-71: Cronkite’s narration in the CBS assassination four-parter, shown in June 1967, revealed the existence of a transcript. The script claimed the manuscript refuted claims that Perry had stated the throat wound was one of entry. For subsequent developments & further background on Lifton’s part in the emergence of 1327C, together with that of CBS researcher Roger Feinman, follow this link: http://www.kenrahn.com/JFK/the_critics/fei...Feinmanbio.html

(2) According to Perry’s comments to the Presidential Commission, another Parkland doctor, Baxter, entered the combined classrooms 101-2, the scene of the press conference, but did not participate (6WCH12).

(3) 6WCH20: 21 March 1964.

(4) 6WCH12: 25 March 1964.

(5) The phrase is from McAdam’s website, where the transcript of the press conference is offered with the correct timing, accompanied by the following explanation: “This transcript was typed by former JFK researcher Kathleen Cunningham and given to Barb Junkkarinen in late 1994. It is posted here courtesy of Barb Junkkarinen. An apparent error regarding the time of the news conference has been corrected in the version published above.” The new commencement time of the press conference is held to have been “2:16 P.M. CST.”

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/press.htm

(6) Lifton follows the erroneous official timing of 3:16 pm in the main text - see p.71 (“shortly after 3 pm”) in the Signet paperback, first edition, 1992 – but follows the evidence in the Chronology at the book’s rear (p.828: 2:20 approx).

(7) Fred T. Newcomb & Perry Adams. Murder From Within (Santa Barbara: Probe, 1974), p.153 n54, citing NBC Log, Nov. 22, 1963, p. 8, 2:36 p.m., CST.

Sylvia Meagher, by contrast, times the NBC report to 2:40 (CST) – see Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities and The Report (NY: Vintage Books, June 1992 reprint), pp.153-4: “…the edited transcript of television broadcasts from November 22 to 26, 1963, issued by NBC nearly two years after the Warren Report in the book Seventy Hours and Thirty Minutes*…contains a telephone report from NBC newsman Robert MacNeil at about 2:40pm Dallas time on November 22: ‘Dr. Malcolm Perry reported that the President arrived at Parkland Hospital in critical condition with neck and head injuries…A bullet struck him in the front as he faced the assailant…’” [*NBC News, Seventy Hours and Thirty Minutes (NY: Random House, 1966).]

(8) According to 1327C, Perry stated there were just two wounds on p.1.

(9) Ibid., Clark, p.5.

(10) Ibid., Clark, p.3.

(11) Ibid, Clark, p.4.

(12) Ibid., p.4.

(13) Fred T. Newcomb and Perry Adams, “Did Someone Alter the Medical Evidence?,” Skeptic, Issue No. 9, September/October 1975, pages 24 ff:

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/issues_and_ev...perry_text.html

See also Vince Palamara’s The Earliest Reports (The Medical Evidence), excepted from JFK: The Medical Evidence (1998), entry 2b:

http://www.jfk-assassination.net/palamara/excerpt_book2.html

(14) Fred T. Newcomb & Perry Adams. Murder From Within (Santa Barbara: Probe, 1974), p.154. WOR Radio: Predominantly talk station: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOR_(AM)

(15) This is very close to the location offered by James Chaney, the Dallas police motorcycle outrider, who insisted in interviews given to reporters immediately after the event, that Kennedy had been hit “in the face.” (See Anthony Summers’ The Kennedy Conspiracy (London: Sphere, 1992), p.23 – “when the second shot came, I looked back in time to see the President struck in the face by the second bullet” – citing, p.543, an “unidentified film interview in police station and taped interview for KLIF, Dallas, on record ‘The Fateful Hours,’ Capitol Records.”)

(16) http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk...et/contents.htm

(17) David Lifton. Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (NY: Signet, Nov 1992), p.70: “During the Warren Commission investigation, Arlen Specter requested the Secret Service to obtain videotapes and transcripts of the Parkland press conference. Secret Service Chief James Rowley reported back that after reviewing the material at all the Dallas radio and TV stations, as well as the records of NBC, ABC, and CBS in New York City, ‘no video tape or transcript could be found of a television interview with Doctor Malcolm Perry.” If only he had looked in his own in-tray.

(18) David Lifton. Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (NY: Signet, Nov 1992), p.72, footnote: “Although Secret Service Chief James Rowley claimed that he could locate no tape or transcript of the Parkland Memorial Hospital press conference, Marvin Garson, a researched assisting Mark Lane in preparing Rush to Judgment, was told Dallas television executive Joe Long, of radio station KLIF, that the original recordings had been seized by Secret Service agents.”

A bump for this thread in response to the death of Perry.

Zapruder public version 1:

"When the assassin opened fire, the Presidential limousine had just passed the steps which lead to the concrete monument on the grassy knoll,"

Harold Feldman, "Fifty-one Witnesses: The Grassy Knoll," The Minority of One, (Vol VII, No 3), March 1965, p.17.

Feldman, like Lane, obviously hadn't been told about the new, improved second version, the one which which moved the shooting back down Elm in the direction of the TSBD - and, of course, removed the footage of the turn of the presidential limousine from Houston onto Elm.

The version Feldman here describes is, of course, the version shown on WNEW-TV, New York, in the first hour of Tuesday, 26 November 1963; as witnessed by, among others, Mark Lane.

Over the last couple of years, I went back and re-read John Newman's, two books, and I believe that the timing of certain key events in both Vietnam and Cuba ran practically like a script, leading to Dallas.

I'm well disposed to the basic idea, Robert, if only from what I've seen of events in April 1961. But the proposition needs further work - a detailed timeline would be of great utility, though finding the time for such a project would be, well, a project in itself.

Ambassador Lodge, it could be argued could have saved Diem, according to Jim Douglass. He writes, accurately I believe, that Diem/Nhu's contemplating a merging of South Vietnam into a possible coalition government with the NLF, coupled with the repression towards the Buddhist monks and an increasingly haughty attitude regarding the presence of the US military in Vietnam, were the driving force behind the decision to support the Vietnamese Generals. According to Douglass, at the last minute, literally Diem agreed to the US demands, and, in effect the need for a coup, was removed.....

Here I must disagree. I think the CIA has used both Lodge's past (UN) sins and its control of the historical record to set Lodge up as a patsy for the Diem coup. Much as I admired Douglass' book, his attempt at a grand unified theory of the assassination appears to have left him, inevitably, spread a bit thin in some areas of research; and not above advancing interpretations, many of them very interesting and well-worthy of further examination, as facts. His verdict on Lodge is, in my opinion, wrong.

What gets really suspicious about Lodge, is that instead of sending an urgent telex that would have arrived in a short period of time to Pres. Kennedy, he opted to send the news in a less urgent form, so that the coup was already underway, by the time news of Diem's concession's reached the White House.

But who controlled the flow and pace of the cables from the Saigon embassy? It assuredly wasn't Lodge. And don't forget, according to at least one source - was it Jones? - Lodge so distrusted the integrity of embassy commumications that his message demanding the recall of Richardson was hand-carried!

I don't think anyone can rationalize all the strange twists and turns of the last 90 days of JFK's Presidency and seriously think that Dallas was some kind of isolated murder, it was, and has been proven to be, at least in my view, the most sophisticated political assassination of the 20th Century.

A second disagreement: I don't believe the assassination was remotely sophisticated - quite the contrary - but the cover-up, now, here I'm in complete accord. Astonishingly devious in conception and brilliant sustained. They won. And likely always will. But, hell, no reason to give up...

Paul

Paul

Feel free to correct my chronology if you think there are any errors:

Post #17 – You claimed that JFK “had some limited success” “on the opening to the Left in Italy” as an example of him pursuing a “different” foreign policy.

Post #18 – I asked you to “elaborate”

Post # 19 – You posted information about Italian PM Fanfani visiting the JFK at a time when “the Italian statesman’s [had] professed [a] willingness to collaborate with the Italian socialists and other parties of the left of Center” as if this was a departure from earlier policy.

Post #20 – I pointed out that at the time he met JFK the centrist Italian PM was in a coalition with two right wing parties and the “slightly left of center” Social Democrats but when he met Ike 3 years earlier not only was he in a coalition with the Socialists, they were his only partners and had 5 in key posts in his cabinet.

Post #22 – You posted all manner of irrelevant rubbish to avoiding dealing with your blunder...

Further "all manner of irrelevant rubbish":

http://z13.invisionfree.com/julyseventh/in...&p=12074496

A few paragraphs from Daniele Ganser's excellent book, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe.

The following excerpt is taken from Chapter 6 of that book, The Secret War in Italy, and relates to political developments in Italy in the period between Kennedy's election in 1961 and his assassination in November 1963.

First, a few acronyms by way of explanation:

Acronyms

COS CIA Chief of Station

PSI Partito Communisto Italiano (Italian Communist Party)

SIFAR Servizio di Informazioni delle Forze Armate (Armed Forces Intelligence Service

Chapter 6 - The Secret War in Italy

When John F Kennedy became president in January 1961 the policy of the United States towards Italy changed because Kennedy unlike his predecessors Truman and Eisenhower sympathised with the PSI. He agreed with a CIA analysis that in Italy the "strength of the socialists, even without aid from outside, means that left-wing sentiment looked forward to a democratic form of socialism". Yet Kennedy's plans for reform met with stiff resistance from both the US State Department and the CIA. Secretary of State Dean Rusk with horror related to Kennedy that for instance Riccardo Lombardi of the PSI had publicly asked for the recognition of Communist China, had asked for the withdrawal of the American military bases in Italy including the important naval NATO base in Naples and had declared that capitalism and imperialism must be fought. "Should this be the party with which the United States should deal?"

Ambassador Frederick Reinhardt at the US embassy in Rome together with COS Thomas Karamessines debated how Kennedy could be stopped. Vernon Walters advised them, a notorious CIA Cold Warrior "who has been involved directly or indirectly of the overthrow of more governments than any other official the US government". Walters declared that if Kennedy allowed the PSI to win the elections the US should invade the country. Karamessines, more subtly, suggested that the forces within Italy that opposed the opening to the left should be strengthened. The absurd situation developed in which President Kennedy found himself up against the Secretary of State and the Director of the CIA.

On Election Day in 1963 the CIA nightmare materialised: The Communists gained strength while all other parties lost seats. The US-supported DCI fell to 38 per cent, its worst result since the party had been created after the war. The PCI polled 25 per cent and together with the 14 per cent of the triumphant PSI secured an overwhelming victory for the first time in the First Republic the united left dominated parliament. The supporters of the Italian left celebrated in the streets the novelty that the Socialists were also given cabinet posts in the Italian government under Prime Minister Aldo Moro of the left-wing of the DCI. President Kennedy was immensely pleased and in July 1963 decided to visit Rome to the great delight of many Italians. The airport was crowded and once again the Americans were greeted with flags and cheers. "He is a wonderful person. He seems much younger than his real age. He invited me to visit the United States", Pietro Nenni, the leader of the PSI with much enthusiasm declared.

Kennedy had allowed Italy to shift to the left. As the Socialists were given cabinet posts the Italian Communists, due to their performance at the polls, also demanded to be rewarded with posts in the cabinet and in May 1963 the large union of the construction workers demonstrated in Rome. The CIA was alarmed and members of the secret Gladio army disguised as police and civilians smashed the demonstration leaving more than 200 demonstrators injured. But for Italy, the worst was yet to come. In November 1963, US President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, under mysterious circumstances. And five months later the CIA with the SIFAR, the Gladio secret army and the paramilitary police carried out a right-wing coup d'etat which forced the Italian Socialists to leave their cabinet posts they had held only for such a short period.

Prior to November 22, Arnoni and The Minority of One seized every opportunity to denounce JFK as a right-wing Cold Warrior. Immediately upon his death, it began publishing critiques of the absurd – and frequently conflicting – official accounts of his death. And renewed the anti-Kennedy drive against the next flag bearer, RFK.

In the January 1967 edition, Arnoni authored a particularly savage attack, as the title left no doubt: “A Dead Brother is No Brother” (TMO, January 1967, p.6). Note how Arnoni runs some classic CIA lines, from the Kennedy family suppressing vital autopsy evidence, to William Manchester being the family’s mouthpiece in its on-off war with LBJ:

With all the material by now published about the Warren Report, there remain few knowledgeable people who accept the Warren Fairytale as a genuine account of how and why the United States lost its President on November 22, 1963. The remaining division is into two groups of disbelievers: those who publicize their disbelief; and those who, for reasons of their own, think it wise not to publicize it and even to pretend to naivete. So undermined is public confidence that the Administration found it necessary to launch a counter-offensive inspiring everyone it can to endorse the Warren Fiction publicly. The one thing it would not risk, however, is a new investigation now to be conducted for a purpose more genuine than to produce a “political truth” (to use a cute euphemism coined by Edward J. Epstein, author of Inquest). For this, officials seem to hold the American public 75 years too juvenile.

In the meantime a whole new elections politics is evolving around the Warren Report. It has little to do with the facts of the assassination, and it is merely part of the comprehensive science of getting oneself into positions of power. Cynical as this may make Robert F. Kennedy look, it is nonetheless a fact that as far as he is concerned what should or should not be known about his brother’s death need be determined by his own political ambitions. Men driven to power as single-mindedly as Robert Kennedy would not be caught in romantic sentimentality; as “realists,” they are totally disciplined. Such men will do anything for a brother with whom they share the chariot, but they would not make themselves guilty of doing anything futile. What can one do for a dead brother? Why, a dead brother is no brother.

There is much to suggest that for a long time Mr. Robert Kennedy has indirectly encouraged some critics of the Warren Report. Mark Lane, the author of Rush to Judgment, may have overstated a case when he claimed the Senator had sent a direct message of encouragement to Hugh Trevor-Roper, the eminent British historian who wrote an introduction to Lane’s book, but the claim is not likely to be entirely baseless. Other Warren Commission critics, including this publication, have received encouragement from individuals likely to have acted on Mr. Kennedy’s behalf. And the main anti-Administration Kennedy salvo was yet to come from the pages of William Manchester’s book The Death of a President.

Then everything went topsy-turvy. The autopsy photographs and X-rays of the late President were entrusted to the National Archives but access to them remains blocked by the Kennedys, a restriction likely to have been calculated not to embarrass the Administration. People on the fringes of Bobby Kennedy’s political entourage suddenly began “proving” the Warren critics wrong; Edward Kennedy very belatedly endorsed the Warren Report while keeping an option on reversal by claiming not to have read the document; and, most surprisingly, there came concerted attempts by the Kennedys to suppress the Manchester book they themselves had commissioned.

While encouraging and then discouraging distrust of the Warren Report, Robert Kennedy throughout kept himself at a non-attribution distance using intermediaries expendable in the event of political embarrassment. He thus left himself complete maneuverability to negotiate, re-negotiate or negotiate away his role in pressing for public knowledge of the assassination truth. That he suddenly halted his opposition strongly suggests that he may have reconciled his political ambitions with those of Lyndon B. Johnson. Such reconciliation could pertain to either 1968 or 1972 or merely amount to a time-limited truce between two rivals tired of off-season undermining of each other.

Robert Kennedy’s drive for power is legendary. So are his ruthlessness and lack of scruples in climbing the political ladder. Whatever public image of himself he now labors to project is to no degree an indication of how he would actually discharge power; it merely reflects his ideas on how to get it. He must feel that he had done so much for this brother when alive that now he may use the latter’s ghost to promote his own ambitions.

Needless to say that this cynicism has nothing in common with that which drives so many honest people to insistence on the exposure of the real assassination facts. They should steer clear of anyone who turns his position on a new investigation into a negotiable of personal career seeking. And if among the independent assassination investigators there are some who, by compromises of integrity, propose to jump on the prospective Kennedy bandwagon, the loss of opportunistic renegades is the gain of the betrayed cause.

In a recent thread on this forum (and elsewhere), Daniel Gallup wondered what motivated long-standing opponents of Warren Commission fiction to suddenly, and seemingly inexplicably, swop sides. In an inspired choice, he termed these turncoats “neo-cons.” The hard, and for many, unpalatable truth is that the alliance we today know as “Neoconservative” formed the bedrock of the coalition which drove the assassination literature and investigations of the 1960s: Zionists and other assorted US right-wingers. Members of this alliance have always constituted a reserve army of chips ready for the cashing; or merely as conduits for disinformation.

Somewhere or other on the web is a talk by Frank Gaffney in which he described Saudi Arabia as simultaneously a deadly enemy and best regional friend. That duality represents how we should see many of the shining lights of the 1960s assassination research community, as our guides - and betrayers. It's Chomsky, too.

Thanks for the very useful assortment of bits and pieces, Tom.

I was particularly interested in Hoffman’s American Experience in Vietnam, about which I was entirely ignorant. I do know the general outline of the Gregorys story, which would, I have no doubt, make a great film. The problem would be, of course, the CIA’s desire to control the finished product. A concerted effort to discredit the couple was made in, I think, 1959. How much justice underpinned the claims of corruption made against them, I don’t know. If I can find the relevant clipping(s), I’ll post them. If you find anything else on them, do add it to the thread.

You’ll find the full text of the censored extant version of the Times of Vietnam piece from its 2 September 1963 edition in post #15 of this thread:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...ost&p=71166

Material on the CIA’s response to that remarkably detailed ToV expose of the former’s late August 1963 coup attempt against Diem is in post #17, which also features extracts from Maneli’s book on the same subject:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...ost&p=71293

More Maneli here:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...st&p=110974

Blair’s book is dreadful; and Halberstam little more than a CIA transmission belt.

As for Hilsman, I think you’re spot on when it comes to the treatment of Mecklin. From memory, he was briefly withdrawn from Saigon as a result of the furore generated by the ToV revelations. Dick Starnes, incidentally, thought him a right-wing fanatic.

I respect the desire of Jocko Richardson’s son to protect his dad’s memory. Were roles reversed, I rather suspect I’d have done the same. The trouble is, filial piety is rarely conducive to accurate history, as you can see for yourself in the aforementioned post #17.

Paul

In early 1964, Starnes reluctantly decided to abandon frontal opposition to the shifting official fictions which sought to explain Dallas. His reasons were rational, and tell the historian more about the state of the nation than any moral failing in the journalist: There was no establishment opposition to the coup behind which he and others of like journalistic mind could cohere; it was career suicide to persist; and then there were the small matters of his family and mortgage to consider.

He ran up the white flag, appropriately enough, in a column following the publication of the Presidential Commission’s Report: “The question is not whether Oswald and Ruby were guilty. Millions saw Ruby kill Oswald; and there now seems little doubt that Oswald was the man who slew President Kennedy “(“The Shoe Fits,” The Washington Daily News, 30 September 1964, p.29). Try as he might (and did), however, he simply couldn’t hold fast to the establishment script. Scepticism, driven out of the front door, kept running headlong through the back, as this column, his deliberated response to the publication of the Report, left no doubt:

The Washington Daily News, 25 November 1964, p.13

Some Doubts Remain

By Richard Starnes

The sobering fact is that the Warren Commission has not conspicuously succeeded in fulfilling the great historical tasks to which it was called.

For good or ill, the Commission has concluded its work. It has published its findings, it had released the voluminous transcript containing most of the testimony and exhibits it received, and, finally, it has adopted a resolution putting itself out of business.

If the Commission is to be judged by traditional bureaucratic criteria involving bulk of its product or time consumed in reaching its conclusions, then it will be judged a success.

But the reality is that the Commission will be judged by a far harsher yardstick.

President Johnson assigned the Warren Commission two tasks of historical of great historical magnitude. The stated function of the Commission was to learn all that could be learned about the facts of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and to report its findings to the President. The second, unstated, function of the Commission was to restore the confidence of the American people in their institutions.

The Commission concluded, of course, that no conspiracy existed, and that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby each had acted alone. But largely ignored was a considerable loophole the Commission left for itself.

“Because of the difficulty of proving negatives,” the commission wrote in its report, “the possibility of others being involved with either Oswald or Ruby cannot be established categorically, but if there is any such evidence it has been beyond the reach of all the investigative agencies and resources of the United States and has not come to the attention of this Commission.”

That is a necessarily large caveat. It means that Oswald and Ruby may have both been pawns in a huge conspiracy, but if this is true the conspiracy was so subtle and skilful that it escaped detection.

Thus the credibility of the Warren Commission hinges on a necessarily imperfect foundation. It could never learn all the facts, it could never prove Oswald acted alone, it could never say with certainty that Ruby was not a part of a conspiracy. It could only weigh such evidence as was available and offer history its best guess as to what really took place. No human agency could do any more, and it is no reflection on the Warren Commission that questions remain unanswered and doubts remain undispelled.

But there is a large area in which the Warren Commission did fail to do all that it might have done to insure that its findings would win the widest possible acceptance. It made a sorry record of its own internal integrity. Washington is a place where secret-keeping is essential to the operation of government. Yet the Warren Commission was as leaky an instrument of high policy as has ever been seen in the Capital. To the very last, its conclusions and choice morsels of transcript were shamelessly leaked for a variety of purposes. Even the final release of the transcript was clouded by premature publication of Mrs. Lyndon Johnson’s testimony, and the reporter who obtained the transcript said it had come from sources “within the Warren Commission.” Earlier, Jack Ruby’s testimony was printed by a female journalist on New York’s saloon beat, and before that the gist of the FBI Director’s testimony found its way into print by mysterious means.

These are not parochial concerns of the newspaper business. The Warren Commission’s integrity was its only stock in trade, and it will be cast in the balance when future generations try to decide whether its findings are really the last word on the death of President Kennedy.

Starnes’ abiding disbelief was to find its final and most powerful expression during his columnar years (January 1960- April 1966) in the following column, from the spring of 1965. The kicker is in the final paragraph:

The Washington Daily News, 8 April 1965, p.37

The Great Dilemma

By Richard Starnes

Lyndon Johnson, who is more dedicated to government by consensus than any President since Warren Harding, has fallen short of generating wide public support for his policy in Viet Nam.

Indeed, Administration brinksmanship in Southeast Asia finds more favor among Republicans than it does among the President’s own party. A Gallup Poll taken before the President made his Johns Hopkins speech found 41 per cent of Americans favored peace negotiations, 42 per cent favored sending more troops and planes, and 17 per cent expressed no opinion.

But when replies were broken down by party affiliation, they showed that most of the Democrats who held an opinion favoured peace talks. Of Democrats polled, 43 per cent backed negotiations, 40 per cent favored increased armed intervention, and 17 per cent were undecided. Republicans showed 45 per cent in favor of greater troop commitment, only 38 per cent in favor of negotiations, and 17 per cent undecided.

Abroad, of course, American policy in Southeast Asia is almost universally mistrusted. An extraordinary Japanese mission to Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos conducted by Shunichi Matsumoto, a respected diplomat and former envoy to Britain, concluded that it was doubtful the U.S. could prevail in Viet Nam by force of arms.

Mr. Matsumoto questioned the basic American assumption that the Viet Cong was the creature of North Viet Nam and communist China, or event that it was largely communist character.

“Even the people of Saigon,” he reported, calculate communist strength in the Viet Cong is “at most 30 per cent.”

The Japanese diplomat, who is an influential adviser to the staunchly pro-American government in Tokyo, went so far as to suggest the Viet Cong guerilla forces “could possibly be called a movement somewhat similar to the resistance of the French underground during World War II.

“It can be said that the Viet Cong is not directly connected to Communist China or the Soviet Union.

“Consequently it is not certain that the Viet Cong will give up fighting because of the bombing of North Viet Nam.”

This same opinion is shared by many of the people who took the trouble to study the U.S. State Department’s “white paper” on Viet Nam. The document purported to show that the civil war in South Viet Nam was sponsored, directed, equipped and manned largely from North Viet Nam. But scrutiny of the white paper revealed that it demonstrated the reverse of what it undertook to show. Documented instances of help from North Viet Nam to the guerillas in the south just could not be reconciled with the magnitude of the Viet Cong war effort.

The inescapable truth is that the war in South Viet Nam is largely a self-supporting civil war that is being supplied almost wholly by captured U.S. weapons.

This leads to the vital question of what would happen even should Hanoi succumb to the pressure bombing and withdraw support from the Viet Cong. If, as Mr. Matsumoto and others have concluded, the guerilla war contains large elements of indigenous nationalism, it is at least possible that the Viet Cong will continue to fight.

If that happens, it will leave President Johnson beset by a dilemma even more cruel than the one that faced him when his advisers from the Department of Defense and CIA reluctantly informed him that the pretense of organized resistance from Saigon was not long for this world, and that other harsh alternatives had to be considered.

Like all Presidents, Mr, Johnson is concerned with the ultimate judgment which history will pass on him and his Administration. Further miscalculation in Southeast Asia could lead it to the grim conclusion that the first shot of World War III was the one that killed John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

Stewart Alsop, “CIA: The battle for secret power,” Saturday Evening Post, 27 July 1963, pp.17-21

Since World War II the Central Intelligence Agency has been our major covert defense- sometimes offense – against Communism. Now a Defense Department agency is challenging its supremacy.

At about 9:30 on most working mornings, Maj. Gen. Chester Clifton, the President’s military aide, comes into the President’s office clutching a handful of documents. The papers in Clifton’s hands are likely to include a couple of “eyes only” cables from American ambassadors, the ultra-secret “Black Book” of the code-breaking National Security Agency and intelligence summaries from State and Defense departments. But the document which Clifton almost shows the President first is a little book which has been put together in the early hours of the morning by the Central Intelligence Agency.

This neatly typed and bound booklet has on its cover the words: INTELLIGENCE CHECKLIST. FOR THE PRESIDENT. TOP SECRET. The booklet represents the quintessential end product of a major postwar industry about which even knowledgeable people know remarkably little. This is the intelligence industry, which spends upward of $2.5 billion a year and employs over 60,000 people.

Intelligence has traditionally been a peculiarly feud-ridden business, and for a simple reason. Intelligence is knowledge, knowledge is power, and power is the most valuable commodity in government. The Central Intelligence Agency has been at the very center of all the great crises of the last decade – and the CIA has actually caused several of these crises.

Where the stakes, in terms of power, are so great, rows and rivalry are inevitable, which is one of the principal reasons why it is rather widely believed within the intelligence industry that “Bob McNamara and John McCone are on a collision course.”

John McCone, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a white-haired, kindly faced man, who has been described by Georgia’s Sen. Richard Russell the second-most-powerful man in the Government. Among McCone’s many responsibilities, the most important is to make certain that the secret intelligence conveyed to the President in his little book is both adequate and accurate.

When the President opens his little book, he sees on the left-facing page a series of newspaper-type headlines – COMMUNISTS PLAN GUATEMALA RIOTS, a headline might read, or IVANOV G.R.U. AGENT IN LONDON. If the headline interests him, the President reads on the opposite page a brief factual paragraph, explaining, for example, that the Communists plan to try to topple the military junta in Guatemala by instigating mass riots; or that Evgeny Ivanov, who shared the costly favors of Christine Keeler with British War Minister Jack Profumo, was a representative of G.R.U., or Soviet military intelligence. Usually there are a dozen or so items.

Anyone with romantic ideas about the spy business might find the President’s book pretty tame stuff on most days. But the book helps to make the President, in the words of one intelligence expert, “the best-informed chief of state in the world today.” It is John McCone’s job to keep him that way.

McCone himself is known hardly at all to the American public: He grants no interviews and makes no speeches. And yet, although he may not be the second-most-powerful man in the Government, he is certainly among the half dozen most powerful. He had three distinct, vital and overlapping jobs.

As a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, McCone is one of the handful of men who advise the President on the substance of high national policy. In his two other jobs, McCone also supplies the President with the intelligence and the estimates on which policy is based. This combination of functions is unique and, some maintain, dangerous.

As director of the Central Intelligence Agency McCone is boss of a vastly important empire that employs some 14,000 people and spends several hundred million dollars a year.

Among those 14,000 people there is an infinite variety – scholarly intelligence analysts, spies, black propagandists, scientists, U-2 pilots, specialists in everything from Urdu to assassination.

The CIA spends a lot more money than the State Department, and at times it has had more real power and influence on high policy. The CIA, for example, was principally responsible for the overthrow of Iran’s Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemala’s pro-Communist President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in 1954. CIA operatives dug the famous tunnel to tap Soviet telephone lines in East Berlin in 1954. The great U-2 crisis of 1960, which broke up the Paris summit conference, was, of course, a CIA operation. And the CIA has been at the center of the two great Cuban crises of the Kennedy Administration – the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 and last October’s great confrontation between Kennedy and Khrushchev.

Running the CIA and advising the President in ExComm might seem job enough for any man. But McCone is also responsible, in the words of a letter to him from the President, “for the effective guidance of the total intelligence effort.” Members of what is known in bureaucratese as “the intelligence community” include the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commission and the FBI. Departments like Commerce and Agriculture, and agencies like AID and USIA also have joined the intelligence act. But in terms of money and manpower, it is the Pentagon that owns the lion’s share of the intelligence industry.

The Pentagon’s heavily guarded National Security Agency employs more people than CIA, and its building at Fort Meade, Maryland, is even bigger than the CIA’s huge new building in Langley, Virginia. All three services have big intelligence setups of their own. So do the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the Defense Intelligence Agency, newly created by Secretary McNamara, will soon spill over from the dark depths of the Pentagon into another huge building of its own in Arlington, Virginia, for which there is a budget request for over $17 million.

McCone has his enemies

The intelligence community over which McCone is supposed to rule is thus a very big community indeed. It is not a community noted for brotherly love and happy fellowship. CIA has been feuding intermittently with the State Department for years. But the real tension nowadays is between CIA and the Pentagon. Both McCone and Secretary McNamara deny that they are “on collision course.” But it is certainly true that McCone’s CIA and McNamara’s new, rapidly expanding DIA have already had plenty of minor and some major collisions.

The place to start in trying to understand what the intelligence industry is all about is with John McCone and his CIA. There are certain facts about McCone which no one disputes. He is immensely rich. His own self-made fortune, based on wartime shipping – when added to the even bigger shipping fortune of his attractive second wife, the former Theiline Pigott – comes to what has been called “Kennedy kind of money.”

McCone is also very able. He has enemies in Washington – 15 senators voted “nay” on his appointment – and in time he is likely to have more. But not even his enemies doubt his ability. Like most able men, McCone enjoys the exercise of power, and he is a born competitor. He is a devout Catholic, a conservative Republican – Richard Nixon is a friend – and a fervent anti-Communist. In any listing of the hawks and doves among the President’s advisers, McCone certainly rates as a leading hawk.

Beneath his rather placid-seeming exterior, in fact, McCone is a passionate man, with deep and stubborn convictions. And, despite that kindly face, McCone can be very tough indeed. “Allen Dulles ran a happy ship – or at least he did before the Bay of Pigs,” says one veteran of the CIA. “John McCone runs a taut ship.”

Dulles, McCone’s predecessor as CIA chief, had devoted most of his life to the intelligence trade, and he loved it. Subordinates found him easy of access and easy to work with. “We were like a band of conspiratorial brothers,” says a CIA man, “although there was never any doubt about who was big brother.”

Dulles liked to involve himself directly in secret operations, and when an agent or station chief – head CIA man in an area abroad – returned to Washington, Dulles would call him into his office, puff his pipe and pick the CIA man’s brains. McCone runs CIA like the big industry it is, on an all-business basis. He rarely sees a returned station chief, and he holds himself aloof from operations, although he insists on being informed.

Within the CIA McCone deals almost exclusively with the five key men who really run the agency. With one exception all five are new at their jobs. The reason for this turnover can be summed up in three words, words which CIA men hate – Bay of Pigs. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster, all CIA’s top officers, from Dulles down, were replaced.

“We were a sick dog in those days,” one CIA veteran recalls. “Anyone could kick us and know we couldn’t bite back.” For at least three weeks after the disaster the President himself wanted nothing to do with the sick dog – he even refused to read CIA reports. In those days the whole organization seemed to be teetering on the brink of destruction.

Nowadays the CIA is back on top of the heap. The men principally responsible for its resurrection are John McCone and his five key subordinates. One of these key men –perhaps the key man, though there is much argument on this point – Lyman Kirkpatrick Jr., a smooth-faced, white-haired polio victim, confined to a wheel chair. Kirkpatrick’s title is executive director – in effect, he acts as a sort of chief of staff to McCone.

Kirkpatrick is certainly an able man, obviously intelligent, with a talent for climbing the bureaucratic ladder. He also has a talent for making enemies. When Dulles ran the agency, Kirkpatrick, who was Dulles’ special favorite, had the enemy-making job of inspector general. After McCone had been nominated but while Dulles was still director, Kirkpatrick added copiously to his roster of enemies when he wrote for McCone a long secret report harshly attacking Dulles and other colleagues for the handling of the Bay of Pigs.

Partly because he was impressed by Kirkpatrick’s ability, and no doubt partly because he wants above all no Bay of Pigs during his tenure, McCone greatly expanded Kirkpatrick’s powers. Even so, in terms of money, manpower and real responsibility Richard Helms, a dark-haired, good-looking ex-newspaperman of 49 may be the real No. 2 man after McCone.

Helms has the innocuous-sounding title of deputy director for plans –D.D.P., as he is known in the agency. A more accurate title might be chief of espionage and dirty tricks. Helms’s division is responsible for what is known in the intelligence industry as the “sexy stuff.” All the CIA’s covert operations in recent years that have come to light – and many that have not - have been the work of the D.D.P.

These operations fall into several categories. The first is traditional espionage, the gathering of secret intelligence by agents acting under one cover or another. Then there are “special ops,” designed to overthrow a hostile government, as in Guatemala or Iran, to prevent the overthrow of a friendly government or to mount a paramilitary operation as the Bay of Pigs. There are “black propaganda” and “morale operations” units, and there is the creation and support of a vast variety of “front” and “cover” organisations. Some of these organisations operate quite openly, and regularly solicit support from the citizenry, but are in fact subsidized and controlled by the D.P.P. All in all, Helms “owns” about half the people in the CIA, and at least until recently, the D.D.P. spent most of the CIA’s funds.

Like Kirkpatrick – and McCone, for that matter – Helms owes his job to the Bay of Pigs. His predecessor as D.D.P. was Richard M. Bissell Jr., chief planner of the Bay of Pigs operation and, before the Bay of Pigs, a good bet to succeed Dulles as CIA Director.

Bissell was also the chief architect of many successful intelligence and special operations, including the U-2, perhaps the most brilliant intelligence achievement of the post-war years. Without the U-2, Nikita Khrushchev’s attempt last autumn to spring a trap for the United States in Cuba might well have succeeded.

Helms is accounted both a more prudent and a less brilliant man than Bissell. “There will be no Bay of Pigs under Dick Helms,” one CIA veteran comments, adding, “but there would have been no U-2 either.” Helms is unquestionably a first-class professional clandestine operator. “He’s a real pro,” comments another CIA veteran. “He knows where all the bodies are buried.”

The chief customer for Helms’ secret intelligence is Ray Cline, deputy director for intelligence, or D.D.I., a stocky, sandy-haired man of 45 with a brilliant academic record. He, too, is accounted a more prudent but less imaginative man than his pre-Bay of Pigs predecessor, Robert Armory. Unlike Helms, Cline mounts no secret operations and “owns” no foreign agents. But Cline is a powerful man too. Allen Dulles is the authority for that less than 20 per cent of intelligence derives from espionage. Cline’s corps of analysts, who deal in the other 80 percent, includes experts on everything from “cratology” and “tentology” – the identification of the contents of a crate or tent from its external appearance – to the medical history of Nikita Khrushchev.

Cline’s main function is to see that the intelligence gets to the people who use it. Cline, for example, made the carefully worded phone call to McGeorge Bundy that first alerted the White House to “hard” evidence of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Cline is also responsible for getting that little book to the President – his subordinates begin arriving at the CIA building at the horrid hour of three A.M. to read the late cables and put the book together. Only McNamara, McCone and Secretary of State Dean Rusk get copies of the President’s book. Cline’s shop also puts out a Daily Intelligence Bulletin with a much wider circulation, and weekly and monthly intelligence summaries as well.

The fourth key man among McCone’s subordinates is Sherman Kent, a brilliant man with a bulldog face, who chews tobacco and talks more like a stevedore than the ex-professor he is. Among the top men, Kent is the only survivor of the Bay of Pigs, in which he was in no way involved. In the bureaucratic hierarchy he is a low man on the totem pole – he ranks below the other men. But his job may be the most important of all.

His job is to interpret the intelligence, to say what it means, and saying what intelligence means is at least as important as getting it in the first place. Kent is chairman of the 12-man Board of Estimates. The Board of Estimates churns out national intelligence estimates, and, in times of crisis, “crash” estimates, known as special national intelligence estimates.

Making the national estimates is a risky business. It involves trying to put yourself in the other fellow’s shoes, and as Allen Dulles has pointed out, Nikita Khrushchev is quite capable of taking off his shoes for desk-banging.

Three examples will suggest how risky Kent’s job is. In 1958 Kent’s board produced a national estimate of Soviet capabilities in the production of strategic missiles. With an assist from the Air Force, which insisted for parochial reasons that the national estimate was too low, and from Democrats, who had parochial interests of their own, the myth of the “missile gap” was born. “Hard” intelligence later proved that the Soviets had in fact produced far fewer missiles than they had been adjudged capable of producing – and that the missile gap was thus a myth. Some of this hard intelligence came from the Soviet official Oleg Penkovsky, shot for treason in Moscow in May, who supplied “absolutely reliable” information on Soviet missile production to CIA and British intelligence. Some also came from certain top-secret technical espionage methods.

A bad guess on Cuba

Last September 19 the estimator guessed wrong. A national estimate of that date, while recommending an intelligence alert, concluded that the Soviets were unlikely to adopt the “high-risk policy” of placing missiles in Cuba. The first Soviet ships carrying missiles had actually arrived in Cuba on September 8. A CIA sub-agent, peering through his shutters on the moonlit night of September 12, spotted a missile carrying-convoy. His report was detailed and convincing enough to be rated “hard” intelligence. But, understandably, in view of Fidel Castro’s elaborate police apparatus, several days elapsed before the sub-agent could get the report to the chief agent in his area and thence to the CIA. Thus the report did not reach CIA hands until September 21, or two days after the national estimate.

Later, during the height of the Cuban crisis, a crash estimate was submitted to ExComm. Its purport was that Khrushchev might now be willing to risk nuclear war. Fortunately for civilization, this estimate also turned out to be wrong. These three examples, it should be noted, do not accurately reflect the acumen of Kent and his estimators. The Board of Estimates has done a creditable job over the years, given the inherent imponderables.

As this is written, the job of McCone’s fifth key man is open. Until mid-June, it was occupied by Herbert (Pete) Scoville, an able scientist highly regarded in the White House. Scoville was D.D.R. – deputy director for research, a post newly created by McCone. A more accurate title might be deputy director for technical espionage. Mata Hari, in fact, is rapidly giving ground to such scientific intelligence devices as the U-2, reconnaissance satellites, side-viewing radar, long-range communications intercepts and other unmentionable technical means of finding out what the other side is up to.

At the height of the Cuban crisis, the job of overflying Cuba in U-2’s was taken out of Scoville’s hands, and was assigned to the Pentagon. The deed – the fell deed in the CIA’s eyes – was done with McCone’s approval after a bloody jurisdictional hassle at Scoville’s level, although the hassle did not, contrary to published report, lead to any “surveillance gap.” Scoville is not talking, but it is a good guess that the Pentagon’s tendency to move in on him, and McCone’s tendency to remain above the resulting battle, had a lot to do with his resignation in June. The search for a successor is under way.

So much for the empire over which McCone rules as director of CIA. It is interesting to compare CIA and its main rivals in the world of secret intelligence, the Soviet K.G.B. and the British M.I.6. CIA is a direct descendant of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, built from scratch by Gen. Wild Bill Donovan. As Donovan once acknowledged, OSS was a carbon copy of the British intelligence system. Now, in some ways, the American system has more in common with the Soviet system than with the British.

The K.G.B., like C.I.A., is headed by a public figure, Vladimir Semichastny, former leader of the Konsomol and a Khrushchev man. Besides the K.G.B., there is a second Soviet secret service, the G.R.U., which is run by the military.

The K.G.B. and the G.R.U. run completely separate and bitterly competing intelligence nets. In CIA files a number of episodes are recorded in which the K.G.B. and G.R.U. cloak-and-dagger men have tripped on each other’s cloaks and stabbed each other with their daggers. In our system the equivalent of the G.R.U. is the Defense Intelligence Agency, headed by a former FBI man, Lt. Gen. Joseph Carroll. The developing relationship between CIA and DIA is not unlike that between K.G.B. and G.R.U.

All important intelligence services employ “diplomatic cover” for their major operatives abroad. In this respect there is a certain honor among thieves. The Soviets, for example, are certainly aware of the identity of the CIA station chief in Moscow, and the American government knows who the K.G.B. station in Washington is – Counselor of Embassy Aleksandr Fomin.

Georgi Bolshakov, also a member of the Soviet Embassy staff until recently, is believed in the CIA to have been a major G.R.U. operative. His assignment was similar to that of his G.R.U. colleague in London, Christine Keeler’s friend, Evgeny Ivanov – to cultivate the acquaintance of powerful persons. Through his connections, Bolshakov conveyed Khrushchev’s false assurances to President Kennedy that Soviet weapons in Cuba were wholly defensive. When an article in The Post reported his role in the Cuban crisis, Bolshakov was hastily withdrawn. Bolshakov is a witty and personally agreeable man, and before he returned to Moscow certain American friends gave him a farewell dinner. His parting toast deserves to be recorded: “Soviet Union has made great concessions for peace. Has withdrawn missiles. Has withdrawn IL-28’s. Has withdrawn Bolshakov. No more concessions!”

In the British system, there is no real equivalent of DIA or G.R.U. But the most obvious contrast between the British and American intelligence systems is suggested by the difference between McCone and “C”, chief of M.I.6. Unlike McCone – or Semichastny – “C” is not a public figure. His name is never mentioned in the British press, and out of regard for British sensibilities, it will not be mentioned here. The Soviets, of course, know who “C” is. But keeping his name out of the public prints does have certain undeniable advantages.

McCone himself would prefer the anonymity of a “C.” But he cannot possibly achieve it. The director of CIA is inescapably a public figure, and there is no American equivalent of the Official Secrets Act. This creates problems. Advance publicity in the press, which would certainly have caused the Official Secrets Act to be invoked in Britain, contributed to the disaster in the Bay of Pigs.

McCone has plenty of other problems, but he also has greater latitude in dealing with them than any other leading Government figure. He can hire and fire at will, and he can spend his “unvouchered funds” as he sees fit. These powers give to the CIA a flexibility unique in the Federal bureaucracy. To cite one example, just eight months passed between December, 1954, when Allen Dulles gave Richard Bissell the green light on the U-2, and August, 1955, when the U-2 first flew. By Pentagon standards, this was a totally incredible performance – it would have taken the Pentagon bureaucracy at least two years, and more probably three, to get the U-2 into the air.

This capacity to act quickly is one of McCone’s major assets, when he is wearing his hat as “director of central intelligence,” with responsibility for “effective guidance of the total intelligence effort.” When he wears this hat, McCone needs all the assets he can find. For, although what McCone says goes in the CIA, what McCone says does not necessarily go in the rest of the nation’s intelligence community – and above all in the Pentagon.

Secretary of Defense McNamara spends far more money and “owns” far more people in the intelligence industry than McCone does as CIA chief. And McCone and McNamara are very much alike on one way – they are both competitors in their every instinct. “Both Bob and John,” says one who knows both well, “like to get that fustest with the mostest.” “Thar” is the center of power – the White House.

The competition between McCone and McNamara to get thar fustest with the mostest has sometimes provided a rather entertaining spectacle. During the Cuba crisis each new crop of U-2 pictures was daily processed in the early hours of the morning at the photo-interpretation laboratory in downtown Washington. While the pictures were being developed and analyzed, McCone’s CIA man and McNamara’s Pentagon man – usually a major general – would breathe anxiously down the necks of the photo interpreters. As soon as an interesting picture appeared, McNamara’s general would grab it and drive like the wind to the Pentagon, where McNamara, a compulsive early riser, would be waiting him.

The CIA man would grab his copy, race even faster for McCone’s house in northwest Washington, rush to McCone’s bedside, and shove the picture in McCone’s sleepy face. At this instant the telephone would ring, and McCone would be able – by a split second – to say, “Yes, Bob, I have the picture right in front of me. Interesting, isn’t it?”

“All I had to do was trip on McCone’s back stoop,” one of the CIA’s couriers has been quoted as saying, “and McNamara would have won the ball game.”

In this game of one-upmanship the CIA’s relative flexibility is an important asset. More than once, doubtless to McNamara’s chagrin, McCone has beat him to the White House with operational intelligence garnered by Air Force or Navy planes. But McNamara has assets, too, above all in the Pentagon’s command of money and power.

CIA’s money troubles

“People think the CIA has more spending money than it does,” says one CIA man. “Hell, these days it’s really tough to get a measly quarter of a million for an operation – and in the Pentagon that’s not even carfare. If the Army hadn’t taken over a lot of our responsibilities in Vietnam, the agency would have had to declare in bankruptcy.”

It is no secret that McNamara and McCone have not always seen eye to eye, particularly in regard to the exceedingly sensitive subject of Cuba. McNamara recently told a congressional committee, “I do not feel [Cuba] is being used as a base for the export of Communism to any substantial degree today.” This was flatly contradictory to McCone’s publicly expressed views on the same subjects – and in this case McCone unquestionably has the best of the argument.

McNamara’s two-hour national telecast on the Cuban missile situation last February did not improve McCone-McNamara relations. On February 6 the President suddenly decided that the rumors that the Soviets had not really withdrawn their missiles from Cuba must be publicly scotched. He ordered McNamara to conduct that same day a “special Cuba briefing” on nationwide networks.

McCone was not consulted about the telecast. He was testifying in executive session on Capitol Hill that morning, and when asked by such senatorial grand dukes as Senators Richard Russell and Saltonstall about details of the Cuban intelligence operation, he was cagey in his replies. When, a few hours later, he heard those same details being broadcast to the world by McNamara, his hair is said to have turned a shade whiter.

On McCone’s orders, an analysis of the McNamara telecast was made in CIA. The report concluded that the telecast had seriously compromised certain intelligence techniques. “On the next go-round,” says one expert, “you can be damned sure they will change the shape of the crates they ship their missiles and IL-28’s in.” As the McNamara telecast made obvious, the CIA’s “cratologists” had confirmed both incoming and outgoing shipments of missiles and bombers.

McCone had a right to be unhappy about the telecast – he is charged by law with “the protection of intelligence sources and methods,” and he should certainly have been consulted in advance. For his part, McNamara has made it abundantly clear that McCone’s presidential authority to “guide” the total intelligence effort has certain well-defined limits where the Defense Department is concerned. During a House hearing McNamara was asked if he was “operating on the intelligence you get from the CIA?”

“No, sir,” McNamara replied firmly. “I receive information directly from the Defense Intelligence Agency, and that information is screened by no one outside the Pentagon.

The Defense Intelligence Agency was created by McNamara on August 1, 1961. There were good reasons for establishing the DIA. The intelligence estimates of the individual services have traditionally been intensely parochial – an example being the wildly inflated Air Force estimates of Soviet missile and bomber production. Moreover, there are some things in the intelligence industry which the Pentagon can do better than the CIA.

For example, John McCone was probably right on balance when he agreed at the height of the Cuban crisis to turn the CIA’s U-2 surveillance operation over to the Air Force. The U-2 operation was no longer covert, and in the circumstances, the sensible thing to do was to make the surveillance effort a straight military operation, as it remains today.

For another example, when the President learned of the Communist plan to instigate riots in Guatemala, he asked his military aide an obvious question. “About these riots,” he said to major General Clifton. “Can the government handle them? Find out about that.” The CIA did not have the answer to the President’s question. Through its close connections with the military men in the Guatemalan junta, the DIA did have the answer – a firm “yes” – and it delivered the answer to the White House the same day.

And yet there is one reason why the Defense Intelligence Agency should not have been created. There is really nothing very much that the DIA can do that the CIA is not doing already. The Army, Navy and Air Force must have their own order-of-battle intelligence, so the three service intelligence units will continue to exist. That being so, the DIA has no choice but to concentrate on the political-strategic intelligence which is the CIA’s chief function. Some military men have sensitive political antennae. A great many, unfortunately, do not.

Moreover, Parkinson’s Law operates with special virulence in the Pentagon. One reason is that all three services are top-heavy with high-ranking officers. This creates an intense hunger for staff “slots,” and intelligence has always been a happy hunting ground for the slot-hungry. This scrambling in turn leads to empire building, and as that budget request for a huge new building for DIA suggests, the DIA’s empire is rapidly expanding.

DIA spokesmen – not CIA – insist that all is sweetness and light between the two agencies. In fact, 13 issues had arisen at last report between DIA and CIA, on which McCone and Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric have been quietly negotiating.

For example: Will DIA’s intelligence bulletins circulate outside the Pentagon in competition with CIA’s? Whom maintains liaison with friendly foreign intelligence, like MI6? Who “owns” the CIA-created national photo interpretation center? Who owns such technical devices as the U-2? Where does the CIA’s responsibility for guerrilla and anti-guerrilla operations end and the Pentagon’s begin?

Above all, who runs covert operations and where? This is the most sensitive issue of all. It is in this area that CIA and DIA, like K.G.B. and G.R.U., are likely to begin tripping over each other’s cloaks and stabbing each other with their daggers. Recently reports reached CIA that DIA was planning a major clandestine operation in an area that was previously an exclusive CIA bailiwick. “If they move in on us there,” says one CIA man, “we’ll really have to pick up the gauntlet.”

Meanwhile, much depends on the answer to the question: How good is the CIA? For DIA and the military can make a case for moving in on the CIA only if they can provide better intelligence more quickly to the President and the other major intelligence consumers.

“Intelligence,” says John McCone, “is not a measurable commodity. You can’t put a price tag on it.” That is true enough. But there are certain measures which can be used all the same. One is the opinion of old hands in the intelligence industry. This reporter has asked many old hands for their opinions of CIA. Their answers in most cases are remarkably similar. They boil down as follows:

Dick Helms’s Department of Espionage and Dirty Tricks – a solid C-plus. This moderate rating must be read in the light of the fact that this is the toughest course in all the intelligence curriculum.

Ray Cline’s analysis section – B-plus.

Sherman Kent’s estimators – a B or, given the trickiness of making the national estimates, perhaps even a B-plus.

The newly vacated department of technical espionage- a B-plus.

There are other ways to assess the effectiveness of an intelligence organization. The grand prize in the game is the “penetration of the opposition.” If you can insert an agent or agents into the other side’s intelligence organization, you are in the happy position of a player without a blindfold in a game of blindman’s buff.

M.I.6 has been penetrated to a fare-the-well, as was proved by the celebrated case of George Blake, one of a seemingly endless succession of Soviet agents who have penetrated the British government. “The British suffer from the old-school-tie complex,” says one security expert. “You know – ‘What, old Guy a turncoat? Why, I went to school with him.’ They regarded the polygraph as ungentlemanly and our security techniques as boorish. But they’re beginning to learn.”

Penetration by spies

K.G.B., it can be stated on high authority, has been penetrated by CIA, although the hows and wheres are, of course, the toppest of top secrets. Has CIA been penetrated by K.G.B.?

There is no way to prove that it has not. As Bedell Smith, Allen Dulles’s predecessor, once testified – thus creating a furor in the McCarthy era – an intelligence chief must operate on the assumption that the opposition has penetrated his organization. At least two men who might have been Soviet agents have been fired from the CIA. But those in the best position to judge believe that the odds are high that CIA has not been penetrated. If so, CIA must be given a higher score in this vital area than its rivals.

Odious comparison, in fact, suggests that the CIA has done reasonably well in total effort over the years. The Soviets have overflown American territory more frequently than is generally known, but they have nothing to match the U-2 operation. Although we have had our Bay of Pigs, they have had theirs – Khrushchev’s missile adventure in Cuba. The outcome of that adventure proved a total Soviet intelligence failure, in regard to both American intelligence capabilities and the probable American reaction to Khrushchev’s challenge.

The K.G.B. has had plenty of other failures. A recent, less obvious example, was the flop in Iraq. According to CIA estimates, the Soviets invested the equivalent of half a billion dollars in General Kassim’s Communist-infested dictatorship, hoping to turn Iraq into a Middle Eastern Cuba. Yet K.G.B. had no advance warning of the coup that led to Kassim’s assassination in February, and the destruction of the Communist apparatus in Iraq. Neither did the British, Israeli or Egyptian intelligence services. The CIA was “thoroughly clued in.”

There is no doubt, furthermore, that CIA has succeeded in attracting and holding many remarkably able analysts and operatives. John McCone himself has clearly been impressed – and, perhaps, surprised – by the quality of people he found in the CIA. “This is the most competent and effective organization I have had anything to do with in private or public life,” he says.

There are some veteran CIA men, perhaps suffering from nostalgia, who sense stodginess creeping in, who regret the days when such brilliant if sometimes overdaring men as Dulles, Bissell and Amory ran the show.

“The real trouble with this new building,” says one CIA man, “is that it tends to make an honest woman of the old madam – you know, no spittoons, keep the antimacassars clean and no champagne in the morning. We ought to be lurking in scrabby old hideouts, with the plaster peeling and stopped-up toilets. There’s something about the atmosphere of this building that leads to too many memos, too many meetings and not enough dirty work.”

There are those who resent John McCone’s tendency to run the organization like a big corporation rather than a band of conspiratorial brothers. “Maybe Allen was a bit of a romantic. But it was fun working for him. Dammit, a man who’s been abroad for a couple of years on a rough assignment wants to see the boss, if only for half an hour.”

Despite these rather nebulous strictures, those in a good position to judge give both the CIA and McCone himself high marks. One thing is certain. Our intelligence industry is here to stay. There are a lot of things wrong with it: it costs too much, employs too many people and involves too much rivalry and duplication. But we can never go back to the dear old days before World War II, when American intelligence was in the hands of a few elderly female civil servants with pince-nez glasses, who tended the attaché files in the War Department. John McCone himself has summed up the best reason why we can’t go back:

“Every war of this century, including World War I, has started because of inadequate intelligence and incorrect intelligence estimates and evaluations. This was true of Pearl Harbor, for example, and it was true in Korea. The Cuban crisis in October could have generated a war, some think a nuclear war. But war over Cuba was avoided because of intelligence success. Every threat to our security, every weapons system, was correctly identified in time to give the President and his policy advisers time to think, to make a rational estimate of the situation, and to devise a means of dealing with it with a maximum chance of success and a minimum risk of global war. I consider this an intelligence success. Although intelligence is not a measurable commodity, that is at least a partial measure of its value.”

If good intelligence can help us to avoid a war which might destroy us all, the enormous American investment in the intelligence industry will surely have paid off rather handsomely.”

Chomsky’s precursor and model: M. S. Arnoni

Key Chomsky propaganda lines turn out, upon inspection, to be derived directly from the work of M.S. Arnoni, the founder of, and chief contributor to, The Minority of One, the “independent monthly…dedicated to the eradication of all restrictions on Thought” (1959-1968) – or some such guff.

Within Arnoni’s work we find the following characteristics of his successor’s work: an obsession with the New York Times, to which he confined most of his criticism of the US press even as he routinely denounced it for suppressing unwelcome truths; an enduring hatred of the Kennedys, most notably JFK and RFK, allied to a systematic mis-representation of their policies and motivations, even when subsequent events proved Arnoni’s claims to have been untrue and misleading; and a sustained censorship of CIA malfeasance and treason under – against – John F. Kennedy. Here’s a classic example of Arnoni’s fidelity to the Allen Welch Dulles line that CIA does not conduct its own independent foreign policy:

M.S.Arnoni, “…and More About the CIA,” The Minority of One, June 1966, (Vol VIII, No 6), pp.8-9

In a recent study of the CIA, the New York Times…published in five lengthy instalments (April 25-29)*…” a report which “makes a unique contribution in that it dispels the myth that the CIA has somehow escaped the U.S. Government’s control. If anything, this myth must have been encouraged by the Government itself, for it enables it to engage in some of the dirtiest practices while at least partly shedding the onus for them. Say the reporters:

“This study…found that the CIA, for all its fearsome reputation, is under far more stringent political and budgetary control than most of its critics know or concede, and that since the Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba in 1961 these controls have been tightly exercised.”

Specifically,

“all CIA expenditures must be authorized in advance – first by an Administrative committee that includes some of the highest-ranking political officials and White House staff assistants, then by officials in the Bureau of the Budget, who have the power to rule out or reduce an expenditure.”

In fact,

“when critics frequently charge that CIA operations contradict and sabotage official American policy, they may not know that the CIA is often overruled in its policy judgments.” (Ibid.)

What all this means is obvious: that all the murders, coups, bribes, intrigues, provocations and other foreign interventions committed by the CIA – a whole litany of which is recited in the Times report itself – are the policies of the United States Government. Far from being at odds with the CIA, “it was [united States] policymakers who chose to make the agency the instrument of political and military intervention in other nation’s affairs…” (Op. cit., April 26)…

…With the CIA clearly established as an obedient arm rather than an uncontrollable outcast of the U.S. Government…”

Arnoni’s conclusion was more than a little unconvincing given that in the same piece, he had first pointed out that the NYT “report” – the five-part series – evidenced a “deliberate effort at presenting a ‘balanced’ picture, with every last doubt resolved in the CIA’s favor and with more good things said about the agency than any facts could justify” (p.8); and, second, that the “report” was “incomplete not in the least because it fails to expose that technique of stigmatization which caused its own editors for years to consider the now conceded facts as news that’s not ‘fit to print.” So there we have it: The “report” was biased and emanated from a newspaper with a shocking record of suppression in the service of the CIA, but was nevertheless to be trusted in its most important conclusion.

Very convincing. And thoroughly Chomsky-esque in its absurdity.

Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB counter-intelligence officer turned CIA mouthpiece, wrote of Arnoni: “A Holocaust survivor, an ardent Zionist, and one-time editor at the Encyclopaedia Britannica,…an eloquent and exuberant man. Minority of One was a highbrow magazine for the liberal American elite, and we decided to use Arnoni and his publication to further the Soviet cause in the United States…He was extremely knowledgeable about the situation in Israel – his circle of friends included such luminaries as Golda Meir and David Ben Gurion…”

Kalugin goes on to make a bunch of CIA-serving claims about KGB funding of TMO, Arnoni’s witting publication of Moscow-prepared propaganda etc., all the usual nonsense designed to a) earn an ex-Russian spook permission from the Agency to remain in the US and make money; and persuade the dim-witted reader that criticism of American mass-murder in Vietnam was, at root, a lot of Russian spook disinformation.

Yet not even Kalugin denies that Arnoni’s first loyalty was to Israel: I wonder if the link between CIA and Arnoni is Angleton, LHO's puppet-master-in-chief, and his visits to Ben Gurion and the blood-soaked US colonial state over which he presided? Just a thought.

Oleg Kalugin (with Fen Montaigne). Spymaster: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West (London: Smith Gryphon, 1994), pp.53-4.

*As printed in The (London) Times under the following titles:

The Truth About the CIA – 1: Secret Weapon That Has Become A Burden,” 26 April 1966, p. 9;

“The Truth About the CIA – 2: How The Agency Is Organised To Glean Information,” 27 April 1966, p.11;

“The Truth About The CIA – 3: The Case Of The Contaminated Cuban Sugar,” 28 April 1966, p.12;

“The Truth About The CIA – 4: A Hunch That Proved To Be Correct,” 29 April 1966, p.11.

We can now add Arnoni to the list of CIA-loyalists:

Quotes:

(1) "The CIA, as the President's loyal tool - tainted to some extent by involvement in Watergate-related activities - also became vulnerable."

(2) "CIA: The President's Loyal Tool."

(3) "One thing I would mention is that when it's a CIA operation, that means it's a White House operation. It's not CIA. They don't do things on their own…If it's a CIA operation it's because they were ordered to do it…"

(4) "[T]he CIA is not a mysterious body with its own brand of politics: it is a tool in the hands of the President of the United States…"

(5): "While the CIA deserves no kudos for its part in the scheme [bay of Pigs], it is a misjudgement to credit it with more than an agent's share of the blame…"

(6) "The Central Intelligence Agency has never assumed the 'right to meddle in other nations' internal affairs.' The charter legislation for the CIA makes it the instrument for such special activities, but only when they are proposed by the policy agencies, directed by the President and financed by Congress after proper notification."

(7) "Let me say again flatly that CIA does not make policy, and does not operate outside or contrary to established policy."

(8) “He was disillusioned, he said, because the CIA had become ‘not an intelligence gathering organisation but a covert operations arm of the Presidency.’”

(9) "The White House knows, or is made aware of, every important step of the CIA...The CIA operates both independently and secretly, but the much circulated view that there are two governments is groundless. There is only one government in the United States and it is directed from Washington."

10) “…all the murders, coups, bribes, intrigues, provocations and other foreign interventions committed by the CIA – a whole litany of which is recited in the Times report itself – are the policies of the United States Government. Far from being at odds with the CIA, “it was [united States] policymakers who chose to make the agency the instrument of political and military intervention in other nation’s affairs…”

Sources:

(1) Victor Marchetti & John D. Marks. The CIA And The Cult Of Intelligence (New York: Dell, February 1975), p. 328.

(2) Victor Marchetti, "CIA: The President's Loyal Tool," The Nation, 3 April 1972, p. 430.

(3) Noam Chomsky. Class Warfare (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 92.

(4) Philip Agee, as quoted by Claude Bourdet, in "The CIA Against Portugal," as found in Jean Pierre Faye (Ed.). Portugal: The Revolution In The Labyrinth (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1976), p. 194.

(5) Carl Marzani & Robert E. Light. Cuba v. CIA (New York: Marzani & Munsell, 1961), p. 52.

(6) Gary E. Foster, (Director of Public and Agency Information, CIA), "C.I.A. Isn't Lone Wolf of Foreign Policy," New York Times, (Wednesday), 17 February 1993, p.A18.

(7) Admiral William F. Raborn, outgoing Director of Central Intelligence, U.S. New & World Report, 18 July 1966, pp.75-76.

(8) Ralph W. McGehee. Deadly Deceits (1989), as quoted, without objection, by John Pilger. Heroes (London: Pan Books, 1989), p.184.

(9) George Morris. CIA and American Labor: The Subversion of the AFL-CIO's Foreign Policy (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp.23 & 145.

10) M.S.Arnoni, “…and More About the CIA,” The Minority of One, June 1966, (Vol VIII, No 6), pp.8-9.

Don't take my word for it...

Not much danger of that, you can rest assured...

It should be noted that Chomsky avoids discussing the book "Rethinking Camelot" because it attracts "message board lunatics" who haven't the brains, time or inclination to digest and absorb what he was writing about ...or how that relates to volumes upon volumes of his (Chomsky's) written work specifically on the subject of Vietnam, it's "war" and the machinations that made it all happen.

Come, come, we know the truth: Chomsky avoids talking about "Rethinking Camelot" because he's a coward and a xxxx who won't risk open debate for fear of being taken to the cleaners. He knows he's vulnerable because he told such brazen lies.

In fact, Kennedy plays a rather small part comparatively to the problems Vietnam faced before it was leveled by psychotic americans with bombs guns and napalm and after.Kennedy was really just a hyphen of sorts.

We now see how attentively you've read both Rethinking Camelot and this thread:

“Kennedy escalated” (p.2); “John F. Kennedy’s escalation” (p.23); “Kennedy’s escalation” (p.27); “Kennedy…escalated the war” (p.37); “JFK raised the level of US attack” (p.43); “As he prepared to escalate the war…in late 1961” (p.46); “Kennedy’s 1961-62 escalation” (p.51); “his 1961-1962 escalation” (p.67)”Kennedy’s war” (p.2); “Kennedy’s war” (p.36); “Kennedy’s war” (p.39); “Kennedy’s war” (p.52); “Kennedy’s war” (p.53); “Kennedy’s war” (p.69); “Kennedy’s war” (p.73); “Kennedy’s war” (p.81); “Kennedy’s war” (p.86); “Kennedy’s war” (p.105). ”Kennedy…his aggression” (p.15); “Kennedy moved on to armed attack” (p.25); “JFK’s aggression” (p.32); “JFK’s aggression” (p.35); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.52); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.63); “JFK’s 1961-1962 aggression” (p.66); “JFK’s aggression” (p.115).

To summarize, your attack on Chomsky is as childish as it is uninformed.

As you've just proved...

That's why you post on the internet and he gets published.

CIA subsidies to publishers, anyone? Good God, Blair, where have you been all years? Langley?

Please feel free to read up and get back to me with sources, citations and scholarly criticism and also provide some literature other than your own internet musings that might "contrast" what the Professor has to say about Vietnam and JFK.

Do you know, I think I just might...after all, what has the good “Professor” to fear from open debate?

Plenty!

Chomsky's entire body of work precludes even the remotest possibility that his bread is buttered by "Virginian spooks".

Quite the contrary, it furnishes conclusive proof that he's a xxxx and a fraud. But then I've actually read it. It's far from clear you have.

Not everyone who works at or for MIT is a CIA operative.

I agree, which is why I've never said or written any such thing. The mystery is why you would suggest so. A straw-man erected in desperation, perhaps? Yup, that does it for me.

One interesting snippet, though, from a friend who did a PhD overseas some years ago. He met a couple of coves from MIT, who told him, among other things, that Chomsky a) employs unacknowledged researchers; and obliges them to sign secrecy agreements. Unsubstantiated, as yet, but hardly stretching plausibility.

People seem to get up in arms when Kennedy is remembered as the womanizing, Irish mob bought "Power Hawk" that he was .

Good to see that rich tradition of anti-Irish bigotry, a stream of filth tapped by Chomsky himself in Rethinking Camelot, is alive and well. It reflects great credit on you, him, and the arguments of his you regurgitate like a parrot (Norwegian blue, I fear).

Don't let your glamorized hero worship for Kennedy get you riled when a "world renowned intellectual and his well respected scholarly work" paint a picture of Ol' Pumkinhead that you don't like.

See above. It's like reading a nineteenth century copy of Punch, only with the added frisson of that interesting piece of diction: "Ol'Pumkinhead." Nice. As Executive Action tends to be.

I'm surprised this isn't the usual "Paul Rigby Solo Post...."

You've been reading those very excellent threads on Starnes and Muchmore, haven't you, you little tinker? Don't blame you. I appreciate quality myself.

Now, as to your "surprise," isn't that just a tad weird expressing "surprise" at your own decision to jump into a thread? You can't seriously mean you surprised yourself, can you? Mind you, surveying the mind-numbing drivel which follows, I woudn't put it past you.

If you have read any of Professor Chomsky's other work, you would realize how sad and pathetic the assertion is that he is a "CIA backed stooge".

Your problem is that I have, he is, and, worst of all, I'm prepared to say so in public. That's not unique: what is is the detail deployed by way of confirmation.

I suggest you read any number of his books related to American Foreign Policy and then come back and explain to us why his work, (which is damning to the CIA and it's cronies to be be short about it,) would warrant a paycheck from the NSA, NSF, All Night Drive Thru BBQ, the CIA or anyone else.

So much reading - you claim - so little comprehension. I'm beginning to give credence to all those nasty little rumours about the decline in US educational standards. You don't think it's anything to do with all that money your government spends on killing and torturing foreigners, do you? I rather fear that's the case in the UK.

For any newcomers to the debate about Z film alteration in general, and Dan Rather's role in particular, here's a website where you can both hear and read his earliest descriptions on CBS (radio and TV):

http://www.etcfilmunit.com/iaccuse.html

I-Accuse - a Gil W. Toff current project on JFK assassination

Toff's involvement in the case goes back to the late 1960s: I have some audio tapes of interviews he conducted at the time, seemingly for Newcomb and Adams' Murder From Within. His point couldn't be clearer. The Z film described by Zapruder (on 22 November) and Rather, twice, (on 25 November), is not the version which emerged in the course of the Clay Shaw trial; and thus to accuse Rather of lying is to miss the much bigger and more important point - the film was significantly reworked after its initial emergence:

http://www.i-accuse.com/audioRather.html

"…at the President's assassination, an amateur photographer positioned himself on an old street lamp base and was facing the automobile, with his side to the window from which the shots came. The President's open black Lincoln automobile made a turn off of Houston Street in Dallas onto Elm Street right below the window from which the shots were fired, it got about 35 yards from the face of the building.

President Kennedy had just put his right hand up to the side of his right eye; in front of them were Governor and Mrs. Connolly, two Secret Service men in the front seat. At almost the instant the President put his hand up to his eyebrow, the President lurched forward just a bit, uh, it was obvious that he had been hit, in the movies but…you had to be looking very closely in order to see it. Mrs. Kennedy does not appear to be aware that he was hit. But Governor Connolly in the seat just in front of the President duly heard the shot, turned in such a way to expose his entire shirt front and chest. At that moment, a shot very clearly hit the front of the Governor. He was wounded once with a chest shot which we now know, and the Governor fell back in his seat. And at that instant, the 2nd shot, the 3rd shot total, hit President Kennedy and there was no doubt there it, it, hit him, went forward with considerable violence. Mrs. Kennedy stood up immediately then threw herself out of the back seat of the car onto the trunk of the car, and then the Secret Service man standing on the back bumper. The Secret Service man leaned over, put his hands on her shoulders and shoved her back into the car. A Secret Service man in the front seat of the car ah, was already on the telephone, perhaps he had been on the phone all along, it was not clear. And the car sped away.

The complete scene that I just described to you covered exactly 20 seconds, that is from the time the car made the turn, until the car disappeared onto an underpass. It is very clear that President was hit, Governor Connolly was hit, then the President was hit again. The 2nd shot hit President Kennedy, and there was no doubt there it it hit and went forward with considerable violence."

http://www.i-accuse.com/audioZap.html

TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is taken from video tape of the live broadcast seen nationwide on the ABC network on November 22, 1963. The interviewer, seated on the left, is WFAA-TV program director Jay Watson. On the right, with his hat on the desk, is Abraham Zapruder.

WATSON: A gentleman just walked in our studio that I am meeting for the first time as well as you, this is WFAA-TV in Dallas, Texas. May I have your name please, sir?

ZAPRUDER: My name is Abraham Zapruder.

WATSON: Mr. Zapruda?

ZAPRUDER: Zapruder, yes sir.

WATSON: Zapruda. And would you tell us your story please, sir?

ZAPRUDER: I got out in, uh, about a half-hour earlier to get a good spot to shoot some pictures. And I found a spot, one of these concrete blocks they have down near that park, near the underpass. And I got on top there, there was another girl from my office, she was right behind me.

And as I was shooting, as the President was coming down from Houston Street making his turn, it was about a half-way down there, I heard a shot, and he slumped to the side, like this. Then I heard another shot or two, I couldn't say it was one or two...

Paul, I'm not a very filmy citizen, but it souds very interesting, to put it mildly.

What are the sources on your comment about Dan Rather describing the film on Nov. 25th?

Nat,

Trask’s National Nightmare on six feet of film: Mr. Zapruder’s home movie and the murder of President Kennedy (Danvers, MA: Yeoman Press, 2005), pp.137-144, offers transcripts of Dan Rather’s two surprisingly detailed descriptions of the film, as offered on November 25, first to radio listeners, then to CBS television news watchers (Walter Cronkite presiding). I have assumed them accurate, whether wisely or not remains to be seen.

Rather’s descriptions suggest a compelling reason for the recall of the first public version of the Z film. In both of them, Rather describes Connally as having turned to face the President, with his right arm extended towards the latter (radio) or merely reaching with an unspecified arm (tv) in response to Kennedy’s agonised response to the first bullet’s impact. Anatomically, then, Connally was in completely the wrong position to receive a bullet in the back from the rear. In fact, he was side-on to the TSBD, chest facing the grassy knoll, when, according to both Rather descriptions, the front of his exposed white shirt clearly manifested the exit wound.

You see at once the problem for the manufacturers of the two official orthodoxies (TSBD and the grassy knoll – I think of them as a pair).

Interestingly, Trask notes elsewhere that Rather was shown the Z film again on November 26 – in effect, one can’t help thinking, “re-educated” as to the film’s contents – at KRLD. According to Trask, it was one of the two copies sent to Washington, and recalled by the Dallas Secret Service (p.131). Call me cynical, but I rather suspect they were not the same film:

“The evening of November 25 the Secret Service contacted the FBI requesting that the FBI-lent first-generation copy be returned to the Dallas Secret Service, as it was needed the next morning. The film was put upon a Braniff Airlines fight scheduled to arrive in Dallas at 3:21 a.m. By 9:00 a.m., the film was delivered by an FBI agent back into the hands of Secret Service Inspector Kelley,”

Richard Trask. National Nightmare on six feet of film: Mr. Zapruder’s home movie and the murder of President Kennedy (Danvers, MA: Yeoman Press, 2005), p.122.

By coincidence, November 25 was not only the day that Rather offered his two descriptions, but also the day on which Time-Life initiated a survey/reconstruction; and, late in the afternoon, that the same organisation felt belatedly compelled to buy the film rights to Z (or so the received version has it). Even more interestingly, it was the same night that Russian TV viewers were treated to a film of the actual shooting, a film that could not – because of the time differences involved – have been the Muchmore film.

All in all, then, for the Zapruder film, a very event-filled day, November 25.

Paul.

“The second little matter flows clearly from the first…You can’t begin and then stop. If you begin, you must keep on beginning; that’s the truth. No rest for the wicked,”

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Body Snatcher.

Dick Russell. On The Trail of the JFK Assassins: A Groundbreaking Look at America’s Most Infamous Conspiracy (NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008), chapter 41, an interview with Doug Horne: “Two Caskets, Two Autopsies, Two Brain Exams: The Disappearing Evidence,” p.293:

Z film’s early history a retrospective fiction:

The processing affidavits which attempt to establish the film’s chain-of-custody are all dated November 22, the day of the assassination, when Zapruder was running around helter-skelter trying to get his film developed. He went first to a TV station and then some other place, where he was told that since the film’s chemistry was proprietary, it had to go to a Kodak lab to be developed. So, yes, these affidavits still do mean that the Kodak lab in Dallas developed the original film; they establish that Mr. Zapruder exposed three contact prints at the Jamieson film lab in Dallas; and they further establish that he then returned them to the Kodak processing plant where the three copies were immediately developed. All these things happened on November 22, 1963 – I don’t doubt that for one minute. But I think the affidavits recording these events were probably really executed on Monday, November 25, and back-dated to the 22. (No one I am aware of saw Abraham Zapruder running round Dallas on November 22 with a manual typewriter under his arm.) On Saturday, Zapruder signed a contract with Life Magazine for $50,000 for print rights only, permitting them to keep the materials for only one week. Then, on Monday, a new contract was signed for print and motion picture rights, and Life was to keep the materials forever. Zapruder got a lot more money - $150,000 total now, instead of $50,000 – when he renegotiated his deal on Monday. In support if his new contract, I believe that he then had to prove the provenance of the film, so he created the appropriate paper trail in the form of the back-dated affidavits.

Ibid., p.295:

Necessary continuities in deception:

Those who would create a false legend of the shooting by culling the autopsy photo collection and inserting manipulated photos that told a false of the wounds and the shooting, would of necessity also have to either destroy, or alter, any motion picture evidence of the assassination that was inconsistent with the officially promulgated version of the assassination. And if an original and seven copies of an autopsy report can be successfully switched out and substituted, then so can an original and three copies of a motion picture film. Perhaps a “film switch” is even why Zapruder was allowed to renegotiate his contract with Life Magazine; perhaps that additional $100,000 (which was pro-rated over a six-year period) bought his silence and future cooperation. After all, he did see the true original in the Kodak lab the day of the assassination and did screen it for others (such as Dan Rather) on Saturday, November 23.* (Perhaps this is why Dan Rather’s contemporaneous account of what he saw in the film that weekend, broadcast on the radio, differs from what we see in the film in the archives today!) It would have been imperative to reliably obtain Zapruder’s silence over the switch. This scenario would also explain the accounts we have all heard over the years of others seeing or possessing different versions of the Zapruder film from the one we know today, if the true original and the three true first-generation copies were not all immediately destroyed.

* Not so: Progressive Labor – A Special Supplement, “Kennedy’s Assassination: A System in Crisis,” Wednesday, 27 November 1963, p.5: “CBS News reported on the afternoon of November 25 that a movie made of the assassination showed three shots hit President Kennedy and Governor Connelly [sic] in a period of ‘five seconds.’”

http://www.swans.com/library/art14/barker10.html

Commentary » swans.com December 15, 2008

Noam Chomsky And The Power Of Letters

by Michael Barker

In a time before e-mail and mobile phones, the art of letter writing was key to the exchange of ideas, and the promotion of political causes, by progressive intellectuals. While letter writing may not be enjoying the same level of usage today, it is still a medium of significance for public campaigning. One prominent figure who has kept up his letter writing habits is Noam Chomsky, who admits to having a "letter-answering neurosis" and admirably spends "some 20 hours a week on correspondence." Unlike lesser known researchers, Chomsky's signature is an influential mark, whether it is on his own letter or those of others. This article will not fault Chomsky's own letters, but it will investigate the effects of his signing other people's letters. Secondly, given the dubious nature of the letters that Chomsky has signed, this article will try to understand why he has failed to extend his regular criticisms of liberal intellectuals to their institutional counterparts, liberal foundations.

The signing of open letters -- which are subsequently usually posted online or reproduced within the mainstream media -- is one significant form of activism in which many intellectuals partake. In this regard, Chomsky, like other leading progressive writers, is regularly called upon to grace the lists of names of well-known social commentators and/or academics collected together on such letters. Consequently this article will examine the power invested in these letters by Noam Chomsky's name. This subject matter will be investigated by reviewing some of the causes that Chomsky has lent his name to during the last six months of 2008. It will be argued that while such forms of activism can certainly play a part in generating awareness of progressive campaigns, it is essential that individuals signing up to such letters, like Chomsky, are aware of how their name may be misused to serve alternative political agendas that are not always readily apparent simply considering the content of each letter in isolation.

Four Letters

For want of a better word the four "letters" that Chomsky has attached his name to since June 2008 were 1) a statement written in solidarity with Dora Maria Tellez, the former president of Nicaragua's Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS), 2) an open letter in support of Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution, 3) a letter voicing concerns over foreign inferences in the electoral process now underway in El Salvador, and 4) a petition addressed to the board of directors of Human Rights Watch, critiquing their recent report A Decade Under Chávez. Although each of these causes may appear reasonable at first glance, a good case can be made that the collective effect of signing all four of these letters may actually have a detrimental impact on effective challenges to imperialism, negatively influencing the ability of other progressive activists to comprehend the full gamut of strategies that are employed by neoliberal democracy manipulators. Arguably this in turn serves to minimize the likelihood of progressive activists from identifying perhaps the most significant root drivers, funders, and legitimizers of the status quo (that is, liberal foundations).

As Toni Solo reports, the first letter that Chomsky signed was published on June 16, 2008, in the Nicaraguan "centre-right newspaper" El Nuevo Diario. Solo, in his critique of the contents of the letter, writes that it called

for the Nicaraguan coalition government, led by the Sandinista FSLN, not to shut down political freedom and to hold a national dialogue to address the food crisis and the high cost of living in Nicaragua. This appeal was made in solidarity with Dora Maria Tellez, the former president of the neo-liberal social democrat Movimiento Renovador Sandinista. (1)

Solo argues that regardless of the signatories' intentions, the letter contributed toward playing an important role in the "developing destabilisation campaign in Nicaragua of which the MRS is, from the US State Department's point of view, a vital part." Indeed, he writes:

Confirmation that the MRS cynically engineered the whole affair came with the letter's sequel. First appeared a paid advertisement in the local press from the group of foreign cooperation development donor countries -- who like the Bush regime have consistently promoted the MRS -- criticising the Supreme Electoral Council's interpretation of Nicaragua's electoral law. Then the same day, the MRS held a national rally in support of Dora Maria's protest. According to the MRS newspaper, El Nuevo Diario, the rally attracted a few thousand supporters from all over the country. The whole series of events was very clearly orchestrated by the MRS leadership, including Dora Maria Tellez herself.

On top of this, it appears that MRS, the political party that Chomsky implicitly supported (in this letter anyway), are linked to the US government's democracy-manipulating efforts in the region; as Solo reminds us how "the MRS leadership -- including former FSLN comandantes Luis Carrion and Victor Lopez Tirado -- negotiated funding from the US electoral destabilisation quango (quasi-NGO), the International Republican Institute to train up MRS electoral officials prior to the 2006 presidential election." This link brings us neatly (or confusingly, depending on how one looks at it) to the open letter in support of Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution that Chomsky signed in June 2008. This connection is noteworthy because, in the past, the Albert Einstein Institution, like MRS, has obtained financial support from the International Republican Institute (a core grantee of the ironically entitled National Endowment for Democracy).

The open letter calling for support of the Albert Einstein Institution was penned by Professor Stephen Zunes -- an individual I have written about at some length regarding his uncritical support for NED-linked groups like the Albert Einstein Institution and the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (another important group that is mentioned within the open letter). Thus despite the fact that the former group has obtained support from the NED-funded International Republican Institute, the open letter reads:

We are aware of, and are adamantly opposed to, efforts by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and other U.S. government-funded efforts to advance U.S. strategic and economic objectives under the guise of "democracy promotion." We recognize, however, that Dr. Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution are not part of such an agenda.

To confuse matters even more, in the same letter Zunes acknowledges that the Albert Einstein Institution has received "a couple of small one-time grants from the NED and IRI... to translate some of Dr. Sharp's theoretical writings." Contrary to the views expressed in Zunes's open letter, over the past year I have fully explored the links between the Albert Einstein Institution and the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict with the democracy-manipulating establishment, and have clearly demonstrated that their work is serving imperial interests (intentionally or not). Given this documentary record it is worrying that one of the leading critics of imperialism (Chomsky) could have overlooked these imperial connections so easily. Moreover, it is surprising to observe that Howard Zinn also ranks among the many progressive activists that signed the letter, as he is an honorary chair and board member of the International Endowment for Democracy, a US-based group that critiques the work of the NED-led democracy-manipulating community. (2)

In line with Chomsky's evident concern with the insidious effects of the democracy-manipulating community, the third letter Chomsky signed, the El Salvador letter, highlights four primary issues: these are 1) the problem of "foreign interference in the electoral processes and the internal affairs of other countries," 2) "the increase in political violence in El Salvador over the past two years and the atmosphere of impunity with which this violence has taken place," 3) "a series of legal changes and reforms to the electoral code that open up the possibility of fraud," and 4) their alarm over statements issued in Washington D.C. by the Salvadoran foreign minister, Marisol Argueta de Barillas, upon the personal invitation of Roger Noriega, that "virtually call[ed] for U.S. intervention in El Salvador to avoid a possible electoral triumph by the FMLN."

Unfortunately, the El Salvador letter does not draw attention to the problems associated with democracy-manipulating groups like the NED whose specialty is electoral interventions. Thus the letter only provides a partial explanation of how the softer "philanthropic" arm of US foreign policy operates; this omission, however, makes sense when one reads the letters concluding sentence:

We are hopeful that [the incoming Obama administration], with its renewed commitment to better diplomatic relations with Latin America and its message of political change... will not support any intervention in the Salvadoran elections and nor will it tolerate human rights violations and electoral fraud.

Sadly there is little reason for the critical scholars who signed this letter to realistically think that there is any hope that the Obama administration's foreign policy will differ significantly from his predecessor. In fact, although Obama may be less likely to promote a direct military intervention in Latin America, we should certainly expect a greater commitment to democracy-manipulating activities. In fact, as the Council on Foreign Relations reported earlier this year, "Obama has [already] said he will 'significantly increase' funding for the National Endowment for Democracy 'and other nongovernmental organizations to support civic activists in repressive societies.'"

The final letter that Chomsky signed this year appears to hold great promise and suggests that Chomsky is finally moving towards supporting a more encompassing understanding of US foreign policy -- as opposed to his overwhelming focus on its coercive militaristic aspects. The letter in question -- which was circulated in November via e-mail by Professor Miguel Tinker-Salas (who also signed the aforementioned El Salvador letter) -- was addressed to Human Rights Watch's board of directors, and aimed to call their attention to the problems associated with their recent report A Decade Under Chávez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela. The letter informs the board that the report "does not meet even the most minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy, or credibility" and "appears to be a politically motivated essay." Here, on this point, I am in agreement with the letter's signatories. However, as I have noted in previous essays, it should not be wholly unexpected that Human Rights Watch should have produced this report, as Human Rights Watch has a long history of acting in the service of imperialism, with their work being closely linked to the NED's. Consequently, I do not agree with the letter's contention that the statements made by the report's lead author, Jose Miguel Vivanco, "run counter to the mission of Human Rights Watch." (3)

Although it is clear that no one letter can address all critics' concerns on every issue, the final letter (in particular) illustrates the problem of dealing with single issues in isolation from one another. Whether the letter's signatories believe it or not, the problems associated with Human Rights Watch's connections to the US foreign policy establishment run deep through their organization, and so the contents of their latest report should not be considered to be an unexpected anomaly. Yet this is exactly how the letter frames the issue, and the perhaps unintended consequence of this (mis)framing is that other progressive activists reading the letter may begin to believe that the ties between groups like Human Rights Watch, the Albert Einstein Institution, and the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista to US foreign policy elites are insignificant and should be excluded from critical analyses of imperialism. I suggest that this represents a troubling trend that works to prevent progressive activists from resisting the tremendous power exerted from the liberal "philanthropic" arm of imperialism. This is because, as I wrote earlier this year:

Liberal philanthropy is in fact a crucial means by which elites exert their cultural hegemony, a process of domination that is all the more powerful because capitalism's Left hand is truly invisible, even to nearly all progressive scholars and activists (unlike the Right hand of capitalism, which is often referred to as the invisible hand of the market but should be more appropriately referred to as the visible hand owing to the obvious way in which capitalists must lend a hand to one another to undermine competition in the marketplace).

Questioning Chomsky

So the question remains, how might we understand the fact that one of the world's most influential critical intellectuals so regularly puts his name to letters whose analyses appear so problematic?

I would argue that the answer to this question lies in Chomsky's limited definition of the key actors that serve to promote US-led imperialism: by this I mean Chomsky's effective silence over the manipulation of global civil society by liberal philanthropists (and to a lesser degree by more overt democracy-manipulators like the National Endowment for Democracy). This omission is all the more surprising given Chomsky's self identification with anarcho-syndicalism or anarchist politics more generally, as anarchists would be expected to be the first to recognize how liberal elites co-opt their progressive counterparts through the provision of selective political support and/or funding. (4)

Moreover, in one of Chomsky's early books, The Backroom Boys (Fontana, 1973), he notes that while elites are often divided over the exact formulation of US foreign policy, they are, as one might expect, all "well represented in its formation" (p.78). This statement is particularly relevant to this essay, as the footnote for this point draws the reader's attention to a variety of sources, one of which is David Horowitz's seminal Ramparts article "The Foundations: Charity Begins at Home" (April 1969). (5) Evidently then, Chomsky is well aware of the criticisms levelled against liberal philanthropy (or at least was at one stage). Yet by choosing to ignore such critiques in all his later work he has clearly decided that their influence is insignificant, and not worth talking about.

Here it is useful to turn to Horowitz's article: referring to the response of liberal elites to the rising tide of progressive activism in the United States, Horowitz wrote:

The first-line response to the militant uprisings and organizations was of course the big stick of Law and Order, as the repression of SNCC and the Black Panther Party showed. But along with the frame-ups and police terror, a highly sophisticated program was being launched by forces of the status quo in the glass-enclosed New York headquarters of the $3 billion Ford Foundation.

In 1966, McGeorge Bundy left his White House position as the top security manager for the American empire ("I have learned," he once told an interviewer, "that the United States is the engine and mankind is the train") to become president of the Ford Foundation. Bundy was an exponent of the sophisticated approach to the preservation of the international status quo. Rejecting what he called "either or" politics, he advocated "counterinsurgency and the Peace Corps ... an Alliance for Progress and unremitting opposition to Castro; in sum, the olive branch and the arrows." The arrows of course would be taken care of by the authorities, from the CIA and the American military to Mayor Daley, while the foundations were free to pursue the olive branch side. Since they were "private" and non-governmental; they could leave the task of repression to their friends in other agencies while they pursued a benevolent, enlightened course without apparent hypocrisy. (p.44)

Given that Chomsky's own work (especially from 1965 onwards) (6) has "been particularly critical of the American intellectual establishment and the American media who hide their real interests behind a mask of 'liberal objectivity'," (7) it is ironic, as I demonstrate elsewhere, that both liberal intellectuals and liberal media outlets have both received ample subsidies from liberal philanthropists like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations -- foundations whose elitist work is thoroughly demystified in Horowitz's article. (8) Indeed, while Chomsky himself has repeatedly taken liberal intellectuals like McGeorge Bundy, Morton Halperin, and Arthur Schlesinger to task, he fails to critique the key institutional home of such liberal elites, liberal foundations. (9)

To conclude, it is fitting to quote a sentence from the first page of Chomsky's first political book, American Power and the New Mandarins (Pantheon Books, 1967). He writes, "The course of history may be determined, to a very significant degree, by what people of the United States will have learned from this catastrophe." Chomsky was of course referring to the Vietnam War, but one might just as easily apply this quote to the insidious influence of liberal philanthropy on progressive social change; because if leading intellectuals, like Chomsky, fail to learn from the well-documented history of elite manipulation, then such democracy-manipulators' influence on historical developments will certainly be amplified. (10) Moreover, as Chomsky's early work on linguistics was intimately related to the broader research agendas of the Rockefeller Foundation (see footnote #6), it is troublesome that he has not spoken out either in favour or against the manipulation of democracy by liberal foundations.

Critiquing Progressive Intellectuals

Stephen Shalom reminds us that while Chomsky himself "has often criticized movements for social change... his criticisms have invariably been motivated by the passionate belief that only a movement that can subject itself to ruthless self-criticism has a chance of victory, or is worthy of that victory." Indeed, this is one of the main reasons why Shalom ultimately regards Robert Barsky's flattering biography of Chomsky's life (published in 1998) to be "largely unsuccessful." (11) Only a rigorous biographical study that combines "independence of mind and tenacious research," is in Shalom's mind likely to do justice to Chomsky's life and to progressive readers.

Chomsky occupies a rare place within the pantheon of progressive intellectuals, and whether he likes it or not, his work has an immense impact on the evolution of the activist lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Consequently it is vital that progressive citizens begin to systematically analyse and document the shortcomings of Chomsky's research, so that we might recognize faults in his invaluable body of work, and make a concerted effort to redress them.

As it happens, the year 2008 marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's seminal critique of the media, Manufacturing Consent -- a book that demonstrated how elites use the power of letters (made into words) to "amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society." (12) Yet as this article has demonstrated, the year 2008 also illustrated the problematic nature of open letters bearing Chomsky's name. Indeed, these letters, when collectively considered, articulate a political viewpoint that arguably serves to cast a veil over more critical competing analyses of elite power.

As this year draws to a close, it is the hope of this author that all progressive citizens will take time out from their busy (perhaps gruelling) schedules to reflect upon the strengths and shortcomings of, and future directions of, global progressive communities. If we are serious about collectively working to building workable alternatives to capitalism then we must learn to subject our most influential theorists to ruthless criticism more regularly. If this happens, 2009 will go down in history as the year that progressive activists worldwide began to seriously challenge elite rule (at all levels simultaneously), which of course will entail critiquing the very organizations that have sustained (and constrained) much progressive activism, liberal foundations.

Notes

1. Toni Solo, "Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, Brian Wilson: At Work for John Negroponte?," Dissident Voice, June 21, 2008. Also see his article "Grotesque Election Fraud in Nicaragua," Scoop, November 24, 2008. (back)

2. One of the leading critics of US-led democracy-manipulators is Professor William I. Robinson, and his book Promoting Polyarchy (Oxford University Press, 1996), provides the seminal critique of the NED's activities. Consequently, it would seem that Chomsky should refamiliarize himself with these books contents, especially considering that a central thrust of Robinson's work on the history of the US government's democracy-manipulating strategies concerns in Nicaragua (a country whose history Chomsky is very familiar with). Incidentally, William I. Robinson like Chomsky signed both the El Salvador letter and the Human Rights Watch letter. (back)

3. For background information on some of the report's other authors, see here. (back)

4. Here it is significant that Peter Marshall in his important book Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (Fontana Press, 1993) does not actually categorize Chomsky as an anarchist per se. Instead, he places Chomsky in his chapter on "Modern Libertarians" alongside Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Martin Buber, Lewis Mumford, Albert Camus, and Michel Foucault. He writes these individuals "have taken socialism or liberalism to the borders of anarchism, and occasionally stepped over." (p.566) Chomsky may have taken anarchist philosophy seriously, but according to Marshall he has "not unreservedly endorsed its conclusions" (p.xv). Thus while Marshall notes "it is easy to see why rulers should fear anarchy and wish to label anarchists as destructive fanatics for they question the very foundations of their rule" (p.x), Chomsky has singularly failed to question a key foundation of elite rule, that is, liberal foundations. (back)

5. This first article was co-authored with David Kolodney, while the following two instalments of Horowitz's critique of liberal foundations were published as "Billion Dollar Brains: How Wealth Puts Knowledge in its Pocket" (Ramparts, May 1969), and "Sinews of Empire" (October 1969). (back)

6. Chomsky writes of his entry to antiwar activism: "No one who involved himself in anti-war activities as late as 1965, as I did, has any reason for pride or satisfaction. This opposition was ten or fifteen years too late."

Although rarely mentioned in polite company, one of the reasons why Chomsky was otherwise engaged prior to 1965 owed to his love of linguistics -- amazingly, given his prolific output, his political activism has always been his night job. That said, Chomsky has however had an extraordinary long relationship with political activism and anarchism more specially, as he wrote his first major political essay (about the Spanish Revolution) in 1938 when he was just ten years old. Either way by 1945 Chomsky had joined the University of Pennsylvania, where after two years of disappointment he notes that he "was planning to drop out to pursue my own interests, which were then largely political." However, it was around this time that he met Zellig Harris and he subsequently decided to put his political activism on hold to pursue his longstanding interest in linguistics under the supervision of Harris, his new-found friend and mentor.

Another figure who went on to play an important role in Chomsky's life was Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, who in May 1951, took up his appointment at Chomsky's future academic base, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Research Laboratory for Electronics. Bar-Hillel "first met" Noam Chomsky in the autumn of 1951 (shortly after Chomsky had moved to Harvard University as a Junior Fellow), and he "was to remain a life-long friend" and Chomsky's "linguistic formalism was to have considerable influence on him." (Around this time Bar-Hillel renewed his relations with Zellig Harris.)

Here it is worth backtracking slightly, as on February 28, 1951, Harris "wrote to the graduate school dean to solicit further support for his promising young student," noting amongst other things that Chomsky had "come to the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation as a possible key man in interdisciplinary research between linguistics and mathematical logic." This is significant because Bar-Hillel's 1951 appointment to the MIT Laboratory "was made with the assistance of a grant from the National Science Foundation," which as John Hutchins points out, was obtained "quite possibly with the influence of [Warren] Weaver who was a director of the Foundation at this time." Weaver's involvement here is critical, because from 1931 until 1958 Weaver acted as the Director of the Natural Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation. As these ties suggest, Weaver was an influential member of the liberal elite, and a "report (pdf) he wrote at the end of the war ("Comments on the general theory of air warfare") was a significant factor in the foundation of the [imperial think tank] RAND Corporation."

The vital role played by Weaver in promoting Machine Translation as a research priority is acknowledged by Donald Loritz, who in his book How the Brain Evolved Language (Oxford University Press, 2002) recounts how:

"In 1949, on behalf of the U.S. military and espionage establishments, Warren Weaver [who was serving as a consultant] of the Rand Corporation circulated a memorandum (pdf) entitled 'Translation' proposing that the same military-academic complex which had broken the Enigma code redirect its efforts to breaking the code of the Evil Empire, the Russian language itself. Machine translation [MT] became a heavily funded research project of both the National Science Foundation and the military, with major dollar outlays going to the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." (p.166)

Writing in 2000, Steve Silberman observed how "Weaver's memo acted like a seed crystal dropped into a solution supersaturated with nascent ideas about computing, communication theory, and linguistics." And he adds that, "Within two years, MT programs had been launched at MIT, UCLA, the National Bureau of Standards, the University of Washington, and the Rand Corporation." "By the end of 1962," Silberman notes, increasing international attention was diverted to MT research and...

"The Department of Defense, the Air Force, the National Science Foundation, and the CIA showered the contents of their coffers onto the heads of researchers who showed interest in MT -- many of whom had been toiling away on arcane projects as chronically undersubsidized academics. When Georgetown University declined to award big bucks to its own faculty members for producing the 1954 MT demo at IBM, the CIA stepped in with more than $1 million."

Returning to Bar-Hillel and stepping back in time again, having received Rockefeller Foundation support to obtain his appointment at MIT, his work continued to receive strong support from the Foundation, and in "April 1952, the Rockefeller Foundation approved a grant to Bar-Hillel for the continuation of his appointment at MIT until June 1953, and for the organisation of the first conference on MT." Bar-Hillel subsequently left MIT in 1953, shortly before Noam Chomsky took up his appointment in MIT's Research Laboratory for Electronics. Shortly thereafter, according to radical anthropologist Chris Knight, Chomsky's work at MIT began "attracting the attention of the US military." Indeed, Knight goes on to explain that Chomsky's initial military funded work, published as Syntactic Structures (Mouton, 1957), opened "up the prospect of discovering in effect 'the philosopher's stone': the design specifications of a 'device' capable of generating grammatical sentences (and only grammatical ones) not only in English but in any language spoken (or capable of being spoken) on earth." Later Knight concludes:

"It is easy to understand why computer engineers might find it useful to treat language as a mechanical 'device'. If, say, the aim were to construct an electronic command-and-control system for military use, then traditional linguistics would clearly be inadequate."

Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, pp. 10-11; Chomsky quoted in James Peck, The Chomsky Reader (Serpent's Tail, 1988), pp. 6-7; Robert Barsky, The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower (MIT Press, 2007), pp.148-9; John Hutchins, From First Conception to First Demonstration: the Nascent Years of Machine Translation, 1947-1954. A Chronology, Machine Translation, 12, 1997, p.220, 221, 224; Chris Knight, Decoding Chomsky (pdf), European Review, 12 (4), 2004, p.584, 587.

7. Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, p.579.

8. For further details of the detrimental influence that liberal foundations have exerted on academia and the media, see Michael Barker, The Liberal Foundations of Media Reform, Global Media Journal, 1 (2), June 2, 2008; and Michael Barker, Progressive Social Change in the 'Ivory Tower'? , Refereed paper presented to Australasian Political Science Association conference, University of Queensland, July 6-9, 2008.

9. For example, writing in the 1960s, Chomsky explains how: "For a glimpse of what may lie ahead, consider the Godkin lectures of McGeorge Bundy, recently delivered at Harvard. Bundy urges that more power be concentrated in the executive branch of the government, now 'dangerously weak in relation to its present tasks'. That the powerful executive will act with justice and wisdom - this presumably needs no argument. As an example of the superior executive who should be attracted to government and given still greater power, Bundy cites Robert McNamara. Nothing could reveal more clearly the dangers inherent in the 'new society' than the role that McNamara's Pentagon has played for the past half-dozen years. No doubt McNamara succeed in doing with utmost efficiency that which should not be done at all. No doubt he has shown an unparalleled mastery of the logistics of coercion and repression, combined with the most astonishing inability to comprehend political and human factors." American Power and the New Mandarins, pp. 104-05.

10. Chomsky is not alone in this critical oversight and he is joined by nearly all the American leading progressive intellectuals on this matter. For instance, Michael Parenti does not mention the influence of liberal foundations in his book-length treatment of power in the U.S., Democracy for the Few (Wadsworth/Thomas Learning, 2002); however, like many other progressive writers, Parenti does acknowledge the that the powerful financial empire "of the Rockefellers, extends into just about every industry in every state of the Union and every nation of the World." And he adds that, "The Rockefellers control five of the world's twelve largest oil companies and four of the biggest banks" (p.12). Later in his book Parenti outlines the importance of a few of the key policy advisory groups of the ruling class, that is, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission (pp. 165-7). Parenti then mentions the key role played by individual Rockefellers in the work of these elite planning groups, but he fails to draw attention to the influence of liberal foundations in supporting their work. On the other hand, at the end of this section on elite planning groups Parenti does pause to briefly mention the influence of right-wing foundations (p.168). Withstanding these criticisms, Parenti's otherwise excellent political writings do provide an important example of a progressive intellectual critiquing Noam Chomsky, as he provides a robust challenge to Chomsky's take on the JFK assassination -- see Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (City Lights Books, 1996), pp.175-91.

11. For example, Shalom writes: "MIT was a major military contractor, and much of what happened there was funded by the Pentagon. Even Chomsky's work was supported by the military*. In the late 1960s, as the student movement reached its peak, war research on campus came under increasing attack, particularly projects being done at two MIT labs. Barsky quotes Chomsky as recalling the political line-up: right-wing faculty wanted to keep the labs, liberal faculty wanted to break relations with the labs formally (so that the same work would be done but invisibly), while 'the radical students and I wanted to keep the labs on campus, on the principle that what is going to be going on anyway ought to be open and above board. ...' But this obscures the fact that most radical students, as well as many liberal students, wanted first and foremost to stop the war research and thus to convert the labs to non-military pursuits. We didn't want the war research to go on in divested labs, nor did we want it to go on in affiliated labs. We wanted the war research stopped, period. Barsky's account, characteristically, is too sketchy to enable the reader to grapple with the issue." Stephen Shalom, "A Flawed Political Biography," New Politics, 6 (3), Summer 1997.

12. Manufacturing Consent was dedicated to a "close personal friend and valued co-worker" of Herman and Chomsky's, the Australian activist researcher Alex Carey (who had sadly died just prior to the publication of their book in 1988). Like Chomsky, for Carey, letter writing was a major part of his life and he regularly bombarded the mainstream media with his biting critiques, nearly all of which were ignored, much like the rejected Op-Eds Chomsky had penned over the last several years -- recently published in Interventions (City Light Books, 2008) -- or those criticisms made of the British so-called liberal media by groups like Media Lens.

*In the case of Machine Translation, not true: the CIA "influenced" the allocation of funding, ordinarily through the National Science Foundation, but also through direct grants.

Sydney M. Lamb (Edited by Jonathan Webster). Language and Reality (London & NY: Continuum, 2004; 524pp):

p.51: “we were informed by the man in charge of machine translation for the CIA (who was influencing the allocation of NSF* funds for MT research)…”

From context, we’re talking the period 1956-58.

*National Science Foundation

US “Government” funding for machine translation at MIT, 1954-1964

Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics (1966), p.108:

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9547&page=108

Any evidence that he had ties to CIA AFTER the 1950's when he merely worked on a project they funded. Far more recently truthers like Barrett and Jones received funding or grants from the State Department and DoE.

By way of confirming Len's agreeably honest assessment of the source of funding:

Sydney M. Lamb (Edited by Jonathan Webster). Language and Reality (London & NY: Continuum, 2004; 524pp):

p.51: “we were informed by the man in charge of machine translation for the CIA (who was influencing the allocation of NSF* funds for MT research)…”

From context, we’re talking the period 1956-58.

*National Science Foundation

_____________________________________________________________________

US “Government” funding for machine translation at MIT, 1954-1964

Language and Machines: Computers in Translation and Linguistics (1966), p.108:

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9547&page=108

_____________________________________________________________________

Lost in translation

Efforts to design software that can translate languages fluently have encountered a problem: how do you program common sense?

by Stephen Budiansky

When the field was still in its infancy, in the early 1960s, an apocryphal tale went around about a computer that the CIA had built to translate between English and Russian: to test the machine, the programmers decided to have it translate a phrase into Russian and then translate the result back into English, to see if they'd get the same words they started with. The director of the CIA was invited to do the honors; the programmers all gathered expectantly around the console to watch as the director typed in the test words: "Out of sight, out of mind." The computer silently ground through its calculations. Hours passed. Then, suddenly, magnetic tapes whirred, lights blinked, and a printer clattered out the result: "Invisible insanity."

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98dec/computer.htm

LOL Paul, Fanfani wasn’t a leftist but rather a former fascist who became a centrist member of the center-right Christian Democrats. He was briefly PM in 1958 and gave “four crucial posts...the Ministries of Finance, Labor, State Participation and Communications” “to his only ally in the coalition government, Giuseppe Saragat's anti-Communist Socialists” and also named “the head of the anti-Communist labor federation, CISL...Minister for Economic Development of Southern Italy and Depressed Areas”. Despite this Time said: “The new government could be expected to be as pro-West as before, but its makeup showed Fanfani's determination to break with Italy's postwar middle-of-the-road pattern.”

He was PM again 1960 – 63. Just before he met JFK Time described him as “sturdily pro-U.S. and pro-NATO” and “a sternly moral Catholic”. The anti-communist Socialists weren’t even coalition partners this time: “Today Fanfani has the parliamentary support of three other parties and the benign abstention of the powerful Nenni Socialists”. According to 1962 article in Time since John XXIII became pope “the Roman Catholic Church...has notably relaxed its opposition to the Italian left” and one of his coalition partners was “the right-of-center Republicans”. The article further stated that thought they were going to be brought into the coalition the Socialists were not going to get any cabinet posts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amintore_Fanfani

1958: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...l#ixzz0WSB3YoPY

1961: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...l#ixzz0WSD4dlCm

1962: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,828912,00.html

It was not even the first time he met a US president, having visited Ike in 1956 and once again 1958 just after he named formed a coalition with the Socialists and added 4 to his cabinet. So JFK’s meeting with Fanfani should have been less controversial than his processor’s.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=11147

What was that nonsense about Harvey? Don’t tell you subscribe to perhaps the stupidest assassination theory, the one about two Oswalds?

Take a break, chum, that's an awful lot of research for one night. Put your feet up and enjoy, particularly the first 18 or so minutes:

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/55858

I don't imagine most of the above is news to you,you seem to what you accuse Chomsky of omitting info which contradicts your claims. So who do you getting your funding from?

The Evertons Supporters' Club. Nefarious bunch, with sinister designs on your mind, Len. Used notes only, big brown envelopes.

Here endeth the dream.

On 6th December, 1963, Paul Mandel wrote an article about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Life Magazine. "The doctor said one bullet passed from back to front on the right side of the President’s head. But the other, the doctor reported, entered the President’s throat from the front and then lodged in his body. Since by this time the limousine was 50 yards past Oswald and the President’s back was turned almost directly to the sniper, it has been hard to understand how the bullet could enter the front of his throat. Hence the recurring guess that there was a second sniper somewhere else. But the 8mm film shows the President turning his body far around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed – toward the sniper’s nest – just before he clutches it." Jim Marrs has argued: "The account is patently wrong, as anyone who has seen the film can verify. The reason for such wrongful information at such a critical time will probably never be known, as the author of this statement, Paul Mandel, died shortly afterward."

John McAdams has argued: "Mandel’s claim was contrary to fact, which can be seen in the Zapruder film. Some conspiracy theorists claim that Mandel must have had access to LIFE’s copy of the Zapruder film and completed a detailed analysis of the film. They further implicitly assert that Mandel must have known the layout of Dealey Plaza. Thus they conclude that when Mandel discovered that the film was inconsistent with the lone assassin theory he either shaded the article to cover up a conspiracy or was coerced into doing so by the editor of LIFE, a veteran of WWII."

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/mandel.htm

I asked James Wagenvoord, the editorial business manager and assistant to Life Magazines Executive Editor, in November 1963, if Mandel had watched the Zapruder film. He replied: "Paul Mandel definitely saw the film. He was a major presence at the magazine, a good guy and an excellent editor-writer. He left Life to become the editor-in-Chief of the Observer Magazine in London. He continued to have total unfettered access to LIFE."

From the admirable thread “Was Muchmore’s film shown on WNEW-TV on November 26, 1963?”:

Why was it necessary to suppress the first version of the Zapruder film on November 25/26, and revise it? One key element of any answer lies with the Parkland press conference. The insistence of Perry and Clark that Kennedy was shot from the front threw a significant spanner in the works, not least because their expert, disinterested, first-hand, matter-of-fact descriptions were broadcast live. How to preserve the credibility of both the patsy-from-the-rear scenario, and the similarly pre-planned supporting film?

The solution was to suppress the film-as-film, hastily edit it, and meanwhile bring the public round by degree through the medium of the written word. Here’s the latter process in action.

Note how in example 1, the first shot, which does not impact, is fired while the presidential limousine is on Houston:

John Herbers, “Kennedy Struck by Two Bullets, Doctor Who Attended Him Says,” New York Times, November 27, 1963, p.20:

“…The known facts about the bullets, and the position of the assassin, suggested that he started shooting as the President’s car was coming toward him, swung his rifle in an arc of almost 180 degrees and fired at least twice more.

A rifle like the one that killed President Kennedy might be able to fire three shots in two seconds, a gun expert indicated after tests.

A strip of color movie film taken by a Dallas clothing manufacturer with an 8-mm camera tends to support this sequence of events.

The film covers about a 15-second period. As the President’s car come abreast of the photographer, the President was struck in the front of the neck.”

In this second example, the first shot, which now does impact, occurs as the turn is made from Houston onto Elm:

Arthur J. Snider (Chicago Daily News Service), “Movies Reconstruct Tragedy,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, (Evening edition), November 27, 1963, section 2, p.1:

“Chicago, Nov. 27 – With the aid of movies taken by an amateur, it is possible to reconstruct to some extent the horrifying moments in the assassination of President Kennedy.

As the fateful car rounded the turn and moved into the curving parkway, the President rolled his head to the right, smiling and waving.

At that instant, about 12:30 p.m., the sniper, peering through a four-power telescope sight, fired his cheap rifle.

The 6.5 mm bullet – about .25 caliber – pierced the President’s neck just below the Adam’s apple. It took a downward course.”

And here’s the process completed in example 3, with the presidential limousine now “50 yards past Oswald” on Elm:

Paul Mandel, “End to Nagging Rumors: The Six Critical Seconds,” Life, 6 December 1963:

“The doctor said one bullet passed from back to front on the right side of the President’s head. But the other, the doctor reported, entered the President’s throat from the front and then lodged in his body.

Since by this time the limousine was 50 yards past Oswald and the President’s back was turned almost directly to the sniper, it has been hard to understand how the bullet could enter the front of his throat. Hence the recurring guess that there was a second sniper somewhere else. But the 8mm film shows the President turning his body far around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed–toward the sniper’s nest–just before he clutches it,”

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/mandel.htm

The film-as-film could not be shown while the above process of fraudulent harmonisation - of medical testimony and the lone-assassin-from-the-rear – was undertaken. More, it was predicated on the removal of the left turn from Houston onto Elm. Showing of that turn would have furnished visual-pictorial refutation of the entire elaborate deceit

To which one can add the following from Mark Lane:

Extract from: The British ‘who killed Kennedy?’ Committee, December 1964 (Pamphlet, 32pp)

The Warren Commission Report and the Assassination

By Mark Lane

When that first bullet struck the President and he grasped his throat with both hands, all one has to do is examine the wound and find out if it was an entrance wound indicating the shot came from the front, or an exit wound. The doctors at the Parkland Memorial Hospital on November 22nd held a Press Conference after they pronounced the President dead, and at that Press Conference, which was widely televised and broadcast by radio throughout America, the doctors made these comments. Dr. Malcolm Perry, the physician who performed the tracheotomy on the President’s throat so that a tube could be inserted in the throat said: “I followed the path of the bullet which entered at the Adam’s apple and ranged downward into the chest. The bullet did not exit, and that is the path I followed with the tube when I performed the tracheotomy.” Dr. Kemp Clark, the physician who signed the death certificate said: “The bullet entered the President’s throat at the Adam’s apple and ranged downward into the chest and did not exit.” Dr. Robert N. McClelland, Senior Physician at the Parkland Hospital, said: “Down here in Dallas we have an opportunity to examine and treat bullet wounds every single day. As a result we know the difference between entrance wounds and exit wounds, and the wound in the President’s throat was an entrance wound. The bullet entered from the front.”

Based upon that information, the FBI and the Dallas Police issued a statement saying that the limousine was right here (on Houston Street, facing the Book Depository Building) when the first shot was fired and Oswald took that rifle, fired down Houston Street, the first bullet striking the President in the front of the throat. Well that testimony then totally confirms the medical statement that the bullet entered the throat from the front and from above and ranged downward into the chest. But there was a problem with that story.

The problem is that it’s totally false and not only that, the witnesses agreed that it was false, that the car was here, moving away from the Book Depository Building in this direction before the first shot was fired. Now among the witnesses who said that the car was on Elm Street, not on Houston Street, were such witnesses as Jacqueline Kennedy, Governor Connolly, Mrs. Connolly, and all the films that were taken showing the car there. Just before it was announced, however, just before the story was changed to version number two, the Dallas District Attorney said: “We have a map found in Oswald’s possession. He circled the Book Depository Building, and he had drawn a dotted line on the map down Houston Street, showing the trajectory which he had planned, and he drew that dotted line in his own handwriting.” However, now that the witnesses have all said publicly: “The car was here” (on Elm Street) and the films show the car was there, the FBI and the Secret Service and the Dallas Police are nothing if not absolutely flexible, and so version number one was forever erased, and we now reach version number two. Now version number two is presented with two new problems. Number one: what about that dotted line that Oswald drew down Houston Street? New York Times, November 29th: “The Dallas authorities said today there never was such a map. Any reference to it was an error.” That takes care of the map.

However, there’s another problem, how did Oswald shoot the President in the front of his throat, how did he shoot him from the front, from the back? That’s a more weighty problem. The autopsy was conducted on November 22nd from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. on the very day of the assassination, and agents of the FBI were there when the autopsy was being conducted and got reports on the progress of the autopsy and immediately thereafter. After that autopsy had been completed, thirteen days later, the Federal Authorities re-enacted and reconstructed the crime, with an FBI Agent sitting in the back seat playing the role of President Kennedy, and the New York Times which observed the re-enactment reported that as the limousine came to this point, the officer of the FBI who was playing the role of the President turned completely around to face the Book Depository Building to expose his throat, seeking to explain how that first bullet entered the President’s throat from above, and from the front. “But,” mused the New York Times, then, “that’s rather curious because the pictures which have already been published widely show that the President was looking in this direction, to the front and to the right when the first bullet entered his throat.” Well, the Times, throwing its hands up at that point, said: “There is one document that will answer these questions for us: the statements made by Dr. Humes, the medical Corps Commander of the Navy who performed the autopsy on the President’s body at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, for Dr. Humes is the expert,” said the New York Times, “on the angle of entry of the bullet, so we must wait for his report.”