Richard Gilbride

Yes, I do subscribe to the belief that Lee Harvey Oswald, the "historic" Oswald who was gunned down by Jack Ruby, was picked up by the Rambler seen by Craig. Shelley's failure to acknowledge having encountered LHO on the landing is support for that belief; he should have shared what was a run-of-the-mill sighting of LHO, but kept that secret.

John Armstrong's presentation of the Harvey & Lee TSBD movements never sat right with me, in his book. But I do believe the doppelganger Lee Oswald was used as the 6th-floor SW window sniper. The photo resemblance on p. 61 should give anyone pause for thought.

For instance, if I was Angleton, running an Oswald doppelganger program, and wanted to entrap one as a patsy, I'd sure as heck get the doppelganger Lee involved with TSBD activities on November 22nd. Just to help confuse the overall investigation, which he knew would go on for years and years. By putting him in the SW window, they had some options for cobbling together an early story, day one , day two, etc. There was further evidence the doppelganger Lee was around town on the 22nd in the Jiffy Store encounter earlier that morning, in the TF White sighting at the El Chico parking lot, and in the Robert Vinson account of a military transport's makeshift landing across from the Trinity River.

Less definitive but certainly in the mix, one can't exclude the doppelganger's role in the Tippit murder and Texas Theater.

A further doppelganger is in one of the tramps photos, in the background talking to Inspector Sawyer approx. 2:19 PM. I don't think he has a designated name yet. How's Leeski sound? Leeski, the Amerikanski.

Ray,

Baker, having been up a bunch of stairs outside to reach what was to him the 2nd floor (for all he knew), soon ascended one flight of a split-level stairway, and did not know whether he was on the 3rd or 4th floor. We have the benefit of diagrams today to see that his description is way off the mark. He was not going to night school studying to be an architect.

The stairs were a big part of his recollection of the TSBD building while filling out his affidavit. After all, he had climbed them from the 1st to the 5th. Once he reached the top of the first set of stairs, which he had described being on the "3rd or 4th floor", he didn't see a man walking toward the stairway, did he?

You're taking a poor description that does give the hunch that perhaps the lunchroom incident was hoaxed, but this claim requires proof, not just a collection of more hunches. Each facet of the hoax hypothesis has a reasonable, mundane alternative explanation readily available. And several facets have to be completely distorted in order to fit a possible hoax scenario. Look at them, please, they are listed in post #120.

You have fallen for this mullarkey, it leads only to imaginary encounters and fruitless speculation. But hey, it's only a homicide case, let's indulge in sophistry as much as possible, right? Life's too short for achievable answers that will sustain.

Vanessa,

I pointed out that you make no allowances for Baker's having been out to Parkland & Love Field, nor his probable mental lapse when he sat down and started composing his affidavit.

It is your hyperbole that is spinning this into an argument that I think Baker was "too stupid and confused"... You are exaggerating a perceived chink of light in Fritz's testimony that seems to you to favor a lunchroom-hoax interpretation. And completely ignoring the list of evidence that the hoaxers have to bend way out of whack in order to be able to fit it into the supports-the-hoax column.

A hypothesis must account for the totality of evidence. You refuse to go there, and prefer the safety of your tribe. We don't have much more to discuss if you want to hide behind the ROKC hoax promulgators.

Robert,

Tommy aptly sums up my position in that I don't think Truly would volunteer any information about hearing Adams & Styles even if he had, i.e. he's the leader of the TSBD conspirators, wanting to keep the intel to a minimum, so why drag A & S into it? And Baker wouldn't be interrupted from his gun-in-the-belly inquiry of Oswald even if he did happen to hear muffled high heels outside on the landing. It did not apply to his present gestalt.

The vestibule door had recently been installed- its grain pattern is fresh and strong- and I do believe the purpose was to keep the racket from the stairs down to a manageable level. So that office workers could eat their lunches in relative tranquility.

The pneumatic door device closed the door completely in only a few seconds. This was not the plush model of pneumatic closers you occasionally find today- those puppies can take forever and a day.

Truly was at the lunchroom doorframe for about 15-20 seconds, arriving inside the vestibule just after Baker, who estimated he spent 30 seconds inside the vestibule/lunchroom area. You'll find a picture of this standard pneumatic closing device in the old ROKC archives thread "The Lunchroom Incident Revisited". Somewhere in the early pages Colin Crow found it from the Secret Service re-enactment film.

***********************************

TRULY: I saw the officer almost directly in the doorway of the lunchroom facing Oswald.

Belin never bothered to specifically ask whether, after Truly leaned in, he stepped in and allowed the vestibule door to close. That detail mattered little or nothing to the testimony, which was about Baker confronting Oswald.

If Truly had stayed frozen in time, leaning in and watching the Baker/Oswald interaction, how could he see Oswald's facial expression and the fact that Baker had a gun in Oswald's gut? They weren't in profile to Truly's point-of-view, because if they were, Baker and Oswald would both be 2-3 feet inside the lunchroom. This wasn't what Truly described- he described Baker just inside the doorframe, facing Oswald, who was 2-3 feet inside the lunchroom. The details Truly was able to garner came from moseying up to them. He crossed about 7-8 feet of vestibule floorspace and the vestibule door closed behind him.

"The elevator was hung several floors up so we used the stairs instead. As we reached the third or fourth floor I saw a man walking away from the stairway."

Vanessa, I cannot agree with your assessment that it seems "crystal clear" that Baker's affidavit implies that the encounter took place on the stairs, i.e. As we reached the third or fourth floor (of the building)... One may look through the lens of the lunchroom incident not having occurred, or having occurred, with equal ease here.

Baker was not the sharpest tack in the drawer, and even as a "trained police officer" initially wrote a statement that the lunchroom was on the "second or third floor", 6 months after his testimony, which included a couple re-enactments.

I view Fritz through the lens of being a conspirator. Baker worked in Traffic & Security, not Homicide. The person who first told Fritz about Baker very likely was Homicide's Marvin Johnson (XXIV p. 307 p. 2 line 4) who wrote a report that included a synopsis of Baker's affidavit, including (line 11): On about the 4th floor Officer Baker apprehended a man that was walking away from the stairway on that floor. Again, this can be taken either way, for or against the lunchroom incident- but nothing of necessity says we have to incorporate it into the hoax column.

The "snack bar" description for the location didn't get introduced until Truly spoke to the FBI that night. So you're putting the onus completely on Baker, 52 years after the event, that he's not smart enough to tell the difference between a stairway and a snack bar. With no allowance for Baker's characterized modest-ranged intelligence, or his having been out to Parkland and Love Field. Ever had a brief mental lapse while sitting down to compose something?

Fundamentally, I go back to the analogy I presented of placing data in the negative region of the x-y coordinate system, versus the positive region. Some of the evidence has to be bent way out of whack in order to fit into the negative region. I cited the filmed interview, the Sept. 23rd affidavit, the will-call counter bump, and the lack of corroboration for Kent Biffle's story. Let's also include the close comparison between Oswald's wedding ring left behind & Baker forgetting to mention Oswald in his first-day affidavit. In the final analysis God only knows why, and it's worthless as a definitive indicator.

I'm embarrassed for the promulgators of the hoax hypothesis, who have so much emotionally involved in being right. Brilliant people are a dime a dozen in JFK research. Correct people count for the most. The truth is most often found in the mundane, and there's no reason here to have to believe in "sexed-up" evidence. The whole back-and-forth has been productive over the years, but I'd rather not see the hoaxers dig in like Japanese soldiers on the Philippines still fighting WWII in 1950. I remind you that it will be more painful for you, when your illusion shatters, the longer you hang on.

Vanessa,

Just a pause before responding to your analysis. Here is the photo I found & scrutinized when Sean informed me of the entity he called PrayerMan. I immediately asked if he was praying for rain. And I saw a similarity in the tuft of hair & general outline of hair to conclude that Oswald was indeed him.

A shock to the system- and extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof. I don't know enough about photography to contend Duncan's claim about buttons. I don't think the debate can be answered at that level. And I do consider Albert Doyle a perceptive inquirer and think he has a valid critique about- why didn't someone mention seeing him as they returned into the building? I'm interested in the content of his posts much more than his "handle". My CB handle in the mid-80's was "Dr. Who".

You can't have room for any arguments at all- particularly in this sound-byte world. I mean, the idea is, get this on the network news. You have 10 seconds to slam-dunk this to the nth degree.

My guess is Robert Groden is the man to enlist for getting a high-resolution scan of that 1st-weekend copy of Darnell that the Sixth Floor Museum houses. I would further guess that some kind of "Power of Attorney" would be served upon them to cut through the copyright litigation red tape, since the Darnell family owns the rights. Probably would need a copyright lawyer to get that.

And, don't be disappointed if the improvement in image quality is less than 5%, and much less than the 20% or so needed. Copies were pretty darn good in those days- just consult the Z-film alteration specialists. No sense getting too, too wrapped up in whether PrayerMan debuts next fall with his own weekly variety show.

Tommy Graves: if Baker & Truly were on the 2nd-floor landing while Adams & Styles were somewhere on the 3rd-floor landing, was there enough time for Truly to get inside the lunchroom before he could be seen by Adams & Styles, given that Truly had apparently continued straight ahead and started walking up the stairs to the 3rd floor, and then, realizing that Baker was no longer behind him, gone back down and entered the lunchroom itself?

Truly testified he "was up two or three steps before I realized the officer wasn't following me." He absolutely had time to get into the vestibule, and then mosey up to the lunchroom doorframe (with the vestibule door automatically closing a few seconds after he proceeded through the vestibule doorframe), before the young ladies arrived on the 2nd-floor landing.

I don't think that it matters much whether Truly ever realized the young ladies were just up ahead of him. I strongly suspect he was laying a trap for Baker- that he knew Oswald was at the vestibule door, and that Baker would most likely find that suspicious, being that deep in the building, far from the parade.

Truly's plan for a quickly-arriving cop was to get him in the lunchroom while the west elevator descended, and it worked to perfection. But Baker was so fast in his response, 15 seconds faster than anticipated, that Truly was forced into hyperdrive. This "perfection" may seem like circular logic, but more closely resembles a well-designed football play. Their mad dash to the freight elevators & 2nd-floor landing was over and done by as little as 50 seconds after the head shots.

Just my 2 cents on Baker's actions after he had virtually reached the first step as filmed by Couch:

WCH VII reads: On March 20, 1964, counsel from the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy timed a re-enactment of my actions after hearing the shots on November 22, 1963. During this re-enactment, I reached the recessed door of the Texas School Book Depository Building fifteen seconds after the time of the simulated shot. Signed this 11th day of August 1964 at Dallas, Tex.

(s) Marrion L. Baker, MARRION L. BAKER

I can't see any reason why Baker would be diverted from sprinting straight up the seven steps. Especially with a re-enactment that brought him straight to the top of the landing. I don't see a need for having a single witness to confirm that this is what happened.

Tommy,

I'd say Adams & Styles were somewhere on the 3rd-floor landing, when Baker made it to the 2nd-floor landing. This is approx. Z-313 plus 50 seconds, given our current understanding that Baker touches the first step to the entranceway at 22+ seconds.

I didn't download the Lancer film study when I analysed it back in 2009. The meat of it was Sean's Lancer posts #61097 & #61202, from July 18-20, 2007. As I recall he worked in concert with a Jeff Daniels (not 100% on this name) and the politics at the time was debunking Gary Mack's assertion that Baker didn't reach the TSBD until 45 seconds. So my thought is that they may have settled on a compromise value somewhere along the line, adding up the respective factors, just to show that Mack was way off.

The Couch film started at approx. Z-313 plus 10 seconds, according to Roffman, and Baker reached the top of the landing at 15 seconds in one re-enactment.

Vanessa,

Apologies on the delayed response. Had to visit a hospitalized family member who's the better part of a day's drive away. Just got back to cyberspace. You seem to be slighted that I have not shown the same kind of adoration for Sean's hallowed hoax hypothesis as you. And it's true that I don't esteem your opinion very much. I have read several of your posts over the past year and still do not see you rising above being an ROKC cheerleader. But your response is good, you are getting somewhere.

But you set up a false dichotomy between me & Greg. My beef is with the attacks & insults that are hurled daily from his forum, which has a long laundry list of people it disdains, on a continual basis. Especially those who express opposing views to that forum's consensus. That is disrespect, plain and simple.

You are misunderstanding my position if you don't think I sign on to Prayer Man. I did in 2010 and have never wavered. There is more about that, and a critique of the methodology of ROKC's study of Prayerman, in the beginning of Part 1 of my Rob Clark interview. Part 3, from 13:00- 32:15, discusses the lunchroom hoax issue.

http://www.spreaker.com/user/thelonegunman/ep-88-inside-job-pt-3-final-with-richard

Baker was not going to night school studying to be an architect. He had a nickname with the force- "Mommason"- and was considered somewhat of a dope. Fritz, who assumedly read Baker's affidavit, does not exactly brim over with unequivocable assurance that Baker had in reality met Oswald on a stairway.

This is another of the negative data points assembled to construct the lunchroom hoax hypothesis. They all get assembled in the negative region of the x-y coordinate system. Hoaxers simply ignore data that doesn't fit in this negative region- the filmed Baker interviews, the will-call counter bump, WC Exhibit 3076, the lack of corroboration for Kent Biffle's news blurb, to name several.

This negative region is not the real world. Sean has seen the problem the Stroud document introduces since 2011. When you couple it with an understanding of the A & S and T & B timelines, it invalidates his hypothesis. This led him to discredit the Stroud document as just hearsay, and construct another fantasy- that T & B had taken the west elevator up- in order to salvage his lunchroom hoax fantasy. (see "Murphy's Postulate" at the end of my first lunchroom essay, which has a separate listing in the table of contents at the old ROKC site.)

The hoax hypothesis has yielded no results, save added confusion, in its 10+ years. It gives an imaginary confrontation between Baker & Oswald on the front landing. There is no substantiable evidence for this, just wishful thinking. It gives an imaginary encounter with "Spooky", i.e. the "3rd or 4th floor" man, who was "walking away from the stairway". It leads neophytes to believe Ira Trantham met Spooky and kept that hidden until his HSCA interview.

Believing the lunchroom incident happened gives these results:

1) the traditional critique, that Oswald was too calm to have just raced down from the sniper's nest

2) Howard Roffman's & Bill Kelly's point- that Oswald had to have entered from the direction of the central offices

3) A & S passed T & B while they were in the lunchroom, which Sean conveniently ignored when I posted it at Lancer in 2011

4) If Sean's research about Adams hearing the cables is correct, the west elevator began its descent approx. 60 seconds after the assassination.

Firewater does not help lift the veil of illusion. It does add to confusion, killing brain cells slowly but surely.

Barry's a nice guy. He responded to an e-mail query before i had the chance to get back to my computer, and was right on top of what I was wondering about. Inside Job, p. 65

The lunchroom hoaxers belittle his work but, frankly, they aren't in his league.

The evidence we are given says Adams & Styles left the 4th-floor window moments after seeing Clint Hill jump onto the limo trunk. They left no later 10 seconds after Z-313.

Sample timelines are given right on the 1st two pages of that section of the essay. Simply to illustrate that it is beyond the bounds of reason to expect that the girls escaped Truly & Baker's notice down on the first floor of the warehouse.

But the November 22nd actual timeline, the section implies, was slower than that for Adams & Styles, because it looks like Baker made it to the 2nd-floor landing by 50 seconds.

I wish we had the original 2007 Lancer film study to examine, which concluded Baker touched the first step at about 22 seconds. They were mainly interested in defeating a push by Gary Mack, who contended it was as long as 45 seconds.

The information from Howard Roffman's book, which states that Couch began filming about 10 seconds after the head shot, as well as Baker's re-enactment ride, which took him to the landing in only 15 seconds, leads me to think that the value of 22 seconds is too much time.

Your claim that this film demolishes the 2nd-floor lunchroom story is based upon Sean Murphy's faulty hypothesis that the incident never occurred. The principle of garbage in garbage out applies here. I wrote a screenplay where Eddie Piper was the sniper's nest shooter. Would a movie have made that more accurate?

The Prayer Man phenomenon is thereby linked with something proven incorrect, and proven several years ago- when Barry Ernest discovered the Martha Jo Stroud document in the Dallas US Attorney papers in the National Archives. Sean got indignant, angry and bitter as he realized the Stroud document made his precious lunchroom hoax hypothesis impossible. And he accused Ernest of deceptive research methodology. This key excerpt demolishes Sean's hypothesis:

Mr. Belin was questioning Miss Adams about whether or not she saw anyone as she was running down the stairs. Miss Garner, Miss Adams' supervisor, stated this morning that after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the Policeman come up.

After reading this in 2011 I immediately posted at Lancer that Adams & Styles had to have passed Truly & Baker while the latter pair were in the lunchroom. And I woke up and quit believing in Sean's hoax hypothesis.

It is part of the group-think, Cheka-like, tribal-intimidation schtick at ROKC that members have to swallow this hoax mullarkey, or else. And it will be more painful for you, the longer you hang onto it. You will do yourself a favor to educate yourself on a critique of the hoax, and you will find one on pp. 26-36 of my essay at jfkinsidejob.com

Mixing the lunchroom hoax with Prayerman is like adding hemlock to a milkshake. Are you going to continue to abandon your innate ability to think critically and make judgments for yourself in favor of being popular with the tribe?

JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax is at CTKA. Scroll down about 40% of the way, the link is in the left-hand column.

I think Jim DiEugenio has mentioned recently that it's still one of his most-viewed pieces. It was so up-front it got Seamus a writing job. You've heard of must-see TV? Well, this is a must-read.

This is a huge lacuna and filling it even partially probably involves several years. You might get lucky. Dr. Rosin may remember associates he contacted fairly regularly, they might have collections of personal papers housed somewhere that hold a clue. My guess on von Braun's associates to look into would be White Sands early Paperclip scientists, Huntsville Germans, & NASA heavyweights such as Kurt Debus and Arthur Rudolph.

My conclusion was that there was a "rogue" group out of the 1000 Paperclip guys, who stayed in the desert, or even went to Wright-Patterson, to develop advanced aerospace technology. Von Braun was always the go-to guy.

I could not adequately figure out, after Seamus Coogan's expose of Tim Cooper's bogus MJ-12 documents, what Cooper or his cohort Richard Doty were trying to tell us. What was the grain of truth in that disinformation ploy? Von Braun is in a couple of them, and his appraisal of the downed crash seemed quite credible. But was this only a clever story?

David von Pein and I do not agree on much interpretation of evidence, but we see eye to eye here, and I thank him for bringing Barry Ryder's critique to my attention. I had strongly suspected that much of Stan Dane's book was devoted to Sean Murphy's lunchroom hoax hypothesis.

This is a failure, to be kind, or 1st-order mullarkey, to be real. It will go the way of "the driver shot JFK". I invested 12 pages in my essay Inside Job thoroughly debunking this hypothesis.

"Ye shall know them by their fruits," and this school of thought, in its 10+ years of existence, has produced only ephemera:

a) an Ira Trantham HSCA memo, mentioning an arrest of someone on the 3rd floor of the TSBD- in contradiction to Trantham's report in the WC's Decker exhibit, where he'd arrested someone who'd been on the 3rd floor of the Dal-Tex, and video of that someone (Larry Florer) being walked in front of the TSBD. In short, Trantham's HSCA memory was horrific. (The alternative is that Trantham & DPD officer Denham join Ochus Campbell & Jerladean Reid in a Truly/Baker mini-conspiracy to fabricate the lunchroom story).

Tan Jacket Man, seen doing a quick about face in the parking lot in the Hughes film. You won't find him in any other footage or crowd photos. Trust me, I've looked, back in 2010 when I fell for this mullarkey. In short, there's no further information that he's anything more than an innocent bystander. But hey, Sean Murphy thinks he may have been "3rd floor man", so let's all rush down to the Dallas DA's office and accuse Tan Jacket Man of murder.

Proponents of the hoax hypothesis completely ignore the obvious- Baker was confused about the TSBD floor layout. He crossed out his first description of the lunchroom's location in his September 23rd affidavit, WC Exhibit 3076, given 6 months after his testimony. And there's a lot more they're in denial about- see Inside Job.

And Stan does a tremendous disservice to Sean by fawning over his every pronouncement. I took pains to show, in a previous essay, that another Murphy postulate- about Truly & Baker having taken the west elevator instead of the stairs (which consumes much of the Prayer Man thread) doesn't float. This construction, which Sean evidently labored over for several years, failed its first sea trial.

To grow as a researcher Stan will have to admit his error like a man. Or he can pretend the lunchroom hoax is still a viable possibility and live in continuing narcissism.

I used to think Danny Arce was involved in the plot, but changed my mind about him, pp. 68-69 of the essay put him under the spotlight. What is of paramount curiosity regarding Arce is why he so blatantly changed his location at the time of the shots when he testified. The answer to that is put forth in the next section of the essay, on Army Intelligence agent James Powell.

I highly doubt Oswald was ever shown the rifle. It was locked away in the Crime Lab on the 4th floor until sometime around 9:00, brought out & examined up there, then turned over to the FBI around midnight and flown to Washington. At least there's no info I'm aware of that says he was shown the rifle.

Alyea's film tells us there was no sniff test done on the 6th-floor rifle, and especially, that it had no ammo clip in it. Yet when Crime Lab head Carl Day brought the rifle out of the building, the ammo clip was filmed & photographed protruding from the bottom about 2 inches. No explanation was given by the DPD for how it got there, nor did they attribute its discovery to anyone, nor were any fingerprints found on it.

This was a blunder the DPD was not called out on- tampering with the evidence, just before the rifle was brought out of the Depository. Somebody fed the ammo clip into the magazine via the bottom, not the top (as the weapon is designed for), and it got jammed.

My essay doesn't get into that, but does mention that Day described the weapon in his hands as a "British .303" to the first reporter who asked. He had just been upstairs with a magnifying glass examining a rifle that was stamped "MADE ITALY", and that same Italian Carcano was in his hands.

What is this, Langley High, Class of '63? Nice work, Brian. Creepy nice.

Right off the bat, I would eliminate from consideration- John McCone, Winston Scott & Desmond Fitzgerald as A-1 good guys. And Frank Wisner I think had left the Agency in '62 due to poor mental health. Also Richard Bissell and Gordon Novel I see as innocent, out of the loop.

I would include a few extras from Angleton's Special Investigations Group- Birch O'Neal, Newton Miler & Ann Egerter. They had handled Oswald's false defection and, of anyone, I would pick Angleton as Oswald's case officer. Also Alan White, #2 man at the Mexico City station.

Guys on the ground in Dallas who should not be overlooked: Fred Crisman & Thomas Beckham, Bernard Barker & Roy Hargraves, Bernardo DeTorres & the Novo Sampol brothers, Guillermo & Ignacio, and the "three amigos"- Loran Hall, Lawrence Howard & William Seymour, who were getaway drivers.

My inner circle, in no particular order, comprises Angleton, Cabell, Dulles, Harvey, Helms, Lansdale, Meyer, Morales & Phillips.

Just one man's opinion.

So true. The technology has been there since WWII, for humans to construct and fly these things, but it's so shielded with lies & disinformation & ridicule it won't be uncovered. A further example is an expose such as Annie Jacobsen's 2011 Area 51 An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. This has great information on the U-2 and Blackbird advanced space planes from CIA whistleblowers, but doesn't take the UFO whistleblower Bob Lazar seriously. So the impression this "expose" gives is that this super-secret facility is only a base where the CIA tests out new spy plane technology, there's nothing more to see here folks, don't be bothered with Lazar, he's probably another one of those tin-hat types.

There is information on von Braun in Farrell's SS Brotherhood of the Bell, but most of it is derived from Torbitt or the debunked MJ-12 documents. I'm quite skeptical that Pamela would find a substantiable source on him in popular books or the internet. She might have to visit wherever his personal papers are housed, or perhaps those of an associate.

Please read the essay, or at least listen to the lone gunman interview. The title choice is a propos, but much overused. For example, Jim Marrs published a booklet years ago titled Inside Job, about 9-11. The content of our essays is not even remotely the same, but the idea is, that it was similar to a bank heist where the tellers enabled the crooks. A lot of things go down that way.

Neither the WC, nor HSCA, nor ARRB ever examined whether the TSBD employees (the tellers) might have participated in the crime.

Au contraire, my essay shouts.

That's definitely Jack, those 2 pictures in the essay. He's also in Skaggs 16, the tall blond guy near the Depository entranceway. Seems they knew about that at jfkassassinationforum for some time, with Gary Mack's help. If you google Dougherty Skaggs you get a slightly better blowup.

I'd like to see someone put together a post that places Dougherty as a spotter in the sniper's nest. I went the other way, and took his word for it that he was 10 feet from the west elevator when the 1st shot went off.

Putting him as a spotter would mean he was the guy Carolyn Walther saw showboating a rifle. And the blond seen by Ronald Fischer and Robert Edwards. But that leads to a timing problem, getting the kill team into an open west freight elevator on the 5th. It looked to me that somebody had to stay with the elevator during the shooting, pull the gates up. Which had to occur before Truly & Baker got to the 1st-floor shaft.

Pamela,

I looked into von Braun a number of years ago, and concluded he would be the logical choice to head up a secret space program- and while he was heading up NASA. That he was privy to an entirely separate technological track of development.

On p. 73 of The Day After Roswell, von Braun "intimated that there was a deeper story about what the Germans had engineered"- he apparently had a look at the famed crash and hinted to the Army brass that he knew a lot more.

Hitler's Flying Saucers has a 16-page section on "The Peenemuende Saucer Project". This was a more-than-fledgling Nazi flying disc program during the war run by Hans Kammler, Walter Dornberger and the engineering genius von Braun. Some of their Haunebu designs were huge- over 120 feet across.

The Torbitt book that I have begins with a photo section- and the caption for JFK's 9/11/62 visit to the Marshall Space Flight Center to see the Saturn V cluster test-fired says that JFK & von Braun got into an argument about other means of travel to the Moon. When one considers the saucer craze of the 50's, especially the July 1952 Washington flyover, President Kennedy had legitimate cause to wonder about alternatives.

Here's a short youtube I think narrated by Joseph P. Farrell that presents strong evidence that there could be such a secret space program:

Unfortunately there's scant details available it seems as to von Braun in relation to the assassination. A negative template, perhaps? The Paperclip Nazis were at the pinnacle of the emerging aerospace technocracy, and Dulles was their #1 benefactor.

My new website, www.jfkinsidejob.com, is almost ready for primetime. It still has a couple of glitches, like the background photo- but I'm happy to present my essay Inside Job for your consideration. I hope you get a chance to read through it sometime this winter, as I guarantee it will deepen your understanding of what went on inside the Book Depository.

For the time being, if you click the blue "Print" command once you've called up the essay, you'll be taken to the entire 75-page PDF. My printer isn't working at the moment, so I don't know whether the command activates the printer, and I can't promise that yours won't go nuts suddenly printing a bunch of pages.

Although mainly about Depository personnel, the last section gets into deeper waters, dealing with Army Intelligence and agent James Powell. I discovered him in the crowd while with JFKLancer in April 2010. Be sure to visit p. 2 of the Murray gallery at Robin Unger's site to look at the full-size blowup of his 12:39 photo (MurrayTraskUnger2LARGE), which shows the difference at the corner beside the Dal-Tex.

Hopefully on Monday November 30th the glitches will be ironed out.

This is a fabulous tutorial, Jim.

I had little or no idea about Operation Vulture, nor JFK's 1954 response- "How will the new Dulles policy and its threat of atomic retaliation fare in an area of guerilla warfare... No amount of American military assistance can confront an enemy which is everywhere and nowhere and has the sympathy and support of the people..."

Was this on the Senate floor, or in a newspaper interview?

Have recently reached that part, on the Dulles Imperium, in the new David Talbot book. My opinion of Eisenhower has gone from good to mediocre, to see him so suggestible to the "crackpot realism" of John Foster Dulles- advocating nukes be used at Dien Bien Phu, and during other crises.

John Hersey's Hiroshima came out in 1946- it occupied a whole issue of the New Yorker- and you won't find a better eyewitness account of the utter devastation wrought by atomic weaponry. Dulles apparently ignored that issue.

Hersey is a personal favorite of mine, when I was living on Martha's Vineyard during the 90's he referred a novel I wrote about Northern Ireland to Alfred Knopf. Of course it didn't get published, but that was one heck of a nice gesture, and I made a pilgrimage to his tombstone to thank him.

Hiroshima's most unforgettable image for me was the shadow of a house painter up on his ladder vaporized against concrete.