Jim Hargrove

Thank you for the link, Mr. Caddy, A couple of decades ago, I was fortunate enough to spend five or six hours on the phone with Martin Sheen interviewing him for a book I was writing. Several times, his admiration of John and Robert Kennedy came shining through. He noted that the birth of his son Emilio Estevez, which he foolishly decided to help his wife Janet deliver without professional assistance, occurred just four days before Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth to their short-lived son named Patrick. The irony was overwhelming. As Mr. Sheen admitted, “All we had was a bottle of alcohol and the New York Times.” He added that, “I was so ignorant of what to expect that after he was born I thought Janet was having his twin. That was the afterbirth and the placenta. I had no idea what that was.” Martin panicked and called an ambulance, but by the time the medics arrived, the worst was over and mother and child were resting peacefully. By contrast, some of the best medics in Boston in 1963 were unable to save infant Patrick Kennedy’s life. (Above is from Martin Sheen, Actor and Activist, by Jim Hargrove)

Ron, From JA’s writeup in Jack Ruby on my website: According to former schoolmate Leonard Patrick, who knew Jack Rubenstein as a youth in Chicago, Rubenstein had no contact with local mobsters. Another childhood friend, Dave Yaras, said that Rubenstein was “positively on his own and not outfit connected." Bill Roemer, an FBI agent who investigated the Mafia in Chicago, said “Ruby was absolutely nothing in terms of the Chicago Mob. We had thousands and thousands of hours of tape recordings of the top Mobsters in Chicago, including Giancana, and Ruby just didn’t exist as far as they were concerned. We talked to every hoodlum in Chicago after the assassination, and some of the top guys in the Mob, my informants. I had close relationships with them—they didn’t even know who Ruby was. He was not a front for them in Dallas.” The Warren Commission reported, “Both State and Federal officials have indicated that Ruby was not affiliated with organized criminal activity." Jack Ruby was never arrested nor linked to any known mob-related activities such as loan-sharking, prostitution, numbers, protection, fencing, contract killing, bribery, robbery, extortion, etc. in Chicago, Dallas, New York or anywhere. Considering Ruby’s business, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see that he had some brush-ups with organized crime people. But what bothers me with accusing him as being a mobster is that it is used an excuse to deny his hidden but increasingly obvious intell connections. The precedent for this type of thing is just awful. Richard Sprague clearly was ousted as the HSCA’s chief counsel because he was asking too many questions about Agency involvement in the assassination. His replacement, of course, was Robert Blakey, who saw the Mafia as a potential boogeyman for the hit. What kind of a mobster enjoyed hanging out with cops as much as Ruby did? Why was his Cuban gunrunning protected by the CIA? Why did he communicate so much with KLIF founder Gordon McClendon, who just happened to be David Atlee Phillips’ lifetime friend and associate? Don’t let this Mafia business hide what really went down in Dallas. The Mafia didn’t make the U.S. government cover up the true nature of the assassination for more than half a century!

One of the questions about the Feldman story involves the early knowledge some of these critics had about Oswald. Did they have inside information? The following doesn’t entirely answer that question, but it certainly shows that news traveled fast, even in 1963. The story below was on the bottom of page 1 of the 11/22/63 evening edition of a Seattle daily newspaper. Note the timing of this information. Henry Wade gave his famous statement about Oswald’s background (the one where Jack Ruby corrected him) during a Dallas press conference at about 11:30 pm. That would have been 9:30 pm Pacific time. There are indications that this story was pretty rushed (several typos and misspellings), but the speed of the dissemination is still pretty remarkable. The newspaper’s masthead for that evening edition is directly below, followed by the story. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Makes perfect sense! In my original post above I said that Feldman’s article “follows the money and seems to attempt to say that the FBI, rather than the CIA, was secretly financing him [Oswald].” The evidence that remains seems to indicate that Hudkins was protecting his source, that “Government official not a Federal official in Dallas….” According to the FBI, Golden/Goulden also refused to state his source, but I was completely unaware of his intelligence connections until now. In the opening pages of Portrait of the Assassin, Gerald Ford describes this incident in detail, including descriptions of the articles by Hudkins, “Golden,” [as he spells it] and Harold Feldman. But Ford only talks about the accusation in relation to the FBI, not the CIA, which comes up later mostly in reference to the Russian “defection,” Powers’ U-2 shoot down, and “Marguerite’s” claim. What is fascinating is that, other than saying Hoover denied the whole thing, Ford never directly disputed the FBI informer claim, at least in his book, which was published in 1965. It appears that he, like Feldman, was far more interested in pointing to the FBI than the CIA. If memory serves (and it often doesn't) someone once called Ford "the CIA's best friend in Congress."

So we’ve been told. Do you believe the Attorney General of Texas and the and District Attorney of Dallas called for a special meeting of the WC based solely on a news story by Lonnie Hudkins? Texas is/was a big, rich state, and Dallas a big, rich city. These guys were not rubes. Feldman also sourced the Philadelphia Inquirer of 12/8/1963 in which a report by Joe Golden stated: The FBI attempt to recruit Oswald as an informant, an informed law enforcement source said, was made in September, just after he had moved to Dallas from New Orleans. The same story is mentioned on page 15 of Portrait of the Assassin by Gerald Ford. Anyway, FOLLOW THE MONEY! Oswald didn’t make enough, according to existing records, to pay for his lifestyle, which wasn’t always as modest as it seemed.

Sandy, From Warren Commission Report, p. 666: Speculation.--After Oswald's arrest, the police found in his room seven metal file boxes filled with the names of Castro sympathizers. Commission finding.--The Dallas police inventories of Oswald's property taken from his room at 1026 North Beckley Avenue do not include any file boxes. A number of small file boxes listed in the in- ventory as having been taken from the Paine residence in Irving con- tained letters, pictures, books and literature, most of which belonged to Ruth Paine, not to Oswald. No lists of names of Castro sym- pathizers were found among these effects.124 Endnotes 123 & 124: 123. 11 H 26 (J. Pic) CE 2206 see 1 251 (Marguerite Oswald) CE 2211, p. 618-6. 124. Ibid.

Interesting VERY early article on Oswald in The Nation magazine that follows the money and seems to attempt to say that the FBI, rather than the CIA, was secretly financing him. https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/OswaldAndFBI.html

That’s interesting, Paul. I’d forgotten how closely the two women described Marina and her children. A couple of things come to mind.... This is kind of reminiscent of all those witnesses from the towns of Alice and Pleasanton and Freer who saw “Oswald” and his family on October 3 and 4. A good write-up is here. WC apologists would like us to believe those many witnesses were mistaken, or publicity seekers, or whatever, but they’ll never convince me. As Chris Courtwright suggested, you can plot the “Oswalds” movements on a map from the observers descriptions. What escapes me is why this pantomime was done. My best guess is to simply create confusion over Oswald sightings, the smoke and mirrors of intelligence operations. As for the Furniture Mart women, let’s remember that, by the time they testified, the family of “Lee Harvey Oswald” had been in the news for months and Marina had famously already testified. Since it surely didn’t occur to Whitworth and Hunter that a false family could be created to implicate Oswald in the assassination, perhaps they both conflated their memories of the Furniture Mart business with what they saw in the news. Stranger things have happened. But now you’ve got me wondering....

David, I definitely should do that, but it is just so hard to distill Mr. Newman’s analyses to a short sentence or two. He has important stuff on the U-2s, on the Agency’s counterintelligence operation against FPCC, on all those black holes where Oswald files should have been, and especially on Mexico City, including the Kostikov disinformation. It’s all in the details, though, which this sort of list can’t cover. Can you give me any specific suggestions?

Funny you should mention that. Just today, Paul J. was emailing around this 9/16/64 memo to Rankin in which Liebeler talked about “dramatic changes in Oswald” that took place between the Bronx Zoo photo and the arrest photos. Sounds like he knew something was weird about “Oswald’s” identity. Paul also came up with the following addresses for the photos mentioned by Liebeler. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh26/pdf/WH26_CE_2963.pdf https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh26/pdf/WH26_CE_2891.pdf https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh26/pdf/WH26_CE_2788.pdf https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh26/html/WH_Vol26_0241a.htm

Maybe I should, Michael, but it's a little hard to reduce it to a single sentence for a list like this, and, to me at least, it's perfectly obvious that high-ranking CIA officials were lying about "Oswald" in that infamous cable just weeks before the assassination. The timing also suggests that at least some FBI officials were also helping take Federal heat off Oswald, clearing the way for his patsification on 11/22/63. Some people suggest that the Agency's lie was part of a mole hunt, but I don't believe it. The "Oswald project" had to be a high level secret, and I can't imagine them risking exposure of it with that cable.

Well said, David. Tracy's piece is just a hatchet job, and not a very skilled one at that. There is lots of evidence that the CIA ran the Oswald project. Here's a list I post from time to time. 20 Facts Indicating the Oswald Project Was Run by the CIA 1. CIA accountant James Wilcott testified that he made payments to an encrypted account for “Oswald or the Oswald Project.” Contemporaneous HSCA notes indicate Wilcott told staffers, but wasn't allowed to say in Executive session, that the cryptonym for the CIA's "Oswald Project" was RX-ZIM. 2. A 1978 CIA memo indicates that a CIA operations officer “had run an agent into the USSR, that man having met a Russian girl and eventually marrying her,” a case very similar to Oswald’s and clearly indicating that the Agency ran a “false defector” program in the 1950s. 3. Robert Webster and LHO "defected" a few months apart in 1959, both tried to "defect" on a Saturday, both possessed "sensitive" information of possible value to the Russians, both were befriended by Marina Prusakova, and both returned to the United States in the spring of 1962. 4. Richard Sprague, Richard Schweiker, and CIA agents Donald Norton and Joseph Newbrough all said LHO was associated with the CIA. 5. CIA employee Donald Deneslya said he read reports of a CIA "contact" who had worked at a radio factory in Minsk and returned to the US with a Russian wife and child. 6. Kenneth Porter, employee of CIA-connected Collins Radio, left his family to marry (and probably monitor) Marina Oswald after LHO’s death. 7. George Joannides, case officer and paymaster for DRE (which LHO had attempted to infiltrate) was put in charge of lying to the HSCA and never told them of his relationship to DRE. 8. For his achievements, Joannides was given a medal by the CIA. 9. FBI took Oswald off the watch list at the same time a CIA cable gave him a clean bill of political health, weeks after Oswald’s New Orleans arrest and less than two months before the assassination. 10. Oswald’s lengthy “Lives of Russian Workers” essay reads like a pretty good intelligence report. 11. Oswald’s possessions were searched for microdots. 12. Oswald owned an expensive Minox spy camera, which the FBI tried to make disappear. 13. Even the official cover story of the radar operator near American U-2 planes defecting to Russia, saying he would give away all his secrets, and returning home without penalty smells like a spy story. 14. CIA's Richard Case Nagell clearly knew about the plot to assassinate JFK and LHO’s relation to it, and he said that the CIA and the FBI ignored his warnings. 15. LHO always seemed poor as a church mouse, until it was time to go “on assignment.” For his Russian adventure, we’re to believe he saved all the money he needed for first class European hotels and private tour guides in Moscow from the non-convertible USMC script he saved. In the summer of 1963, he once again seemed to have enough money to travel abroad to Communist nations. 16. To this day, the CIA claims it never interacted with Oswald, that it didn’t even bother debriefing him after the “defection.” What utter bs…. 17. After he “defected” to the Soviet Union in 1959, bragging to U.S. embassy personnel in Moscow that he would tell the Russians everything he knew about U.S. military secrets, he returns to the U.S. without punishment and is then in 1963 given the OK to travel to Cuba and the Soviet Union again! 18. Allen Dulles, the CIA director fired by JFK, and the Warren Commission clearly wanted the truth hidden from the public to protect sources and methods of intelligence agencies such as the CIA. Earl Warren said, “Full disclosure was not possible for reasons of national security.” 19. CIA's Ann Egerter, who worked for J.J. Angleton's Counterintelligence Special Interest Group (CI/SIG), opened a "201" file on Oswald on December 9, 1960. Egerter testified to the HSCA: "We were charged with the investigation of Agency personnel....” When asked if the purpose was to "investigate Agency employees," she answered, "That is correct." When asked, "Would there be any other reason for opening up a file?" she answered, "No, I can't think of one." 20. President Kennedy and the CIA clearly were at war with each other in the weeks immediately before his assassination, as evidenced by Arthur Krock's infamous defense of the Agency in the Oct. 3, 1963 New York Times. “Oswald” was the CIA’s pawn.

Understood, Tracy.... You defend the Agency.... That's what you do.... Even though the Agency murdered JFK!!!

Tracy, For how many years have you defended the CIA?

OMG! Do you seriously believe that the Agency would publicly release the Lee Harvey Oswald project's cryptonym? After the assassination of JFK? Really?

My bet is that it was the American-born Oswald To point out the obvious, SOMEONE was running around Dallas and environs setting up the Russian-speaking Oswald for the hit, not only at the Furniture Mart but also during all those Sports Drome rifle range appearances, at the Southland Hotel, the Downtown Lincoln-Mercury dealership, the Yates hitch-hiking drama, and so on. Every new person cast into those “impersonations” was another person who had to be silenced. How many people would you want involved if you were a conspirator, or even a low-level mechanic? It’s mostly hearsay, but there’s really a lot of evidence that “Lee Harvey Oswald” was hanging around with Jack Ruby at the Carousel Club during the very period “Lee Harvey Oswald” was sheep-dipping himself in New Orleans as a Castro-loving commie. The summer of ‘63 Dallas Oswald, according to quite a few accounts, could drive a car. There’s something that always amazed me about the incident you linked above, in which the WC brought together Marina and Edith Whitworth and Gertrude Hunter ostensibly to figure out what happened that day at the Furniture Mart. Although Marina and others clearly testified “Lee Harvey Oswald” didn’t drive and didn’t have a driver’s license, Whitworth and Hunter both said he drove a two-toned blue car to the store. Faced with that wildly conflicting testimony, not one of the high-paid WC attorneys apparently thought of calling the Texas Department of Public Safety to ask if “Lee Harvey Oswald” had a Texas driver’s license. Not one! Perhaps none of them knew how to place a call to Austin. Or perhaps they were all afraid of finding what Jim Garrison had no difficulty finding. The Oswald with the valid Texas driver’s license is my pick as the man who towed his “family” into Whitworth’s Furniture Mart that day. And made the other appearances in and around Dallas appearing to be a presidential assassin. And paraded around on the sixth floor of the TSBD on 11/22/63, and murdered J.D. Tippit, and led the cops to the Texas Theater where he sat in the balcony until he was led out by the cops soon after the patsy was arrested on the main floor.

I wouldn’t trust anything said by any USA agency or employee about James Wilcott and/or his wife. Following are apparently raw notes typed by HSCA staffers following their discussions with James Wilcott. Bill Schaap was Mr. Wilcott's attorney. Note the many details that should have been included in Mr. Wilcott's Executive Testimony posted above that were not permitted by HSCA counsel Michael Goldsmith, including the CIA cryptonym for the Oswald Project, the fact that Mr. Wilcott was anxious to take a standard lie detector test, the fact that he had clearly passed a “voice stress” lie exam, and that he knew many names of CIA personnel he wasn't allowed to state. If you haven’t read these notes before, you might want to do so now. Very eye-opening.

John, The way I explain this is that Russian-speaking Harvey Oswald was just given a “taste” of American-born Lee Oswald’s life, starting in elementary and middle schools. There, for example, while Lee Oswald attended school regularly, Harvey’s attendance was sporadic, sometimes part-time, and he was often truant. The whole idea of this was so Harvey, posing as Lee, could answer specific questions from Soviet interrogators about Lee’s life. I don’t think Lee was ever employed at the TSBD, although he probably appeared there to help set up Harvey as the patsy.

Indeed! Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach was all over this cover-up. If Malcolm or anyone else can get copies of his letters to Warren out of the Archives, let’s urge them to do so! On the following day, November 25, Belmont sent a memo to FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan indicating again that conclusions on the assassination had already been arrived at, and that the primary problem was one of convincing others of their validity. Belmont begins this memo by saying that the Director [Hoover] had been talking to Katzenbach, who in turn had been speaking with "the White House." Katzenbach reportedly felt that the FBI's report should include everything which may raise a question in the mind of the public or the press regarding this matter, including information on Oswald's military record, his return from Russia, and his trip to Mexico. Belmont went on to state that "In other words, this report is to settle the dust in so far as Oswald and his activities are concerned.... From “The First 72 Hours” by Donald Gibson Probe Magazine, Nov-Dec 1999 (excerpted from Gibson’s book, The Kennedy Assassination Cover-up.

John and Paul, I can’t keep up with you guys, but yeah, there is lots more about the bogus tax returns, but the obvious thing here is that “Oswald” was in the USMC for more than two months toward the end of 1956, but did not report any income from it. And, as John B. points out, any Marine vet will tell you the Corps takes the IRS seriously and makes every effort to see that their soldiers complete their IRS forms accurately. The reason “Oswald’s” 1956 USMC income was not reported on his Form 1040 is simple. The Department of the Navy didn’t officially figure out how much Classic Oswald® was paid until Sept. 15, 1964, long after the FBI faked the documents and the WC completed its work. If anyone is wondering, there are W-2 forms in the National Archives that precisely match the three employer entries in the 1956 Form 1040. In the late 1990s, when I began working with John Armstrong, he sent me first generation blowups of the three 1956 W-2 forms from NARA and asked me to find a typography expert to examine them. John asked me to carefully black out “Oswald’s” name because, as he put it, “when people learn they're checking into Lee Harvey Oswald, things always get weird.” And so I blacked out Oswald’s name and sent the three W-2 forms to a woman named Dawn Stanford, an archivist at the IBM Corporation. Dawn had thousands of examples of typewriter fonts and declared that, on close examination, the three W-2s had a very unusual font and, in her opinion, they were all typed on the same machine. What are the chances of that? Interestingly enough, Social Security Administration records report no income whatsoever for “Lee Harvey Oswald” prior to his USMC employment. For more information from John Armstrong on this, see these two pages on my website: 1955 and 1956

All of “Lee Harvey Oswald’s” remaining tax returns were allegedly released in 1996 with Marina Oswald Porter’s permission. See them here: Oswald's Alleged Tax Returns At least some of these documents, I believe all of them, appear to be fraudulent. For example, look at the first page of his so-called 1956 IRS form 1040 (which was "released" earlier than the other tax returns: There are a number of things wrong with this document, but one of them is quite obvious if you know the alleged biography of Classic Oswald®. Can anyone spot it?

Here's a link to page 8 of the transcript of the WC meeting of Jan. 21, 1964: https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcexec/wcex0121/html/WcEx0121_0009a.htm Earl Warren's statement seems odd indeed, because FBI agents within hours of the assassination had confiscated original documents of even "Oswald's" teenaged employment, and Rankin and Warren indicated that agents from both the IRS and Treasury Department were involved. In the same meeting, as Len Osanic has pointed out, “the WC talks about how they want to exhume Oswald's body, and burn it! At that meeting, Earl Warren says, ‘The question might arise as to something on that body. Now, I don't know what it is.’ and Warren also states he is afraid that ‘they’ [no indication as to who that is] might come and 'exhume him' and 'do something that would further injure the country.’ Extensive discussion goes on among the members about cremating the body or locking it into a mausoleum, and they talk about how they might do this without Marguerite's consent, if Marina might agree to it.” Now, why would some WC people believe it would “further injure the country” if “Oswald’s” body was exhumed back in 1964? Thanks to Richard Booth, Len Osanic, and James Norwood for their emails regarding the above.

In the 1970s, Robert Mullen was quick to deny that Southern Air Transport (SAT) of Miami was a CIA front. SAT later was heavily involved in the Contra-cocaine scandal. The May 19, 1975 issue of Newsweek linked Price-Waterhouse executive Percival Brundage to Southern Air Transport, Double-Chek Corp, the Robert R. Mullen Company, and Zenith Technical Enterprises. Brundage was president of the Friends of Albert Schweitzer College, to which, of course, “Lee Harvey Oswald” famously applied. Small world, this world of Lone Nuts!

OK, so apparently the 1940 census-taker was given Lance Oswald’s nickname, rather than his legal name. Odd, but possible, I suppose. That is incredibly suspicious that the 12:45 call for Tippit to “move into central Oak Cliff area” is left out of CD 290. No doubt WC apologists will say this is a simple error, but several other possibilities seem more likely, none of them innocent. Sandy asked about the dispatcher’s instruction to Tippit: "You will be at large for any emergency that comes in." I remember that someone speculated that this was a kind of inside joke between Jackson and Tippit, though I don’t remember the specifics. Seems like an odd time for jokes.

Thanks, but now I'm even more confused. Do you think "Lance Armstrong" and "Lee Armstrong," both of Wisconsin, are the same person?