Paul Rigby

But not to me, Tim, nor to any objective standard of logic. You invite us to believe it was easier to shoot Kennedy from distance with a rifle than from close-up with a handgun. Er, why? It is not self-evident. Quite the contrary. See my thread on special forces typology: Direct-Positive is always to be preferred. Then there is the small matter of history and precedent in US presidential assassinations: Handguns, from close range. Sorry, Tim, but no, that is not, and never has been, my theory. I follow Newcomb & Adams as to the origin of the first shot from the rear: A challenge, then, to all the many adept film & picture afficionados, Bill Miller included - let's see the best enlargement obtainable of the SS hand in question. If my belief is erroneous, show it for all to see. You forgot intense religious bigotry, the most serious, and attested, runner of them all. In the eyes of the US establishment, Kennedy was a Catholic upstart and parvenu with profoundly heretical notions on the central issues of the time - peace, war, and profit. Our knowledge of Greer's career is scant. If you have a full resume, please produce it.

They never do, Tim, but, hell, you've never let it deter you in the past, so why stop now!

Bill's familiar message: Don't listen to the eyewitnesses, they were there, listen to Miller - I wasn't! Note, no claim that the eyewitnesses didn't offer the claims I've quoted, just a blank recourse to ...a yes, a lot of fake films, with no proper provenances, or chains of possession, and entirely inconsistent accounts of their early durations and contents, not least from their alleged takers. To state the obvious - this isn't evidence, but its negation. Your position is "common sense"? Come, come, Bill, I fear you flatter yourself. She was in just a marvellous position to launch a counter-attack: The guys who had just blown her husband's brains out were guarding her children; she was armed with very sharp bits of his skull; and she was utterly unshocked by what had just occurred. Yup, in a prime state personally to roll back the coup.

In other threads on this forum, I've come across claims that Greer et al were little more than village idiots unburdened by a day's training. Nothing could be further from the truth, as common sense would suggest. Here's a useful footnote from chapter 4, The Filmed Assassination, of Fred Newcomb & Perry Adams’ Murder From Within (Santa Barbara: Probe, 1974):

I keep a jar handy next to the computer. You never know when it might prove useful. Let me see. These are "slight variations": A sharp left veer to the south curb of Elm; a stop; shooting; SS men swarming on the presidential limo? All this - and more - from the eyewitness testimony, but mysteriously absent from the films. "Slight variations"? I "hallucinated" the quotations above? Really? Me and the peeps who compiled both the Report and the Hearings volumes? The FBI guys who took down the statements? Which of course explains the FBI's decision to inverview both men in the White House on 27 November and, as Lifton long ago noted, set down a physical description of Greer. But not, admittedly, his right foot. More hallucinations, I suspose:

Not sure that's true, Peter... And as for this objection... If you've seen Jackie's full testimony, you're a very privileged soul. Care to share its location(s)? JC thought so much of the SS he wouldn't let it near him in 1980. Actions speak louder than words. As for members of the US elite engaging in self-censorship, that's agreeably easy to demonstrate. The film record's a rank fake, with one important exception. There's a spaceship at my disposal, don't you know, so distance is no object. And after visiting Planet Knoll (north & south poles), I can confirm there's not a sign of intelligent life...

It's a full life being an advocate of an in-car shooting, what with locating our mandatory turquoise track-suits, coming to terms with our divinity, fighting the good fight against artfully disguised elite lizards etc. Worst of all, we have to cope with the shame of having read the testimony of some of the closest and/or best-placed eyewitnesses - and taken it seriously! No wonder we struggle for credibility. Ah, well, such is life, and I have a UFO to catch - straight to the newsagents, please, Alien Cooper... 1.Bobby Hargis (Police motorcycle outrider, left rear of limousine): Mr. Stern: Do you recall your impression at the time regarding the shots? Hargis: “Well, at the time it sounded like the shots were right next to me,” 6WCH294. 2. Austin Miller (railroad worker, on triple overpass): Mr. Belin: “Where did the shots sound like they came from?” Miller: “Well, the way it sounded like, it came from the, I would say right there in the car,” 6WCH225. 3. Charles Brehm (carpet salesman, south curb of Elm St.): “in front of or beside” the President. Source: Dallas Times Herald, November 22, 1963, cited by Joachim Joesten. Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? (London: Merlin Press, 1964), p.176. 4. Officer E. L. Boone (policeman, corner of Main and Houston Streets):" I heard three shots coming from the vicinity of where the President's car was,” 19WCH508. 5. Hugh Betzner, Jr. told the Dallas County Sheriffs Office that he “saw what looked like a fire-cracker going off in the President's car and recall seeing what looked like a nickel revolver in someone's hand in or somewhere immediately around the President's car," 19WCH467. 6. Jack Franzen: “He said he heard the sound of an explosion which appeared to him to come from the President's car and ...small fragments flying inside the vehicle and immediately assumed someone had tossed a firecracker inside the automobile,” 22WCH840. 7. Mrs. Jack Franzen: “Shortly after the President’s automobile passed by…she heard a noise which sounded as if someone had thrown a firecracker into the President’s automobile…at approximately the same time she noticed dust or small pieces of debris flying from the President’s automobile,” 24WCH525. 7. Clint Hill (on the second shot, the fatal one to the head): “It was as though someone was shooting a revolver into a hard object," 2WCH144. 8. James Altgens: “The last shot sounded like it came from the left side of the car, if it was close range because, if it were a pistol it would have to be fired at close range for any degree of accuracy," 7WCH518.

JOHN J. McCLOY, letter to fellow-Philadelphian George Wharton Pepper at the end of WWII: Kai Bird. The Chairman: John J. McCloy: The Making of the American Establishment (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p.661. JOHN F. KENNEDY, speech delivered at the American University in Washington, 10 June 1963: http://www.jfklibrary.org/Historical+Resou...ity06101963.htm

That piece of diction – “radicals” – lingers. Could it be that Mellen wishes to suggest to her readers that RFK, had he won the presidency in ’68, would have hunted down domestic “radicals” like, well, Mellen herself? But we need not linger on mere suspicion of hysterical and self-dramatising anti-RFK propaganda when we have such clear proof of same: Did RFK really reveal any such plan – to fill Vietnam with “death squads,” no less - to Ellsberg? If so, why is it missing from Ellsberg’s first version of his contacts with, and impressions of, RFK? It certainly isn’t anywhere in an article on the subject which preceded Ellsberg’s book-memoir by thirty years: Jan Wenner, “Dan Ellsberg: Interview, part II,” Rolling Stone, 6 December 1973, pp.16-25. On the contrary, Ellsberg became increasingly impressed with RFK (p.24): “The picture that people had of him, that he was purely an opportunist on the War – nailing down a particular position so as to oppose Johnson – I felt was exactly the opposite of the truth. That he cared very deeply about the War and that, often – too often – he compromised that feeling for political tactics. But I don’t doubt the sincerity of his feelings, and that drew me to him very strongly.” Of course, the obvious rejoinder to this charge of an obsession with the mere acquisition of power is what on earth could RFK achieve without it? One group certainly did not share the view of RFK here propounded by Mellen – the people who killed him, as Mellen herself, with that sure mastery of logic which so disfigures her Garrison book, proceeds to make clear in her very next paragraph: A second group – let us here assume there were no links with the first - doubtless perplexed by Mellon’s version of JFK’s policies in Laos would appear to be the very CIA/Special Forces men running the actual death squads there in 1961-62. Both the Agency and Military Assistance Advisory Group personnel there “scarcely hid their disapproval” of the Kennedy-backed peace negotiation and worked actively to “subvert it.” (1) The opposition became so naked that in mid-November 1961 Brigadier Andrew Boyle, commander of the US military “adviser” contingent in Laos, was obliged to threaten “that any enlisted man or officer who violated” his order to desist from public dissent to the Kennedy White House policy “would be returned immediately to the United States with an official reprimand and might face further disciplinary action.” (2) A New York Times editorial at the end of the month lamented that “American policy in Laos has often suffered from conflicting action by agents of different branches of the United States Government. In Vientiane the embassy has at times pursued one program, Pentagon men and Central Intelligence operatives still another.” (3) In summary, Mellen’s game-plan is the familiar one – offer revelations about the CIA to gain credibility, then lavish the banked credit on a depressingly familiar assortment of preposterous inversions & crude smears. (1) Don A. Schanche, “Have We Lost Southeast Asia?,” Saturday Evening Post, 7 April 1962, p.88. (2) Jacques Nevard, “US Bars Carping By Aides In Laos,” The New York Times, 29 November 1961, p.8. (3) Editorial, “Untogetherness in Laos,” The New York Times, 30 November 1961, p.

William F. Buckley, Jr. - not the National Review, Tim, do keep up - was out of the loop? An outrageous proposition! And no complaints about Buckley's ghastly invocation of the Holocaust in this context? Perhaps you've been taking lessons from the ADL. Paul

Thought it might be useful to revisit the immediate response of a CIA journo with undoubted connections to the upper levels of the plot. Worth noting before proceeding that Buckley's National Review did bother to blame Moscow for the CIA-directed coup attempt in Saigon in November 1960. "Pogrom"? "Genocidal"? Interesting to note how early the American elite right took up the Holocaust as a shield for its crimes.

A revolution under the guise of a covert restoration of the status quo ante.

In his 1961 book, Secret Service Chief, ostensibly co-written with Leonard Wallace Robinson, recently retired Secret Service head U.E. Baughman offered a plausible picture of the background to his decision to retire: But was it as simple – not to mention schmaltzy and hackneyed - as described? There is ground for scepticism. One source of such doubt comprises a UPI-sourced piece which appeared in the NYT in late January 1961. It reported the retirement of the deputy chief of the SS, Russell Daniel, 54, “an agent of thirty one years” who “could have become Chief of the Secret Service had he not elected to retire…It was learned that the chief, U.E. Baughman, had considered retiring in favor of Mr. Daniel.Now Mr. Baughman plans to remain head of the service for three or four years” (UPI, “Secret Service Shifts,” NYT, 26 January 1961, p.20). Baughman was only 56. Nor was this the only ground. As we have seen above, Baughman dated his day of decision to May 1961. Yet it was to take until late July for the news to reach the press, at minimum, then, nearly two full months: “Chief of Secret Service to Retire Next Month,” NYT, 25 July 1961, p.17. According to this report, Baughman possessed “no plans to seek another job,” but was now “thinking about writing a book about his career.” (The Washington Post report repeated the line that Baughman “had no plans for private employment at the moment,” but failed to record Baughman’s new-found literary ambitions.) Why such an apparently lengthy delay between decision and public announcement? Was there an event or development which occurred in the intervening period that it was felt better to gloss over? The suspicion that the book version of the circumstances surrounding Baughman’s decision to retire is not entirely reliable or candid is reinforced by a report which appeared in the NYT in late August 1961. According to the NYT’s Joseph Loftus, reporting on the approval given to Baughman to keep his guns in retirement, the latter had “received several job offers. Since he was only 56, he would surprise no one if he started a new career” (“Baughman able to keep guns,” NYT, 20 August 1961, p.58). Surprise no one, that is, except the authors of a book called Secret Service Chief. Memory plays tricks, of course, and it is not my attention to spatchcock Baughman into the ranks of the conspirators. To the contrary, it was likely because he was of pre-war Cold War vintage and honest that he was subject to a little inducement to help sway his decision. What form could such an inducement have taken? How to tip to the balance for retirement – let us concede, as the evidence suggests, the disposition existed - without arousing suspicion? We have already seen the answer. Memoirs as CIA pay-off, buy-out, &/or syke-warfare. In Gavan McCormack’s contribution, “Burchett’s Thirty Years’ War,” to the Ben Kiernan-edited Burchett Reporting the Other Side of the World, 1939-1983 (London: Quartet Books, 1986), there is a rare mention of a classic CIA gambit (p.180): The company which took Secret Service Chief was Random House, a publishing house characterised by Christopher Story, the editor of Soviet Analyst and a man with excellent connections in the Anglosphere spookocracy, as a veritable “front for the Central Intelligence Agency” (Volume 29, Numbers 1-2, (May-June 2004), p. 17). Serialisation rights were quickly arranged with none other than the Washington Post, a Mockingbird bastion par excellence, which duly offered ten instalments beginning Christmas 1961. The book had four stand-out utilities to the CIA. For the moment, I confine myself to two, both of which featured in the WAPo extracts from the book. First, it promulgated the establishment fiction that all previous would-be, not to mention actual, presidential assassins had been “lone-nuts,” an assertion hammered home. Second, and most unsubtly of all, the threat posed by “a good marksman with a high-powered telescopic rifle” was flagged. This latter theme was to remain a staple of the genre: In a lengthy profile of Baughman’s replacement, James Rowley, by Emile C. Schurmacher published in True magazine – the edition dated 22 November 1963 – only the identity of the originator of the fear had been changed (Emile C. Schurmacher, “The Man Who Protects the President,” True, 22 November 1963, pp.12-15, 73-79). This was a deliberate and systematic red-herring. It was to work triumphantly.

Will do - I got it on inter-library loan, got side-tracked, then skimmed it in indecent haste to avoid the fiscal hammering that comes with late return. From what you say, I missed a trick. Ta for the tip. Agreed - Richardson was essentially a front-man/blind for the more active players until the late August attempted coup, when the CIA institutionally moved into overt opposition to a negotiated settlement. In this, the August '63 coup followed the model established by the November 1960 effort. There, too, the station chief was not central to the attempt. So from where was control exercised? Stategically, it had to be Washington (or rather its spookiest suburb) for the post-Dallas changes to US policy in Vietnam had to be readied in advance for integration into the broader post-Dallas narrative. Tactically? That would have to be Saigon -USOM would be my favoured guess. Paul

UPI (London), “World Press Raises Doubts About Assassination Case,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 26 November 1963, p.4A: …The Milan newspaper Corriere Lombardo…referred to a movie of the actual shooting and said it showed that “not more than five seconds elapsed from the moment Kennedy was shot and the moment his car sped away.”

Dupe deleted.

Charles, A fascinating proposal, and one I may well take up at a future date. For the moment, however, an observation and two inferences from it. Consider again the nature of the damage to the Merc. The front of the car bore a pronounced dent at the mid-front, to the extent that the wings of the car appeared to have curved round the impediment. It had clearly struck the column head on, not on either wing; and it was thus anything but a glancing blow. My first inference from that reinforces both my own aforementioned viewing, early on the Sunday morning on BBC TV, of footage showing the car upside down, and its occupants, including Diana, still in it; and the eyewitness testimony quoted in that same day’s newspapers confirming same: A head on collision at great speed would likely cause the car, especially such a heavy one, to flip over. My second: The fact that the Merc hit the pillar head on is powerfully suggestive that the driver was NOT in control of the vehicle. Why? Because the instinct to turn away from the looming obstacle is universal, universally powerful, and incredibly rapid. Even if Paul could not avoid it entirely, as was perhaps the case, one would confidently expect to see damage to one side or the other of the car’s front. Unless, that is, we are to believe that Monsieur Paul did not have time to make any instinctive reaction at all; or was either a hypno-programmed assassin, or else hopelessly drunk. I’ve seen no reliable evidence for the Manchurian Candidate chauffeur hypothesis, or for his being steaming drunk. And the fact that the pillar struck was not right at the tunnel’s entrance leaves me with little option but to rule this objection unlikely. Paul

Just a shift in emphasis, or a dropping of the mask? Great questions! Paul

A further potential lead on British involvement in Vietnam peace negotiations came earlier this year from a surprising source – the Cottesloe theatre, London, and playwright Nicholas Wright, whose play, “The Reporter,” took as its subject the career and suicide of one-time star BBC reporter James Mossman. Mossman’s was a household face in the UK in the early-to-mid ‘60s thanks to his appearances, among other places, on Panorama, BBC TV’s flagship current affairs-cum-investigative reportage programme. Founded in 1953, Panorama’s first editor, Dennis Bardens, was a spy-occultist – pre-war he “joined the bohemian and occult circles gathered round Victor Neuberg, the great disciple of Aleister Crowley” before a spot of “secret service work in Czechoslovakia” in the immediate post-war period (1) – who appears to have bequeathed the programme a tradition it was never to loose, as a front for British intelligence. Among the Brit spooks who wound their way onto the programme was James Mossman, who did “undercover work for MI6” earlier in his career (2). In the summer of 1963, Mossman was in Saigon, where he witnessed “a Buddhist monk immolate himself, like a charred tottering marionette” (3). The inevitable question – was Mossman there on behalf of his former employer, MI6? And if so, what was his role? Mere observer? One strong clue as to Mossman’s personal assessment of the political situation in Saigon was offered in a pre-curtain up piece for the Guardian by the playwright himself: The script of the play appears to be unavailable as yet – has anyone reading this seen the play? And recall Wright’s version of what Mossman said the evening of Diem’s overthrow and murder? (1)C.A.R Hills, “Obituary: Dennis Bardens,” The Guardian, Saturday, 21 February 2004, p.23. (2)Kate Bassett, “Theatre: The life and loves of a fatal Englishman,” The Independent on Sunday, ABC section, 25 February 2007, p.15. (3)Ibid. (4)Nicholas Wright, “The real Jim,” The Guardian, Saturday Review, 3 February 2007, p.14.

Myra, One of the most intriguing and, from Diana’s point of view, ominous, pre-assassination pieces on her appeared in the Guardian’s Outlook section in mid-May 1993. Jointly attributed to Martin Kettle (a New Labour bootlicker, but a well-connected one), Richard Norton-Taylor (no stranger he to MI6) and Michael White (a political correspondent ever willing & able to discern wisdom in our unelected rulers), it bore the snappy title “Diana may be a loose cannon on the English flagship. But its officers are also feeling the heat. Accustomed to greatness, the English ruling class is being destabilised and it is reacting with venom,” Saturday, 15 May 1993, p.23. Though making a passing nod in the direction of her utility to Rupert Murdoch’s campaign against the traditional Right in Britain, the article was primarily concerned with Diana’s serious flirtation with conversion to Catholicism. (Her papal pied piper was Dom Henry Wansborough, the Benedictine monk who was master of St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and a former housemaster of her “friend” James Gilbey at Ampleforth.) There followed a surprisingly serious consideration of the implications of such a conversion for the Church of England, the Monarchy – and the intelligence services. The most interesting passages in that meditation follow. Ignore the absurd bit about MI5 officers deferring to “no other power” – you can’t become head of either MI5 or MI6 without CIA approval: As is obvious, this was well-informed, shrewd and deeply serious stuff – and entirely forgotten in the wake of Diana’s death, most notably by that obsessive attacker of things even remotely conspiratorial, the Guardian, the very paper in which it had appeared. Paul

Again: And again (though note the adverb "partially" - the car's position of rest in transition?): The delay in getting the injured and dead out of the car: Given the weight and speed of the Mercedes, it would appear unlikely that a small Fiat Uno - or whatever it was - was capable of bumping the Merc into an unwanted change of direction. Was the white Fiat introduced into the tale as a "grassy knoll" piece of mis-direction from the Merc itself?

But chose not to testify at his trail in Pakistan - odd, really, if he wanted to deliver his message to his home audience. Given who he worked for - see below - my faith in the testimony of his roommate isn't the greatest. Planted evidence? Police in cahoots with the CIA? Unthinkable. Or may be that wasn't the case here (see final item). Not too often you get a boat-load of eyewitnesses who openly admit to working for Langley. All you've shown me, Len, is a photograph with what appears to be an unnatural light source on his face, a photograph whose provenance and handling would require a great deal more investigation than a thumbs-up from an habitual establishment shil. And then there's the small matter of Kasi's job. Here's the aforementioned Rashid and Adams on that and other interesting bits and pieces: Can we say "CIA"? I think we can. And just in case there's any doubt about this, we need only look at his employ at the time of the shooting. Rashid and Adams again: So a man who presumably has access, but virtue of his job, to some interesting CIA locations, chooses to register his alleged protest by a harum-scarum random shooting at the entrance to a heavily guarded site when he could have pulled off something much more murderous much more easily in the course of a standard working day, and got away without a hot pursuit. Ho-hum. Yet another dog that doesn't hunt. To finish, Rashid and Adams again: The Agency burns yet another Muslim asset? The only novelty was in the location for, and the elaborateness of, the fit-up.

Sorry, Nat, I should have been clearer. (Brevity is sometimes, alas, no more than the soul of tiredness…) I was merely alluding to themes touched upon previously in the thread. Humour me while I revisit them. We are routinely invited to deride Kennedy, Harriman et al – the small group favouring a political settlement, not a military one, along the lines of the Geneva agreements on Laos – for their hypocrisy. Here’s a group of prize hypocrites, this view would have it, which publicly opposed assassination and coup d’etats until it suited, as, allegedly, in Diem’s case in November 1963. Now here’s that remarkable oddity again. If this version had any truth in it, its advocates would surely seize upon any pre-coup instances of the peace group’s support for Diem to ram home the charge of hypocrisy. And who could blame them, for their interpretation would be true and justified? Yet for the most part, they don’t. Why the silence? Well, part of the problem lies in the terms in which Kennedy, Harriman et al defended Diem. As we have seen earlier in the thread, courtesy of the estimable Bernard Fall, Harriman’s defence of Diem on a US radio station in February 1963 was anything but starry-eyed. The peace group did NOT harbour any great illusions about the nature of Diem’s government. Furthermore, what was true in Feb ’63 – that there simply was no viable political alternative to Diem – was as true in November of the year as it was eight months earlier. It was particularly true if, as was obviously the case, Kennedy and the peace faction were continuing to push for the political settlement strategy for Vietnam initiated in earnest at Honolulu in the summer of ’62. Diem was essential to it. A further crucially important factor constraining the scope of the attack on Kennedy and the peace group is to be found in the propaganda myth erected around the work of the CIA’s press group in South Vietnam, the men used to sell us the Agency view – and plan, for Langley works assiduously, if necessarily covertly, to fulfil its own prophecies, thus appearing infinitely sage – embodied in Carver’s Feb 63 NIE. Halberstam, Sheehan, Browne, and Arnett, to name but four of the most prominent “salesmen,” were sold to the US people as independent truth-seekers, fearlessly telling it like it was in the face of the best endeavours of a schlerotic, delusional, and pro-Diem foreign policy establishment. Recall that Halberstam boasts that Kennedy personally intervened with his publisher in late October 63 to have him recalled; while Arnett has Harriman seeking his removal a month earlier. You see the problem at once: If Kennedy and the tiny pro-peace deal faction which he headed really were resolved to dish Diem, why on earth would they be seeking the removal of the very US journalists campaigning most vigorously for that very end? It makes no sense. But it does, I submit, account for the above-noted absence of vigour in unearthing and publicizing the peace faction’s public pronouncements in favour of Diem’s retention. In this specific context, to publicize Harriman’s Feb 63 support for Diem would be to leave the unmistakable suggestion, when allied to Arnett’s revelation that Harriman sought his removal in September 63, of continuity in the peace faction’s position. Now that would never do. In summary, then, we have an apparently blatant disconnect in the CIA version of who advocated what, when, and for what purposes. But the contradictions are superficial and relatively easily accounted for by chronology and context: CIA propaganda requirements shifted as the year progressed; and, post-coup, necessitated the maintenance of mutually contradictory propaganda positions. The really malign genius of the CIA’s work on Vietnam 1963 was in the realm of propaganda: the image-work with the Buddhists; and, above all, the campaign to create the impression, via selective leaks to the US press, that the peace faction, not the Agency, was driving the campaign in Washington to remove Diem. That’s the real hypocrisy I had in mind. I'll come back to your other questions when time permits. Paul

Those ISI interrogators - such gentle souls. My used car emporium beckons, Len..."glass shards...bought a ticket for Pakistan...reported missing" - proof positive, indeed. Why not go the whole hog, Len, and give him pink eyes - now a Pakistani albino, there's a runner!

Er...logic's obviously a strong point of yours, Len. If it ain't on the Net, it never happened, right? A truly fascinating position, for which I feel confident chemical remedy will soon be found. Particularly eyewitnesses to an event quoted shortly afterwards who have not yet seen any television footage of the event. Jeesh, Len, you're losing it. Let's see if we can help Greenie out, shall we: Bush is an habitual lier with a memory of convenience and the IQ of a gnat? There, not too difficult, surely? Most kind. Who said Americans don't do understatement? Paul