Farewell America - now it's permissable?

[Randy Downs]

Sometime back around 1980 i was told ""Farewell America" is one of the few books not allowed to pass thru U.S. Customs." You can't imagine what a shock it was to hear this, for someone who was indoctrinated -excuse me- educated in the public school system. So i called my local Customs office and i was told, yes there are certain books not allowed into this country.

Earlier this year, i picked up a paperback edition at the local Barnes & Noble.

Does anyone know why this book (the origins of which are shrouded in mystery) is suddenly allowed to be read by U.S. citizens?

Another minor mystery: When this book was still banned, i found a copy in the public library system. I have no idea how a banned book gets into the library system, but this book (hardback) had had a section of photograph pages. Those pages had been cut out but i could see a remnant in the spine. I couldn't count them but this was more than 1 or 2 pages, this had substantial width.

I spoke with a bookstore owner who had a lot of experience in handling this book; he told me there was no edition published with a section of photos.

(I have read Mr. Hinckle's account of his experiences with this book.)

I would be most interested in hearing from anyone who can shed some light on this.

Regards,

R. D.

[Michael Hogan]

Hello Randy...

Hardback copies of Farewell America were notorious for binding problems. I'm certain that was the problem with the library copy.

There's a lot of info on the internet; I believe William Turner wrote a chapter about Farewell America in his book Rearview Mirror. Hardback copies have been available for many years from The Last Hurrah Bookstore, ABE Books, and occasionally eBay.

I'm certain there is good information lurking somewhere in this Forum's archives. What did you think of Farewell America after reading it?

Mike Hogan

Edited May 26, 2006 by Michael Hogan

[Shanet Clark]

AMAZON $17.95

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Originally published in Europe in 1968, this is a once-notorious, now-dated look at John Kennedy's assassination and an excoriation of the American scene in its aftermath. Turner (Rearview Mirror, etc.) explains in his introduction that the book was first published under mysterious circumstances and was "aimed at advancing the 1968 presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy," but its U.S. distribution was rapidly curtailed after RFK's death. The authors ("James Hepburn" is a pseudonym) conducted clandestine research among KGB and Interpol agents and French petroleum espionage specialists and relied on a rare, unmodified print of the famed Zapruder film. The book seethes with aggrieved passion in defending the Kennedys and their ideals, and seeks to defrock the "lone gunman" theory of JFK's assassination. Most of the text is a damning jeremiad, portraying pre-1964 America as a vicious, discriminatory oligarchy controlled by alliances of Big Steel and Big Oil, the military and organized crime, which all had reason to fear JFK's proposed reforms. According to "Hepburn," these interests combined with ultra-right-wing paramilitary groups like the Minutemen and Cuban exile groups to plan the assassination. Chapters discussing the assassination itself will be grimly convincing to some readers, with excellent analyses of the Secret Service's failures and the ambiguous roles played by the CIA and FBI during this tumultuous era. This is a pungent historical document, but its conspiracy theory is familiar by now, and its information has been surpassed by more recent studies such as Murder in Dealey Plaza, edited by James Fetzer.

Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ed Tatro, JFK assassination expert

Penmarin Books deserves high praise for allowing Farewell America to reach a new and expanded audience.

Book Description

Originally published in 1968 in France under the title L’Amerique Brule (America Is Burning), Farewell America quickly became a best-seller in Europe in eleven languages. It was the inside story of the assassination of President John Kennedy. Although borrowing heavily from published critics of the Warren Commission Report, the book describes the roots of the Cold War, the linkage between large corporate and banking interests, the ever-growing American intelligence apparatus, and the international petroleum cartels that were lined up with a bevy of military brass and Mafia chieftains against JFK.

A combination of these powerful interests called "The Committee" coordinated all aspects of the murder, from setting the time and place of the shooting to the recruitment of the gunmen and the coverup of the conspiracy afterward. The bottom line was that enemies of JFK collaborated with the CIA to erase the perceived threat to their interests by John and Robert Kennedy.

Heady stuff for 1968. So incendiary, in fact, that importation of the book through Canada was squelched, allegedly at the instigation of the FBI. Farewell America wasn’t just another book about the assassination conspiracy; it bristled with restricted information about U.S. intelligence agencies, the White House, global business, and military and political affairs that had to have come from a knowlegdeable source, in this case, French intelligence. It also represented the surreptitious intrusion by those in French government circles into American politics, namely, the 1968 presidential elections.

About the Author

Herve Lamarre, the publisher of the original edition of Farewell America, admitted that the author of record, James Hepburn, was fictitious and that the true sources included Andre Ducret of the Surete; Interpol; and, among others in French intelligence, Philippe Vasjoly, the chief French petroleum agent in the United States. William Turner is an authority on the Kennedy assassinations, the FBI and the CIA, and the author of nine books, including his recent memoirs, Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA and Other Tails.

>>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>>

[Bill Cheslock]

AMAZON $17.95

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Originally published in Europe in 1968, this is a once-notorious, now-dated look at John Kennedy's assassination and an excoriation of the American scene in its aftermath. Turner (Rearview Mirror, etc.) explains in his introduction that the book was first published under mysterious circumstances and was "aimed at advancing the 1968 presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy," but its U.S. distribution was rapidly curtailed after RFK's death. The authors ("James Hepburn" is a pseudonym) conducted clandestine research among KGB and Interpol agents and French petroleum espionage specialists and relied on a rare, unmodified print of the famed Zapruder film. The book seethes with aggrieved passion in defending the Kennedys and their ideals, and seeks to defrock the "lone gunman" theory of JFK's assassination. Most of the text is a damning jeremiad, portraying pre-1964 America as a vicious, discriminatory oligarchy controlled by alliances of Big Steel and Big Oil, the military and organized crime, which all had reason to fear JFK's proposed reforms. According to "Hepburn," these interests combined with ultra-right-wing paramilitary groups like the Minutemen and Cuban exile groups to plan the assassination. Chapters discussing the assassination itself will be grimly convincing to some readers, with excellent analyses of the Secret Service's failures and the ambiguous roles played by the CIA and FBI during this tumultuous era. This is a pungent historical document, but its conspiracy theory is familiar by now, and its information has been surpassed by more recent studies such as Murder in Dealey Plaza, edited by James Fetzer.

Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ed Tatro, JFK assassination expert

Penmarin Books deserves high praise for allowing Farewell America to reach a new and expanded audience.

Book Description

Originally published in 1968 in France under the title L’Amerique Brule (America Is Burning), Farewell America quickly became a best-seller in Europe in eleven languages. It was the inside story of the assassination of President John Kennedy. Although borrowing heavily from published critics of the Warren Commission Report, the book describes the roots of the Cold War, the linkage between large corporate and banking interests, the ever-growing American intelligence apparatus, and the international petroleum cartels that were lined up with a bevy of military brass and Mafia chieftains against JFK.

A combination of these powerful interests called "The Committee" coordinated all aspects of the murder, from setting the time and place of the shooting to the recruitment of the gunmen and the coverup of the conspiracy afterward. The bottom line was that enemies of JFK collaborated with the CIA to erase the perceived threat to their interests by John and Robert Kennedy.

Heady stuff for 1968. So incendiary, in fact, that importation of the book through Canada was squelched, allegedly at the instigation of the FBI. Farewell America wasn’t just another book about the assassination conspiracy; it bristled with restricted information about U.S. intelligence agencies, the White House, global business, and military and political affairs that had to have come from a knowlegdeable source, in this case, French intelligence. It also represented the surreptitious intrusion by those in French government circles into American politics, namely, the 1968 presidential elections.

About the Author

Herve Lamarre, the publisher of the original edition of Farewell America, admitted that the author of record, James Hepburn, was fictitious and that the true sources included Andre Ducret of the Surete; Interpol; and, among others in French intelligence, Philippe Vasjoly, the chief French petroleum agent in the United States. William Turner is an authority on the Kennedy assassinations, the FBI and the CIA, and the author of nine books, including his recent memoirs, Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA and Other Tails.

>>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>>

The following message was forwarded to me by Hal Lockwood, the

publisher of Penmarin Books, which published the new edition of Farewell

America. He requested that I post it on the forum:

To All Concerned:

Our publishing house, Penmarin Books (www.penmarin.com) published several

works by William Turner, including Rearview Mirror:Looking back at the FBI, the

CIA and Other Tails, his memoirs. As one reader commented, Turner devoted

a chapter to Farewell America. As his publisher, I was fascinated by the story

of its creation (by members of Interpol and French Intelligence under a pseudonym

in the mid-'60s) and the embargo of a shipment of the English edition in Canada

by the RCMP. I obtained an original edition in hard copy from Bill and read it

cover to cover.

It was all that it promised...and then some. Not to be held back because it was

repressed--and in fact driven to finally publish the book here in the U.S.--I agreed

to publish it, with Bill's chapter as introduction and history of its creation, purpose,

publication, and suppression. We took pages from the original work, scanned them,

added Bill's introduction, and new frontmatter, and published it in facsimile. We

did due diligence as far as Frontier Publishing, the nominal Swiss publisher, and

James Hepburn, the ostensible author and copyright holder, were concerned. We

found no copyright restrictions and went ahead and published Farewell America

in paperback.

It is available on Amazon, in most bookstores, and directly from our Web site,

www.penmarin.com.

Incidentally, the hard copy original edition we received had no photos.

Hal Lockwood

Publisher

Penmarin Books

Edited May 27, 2006 by Bill Cheslock

[John Simkin]

Sometime back around 1980 i was told ""Farewell America" is one of the few books not allowed to pass thru U.S. Customs." You can't imagine what a shock it was to hear this, for someone who was indoctrinated -excuse me- educated in the public school system. So i called my local Customs office and i was told, yes there are certain books not allowed into this country.

Earlier this year, i picked up a paperback edition at the local Barnes & Noble.

Does anyone know why this book (the origins of which are shrouded in mystery) is suddenly allowed to be read by U.S. citizens?

Another minor mystery: When this book was still banned, i found a copy in the public library system. I have no idea how a banned book gets into the library system, but this book (hardback) had had a section of photograph pages. Those pages had been cut out but i could see a remnant in the spine. I couldn't count them but this was more than 1 or 2 pages, this had substantial width.

I spoke with a bookstore owner who had a lot of experience in handling this book; he told me there was no edition published with a section of photos.

(I have read Mr. Hinckle's account of his experiences with this book.)

I would be most interested in hearing from anyone who can shed some light on this.

Regards,

R. D.

I have a copy of the original edition of this book and it include no photographs. However it does have a drawing that shows the positions of the 4 shooters (pages 356-57)

[Randy Downs]

Well, i'm going to have to check my settings here; i didn't think anybody had responded so i've just read these today.

Michael, yes the binding was terrible, my book didn't make it thru the first read. I eventualy had the entire thing 3-hole punched and put in a binder.

I never heard of Turner's book, Rearview Mirror. I read an older work of his, If Life Gives You Lemons; which was about his time with Ramparts Magazine. His account there of obtaining Farewell America was quite interesting and kind of cloak-and-dagger.

Bill, i'm most grateful for your post and the information you provided from Hal Lockwood. That was fascinating and i just loved it. Thank you.

I cannot offer up any explanation for this, either sinister or innocuous. I can only tell you what i saw. I'm sure we're all familiar with books that contain a section of photographs. You simply cannot confuse or mistake the regular paper with the slick, thicker photograph pages (sorry, i forget the word for that type of paper).

I had to make a special request from the library and it was a reference book so i wasn't allowed to take it, but there was a remnant of slick, photographic paper roughly a bit less than 1/4 of an inch in size (the book practicly fell open to that gap) clearly cut out (smooth edges, not rough). It was definately the right book. However the binding wasn't falling apart. And while i've only seen about a dozen copies, they all look the same on the outside, but that one didn't.

Regards,

Randy

[Jack White]

Sometime back around 1980 i was told ""Farewell America" is one of the few books not allowed to pass thru U.S. Customs." You can't imagine what a shock it was to hear this, for someone who was indoctrinated -excuse me- educated in the public school system. So i called my local Customs office and i was told, yes there are certain books not allowed into this country.

Earlier this year, i picked up a paperback edition at the local Barnes & Noble.

Does anyone know why this book (the origins of which are shrouded in mystery) is suddenly allowed to be read by U.S. citizens?

Another minor mystery: When this book was still banned, i found a copy in the public library system. I have no idea how a banned book gets into the library system, but this book (hardback) had had a section of photograph pages. Those pages had been cut out but i could see a remnant in the spine. I couldn't count them but this was more than 1 or 2 pages, this had substantial width.

I spoke with a bookstore owner who had a lot of experience in handling this book; he told me there was no edition published with a section of photos.

(I have read Mr. Hinckle's account of his experiences with this book.)

I would be most interested in hearing from anyone who can shed some light on this.

Regards,

R. D.

I have a copy of the original edition of this book and it include no photographs. However it does have a drawing that shows the positions of the 4 shooters (pages 356-57)

The FAREWELL AMERICA diagram of shots.

Jack

[Guest Robert Morrow]

Al Navis is a long time JFK assassination researcher. I think he owns a bookstore in Canada. In his essay he talks about the time he tried to buy a bunch of copies of Farewell America at an auction, then suprisingly 2 men (presumably government agents; I would guess Canadian) paid outrageous amounts for copies of the book and even tried to buy his ones on the spot for 4 times what he paid for it.

The year was 1984!! Not 1968, but 16 years later in the spring of 1984 someone (presumably government agents) was still trying to sop up copies of "Farewell America" and was willing to pay outrageous amounts for the book.

"Farewell America: The Book and the Enigma"

By Al Navis

“Farewell America, Al, you have to get a copy of Farewell America”, said the voice on the telephone. The soft East Texas twang immediately identified the caller as one William Penn Jones, Jr. and he was calling me from his desk as Editor-in-Chief of the Midlothian Mirror, a weekly newspaper from the town just south of Dallas.

It was about two weeks before Christmas, 1968 and winter in Toronto was fast approaching. America, and indeed the entire world, had just endured what was possibly the worst single year of the century, excepting the Wars. It was a presidential election year and Lyndon Johnson said he wouldn’t run, but Robert Kennedy said he would. By the end of the year, Kennedy was dead by assassins’ bullets, Richard Nixon was President, Hubert Humphrey had lost the election by just over 25,000 votes and Johnson was back home in Texas after aging 20 years in the past five.

Add to this, the assassination of Civil Rights champion Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; North Korea capturing the electronic spyship U.S.S. Pueblo; the continuing war in south-east Asia; the Soviet Union occupying Czechoslovakia, a student and worker revolt in France and the few good things which occurred that year were all but invisible.

The first heart transplant in December, 1967 gave way to an avalanche of them in 1968; American astronauts orbited the moon in preparation for a lunar landing in mid-1969 and President John Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline, married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.

So when Penn mentioned Farewell America, I asked him what was it about. The story that Penn told me—coupled with what I learned from former F.B.I.-agent-turned-author William Turner and added to the rather bizarre occurrences which would happen to me 16 years later—is what Paul Harvey routinely calls “the rest of the story”.

The rest of this story begins on 22 November 1963, with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. While the various timelines of history converged on that place at that time, what came out of Dallas was best described by a Hopi word koyaanisqatsi, meaning crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating or a state of life that calls for another way of living.

For virtually every person connected with the assassination, this is true and it was especially true for the President’s brother, then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Even in the middle of the worst four days of his life, Robert Kennedy had the presence of mind to ask one of his most trusted aides, future Senator from New York Daniel Moynihan to quietly assemble a small staff to look into his brother’s murder. Kennedy basically asked Moynihan to get him the answer to two questions: did Teamster boss and Kennedy family enemy Jimmy Hoffa have any involvement in the assassination?, and, was the Secret Service as an agency or specific agents themselves paid off?

In a few months, the results came back to Kennedy: “no” and “no”. The report was, however, quite damning in its criticism of the Secret Service agents and the agency in general, as far as their collective performance was concerned. Standard protection procedures had been ignored, countermanded or subverted and the result was that the President was left exposed from practically everywhere in Dealey Plaza—a full 360° of opportunity.

When you look back at the weekend which followed the assassination in 1963, you can probably agree with Robert Kennedy’s prime suspects. Jimmy Hoffa was the most vocal of the detractors of the Kennedy White House as both John and Robert Kennedy had sat on the Kefauver Committee in the late 1950s looking into organized crime in America. The very fact that the President was so completely defenseless naturally gave cause to cast disparaging glances at the organization whose primary duty is to protect him.

It is indeed interesting, from the point of view of 35 years after the fact, that Hoffa and the Secret Service would be the primary suspects in the ‘crime of the century’. When we now look at who might have had a hand in the planning and execution of this execution, we normally list the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Mafia, the anti-Castro and pro-Castro Cubans, the Joint Chiefs of Staff/Pentagon/D.I.A., the Texas oil fortunes of the Hunts and the Murchisons and even the massive interests involved in the Federal Reserve Bank. The ‘grassy knoll’ is now getting to be as crowded as a Tokyo subway car at rush hour!

It was during the first few months of 1964 that a copy of the Moynihan report to Robert Kennedy found its way across the Atlantic and into the caverns of French Intelligence and, eventually, onto the desk of President Charles de Gaulle. Who actually was the genesis of what would become Farewell America must now be left to pure conjecture, as it was probably done verbally, covertly and quietly. Was it Robert Kennedy or Charles de Gaulle or both or neither?

It became the provenance of two recently-retired French Intelligence operatives and one of their British counterparts to look into the murder of a president, again probably done verbally, covertly and quietly. They were basically given carte blanche to travel wherever leads took them and to talk to whoever they thought had useful and pertinent information to give. Their investigation took more than 3 years and covered practically the entire globe.

Because the operatives were just that, and not writers, they enlisted a rather peculiar-looking Frenchman who called himself Hervé Lamarr. It was this slightly-built, chain-smoking editor who took the voluminous notes, reports, interview transcripts and essays that the operatives had accumulated over the past 40+ months and collate them into a somewhat readable concise report. It was also Lamarr who came up with the pseudonym “James Hepburn” based on his overwhelming love and admiration for actress Audrey Hepburn. He bastardized the French word j’aime which means I love.

It was most probably in mid-December, 1967 that Robert Kennedy received the final draft of the report and its effect was quite noticeable. Kennedy’s public image changed from that of a New York Senator to a potential Presidential candidate. His speeches became more international and less local-oriented. And it was quite soon therafter that he did indeed throw his hat into the ring for the November presidential election.

During Kennedy’s all-too-brief run for the Presidency, most people judiciously avoided the assassination questions, but one student reporter for a campus newspaper in Berkeley, California asked Kennedy a rather direct question, couched in metaphor—if elected would he open ‘the files’? Kennedy’s reply was metaphorical in return, saying that only the President can open ‘those files’ and I will be President! In less than three days, Robert Kennedy lay dead in a Los Angeles hospital after being shot three times at point blank range 25 hours earlier, only minutes after winning the California Democratic Primary.

After waiting a few weeks, the Kennedy family was contacted about the status of ‘the project’, meaning Farewell America. It was now the duty of the last remaining son, Edward Kennedy to basically squelch the entire operation as he said to the effect that he and the Kennedy Family no longer wished to pursue any aspects of either of the brothers’ deaths.

So now Lamarr had a book with content that could change the world’s view of what had happened in Dallas. After approaching nearly every major American and British publisher and getting rejections from all of them, Lamarr decided to begin in Europe. One can assume that corporate attorneys working as counsel for those American and British publishing houses looked at a statement on page 387 of Farewell America:

We challenge the individuals whose names are cited in this book to sue us for libel.

One can also assume that those same attorneys would have cast a ‘no’ vote when asked by the editorial staff if they should publish Farewell America. But that was the entire tone of the book, because the book was a natural product of the results of the research and that research named names and placed blames.

While I won’t disclose what that research found, leaving it up to you to read the book, I will say that it cast light in directions which, at that time, had always been in shadows. When it was published in France under the title America Brûlé (America Burns), it quickly shot to the top of the non-fiction bestseller charts. Italian and German editions soon followed, each a bestseller as well and soon it became apparant that the only way to get an edition published in English was to self-publish it.

So came the entity now known as “Frontiers Publishing”. It was registered in Vaduz, the tiny capital city of the even tinier Duchy of Liechtenstein, nestled in the Alps. The legal office was in Geneva, Switzerland. The editorial office in Paris. The books were actually printed in Belgium and shipped to Manchester, England and Montréal, Québec. The print run has never been disclosed but my research came up with an approximate number of copies in the 10,000 range. It seems that 4,000 were shipped for distribution throughout the UK and the other 6,000 were off to North America, but by having them sent out from Montréal they kept them out of the reach of the American authorities. Or so they thought.

While the copies which were in England were distributed without incident to various bookstores in the British Isles, the copies which were sent to Canada came under attack quite quickly. After about one-third of the consignment had been shipped, a very odd thing happened. The shipments stopped completely.

I have been able to place together some random facts and oddities into a fairly reliable story of what indeed happened. It seems that the F.B.I. (or perhaps the C.I.A., but more probably the former) had traced the flow of Farewell America to a book warehouse in Montréal and they elicited the assistance of the Canadian Government (possibly the R.C.M.P., but more probably the Ministry of Customs and Excise) to find a way to staunch the flow of Farewell America into the U.S.

Now comes the creative part. Through some logistical legerdemain they were able to create an excise on hardcover books which were printed in Belgium. They were then assigned a 50% duty, to be applied retro-actively as well! This means that the books would be seized for non-payment of a duty which didn’t even exist when the shipment arrived in Canada. It’s like getting a speeding ticket in September after they lowered the speed limit, and you travelled there in July! Nice grift if you can swing it.

From 1969 until 1984 two pallets of Farewell America languished in Montréal, in an unheated, bonded, government warehouse. Freezing cold winters and blistering hot summers—all fifteen of them.

During this time the book became very tough to find and the price began to climb, eventually hitting more then $100.00—if you could find a copy. The scuttlebutt was that the F.B.I. had bought up all remaining copies and had them destroyed. This type of tactic had worked with two of William Turner’s books, The Fish is Red and The Assasssination of Robert F. Kennedy which Random House had stopping shipping to bookstores a few months after it was published, probably at the behest of the F.B.I. Of the 20,000 copies it printed, Random House probably burned three-quarters of them! Not good for the bottom line, but very good for the government relations.

But the rumours were untrue and for some reason, still unknown, the book showed up as part of a Canadian government auction back in the spring of 1984. When I saw that there were two lots of about 2,000 copies each, I decided that I would attend the auction. With most of the auction audience after office furniture and the like, I was unopposed when bidding for the first lot of 2,000 copies. That changed in the few minutes that it took to begin bidding for the second lot. I repeated my opening bid when a voice from the back of the room bid an amount that was ten times my bid! Needless to say I didn’t get the second lot.

The bidder was a non-descript white male in a dark suit, perhaps 6’2” and around 200 pounds, as was his partner. I say ‘partner’ because they immediately radiated the impression ‘government’ or ‘police’. When I paid for the lot and got my receipt and release slip I was approached by the two men and offered twice what they had just paid for the second lot in cash, right there and then, if I gave them my release slip and receipt. I politely declined.

Since the books had to be picked up within 24 hours, I borrowed a friend’s van and drove to the government warehouse to claim my books. Want to guess who was there when I arrived? That’s right, the same two guys from the auction the day before. This time they offered me four times what they had paid for the books, which means that I could have made a nice tidy profit…40 times what I had paid the day before. Again I said. “no thanks” and loaded the 50 boxes into the van and drove away.

I drove around for about 2 hours basically seeing if anyone was following me, but, not exactly being a private detective myself, I couldn’t really tell. I had a friend who had a warehouse in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto and he had two rear loading docks. One was the standard truck-backs-up-to-the-door height and the other was a long ramp which allowed him to park his car inside the warehouse during the winter. It was up this ramp that I drove that afternoon and for the next two hours the van just sat inside the warehouse as my friend and I chatted.

He called his neighbour, who was an off-duty policeman to come over, which he did. I gave him the short-version of the story and then I drove the van back out and down the ramp, this time driving it a bit faster, trying to make anyone watching to believe that I had off-loaded the books and that the van was now empty. The ruse must have worked as not more than 15 minutes later, the sound of glass breaking in the warehouse caused both my friend and his policeman neighbour to come running back there.

When they turned on the lights, all they saw was an arm trying to reach through the broken window pane to unlock the door, but as the lights came on, the arm disappeared, coupled with a loud scream. By the time my friend had unlocked the back door and opened it, all they saw were the tail lights of a dark-coloured Ford sedan high-tailing it out of the rear parking lot. When they shone the beam from a flashlight down on the ground just outside the door, they noticed a trail of blood—he had sliced his arm open on the broken glass when startled by the lights coming on!

So for the next 15 years I quietly sold copies of this gem to Kennedy assassination researchers from all over the world. I also ended up donating probably close to 200 copies to the JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas which was run by the late Larry Howard and Robert Johnson. Selling these books at the Center was my way of donating to their cause.

Even though I know so much about the book, I still have so many nagging questions. Who actually were the three operatives? Who was Hervé Lamarr? Who began and financed the project? And finally, who owns the copyright? This last question will be answered, possibly, in the next few years because, when my supply of Farewell America gets down to a few copies I am going to reprint it…and let’s just see who sues ME for libel!!!