Bugliosi Error

[Jim Root]

On Page 111 of Vincent Bugliosi's book Reclaiming History there is a fundamental error that is rather substantial but a necessary error if you want to debunk the possibility of a conspiracy that includes participation by individuals at high levels of US Intelligence.

This is substantial for my own belief that John J. McCloy and Maxwell Taylor may have been the "Big Fish" at the top of the conspiracy food chain.

The sentence is:

"Hosty had learned on November 1 that Lee worked at one of the Texas School Book Depository buildings in Dallas, but he did not know which one."

In a 1600 + page book (which I have not as yet finished) a single sentence may seem obscure but it is more than an omission of fact. In this case it is a distortion of the Warren Commission Testimony of James Patrick Hosty.

In the Testimony of Hosty we find this information that contradicts Mr. Bugliosi:

"Mr. STERN. When Mrs. Paine told you that Lee Harvey Oswald was working at the School Book Depository, did that mean anything to you? Did you remember the building?

Mr. HOSTY. No, sir; I knew of the building in the outskirts of the downtown area. That is about all. I looked up the address, and I recognized the address, but it meant nothing to me...."

"Mr. HOSTY. Oh, yes, sir. This occurred on the (November) 1st. This was a Friday. I returned to the Dallas office. I covered a couple of other leads on the way back. I got in shortly after 5 o'clock and all our stenos had gone home. This information has to go registered mail, and it could not go then until Monday morning.

Monday morning---shall I continue?

Mr. STERN. Yes.

Mr. HOSTY. On Monday morning, I made a pretext telephone call to the Texas School Book Depository, I called up and asked for the personnel department, asked if a Lee Oswald was employed there. They said yes, he was."

21 Days before the assassination of JFK the FBI was aware of where Lee Harvey Oswald was working and this information was forwarded to Washington, DC on November 4th, before the Dallas luncheon location was decided upon and before the final motorcade route was decided.

But in another unusual happening this Hosty note was not given a Commission Exhibit Number nor was it ever brought before the Warren Commission even though two previous Hosty notes were given Commission Exhibit Numbers.

In an article written by Washington journalist Jefferson Morley, "What Jane Roman Said, A Retired CIA Officer Speaks Candidly About Lee Harvey Oswald," we find some interesting information revealed about the information that James Hosty was providing to the FBI and where that information was being forwarded too.

Quoting from Morley's article:

"I first called Jane Roman in the summer of 1994. I told her that I worked as an editor for the Sunday Outlook section of the Washington Post. I told her I had seen her name on some new CIA records in the National Archives. Could she spare some time to review them with a colleague and me?Roman said she was going away for the summer, maybe when she got back in the fall. In October, I called her again. I explained that it was very difficult to understand records like this, especially for some one like myself who had never worked at the CIA. I needed her help. I told her that I liked to work with a colleague, I preferred to tape record my interviews and thought we could cover everything in 90 minutes.

She agreed. She invited me to come to her house on Newark Street in Cleveland Park on November 2, 1994."

Morley took with him a former CIA employee named John Newman.

"Newman produced a sheath of copies of the CIA cables that Roman had signed for over the years. They were all cables about one Lee Harvey Oswald of New Orleans and his travels between November 1959 to October 1963. Roman took her time examining them. From that point on, Roman did not dispute that she had been familiar with Lee Harvey Oswald before November 22, 1963. She spoke with candor.

A second thing that stands out from the interview tape: Jane Roman was well informed about the agency’s workings and its inner circle. She mentioned that she had been to the funeral of Ray Rocca, a longtime counterintelligence expert. She alluded to her friendship with retired CIA director Dick Helms, then living a couple of miles away on Garfield Street in Northwest Washington."

Digging further into the Morley article:

"As the interview proceeded, Newman sought to coax Roman into talking about the handling of information on Oswald by the senior staff members of the CIA’s operations division and the counterintelligence staff in the weeks before Kennedy was killed.

He showed her the cover sheet on one FBI report on Oswald that had been sent to the agency. There was a blizzard of signatures on it. Newman had deciphered the writing and identified the officials in various offices in the Directorate of Plans, as the covert operations division was then known. He read off the names of all the people who signed the routing slips for the Oswald file in September 1963.

“Is this the mark of a person’s file who’s dull and uninteresting?” he asked. “Or would you say that we’re looking at somebody who’s—“

“No, we’re really trying to zero in on somebody here,” Roman acknowledged."

But what of Hosty's notes? The article continues:

"Newman then reviewed the routing slips on two documents about Oswald that Roman herself had received in September 1963.

The first was the FBI report from agent Hosty in Dallas. Hosty reported on Oswald’s address in the summer of 1963 and his recent leftist political activities, including his subscription to the Socialist Worker newspaper."

Continuing:

"On top of that cable was the cable and routing slip that showed she had just a few days before signed for the two FBI reports on this same Lee Harvey Oswald. She had signed for the second of these reports on Oct. 4, 1963."

"Newman’s implication was clear. If Roman had read the FBI reports, then she knew on October 10, 1963 that Oswald had just a few weeks earlier been handing out pamphlets on behalf of the FPCC, the most prominent pro-Castro organization in the United States. Moreover, Oswald’s pro-Castro activism had embroiled him in an altercation with members of the Cuban Student Directorate, one of the agency’s most favored front groups in the anti-Castro cause. All of this information was on Jane Roman’s desk in October 1963."

My question is, "What would motivate Mr. Bugliosi to misstate this information about what Hosty knew and when he knew it, especially in light of the fact that Hosty's information was being routed to the highest echelons of the CIA?"

Jim Root

[Larry Hancock]

Jim, a good catch but I also think it further illustrate's Bugliosi's management of information. Surely if he had read Hosty's

book or talked with Hosty himself he would know that Hosty feels that a great deal of information about Oswald was

suppressed, that evidence was removed from the record pertaining to Oswald's contacts in Mexico City, etc. Indeed Hosty

states (and I have heard him do so in person) that that the MC investigation itself was gutted in regard to Oswald's contacts and

that he was very likely being manipulated by others e.g. some sort of conspiracy was involved. Jim suspects the Cubans but

of course the real point is he does suspect conspiracy and Bugliosi should be obligated to report on that.

Hosty also accuses Hoover and the FBI of manipulating his own files and statements on the case.

If Bugliosi does not comment fully on Hosty in the book, at least in an end note, he is certainly not doing a fair job.

-- Larry

[Pat Speer]

Jim, a good catch but I also think it further illustrate's Bugliosi's management of information. Surely if he had read Hosty's

book or talked with Hosty himself he would know that Hosty feels that a great deal of information about Oswald was

suppressed, that evidence was removed from the record pertaining to Oswald's contacts in Mexico City, etc. Indeed Hosty

states (and I have heard him do so in person) that that the MC investigation itself was gutted in regard to Oswald's contacts and

that he was very likely being manipulated by others e.g. some sort of conspiracy was involved. Jim suspects the Cubans but

of course the real point is he does suspect conspiracy and Bugliosi should be obligated to report on that.

Hosty also accuses Hoover and the FBI of manipulating his own files and statements on the case.

If Bugliosi does not comment fully on Hosty in the book, at least in an end note, he is certainly not doing a fair job.

-- Larry

Exactly, Larry. One of the things that's so annoying about da Bug's book and the Ghost movie is this attitude that "since Oswald did it, we should just move on." Well, even if LHO was a looney bad guy who woke up on the wrong side of the bed, history should be corrected to acknowledge that people like Warren, Humes, and Specter lied and played stupid in order to misrepresent the medical evidence, and that Ramset Clark and the Justice Department continued on with this misrepresentation. OK OK, da Bug would just say that's my theory blah blah blah. But here he mentions Hosty without acknowledging that Hosty claims the FBI altered his personnel file to distance the Bureau from Hosty's purported mistakes. That's deserving of a congressional investigation right there, IMO.