Greg Doudna

9 hours ago, David Boylan said:

Greg,

Interesting thesis. Hart either worked for or with David Phillips at one time. Hart is listed in this address book. Notice that Phillips is penciled in just under Hart's name. The left page is a who's who of McLean. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=154765

This address book belonged to Emilio Rodriguez. Emilio's brother, Arnesto/Ernesto was a very close friend of Carlos Bringuier. Arnesto was also an acquaintance of Oswald. Oswald had approached Arnesto about learning Spanish at his Berlitz Language school in New Orleans.

David, what a valuable document find. It directly appears to associate John Hart with David Phillips in some sense, though it is not easy to interpret the exact meaning of the association. Below "John Hart" but above John Hart's office and home numbers there is some lettered title/acronym whose first part is missing but which ends with "/Ops" and then a redacted phone number and an extension number, above which there is handwritten in tiny letters "David Phillips" and a different extension number, almost as if David Phillips was an alternative to ask for if John Hart could not be reached?

I would be interested in the documentation that this address or phone book page is from Emilio Rodriguez.

I notice two details that date this address/phone page later than 1963. It has "DDP - Desmond FITZGERAL[D]". Desmond Fitzgerald became Deputy Director of Plans of the CIA in June 1965. Also, the page has "[DI]RECTOR - Dick HELMS", and Richard Helms became Director of CIA in June 1966. Each of these establish a terminus a quo/earliest possible date for the document which is therefore not earlier than June 1966. 

There is a different image of the same page, no change in original content on the page but differences in whiteouting and redactions at https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=26680#relPageId=2&search=104-10161-10321.  

5 hours ago, Denny Zartman said:

They can answer it, they just don't want to.

Over the past ten years I've had the opportunity to discuss the JFK assassination on other websites, and there are invariably half a dozen folks with extensive experience with rifles and target shooting chiming in with their opinions on how it was an easy shot from the sixth window, how Oswald was actually good with a rifle, ect.

But when I point out that Oswald had no other rifle ammunition or rifle cleaning equipment among his possessions and ask if that's the usual state of affairs with themselves or their rifle enthusiast friends, there's never any reply at all. Now, maybe I've walked between the raindrops and just by chance every person whom I've asked has been unable to reply for unrelated reasons, but let's get real.

If Oswald was practicing with his rifle on a regular basis he would have rifle ammunition and rifle cleaning equipment among his possessions. Instead he's apparently assembling and disassembling and maintaining his rifle with only a dime, and that he was practicing target shooting regularly without ever cleaning or even oiling down his rifle, and was literally down to his last four rifle bullets that morning.

This is such an excellent point Denny: the missing ammunition or cleaning equipment among Oswald's possessions in Nov 1963. Of course the full searches of his belongings in Ruth Paine's garage, and at the rooming house in Oak Cliff, is evidence at that point of time. It is hypothetically possible, for example, that if he had had any cleaning equipment he could have conveyed that to a buyer of the rifle at the time of conveying the rifle, as part of the package (same with any remaining ammunition). But what this is not consistent with is Oswald himself as active shooter of the Carcano from the sixth floor on Nov 22.

I just did a search in Bugliosi's massive tome, Reclaiming History, the most exhaustive argument for Oswald as killer of JFK in the universe, to see how Bugliosi addresses this. I checked his two chapters, "Ownership and Possession of the Rifle Found on the Sixth Floor" (pp. 789-804) and "Identification of the Murder Weapon" (pp. 805-844), as well as the descriptive index subheadings under the listings "Mannlicher-Carcano" and "Oswald, Lee Harvey", and found nothing of Bugliosi addressing the point (of how having no ammunition or rifle cleaning supplies among his belongings is consistent with Oswald being the 6th floor shooter of the Carcano). Bugliosi addresses nearly everything else under the sun, why not that relevant question? Now it is possible that Bugliosi does address it somewhere and I missed it, especially if he took up that point in a footnote (I have the 1612 pp paper volume but do not have access to the CD with another 958 pages of footnotes). But when you cite and agree with Karl Hilliard that "no one has ever been able to answer that one", that provisionally appears to be true for even Bugliosi. (I have not checked Posner, and obviously have not checked all of Bugliosi either, only tried to find it in Bugliosi the best I could.)

Flip de Mey, whose two books I have mentioned earlier, has a strong discussion of this among other points concerning the rifle and the various component parts of the argument that Oswald was the shooter from the 6th floor that day. In fact, for what it is worth to anyone reading here, the Flip de Mey chapters in those two books relating to the rifle, Oswald, and the TSBD and the physical evidence thereof strike me as as compelling and clearly presented as to be capable of changing the mind of a serious objective adherent to the Warren Commission lone-nut interpretation. (Not all chapters of de Mey are of equal weight, nor do I agree with every conclusion, and there are occasional factual misstatements along the way the sign of a serious researcher working alone and erring, but I have not personally seen elsewhere the argument for Oswald's innocence from being the shooter of the Carcano on the 6th floor so clearly and convincingly reasoned and developed. Despite the strength of de Mey's argumentation, his first book received only a few reviews, and his second one I have not seen any.) On the current points at issue (the quotes below are without the footnotes):

"2. Did Oswald buy bullets? The believers do not deny that Oswald had only four bullets. These are the three bullets he allegedly used in the attack, and the fourth unused bullet that remained in the rifle. The investigators found not a single additional bullet in Oswald's belongings, or even packaging that could have contained bullets. Four bullets or a hundred bullets make little difference for the believers. It seems quite logical to them that Oswald was aware that he could not target the president five times, and therefore only took four bullets with him. But not a single bullet could be found anywhere, either at Oswald's home or with his belongings in the garage of Ruth Paine. Marina stated that 'she had never seen any ammunition around the houses in which they had lived.' Her statement to the FBI on December 17, 1963, is even clearer: 'Oswald did not have any ammunition for the rifle to her knowledge in either Dallas or New Orleans, and he did not speak about buying ammunition.' But that's odd, because bullets are sold per dozen, or per hundred. One of the two stores that sold bullets purchased them for 45 dollars per thousand. Even Oswald was not so stingy that he would save on a bullet that cost a few cents. The 6.5 mm caliber is relatively common as such, but only bullets that have been produced in Italy can be used for the Carcano. The cartridge clip was not supplied with the gun, and Oswald must therefore have purchased it somewhere. The Commission realized that this was, once more, a problem. They were well aware that the weapon was delivered without a cartridge clip, but still kept this possibility open, and wrote: 'The rifle was probably sold without cartrdige clip.' The word probably says it all. If the cartridge clip had indeed been sold together with the weapon, the Commission would, of course, have known this, and would also have had this on record. They questioned the salesmen who sold the weapon, and could simply have asked the question. The question of where Oswald had purchased the reasonably common cartridge clip was, in fact, the least of our concerns. But where had he purchased the four bullets--or actually five if he had indeed taken a shot at General Walker on April 10, 1963? This question proved difficult, or even impossible, to answer. Intensive investigation revealed that only two gun stores in the Dallas neighborhood sold Carcano bullets. Both stores had sole proprietors, and the proprietors were always present when the store was open. They were both convinced that they never sold a bullet to Oswald. No Carcano bullets were sold in the gun store in Irving where a certain 'Oswald' allegedly had the sight adjusted. It is possible that Oswald had only four bullets, but it does seem quite unlikely. And this improbability is added to the improbability of the replies to the other questions. 

"3. Did Oswald practice with the weapon? The Commission asked gun expert Simmons whether 'a marksman who is less than a highly skilled marksman' could be capable of a shot with the required accuracy under those conditions. The army expert replied: 'Obviously considerable experience would have to be in one's background to do so. And with this weapon, I think also considerable experience with this weapon, because of the amount of effort required to work the bolt.' So you absolutely need 'considerable experience' to match the performance of the sniper with the Carcano at Dealey Plaza. About three years after his fairly decent results with an M16 in January 1957, Marine Oswald achieved a score just one point above the absolute minimum. He barely touched a weapon in the next four years. Although he was a member of a hunting club in Russia, and owned a rifle, his wife, Marina, scornfully said that hunting in Russia usually means that you catch a bottle of vodka. These hunts were therefore mainly a get-together for men, and hunting was ancillary. After his return to the United States, Oswald also never practiced to improve his poor marksmanship level of 1959. According to the official story, the weapon was stored in Ruth Paine's garage during the last two months before the attack. Ruth, who provided accommodation to Marina, never saw Oswald with this weapon. She never even saw him practice with it. As a fervent opponent of firearms, Ruth Paine would certainly have noticed. According to an FBI statement of December 3, 1963, Marina also never saw her husband practice with the rifle: 'Marina said she had never seen Oswald practice with the rifle or any other firearm and he had never told her that he was going to practice with his rifle or any other firearm.' In a later statement, on December 17, Marina repeated her point of view: 'She cannot recall that he ever practiced firing the rifle either in New Orleans or in Dallas.' She also never saw Oswald take the weapon with him when he left the house in New Orleans. She never saw him handling the rifle, not even to clean it. The only device for which Oswald was trying to improve his skills at the time was a typewriter, and that did not seem to be going too smoothly either. Oswald and mechanical devices were not a good combination; he couldn't even drive a car [sic]. Despite the above two clear statements of December 3 and 17, Marina said the following in her questioning before the Commission on February 3, 1964: 'I think that he went once or twice. I didn't actually see him take the rifle, but I knew that he was practicing [...] He told me.' Marina had a good reason to change her statement: 'I said before I had never seen it before. But I think you understand. I want to help you.' It is pathetic to see how the Commission Counsel rushed to her aid: 'She says she was not sworn in before. But now inasmuch as she is sworn in, she is going to tell the truth.' On February 22, 1964, Marina proved that even her sworn truth still left room for improvement. The FBI asked her the same question for the fourth time, and she was finally satisfied to record: 'He had his rifle wrapped up in a raincoat and told Marina he was going to practice firing with the rifle. She said the police would get him. He replied he was going anyway and it was none of her business. He did not say where he was going to practice firing the rifle, other than he was going to a vacant spot.' 

"In its final report, the HSCA put the responsibility for the lies entirely in the hands of Marina: 'She gave incomplete and inconsistent statements at various times to the Secret Service, the FBI and the Commission.' But that is not entirely fair: the FBI also bears a lot of the responsibility for this. Marina unilaterally changed her statements in the direction the FBI wanted. In February, Marina no longer feared that she would be extradited to the Soviet Union if she did not cooperate sufficiently with the investigation. She no longer adapted her statement in her own interest. It was the FBI that put her under pressure. Ultimately, it makes little difference. Even if Marina did speak the truth in her final statement, Oswald only practiced with the rifle in the house in Neely Street. The couple lived there for seven weeks, from March 2. The rifle was shipped to Oswald at the Hidell post office box on March 20. Oswald moved to New Orleans on April 24. Marina stated that the rifle would then have traveled in her luggage to Ruth Paine's garage in Irving. It remains possible that the weapon was disassembled and traveled to New Orleans in one of Oswald's NAVY duffel bags, but there are no witnesses who ever saw Oswald practice with a gun in New Orleans. So, at best, Marina only confirmed that Oswald allegedly practiced very sporadically with the rifle for a period of four weeks, seven months before the attack. In any case, Oswald was only near the weapon in the weekends in the last ten weeks before the attack. Besides, where would he have practiced? Practicing with a weapon is prohibited in Dallas. A storekeeper stated that it occasionally happened that someone came to practice with a weapon in a particular deserted spot along the highway. In Ruth's community, Irving, there were 46 people who lived near places were someone could potentially practice with a gun. All of them were questioned, but no one had seen Oswald or noticed anything that could be an indication of shooting practice. There was a flash of hope that someone had found two empty boxes of 6.5 mm bullets, but it turned out they were not Carcano bullets. The Report of investigation of possible target practice by Lee Harvey Oswald section amounts to no more than eighteen pages in the entire FBI report containing 971 pages. This is how meager the findings on the possible practice sessions of Oswald were. Oswald therefore did not practice with the weapon in the months prior to the attack (. . .) Oswald therefore never practiced intensively with the Carcano, and that certainly plays a role in his chances of hitting the target twice in 5.5 seconds on November 22. Lattimer highlights that practicing was particularly important in terms of getting used to the stiff bolt: 'It must be emphasized that a leisure period of repeated manipulation and dry firing was essential for acquiring the proficiency demonstrated by the assassin.' But there is no evidence at all regarding any such practice." (Flip de Mey, the Lee Harvey Oswald Files, 51-57)

Here I suggest a new interpretation of the Raleigh phone call on the night of Nov 23, 1963, which departs from previous interpretations. For the facts of the story, background and discussion: "The Raleigh Call and the Fingerprints of Intelligence" by Grover Proctor, http://groverproctor.us/jfk/jfk80.html. For argument that the Raleigh call did not happen, on the Prayer Man website (excellent site for research), http://www.prayer-man.com/the-raleigh-call-did-not-happen/.  

According to Alveeta Treon, switchboard operator at the Dallas Municipal Building, she listened as Lee Harvey Oswald from the jail attempted through operator Louise Swinney to place a call to a "John Hurt" of Raleigh, North Carolina. According to Mrs. Treon, Mrs. Swinney purposely did not put through the call, then told Oswald she was unable to reach the party and disconnected Oswald, appearing as if acting on prior instruction. Two officers listened in an adjoining room as this happened. Mrs. Treon, listening, filled out normal call sheet notes with the name "John Hurt" and two phone numbers, which indeed were the phone numbers of two John Hurts in Raleigh, N.C., in 1963.

That the call was outgoing (from Oswald trying to reach someone) and not incoming (a crank call) is indicated from two, not one, phone numbers belonging to two John Hurts, not one, on Mrs. Treon's note record, in addition to Mrs. Treon saying she heard the phone call as outgoing. Additional evidence, which should remove any remaining doubt on this point if it exists, is this corroboration of the existence of an outgoing phone call corresponding to what Mrs. Treon heard from Mrs. Swinney when HSCA asked Mrs. Swinney about it:

"When HSCA investigator Harold Rose approached 59-year-old Mrs. Swinney and identified himself, he reported she became 'very nervous' and asked, 'Do I have to talk about it? Are you going to harass me? What will happen to me if I don't talk about it?' After her fears were somewhat allayed, she told Rose that 'sometime around 7 p.m., November 23, 1963, she was told by the DPD [Dallas Police Department] that if Oswald tried to make any phone calls, they would send two men to the telephone room to 'tap in on the line.' She stated that about 10 p.m., two DPD homicide detectives came to the telephone room and identified themselves to her.' She revealed that 'Oswald tried to make two calls,' one to 'Lawyer Apt.' [sic] in New York and she doesn't remember where the other call was to.' According to her statement, 'she did not put either call through for Oswald.'" (Proctor p. 9)

The "other call" Mrs. Swinney made to a party requested by Oswald whose name she did not recall, would be the call Oswald attempted to make to "John Hurt" that Alveeta Treon witnessed, which attempt on the part of Oswald was unsuccessful.

Obviously it becomes a matter of interest to identify who "John Hurt" was, and why Oswald would want to reach "John Hurt". The whole story has not made much sense to anyone so far, and this lack of sensibility has been a contributing factor to the theory that either no such call happened, or that it was a misunderstanding of a crank phone call phoned in by one of the John Hurts of Raleigh, N.C. that evening, nothing actually to do with Oswald. 

The Warren Commission never mentioned this John Hurt/Raleigh, N.C. phone call. No newspaper reported it. No FBI document is known to refer to it. No DPD document is known to refer to it. Both of the phone numbers on Mrs. Treon's call notes were verified to belong to real John Hurts in Raleigh, N.C., but neither of them had any known connection to Oswald, both unequivocally denied any connection, and both denied receiving any such phone call (this last is in agreement with both Swinney and Treon that the attempted call from Oswald was not put through).

And yet there are the two witnesses, two out of two operators that night, plus one contemporary handwritten document, Mrs. Treon's phone call notes from that evening, which say that phone call attempt on the part of Oswald did happen (in Mrs. Swinney's case, an unremembered-name, unremembered-destination phone call that she did remember Oswald had requested that did not go through, corresponding to Mrs. Treon's witness and written record that that call was to "John Hurt". And in addition to that there is a statement in a 1978 HSA interview from former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden of Chicago that Secret Service agent Kelley from Dallas (who was present for some of the Oswald interrogations) had come to Chicago and had spoken of a "John Heard" name which puzzled him, days after Oswald's unsuccessful attempt to reach "John Hurt".

"[Bolden] said when Agent Tom Kelley arrived in Chicago from Dallas on or about 11/26/63, he mentioned a John Heard or Hurt. They searched the office card files for a similar sounding name." (https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=197033#relPageId=8)

Bolden's testimony was referred to earlier in a 1970 affidavit.

"On November 24, 1963, Acting Supervisor Martineau [Secret Service, Chicago] called one of his secret service agents and asked him if he had ever heard of a John Heard, phonetically pronounced. Martineau asked the agent to 'pull' all cards marked 'Heard'. There were approximately 100 such 'Heards'. It is believed that the Secret Service arrested a John Heard at that time; said name phonetically pronounced." (https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=62459#relPageId=186)

The testimony appears to reflect puzzlement on the part of Agent Kelley concerning the name of the Oswald phone call attempt of Nov 23, although why Agent Kelley was expressing his puzzlement in Chicago is unclear (maybe because Kelley happened to be there?). 

Yet both of the John Hurts of Raleigh, N.C., of the two phone numbers of Mrs. Treon's notes, go to two persons who had no connection to Oswald, so the whole thing has seemed to make no sense.

Much attention has focused on one of the John Hurts, John David Hurt, because he served in Army Counterintelligence during his military service in World War II. His work there involved interviewing nationals of European countries to see if they had poopoo connections before they were permitted to come to the U.S. But he reentered civilian life after the war and worked as an insurance investigator and then was unemployed living on a disability pension, and unfortunately seemed to have some history of mental or emotional disturbance issues from time to time. 

Apart from the coincidence of the fifteen-plus-year past wartime job in Army Counterintelligence of one of the two Raleigh John Hurts, there is just nothing of any known interest with respect to connecting to Oswald in either of those John Hurts. And that wartime Army Counterintelligence service of John David Hurt, which predated and could have involved no contact with Oswald at the time, is surely accident, not of any significance--pure random chance of a biographical detail found in one of two random names pulled out of a phone book. 

Faced with both evidence that the unexplained attempt on Oswald's part of this phone call did happen, and yet no way to make sense of it in terms of either of the two John Hurts of the two Raleigh, N.C. phone numbers, many researchers turned to an explanation of Victor Marchetti, a former executive assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA, to fill in the gap of a missing explanation. Marchetti attempted to make sense of this phone call in terms of John David Hurt (who had no intelligence or Army affiliation at the time of Oswald's attempted call and denied ever having known of the existence of Oswald prior to the assassination):

"[Marchetti] told us categorically that, in making the Raleigh call, Oswald was following a standard set of intelligence and spycraft practices. An agent or NOC (non-official cover; someone doing covert work but without any ties to the government) can contact his case officer through what is known as a 'cut-out', a 'clean' intermediary who can act as a conduit between agent and officer without ever getting involved in the intelligence operation itself. All the 'cut-out' knows is that if anyone ever calls asking for a certain officer's real name, or pseudonym, he's then to contact a predetermined person or agency. The 'cut-out' can legitimately say he never heard of the agent calling." (Proctor p. 19)

By this interpretation, poor civilian John David Hurt, who had nothing to do with anything, was now considered a "cut-out", covering up something. Proctor analyzes Marchetti's interpretation: John David Hurt's "failing professional, personal, medical and mental conditions in the years leading up to the assassination seem to suggest he would have been an unreliable choice, at the very least". Since that was a bit of a stretch in plausibility, Proctor reasoned a different modified scenario from Marchetti's: that someone was having Oswald think he was doing spy work (even though it was bogus, though Oswald did not know that) and gave him John David Hurt as a "fake" cut-out, which Oswald would believe up until the point he attempted to call the cut-out, when he would find out it was a dead-end.

Of course certainty may be unobtainable in a case such as this, but let us reason through what I think is a possibly more promising approach, in which the phone call attempt on the part of Oswald was real, but the hapless John David Hurt was not who Oswald was trying to reach and had absolutely nothing to do with anything related to Oswald, and Marchetti's conjecture is not actually correct either. 

The context is Oswald is under arrest and has been arraigned for about the most serious charge one could imagine: the assassination of a popular United States president. There is also what Senator Richard Schweiker, 1970s member of the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence, said of Oswald, "we do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are the fingerprints of intelligence"--even though CIA denied he worked for them, FBI denied, and no evidence can be found in nonexistent Army records which the Army destroyed, that Oswald worked for them either. The matter of possible intelligence agencies' relationships with Oswald is disputed and contested. But almost without exception, everyone of the police and the representatives of the various lettered agencies who were with Captain Fritz of the Dallas Police Department interrogating Oswald marveled at Oswald's coolness under extraordinary pressure, with many saying it looked for all the world like Oswald had been trained to withstand hostile interrogation. Oswald, the high-school dropout who had mastered the difficult language of Russian, read voraciously and loved classical music and opera, answered quickly, intelligently, without hesitation. He said what he chose to say, and refused to talk when he chose to.

It is a fact that Oswald lied at some important points during that questioning. This has been claimed as one of the most important evidences of guilt, "consciousness of guilt" it is called, or the logic is, why would an innocent person lie? That logic is less clearcut than it seems. On the supposition that Oswald had shot the Carcano at JFK and killed JFK, a first reaction is that that explains his lying, because he is guilty and wants to deny to the police the evidence that makes him look guilty. But that explanation is questionable when looked at more closely, for his lies involved the rifle, his lies about the rifle would easily be shown false (and Oswald would have known that), so the question is: why did he lie at all about the rifle? Why, in fact, was he talking at all, and not simply remaining silent until he got a lawyer? A normal innocent person would either not talk at all or would tell the truth if he did talk. A guilty person if he killed for ideological reasons might be proud of what he did rather than state easily-refutable false statements to deny that he did it. A guilty person who had killed for non-ideological reasons (e.g. a contract killer) and who was smart would not talk at all but wait for a lawyer. And there is no issue that Oswald was not sane--he was sane.

In arguments developed elsewhere, I have argued that Oswald did not kill shoot or Tippit (https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/27367-an-argument-for-actual-innocence-of-oswald-in-the-tippit-case/); that Oswald did shoot through the window of Walker but there is credible cause to consider (more than unsupported conjecture) that Walker was not in the line of fire, that there was no intent to murder, and that the very light injuries to Walker that evening were self-inflicted ("The shot fired by Oswald into Walker's house", https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/27502-the-oswald-family-at-the-furniture-mart-a-rifle-scope-installation-in-november-1963-and-why-it-matters-a-sale-of-the-rifle-before-the-assassination/page/5/); and that Oswald did not bring the rifle into the TSBD, did not fire the Carcano from the sixth floor of the TSBD, and did not attempt to kill JFK, even though it was from his rifle that the shots were fired from the sixth floor ("An alternative mechanism for Oswald's rifle to have gotten inside the Texas School Book Depository", https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/27502-the-oswald-family-at-the-furniture-mart-a-rifle-scope-installation-in-november-1963-and-why-it-matters-a-sale-of-the-rifle-before-the-assassination/page/6/). And the story of Marina that she stopped Oswald from going out the door to kill Nixon in April 1963 (http://www.22november1963.org.uk/did-oswald-try-to-kill-richard-nixon) was neither an intent of Oswald to assassinate nor a fabrication on the part of Marina, but a misunderstanding or misrepresentation on the part of Marina of Oswald starting to go to a political meeting in which a visit of Nixon was going to be discussed. The meeting was right-wing, with possible violent or crazies in attendance. For his own self-defense Lee was carrying a concealed weapon. It was this to which Marina reacted. Obviously Marina could not literally keep Lee in the house or in the bathroom if Lee was really intent on going. But Marina expressed objection so forcefully that Lee did not go (and according to Marina ended up sobbing). Lee was not intent on assassinating anyone, let alone Nixon who was nowhere in Dallas, and Lee could not have told Marina he was going out to kill Nixon since Nixon was not there. On Oswald and right-wing political meetings:

"We discussed we were both interested in the activities of right-wing groups in Dallas, which were common, numerous at that time. And I think he described his activity as spying on them." -- Michael Paine, describing Oswald (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lzWSLSa08k)

How would an innocent man if trained in spycraft behave under hostile interrogation without blowing his cover, if that was what was going on with Oswald after his arrest?

Let it be considered that Lee acted on training or preparation for this eventuality, of an arrest, and was keeping his "cover" until intervention would spring him free. He would lie about the rifle, even though the lies would be exposed upon investigation. In this light his lying concerning the rifle could be considered as part of the deception involved in living undercover for an agency, maintaining cover, buying time, while awaiting promised and imminent intervention to free him.

When that did not happen, at some point Lee would be tempted to go nuclear, to tell of his (hypothesized and conjectured, though unverified) true agency affiliation, in which case an entire spy operation might be blown and his usefulness over. Furthermore, if this was anything like spycraft in the movies, he might have been told he would be hung out to dry if he did blow his cover, with agencies denying he worked for them.  

In this context, at some point Oswald would realize quick intervention was not happening to get him released. I am going to suggest here that whether or not Oswald was covertly working for CIA, whatever agency affiliation he did have (if so), it actually did go to CIA, and he knew it. In this context, a desperate Oswald sought to make a phone call, tried to call not any low-level official, not an underling, but a top, senior CIA official overseeing whatever Oswald was doing--tried to reach that man by a phone call. To plead with him directly to get him out of his predicament!  

John Limond Hart.

Someone whose name hardly anyone has even heard of. I am not sure he appears in the Warren Commission Report or exhibits at all. He did testify on behalf of CIA to the HSCA where his name was misspelled at one point as John Clement Hart (https://maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=81#relPageId=491&search=John_hart). Apparently a stenographer misheard "Limond" and wrote "Clement", and no one caught the mistake in proofreading. Information on John L. Hart is sparse, but this is no insignificant figure. Here is what I have found:

"John Limond Hart joined the CIA in 1948, serving as chief of operations in Korea, Thailand, Morocco, and Vietnam, managing operations against China and Cuba, and heading CIA operations in Western Europe from 1968 to 1971. He died in 2002." (US Naval Institute website, https://www.usni.org/people/john-l-hart) 

"The [HSCA] Committee provided both the FBI and CIA with copies of the report ["Oswald in the Soviet Union: Investigation of Yuri Nosenko"] and asked the agencies if they wished to respond to the report at a public hearing on September 15. The FBI informed the Committee that no response would be submitted. The CIA has sent John Limond Hart as its official representative to state the Agency's position on the Committee's Nosenko report. Mr. Hart is a career agent with [sic; officer of] the CIA, having served approximately 24 years. He has held the position of Chief of Station in Korea, Thailand, Morocco and Vietnam, as well as several senior posts at CIA Headquarters. Mr. Hart had considerable experience with Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence activities while serving in various capacities in the United States and abroad. He has written two extensive studies of Soviet defectors, one of which, dated 1976, dealt with the handling of Yuri Nosenko by the CIA" (G. Robert Blakey, HSCA, 1978, https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=145110#relPageId=51&search=John_Limond Hart blakey)  

"John Limond Hart, 81, the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in Vietnam from 1966 to 1968 who called the agency's treatment of a top KGB defector an 'abomination' in a sensational report in 1978 for which he came out of retirement, died May 27 at the Ingleside at Rock Creek assisted living community in Washington. He had Alzheimer's disease. Over the years, Mr. Hart had served as head of CIA operations in Korea during the Korean War and later as chief of a Cuban task force. He was head of the CIA's European division from 1968 to 1971, when he was asked by then-CIA chief Richard Helms to review the case of Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko. (. . .) Mr. Hart's expertise in the Nosenko case stemmed from his larger interest in the psychology of Soviet defectors. He was author of a top-secret report from the early 1970s that sought to delineate the motivations of clandestine turncoats. Mr. Hart retired from the CIA in 1973 (. . .)" (obituary, Washington Post, June 1, 2002)

"Testimony from a CIA officer in 1975 to the Church Committee mentioned that Hart took over as Chief, Task Force W, in the early spring of 1965" (Mary Ferrell Foundation site: https://maryferrell.org/php/pseudodb.php?id=SABETAY_EDWARD&search=john hart)

Task Force W, run by William Harvey in 1963 and then Desmond Fitzgerald, is what did the assassination plots against Castro and Cuba. I have been unable to find what Hart was doing, and what his relationship, if any, was to Cuba operations and/or Task Force W prior to early spring 1965 when he came to be in charge of it. What Hart was doing in 1963 appears to be a lacuna in his biography in publicly accessible sources.

I suggest Oswald was trying to reach CIA officer John L. Hart Saturday evening, Nov 23, when, on instruction from over her head, Mrs. Swinney took the request from Oswald and, according to Mrs. Treon, did not attempt to put the call through, then told Oswald the call did not go through. 

Somehow Oswald's request was set into writing with the name misspelled as John Hurt. As to why Oswald would ask to have phone numbers searched in Raleigh, N.C. to find his party, not known. 

But it looks like neither of the John Hurts of Raleigh had anything to do with the individual Lee Harvey Oswald was attempting to reach; yet the attempt on Oswald's part to reach someone was real; and the person Oswald was really after was senior CIA official John Limond Hart. But Oswald's attempt was doomed before it began, with (according to Mrs. Treon) the very attempt to place the call sabotaged with the wrong spelling of the name searched and two wrong persons' numbers found, then Oswald deceptively told the call did not go through, when it was (according to Mrs. Treon saying what she saw) not attempted to be put through. Then, nothing about this call entered into the documentary record, nor did the name John Hart appear in the known record of 1963 or the FBI and WC investigative documents of the assassination, and the "John Hurt" phone call only came to light by the accident of Mrs. Treon speaking about it several years later--fortuitously still having in her possession the written artifact from that night, the notes she wrote as she listened in on the same phone line as part of her job as switchboard operator that night. 

That attempt to reach John L. Hart of CIA was Oswald's "Hail Mary" pass. He did not stand a chance. No one intervened to spring him from the custody and the charges of the Dallas police. He was hung out to dry by an agency. Maybe. It is not proven, but I set it forth here as a scenario to be weighed and considered and vetted by others. 

This article by David Reitzes sure seems devastating on the credibility of the Nagell story. The claims are so wild and unverified, so many impossibilities and contradictions indicating he was just making the stuff up. Rabbit hole city, my take on it. https://www.jfk-assassination.net/nagell3.htm.

Larry, Waldron has the idea that the Mob piggybacked on a plan to overthrow Castro and essentially blackmailed RFK and the US government into not punishing them (Mob) for the Mob's free-lance decision on their own to kill a president. (And none of the CIA, Hoover, LBJ, entire US government etc. victimized by the Mob ever told that they were being blackmailed.) That does not seem to make sense. The fact is JFK was killed and nobody was held responsible for it or punished who actually did it. Would an inversion of Waldron's construction not make better sense that the Mob was signaled approval by some within the government to go ahead with an assassination, and then CIA piggybacked on that Mob action to attempt to blame Castro, proceed with regime change in Cuba, etc.? It is just obvious neither Hoover (FBI) nor the Warren Commission were touching anything investigative in the JFK assassination that pointed to the Mob, even in the most blatantly obvious case of Jack Ruby. The reason would not be because the Mob was blackmailing the US government but because it went higher than the Mob, and all it would take would be for the wrong person to flip. HSCA under Blakey did try to go after Mob leads, with the sensational deaths of Roselli and Giancana in the context of those HSCA inquiries suggesting something might be there, but Blakey was such a trusting team player with the CIA that he did not go after who was behind the Mob (Blakey later said he had been rolled by the CIA).

I believe the continuing core coverup of the truth of the JFK assassination is not because any living person today is being seriously protected, but because it is just too horrible on an existential level to open up this recent of a major skeleton in America's closet--that there was a high-level approved violent regime change in America that was an inside job. The craziness plaguing conspiracy theorizing and the ongoing recurring attempts to blame Castro, or introduce new foreign scapegoats, can be seen in a context of a national security mindset that believes it is a matter of national security, and necessary for the effective conduct of international relations, that the US not allow some dirty laundry in its history to be aired. The most simple and open historical truth that the US's economic greatness was founded and built on slavery is passionately denounced and condemned from being voiced or taught in schools though that is partisan coming from conservatives, whereas the formal mainstream denial that the JFK assassination looks like an inside job is bipartisan, despite significant numbers of the educated and elite in America individually suspecting exactly that to have been the case. (Though the two examples differ also in the facts of slavery being largely known and uncontroversial to historians whereas the solution and facts of the JFK assassination remain unclear.)  

Again on the Nov 11, 1963 date, Ruth Paine's testimony, WC 9, 395-96:

"Mr. Jenner. Is it your opinion, based on your recollections of all of the association of Lee Oswald with you and at your home, that it could not have been possible for him to have taken a weapon, such as the rifle involved here, to any range, shooting range, sportsdrome, gun range, or otherwise, on any occasion when he was in Irving, Tex., residing or staying as a guest in your home?

"Mrs. Paine. The only time when he was there and I was away long enough for him to have gone somewhere and come back, and I now know that I can recall was Monday, the 11th of November. I have described my presence at the home on the 9th and 10th. And to the best of my recollection, there was no long period of time that I was away from the home when he was there. I may also say that there is no way of getting from my home unless you walk or have someone drive you."

Part 3 of 3. An alternative mechanism for Oswald's rifle to have gotten inside the Texas School Book Depository

My argument here follows in key ways, with modifications, an analysis of Philip de May in two books, Cold Case Kennedy (2013) and The Lee Harvey Oswald Files (2015). De May takes up in turn three propositions, all three of which must be correct for Oswald to be guilty of the assassination of JFK:

• The Carcano that was found is Oswald's Carcano
• Shots that were fired at Kennedy were fired from that Carcano
• The shots that were fired from that Carcano were fired by Oswald

De May argues that the first two propositions are correct but that the third is not, on the basis of evidence and argument. The main difference between the two books is that in the first (2013) he incorrectly argued the Carcano in the Backyard Photos was not the same Carcano on the sixth floor of the TSBD, and proposed use of a sabot by a shooter to account for the bullets' match to the Carcano. In his second book (2015) de May corrects that, showing that the Carcano of the BYP is the Carcano of the sixth floor. In the second book de Mary argues that only the notion of Oswald bringing a disassembled rifle into the TSBD and assembling it that morning makes accurate shooting unlikely, that the Carcano fully-assembled and sighted in was capable of accurate shooting by a good marksman. However, bringing the Carcano in to the TSBD fully assembled rules out Oswald as the mechanism for the Carcano entering the TSBD. Therefore de May ends up arriving by different line of argument to the same conclusion I argue here: that the rifle entered the TSBD before Fri Nov 22, not from Oswald, even though it had been his rifle. 

"Based on the analysis of the facts, we can confirm the first two items. There were indeed shots from the sniper's nest, and they were more than likely fired with the Carcano. But, objectively speaking, we must conclude that the claim that Oswald was the gunman is contrary to the findings. All the objective elements we have investigated point in the same direction: Oswald did not fire the Carcano himself, and he was not at the crime scene [6th floor]. The fact that this assumption is quite outrageous is not a valid counter-argument. Anyone who wants to disregard this conclusion must rebut, in detail and with reference to the source, the answers we have provided to the seven questions in the section headed 'Could Oswald have shot with the Carcano?" (. . .) The most surprising finding is the answer to question 2 above: the shots were fired with the Carcano. This answer interrelates with the assumption that the Carcano was brought into the building assembled and perfectly adjusted. This cancels out the otherwise insurmountable questions regarding the precarious reassembly, the lack of fingerprints, the questionable accuracy of the weapon and the insufficient length of the package Oswald had with him that morning [sic: is concluded by the Warren Commission to have had that morning]. The above leads to the unexpected conclusion that the Carcano was indeed used for the shots, but that it was not Oswald who took the shots. This possibility has never before been considered by the conspiracists. Those who don't believe in Oswald's guilt felt compelled to run with the pack and cry out that the Carcano is an unreliable weapon, but the facts contradict this. Oswald was at best a mediocre shot, but the Carcano is not that bad if it is properly adjusted. That precludes that the Carcano entered the building disassembled. If the Carcano was indeed smuggled into the building in twelve pieces, the conspiracists are right in saying that the weapon was unusable for the assassination. (. . .) The main intention behind the use of the Carcano could then have been to point directly towards Oswald, the scapegoat." (The Lee Harvey Oswald Files, pp. 115-116).

In Parts 1 and 2 I have argued that both the Furniture Mart and Irving Sports Shop sightings of Lee and Marina, and Lee getting a scope installed on the Carcano, happened on Nov 11, 1963. I argued that the scope was a reinstallation of the same scope that came with the rifle from Klein's, which Lee had taken off, stripped the threads, then wanted reinstalled which would be for the purpose of a sale or conveyance restored to the condition in which he bought it. The reason for taking the scope off is comprehensible (because the scope was crap) and the reason for putting it back on indicates a purpose of resale not personal use.

If we get to this point, in which Lee has a scoped Carcano in Ruth Paine's garage on Nov 11, there seem to be only three possibilities for how that Carcano would get into the TSBD on Nov 22:

• Lee took the rifle into Dallas and then Oak Cliff on Tue Nov 12, broken down in a paper bag, and some time prior to Nov 22 conveyed that rifle to another party, who took the rifle into the TSBD.
• The rifle remained in Ruth Paine's garage until the night of Thu Nov 21, and Lee took the broken-down rifle in to the TSBD on Fri morning in a paper bag. 
• Someone broke into Ruth Paine's garage surreptitiously and stole the rifle out of that garage some time between Nov 11 and Nov 22 and took the rifle into the TSBD, before Lee had a chance to sell it.

For reasons brought out by de May there are serious improbabilities for the second of these (the WC interpretation), and it is the first above which is argued here.

What happened next, after Nov 11

If Oswald removed the rifle from Ruth Paine's garage, he either did it on Nov 12 with his ride with Wesley Frazier into Dallas, or on Nov 22 with his ride with Wesley Frazier into Dallas. Lee was not in Irving any other times in between, so it had to be one of those two dates. Since he did not take the rifle in on Fri morning Nov 22 (per argument), it will have been Tue Nov 12. 

The specifics are conjectural but Oswald presumably would have broken down the rifle again (nullifying the sighting he was charged for at the Irving Sports Shop, $1.50 wasted on that), put it into a bag of some kind, and carried it with him to work Tue morning Nov 12. Where it was during Lee's workday Nov 12 unknown, but that night he takes it home on the bus with him to the rooming house in Irving, where it remains, inside some kind of wrapping, hidden in a closet or under his bed, until Thu Nov 21 when he sold or conveyed it.

A possibility is that not only the rifle, but the paper bag taken into evidence on the 6th floor also, came from Oswald but did not come from Oswald on Fri Nov 22 (the paper bag coming from paper from the TSBD taken by Oswald earlier prior to Nov 11). This could account for blanket fibers and partial palmprints of Oswald on the paper bag.

A minor objection may be that Wesley Frazier never said anything about Lee carrying a package of that nature on Tue Nov 12. However first, Frazier was not specifically asked about that, and second, Frazier also did not remember ever taking Lee in to work on a Tuesday at all in his testimony (he claimed it was only Fridays and Mondays, except for sole exception Thu Nov 21); did not remember in his WC testimony what he later did remember concerning seeing Lee walk away from the TSBD after the assassination; did not remember seeing Lee as Prayer Man nearby on the steps; did not volunteer in his WC testimony the man carrying a rifle walk by the front of the TSBD that he says in his book he saw while after the assassination. 

That Lee did take the rifle from Irving in to Dallas on Tue Nov 12, and then to his rooming house in Oak Cliff that day, is indicated from independent grounds that Lee conveyed the rifle in Oak Cliff on Thu Nov 21.

Conveyance of the rifle on Thu Nov 21

As brought out elsewhere, the argument for this is the juxtaposition in timing of ca. 10 am for Oswald witnessed at the Dobbs House restaurant on Beckley near his rooming house, whereas at ca. 10:30 am the same day a hitchhiker was picked up by Ralph Yates at the Beckley freeway entrance in Oak Cliff, proximity to the Dobbs House, carrying a rifle-sized package, and dropped off at the corner of Houston and Elm, right next to the TSBD. The juxtaposition in the timing (10 and 10:30 am from independent witness testimonies, and immediate locational proximity) is the coincidence lending strength to both of these witness testimonies being substantial.

On the timing, in each case there is uncertainty among witnesses concerning whether it was Wed or Thursday. However the Thursday date is nailed down by an invoice at Ralph Yates' place of employment for a Thursday service call in Irving, which Yates went to after dropping off his hitchhiker that morning. Therefore it was Thursday Nov 21.

In addition to the timing and locational juxtapositions backing up the witness testimonies of the Dobbs House/Yates' hitchhiker connection, there is the additional argument that somehow Oswald's rifle did get from his possession into the TSBD by Fri Nov 22, and this is a known alternative to the conventional focus on Friday morning for that conveyance, with all of the incongruities that are raised there. In other words, the rifle got from Oswald into the TSBD in some way between Nov 11 and Nov 22, and the only issue is how. In terms of known choices it is either Nov 21 (LHO --> Yates' hitchhiker --> TSBD Thu night) or Nov 22 (LHO --> TSBD/assassin).

Mechanism of rifle getting into TSBD without anyone noticing

With Oswald on Friday morning this is a difficulty: how could he bring in a rifle in a paper bag into the TSBD and not one single person saw him with a rifle-sized paper bag inside the TSBD, or carrying it to the sixth floor, assembling it with or without a screwdriver, and aiming accurately without sighting it in.

Whereas every daytime employee who worked in the TSBD was questioned concerning whereabouts, alibi, and did they see or notice anyone or anything unusual in the building that day, one set of persons with full access to the building for whom I am not aware of any record of having been interviewed or questioned is the after-hours janitorial crew. Keys and access to the entire building Thursday night. No one even knows the names of these invisible custodians. As someone at the TSBD said, anything at all could have gone in and out of that building Thursday night. And no one was ever asked or investigated or inquiry made on that. (There was probably deemed no need to do so, since with Oswald they "had their man", therefore Thursday night building access was not an issue of any law enforcement interest.)

So the difficulty of getting the Carcano (or any other rifle, but the Carcano is the rifle that was found) into the TSBD is only an incongruity during daylight working hours. After-hours, after dark, it is as simple as having access to the building via some infiltration or assistance of someone on a night janitorial crew. A complete black hole of information, never investigated, with respect to the TSBD and Thursday night. 

Nighttime infiltration of the rifle into the TSBD would also be a viable time for a shooter himself to enter the building, prepare the sniper's nest, go to some innocuous spot on the 7th floor or roof and wait unseen until the appropriate time around 12:25 pm Friday. This eliminates all the complicated puzzles over how a shooter or shooters could get into the building on Friday without being seen.

After the shooting, de May makes the point that whoever the shooter was took time to wipe off fingerprints, unlike the conventional narrative in which Oswald shoots and flees immediately with no time to wipe off fingerprints. There is other evidence that after the shooting the shooter did not flee right away. The three workers on the 5th floor heard no running on the floor above and heard no one running down the stairs, no one lower on the stairs saw or heard anyone running down the stairs afterward, and there are those two photos after the shooting which appear to show evidence that someone moved boxes in the 6th floor window after the shots were fired, instead of running immediately. All of this is consistent with a reconstruction in which the shooter was not Oswald but remained on the upper floor levels until descending down the stairs assumed to be a law enforcement person. So there is no need to conjecture elevators and accomplices, or Dougherty or other workers as accomplices, etc. Everybody, except possibly somebody corrupt or planted on the night janitorial crew whose name we will never know, in the TSBD may be innocent! 

In this reconstruction the Yates' hitchhiker's rifle-sized package on Thursday morning carried Oswald's Carcano. The rifle was broken-down. After both the hitchhiker and the Carcano were dropped off at Houston and Elm, late morning Thu, there is time for the rifle to be assembled and sighted in, then rifle and shooter into the TSBD Thursday night, prior to a successful assassination the next day (unlike Chicago and Tampa where similar m.o. attempts failed).

The paper bag found on the 6th floor

Oswald's paper bag Friday morning

In this scenario, Oswald is involved in something in the runup to the assassination (the Mexico City trip suggests as much) but, per present hypothesis, has no idea that an assassination of JFK is planned. I realize there are many theories on how much Oswald knew. The bottom line is, nobody knows whether Oswald had foreknowledge--it is all scenario reconstruction. Oswald's foreknowledge can be argued pro and con. There is certainly no unequivocal positive evidence that Oswald had foreknowledge. As I see it, the only way a conveyance of his rifle to what may or may not have been shady characters on Thu Nov 21 makes sense if he had no clue it would be used in an assassination of the president the next day. (This was in the midst of hunting season, there was lots of non-assassination gunrunning happening, etc. Therefore a sale of a rifle with a scope the day before a president's visit would not necessarily in itself raise any eyebrows. For example, the two new hunting rifles Castor bought on his lunch hour and showed inside the TSBD on Wed Nov 20.) 

The no-clue hypothesis would account for the total lack of getaway arrangements, his lack of money or preparation, but it would also account for if he heard the shots and put something together and realized he had been set up (and not simply set up for legal criminal conviction, but in imminent danger of being killed at any moment as a "dead" patsy), and went into flight-and-escape mode, escaping the cold-blooded Mob types assumed to have carried out the assassination more than fearing law enforcement. (It has occurred to me that one reason Oswald punched officer MacDonald in the face and resisted arrest in the Texas Theatre, which was not objectively a very rational thing to do, could to ensure that he would be arrested, as a personal safety strategy from being killed.)

With that as background, the paper bag on Friday morning. Leonard Hutchison of Hutchison's Market in Irving, within walking distance of Ruth Paine's house, recalled Oswald coming in at 7-7:30 am several times to buy "milk, bread, and cinnamon rolls". On Friday Nov 22, Marina said Lee had nothing for breakfast at Ruth Paine's house except coffee. Lee's job at the TSBD was physical work requiring energy. Lee going to work in the morning at the TSBD on coffee alone is not realistic. A reconstruction would be Oswald left the Ruth Paine house that morning after his coffee, walked to Hutchison's Market and bought milk and French bread or equivalent, and had a long narrow brown paper bag from the bread. He had his cheese sandwich and fruit for lunch in his jacket pocket which he then transferred to the paper bag. Then he walked to Wesley Frazier's house, arriving there a couple of minutes before Wesley was ready to go. Having arrived a little early, he put his bag in Wesley's car.

Wesley said Lee's paper bag was a regular light-paper brown ordinary grocery shopping bag. Oswald always carried a sack lunch all other days. Oswald told his interrogators after his arrest that that was his lunch that day. Oswald never denied the length or size of the bag, just saying he used whatever size he had. Wesley described how the Dallas police separated him from his sister Linnie and had each of them repeatedly estimate the size. The size mattered because the broken-down Carcano required a minimum of 34" length. Wesley was insistent that Lee's bag was only about 24-25", significantly too small to hold the Carcano. Wesley insisted Lee held the bag by cupping his hand underneath the bottom of the bag, and the top did not come up higher than his armpit, inconsistent with 34". Linne Mae testified she saw Lee out the window of her house holding the top of the bag with one hand and the bottom of the bag was not hitting the ground, again inconsistent with 34". 

It was a simple bread bag, estimated by Wesley to be maybe 6" x 24", a common size of bread bag even today. 

When Oswald got to the TSBD and ate his lunch the bag would have been thrown away, end of story for that bag. 

Wesley Frazier was taken in for questioning and that Friday night shown the 37" brown paper bag associated with the rifle on the 6th floor, and despite pressure and duress, told Capt. Fritz it definitely was not the bag Lee carried Fri morning, and Wesley's insistence held up under polygraph examination. 

Oswald's paper bag carrying his lunch was not the 37" bag associated with the Carcano, and that it was longer and narrower than a normal paper bag for a sack lunch was simple accident as a result of his stop at Hutchison's Market that morning. There was no rifle in it, he was not trying to incriminate himself by making anyone think there was a rifle. Oswald was known, including by Wesley, for not talking much. When Wesley said Lee said curtain rods were in the bag, that may have been a misunderstanding of Wesley, which he assumed and interpreted a noncommittal answer from Lee as if it was confirmation. Oswald himself said some things to his interrogators after his arrest that were not truthful, related to the rifle, but one thing Oswald said that may not have been untruthful was not only that the bag contained his lunch, but his denial that he told Wesley there were curtain rods in it. He may have told Wesley "curtain rods" was the reason he went out to Irving to see Marina on a Thursday night. He may have told Wesley a bag which in fact contained his rifle was "curtain rods" at an earlier time (such as Nov 12). But he was not carrying either the rifle or curtain rods Fri morning, but his lunch. 

Identity of the hitchhiker who obtained Oswald's Carcano

The most economical explanation is that the hitchhiker who obtained Oswald's Carcano on Thu Nov 21, was Larry Crafard. That would explain the mistaken identification of the hitchhiker, by Yates, as Oswald himself, in light of known confusion of identities of Crafard for Oswald in other cases. It would explain the hitchhiker asking Yates in passing if he had ever serviced the Carousel Club or knew Jack Ruby. (The question of some relevance because if the answer was "yes", it might affect matters for Yates.) It would agree with Crafard not having a car and hitchhiking. It would agree with Crafard, if he were the buyer of the Carcano from Oswald on an occasion at which Tippit was present, as was the case according to witnesses at the Dobbs' House--Crafard killed Tippit the next day and would have killed Oswald too if not for the police saving Oswald's life from Crafard by arresting Oswald at the Texas Theatre. Crafard as the identity of the Thursday hitchhiker receiving Oswald's rifle could explain how Crafard would recognize both Tippit and Oswald by sight the next day, and perhaps how Tippit could recognize Crafard on 10th in Oak Cliff. However the identity of Yates' hitchhiker as Crafard is not certain. Also, although both Oswald and (separately) Tippit are located at the Dobbs House at the same time Thu morning ca. 10 am, and the hitchhiker with the rifle-sized package caught his ride starting from proximity from the same Beckley Ave, it is not known the details of how the parties met or a handover of the rifle might have occurred exactly (somewhere outside the restaurant out of public view, probably). 

A waitress and cook at the Dobbs House remembered Oswald that morning as making a scene complaining about the way his eggs were cooked. This seems uncharacteristic of Oswald, who was normally quiet and mannerly. Although it is in the realm of conjecture, making a scene like that could be a way to signal one's presence or identity if meeting someone not previously familiar by sight. It also could serve to establish memory in other restaurant patrons of presence or alibi. 

To suggest that Oswald was clueless regarding the JFK assassination is not to say Oswald was not mixed up in some things--only that in the particular event of the JFK assassination, he may not have seen that one coming. But he made a perfect patsy. All that needed to be done was have the rifle connected to him. That Oswald ended up being accused of being the shooter, and not simply the owner of the rifle, may have been an accident. 

4 hours ago, John Butler said:

This was 1964 WC testimony.  None of the trips had been linked to a 1967 book photo.  Robert mentions during this testimony that there may have been 4 occasions for hunting trips.  None of these are linked to the hunting photo.

Thank you John for acknowledging that there is no basis to say that photo of Lee hunting was ever labeled by Robert Oswald as Sept 1959. 

On 12/25/2021 at 10:01 AM, John Butler said:

Greg,

Robert wrote a book in 1967.  The exact title escapes me at the moment.  The pic is in the book.

I generally pay attention to Tracy Parnell.  I believe he is an honest researcher.  I don't agree with many of his ideas.  I made a timeline of Harvey and Lee in the military.  His work was helpful in in verifying the timeline in places.  

I'm sorry to disappoint, but what I said was it was possible for Lee Oswald to be there.  I also said it is possible for Harvey to be there.  This is not based upon my ideas, but David Joseph's timeline of Harvey and Lee and research that I have done. 

My best assumption is that Robert did mean Lee Oswald was there in Feb. 1958 (don't take this out of context).  But, in reality which Oswald was really there?  When it was pointed out that Lee Oswald was in Japan at that time and place, he had to change the date.  He chose Sep. 1959.  Sep. is definitely a wrong date for the photo.  The temperature difference between Feb. and Sep. is extreme in the sense of cold weather to warm weather.

Mama Oswald, Robert Oswald, Marina, and possibly John Pic were all involved in this intelligence scheme.  Oswald's family were patriots.  They thought they were doing the right thing up until the end and then afterwards.   

Can you say where you are getting that Robert Oswald dated that photograph to Sept 1959? 

18 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Curiously, the 6th floor museum had the famous Crichton oral history including his 488th MId misfiled due to incorrect spelling. I’ve seen the name spelled Creighton, and mispronounced that way too. Mr. Doudna - do you recall anything more about that exchange with Curington, or perhaps why you asked the question? 

Hi Paul-- I have had a number of phone calls with Curington over the past 2-3 years and it was in one of the earlier phone calls, not in the recorded interview, when I asked him if he knew Crichton, and told him who it was, and would have spelled the name so he was clear as to the question. He told me no, he did not recognize or remember the name. There was no sign of unusual reaction. I think I asked him a couple of times, trying to jog his memory but his answer was clear, he did not recall the name. Though Curington was in sound mind, he was 93. It was not recorded. I did not see much else to ask as followup on that given his answer.

There is a recurring story that HL Hunt met Crichton on the day after the assassination. (It appears even now again in Coup in Dallas, p, 365, no footnote.) I have sought to track down the source of this story without success, other than it goes back to something in the Garrison investigation or files, but I cannot find anything more specific than that. If it were verifiable it would be significant concerning a question I have of HL Hunt's whereabouts that weekend. A central story of John Curington is that he visited the Dallas City jail on Saturday evening Nov 23, where Oswald was being held, cased the place concerning security under which Oswald was being held at HL Hunt's instruction, then, again at HL Hunt's instruction, went out to HL Hunt's "Mount Vernon" home and briefed HL Hunt on what he had learned, which was there was very poor security. Then, Curington says, Hunt told Curington to immediately set up a meeting between HL Hunt and Dallas Mob boss Joseph Civello, which Curington did. According to Curington Hunt and Civello met around 7 am that morning (Sunday morning)--Curington was not present--and four hours later Ruby shot and killed Oswald. In his public writings Curington says he is simply reporting what happened without claiming evidence this was connected, but privately Curington told me when HL Hunt called him ca. 5 pm on Saturday Nov 23 to go check security on Oswald and report back, that Curington knew Oswald "was a dead man". Curington's first public telling of this was in 1977, reported in National Enquirer.

The story is sensational but unfortunately, subsequent to my interview with Curington, I became aware of a serious problem in this story: two major national magazines separately report HL Hunt giving a detailed account of how he and his wife left Dallas Friday afternoon Nov 22 on the advice of the FBI for their personal safety, and were not in Dallas that weekend. This was HL Hunt saying this in around 1966 and 1967, separately in an interview in Playboy (Aug 1966) and in a feature story in Esquire (Jan 1967). Separately I have found a statement from Paul Rothermel, the other closest HL Hunt aide besides Curington, saying that he, Rothermel, had been the one to recommend to Hunt to leave Dallas immediately, also saying HL Hunt was gone from Dallas all that weekend after Friday afternoon. 

My attempts to take up this matter and find resolution on it with Curington have not been satisfactory. He absolutely insists his story is correct and that HL Hunt and Mrs. Hunt were at their home that entire weekend and did not leave Dallas, and Curington added further details of his actions, telling me he drove Hunt home that Friday night etc., repeating that HL Hunt did not leave Dallas. He offers no explanation for HL Hunt saying differently in national publications other than to say that is wrong and that he questions whether HL Hunt was quoted accurately. I asked Curington questions every which way but cannot shake him from his story. Curington's position is "I was there, what do you know?"  

This is the background to why I really, really wish I could nail down that claim of a Crichton/HL Hunt meeting on Saturday Nov 23, 1963 originating from some depths of the Garrison investigation files--who was the source of that, what was that all about, is there anything to it.

Merry Christmas!

11 hours ago, John Butler said:

  But, Robert's real problem with veracity is he changed his mistake from Feb. 1958 to Sep. 1959.  

Maybe you have cited this earlier but could you say where Robert Oswald dated that photograph to Sept 1959? That makes little sense, so just would like to know the documentation on that.

Very gracious of you to acknowledge not having a problem with Tracy Parnell's dating of the photograph to Feb 1957 as reasonable and possible, thereby removing that photo as citable as a positive argument for two Oswalds. Glad to get that cleared up and out of the way!

1 hour ago, W. Tracy Parnell said:

There are other explanations for sure. Here is mine for John Butler:

The Hunter Photo ~ W. Tracy Parnell (wtracyparnell.blogspot.com)

John, I think Tracy has this right: February 1957 being the correct date instead of mistaken "February, 1958" in Robert's book one year off (mistake). WR, Appendix 13, p. 682: "On February 27 [1957], he went on leave for 2 weeks, during which he may have visited his mother in Forth Worth." If he travelled from California to Fort Worth on Feb 27 he would then go hunting with his brother the next day, Feb 28. The temperature Feb 28, 1957 in Dallas (no data available for Fort Worth) was 45 degrees at 8 AM rising to a high of 65 degrees at 4 PM, which is temperature consistent with a need to wear the jacket Lee wears in the photo (https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/us/tx/dallas/KDAL/date/1957-2-28). Tracy explains the different look of the haircut as due to the Marines. That this was Lee has pretty good testimony from his brother saying it was. And notice in the photo the background sky is fully overcast but not raining? From Dallas data it did not rain on Feb 28, 1957, and the sky had full cloud cover in the morning and partly cloudy in the afternoon that day (from same link above). The overcast sky in the photo agrees with the photo having been taken in the morning, perfect non-raining cool crisp day to go out.  

Reply to Leslie Sharp

This is the risk of saying what one thinks with respect to someone else's published work, if it is critical of a basic source used: no matter how nice of a person I may be in person, and Leslie Sharp in person, I am close to getting on some kind of "list" (metaphorically speaking), with some hints of ad hominem coming back my way. I don't seek to make an enemy.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". This is a basic statement of method which was often cited by the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan. The Jean-Pierre Lafitte datebook which is foundational to Coup in Dallas is an extraordinary claim. It has every earmark of being, and I have very little doubt it is, phony, made-up, and that Albarelli and you have been, with no ill will intended, almost certainly bamboozled. 

And if that is correct, it should hardly come as a surprise given that Jean-Pierre Lafitte, the apparent author and source, was, not to put too fine a point on it, a lifelong con artist and swindler. This is where you have put your trust. No one is able to see or examine the original (there are poor-quality photos of selected pages published). You say in Coup in Dallas that you rely upon Albarelli's having seen it and knowing of it. Albarelli never met Jean-Pierre according to his account (he contacted the widow after Jean-Pierre died). Albarelli gives no year he first saw the document (though you refer in your post to 37 yrs after 1963 = 2000 as the year Albarelli learned of it; it first comes to light published in 2021). In the entire book Coup in Dallas I could not find a year of Jean-Pierre's death given, that most basic item of biographical information. There is no statement from Rene Lafitte, the widow, concerning the circumstances of origin, production, of the document--the most basic starting information one wants and needs to know to assess an extraordinary claim of a new source.  

I do not consider myself a full member of this community or guardian of it (the JFK assassination research community), though I post here as a free-lancer and think of myself as a guest. I never accused nor do I think Albarelli was party to doing any hoax. Jean-Pierre is the known con, on a mega scale, throughout his whole life, or if not he then someone in his circles who would have done this bogus JFK assassination datebook--not Hank Albarelli. The only reason I mentioned some recent personal knowledge of forgery issues in my field was to make the point that personal honesty, and scholarly or academic competence and excellence and high reputation, are simply no guarantees against falling victim to forgery and cons. I have seen this up close, could cite instances. There is the Morton Smith "Secret Mark", a claimed incendiary ancient text which to the present day remains heavily debated by New Testament scholars as to hoax vs. authenticity. I played a minor role in prompting that discussion at an earlier stage (on the hoax side). There are the founding documents of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). There were more recent forged documents which fooled the hierarchy of the LDS church who, convinced they were real, paid back-channel hush money to cover up documents they believed were genuine which would impeach the church's belief in its historical origins if they became public--when actually the shakedown was a con. In the JFK assassination area, there have been so many fake claims.

One of the patterns of forgeries (in other cases) is that the issue of authenticity is jumped over and a massive publication is presented with extensive scholarly and philological minutae in order to frame the debate as being "what is the interpretation" of this sensational new find, rather than the first order of business: establishing that it is authentic.

To go to specifics: you mention several times a criticism that I did not read the entire 700-pages before commenting. You cite the late Albarelli's spirit as if he would say the same: read the entire book before commenting. No I did not read all of the 700 pages, but it is not necessary to read an entire book before fact-checking the first footnote or source cited, in this case the datebook. At that point I searched through the book for whatever bore on the question of authenticity of the datebook.

You questioned my opening words, "I have respected the work of Albarelli..." thinking I was being disingenuous but I was not being disingenuous when I wrote that. What I knew of Albarelli was I had and had read part of A Secret Order (2013), which I thought had some interesting material, and I knew Albarelli had written a book on Frank Olsen although I have not seen that one but I have seen and was moved by Errol Morris's powerful film Wormwood. Therefore that was two positives and no negatives predisposing me favorably such that like others I advance ordered the book on amazon, followed the notifications of the delays, and then when the book arrived immediately started reading it because of the claims of important new information--until I pretty quickly realized it was grounded upon the Lafitte datebook, and found that source just struck me as nonsensical and looked like so many other classic forgeries which take in bright researchers and academics, in this case, it looked to me, Albarelli. That was the basis for my favorable opening words. But I do not go along with the Skorzeny/pan-poopoo international-connections JFK assassination conspiracy thinking, and was not referring to that aspect of his work.  

On the Skorzeny papers, critical review of Michael La Flen on Kennedys and King: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/major-ralph-p-ganis-the-skorzeny-papers-evidence-for-the-plot-to-kill-jfk 

On Jean-Pierre Lafitte as lifelong con artist: http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/printout/0,8816,941724,00.html (Time magazine, Dec 19, 1969):

"Lafitte returned to the U.S. in the 1930s. He first came to the attention of the authorities in the early 1940s, when he failed to register for the draft and was sent to Ellis Island to await deportation to France. While there, he saw a chance to ingratiate himself with the law by becoming an informer. He won the confidence of some racketeers who were being held on the island and offered to carry a message to their fellow gangsters in New York. Instead, he carried it to the Government. 

"From then on, Lafitte, who changed identities as easily as he changed his stylish clothes, led a double life. Although police records show that he was arrested 23 times in 48 years for fraud, confidence schemes and burglary, they also show that he was a valuable undercover man for the Federal Government. He helped trap some of the late Vito Genovese's mafiosi for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He also posed as a buyer for the FBI, luring thieves into selling him stolen paintings and jewelry and then testifying against them in court. 

"Expensive Tastes. In public as well as private enterprise, Lafitte has always had flair. His expensive tastes appalled the Government auditors who approved his expense accounts as an informer. He drank only the best wines, smoked only the finest cigars. He rented only Cadillacs, stayed only in hotel suites. His bait was costly and effective. Once, when trying to ferret out some stolen paintings, he set himself up at Chicago's Drake Hotel. Instead of getting down to business right away, he entertained the thief's intermediary over dinner, sent wine, caviar and crêpes suzette back to the kitchen for imagined flaws, then prepared the crêpes himself before the wide-eyed fence. Lafitte refused to rush the business discussion. "Not now," he told the middleman. "See me tomorrow." Convinced that Lafitte was genuine, the thieves delivered the paintings the next day—and stepped into an FBI trap. 

"As expected, Lafitte's undercover activities made him a prime target for underworld revenge. In 1956, as a matter of self-preservation, he dropped from sight. A year later, he reappeared in Kittery Point, Me., posing as Louis Romano. There he offered to help speculator Ralph L. Loomis out of his difficulties with the Securities and Exchange Commission for $30,000. One deal led to another, and Loomis soon found himself investing more than $300,000 in a pair of Lafitte-organized companies to develop mineral rights and diamond mines in Africa. When the mines produced glowing reports but no acres of diamonds, the Government moved in and indicted its errant undercover man on 15 counts of mail fraud and transportation of stolen property. Lafitte posted a $25,000 bail, and on Dec. 3, 1963, vanished. He was reported in Africa, Europe and the Bahamas. 

"Lucky Pierre. Two years ago [two years before 1969], he turned up in New Orleans, where he answered the Plimsoll Club's advertisement for a manager-chef. He was a stunning success. Local gourmets praised his Dover sole, sighed over his crêpes suzette. (. . .)

Some JFK assassination insider! 

Albarelli states on p. xxvii, "Laffite, who resided with his family in New Orleans in 1963...". The 1969 Time magazine article (above), says of Lafitte, "two years ago [i.e. in 1967] he turned up in New Orleans". How accurate is Albarelli's statement of Laffite in New Orleans in 1963? Albarelli is not living to ask himself, and there appears to be no known written source or document that verifies the statement.    

Supposedly Lafitte wrote the datebook with details of Oswald and Oswald's associates and the ongoing progress of the JFK plot in Dallas in 1963 while dealing with his sideline illegal African diamond mine investment scams carried out in other states on unwitting marks.

What about Rene Lafitte, who may have control over the Lafitte daybook with the incendiary real-time JFK assassination plot information which no historian is allowed to see or study, which has never been turned in to a proper agency for investigation? Who knows, perhaps with your help, Leslie, she or the heirs may be able to get a good price for such valuable documents one day at an auction! (Are you certain in your own mind that that can be excluded as what this is about?) 

Rene Lafitte's claims too sound a bit dubious to me:

"Rene clearly remembered Otto Skorzeny: 'He was imposing; his presence dominated a room, any room.' Ilse Skorzeny: 'She was all business. Maybe the woman behind the man, meaning the brains.' Lee Harvey Oswald: 'I only saw him a few times. Pierre didn't care for him. A confused young man. Pierre always said: 'He's always desequilibre'. Marina Oswald: 'We felt sorry for her. She had no idea what was going on. He seemed to stick to her like glue but shared nothing with her.' Jean Soutre: 'Oh, he was very handsome, but a modest person, and very serious about his beliefs.' Thomas Eli Davis, Jr.: 'You couldn't help but like him.' Charles Willoughby: 'A dedicated soldier. A little too dedicated, with a sky-is-falling mindset.'" (p. xix)

OK(?). Here is Rene Lafitte explaining why the handwriting in the datebook may look different from the handwriting on a genuine letter of Jean-Pierre should some outsider produce such: 

"Rene was not only well aware of Pierre's entries in his datebooks--and in a few cases helped early on in deciphering his handwriting because, as she explained, Pierre had had a 'mild stroke' in 1962 that affected his handwriting, which she said at one time was 'near beautiful'" (. . .) (p. xviii)

Changed his handwriting, but fortunately not his ability to sell non-existence diamonds in Africa and chronicle the day-to-day Dallas JFK assassination plot details every day. And in 1963, when Lafitte is claimed to be writing knowledgeably of details and names of the Dallas JFK plot via secret communications, all written in the form of a few words in the center of mostly pristine pages of a notebook, one for each day's entry, here is what the federal government thought Lafitte was up to:

New Orleans States-Item, 1/12/70. Lafitte goes on trial in Boston. Lives Armonk, NY. Fraud charge now down to $100,000. Feds say he has used many names and came to New Orleans Plimsoll Club [at the World Trade Mart, formerly Clay Shaw's International Trade Center] about two years ago, brought by management firm which has operating contract. Feds say he jumped $50,000 bail in 1963. (http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/White Files/Garrison/Garrison Files/White's Letter L.pdf)

Sounds like a complicated life, hiding from bail bondsman bounty hunters over that $50,000 bail skip, and maintaining lines of communication with the plotters of the assassination of JFK keeping him informed of day-to-day operational details to be written down in entries to his datebook while he is on the lam from the feds on that irritating bail-skip charge.

It is like a claim of a UFO sighting, or a sighting of Bigfoot, or a claim to have unearthed through murky circumstances a private confession letter of Allen Dulles or James Angleton or Lyndon Johnson telling a mistress exact details of how they did it. Before discussing 700 pages of commentary on such a claim, the first question front and center must be to establish and address all that can be known toward the question of authenticity. I realize this situation is not of your doing, in which there is no ability or authority for you personally to accomplish that. I also realize (having gone through publishing books myself) how a book is one's baby, it is one's life, months and years of heart and labor, and some outsider so unthinkingly and unfeelingly can so easily make a comment that wounds, and may hurt economically. That is not my intention (though it is probably unavoidable when readers give their reactions--part of the dilemma of living in this world, this vale of tears), and I hope you will not regard me as an enemy, nor do I intend to make this a project of my own to impugn your views or those of others if you continue to believe and write about the Lafitte datebook being authentic. I do not regard it as my issue, apart from I paid in advance to amazon for the copy and then said my reaction. I meant no misrepresentation of your reference to "the timeline Hank left in his Frank Olson book, A Terrible Mistake, reflects dates tied to the Lafitte material that sometimes contradicted my understanding of the trajectory of events." You have clarified that was in reference to "Hank's own recollection of the timing of his access to the exclusive material and his interactions with sources over the years ... I came to realize that Hank had the equivalent of dyxlexia when recalling his own timeline." OK, but some kind of serious timeline with annotation and critical evaluation and discussion ought to be offered, with specifics to the best of your knowledge and ability, if this source's authenticity is to be seriously considered. As it stands, you know specific timeline discrepancies in the circumstances of this source's discovery but do not say what they are; you conclude that you are satisfied with an "equivalent of dyxlexia" explanation for those discrepancies, therefore there is no need to provide the specifics to anyone else; but woe be to anyone who questions and does not accept your conclusion with faith equal to your own.

You say,

"The ink analyst also offered a preliminary assessment. After taking hundreds of samples from the datebook, he told Hank that he was persuaded that the only anomalies were likely the result of rare writing instruments Lafitte could have picked up during 1963 while traveling that would not necessarily be in the analyst's database."

But do you not see that unless you name this ink analyst, or unless this ink analyst is willing to make a statement signed under his name, this goes nowhere? And why would the ink analyst not be willing to say so? What is the block, the big deal? Who is stopping him? If there is a nondisclosure agreement stopping him, who is not willing to release him from that nondisclosure agreement? Or is it the ink analyst wants to be paid before releasing his findings? (Understandable if that is the reason.) Perhaps some from here would raise the reasonable payment to this expert if so. What were the "anomalies" that are to be explained in terms of "rare writing instruments Lafitte could have picked up during 1963 while traveling", instead of explicable in terms of ordinary non-rare writing instruments? Just based on what you have said here, this ink analysis could be a very good material test relevant to the authenticity vs. forgery issue. 

To answer another question you asked on a different topic, regarding Jack Crichton and H. L. Hunt, I did ask John Curington and he told me he did not recognize the name of Crichton. He asked me who that was and I told him, but he said he still did not recognize or remember the name. 

[deleted]

The main problem Oswald had with driving was parallel parking, plus lack of experience. Ruth told of his problem with parallel parking, and then Ruth told of her showing him how, and that he solved it and had learned that. This was in October. I think some people here are not realizing that Ruth herself documented that Oswald went from having difficulty parallel parking, to "getting it" on how to parallel park. This was before Nov 11 when Lee was seen driving Ruth's car while Ruth was gone that day. The incident with the "wide turn" that Ruth Paine told about, which Denny seems to be referring to, occurred on October 13, nearly a month earlier. Lee told Ruth at that time that in New Orleans his uncle let him drive a car on city streets by himself.

Mrs. Paine. There were two occasions when we practiced parking, one in the larger parking lot [Oct 13] just backing into, pretending there were cars there to back between, as in parallel parking, and another occasion directly in front of my house. On this second occasion directly in front of my house he finally learned how to do it. He had had a bad time, getting his wheels too cramped and not getting in, and getting his wheels straightened out, a beginner's mistakes. Finally, I got into the car and told him when to start reversing the twist on his wheel and cramp, and he said, so soon. It was a surprise. It didn't feel to him it was time already to start coming out of the turn. And then he saw that it was when he then got into the parking place correctly, and quite soon got the feel of it but this was clearly his first experience doing it right, and then he practiced doing it right several times, and he learned quite well, I thought.

(. . .)

Mr. Dulles. What progress did he make over that period [Oct 13 to Nov 10]? 

Mrs. Paine. Considerable.

Mr. Dulles. Reasonable progress?

Mrs. Paine. Very reasonable progress. I thought he learned well, as I have said, both backing and to make a right-angle turn, and really began to understand the feeling of parking. 

So by Nov 11 there is nothing implausible about Lee driving to the Furniture Mart, the Irving Sports Shop, or Hutchison's grocery store, all local in Irving. The only question would be with the Downtown Lincoln Mercury test drive on Nov 2, and that involves an evaluation and judgment on whether that was a true Oswald sighting or a mistaken identification. Bogard the salesman remembered writing down the name "Oswald" though the piece of paper was gone. Bogard passed a polygraph examination. Another salesman said Bogard told him the customer (Oswald) had driven like a madman on a rainy morning when the roads were slick. That is second-hand hearsay. With allowance for some florid retelling as salesman tell each other stories of their customers, this could be a version of Oswald's inexperience in driving as experienced by a passenger, rather than an experienced driver purposely driving recklessly. It is known that Oswald was thinking about wanting a car, and was on the verge of getting his driver's license. Saturday Nov 2 is when the date was securely set by another salesman, and on Sat Nov 2 it rained, the only time it rained that day, in the 8-10 am time frame. I think therefore the story hangs together as having been Oswald. The alternative would be Bogard confused some similar-sounding name of a customer unrelated to Oswald, and the perceived problem in driving ability is removed. It looks to me like it was Oswald and no actual contradiction in driving ability. But however one judges the Downtown Lincoln Mercury, there is no problem on grounds of Oswald's driving ability in itself in Oswald's ability to drive to the Furniture Mart or to Hutchison's market on Nov 11. There is no need to overthink this. Ruth Paine's testimony is not conflicted outside the range of normal good-quality witness testimony description from point of view. She told both of his earlier difficulty with parallel parking and his learning curve in which he learned how to do it and could now do that, all before the date at issue, Nov 11. And there are many licensed drivers on the roads today, satisfactory and safe drivers, who still struggle with parallel parking--considered the last and most difficult necessary driving skill to learn. 

On 12/15/2021 at 9:56 AM, Steve Thomas said:

You can read the documents released by the National Archives om 12/15/21 here:

https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/release2021

Steve Thomas

Here is my favorite among the ones I checked, a 1964 report of a CIA chief in Cairo telling of a conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Drew Pearson, the famous columnist, telling of their meeting with Khrushchev in Moscow. 

"Chairman Khrushchev then joined the conversation, expressing sorrow at the assassination and also inquired about Mrs. Kennedy. Thereupon he asked, Mr. Pearson, 'What really happened?' Mr. Pearson said in effect that the whole affair had taken place just as had been reported in the newspapers and presumably by the Soviet Ambassador in Washington. Chairman Khrushchev was utterly incredulous and his attitude was characterized by Mrs. Pearson as being archetypical 'of every European I have ever talked to on this subject'. That is, that there was some kind of conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy and then murder the assassin with the Dallas Police Department being an accessory. Mrs. Pearson got the impression that Chairman Khrushchev had some dark thoughts about the American Right Wing being behind this conspiracy although Chairman Khrushchev did not articulate this in any clear fashion. Mrs. Pearson was a bit vague on this point in distinguishing between what Chairman Khrushchev said and what she thought he believed. 

"When Mr. Pearson said that we Americans are peculiar people, it understandable [sic] that we foreigners had difficulty comprehending this fantastic episode, but in fact Oswald was mad, had acted on his own, ditto Ruby, Chairman Khrushchev said flatly that he did not believe this. He said he did not believe that the American security services were this inept. Mr. Pearson again said he agreed this was hard to believe but the facts were as they appeared. Mrs. Khrushchev also expressed disbelief and reiterated her affection for Mrs. Kennedy. Mrs. Pearson repeated that the reaction of Chairman Khrushchev and his wife was one of flat disbelief and archetypical of the universal European belief that there was some kind of American conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Oswald. Chairman and Mrs. Khrushchev could not believe that the affair had happened as it apparently did and Mr. Pearson made no headway whatsoever in trying to change their belief that something was not on the level. Chairman Khrushchev greeted Mr. and Mrs. Pearson's efforts with a tolerant smile. . . ."

Thanks Larry for the earlier comment, much appreciated.

Denny on your question regarding Lee's ability to drive, Ruth herself testified that Lee drove her car on his own (with Ruth in the car) several blocks to a destination. Ruth did not think he was a very good driver, true, but he could drive, and testimony supports that he could drive (if you accept the testimony of the Furniture Mart women, the Downtown Lincoln Mercury, and indirectly Hutchison, as well as Marina saying his cousin and/or uncle had taught him to drive in New Orleans, and Marina saying she believed he was capable of passing a driving test if he had been tested). And Ruth herself testified firsthand that Lee drove her car several blocks.

I think of it mentally roughly like this. Let us put driving skill on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the most experienced skilful driving ability. Let us say 3 is what it takes to pass a driving exam, 5 would be a beginning new driver skill level after coming through professional driver training, and 3-4 being a beginning licensed driver from "homemade" driver training from a friend or family member. Average skill level of an experienced driver on the road (>20,000 miles driving experience) 7-8. These are ballpark numbers I am throwing out. 

On this scale Oswald would be about 3. Ruth would put him at maybe 1-2 but that would be a little low compared to his actual ability. The Lincoln Mercury salesman Bogard, if pressed, might say 3-4 if the recklessness was interpreted as caused by inexperience. Marina would maybe put him at about 3. You seem to be citing Ruth's equivalent of 1-2 as if that falsifies all non-Ruth estimates, when it is better to see these estimates with some variability on a spectrum of witnesses, just as witnesses vary on other matters. 

Now you bring up a separate question, something about you argue that Oswald's lack of driving himself away in a car from the TSBD after the assassination is evidence he was not able to drive, because if he could drive, he would have driven away by car rather than by the bus or cab. (If I understand your logic correctly.) That logic assumes more knowledge of Oswald's role in the JFK assassination than I know. I question whether Oswald knew JFK was going to be killed or attempted to be killed out of the TSBD, prior to the fact. Your question assumes certainty that Oswald did have such knowledge prior to the fact. It is clear that after the shots Oswald fled the TSBD (and that it was a rifle traced to him which was on the 6th floor and used in shooting). An alternative reconstruction would have Oswald not having foreknowledge of his rifle's presence in the TSBD, or that shots fired at JFK would come from the TSBD, and upon realizing this, Oswald fled. The reason he would flee on foot, by cab or bus, without confederates in the flight, in this scenario, would be because he did not have access to a car. 

You ask why did Oswald not buy a ticket at the theatre. Well I and some others think he did. It was the killer of Tippit who ran past Brewer's store and Julia Postal's ticket booth into the theatre up into the balcony without buying a ticket, but I argue on a different thread that Brewer's identification of that individual as Oswald was a mistaken identification. Whether Brewer's identification of that individual as Oswald was correct or mistaken is of course contested and you may   feel certain that Brewer's identification was correct, but I do not share such certainty.

But it is not good method to start from a scenario at the end, where there is so much unknown and uncertain, and use that as a premise for a backward-reasoning argument or claim of evidence that Oswald was unable to drive, against the real evidence that he could drive. There is not a single witness that actually supports a conclusion that Oswald literally could not drive--not even Ruth Paine despite the fact she may have said words to that effect, since she testified that she was with him when he drove her car, against her will, several blocks on his own. The only question is where on that 0-10 scale of driving ability/skill he was, and I think the aggregate of the good-quality witness testimony would put it at ca. 3 relative to the pegs on the scale I outlined above. Enough ability to get a car from Point A to Point B in a neighborhood, enough to drive a new car out of a lot for a test drive, but not enough ability to avoid scaring the daylights out of a salesman in the passenger seat when giving it some gas. Anyway that is how I see it.    

An additional reconstructed detail re Oswald on Monday Nov 11 (the day Lee drove Marina to the Furniture Mart): Hutchison's market in Irving

It is possible that day could be when Leonard Hutchison, of Hutchison's market (grocery store) in Irving, said he saw Lee and Marina in his store buying a "full ticket" of groceries, meaning a full bill of food and household supplies. In rereading Hutchison's testimony at WC 10.327f, that is how I see a reading of that. Hutchison had some date and time confusion but his memory of the customer--Lee and Marina--seems credible, the only issue being when. (Hutchison's WC testimony: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=44#relPageId=335)

Hutchison identified Lee and Marina as having been in his store from photos in the news after the assassination, plus his description matches Lee and Marina. The physical descriptions match, and he said he was in one aisle and heard a man speaking in a foreign language which he did not recognize but knew it was not Spanish, French, or German. Hutchison came around to the aisle and saw the man speaking a little sharply to the woman in this foreign language and returning an item she had taken off the shelf, putting it back on to the shelf, as if telling the woman not to buy that item. The woman did not say anything. This is exactly the profile of Lee and Marina as observed at the Furniture Mart--Lee speaking, Marina silent and not saying a word. 

A confusion is that Hutchison saw an older, heavy-set "dumpy" looking woman, estimated 50-60 age, hornrimmed glasses, with Lee and Marina. Everyone has assumed this would be Marguerite (Lee's mother) yet it was impossible for Marguerite to have been in Irving, and Marguerite denied she was ever in Hutchison's store. Because of those impossibilities or incongruities, Hutchison's entire account of seeing Lee and Marina in that incident has been mistakenly rejected. I believe the simple explanation is that the older woman Hutchison remembered in the same aisle and thought was with Lee and Marina, was an unrelated shopper not connected to Lee and Marina. There was no other basis for Hutchison's conclusion than that he saw the third person, the older heavy-set woman, appearing to be with them, but he heard no speaking between them, and seems to have observed for only a few moments. Unlike with Lee and Marina, Hutchison did not claim to identify the older woman as Marguerite from photos. Yet Hutchison's testimony is credible as to the identification of Lee and Marina. The conclusion is the older woman was not Marguerite, was not with Lee and Marina, and Hutchison was mistaken on that detail.  

As for the date, Hutchison showed some confusion. In his Warren Commission testimony he estimated the groceries purchase had been on a Wednesday evening sometime in the last two weeks of Oct 1963. He remembered a separate incident in which Lee (alone) had sought to cash a check for $180, which he remembered as an evening and dated Fri Nov 8. However Mr. Jenner reminded Hutchison that in his original FBI interview of Dec 3, 1963, he had originally dated the Lee-and-Marina groceries-purchase incident to Wed. Nov 13. (Hutchison's Dec 3 FBI interview: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=95676#relPageId=33)

When reminded of this the transcript notes there was a long pause before Hutchison replied, then Hutchison said the Lee-and-Marina grocery buying was before the check-cashing. Based on that belief Hutchison was now reasoning the Lee-and-Marina must have been before Nov 8, even though he had originally told (and had forgotten that he had originally told) the FBI the Lee-and-Marina had been Wed Nov 13. 

The best interpretation is that Hutchison is a credible witness, a local business owner and manager who knew his customers, who reflected ordinary human confusion in memory over times and dates when interviewed weeks later, but was not wrong about the event itself having occurred, or the Lee and Marina identification.

The buying of the "full ticket" of groceries of Lee and Marina not simply implies but really requires that Lee was driving a car to Hutchison's market that particular day, as impossible as that has sounded (and another reason Hutchison's testimony concerning seeing Lee and Marina in his store has been rejected). But if the Lee-and-Marina groceries purchase is located on the same date as the Furniture Mart/Iriving Sports Shop expedition in which Lee drove Ruth's car on Monday Nov 11 when Ruth was gone that day--now it becomes sensible. For that is the one and only day Lee drove on his own in Irving in Oct-Nov 1963. That is the one and only day the Hutchison's market grocery purchase could have occurred, and therefore that is the day it did occur.

The original backward estimate Hutchison gave the FBI for the date when it happened, Wed Nov 13, is very close to Nov 11. All that needs to be supposed is Hutchison was close but got the date wrong. As for the attempted check-cashing--in which Hutchison remembered the non-speaking Lee (characteristic of Lee from other witnesses), the amount of the check being $180, and that it was a bank check not an imprinted personal check from someone who had a checking account--Hutchison's original date for that of Fri Nov 8 would likely be accurate since Lee was in Irving that evening and was not in Irving any weekend after that. Hutchison in his later Warren Commission testimony would have confused which came before and after the other, but they both happened, as reconstructed: Fri Nov 8 (check-cashing attempt, Lee alone) and Mon Nov 11 (Lee and Marina buying groceries, Lee driving).

It would need to be assumed in this reconstruction that Lee and Marina had two-year-old June and the baby with them, but left in the car as Lee and Marina shopped inside, until they returned to the car. Although Hutchison's memory of the time of day for the check-cashing attempt of Lee would be accurate--ca. 5-6 pm in his memory on Fri Nov 8 (and Hutchison's market was an easy walk for Lee to and from Ruth Paine's house)--the grocery purchases of Lee and Marina would need to have occurred earlier in the day on Mon Nov 11, likely a last stop on the way back to Ruth Paine's house before Ruth returned that day, with Hutchison mistaken on his Warren Commission testimony of remembering that also as having been late in the day.

On Hutchison's memory that Lee would come in between 7 and 7:30 am on several occasions buying milk, bread, and cinnamon rolls, this too has been rejected but wrongly. Marina elsewhere in testimony said that Lee when they lived earlier in Oak Cliff was a milk drinker, so that part fits the description. The timing could very well work on mornings before Lee caught his ride with Wesley Frazier back in to Dallas to work. Hutchison remembered on these occasions Lee was on foot, and came from the direction of Ruth Paine's address into his store, and when he left, walked back in the direction of Ruth Paine's house. It has been objected that Marina testified that she did not see Lee eat anything for breakfast other than coffee. That is what Marina observed at Ruth Paine's house. The reason is because Lee was walking out to the then-equivalent of the local 7-11 to buy milk and rolls which he ate for breakfast! It is not reasonable that a working man goes to work on coffee alone in the morning.

Again Hutchison shows confusion on dates in his later interviews on these, but his memories themselves of Lee having been in his store are not a mistaken identification: it was Lee, and that one time, Marina.

On 12/15/2021 at 9:50 PM, Karl Hilliard said:

He was the only person on the planet that claimed to have have heard that a policeman had been shot at the Oak Cliff location at the time he specified because that report was not made on public radio until almost 2:00 PM. Oswald had already been arrested and loaded into a squad car by then.

So no...something was fishy there.

Nothing fishy. Brewer's response to seeing the suspicious man appearing to be avoiding flashing sirens of police cruisers and etc. would be sensible no matter what Brewer may or may not have heard on the radio. But see the extended footnote 617 of Myers, With Malice, pp. 738-739. Without quoting the whole footnote, Myers assesses:

"The exact time that Brewer heard the radio broadcast on the shooting of Office Tippit is not known, although it was very likely broadcast at about 1:31 p.m. over KBOX radio. There were five major radio stations covering the Dallas area--WFAA (570 AM), WBAP (820 AM), KRLD (1080 AM), KBOX (1480 AM), and KLIF (1190 AM). All of hem routinely monitored the Dallas police radio. A review of archival recordings made by the four radiop stations show that neither the shooting in Oak Cliff nor its location was broadcast until after Oswald was arrested at 1:51 p.m. However, the archival recordings of two of the radio stations--WFAA and KBOX--do not cover the entire assassination period. The WFAA recordings begin at 1:47 p.m.; KBOX recordings. begin at 1:35 p.m. A 1:59 p.m KBOX report from newsman Sam Pate, repeats information known to have been previously broadcast, including a report about the Tippit shooting ("Moments ago a police officer reported to have been shot down at Tenth and Patton in the Oak Cliff area. Several squads of police, approximately twenty men, ordered to the Oak Cliff area. A late word shows that the police officer was dead on arrival at Methodist Hospital.") This KBOX report on the Tippit shooting was probably broadcast earlier on KBOX shortly after 1:31 p.m. when it was reported over the Dallas police radio that Tippit was DOA at Methodist Hospital."

The death of President Kennedy was reported on radio news 1:35 p.m. Is it possible Brewer was confusing hearing radio news of President Kennedy, with the local Tippit killing? Then conflated the two retroactively in his memory? If so, then the suspicious person Brewer saw would not be a suspected cop-killer at that point in time but would be a suspicious person in a context of a presidential assassination and police sirens on Jefferson Blvd. If it is not the unverified but argued possible KBOX report of Myers, then Brewer misremembered which news report he heard first of the two (JFK and Tippit). Big deal. If it was a confusion of reporting of Kennedy and Tippit being killed it means Brewer is a mortal human with fallible memory. It would be different if the error had meaning or went somewhere, but this is in the genre of finding some random mistake in a witness and concluding not that they got something wrong in their memory but that therefore that proves they were part of a sinister plot. If Brewer got that radio news report wrong as to which killing it was, why assume more than he was mistaken? Do you seriously think he heard of Kennedy over the radio but intentionally said to himself, "I am going to lie and say I heard about Tippit?" What point to such a lie? Why so quick to see goblins in Brewer? Why so quick to condemn or judge so harshly?

On 12/14/2021 at 10:18 AM, Paul Jolliffe said:

The mysterious "IMB men" really did prompt Brewerto walk down the sidewalk and speak with Julia Postal.

How do we know?

Because Johnny Brewer admitted to Ian Griggs that "he didn't really know why he was there . . ." Why not?

Because the universally told story that Johnny Brewer witnessed the unknown man duck into the theater without buying a ticket was a lie.

No one can stand on the sidewalk in front of Hardy's Shoes and see the ticket booth at the Texas Theater. The booth is recessed back from the sidewalk. The only way to see the booth is to walk to the front of the theater. Any transaction at the booth would have been invisible to Johnny Brewer unless he was standing almost in front of the theater. Yet the very reason he claimed he was suspicious was because he saw the man duck in without paying. Brewer could have seen no such thing from any location on the sidewalk anywhere near Hardy's.

Incidentally, as I pointed out years ago, all three early audio/video taped interviews with Johnny Brewer all contain the same bizarre interruption of his narrative, just as he about to describe how and why he went down to the Texas Theater.

Some comments in defense of Brewer

Johnny Brewer never claimed to see the man open the door to the theatre and go inside, even though the man did. Brewer said he saw a suspicious man outside his store appearing to hide from police cruisers. Suspicious, Brewer went out to the sidewalk and saw the man turn to the right out of his sight into the vestibule area outside the doors of the Texas Theatre. Brewer followed him because suspicious and asked Julia Postal if the man, whom Julia Postal had also seen out of peripheral vision or a glance as she momentarily left the ticket window to go to the sidewalk to look at the police cruisers--Julia Postal said, no, he had not bought a ticket. Julia Postal saw him "duck in" in the direction of the theatre doors, and then he is nowhere to be seen, and he had not bought a ticket. Therefore both concluded he was inside and had not purchased a ticket. The story is straightforward and two witnesses are in agreement on it not simply one. I don't see you challenging that it happened (the man entered the theatre), but you are questioning why Brewer followed the man in the first place. 

For some reason you find it unsatisfactory that a store manager might find the movements of a man outside their store windows suspicious enough to go outside and follow a suspicious man. I have dealt with hundreds of small-town retail store managers and what Brewer describes is extremely plausible and familiar to me. See something suspicious, go out front, take a look. Store owners looking out for the neighborhood, looking out for their fellow store owners.  

For some reason that simple mundane and ordinary explanation of Brewer you reject as could not have happened that way, and therefore because in your reasoning that could not possibly have happened as Brewer described it you conclude it could only be for a different reason: it must have been the two IBM men inside the store who told Brewer "that man looks suspicious--go follow him", whereupon Brewer, who had not thought of that, said, "good idea--OK", and then he goes out, follows, asks Julia Postal, etc. the same narrative, etc. All I can say is who cares, what difference does it make: there is still the man disappearing into the theatre known to Julia Postal and Brewer. And it is a red herring on your part to insist Brewer did not see the man go through the doors into the theatre--since neither Brewer nor Postal ever claimed they did--they claimed rather that they knew the man had done so, not that they had seen the man do so. 

I see people attacking Brewer and it is unjust. There is no evidence Brewer did anything in bad faith that day. He made the critical identification of Oswald on the ground level of the theatre, as the suspicious man he had seen in front of his store windows who had gone into the theatre. That identification is the crux of the matter concerning whether the Tippit killer was Oswald or was not. I happen to think Brewer's identification was incorrect. A mistaken identification. But whether Brewer's identification was right or wrong, it is wholly uncalled-for, without any evidence, to have these incredibly detailed conspiratorial scenarios in which civilian Brewer, trying to do the right thing that day, was part of or manipulated in an advance plot to frame an innocent man.

So many innocent civilians have been defamed unmercifully by JFK assassination conspiracy theorists. Living persons, ordinary persons who did not ask to be part of history that day but tried to do the right thing--or acted as ordinary human beings. Brewer sees a suspicious man avoiding police in front of his store windows at a time of racing police cars with sirens, less than an hour after the news that President Kennedy had been killed in Dallas by an assassination whose perpetrators were still at large. Why wouldn't he be curious to see where that man was headed. News flash--this is how retail store managers in neighborhoods behave. I think the things that have been said about Brewer, all on the basis of zero evidence, just witchhunt-suspicion only, have been appalling. 

On Brewer as having had Oswald as a shoe customer in his store previously. As I recall, he said he later made that connection after thinking about it. You say a pair of Oswald's shoes were confirmed to have come from his store. I do not think that claim of corroboration is accurate or correct, which is not to say Brewer's recollection was wrong. 

Brewer remembered a customer whom he retroactively identified as the man he saw in front of his store window (whom he subsequently identified as Oswald). The original claim of recognition of the man at his store window may or may not be correct. Brewer was indeterminate or fuzzy in his memory of when that shoe sale occurred. I think he ended up saying he thought it was two or three or more months earlier, before late Nov. The problem with that timing is: if it was Oswald, it had to be either earlier than April 1963 or later than Oct 4, 1963 neither of which fit well with Brewer's memory. (If Brewer's remembered shoe customer was someone other than Oswald those constraints would not apply.) If it was Oswald, Brewer is off on his memory of the timing. 

Brewer thought the suspicious man he saw in front of his store who entered the Texas Theatre without paying around 1:40 pm was Oswald. A lot of people are aware of the reasons from witnesses inside the theatre arguing that Oswald was there before that time (Jack Davis, Burroughs). Brewer's initial identification of Oswald in the theatre followed an unsuccessful attempt by him and usher Butch Burroughs to locate the suspicious man in the balcony. (Even though there was a man in the balcony encountered and talked to by several arriving officers, no name or identification of which survives in any record, and one arriving officer actually mistakenly believed that man in the balcony was Oswald himself [deputy sheriff Courson, in Sneed, No More Silence].) Failing to see anyone in the balcony where they first looked and tried to find the suspicious man, Brewer's attention from the stage was drawn to a movement of a lone man at a distance from him on the ground level who stood up then sat back down again in the darkness--this was Oswald--and (because he had not seen any such man in the balcony) Brewer told officers "that's him!", and the rest is history.

Whether Brewer got that identification right or wrong, in either case Brewer was trying to help catch a suspicious man, trying to help law enforcement. Brewer does not deserve the opprobrium he has received from assassination conspiracy theorists, who not really knowing what happened, cast about for anyone on the scene who is nearby and lynch whoever is handy. Its so easy following some unsolved crime to just pick some random innocent person nearby, lynch them, and everybody feels better that a scapegoat has been found. Witchhunt logic.

An officer that day confused a man in the balcony (who was not Oswald) with Oswald. Brewer and Julia Postal saw a suspicious man, who went into the theatre up into the balcony (these last two statements concluded by Julia Postal as opposed to seen by her)--at a time later than Oswald entered that theatre according to witnesses inside the theatre.

There is the appearance not of an advance intent to frame Oswald on the part of police, but of some kind of police coverup after the event. A man in the balcony, exactly where Julia Postal knew and told officers the suspicious man had gone, was questioned by police, then let go without preserved written record of that man's identity, name, address, or what he was asked or answered. This after commanding officer Westbrook, as well as subordinate officers, testified that Westbrook had ordered that names and addresses be taken. It can be considered certain that names and addresses were taken by officers in keeping with those orders, especially since officers testified they did take names and addresses. But there is no record of names and addresses of Texas Theatre patrons that day known in any Dallas Police Department records. That suggests someone inside that theatre may have been let go on purpose that day. 

The reconstruction which I have been proposing, that the suspicious man outside Brewer's storefront who, as Julia Postal said, entered the theatre without paying--going through the doorway and then up a stairs to the balcony, was Jack Ruby's employee Curtis Craford aka Larry Crafard, accounts for the confusion in identifications due to known, non-Tippit-related Craford/Oswald identification confusions from witnesses. The argument here is that Brewer's good-faith attempt to help officers nail a suspected cop-killer (a good motivation) was one more of a number of Craford/Oswald identification confusions which are otherwise known.

Oswald entered the Texas Theatre at an earlier time than the non-ticket-payer suspicious man. Usher Burroughs remembered selling Oswald popcorn. Other patrons remembered Oswald sitting on the main floor. Oswald likely never was in the balcony. Oswald was watching the movie on the ground floor! He would have bought a ticket going in. (There is no record of the manager who took the tickets that day, Callahan, being asked whether he remembered taking a ticket from Oswald--a question some might consider odd not to have been asked and answered.) Oswald was not seen walking to the area of Oak Cliff in which officer Tippit was killed. No reason has been established to render sensible why Oswald would be in the area where Tippit was killed at all. There was no motivation for Tippit to stop Oswald there, even if there were some reason for Oswald to have been there which eludes comprehension. The standard scenario makes little sense, having in its favor some imperfect eyewitnesses and cartridge hulls of disputable chain of custody match to Oswald's revolver. 

Whereas it is not certain that Oswald had a confirmed prior history of murder or intent to murder (see the argument concerning the shot into Walker's house as a possible faked murder attempt as opposed to actual attempted murder, at https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/27502-the-oswald-family-at-the-furniture-mart-a-rifle-scope-installation-in-november-1963-and-why-it-matters-a-sale-of-the-rifle-before-the-assassination/page/5/#comments), Craford by his own later account came to Dallas with prior hit man and Mob-association history. He worked for mobbed-up Ruby whose killing of Oswald gives every appearance of having been connected in some way to the JFK assassination plot, and Craford precipitously fled Dallas for another end of the country leaving only hours after the killing of Tippit and arrest of Oswald. That is, hours after the man coming from the balcony at the Texas Theatre reported seen by deputy sheriff Courson--the likely killer of Tippit and would-be killer of Oswald in the theatre--was allowed to leave that theatre without any record of his name or address or police interview information of that man. An appearance of coverup. By an officer or officers possibly related to Ruby's significant cultivated police contacts. 

Brewer acted with honorable intentions that day and from all that is known, to the present day. The only issue is whether he fingered the right man. But that is an issue of fact and evidence, and has nothing to do with that he acted in good faith, in his heart and conscience, that day, on the basis of any known evidence. 

Those who are so quick to condemn Brewer over this or that wildly hallucinatory imagined scenario, with no actual evidence or sound argument, might consider: what should Brewer have done differently that day? 

The only thing I can see is: not have identified Oswald as the suspicious fleeing man (= Tippit killer) who entered the theatre without buying a ticket. But as serious as that mistake was, as horrible the consequences that a mistaken witness identification can be on an innocent person in the cases where that has happened, if that was indeed the case, there is nothing about Brewer that suggests it was malicious or dishonest from his perspective.

Brewer deserves better from JFK assassination research people. 

Jake I would like to comment your proposal and arguments that the woman with the camera of the news footage at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vhVenvzxQg, at 15:39-45, is Prayer Man. This woman holding a camera appears about 20-30 minutes after the assassination on Houston near the corner of Houston and Elm, a very short walk from the location of PM on the steps of the TSBD. You argue that she matches in physical description PM in the photos, and that the camera in her hand may correspond to what appears to be something in the hand of PM. Being short (as a woman), she might have gone up the steps to the top level in order to get a better camera shot, then over the next twenty minutes or so wandered across the street to Houston. The fact that none of the TSBD witnesses' testimony directly establish any other identification for PM would be consistent with camera woman being that person. So that is the argument.

If camera woman is--my guess--maybe 22? yrs old in the photos?--she would be only early 70s in age today, very possibly alive. If she could be identified and found she could be asked whether she stood on the top steps at the front of the TSBD entrance that day, and get an answer on that from her herself. 

However here are some points which seem to me to favor an Oswald identification over camera woman.

• Shirt neck profile. PM has a shirt neck profile in exact agreement with how Oswald wears his shirt when arrested, suggesting that is how he normally wore his shirts, unbuttoned ca. 3-4 buttons from the top with a T-shirt underneath. But camera woman's shirt is buttoned at the top neck button. You propose that she had that top collar button unbuttoned when PM (the next button below that being near breast level), then buttoned up her shirt at some point in the next ca. 20 minutes before she was photographed with her shirt buttoned at the collar. While that is possible, all else being equal would a woman taking photos take time out to button that top collar button, or just keep on as she was. And second, if camera woman did have her top collar unbuttoned so as to look like PM, she must have had a woman's equivalent of a T-shirt underneath because otherwise it would probably be considered borderline immodest or uncomfortably low cut for most women's preference I would think, but if she did why then button the neck button. Maybe there was a breeze and she was cold? But with Oswald, no change in how he wore his shirt needs to be assumed.
• Camera in left hand. The woman holds her camera in her left hand, which makes sense for a right-handed person, using the right hand at the time a picture is taken to steady and click the shutter. However PM is holding something in his right hand, not left. If PM is Oswald the object in his right hand would not be a camera (no indication at all that Oswald had a camera at work) but could be a glass coke bottle. An argument that the object in PM's right hand raised to PM's face in one PM photo is not a flash of a camera is that the same light reflection is seen when the object is lowered and not at PM's face. But possibly the light could be accounted for from reflection from the glass bottom of a coke bottle, with one photo capturing PM taking a swig. Camera woman is not holding anything in her right hand, suggesting the left hand is the hand she normally holds her camera when using only one hand, seemingly inconsistent with PM's object in the right hand.
• Hairline. While camera woman's haircut seems close to a match, PM's hairline seems to show an "indent" "in", more than the straight 90 degree drop of camera woman's hair. PM's hairline seems distinctive male pattern, a distinctive partly receding hairline of a type that Oswald and roughly 25% of American males have as Andrej brought out, but which camera woman does not have.
• Hair and top of ear. All of PM's right ear seems uncovered by hair, in agreement with photos of Oswald, whereas the hair of camera woman comes down over the top part of her right ear. (On the dark spot below PM's right ear, which matches the hair of neither Oswald nor camera woman, see below.)
• Darker area of PM's shirt. Although this tests the limits of visual resolution from the poor photo image, there does seem to be a slightly darker area of part of PM's shirt, which is irregular and not an intentional pattern of the shirt, which Andrej has intriguingly proposed matches a similar distribution of darker area on the maroon-red shirt that Oswald was wearing that morning (C150). Rather than shirt pattern this would be from wear and/or discoloration maybe from sweat over time. I don't know the cause, just guessing, but there is some discoloration in Oswald's C150 shirt which sort of corresponds to a discoloration area detectable in PM's shirt, but there is nothing in camera woman's shirt that is equivalent or to account for that.
• Weight. This is very subjective, but it "seems" PM may have somewhat more body mass than camera woman. Camera woman appears to be slender and light weight. Oswald was slender but taller and male and would have weighed perhaps 20? 30? pounds more than camera woman? In better agreement with PM?
• Forearm. The size and heft of the right forearm on PM seems to look like a man's forearm, a bit larger than would be anticipated for lightweight camera woman.

These comments are tentative subject to more expert opinion (I do not trust myself on photo interpretation of this nature) but these features on present analysis seem to me to better favor Oswald than camera woman as a match to Prayer Man. There is however one feature of PM that is puzzling and for which I can think of no good explanation: a dark streak below PM's right ear of same hue as the dark hue of hair above. It seems difficult to interpret that dark streak as actually being hair since it is odd for any hair of a man or woman to look that way. Certainly neither Oswald's nor camera woman have hair below their ear that way. The only parallel I can see is in this photo below which shows a similar dark streak below Oswald's ear as a result of shadow. However since PM is standing wholly in shadow without sun it seems that explanation will not work for PM, so I do not know what the explanation on that might be. 

On 12/13/2021 at 9:23 AM, Paul Jolliffe said:

 

Greg, your dismissal of Ralph Yates's statement to the FBI is beneath you (I hope.)

You've implied that you think Yates told the truth, but was merely mistaken. You apparently believe that Yates apparently picked up a hitchhiker (maybe Crafard) who had no connection to any later events in Dealey Plaza. 

But . . .

No one can seriously your belief that Yates' hitchhiker - who was a ringer for our "Oswald" - talked of shooting the president and then claim, as you did, that it was " mistaken identifications of Larry Crafard as Oswald, without credible reason to suppose Crafard intended or planned any of those mistaken identifications. (And I think Yates' hitchhiker was Crafard.)"

You've got to be kidding me! If Yates told the FBI the truth, then there was NO WAY his hitchhiker was innocent! This could not be an "innocent" Larry Crafard! Whoever was the hitchhiker, that person was not innocent!

Not once we read that Yates told the FBI that:

"the man then asked Yates if he thought that a man could assassinate the president. Yates replied that he thought such a thing could be possible. The man then asked Yates if it could be done from the top of a building or out of a window, high up, and Yates said he guessed this was possible if one had a good rifle with a scope and was a good shot.

Yates advised that about this time the man pulled out a picture which showed a man with a rifle and asked Yates if he thought the President could be killed with a gun like that one. Yates said he was driving and did not look at the picture but indicated to the man that he guessed so . . ."

Sorry Greg. Your attempts to portray this as "innocent" are completely wrong or in bad faith. Either Yates was a complete fabricator, xxxx and fool (it is a federal crime to lie to FBI agents) or there was something very sinister going on here. 

There is no 'innocent mistake" here.

Paul J., you misunderstand me. I do not dismiss Yates' FBI statement, I do not think the hitchhiker had no connection to the events at Dealey Plaza, and I nowhere said or implied Yates' hitchhiker was an "innocent Crafard". I think the hitchhiker was conveying the TSBD Mannlicher-Carcano assassination rifle, in a "noisy" manner (such that a random witness would be created), a witness who might later connect that rifle to Oswald by means of remembering a photo of Oswald shown by a hitchhiker who entered from an exit on Oak Cliff in proximity to where evidence could be produced showing that hitchhiker received that rifle from Oswald.

In my reconstruction the rifle that hitchhiker was carrying was the assassination rifle of the TSBD obtained from Oswald, whoever the hitchhiker was, whether Crafard or not. You agree the hitchhiker was not Oswald but was mistakenly thought to be Oswald by Yates. You propose no identity for the hitchhiker but for some reason seem certain my proposed identity is not right, even though you appear to have no idea who else it was. Why in your thinking is Crafard excluded as the identity of that hitchhiker?

I have argued elsewhere that Crafard was the killer of Tippit the next day, and sought to kill Oswald after Tippit but was prevented in doing so by officers who saved Oswald's life by arriving and putting him under arrest. I think Crafard abandoned the Tippit murder weapon, a snub-nosed .38 Special, tossed in a street near the Carousel Club in the early morning hours of Sat Nov 23, in the direction Crafard was leaving Dallas in those same early morning hours of Sat. Nov 23. FBI documentation establishes that weapon was found and reported to Dallas police in the same hours of Crafard's flight and in proximal location to Crafard's last location in Dallas prior to flight, but nothing has been heard since of that handgun found and turned in by a citizen on a Dallas street the morning after the assassination. (https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/27367-an-argument-for-actual-innocence-of-oswald-in-the-tippit-case/)

The circumstances of Crafard's recent arrival in Dallas in the runup to the assassination (introduced to Ruby who let Crafard live at the Carousel Club); his reported hitman experience and Mob-related connections prior to arrival to Dallas; his being hosted and employed by the man who then killed Oswald; and his sudden flight from Dallas in the hours following the assassination, let us just say puts him on the short list of suspects.

Yet so far as is known Crafard was not himself a member of the Mob in the "made man" sense. He seems rather like an independent contractor paid to do occasional jobs, which if he does well he gets repeat business. I don't think Ruby was masterminding, but Ruby was on location, a Mob frontman with a legitimate legal business, and he hired and housed the newly-arrived hitman, Crafard, in the weeks prior to the assassination. 

The case for the identity of Yates' hitchhiker as Crafard:

• the hitchhiker is connected to the assassination (conveying the rifle which ended up 6th floor TSBD), and Crafard as killer of Tippit and attempted killer of Oswald on Fri Nov 22 gives the appearance of being connected to the assassination.
• the hitchhiker resembled Crafard in physical description and appearance, based on the mistaken identification of Yates that the hitchhiker was Oswald. Crafard is known to have been mistakenly identified as Oswald by witnesses in other instances, making that misidentification of Yates plausible in terms of Crafard, as one more instance.
• the hitchhiker's mode of travel corresponds to Crafard's hitchhiking. 
• the hitchhiker mentioned the Carousel Club to Yates, which is where Crafard was living
• Crafard as the one who obtained the assassination-implicated rifle that morning from Oswald with Tippit present would give a mechanism for Crafard physically recognizing and being recognized by Tippit the next day, and physically recognizing Oswald his next target in the theatre.

I see no credible reason to suppose Crafard ever represented himself as Oswald or was aware that others would think he was Oswald. Any mistaken identifications of Crafard as Oswald that did happen I therefore interpret as accidents, such as Yates.

6 hours ago, Tony Rose said:

Ditrral = Kitrell, a woman with whom he had established some measure of rapport, making her name (mangled though it was) something that was in his memory.

Tony thank you for the suggestion. The main problem I see with it is that Oswald used the name "Drittal" on the order form on March 12, 1963, whereas his first encounter with Laura Kittrell at the Texas Employment Commission did not occur until the first week of October 1963.

On 12/12/2021 at 11:14 AM, Jeff Carter said:

Michael Paine’s 1993 revisionist history re: Oswald showing him a backyard photo entirely contradicts two key facets of his Warren Commission testimony from 1964, both of which he spoke in great detail at the time. First,  recounting the initial meet with Lee, at Neely Street, when Paine arrived to drive the Oswalds to a dinner engagement at the Paine home in Irving, he describes a half-hour conversation in detail which fills ten transcript pages (WCH II, pp. 393-398). It is this encounter at which Paine would later claim Oswald showed him the photograph, but that incident is not recalled at all in 1964. Is his memory lapse, a year instead of thirty years after the fact, credible, particularly considering the weight or gravitas he would later apply to the supposed presentation? Second, Paine spoke of the “camping equipment” or a “folding shovel” during seven pages of transcript (WCH IX, pp. 437-443)  over-describing his thought patterns regarding the rolled blanket which he had unloaded from Ruth’s station wagon, carried into the garage, and had to move from time to time during the ensuing two months. While later accounts by members of the DPD that the blanket had the obvious form of a “rifle”, such thought does not even occur to Paine even though, should one take his 1993 revision seriously, he not only had direct knowledge that Oswald had been photographed holding a rifle the previous spring but also, according to his revisionist take, the photograph expressed Oswald’s deepest personal view of himself. It doesn’t really add up.

Note also that Marina Oswald was directly advised of a poor outcome concerning her U.S, residency should she not “cooperate” with a Secret Service interviewer on Nov 28/63, a threat which immediately followed the interviewer articulating details of Marina’s previous activities back in Leningrad, including specifically at a locale called the “Inter Club” (CE1792).

Jeff I took a little time to go back over and read Michael Paine's testimony where you cite, as well as your discussion of such in your published article for Kennedys and King (https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/a-new-look-at-the-enigma-of-the-backyard-photographs-part-5?tmpl=component&print=1). I agree with you that the 1993 claim of Michael Paine, so decisive and confident and specific, of having been shown a Backyard Photo on April 2, 1963, on the first night he met Lee--two days after the photos were taken--seems puzzling in light of his not having mentioned that earlier in his Warren Commission testimony. 

Does it contradict his earlier Warren Commission testimony? Was he asked?

There is one way in which I can see a certain plausibility to it. First, William Kelly judges that the Backyard Photos were a "mission photo" (https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2018/09/evaluating-photo-evidence-in-jfk.html), a momento or something to show off, or an item to include with a resume--or a joke. I have a photo on the wall of me and my wife in 1800s period costume, me with a rifle looking mean like Davy Crockett or out of an old Western movie set. Its great fun to everyone who sees it given that I have never owned a firearm in my life. Marina's "hunter of fascists--ha ha!" inscription on the back of one, dated April 5, suggests a possible similar light sense in that photo's origin. The inscription I wrote for mine is, with Caroline looking demure with bonnet and peasant dress and milk pail next to mean-looking me with one arm around her and the other holding the musket and glaring at the viewer: "Nobody messes with my woman".

In Michael Paine's testimony he continually refers to Lee as believing change would come about through violence and revolution, and yet that characterization is actually poorly supported in terms of any specific thing Lee is supposed to have said in Michael's testimony. However, seeing a Backyard Photo could help explain where Michael got that about Lee.

If he did see a Backyard Photo from a proud Lee showing off a semi-humorous photo it would not necessarily mean the rifle and pistol are owned by the person in the photo; they could be props or lent for the photo, just as my 1800's period photo has me with a musket which was not mine. If Lee did show such a photo to Michael it would not necessarily follow that the firearms would be expected to be in Lee's things in the garage.

On the testimony about the camping equipment inside the blanket, I don't know whether it is actually true that it never occurred to him that the object in the shape of a broken-down rifle stock and barrel in the tied blanket that he moved around to get out of the way of his drill press could be a weapon (a rifle), even though he says it did not, but the extended details he gives on that can be explained in part in that the questioning of him by the WC on that point was prolonged and witnesses do not choose the questions or the topic but are to answer the questions asked. It is believable to me that Michael would not open the blanket or consider it his business to do so or care what was in the blanket. It also is not clear to me that a broken-down rifle inside the blanket would have been any big deal to him (speaking of prior to the assassination obviously). This was Texas ... probably dozens of rifles within nearby homes and pickup trucks. Buell Wesley Frazier had a rifle. Probably quite common. Ruth's scruples re guns would seem to be something of an outlier on that issue compared to mainstream Texans. 

As for the Backyard Photos themselves, as I understand it an HSCA panel of expert analysts found no evidence of inauthenticity, and Marina has always to the present day insisted in the most emphatic way that she took those photos. Marina in 1991:

"I did take those pictures of Lee ... I took them one Sunday. Yes. I swear on my children I'm telling the truth. I do not remember how many. Because I didn't want it; I didn't like it; but two [pictures] I definitely took." (https://www.jfk-online.com/jfk100backyard.html)

The shot fired by Oswald into Walker's house

I have come to my own theory of the case on the Walker house shot, which I think agrees with the facts. Oswald, as part of infiltrating a right-wing group, came to know people around Walker. By arrangement with Walker's people Oswald took the shot through Walker's window, but it was to be a single shot into a room with no one there. This would be used as publicity by Walker and blamed on Walker's enemies. There was no intent to murder in the shot. Walker was not in the room at the time of the shot.

After the shot Walker intentionally lightly self-injured by pressing the back of one arm down on broken glass shards and debris lying on a chair or table or floor, such that some shards and splinters cut into his arm, minor scratch or flesh wounds, plus some dust and debris in his hair (but no wounds there). Reporters arrived immediately, marveling with Walker at his extraordinary good luck in being spared serious injury, while Walker with no evidence implied domestic communists had done it (loosely equivalent to the Kennedys in Walker-speak). Walker criticized the Kennedys by name in the moments after the shooting ("The Kennedys say there's no internal threat to our freedom"), and the story of the despicable attack on a patriot standing for American values went out over wire services across the land.

Police that night arriving on the scene privately suspected the shooting was fake. If it was fake it may not have been the first time. Extremist-right Minutemen leader Robert DePugh knew Walker well and worked with Walker organizationally and ideologically. DePugh claimed that Walker asked him to arrange a staged kidnapping of himself for publicity:

"Minuteman leader Robert DePugh told the author that he [DePugh] visited Walker at his Dallas home during the primary campaign [for Texas governor in 1962]. Walker asked DePugh to have his men kidnap him in a publicity stunt, which DePugh refused. Walker had planned to blame the kidnapping on the Communist conspiracy, in an effort to help his campaign." (Jeffrey Caulfield, General Walker and the Murder of President Kennedy [2015], 327, on the basis of author interviews with DePugh in 1999 and 2000)

On the Bradford Angers story of Walker employee Robert Schmidt driving Oswald and accompanying Oswald, helping him to take the shot, that sounds like a spun version of the truth of the Walker house shot, of Oswald taking the shot into Walker's house at the behest of Walker's people and Walker. The story as leaked casts it differently (in which Walker does not know and was victim), but that is what the facts of that story prima facie say. Someone was spreading a Walker-favorable version of the truth should the truth leak. A Dec 29, 1977 letter from Earl Golz of the Dallas Morning News to Walker: 

"Dear Mr. Walker,

"I received a copy of the material you sent to Tip O'Neill and others. It may open some eyes and I hope it does. I am especially interested in Marina's message on the back of the photograph which you say was dated five days before the shot fired at you by her husband.

"A friend of Larry [sic] Schmidt's recently told me that Larry and his brother, who he says was then associated with you, had accompanied Oswald in the brother's car to the scene of the shooting. Larry Schmidt supposedly has protected himself since that time by placing written accounts of his story in safe deposit boxes around the country (. . .)"

Caulfield reports that Walker answered Golz in longhand written on the back of the letter speaking of other things without comment on the Schmidt brothers' story. According to Angers, the private security contractor--perhaps the operations man tasked and paid to get this little operation done--a taped statement was coerced out of Larrie Schmidt (not a euphemism if one considers what preceded Larrie's "voluntary" taped statement to Angers), who at the same time may have been asked or sworn not to speak of it. If it did leak, it has been preemptively framed and spun in the desired way--that some of Walker's own people spontaneously joined with their good buddy Oswald one night and just decided to shoot the boss dead as a lark. Walker knew nothing about it and was the victim. So the Bradford Angers version leaked to Dick Russell and Earl Golz above. That version of the story is nonsense as it stands. But the tape of Larrie Schmidt is probably real. The part about Oswald assisted by Walker people in taking the shot into Walker's house is probably real. Underneath the nonsense is the truth.

In this theory of the case, Oswald, working with Walker's people, shot into Walker's house but would have understood that no one would be hit, and it would have come as a surprise to Oswald that Walker claimed to have been in the room and injured and almost killed by the shot. If Oswald's role in taking the shot had leaked to law enforcement (and it is almost difficult to imagine that it would not), Dallas police did not act against Oswald, which may or may not be explained in terms of an agency protecting Oswald (asking police to look the other way), although there is no evidence of that. But there is also no evidence that that shot ever was solved otherwise.

Conclusion: Oswald did take the shot, growing out of a possible informant involvement in infiltrating the Walker group. Marina was not making it up about being freaked out by Lee's role in the shooting. Lee's precautionary list of contingency advice to Marina if he were arrested was not made up.

But Oswald was not involved in an attempted murder. Based on the reasonability of the above, there is no secure basis to assume that he was. There is more than reasonable doubt; there is likelihood that he is clean on this one, of the charge of intent to do violence to a person in the case of the Walker house shooting.