David Andrews

Really, can you imagine kissing the wife and kids in the morning and then going off to work to develop aerosols to randomly exterminate men, women and children and intellectually dressing that up as Betsy Ross? People do that to this day, maybe hitting on Betsy Ross a little less. This redounded on the citizenry with the 9/11 anthrax letters, for which a probably innocent scientist was ostracized, prosecuted and suicided. Go look up the retitled "animal research" lab on Plum Island, NY - I'm sure there's enough rot there to fell everybody from Montauk to Poughkeepsie. I don't suppose Olson was a lilly-white rose in the whole deal. I think Kinzer covers Olson's guilt and remorse fairly well. I have the Alberelli book but have been delayed in reading it.

I posted this link elsewhere, but Bissell is also evaluated in this article. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1979/08/inside-the-department-of-dirty-tricks/305460/

Finally, in 1984 Gottlieb has the audacity to tell Olson's son Eric "your father and I were very much alike". Like some old Nazi in a spy movie.

Thanks. What is to be made of the witnesses who say two men killed Tippit?

Just for the sake of a recap at this point: Do we feel that one of the Oswalds at Texas Theater was one of two men who killed Tippit? The one seen by Brewer-Postal-Burroughs? If not, why was it necessary for two Oswalds to be at the theater at once? JC Brewer could have just told a bigger lie and sworn to Julia Postal that a man had sneaked in when he hadn't. If I were the Oswald hustled out the back door, I'd worry that I'd never be seen again once front-door Oswald was in custody. That might lead to me not show up for work that day, or at least to leave by rear exit earlier. For the plotters, that's an awful close proximity for two Oswalds, perhaps the closest they were ever brought together in their lives. Even in a darkened theater, more persons than Butch Burroughs and Bernard Haire might have seen that. An overzealous herd of cops could have hustled then both out the front door, or shot one and arrested the other - a lot of risk there for results that could have been gotten with lies, bribes and threats.

I can't speak for a book that isn't published yet, but I'm hoping that through researching Sidney Gottlieb, Kinzer will add to our knowledge of Louis Jolyon West's involvement in the Ruby, Sirhan and Manson cases.

I hadn't known that she recanted. I had thought that the perjury threat faded because HSCA couldn't agree on whether she was "lying." The pages you linked to at the Harvey and Lee website provide enough anecdotal evidence that an "Oswald" was operating in the US Gulf region while another was in Russia.

Oh, cripes! Well, at least it isn't a tattoo.

Her HSCA testimony was judged unreliable - yet no perjury charge, against which she was warned.

Delete my post as redundant - better gags above.

This is an edited extract from Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, published by Henry Holt & Co on 10 September https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/06/from-mind-control-to-murder-how-a-deadly-fall-revealed-the-cias-darkest-secrets

Linked to on the same page, also a must-read for those who haven't read Thomas Powers on Dick Helms: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1979/08/inside-the-department-of-dirty-tricks/305460/ Line worthy of Kubrick: Senator, how can you be so goddamned dumb? This isn't the kind of thing you put in writing.

A more fulsome edit of the tape than on the Morley site: I would like to hear the entire tape, to study just what kind of introduction he gives to Morales and Harvey, among the rest. There's a hint that Hunt's talking about conspirators because they've become familiar characters in JFKA research, and not strangers from the intelligence community of 44 years ago that he has to give background on. They certainly don't seem like strangers to St. John at his first glance. From the Rolling Stone article, emphasis added: 'That time in Miami, with Saint by his bed and disease eating away at him and him thinking he’s six months away from death, E. Howard finally put pen to paper and started writing. Saint had been working toward this moment for a long while, and now it was going to happen. He got his father an A&W diet root beer, then sat down in the old man’s wheelchair and waited. 'E. Howard scribbled the initials “LBJ,” standing for Kennedy’s ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under “LBJ,” connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that’s never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer’s name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer’s name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales’ name, with a line, the framed words “French Gunman Grassy Knoll.” 'So there it was, according to E. Howard Hunt. LBJ had Kennedy killed. It had long been speculated upon. But now E. Howard was saying that’s the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in other assassination theories. '“By the time he handed me the paper, I was in a state of shock,” Saint says. “His whole life, to me and everybody else, he’d always professed to not know anything about any of it. But I knew this had to be the truth. If my dad was going to make anything up, he would have made something up about the Mafia, or Castro, or Khrushchev. He didn’t like Johnson. But you don’t falsely implicate your own country, for Christ’s sake. My father is old-school, a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, and that’s the last thing he would do.”' Even the reporter (amid calling Hunt "E. Howard" throughout, like that was Hunt's around-the-house name) seems to be helping the story along by presuming Lucian Sarti is the French gunman. "Sarti - He's Hot, He's Sexy, and He's Dead!" as RS once headlined Jim Morrison. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-last-confession-of-e-howard-hunt-76611/ The article also presumes that "Oswald wasn’t the only shooter in Dallas." Hunt states that David Atlee Phillips "[met] with Oswald in Mexico City." So we're down to only two (semi-)identified shooters, one of them Oswald. No Cubans in sight. The RS article broke Saint's version of the confession. Is there a version in St. John's own words?

Why implicate these specific political figures in the most treasonous criminal act in America's history? Because his son needed money. Because they were all dead, and they were all hot on the internet that year. Who would know Cord Meyer in 2007, if not for the internet, and perhaps Ed Forum itself? Why doesn't the mysterious French assassin have a name? Because the internet hadn't decided on one.

Joe, I have no problem with Hunt's bona fides as an actor in some very bad happenings for the world, and I believe he was involved in the JFKA. I just feel that you or I could turn on a tape recorder and produce a similar piece of name-dropping disinfo. How, for instance, did Hunt jump from refusing Morales and Sturgis because of his distrust of William Harvey, and then jump to being a "benchwarmer"? What was that particular involvement? What team was he warming a bench for? From the Rolling Stone article that essentially broke the "confession" story: [St. John Hunt:] "Actually, there were probably dozens of plots to kill Kennedy, because everybody hated Kennedy but the public,” Saint says. “The question is, which one of them worked? My dad has always said, Thank God one of them worked.’ I think he knows a lot more than he told me. He claimed he backed out of the plot only so he could disclaim actual involvement. In a way, I feel like he only opened another can of worms.”

Here's an important thing about Hunt's confession to being merely a "benchwarmer" in the event, and an eyewitness to an alleged scene of planning. Without Hunt confessing direct involvement, none of it happened. If the meeting with Sturgis and Morales occurred, it had no application to actual assassination that Hunt would confirm. It can all be written off to a dying man trying to leave some legacy of notoriety to his impecunious son, who may have directed Dad to the list of conspirators which, in that year, was favored on the internet, perhaps on this forum. That's the top of the game here: Hunt's confession is also a denial. In the form that it emerged, nothing is confirmed. Unlike a statement prefaced with "I can neither confirm nor deny," Hunt's "confession" does not tacitly confirm events short of a legal and binding statement. He left us with mystery tending toward negation. Now that's tradecraft. Now that's cheek.

Well yeah - but the Bureau was something of a hermetic organization, so if some of the far-stretching tentacles of the plot were amputated, like mob guys, I would still want to know what brought seven Bureau men down. Who were they and what threat did they pose? Sullivan had a lot to hide if Congress had opened the MLK case in earnest. But that wasn't happening. It's true hat he had broken with Hoover over civil rights and COINTELPRO, and was forced into retirement. He also predicted his murder, though five years earlier: "Sullivan died age 65 from an accidental gunshot wound, as recounted by Robert D. Novak: "'Sullivan came to our house in the Maryland suburbs in June 1972 for lunch and a long conversation about my plans for a biography of Hoover (a project I abandoned as just too ambitious an undertaking). Before he left, Bill told me someday I probably would read about his death in some kind of accident, but not to believe it. It would be murder. '" [wiki] But what about the other six agents? Regis Kennedy had been an agent since 1937, and had stonewalled the Clay Shaw trial in 1967. The strain of testifying again in 1977 may have done him in. Here's a Ray Locker article on Sullivan in the Nixon years: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/30/nixons-gamble-excerpt-sullivan-accomplice-fbi/72751074/ Sullivan wrote an autobiography, which was published two years after his death, subject perhaps to Bureau editing. Excerpts are in this Spartacus article: https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKsullivan.htm It's still hard to predict how far out Sullivan would have let it hang before HSCA. Some of the revelations in the book excerpts would have been embarrassing, including Sullivan;s doubts about Oswald's marksmanship. It may have been his opposition to Hoover on domestic issues that led him to fear for his life in 1972. But who would have arranged his "accident"? He was on good terms with Dick Helms and probably would have avoided spoiling that before HSCA.

Premature judgments happen among killers - but was William Sullivan previously known as the whistleblower type? He seems to have paint-rollered a lot for the Bureau, espexially in the MLK case.. Could there have been succession worries on Hoover's mind? What would Sullivan have been willing to tell HSCA, and why?

The brain "was put into a jar and taken away" seems not to jibe with James C. Jenkins' account in At the Cold Shoulder of History, where he states that the brain was suspended on netting above a bucket of formalin, and underwent infusion of formalin through the carotids by tubes connected to a tank, all while the autopsy was going on.

Joe, I amended my post to better cover Oswald. All the anecdotal record tends to exonerate Oswald and/or "Oswald" as JFK's and Tippit's killer, and comes near to eliminating him as the person who shot at Walker. But, create a social myth of the average man becoming an omniscient rifleman in a tall building, bringing down the most powerful American, and see what blowback that brings upon a society. We seem to have become a nation that insists on attacking itself. Not to be flip here, but M. Night Shyamalan made a movie (The Happening) about that being caused by some virus out of space. Maybe there was a media metaphor there.

Historically, American multiple murder began and ended at home, the victims being family members. It wasn't until Charles Whitman in Austin, TX, 1966, that we began to have mass shootings of strangers, and Whitman in his madness may have been influenced by the Kennedy assassination three years earlier, in his home state. "From a tall building, with a rifle," as it were. Whitman was a former Marine, and the analogy between Whitman and the presumed character of Oswald appears in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. If I'm missing any earlier shooters, fill in the gaps, if you care to. Other multiple murderers before Whitman tended to be sex criminals.

Come Retribution (1988), by Tidwell. et al., is a convincing examination of the Confederate secret service's role in funding the Lincoln kidnap and assassination plots. https://www.amazon.com/Come-Retribution-Confederate-Service-Assassination/dp/0878053484 Shades of Cuba, Confederates in both the South and hiding in Canada were furious at the failed Dahlgren raid on Richmond of March, 1864. The Union commander's body was found with a memorandum directing his party to hang Jefferson Davis and Confederate government members. Without direct attribution, Lincoln was blamed.

Andrew - check the name Joe Molina in this thread:

From the article: Is this the TSBD employee who Jesse Curry said had been under scrutiny as a subversive? His identity was sought by a poster in another thread. Will link when I find. Joe Molina, of the accounting department of the T.S.B.D., arrives at the D.P.D. after a visit by some heavy weights in the middle of night who searched through his house for a few hours and come up with nothing of significance. He is being kept at the D.P.D. for roughly 7 hours and loses his job about one month later as Chief Curry names him to the press as a subversive person (pages 218-223). EDIT -Andrew Prutsok asked in this thread: Your choice of Joe Molina coverage: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=joe+molina+texas+school+book+depository

You can edit a quoted post, but not the original. This was conceived to save space in quotations, so you could reprint only pertinent sections if you chose, and also boldface or otherwise highlight selected text. A good concept that so far has not been abused.