Ultimate Sacrifice by Thom Hartmann & Lamar Waldron

[Tim Carroll]

The thing that is missing from Ultimate Sacrifice's version of the planning for a December, 1963 invasion/coup of Cuba is what would make it different from the Bay of Pigs. That was a fiasco by anyone's terms, and certainly the Kennedys had every reason to avoid a rerun of it. So what was different in 1963?

Whether or not the Kennedys knew it, the Bay of Pigs had its assassination element. The idea that the 1963 planning depended upon the assassination of Castro was as potentially flawed as it had been in 1961. There had to be some other element to trigger the operation, and to justify it.

The Bay of Pigs had had the trappings of an indigenous effort launched from Latin America, just as the new plan did. And regarding the threat of a Soviet retaliation in Berlin, despite the no-invasion pledge not being formalized due to Castro's refusal to allow inspections, JFK had given a private assurance to Khrushchev that absent some Cuban offense, there would be no invasion.

So what was the difference between the Bay of Pigs plan and the 1963 plan? A precipating event would be required to justify supporting an indigenous invasion with U.S. forces. Operation Northwoods recogized this pointedly. Some event had to be manufactured that would pretextualize an invasion. This leads to the hypothetical fake assassination attempt. The fake attempt failed to materialize in Chicago and Tampa, so that the last opportunity would be in Dallas, where yet another piggybacked operation awaited to unfold.

T.C.

[Scott Deitche]

This has just appeared on the web.

TAMPA, Fla., Nov. 23 (UPI) -- A new book claims that three mob bosses were behind President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Authors Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann also say that law enforcement agencies protected the three Mafiosi because they had infiltrated a plan to invade Cuba, the St. Petersburg Times reported. The book says the government could not fully investigate without exposing the invasion plot.

Tampa mob boss Santo Trafficante Jr., according to the book "Ultimate Sacrifice," planned to have Kennedy killed in Tampa. But the attempt misfired and Trafficante instead arranged with New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello for the assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

While conspiracy theorists have been pitching the mob connection for years, linking it to Cuba is new. Waldron and Hartmann say that the mobsters not only hated Kennedy because of his brother's investigations but wanted to get Castro out of Cuba to return to their profitable businesses there.

Hopefully the book doesn't place the "boss" mokier on Johnny Roselli. He was far from a boss. He was officially a made guy in The Outfit (Chicago mob), but is often referred to as a California boss- not true. Powerful and connected gangster- yes.

[Tim Gratz]

It seems to be Tim's suggestion that there was to be a failed assassination attempt to be blamed on Castro to justify a US invasion of Cuba ("C Day".) If the proposed invasion was known and approved by the Kennedys, as "Ultimate Sacrifice" posits, then arguably the Kennedys even knew about the fake assassination attempt. (This may be way too speculative:) If that is the case, then that could even explain JFK's remark to Jackie on the morning of the assassination re how easy it would be for someone to shoot the president from a tall building. If the CIA was involved in the fake assassination attempt (arguably using its agent Oswald?) that would also explain the presence of certain CIA operatives in Dealey Plaza. And what a perfect opportunity for the Mafia to "hijack" the fake attempt and make it real. The CIA had already created and had in place a man the assassins could turn in to "the perfect patsy".

If the above is close to what happened, it would certainly explain RFK's desperate attempt to "cover up".

A most interesting scenario.

Edited November 26, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Tim Gratz]

Jefferson Morley, a Forum member, reviewed "Ultimate Sacrifice" in the November 27, 2005 edition of "The Washington Post" (he also briefly reviews "A Farewell to Justice").

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains the great unsolved mystery of American politics. With dozens of books in print on the subject, the case of the murdered commander in chief now seems to attract more interest from the publishing industry than from journalists or historians.

The fascination with a shocking crime is not hard to understand. On Nov. 22, 1963, the president was shot in the head during a motorcade through Dallas. Police arrested an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, who proclaimed himself a "patsy." Two days later, a Dallas strip-club owner, Jack Ruby, shot Oswald dead on national TV. Not until the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, would the American people experience such a bewildering, sudden and painful loss.

Why official Washington has seemingly lost interest in the story in recent years is harder, though not impossible, to figure out. The JFK story remains an enduring symbol of popular mistrust. Public confidence in the federal government was somewhere near its high-water mark in 1964, the year the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald, for no discernible motive, killed Kennedy alone and unaided. Confidence declined steadily over the next three decades. Rejection of the Warren report was not the only or even primary cause of that decline (think of Vietnam and Watergate), merely a vivid indicator.

So while a new crop of JFK assassination books blooms every November, the Washington press corps, confident in its own ability to uncover wrongdoing, tends to see the JFK story as a black hole of misinformation and irrationality. That viewpoint has gotten plenty of support over the years from ludicrous conspiracy theories positing that Kennedy was killed by a gunman lurking in a sewer, by a bystander wielding a dart-shooting umbrella or (my favorite) by an accidental gunshot from a Secret Service agent.

After the fierce debate over Oliver Stone's controversial 1991 hit movie "JFK," which portrayed the assassination as the work of a sinister CIA-Pentagon cabal determined to kill Kennedy lest he pull out of Vietnam, much of the Washington press corps never rejoined the discussion of his murder. Most (but not all) historians and journalists scorned Stone's scenario as unfounded, wild-eyed and destructive. But a CBS News poll taken two years later found that far more respondents thought the CIA was involved with JFK's murder (49 percent) than thought that Oswald acted alone (11 percent). This impasse fuels the industry of new assassination books.

The case that Oswald acted alone was most persuasively restated by the investigative reporter Gerald Posner in his 1993 bestseller Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK . His success prompted furious rebuttals of his reading of the evidence.

Beginning in 1994, the Assassination Records Review Board declassified thousands of once-secret JFK records. They generated yet more JFK books but also (mercifully) eliminated some of the least plausible theories. First to go was the claim that Oswald had acted on behalf of the Soviet Union, a claim effectively debunked by the new U.S. records and records from the former communist spy agencies.

The Board also dispatched the far-fetched claim that the U.S. government had altered Abraham Zapruder's famous home movie of the assassination to hide evidence of a conspiracy. David R. Wrone, a historian, refuted this bogus theory in his 2003 book The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK's Assassination . The unaltered film, Wrone concluded, shows that Kennedy was hit by gunfire from two different directions.

Another leading theory -- that the Mafia killed Kennedy -- has endured in the memoirs of people close to top organized-crime figures. But reams of recently released FBI surveillance records do not provide any corroboration. Nor has Oliver Stone's malign vision of murder-by-military-industrial-complex found any substantiation.

The new records have bolstered other scenarios, however. Gus Russo's 1998 book Live by the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK resuscitated the lone-gunman theory by giving it what it had long lacked: a motive. Russo, an investigative reporter, argued that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's secret efforts to overthrow Castro in 1963 were much more extensive than had previously been known. He suggested that Oswald, acting out of leftist conviction, killed JFK in defense of Castro's revolution, perhaps with Havana's help.

The Board's documents arguably enhanced another popular scenario -- that CIA operatives manipulated or framed the pro-Castro Oswald. In his 1995 book Oswald and the CIA , John Newman, a former military intelligence officer, demonstrated that senior CIA officials gave pre-assassination reporting on the itinerant ex-Marine far more attention than they ever admitted. Newman refrained from passing judgment on whether Oswald was involved in an authorized, still-classified CIA operation with a legitimate purpose and no apparent connection to Kennedy's assassination. He noted that the agency had not released all of its JFK records, which remains true in 2005.

The rational reader is confronted by the paradox that while plenty of wacko theories circulate on the Internet (["plenty of wacko theories on the Internet"--must be talking about the Forum!], a good-faith parsing of the evidence can still yield reasonable doubt. After all, many people in high places concluded that JFK had been ambushed by his enemies. Lyndon B. Johnson, for one, never believed that Oswald acted alone; he suspected Cuba's Fidel Castro had retaliated for CIA efforts to kill him. House Speaker Tip O'Neill said that JFK aide Kenneth O'Donnell had told him in 1968 that "he had heard two shots" from the "grassy knoll." Conspiratorial fears found support in 1979 when the House Select Committee on Assassinations, led by former federal prosecutor G. Robert Blakey, concluded that JFK had been killed by unidentifiable conspirators. Former cabinet secretary Joseph Califano, intimately involved in JFK's Cuba policy, wrote in his autobiography that he had "come to share LBJ's view" that Oswald was not a loner.

In 1997 it was revealed that Bobby and Jacqueline Kennedy believed there was a conspiracy in Dallas. In their book on the Cuban missile crisis, "One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964, historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali reported that the president's widow and brother sent an envoy to Moscow in late 1963 to tell a Soviet intelligence officer that they believed JFK had been killed by what the authors called a "large political conspiracy" originating in the United States. The grief-stricken widow and brother wanted the Kremlin to know that RFK would resume his brother's policy toward the Soviet Union as soon as he became president himself. This rather startling revelation deserved more attention in Washington than it got at the time. Inside the Beltway, the idea that serious political players believed that JFK's murderer got away with it was somehow inadmissible. Elsewhere, the strange circumstances of the Dallas tragedy make Jackie and Bobby's suspicions seem almost commonsensical. Conspiracy theories endure. Yet, as two new JFK assassination books illustrate, there is still no compelling case to explain who the alleged conspirators were, if they existed at all.

In Ultimate Sacrifice , researchers Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann propose a novel variation on the Mafia conspiracy theory. They report that Bobby Kennedy sought to orchestrate a "palace coup" in Havana on Dec. 1, 1963 -- which the authors refer to as "the Kennedys' C-Day plan," "a name entirely of our own invention" that they use alongside actual terms from the time, doing their credibility no favors. Mafia crime bosses, they contend, learned of this plan and killed Kennedy, using Oswald as their patsy, knowing that the crime could not be investigated lest it reveal Bobby's secret scheme.

Their exhausting, massive account, grounded in new CIA and Army records, valuably fleshes out Russo's portrait of RFK's secret campaign to oust Castro. But their theory about how that ties into the assassination itself is conjectural. They inflate tenuous links between Oswald and organized-crime figures and presume that the Mafia had a bureaucratically savvy leadership. To attribute the gunfire in Dallas and the alleged subsequent cover-ups to the ingenuity of thuggish crime bosses like Jimmy Hoffa, Johnny Roselli and Santo Trafficante Jr. has the feel of a deus ex mafia , wrapping up a complicated story too neatly.

Joan Mellen's brisker A Farewell to Justice retells the story that Stone mythologized in "JFK." In 1967, Jim Garrison, district attorney for the city of New Orleans, sought to investigate Kennedy's assassination by indicting businessman Clay Shaw on conspiracy charges. Mellen, a biographer (of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, among other literary figures) and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, shows beyond a reasonable doubt what the CIA denied for years: that Shaw was a sometime agency informant from 1949 to 1965. She persuasively argues that Oswald was neither a loner nor a nut and may well have associated with Shaw. But Mellen's insistence that any contact between Shaw and Oswald proves an assassination conspiracy is a stretch, to say the least. Ultimately, her assertion of a New Orleans-based plot depends on two witnesses whose credibility is far from certain.

And so the JFK jury remains out. Those who say there is no proof of a conspiracy are correct, and those who say the preponderance of evidence indicates that Oswald did not act alone also have a strong case. Those who want a decisive answer to the question of who killed John F. Kennedy 42 years ago will have to await new books -- and live with the disturbing thought that we still don't know.

Jefferson Morley is a staff writer at washingtonpost.com. He is writing a biography of Winston Scott, a former CIA station chief in Mexico City.

Edited November 27, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Tim Carroll]

It seems to be Tim's suggestion that there was to be a failed assassination attempt to be blamed on Castro to justify a US invasion of Cuba ("C Day".) If the proposed invasion was known and approved by the Kennedys, as "Ultimate Sacrifice" posits, then arguably the Kennedys even knew about the fake assassination attempt.... And what a perfect opportunity for the Mafia to "hijack" the fake attempt and make it real. The CIA had already created and had in place a man the assassins could turn in to "the perfect patsy".If the above is close to what happened, it would certainly explain RFK's desperate attempt to "cover up". A most interesting scenario.

"I now believe you are right to suggest to me that the person who was supposed to be sitting in that seat was Ralph Yarborough, LBJ’s liberal political enemy, which explains not only why they were shooting at him but also why LBJ put up such a huge fuss over who should ride with JFK. When Jack insisted that the Chief Executive of the state should ride with the Chief Executive of the United States that morning, it must have been too late to change the arrangements that were in place." http://www.paranormalnews.com/article.asp?articleId=569

A fake assassination plot being hijacked to become a real one brings up the issue of who was the intended passenger with the president. There is no debate that people were arguing about it right up until Air Force One landed in Dallas. Many have suspected that LBJ was strongly motivated to have the passenger be Yarborough because he had foreknowledge and wouldn't want his protege, Connally, in the line of fire. But considering foreknowledge that the passenger is to be a target and lending consideration to the possibility that the fake attempt was an Operation Northwoods plot to create a precipating action for the Cuban invasion, it would have been the Kennedy forces most adamently arranging for it to be Connally. In this scenario, Oswald, who personally loathed Connally, would be assigned to shoot the Governor, with the appearance being a Castro attempt against Kennedy. This has its historical percusor in the murder of Chicago Mayor Cermak while in the presence of FDR in 1933.

T.C.

[Tim Gratz]

Tim a very interesting thought, but I do pose several objections. I would be loathe to believe that either of the Kennedys were murderers (at least just to get rid of Connally; it is possible that RFL participated in the murder of Marillyn Monroe only because her threat to tell all could have caused the immediate crash of Camelot and "desperate men do desperate things"). Your scenario would also make Oswald a murderer and I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt as well. Now, from a non-moral standpoint, I do not think that JFK would have ordered anyone (even the best sharpshooter in the military) to try to take out the man sitting immediately in front of him in the limousine. Forgetting the morality of it, that would truly be a "profile in courage".

I think your suggestion that JFK was aware of a fake assassination attempt is very intriguing, however.

[Tim Carroll]

I don't actually believe or disbelieve that Connally was a target, or that Oswald was necessarily an actual shooter. But I do accept that Operation Northwoods was an actual framework adopted to address the need for a precipitating event to trigger and justify the Cuban invasion. I don't see anyway around accepting that the Kennedy brothers were aware of Operation Northwoods, its ramifications and its potential for collateral civilian casualties. I also, however, don't necessarily believe that the Kennedys were actually ready to initiate the Cuban coup on a date certain, recognizing that they multi-tracked everything. My bottom-line premise is that the Kennedys would have required a sufficient pretext to make the second invasion significantly different than the Bay of Pigs. This meant they had to have acknowledged to themselves that U.S. military support would be an integral part of the plan. Therefore, the missing element is the factor that would have allowed such U.S. military participation without provoking and/or justifying a countermove in Berlin. An assassination attempt on the President would have accomplished this, as well as ensuring reelection. Has anyone heard of the home movie two months before Dallas in which Kennedy was walking up the dock in Hyannis Port and pretended for the camera to have been shot?

T.C.

[Tim Gratz]

Excellent post, Tim. I think I could agree with every point you made.

And if you are correct it could explain a lot of things!

Edited November 28, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Ron Ecker]

FWIW a faked assassination attempt would explain the first shot missing the limo completely and hitting the pavement. This would be followed (perhaps unbeknownst to the first errant shooter) by shots meant to kill. (Or how's this theory: Oswald was shooting to miss, but was such a bad shot he kept hitting the president.)

[Tim Gratz]

It's terrible to kid about such a tragedy, but Ron's point was funny: It was indeed a fake assassination plot, but it was not hijacked. As Ron said, Oswald was just such a poor shooter that after his first miss he starting hitting people! Only such a poor shot as Oswald could accomplish a "magic bullet"!

Edited November 28, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Tim Carroll]

FWIW a faked assassination attempt would explain the first shot missing the limo completely and hitting the pavement. This would be followed (perhaps unbeknownst to the first errant shooter) by shots meant to kill.

The idea of a deliberately errant shooter might also explain that only one conventional rifle/ammunition was in play that day. Those who don't believe in the SBT are at a loss to explain why more shots weren't heard. One explanation is that the shots came in volleys, but an alternative would be that one conventional rifle was firing while other rifles were silenced and possibly firing frangible bullets. This scenario would likely still involve the Carcano firing into the limo to plant evidence.

The Tague shot is another element which defies easy explanation. Even a deliberately errant shooter would have to be missing the limo by a wildly huge margin to hit the Tague curb. Given that there were no traces of copper on the curb, the bullet would have to have been a dejacketed ricochet [even the WC didn't believe this latter-day Posner contrivance] or a non-jacketed frangible bullet from a near-miss which reverse trajectory would demonstrate to have originated from the Dal-Tex building.

T.C.

[Gerry Hemming]

FWIW a faked assassination attempt would explain the first shot missing the limo completely and hitting the pavement. This would be followed (perhaps unbeknownst to the first errant shooter) by shots meant to kill.

The idea of a deliberately errant shooter might also explain that only one conventional rifle/ammunition was in play that day. Those who don't believe in the SBT are at a loss to explain why more shots weren't heard. One explanation is that the shots came in volleys, but an alternative would be that one conventional rifle was firing while other rifles were silenced and possibly firing frangible bullets. This scenario would likely still involve the Carcano firing into the limo to plant evidence.

The Tague shot is another element which defies easy explanation. Even a deliberately errant shooter would have to be missing the limo by a wildly huge margin to hit the Tague curb. Given that there were no traces of copper on the curb, the bullet would have to have been a dejacketed ricochet [even the WC didn't believe this latter-day Posner contrivance] or a non-jacketed frangible bullet from a near-miss which reverse trajectory would demonstrate to have originated from the Dal-Tex building.

T.C.

------------------------

Tim:

While working on the "JFK" movie [both in Dallas & later in N.O.] I took great pains in detailing the years of "Ballistic-Tradecraft" used by ALL security services when executing "Wet/Ops".

First: Years before I had explained these "techniques" directly to "Jimbo/Gumbo" Garrison in a "well-swept" and-presumably-BUG free" hotel room [randomly-picked by ME !!] at the N.O. Fontainebleau Hotel. [June 1967]

At the onset of a "glazed-eyeball" look, I shortened my "perenniallly-wandering" narrative to short and sweet paragraphs. I sure as hell didn't want him gong catatonic on me once again -- and then reaching for his "Meds ?? -- which guaranteed that he would be "Out-of-It" within minutes !!

The "spiel" to Stone was: "..Oliver...when I explained this same line of supposition to Billings during 1968... and again later during 1992 [Washington, D.C.]....I described in great detail exactly how a "Meat-Shot" was accomplished...and this was the 'ultimate-frame-up' in which an "Almost-Pristine" bullet would be recovered by the forensics folks during the post-mortem...!!

[Too bad that the "C.S.I. TV Producers" are extremely wary of including same within any of their episodes]

The son of my most favorite war correspondent works onboard said series !!

I "tutored" Garrison as follows: The "Meat-Shot" is done witha semi-pristine bullet, which usually has been fired into a barrel of water [NOT cotton] -- and thus it carries the "lands & grooves" drilled inside all rifle barrels; and is acepted by ALL courts as admissable evidence, and even beyond that of latent fingerprint lifts, which might well be challenged as to "number-of-points" by a "Defense Expert Witness".

The "Meat-Shot" bullet -- unfortunately carries the "Signature" of having been previosly fired into water; and that "signature" is: The rearmost lead core of a "Full-Metal-Jacket" slug will exhibit an "OVAL" disfiguration, which is caused by the "water-ballistic-wave" causing a crimping type effect. Note that WATER cannot be compressed -- and therefore reacts to ANY high velocity passage of a missile with this "crimping effect"

[The Navy scientists at AU.T.E.C. (Fresh Creek, Andros Island, Bahamas) faced a minor version of said effect while testing torpedoes at the "Tongue of The Ocean" deep trench underwater test site.]

[Google "Atlantic Underwater Test and Engineering Center, Andros, Island, Bahamas]

Note also that Senator Arlen Spector's "Magic Bullet" exhibits such an "Oval" disfiguration !!

As explained to Stone, and in much lesser detail than with Garrison -- the "Meat-Shot" must NOT be allowed to penetrate the target torso very deeply. The most common device used to deliver this "Sabot-Encased" round is by "Saw-Off Shotgun" !!

But I as had explained to Garrison. "...Sir...you do recall that as a miltary pilot...you carried on board your "Grass-Hopper" (Cessna or Taylor-Craft "L-5")...an emergency flare pistol...and that when you rode the "jumps-seat" behind the pilots flying a Douglas C-47...and when you glanced up...just aft of the "Navigators Sextant Window" (Plexiglass bubble)...there was affixed to the "overhead"...an identical model of flare pistol....Right ??!! "..Yeah...I do recall...but what is all of this leading to...??!!

"..Well...Sir...a Sabot-Encased "meat-shot" bullet can oftentimes be fired by this very [37mm or 40mm] calibred flare pistol...!! "....Uhuh..I think I get it now..??!!

Further expounding upon this matter included the "facts" that the major drawbacks to this specific techniques was: The accuracy of the shot decreases after 100 +/- feet, unless you are firing "downhill".

The 2nd "imperfection" is that when this weapon is fired, it GOES OFF WITH A VERY LOUD FIRE-CRACKER LIKE SOUNDING "BANG" !!

I reminded ALL that contained within a forensic report there was a doctor who claimed that he had inserted his forefingers inside of JFK's back wound -- and that his finger stopped after about 4 inches, and without encountering muscle fiber -- which indicated a "minor entry" wound, and reflected a 44 degree up-angle entrance from the vertical !!

Once again those "famous" Ballistic/Mob/Silencer-Experts" [Dale Dye & Sgt. Stanley White] disagreed profusely. And once again, Stone said those details would be researched by Rusconi, et al. -- to see if "Big Gumbo" had actually known these details during 1966-1969 ??" I retorted that: Why don't we just drive over to his hotel and see if he remembers ??!!

Guess what ??!!"

Chairs,

GPH

______________________

[Tim Carroll]

The "Meat-Shot" is done with a semi-pristine bullet, which usually has been fired into a barrel of water [NOT cotton] -- and thus it carries the "lands & grooves" drilled inside all rifle barrels; and is acepted by ALL courts as admissable evidence, and even beyond that of latent fingerprint lifts, which might well be challenged as to "number-of-points" by a "Defense Expert Witness". The "Meat-Shot" bullet -- unfortunately carries the "Signature" of having been previosly fired into water; and that "signature" is: The rearmost lead core of a "Full-Metal-Jacket" slug will exhibit an "OVAL" disfiguration, which is caused by the "water-ballistic-wave" causing a crimping type effect. Note that WATER cannot be compressed -- and therefore reacts to ANY high velocity passage of a missile with this "crimping effect".... Note also that Senator Arlen Spector's "Magic Bullet" exhibits such an "Oval" disfiguration !! As explained to Stone, and in much lesser detail than with Garrison -- the "Meat-Shot" must NOT be allowed to penetrate the target torso very deeply. The most common device used to deliver this "Sabot-Encased" round is by "Saw-Off Shotgun" !!.. Further expounding upon this matter included the "facts" that the major drawbacks to this specific techniques was: The accuracy of the shot decreases after 100 +/- feet, unless you are firing "downhill". The 2nd "imperfection" is that when this weapon is fired, it GOES OFF WITH A VERY LOUD FIRE-CRACKER LIKE SOUNDING "BANG" !! I reminded ALL that contained within a forensic report there was a doctor who claimed that he had inserted his forefingers inside of JFK's back wound -- and that his finger stopped after about 4 inches, and without encountering muscle fiber -- which indicated a "minor entry" wound, and reflected a 44 degree up-angle entrance from the vertical !!

It has previously been discussed that the non-transitting back wound may have been a "light load." Gerry Hemming's above post corroborates that for the "Sabot-Encased" Magic Bullet to have been fired into a barrel of water (a "signature" evidenced on CE399) and retain its Carcano "lands & grooves," it would have required a light load in order that it not "penetrate the target torso very deeply." This supports the notion that the Carcano-related ballistics evidence was planted in Dealey Plaza rather than at the hospital, and that the gun doing the firing would have been particularly loud in relation to others.

T.C.

[Tim Carroll]

The first and second shots, if they did indeed come at 188 and 222 (and strike Kennedy at 190 and 224) are too close together to have both been fired with any accuracy from the Sniper's nest.

The WC reasoning that the first wounding occurred at Zf-210 was based upon the timing of the limo coming out from under the live oak tree. I don't really understanding placing the source of JFK's backwound at Zf-188 from the TSBD. Even the WC said this was an impossible shot.

Knowing that there was a second shooter who needed fire from the sniper's nest to cover his fire, the sniper in the nest would shoot at the earliest opportunity. The WC showed there was a brief opening in the twigs at 186. A shooter following Kennedy with his rifle for a few seconds leading up to the brief sojourn behind the twigs would be unlikely to hold off firing simply because a few twigs appeared in his view. He needed to get the thing started. I see the twigs as a non-issue.

Certainly the WC would have preferred to dismiss the "twigs as a non-issue" as well, given the compact timeframe it forced them to work with. But being from the old school, and remembering the importance of the generally-recognized argument that a clear shot wasn't possible from the 6th floor SE nest until Zf-210, I do find the assertion of a shot actually hitting Kennedy from that spot at that time to be anamolous. But if one removes that shot from the list of those that hit their targets, Pat's point about a TSBD shot at that time fits well with the idea that the Carcano ammunition didn't need to be precise, it primarily needed to serve as cover fire and evidence planting. It isn't a supportable assumption that the TSBD shooter had to have been "knowing that there was a second shooter."

T.C.

Edited November 29, 2005 by Tim Carroll

[Gerry Hemming]

It seems to be Tim's suggestion that there was to be a failed assassination attempt to be blamed on Castro to justify a US invasion of Cuba ("C Day".) If the proposed invasion was known and approved by the Kennedys, as "Ultimate Sacrifice" posits, then arguably the Kennedys even knew about the fake assassination attempt.... And what a perfect opportunity for the Mafia to "hijack" the fake attempt and make it real. The CIA had already created and had in place a man the assassins could turn in to "the perfect patsy".If the above is close to what happened, it would certainly explain RFK's desperate attempt to "cover up". A most interesting scenario.

"I now believe you are right to suggest to me that the person who was supposed to be sitting in that seat was Ralph Yarborough, LBJ’s liberal political enemy, which explains not only why they were shooting at him but also why LBJ put up such a huge fuss over who should ride with JFK. When Jack insisted that the Chief Executive of the state should ride with the Chief Executive of the United States that morning, it must have been too late to change the arrangements that were in place." http://www.paranormalnews.com/article.asp?articleId=569

A fake assassination plot being hijacked to become a real one brings up the issue of who was the intended passenger with the president. There is no debate that people were arguing about it right up until Air Force One landed in Dallas. Many have suspected that LBJ was strongly motivated to have the passenger be Yarborough because he had foreknowledge and wouldn't want his protege, Connally, in the line of fire. But considering foreknowledge that the passenger is to be a target and lending consideration to the possibility that the fake attempt was an Operation Northwoods plot to create a precipating action for the Cuban invasion, it would have been the Kennedy forces most adamently arranging for it to be Connally. In this scenario, Oswald, who personally loathed Connally, would be assigned to shoot the Governor, with the appearance being a Castro attempt against Kennedy. This has its historical percusor in the murder of Chicago Mayor Cermak while in the presence of FDR in 1933.

T.C.

------------------------------------

Elliot Ness considered Kennard Smith to be the "Last of his Untouchables" -- because Smith had worked with Ness as an investigator, almost up to his death during 1957.

The actual "Last of The Untouchables" died many years later, and had lived out his last years in Perrine, Florida -- just south of Miami.

Smith also had a loose acquaintanceship with Melvin Purvis, but this was when Smith was quite young. When I asked Ken about the "inside scoop" on the shooting of Mayor Cermak, he related to me that: Both Ness and Purvis believed that "Queen" Hoover had tried to do a complete cover-up -- but had failed.

The first salient "facts" that came out immediately upon a cursory investigation were:

(1) The bullet recovered from Cermak's chest was a .45 ACP calibre round, not a .32 cal., and moreover, no attempt was made to trace the recovered slug back to Zangara's .32 cal. revolver;

(2) The doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital had very good reason to go along with the cover-up. This was simply because it was their malpractice [in the E. R. and post-Op] which caused an otherwise non-fatal wound to became infected. This being coupled with a failure to close one artery completely, ultimately led to internal bleeding -- and this was the actual cause of his death;

(3) The "Hoover-fabricated-legend" about Zangara faded greatly a few months later. This occurred when a high ranking official of the Italian Caribinieri passed some military documents to the Rome based representative of the National Cash Register Company;

(4) But, since Zangara had already been electrocuted ["after a speedy trial"), said documents were just filed away. These documents were Zangara's military records, and they showed that he had been a member of the Italian Army Olympic Pistol Team -- and was one of their top shooters;

(5) The documents further disclosed that: Zangara had illegally supplied the Mafia with both police and military dossiers and "anti-Mafia plans". The last segment of an investigative file indicated that Zangara had been forced to cooperate with the Mafia only after both his mother and sister had first been threatened, and shortly thereafter -- kidnapped and held hostage;

(6) The high ranking Italian officer would add verbally only [to the NCR Rep.] that: Zangara had been encouraged to cooperate with the criminal element, and especially when Zangara informed this superior officer that he was scheduled to go to America to "work" for the Mafia; and,

(7) The top ranking superiors of this officer were thrilled that they would be able to once again form a relationship with the American law enforcement authorities, and this had been a firm "Compact" due to the fact that Italy had been a WWI Ally. However, and beginning even before the Volstead act took effect, the U.S. Government was quite angry at the widespread corruption linked to the bootlegging the drug trafficking. Blatant corruption of American police departments and politicians had soured completely all of the prior formal agreements !!

One wonders whether Jack Ruby was in the process of protecting members of his own family when he executed LHO ??!!

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From Where Were You Before The Tree of Life? Vol 5

by Peter Farley

. . .How limited the human mind is in being able to grasp the concept of a conspiracy so big as to have lasted tens of thousands of years. The following excerpts from Contract on America The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy by David Scheim, even show how long (and how obvious) has been the relationship between these ruling families, the political and judicial arms of the United States, and one of its enforcing agencies—organized crime:

The Assassination of RFK:

"The key to unraveling this mystery may lie in thousands of documents collected during the investigation that for nearly twenty years were locked away in Los Angeles Police files. All that was released was a widely expurgated summary that is of no value to scholars. Finally, in December 1986, after calls to open these files from two Los

Angeles newspapers and several concerned citizens, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley fulfilled a promise to press for such disclosure, and the City Council passed a resolution to effect it. Although these RFK files have been turned over to the California State Archives, nothing has been released as of this writing. It is imperative that this evidence be expeditiously and fully disclosed.

"If in fact hints of underworld involvement in the RFK killing are true, we have come full circle in the Mafia's contract on America. For recall that on February 15, 1933, Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was shot together with several bystanders as Guiseppe Zangara stepped forward and fired his revolver. Cermak, who dies after accusing the mob of the shooting, had, like Robert Kennedy, aroused its wrath by intensive official action against it. And Zangara, the conjectured victim of a Mafia squeeze play, was, like Sirhan, a drifter who spent much of his time betting at race tracks.

"But most chillingly reminiscent of the Cermak slaying was the role of suspected second gunman Gene Cesar. For, according to noted sociologist Saul Alinsky, the way Cermak was killed had "been commonly known for many years in many circles in Chicago." As quoted earlier from The Bootleggers by Kennedy Allsop, "In the crowd near Zangara was another armed man—a Capone killer. In the flurry of shots six people were hit—but the bullet that struck Cermak was a .45, and not from the .32-calibre pistol used by Zangara, and was fired by the unknown Capone man who took advantage of the confusion to accomplish his mission."

(^Like JFK and RFK's killers, there has always been at least one other professional to do the job while the front man takes the blame)..."

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Warren Commission Report: Page 512

(APPENDIX VII - A Brief History of Presidential Protection)

As the scope of the Presidency expanded during the 20th century, the Secret Service found the problems of protection becoming more numerous. In 1906, for the first time in history, a President traveled outside the United States while in office. When Theodore Roosevelt visited Panama in that year, he was accompanied and protected by Secret Service men.41 In 1918-19 Woodrow Wilson broadened the precedent of Presidential foreign travel when he traveled to Europe with a Secret Service escort of 10 men to attend the Versailles Peace Conference.42

The attempt on the life of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 further demonstrated the broad scope and complexity of the protection problems facing the Secret Service. Giuseppe Zangara was a bricklayer and stonemason with a professed hatred of capitalists and Presidents. He seemed to be obsessed with the desire to kill a President. After his arrest he confessed that he had first planned to go to Washington to kill President Herbert Hoover, but as the cold climate of the North was bad for his stomach trouble, he was loath to leave Miami, where he was staying. When he read in the paper that President-elect Roosevelt would be in Miami, he resolved to kill him.43

On the night of February 15, 1933, at, a political rally in Miami's Bayfront Park, the President-elect sat on the top of the rear seat of his automobile with a small microphone in his hand as he made a short informal talk. Fortunately for him, however, he slid down into the seat just before Zangara could get near enough to take aim. The assassin's arm may have been jogged just as he shot; the five rounds he directed at Roosevelt went awry. However, he mortally wounded Mayor Anton Cermak, of Chicago, and hit four other persons; the President-elect, by a miracle, escaped. Zangara, of course, never had any chance of escaping.44

Zangara was electrocuted on March 20, 1933, only 33 days after his attempt on Roosevelt. No evidence of accomplices or conspiracy came to light, but there was some sensational newspaper speculation, wholly undocumented, that Zangara may have been hired by Chicago gangsters to kill Cermak.45

The force provided since the Civil War by the Washington Metropolitan Police for the protection of the White House had grown to 54 men by 1922.46 In that year Congress enacted legislation creating the White House Police Force as a separate organization under the direct control of the President.47 This force was actually supervised by the President's military aide until 1930, when Congress placed supervision under the Chief of the Secret Service.48 Although Congress transferred control and supervision of the force to the Secretary of the Treasury in 1962,49 the Secretary delegated supervision to the Chief of the Secret Service.50

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Anton Cermak

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Anton Cermak, in Czech Antonín Čermák, (May 9, 1873 - March 6, 1933) was the mayor of Chicago, Illinois, from 1931 until his death in 1933.

Born in Kladno, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), Cermak emigrated with his parents to the United States in 1874. He began his political career as a precinct captain and in 1902 was elected to the Illinois state legislature. Seven years later, he would take his place as alderman of the 12th Ward (Bridgeport, the home base of future mayors Richard J. Daley, Mike Bilandic and Daley's son Richard M. Daley). Once elected mayor of Chicago in 1931, in the wake of the Great Depression and the deep resentment many Chicagoans had of Prohibition, Cermak treated the city as if it were a personal business and tried to provide the best service possible. He was so popular that anyone who went up against him was achieving their own political death. While riding in an open car next to President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami Beach, Florida on February 15, 1933, Cermak was shot and fatally wounded when Giuseppe Zangara tried to assassinate Roosevelt and hit Cermak instead. Some have theorized Cermak, not Roosevelt, had been the intended target as he was intent on driving the Mafia (at least its Capone faction) out of Chicago. Cermak died of his wounds on March 6 and was interred at Bohemian National Cemetery, Chicago.

Cermak is considered the father of Chicago's powerful Democratic political machine. Before Cermak, new immigrants in the early 1900s such as Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Italians, and blacks were apolitical. Cermak, with help from FDR on the national level, also gradually wooed blacks into the Democratic fold. The taunt of William Hale Thompson in the 1931 mayor's race, representative of the WASPs who had led Chicago for years, only backfired on him.

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Cermak's son-in-law, Otto Kerner Jr., was Illinois governor from 1961 to 1968 and later headed the Kerner Commission, which issued a report on race relations in the United States. Kerner was appointed a judge of the United States Court of Appeals, a post he had to resign in 1973 after being convicted for his role in an illegal racetrack financing scheme while serving as governor.

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GPH

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