Rob Reiner And Soledad O'Brien Aim To Reveal JFK's Real Killers

[Jonathan Cohen]

26 minutes ago, Richard Booth said:

Savastano makes a pretty good argument against Souetre having had any involvement:

https://www.tpaak.com/the-french-deception

Indeed he does make a good argument. Leslie Sharp should be arriving any minute to claim Savastano is wrong and only "Coup in Dallas" tells the Souetre story accurately ...

[Richard Booth]

6 minutes ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

Indeed he does make a good argument. Leslie Sharp should be arriving any minute to claim Savastano is wrong and only "Coup in Dallas" tells the Souetre story accurately ...

I'm open to either, I've not been convinced yet.

[Benjamin Cole]

8 hours ago, Roger Odisio said:

You're right that those who planned the murder would have made sure there were no expulsion records on the killers they used.  And there are none that I'm aware of.  Not of Souetre or anybody.

 

Could you be thinking of the article in early '64 in an obscure French newspaper in which the author claimed to have met with a drunken Frenchman who said he had  been expelled from Dallas?  The French thought he may have been talking about Souetre and set off a brief inquiry of the FBI and CIA as to what they knew.

 

I concluded, back in April in a couple of posts, that the reporter made up the story of the encounter.  It never happened.  The whole inquiry lasted only a few days and provided no information of Souetre's whereabouts.   

 

In a recent podcast with Jeff Morley and Larry Schnapf, Reiner briefly named Souetre as one the shooters.  https://jfkfacts.substack.com/p/the-jfk-facts-podcast-talks-to-rob.   I assume that claim will come up again in more detail later.  I will be surprised if he can really put Souetre in Dealey Plaza with a gun.

Here is the problem that many have backwards.

When a claim is made about the JFKA (in general) the onus is on the people making the claim to show that the claim is true, at least somewhere near beyond reasonable doubt. 

The onus is not on skeptics and observers to disprove all claims.

Indeed, proving a negative is often impossible (a fact well known to rank fraudsters). 

Side note: At this point, I plan a small book, steadily shrinking, on "people not involved in the JFKA." Right now, it is down to a couple of pages. 

Just for fun, here is a list of ethnicities that had JFK assassinated:

1. Italians (Mafia)

2. Jews (J-mob and Israelis)

3. Latins (Cubans)

4. French (various assassins related to French right-wing)

5. Germans (Nazis brought into the CIA post WWII)

6. WASPs (the old East Coast power structure)

7. Americans (LHO or right-wingers like Milteer)

8. Russians (through LHO). 

AFAIK, Africans and Asians are considered innocent of the JFKA.

Although I think I read once that Catholics related to Diem did the deed, so maybe we can bring Asians into the mix. 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 2, 2023 by Benjamin Cole

[Roger Odisio]

1 hour ago, Richard Booth said:

I'm open to either, I've not been convinced yet.

 

The Papich document you cited was from the FBI-CIA response to the French inquiry in March 1964 for information about the story that Souetre had been expelled from Dallas the weekend of the murder. Both agencies said they had no record of such an expulsion.

 

The French inquiry originated from the article I mentioned to you by the reporter who claimed he had met a drunken Frenchman who said he was expelled from Dallas.  He didn't name the Frenchman in the article but when the local police contacted him a few days later he said the man was Michel Roux.  Souetre sometimes used Roux as an alias.  But when the reporter described the man. he described Souetre, who was 6'1" not Roux who was 5'8".  The French surmised the reporter was talking about Souetre, not Roux.

 

Since DeGaille was scheduled to go to Mexico in a few weeks they wanted to know what the US agencies knew about the story. They dropped the inquiry a few days later and DeGaulle went to Mexico without incident. 

 

The upshot of all of this is that the French inquiry established nothing when it was abandoned, *not* that Souetre was *not* in Dallas.  Fensterwald tried to get the Souetre's file from French in the 80s, but they wouldn't give it to him.

 

Here are two of my posts last April when this story was extensively discussed.  Sorry for some redundency.

 

"My arguments in this thread have been based on the assumption that Louis' article about the Dallas expulsion was true.  French authorities had looked into it, interviewed Louis, and found his story credible enough to inquire about it to the FBI.  They decided it was Souetre using Roux as an alias.  They didn't ask *whether* Souetre had been expelled; they asked the FBI for an explanation as to *why*, and where he was sent.  Of course, we don't know all the French knew, or thought they did, when they made the inquiry.

 

But suppose the story was a work of fiction, as Greg Parker has suggested on ROKC.

 

It wouldn't have taken any great imagination to create.  If the CIA had hired a foreign assassin, as the ZRRifle project suggested they preferred, they likely would have expelled him precisely as Louis described, and covered up any vestiges of his visit to Dallas.  They had the planes, pilots, and resources to do that.  Expulsion of foreign assassins, if hired, had to have been part of the plan as originally conceived.  Louis was probably smart enough to realize that and build his story from there. 

 

Louis didn't name the assassin in the article.  But when questioned by the police, he said his source was Michel Roux.  The French contacted Roux and he acknowledged being in Montreal at the time of the alleged interview and talking to Louis, but only over the phone, not in person. They had talked about the JFKA, he said, but he denied telling Louis any such story as had appeared in the article.  I have no reason to doubt Roux or his story of his travels thru the Dallas area beginning on Dec 19, to Canada, and back to France in late January,'64.  He was not expelled. There is nothing to connect him to the JFKA.

 

But the two stories, Louis' and Roux's, do not fit together. It's unlikely both could be true.  If both things had happened--an in-person meeting with Souetre saying he was Roux, followed by a bunch of calls from Souetre wanting another meeting, and one previous phone call that we know about from the real Roux, it's likely Louis would have known these were two different people.  Not naming his source in the article allowed Louis to obfuscate that problem for a while, but not after he named Roux as his source. This is one clue something was amiss.

There is still much we don't know.  Perhaps the MFF lawsuit can retrieve the French file on the Souetre expulsion that led to their inquiry.  The JFK Act provides for the release of records held by foreign governments.  Bud Fensterwald tried to get it 40 years ago.  The French denied him, citing privacy concerns as I recall.  Souetre died in 2001.  Maybe they will be more cooperative now.

 

To be clear, nothing in the foregoing, whether or not Louis made up the story, tells us anything about Souetre's whereabouts. If Louis concocted his expulsion story, it doesn't mean it didn't happen.  A logical part of any conspiracy using foreign components must include a plan to get rid of them before they are detected.  It's still worth pursuing whether Souetre was in Dallas and expelled after the murder. Or some other assassin."

 

" We're dealing with probabilities here, Steve, as we must.  When I said Louis' story was probably a work of fiction, this is what I meant.

 

There was no in-person meeting with a drunken assassin, nor 8-10 anguished followup calls seeking another meeting.  Louis made that up to embellish his story.

 

Louis was interested in the JFKA. When hooked up by phone by the two women with Michel Roux, who had been in the area at the time, Louis asked him what he thought happened.  Roux said it couldn't have been done by Oswald alone, there must have been others involved.

 

That gave Louis the bare bones to construct his story. It took Louis almost a month to publish his article after the alleged apartment meeting (I don't know when his phone call with Roux happened, but it was about the same time as the alleged in person meeting.)

 

Louis didn't name his source in the article.  

 

Within 10 days after the article came out, the Bayonne police showed up to ask Louis some questions.  DeGaulle was scheduled to go to Mexico in two weeks and the authorities were worried that Louis' assassin might still be lurking in the area.

 

Who was the assassin Louis had talked to, they wanted to know.  Louis (a "sometime" journalist, according to Fensterwald, whatever that means) who wasn't burdened by a concern to protect his sources, told them it was Michel Roux.  Roux had returned to France about a month before. 

 

Aware of Souetre's aliases, the French took Louis' answer to be a confirmation of sorts that Louis had actually talked to Souetre saying he was Roux.  At some point they had confirmed that Roux was not expelled from the Dallas area, but had left of his own volition, so it was unlikely he could have been Louis's source for the expulsion. 

 

Five days after receiving the police report, the French dashed off an urgent inquiry to the FBI about Souetre.  They didn't ask *if* Souetre had been expelled.  They had already determined he was on the basis of Louis' story (and perhaps other things we don't know about). They asked *why* was he expelled and to where. 

 

The Americans stonewalled the French and the inquiry was closed a couple of days before DeGaulle's trip, 8 days after it began 

 

Upon reflection, maybe one reason the French had refused to let Fensterwald see their file on Souetre 20 years later was because they had realized they had been played by Louis. 

 

None of this tells us anything about Souetre's whereabouts. It's back to square one for that.

[Leslie Sharp]

As I noted recently, the clever repartee on Kennedy-related threads on this forum has grown stale imho.

Why don't the guilty parties sit quietly in the corner of this thread rather than tossing wrenches into current deliberations?  Or have they purchased a seat at the adults' table? I've seen no indication of them having earned it. @Jonathan Cohen @Benjamin Cole

Edited December 2, 2023 by Leslie Sharp

[Leslie Sharp]

@Richard Booth The breadcrumbs led to “The KGB JFK Assassination Files” directed and produced by David McKenzie a.k.a. Stanton along with Brad O’Leary, narrated by Roger Moore on location in Moscow. Five years later O’Leary published “Triangle of Death: The Shocking Truth about the Role of South Vietnam and the French Mafia in the Assassination of JFK.”

I plan to introduce a thread on EF devoted to this inquiry soon.

For now, the identities of French nationals expelled from Dallas are at the center of the decades-long confusion. We argue the confusion was deliberate, and every ten-twenty years another layer is piled on. This research is also germane to another active EF thread deliberating why certain files remain withheld in contravention of the spirit — if not the letter of the law as most here argue —- of the JFK Records Act. 

[Leslie Sharp]

@Richard Booth Col. Jack Canon evaded scrutiny even after Dick Russell revealed that Richard Case Nagell identified Canon as having played a role in Dealey. Subsequently we also learned from Dick in his 1992 break-out book, The Man Who Knew Too Much, that Canon had run Gen. Charles Willoughby’s deadly Z unit.

Had researchers maintained the open mind essential to competent investigative work, how much further along would we be.  This is personal for me because it was Dick’s book — recommended to me by a close friend during a rare phone call from NYC to Dublin Ireland where I was living in 1993 — that launched my pursuit of who killed Kennedy. It had haunted me since age 16 for reasons beyond the collective trauma but I never anticipated it would consume the last 1/3 of my life on planet earth.

This friend and I met and bonded in Dallas in 1981 while we helped launch the flagship property of Rosewood Hotels, founded by a daughter of the late oilman H. L. Hunt. He was stunned to read about Willoughby’s ties to Hunt and suspected I would be as well. The rest is, as the saying goes, history and here I am, thirty years later almost to the month, discussing the book, Dick Russell, Canon, Soutre, et al with a stranger and presumably genuine fact & truth seeker, Richard Booth.

[Leslie Sharp]

@Richard Booth I may have overlooked it. Does Carmine Savastrano reference the HSCA handling of the Souetre question?

The Shaw / Fensterwald files were handed over in good faith to the committee.

Several years later, Robert Blakey was asked about Jean Souetre during a q&a following his interview on a popular radio talk show.  I’ve heard the recording. Paraphrasing for now until I have permission to share the precise transcript: Before the caller could complete his question, Blakey stepped over the name Souetre with, “Yes. Yes. I’m familiar with the name.” When pressed further, Blakey said the committee investigators looked into “him,” and while it was interesting info, they concluded he wasn’t involved. There was nothing there. When pressed further, Blakey then said they “ran out of time.”
 

Bud and Gary, who pursued the FOIA requests for Soutre & related through to the Appeals Court, handed a large portion of their files over to the committee at the outset of the HSCA investigation so Blakey et al had a full year to pursue the suspect shooters. It has been argued their mandate didn’t include crime solving. The files currently languish in an unknown DC location.  Perhaps @Greg Doudna might look into this?

Edited December 2, 2023 by Leslie Sharp

[Richard Booth]

11 hours ago, Roger Odisio said:

 

The Papich document you cited was from the FBI-CIA response to the French inquiry in March 1964 for information about the story that Souetre had been expelled from Dallas the weekend of the murder. Both agencies said they had no record of such an expulsion.

 

The French inquiry originated from the article I mentioned to you by the reporter who claimed he had met a drunken Frenchman who said he was expelled from Dallas.  He didn't name the Frenchman in the article but when the local police contacted him a few days later he said the man was Michel Roux.  Souetre sometimes used Roux as an alias.  But when the reporter described the man. he described Souetre, who was 6'1" not Roux who was 5'8".  The French surmised the reporter was talking about Souetre, not Roux.

 

Thank you for those additional details, it provides some additional insight that goes well with the Savastano piece that argues Souetre was not there. This is why I come to this forum, for in depth knowledge like what you wrote there. Rarely can you go somewhere online and get a great summary like that based on facts.

FWIW, my initial post on this was to say who I think Reiner is going to name when he names the shooters -- it was not necessarily saying I buy it or believe it, just was me saying "this is who Reiner will probably name"

I am open on the subject, remain unconvinced on Souetre. Before reading your post there I had assumed that Souetre was indeed expelled from the country but thought it was more likely someone was using his name and it wasn't him. Now I'm not so convinced he was ever "expelled" from the country. Sounds a lot like that was something floated years ago, intending to muddy the waters.

The only named shooter i've ever read about that is persuasive to me is Herminio Diaz Garcia. And even then there is no proof for it. But that is one that I think is credibly possible. 

Ultimately I think it's a losing game to try to identify mercenary hired guns.  I don't care who was paid to pull a trigger or who volunteered. I care more about the apparatus that engineered such an operation and those involved in setting it in motion and later covering it up.

[Richard Booth]

3 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:

@Richard Booth I may have overlooked it. Does Carmine Savastrano reference the HSCA handling of the Souetre question?

The Shaw / Fensterwald files were handed over in good faith to the committee.

Several years later, Robert Blakey was asked about Jean Souetre during a q&a following his interview on a popular radio talk show.  I’ve heard the recording. Paraphrasing for now until I have permission to share the precise transcript: Before the caller could complete his question, Blakey stepped over the name Souetre with, “Yes. Yes. I’m familiar with the name.” When pressed further, Blakey said the committee investigators looked into “him,” and while it was interesting info, they concluded he wasn’t involved. There was nothing there. When pressed further, Blakey then said they “ran out of time.”
 

Bud and Gary, who pursued the FOIA requests for Soutre & related through to the Appeals Court, handed a large portion of their files over to the committee at the outset of the HSCA investigation so Blakey et al had a full year to pursue the suspect shooters. It has been argued their mandate didn’t include crime solving. The files currently languish in an unknown DC location.  Perhaps @Greg Doudna might look into this?

@Leslie you can see the Savastano piece below:

https://www.tpaak.com/the-french-deception

He does link to many of the primary documents relating to Souetre. He concludes that there is no evidence that Souetre was ever here. Which is technically accurate.

He does not write about how the HSCA approached the material.

Re Blakey I am speculating but believe it is likely Blakey had no idea who he was and just did not want to sound ignorant so he said he's "familiar" with the name. I wouldn't put any faith in Blakey or anything he says anyway, he was too much of a political figure who just wanted to please his superiors in D.C. and get something on his resume that looked good.

I understand you are a big supporter of the Coup in Dallas thesis. I have flipped through the book and read parts of it, but I can't buy into it. I will have to remain skeptical of it but welcome others discussing it if that is what they want to do.

[Richard Booth]

6 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:

@Richard Booth Col. Jack Canon evaded scrutiny even after Dick Russell revealed that Richard Case Nagell identified Canon as having played a role in Dealey. Subsequently we also learned from Dick in his 1992 break-out book, The Man Who Knew Too Much, that Canon had run Gen. Charles Willoughby’s deadly Z unit.

 

Yes, I did read TMWKTM but it was back in 1998. Quite a long time ago and as I've aged many of the details in that book have faded into the realm of "oh wow I forgot about that"

Back when I read the book I actually used the Lycos and Altavista search engines to try to locate Robert Nagell, Dick's son. I did get an email for an alumni of a university in California and I emailed him out of the blue, right around Veteran's Day. At that time I would have been 21 years old. I asked Robert if he was the same Robert whose father was Richard Case Nagell. To my surprise, he replied, and said that yes that was his father. We exchanged a couple of emails and I told him that I had recently read a book about his father and thanked him for his service. He sent me a scanned photo as an attachment to the email, a high-resolution scan of a portrait that Robert had. It was Dick in the 50s, looking young and smiling in his uniform.

Robert did not share anything with me that would contribute to research, I don't think. It was so long ago I don't even remember his exact words just that he said he was indeed Richard Case Nagell's son, and he shared with me that picture.

At the time I was a kid and a few years earlier had become interested in the JFK assassination. After reading TMWKTM, I was blown away and it only served to reinforce my worldview to have carried on a conversation with the man's son. It made everything I read feel all the more "real" and in a way served to keep me interested and here I am 30 years later, still interested.

[Richard Booth]

Episode 4 - "The Patsy" came out a few days ago on the Reiner podcast.

In that episode, Reiner again endorses Tosh Plumlee and plays clips of him talking about Nag's Head and how he supposedly had training there with Oswald. It's once again asserted as fact without anything to back it up.

A clip of Dick Russell is played where he says it's "not just Plumlee" talking about the Nag's Head program where allegedly a group of recruits were trained to be false defectors, and he cites the Marchetti book. Ironically, I think that book is where Tosh Plumlee read about the program and believe he made up his story to align with what is in the book.

Episode 4 covers Oswald from around Renatus Hartogs/Youth House through his defection and return to the United States.

A clip of David Talbot is played where he says that if anyone were to defect to the USSR and offer to turn over secrets, he would be put in shackles/arrested upon his return, which I thought was a good point. 

In the episode, Reiner repeatedly speaks of Oswald in a derogatory manner, calling him a "misfit" and other such things. 

Overall: Bad. He left out so many details and wasted time with the Plumlee story.

[Richard Booth]

Additionally: I suspect that Reiner might later try to connect George Joannides with the Nag's Head defector training thing.

I say this because in episode 3, Reiner says that Joannides "ran the black ops program that recruited Oswald"

At the time I heard that I thought it was just a gross mischaracterization of Joannides' running DRE. However, after episode 4, it's clear that Reiner is positing that Oswald was recruited to be a false defector. Given that is what Oswald was "recruited" for (per Reiner and episode 4) his earlier comments in episode 3 that Joannides "ran the black ops program that recruited Oswald" seems to indicate that Reiner is connecting Joannides to the Nag's Head "false defector" program that "recruited" young men.

In the existing literature on this, the Nag's Head thing is described as "Illusory Warfare" or something along those lines. I suspect Reiner might speculatively assert that this would fall under "psychological warfare" and thus be in Joannides' wheelhouse.

Anyway, just my .02 on what Reiner said in episode 3 (that Joannides "ran the black ops program that recruited Oswald") and how that might play out according to what we heard in episode 4 (that Oswald was 'recruited' for the false defector program).

If that is what Reiner is going to do, it will create a linkage between Plumlee and Joannides. Which is, to say the least, a hugely concerning and would do a disservice to research on the subject.

[Larry Hancock]

Well said Richard, and aside from Plumlee and a couple of fiction books I have never seen any documentation (other than assertions in JFK literature) of the term "illusionary warfare" (military deception is a term which is used and the Army uses the term illusory concept in regard to psychological warfare) of such a specialty or of specific, related training under that name at Nag's Head or anywhere else. 

I would also like to see some documented support for both that term and also for an ONI Defector program targeted on Russia.  That gets talked about frequently and seeing some actual source material would be really helpful. 

[Richard Booth]

1 hour ago, Larry Hancock said:

Well said Richard, and aside from Plumlee and a couple of fiction books I have never seen any documentation (other than assertions in JFK literature) of the term "illusionary warfare" (military deception is a term which is used and the Army uses the term illusory concept in regard to psychological warfare) of such a specialty or of specific, related training under that name at Nag's Head or anywhere else. 

I would also like to see some documented support for both that term and also for an ONI Defector program targeted on Russia.  That gets talked about frequently and seeing some actual source material would be really helpful. 

Thanks Larry. 

I have a feeling that Plumlee made up "illusory warfare" - nothing explains this phrase not appearing anywhere else if it's indeed an actual used nomenclature. In fact, it not appearing anywhere is a "tell"

I don't believe that phrase would have been used in 1959, 60, 61.  It would have been called something simpler, I think.