Joseph McBride

Retired DPD detective Morris Brumley, who had known J. D. Tippit since they grew up together, pulled out his wallet during our interview and, with my tape recorder running on the table in front of us, showed me his KKK membership card and started bragging about his violent activities against Black men. Brumley claimed he was "infiltrating" the Klan for the Dallas Police Department. I told that to a Dallas-area JFK researcher, who told me about three-fourths of the Dallas Klan in those days were police officers.

Frank Capra told me that during World War II, when he was in the Army making propaganda films, he was walking through a warehouse full of paper military records with a higher-ranking officer. Capra asked what they do when such a warehouse becomes full. The officer smiled and said, "We have a fire."

Also this, from the Washington Post (2015): The bombing [of North Korea by the U.S.] was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops. Although the ferocity of the bombing was criticized as racist and unjustified elsewhere in the world, it was never a big story back home. U.S. press coverage of the air war focused, instead, on “MiG alley,” a narrow patch of North Korea near the Chinese border. There, in the world’s first jet-powered aerial war, American fighter pilots competed against each other to shoot down five or more Soviet-made fighters and become “aces.” War reporters rarely mentioned civilian casualties from U.S. carpet-bombing. It is perhaps the most forgotten part of a forgotten war.

"Don't believe all this so-called evidence." -- Lee Oswald to his brother Robert, November 23, 1963

Speaking of Danny Thomas: while researching my biography FRANK CAPRA: THE CATASTROPHE OF SUCCESS, I read all the (mostly dismal) scripts and outlines Frank Capra tried to flog to studios in the 1950s and '60s. Most were clumsily religioso to an extent that embarrassed the studios, which would do Bible epics but usually not the kind of Catholic propaganda Capra was pushing. One project stood out as unusually good: THE CARPENTER OF GOD, about St. Joseph and his bafflement and anger while trying to understand how his virginal young wife, who wouldn't sleep with him, could come to him and tell him she was pregnant (by a bird). Capra wanted to film it as a TV movie with Danny Thomas as St. Joseph. It is a charming and touching script about faith and humanity, by the estimable novelist John Fante. But the Legion of Decency nixed it, since it raised too many questions about the touchy subject of the Immaculate Conception, and Capra dropped it like a hot potato. Another unusual notion he had (although it probably wouldn't have turned out well) was to do a movie about a character like Elvis being used as a demagogue to corrupt the youth of America (a rightwing notion, though the British film PRIVILEGE did a similar story well from a leftist POV). Col. Parker nixed that one by refusing to let Elvis play the role. Elvis made few good movies and a lot of dreck, thanks to the Colonel. Capra's project, THE GENTLEMAN FROM TENNESSEE, was too similar to A FACE IN THE CROWD and reminiscent of MEET JOHN DOE and partly related to a terrible novel Capra wrote and was published not long ago, CRY WILDERNESS, a very muddled work politically, sexually, and in every other way.

I covered the Oscars for Daily Variety the night HEARTS AND MINDS won. I printed a brief sidebar about Bert Schneider reading the telegram of congratulations from the NLF. I foolishly did not realize what a firestorm that would create, or I would have made more of it and tracked down people for quotes in response; usually I was more on the ball than that. But I got an inkling when I attended (i.e., crashed) the Academy ball after the show and was standing next to Danny Thomas, who seethed when Schneider arrived with his Oscar. Thomas muttered to himself, and, I guess, to me: "Look at that guy in his five hundred-dollar white suit, pissing all over the feet of the Academy!"

Right, Robert Oswald forfeited any credibility by maligning his brother falsely as a killer.

Bowley told me Benavides was at the scene and tried to call the police before he managed to do so.

Lawrence, I don't think Wade was conflating the reported meeting between Oswald and the FBI's Hosty a day or two before the assassination with Oswald's reported visit to the FBI office about Nov. 12. There was also the meeting between Oswald and the FBI on Nov. 16, which was closer to the reported third meeting that month. I wrote about all this and the question of whether there were two or three meetings in the book excerpt I posted.

Thanks for the good words. That's an intriguing post, Gil. I hadn't heard of Elizabeth Cole before. Is there documentation of that, or how did it get out?

The relevant sections on Oswald and the FBI from my 2013 book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: OSWALD, THE FBI, AND OTHER AGENCIES Ruth Paine and Marina were responsible for providing most of what Oswald called the “so-called evidence” linking him to the assassination, while Marina was being held by the Secret Service, separated from Ruth, who nevertheless was still busy producing items of “evidence” from her bounteous home and its celebrated garage. Mrs. Paine’s Garage & The Murder of John F. Kennedy is the title of one of the most foolish and naive books on the assassination, Thomas Mallon’s 2002 canonization of this supposedly selfless Quaker woman who charitably befriended a needy Russian immigrant and helped her ne’er-do-well husband find a job that unfortunately happened to be on the presidential motorcade route while the rifle used to shoot the president was secreted in the unsuspecting Mrs. Paine’s garage. FBI Agent Hosty had met with Ruth and Marina on November 1 at the Paine home, supposedly to establish a working relationship with them. Hosty returned on November 5. Both times Lee Oswald was not there. Hosty complains in his book that any leverage he might have had in interrogating Marina after the assassination was blown by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which he claimed too quickly assured her she would not be deported. Others have speculated that Marina was only cooperating with the authorities under a constant threat of deportation. But if Hosty’s report about the INS (then a division of the Justice Department, which also included the FBI) is correct, its protection could have been the flip side of an implied threat of what could happen if Marina were to stop providing federal authorities with the help they needed to complete the framing of her husband. After returning from New Orleans to live in Dallas again by early October 1963, Lee Oswald reportedly continued his undercover activities on behalf of the FBI to investigate the activities of anti-Castro Cubans, including those at the Oak Cliff safe house three miles from what would become the scene of the Tippit shooting. Oswald’s connections with the CIA may have helped lead him to that house and the Alpha 66 members who frequented it. It was discovered after the assassination that Oswald had Agent Hosty’s name (misspelled by the dyslexic Oswald as “Hasty”), FBI office address, telephone number, and automobile license number in his address book, a fact that caused considerable embarrassment to the FBI, leading the bureau to try to conceal the information from the Warren Commission. Hosty was preoccupied during the morning of November 22 in a meeting with an agent for the Treasury Department and an Army Intelligence agent, a meeting that lasted almost three hours and ended forty-five minutes before the assassination. Hosty’s book identifies these agents as Frank Ellsworth of Treasury’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax unit (later renamed Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, or ATF) and Edward Coyle of Army Intelligence (although Hosty calls Ellsworth “Jack”); the Secret Service was also part of Treasury at the time, before being transferred to the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. Scott identifies Ellsworth as Treasury’s “top expert on the illegal arms traffic in Dallas” and Coyle as a 112th MIG (112th Army Military Intelligence Group) Specialist 5. Peter Dale Scott points out that on November 22, the 112th’s file on Oswald was “instrumental, perhaps crucial, in clinching the superficial case against Oswald as an assassin,” because the file identified Oswald as the A. J. Hidell who allegedly bought the rifle used to kill Kennedy and the pistol used to kill Tippit. The information was relayed to the FBI, the Dallas Police Department, and other agencies. Hosty writes that the meeting he held with Ellsworth and Coyle on the morning of the assassination was about an ongoing investigation of “a weapons case involving an Army ordinance [sic] officer at a nearby base who had been embezzling equipment, including guns and ammunitions. This officer was then fencing the goods to an outside party, and we had discovered that a right-wing extremist group was trying to purchase the weaponry.” As detailed in the work of various assassination researchers, including Fred T. Newcomb and Perry Adams, Dick Russell, Ray and Mary La Fontaine, and Scott, this case involved Dallas gunshop owner John Thomas Masen, anti-Castro Cubans in the Alpha 66 group, and an ordnance officer at Fort Hood in Texas who supposedly was the source of the illegal weapons being trafficked. Scott speculates that Oswald could have been an informant, through Hosty, on this deal that led to the arrests of two men in Dallas four days before the assassination. The LaFontaines claim the ordnance officer was involved in a sting with Hosty and Coyle of which Ellsworth was unaware and in the course of which the Dallas police deliberately helped bungle the investigation. Scott writes that Masen was “amassing weapons to sell to anti-Castro Cubans in Dallas, and he supplied the names of two of his Cuban buyers to Frank Ellsworth, who later transmitted them to the Secret Service and the Warren Commission. Of the two Cubans, one, Manuel Rodriguez Orcarberro, was the leader of the local chapter of one of the most anti-Kennedy Cuban exile terrorist groups, Alpha 66.” Both Masen and Orcarberro reportedly bore physical resemblances to Oswald (especially Masen), and it has been speculated that one or both could have been one of the “doubles” identified as Oswald in various incidents around the Dallas area in the weeks leading up to the assassination. In addition, Masen’s gunshop was one of only two in Dallas that sold the kind of ammunition used in the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that Oswald was alleged to have used in the assassination. Further complicating this intricate picture of intrigue and doubledealing is Scott’s suggestion of an alternate scenario in which Rodriguez and the groups whose Dallas chapters he led, Alpha 66 and SNFE, could have been among the more “moderate” Cuban exile organizations that were working with Robert Kennedy in his campaign against Castro and as such became targets of pre-assassination disinformation by the CIA and others to paint them as violently anti-Kennedy. When Masen was interviewed by Dick Russell in 1976, the former gunshop owner said he had lost his firearms license as a result of the investigation that had been underway before the assassination. Masen admitted he had been involved with the Minutemen and was “very sympathetic to the cause,” and that he had been acquainted with General Walker and members of the Hunt family (he called H. L. Hunt “a fine man”). Masen told Russell, “I really don’t believe [the assassination] was the brainstorm of one deranged man. I think it was the sophisticated work of someone with a great deal of money, who could buy a life.” Although Treasury Agent Ellsworth was not called as a witness before the Warren Commission, one of the many such omissions, he passed along information about these interconnecting investigations to the commission staff in April 1964. Assistant Counsel Burt W. Griffin wrote a memo indicating Ellsworth reported that An organization known as the Minutemen is the right-wing group most likely to have been associated with any effort to assassinate the president. . . . The Minutemen are closely tied to General Walker and H. L. Hunt. Mr. Ellsworth described in some detail his undercover efforts in procuring the arrest of a local gunshop owner [Masen] who is an ardent member of the Minutemen. As a result of these undercover activities Agent Ellsworth learned that Manuel O[rcarberro] Rodriguez, apparently a Cuban survivor of the Bay of Pigs episode, was attempting to purchase arms in Dallas for Alpha 66. Mr. Rodriguez is also a member of the DRE. Agent Ellsworth indicated that virtually all information gathered by the FBI with respect to [such] activities was the responsibility of Agent Hosty. On the day of the assassination, Scott reports, Ellsworth was one of eight agents from Treasury’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax unit who were “among the first law-enforcement personnel of any description to reach the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository where the controversial Mannlicher-Carcano was found.” They ran there from their branch office on Commerce Street upon hearing the news of the assassination and helped in the search of the building before leaving at 3 p.m. Ellsworth’s FBI contact was James Hosty, who, as noted earlier, was with him shortly before the shooting. Despite the fact the Secret Service and the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Unit were both arms of the Treasury Department, Hosty complains in his book about the limited cooperation between the Secret Service and the FBI in the matter of presidential protection. An Army Intelligence agent named James W. Powell was, like Ellsworth, inside the Book Depository when the rifle was found; Powell was in Dealey Plaza taking a photograph of the front of the building at the time of the assassination. The extent of Army Intelligence presence surrounding the assassination was unusual. The pilot car in the motorcade contained Deputy Chief G. L. Lumpkin, a member of the Army Intelligence Reserve, and Lieutenant Colonel George L. Whitmeyer, Sr., commander of the local Army Intelligence Reserve unit and of all Army Reserve units in East Texas. Whitmeyer’s wife, Frances, had a gift shop in the Trade Mart that she told Mary Ferrell was used that day as a command and communications center by the FBI and the Secret Service (since the official communications center that day was at the Sheraton Hotel, that raises the question of why another one was set up; the conspiratorial implications are obvious). The involvement of Army Intelligence Reserve personnel also included other Dallas police officers, such as Captain W. P. Gannaway, supervisor of the Special Service Bureau, which included Lieutenant Jack Revill’s Criminal Intelligence Section. Revill was also the chief Dallas representative of the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU), an intercity police intelligence agency. Scott suggests that Oswald might have been an informant for LEIU, since Revill’s Intelligence Division helped supply some of the earliest identification of Oswald in the case. Another possibility, perhaps overlapping with Oswald being an informant, is that Revill and his unit were keeping a watch on Oswald. According to Greg Lowrey, the late “Larry Harris thought Revill was the kind of a guy, a rightwinger, who would have had a file on a ‘subversive’ like Oswald. I think they had him under surveillance.” Another Army Intelligence figure who was deeply involved in the events of that weekend was Dallas oil man Jack Crichton, the George H. W. Bush political associate who was running for governor and supplied a Russian translator for Marina Oswald after the assassination. Besides heading a local Army Intelligence Unit, Crichton had Army Intelligence Reserve connections and had served with Lieutenant Colonel Whitmeyer. Hosty’s claims that he had never met Lee Oswald until he helped interrogate him at 3:15 p.m. on the day of the assassination and that Marina had supplied the information about him that Oswald had entered into his address book were thrown in doubt by Oswald’s brother Robert. Robert testified to the commission that Marina had told him that Hosty had in fact met Lee previously and had “harassed Lee in his interviews.” When Hosty attempted to interview Marina soon after the assassination, she was unwilling to talk with the FBI agent as a result of that situation. Robert had to intervene to try to temper what he considered “very harsh” treatment of Lee’s widow at that stage, including an implied threat from Hosty and another FBI agent to have her deported. Nevertheless, this information from Robert Oswald, which would make it seem as if Lee, rather than being a willing informant of Hosty, actually had a hostile relationship with the FBI agent, perhaps should be considered skeptically in light of Robert’s general cooperation with the authorities and his willingness in his testimony and his 1967 book, Lee: A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as in other venues, to help portray his late brother as an assassin (Robert did tell the commission he thought that his brother might have had assistance in the assassination from Ruth and Michael Paine and Jack Ruby). John Armstrong in Harvey & Lee reports that FBI Agent Carver C. Gayton reported that Hosty had told him after the assassination that “Oswald was a PSI (potential security informant) for an older agent who retired just before Hosty was assigned to Oswald’s case. . . . Hosty told Gayton that he tried to contact Oswald by placing notes under his apartment door, without success. Carver said, ‘You mean the Paines’ house?’ Hosty responded, ‘No, Oswald’s apartment [i.e., on North Beckley].’” Gayton made this claim in a sworn affidavit for the Church Committee but later denied it in an unsworn interview with the HSCA. While Hosty was on his way into the Dallas police headquarters at about 3 p.m. on November 22, he ran into his principal DPD contact, Lieutenant Revill, and blurted out that the FBI knew Oswald was in Dallas and that he was a Communist. Revill said Hosty began this conversation by announcing, “Jack, a Communist killed President Kennedy.” Hosty reported the encounter somewhat differently, writing that he told Revill that Oswald was a Communist and had killed Tippit and “probably” killed Kennedy. The FBI agent claimed the conversation was preceded by Revill saying the police had a lead, that “a guy named Lee” was the only employee of the Book Depository not accounted for (a frequently repeated myth, for numerous employees did not answer the roll call, and anyway Oswald was already under arrest for the Tippit killing). Revill told the commission he “blew up” over Hosty’s belated piece of intelligence sharing. He also claimed that Hosty admitted, “We had information that he was capable of this.” Revill filed a similar report with his superior officer, Captain Gannaway of the Special Service Bureau, shortly after the conversation. Hosty’s alleged comment was reported in yet another form in the Dallas Morning News on April 24, 1964, as “We knew he was capable of assassinating the president, but we didn’t dream he would do it.” Hosty filed an affidavit on that date denying he had made that statement or told Revill or anyone else “that the FBI knew OSWALD was capable of assassinating the President or that OSWALD possessed any potential for violence.” Shortly after the assassination, Chief Curry embarrassed the FBI by saying on national television that the bureau had interviewed Oswald “a week or two ago” and had not shared its knowledge about Oswald with his department before Kennedy was killed, a highly provocative statement Curry then was pressured to withdraw in front of TV reporters. But in his 1969 book on the assassination, Curry reiterated his and Revill’s charge about the FBI withholding vital information about Oswald from the DPD. According to some of my Dallas police sources and other sources, the relationship between the DPD and the FBI was seriously strained in the wake of the assassination as a result of this incident and other alleged failures of cooperation by the bureau. But, like the FBI itself, the police knew more about Oswald before the assassination than they were letting on afterward, so some of this outrage may have been disingenuous. Hosty’s book describes Revill as “an avid John Bircher-type conservative, and he absolutely detested Kennedy. . . . [J]ust the day before [the assassination] Revill and I had discussed the president’s forthcoming trip to Dallas and the security detail. The Secret Service wanted to utilize numerous Dallas police officers to help with security, and Revill wanted no part of it. ‘I don’t want to guard that son of a bitch. I think I might call in sick,’ he had said.” Revill denied to the commission that he had a meeting about the president’s security with the FBI or the Secret Service before the assassination. Speaking of Revill in January 1993, Greg Lowrey told me, “There’s the man who could blow the lid off it. Larry Harris thought Revill was the kind of rightwing guy who would have had a file on ‘subversives’ like Oswald, and he would know what the FBI wanted.” Scott writes in his 1993 book on the assassination, “Revill is some critics’ candidate for Most Conspiratorial Policeman on the weekend of November 22-24, 1963.” Revill retired in 1983 as executive assistant chief of the DPD. I tried to obtain an interview with him in Dallas in December 1992. But when I reached him on the phone, he declined to meet with me, saying, “That was about a hundred years ago. I really have not cooperated with anybody in any of this.” He said cryptically that there were too many “bad memories” involved. I told him, “You could probably help me more than anybody else.” He replied, “I doubt that. It’s been so much time, I’ve forgotten so much of it, and I’ve had some health problems. So I’d rather not get involved. Good luck to you on your book.” Revill lived for almost twenty more years, dying at his home in Granbury, Texas, at age eighty-two in September 2012, of Parkinson’s disease and lung cancer. “THE NOTORIOUS F.B.I.” One of the most eyebrow-raising aspects of the FBI‘s handling of the assassination was Agent Hosty’s admitted destruction of a key piece of evidence, a note allegedly left at the Dallas FBI office by Oswald before the assassination. This did not become public knowledge until 1975, when it caused a sensation and deepened skepticism about the FBI’s handling of the case. Hosty was ordered by his superior, J. Gordon Shanklin, to destroy the note on November 24, after Oswald was shot. Hosty claimed the unsigned, undated note had been left at the FBI office by Oswald about ten days before the assassination. Hosty claims in his book that the note, “in effect,” said, “If you want to talk to me, you should talk to me to my face. Stop harassing my wife, and stop trying to ask her about me. You have no right to harass her.” A receptionist in the FBI office, Nannie Lee Fenner, told a diametrically opposite story, that the note contained a threat to blow up the office. But that, as Hosty points out, was unlikely, since anyone delivering such a note would find soon himself in custody. Hosty writes that when he arrived at the interrogation of Oswald in Captain Fritz’s office on November 22, the prisoner, handcuffed behind his back, “exploded” and said, “Oh, so you’re Hosty, the agent who’s been harassing my wife? My wife is a Russian citizen who is here in this country legally and is protected under diplomatic laws from harassment by you or any other FBI agent. The FBI is no better than the Gestapo of poopoo Germany. If you wanted to talk to me, you should have come directly to me, not my wife. You never responded to my request.” Of course, it’s convenient for Hosty to remember Oswald never having met him before the day of the assassination and being hostile and uncooperative. Since we don’t have the actual note, we don’t know what it said, and since the twelve hours of intermittent interrogation sessions the police and other agencies conducted with Oswald inexplicably were not recorded, we also don’t know what he said in those sessions. Captain Fritz’s “rough notes” of the interrogation sessions, supposedly made “several days later,” were discovered very belatedly, after Fritz’s death in 1984, and only made public in 1997 by the ARRB. They record Hosty’s presence at that session but say nothing about any such outburst by Oswald. Hosty’s own skimpy handwritten notes, reproduced in his book, record that Oswald “said contacted Soviet Embassy re wife. Hosty talking to wife was the reason.” Oswald allegedly wrote a letter complaining about Hosty’s tactics to the Soviet Embassy in Washington on November 9-10 that was postmarked on the twelfth (and intercepted by the FBI just before the assassination). Hosty writes that on November 23, Ruth Paine helpfully supplied him with an early draft of that letter in Lee’s handwriting (she gave a different account to the Warren Commission, saying she made her own handwritten copy of his typewritten letter). The suspiciously self-incriminating letter discusses Oswald’s (fictitious) visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City and his alleged meeting there with a Soviet assassinations expert, as well as Oswald’s activities on behalf of the FPCC (Fair Play for Cuba Committee) in New Orleans. The mailed version that became a commission exhibit complains, The Federal Bureau of Investigation is not now interested in my activities in the progressive organization “Fair Play For Cuba Committee”, of which I was secretary in New Orleans (state Louisiana) since I no longer reside in that state. However, the F.B.I. has visted [sic] us here in Dallas, Texas, on November 1st. Agent James P. Hasty [sic] warned me that if I engaged in F.P.C.C. activities in Texas the F.B.I. will again take an “interrest” [sic] in me. This agent also “suggested” to Marina Nichilayeva that she could remain in the United States under F.B.I. “protection”, that is, she could defect from the Soviet Uion [sic], of couse [sic], I and my wife strongly protested these tactics by the notorious F.B.I. Like many other documents attributed to Oswald by the commission and the FBI, this letter, which implies that Oswald colluded with the USSR to kill Kennedy, has the earmarks of a forgery to implicate him in the assassination. One of the major reasons the FBI’s prior knowledge of Oswald had to be promptly denied in public by Chief Curry and others may have been to discourage inquiries into Oswald’s actual status as an informant for the bureau. The rumor about Oswald working for the FBI “was the most serious problem we faced,” commission member Allen Dulles admitted to Edward Jay Epstein, the author of Inquest, in a 1965 interview. At what Dulles described as an “emergency” meeting of the commission on January 22, 1964, the transcript of which was not declassified until 1975, the commission’s general counsel, J. Lee Rankin, passed along the tip received from Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr and Henry Wade. Rankin said it had been given to those two Texas officials by a newspaperman and by one of Wade’s assistants, i.e., Bill Alexander, and that it may have come from Allan Sweatt, the chief criminal deputy of the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office. And as noted in Chapter 9, Hugh Aynesworth of the Dallas Morning News later claimed to have started the rumor falsely. Rankin at a subsequent commission meeting on January 27 described this as “a dirty rumor that is very bad for the Commission, the problem[,] and it is very damaging to the agencies that are involved in it and it must be wiped out insofar as it is possible to do so by this Commission.” Alexander claimed he had planted the rumor maliciously to throw off the federal investigation. In an interview for Posner’s book Case Closed, after declaring that he “never much liked the federals,” Alexander said, “I figured it was as good a way as any to keep them out of my way by having to run down that phony story.” But was that claim by Alexander a further piece of disinformation from an admitted xxxx in the case who might have wanted to discredit the idea of Oswald being an FBI informant because it was actually the truth? The Warren Commission relied on the FBI as its main source of information, and the previously “Top Secret” transcript of the January 22 “emergency” meeting shows the level of its concern that the public might find out Oswald was an FBI informant: RANKIN. [W]hen the Chief Justice and I were just briefly reflecting on this we said if that was true and it ever came out and could be established, then you would have people think that there was a conspiracy to accomplish this assassination that nothing the Commission did or anybody could dissipate. [U.S. Representative Hale] BOGGS. You are so right. DULLES. Oh, terrible. BOGGS. Its implications of this are fantastic, don’t you think so? DULLES. Terrific. The commissioners and Rankin in their January 22 and 27 meetings frankly discussed the motives of the FBI in possibly trying to shut down the investigation of the assassination prematurely by identifying as the assassin as someone they had formerly employed as an informant, a situation that would be damaging to the U.S. government and to Robert Kennedy as attorney general, in charge of the bureau. “They would like to have us fold up and quit,” said Rankin on January 22. BOGGS. This closes the case, you see. Don’t you see? DULLES. Yes, I see that. RANKIN. They found the man. There is nothing more to do. The Commission supports their conclusions, and we can go on home and that is the end of it. . . . BOGGS. I don’t even like to see this being taken down. DULLES. Yes. I think this record ought to be destroyed. The FBI issued a pro forma denial that Oswald had worked for the bureau. Even the commission was skeptical of such denials. Rankin said at the January 22 meeting, “I am confident that the FBI would never admit it, and I presume their records will never show it.” Former CIA director Dulles noted at the meeting five days later that even if someone were an informant for the CIA, the man who recruited him would know but “wouldn’t tell. . . . I wouldn’t think he would tell it under oath, no.” Earl Warren asked why, and Dulles responded, “He ought not tell it under oath.” The Warren Report deals with this potentially incendiary dilemma by stating, Speculation that [Oswald] had some working relationship with the FBI was based on an entry in Oswald’s notebook giving the name and telephone number of an agent from the FBI office in Dallas. The Directors of the CIA and the FBI have testified before the Commission that Oswald was never in the employ of their agencies in any capacity. The Commission has concluded on the basis of its own investigations of the files of Federal agencies that Oswald was not and had never been an agent of any agency of the U.S. Government (aside from his service in the Marines) and was not and had never been used by any U.S. Government agency for any purpose. The FBI was interested in him as a former defector and it maintained a file on him. But the planted rumor aside, the circumstantial evidence of Oswald being an FBI informant is highly suggestive. In addition, documentation has emerged making it “highly probable” that Jack Ruby was “a narcotics informant not just at the local level but at the federal level as well,” according to Scott, who cites reports of Ruby’s role as an informant for the FBI as well as his involvement with the DPD. Ruby evidently was playing a double role to help protect his own involvement in organized crime drug trafficking as well as arms smuggling to Cuba. In Dulles’s interview with Epstein about the rumor that reached the commission about Oswald being an FBI informant, the former CIA director said, “I knew it was bunk from the start but we’d have a hard time [dis?]proving it. There was less fuss than we all expected about it. It was very damaging, if true, and concerned our security.” Epstein asked how Dulles knew it was untrue. He replied, “I know J. Edgar Hoover and I know that he would never employ anyone like Oswald. He was too unstable.” Somehow, with all that has emerged in later years about Hoover and his methods of operations, that is a less than conclusive and reassuring answer. “As to the story that Oswald was an FBI informant,” Scott argues in Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, “I doubt that Oswald was directly on the FBI payroll. A more likely possibility is that he worked for a private security agency which in turn reported to the FBI, the way that ex-FBI and ex-Office of Naval Intelligence agent Guy Banister, according to a CIA document, reported to the FBI in New Orleans.” Scott and other researchers have suggested that Oswald’s work in passing information to the FBI, whether as a designated informant or in another capacity, may have been focused on the gunrunning activities of Alpha 66, which were also of serious concern to the Treasury Department’s investigators of illegal firearms traffic and to U.S. Senator Thomas Dodd (D-Connecticut), a former FBI agent, and his Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The subcommittee was investigating the mail-order trade in weapons and “so-called ‘junk’ guns that foreign governments have found obsolete.” Newcomb and Adams, in their groundbreaking 1974 Kennedy assassination book Murder from Within, were the first to speculate that Oswald’s reported purchases of a mail-order handgun and an Italian-made “junk” rifle were part of the clandestine investigation of Senator Dodd, who in the fall of 1963 was collecting data for an investigation on such sales that eventually led to the Gun Control Act of 1968. Among the mail-order weapons suppliers Dodd’s subcommittee and Treasury had under investigation were Klein’s Sporting Goods of Chicago and Seaport Traders of Los Angeles. The Warren Commission alleged that Oswald used the alias of “A. J. Hidell” or “A. Hidell” to purchase, by mail order, a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle (from Klein’s) and a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver (from Seaport Traders). The documents involved in these purchases are among the primary items of “so-called evidence” used to link Oswald with the assassination. But as Armstrong’s Harvey & Lee exhaustively demonstrates, the document trail introduced by the commission to demonstrate Oswald’s supposed purchases of the handgun allegedly used to kill Tippit and the rifle allegedly used to kill Kennedy is so faulty that it tends to show the opposite, i.e., that Oswald could not have purchased or received those weapons. As has often been pointed out, it would have been unlikely, and foolish in the extreme, for someone seriously planning to assassinate the president to use potentially traceable mail orders rather than simply buying weapons over the counter anonymously, as was easy to do in Dallas gun shops at that time. But the hypothesis that Oswald could have purchased those weapons as part of the Dodd subcommittee’s investigation of the mail-order firearms trade, not realizing that he was helping to set himself up as a patsy in the murders of Kennedy and Tippit, is questionable in the light of the flawed paper trail. Since it seems impossible that Oswald actually made the purchases of the rifle and the handgun, if Oswald was actually working for the subcommittee (although that in itself has not been proven), someone who knew of his involvement with the Dodd investigation and the mail-order weapons trade would have had to fabricate his alleged orders to help set him up for the assassination and the killing of Tippit. THE FBI COVERS MORE OF ITS TRACKS The delicate matter of the FBI’s possible relationship with Oswald, which caused Agent Hosty to destroy the note he claimed Oswald had left at the Dallas office around November 12, was exacerbated on November 24 when Jim Ewell of the Dallas Morning News reported that Oswald was interviewed by the FBI here six days before the Friday assassination. But word of the interview with the former defector to Russia was not conveyed to the U.S. Secret Service and Dallas police, reliable sources told The Dallas News Saturday. An FBI agent referred all inquiries to Agent-in-Charge Gordon Shanklin, who could not be immediately reached for comment. However, in Washington, a spokesman for the FBI said it was “incorrect” that the FBI had questioned Oswald or had him under surveillance at any time in recent months, the Associated Press reported. The interview reportedly was held Nov. 16 -- at a time when the Secret Service and police officials were coordinating security plans for the President’s ill-fated Dallas visit. These sources said the Oswald interview added more data to an already “thick file” the FBI has on the 24-year-old avowed Marxist who defected to Russia in 1959 and returned in 1962. Later the same morning that report hit the streets, Oswald was killed. And still later that day, Hosty’s supervisor, the same Gordon Shanklin, ordered him to destroy the note from Oswald. A lot was at risk in the frantic attempts to dispose of Oswald and cover up whatever relationship the FBI had with him. What was in jeopardy was the whole house of cards surrounding the assassination, the developing cover story of Oswald as a “loner” who conceived and carried out his scheme to kill the president with no apparent political motive, or, indeed, no discernable motive of any kind. What Scott describes as part of the “phase-two” story was fast being implemented, the denial that Oswald was in cahoots with the USSR or Cuba and portraying him instead as a loner with vague communist sympathies that were not of the nature to lead the U.S. into a retaliatory war. The same Dallas Morning News article that morning about Oswald’s November 16 interview with the FBI carried Chief Curry’s retraction of his statement about the bureau withholding information from the police. But according to Ray and Mary La Fontaine in their 1996 book Oswald Talked: The New Evidence in the JFK Assassination, reporter Ewell told them that Curry himself “and his police intelligence unit” were the “reliable sources” who leaked that piece of embarrassing information (or falsehood) about the FBI to the newspaper. The chief evidently felt the lack of cooperation his department had received from the bureau contributed to making the Dallas police look worse than unprofessional in the eyes of the world when the president was killed. Nothing, however, could make the police look more incompetent or corrupt than allowing their prisoner to be murdered on live network television while handcuffed to two detectives and surrounded by dozens of other officers in the basement of the police headquarters. But with the reputation of the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency, the FBI, in equally serious jeopardy, the report of its November 16 interview with Oswald seemed to magically vanish from the accumulating public record of the assassination, rarely being mentioned again except in an occasional book such as the LaFontaines’ or Scott’s Deep Politics II. Later, another story emerged that may or may not have been connected with a contact between Oswald and the FBI on November 16. It was reported that at 1:45 a.m. on November 17, a clerk in the FBI’s New Orleans office, William S. Walter, received an “URGENT” Teletype sent to all Special Agents in Charge from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warning of a possible threat to assassinate President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22 by a “MILITANT REVOLUTIONARY GROUP.” Walter later made a copy of the Teletype from notes he said he had taken from it; he added before that phrase, “CUBAN FACTION.” The FBI denied the existence of the Teletype, but the LaFontaines, who report Walter’s belief that Oswald was an FBI informant, speculate that the urgent warning may have stemmed from a tip provided by Oswald in the November 16 interview. They raise the possibility that the gunrunning investigation involving the Treasury Department and the FBI, in which Oswald also may have been an informant, could have become intertangled with this assassination warning in the eyes of the FBI. With some of the documentation destroyed or otherwise missing, including any original copies of the Teletype Walter said he received, it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly what kind of warning Oswald might have been passing along to the FBI. The possibility that this tip came from Oswald echoes the report that an FBI informant named “Lee” had passed along the warning that caused President Kennedy’s Chicago trip on November 2 to be canceled because of the threat of an assassination attempt. THE WADE REVELATION The FBI’s jeopardy over its relationship with Oswald could have been even worse if Henry Wade had told the media in 1963 what he told me three decades later. The former Dallas County district attorney revealed a piece of information that, if true, would be an indication of a deeper relationship between Oswald and the FBI than has ever been acknowledged. A former FBI agent himself, Wade told me in 1993 that Oswald may have given information to the FBI only a day or two before the assassination. “We weren’t getting much -- full cooperation from some of the federal authorities,” Wade said. “You know Jack Revill said when he walked into the jail up there, an agent of the FBI said, ‘We know Oswald well. I talked with him yesterday.’ Or something similar to that. And then it got into a big fuss with the FBI and the Dallas police, [over] who was telling the truth. Hosty’s the agent.” I asked Wade to clarify if Hosty indeed said he talked with Oswald the day before the assassination, and the former DA replied, “Within a day or two, I don’t know exactly.” Wade then recounted the story about Oswald going to the FBI office to tell them to leave his wife alone. Wade seemed uncertain whether or not Oswald had left a note or how that story came out; Wade said, “I don’t know who said he went there. The only one I could think of was his wife.” Whether or not Wade was mixing up the timeline of Oswald’s visit to the FBI office with a subsequent encounter with the FBI was unclear. But a report from a well-placed source such as Henry Wade about possible contact between Oswald and the FBI a day or two before the assassination would (if accurate) seriously contradict even the belated official version, revealed twelve years after the assassination, of the latest date on which Oswald had contact with the FBI (November 12, the approximate date Hosty said Oswald left the note) as well as the virtually forgotten newspaper report of the Bureau’s interview with Oswald on November 16. Wade’s revelation, especially when added to those other reports, would make it even more likely that Oswald had an informant relationship with the FBI, and would make the destruction of the note (with its contents that remain uncertain) a matter of even more critical importance to maintaining the coverup. Of course, it is possible that in our interview, the seventy-eight-year-old Wade, who had retired as DA in 1987 but was still practicing law, misremembered the date of Oswald’s last contact with the FBI, placing it closer to the time of the assassination than earlier reported. Nevertheless, Wade still appeared sharp-witted, and he seemed emphatic about the close proximity of Oswald’s contact with the FBI and the assassination, although uncertain whether the contact came on November 20 or 21. It is also conceivable that Wade might have been consciously or subconsciously exaggerating the proximity of the acknowledged and unacknowledged contact(s) with Oswald in order to spite the FBI. This could have been a further sign of the resentment felt by the Dallas law enforcement community over its fraught relationship with the FBI. Although it’s worth recalling in this context that Wade was one of the Texas law enforcement officials who discussed with the Warren Commission the potentially highly damaging rumor about Oswald being an FBI informant, the DA nevertheless expressed skepticism about that report in his June 1964 testimony. The commission had called Wade, Bill Alexander, and Waggoner Carr to an informal meeting in Washington on January 24 to discuss the rumor after hearing it from Carr. J. Lee Rankin wrote in a memorandum to his files that Carr “suggested that his information came ultimately from District Attorney Henry Wade,” although Wade denied that. Rankin reported after the Washington meeting that Wade “and others of the Texas representatives stated that the rumors to the effect that Oswald was an undercover agent were widely held among representatives of the press in Dallas,” and that the rumors were that Oswald was an informant for both the FBI and the CIA. But Rankin’s memo reports that Wade and Alexander blamed reporters for the rumors and “both indicated that they would not vouch for the integrity or accuracy” of those reporters. Before meeting with Wade in Washington, the commission quietly but expeditiously looked into the DA’s own relationship with the FBI and why he had left as an agent in 1943 after working mostly on espionage cases. Rankin told the commission in the secret January 27 executive session (not declassified until 1974) that “we thought possibly there was --- he might have left under a cloud.” But Rankin found that Wade left the FBI because he wanted to go into private practice and to join the U.S. Navy; “there was no ill feeling between them,” and the FBI had tried to persuade Wade to return to its employ. So that suspicion about Wade’s motives was unsupported by evidence, and Rankin’s impression of Wade was that he was “a very canny, able prosecutor.” Although in this instance, it was Wade’s deputy Alexander who was spreading disinformation, Wade had already become known for playing it loose with facts. His reputation suffered badly in the national spotlight of 1963-64 as a result of the poorly handled Dallas investigation of the assassination and the botched trial of Jack Ruby prosecuted by his office. Wade’s relationship with the out-of-control rightwing fanatic Alexander did not reflect well on the district attorney then or later, when Wade finally had to fire Alexander for his “wild statements” about Earl Warren. But it was Wade’s own misguided nationally televised press conference on the night of November 24, 1963, that most tarnished his reputation nationally at the time of the assassination. He seemed both reckless and ill-informed in rattling off the “so-called evidence” assembled in haste by the DPD against Oswald, who had been slain in their custody only a few hours earlier and was already largely convicted in the public eye without having had the benefit of a legal defender. Wade’s performance -- “of which it has been said that he was not guilty of a single accuracy,” notes Sylvia Meagher in Accessories After the Fact -- added to the shame of Dallas’s legal system. Wade felt sufficiently chagrined to give an apologetic and somewhat regretful explanation during his June 1964 testimony to the Warren Commission. He contended that he had trouble prying accurate information out of the police before going in front of the cameras on his own volition. He said he did so because the police were being subjected to harsh criticism and he felt it necessary to make a public case against Oswald by summarizing what he thought was the evidence (he had earlier put out some even sketchier claims at his other televised news conference in the early morning of November 23). Wade expressed doubts to the commission about the evidence assembled by the police against Oswald and made extraordinarily candid admissions about the overall weakness of the assassination case, in contrast to what he had told the media on November 24, when he declared that Oswald was guilty “to a moral certainty” of killing Kennedy. To the commission, he contrasted the assassination case with the tighter one he claimed (as he later did to me) the police had developed against Oswald in the Tippit killing. Speaking of what he had known on the night of November 22, Wade told the commission, “I think they had some witnesses who had identified him there at the scene [of the Tippit killing], but I was more worried about the assassination[,] of them filing on somebody that we couldn’t prove was guilty.” The DA went so far as to admit that “I wasn’t sure I was going to take a complaint,” i.e., to file on Oswald for the assassination (in fact, as was mentioned in Chapter 1, an FBI document states that Oswald was never arraigned for the killing of the president, only for the killing of Tippit). Wade told the commission that as early as November 23, with the police talking too freely to the media about the evidence they planned to present against Oswald, thereby prejudicing the case in the minds of potential jurors, he “felt like nearly it was a hopeless case.” Wade complained that Captain Fritz “runs a kind of a one-man operation there where nobody else knows what he is doing. . . . I will say Captain Fritz is about as good a man at solving a crime as I ever saw, to find out who did it but he is poorest in the getting evidence that I know, and I am more interested in getting evidence, and that is where our major conflict comes in.” As Greg Lowrey simply noted, “The Dallas Police Department never had a good case against Oswald.” Was this, then, one of the principal reasons for doing away with him? Not only might he have talked about those who had plotted against the president, conspirators whose tracks he had been following, but in the process he would have shown that the authorities had no case against him and that as a result they had failed to catch the actual perpetrators. Such a display of truth could not be allowed.

Michael, how can you place faith in any of those 5 sources?

I interviewed Wade in his law office in 1993. I discuss that interview and the topic of Oswald as an FBI informant in my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE.

I'm just reporting what Rupert Allan told me and believed. You may pick holes in his account.

Oswald was an FBI informant infiltrating the plot and had met with the bureau at least three times in November before the assassination. DA Henry Wade, a former FBI agent, told me Oswald met with the FBI "Within a day or two" before the assassination, adding "I don't know exactly." Wade said FBI agent James Hosty told the DVD's Jack Revill on November 22, "We know Oswald well. I talked with him yesterday" ("Or something similar to that"). Two earlier November meetings Oswald had with the FBI had previously been established, on November 16 and about November 12. Oswald did not know before the shootings of Kennedy and Tippit that he had been set up as the patsy in the plot.

No.

Gil, when I went into that storm drain, it had an unobstructed angle to the area where the limousine was.

Lawford is good in THE LONGEST DAY too. And he plays sort of a JFKish senator in Otto Preminger's ADVISE AND CONSENT, one of the best American movies about politics.

I raise the possibility in my books on the case that Kennedy's body was not in the coffin removed under threat of gunfire from the hallway at Parkland Hospital, which could have been why the Secret Service went to such extreme measures. A tunnel existed that could have been used to spirit the body out of Parkland without it being spotted.

Lawford is especially good in Ernst Lubitsch's last completed film, CLUNY BROWN, in which he plays a British upper-class twit who is concerned about the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s but thinks the solution is to write a sharp letter to the Times.

So she agrees it's powerful. And "awful" has a double meaning: it can mean "full of awe." With CIA asset Ruth Paine, one must read in code.

I don't know enough to be certain about Monroe's death other than it was suspicious and some points do not add up.

The throat shot may have come from the storm drain at the right edge of the picket fence at the top of the knoll, where it meets with the bridge of the triple overpass. I have been at that spot and found the man-sized hole at that corner of the picket fence. When I lowered myself into it, I found that it offered a clear, perfect, direct angle toward the front of the limousine. And it offered cover for a sniper and a quick and easy escape into the parking lot.

I've mentioned before my conversation about Marilyn Monroe's death with her publicist Rupert Allan, one of the most urbane people I met in the Hollywood publicity scene (he also was the longtime representative of Princess Grace). Rupert said he thought Monroe's death was due to an accidental overdose. She was in the habit of lining up small bottles of Champagne around her bedroom and would guzzle them from time to time, losing track of how many she had drunk. When they were mixed with pills, it was dangerous, as he said happened in this instance. He said she was upset that night because Peter Lawford had called to invite her at a party at his beach house along with a bunch of call girls. She was hurt that Lawford evidently thought of her as nothing better than a call girl. Rupert said Monroe told him that when she was in a New York hospital for one of her "miscarriages" a couple of years earlier, she thought of suicide. But she was on the eighth floor, and when she looked down, she saw a woman standing at a bus stop wearing a green coat. Fearing she would land on the innocent woman and kill her, Monroe pulled back from her suicidal thoughts. Rupert thought she was not suicidal on the night of her death in 1962 but was generally somewhat reckless in her consumption of alcohol and pills. One problem, of course, with that theory is that the autopsy by Dr. Noguchi did not turn up evidence of a lethal dose in her stomach.

The first lesson I ever learned in writing about films was a simple one: Don't write about a film if you have not seen it. Back in the bad old days of writing on film, that unfortunately was common, so it was an important lesson and remains one.