Paul Rigby

I cannot even remember how this thread started but we are no longer discussing the DP eyewitnesses.

Instead, we have three different topics under way, and all at the same time:

(1) Whether there was security stripping in Dallas.

(2) Whether the Z film was altered.

(3) Whether JFK ever met Ian Fleming.

We have now a marvelous but messy morass!

Genuine debate is. Enjoy it!

And if the Altgens photo is genuine, and Chaney's position is alongside the limo, we now have a very good explanation - the best - for the otherwise inexplicable: why the WC failed to call him as a witness. In other words, he had to be omitted to protect the second version of the Z film.

Clarification:

Removing Chaney from the Z-film - and its supporting filmlets - is of considerable utility to anyone trying to sell the grassy knoll as a fall-back position: Chaney in his true position, moving beyond the presidential limo as it stopped, interposes himself between limo and knoll. Perhaps the knoll bullet bent round him, giving us a second "magic bullet"?

Paul, I hold out the possibility that the first shot Chaney heard was not necessarily

the first shot fired or the first shot to hit JFK.

Perfectly conceivable, agreed.

I see nothing in Altgens #6 (Elm St) in conflict with Chaney's testimony, no matter

how we may characterize his location.

1) I don't know the full extent of Chaney's testimony, which is why I asked if some better informed soul could reproduce, for all of our benefits, his interview in the Houston Chronicle. It is amazing - to me, at least - that the full texts of Chaney's various radio, TV, and newspaper interviews are not readily available. It is an omission that needs rectifying.

2) That's uncharacteristically lawerly of you: Does Altens #5 concur with Z255? If Chaney is where he appears to be in the former, Z255 is a blatant fake, as are the frames prior to it, which should capture Chaney's movement to the position captured in that frame/Altgens #5.

And if the Altgens photo is genuine, and Chaney's position is alongside the limo, we now have a very good explanation - the best - for the otherwise inexplicable: why the WC failed to call him as a witness. In other words, he had to be omitted to protect the second version of the Z film.

Paul

Since Cheney doesn't say anything that impeaches the authenticity of Altgens #6...

Cliff,

Me old Harriman sparring partner, might be worth checking the Houston Chronicle interview with Chaney published in the paper's edition of 24 November 1963. According to Mark Lane's testimony to the WC, citing that interview, Chaney said he was 6 feet to the right and front of the President’s car, moving about 15 miles an hour…when the first shot was fired” (2H43).

Anyone got a copy of that Chronicle interview to confirm or refute Lane's version?

And is Chaney really behind the presidential limo at the moment of Altgens #5? Looks very like he's alongside it to me, looking to his left!

He died, incidentally, reportedly of a heart attack, in 1976.

Paul

Defectors from the Soviet Union had given information about a Soviet agent who held a senior position in MI5.

John,

Do we know for sure that this is the way it really worked? Is it not every bit as likely - more so, I can't help thinking - that Angleton et al fed the defectors the lines he/they wanted pursuing?

In effect, aren't we confronted with a variant of what, to modify Karl Kraus, is no more than: "Spooks tell lies to their assets in the media and academia, then pretend to believe what they read"?

Paul

From memory, House was enthusiastic about Hitler & Mussolini...

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-21058925.html

“House's 1912 novel, Philip Dru, provides much insight into House's fantasy life. In it he created a role-model administrator whom he sought to emulate. The novel also displays contempt for democratic processes, a taste for violence, and admiration for benevolent authoritarianism. House's protagonist, a young West Point graduate who, like House, suffers from frail health, quits the army to become a social critic. After overthrowing the U.S. government in a brief and bloody "Second Civil War" Dru disbands Congress and installs himself as a de facto dictator, keeping the president only as a figurehead. He institutes popular reforms, including some that smack of fascism: Strikes are outlawed, but labor is compensated by representation in a government-management-labor syndicate that eerily foreshadows Mussolini's Italian corporativism. House himself later compared Dru to Mussolini, while praising the Fascist strongman's ability and courage.(10)”

(10) Edward House, "Does America Need a Dictator?" Liberty, 7 January 1933, 6.

Forum member Anton Chaitkin’s Treason in America: From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman has this on House:

A particularly chilling example of the failure of post-Lincoln Americans to appreciate the nature of the Rebellion is the case of Edward House. His father Thomas House was a British merchant who came to the Texas province of Mexico in the 1830s. The elder House did not stick by Sam Houston when Houston fought against Secession; Thomas House made a fortune as a British national, carrying guns from Britain through the Union blockade to Texas. After the Rebellion was defeated Thomas House returned to England and educated his son Edward at Bath. Years later, the young man returned to America to tend his father’s cotton plantations; he despised the United States as an enemy land, retained a fierce loyalty to Great Britain. This was “Colonel” House, who directed the foreign policy and much of the domestic affairs of the United States during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson…the years of the World War and the League of Nations... [/color](pp 258-259)

Not convinced by the suggestion that House was an agent of perfidious Albion.

R. Palme Dutt. World Politics 1918-1936 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), pp.59-60:

“In 1919-1921 the Anglo-American antagonism flared up at a reckless pace. Already in 1919 Colonel House could report to President Wilson (on July 30th, 1919):

‘Almost as soon as I arrived in England, I felt an antagonism to the United States…The relations of the two countries are beginning to assume the same character as that of England and German before the war.’

The sharpest expression of this conflict was the naval building race which developed in 1919-21 (the conflict in fact ranged over all fields, notably oil, was in the sharp Curzon-Colby correspondence in 1920 over San Remo and Mesopotamian oil).”

Dutt goes on to note Lloyd George’s desperate attempt – what complete buffoons the Round Tablers were – to persuade Wilson at Versailles to agree to the preservation of British naval supremacy. The Round Table puppet’s position was summarised by a manifestly unsympathetic US Secretary of the Navy, Daniels, thus: Unless the US ends its naval expansion programme, London won’t support the League of Nations.

Dutt notes that the British were unsuccessful, and, in 1920, “began to climb down and announced a One-Power Standard” (Ibid., p.60). A year later, the US “summoned the Washington Conference….and was able to compel the acceptance by Britain of naval parity in capital ships, the acceptance by Japan of a three-fifths ratio, and the abandonment of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. This victory of the United States was one without a battle on the strength of its superior economic and financial resources” (Ibid., p.61).

From memory, House was enthusiastic about Hitler & Mussolini. If I can remember source(s), will let you know. He also flits in and out - mostly "out" of the indices - of any number of books on the "left-wing" luminaries backing FDR.

Colonel House, Gruening and the New Deal

Robert David Johnson. Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1998), p.103:

“Colonel Edward House, whom, like Frankfurter, he knew from the campaign to end the occupation of Haiti…House no longer possessed the influence he had enjoyed as Wilson’s most intimate adviser on international affairs, although during the early New Deal he functioned as something akin to the progressive conscience of the era.”

Robert David Johnson. Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1998), pp.125-6:

In February 1935, Gruening, depressed by the FDR government’s insufficient progressivism, voiced his disillusion to Harold Ickes, who suggested “Gruening go to New York to see their mutual friend, Colonel House…House suggested the possibility of a conference of progressives in Washington…Upon his return to the capital, he met Frankfurter, who informed him that plans for such a gathering were already in the works; its agenda foreshadowed many of the programs associated with the Second New Deal of 1935.”

Robert David Johnson. Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1998), p.114:

“…the Frankfurter bloc’s ideological rival Rexford Tugwell, who hoped to structure a planned economy for the island as a model for his desired reforms in the United States…”

Colonel House and the utility of the Bolsheviks

From Preparata's tour de force, Conjuring Hitler, p.35:

“Colonel House, privy counsellor of US President Woodrow Wilson and always a pragmatic supporter of Bolshevism, offered in late 1917 the rationale for the West’s conspiratorial endorsement of the otherwise repugnant (to Western Liberalism) Bolshevik Communism:

‘It is often overlooked that the Russian Revolution, inspired as if by deep hatred of autocracy, contains within it…great motives of serious danger to German domination: [for example], anti-capitalist feeling, which would be fully as intense, or more intense, against German capitalism…”(78)

p.271, n78: N. Gordon-Levin, Jr. Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (Oxford UP, 1968), p.60.

I seek something in the moderately paranoid range(US); if not on House a book with a lot of good stuff on him would be good also. It would be good if the book mentioned something besides the Federal Reserve Bank, although I suspect it will have to be an ingredient, and am far from allergic.

Nat,

Try Michael Wala's The Council on Foreign Relations & American Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1994) - it contains a very extensive bibliography. Beware, though, for the rear cover blurb informs us that the author "previously edited Allen Dulles' The Marshall Plan (1993)." Nice.

From memory, House was enthusiastic about Hitler & Mussolini. If I can remember source(s), will let you know. He also flits in and out - mostly "out" of the indices - of any number of books on the "left-wing" luminaries backing FDR.

Paul

Certainly the CIA's position is not improved by the recent disclosure of its destruction of evidence, a revelation that I am sure shocked most of us that the CIA would so brazenly break the law!

Tim,

I'm impressed with the speed of your recovery; and feel sure many of us will, in the fullness of time, learn to live with the profound shock of it all.

Whether the mainstream media covers this story remains to be seen.

The NYT and Washington Post await guidance - er, from Langley.

I don't believe anyone in MI5 or any Englishman would take orders from an American no matter how much was paid out.

Very generous of you, Bill, let's hope 5 and 6 note your kindly sentiment. Alas, Americans with rather more practical experience of the market in Brits - spooks among them, one confidently assumes - tend to report to the contrary:

Nelson D. Lanford. The Last American Aristocrat: The Biography of Ambassador David K. E. Bruce (Little, Brown & Co., 1996), p.137:

“Even Bruce, perhaps spotting his ally’s weakness, once ruefully noted the success of his people in ‘infiltrating almost every British department or agency of any consequence’” (34).

(34) p.423: Strategic Services Officer – London, war diary, OSS papers, RG 226/147/3 (National Archives).

You can't blame the CIA for everything.

I don't - Confederate intel found exactly the same thing during the US Civil War; and Bruce (above) was referrring, of course, to his fellow OSS-ers.

Paul

... CIA agent Matthew Smith spent a considerable time with Crabbe. In reality, this was a CIA rather than MI6 operation.

Bob Edwards, MP, & Kenneth Dunne. A Study of a Master Spy (London: Housmans, second edition, May 1961), p.63:

“At all events, it has been definitely stated that a certain ‘quiet American’ persuaded Captain Lionel Crabb to undertake his unfortunate enterprise with a promise of 5,000 pounds. The ‘quiet American’ – his alias was ‘Matthew Smith’ – thought that five thousand pounds would be enough to compensate for any discomfort Crabb might experience underwater. He paid his money. Britain paid too – in public embarrassment.”

Was it Adenauer or Erhard who groaned, upon being introduced to yet another CIA man bearing the wearingly familiar alias, “Not another Smith!”?

I would need to check but I think Balfour (or those surrounding him) were key members of the Rhodes-Milner "Group". Certainly Lord Rothchilds was.

Founder member – see Quigley’s Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (NY: The Macmillan Company, 1966), p.133. Quigley’s notably reticent on the subject of oil.

Much neglected, incidentally, is the fact that Milner and Balfour worked arm-in-arm to foment civil war in Ireland in the years preceding the WWI:

“Milner, who recently had raised considerable money to provide arms for the Ulster Volunteer Force, told Bonar Law that any attempt to use troops against Ulster, or the threat of it, would bring the government down,”

Catherine B. Shannon. Arthur J. Balfour and Ireland, 1874-1922 (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), p.187.

I note in passing that of all the post-WWII groups in the Anglosphere, it is the Neo-Cons who have most faithfully embraced the maniacal senses of superiority and imperial destiny we find in the Round-Tablers. God help America: The Round Tablers cost Britain dear.

Brian David Andersen has just published his book, “My God, I’m Hit: Investigating the Kennedy Incident on Elm Street from the Diagonal”. The book can be obtained from:

http://mygodimhit.com/

Brian has joined the forum and is willing to answer questions on the forum.

Norman Vincent Peale on acid.

I loved it.

Why would Abrahams want to keep this a secret. I imagine it is about his desire to build a multimillion-pound business park development at Bowburn in County Durham. This was initially blocked by the Highways Agency. This was followed by the following donations:

John McCarthy 05 February 2005 £25,000

John McCarthy 01 June 2005 £25,000

John McCarthy 22 December 2005 £52,125

Janet Kidd 23 December 2005 £30,000

Ray Ruddick 23 December 2005 £17,850

John McCarthy 21 April 2006 £50,000

Ray Ruddick 24 May 2006 £50,000

In October 2006, the then transport secretary, Douglas Alexander, overruled the Highways Agency and gave Abrahams permission to build the business park development at Bowburn. Alexander of course was Brown's campaign manager for the election to become prime minister.

Abrahams has issued a statement: "Any suggestion that I have made donations in exchange for favours is false and malicious. I will not hesitate to issue proceedings to protect my reputation."

John Poulson - a deliberate echo, presumably. The question is, who has been deliberating - or should that be incubating - this one?

A quick and straightforward comparison of the respective coverage of The Grauniad and Novosti. One of the two pieces spends more or less its entire length misleading us. The other one introduces us to the George Soros of Tbilisi – and thus doesn’t.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,331209788-103681,00.html

World briefing

Pinning blame on Russia

Simon Tisdall

Friday November 9, 2007

Guardian

...Whether or not Moscow's hand lies behind the current crisis, mutual hostility seems likely to deepen as long as the Mr Saakashvili remains in power and the Kremlin persists with its pressure tactics...

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Soviet intelligence continues to work miracles in Georgia. The latest sign of its extraordinary powers is manifested in today's edition of the Observer, the sunday stablemate of the Guardian, the CIA's favourite British liberal daily:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/st...2216829,00.html

My week: Peter Goldsmith

The former Attorney General attempts to define British citizenship and stands up for freedom of speech in Georgia - but doesn't get quite enough sleep

…I am writing this in a hotel room in Tbilisi, Georgia, with a national day concert outside and opposition demonstrations planned for Sunday. I am here to assist a major opposition figure vindicate his legal rights to free expression and political participation. The authorities raided the TV station Imedi on 7 November and it has stayed closed since then.

Georgia's independent ombudsman has concluded that 'nothing can justify the actions committed by the representatives of law enforcement authorities for termination of the broadcasting of the TV company Imedi'. And foreign governments are expressing concern that these are not the conditions in which free and fair elections can take place on 5 January.

Before leaving for Georgia on Wednesday night, I gave a lecture in Lincoln's Inn on the role of the Attorney General, with particular reference to the government's consultation on that role, which finishes at the end of the month. The key point is that the accountability of law officers has to be to Parliament and through Parliament to the public. That is why the idea that the law officer should be a civil servant would be so wrong. The report of the Constitutional Affairs Committee was therefore wrong to look to downgrade the figure of the law officer…

Yes, Blair's Attorney General - the man who ruled legal the blatantly illegal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq - is working for Moscow in destabilising the current ruler of Georgia. I wonder which Russian intel front paid for Goldsmith's jaunt?

Of course, and rather more sanely, it might just be Tisdall's original story was little more than a Foreign Office/MI6 piece of nonsense; and the real drivers of change in puppet in Georgia are our old friends, the CIA and its lapdogs in MI6.

Paul, thank you posting this. I will add a link to this thread from my page on C. P. Scott. Of course, C.P. Scott was a liberal and not a revolutionary. He campaigned against the Boer War and would have done the same with the First World War if it had not been for his close relationship with David Lloyd George, who had said he would resign from the government if war was declared.

John,

This is to ignore the fact that by late 1916, when Lloyd George supplanted Asquith as PM, the former was little more than a front-man for the Round Table (aka the Rhodes-Milner group): “Betrayed in a backroom conspiracy of the Liberal Party, Asquith fell, and on December 7, 1916, David Lloyd George became Prime Minister. Exponents of the Round Table were forthwith raised to several high posts, and the master himself, Milner, was made into the chief strategist of the War Cabinet. Thereupon British troops were embarked for the Middle East to fight the Turks” (1).

And what of Scott and the Manchester Guardian, that brave, honourable paper which had rightly denounced Rhodes’ skulduggery in the Jamieson Raid (2), and, like Lloyd George, courageously opposed the British imperial attack on the agrarian Afrikaners (3)? Had it, too, become little more than a liberal mask for the Round Table?

Not according to Carroll Quigley, the American academic – and Round Table insider – who single-handedly raised the veil on the subject. According to Quigley’s magnum opus, Tragedy and Hope, the major press fronts for this ramified network were, in Britain, The Times; and, in the US, the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, Christian Monitor, The Washington Post and Boston Evening Transcript (4). Quigley’s failure to include the (Manchester) Guardian in his list of Round Table press properties, however, should not be seen as definitive. After all, Quigley remained an establishment loyalist – there is nothing critical, for example, on the Warren Report within Tragedy and Hope – and to have included the paper within the British section of his list might, just conceivably, have provoked a question or two about who – or what – financed the Guardian’s move to London in 1961, a bait first dangled by Round Tablers Lloyd George and Churchill in June 1916 (5).

Contemporaneous evidence, moreover, is conclusive: The Manchester Guardian was part of the Round Table stable of tame press outlets. This was only to be expected, given the context. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the burgeoning of Round Table power and influence made its presence felt in two classic, mutually reinforcing, ways of real power in the Anglosphere: censorship and the sack. Thus in the wake of Rhodes’ death in March 1902, a former MP, Herbert Paul, “who had weathered successive storms in Bouverie Street…was dismissed [from the Liberal Daily News – PR] for having written a vitriolic obituary of Cecil Rhodes.” Who sacked him? George Cadbury, a man not unknown to Scott (6). Real power also tends to be modest, going on reclusive, when it comes to publicity, and none too keen on accurate history, as the improbably named J. Saxon Mills discovered when he “was required to expunge from an article on King’s College, London, any reference to Milner, perhaps its most celebrated living undergraduate” (7).

The Round Table did not invite the Guardian to abandon its public character, merely to put it at the Rhodes-Milner group’s service. In foreign affairs, the Guardian’s semitophile grain – not always evident or consistently applied, contrary to lazy retrospective readings, as the Boer War correspondence of J. A. Hobson attested (8) – was run with by the Round Table to most long-lasting and inhumane effect in the Middle East: “From the Manchester Guardian, in November 1915, recruits of the so-called Kindergarten – Milner's club, also known as the Round Table – intimated 'that “the whole future of the British Empire as a Sea Empire” depended upon Palestine becoming a buffer state inhabited “by an intensely patriotic race”' Indeed, Palestine was 'the key missing link' that joined together the limbs of the British empire in a continuum stretching from the Adriatic to the middle of the Pacific” (9). The Guardian loved the Balfour Declaration.

To this day, the Guardian’s apologists pride themselves on the paper’s unflinching honesty in describing the tragic fate of European Jewry in general, and that of Germany’s in particular. They are silent, as far as I can see, on the limits to the Guardian’s philo-semitism.

And no wonder, for its domination from behind the scenes by the Round Table set profound curbs on the accuracy and purpose of its inter-war journalism. It could tell its readers what was happening Germany, but not who was really responsible: “In 1934 the foreign correspondent of the Manchester Guardian confirmed the widely diffused rumor that the bulk of Nazi funding was foreign in origin: ‘Hitler had large funds at his disposal, not obtained entirely from German sources, He got money from certain capitalist interests in foreign countries, who were attracted by his hostility to Soviet Russia, or by...his policy to increase the demand for armaments...International finance does not seem to be unfavorable to the Nazi regime’” (10). Who were these foreign financiers? As far as I have been able to establish – and this was prior to the recent unveiling of the paper’s archive on the web - the Guardian failed to identify them when it mattered, before the Holocaust began. It could not because they were, in many instances, the cream of British and American banking, finance and industry (11). Communists did much better.

More to the point, Round Table-ism was a profoundly racist creed which embraced philosemitism for purely geopolitical reasons. None of its senior members appear to have lifted a practical finger to save Europe’s Jews.

What is most striking about the Guardian’s treatment of the Round Table and its epoch-making, catastrophic Machiavellianism is the continuity in dishonesty. As recently as May this year, the paper’s Saturday Review section carried a book review by historian Maya Jasanoff of John Darwin's After Tamerlaine: The Global History of Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007). One particular passage caught my eye:

“But a deeper resonance lies with the work of a scholar of decidedly different stamp: the early 20th-century geographer and ardent imperialist Sir Halford Mackinder. In his pioneering work on geopolitics, Mackinder identified Eurasia as the "heartland" of global empire. "Who rules East Europe rules the Heartland," he wrote in 1919. "Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: Who rules the World-Island commands the World." Mackinder's opinions were little heeded by the British government, but would find uncanny resonance in the policy of Adolf Hitler, who anchored his visions of world empire in the resource-rich domains of the Soviet Union” (12).

In fact, Mackinder’s thesis was the geopolitical bible of the British elite for nearly half a century (13); and its author so ignored by an ungrateful establishment that it made him High Commissioner of South Russia, 1919-1920, for which service he was knighted in the latter year (14). The conventional version has that Mackinder sought to save the White Guardists. As Preparata demonstrates, the truth was otherwise.

(1) Guido Giacomo Preparata. Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America made the Third Reich (London: Pluto Press, 2005), p.40.

(2) Stephen Koss. The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (London: Fontana Press, 1990), pp. 367-8.

(3) Phillip Knightley. The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd., 1975), quotes Lloyd George on the Boer War: “the war is an outrage perpetrated in the name of human freedom” (p.72).

(4) Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (NY: The Macmillan Company, 1966), p.133.

(5) Koss, loc. cit., pp. 732-733: “Churchill and Lloyd George discussed the ‘old theme’ of bringing the Guardian to London, where it might exert a more direct influence. ‘What wd. It cost?’ Lloyd George asked Scott, who ‘said £20,000 a year.’ ‘That’s not much,’ declared Lloyd George. ‘All the same it is,’ Scott reflected silently.” (Memorandum by Scott, 12-17 June 1916, Scott Papers, Add. MSS. 50, 903, fol 53.)

(6) Ibid., pp. 454-5.

(7) Ibid., p.399.

(8) Ibid., p.395: “It ought not to detract from the moral courage of the Manchester Guardian to recall that J.A. Hobson’s dispatches from South Africa were tinged with a virulent anti-semitism.”

(9) Preparata, loc. cit., p.39.

(10) Ibid., pp.198-9

(11) For a very useful list, see George Seldes Facts and Fascism (NY: In Fact, Inc., September 1943).

(12) http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2077495,00.html

(13) Preparata, loc. cit., pp. 8-15

(14) Blouet, B.W. (1976). Sir Halford Mackinder as British high commissioner to south Russia, 1919-1920. Geographical Journal. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halford_John_Mackinder

The obvious question: How did the Associated Press produce a report on the Perry-Clark press conference at “just after two o’clock” (CST) when said press conference didn’t begin until a) 3:16 pm (transcript 1327C); or, at earliest, at 2:18 pm (photographic section of Lifton’s Best Evidence*)?

An obvious solution suggests itself: The press conference began before 2 pm (CST), and was still going on – perhaps winding up - at 2:18 pm when the photo reproduced in Best Evidence was taken. So much for the hypothesis. Any evidence to support it?

So far, only one piece that I can find.

In the second section, p. 3, of the evening edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram of Saturday, 23 November, a similar or identical photograph of Perry and Clark to that found in Best Evidence is reproduced. The caption beneath it runs as follows:

“DOCTORS DESCRIBE DEATH: Drs. Kemp Clark, left, and Malcolm Perry, right, told newsmen at 1:45 pm Friday of what they and others at Parkland Hospital in Dallas did to try to save President Kennedy’s life. Man at center is White House aide.”

And then there were two.

I had forgotten that Hearst journalist Jim Bishop’s The Day Kennedy Was Shot - first published by Funk & Wagnalls in 1968, edition cited here the HarperPerennial reprint of 1992 – is arranged hour by hour, from 0700hrs on 22 November until 0300hrs 23 November, a chapter per hour. In the chapter devoted to events between 1300hrs and 1400hrs, we find the following:

“A communications mob scene began at 1:40 pm Central Standard Time.

On the stage in the nurses classroom stood Dr. Kemp Clark, Dr. Malcolm Perry, Dr. Charles Baxter, and Dr. McClelland. One hundred journalists with deadlines and no time for tact began firing questions. It was agreed that they would be answered by Dr. Clark and Dr. Perry,” p.282.

Bishop’s version of how many doctors were present at the press conference’s commencement is plainly different from Manchester’s – see earlier in the thread: Manchester has Perry starting solo – but does have the virtue of identifying all four doctors who present either from the outset, or at some point during, the press conference.

The addition of McClelland is significant, and provides one important explanation of why footage and recordings of the press conference were seized and suppressed by the Secret Service; and why transcript 1327C was fabricated.

McClelland, after all, was the doctor who was shortly to state unequivocally in his written report that Kennedy had been killed by a bullet which entered the left temple. His presence makes it all the more likely that Perry did indeed describe a bullet entrance in the front of the dead President’s head, as reported by the Associated Press at a little after 2 pm, CST; and that this was the consensus among the Parkland medical team on the afternoon of 22 November.

A further reflection.

If the Fort Worth newspaper-Jim Bishop start time is correct, give or take a few minutes either way, and the photograph in Lifton's Best Evidence is undoctored, we would appear to have a basic duration of the press conference to work with - from circa 1345hrs to at least 1418hrs, CST. Roughly, then, a half hour or so. Transcript 1327C is, at most generous, by my admittedly crude re-enactment, no longer than 10-12 minutes at the outside.

This all assumes, it almost goes without noting, that the conference was uninterrupted; or not hastily reconvened - for purposes of "clarification," or somesuch - at or just before 1418hrs.

I would add this: If Superman can pose as a newspaper reporter without condemnation, why not James Bond?

Tim,

If you want to live in a democracy, you need reliable information: spook control of the press is the enemy of reliable, unmanipulated information.

If intelligence operations are necessary for a society, so is cover.

But are they? Is it really so self-evident that covert intelligence gathering produces better decision making than contested open sources? Iraq? The Falklands War? If MI6 was measured by results, it would no longer exist; and a number of its most senior figures would be in prison or unemployed.

Moreover, presumably a spook as a journalist is normally nothing but an intelligence-gatherer rather than a covert operator.

Big and, frankly, unjustified assumption: He - or she - could equally have played a role in the planting of a bomb, or the assassination of a politician adjudged disposable. It would be interesting to see a decent study, for example, of why Nkrumah expelled a bunch of British correspondents in the wake of an assassination attempt against him in 1962. Were they merely gathering intel, or active members of the assassination plot?

Was C.P. Scott, the Guardian’s legendary editor, quite the paragon of virtue portrayed in John Simkin’s online biography? To the contrary, I would suggest, Scott was responsible for at least the continuance, and quite possibly the establishment, of a Guardian tradition that betrayed any good he might have done in the rest of his life and work; and continues to this day. The tradition to which I refer is directly related to the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy – media collusion with the intelligence services.

The practice of combining espionage with journalism is as old as newspapers. In May 1923, it was the subject of a withering editorial in a major British daily. The occasion was the cheery confession of Marguerite Harrison, a recently released American spook, upon arrival in Riga from imprisonment by the Cheka:

“Mrs. Harrison went to Russia in 1920 in a dual capacity. She was described as the correspondent of the Baltimore Sun. She was, in fact, also a secret agent of the American Military Intelligence Department. When the latter part of her purpose in Russia became known to the Soviet Government, she purchased her liberty, according to her own account, by bluffing that Government into believing that she would act as their agent…

We think…that any ugly blow at that honesty and independence in journalism which the public can ill afford to see tampered with, was struck by the combination of secret agent and special correspondent which some ill-advised American authorities evolved…The main thing is that the light thrown on this case should make the vicious experiment impossible of repetition” (1).

The British newspaper responsible for this grotesque piece of cant? Yes, the good old Manchester Guardian.

To appreciate the extent of the editorialist’s hypocrisy, we must jump forward to 1987, and the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, as commemorated in the pages of…The Guardian. In a piece entitled, “The MG and 1917,” the paper’s Richard Gott (2) examined “the way the Manchester Guardian dealt with the upheavals of a dramatic period” (3):

“At the time of the October Revolution, the Guardian had two correspondents in Russia. One, Philips Price (who later became a Labour MP), expressed growing enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks. The other, David Soskice (the father of a future Labour MP), was solid with the provisional government of Kerensky – and was most indignant when it was overthrown.

In keeping with a long Guardian tradition, the first correspondent had not been told of the existence of the second. Philips Price later recalled how, in about the middle of June 1917, ‘a Mr. David Soskice arrived from England and asked me to come and see him at his hotel. I went at once and found that Scott had appointed him to act as Manchester Guardian correspondent, not to replace me but to write in addition to me. I realised that Scott must be under some pressure to get opinions expressed in the paper different to mine and, no doubt, the Foreign Office must have used its influence in this sense…I found that he [soskice – PR] had been appointed one of Prime Minister Kerensky’s secretaries, so that he was well placed to get inside information” (4).

The Guardian lied to its readers about Soskice’s true role in the Winter Palace with Kerensky. As Gott noted the following day, as he detailed Soskice’s flight from Russia and major account of the fall of Kerensky:

“Soskice’s detailed account of the uprising…was not actually published until December 27, 1917. The Guardian was clearly somewhat embarrassed at this stage by Soskice’s association with Kerensky, and the sub-editorial introduction suggests (incorrectly) that his period as a special correspondent has not overlapped with his time in the employ of the Russian prime minister”(5).”

Price Philips’ enthusiastic championship of the Bolshevik revolution inevitably drew the attention of both the British censor, and, upon his return to Britain, “the head of CID at Scotland Yard, who kept C.P. Scott…informed of his activities” (6). As Gott went on to note, Philips Price “came from an old Liberal Manchester family, and indeed his great grandfather had been one of the Manchester cotton merchants who had helped set up the Manchester Guardian in the first place” – a fact which did not prevent Scott from dispensing with his services (7).

The man who replaced Price Philips, Arthur Ransome, also worked for MI6 (8).

So much for the claim, advanced in David Ayerst’s hagiographic work on Scott and the paper, that "from Peterloo to Suez the Scott family throughout…endeavoured to speak plainly and truthfully” (9).

This collusion between Guardian and spook endured long after Scott. The Cold War saw only one change of note, and that was for the worse. In addition to the usual welter of British Intelligence officers and assets - by the mid-1950s, the paper was little more than a front for the infamous Information Research Department (10) - the Guardian increasingly acted as the CIA's primary vehicle for channelling harmlessly the Non-Communist Left in Britain. The Agency's involvement was characteristically brazen. As with Encounter, it took the form of subsidy by subscription (11). Thus by August 1952, no less than nine percent of the paper's circulation of 127,000 made its way, ostensibly at least, to the US (12). The appeal to American readers - all 12,000-plus of them - was obvious: the paper still carried adverts on its front-page, and continued to be published in Manchester, the very heart of state power in highly decentralised fifties Britain. By the late 1960s, The Guardian was the recycler of much material from a series of CIA fronts, most obviously the news services of Kern House Enterprises Inc., a typical Delaware-registered scam (13). Any wonder, then, that the paper should have proved such a stalwart supporter of the Warren Report? (14).

The Guardian moved to London from Manchester in 1961. Commenting on the move, Arthur Christiansen, the legendary editor of the Daily Express, and Beaverbrook’s favourite editor-harlot, expressed the view that the paper was now set to become a "third force" - next to the Times and the Daily Telegraph - in British journalism (15). Whether inadvertent or mischievous, the phrase was inspired: By 1961, the phrase was routinely used in America to denote the CIA (16). Amusingly, the Guardian's pride in its "exceptionalism" - that the paper is uniquely independent and virtuous (by virtue of its ownership by a Trust) - replicates precisely a core belief of the American right, which ordinarily sees a rather more divine source for the blessing (17).

And who exactly financed that move from Manchester to London?

John Simkin, in compiling his profile of C.P. Scott, might usefully have asked precisely that question with regard to Scott’s acquisition of the Guardian in 1904. I don’t know the answer, but I’d be willing to bet a tidy sum that the money men were not a million miles away from Rhodes’ heirs in the Round Table.

To be continued…

(1) George Seldes. Tell the Truth and Run: My 44 Year Fight for a Free Press (New York: Greenberg, 1953), pp.122-123.

(2) In December 1994, Gott was charged by The Spectator, the right-wing weekly with positively organic ties to the Anglo-American spook empire, with being a KGB "agent-of-influence." He subsequently confessed to having accepted free trips from the Cheka. This was obviously not the full story.

(3) Richard Gott, “The MG and 1917,” The Guardian, 2 November 1987, p.18.

(4) Richard Gott, “Giving a voice in the paper to both reform and revolution,” The Guardian, 3 November 1987, p.26.

(5) Ibid.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Ibid.

(8) “Swallow, Amazons, and secret agents, “ The Observer, 21 July 2002:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/...,759749,00.html

(9)"All the views fit to print," The Guardian, 23 September 1992.

(10) For a list, by no means exhaustive, of Guardian editorialists, columnists and reporters working with and for the IRD, see Paul Lashmar & James Oliver. Britain's Secret Propaganda War, 1948-1977 (Stroud, Gloucester: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1998): John Midgely (p.118); Guy Wint (p.121); Victor Zorza (pp.120-121); and Darcy Gillie (p.97). Gillie was commended to IRD by Orwell (p.97). Zorza, the paper's resident Sovietologist, was later to earn a reputation as a critic of the CIA line on détente. Wint wrote editorials. Midgeley had earlier worked for The Economist, "many" of whose staff, according to the same authors, "were very close to the intelligence establishment" (p.118).

(11) Frances Stonor Saunders. Who paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), p.186.

(12) "The Press: A radical change," Time (Atlantic Edition), 25 August 1952, p.41.

(13) Paul Lashmar & James Oliver. Britain's Secret Propaganda War, 1948-1977 (Stroud, Gloucester: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1998), p.138.

(14) Visit the Guardian’s newly unveiled digital archive and see for yourself: http://archive.guardian.co.uk/Default/Skin...W=1195511464477

(15) "Journalistic shot in the arm," The Guardian, 1 August 1961, as reprinted in The Guardian Century, Part Seven: 1960-69, p.5, as issued free with the edition of Saturday, 20 November 1999.

(16) Richard & Gladys Harkness, "The Mysterious Doings of CIA," Saturday Evening Post, (227), 6 November 1954, p.66: "Besides its spy network, and the open CIA function of research, the agency operates a superclandestine third force…"; Harry Howe Ransom. Central Intelligence and National Security (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp.203-204: "The CIA: A Third Force?: Quite possibly the ascendancy of CIA to prominence and power in national policy making represents the growth of a third force…"; Richard Starnes, "Arrogant CIA Disobeys Orders in Viet Nam," The Washington Daily News, 2 October 1963, p.3: "Unquestionably Mr. McNamara and General Taylor both got an earful from people who are beginning to fear the CIA is becoming a Third Force co-equal with President Diem's regime and the US Government - and answerable to neither."

(17) Polly Toynbee, "Guarding the Guardian," The Guardian, 10 September 1999, p.21: "The Guardian is not like any other national newspaper…" Quite so. No other British national so routinely bothers to masquerade as independent of intelligence service control.

Not much more to say I'm afraid

Except maybe Iraq is apparently experiencing great civil rights now Saddam's gone and the UK is doing multi-billion pound deals with Saudi.

What am I missing!!!!

Your cut of the kickback?

Lincoln's worry about the destructive power of "enthroned" corporations growing out of war certainly did not "prove groundless" as he hoped it would...These great men knew what they were talking about. It would be flabbergasting if a single one of the latest lame crop of presidential candidates expressed a modicum of the insight of Lincoln, Butler, and Eisenhower on how things work, for the benefit of all those Americans who are still in the dark.

But of course that person wouldn’t last long as a candidate. Such frank talk would have to come from an outsider with no chance to begin with. As it is, viable candidates are themselves always creatures of the war-loving "money power of this country" that Lincoln spoke of and feared.

Edward T. Folliard, "Robert Kennedy Insults Texas, GOP charges," Washington Post, (Saturday), 17 February 1962, p.A4:

In the course of visit to Indonesia, RFK called the US-Mexican ear of 1846-48 "unjustified". "It was not a very bright spot in our history - not one to be very proud of."

In joining with a youthful Lincoln's assessment, RFK joined with Lincoln's fate.

Footnotes (Paul Foot), “Blue Gene,” Private Eye, No. 169 (7 June 1968), p.15:

In the Democratic primary in Oregon it was being put about that Senator McCarthy’s campaign was being organised by the CIA...

British affection for RFK was unusual in that it emanated from both the general public, and our hereditary foreign policy establishment (fpe). Perhaps the clearest expression of the latter's enthusiasm is to be found, appropriately enough, in what used to be the house organ of the British establishment:

From our own correspondent, "Mr. Stewart Finds An Ally On Defence Security Policy," The Times, (Thursday), 14 October 1965, p.10:

"Listening to the Senator's speech was an extraordinary experience. In spite of the New England accent, it was like listening to a Foreign Office spokesman expound British policy. Hardly a point was missed, including the necessity of bringing China into nuclear discussions."

My strong impression is that MI6 did not share the enthusiasm of the rest of the British fpe; and that Foot, if I have his career right, was no stranger to that fine body of disinterested professionals.

Paul Rigby: Oct 21 2007, 03:55 PM Post #1: 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

Contrary to the impression left by Lifton in Best Evidence, CBS claimed to have rather more than just the transcript. Below, a clipping I printed from Denis Morissette’s website in March 2003. Part of the text, unfortunately, was cut off by the right margin. Since then, the link to this particular clip seems to have gone down, but the rest of the clippings appear to be available still, & are well worth a look:

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senat...Newspapers.html

New Mystery in JFK Assassination: What Happened to Dr. Perry's Tapes?

June 29, 1967

Reprinted from: Variety

What happened to the many film, video and audio tape records made of the nationwide broadcast debut of Dr. Malcolm Perry? CBS News, among others, would surely like to know.

Dr. Perry was one of the two main surgeons who operated on President John F. Kennedy after he was shot in Dallas. Perry was filmed and taped extensively at a press conference held at Parkland Memorial Hospital when attempts to save the President's life had failed. During that conference Perry reportedly stated that the throat wound suffered by Kennedy was an entrance wound – a statement in sharp contrast to the findings of the Warren Commission Report on the assassination.

Preparing its three-hour “CBS News Inquiry: The Warren Report,” scheduled for the 10 to 11 pm time periods June 25, 26, and 27, CBS News had scoured network archives and several local stations for either visual-audio or audio records of Perry's interview, but all traces of it seem to have vanished. Les Midgley, producer of the inquiry, says CBS archives (with more than 80 hours of footage on the assassination and its aftermath) contain a visual version of the interview sans sound (it seems technicians covering for CBS misplugged the sound equipment).

Midgley says CBS had figured on getting that interview from the network affiliate in Ft. Worth, but the footage disappeared from the station's library. And neither NBC or ABC can locate the interview in their libraries.

CBS news went so far as to ask Emile de Antonio, producer of Mark Lane's “Rush to Judgment” now running theatrically, for a copy of the interview (it was a somewhat far-fetched request, since, as reported some weeks ago in Variety, CBS had first invited de Antonio to screen and buy footage from its assassination library and then refused his use of the bulk of it on the premise the web (?) was doing its own show).

I wonder if CBS still has the soundless recording it claimed to have in 1967? I suspect a native enquirer would fair better than a perfidious Brit, so if any American reader has a spare half hour or so, fancy emailing or writing CBS to find out?

PS: Denis, if you read this, please restore the clipping in full.

(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.”

Paul--

Later Lowenstein became a leader in the campaign to reopen the RFK assassination files held by the LAPD. Melanson seems to take these efforts as sincere. Do you?

Nat, no, absolutely not. As Richard Cummings’ aforementioned estimable biog, The Pied Piper: Allard Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream (NY: Grove Press Inc., 1985) - in particular, the opening chapter of the work’s final section, VII, “On His Own,” pages 454-469 - leaves no doubt. Lowenstein was a dutiful CIA footsoldier throughout the period in question. The Agency had other purposes in mind, none of them remotely edifying, when it had Lowenstein go public about his "doubts."

Later in the Spring of 1980 he was murdered by an old colleague from the anti-war movment who had become irrational. Melanson quotes fellow RFK assassination Greg Sone to the effect that Lewenstein's killer was " a nut but was he a handled nut?" Any take on his death, if, as you suggest, he was working with the CIA?

I agree that Sweeney gives every indication of being a "handled nut." The purpose of his assassination? Like John Lennon's, essentially symbolic, as Lowenstein was now considered expendable. The 60s terminated in hail of bullets. Here comes Ronnie!

Paul