Can I get some feedback on "the cover-up chapter" of State Secret before I write the second edition? I will serialize the chapter here.

[Robert Morrow]

5 hours ago, Steve Thomas said:

Robert,

No. You're absolutely right. The cable does specifically say that that physical description came from Stringfellow. 

It just says that "additinal information" about Oswald..., blah, blah, blah; but doesn't say where that information came from.

I was wrong to make that assumption.

Steve Thomas

Steve, a have a question for you. What is wrong with you? I have never seen someone at Education Forum EVER admit they were wrong about ANYTHING, even if encountered with a massive amount of information that contradicts their claim. Have you ever considered mental health counseling to cure you of this alleged infirmity that you might have?

[Robert Morrow]

3 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Ditto.

As I was reading State Secret, I immediately quit when I saw the sentence reading, “Oswald was a spy in his own mind.”

There's plenty of evidence for Oswald being a paid CIA asset.

Here's just one: How do you explain the fact that Oswald just happened to get a job exactly where he need to be for the assassination? Oswald's actions were clearly controlled. He had a CIA handler.

Having said that...

In all honesty, I'd probably disagree with the premise of your book from the get go, based on what others have said about it. I believe that the purpose of the Mexico City shenanigans was to create the impression that Oswald was in cahoots with Cuba and Russia. That Cuba gave Oswald a $6500 down payment to have Kennedy killed.

In other words, it was a CIA false flag op against Cuba and Russia designed to create a pretext for invasion of Cuba, or a first nuclear strike on the Soviet Union at a time when it was thought that the US had a nuclear advantage. The assassination was a military-sponsored CIA-planned coup d'etat.

 

Sandy, didn't Oswald make a detailed report on the radio factory where he was working at?

He was a (lowly paid) spy for the CIA just as his mother Marguerite Oswald was making abundantly clear in the early months after the JFK assassination.

Didn't the CIA's Pete Bagley in 2012 conclude that Oswald was a WITTING asset/agent of the CIA?

Longtime CIA officer Pete Bagley had some very interesting things to say about Oswald to JFK researcher Malcolm Blunt in 2012: “OH NO, HE HAD TO BE WITTING!” (that is a witting, willing asset/agent of the CIA)

QUOTE

          It was during a meeting in 2012, that the most telling moment in their relationship took place. Malcolm Blunt laid out in front of Pete Bagley, piece by piece, the documents demonstrating the capture of the Oswald paper trail by the Security Office Security Research Staff (SRS) after Oswald’s defection in 1959. Bagley carefully examined the documentation. He was especially interested in the details reported by H.C. Eisenbess in 1976, on the Office of Central Reference (OCR) dissemination of non-CIA documents - discussed at length in a previous section of this chapter.

          At this point, the same switch that had turned on in Bagley’s brain when Kondrashev told him that that the Polyakov defection sequence was no coincidence, turned on again. And so, Bagley, right out of the blue, put the following question to Blunt: “Okay, was he witting or unwitting?” Bagley knew Malcolm would have no trouble understanding who “he” [Oswald] was. Blunt replied, “You can’t ask me that question, how would I know?”

          At this and, raising his voice, Bagley responded, “No, No, you have to know! Was he witting or unwitting?” Challenged in this manner, Malcolm had little choice but to proffer a guess. With some reluctance he replied, “Okay, unwitting.” With even firmer emphasis Bagley countered, “OH NO - HE HAD TO BE WITTING!”

          Malcolm believes that these were Bagley’s thoughts that resulted from suddenly seeing the documents that had been withheld from SRD: “Yes, I think in that instant  he saw that this high school dropout, a nothing, a nobody, may have indeed been utilized.” By many observers, Pete Bagley was considered the “best counterintelligence analyst of the cold war era,” as the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence later said about him. He had served as Chief of Counterintelligence in the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division (SRD/CI) and Deputy Chief of SRD and been Nosenko’s case officer. His reaction to the documents that Blunt showed him was a telling moment. It was, as Malcolm told me and Alan Dale later, “a significant departure from Bagley’s normal cautious phrasings.”

          Bagley said nothing more at the time. When asked about no mention of Oswald in Spymaster, Malcolm recalls “he went sideways and I didn’t press him.” Malcolm’s moment with Bagley that day reminds of of the day I was sitting across the table from Jane Roman, the liaison officer for James Angleton. Just as Malcolm had done with Bagley, I was showing her documents one at a time. When I asked her what she thought of the untrue statement about the CIA paper trail on Oswald in the HQS cable to Mexico Station in October 1963, she replied: “Well, to me, it’s indicative of a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on a need-to-know basis.” The chains moved down the field that moment with Roman. And they moved again during Blunt’s moment with Bagley.

UNQUOTE

[John Newman, Countdown to Darkness: The Assassination of President Kennedy, Volume II, pp. 29-30]

Tennent H. “Pete” Bagley – CIA officer – obituary in the Washington Post – Bagley dies on Feb. 20, 2014 at the age of 88

Washington Post obituary:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/tennent-h-pete-bagley-noted-cia-officer-dies-at-88/2014/02/24/b2880bf2-9d6c-11e3-a050-dc3322a94fa7_story.html

NYT obituary - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/us/politics/tennent-h-bagley-who-aided-then-mistrusted-a-soviet-spy-dies-at-88.html

 

[Sandy Larsen]

1 hour ago, Robert Morrow said:

Sandy, didn't Oswald make a detailed report on the radio factory where he was working at?

 

Yep! It is a long, detailed report. Some might say the report is too mundane to be a spy's report. But a lot of reports are mundane, and back then the U.S. had little information on how Soviet factories were organized and run.

Also, what about Oswald's 201 file being filed in Angleton's SIG/CI office, where the agency "spies on spies?"

 

[Steve Thomas]

7 hours ago, Robert Morrow said:

Steve, a have a question for you. What is wrong with you? I have never seen someone at Education Forum EVER admit they were wrong about ANYTHING, even if encountered with a massive amount of information that contradicts their claim. Have you ever considered mental health counseling to cure you of this alleged infirmity that you might have?

Robert,

That's alright.

Womem have been telling me I have a tiny...

ego

all my life.

My infirmity is not alleged.

The doctors tell me it will get better over time.

Steve Thomas

 

[Bill Simpich]

Thanks to everyone for their positive feedback!

Could I ask for the same in the second of the five sub-chapters below?  This small portion focuses on the most visible aspects of what has been called "the national security cover-up", which I don't think has much to do with the cover-up done by the people who did the deed.

The other three sub-chapters will get much deeper into other aspects of the cover-up.  

 

II.  The National Security Cover-Up

1.  Angleton and Hosty said the cover-up was designed to protect the Soviets

My original goal in writing this book was to write about the cover-up, and to see if I could resolve the issue of the Mexico City tapes that survived after the assassination. The tale of the tapes took over my approach to this book. The result was a different book than I anticipated. The cover-up is a longer story that I can only sketch here.

I will confine myself mostly to the first days after the assassination which shaped the investigations that followed.  I will then to turn to a few of the high points.  

Dallas FBI agent Jim Hosty even revealed the cover-up in his book – however, his contention was that it was a benign cover-up by “President Johnson, the Warren Commission, the FBI, the CIA” that was conducted to avoid international tensions with the Soviet Union and Cuba, who he viewed as possible assassination co-perpetrators with Oswald.[ 18 ]

Cover-up architect Jim Angleton was motivated by the Mexico City situation, but would have little reason to quibble with Hosty's sentiments until 1967. That was the year that Angleton learned some information from a double agent that “tended to absolve the Soviets”. That was the same year that the KGB conducted a big study into the JFK assassination and concluded that it was a domestic operation. Angleton was shaken by this revelation, obtained from a double agent known only as “Byetkov”. 

(New note:  Thomas Graves points out that "Byetkov" appears to be Obyetkov - who was the guard that LHO allegedly spoke to on Sept 28 and Oct 1.  At least one of these phone calls was memorialized on audiotape - and has now disappeared.)

Gallup poll taken within
days of the assassination
(click to see entire article)

CIA chief John McCone believed there were two shooters in Dealey Plaza. Although Hoover publicly adopted the view that Oswald acted alone, he told his colleagues that he couldn’t forget the CIA’s “false story re Oswald’s trip in Mexico City”.

My reading of the evidence indicates that there was a rough consensus among CIA and FBI higher-ups such as Helms and Hoover within hours of the Kennedy assassination to push for a lone gunman theory based on Oswald as the perpetrator. During the afternoon of the 22nd, we’ll review statements made by Hoover and the White House indicating that Oswald was the lone assassin, while the Dallas DA was convinced there was more than one shooter.

The national security cover-up began within hours after the assassination, due to two major factors. One was that the Mexico City-driven blackmail of the CIA and the FBI caused the compromised officials within these agencies to move towards a solution that would limit any serious analysis of who killed Kennedy and why. The other was to avoid any public debate that would point towards Cuba as a sponsor of the assassination. Such turmoil could lead to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, which was greatly feared by Lyndon Johnson, Earl Warren and other American leaders.

As described in Chapter 5, the Mexico City-driven "poison pill" specifically included the agencies’ fear of public  exposure of the paper trail showing not only how intimately CIA and FBI had monitored Oswald in the last weeks of his life, but that that enemy agents had penetrated the FBI’s field office and even CIA's assets.   

Such exposure could lift the curtain on the impersonation of Oswald in Mexico City - at least on the telephone on 9/28/63 and 10/1/63.  It could reveal how the CIA responded by stripping Oswald's 201 file and hiding the key documents in the FPCC 100-300-011 file - what John Newman calls "smoking file".   It's not impossible that the world could have learned that the CIA initiated a molehunt in late September 1963 in an effort to smoke out who impersonated Oswald on the telephone and why.

There is also no question that it was imperative for intelligence chiefs to prevent any public exposure of the Mexico City wiretap operations and the supporting roles of Staff D and the NSA. Lee Oswald was well-known to most of the major agencies investigating the assassination – CIA, FBI, Navy, State and INS – and every one of them needed protective cover regarding their role in monitoring Oswald, quite apart from whether they were using the Oswald file for their own devices.

The national security cover-up was driven by Helms and Hoover, determined to protect not only their individual agencies but their personal careers from oblivion. 

Helms chose WH/3 chief Jack Whitten as the trailblazer through the worst of the dangers posed by the Mexico City blackmail. As we will see, after a month of letting Whitten take the heat, Helms was convinced it was necessary to pass the baton to Angleton.

Hoover disciplined Supervisor Marvin Gheesling, Lambert Anderson at the Nationalities desk, and sixteen other agents. Hoover's main frustration was that right before the twin 10/10/63 memos were sent by the CIA to the upper-echelon and lower-echelon monitors of Oswald at FBI, ONI and State, Anderson and Gheesling had removed the security flash on Oswald that Anderson had placed on LHO when he arrived in Moscow in October 1959 -- and that the other agents who had handled the Oswald file should have put the man on the security index. This sequence of events resulted in Oswald being “out of the spotlight” of the intelligence agencies, and particularly the Secret Service. If these FBI agents had not been playing fast and loose with the Oswald file, Hoover would not have been in such a tight spot.

2.  How do you harmonize the shots, wounds, autopsy findings, and photos?

The JFK case has been marked by an inability to harmonize the descriptions of the shots, the wounds, the findings at the autopsy, and the photographic evidence. This has been because of a political need to control the autopsy and to ensure that the Zapruder film and other photographs were analyzed in a way that only reflected one gunman.

The government’s version of the story could not include more than three shots, in order to avoid providing proof of a second gunman. But it had to include three shots, once it was evident that one of the bullets was a complete miss. That left two bullets to do all that damage to the President.

It was apparent that the President’s nonfatal wounds were one in the upper back and a frontal wound to the throat, indicating two separate shots from the front and the back.

FBI officers at the autopsy reported that the doctors found a back wound below the shoulders and on a 45-degree downward track from the inshoot at the back. That evidence was massaged by arguing that the President’s body was tilted, causing a shot from the rear to go into his back and then out his throat.

The President’s fatal wounds were caused by at least two bullets to the head. The doctors who examined the President saw not only the large gaping exit wound to the back of the skull, but also a "small occipital wound" at the back of the skull, indicating a double hit from the front and the back.

After many years of study, veteran investigator Josiah Thompson has concluded that the President suffered a glancing headshot to the right temple at frame 313, resulting in much of the front of his skull flying off. The President’s brain matter was blasted out as he was thrown back and to the left, covering the motorcycle officers and Secret Service officer Clint Hill with gory debris.

Thompson then finds a headshot to the base of his skull at Zapruder frame 328, causing the President’s head to go forward at that point. This sequence of events would explain what looks like a big exit wound to what most doctors state was the right rear of his skull.

Autopsy photographer James Stringer was shown the National Archives photograph showing the President’s largely intact brain after the shooting, and concluded that this is not the photo that he had originally taken. The FBI agent at the scene affirmed that more than half of the brain was missing. These gruesome facts set forth some of the strongest evidence that there were at least two bullets fired towards the front of the motorcade.

Extra bullets are hidden in the record and must be teased out, mainly because inexperienced and easily intimidated doctors – Dr. James Humes and Dr. Thornton Boswell - were forced to conduct a controlled autopsy. Their colleague, Pierre Finck, reported that an Army general ordered them not to dissect the back wound. Autopsy witness Richard Lipsey said that the doctors told him that this bullet was a shallow wound, lodged in his back. Alan Belmont told Dallas FBI chief Gordon Shanklin on November 22 that a bullet was “lodged behind the President’s ear”. Chief of Surgery David Osborne said that when he removed the President’s coat an intact bullet rolled out from his clothing – but that intact bullet has now disappeared from the autopsy record. The only intact bullet in the record is the infamous “magic bullet” was supposed to have passed through both President Kennedy and Governor Connally, causing several wounds while remaining as good as new. Autopsy doctor Pierre Finck rejected the magic bullet theory because there were “too many fragments” remaining in Connally’s wrist. Autopsy doctor Humes also disagreedwith the single bullet theory. Two good-sized bullet fragments were found in the limousine. At least one bullet was found in Dealey Plaza and was recorded by the FBI, but never placed in the record.

The analysis of the Zapruder film was guided by the creation of two sets of briefing boards - one set was created on Saturday night the 23rd, and a second set was created on Sunday the 24th. The first set of briefing boards has never been seen in public, but the reports of those involved are that they revealed more than one shooter. It looks like Director McCone may have come to the two-shooter conclusion as early as that Sunday morning.[ 19 ] The second set of briefing boards - consisting of four panels that offer a theory that depicts three shots - provided the assurance of only one shooter, but I don’t think McCone was ever convinced.

3.  Why did Helms decide to have Jack Whitten conduct the investigation?

Even though CIA director John McCone believed there were two gunmen, the man who was making the decisions about how the assassination would be investigated was his subordinate in charge of covert actions, deputy director Richard Helms. I believe that Helms knew about the problems in Mexico City and with the story of Lee Oswald. Helms decided to put Jack Whitten in charge of the investigation. As Whitten was the chief of WH/3 - the Western Hemisphere division covering Mexico and neighboring countries – he was a logical choice.

Helms asked Whitten to focus on the events in Mexico City, believing that he could manipulate him to stay out of the troublesome areas of that story. Whitten knew the backstory about the probe of Azcue and Kostikov in the fall of 1963, and would be motivated to keep the wiretap operations secret and free of investigation. Whitten had personally signed off on the twin 10/10 memos without realizing their underlying significance, which was a very important plus.

The goal was to avoid investigation of the other three circles of intrigue in Mexico City that Whitten knew nothing about: the Tilton-Anderson anti-FPCC operation described in Chapter 5, the impersonation of Oswald by parties unknown, and the molehunt that is revealed by comparing the wildly differing descriptions of Oswald in the twin 10/10 memos. I think that Helms believed that if Whitten remained ignorant of those three events, he would be an effective advocate of the official story.

Edited March 14 by Bill Simpich

[Steve Thomas]

2 hours ago, Bill Simpich said:

Thanks to everyone for their positive feedback!

Could I ask for the same in the second of the five sub-chapters below? 

 

 Hoover's main frustration was that right before the twin 10/10/63 memos were sent by the CIA to the upper-echelon and lower-echelon monitors of Oswald at FBI, ONI and State, Anderson and Gheesling had removed the security flash on Oswald that Anderson had placed on LHO when he arrived in Moscow in October 1959 -- and that the other agents who had handled the Oswald file should have put the man on the security index. This sequence of events resulted in Oswald being “out of the spotlight” of the intelligence agencies, and particularly the Secret Service. If these FBI agents had not been playing fast and loose with the Oswald file, Hoover would not have been in such a tight spot.

 

Bill,

Long about November 12th or so, didn't Oswald write a letter to the Soviet Embassy in which he said something to the effect that, " I am not now of interest to the FBI"?

Do you think it's possible that Oswald knew he had been taken off that Security Index?

It's an odd choice of words, to be sure, and smacks of someone who has inside information.

Steve Thomas

[Bill Simpich]

Yes, I think it’s possible.  I think that Oswald was trying to get his discharge upgraded and was going through a lot trying to be treated with respect in that effort.  Hosty says he went to the FBI office warning that if they didn’t leave his wife alone he would take “appropriate action”.  Those are the same words that Connally used on the form that denied Oswald’s request to upgrade his discharge as he was leaving his post as Secretary of the Navy. I don’t think it’s coincidence.

[Paul Cummings]

Did Whitten and Win Scott work together during LHO investigation in Mexico City?

Edited March 15 by Paul Cummings

[Jim Hargrove]

13 hours ago, Bill Simpich said:

Hoover disciplined Supervisor Marvin Gheesling, Lambert Anderson at the Nationalities desk, and sixteen other agents. Hoover's main frustration was that right before the twin 10/10/63 memos were sent by the CIA to the upper-echelon and lower-echelon monitors of Oswald at FBI, ONI and State, Anderson and Gheesling had removed the security flash on Oswald that Anderson had placed on LHO when he arrived in Moscow in October 1959 -- and that the other agents who had handled the Oswald file should have put the man on the security index. This sequence of events resulted in Oswald being “out of the spotlight” of the intelligence agencies, and particularly the Secret Service. If these FBI agents had not been playing fast and loose with the Oswald file, Hoover would not have been in such a tight spot.

This needs even more emphasis, because at worst it suggests the possibility of a conspiracy among several members of the Bureau and the Agency.  To reiterate... 

The FBI took Oswald off the watch list, managed by its “WANTED NOTICE” cards, at the same time a CIA cable gave him a more-or-less clean bill of political health, just a couple of months after Oswald’s New Orleans arrest for alleged violence in support of Communist Cuba and less than two months before the assassination.  These two actions effectively took the federal spotlight off “Lee Harvey Oswald.”

The WC didn’t even bother to depose Gheesling, who ordered the FBI's flash cancellation. “Lee Harvey Oswald” had been on that list for nearly four years, since the “defection.” Now that he was taken off it, he’d no longer be under FBI and SS surveillance on 11/22.

At the very same time the FBI was taking “Lee Harvey Oswald” off the watch list, the CIA was publishing several confusing things about him. Responding to a query from the Mexico City station, four CIA officers signed a cable giving lots of accurate biographical data on our boy but calling him “Lee Henry Oswald.” The three page cable expressed no security concerns whatsoever about Oswald and, in fact, indicated the Moscow embassy felt “life in the Soviet Union had clearly had maturing effect on Oswald.” Nothing to worry about here!

This cable was signed by Jane Roman (Angleton’s assistant), William Hood (also close to Angleton), Thomas Karamessines (assistant to Helms) and John Whitten who, according to Jefferson Morley, was the only CIA officer of the four signers who suffered any adverse consequences for this troubling cable. John Armstrong believes that Angleton ran the Oswald Project.

Again, at the same time the FBI was taking “Lee Harvey Oswald” off the watch list, the CIA was giving “Lee Henry Oswald” (biographical data mostly matching LHO’s official biography) a clean bill of political health in the infamous cable of 10/10/63 (see above). 

It was now no longer officially necessary for the FBI to monitor “Oswald’s” activities in Dallas. And the Secret Service would no longer be expected to investigate him prior to a presidential visit to Dallas.

Although “Lee Harvey Oswald” had been arrested for a supposedly violent confrontation in support of Fidel Castro in New Orleans just two months earlier, the entire National Security apparatus of our Federal government now seemed to just stop worrying about him.  What stunning timing!

[Roger Odisio]

17 hours ago, Bill Simpich said:

 

The goal was to avoid investigation of the other three circles of intrigue in Mexico City that Whitten knew nothing about: the Tilton-Anderson anti-FPCC operation described in Chapter 5, the impersonation of Oswald by parties unknown, and the molehunt that is revealed by comparing the wildly differing descriptions of Oswald in the twin 10/10 memos. I think that Helms believed that if Whitten remained ignorant of those three events, he would be an effective advocate of the official story.

I have a somewhat different perspective on the coverup, Bill.

 

I don't think there is any way the planners of the murder would have gone ahead with it without a plan in place to conceal their involvement, control the flow of information, and blame someone else (Oswald).  The job, and their personal risk, was too large to rely on improvising something after the murder.  This is not to say they didn't have to make changes in the plan along the way,

 

We can see that the coverup was ready to go right after the murder

 

*  The quick arrest of Oswald and the charging him with the crime. They admitted at the time that they didn't have any witness who could place Oswald on the 6th floor. No evidence had yet been gathered.

 

*  The murder of Oswald about 46 hours after Kennedy was shot.  They knew he could contradict the story they were going with. He could not be allowed to talk to a lawyer. When, on Saturday, Oswald told the head of the Dallas Bar to get back to him in a few days with his offer of a lawyer if he couldn't get the lawyer he preferred, the timetable for his murder--whatever it had been--was moved up to the next morning.

 

*  The illegal snatching of the body from Dr. Rose at Parkland so it could be flown to Washington where they could control the autopsy.   The autopsy was the second major piece of information, besides Oswald himself, that could contradict their story.  Johnson knew the Soviets weren't involved and no war was imminent. He delayed the AF1 flight to wait for the body, claiming he wanted to be sworn in first (he knew he already was president) and only by Judge Hughes who had to be fetched.  Knowing the autopsy was within his jurisdiction, Dr. Rose initially objected to its removal.  It's easy to see how the words "we have an order from the President" would have ended any skirmish.

 

*  The messages from the White House Situation Room to the two planes carrying officials back the Washington that afternoon, asserting they had caught Oswald and he had acted alone.  Which they could not have known at that time.  Have you read or watched Salandria's speech "False Mystery" at the 35th anniversary?  He explained that those on the planes would have understood that the messages were coming from the killers, who were backed by power that could not be challenged. The first job of the planners was to quell any questions by those in Washington, inside of government and in the media, who knew about the battle between JFK and the war mongers.

 

Salandria once gave a speech years later in which he linked Bundy, who was running the WHSR at the time, to the murder, hoping Bundy would sue him.  Alas, Bundy didn't take the bait.

[Bill Simpich]

Roger, totally agree that the planners had to have a plan, a few thoughts:

You refer to the quick arrest of Oswald - yes, he had to be taken off the street immediately, but I think he and Tippit were both supposed to die immediately as part of the planners' cover-up.   The government had its own separate national security cover-up - a visceral response to an attack on the center of American power that had to be stabilized as soon as possible.

I'm glad to tell you what I think.

The planners' cover-up began when Jerry Hill "found" three spent shells on the sixth floor at 12:55 and immediately ran off towards Oak Cliff.  Tippit died about 1:07 in Oak Cliff, with the final shot to the head as a coup de grace.   Jerry Hill did his best to take control of the Tippit crime scene.  Tippit was in the middle of a hunt in Oak Cliff - after monitoring the Trinity River viaduct and failing to find his quarry, he ran inside the Top Ten and tried to place a phone call, finally resorting to stopping and searching a car in the middle of the street moments before his interaction with his killer.  The Tippit killing was done to enflame the Dallas police and the populace.

What went wrong was when Oswald wasn't killed in the theatre 45 minutes after Tippit.   Oswald played it smart, waiting till the very minute to punch the cop and got into a clinch where it was impossible to shoot him, shouting "I protest this police brutality".  Oswald wasn't supposed to live.  Now what?

Two different sets of decisions were going on - the national security cover-up and the planners' cover-up.

In terms of the national security cover-up, it was decided by 1:30 pm - before Oswald was in custody at 1:50 - there was absolutely no way JFK's body was going to remain in the possession of the local medical examiner.  The country was in the middle of a national crisis, and LBJ and his advisers were not going to allow a destabilizing situation to develop.  JFK's body was going back to Washington - period.    To me, the interesting thing is simply that the federal government controlled the autopsy and determined that evening that one man killed JFK.

Why?  Because Hoover and Bundy had both already decided by 4 pm that Oswald acted alone.   Why?  For the same reasons above - the executive branch did not want a destabilizing situation to develop.  Between 2 pm-4 pm, that decision was made by those two government actors in coordination with LBJ's people and immediately became the government's party line.

I love Vince Salandria.  I just don't agree with him - as much as I would like to - that McGeorge Bundy was the Great Satan in this affair.  He was an apparatchik.

When Bill Alexander tried to introduce "the Communist conspiracy" the night of Nov. 22, LBJ's aide Cliff Carter got on the line with Henry Wade and immediately slapped that down.

That was the problem for LBJ that came up repeatedly over the next few days - that people like Bill Alexander, Win Scott (who espoused the Alvarado story), the DRE, and many other provocateurs kept cooking up stories designed to beat the drums of war with the Cubans or even the Soviets.  The World War III blackmail card was used by LBJ to get Earl Warren to sign on to the national security cover-up that culminated with the Warren Commission.

Here's the big problem that the planners' cover-up people had to deal with:

As you say, the Dallas Bar representative got all the way into Oswald's cell by Saturday night.  If Oswald had decided to talk with him, the story would have broken wide open.  (I have often wondered if the Dallas Bar attorney was part of the plot to make sure Oswald didn't talk to a lawyer!)

For whatever reason, Oswald didn't trust the Dallas Bar attorney enough to talk with him.  To me, that indicates that Oswald was given strong directions not to deviate from his provocative demand for the Communist Party's trusted counsel, John Abt - with the troublesome American Civll Liberties Union as a backup.

Using Jack Ruby Sunday morning was extremely risky.   He had ties to the mob and wasn't a proven assassin.  But he had successfully worked inside the media and police crowd all weekend.  He was the best one likely to get a clear shot at Oswald from up close.  It worked.   

Now the plotters had to make sure that Jack shut up.  He was not the right man for the job.  But getting Belli on the case was the best way to ensure that Ruby's motives were no longer at issue, and the case devolved into whether Ruby was crazy or not.  

One of the reasons people thought that Ruby was crazy was because he repeatedly said that he trusted Bill Alexander - the district attorney who was seeking the death penalty - more than he trusted his own lawyers!   When you think about it, it makes sense - Ruby, Alexander, Hill and others were part of what I consider a small team of locals entrusted in the plan to kill the President.

The planners at the top?  I assume - like many of us - a tight network of military, intelligence, anti-Castro, and fascist elements that wanted to keep American policy focused on building the national security state and away from international cooperation.

 

 

 

[David Boylan]

Bill,

I'd love to see a second edition of State Secret with all the new release info woven into it.

[Bill Simpich]

Some quick responses...

David, the second edition of State Secret will have the new documents and my updated analysis all the way through it.

Paul, Win Scott (chief, Mexico City office) and Jack Whitten (chief, Central American desk in DC) were in close communication before and after 11/22.

Jim, there does seem to be a plan by either Gheesling or Anderson, or both of them, to make sure that the flash was removed before the twin 10/10 letters went out.  I was surprised that you didn't point out that the letter to the intel higher-ups falsely described Oswald as 5 foot 10 inches, 165 pounds (the actual description of defector Robert Webster) while the letter to the ground troops falsely described Oswald as 6 feet tall with an athletic build (the actual description of the "Mystery Man" in Mexico City).   Both letters were sent out by Charlotte Bustos and her colleagues, with these starkly different descriptions and stories.   

Why?  I say these letters were designed to look for a mole inside the government ranks, with the phony Oswald stories being used as the bait to see if these phony stories were spread to unauthorized parties.

The Oswald buried in Fort Worth was 5 foot 9 and 140 pounds.

Edited March 15 by Bill Simpich

[Sandy Larsen]

@Bill Simpich, how did the plotters get patsy Oswald to work for the TSBD? It seems like that is where they wanted him to be.

 

[Steve Thomas]

12 minutes ago, Bill Simpich said:

Some quick responses... I was surprised that you didn't point out that the letter to the intel higher-ups falsely described Oswald as 5 foot 10 inches, 165 pounds

 

Bill,

Something I don't understand, and I don't mean to detract from your thread, but...

That 1960 Report from FBI Agent, Fain says that Marguerite showed him a picture of Oswald and provided a physical description of 5'10".

Anybody looking at a picture of LHO would know he wasn't 5'10".

Why didn't Fain say something?

Steve Thomas