Ron Ecker

Wim has also stated that according to Tosh the photo goes "way beyond 1963," i.e. it was taken much later. Perhaps Wim can also expand on that.

I’m Ron Ecker in Florida. I received my BA in English at the University of Florida in 1964, and spent two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Peru. I earned a Masters in Library Science degree at Florida State University, and spent almost 20 years as a librarian with the state of Florida. During those years I also wrote books, and took early retirement in 2000 to become a full-time writer. My books include the Dictionary of Science and Creationism, And Adam Knew Eve: A Dictionary of Sex in the Bible, The Evolutionary Tales: Rhyme and Reason on Creation/Evolution, and the vampire novel (writing as William Pridgen) Night of the Dragon’s Blood. My complete modern-English translation of The Canterbury Tales has been a widely adopted text in college and university literature courses. My website includes electronic editions of And Adam Knew Eve and The Evolutionary Tales, a collection of unproduced screenplays, and Ecker’s JFK Web Page. I began researching the JFK assassination in the 1980s, after reading my library's copy of David Lifton’s Best Evidence.

While doing a Search-in-the-Books search on Barnes at Amazon.com (there are over 1,000 references), I’ve come across a suspicion that Barnes was complicit in the murder of Black Panther Alex Rackley in New Haven, CT. There was a Black Panther chapter in New Haven. In 1969 Black Panther founder Bobby Seale made a cross-country trip from Oakland, CA to New Haven to speak at Yale. This put him in New Haven on the day that Rackley was tortured and murdered by fellow Black Panthers, who thought Rackley was a police informer. Seale allegedly ordered the murder and was put on trial in New Haven. Barnes had left the CIA and was special assistant to Yale president Kingman Brewster. From page 403 of The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment, by Geoffrey Kabaservice (NY: Henry Holt, 2004): “The link between Yale and the Panther trial was suggested rather than established. Zanger heard a story that Brewster’s ex-CIA assistant Tracy Barnes had helped facilitate Seale’s visit to New Haven on the day of Rackley’s murder. Furthermore, ‘the Black Panther organization was riddled with informers. . . . And then you had the decision made to discipline this comrade, and Bobby Seale was asked for an OK, like the Mafia condoning a hit. . . . And lo and behold, Seale happens to be in New Haven at the right time. So it attract(ed) a certain amount of speculative attention to who in the Yale administration might have been horsing around with this.’” BTW assisting the defense in Seale’s trial was activist Yale law student Hillary Rodham Clinton. The trial ended with a hung jury and charges were dismissed.

John, That's an interesting scenario. Sounds plausible. I did a Google search and found a similar scenario, different in details (e.g. Ted and Mary Jo are ambushed), in Chapter 7 of the online book The Taking of America. The chapter summarizes a book by Cutler called You the Jury, self-published in 1974. http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ToA/ToAchp7.html

I believe the best explanation for the Watergate break-ins was given in the book Silent Coup. Liddy read the book and was convinced that this explanation was correct. He discusses it in the appendix of his book When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country. The first break-in was to bug the telephone of the DNC's Spencer Oliver, because that phone was used to set up important Democratic visitors with call girls. IOW the purpose of the break-in was to expose a call-girl ring being run out of the DNC. John Dean subsequently found out that one of the photographs of call girls that were kept in the desk of Spencer's secretary to show visitors may have been of his fiance Mo Biner. Dean ordered the second break-in in order to get rid of anything that would damage his own reputation and Mo's. Apparently the CIA made sure the burglars were caught in the process, for whatever reason they wanted to bring down Nixon. But the break-ins themselves were, to quote Bill Clinton fans, "just about sex." The key that was taken from Eugenio Martinez upon his arrest was the key to the secretary's desk, and, in Liddy's words, "the key to Watergate."

Can you offer a scenario by which conspirators arranged, to begin with, for Ted to take Mary Jo from the party in his car, and then, secondly, to drive the car off the bridge? Unless Ted himself intended to take her off and murder her, how did conspirators do this?

And, according to Morrow, the person who requested he buy the rifles was Tracy Barnes. Barnes made the request on July 1, 1963 for 4 7.35 MC rifles, available from Sonny's Supply stores in Baltimore. Barnes asked Morrow to modify them so they could be easily dismantled, hidden, and reassembled. Morrow bought 4, but when he found a screw on one had been stripped, Barnes told him 3 would suffice, and said someone Morrow knew would pick them up in a few weeks. The man who picked them up was David Ferrie, who said they were to be used to assassinate a head of state. Ferrie then added that it was Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic. On 11/23/63 Morrow says he was in a panic because of the rifles (and 4 transceivers he had supplied to Eladio del Valle), and called Barnes, who told him that he (Morrow) was "clean as a whistle."

Apparently the main source on Kilgallen giving her notes to Mrs. Smith was Penn Jones. I have no copies of Jones's works, but it would be interesting to know where Jones got his information. I recently bought a used copy of Lee Israel's biography "Kilgallen," which as far as I know is the most authoritative work on her. Florence Prichett (aka Florence Smith) gets one mention in the whole book, with no indication that she and Kilgallen even knew each other, though I'm sure they did. From page 426, on Kilgallen's Jack Ruby material: "Three days after (Dorothy's) death, Bob and Jean Bach invited (her husband) Richard Kollmar to their home for dinner. Bob asked the widower, 'Dick, what was all that stuff in the folder Dorothy carried around with her about the assassination?' "Richard replied, 'Robert, I'm afraid that will have to go to the grave with me.'" (From author's interview of Bob Bach.) Israel also relates that Mark Lane called Kollmar a month after Kilgallen's death and asked if he could see "the folder." Kollmar told him, "I'm going to destroy all that. It's done enough damage already." (From author's interview of Lane.) Israel also notes that in 1975 the FBI asked Kilgallen's son about his mother's papers. (Kollmer committed suicide in 1971.) He knew nothing about their disposition and "suggested that his grandfather might have them" (p. 427). Israel concludes "it is impossible to know whether (Kollmer) ever really possessed the material or what he decided to do with it. . . . Nothing of what Dorothy gathered, surmised, or wrote during her private interview with Jack Ruby or on her Texas or New Orleans sojourns has ever come to light" (p. 427).

James, Egad, yet another Main and Houston lookalike! How many does that make? The Barnes resemblance is indeed striking, except the man on the corner looks to have a normal left ear. In Barnes’ photo his ear looks to be all but missing. There is another photo of Barnes in Morrow’s book, and his ears look almost non-existence there too. (Of course that master of disguise E. Howard Hunt could have given Barnes some ears to wear for the Dallas trip.) Larry, On Barnes, there is this from Hunt’s HSCA deposition (p. 31 of second session): Mr. Genzman: During the time period 1962 to 1965, where were you stationed specifically? Mr. Hunt: After Allen left, I joined Tracy Barnes’ new Domestic Operations Division, which should have been called the commercial operations division, and I worked for them in Washington until sometime in 1965, when we left for Spain under cover. In his book Undercover (p. 132), Hunt goes into more detail on Barnes' division: “At the end of 1961 Dulles was forced to ‘retire,’ and Richard Bissell followed. He was succeeded, not by Tracy Barnes, but by Richard Helms, untainted by the Bay of Pigs. “After a considerable bureaucratic struggle Barnes established the Domestic Operations Division and appointed me its chief of covert action. The new division accepted both personnel and projects unwanted elsewhere within CIA, and those covert-action projects that came to me were almost entirely concerned with publishing and publications. We subsidized ‘significant’ books, for example, The New Class, by Milovan Djilas, one of a number of Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., titles so supported; ran a couple of news services—one based in Washington’s National Press Building—even subsidizing the printing and distribution of a well-known series of travel books. The work was not particularly demanding, and at the end of the day I still had sufficient energy to write fiction at home.” Hunt skips to the summer of 1964 (p. 133), when “I received orders from the division's executive officer, Stanley Gaines, to have some of my ‘outside’ personnel obtain information from the nearby headquarters of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. This was a White House matter, I was told, President Johnson being keenly interested in the plans and utterances of Barry Goldwater.” Hunt had his subordinates frequently pick up press material, position papers, and advance speaking schedules from Goldwater’s headquarters under various pretexts. “This was my first exposure to White House use of Agency personnel against a ‘domestic enemy,’ and I found it disturbing.” Hunt also says this of Barnes in his book Give Us This Day (pp. 22-23), when Barnes hired him as Chief of Political Action for the Bay of Pigs: “Suave and popular, Barnes was a product of Groton, Yale, and Harvard Law. Through marriage he was connected to the Rockefeller clan, and during World War II he had worked for Allen Dulles and been decorated with the Silver Star. We had a common OSS background, and five years before I had worked for Tracy as a member of the CIA team that ousted Jacobo Arbenz from Guatemala.”

The man cannot be Jim Braden. Since Braden was arrested for acting suspiciously in the Dal-Tex Building, he was presumably in custody for a while. He was not roaming around in the plaza after the assassination.

From Larry Hancock's Someone Would Have Talked (p. 163): "After being given personal instruction and orders from the Assassination Records Review Board (under federal statute) not to destroy any further records, the Secret Service destroyed boxes full of documents relating to an aborted Kennedy trip to Chicago in early November, 1963."

Yes. To borrow a phrase from the HSCA, America on 9/11 was "uniquely insecure."

ARRB stands for the Assassination Records Review Board. See the post by Doug Horne in the thread "Student Questions: JFK and LBJ" (second page) for an excellent description of the ARRB and its work. Mr. Horne was an ARRB staff analyst.

To add to what Larry has said, the ARRB interviewed Lt. Col. Reich, who was commander of the 316th INTC Group in November 1963, and he firmly denied there was any stand down order as claimed by Prouty. When Reich first read Prouty's claim, in Mark Lane's book, he considered taking legal action, and he told the ARRB "that guy (Prouty) has been smoking something." All this is covered in Larry's CD "Keys to the Conspiracy" available from JFK Lancer. Regarding the Secret Service, the undeniable fact is that JFK was stripped of normal security in Dallas. The number of escorting motorcycles was reduced, those that would normally ride beside the limo were moved back, and where motorcycles would normally flank the limo in front there were none. This action was taken by the Secret Service in a meeting the night before with the Dallas Police, who had planned the normal deployment. As the HSCA put it, these changes made the Dallas motorcade "uniquely insecure." In addition, the press truck that would normally be in front of the limo was eliminated from the motorcade, with the press stuck back where they couldn't see or photograph anything. No one seems to know how this happened! These actions left nothing but open space in front of the limo for snipers from the right, front, or left. McHugh or another JFK military aide who would often ride in the middle of the front seat was also absent from the limo and thus out of any line of fire. Strange that they went to this trouble to leave JFK completely open to snipers from the front or side, when Oswald behind him was going to do all the shooting!

I’m Ron Ecker in Florida. I received my BA in English at the University of Florida in 1964, and spent two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Peru. I earned a Masters in Library Science degree at Florida State University, and spent almost 20 years as a librarian with the state of Florida. During those years I also wrote books, and took early retirement in 2000 to become a full-time writer. My books include the Dictionary of Science and Creationism, And Adam Knew Eve: A Dictionary of Sex in the Bible, The Evolutionary Tales: Rhyme and Reason on Creation/Evolution, and the vampire novel (writing as William Pridgen) Night of the Dragon’s Blood. My complete modern-English translation of The Canterbury Tales has been a widely adopted text in college and university literature courses. My website includes electronic editions of And Adam Knew Eve and The Evolutionary Tales, as well as Ecker’s JFK Webpage. I began buying all the JFK conspiracy books I could find in the 1980s after reading David Lifton’s Best Evidence. Since my retirement from library work in 2000, I have had plenty of time to devote to JFK research, and have written a few articles on the assassination that can be found at http://www.hobrad.com/jfk.htm.

What was the KGB motive for assassinating JFK? What did Russia gain?

Amos Euins stated at the scene that the man he saw in the window was black. No one should be surprised if the kid's story changed by the time Arlen Specter got him in front of the commission.

He was working the night shift at CIA headquarters, as CIA spokeswoman Sharron Basso stated in 1988 and she said that would have been "the appropriate place to have received such an FBI report." That report took place on November 23, 1963, presumably in Washington and perhaps in the wee hours of the morning or else late that night, in either case when this low level clerk was on duty. George H.W. Bush was in Tyler and Dallas the afternoon of November 22, with plans to return to his Houston home on November 23. Would he be the first government xxxx in the JFK case? He would be included if he in fact was the person who received the report. Hoover would not say that the information was furnished to "somebody at the CIA."

I don't know much about undercover CIA work, but it seems odd to me that an agent under cover enough to be running for Congress would at the same time put himself, or be put, in a position of being officially briefed for the agency by the FBI. The other George Bush reportedly specialized in maps and coastlines. That would include maps and coastlines of Cuba. He was also on weekend duty at the CIA the weekend of the assassination. It makes me wonder if he was part of or privy to a planned or hoped for invasion of Cuba in the immediate wake of the assassination (assuming it was to be blamed on Castro), something that later could not be disclosed, hence his denial that he talked with anybody about the assassination. But that's just my speculation. There was a lot happening in those days that doesn't make sense.

This is interesting in that Bush seems to have been a little more well known at the time than I have assumed. And since a known, active CIA agent would not be an announced candidate for political office, it doesn't make sense that Hoover would refer to him in an FBI memo as "Mr. George Bush of the CIA." This would mean that Hoover was in fact referring to the other George Bush, the CIA employee who later strongly denied it was him. The question then becomes, why that denial? There was something later being hidden about that George Bush's connection to the events of November 1963.

In an old file I came across an article clipped from the 11/21/93 Gainesville (FL) Sun (“A Special Friendship,” by Mitch Stacy) based on an interview of former Senator George Smathers, then 80. The most interesting portions: “That’s the Monday when he said to me, ‘God, I hate to go to Dallas,’ recalls Smathers. “And I said, ‘You got to go because Lyndon would never speak to you again.’ Lyndon didn’t like him anyway.” One touchy issue for Smathers as a lawmaker in the conservative South was civil rights, which Kennedy championed. Smathers says that backing civil rights at the time was as bad as being a communist as far as many voters in North Florida were concerned. “I was telling him to go slow,” Smathers remembers. “He didn’t need to be told to do it. . . I was just saying, go slow; don’t run off all your votes in the South.” Smathers learned of Kennedy’s death via a radio report as he was flying in a private plane from Jacksonville to a vacation spot in Georgia. “It was a sad, sad day,” he says. “I talk about it some days, and tears come to my eyes, and I have to watch myself so I don’t cry. But it was a terrifically bad blow.”

From “Nowhere Man: The Strange Story of Gordon Arnold,” by Dave Reitzes: In 1993 Ralph W. Yarborough was interviewed at his Austin home by historian David Murph of Texas Christian University. Murph reminded Yarborough that he had been quoted as saying he had witnessed a man on the grassy knoll throw himself down on the ground, and that the man had impressed him as a combat veteran. Yarborough seemed puzzled to hear that his words had been applied to someone standing on the grassy knoll. That couldn’t possibly be correct, he insisted repeatedly. “Remember where I was in the motorcade — with the Johnsons,” he cautioned Murph, “too far back to have been able to see anyone [on the knoll] drop to the ground when firing began.” Whoever Yarborough had described (and there were many people in Dealey Plaza throwing themselves down on the ground as the shots rang out), it could not have been Gordon Arnold. (end quote) http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/arnold1.htm

I recall a plane crash years ago in which Senator Ted Kennedy was seriously injured. It wouldn't surprise me if that crash wasn't accidental.

Larry, I believe that Escalante's claim that Diaz Garcia was involved in the assassination is corroborated by the WC testimony of Arnold Rowland, who saw a fiftyish black man at the 6th floor window, whose face was "wrinkled or marked in some way." In the only photo I've seen of Diaz Garcia, who was black, there is some sort of mark on his forehead. It's possible that Escalante got the idea of involving Diaz Garcia from the testimony of Rowland. But then did Escalante also put the mark on Diaz's forehead?

Here's an article on the Flight 175 photos, originally published in La Vanguardia, a national newspaper in Barcelona, Spain. (Here's a joke: imagine this being published in the New York Times or Washington Post, one of our national newspapers. Ha ha ha ha.) According to the article, La Vanguardia contacted Boeing, which refused to comment on grounds of "national security." It referred them to the 9/11 commission. (Another joke. Ha ha ha ha.) http://www.rense.com/general41/spain.htm