Penn Jones Jr

[John Simkin]

Researchers will be interested in this news from Baylor University:

Baylor University’s Collections of Political Materials recently acquired papers of the late Penn Jones Jr., one of the earliest Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists, from a political memorabilia dealer in Fort Worth.

Jones began investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy soon after the event in 1963. Gary Mack, a fellow researcher and archivist of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, later explained, “Penn was one of the first generation of researchers who felt the government was behind the assassination — probably a conspiracy involving military intelligence...He always thought LBJ was behind it somehow.”

The editor of the Midlothian Mirror for 28 years, Jones was the author of four books on the assassination: Forgive My Grief I-IV (1966, 1967, 1974, 1976). He also founded and edited a JFK newsletter, The Continuing Inquiry, in the 1970s and early 1980s. Every year, on the anniversary of the assassination, Jones held a memorial service at Dealey Plaza.

In 1995 the Coalition on Political Assassinations presented Jones with the Sylvia Meagher Lifetime Achievement Award in honor of his groundbreaking and persistent work in pursuit of the truth.

Jones’ papers consist of magazines, articles, media, photographs and letters related to assassination conspiracy theories. BCPM staff is currently preparing an inventory which will be available online. Some materials should be ready for researchers by late spring.

For more information, contact Ben Rogers, director of the BCPM, at 710-3540.

For more information of Jones see:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKjonesP.htm

[Shanet Clark]

Penn Jones was a great theorist and the courage to look into this in the 1960s.

A recent thread brought out one major mistake he made, though.

He accepted a genuine looking document from anonymous sources

(a hostile agency) and published it as true, and vouched for it.

The recent KGB files appearing in the US now show that the LHO note

to a Mr. Hunt, which many of us believed true, was manufactured to make

the CIA look bad..........I even posted it and had to remove it when the

forgery was pointed out and I thank Tim Gratz for pointing out how

a big piece of the Penn Jones story turned out to be psychological ops ...

[Jack White]

Penn Jones was a great theorist and the courage to look into this in the 1960s.

A recent thread brought out one major mistake he made, though.

He accepted a genuine looking document from anonymous sources

(a hostile agency) and published it as true, and vouched for it.

The recent KGB files appearing in the US now show that the LHO note

to a Mr. Hunt, which many of us believed true, was manufactured to make

the CIA look bad..........I even posted it and had to remove it when the

forgery was pointed out and I thank Tim Gratz for pointing out how

a big piece of the Penn Jones story turned out to be psychological ops ...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Shanet...why do you believe the KGB? That position is as weak

as believing the CIA. Why should we believe one over the

other?

The letter may or may not be a plant. To me it is a mystery. If

genuine, it is far more likely addressed to Eduardo Hunt than

Lafayette. I discussed the provenance of the letter with Penn,

and we decided it likely came from a CIA whistleblower in

Mexico City who found it in agency files there. The CIA tried

to twist it to implicate H.L.Hunt.

Jack

[Tim Gratz]

Jack, it has been conclusively established that the "Hunt letter" was a KGB forgery. See "The Sword and the Shield" co-written by a respected English historian who specializes in intelligence matters and by he KGB archivist who defected with a bunch of stolen documents. It is my understanding the KGB was trying to link E. Howard Hunt to the assassination and was frustrated when some assassination researchers assumed the letter was addressed to H. L. Hunt.

Of course, even the manner in which the copy of the letter was sent is suspicious.

The fact that the KGB was planting misinformation to link E. Howard Hunt to the assassination does not necessarily mean the KGB was involved in the assassination but it does raise questions, certainly.

[Dawn Meredith]

Jack, it has been conclusively established that the "Hunt letter" was a KGB forgery.  See "The Sword and the Shield" co-written by a respected English historian who specializes in intelligence matters and by he KGB archivist who defected with a bunch of stolen documents.  It is my understanding the KGB was trying to link E. Howard Hunt to the assassination and was frustrated when some assassination researchers assumed the letter was addressed to H. L. Hunt.

Of course, even the manner in which the copy of the letter was sent is suspicious.

The fact that the KGB was planting misinformation to link E. Howard Hunt to the assassination does not necessarily mean the KGB was involved in the assassination but it does raise questions, certainly.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

____________________________________

Why would the KGB be interested in trying to link E Howard Hunt to the assassination of JFK? Only way would be if they killed him and there's no way JFK was killed by a Russian and or Castro conspiracy. Logic says the forgery is CIA. (IMHO)

Dawn

[Don Jeffries]

I'm with Jack here (as I usually am). The KGB credible? This note did appear rather mysteriously, and while it's hard to prove it's from Oswald, I wouldn't definitely dismiss it as a hoax on the grounds cited by Tim.

You may recall that it was an early tactic of the CIA to claim that the critics were either commie dupes or unconsciously touting Soviet propaganda.

[Tim Gratz]

There seems to be no way to dispute the credible assertion in "The Sword and the Shield" that the KGB forged the Hunt letter.

If so, Dawn says, then the KGB killed Kennedy. That is certainly a possibility. That possibility is of course also raised by the likelihood that Nosenko was a dispatched agent. (I recently read all the verifiable lies the CIA caught Nosenko in, apart from his failed polygraph--I'll post these soon.)

While I am inclined to believe Trento and Haig that the KGB was involved in the assassination (and remember that per Dick Russell the KGB at least had foreknowledge of the planned assassination), the following alternative scenarios must be considered:

1. The KGB was trying to link the CIA to the assassination merely to muddy the CIA.

2. Although Nosenko was a "dispatched agent", what he was telling us about no KGB/LHO relationship was true (but remember his 1966 polygraph showed deception in response to this line of questioning).

Re possible KGB involvement in the assassination, I would also like to remind members that in the late 1950s the KGB murdered an Eastern European anti-Communist named Stephen Bandera in a manner that the death was viewed as a premature heart attack (the murder was only revealed when the actual murdered confessed several years later). Given the number of witnesses or possible conspirators who died of apparent premature heart attacks, it is worthwhile to remember the KGB murder of Bandera.

[Roger Fong]

2.  Although Nosenko was a "dispatched agent", what he was telling us about no KGB/LHO relationship was true (but remember his 1966 polygraph showed deception in response to this line of questioning).

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Nosenko was put through three polygraph tests. The first two were under extremely hostile conditions. In October of 1967, Nosenko was taken from his isolation cell, moved to a safe house, and review of the case was assigned to Bruce Solie of the Office of Security. On August 8, 1968, Nosenko was given a third polygraph test. Nosenko passed this test and this is the only one that the CIA now accept as valid.

When the HSCA assigned Richard Arther, president of Scientific Lie Detection, Inc., to do an independent analysis, he concluded that the second test (in 1966) was the most valid, but he did not know about the hostile conditions under which this test was administered.

[Tim Gratz]

Roger wrote:

When the HSCA assigned Richard Arther, president of Scientific Lie Detection, Inc., to do an independent analysis, he concluded that the second test (in 1966) was the most valid, but he did not know about the hostile conditions under which this test was administered.

The issue of Nosenko is important and probably deserves its own "thread."

Roger, what hostile conditions do you refer?

Have you read Arther's report?

Are you aware of all the demonstrable lies Nosenko told the CIA?

[Roger Fong]

Re: interrogation of Nosenko, see John Hart's testimony in HSCA Vol II; Nosenko's testimony in HSCA Vol XII; Posner, Chapter 3; and Wise, Chapter 11.

The Nosenko case is extremely complex. There are hundreds of pages of testimony and narrative in the HSCA 12 volumes. Mark Reibling's book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA add some interesting insights. I'm working my way through these and other sources: Posner, Weisberg's rebuttal of Posner, David Wise's Molehunt, and an earlier work, David Martin's Wilderness of Mirrors.

There is a Nosenko thread started by Jim Root. I'll post my findings there or start a new thread. But it might be awhile. There's a lot of material to digest.

[Shanet Clark]

A murky morass of mirrors.

Epstein's LEGEND lays out a pretty reasonable summary.

[Gary Buell]

Of course we do not know which Mr. Hunt the letter was supposedly directed to. Just as likely it was HL Hunt. There is evidence that the Soviets suspected right-wing Texas oil interests as being involved in the assassination.

There was someone, however, who was involved in trying to link Howard Hunt to the assassination: James Angleton, the man who showed the Hunt memo to Joseph Trento. Whether this memo was authentic or an Angleton fabrication it is difficult to imagine a non-sinister explanation for Angleton's behavior.

For more on the Hunt memo you can search alt.assassination.jfk for my email exchange with Trento after his last book came out.