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Bill Simpich

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  1. Jim Hargrove posed this question: "Is it your honest opinion that all the FBI/CIA disinfo about “Lee Harvey/Henry Oswald” on Oct. 10, 1963 was about a “mole hunt?” Or …. Wasn’t it more likely about turning off the federal spotlights on LHO and setting him up a patsy for the JFK assassination?" Let me start off by asking the reader to note that there were two Oct. 10, 1963 letters written by CIA Mexican desk officer Charlotte Bustos - relying on information from Ann Egerter and her colleagues at CI-SIG. One of these letters described Oswald as 5 foot 10/165 pounds (identical to the description of Navy defector Robert Webster) and the other letter described Oswald as "6 feet, athletic build" (identical to the description of the Mystery Man in Mexico). Oswald had a slight build. He was 5 foot 9, 140 pounds. How could the same author, relying on the same sources, send two letters on the same day with such different descriptions? One went to the higher-ups, the other went to the ground troops. It was guaranteed to spark discussion. Let me offer my hypothesis of the Mexico City solution. When CIA chiefs discovered that Oswald had been impersonated in Mexico City (at a minimum, on the phone calls of Sept 28 and Oct. 1), they conducted a molehunt to try to figure out who was responsible; - which in turn created a paper trail that tied the key investigative agencies firmly to the Oswald story in the last weeks before 11/22; - which in turn created a "poison pill" causing these agencies to reflexively engage in a cover-up that successfully hid the key "Oswald in Mexico City" documents from the Warren Commission and the world. No one wanted to expose their jobs, their families, and even their agencies to the devastating fallout. Nor did we know about the roles of Jim Angleton, Win Scott, Ann Egerter, Charlotte Bustos and many others in this until the late 90s. From Chapter 5 of my book State Secret. I include a link below to Peter Dale Scott's wonderful "The Hunt for Popov's Mole" - for any of you who want more descriptions of molehunts in this case & in history. I can include more later, but I don't want to overwhelm the reader. Here's my thinking on this. My hypothesis of the Mexico City solution It looks to me like CIA Cuba operations officers were among the prime suspects in an October 1963 investigation designed to figure out who impersonated Oswald and Cuban consulate secretary Sylvia Duran on the telephone call to the Soviet consulate on September 28. In this investigation, the CIA officers went to great pains to omit from their memos any reference to any Oswald visit to the Cuban consulate, any reference to Oswald’s membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and any reference to his attempts to get a visa. Why was any reference to Cuba omitted? I believe it was done to prevent the rank and file of the Cuba division of the CIA from knowing about the details of the investigation. If there was no reference to Cuba in this investigation of Oswald, then there would be no reason to include the Cuba division in the discussion. The Cuba division included both Harvey’s successor Desmond FitzGerald and the Special Affairs Staff (SAS) at Headquarters, as well as the forward operating base in Miami for tactical operations on Cuba known as JMWAVE and run by Ted Shackley and David Morales. Here’s the center of the intrigue. It looks like someone in Cuba operations was a prime suspect in an investigation of the impersonation of Oswald. It had to be handled carefully, as SAS had several of its officers embedded at the Mexico City station under Scott’s command. Another prime suspect was the Mexico City branch of the FBI. Even the CIA’s Mexico City station itself could also have been the source of the mole. It is important to note that not only the FBI, but the Navy and the State Department were also included in the investigation. This was because all three of them had responsibilities for Oswald, and hence all three of them had to be examined for signs of penetration by enemy spies. Under the Delimitations Agreement, the FBI and the Navy were charged with investigating and tracking an ex-Marine like Oswald once he had returned to the United States, and the State Department had a potential interest as well.[ 1 ] Furthermore, the State Department had done this work while Oswald was in the Soviet Union. This meant that these agencies were in charge of any debriefing of Oswald after his return to the United States. I believe that John Fain’s interviews with Oswald in 1962 constituted the actual debriefing. In the real world, these three agencies had continuing responsibility for Oswald during 1963. I believe that the impersonation of Oswald was done to plant a poison pill within any attempt by the CIA or the FBI to investigate the role of Oswald in the assassination of the President. I believe that after Oswald was impersonated, CIA investigators tried to capture the perpetrator. After an unsuccessful attempt, would those investigators be willing to have their futile efforts become public knowledge in the wake of the assassination? No way. The investigators would be threatened with the loss of their jobs and livelihood. I offer the hypothesis that the impersonation of Oswald was an inside job and a key aspect of a plan to assassinate President Kennedy. The plan was for the Oswald call to be picked up by the CIA’s wiretaps in Mexico City. That alone would be a significant roadblock in any investigation of Oswald, as the CIA considered the Mexico City wiretap operation one of its crown jewels. The CIA hierarchy wanted as few people as possible in the CIA to know about this operation, let alone the FBI and other US agencies. The notion of unveiling the Mexico City wiretap operation to the general public was a nightmare. Paul Garbler, CIA staffer: "You know what CI-SIG was? Find the mole. That's all they had to do." This nightmare was heightened by using Oswald to entice the Agency to start a molehunt to find out who made the call. After all, a molehunt had been done with the Oswald file in the past, using Ann Egerter at Angleton’s “office that spied on spies” at CI/SIG. Molehunts were standard operating procedure for CI/SIG – its bread and butter. As Paul Garbler, the CIA’s first station chief in Moscow, told a researcher: “You know what CI-SIG was? Find the mole. That’s all they had to do.” Bringing Ann Egerter into a molehunt that relied on Oswald’s biographical file meant that those trying to figure out who did the impersonation would use the Oswald legend in a paper trail that stretched into several US agencies and would be impossible to destroy later. It’s hard to think of any reason to bring Ann Egerter back into the Oswald story in late 1963, other than to design a molehunt to find out if someone was trying to penetrate the CIA. That’s how Egerter earned her salary as a CI/SIG analyst. That was the role of CI/SIG itself. Whoever imitated Oswald on the telephone in Mexico City knew that such a paper trail would be a powerful way to blackmail the involved CIA and FBI officers after November 22 into deep-sixing any serious investigation of the assassination – even an internal inquiry that could be hushed up on the grounds of “national security”. If it went public that these officers had used the Oswald legend for a molehunt prior to the assassination, the result would be not only embarrassment or a security breach, but suspicion that they were involved in the assassination itself. At a minimum, it would mean the end of the careers of these officers. The impact on their families and their agencies would be devastating. What got me thinking about a Mexico City molehunt was Peter Dale Scott’s analysis of molehunts conducted by Egerter and others, some of which I discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, the Double Dangle. The Mexico City station was a very powerful station, and its abilities should be acknowledged even though I am incensed by their deeds. For the life of me, I couldn't understand why the station would create a paper trail that made them look suspicious and incompetent at the same time. I think I have figured out the answer. Due to the September 28 phone call and the calls that followed, the Mexico City Station was duped into embarking on a molehunt to find out who impersonated Oswald and Duran in the phone call. In the process of conducting that molehunt, the paper trail of memos that followed compromised both Headquarters and the Mexico City station, making an honest investigation impossible. Of course, there's a number of possibilities of who knew enough inside ball to get the Station to play itself out of position. I lean towards David Sanchez Morales, the paramilitary chief at the CIA station in Miami. Morales had been the founder and the intelligence chief for the AMOTs. The AMOTs were the shadow intelligence service designed by the CIA to take over after Castro was overthrown. The AMOTs were highly trained intelligence officers whose primary language was Spanish. As discussed below, the September 28 conversation was in Spanish, broken Russian, and probably broken English. The September 28 call was probably made by two Spanish speakers, and it wouldn't surprise me if one or both of them were AMOTs from the CIA's Miami station. CIA officer William Sturbitts testified that AMOTs often worked inside the listening posts of audio intercept stations. Whoever made the calls knew that the Mexico City station would be surprised by the call, and that a paper-driven molehunt was the logical response. Morales had spent considerable time at the Mexico City station visiting David Phillips in the early sixties, and knew how Win Scott ran his shop. If Morales needed any help in knowing what it would take for the Mexico City station to convince Angleton’s people to conduct a molehunt - a doubtful proposition - he would have picked up some tips from Bill Harvey. It’s documented that Harvey knew how to run a molehunt, not to mention how to conduct an operation without writing anything down. As Harvey’s executive officer said, “…you think I was tight lipped. He could run rings around me.” Morales, Roselli and Martino worked together for years in efforts to assassinate Castro. All three men made damaging admissions about their own involvement in the assassination of JFK, as detailed at length in Larry Hancock’s Somebody Would Have Talked. Harvey's people in CI and Staff D - Neill Prew, the Potockis, Lou DeSanti, "Thomas Urquhart" (the possible pseudonym of the new staff D chief Alex MacMillan) - hover over what I consider most of the important events. Some or all of these officers may have been unwitting, but they passed along reports that provided very important information about the wiretap system, key Cuban informants, and targets for disruption such as Cuban consul Eusebio Azcue and press attaché Teresa Proenza. Someone wanted to use the Oswald tapes and the ensuing paper trail to blackmail the leading players in US intelligence after JFK was shot. They wanted a cover-up, and they got one.
  2. Thanks, Ron, I have studied Hill's "unknown witness" of a 5 foot 10, 160-170 pound man and consider Hill's identification equally suspect as Sawyer's. Both of those Dallas police officers were bad apples. Sawyer was fired by 1967 and left in disgrace. Sandy, thank you for creating a site for the molehunt discussion. I will address Jim Hargrove's thoughts on the subject there. Here is my follow-up for the fourth of the fifth subchapters. I think the events of Nov. 23 illustrate how the tapes were a "poison pill" that caused everyone to cover up whether they were part of the plan to kill JFK or not. The internal correspondence also shows that neither the FBI or the CIA believed the notion that Soviet official Valeriy Kostikov was part of any "assassination bureau" - Angleton's contribution to the cover-up - and he knew better: November 23: How the Tapes Became a State Secret a. Nov. 23 was the day the tapes became a state secret November 23 was the day that the tapes became a state secret. Scott had decided to take a secretive approach with the tapes that supposedly contained Oswald’s voice. Keep in mind that transcriber Boris Tarasoff and others had discussed the importance about any call made by an American to an “enemy” embassy, and that Scott had a separate file set aside for all Americans who visited representatives of a Soviet bloc embassy. (See Chapter 5) Such a tape was not likely to be erased. The plane arrived at Love Field in Dallas at 2:47 AM CST on the morning of the 23rd. Dallas FBI chief Shanklin mused in his report that Hoover’s right-hand man Alan Belmont had told him that “we have on file practically all the information on Oswald down there in Mexico City except the fact that CIA had secured some information that this individual very probably called from the Cuban Embassy to the Russian Embassy.”[ 42 ] An October 16 memo to the FBI had tipped off the Bureau that Oswald had personally met with Kostikov on September 28, but did not mention the phone call later that day. The call on the 28th was the hot topic of concern that terrible night, with the CIA unwilling to firmly commit that the caller was Oswald. Goodpasture testified in 1995 that she recalled a reference that Rudd hand carried the tape dub to Laredo. If this is true, it would mean that the tapes were literally taken by Rudd from Dallas and down to the Mexican border. The importance of the sending of the tapes to the FBI cannot be overemphasized, for two reasons. First, by sending the tapes, Scott was sending the most powerful evidence about Oswald. As we will see, this evidence was covered up almost immediately and denied under oath for many years. Secondly, the following officers swore under penalty of perjury that the tapes did not exist by the time of the assassination: David Phillips (twice), Ann Goodpasture, Robert Shaw, and Deputy Chief of Station Alan P. White.[ 43 ] We know that Goodpasture lied; she was not just mistaken. Goodpasture said that it was her understanding that Rudd was given a tape to take to Texas and that Scott had a copy “squirreled away in his safe”.[ 44 ] Assuming that Phillips was in on the molehunt, then he lied as well. White’s credibility in this affair is low - Warren Commission staffers David Slawson and William Coleman admitted in a 2003 interview that White was the one who actually played the Oswald tape for them in Mexico City during April 1964.[ 45 ] Slawson had promised the CIA during the Warren Commission investigation that the report would say nothing about the wiretaps, before Slawson and Coleman admitted the existence of the tapes to researchers Tony Summers, Peter Dale Scott, and finally the Assassinations Records Review Board in the early 90s. Goodpasture then changed her testimony from “denial” in 1978 to “admission” in 1995.[ 46 ] John Whitten is the only CIA official I know of who admitted under oath that the tapes existed at the time of the assassination before Goodpasture finally admitted the truth in 1995.[ 47 ] Whitten wrote in the days after the assassination that "the actual tapes were also reviewed" and a copy of the Oct 1 "intercept on Lee Oswald" was discovered after the assassination. At 9:15 am EST, Gordon Shanklin (left) told Alan Belmont (right) that Oswald was impersonated on the September 28 call. The Church Committee staff refused to accept the FBI’s assurances that the tapes had been destroyed. What the staff missed, unfortunately, was a report from Alan Belmont. (Since the action largely shifted from Dallas to Langley, events will be described using Eastern Standard Time.) At 9:15 am EST, Shanklin told Belmont that Oswald was impersonated on the September 28 call. “The Agents who spoke to Oswald have listened to the tape provided by the CIA of the call allegedly made by Oswald to the Soviet embassy, and they do not think that the individual was Oswald, as his voice is different and he spoke in broken English.”[ 48 ] Angleton himself had the highest praise for Belmont’s acumen. "In the old days, Oswald's return to the US after his redefection would have been the highest priority for the counter-intelligence community. However, when Al Belmont left the bureau, its CI (internal security) operations fell apart."[ 49 ] At 10 am EST, Hoover and LBJ discussed how the Mystery Man photo and the tape did not match with Oswald’s appearance or his voice – and how there may have been two people in Mexico City that day. Incredibly, this presidential phone call has been erased. Because the existence of the Mexico City tapes was treated as a dark national security secret, the HSCA reported the stories of these tapes in a deceptive manner, saying in their reports that no "recording of Oswald's voice" was ever "received" or "listened to" in the United States.[ 50 ] Peter Dale Scott suggests that “this language is a lawyer's subterfuge: what was received and listened to was precisely not a recording of Oswald's voice.”[ 51 ] At 10 am EST, Hoover and LBJ discussed how the Mystery Man photo and the tape did not match with Oswald’s appearance or his voice – and how there may have been two people in Mexico City that day. Hoover also admits in private the opposite of what he has said in public: “The evidence against Oswald is not very very strong.” The entire tape of this approximately fourteen minute conversation has been mysteriously erased, while the transcript somehow survived. b. After this critically important Hoover-LBJ call, things happen very quickly At 11:45 am, someone at CIA contacted FBI liaison Sam Papich and told him about the impersonation of Eldon Hensen in Mexico City back in July. Belmont told Tolson that he called Shanklin at 11:50 am EST. This was at least their second conversation that morning about the agents and the tape. Years later, the Church Committee was fascinated by Belmont’s story: "Inasmuch as the Dallas agents who listened to the tape of the conversation allegedly of Oswald from the Cuban Embassy to the Russian Embassy in Mexico and examined the photographs of the visitor to the Embassy in Mexico and were of the opinion that neither the tape or the photograph pertained to Oswald, I requested Shanklin to immediately send a photograph of Oswald to our Legal Attache. This will be done by Agent Rudd who is returning to Mexico City by air. CIA in Mexico should check the photograph of Oswald against visitors to the Soviet and Cuban embassies to see if they can identify him." Right after talking to Tolson about Shanklin, Belmont got on the phone with Shanklin’s deputy Kyle Clark at 12 am EST. Belmont asked Dallas deputy chief Clark about the Hidell name, and whether one or two people had Hidell identification. Belmont asked Clark to explore all angles of the Hidell story, as well as any embassy visits by people who may be identical with Hidell in Mexico City. A big to-do list was created after this call. c. Goodpasture, O’Neal and Helms suggest a change in the narrative While Belmont was talking with the Dallas FBI office, Anne Goodpasture made an incredible statement in a memo at 11:59 am: “In view Oswald in Sov Union and fact he claimed on 1 Oct LIENVOY to have visited Sov Emb 28 Sep, Subject…probably Oswald. Station unable compare voice as first tape erased prior receipt of second call.” Those calls were made three days apart. The protocol was to destroy no tapes for at least two weeks, and 30 days for tapes on Cuba. According to Tarasoff’s testimony, he would have just returned the tape on or about September 30. It is obvious that Goodpasture was covering up, especially as we see that the Belmont-Shanklin conversation refers to unnamed FBI agents listening to the September 28 conversation. Goodpasture’s testimony in 1995 refers to the October 1 conversation. Perhaps the duplicate of the tapes that the FBI agents listened to contained both conversations.[ 52 ] At 12:10 pm, CI-SIG Birch O'Neal asks Mexico City “are original tapes available?” Author Rex Bradford asks: “(C)an this cable have been anything other than a big hint that a new story about the tapes’ existence (or lack thereof) was desired?” At about the same time, Goodpasture put out a big story. She said that "Douglas J. Feinglass (note: Boris Tarasoff’s pseudonym) who did transcriptions says Oswald is identical to the person para one speaking broken Russian who called from Cuban embassy September 28 to Soviet embassy".[ 53 ] This Tarasoff memo was passed on the same day from Helms to FBI liaison Sam Papich. Helms emphasized that voice comparisons were made and that the call on the 28th matched the call on the 1st. A plan seems to be taking shape. Tarasoff is never sought out for an interview. Instead, Tarasoff and his wife are hidden away from the investigators and treated as non-entities. Even five years later, when Goodpasture wrote a history of the JFK case, she referred to Tarasoff merely as "Transcriber” and said nothing about Oswald’s supposed “terrible Russian”.[ 54 ] While Helms, O’Neal and Goodpasture were going through these machinations, Belmont was still ostensibly in the thick of his investigation. At 12:40 EST, Belmont called the legal attache Clark Anderson to let him know that Oswald's photo is being sent back with Rudd. We have some good stories (see Chapter 5), but no photos of Oswald in Mexico City have surfaced to this day. During this day, Shanklin and Belmont have been the two men at the center of the investigative activities. During the afternoon, we see Shanklin offering a new tune. At about 3:30 pm EST (2030 Zulu), Shanklin tells Hoover "the actual tape from which this transcript was made has been destroyed". Ed Lopez and Dan Hardaway wrote a good memo about this change in the story. I don’t believe the change in the story. With the assistance of his aide Fletcher Thompson, Hoover then wrote a memo to the President, and another to the Secret Service chief Rowley, with both memos saying that FBI agents reviewed the tape and concluded that the voice was not Oswald’s. The Secret Service’s letter was hand-delivered on the morning of the 24th, indicating that the Secret Service and LBJ got the correct story while everyone else got the cover story.[ 55 ] 4. The lone nut/no tapes story is polished throughout the week following the assassination a. The attacks on Sylvia Duran After Scott saw the photos of Oswald on TV the night of the assassination, he informed CIA HQ of his suggestion to Gustavo Ortiz (also known as LITEMPO-2, who would become President of Mexico in 1964) that Duran be arrested. Based on the Duran-Oswald phone call on September 28 from the Cuban consulate, Scott wanted Duran held incommunicado until she provided everything she knew about Oswald. Scott added that “LITEMPO-2 can say DFS coverage revealed call to him if he needs to explain.”[ 56 ] This is another indicator that DFS had its own set of tapes and transcripts from the Mexico City station, and was not forced to rely on CIA largesse. These tapes may still exist today. Duran was taken into custody by the Mexican police on November 23, and released the next morning. The Mexicans told Scott that they would pretend that the decision to arrest Duran came from “Mexican initiative” rather than from Scott.[ 57 ] The official record of Duran’s interview is missing. We have a third-hand version, summarized and translated into English.[ 58 ] We also have reports from “R. L. Easby”, the pseudonym for deputy chief Alan White. The initial report from Easby states that “Echevierra told COS Duran was completely cooperative.” In fact, Duran was abused. This statement indicates that “Easby” may have inspired David Phillips; as we will see, Phillips falsely described the double agent Gilberto Alvarado as “completely cooperative” a couple of days later.[ 59 ] From a conversation she had with Ed Lopez, we know that she said that her interrogators mistreated her during this interview and a second one days later.[ 60 ] The ambassador urged them to “go all out” while questioning her. Duran was interrogated by Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, the same DFS officer who threatened to hang Alvarado by his balls a few days later.[ 61 ] Duran told Joaquin Armas that she was shoved around and her arms had black and blue marks. Significantly, she was asked if she had intimate relations with Oswald. The initial report of her interrogation alludes to this, stating that Duran gave Oswald “on a piece of paper, her name Silvia Duran with the office telephone number but that Oswald was not given her address since he had no reason to have it.”[ 62 ] Historian Gerald McKnight states that “the line of questioning originated with COS Win Scott. The CIA was trying to force Duran to confess to entrapping Oswald, luring him with sexual favors into a Cuban conspiracy to kill JFK.”[ 63 ] That would have created the basis for an invasion of Cuba. There is a mysterious unsigned memo in the files, extremely well written, with details few would know, and with a Spanish phrase sprinkled in it. The writer refers to the Marines as the “Infanteria de la Marina”. Win Scott wrote “read to President the night of 11/25/63”. This was the President of Mexico and not Lyndon B. Johnson. It is designed to spread blame on the Cubans and Soviets, and Silvia Duran in particular. Oswald is described in the very first paragraph as 5’ 10”, 165, with blue-grey eyes. The memo then says that Oswald met with Duran at the embassy on September 28, and falsely states that “no details of conversations Oswald had inside the Cuban embassy are available.” We have Scott repeating a flat-out lie to the President of Mexico – as seen in Chapter 5, the wiretaps of September 27 are filled with details of what Oswald told Duran. The typeface in an adjoining document reveals it was written by the same person who ran the soon-to-be-reviewed Alvarado scam to push the story of a known informant on the Communists. Who was that person? The “adjoining document” about Alvarado reveals the author to be A. C. Plambeck with the State Department’s Office of Security. I assume that Plambeck used the same typewriter in writing both the Alvarado memo and the author of the “5 foot ten/165” memo described above. Plambeck was with Eldridge Snight, a security officer for the State Department but identified by Win Scott as an “officer of this Section”. The memo says that Oswald embraced a woman from “Calle Juarez 407”. That is the address for Luisa Calderon, who the station had been surveilling for months. I believe Calderon was being used here as “embroidery” for the story because Cuban intelligence was questioning her loyalty based on an alleged affair with an American named Oscar Cower from Los Angeles. Calderon had also been unwittingly at the center of the impersonation that Phillips and Shaw had engineered to fool Eldon Hensen (see Chapter 3). Calderon was to become the focus of a CIA-driven wild goose chase with a claim that she had foreknowledge of the assassination. A LIENVOY tape revealed that when Calderon was asked if she had heard the news, Calderon had joked, “Yes, of course, I knew almost before Kennedy.” The CIA did not provide documents to the HSCA showing that Calderon’s initial response prior to the alleged “foreknowledge” was her surprise and a statement that the news had to be “a lie”. b. The FBI and CIA admit that there is no proof that Kostikov was ever part of any “assassination bureau” – Angleton’s contribution to the cover-up Statements made by the Soviet consuls many years later (see Oleg Nechiporenko’s Passport to Assassination) indicate that Oswald personally met with Kostikov, Yatskov and Nechiporenko on the morning of the 28th, although we can’t prove that Oswald’s visit was known to the Mexico City station until much later. What we do know is that the Mexico City station claimed on the day after the assassination that it was very concerned about the October 1 phone call from “Oswald” to the Soviet Embassy, asking for Kostikov. If Kostikov was such a dangerous man, why wasn’t the CIA on top of Kostikov on a daily basis after the October 1 phone call was translated? The answer is that no one was worried about Kostikov until after the assassination. Before that, the emphasis was in trying to recruit him to the American side – see, for example, the REDCAP memo for September 27. Right after JFK was killed, Angleton received a call from Anatoliy Golitsyn, a Soviet defector that had become Angleton’s most trusted source. Golitsyn told Angleton that “the modus operandi with any defector from anybody’s army to the Soviet Union required that he go through processing by the 13th Department of the KGB.”[ 64 ] This is why much ado was made on the day after the assassination about a claim made by counterintelligence chief for the Soviet station, Tennent (Pete) Bagley. Bagley insisted there was strong proof that Kostikov was a member of the KGB’s 13th Department in charge of assassinations.[ 65] The CIA’s belief that Kostikov was a member of Dept. 13 was based solely on a “clandestine contact.”[ 66 ] This contact was a double agent known as TUMBLEWEED. Kostikov made it possible for TUMBLEWEED to get together in the US with Oleg Brykin, a KGB member of the 13th Department. Golitsyn was the source of this information, passed on to Jim Angleton and then on to Bagley.[ 67 ] However, as stated in Chapter 3, Angleton had told the FBI as recently as June 1963 that Kostikov had nothing to do with the 13thDepartment. The FBI’s response to Golitsyn’s claim was that neither agency could be certain that Kostikov was part of the 13th Department.[ 68] Bagley’s strong opinion, however, was a force to be reckoned with. Bagley was the chief counterspy for the Soviet Russia division, and had been stationed in Switzerland (eventually to become station chief) during the time that Oswald was due to attend Albert Schweitzer College.[ 69 ] Bagley had been transferred from Berne to Langley where he gained a rapid promotion to become C/SR/CI. Like Angleton, Bagley believed in Golitsyn’s theory of the “Monster Plot” – that the entire Sino-Soviet split was a fake maneuver designed to lull the West into dropping its defenses and making itself vulnerable to the Communist menace. Bagley went so far as to write in his November 23 memo that “one of Harold Wilson’s principal scientific advisors is Captain Ian Maxwell, who has a long Soviet intelligence background. This may shed new light on (Golitsyn’s) report, i.e., that Harold Wilson may be a Soviet agent.” Like Bagley, Mexico City station chief Win Scott was a “Fundamentalist” – one who subscribed to Angleton and Golitsyn’s school of thought about a monolithic Communist threat – and it’s no accident that Scott’s pen name for his Mexico City memoirs was Ian Maxwell. Scott did not want Maxwell to be forgotten. There has been speculation that Bagley may have played a role in suppressing Kostikov’s name from the twin October 10 memos. Kostikov could have been the centerpiece of discussion, since Mexico City’s memo of October 8 said that Oswald was trying to reach Kostikov on October 1. Many people believe that the absence of Kostikov’s name in these memos was very important and helped “dim the lights” on Oswald prior to November 22. That may be true, but I think there’s a more important insight here. My thinking is that the alleged Kostikov-Oswald conversation was no secret. Kostikov’s name was flagged in the aforementioned Mexico City memo to the FBI on October 16, with no expression of concern by either the letter-writer or any of the numerous recipients. The October 16 memo said that “Lee Henry Oswald” had talked with Kostikov on September 28. Written by Barbara Manell from Mexico City’s Soviet desk, she directed a copy of the October 16 memo to the extremely anti-communist Ambassador Thomas Mann. Bert Turner at the FBI and key people at other agencies also received this information. Yet no one lifted a finger of concern.[ 70 ] Manell could have toned it down by mentioning that Oswald and Kostikov were talking about a visa. Instead, she wrote that there was “no clarifying information”, which was not only untrue but added an unnecessary level of intrigue. When challenged on this point, Manell made it clear that “they had no need to know all those other details.” Similarly, Manell claimed that she did not know that the September 28 transcript mentioned the Cuban consulate, or she would have included that information in her memo. But she told the HSCA that she “had rechecked the transcripts by this time, as otherwise she would not have used such certain language.” The memo also indicates that it was Manell herself who figured out that the officer who spoke to Oswald was Kostikov. Nothing in the record explains how she came to that conclusion. When interviewed, she didn’t remember anything except she knew a lot about Kostikov, and “I probably decided that it was Kostikov”. Again, I do not see a hint of concern by anyone about Kostikov, Department 13, or anything else. In regards to all of these items, Manell maintained that “we were told what to send and that is what we sent…I did what headquarters asked me to, to the best of my knowledge.”[ 71 ] Golitsyn played a role in sparking the conversation about Department 13, as he called Angleton on the day of the assassination and told him that “the modus operandi with any defector from anybody’s army to the Soviet Union required that he go through processing by the 13th Department of the KGB…which is called their Affairs for Executive Action. And this was the SOP on the dealing with military defectors.”[ 72 ] The FBI did not want to let Golitsyn see their intelligence, saying that it was against their policy to provide such material to defectors.[ 73 ] By December 20, Win Scott wrote his superior that the CIA wasn’t even sure whether Kostikov was KGB or GRU (Soviet military intelligence), which meant that Scott was uncertain whether Kostikov was part of KGB’s Department 13.[ 74 ] A similar conclusion was drawn by FBI counter-intelligence head Bill Branigan, who told Division 5 chief William Sullivan that there was “no indication that Lee Harvey Oswald was ever recruited or trained by Department 13.”[ 75 ] Nonetheless, Angleton’s assistant Ray Rocca wrote a damning report by the end of January, telling the Warren Commission that Oswald was mixed up with Kostikov, who worked with the Soviet assassination specialists at Department 13. Rocca added that Department 13 analyzed every military defector to the USSR “to determine the possibility of utilizing the defector in his country of origin.” A report on “Soviet assassination and kidnapping” was presented to the Warren Commission on 2/17/64.[ 76 ] It focused on attacks on a White Russian official in 1954, Radio Free Europe in 1959, and what was known as “the Stashinsky murders” of the 1950s. The last case cited in the article is 1961, with the last page of the study concluding that “the assassination of an Allied official would be highly unlikely and probably unprofitable.”[ 77 ] Shortly before the Warren Report went to press, Hoover aide John C. Stokes stated the CIA had “overstated its case” about Kostikov and Department 13. Stokes went to great lengths to point out that the FBI had provided all this information to Angleton before the assassination, and Angleton’s response had been to write a memo on June 25, 1963 saying there was no information in the files to support the claim that Kostikov was part of Department 13.[ 78 ] By 1976, Angleton testified to the Church Committee that there was never any confirmation of the Department 13 story.[ 79 ] CIA counter-intelligence chief David Blee admitted in 1982 that the CIA was never able to prove that Kostikov was part of Department 13, and that the last known assassination attempt conducted by that agency was in 1959.[ 80 ] There was never any good reason to believe that Kostikov was a member of Department 13 or any “assassination bureau”. It was made up from whole cloth after the assassination. It was a provocation, designed to distract the investigators. It’s entirely possible Golitsyn believed it, but Angleton used the Department 13 story to drive the cover-up. The CIA’s psychiatrist Charles Bohrer told the head of the Soviet Russia division that Golitsyn was offering much the same picture as he had when he defected to the USA, “dangling before the Agency very enticing and intriguing statements in exchange for acceptance, entrée, support and control…re Gaitskill, Wilson, Penkovsky, the Communist split, wild, crazy – the product of a sick mind?” Bohrer was stunned by Golitsyn’s contention that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent. Golitsyn had been seen a year earlier by another CIA psychiatrist, Dr. John Gittinger’s, whose 1962 report was much the same as Bohrer’s in 1963. Gittinger said that “our tests showed Golitsyn was clinically paranoid. I know I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could throw a bomber. I find it amazing how much of what he said was accepted. It remains incomprehensible to me…He suffered from a form of megalomania.”[ 81 ] For Jim Angleton to rely on Golitsyn’s speculation - while ignoring his own pre-assassination written statement saying that Kostikov was not a Department 13 official - is strong evidence of cover-up. c. Jack Whitten was appointed as chief of the CIA’s investigation into the JFK assassination On November 23, Helms appointed Jack Whitten as the chief of the CIA’s investigation into the JFK assassination. The period of Whitten’s leadership role has been described as the “GPFLOOR phase” that focused on the cable traffic around the world and the focus on Oswald’s activities in Mexico City.[ 82 ] Rocca describes Whitten and J. C. King (C/WHD) as the two Washingtonians in charge; Win Scott in Mexico was responsible, and Phillips was also “knowledgeable”.[ 83 ] Whitten believed that one of the reasons he was given the case was that Angleton was so close to the FBI. There was “initially the possibility that the FBI was in some way derelict or involved or something like that...Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was not in bed with the FBI, and I was not and Angleton was." Given that Angleton’s source Golitsyn had made such a wild charge that contradicted the FBI’s belief about Kostikov being harmless, that may have been a factor as well. Jack Whitten spoke for much of the Agency when he said that Angleton’s view of the world was bizarre and over-suspicious. Helms may have been decided to keep Angleton under wraps, at least initially. Helms had to have known about the molehunt and how badly Angleton was compromised in that affair. I see no proof that the FBI figured out prior to the assassination that the twin 10/10/63 memos were part of a molehunt. However, the FBI did know that there was a big problem with the Mexico City tapes not containing Oswald’s voice. What was Helms going to do about the FBI? I think his successful game plan was to convince Hoover to hold back on exposing the tapes. Both Hoover and Helms wanted to weather this disaster. When supervisors Sullivan and D.J. Brennan were discussing the CIA’s plans to open new domestic contact offices in the US a couple months later, Hoover reminded them, “OK, but I hope you are not being taken in. I can’t forget CIA withholding the French espionage activities in USA, nor the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico City, only to mention two of their instances of double dealing.”[ 84 ] I believe Hoover’s frustration was about the tapes. Whitten believed that another reason he was chosen as chief investigator in the JFK case was because Mexico was part of his bailiwick as the chief of the Central American desk, and that Helms knew him as a successful investigator of big cases and a polygraph operator. I think the biggest factor was that Bustos had written the 10/10 letters as Whitten’s subordinate, and Whitten had signed off on the letters without realizing that they were part of a molehunt. If Whitten remained in that state of mind throughout the investigation, that secret would be kept safe. d. Instead of being informed about Cubela, Whitten is offered Ramon Cortes as a Castro-did-it suspect On Whitten’s first day as chief of the JFK investigation, Angleton’s people immediately sent him off on a wild goose chase. No one ever stepped forward and told Whitten anything about the Castro assassination plots, or anything about how closely the Cuba division was working with Rolando Cubela in the days before November 22. Instead, the files reveal a very different story, encapsulated in a handwritten note to Whitten from Ray Rocca during the late night hours of November 23. Rocca intoned that “here is the assembled file”, and added that these documents were too sensitive to be shared with the FBI.[ 85 ] The key documents cited by Rocca expound the theme of Oswald’s Soviet connection, and the importance of following Kostikov everywhere. “Priority” was given to the possibility that Duran might have been exchanging information for sexual favors – this lead never went anywhere, but an unfounded rumor that Oswald and Duran had sexual relations has persisted in CIA circles ever since 11/22/63.[ 86 ] The purpose of this rumor has been to make Duran look untrustworthy. The attachments to Rocca’s note point right to links between Castro’s mistress and aide Celia Sanchez with Dallas import-export agent Ramon Cortes discussed in Chapter 3. Both Sanchez and Cortes were close to Maria Witoski, also known as AMKIRK-1. Witoski was the estranged wife of Rene Vallejo, Castro’s closest aide who had been negotiating the possible rapprochement between Castro and JFK for the last several months. Rocca provided a backgrounder of Celia Sanchez, stating she was the head of intelligence in late 1958 before Batista was overthrown, and how she was presently the political officer for the Communist Party as well as Fidel's secretary and mistress. He then turned to three pages on the Saavedra family, and how Cuban interior minister Raul Saavedra was married to Nenita Sanchez, a close relative of Celia Sanchez. The final page recited five of the greatest hits from the file of the double agent Ramon Cortes, much of which was discussed in Chapter 3. All five hits point to Cortes’ close relations with Cuba, while ignoring his covert relations with the American government. The last two hits point to Cortes’ relationship with Witoski/AMKIRK-1; as discussed earlier, she was close friends with Celia Sanchez. During 1962, June Cobb, a major source of information on the FPCC, was accepted by the CIA as a contract agent. Rocca’s last memos focus on how Witoski wrote June Cobb and accepted her invitation to come to Mexico, while saying how much she’d like to see Cortes again.[ 87 ] By early December, CI-SIG chief Birch O’Neal confirmed that a French diplomat outside of the US was saying JFK was killed due to a joint plot by the Chinese government and Castro, with Cortes and Saavedra in the middle of it all. O’Neal also admits that the tips from the French diplomat “have proven to be not too reliable”. It is third-hand information from “a source” to the French diplomat “Unstar”, and then to WAVE staffer Dudley Jentons aka J. Deering Danielson.[ 88 ] On the 10th, Cortes was questioned by the FBI. He admitted that he was friends with Witoski and her boss, Castro’s disloyal secretary Juan Orta. (Orta was the man who received from a courier sent by Sam Giancana and the CIA the poisoned pills to kill Castro shortly before the Bay of Pigs.) Cortes denied ever meeting Castro’s mistress Celia Sanchez, but remembered Witoski telling him about her friendship with her.[ 89 ] Cortes’ story was that he had "beat the Cuban government out of $80,000," and that he was now seeking protection from Dimas Figueredo, his former shoe factory partner and operative in Mexico City’s Gyrose Debriefing Unit. After months of reports on Cortes that wasted precious time, the case simply faded away. Cortes received criminal immunity in return for his continued cooperation about the Cubans.[ 90 ] The CIA agreed not to provide the sources in the Cortes investigation to the FBI.[ 91 ] Besides leading Whitten and the FBI on a wild goose chase, the Cortes story is probably included in the “French espionage activities” that had Hoover so mad at the CIA’s double-dealing.
  3. Robert, I don’t think any of us can seriously evaluate the role of Oswald without evaluating the mole hunts that occurred using his file. In 2012, I spoke to Peter Dale Scott, who wrote The Hunt for Popov’s Mole” in the 1990s, an analysis of the various mole hunts conducted using Oswald’s file. Peter’s article walks through all the inaccurate information carefully inserted into his file by highly intelligent people - “Lee Henry Oswald” “5 foot 10, 165” “Robert Edward Oswald” just three of many - I told him that several of us thought it was the most important article ever written about the assassination. He sighed and said, “yes, and no one has ever reviewed it”. That has finally changed. John Newman’s latest book is “The Hunt for Popov’s Mole”. But you know what? The comments on this forum focus primarily on what happened in Dealey Plaza, which is fine and has its place. However, although Newman and Scott (to name just two) have provided well-documented analyses that mole hunts were conducted with Oswald’s file… …in the JFK critical community it seems like no one cares. No one criticizes Scott or Newman for discussing the mole hunts conducted with Oswald’s file. Instead, they simply shy away from a serious discussion of mole hunts and the Oswald file. Why? In my opinion, because it is not as exciting as trying to figure out who fired the guns in Dealey Plaza. One of my favorite quotes: “They want to have their dessert without eating their vegetables.” So I am pleased that Robert “doubts” my contention that Fain made up a tiny portion of his report. I just wish he had said why he doubts it. Then we could have a real discussion. In that vein, I wish someone had commented on my long analysis of how the 5 foot 10/165 description of the defector Robert Edward Webster entered into the Oswald file. Or how the 5 foot 10/165 pound description of the Dealey Plaza shooter went out over the radio 15 minutes after the assassination. It was called in by detective Herbert Sawyer, who later said he got the description from a witness - he couldn’t remember his name. When asked to describe this key witness? “He wasn’t too young, he wasn’t too old.” What happened to the witness? Sawyer turned him over to a deputy sheriff. Who was he? Sawyer didn’t know. Did any of the investigating agencies ever comment that the shooter description ever matched the intelligence agencies’ faulty description of Oswald? Hell no. Did anyone in the JFK critical community besides Peter Dale Scott and myself ever comment on the importance of this 5 foot 10/165 description? To my knowledge, only Robert Morrow. That’s to his credit. So I will broaden my request - any analysis about the coverup or the molehunts gratefully appreciated. Thanks.
  4. It was great to meet Jim Gochenaur at CAPA in 2018. He made major contributions in moving this case forward and exposing bad apples like Elmer Moore.
  5. Again, thank you very much for the insightful comments. To avoid de-railing this thread, please send any comments or questions not addressing the text to me by private message. This is the third posting of the five sub-chapters promised. This third posting will be the first part of a three-part chronology of the cover-up - starting with November 22. The other two parts will address November 23, and November 24 and the aftermath. This early draft focuses mostly on the national security cover-up, but offers the outlines of the planners' cover-up. After your feedback, I will add more details on the planners' cover-up. With appreciation, Bill Simpich A Chronology of the Cover-Up November 22: The planners' cover-up and the national security cover-up The planners' cover-up began when Jerry Hill "found" three spent shells on the sixth floor at 12:55 and immediately ran off towards Oak Cliff. Tippit died about 1:07 in Oak Cliff, with the final shot to the head as a coup de grace. Jerry Hill did his best to take control of the Tippit crime scene. Tippit was in the middle of a hunt in Oak Cliff - after monitoring the Trinity River viaduct and failing to find his quarry, he ran inside the Top Ten and tried to place a phone call, finally resorting to stopping and searching a car in the middle of the street moments before his interaction with his killer. The Tippit killing was done to enflame the Dallas police and the populace. In the moments after Tippit's death, TSBD manager Roy Truly and deputy chief George Lumpkin put their heads together and identified Oswald as the key person "missing" from the book depository. (ALL OF THIS WILL BE GREATLY EXPANDED) By 1:30 pm, the national security cover-up began when Secret Service had wrestled JFK's body away from the custody of Dallas medical examiner Earl Rose. Whether or not LBJ gave the Secret Service orders to take such action, the result was pre-ordained. No forces in the executive branch were willing to entrust the autopsy in the hands of the Dallas authorities in the middle of a national crisis. JFK's body was going to immediately return to Washington - period. What went wrong was when Oswald wasn't killed in the theatre 45 minutes after Tippit. Oswald played it smart, waiting till the very minute to punch the cop and got into a clinch where it was impossible to shoot him, shouting "I protest this police brutality". Oswald wasn't supposed to live. Now what? Two different sets of decisions were going on - the national security cover-up and the planners' cover-up. To me, the interesting thing is simply that the federal government controlled the autopsy and determined that evening that one man killed JFK. Why? Because Hoover and Bundy had both already decided by 4 pm that Oswald acted alone. Why? For the same reasons above - the executive branch did not want a destabilizing situation to develop. Between 2 pm-4 pm, that decision was made by those two government actors in coordination with LBJ's people and immediately became the government's party line. I love Vince Salandria. I just don't agree with him - as much as I would like to - that McGeorge Bundy was the Great Satan in this affair. He was an apparatchik. When Bill Alexander tried to introduce "the Communist conspiracy" the night of Nov. 22, LBJ's aide Cliff Carter got on the line with Henry Wade and immediately slapped that down. The role of the Planners in the cover-up will be greatly expanded - the remainder of this sub-chapter will focus on the National Security cover-up. a. At Parkland Hospital, the Secret Service’s first response was to wash blood and brain debris off the presidential limousine I would say that the most important items of evidence are the President's body, the autopsy of the President's body, and the fate of the crime scene within the President's limousine. (In that context, Connally's wounds are also critical, and will be addressed at a later date). Shortly after the presidential limousine pulled into Parkland Hospital, a bucket of water was used by a Secret Service man to wash blood and brain debris from the vehicle. Before the convertible top was put back up and the limousine was driven away, people reported seeing holes emanating right through the front of the windshield and elsewhere that did not match up with the holes that were documented on the following day. The controversy over the fate of the windshield is contested and continues to this day. The limousine was then loaded on a cargo plane and taken to Washington before the Dallas police evidence unit was able to conduct an inspection. The limousine was then driven from Andrews AFB to the White House Garage, causing its contents to shift and thus causing further damage to the integrity of the crime scene. Only by 1 am on November 23 did an FBI evidence team arrive, nor was any diagramming of the evidentiary items begin prior to this time. We will never know the true status of the evidence offered by the limousine.[ 20 ] b. In Langley, CI/SIG chief O’Neal’s immediate response was to hedge During the afternoon of the assassination, the first thing that CI-SIG chief Birch O’Neal did was to lie to the FBI’s counterintelligence man in Washington, Courtland Jones. O’Neal was Ann Egerter’s boss. O’Neal had to know about the lead role Egerter played in preparing the twin 10/10/63 memos. When Jones asked O’Neal what was in the file, O’Neal responded that “there is nothing in CIA file regarding Oswald other than material furnished to CIA by the FBI and the Department of State.”[ 21 ] As discussed in Chapter 5, Oswald’s biographical 201 file had been stripped of all references to the pro-Cuban Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), as well as other FBI memos that were dated after May 1962. Those memos were tucked away inside the FPCC file – what John Newman calls “the smoking file” – the file that had the good stuff about Oswald and Cuba. Anyone who read Oswald’s stripped 201 file would not know about Oswald’s pro-Castro background, or that he had even returned to the United States. Once Oswald was captured, Whitten said that the “effect was electric” on the top CIA officials in Langley – many of them knew who Oswald was. O’Neal’s immediate instinct was to hide from the FBI any personal knowledge of the CIA’s memos about Mexico City and the transcripts and tapes of Oswald’s adventures during that time. O’Neal also had to be thinking about the routing sheets for documents that showed how the CIA had monitored Oswald throughout his time with the Soviets, during his time with the right-wing White Russians and the left-wing Paines in Texas, as well as the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the Cuban exiles in New Orleans. ...Once he learned about the shooting, O’Neal knew that a plan had to be made about how to deal with the Mexico City evidence. As the head of CI/SIG and Egerter’s immediate superior, O’Neal should have known about the molehunt. c. Hoover immediately wanted to declare Oswald as the lone assassin At 6 pm on 11/22/63, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade was telling the world: "Preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting. The electric chair is too good for the killers." Hoover made it clear to Bobby Kennedy by 3 pm CST that he believed the Dallas police had captured “the man who had killed the President”. This was in stark variance to what Dallas, District Attorney Henry Wade was telling the world at 6 pm: "Preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting. The electric chair is too good for the killers.” LBJ’s aide Cliff Carter got on the horn and made sure that the D.A. did not charge Oswald with conspiracy.The Johnson team had been nervous about a military attack all day, and did not want to give any signals that could lead towards a conflict with the Soviet Union. Hoover knew that the Bureau was compromised dealing with Oswald as the assassin, and that the enormous blowback might spell the end to the FBI’s future. We have seen the record that revealed show Hoover’s fears that Oswald might have been impersonated while he was a Soviet defector back in 1960. Hoover probably knew that the Mexico City wiretaps had picked up Oswald, and he certainly knew the national security implications of having to reveal the existence of the wiretaps. Hoover’s response was to demand that the Dallas police turn over their evidence to him. Dallas officer J. C. Day delivered two of the three alleged hulls to the FBI by 2:15 pm CST on November 22, even though Hoover admitted that he had no jurisdiction over the case until after Johnson landed in Washington about 5:00 pm CST. (Fritz held on to the third hull for several days.) Dallas police chief Jesse Curry told the Warren Commission that due to FBI insistence, on “Friday night we agreed to let the FBI have all the evidence and they said they would bring it to their laboratory and they would have an agent stand by and when they were finished with it to return it to us.” Curry was upset about the chain of custody problems.[ 23 ] Dallas FBI chief remembered the intensity of the effort to get the evidence to Washington DC by Saturday morning. The only inventory for 11/22/63 that I can find contains the rifle, the pistol, bullet fragment, shell casings, a blanket, Oswald’s shirt, prints, and paper and tape samples. An evaluation of the above evidence was sent from the FBI Laboratory to the Dallas police chief the next day. A few other items came in separately during the first 24 hours, but not many. I can’t find an inventory for the “four or five hundred” other evidence items that the FBI evidence technicians received during the initial twenty-four hours – the lack of an inventory would break the legal chain of custody for all of these items.[ 24 ] How was the Dallas district attorney going to get a conviction against Oswald, who was still alive at this point? The evidence technician James Cadigan affirmed that it was “many, many items…a very large quantity of evidence that was brought in.” Cadigan also testified that “time was of the essence and this material, I believe, was returned to the Dallas police within two or three days.” Someone drew lines through the original transcript of Cadigan’s deposition and wrote “delete”.[ 25 ] This portion was excised from the official transcript, in an ultimately-futile effort to hide this original transport of evidence during the evening of November 22. The public was informed by the media that Tuesday the 26th marked the beginning of the transfer of evidence to Washington.[ 26 ] As journalist Jim Marrs put it, rather indelicately, “Wouldn’t any criminal be delighted if he could have complete, secret, and unsupervised control over all the evidence in his case for two full days?” d. In Mexico City, Win Scott’s immediate response was to hedge During that fateful afternoon, Mexico City chief Win Scott wrote a memo saying that he would “forward soonest copies of only visitor to Soviet Embassy 28 Oct who could be identical with Oswald.”[ 27 ] Trained as a mathematician, Scott prided himself on being exact in all matters of substance. Why did Scott blend the two dates of the Oswald calls of September 28 and October 1 into “October 28” at a critical moment like this? Like O’Neal and Dallas homicide chief Will Fritz, Scott was hedging his bets while feigning ignorance about Oswald. Like O’Neal and Fritz, Scott was buying time to figure out what his story about Oswald was going to be. A CIA analysis states that “the Agency and its field stations, particularly Mexico City and Miami, were not unmindful of the possibility that Oswald did not act alone.”[ 28 ] While Mexico City was on the move, there were no sudden moves in Miami. e. During the evening of November 22, the Mexico City station sent the Mystery Man photos and a wiretap transcript to the Dallas FBI and to CIA HQ In the moments after the assassination, Mexico City chief of station Win Scott asked Ann Goodpasture for the station’s information on Oswald, as she understood the tape and phone set-up better than anyone.[ 29 ] For many years, Goodpasture went to great lengths to deny that she gave a tape of the man who called himself Oswald to Scott, even at deposition. Goodpasture finally admitted in 1995 that she gave Scott a duplicate tape of the Oct 1 conversation, the last of the Oswald phone calls.[ 30 ] She claimed that the master tapes were erased. "I don't know what happened to the tape after I brought it in. I think I...gave it to the (deleted)". I surmise that the nine-letter deletion says “FBI legat”, which would mean that she gave the tape to the FBI legal attaché Clark Anderson. What we don’t know is when she gave it to him. We also don’t know if the tape made it onto the airplane to Dallas. We know the Mystery Man photos and a wiretap transcript made it on the plane. Before any discussion about the transcript, take a look at how the photos were handled. We know Goodpasture provided Scott with photos of the Mystery Man, who gave them to the legat Clark Anderson. CIA HQ sent a message at 7:36 pm CDT and asked for the photos to be sent on the next available flight. Anderson called Alan Belmont and told him that the photos were coming by airplane to Dallas with his aide Eldon Rudd. This raised two problems for Goodpasture. The first problem was that Goodpasture had led everyone to believe that the Mystery Man was Oswald, as seen in the October 8 memo to CIA HQ. I am convinced that Goodpasture originally chose the Mystery Man as fodder for the October molehunt, not to convince anyone that the Mystery Man was Oswald. The Mystery Man’s description was useful for the molehunt. Like Oswald, the Mystery Man looked like an American. The Mystery Man was also similar to the “5 foot 10, 165, 35 years old” Webster-like description that the CIA had been using for Oswald since 1960. Now she was stuck with this story. The second problem was that Goodpasture had also led everyone to believe that the Mystery Man photos were taken on October 1 at the Soviet embassy, when they were actually taken on October 2.[ 31 ] Since she also had available photos of the man taken on the 4th at the Soviet embassy and the 15th at the Cuban embassy, Goodpasture tried to obscure this second problem by giving Scott photos of the Mystery Man on all of these dates. The evidence indicates that at the request of Ambassador Thomas Mann, Win Scott sent the Mystery Man photos of “October 1” and October 4 during the evening of November 22 with the naval attache and the FBI legat’s aide Eldon Rudd for the FBI to review. Did either Rudd or the naval attache carry the tape? Rudd denies it, but I see no record about whether the naval attache who was flying the plane might have had it. That would have been good compartmentalization. Rudd had no need to know. f. Scott needed to get the bad news about the Mystery Man out of the way Scott needed to send the Mystery Man photos to Washington, DC and get them out of the way. Given the Mystery Man description of Oswald that Goodpasture provided to Whitten’s office back in October, it was time to get the bad news out there.[ 32 ] I do not think that Whitten knew about the molehunt, even if his subordinate Bustos did. By the time the plane left off Mexico City, photos and TV footage of Oswald had been disseminated throughout the world. Any reasonable station officer would have realized that the Mystery Man was not Oswald. Like Goodpasture, I believe that Scott knew that the Mystery Man was not Oswald back in October. Oswald was arrested shortly before 2 pm CST, and his picture was all over the television in the USA by 4 pm CST. Mexico City and Dallas were in the same time zone. Before Scott sent the Mystery Man photos to the USA, all he had to do was pick up a telephone and ask someone to describe what Oswald looked like. Mexico City admitted seeing Oswald on TV the night of 11/22 and “obvious photos sent to Dallas were not iden with Lee Oswald held Dallas”.[ 33 ] Eldon Rudd left with Scott’s package at 10:00 pm CST, with the naval attache flying the plane.[ 34 ] Probably for reasons of security, the photos were mailed to WH chief J. C. King from Dallas – there was no hurry, an accompanying memo showed Scott telling King the photos were of “a certain person who is known to you”. Whitten sent a post at midnight CST saying to send a staffer with all photos Oswald to HQ on next available flight and to call him upon arrival.[ 35 ] This was immediately countermanded in the next post sent moments later by “PWO”, saying “No need send staffer with photos. We have asked Navy for photos again, but Mexi can see Oswald’s picture sooner on the press wire.”[ 36 ] But it was too late to stop the delivery of the Mystery Man photos to the USA. The photos were already enroute. Dallas FBI chief Shanklin’s colleague Kyle Clark then sent on the photos to Hoover’s office during the early hours of the 23rd, saying the photos were of the individual “known as Lee Oswald as obtained from confidential source” In any case, the best thing for Scott was to get the Mystery Man photos that he had supposedly relied on in October to all of his bosses at CIA HQ right away. The pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald were all over the world by 4 pm Central Standard Time. g. Was the tape flown to Dallas, or did someone phone it in? FBI agent Wallace Heitman was the Spanish-speaking agent in Dallas and was close with counterintelligence chief Bill Branigan. Heitman wrote a report about how Eldon Rudd picked up the package and proceeded to Dallas in the naval attache’s plane. Look how everyone mentions the transcript but Heitman: Heitman’s memo mentions the photos, but no transcript. Rudd’s memo mentions photos and a transcript.[ 37 ] Heitman’s partner Bob Odum reported that Heitman handed Rudd a transcript as well as photographic material.[ 38 ] The legat Clark Anderson wrote that Rudd delivered transcripts as well as photos.[ 39 ] Dallas FBI chief Gordon Shanklin said that Mexico City legal attaché Clark Anderson gave Rudd a transcript to bring. People have wondered if Anderson also gave Rudd or the naval attache a tape, or if a tape was played for the FBI agents in Dallas.[ 40 ] Another indication that the tapes may have been on the plane to Dallas can be found in a memo written by Bureau supervisor Burt Turner to the legal attaché Clark Anderson in Mexico: “If tapes covering any contact subject [Oswald] with Soviet or Cuban embassies available forward to Bureau for laboratory examination. Include tapes previous reviewed Dallas if they were returned to you.”[ 41 ] Burt Turner was considered one of the very best FBI agents of that time. When Hoover tried to demote Turner, Turner successfully faced Hoover down. How often did that happen? Turner’s memo indicates that Heitman sent “tapes” as well as photos with Rudd to Dallas. In any swearing contest between Turner and Heitman, Turner would win. No contest.
  6. Michael, I have problems with Jack Tatum too. My focus is simply the head shot. My understanding is that the head shot came last, and separate from the first three shots to the body. Alaric Rossman offers a good analysis that the head shot split Tippit's brain stem, and would have rendered the other three shots superfluous, among other points.
  7. Yes, Sandy, I do believe that LHO was lured to work at the TSBD before 11/22 in order for him to become the designated patsy. Your question is an important one, and I don't have a full answer, but this is what I think. My conclusion is that there are three balls in the air - Buell Frazier's sister Linnie Mae Randle passed on a tip in to Ruth Paine that there was a job opening at the TSBD which Ruth passed on to Lee; Robert Adams' subsequent tip to Ruth Paine about a more-profitable job at another location which it appears Ruth may or may not have passed on to Lee (we see Adams' phone number in Lee's phone book); and indications that Lee may have been spying on Joe Molina at the TSBD. (I mentioned more about this in my previous post, which I edited for clarity.) I think, but can't prove, that Roy Truly was one of the planners of the 11/22 operation and enticed Linnie to pass the tip on to Ruth. Similarly, I think Lee was enticed to take the TSBD job because he could gain some extra cred by spying on Molina. I do renew my request for questions about the cover-up text that is the basis of this thread to be asked here, and for other questions about the case to be directed to my email or as a message here. Thanks.
  8. Thank you, Paul. I appreciate the communications and the questions. To keep the thread coherent, I ask that questions focus on this "feedback on the cover-up" text that is where I am seeking scrutiny. Any other off-thread questions? Please feel free to send me a private post.
  9. A couple more quick responses: Steve, your question about the Oswald letter is a good one because after many years I came around to the view that he did write it. He may have had help of course. You mention (regarding the security index issue) that he wrote that "he was not of interest to the FBI" - but he was telling a whopper there, Hosty had just come to the Paine home a few days earlier, talking with Ruth at length, trying to communicate with Marina, and getting LHO so concerned that he wrote a note to Hosty saying that he would take "appropriate action" after sending the letter to the Soviets. Why he told that whopper? I'll go out on a limb and say that I think he knew the letter might wind up in the FBI's hands, and he wanted the FBI to know that he was a cagy operator and could be trusted. My overarching theory is that LHO really wanted his discharge upgraded and would do pretty much what it took to make it happen, including ingratiating himself with other federal authorities like John Quigley in New Orleans, who he sought out and spoke to for hours while in jail in August. He wasn't pleased with Hosty and gave him some "guff", as Hosty put it. On "why didn't Fain say something" when Marguerite allegedly told Fain that Oswald was 5 foot 10? Agents are allowed to put false information in a report as part of a molehunt - Oswald's file was used as part of a molehunt more than once throughout his short lifetime by both the CIA and FBI. Peter Dale Scott nailed this down in his article "The Hunt for Popov's Mole", one of my favorite articles on this case. I am convinced that Fain made up this false description as part of that effort. On Sandy's question - I think Greg Parker got it right - Oswald was keeping an eye on Joe Molina, who worked at the TSBD. William Lowery of the local Communist Party - and an FBI informant - had kept an eye on Molina for years as a possible recruit because of his long advocacy within the local Latino community. Thanks to Lowery, Jim Hosty also kept an eye on Molina. Molina was actually on the conservative side, but he had a long history of activism. I think Oswald was watching Molina even during lunch on 11/22, and may have followed him right out to the steps during the motorcade. Molina was the only other person who was detained by the Dallas police, and he got a midnight visit from DPD intelligence chief Pat Gannaway and his boys the night of 11/22 where they tossed his home and interrogated him throughout the day of 11/23. Molina lost his job and filed a suit against various entities who publicized his detention. There is some connection that I am still trying to understand between this Molina story and the coffeecake conversation with Buell Frazier's sister Linnie Mae Randle and Ruth Paine where Ruth got wind from Linnie that there was a job available at the TSBD and Ruth told Lee about it. The story goes - recounted by Jim Douglass and others - that a better paying job was called in to Ruth by Robert Adams at the Texas Employment Commission, and Ruth didn't pass that information on to Lee before he took that job. Robert Adams is also believed to have had some connection was "Bob" Odum better known as Bard Odum of the FBI who was Ruth's handler. The Texas Employment Commission is one of the least-studied and most-important aspects of the Lee Oswald story. It may have been that the Robert Adams-story was designed to put LHO closer to the motorcade route then the TSBD job. After LHO wound up at the TSBD, greater effort was needed in order to move the motorcade towards the TSBD.
  10. Some quick responses... David, the second edition of State Secret will have the new documents and my updated analysis all the way through it. Paul, Win Scott (chief, Mexico City office) and Jack Whitten (chief, Central American desk in DC) were in close communication before and after 11/22. Jim, there does seem to be a plan by either Gheesling or Anderson, or both of them, to make sure that the flash was removed before the twin 10/10 letters went out. I was surprised that you didn't point out that the letter to the intel higher-ups falsely described Oswald as 5 foot 10 inches, 165 pounds (the actual description of defector Robert Webster) while the letter to the ground troops falsely described Oswald as 6 feet tall with an athletic build (the actual description of the "Mystery Man" in Mexico City). Both letters were sent out by Charlotte Bustos and her colleagues, with these starkly different descriptions and stories. Why? I say these letters were designed to look for a mole inside the government ranks, with the phony Oswald stories being used as the bait to see if these phony stories were spread to unauthorized parties. The Oswald buried in Fort Worth was 5 foot 9 and 140 pounds.
  11. Roger, totally agree that the planners had to have a plan, a few thoughts: You refer to the quick arrest of Oswald - yes, he had to be taken off the street immediately, but I think he and Tippit were both supposed to die immediately as part of the planners' cover-up. The government had its own separate national security cover-up - a visceral response to an attack on the center of American power that had to be stabilized as soon as possible. I'm glad to tell you what I think. The planners' cover-up began when Jerry Hill "found" three spent shells on the sixth floor at 12:55 and immediately ran off towards Oak Cliff. Tippit died about 1:07 in Oak Cliff, with the final shot to the head as a coup de grace. Jerry Hill did his best to take control of the Tippit crime scene. Tippit was in the middle of a hunt in Oak Cliff - after monitoring the Trinity River viaduct and failing to find his quarry, he ran inside the Top Ten and tried to place a phone call, finally resorting to stopping and searching a car in the middle of the street moments before his interaction with his killer. The Tippit killing was done to enflame the Dallas police and the populace. What went wrong was when Oswald wasn't killed in the theatre 45 minutes after Tippit. Oswald played it smart, waiting till the very minute to punch the cop and got into a clinch where it was impossible to shoot him, shouting "I protest this police brutality". Oswald wasn't supposed to live. Now what? Two different sets of decisions were going on - the national security cover-up and the planners' cover-up. In terms of the national security cover-up, it was decided by 1:30 pm - before Oswald was in custody at 1:50 - there was absolutely no way JFK's body was going to remain in the possession of the local medical examiner. The country was in the middle of a national crisis, and LBJ and his advisers were not going to allow a destabilizing situation to develop. JFK's body was going back to Washington - period. To me, the interesting thing is simply that the federal government controlled the autopsy and determined that evening that one man killed JFK. Why? Because Hoover and Bundy had both already decided by 4 pm that Oswald acted alone. Why? For the same reasons above - the executive branch did not want a destabilizing situation to develop. Between 2 pm-4 pm, that decision was made by those two government actors in coordination with LBJ's people and immediately became the government's party line. I love Vince Salandria. I just don't agree with him - as much as I would like to - that McGeorge Bundy was the Great Satan in this affair. He was an apparatchik. When Bill Alexander tried to introduce "the Communist conspiracy" the night of Nov. 22, LBJ's aide Cliff Carter got on the line with Henry Wade and immediately slapped that down. That was the problem for LBJ that came up repeatedly over the next few days - that people like Bill Alexander, Win Scott (who espoused the Alvarado story), the DRE, and many other provocateurs kept cooking up stories designed to beat the drums of war with the Cubans or even the Soviets. The World War III blackmail card was used by LBJ to get Earl Warren to sign on to the national security cover-up that culminated with the Warren Commission. Here's the big problem that the planners' cover-up people had to deal with: As you say, the Dallas Bar representative got all the way into Oswald's cell by Saturday night. If Oswald had decided to talk with him, the story would have broken wide open. (I have often wondered if the Dallas Bar attorney was part of the plot to make sure Oswald didn't talk to a lawyer!) For whatever reason, Oswald didn't trust the Dallas Bar attorney enough to talk with him. To me, that indicates that Oswald was given strong directions not to deviate from his provocative demand for the Communist Party's trusted counsel, John Abt - with the troublesome American Civll Liberties Union as a backup. Using Jack Ruby Sunday morning was extremely risky. He had ties to the mob and wasn't a proven assassin. But he had successfully worked inside the media and police crowd all weekend. He was the best one likely to get a clear shot at Oswald from up close. It worked. Now the plotters had to make sure that Jack shut up. He was not the right man for the job. But getting Belli on the case was the best way to ensure that Ruby's motives were no longer at issue, and the case devolved into whether Ruby was crazy or not. One of the reasons people thought that Ruby was crazy was because he repeatedly said that he trusted Bill Alexander - the district attorney who was seeking the death penalty - more than he trusted his own lawyers! When you think about it, it makes sense - Ruby, Alexander, Hill and others were part of what I consider a small team of locals entrusted in the plan to kill the President. The planners at the top? I assume - like many of us - a tight network of military, intelligence, anti-Castro, and fascist elements that wanted to keep American policy focused on building the national security state and away from international cooperation.
  12. Yes, I think it’s possible. I think that Oswald was trying to get his discharge upgraded and was going through a lot trying to be treated with respect in that effort. Hosty says he went to the FBI office warning that if they didn’t leave his wife alone he would take “appropriate action”. Those are the same words that Connally used on the form that denied Oswald’s request to upgrade his discharge as he was leaving his post as Secretary of the Navy. I don’t think it’s coincidence.
  13. Thanks to everyone for their positive feedback! Could I ask for the same in the second of the five sub-chapters below? This small portion focuses on the most visible aspects of what has been called "the national security cover-up", which I don't think has much to do with the cover-up done by the people who did the deed. The other three sub-chapters will get much deeper into other aspects of the cover-up. II. The National Security Cover-Up 1. Angleton and Hosty said the cover-up was designed to protect the Soviets My original goal in writing this book was to write about the cover-up, and to see if I could resolve the issue of the Mexico City tapes that survived after the assassination. The tale of the tapes took over my approach to this book. The result was a different book than I anticipated. The cover-up is a longer story that I can only sketch here. I will confine myself mostly to the first days after the assassination which shaped the investigations that followed. I will then to turn to a few of the high points. Dallas FBI agent Jim Hosty even revealed the cover-up in his book – however, his contention was that it was a benign cover-up by “President Johnson, the Warren Commission, the FBI, the CIA” that was conducted to avoid international tensions with the Soviet Union and Cuba, who he viewed as possible assassination co-perpetrators with Oswald.[ 18 ] Cover-up architect Jim Angleton was motivated by the Mexico City situation, but would have little reason to quibble with Hosty's sentiments until 1967. That was the year that Angleton learned some information from a double agent that “tended to absolve the Soviets”. That was the same year that the KGB conducted a big study into the JFK assassination and concluded that it was a domestic operation. Angleton was shaken by this revelation, obtained from a double agent known only as “Byetkov”. (New note: Thomas Graves points out that "Byetkov" appears to be Obyetkov - who was the guard that LHO allegedly spoke to on Sept 28 and Oct 1. At least one of these phone calls was memorialized on audiotape - and has now disappeared.) Gallup poll taken within days of the assassination (click to see entire article) CIA chief John McCone believed there were two shooters in Dealey Plaza. Although Hoover publicly adopted the view that Oswald acted alone, he told his colleagues that he couldn’t forget the CIA’s “false story re Oswald’s trip in Mexico City”. My reading of the evidence indicates that there was a rough consensus among CIA and FBI higher-ups such as Helms and Hoover within hours of the Kennedy assassination to push for a lone gunman theory based on Oswald as the perpetrator. During the afternoon of the 22nd, we’ll review statements made by Hoover and the White House indicating that Oswald was the lone assassin, while the Dallas DA was convinced there was more than one shooter. The national security cover-up began within hours after the assassination, due to two major factors. One was that the Mexico City-driven blackmail of the CIA and the FBI caused the compromised officials within these agencies to move towards a solution that would limit any serious analysis of who killed Kennedy and why. The other was to avoid any public debate that would point towards Cuba as a sponsor of the assassination. Such turmoil could lead to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, which was greatly feared by Lyndon Johnson, Earl Warren and other American leaders. As described in Chapter 5, the Mexico City-driven "poison pill" specifically included the agencies’ fear of public exposure of the paper trail showing not only how intimately CIA and FBI had monitored Oswald in the last weeks of his life, but that that enemy agents had penetrated the FBI’s field office and even CIA's assets. Such exposure could lift the curtain on the impersonation of Oswald in Mexico City - at least on the telephone on 9/28/63 and 10/1/63. It could reveal how the CIA responded by stripping Oswald's 201 file and hiding the key documents in the FPCC 100-300-011 file - what John Newman calls "smoking file". It's not impossible that the world could have learned that the CIA initiated a molehunt in late September 1963 in an effort to smoke out who impersonated Oswald on the telephone and why. There is also no question that it was imperative for intelligence chiefs to prevent any public exposure of the Mexico City wiretap operations and the supporting roles of Staff D and the NSA. Lee Oswald was well-known to most of the major agencies investigating the assassination – CIA, FBI, Navy, State and INS – and every one of them needed protective cover regarding their role in monitoring Oswald, quite apart from whether they were using the Oswald file for their own devices. The national security cover-up was driven by Helms and Hoover, determined to protect not only their individual agencies but their personal careers from oblivion. Helms chose WH/3 chief Jack Whitten as the trailblazer through the worst of the dangers posed by the Mexico City blackmail. As we will see, after a month of letting Whitten take the heat, Helms was convinced it was necessary to pass the baton to Angleton. Hoover disciplined Supervisor Marvin Gheesling, Lambert Anderson at the Nationalities desk, and sixteen other agents. Hoover's main frustration was that right before the twin 10/10/63 memos were sent by the CIA to the upper-echelon and lower-echelon monitors of Oswald at FBI, ONI and State, Anderson and Gheesling had removed the security flash on Oswald that Anderson had placed on LHO when he arrived in Moscow in October 1959 -- and that the other agents who had handled the Oswald file should have put the man on the security index. This sequence of events resulted in Oswald being “out of the spotlight” of the intelligence agencies, and particularly the Secret Service. If these FBI agents had not been playing fast and loose with the Oswald file, Hoover would not have been in such a tight spot. 2. How do you harmonize the shots, wounds, autopsy findings, and photos? The JFK case has been marked by an inability to harmonize the descriptions of the shots, the wounds, the findings at the autopsy, and the photographic evidence. This has been because of a political need to control the autopsy and to ensure that the Zapruder film and other photographs were analyzed in a way that only reflected one gunman. The government’s version of the story could not include more than three shots, in order to avoid providing proof of a second gunman. But it had to include three shots, once it was evident that one of the bullets was a complete miss. That left two bullets to do all that damage to the President. It was apparent that the President’s nonfatal wounds were one in the upper back and a frontal wound to the throat, indicating two separate shots from the front and the back. FBI officers at the autopsy reported that the doctors found a back wound below the shoulders and on a 45-degree downward track from the inshoot at the back. That evidence was massaged by arguing that the President’s body was tilted, causing a shot from the rear to go into his back and then out his throat. The President’s fatal wounds were caused by at least two bullets to the head. The doctors who examined the President saw not only the large gaping exit wound to the back of the skull, but also a "small occipital wound" at the back of the skull, indicating a double hit from the front and the back. After many years of study, veteran investigator Josiah Thompson has concluded that the President suffered a glancing headshot to the right temple at frame 313, resulting in much of the front of his skull flying off. The President’s brain matter was blasted out as he was thrown back and to the left, covering the motorcycle officers and Secret Service officer Clint Hill with gory debris. Thompson then finds a headshot to the base of his skull at Zapruder frame 328, causing the President’s head to go forward at that point. This sequence of events would explain what looks like a big exit wound to what most doctors state was the right rear of his skull. Autopsy photographer James Stringer was shown the National Archives photograph showing the President’s largely intact brain after the shooting, and concluded that this is not the photo that he had originally taken. The FBI agent at the scene affirmed that more than half of the brain was missing. These gruesome facts set forth some of the strongest evidence that there were at least two bullets fired towards the front of the motorcade. Extra bullets are hidden in the record and must be teased out, mainly because inexperienced and easily intimidated doctors – Dr. James Humes and Dr. Thornton Boswell - were forced to conduct a controlled autopsy. Their colleague, Pierre Finck, reported that an Army general ordered them not to dissect the back wound. Autopsy witness Richard Lipsey said that the doctors told him that this bullet was a shallow wound, lodged in his back. Alan Belmont told Dallas FBI chief Gordon Shanklin on November 22 that a bullet was “lodged behind the President’s ear”. Chief of Surgery David Osborne said that when he removed the President’s coat an intact bullet rolled out from his clothing – but that intact bullet has now disappeared from the autopsy record. The only intact bullet in the record is the infamous “magic bullet” was supposed to have passed through both President Kennedy and Governor Connally, causing several wounds while remaining as good as new. Autopsy doctor Pierre Finck rejected the magic bullet theory because there were “too many fragments” remaining in Connally’s wrist. Autopsy doctor Humes also disagreedwith the single bullet theory. Two good-sized bullet fragments were found in the limousine. At least one bullet was found in Dealey Plaza and was recorded by the FBI, but never placed in the record. The analysis of the Zapruder film was guided by the creation of two sets of briefing boards - one set was created on Saturday night the 23rd, and a second set was created on Sunday the 24th. The first set of briefing boards has never been seen in public, but the reports of those involved are that they revealed more than one shooter. It looks like Director McCone may have come to the two-shooter conclusion as early as that Sunday morning.[ 19 ] The second set of briefing boards - consisting of four panels that offer a theory that depicts three shots - provided the assurance of only one shooter, but I don’t think McCone was ever convinced. 3. Why did Helms decide to have Jack Whitten conduct the investigation? Even though CIA director John McCone believed there were two gunmen, the man who was making the decisions about how the assassination would be investigated was his subordinate in charge of covert actions, deputy director Richard Helms. I believe that Helms knew about the problems in Mexico City and with the story of Lee Oswald. Helms decided to put Jack Whitten in charge of the investigation. As Whitten was the chief of WH/3 - the Western Hemisphere division covering Mexico and neighboring countries – he was a logical choice. Helms asked Whitten to focus on the events in Mexico City, believing that he could manipulate him to stay out of the troublesome areas of that story. Whitten knew the backstory about the probe of Azcue and Kostikov in the fall of 1963, and would be motivated to keep the wiretap operations secret and free of investigation. Whitten had personally signed off on the twin 10/10 memos without realizing their underlying significance, which was a very important plus. The goal was to avoid investigation of the other three circles of intrigue in Mexico City that Whitten knew nothing about: the Tilton-Anderson anti-FPCC operation described in Chapter 5, the impersonation of Oswald by parties unknown, and the molehunt that is revealed by comparing the wildly differing descriptions of Oswald in the twin 10/10 memos. I think that Helms believed that if Whitten remained ignorant of those three events, he would be an effective advocate of the official story.
  14. Education Forum colleagues: Ten years after I wrote State Secret, I have received much valuable feedback on the book (which can be found on the Mary Ferrell website) With the new releases and some new discoveries, I am warming up to write a second edition. It may take a little while, because the JFK lawsuit I am working on remains my first priority. Among other reasons, I have discovered that AMKNOB-1 was not the double agent Santiago Garriga of the would-be Fair Play for Cuba Committee in Miami (also known as Juan Cruz, a fascinating figure in his own right) - no, AMKNOB-1 was a double agent known as "the Swiss" - Piero Fedeli Medici, who had a fascinating inter-relationship in 1963 with the cousin-in-law of Antonio Veciana, Cuban agent Guillermo Ruiz/AMAUTO-1 that I am studying as of this day. My mistaken identification was a fortuitous mistake that led to more discoveries. I may even do two versions - a super-short version for the general public and a tightened version for the research community. Up to this time, the research community has always been my intended audience. I noticed that I never received any feedback on my "cover-up chapter" - which was my original intent for the book until the Mystery of Mexico City became foremost in my mind. I think the best way to get this feedback is to serialize the cover-up chapter. The first few chapters are pretty short. As the book reaches its conclusion, the final two chapters became much longer than I intended. "The Set-Up and the Cover-Up" - Chapter 6 - is the longest of all. So I will break the cover-up chapter into five or more sub-chapters. I will begin with the "set-up" - you have to have a set-up before any cover-up. I have shortened the chapter to some degree already. Let me know if it is clear enough. All thoughtful comments appreciated! I. The set-up 1. The sixth floor was insecure It’s hard to think of a less secure sniper’s nest than the sixth floor. Six men had been up there all morning on November 22 laying a wood floor, and they were nowhere near done. It was an optional sniper post at best. The entire sixth floor was open storage space. Anyone could walk in at any minute. In fact, the men had planned to eat lunch on the sixth floor that day, and Bonnie Ray Williams left the floor at 12:15 only when he realized no one was coming up to join him. The sixth floor was not Oswald’s turf – as an order filler, he would only come up there when he needed some books to pack into a carton, and then he was on his way again. The best evidence is that Oswald wasn’t on the sixth floor on the day of the assassination, but on the first or second floor. 2. The two lunchroom theory I never understood why there weren’t more witnesses coming forward and saying that they saw Oswald in the lunchroom. Then I found out that Oswald regularly ate his lunch in the first floor lunchroom called the “domino room” where the African American employees would gather, instead of in the all-white, main lunchroom on the second floor that had all of the soft drink machines. This behavior was Oswald’s regular practice. When he went to court in New Orleans in August 1963, he sat on the side of the courtroom with the African Americans. During that same month, Oswald was seen in the predominantly black voter registration line. Many African Americans were dissuaded from providing testimony due to racism, and this is one more example of it. Oswald himself told his interrogators that he saw Junior Jarman and a second short another African American man that he recognized in the domino room while he was eating lunch during noontime, which was subsequently verified. It has been suggested that Oswald may have left the domino room “to go up to the second floor to get a coke.”[ 1 ] Maybe we should rehabilitate what we called during the Vietnam War “the domino theory” - many things fall in line when you look at the story this way. I’m also relying on several witnesses. Carolyn Arnold stated on November 26 that she saw Oswald on the first floor a few minutes before 12:15 pm. On the sixth floor itself, Bonnie Ray Williams told the Warren Commission that he was up there until about 12:15, and Oswald was not there. Arnold Rowland said that he saw an African American man and a white man with a rifle in two separate windows on the sixth floor at 12:15 pm. Carolyn Walter also saw two men on the sixth floor a few minutes later, one of them with a rifle. The HSCA photographic panel found that someone rearranged the boxes in the sniper’s nest within two minutes after the shooting – given Oswald’s verified appearance on the second floor with Patrolman Marrion Baker ninety seconds after the shots, I don’t see how Oswald had the time to do this rearrangement. 3. The humanitarian weapon It’s even less likely that anyone used the Mannlicher-Carcano later found near the sixth floor stairwell to fire at anything. This rifle is what Oswald supposedly used to kill JFK and wound Connally by firing three shots from behind the president’s car in the motorcade. It’s hard to imagine why Oswald would have used it – it was a mail order weapon ordered under the name of Oswald’s supposed chief of the New Orleans Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Alex Hidell. Of all the rifles in the world, what assassin would use a rifle that would maximize chances of getting caught? This rifle was hardly an assassin’s choice – the Mannlicher-Carcano was a World War I relic best known as the “humanitarian weapon” during World War II because it never killed anybody on purpose - MCs could be purchased for three dollars each in lots of 25. On the day the rifle was found, the firing pin was found to be defective or worn-out, the telescopic sight was not accurately sighted, and no ammunition clip was officially reported. Without an ammunition clip, a gunman would have to hand-load cartridges. 4. An unknown man provided “5 foot 10, 165 pounds” tip at JFK crime scene The unknown white male's "five foot ten/165" description of the shooter was announced five times by the Dallas police dispatcher Murray Jackson in the hour after the assassination Fourteen minutes after the shooting, a 12:44 pm radio call in Dallas gave a description of a man with a rifle on the 6th floor of the Texas Book Depository. This radio call was based on the report of an “unknown white man’s” report to police inspector Herbert Sawyer. “Slender white male about 30, five feet ten, 165”.[ 2 ] The dispatcher Murray Jackson relied on this description, providing it again at 12:47, 12:49, 12:55 and 1:08, offering it as “all we have” prior to the shooting of Tippit at 1:09 pm. Ann Egerter and the FBI had used the phony Webster-like description of Oswald as “5 feet ten, 165” repeatedly to describe Oswald since his time in the USSR in 1960. This was no molehunt. This was a manhunt. The specificity of the “5 feet ten, 165” tip cannot be squared with the impossibility of providing a height-and-weight ID of a sixth floor sniper located at a window and only visible from near-waist height. You’re only seeing a portion of his body. There is no way to tell how tall he is, much less how much he weighs. What you would notice would be his clothes – but the witness noticed nothing on that subject. Also, there’s nothing “slender” about any man who is 5 foot 10 and 165. Such a man comes up with a body mass index (or “BMI”) of 23.7 – right in the middle of the American population. “Average” is BMI of between 23 and 26. Oswald, however, was generally referred to as “slender” in his CIA and FBI records. His weight was generally between 126 and 140. J. Edgar Hoover exhausted all leads before concluding that the 5'10"/165 description came from an “unidentified citizen” that approached Sawyer. No one ever convinced the FBI that the alleged witness Howard Brennan provided this tip. No one to my knowledge ever remarked that the tip largely matched Oswald’s FBI description from 1960 until his arrest in August, 1963, when he was described as five foot nine/140. The absence of important evidence in the record - what Peter Dale Scott refers to as “the negative template” – is often the strongest evidence of all. 5. Oswald probably played no role in the Tippit shooting After Sawyer called in with the five-ten/165 description, police dispatcher Murray Jackson explained over the radio that Sawyer’s call was about a suspect in the President’s shooting that had been sighted at the Texas School Book Depository. Two officers immediately reported that they were either at the location or en route. For no understandable reason, Dispatcher Jackson then summoned patrolmen J. D. Tippit and R. C. Nelson and mysteriously asked them to “move into Central Oak Cliff area”. This is the neighborhood where Oswald lived. By this time, Oswald was heading for home. Nine minutes later, Dispatcher Jackson informed Tippit at 12:54 that “you will be at large for any emergency that comes in” nearby “Lancaster and 8th” in the Oak Cliff neighborhood – placing him less than a mile from Oswald’s address at 1026 North Beckley and far away from the manhunt in downtown Dallas three miles away! Years later, Jackson made the improbable claim to CBS News that he “realized that, as you said, that we were draining the Oak Cliff area of available police officers, so if there was an emergency, such as an armed robbery or a major accident, to come up, we wouldn’t have anybody there…”[ 9 ] In a multiple hearsay story that is worthy of consideration, Tippit’s father told author Joseph McBride that he learned from Tippit’s widow that an officer told her that Tippit and another officer had been assigned by the police to hunt down Oswald in Oak Cliff. The other officer was involved in an accident and never made it to the scene, but “J.D. made it”.[ 10 ] Tippit’s widow has never made a statement for the record. When you have a witness that has offered limited interviews but no sworn testimony, that’s when a hearsay account may provide the reason why the witness is reluctant to talk. Tippit’s story is backed by none other than Johnny Roselli’s associate John Martino – both of these men admitted their involvement in JFK’s murder. Martino said that Oswald “was to meet his contact at the Texas Theater” in his Oak Cliff neighborhood.[ 11 ] I think it’s more likely that Oswald went straight to the Texas Theater, and was never at the Tippit crime scene. Butch Burroughs, a Texas Theater concessions employee for decades, told author Jim Marrs in 1987 that he sold Oswald popcorn right around 1:15 pm. Author Dale Myers challenged Burroughs, saying that he “told the Warren Commission that he didn’t see Oswald slip into the theater. He also didn’t mention selling popcorn to Oswald.” Myers missed the point. Ticket taker Julia Postal quoted Burroughs as saying “Well, I saw him coming out.”, presumably when Oswald bought the popcorn. Burroughs was never asked by the Warren Commission if he saw Oswald prior to the police hunt. Burroughs also told Marrs that Julia Postal knew that she sold Oswald a ticket earlier that day, but didn’t want to admit it. She moved away from Dallas to escape questioning on the subject. When Ms. Postal was asked by researcher Jones Harris if she realized upon seeing Oswald’s face that she might have sold him a ticket, she burst out in tears. (Theater patron Jack) Davis stated that Oswald sat next to him and then another patron before going out to the lobby. According to author Lamar Waldron, Oswald was armed with half a box top saying “Cox’s, Fort Worth”. If Waldron is correct, Oswald was apparently trying to meet someone who had the other box top half.[ 13 ] Manuel Artime did this kind of thing – his practice was to meet AMWORLD officers with torn one dollar bills. 6. One unknown man described Tippit's shooter as "5 foot 10, 160-170 pounds" Another unknown man told Officer Gerald Hill at the Tippit crime scene that the man who shot the policeman was a white male about 5 foot 10 inches, weighing 160 to 170 pounds. As soon as Officer Gerald Hill came on the scene, he was approached by an unknown witness. Hill said “the first man that came up to me, he said ‘The man who shot him was a white male about 5 foot 10 inches, weighing 160 to 170 pounds, had on a jacket and a pair of trousers, and brown bushy hair.” Hill never got the man’s name, turned him over to another officer, and no one knows his identity. Patrolman Howell W. Summers called in a description from witness Ted Callaway of a “white male, twenty-seven, five feet eleven, a hundred sixty-five, black wavy hair, fair complected, wearing a light grey Eisenhower-type jacket, dark trousers and a white shirt…(with) a 32 dark-finish automatic pistol.” Oswald owned a 38 caliber revolver, not a 32 automatic. Joseph McBride is the author of the new book Into the Nightmare, focusing on the Tippit case. A key aspect of the case is Detective Jim Leavelle’s admission that cartridge shells supposedly found at the crime scene were never actually marked on the scene by the Dallas police. McBride points out that “given that the HSCA relied solely on the shells to make its case that Oswald shot Tippit, Leavelle’s admissions that the shells were not marked at the scene help nullify that homicide case against Oswald.”[ 15 ] One aspect of the Tippit case has fascinated me since it was revealed by FBI agent Jim Hosty in 1996. Hosty revealed that FBI agent Robert Barrett said that a wallet containing identification for Oswald and his purported alias Alek James Hidell was left at the scene of Tippit’s shooting and found by police captain W. R. Westbrook near a puddle of blood. The rifle found on the sixth floor was ordered by A. Hidell, with Oswald's post office box as the return address. The Warren Commission was told by postal inspector Harry Holmes that anyone who had access to Oswald’s PO box could have picked up the rifle without even showing identification. 7. A second unknown man said the suspect handed something to Tippit through the open passenger window FBI agent Barrett claims to this day that an unknown witness told him that Tippit pulled over and the gunman handed something through the open passenger window to Tippit inside the car. Barrett believes that Tippit saw the two IDs for Oswald and Hidell, got out of the car to question Oswald, and was shot. Barrett admits that he doesn’t know who the witness was, and can’t verify it, but the wallet was “there”. Who would hand their entire wallet to a police officer when asked for identification when not under arrest? It looks like someone planted a wallet with Oswald’s identification on the ground at the scene, framing him with a throw-down wallet much as others have been framed with a throw-down gun. 8. A third unknown man handed Oswald's wallet to the police at the crime scene An unknown man provided Oswald's wallet to Officer Kenneth Croy at the crime scene where Officer Tippit was shot. The wallet contained ID for both Lee Oswald and Alek J. Hidell. The finding of this wallet was hidden until 1996. I say that because since Hosty’s revelation in 1996, we have learned quite a bit more, thanks to researcher Jones Harris. When Sergeant Kenneth H. Croy arrived as one of the first officers on the scene, an unknown man handed him a wallet. Croy handed the wallet to Sergeant Calvin Owens.[ 17 ] Owens apparently gave it to Westbrook, who displayed it to Barrett. After the wallet was videotaped, it went back to Westbrook’s custody, and Hosty tells us that it was never seen again. Westbrook and Barrett were in charge of the scene at the Texas Theater when Oswald was arrested. When Oswald refused to provide his name, Westbrook ordered, “Get him out of here.” The history of Oswald’s wallets can only be described with three words: Smoke and mirrors. Only after the release of the Warren Report did the FBI evidence inventory show three wallets for Oswald: B-1 (the arrest wallet), 114 (brown billfold) and 382 (red billfold). No wallets were found at his rooming house. The “arrest wallet” appeared on videotape at the Tippit crime scene; we have discussed how no one knows how it appeared on the scene. This arrest wallet of Oswald’s was supposedly removed from his pocket by Officer Paul Bentley following his arrest and while on the way to City Hall, Bentley said that he reviewed the contents and saw the identification for Oswald and Hidell. Since Bentley’s recent death, FBI agent Robert Barrett now says that Bentley was lying. (Whether or not Barrett is telling the truth...) The best evidence indicates that an unknown citizen brought the wallet to the murder scene, based on Officer Croy’s interview with Jones Harris.
  15. Paul, I believe that Oswald was all about "financial security" during the last months of his life. His attempts from 1961 in the Soviet Union all the way to September 1963 in Austin to get John Connally to upgrade his discharge are a big clue - and probably what led to the motorcade being moved to the street in front of the book depository. Navy counsel Andy Kerr's memoir A Journey Among the Good and the Great addresses Connally's involvement in Oswald's loss of his GI Bill benefits. Kerr wrote that he advised Connally: "In Oswald's case, my conclusions were that his complaint had no legal basis, his request was without merit, and that Connally should not involve himself in any way. (This routing slip supports the story about how Connally deep-sixed Oswald's attempt to obtain an upgraded discharge by directing "appropriate action".) "I recommended that he refer the letter to the commandant of the Marine Corps for 'appropriate action'." (Emphasis added.) This phrase meant, in clear officialese, that the secretary was washing his hands of the case. The commandant could do with it as he wished. No one could doubt that the result would be. It was a kiss-off. "A day or two later, Connally called me into his office. He had obviously read the entire file and was intrigued. We discussed the case for half an hour or so, and at the end he said, "I agree with you, Andy--this is the way we should handle it." He then signed that second piece of paper that sent Oswald's letter on its way, we thought, to oblivion." And, in fact, that's precisely what happened. The Warren Commission has a memo dated 2/26/62 - three days after the purported cc from Connally to Fred Korth, at a time when Connally was clearing his desk as Secretary of the Navy to pass the reins to Korth - stating that the Oswald matter was being "routed to CMC (Commandant, Marine Corps) for 'appropriate action'." (Emphasis added.) There's no sign that Fred Korth saw this memo. There's an initial "C" on the bottom - that may be from Connally. Connally's signature looks similar. Instead, a week later, Oswald was sent a "kiss-off letter" from Brigadier General R. Tompkins of the Marine Corps, saying that your letter "was referred to me for reply". Kerr's colleague Hank Searles also corroborates Kerr's account. Searles recalled the morning that Kerr opened the Oswald letter, read it, and advised Connally to reject it. The "appropriate action" recommendation from the Secretary of the Navy (who was Connally until early 1962) can also be seen at Exhibit 780 in the Warren volumes: The "appropriate action" quote comes up in a wholly different context mid-November 1963, before the assassination. Oswald wrote a note to the FBI and delivered it on or about Nov. 15, just days after the November 9 letter to the Soviet embassy. Hosty said the note said: "If you have anything you want to learn about me, come talk to me directly. If you don't cease bothering my wife, I will take appropriate action and report this to proper authorities." There was a dispute about what the note said - the FBI secretary said that the letter threatened to blow up the building. Did Oswald find out about the "appropriate action" recommendation? Or did Hosty learn about it and make it up? Almost no one knows that Ruth told the Warren Commission back in 1964 about the Hosty note. Her version was that Oswald told her that he left a note for "the agents" at the FBI office that told them to stop bothering hims and his family. Ruth told the Warren Commission that she believed it until she learned after the assassination that it was "another lie" by Oswald. In 1975, when the Oswald note to Hosty was finally revealed to the public, most of the agents at the office admitted they knew the story. But not Odum. Bardwell Odum with Marina Oswald on 11/23/63. Ruth testified in 1964 that she had learned from the FBI that Oswald had never delivered the note that he told her in November 1963 that he was going to deliver. But, of course, he did! Odum claimed to Ruth that he had never known about the Oswald visit to the Dallas FBI office - even though just about everyone else did! When Ruth found out that Oswald had actually delivered the note to Hosty, she blurted out Odum's name to the media as her source. She then called Odum and apologized, saying that "it's all my fault". Ruth referred to Odum as "her primary contact".
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