PROBABLE CAUSE AUSTRALIA

A Continuing Inquiry into the JFK Assassination

Double Issue 7 & 8 - November 1994

Probable Cause Australia is the only Australian magazine dedicated to the JFK assassination.

Editorial

As we come to the end of our second year with this big, double issue, the JFK Assassination seems in danger of slipping back into the mists of history and obscurity.

The press have forgotten the case as we approach the 31st anniversary of the death of Truth and Justice in Dallas. Even Gerald Posner isn't being wheeled out to sprout his propaganda like he used to. But still we soldier on, spreading the word, informing the ignorant, trying to do our bit for democracy.

Over our Summer recess, the Centre will be looking at the best mode of attack for the years ahead. Questions have been drawn over Probable Cause, and whether it can continue to be a news-breaking magazine when there just isn't enough news breaking to fill its covers. Its format may change in the next year, as we look at new technology and whether our focus should change from news material to source material. Even the internet may be the place to head. Stay tuned and we'll keep you up to date.

Due to an enforced holiday break for myself this year, there will be no formal get together on or around the assassination date. I will be out of the state and trying to co-ordinate something so big so late is too much. Look out for a formal gathering around the middle of next year.

LAKE BREAKING NEWS:
It is indeed wonderful to report that our very own regular columnist, Wait Brown, has been chosen as the Keynote Speaker at this years Assassination Symposium on John Kennedy in Dallas! Walt and his good wife Jill are, needless to say, thrilled. He will be following in the steps of Norman Mailer who spoke last year. Congratulations Walt!

Speaking of conferences. as reported above the ASK symposium is on again, as is the first COPA (Coalition on Political Assassinations) conference in Washington. COPA, set up as both a research and political lobby group, is keeping its finger on the pulse of all that's happening in Washington. We hope to bring you some of their reports in upcoming issues.

IN THIS ISSUE
Gary Aguilar tells us some home truths about Gerald Posner and his 'research'; we have the 1969 Penthouse interview with the poor, victimised Clay Shaw; Walt Brown tells us why David Belin can't hear like he used to, David B. Perry rides into town to shoot down Posner (he helped Posner research Case Closed!) and the Roscoe White debate with his six-shooters; we have a not-at-all-biased piece of Dallas journalism on our very own researchers; the final interview with the man Oswald missed General Edwin Walker; Paul Jones ventures into the Washington Archives for a ride into pure lunacy; L. Fletcher Prouty hits back at last issue's Edward Jay Epstein article and throws down the gauntlet to any non-believers; a re-print on how the French Intelligence wrote a book on the Kennedy assassination; and the final installment of everyone's favorite crook next door, Richard Nixon.

The above is sure to make fine reading as the assassination weekend approaches and passes and we enter another year or silence. Some will argue our make or break time has passed and that we've run our race. Still, there is hope just one piece of evidence or a stray memo missed by the eagle-eyed censors could make or break us. After 30 years of silence, the US Government is determined now to bury us all in such a mountain of paper and memos (yes, more than the Warren Commission!) and keep us quiet for a few more years until it's too far down the track for anyone to care. We must make sure we don't drown in paperwork or help keep the silence.

If we drop the ball here, there will be no tomorrow - no chance to delve further into the other assassinations of the sixties and the political intrigues that are still happening around us. Lose this one, and we lose it all. We have our best chance with the JFK case - let's show the skeptics and the biased media that we aren't crack-pots or "buffs".

It's up to you.

Aguilar on Posner - The Other Side by Gary L. Aguilar

Dear Mr. Gerlach,
I've little time but I appreciate your note of March 9, 1994. I do have something of possible interest to your colleagues. Mr. Gerald Posner testified before the House of Representatives in the fall of 1993, at the so called "Conyers Committee", and claimed that the autopsy pathologists, James Humes and J. Thornton Boswell, have changed their minds about the location of the bullet entrance wound in the skull. That is, he claimed that he interviewed them both and that they have, in effect, repudiated the low location in the skull for the bullet entrance they claimed to the Warren Commission and to the HSCA under oath, and even again recently to JAMA in their May 27, 1992 interviews. According to Posner, they told him that they now believe that the entrance wound was 10-cm higher than their previous claims -- in the cowlick region at the top of the skull, rather than the base of the skull at the level of the External Occipital Protuberance!

On another matter, Posner, in his book, claims that James Tague, who suffered a superficial flesh wound from a Dealey Plaza fragment at the time of the shooting, was not sure which fragment hit him. Posner made this claim on the basis of an interview with James Tague (See the index to his book, it is not handy to me now or I'd get it for you.) Tague, it should be recalled, told the Warren Commission that he wasn't sure whether it was the second or third shot that hit him -- but that it definitely was not the first shot. Posner's reconstruction of the assassination requires that the Tague fragment was from the first shot, and so Tague's change of recollection is quite important evidentially, of course.

I called both J. Thornton Boswell and James Tague. BOTH SAID THAT THEY HAVE NEVER SPOKEN WITH GERALD POSNER, AND BOTH CLAIM THAT THEY HAVE NEVER DEVIATED FROM THEIR ORIGINAL OPINIONS AND WARREN COMMISSION TESTIMONIES -- THEY HAVE NOT CHANGED THEIR MINDS AT ALL! Boswell TOLD ME the entrance wound in the skull was low, and Tague TOLD ME the first fragment definitely did not hit him -- it might have been either the second or the third, as he's always said. I also called Humes who was quite defensive and reluctant to speak with me, but he said that he stands by his account in JAMA on JFK's wounds, and apparently has not, as Posner asserts, changed his mind to 'recall' that the entrance wound was 10-cm higher than he claimed in the autopsy report. One wonders how many other of Posner's quoted 'sources' would today deny ever having spoken with him.

Please make note of an upcoming JFK conference in Washington, D.C. on October 7, 8, and 9, 1994 which is sponsored by The Coalition on Political Assassinations (C.O.P.A.). This organization was formed in reaction to the feelings of many at the last ASK conference that many qualified critic-authorities were not invited to speak (Jerry Policoff, Roger Fernman, Wayne Smith, Ph.D., etc.), while many other Warren apologists, such as Robert Artwohl, Gus Russo, Ed Butler, Jim Moore, and others were given a forum: With some very important data on JFK emerging in consequence of the Records Release Act, there was a wish that a forum be established to feature ACCOMPLISHED AND RELIABLE CRITICS.

C.O.P.A. was established with this in mind, and includes among its members John Newman, Ph.D., Cyril Wecht, MD, JD, David Mantik, MD, Ph.D., James Lesar, JD, Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D, myself; John Judge, Randy Robertson, MD, Walt Brown, Ph.D., James DiEugenio, Roger Bruce Fernman, JD, James Alcorn, JD, Wayne Smith, Ph.D. Jerry Policoff, etc., etc., etc. I cannot emphasize enough that this group's goal is to feature responsible, carefully considered damning criticism of the 'official conclusions', both at the planned fall conference, but also on an ongoing 'political action' basis in the future. C.O.P.A.'s fall conference will feature what the Dallas ASK conferences might wish they had featured, without David Lifton and Harrison Livingstone. (No insult is meant by excluding Lifton and Livingstone. It was felt, however, that prominent featuring of them might be exploited by the press, as in the past, as a 'sleazy' attempt to sell their books. The conference's credibility, it was hoped, might be enhanced showcasing authorities whose livelihoods or income do not depend on commercial exposure of the tragedy.) With the new revelations that will be featured at this conference, it should be an exhilarating and fascinating time. I hope you are able to come, or can at least send an emissary.

For information, please write to John Judge, or me again.
John Judge P.O. # 772, Washington, D.C. 20044-0772, or call 202-310-1858. You may fax via the Assassination Archive Research Centre at 202-393-7310.

As you might expect, there is much more to tell, but no time to do so!
Best wishes to you,
Gary L. Aguilar, MD
Chairman, Department of Surgery, Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, San Francisco Assistant Clinical Professor of Ophthalmology, Stanford University Medical Center Assistant Clinical Professor of Ophthalmology, University of California, San Francisco Head of Ophthalmology, Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, San Francisco Member, Board of Directors, San Francisco Medical Society Member, American Medical Association

Dear Steve,
Thanks for your letter of June 12, 1994 which included the issue of "Probable Cause". Enclosed please find a copy of my letter I published in the Federal Bar News and Journal. As I've added a few things to the list, I thought to include a more complete listing which follows. Please let me know if you want more. I'm continuing the inquiry. Tony Summers gave me another example, but until I get clearance from him to use it, I'll have to be mum.

Hope you're well. Please come to the COPA conference in the fall in Washington at the Sheraton Washington Sheraton Hotel, October 7 -10, 1994. For information write the Coalition on Political Assassinations, c/o AARC, 918 F Street, Rm, 510,Washington D.C. 20004.

Posner Agonistes
Even without the Pulitzer Prize nomination, it is difficult to exaggerate the praise heaped upon Gerald Posner's work, "Case Closed" for settling the matter of 'who killed Kennedy'. The U.S. News and World Report acclaimed, "Posner now performs the historic office of correcting the mistakes and laying the questions to rest with impressive finality, bringing the total weight of evidence into focus more sharply than anyone has done before. (USN&WR 8/30-9/6/93, p.64.) Scrutiny of both Case Closed, and of the author's public statements on the topic of JFK's death, however, has raised doubts about the reliability of Posner's claims. Some troubling examples of Posner's assertions include:

I) In support of his contention that Mr. James Tague was hit by a fragment from the first of three shots, Posner said that Tague reported in a 1992 interview that he did not know which of the three shots hit him. As recently noted by Harold Weisberg in his new book, Case Open, however, Tague told the Warren Commission that he was not hit by a fragment from the first shot. Gary L. Aguilar, MD called Tague on 4/30/94. Tague told Aguilar the same thing he told the Warren Commission -- the first shot did not hit him. Thus Posner's own eyewitness, advanced in support of his reconstruction of the shooting, flatly controverts the author's hypothesis. Case Closed misrepresents Tague's views which have been consistent over three decades. Moreover, Tague also told Aguilar that he has never spoken with Posner, though the implication of three references in his book is that Posner did speak with him on two successive days.

II) Posner made the following statement in a radio discussion with Peter Dale Scott on 11/12/93:
Posner: "You (Scott) have him [Carlos Bringuier] as a member of the DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil), this anti-Communist group. I just spoke to Bringuier again the other night on this very issue. It's absolutely not true that he was a member of the DRE and he takes great offense at that. He is not. It's stated a number of times in the book [Scott, PD. Deep Politics] that he is, but that is not the organization that he was associated with."
Less than two weeks after this exchange, Scott telephoned Bringuier in New Orleans, Scott's having spoken to him twice before. Briguier confirmed to Scott the following:
1) He was a member of the DRE, indeed the New Orleans Delegate, and was proud of that association. Thus he could not have taken offense at being so described.
2) He had never denied DRE membership to Gerald Posner, and would not.
3) He had not spoken to Posner, as far as he could recall, since the Spring of 1993, which was several months before Scott's book appeared in bookstores in September 1993. Thus during the conversation Posner cited on the radio, Bringuier was unaware of Scott's book, and so, presumably, was Posner.
III) In a radio disputation with author David Scheim on 11/27/93 the following exchange occurred:
Scheim: "...Even if Oswald was the lone killer, he was seen by a respected businessman in Georgia who became mayor of his town -- this is an FBI report -- he saw Oswald receive money from Joseph Poretto, an underboss --"
Posner (interrupting): "That's absolutely false, and I prove it in the book .... I can't believe that you cite this old information that's been rehashed a dozen times and is now totally discredited."
In fact, not one word in Case Closed is mentioned about the reported payment from Marcello underboss Joseph Poretto to Oswald in early 1963 at the New Orleans Town and Country restaurant. This report, apparently extracted from FBI files by John Davis and first reported in his 1988 book, Mafia Kingfish, was only otherwise mentioned in an epilogue to the 1989 Zebra paperback edition of Scheim's Contract on America. Thus no evidence can be found to support of Posner's statement, "this (is) old information that's been rehashed a dozen times and is now totally discredited."

IV) In his book Posner dismissed Rose Cheramie's remarkable clairvoyance that JFK was to be killed in Dallas by claiming that the witness to Cheramie's statements, Dr. Victor Weiss, reported that Cheramie only mentioned this after Oswald's death. This is flatly untrue, which Mr. Posner must know from the work he cited himself from the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) which reported, "[According to Dr. Weiss] Dr. Bowers allegedly told Weiss that the patient, Rose Cheramie, had stated before the assassination that President Kennedy was going to be killed...". Moreover, Mr. Posner certainly knowingly omitted another unassailable, HSCA witness who is mentioned in the same pages Posner misconstrued on Weiss, Francis Fruge. A Louisiana State Police lieutenant, Fruge reported Cheramie made the prediction of JFK's death in Dallas directly to him two days before murder.

V) Posner cited the testimony of Renatus Hartogs, the psychiatrist who examined Oswald as a teenage truant, arguing that Hartog's findings suggested a violent potential. The Warren Commission dismissed Hartog's testimony when an examination of his original report revealed the opposite conclusion. In fact, the Commission concluded, "Contrary to reports that appeared after the assassination, the psychiatric examination did not indicate that Lee Oswald was a potential assassin, potentially dangerous, that his 'outlook on life had strongly paranoid overtones,' or that he should be institutionalized."

VI) On November 17, 1993, before Representative John Conyers and the Committee on Government Operations House of Representatives, Mr. Posner reported that he had interviewed two of JFK's pathologists, James Humes, MD and J. Thornton Boswell, MD. Posner testified that they confirmed to him that they had changed their minds about the location they had given for the bullet entrance of JFK's skull wound. In their 1963 autopsy report, to the HSCA in 1977, and recently again in 1992 interviews published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, both pathologists claimed the bullet entered JFK's skull at the bottom of the rear of the skull, near the external occipital protuberance. Posner, however, informed the U.S. Congress that the pathologists told him that they had erred -- the wound was in fact 10-centimeters higher, at the top rear of the skull. On March 30, 1994 Gary L. Aguilar, MD called both Drs. Humes and Boswell. Both physicians told Aguilar that they had not changed their minds about the location of JFK's skull wound. They stood by their statements in JAMA, which contradict Posner. Startlingly, Dr. Boswell also told Aguilar that he has never spoken with Posner.

One can accept the occasional interpretational error, but when witnesses are repeatedly presented giving the opposite opinions they truly have, and later those same witnesses deny that the cited interviews ever occurred, a rather serious problem is at hand. While one is naturally loath to question the good faith of any author, especially one nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Posner seems to be begging even Warren Commission loyalists to question his.

Best wishes to you, Steve.
Gary L. Aguilar, MD
Chairman, Department of Surgery, Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, San Francisco Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology, Stanford University Medical Center Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology, University of California, San Francisco Member, Board of Directors, San Francisco County Medical Society Member, American Medical Association Member, California Medical Association

The Penthouse Interview with Clay Shaw

Clay Shaw, a deep-chested soft-spoken bachelor of 57, achieved instant notoriety on 1 March 1967. He was charged by District Attorney Jim Garrison with having conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald and an eccentric one-time airline pilot, private eye and fake psychologist, David Ferrie, to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Until then, Shaw was barely known beyond his home city of New Orleans, where he lives alone in a handsomely furnished little French Quarter house on Dauphine Street, and has a broad circle of friends, including playwright Tennessee Williams.

But Garrison's sensational charge brought hundreds of American and foreign newsmen racing to the city to satisfy their readers curiosity about the man at the centre of Garrison's "conspiracy" revelation. "My staff and I," Garrison told them, in one of a series of public pronouncements that made headlines around the world, "solved the Kennedy assassination weeks ago. I wouldn't say this if we didn't have the evidence beyond the shadow of a doubt. We know the key individuals, the cities involved, and how it was done."

Denouncing the Warren Report as a fraud and a whitewash, Garrison promised further arrests, and privately assured newsmen that, "this case isn't even close. If you want to lose money, bet against me."

Garrison's reckless claims found a ready audience. A glut of books critical to the Warren Report had eroded confidence in the commission's procedures and the validity of its findings--particularly its key conclusion that Oswald was a lone assassin. Mark Lanes Rush to Judgement had been a best-seller for months and according to a national poll, two-thirds of the US population had come to doubt that Oswald had operated alone.

Two weeks after Shaw's arrest, a special three-judge panel ruled in a preliminary hearing that there was enough evidence to hold Clay Shaw for trial. Garrison produced only two witnesses: an admitted drug addict, Vernon Bundy, and a young insurance salesman-trainee, Perry Raymond Russo. Russo's was the only testimony directly supporting the charge against Shaw. Russo claimed to have dropped in at a party in Ferrie's apartment in September 1963. After the other guests left and while Russo waited around for a ride home--he swore on the stand--Shaw, Oswald, and Ferrie had openly discussed plans to kill the President.

It was only nine weeks later that Kennedy was assassinated and Oswald was charged with the crime. yet Russo did not come forward with this story for four years, after David Ferrie had died. Shaw immediately denied not only the conspiracy charge but that he had ever known or even met either Ferrie or Oswald.

Garrison declared that Shaw had engaged in the conspiracy under the alias of "Clay Bertrand"--a name that showed up briefly in the Warren Report. According to a New Orleans attorney called Dean Andrews, a man using the name had telephoned him the day after Kennedy was killed and asked Andrews to go to Dallas to represent Oswald. After a series of wildly contradictory descriptions of "Bertrand," Andrews was convicted of perjury and ultimately confessed on the stand at Shaw's trial that "Bertrand" was a figment of his imagination and that he had concocted the whole story "to get on the gravy train of publicity."

After the initial headlines generated by Shaw's arrest subsided, a number of outside newsmen began digging into the Garrison investigation. They uncovered some peculiar circumstances. The Saturday Evening Post disclosed, in an article by James Phelan, that Russo had said nothing whatever about Shaw's involvement in the "Kennedy conspiracy" when he first came forward as a witness, but had developed his tale of the conspiracy when asked suggestive questions under hypnosis conducted under the supervision of Garrison's office. The New York Times and Newsweek magazine's Hugh Aynesworth followed with accounts of Garrison's staff pressuring and attempting to induce witnesses to tell incriminating stories. Several of Garrison's staff defected and charged that the "Kennedy conspiracy" existed mainly in his imagination.

In the face of these developments, Garrison began to assert that there was a vast federal conspiracy to conceal the truth about the Dallas tragedy. He declared without qualification that Lyndon Johnson knew that the Warren Report was false and that the assassination was a CIA plot aimed at removing Kennedy because he wanted to ease the cold war with Russia and end the war in Vietnam.

In the two-year-long hullabaloo, Clay Shaw became virtually the forgotten man. He just worked quietly with his four attorneys, Irving Dymond, Edward and William Wegmann, and Sal Panzeca, trying to build his defence. "It is an extraordinarily difficult job to prove a negative," he said later. "How do you establish that you didn't attend a party held years ago, and that you didn't know two men who now are dead and can't confirm your story?"

Late this January his case finally went to trial before a New Orleans courtroom packed with newsmen. The case had aroused such intense passions in New Orleans that it was necessary to examine 1170 possibles to obtain 12 jurors and two alternatives who said they could weigh the evidence objectively. The trial lasted 35 days with Mark Lane sitting at the prosecutors' side and feeding them suggestions. It devolved mainly into a trial of the Warren Report. Despite Garrison's flamboyant boasts of "secret witnesses" and "disclosures that will rock the nation," he produced no evidence of CIA involvement and never even mentioned that agency. His case against Shaw was largely a rerun of the preliminary hearing, resting almost wholly on the testimony of Perry Russo. After a dramatic closing speech in which Garrison appealed to the jurors to save the US from a federal plot that he had not established, the jurors filed out took one ballot, and unanimously acquitted Clay Shaw.

What seemed a fitting conclusion to one of the most bizarre chapters in US jurisprudence proved to be not a conclusion at all. Three days later, at his own instigation and over his own signature, Jim Garrison charged Shaw with perjury for having denied on the witness stand that he had known Oswald or David Ferrie. Shortly afterwards Garrison announced that he had scrapped his plans to retire to private law practice and would run for a third term as District Attorney in November.

Clay Shaw sustained this new legal blow with at least outward equanimity. He abandoned his plans to take a "recuperative vacation" with friends in North Carolina and is once more working out a legal defence with his lawyers. In this exclusive Penthouse Interview, conducted in New Orleans by James Phelan, the central figure in this far-out case says he "is beginning to feel like a character in a Kafka novel," and tells how it feels to be pursued by a District Attorney who just won't quit.

Penthouse: Being accused of plotting to kill an American President is a unique predicament. Could you reconstruct your feelings when you first heard of the charge against you?

Shaw: My reaction was shock, disbelief, incredulity. I was inclined to tell Garrison's men, "Gentlemen, this is a very bad joke," but it was obvious that they were taking themselves seriously. Actually, I had been asked to come out to the DA's office several months before I was charged. Back on December 23 1966, I was questioned by one of the assistant DAs and finally by Garrison himself. They questioned me largely about "Clay Bertrand"-- whom I said I didn't know--and about the Cuban consulate, which had been housed in the International Trade Mart, of which I was managing director, and about the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald had chosen to distribute leaflets in front of the Trade Mart on that pro-Castro Cuban thing he was involved in. I gave them all the information I had and thought no more about it. I had read that a national magazine was reinstituting an investigation into the Kennedy assassination and I thought that Mr. Garrison was working with or for the magazine. I assumed that he was questioning me in search of information in this context and I paid no serious attention to the matter.

Penthouse: You had no idea then that you were under consideration as a suspect?

Shaw: None whatsoever. Then on March 1 1967, I received a phone call from a friend that he had just heard on the radio that a subpoena had been issued for me. I thought that was peculiar--if Garrison wanted any further information from me he didn't have to subpoena me. So I called the DA's office and asked "Do you people want to talk to me?" A Mr. Ivon said they did and I told him I was perfectly willing and when should I come in. He said about 1 pm and I told him I'd be there.

Penthouse: By this time, had you received any hint or indication that Garrison was after you?

Shaw: Only an indirect hint. On the Sunday before I was arrested, Walter Sheridan who was covering the Garrison investigation for NBC--whom I didn't know--called me up and said he wanted to see me. He came down and told me there was a rumour in town that I was "Clay Bertrand," I told him this was silly and ridiculous, that I had never been "Clay Bertrand" and that if there was anyone in New Orleans who would have difficulty using an alias it would be me. And again, I dismissed this from my mind. Innocence, I must say, can be a frightening thing.

So I went out to the DA's office with a perfectly clear conscience, I didn't take a lawyer with me. When I got there they kept me waiting for about two hours, which rather annoyed me. To my mind, I was in the position of a good citizen making himself available to give information to these people, which might or might not be useful. Finally they began to question me about David Ferrie and Louisiana Parkway--where I later learned he had an apartment. I told them I didn't know Ferrie and had never been to his place. Then suddenly they said: "What would you say if we said we had three witnesses proving that you have been there?" I told them that their witnesses were either mistaken or they were lying. At this point it was suggested that I take a lie-detector test. I said: "Certainly not. Why on earth should I take a lie-detector test?"

They told me '"If you don't take a lie-detector test, we're going to charge you with conspiring to kill the President of the United States". To put it mildly, I was stunned. I said, "Well, in that case, I certainly do want a lawyer, and I want one right now." They locked me in the interrogation room, and I tried to call my long-time lawyer, Ed Wegmann, who was out of town. I then tried his brother, William Wegmann, who was not available. I finally got one of their associates, Sal Panzeca, who came rushing to the rescue.

Penthouse: Why do you say that the idea of your using the alias of "Clay Bertrand"--as Garrison charged--was ridiculous? Using a cover name is not unheard of. In fact, on some touchy assignments, journalists occasionally use a cover name.

Shaw: I doubt that you would try to use one in your home town where you were well known. For about 17 or 18 years I had been managing director of the International Trade Mart here and in that capacity I was in the public eye a great deal. I was on television quite often and my picture had been in the local papers. I attended many civic affairs, luncheons, meetings. In addition, I'm a highly recognizable fellow. I'm rather outsized--6 ft 4 inches tall-- and I have a shock of prematurely grey hair that is almost white. In a town of this size, where I had made perhaps 500 speeches and knew literally thousands of people, the idea that I would go around here trying to use an alias is utterly fantastic. Then at my trial, of course, the man who told the story about "Clay Bertrand"-- a local lawyer named Dean Andrews--admitted that he had made up the whole story in an attempt to get in on the Oswald publicity. Andrews finally confessed that Clay Bertrand didn't exist. As someone put it after Andrews testified, "Dean Andrews assassinated Clay Bertrand." And if Clay Bertrand existed only in Andrews' mind, how could I have impersonated him?

This was only one of the inconsistencies that ran through Garrison's case. He charged, for example, that I went out to San Francisco on the day of the Kennedy assassination to establish an alibi for myself. But if I had needed an alibi, I could have stayed right here at my desk in the Trade Mart in New Orleans, where everyone knew me. I wouldn't have had to go to a distant, strange city where I was largely unknown.

Penthouse: In the March 1 interrogation that resulted in your arrest, were you questioned by Garrison?

Shaw: No, he wasn't present. As a matter of fact, I have not had one word of conversation with Garrison from that first casual questioning in December 1966 to the present time. My only communication has been his new charge that I committed perjury.

Penthouse: Panzeca says that he felt as if he had been hit by a two-by-four when he found that he was suddenly representing a client charged with plotting to kill the President.

Shaw: He was plainly astonished, as I guess any lawyer would be.

Penthouse: When Garrison's men told you they had three witnesses who would testify that you knew David Ferrie, did they tell you who these witnesses were?

Shaw: They did not. And if they had three at that time, they did not produce them at my preliminary hearing. They produced only one, Perry Raymond Russo. Indeed, every additional witness that they produced at my trial this year had come forward, or been sought out, or acquired after the date of my arrest.

Penthouse: When was the first time you saw Perry Russo, to your knowledge ?

Shaw: The day before my arrest. A friend had dropped in at my house and we were having drinks when the doorbell rang. I went to the door, and a guy I now know to be Perry Russo gave me a false business card with e false name and said he was conducting an insurance survey. I told him I was a very poor prospect. He asked if he could call me later. This visit was for the purpose of Russo's "identifying" me. There was a fellow with him who I learnt later, was from the DA's office.

I would like to point out the rather idiotic logic behind this incident. You will recall that Russo testified under oath that he attended a party at David Ferrie's apartment in 1963 where he claimed to have heard me, Ferrie and Lee Oswald plot to kill John F. Kennedy. Now if Russo's story were true and I had sat in a room with him and two other people and plotted to kill the President, I think I might have recognized him when he came to my door, even if he gave me a false name. I don't know why Garrison thought that Russo would recognize me--assuming his story was true--but that I wouldn't recognize him. But this is just another of a long series of logical inconsistencies that ran through Garrison's case.

Penthouse: Have you ever understood what motive Mr. Garrison ascribed to you for wanting to kill the President?

Shaw: He never ascribed any motive so far as I know. Certainly none was brought forward at my trial. The only motive I've ever heard attributed to me was his statement to a journalist shortly after my arrest, that the assassination was a "thrill killing" like the Loeb-Leopold murder of Bobby Franks. But Garrison quickly abandoned this idea, and in his subsequent public statements he came up with a bewildering series of "principals" end "motives". First was the anti-Castro Cubans who were angry at Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs fiasco. But nothing about the Cubans was brought out at my trial. Then it was the CIA, or certain elements of the CIA, and the FBI. Then it was oil-rich Texas millionaires, and after that the Minutemen. Over the two years between my arrest and my trial, Garrison must have produced eight or ten separate groups of "masterminds," sometimes combining them or switching from one to another. He finally wound up with the major villain being the "military-defence industry complex." According to Garrison, their motive was a desire to remove Kennedy because of his intention of ending the cold war. But other than his quickly abandoned notion that I was a "thrill-killer," I never under--stood what role he attributed to me.

Penthouse: Did you actually know President Kennedy?

Shaw: I met him once, and was greatly impressed by him. When Chep Morrison was mayor of New Orleans, he and I worked closely in the building of the International Trade Mart and the furthering of New Orleans as an international trade centre. When Morrison became our ambassador to the Organization of American States he asked me to come to Washington when he was sworn into office. There were 20 or 30 of us there, and he was sworn in by President Kennedy and I had the opportunity to meet him.

What made Garrison's charge so outrageous to me was that I was a great admirer of Kennedy. I thought he had given the nation a new turn after the rather drab Eisenhower years, and that he was in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt--in the stream of liberal Presidents. I felt he was vitally concerned about social issues, which concerned me also. I though he had youth, imagination, style, and �lan. All in all, I considered him a splendid President.

Penthouse: Before your arrest, had you known Jim Garrison?

Shaw: I had met him on occasion. In a city the size of New Orleans--and with the jobs we both had--l would encounter him from time to time at civic affairs, luncheons, meetings. We were on a first name basis--it was "Hi, Jim," and "Hello Clay," but I had never known him to the extent of sitting down and having a drink with him or a meal, and I'd never been in his home nor had he been in mine. In all honesty, I must admit that I voted for him when he first ran for District Attorney.

Penthouse: What kind of reaction did you encounter in New Orleans after you were publicly charged with plotting the Kennedy assassination ?

Shaw: Well, there was a rallying around by my good friends, which was enormously helpful. And I encountered no animosity whatsoever from people here in New Orleans. In fact, when I went out, perfect strangers came up to me and patted me on the back and said, "Don't worry--you're going to come out all right." I never met any evidence of hostility. Immediately after the accusation, I received three or four hundred letters and of these only three were hostile. It was quite apparent from the tone of these three letters that they were written by disturbed people.

Actually, the ordeal brought me some new friends. One of the most heart-warming experiences involved a New Orleans cab-driver. Shortly after the preliminary hearing back in 1967, I called a cab to take me to my lawyer's office. The driver was a typical cabbie--if you called Central Casting he'd be the kind they'd send you. When I got in his cab he said, "Haven't I seen you somewhere before? Your face is familiar." I told him, "You've probably seen me on TV. I'm Clay Shaw." "Oh, you're Mr. Shaw," he said, and flipped down the flag on his taxi-meter. "There's no charge," he said,. "Come on, you have to make a living," I told him, "Besides, maybe I did all these things I've been accused of." "Naw", he said, "Everybody knows that s.o.b. Garrison. We know what's goin' on." He took me to the lawyer's and asked when I would be going home. I said in about 40 minutes. "I'll be waitin' over at that cab stand," he told me. "I've got my Daily Racin' Form." When he took me home, he still wouldn't take any money. "Naw," he said, "you've got a bum rap to fight and I want to help. Whenever you need a cab, give me a ring." I figured he really wanted to do something for me, and I've used Marty ever since. He's a wonderful human being, and by now his family is just like a part of my own. So something good came out of all this.

Penthouse: When you finally came to trial, were you apprehensive about the outcome?

Shaw: Well, I made up my mind very early that my only defence was the truth. I decided to take the stand in my own defence and allow myself to be cross-questioned. I expected that there would be witnesses who would perjure themselves--as there were--and I hoped that the jury would get to the heart of the matter, as this jury did, and would see the flimsiness of the case that had been constructed against me. But of course you never can really know what a jury will do, and it was a very trying experience. As the case drew to a close, I told a number of friends and newsmen that if the jury could convict me on such shoddy evidence as Garrison presented I would go gladly to jail because that would be the safest place to be in a world gone mad.

Penthouse: How would you account for the fact that a total of perhaps eight witnesses positively identified you either as Clay Bertrand or as an associate of David Ferrie?

Shaw: Of these, there were about five from Clinton, Louisiana, who claimed to have seen me up there in 1963 in a car with Ferrie. I think these people actually saw someone who must have resembled me, though I have never been in Clinton in my life. Of course, as people who have studied this case know, there was a private investigator--now dead--named Guy Banister who was involved with Ferrie. Banister did resemble me. So far as the Clinton people are concerned, I must conclude that if they did see someone up there it may well have been Banister, and their testimony was a case of mistaken identification. Even so, it did seem odd to me that they would remember in detail an encounter with a stranger that happened five or six years earlier. In his closing argument to the jury, my attorney Irving Dymond quotes Justice Frankfurter on the lack of reliability of eyewitness identification. Justice Frankfurter said that such identification was the greatest single cause of error in the judicial process. I think that with the Clinton witnesses it was perhaps an honest case of mistaken identity. As to the other few witnesses, I have my own ideas about them, but I don't care to express them for publication.

Penthouse: In his investigation of the assassination, Garrison has been financed in part by a group of New Orleans businessmen who call themselves Truth and Consequences. What is your reaction to their activity in this case?

Shaw: There are many appalling things about this affair but one of the most appalling is that a group of private citizens can contribute money to a District Attorney to investigate this, that, or the other thing. You can see the doors to abuse that this opens. My God, any group of people can go to the DA and say: "We want you to investigate so-and-so and here's the dough." The District Attorney is paid a salary and given a budget and it's his duty to investigate crimes that come under his jurisdiction. There should not be one penny accepted by him under any circumstances whatever to do any particular thing for any group. I think this is fundamental.

Penthouse: Do you know whether Truth and Consequences is still functioning since you have been acquitted?

Shaw: I don't know. I haven't seen any of the principals in the organization. Before the trial we subpoenaed their records, but Judge Haggerty impounded them and says now that they will not be released because they are not pertinent. So we don't even know how much money they contributed privately to the District Attorney, but even a dollar would have been too much.

Penthouse: You have had four lawyers, including one of the most able New Orleans trial lawyers, Irving Dymond, to represent you. Wasn't this rather costly?

Shaw: Extremely costly. In addition to legal fees, there was the matter of hiring investigators to check on some of the peculiar witnesses that popped up in the case. Before Garrison accused me, I was rather comfortably fixed. Now I'm broke. It is a somewhat cold comfort, of course, that I was financially able to obtain competent defence. Throughout these two years, the thought was rarely absent from my mind that had I not been able to do the costly things involved in properly defending oneself, what would have happened to me? And of course there is the corollary to this thought--how many men are in jail now, falsely charged, simply because they lacked the money to defend themselves adequately.

Penthouse: Some of your critics have raised the point that you seemed to be trying to avoid trial. Although you had a speedy preliminary hearing, it took almost two years for your case actually to come to trial.

Shaw: I think the record should be made clear on that point. After all the pleadings had been taken care of--and this took months-- sometime in the fall of 1967 we applied for change of venue. Because of the vast torrents of publicity that poured out of the DA's office and were religiously printed by the local papers, it seemed impossible to get a fair trial in New Orleans. As an alternative to a change of venue, we asked that the trial be delayed for a reasonable period. The District Attorney agreed to a six-month-continuance. In the spring of 1968, we again applied for a change of venue and there was a lengthy hearing on this. It was denied. My lawyers then decided that there was no reason to go to trial on such fraudulent and contrived evidence, and they decided to ask a federal court to enjoin Garrison against any further prosecution. It was their intention to prove in the federal court the false nature of Garrison's case. The three-judge federal court decided against our request for an injunction, but they did enjoin Garrison against further prosecution pending an appeal. It took the US Supreme Court until December of 1968 to rule that they would not hear the appeal. Garrison then set the case for January, 1969. The delays were for proper legal purposes, not for avoiding trial.

When I became involved in this matter, I decided that since I knew nothing about the law I would be guided by my attorneys. The decisions to seek a change of venue and to appeal to the federal courts were all made by my legal counsel and I simply went along with their decisions.

I think it should be pointed out that Garrison repeatedly charged that there was a vast federal conspiracy to keep my case from coming to trial and thereby--in his words--to frustrate him from "bringing out the truth for the American people." But in fact, the Warren court declined to intervene when the matter came before it.

Penthouse: There is a tremendous public curiosity about Jim Garrison's motives in this whole affair. If his case was as flimsy as the jury apparently decided it was, what do you think drove him to push it to trial?

Shaw: I certainly refuse to speculate about what goes on in Garrison's mind. This is a question that only he can answer. The minds of most humans are a labyrinth and Garrison's mind is more labyrinthine than most. Possibly he thought that all this would rebound to his credit somehow--maybe politically--but I'm not going to try to figure out what made him do it.

Penthouse: What are your personal feelings about Garrison now?

Shaw: At the risk of sounding like an early Christian martyr, early on I recognised that I could not bear the burden of hating as much as the circumstances seemed to justify. Hate is a very corrosive emotion and it doesn't hurt the guy you hate. It hurts you. If I had allowed myself for two years to hate--really to hate-- the people who were oppressing me, I don't think I would have survived. What it comes down to is that hate was a psychological luxury I couldn't afford.

Penthouse: Are you a native of Louisiana?

Shaw: Yes, I was born in a small town north of here. I went to New York in my early twenties and lived there until the war. I was in public relations and advertising. I went into the army in 1941, and became deputy chief of staff to General Charles Thrasher, who commanded Northern France, Belgium and Luxembourg as the supply base for the three armies fanning out across Europe after the invasion of the continent. It was a very interesting job to have everything at the right point at the right time for a million men moving forward and I learnt some things about organization from it. When I was discharged, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. There was a group of men here in New Orleans who had an idea of reconstructing an old building as an international trade centre, and they invited me to come in and work on the project. I spent 18 years altogether--first reconstructing the old building and then planning and financing a new $15,000,000 structure--the present International Trade Mart. The Trade Mart was designed to increase trade through the port of New Orleans, and if I do say so myself, we did a pretty good job. There has been an increase in trade here year after year. When I was 52--in 1965--I decided that I had achieved what I set out to do. The new building was a reality and I decided I wanted to travel and to write. I had accumulated a little. money. It was not that I had so much money, but I am a man of rather few wants and what I wanted most was freedom. I wanted to travel before I had to be carried up the gangplank on a steamer. I thought then that my whole life was planned, and I did get to make a trip to Spain and to England. Then I came back here, and suddenly the world fell in on me on March 1 1967.

Penthouse: In his public utterances, Garrison repeatedly declared that the CIA had a major role in the Kennedy assassination. In this connection, the Rome newspaper Paesa Sara published a long story alleging that you were connected with an "international commercial organization" named Centro Maondiale Commerciale, which Paesa Sara termed "a CIA front." What is your explanation?

Shaw: Back in 1959 or 1960, a young Italian came to see me in New Orleans and told me about a world trade centre that was being planned in Rome. The idea was to have one place where buyers coming into the Common Market area would find all the Common Market countries represented in one centre. He wanted my advice and asked me to serve on the board of directors, I had no objection if it was a legitimate project. I investigated it and found that the head of it was a man named Imre Nagy, who had been the last non-Communist premier of Hungary. Some of the other people involved were Italian senators, Journalists, lawyers, and other responsible people. It was agreed that we would have an exhibit at their centre, and they would have one at the mart here in New Orleans, and we would exchange information and so on. I didn't mind being on their board, although there was no money involved, but I would have to go to Rome annually to the board meetings and my way would be paid, so why not? Then they ran into difficulties, but they finally got the centre opened. It turned out to be either badly planned or badly organized and it closed very shortly, and that was the last I ever heard of it. I never heard that it was a CIA operation and I don't know that it was. I'll say this--it was a highly unsuccessful operation which is not customary with the CIA. Other than what I've told you, I know nothing more about the Centro Mondiale Commerciale. I have never had any connection with the CIA.

Penthouse: You say that defending yourself against Garrison's charge has wrecked you financially. Do you feel that you should be compensated for this?

Shaw: I certainly do. I don't know what responsibility the state has for the erratic actions of one of its officers. My lawyers are studying this now with a view to recouping my losses. I don't know the legal obligations, but I think as a matter of equity somebody ought to have to reimburse me. Good Lord, a District Attorney can wreck anyone financially on his mere whim by filing serious charges against him.

Penthouse: Has there been any move by any state legislator to put in a bill of relief on your behalf?

Shaw: Not so far.

Penthouse: Do you plan to sue any of the people involved in the charges against you?

Shaw: My lawyers are studying this now, and I'll be guided by them. My personal inclination is to sue everybody in sight. If they find a cause for action, you better believe that I'll be willing and eager to go to court. I'd like to put a number of people in the dock where they'll have to answer the questions.

Penthouse: What do you think will happen to Garrison as a result of having lost his case against you?

Shaw: There are elections coming up in November and Garrison has announced that he will run for DA again. There already is one opponent in the field against him and I hear another candidate will announce shortly. After that, what happens will be up to the people of New Orleans. If they decide that they want Jim Garrison to continue in office, well--so be it. I think it was Lord Acton who once said the people get the government that they deserve. Personally, I think that some move should be made to curb the tremendous powers of the District Attorney by revising our laws, but so far nothing has been done.

Penthouse: A number of the members of the national press who covered the Garrison investigation and your trial commented on the apparent apathy of New Orleans toward what happened to you. Now that you have been cleared, there seems to be a tendency merely to revert to business as usual. Do you think New Orleans is unique in its response?

Shaw: I wouldn't say that what happened to me couldn't happen elsewhere, because it could. But I think New Orleans is a unique city in some respects. For one thing, it is a sort of fantasy-land. This stems from its preoccupation with Mardi Gras. This not only pervades the weeks before the carnival but occupies everyone's attention for many months of the year. People devote a tremendous amount of time and attention to working out the costumes they will wear as dukes and kings, and sometimes I think they forget that they are not really dukes and kings. So there is an abiding air of fantasy here and I think it is easier for people here to accept the kind of fantastic plot that Jim Garrison spun. Any rational analysis of the various contradictory statements that he made and the wild variety of "solutions" he came up with before my trial would impel a person of common sense to the conclusion that he really had no case. I would say that New Orleans provides a good culture in which Garrison's bacteria could grow.

Penthouse: Now that you have been quickly and unanimously cleared by the jury, what do you think the future effects of the case will be?

Shaw: As to the effects on me, personally, I don't think I'll ever be entirely free again. I'll be known as the man who was accused of this heinous thing. This doesn't disturb me too much, now that the truth has been legally established. It has certainly had the effect of impoverishing me, but that doesn't truly disturb me too much, either. The French have a saying that the wounds that come from money are never fatal. I suppose that I can make my living somehow as I've done in the past. It has had considerable effect as far as Mr. Garrison is concerned. His credibility on a national scale has been completely destroyed. It would be truly ironic if he now discovered some new information of a serious nature. I greatly doubt that anyone would pay him any serious mind.

Penthouse: Do you agree or disagree with the findings of the Warren Commission?

Shaw: By and large, I agree with them. I think there were certainly errors, both of omission and commission, but I think that fundamentally their conclusions were sound and valid. Just one point, that no one ever much dwelt on. There were five Republicans on the commission and two Democrats. If there had been any attempt in the report to cover up on the part of the administration, you can be sure that those Republicans would never have signed the report. They would have brought out a stinging report of their own and this would have become an issue in the next presidential campaign. I just don't believe that if there had been any kind of cover-up or whitewash or collusion that Republicans of the stature of Gerald Ford or Sherman Cooper would have gone along. By exposing this they could have put a Republican in the White House and they would have exploited it to the hilt. And that's just one reason for accepting the report.

The commission conducted something like 25,000 interviews and there were about 500 witnesses whose testimony was taken under oath. I simply cannot believe in any conspiracy that would have to run from the Dallas police on up to the president of the United States. If Mr. Garrison's ideas were taken seriously, there would have to be a cast of two or three thousand people involved. Certainly by now there would be some leaks somewhere, some death-bed confessions.

I think that it was just Lee Oswald, a poor psychotic loser, who got a lucky shot at the President. People find it difficult to believe that the great golden prince should be killed by this psychotic little man, crouching behind paste-board boxes, with a cheap mail-order rifle. But the fact that it is inappropriate doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Life is full of inappropriate things, and I believe that I am a well-qualified person to make that statement. I speak from first-hand experience.

Penthouse: Mr. Shaw, thank you.

The Tippit Assassination and David Belin's Hearing Loss: You Are the Jury! by Walt Brown, Ph.D.

Shortly after 7 p.m. on November 22,1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was either a malcontent Communist Castroite or an agent of the US government who had staged a successful "defection" to the USSR, was charged and arraigned for the premeditated murder of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit.

The Dallas authorities at least got half the story right, and in so doing, they clearly disproved the second part of the allegation. J.D. Tippit's murder was premeditated; that being the case, it is inconceivable that Oswald, suddenly aware of his "patsy" status and on the run from the Book Depository, would compound his existing problems by going to a predetermined location and dropping the hammer on one of "Dallas's 'finest.'"

Warren Commission Counsel David Belin took the testimony and heard the evidence to prove this; he just chose not to hear what he was told, so the standard Tippit story was carved into Warren Commission cuneiform by the same witless scribes who swallowed the magic bullet and carved that fantasy on all of pharaoh's pylons and obelisks.

To his credit, Counsel Belin donated the royalties from his books, November 22, 1963: You are the Jury, and Final Disclosure; The Full Truth about the Assassination of President Kennedy, to charity. (It should strike the reader as odd that a Warren Commission staff attorney would publish a book which contained the "full truth about the assassination of President Kennedy," inasmuch as he had already put his name on the Warren Report, which we were told was the "full truth...") To his discredit, he still seems to believe the drivel contained in those books.

Many of the Warren Commission's errors and/or lapses of judgment can be attributed to the compartmentalization of their investigation. An occasional snippet (rhymes with Tippit) of testimony might be heard by one staff member without it striking an odd chord, because that counsel had not been privy to other testimony. That was not the case, of course, with the medical testimony taken by Arlen Specter, where the suborning of perjury became a fine art; nor was it true in the case of the two innocent witnesses who testified before David Belin, and gave him the Tippit case on a platter. Ever the gracious host, he declined to accept the judicial offering from those less fortunate than he.

Belin's "Hearing Loss" began on March 26, 1964, in the headquarters of the Warren Commission, the Veterans' Building at 200 Maryland Avenue NE, in Washington, a faceless bureaucratic edifice of little note where the FBI had supplied the Commission with projectors, a scale model of Dealey Plaza, and, undoubtedly, a dozen or so undetected listening devices.

On that fateful March 26, Belin would serve as the front man for Commissioners Warren, Ford, and Dulles, who were "present" for the testimony of Helen Markham, William W. Scoggins, Mrs. Jeanette Davis, and Ted Callaway.

The operative concern here is the testimony of William Scoggins, a poor wretch of a soul who had only achieved an eighth grade education before embarking on a series of menial occupations which culminated in him being a 49 year old hack driver in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Scoggins had delivered a fare and then gone to the Gentlemen's Club, a lunchtime eatery located not far from the infamous corner of Tenth and Patton, where J.D. Tippit would die in a hail of bullets. After the preliminary questions were seen to, Belin asked Scoggins, "All right. Did you see the police car go across right in front of yours?" Scoggins answered, "Yes; he went right down the street. He come from the west, going east on east Tenth." Belin then asked a reasonable question: "Then what did you see?" Scoggins: "I noticed he stopped down there, and I wasn't paying too much attention to the man, you see, just used to see him every day..." [emphasis added to cure "hearing loss." Testimony from 3H, 324-325.]

Scoggins told Belin, in effect, that he took no notice of Tippit because he was accustomed to seeing that officer in that particular location at that general time of day on an apparently regular basis. This strongly suggests that Tippit was not there merely by chance on Black Friday, and it also suggests that some dirty dealings were done with respect to the Dallas Police radio logs (original copies of which are now available from the D.P.D. archives @ .25/page.). At 12:48 p.m., November 22, amidst what was undoubtedly the greatest personhunt of the 20th Century, and amidst radio traffic that is devoid of any non-assassination related comment, we find the routine transmission to two officers, one of whom was J.D. Tippit, to move into Oak Cliff and be "at large" for any emergencies that came in. Recall: no other officer was contacted for hours, except with respect to the assassination, and subsequently, with respect to Tippit's assassination. Clearly, the log was dummied up after the fact, as Scoggins' testimony indicated, as even a poor old cabbie knew where to find Tippit at lunchtime on most days. So he didn't have to be dispatched to that location -- he was there anyhow. We shall soon discover why.

Belin's hearing loss was even more acute seven days later, on April 2, 1964, in the office of the U.S. attorney, 301 Post Office Building, Bryan and Ervay Streets, in Dallas, Texas. On this equally inauspicious occasion, Belin was on his own, taking the testimony of Mrs. Charlie Virginia Davis. Mrs. Davis, who was sixteen on that day and had been married forseven months, lived in a dual apartment residence at 400 East Tenth Street, which is the standard address given for the Tippit murder.

Again, following preliminaries, Belin asked the reasonable question: "Where was the police car parked?" Mrs. Davis, obviously uninformed about the neighborhood, nevertheless gave an answer that would arrest anyone's attention.

Anyone but David Belin's attention, that is. She answered, "It was parked between the hedge that marks the apartment house where he lives in and the house next door." [6H 458] First we had Scoggins saying that Tippit was in the neighborhood so often that he was virtually a part of the landscape, present but unremarkable. Now we have the testimony of a witness who apparently saw Tippit at that location so often that she believed he lived there!

We know, of course, that Officer Tippit did not live there, and since there is no record that the house Mrs. Davis believed he lived in was a residence where crime was so prevalent that Officer Tippit had to investigate on such a regular basis, we must question his reason(s) for being there so often. From other research that has been done, it can be inferred that Tippit was in that neighborhood that often in pursuance of an amour impropre.

Sorry, Counsel Belin. Those people did not whisper to you. They told you things you didn't want to hear, so you pretended you didn't hear them. After Scoggins gave his indication of Tippit's regularity in the neighborhood, he told of seeing someone else down the street on foot. Belin did not pursue the "Tippit in the neighborhood" concern; he asked, "When you first saw this man, had the police car stopped or not?" [3H 325]. When Mrs. Davis testified that she saw the police car by a hedge where she believed the officer lived, she was asked by the ever-astute Belin, "Was it on your side of East 10th or the other side of the street?" [6H 458] This is a throw-away question born of "suppression" mentality, as there were no doubt piles of documents and photographs which could have answered the question about which side of the road Tippit's car -- and shortly after, his body, were on.

Let's put Belin aside [he earned it] and allow the plot to thicken. If the question "What one and only one event could distract a police department from an investigation of the shooting of the President of the United States, what would that event be?" were posed to a given number of individuals aware of police procedures and behavioral traits, the vast majority would answer simply, "The only such event would be the shooting of a fellow officer," and they would be right.

Now let's look at the timing. Despite several witnesses in the general vicinity of Houston and Elm who immediately told police of seeing a weapon in a specific window of the Texas School Book Depository, no officer arrived in that "sniper's nest" until Luke Mooney "discovered" three spent cartridges there at 1:12. Exactly ten minutes later, Constable Seymour Weitzman and Sheriff's Deputy Eugene Boone found -- well, let's call it a rifle, since they both identified it as a Mauser.

The key times here are 1:12 and 1:22. The Tippit shooting was called in at 1:18. Now that is timing! The stage prop shells and rifle are found, but then an "officer shot" call comes in, timed more perfectly than the punchlines in vaudeville, and the focus of attention moves from the TSBD to the Tippit scene. Deputy D.A. William Alexander, upon hearing the Tippit call, decided, from his vantage point at Houston and Elm, that Tippit's killer was also JFK's assailant, and led the posse to find the one man who had committed both crimes. This might have seemed a reasonable supposition if the two crimes had occurred a few minutes and a few blocks apart. But several miles and 45 minutes stretches police theorizing, given the urgent problem of having bupkis, suspect-wise, with respect to the Dealey Plaza crime before charging off to solve the one at Tenth and Patton.

Yet charge off they did. Scoggins indicated that he called the shooting in to his dispatcher, but that an ambulance arrived at the Tippit scene before he finished giving details to his dispatcher. [3H 326] Again: the timing is too slick. Ambulances do not cruise through neighborhoods as do taxis. Of equal note, while there are numerous photos of Tippit's car, which neither committed a crime nor was a victim of one, there is no picture of the dead officer on the ground, nor were chalk lines drawn as are done in every other homicide committed since Magna Charta was signed. "Well, by that time there was more policemen there than you could shake a stick at. They were all over that place..." Scoggins concluded. [3H 333]. But they were not all over the TSBD. Not any more. Not after the props were found; not after the Tippit call came in, right smack-dab-in the middle of the most half-ass crime scene search(es) in history.

What can we conclude? For openers, we can posit three very strong motives for the death of Jefferson Davis Tippit. First, his death drew already limited manpower away from the primary crime scene well before the entire area was secured or searched; second, Tippit's death gave authorities an excuse to arrest a suspect in a theater, and convince themselves, "Case Closed," to coin a phrase, on the other, more important murder that had occurred that day. And finally, it allowed the Dallas p.d. to be purged of an individual who was giving the department a black eye with his "amour impropre," which was so obvious that both a cab driver in the neighborhood and a local tenant believed Tippit to be part of that landscape.

And if those two folks knew where to find good ol' J.D., we can posit with certainty that his real killers knew where he was spending his not- so spare time.

Real killers? What about Oswald? Consider the motives: Did Oswald kill a police officer so that fewer people would search the building in which he worked, assuming perhaps that they would abandon the place altogether? Not likely. Did Oswald kill Tippit to draw attention to himself, to enhance his suspect status, or, like his Belinesque motive for the murder of JFK, because he was a Castro Red? Hardly. Lastly, did Oswald kill Tippit because he was carrying on with a paramour localized in and around Tenth and Patton? Of course not.

Which brings us back to David Belin, who defends every Warren Commission word and punctuation mark to this day, and dusts off his bow tie whenever necessary, and points to the 26 volumes of Warren Commission evidence on selected t.v. appearances and boasts of how deep the investigation went. Except, of course, for the two answers spoken to him that he ignored. So, Mr. Belin, let us seek final disclosure: I challenge any group of twelve objective Americans to read your book, November 22: You Are the Jury, and my first book, The People v. Lee Harvey Oswald, and let them be "the jury" and decide on the guilt or innocence of Lee Oswald. With all due respect, sir, you will never get a conviction. Never. And I say that with confidence because you didn't demonstrate much "conviction" in your search for the truth.

Case Closed . . . NOT! by David B. Perry

Synopsis
The premise of Case Closed is Lee Harvey Oswald and Oswald alone killed President John F. Kennedy. Oswald, an ex-Marine, malcontent and Russian defector fired three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963. Oswald fired shots at Kennedy who was riding in a limousine. The first shot missed. The second passed through the President's back or neck, dependent on which version of the "evidence" you accept, and struck Governor John Connally who sat in front of Kennedy. Connally sustained wounds to his back, chest, right wrist, and left leg. The bullet finally lodged in his left thigh. The third shot struck Kennedy in the right side of the head ending his life.

Later that afternoon, a hospital orderly discovered the second bullet on a gurney at Parkland Hospital. Remarkably this bullet (Warren Commission exhibit 399) had only slight deformity at the base. Pro-conspiracy theorists refer to this missile as the "magic" bullet.

Approximately 45 minutes after the Kennedy assassination, police officer J.D. Tippit was patrolling the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Tippit confronted Oswald who was attempting to escape. Oswald shot and killed the officer and fled to a nearby movie theater. Police converged on and sealed off the building after receiving a call from the theater's ticket seller. After a scuffle, they apprehend Oswald.

On November twenty fourth, two days after the assassination, Jack Ruby, a local night club owner shot and killed Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Station. Case closed.

The Purpose Of This Paper
I am puzzled by the number of authors both pro and anti-conspiracy whose books upon scrutiny reveal inconsistencies. The majority of these books have been pro-conspiracy and often sensational to boost sales. The writer will usually select testimony, recollections, interviews, evidence and research that supports his or her thesis. Un-named sources provide important clues. There is a tendency to cross cite each others work. Now we have Gerald Posner's Case Closed that unmasks some of the duplicity but unfortunately does so by using the same conventions.

I intend to site the contradictions within the text as well as between the book and Gerald's two major sources, The Warren Report and the Warren Commission's twenty-six volumes of evidence. I propose to show you can't have it both ways.

A Truly Magic Bullet
On page 328 Gerald is trying to explain Kennedy's so called "blast injury" near the sixth cervical vertebra. This we find resulted in the President's assumption of the 'Thorburn Position" in which Kennedy's arms jerked up giving the appearance of his clutching at his throat.

"The bullet [second] did not have to hit [Kennedy's] spine to cause such an injury -- entering the body at more than 2,000 feet per second and traversing very close would be enough." Here damage to the spine relates to speed of the bullet. However, ten pages later the bullet must be slow enough to fall from Connally's thigh onto the gurney with only slight deformity at the base.

How is this achieved? On page 338 we find "The 6.5mm slug left Oswald's rifle at 2,000 feet per second and hit Kennedy at the base of the neck between 1,700 and 1,800 feet per second." Mr. Posner shouldn't use one entry velocity (2,000 feet per second+) to prove spinal cord injury then change to another entry velocity (1,800 to 1,700 feet per second) to support the "magic" bullet theory.

Selectively Unstable
Page 72 - The State Department notifies The Immigration and Naturalization Service that Oswald is an "unstable person."
Page 84 - Katya Ford, one of Marina's friends, considered "[Oswald] a mental case... We all thought that at some point."
Pages 87 and 89 - George De Mohrenschildt, one of Oswald's closest friends in Dallas, considered Oswald "a harmless lunatic... was a semi-educated hillbilly... an unstable individual, [and] mixed-up."
Page 99 - Volkmar Schmidt, a German geologist introduced to Oswald by George De Mohrenschildt felt Oswald "appeared to be a violent person."
Page 184 - "..., the KGB agents thought Oswald's rantings were evidence of an 'unstable personality.'"
Page 215 - Oswald asked Dallas FBI receptionist Nanny Fenner to deliver a note to Agent "Hasty." Her recollection of the note was "Let this be a warning. I will blow up the FBI and the Dallas Police Department if you don't stop bothering my wife."

It looks as if Gerald has definitely proved Oswald capable of violent acts. So how does he explain the government's lack of interest. How did Oswald slip between the cracks of justice? It may be overwork that killed Kennedy.

Page 217 - Once FBI Agent Hosty "determined Oswald 'was not employed in a sensitive industry,' he did not take a priority over the other twenty-five to forty cases assigned to him at any one time."

Here a trained FBI agent responsible for shadowing Oswald was one of the few individuals who failed to recognize his "target" as unstable. In Case Closed I discovered Gerald often paints a sympathetic picture of government officials such as Hosty, who failed to perform responsibly. In this case he lets this agent and the FBI off the hook on page 409 with "The FBI, anxious to downplay its contacts with Oswald, withheld information from the Commission, including Agent James Hosty's receipt of a note from Oswald." Remember the FBI was also responsible for the destruction of that note.

Selectively Strong Oswald has to be one of the great Jekyll and Hyde personalities of all time. The early chapters of the book detail Oswald's ill treatment of his wife Marina. The book's index shows references to:
Oswald, Marina
Oswald's beating of, 80, 81n, 83, 85, 90, 93-94, 95-96, 97, 99, 102, 105, 109

On page 117 Oswald returns from his attempt to assassinate General Walker. He tells Marina he is sorry he missed and failed to kill the General. Marina berates him and pulls out a note he left her which in essence explains the details of the plot. Marina tells him she "would go to the police and I would have proof in the form of that note." I expected the next paragraph to detail Oswald's physical abuse of Marina. There is none.

On page 120 Oswald has decided to kill Richard Nixon. We are led to believe he wants to assassinate Nixon because the newspaper that day ran the following headline - Nixon Calls For Decision To Force Reds Out Of Cuba. Before Oswald can leave the apartment, Marina locks him in the bathroom. On the basis of previous descriptions of their relationship Marina should receive a sound thrashing. It never happens because Marina claims "... my husband... is not strong and when I want to and when I collect all my forces and want to do something very badly I am stronger than he is."

It would seem Oswald is abusive only with respect to trivial incidents. If Marina finds him in a killing mood she applies sight pressure and he becomes passive! Again and again explanations for these types of incongruities are left out of the book.

Who's Zoomin Who?
Page 275 - '"The critics, trying to exonerate Oswald of the Tippit murder, question the accuracy of the witnesses by highlighting any inconsistencies. They claim [Helen] Markham, who was excitable and at times hysterical, identified Oswald by his clothing and not his face."

Gerald is confusing the "critics" with the Warren Commission. It was Commission Counsel Joseph Ball who claimed Markham was an "utter screwball." Additionally, in order reinforce the point that Oswald is a lone gunman, Mr. Posner himself uses inconsistencies in the stories of Delphine Roberts (p. 141), Jean Hill (p. 251), Gordon Arnold (p. 257), Ed Hoffman (p. 258) and Dr. Charles Crenshaw (p. 314).

Gerald further vacillates in the use of his favorite Dealey Plaza witness, Howard Brennan. On page 247 Brennan is "leaning against a four-foot-high retaining wall..." I'm sure some will debate the validity of that statement as Brennan was actually sitting on the wall . . . a minor point (CE 477). However, Brennan sees Oswald in the sixth floor window and '"To [Brennan's] amazement the man still stood there in the window. He didn't appear to be rushed."

On page 264 the author claims "After firing the final shot, he slipped through the narrow gap he had created between the cartons of books. He hurried diagonally across the sixth floor, toward the rear staircase." Hurried? Brennan said Oswald didn't appear rushed. Diagonally? Photographs show the sixth floor randomly littered with stacks of cartons.

On page 266 Oswald's "actions [after leaving the Depository] are unquestionably those of someone in flight." Two pages later Oswald is in a cab. "Before the taxi left the station, an elderly woman approached and asked [the driver] to call her another cab. Oswald offered her that cab, apparently in the belief that it would be easier for him just to take another one than wait for [the driver] to help the woman."

Oswald has to be the only assassin to use public transportation to affect an escape. Since when does "someone in flight" give up a ride and wait for another cab? Incredibly Gerald offers no explanation for this bizarre behavior.

One Coca Cola Please:
On page 265 Oswald purchases a Coca Cola as he "was now left in the empty [Book Depository] lunch room..." after his confrontation with Dallas police officer Marrion Baker and Book Depository manager Roy Truly. Truly testified that Oswald "didn't seem excited or overly afraid or anything. He might be a bit startled, like I might have been if somebody confronted me." (3H225)

Chapter 12 has the title "He Looks Like a Maniac." This relates to a statement made by Mary Bledsoe, Oswald's former landlady. When Oswald left the depository he walked a few blocks east and caught a city bus. Mary Bledsoe was a passenger. In Mr. Posner's view her observations must be important. Here's how it looks when compared to other statements in the book:

WITNESS	LOCATION	ATTITUDE	PAGE #
Brennan	Sixth Floor	Not Rushed	264
Truly	Lunch Room	Calm	265
Bledsoe	City Bus	Manic	267
Whaley	Taxi Stand	Offered Cab to Lady	268

Amazingly the most sensational and irresponsible quote becomes this chapter's centerpiece!

Lets Go To The Audio Tape
Many researchers wonder why there are no recordings of Oswald's interrogation while he was in the hands of the Dallas Police Department. The question is certainly a valid one. Apparently this feature was not unique to law enforcement agencies. On page 354 we discover the Dallas Sheriff's office had at least twenty-two surveillance recordings of Jack Ruby. The Chicago FBI had thousands and thousands of hours of tape recordings of the top mobsters in Chicago.

So why didn't the Dallas Police employ such techniques with Oswald?

Rather than question representatives of the Dallas Police Department, Gerald relies on a secondary source. On page 342 former assistant district attorney Bill Alexander explains "We had to inform him that he did not have to make any statement, and that any he did make had to be voluntary, witnessed and reduced to writing, and could be used against him." Alexander later reveals " ... so why even take the chance since the physical evidence was so strong."

In my view Alexander has a strange concept of prisoner's rights. He assigns the police an almost incredible ability to collect strong physical evidence within hours of the crime! He describes a model law enforcement group except when it came to protecting Oswald.

I have an additional point about Gerald's extensive use of Bill Alexander. In a note on page 348 "...Alexander and two local reporters concocted a story that Oswald had been FBI informer S-179 and had been paid $200 a month." If the assistant district attorney was up to concocting stories immediately after the assassination, how much of what he has to tell can we believe?

Chapter 12
Unfortunately, Chapter 12 is shot full of contradictions such as the Bledsoe episode mentioned previously. Here are some more examples:
Oswald is unprepared for his moment with destiny. He only had four bullets. "They were all he had left from his last practice session." This brings up several questions all unanswered. 1) Where and when was his last practice session? 2) What happened to the shell cases he left or gathered from that session? 3) Where is the box or any box for that matter that contained the shells? and 4) Where is the gun cleaning kit?

After the Walker shooting Oswald claimed he buried his rifle in the ground (pg. 113/114)! Lee is a marksman who never owned equipment to clean his weapons. Wouldn't Oswald, living as a pauper, collect his shell casings to save expenses? The book never addresses these issues.

Page 275 - In reference to the Tippit shooting - "The first call reporting the shooting came in to the police at 1:16 when two witnesses, T.F. Bowley and Domingo Benavides, ran immediately to Tippit's car and called it in on the police radio."

1) Benavides testified before the Warren Commission that he did not immediately run to Tippit's car.
2) Benavides never called in on the radio because he didn't know how to operate it.
3) Bowley who also waited before approaching the cruiser was the one who actually made the call.

Benavides testified before the Warren Commission. The Warren Report (WR pg. 166) credits him for a call he never made. T. F. Bowley, the man who actually radioed in, was never called to testify. He is not mentioned in the report. Why? Maybe because Bowley claimed he looked at his watch at the time of the shooting and it read 1:10. Under the government's time line Oswald would not be able to reach the scene by 1:10.

Incidentally, Benavides maintained he couldn't identify Tippit's assailant. Because of this the police never took him to the station to view the lineup.

On page 278 we discover "Oswald left behind critical ballistics evidence. Benavides and Virginia and Barbara Davis found four shells that Oswald had emptied from his gun while escaping. These shells were matched, to the exclusion of any other gun, to Oswald's revolver, which he had with him when captured just blocks away."

Technically these three sentences are accurate. But as with other information gleaned from The Warren Report, all is not as it appears.
1) The Commission never asked Benavides to view and identify the shells that he found.
2) Benavides turned his two shell casings over to Dallas police officer JM. Poe.
3) Gerald has not revealed what Poe said when asked to identify the shells as the ones he received from Benavides. "Poe indicated he marked the two shells with 'JMP' but could not find his identification on any of the shells." (24H415)

4) What did the Davis' have to say? "Barbara and Virginia Davis could not identify their shells when asked to do so." (24H414)

Case Closed never mentions the following incident. The Warren Commission asked the opinion of firearms expert Cortland Cunningham concerning the one bullet removed from Tippit's body immediately after the shooting. The Warren Commission referred to this bullet as exhibit Q13. Cunningham states "The bullet Q13 is so badly mutilated that there are not sufficient individual microscopic characteristics present for identification purposes." (24H263)

What did the Commission do with this piece of information? Instead of using Cunningham's statement for the final report they chose instead that of Dr. Joseph D. Nicol. Read on and you will understand why. Nicol claimed "This bullet (Q13) was fired from the same weapon that fired the test bullets to the exclusion of all other weapons."

More Magic With The Rifle
Early in the book (pages 20 and 21) Sgt. Zahm and Major Eugene Anderson, two Marine marksmen, claim Oswald had "an easy shot." Unfortunately The Warren Commission never asked either gentleman to reproduce their effortless blast.

We must wait until page 410 to discover that "In replicating the firing of the Carcano [rifle], and figuring trajectory angles, the Commission used FBI tests that had a platform at the incorrect height when compared to the sixth floor of the Book Depository."

This is an understatement. I am not a surveyor nor an expert in geometry. However, I tend to believe that reducing the height from approximately 60 feet [the window] to 30 feet [the platform] and allowing the marksmen to fire at stationary rather than moving targets would tend to distort the result. (3H444)

Those "writers who present cases of guilt by association supported by rumor an innuendos" (Page 472)
Page 277 "A high ranking Dallas police official who was a member of the force in 1963 told the author there was another witness who had positively identified Oswald as the shooter [of J.D. Tippit] but was never publicly identified. Evidently, the man was married and had been at a house in Oak Cliff visiting his mistress for an afternoon tryst."

Page 314 "A senior Dallas doctor who is a close [Dr. Charles] Crenshaw friend admitted to the author, 'If you spend time with him, he starts to confabulate, or plot or plan, and that sort of thing.'"

I think serious research requires the naming of sources particularly when they are revealed as important witnesses or are used to impugn an individual's character.

The NEW Autopsy
Originally, I believed Doctors Boswell, Humes and Finck carried out the Kennedy autopsy. After reading Case Closed I have to conclude it was actually performed by Doctor Michael Baden. Why? Because there are 18 pages that reference the three autopsy doctors while Baden gets 15.

Overall Mr. Posner and Doctor Baden have little regard for these physicians. Between pages 300 and 304 we find Humes and Boswell were not trained in the forensic aspect of autopsies, Finck had never done a gunshot wound autopsy, a proper examination should have taken two to three days, and a lot of things weren't done.

It seems the trio was so ineffective there is no need to deal with them. There is more space devoted to getting certain Parkland doctors to recant on the neck wound. In their Warren Commission depositions Parkland doctors Baxter (6H42), Jones (6H55) and Peters (6H71) thought this wound was one of entrance. Doctor Malcolm Perry maintained the wound was of entry during questioning at a press conference but claimed he didn't have enough facts when he testified before the Warren Commission (6H11). On page 306 we find Jones and Baxter have changed their minds because they didn't know about the back wound. At page 305 Perry claims the media took his remarks "out of context." I can't find a reference to Peter's testimony.

Mr. Posner spends little time with the autopsy doctors. And of course, the autopsy doctors have judiciously avoided any reference to Connally's wounds and in essence refuse to discuss the "magic" bullet theory. Why? Because both Doctors Humes (2H376) and Finck (2H382) testified before the Warren Commission that the bullet retrieved from Connally could not possibly have been the one that hit Kennedy in the back or neck. Gerald decries witnesses who change their stories. So what of these many doctors?

Gerald did re-index the Warren Volumes (page 419). He had to know about the Humes and Finck testimony yet he never mentions it. We are left with apologies for the confusion created by a bungled autopsy.

Maybe the answer lies in the footnote on page 419. Gerald discovered by re-indexing the volumes that Sylvia Meagher reflected bias in citing areas where "Oswald was innocent." I suggest the author is guilty of the same technique. He failed to instruct us on the doctors contradictory testimony.

Conclusion:
With the exception of Gerald Ford and David Belin, I know of very few individuals who believe The Warren Commission's investigation was adequate. Case Closed discusses this very point on pages 409 through 413. Somewhat sympathetically we hear that the FBI and ClA "held out" on the Commission. Walter Cronkite feels this "weakened the credibility of The Warren Report." Walter misses the mark. We all should be concerned with the credibility of some members of the Commission for selective use of information to support a pre-conceived conclusion. We should also be concerned with the credibility of many authors and witnesses be they pro or anti-conspiracy for they have done exactly the same thing.

Of course this book does not close the case. It is merely another man's theory. Some individuals claim "we must get the word out on this awful, terrible, unfair and deceptive book!"

Baloney... on this issue the public does not believe the Warren Commission, Walter Cronkite, the lone nut theory or the single bullet theory and they are not about to believe Gerald Posner.

Many of our self appointed spokespersons don't care a whit about discussing the merits or faults of the book. They only want to get their faces and voices on TV or radio. They have spent years praising each other for their eloquence and have lost all debating skills if they possessed any to begin with. They pop up like prairie dogs on any tabloid TV show that will have them. They have gotten fat and happy hanging out at the autograph tables of various symposia, hoping to be recognized as an expert. More than likely their public rantings are doing more to sell this book than the extensive efforts of Random House's publicity staff.

If this case does get closed it will be through the efforts of the real researchers who toil in silence. They are the ones who want to see justice done.

The Final Conspiracy - Obsessed With A 30-Year-Old Murder, JFK Assassinologists Go To Court To Silence One Another by Rebecca Sherman

Attorney-at-law Brad Kizzia is hardly able to contain himself. Punching his phone to put the caller on hold - in mid-conversation - he sputters excitedly to a visitor in his office: "Do you know who this is?"

"It's Mark Lane!" Kizzia blurts, unable to await a guess. "The Mark Lane." When the name elicits only a blank stare, the stocky, rust-haired barrister twirls his executive chair around. "Over there on the bookshelf!" he exclaims, wagging an index finger at the overstuffed rows, a veritable library of such JFK-assassination classics as High Treason, JFK: Breaking the Silence, and On the Trail of the Assassins - one of the two books on which Oliver Stone based his movie, JFK. Among the many esteemed tomes: an autographed copy of Rush to Judgment, published in 1966 by, of course, Mark Lane, the dean of "assassinologists" - and the very same man who is now dangling on interminable hold.

Lane is calling Kizzia, a 39-year-old insurance and personal-injury litigator at the conservative downtown Dallas firm of Strasburger & Price, to announce his plans to file a lawsuit. Not about an accident or malpractice claim, but because Kizzia shares Lane's passion: proving that the assassination of America's 35th president was the product of a sinister, and as yet unearthed, conspiracy.

It is no accident that this lawyer has pinned a poster-sized diagram of Dealey Plaza on the wall of his 44th-floor office, which offers a clear view of the assassination scene, including Dealey Plaza, the former Texas School Book Depository, and the edge of the grassy knoll.

And it is no accident that Kizzia is at the center of the latest twisted wave of the 30-year-old controversy surrounding the martyred president: he represents conspiracy theorists who are suing other conspiracy theorists for defamation - and who allege that the attacks upon them are part of yet another conspiracy. Jokes Kizzia: "You could call what I'm doing, 'On the Trail of the Character Assassins.'"

The assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 in Dallas has inspired more than 250 books - and at least as many theories. Dissatisfied with the Warren Commission conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, serious researchers, buffs, and assorted flakes have made their various cases for the involvement of the CIA, the FBI, Soviet intelligence agents, anti-Castro Cubans, the Mafia, and extraterrestrial beings.

Kizzia himself blames the Cubans. He believes exiles sent to overthrow Castro during the Bay of Pigs fiasco were angry at Kennedy for abandoning them - and conspired to kill JFK to provoke a war against Cuba. "It didn't work," Kizzia explains. "Because the CIA and the FBI covered it up. I think a lot of well intentioned people participated in the cover-up because they thought they were doing their country a service by avoiding World War III."

Though he admits he snatched up the law office with the assassination vista when the opportunity presented itself, Kizzia insists, "I don't spend hours looking out the window, wondering." Likewise, he says he resists the temptation of a lunchtime stroll two blocks away to the scene of the crime - including the Sixth Floor exhibit, featuring more than 400 photos and an inside view of the sniper's perch. "I've only been there twice since it opened. Really.

"I'm not obsessed," he declares, before pausing to contemplate his words. "Of course, obsessed people would deny that they are obsessed."

Rhetorical characterizations aside, Kizzia is clearly part of the passion that keeps the Kennedy assassination controversy alive.

"I've been thinking for a long time about writing an open letter to District Attorney Vance," Kizzia announces brightly, "and asking him to reopen the investigation of the case. I know he lost the Railey case, and maybe he wouldn't want to take on something as controversial as this during reelection, but there were three murders in Dallas County - Kennedy, Officer Tippet, and Oswald. Ruby was prosecuted for murdering Oswald, but there is no statute of limitations for the other murders."

"People have written books claiming they participated in conspiracies to murder the president. They either need to be exposed as frauds or they deserve to be prosecuted."

Just a third-grader when the president was shot, Brad Kizzia became "totally fascinated" by the assassination - "as a murder mystery and as a cover-up"--while a political science major at Austin College in Sherman. That's when he wrote a term paper on the case and invited Mark Lane - the Mark Lane - to speak on campus about his theory of CIA involvement.

That's also when Kizzia, who picked up Lane from the airport, recognized that not all his peers shared all his passion. "The turnout was disappointing," Kizzia remembers. "I guess not that many people at that time were as interested in the assassination as I was."

Undaunted, Kizzia through the years became an avid student of JFK conspiracy theories. In 1991, he noticed a newspaper ad for the first annual "Assassination Symposium on Kennedy," or "ASK," being held in Dallas.

It is there Brad Kizzia made the connections that would make him the man for unhappy conspiracy theorists to call. It is there that he met Tom Wilson - and heard about what we shall call "The Second-Gunman-Detecting Machine."

When Tom Wilson invented his device, officially called "Image Processing with Computer Analyses Systems," he harbored only mundane industrial ambitions. Wilson, after all, was a retired engineer living in Murrysville, Pennsylvania - about as far from the 20th century's foremost murder mystery as one can get.

He had been tinkering with his machine for eight years by 1988, when a revelation struck him one crisp evening, as surely as it befell Archimedes fitting in his bathtub. "l was in my office doing repetitive tests on the machine I had invented for my work in the metals industry," Wilson, now 61, recalled in a recent telephone interview with the Observer. "It could detect bare metal, or flaws, in metal products. When that happened, the monitor would register a flash, or sparkle. But I had to run it over and over again. I was bored."

Wilson ejected the metals test tape and popped in a video of a TV documentary about the 25th anniversary of JFK's assassination. This moment of boredom would change his life forever.

When the famous Mary Moorman photograph of the grassy knoll appeared on his screen, flashes and sparkles materialized behind the knoll's wooden fence. "That meant an object behind the fence was metal," explains Wilson. "But the area behind the fence was dark. Why would something shine if there is nothing there?"

To find out, Wilson, a metals-industry consultant, abandoned all his projects and concentrated on testing the Moorman photograph. Months later, he emerged triumphant: "Yes, there was a metal object behind the fence," he recalled. "And yes, there was a person firing a weapon."

Additional studies, he insists, proved that another shooter was lurking behind the fence: "I'm not going to say I know who did it or why," Wilson says. "But it was proof there was a conspiracy."

Wilson felt certain he had cracked the case that had stumped the nation's top criminal investigators. But there was a problem: Wilson couldn't find anyone who believed him - or would even listen to his claims. Adamant that he would not profit from his discovery, nor allow its exploitation, Wilson says he turned down offers by tabloid TV shows that wanted to break the story. Instead, he solicited the attention of Dan Rather and The New York Times, among others. "I had this hard evidence," he says. "I tried to call, to write letters. I didn't hear back."

Despite the rebuffs, Wilson continued his research. But now, there were other problems. Measurements and photographs he had taken at Dealey Plaza in November 1990 didn't match his other data. So on the morning of December 17, 1990, Wilson commandeered his wife Marcelyn, several of her metal pie pans - to which he had affixed various sizes of fabric and glass "targets" - and jumped on a plane back to Dallas.

Once at Dealey Plaza, Wilson, a heavy- set man with thinning gray hair, instructed his wife to stand holding the pie pans in front of her face while he photographed her in three critical spots; the pedestal next to the grassy knoll where Henry Zapruder filmed the fatal shots; the site across from there where Mary Moorman photographed the grassy knoll; and smack in the middle of Elm Street (and busy traffic) the location where Kennedy's head would have taken the fatal shot as he passed by the grassy knoll.

A bewildered Oliver Stone, at work on JFK, watched this odd couple from the safety of the sidewalk in front of the old School Book Depository. "Do you mind if I ask you what you're doing?" a member of Stone's crew asked Marcelyn as she scurried to find her next cue.

"I can't tell you," the inventor's wife responded. Eventually, Wilson recognized Stone and approached him. And soon, according to Wilson, the couple and the filmmaker were sharing hot dogs and swapping opinions about the precise location of the presumptive assassin (or assassins) who fired from behind the wooden fence.

Weeks later in Murrysville, Wilson received an offer from Stone to consult on his movie-in-progress. Wilson worked, for the most part, authenticating photographs. "I never did see a movie star," he complains.

But the Stone connection did help win Wilson a feature role before the first annual Assassination Symposium on Kennedy, in November 1991. Invited to speak, he says he paid his own way. "It was my first chance at a legitimate forum," Wilson explains.

The annual symposium now attracts thousands of assassination buffs to the Hyatt Hotel and Dealey Plaza. "Assassinologists," as ASK organizers say their participants prefer to be called, pay a $175 registration fee for four days of panel discussions on such topics as "JFK 101: An Assassination Primer," "Intelligence Community and Defectors," "Eyewitnesses," and "New Leads and Revelations."

Although most speakers had been allotted but a single hour, Wilson's 1991 talk lasted more than two hours. "I was going to pull the plug on him," remembers an ASK organizer, "but I was told if I did, the crowd would riot. They were completely mesmerized by what he was saying."

A Dallas Times Herald reporter named Mark Potok, himself an assassination buff, covered Wilson's talk and wrote an article about it published in the Times Herald on November 16, 1991. In the story, Dr. Cyril Wecht, a noted forensic pathologist and former president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, was quoted calling Wilson's work "beautiful."

But others were less generous. Their statements, as quoted in the Herald, would incite a lawsuit.

"It's a series of massive lies," declared David Belin, counsel to the Warren Commission, according to the Herald story. "The man is basically making an outrageous claim." The Warren Commission had, of course, concluded that the assassination was the work of Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone. Like everyone else with an opinion on the subject, Belin had offered his point of view in print - with two books that supported the single assassin theory, November 22: You Are The Jury, and Final Disclosure: The Full Truth About the Assassination of President Kennedy.

The Times Herald reporter also sought comment from Robert Blakey, chief counsel and staff director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations; the committee had concluded that Oswald most likely did not act alone. Blakey, who has offered his own conspiracy theory in a book titled Plot to Kill the President (later reissued under the title Fatal Hour: The Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime), was quoted saying about Wilson's theory: "You know the saying among computer people, 'garbage in, garbage out'? This is garbage."

Wilson, who previously had no standing in the world of assassination theorists, was unwilling to let these attacks on his new-found stature go unchallenged. "You don't have to take this, you know," Wilson says a friend told him after he'd returned home to Murrysville. A short time later, Wilson received a letter from Brad Kizzia, who had heard him speak and had read the newspaper criticism of Wilson's presentation. After mulling over the matter, he had hopped on a plane back to Dallas and was sitting in Brad Kizzia's office.

Stone's movie, JFK, had just come out amid a storm of controversy, and Kizzia had written an opinion piece in The Dallas Morning News defending the film, for which Wilson had served as a consultant. That allied the lawyer with Wilson - and against Belin, who had aggressively attacked Stone's film.

In most intellectual debates - particularly the dicey business of unproven conspiracy theories - proponents of various points of view attack one another freely without fear of litigation. Theorists, after all, are supposed to offer sharply contrasting opinions about public controversy.

But Wilson wasn't going to take it. Angered by the published comments in the Times Herald article, in November 1992 he filed a defamation suit against both Blakey and Belin. Brad Kizzia is handling the litigation for Wilson.

Belin could not be reached for comment.

Blakey, reached at his office at Notre Dame School of Law in South Bend, Indiana, where he is a tenured professor, declined to talk directly about the case. But he noted the oddity - and potentially chilling effect - of the litigation: "The debate on the Kennedy Assassination ought to be free and robust. If people get sued every time a reporter calls them on the phone, then that severely limits that freedom."

On April 13, 1993, Kizzia, suing one conspiracy theorist on behalf of another, flew to South Bend to depose Blakey. Though the deposition was ostensibly being taken to determine whether Blakey could be sued in Texas, Kizzia took the opportunity to quiz Blakey about CIA memos and retouched Life Magazine photos of Oswald. "Tell me how that's related to jurisdiction," Blakey demanded, refusing to answer the question.

Kizzia also quizzed David Belin, in an April 7, 1993 deposition taken to help determine proper jurisdiction, about photographs of the grassy knoll and Dealey Plaza. "Do you feel that all persons who take issue with the Warren report are liars?" Kizzia asked. Belin's attorney advised him not to answer because the question had nothing to do with jurisdiction. Kizzia pressed on. "...Did you come into possession of or did it come to your attention that there was, I believe, a CIA memo in 1967 that was distributed instructing and encouraging agents on how to counteract critics of the Warren Commission?" he asked. Belin again declined to answer.

Through an April 17, 1993 affidavit, even Oliver Stone makes a cameo appearance in Wilson's lawsuit. The affidavit reads, in part: "John W. Belin has made speeches, given public appearances (including appearances on network television), and has written letters and articles that were published in newspapers and magazines around the country which have attacked me, the movie JFK, and people associated with the movie. He has unjustly called us liars and profiteers...Mr. Belin has apparently undertaken a nationwide campaign to strike back at those who voice opinions different from his own in connection with the JFK assassination.

"I, like most Americans, want to know the truth regarding the assassination of President Kennedy, but the process of determining the truth through public discussion is undermined when people are discouraged from disputing the so-called 'official' government versions of the truth because of fear that their reputations and integrity will be smeared by influential people."

Stone was not available to address the issue of how Wilson's decision to sue critics - including a prominent Stone critic - might promote "the process of determining the truth through public discussion." Stone's publicist Mark Pogachefsky, says the filmmaker has no comment. "I think we'll just let the affidavit speak for itself," he says.

Wilson's suit was recently dismissed for lack of personal jurisdiction; federal judge Barefoot Sanders ruled that none of the defendants had sufficient ties to Texas. But Wilson is appealing the decision. And he says he intends to refile in Pennsylvania if the appeal isn't successful.

"I am willing to stand up under oath and say exactly what I have found that positively shows there was a conspiracy," the inventor of the "Second-Gunman-Detecting Machine" declares from his home in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. "If people want to do the same, we'll see who's telling the truth."

Brad Kizzia holds an elegant black and white book in his hands and opens it from back to front. Although the volume was a gift from the author, it is the only book in his collection that Kizzia hasn't read - and for good reason. The book is written in Japanese. Its title, however, is in English: JFK: Conspiracy of Silence, by Charles Crenshaw, M.D.

The English version is a different matter. Kizzia has scrutinized every word of the Fort Worth doctor's book; after all, Dr. Crenshaw is his client.

The book was published last year with help from Cleburne-based assassination researcher Gary Shaw - who serves as director of the JFK Assassination Information Center - and writer Jens Hansen. The book is mostly a personal account of what Dr. Crenshaw, then a third-year resident at Parkland Memorial Hospital, says happened on November 22, 1963.

Crenshaw was one of 15 doctors who played a role in attempting to save the president's life - he helped insert and drip an IV into the president's leg. Two days later, he says, he assisted in resuscitating Lee Harvey Oswald after Jack Ruby shot him.

Crenshaw, now 60 and the semi-retired head of surgery at Tarrant County's John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, claims several controversial facts in his book. First, he maintains that two bullets struck Kennedy from the front - a critical point for conspiracy theorists, since Oswald could have only shot Kennedy from the rear. According to Crenshaw, one bullet hit Kennedy in the neck and another in the temple near the hairline, creating a massive wound at the back of the head. Crenshaw not only claims to have seen the wound himself; he says the autopsy photographs have been altered to disguise the evidence.

While one other physician who treated Kennedy backs Crenshaw's published account, several other doctors who cared for the president have said they do not recall such a head wound. Much of the harshest criticism of Crenshaw's book - and the words that would spur him to sue for defamation, according to Kizzia - appeared in the May 27, 1992 issue of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.

David Breo, the author of one of the JAMA articles, interviewed the two doctors who performed the autopsy and four doctors who treated Kennedy at Parkland on November 22, 1963. Writes Breo: "...no one can say with certainty what some suspect - Crenshaw was not even in the trauma room; none of the four [doctors] recalls ever seeing him in the room." Breo quoted Dr. Charles Baxter, a surgeon who treated Kennedy at Parkland, as saying: "I've known [Crenshaw] since he was three years old. His claims are ridiculous. The only motive I can see is a desire for personal recognition and monetary gain."

On April 9, 1992, the Dallas Morning News published an opinion column by free-lance writer Lawrence Sutherland, who attended a press conference Crenshaw called in Dallas. Sutherland's column repeated some of the statements in Breo's JAMA report and included some of Sutherland's own choice rhetoric: "Conspiracy of Silence is peddling lies."

Although Crenshaw's book stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for months, Crenshaw claims that the JAMA article and the Sutherland column defamed him. He had been carved up by many of the same critics who attacked Oliver Stone.

In March 1993, Crenshaw and Shaw filed a defamation suit against the Morning News and Sutherland. (The other author, Jens Hansen, did not file suit. He told the Observer, "I didn't sue because I didn't feel like I had been damaged.") Two months later, Crenshaw and Shaw added four more defendants to the suit: the American Medical Association, which publishes JAMA; JAMA's editor, George Lundberg; writer David Breo; and, finally, Oliver Stone's archnemesis, David Belin. Belin was named because of interview excerpts published in the News on May 17, 1992, according to Kizzia. In part the story quoted Belin as saying: "I think that the press should demand of the Dr. Crenshaws of the world, of the Oliver Stones of the world, or the Mark Lanes of the world, full financial disclosure. Because hundreds of thousands of dollars have been made out of the assassination."

Not exactly a vicious example of character assassination. But enough for Crenshaw and Shaw, whose suit accuses all the defendants of "individually and/or in concert and/or conspiracy" making defamatory comments."

Kizzia says the published criticism of JFK: Conspiracy of Silence in JAMA and the News damaged book sales as well as Crenshaw's reputation. "In the JAMA article, it suggests that Dr. Crenshaw wasn't even there," declares Kizzia. "There is no question he was there and participated with the resuscitation efforts."

On that issue, Kizzia has a point. In fact, transcripts of the 1964 Warren Commission hearings show two witnesses identified Crenshaw as having participated in the attempt to save Kennedy's life. The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review also have both criticized the JAMA article for its sloppy research. It failed to note that several doctors had changed their stories over the years since the assassination; writer Breo even interviewed his own editor, George Landberg.

Kizzia complains that Dr. Crenshaw was not interviewed for the JAMA article. But when asked if Crenshaw would comment for this story, Kizzia said his client was unavailable. "I think Dr. Crenshaw was really shocked by the responses to the book," Kizzia says. "I know it really hurt him personally and emotionally."

Kizzia notes that the AMA called a press conference to promote the Breo article. "Was there a conspiracy to silence Dr. Crenshaw?" he asks rhetorically. "I don't know. I do know that there are groups and organizations that have an agenda, and Dr. Crenshaw is certainly a threat to that agenda." The AMA is one such group, Kizzia maintains; he declines to list others.

Through their attorneys, Lundberg and Breo declined to comment on the suit. David Belin also did not respond to requests for an interview about this matter.

Gary Shaw, a 55-year-old Cleburne architect and well-known assassinologist, insists he and Crenshaw filed suit as a last resort after the News and JAMA declined to publish their rebuttals and letters to the editor. The critiques of the book focus on Crenshaw. He says: "We have no problem with anyone who has a different approach to the assassination case. What we have a problem with is personal attacks."

Shaw, who grew up in Cleburne, says he made frequent trips to Dallas before Kennedy was killed to drink in Jack Ruby's Carousel Club. "I heard the scuttlebutt that Ruby was Mafia and to be careful around him," he says. Shaw, who was 25 years old when Kennedy was killed, says he doesn't know who killed Kennedy. "I'm certain that if Lee Harvey Oswald was given a trial he would have been found probably not guilty. We've really not been told the truth by the government. There has been a cover-up."

Brad Kizzia's call from Mark Lane - the Mark Lane - who makes his living as a Washington attorney, concerned a suit Lane wants to file against the hottest JFK author of them all: Gerald Posner, whose best-selling 1993 book, Case Closed, made the August 30 cover of U.S. News and World Report.

From his law office, Lane declared he plans to sue Random House, Inc., publisher of Posner's book Case Closed, "for millions and millions of dollars" this week in U.S. district court. The basis for the suit, according to Lane: a promotional ad published in the August 24, 1993 New York Times that shows Lane in a photograph with other conspiracy theorists, including Oliver Stone. The photo's caption reads: "Guilty of misleading the American public." Lane says he is preparing a suit against Gerald Posner for "the incredible errors in his book."

"I'm not settling the case, either," Lane says at fever pitch. "Not unless Random House wants to give me the publishing house so we can publish books by eyewitnesses to the assassination whose books can't get published."

Lane, who says he will handle his own case with help from another Washington attorney, was calling Brad Kizzia because the Dallas lawyer has already fired his first legal salvo at Posner - on behalf of Dr. Charles Crenshaw. Case Closed quotes "a senior Dallas doctor who is a close Crenshaw friend" in distinctly unflattering terms: "If you spend time with [Crenshaw], he starts to confabulate, or a plot or plan, and that sort of thing. We are not dealing with a normal individual...He has had a stroke and can't operate anymore. I think it is a bag of worms of ego, going over the hill, the last hurrah." In September, Kizzia fired off a letter to Posner and Random House demanding an "immediate retraction and apology" for "the outrageously defamatory comments" about Crenshaw in Case Closed.

Posner's book attempts to dismantle the conspiracy theories set up by Lane, Crenshaw, and others over the last 30 years; much to the dismay of many active assassinologists, he concludes that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

"It is a book filled with errors," Lane says. Then, dishing out the most stinging insult a conspiracy theorist can offer, he adds: "It's very possibly the worst thing since the Warren Commission published their report."

Posner, resting for a few minutes between endless rounds of radio and television interviews to promote Case Closed, laughs when he hears that Lane intends to sue him. "He's been saying that for two months now. Every time I turn on the radio, he's saying it.

"Let me guess: Did he say my book was worse than the Warren report?"

Posner, saying that "truth is the absolute defense," insists he wasn't prepared for the response to his book. "It's created a lot more controversy than I hoped. This shows you how far our country has come. Thirty years ago, Lane was considered the skeptic. Now, when I'm the one who's backing the Warren report, I'm considered the skeptic."

Posner muses for a moment about the prospect of one author trying to silence another by going to court. "What is it about Case Closed? It's almost as if he doesn't want anybody to read it."

This week, Brad Kizzia - appropriately enough - will moderate a panel discussion of doctors and lawyers during the third annual Assassination Symposium on Kennedy. Norman Mailer, who is writing a book about Oswald, will deliver the keynote speech at the Hyatt Hotel.

It is clear that, within this gathering of conspiracy theorists, Gerald Posner has assumed the status of the assassinologists' antichrist.

Tom Wilson, for example, whose invention caused such a stir in Dallas two years ago, is devastated that a story Newsweek planned to write about him was replaced by a story on Posner's new book. "Everything Posner says is black, I say is white. It's very difficult to take."

Wilson suspects the decision to pull the story about him might have been, yes, part of an effort to conceal the truth. "I have a feeling certain interests don't want this [information] to come forward," Wilson says. Then, in a moment of self-insight, he adds: "You can get so paranoid with this."

An employee with the symposium, who didn't want her name used, says Posner has been invited to speak this year but may not come because Norman Mailer, who is writing a book about Oswald, will be speaking. Posner confirms that he won't be coming and that Mailer's presence - as well as the ASK group's hostility toward his book - are among the reasons.

The symposium staffer says Lane is not welcome. "He came to the first one to speak and stood up and told all of us we were exploiting Kennedy's death and trying to make money off of the assassination." Ironically, Lane's 1966 best-seller, Rush To Judgment, is considered the first commercial success for a conspiracy theorist. Hundreds of other books about conspiracy theories have followed. Hundreds more are surely to come.

So the gathering known as "ASK" - dedicated to airing divergent views about the assassination of President Kennedy - will take place without the presence of several key figures on both sides of one of America's longest-running historical debates.

"Some days," says the symposium staffer, "I think they are all loony."

JFK ASSASSINATION HACKS by L. Fletcher Prouty

There has grown up around us during the past three decades the "Cult of Assassination Hacks." These are the writers of little experience, who know little about the subject, and who spend their time frivolously, and libelously doing their best to demean those who do. Many are paid to prostitute themselves in such a career. One of these, pre-eminent in this sordid game, is Edward Jay Epstein.

In the last issue of Probable Cause, June 1994, there is a reprint of "JFK: The Second Coming of Jim Garrison" by Epstein. In an effort to assure the reader of his erudition, he leads off with a quote from Karl Marx, "All great events and personalities in world history happen twice. The first time as tragedy, the second as farce." Epstein succumbs to that idea by adding a wild comment for no reason at all, "Oliver Stone's film JFK is a case in point." So Epstein prefers to be recognized as a Marxist.

Behind this bit of scholastic whimsy, Epstein gets down to his dirty work, his true goal and foul duty. He sets out to demean, to libel and to mis-quote Oliver Stone, Jim Garrison, and myself.

He proves himself to be a very brave man. Oliver Stone is perfectly capable of handling such attacks; Jim Garrison has died; and Epstein must have assumed that "Man X" would not be able to fight back. I wish to assure him that "Man X," this writer, is alive, well, and able to fight back especially against uninformed, somewhat ignorant types such as Edward Jay. I challenge him to an open debate...any day.

There is no point at present to counter every lie and slander Epstein has contrived, although that would be a pleasure. However one subject he butchered stands alone because of its significance. Epstein begins with the implication, a la Marx, that the film "JFK" is a "Farce." We know it is not!

One thing must be made clear. During the three decades that the unmitigated farce, popularly known as the "Report of the Warren Commission" has held sway, little or nothing has been done to actually solve the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Only one man has risen during those three decades to bring that case into a legitimate court and to prosecute one or more of the conspirators. This man was Jim Garrison. Against horrible opposition from the highest sources, and including the murder of potential witnesses for his case, he did in court and in his remarkable books, more than anyone else for the cause of justice.

The law of the land requires that all murder cases be tried in the state where they occur. The murder of President Kennedy has never been tried in a court in the state of Texas. Garrison attempted the next best thing. He tried in Louisiana.

Secondly, during these same three decades no one had made a serious and meaningful attempt to bring this case before the public in such a way that the exposure would totally demolish the contrived 26 volume mythology of the Warren Commission. This was the objective of Oliver Stone, his loyal cast and production team, and his writers with the film "JFK." His objective was not to solve the crime. No one ever will. As we all know now, he succeeded in this important endeavor. He demolished the Report of the Warren Commission. The great majority of the American public, and tens of millions more around the world, now know how false and contrived the work of that Commission was. Stone demolished them.

The Garrison battle, and the Stone campaign are now impregnable. Therefore Epstein had to resort to his characteristic and demeaning effort by attacking the film "JFK," Oliver Stone, Jim Garrison and myself with untruths, innuendo and contrived nonsense. He has no useful experience in this subject. He is incompetent for the task. He must turn to other, and quite dishonorable weapons. In doing so he makes a fool of himself.

I shall not argue his theme point by point It is not worth it and most people know the subject well enough now to be able to make up their own minds about his sordid work. I wish to take one paramount subject that he has mangled and clarify it; and using my own experience with that significant subject apply it to an understanding of the murder of John F. Kennedy. ,

Let's take a few lines from Epstein's work that have been designed to denigrate my own military experience, and the importance of a certain task that I had written about almost ten years ago, and which Oliver Stone had decided to use in the script of his film. This is the entirely serious subject of Presidential Protection.

Presidential Protection is a function of trained military units, in conjunction with the Secret Service. The military services have the numbers of trained men required from time to time to provide that augmentation.

By the time I had become the Chief of Special Operations on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon in 1963, I had become well aware of that subject, and experienced in its application. (It should be made clear that the record of my military service is backed up by official orders. Epstein could have checked that, or called me.)

In your QUID PRO QUO article, "JFK: The Second Coming of Jim Garrison" Epstein finds fault with all manner of minor matters while totally overlooking the important things that he does not understand. I'll use an example involving myself.

As is stated in the film, I was in New Zealand when I heard the news of President Kennedy's death. I was having breakfast with a U.S. Congressman. When we were able to find a newspaper, under the banner headline, "KENNEDY SHOT DEAD" it carried a quarter- page radio-photo of the Texas School Book Depository Building, the building from which Oswald is supposed to have fired the "three fatal shots." I noticed immediately that windows were open on several floors directly over-looking the small street where the President's car had been moving at a slow pace.

I turned to the Congressman and said:
"There is something seriously wrong in Dallas. The Secret Service and the Military Presidential Protection units must not have been there. If they were not there, they must have been called off. If they had been called off, that would have required word from the highest level, and before the President traveled to Dallas."

That act alone is evidence of a top level conspiracy, not only to assassinate the President; but to take over the U.S. Government via a Coup d'etat. That was obvious, even to a newspaper reader in far off New Zealand. Those windows ought to have been closed, sealed and under constant observation by men with radios and by snipers. They weren't. That photo proved that. How did I know that?

Not too many years before, when I was the Chief of Special Operations for the Headquarters, U.S. Air Force, I had been sent to Mexico City with other military personnel and Secret Service men for the purpose of preparing for a visit there by President Eisenhower. We were there weeks ahead of time, and we completely checked out all the possible danger sites in the city along the planned presidential motorcade route. Working with the senior Secret Service representative, we checked and double-checked all danger spots according to their manual. At the same time we laid out plans for the placement of men on roof-tops, at prominent places where they could observe the crowd, etc. One thing became clear, we made arrangements to have enough men there so that a man could be placed beside someone with an umbrella, someone else with a coat over his arm, others who were carrying newspapers or other packages that might conceal a weapon. Such men would be in civilian clothes to blend in with other bystanders. The whole motorcade route was to be covered. Even man-hole covers in the streets were welded shut...as is done in Washington regularly. (This was not done in Dallas.)

This was up-to-date experience for me. I had been in Cairo during the Cairo Conference in 1943 when the protection of Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek was a war-time military responsibility. Following Cairo, I was at the Teheran Conference when Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek met with Stalin. There the Soviets were in charge of protection, and they went to the extreme of rigging a 10-foot high heavy curtain completely around the center of the city where the conferees and their staffs would meet. Armed soldiers manned every bit of that huge curtained area. No one was allowed in except at monitored entrances.

I have no idea whether Epstein made any attempt to check my record properly; but in any event he contrived that "He [Prouty] was not even a liaison with the Secret Service" and that my "duties did not include providing additional security for the president's motorcades." All he does with such statements is add more proof to the fact that he did not check out the facts of his writing, and if he did that he asked the wrong questions of the wrong people. It would have been easy for me, or the official record, to prove that I had been in Mexico City "to provide [among other things] security for the president's motorcade."

It would have been a little difficult for me to have done that in 1963, for the Kennedy motorcade, because I had been ordered to be the Military Escort for a group of industrial dignitaries who were going to Antarctica to officially dedicate a Nuclear Power Plant at the U.S. Navy Base at McMurdo Sound, during November 1963. And, as for Epstein's imaginary task of being "liaison with the Secret Service" this is something he dreamed up. In the position I had in 1963 with the Joint Chiefs of Staff such an assignment would have been out of the question. I managed an all-service global organization and being "liaison" to such an organization as the Secret Service is simply Epstein's dreamland. The military services had their own trained men who served in that capacity...regularly.

While clarifying that record, I should make it clear, that had I been in the Pentagon at the time the assignments for Presidential Protection for Kennedy's trip to Dallas were being made, I might very well have been called...as an available and experienced senior officer...when the Commander of the Army unit that ought to have been assigned that task was told his unit was not needed in Dallas on Nov 22, 1963.

As a matter of fact, I was called later after my return from Antarctica by an officer there who knew me, because he and his boss were extremely up-set by that call that told them not to go to Dallas. This was quite irregular, and as most people now know elements of the Secret Service had also been told that they would not be needed in Dallas that day.

These are the important facts of the case, that Epstein in his own warped account is attempting to conceal with his childish intrigue against me. Or, what worries me more, is Epstein a part of the conspiracy? By working so hard to make it seem that somehow I was all wrong on the subject of "Presidential Protection", is he really acting to cover the real culprits? After all, someone ordered those Protection units to "Stand Down." They were part of the Conspiracy the existence of which Oliver Stone's film proved so convincingly. Is this why Epstein plays this role? This is a serious question. We have been subjected to the Cover Story now for more than three decades. The propagation of the Cover Story is the sinister work of the Conspirators even to this day.

It is extremely important to understand that someone in a position of high power had to have made those calls to elements of both the military and the Secret Service directing them that they were not needed on that crucial Nov 22nd of 1963, in Dallas. Few clues relevant to the assassination of the President are more important than that. Political assassinations are committed when the planned victim is unprotected, when his regular guard is down. This is an historical truth.

I have pointed out here the most significant of the points Epstein has chosen to attack. The others are relatively insignificant with respect to the assassination of the President. They are trivial, spiteful attacks on me, on Garrison, and on Stone. We are accustomed to that and we know the source. Why bother. Epstein lives by producing lies.

Should any reader desire an explanation to any other of his contrived allegations, let the editor of this publication know and we shall be only too pleased to provide answers.

Archive Jive by Paul Jones

"Washington was built on a stagnate swamp. It stank then and it stinks now." -- Lisa Simpson.

Washington D.C. planners designed a city core that epitomises power. Architects created white monolithic structures to house that power, whilst the people inside (ab)use that power. I was in the U.S. capital and I knew it.

From my lodgings on K and 11th streets, I would walk to 10th down past Fords Theater (site of another presidential conspiracy) onto Penn. Ave. Continuing south-east the J. Edgar Hoover building (not to be confused with the FBI building) parallels the Justice Department. Further on lay the foundation of the nation, the U.S. constitution inside the National Archives.

I was in awe of the stone columns with two statues marking the entrance. And then, a small doorway leading to...security guards. Who was I, an Aussie traveller, part-time conspiracy sleuth, to go looking around the Archives? I was promptly told to visit the "tourist" entrance on Constitution Ave. I approached the tourist guide and asked about research work.

"Oh some family research?" she blurted out.
"Well...um...yes, sort of," I clumsily replied.

She then directed me back to the front entrance, naturally. This time, I passed through security when I advised them of my "family origins". After being X-rayed, interrogated and having my camera confiscated, I proceeded to Administration where I received my I.D. I then explained that I was interested in the reading the Schweiker-Hart subcommittee report.

"The who-Hart report?" the administration officer asked.
(You know, that former senator guy, former G.O.P. running mate of that Reagan guy in 1976?)
Sheeesh!

After further conversation I was provided with the name of the Kennedy assassination liaison officer within the Archives. After a fruitless search (I later found that he was on holiday!!!) I decided to go it alone.

The second floor of the Archives housed what appeared to be a large study room with a variety of old desks, furnishings and...indexes. I cleared security (once again), clocked in and made my way to a vacant table. (Public Service) Americans don't take too well to "Conspiracy Turks", especially ones from out of town, so I guess invaluable assistance was expecting a little too much.

"If you need to find this report, you'll have to find out when the Bill was enacted in Congress," the librarian explained.
"Oh, so that explains the indexes," I sarcastically remarked. She then taught me the basics of legislation and the codes that are given to each bill.

I spent the next two hours attempting to find a code number in order for the librarian to search for my request. Firstly, The Congress Year Book needs to be found, and the exact date the bill was passed is needed. This can be time consuming because often Congress might not pass the legislation, however, and it may have been "watered down" or bought forward to an earlier hearing. The exact date is important because this then enables you to use the code number to access the "more detailed" Congress Year book. This second index explains in blurb format what was contained in that legislation from which you accessed your original code number!

From this blurb you can further extract other codes that pertain to your research, namely the Schweiker-Hart report. However, the report will not have been tabled until later, so therefore you must follow in Congress the preliminary discussions, budgetary limitations, subpoenaed witness testimony, Senate hearings, then the final report! Once you have the code number that corresponds to the final report you've done it!

Well, almost.

With relief I provided my precious record number to the librarian. She then explained that I would have to queue for my request, but since it was after three o'clock...no more requests until tomorrow. Totally dejected, I made my way back to the hostel to get an early night. Tomorrow would be a long day.

The next day, as 8:30 am approached, my faith was restored in the FOI act, as the doors opened and I lodged my request without hesitation. By 9am, the Schweiker-Hart plus the Church committee reports were mine! Apart from the stock standard government printing office binding (and, ironically, lack of index), they all contained introductory, irrelevant jargon that explained the formation of the committee, staff members and so on. Of the Church committee (by the way, that's 76 S403-1 book 4 94th Congress 2d session, if you ever need it...) the first pages provide an account of the CIA's formation. Go figure? Once you wade through the perfunctory rhetoric, some interesting reporting arises. The committee found that since 1948:
"State and Defence Department officials were designated to provide only loose policy guidelines to the CIA with an assumption that covert operations would be infrequent. As covert activities proliferated loose understandings rather than specific review formed the basics for the CIA's accountability for covert operations." (italics added) (p50)

It was not until 1955 that approval mechanisms existed outside the agency to authorise covert action projects, and these "rubber stamps" came from a Department of Defence representative created to liaise with the Agency. By the fall of 1961, the growth of the CIA necessitated the need of a permanent headquarters. The move to Langley was succinctly criticised by the committee because of:
"...the physical isolation of the Agency from the policy makers it was created to serve." (p 50)
They further acknowledged:
"...(that) the Clandestine Service had developed its own capacity and was less dependent on liaison for executing its clandestine collection function."

President Eisenhower in his prophetic farewell address coined the term, "military industrial complex", and its easy to dismiss the fact that as the Cold War arms race accelerated, so too did the entire intelligence apparatus designed to support and encourage the magnification. Clearly, President Kennedy inherited a system that had begun to construct its own ideas on how America was heading toward the next millennium. The Church Committee, for all its democratic responsibility, failed to see the forest for the trees.

I left the Archives with a feeling of frustration. Never before had I realised how true the words of Allen Dulles were when he claimed, "Americans don't read". After two days in the Archives I can understand why the majority of Americans would prefer to be bottle-fed. The bureaucratic system is a nightmare for anyone, and to read the candid, almost blas� approach to the "what can we do about it?" Church committee reports, really makes you wonder what kind of democracy we are living under.

Prince of Thieves - Part III by E. Burton Mercer

"The object of chess is not to kill the king. To succeed in this game, the king must be forced to kill himself." - J.S. Darcy

1. RICHARD NIXON ENTERS POLITICS (1946 - 1952)
1946. An article in the Los Angeles Times reads "G.O.P. Seeks Candidate To Run Against Voorhis". Fresh out of the Navy, young lawyer Richard Milhous Nixon is interviewed for the candidate's position by a group of conservative and influential businessmen. These men include representatives of billionaire industrialist Howard Hughes, and Texas oil barons Clint Murchinson and H.L. Hunt - men who are seeking a candidate to represent their business interests in Washington. Amazingly, Nixon is successful. The businessmen provide him with substantial financial backing, establishing a secret trust fund to bankroll his future election campaigns; within months, Richard Nixon, a complete unknown, is elected to a seat in the U.S. Congress. New York Times journalist Anthony Lewis later comments: "I imagine that those [men] who backed Nixon...saw in him a figure who would genuinely be conservative, would represent [their] business interests, and would be rather pliable. If they said, `Look, this is important to us', [Nixon] would do it."

1950. Congressman Nixon aggressively pursues the Alger Hiss spy case, immediately rising to national prominence as a vehment anti-Communist. Then, after only four years in Congress, Nixon sets his sights on the U.S. Senate. With continued support from his conservative backers, Nixon wins by the biggest margin of any other senatorial candidate that year.

1952. As the presidential elections begin, Nixon is courted by right-wing Republicans to run on Dwight D. Eisenhower's ticket as the nominee for vice-president. Publicly, Nixon supports potential candidate and fellow Californian Earl Warren; privately, Nixon and his backers lobby hard for Nixon himself. Within days, Nixon has secured the nomination. Then, on the campaign trail, disaster strikes; the New York Post reports that "Secret Rich Men's Trust Fund Keeps Nixon In Style Far Beyond His Salary". A political bombshell, Eisenhower is urged to immediately dump Nixon from the campaign; Nixon, however, fights back, delivering the famous "Checkers" speech on national television. Nixon details his personal finances in an attempt to prove that he is not in the pocket of a secret cabal of right-wing businessmen, and as a result he effectively shields Hughes, Hunt and Murchinson from public scrutiny. The gamble works. Eisenhower doesn't dump him, and within six years of entering politics, Richard Nixon is elected Vice-President of the United States.

2. THE CIA, THE MAFIA, AND RICHARD NIXON (1959 - 1960)
1959. On New Year's Day, Communist rebel leader Fidel Castro seizes control of the island of Cuba, toppling the corrupt Batista Government. The American Mafia, with its massive investments in Cuba's hotels and casinos, are either imprisoned by Castro or deported back to the United States, losing billions of dollars in real estate, prostitution and the narcotics trade. Thousands of officials and supporters of the Batista regime are also exiled, many of them militant right-wingers with previous involvement in Batista's military death squads. Many are also close associates of the explelled American gangsters. Settling in Miami, the Cuban-exiles immediately begin to mobilize for a return to Cuba, an invasion designed to topple Castro and re-install Batista as absolute ruler.

1959. Vice-President Richard Nixon also loses money from the Castro revolution; several properties in his personal investments portfolio are in partnership with Batista officials and associates of Florida mob boss Meyer Lansky. Nixon's political bankrollers, such as Howard Hughes, have also lost substantial sums from the New Year's Day uprising.

1960. Nixon sits as head of the 54-12 Special Group, the top secret White House/CIA liaison committee. As the political action officer, Nixon authorizes a series of initiatives to remove Castro from power. Central to these initiatives is a plan known only as the ZR/RIFLE Project. As devised by the 54-12 Special Group, ZR/RIFLE instigates a shift in American foreign policy by eschewing diplomacy and replacing it with assassination as a viable political tool. Under the umbrella of the CIA's Technical Services Division, ZR/RIFLE is to be a union of the CIA and organized crime, with the Mafia providing the "mechanics" for the assassination Project Team. To that effect, the ZR/RIFLE Project Team was established as follows:

(1) Nixon authorizes the plot and contacts former FBI agent Robert Maheu, a high- ranking lawyer in the Howard Hughes organization. Maheu is to act as a conduit between the CIA and the Mafia, enlisting the Mafia's aid. Maheu begins a personal diary, secretly documenting his involvement in the plan.

(2) Maheu meets with John Roselli, a lieutenant in the Sam Giancana crime family, at the Hilton Plaza in New York. Maheu requests assistance in assembling a short list of professional killers, to be used at the CIA's discretion. Roselli agrees to help.

(3) Roselli meets with Sam Giancana in Chicago. Giancana agrees to supply men for organizational purposes only, selecting lieutenants Charles Nicoletti and Richard Cain to act as "handlers" for the proposed hit team. Satisfied, Roselli then flies to Miami and meets with mob overlord Santos Trafficante, Jr. at the Fountainbleau Hotel. Trafficante suggests using European contract killers, thereby removing any connection to his own organization.

(4) Trafficante contacts close friend Antoine Guerini, cheiftan of the Marseilles Union Corse. Guerini, Trafficante's partner in the Cuban drug operation, suggests hiring a qualified "scout" who is capable of assembling an assassination squad. The candidate chosen is a former French Army captain, Michael Victor Mertz.

(5) Mertz, an OAS activist and member of Guerini's drug operation, is immediately placed on the CIA payroll as the primary operational asset for the ZR/RIFLE Project. Given access to CIA funds, he is issued the codename "QJ/WIN". CIA Director of Operations Richard Helms later comments: "If you needed somebody to carry out murder, I guess you had a man who might be prepared to carry it out."

(6) Mertz is placed under contract "with the primary task of spotting agent candidates". His first step is to contact former French Intelligence agent Christain David and place him on the payroll. David is issued the CIA codename "WI/ROUGUE".

(7) David scouts Europe and draws up a short list of "agent candidates", comprising of approximately 5-10 names. Each candidate is placed on the payroll, issued a fake passport, and given a CIA acronym. These men have no direct contact with the CIA, with Mertz and David their only connection to the operation.

With the ZR/RIFLE Project Team secured, CIA Director Allen W. Dulles orders Case Officer E. Howard Hunt, Jr. to begin mobilizing a Cuban-exile invasion force. Former OSS Colonel Paul Helliwell is chosen as paymaster for the operation, with CIA agent William Pawley ordered to raise "off-the-shelf" finance for the exile brigade. Funding for the invasion comes from contributors such as Howard Hughes and Santos Trafficante, Jr., with CIA asset Frank Sturgis serving as a direct link to Trafficante himself. In addition, Trafficante lieutenants Russell Bufalino, James Plumeri, George Levine and Salvatore Granello provide intelligence on Castro's troop movements. Meanwhile, CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, operating under the alias "Maurice Bishop", assists in the training of the invasion force, and is ordered to serve as Chief of Propaganda for the invasion itself. But most importantly, the CIA makes contact with Mertz and David, ordering them to activate a portion of their ZR/RIFLE Team in preparation for a machine gun ambush of Castro at some point after the invasion. Giancana lieutenants Charles Nicoletti and Richard Cain are to meet the assassins in Miami, acting as a liaison between them and the exiled Cuban brigade. The invasion date is set for April, 1961.

3. RICHARD NIXON RUNS FOR PRESIDENT (1960)
1960. With the continued support of his secret financial backers, Vice-President Richard Nixon announces his candidacy for President of the United States. For the Democratic Party, Senators' John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson emerge as the obvious front-runners, with Kennedy, a man of enormous political savvy, eventually securing the nomination. Kennedy immediately offers Johnson the token vice- presidential slot, but Johnson, however, is reluctant. Hedging his bets, oil baron H.L. Hunt meets with Johnson and urges him to accept Kennedy's offer; Johnson does, and the resultant Democratic ticket is formed. Meanwhile, Kennedy family patriach, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., privately meets with entertainer Frank Sinatra and requests him to liaise with mob boss Sam Giancana. Predicting a tight campaign, Kennedy, Sr. secretly buys the Illinois votes, thereby indebting himself, and his son, to the Mafia chieftan. JFK is unaware of the deal.

1960. John Fitzgerald Kennedy is elected 35th President of the United States, defeating Richard Nixon by a little more than 100,000 votes. Rumours of the stolen election abound, but Nixon, although privately bitter, decides against contesting it, saying: "It would leave the country in a bad state, with no president." Meanwhile, Kennedy, oblivious to the Giancana deal, sends shockwaves through the mob by appointing his younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, to the post of Attorney-General. RFK, already notorious for his pursuit of corrupt union leader James Riddle Hoffa, immediately begins a massive crackdown on organized crime on a scope unprecedented in American history. He specifically targets the operations of Giancana, Trafficante, and Lousiana chieftan Carlos Marcello.

4. THE CIA, THE BAY OF PIGS, AND JOHN F. KENNEDY (1961 - 1962)
1961. CIA Director Allen Dulles and his deputy, Richard Bissell, meet with President- elect Kennedy and brief him on the proposed Cuban invasion plan. Kennedy approves the operation, but quashes the ZR/RIFLE component, ordering that the assassination plot be adandoned.

1961. April 17, 1600 CIA-trained Cuban-exiles land at Cuba's Bay of Pigs in a pre- dawn raid. Kennedy, fearing the consequences of US military involvement, refuses to provide air cover for the exile brigade, and as a result, 114 exiles are killed and 1200 more are captured. The invasion is an unmitigated foreign policy disaster, with Kennedy taking public responsibility for its failure. Privately, however, Kennedy claims that the CIA lied to him, attempting to manipulate him into a full-scale American invasion of Castro's domain. Vowing to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds", Kennedy immediately dismisses the CIA's top leadership, sacking Allen Dulles and his deputies, Richard Bissell and General Charles Cabell. In addition, Kennedy authorizes National Security Action Memorandum's (NSAMs) 55, 56, and 57, instigating the most dramatic restructuring of the Central Intelligence Agency since its inception. In the top secret documents, Kennedy orders the transfer of the CIA's covert activities powers into military jurisdiction, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff now acting as his "prinicipal advisor" in relation to "Cold War operations".

1961. Kennedy issues memoranda authorizing a new anti-Castro program, known as Operation MONGOOSE. Appointing Major General Edward G. Lansdale as Chief of Operations, Kennedy orders a massive sabotage operation against Cuba in an attempt to force Fidel Castro to the political bargaining table. However, Lansdale, protege of the disgraced Allen Dulles, immediately begins plans for another Cuban invasion; acting in secret, he re-activates the ZR/RIFLE Project, appointing CIA agent William Harvey to oversee the Castro assassination plots. Ignoring Kennedy's NSAM directives, Lansdale then embarks on a plan audacious in its scope: establishing comapnies like the Mullen & Company public relations firm and Zenith Technological Services as CIA fronts, Lansdale launders and funnels millions of dollars of mob donations into Miami and Lousiana, establishing secret military boot-camps for the training of a new exile brigade. Within months, Lansdale has transformed MONGOOSE into a complete CIA operation, the biggest in the Agency's history. Keeping his own counsel, the invasion date is set for October, 1962.

1962. Using his informants in the sprawling MONGOOSE operation, Fidel Castro learns of the proposed October invasion. Contacting USSR Premier Nikita Krushchev, Castro requests the installment of Soviet nuclear warheads on his island, indicating his readiness to retalliate against another US invasion attempt. Through military intelligence, President Kennedy soon learns of the Soviet missile build-up; quarantining Cuba, he promises a full US invasion unless the weapons are removed within twelve days. Castro agrees, and Kennedy, defying both the Joint Chiefs and the CIA, assures the Cuban leader that no further invasion plans will be initiated. Good to his word, Kennedy immediately disbands Operation MONGOOSE, reassigning an embittered General Lansdale to the Pentagon; William Harvey, however, continues with the assassination plots unabated, and the increasingly violent network of Cuban-exiles, gangsters, and sympathetic CIA agents continues to spiral dangerously out of control. Within eighteen months of assuming the presidency, Kennedy has been marked for "betraying the cause".

5. RICHARD NIXON RUNS FOR GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA (1962)
1962. Richard Nixon announces his candidacy for the Governorship of California, a last-ditch attempt to ressurect his political career. His efforts are undone, however, when more media reports of his connection to the Howard Hughes organization begin to surface, this time in the form of a $205,000 loan from Hughes to Nixon's brother, Donald. The resulting embarrassment finally ruptures the Nixon/Hughes relationship, ending sixteen years of surreptitious financial sponsorship and festering a state of extreme mistrust between the two men. Nixon loses the election, angrily declaring that the media won't have "Nixon to kick around anymore." Moving back to his private law firm, Richard Nixon shuffles into obscurity as a "political corpse".

6. THE ASSASSINATION OF JOHN F. KENNEDY (1963)
1963. With his continued agenda of sweeping reform, President John F. Kennedy shakes the very foundations of the American Right. In addition to his stance on Cuba, Kennedy signs the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and begins, with the signing of NSAM 263, the surreptitious withdrawl of American "combat advisors" from the jungles of Vietnam. With these initiatives, calculated to bring about an early end to the economically disasterous path of the Cold War, Kennedy effectively seals his own fate. Attempts at curbing him fail; unlike Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy, already a multi-millionaire by the age of twenty-one, cannot be bribed; even veiled attempts at sexual blackmail from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover fail to stop the Kennedy juggernaut. By the Spring of 1963, a small, inter-connected cabal of right- wing businessman with interests and connections to defense contracting, oil, high finance, and the intelligence community, decide that drastic action must be taken to preserve their ideals and livelihoods. This cabal, including H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchinson, Allen Dulles, General Charles Cabell, and General Charles A. Willoughby, have the means, motive, and opportunity to set in motion an effective assassination plot against the President of the United States. To that effect, Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson, a man sympathetic to their concerns, would accede Kennedy as his natural successor by law, thereby giving this cabal limited control over the most powerful political office in the world.

1963. Former CIA Director Allen Dulles, acting on behalf of his network of associates, makes telephone contact with his protege, Major General Edward G. Lansdale, and instructs him to devise an assassination plot against President John F. Kennedy. Lansdale does so, and in a meeting with maverick CIA agent William Harvey, Lansdale instructs Harvey to fly to Rome. There, Harvey makes contact with ZR/RIFLE contract agents Michael Victor Mertz and Christian David. Instructing them to assemble a three-man assassination squad for a US "domestic operation" against a "highly placed American politician", David then flies to Marseilles and liaises with mob chieftan Antoine Guerini, requesting the services of three "specialistes de tir" (sharpshooters). The gunmen, three French Corsicans, are provided. In the company of Mertz, the assassination squad fly from Marseilles to Mexico City where they are met by CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, Jr. and CIA Station Chief David Atlee Phillips, men who have both performed other duties in relation to the assassination conspiracy on the direct orders of Lansdale and Harvey. The hit team reside at a Mexico City safe house for several weeks, before they are driven to the United States border at Brownsville, Texas. Using Italian passports, they cross the border, and are met by Giancana lieutenants Charles Nicoletti and Richard Cain, their allotted "handlers" for the operation. From there, they are driven to Dallas, where the team is provided accomodation at a CIA safe house in Harlandale Avenue, Oak Cliff, an outer suburb of Dallas. They spend several days photographing the proposed ambush site, and decide on a "military-style crossfire" as the safest means of eliminating their target.

1963. November 21, Richard Nixon flies into Dallas for business meetings, and, later, a private dinner engagement at the home of oil magnate Clint Murchinson. Also present at the dinner is former political backer H.L. Hunt, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. During the course of the evening, a lengthy discussion concerning Nixon's political future is initiated. With the prospect of a "Kennedy dynasty" imminent, Nixon's chances of regaining a position on the political stage are unlikely; yet Murchinson and Hunt hold out a morsel of hope, declaring their willingness to financially support Nixon in a 1968 presidential campaign, indicating, along with Hoover, that the Kennedy dynasty may not materialize as many believe. Nixon is urged to consider their offer.

1963. November 22, President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson, whilst leaving Dallas aboard Air Force One, is sworn in as 36th President of the United States. Within four days of Kennedy's death, Johnson rescinds NSAM 263, and, in effect, immediately escalates United States involvement in Vietnam.

1963. November 29, President Lyndon B. Johnson appoints US Chief Justice Earl Warren to form a seven man panel to investigate the circumstances surrounding John F. Kennedy's death; known as the Warren Commission, it immediately absolves the CIA, the FBI, organized crime, right-wing extremists, and the Cuban-exile movement from any involvement in the assassination. Former CIA Director Allen W. Dulles sits as one of the seven commissioners.

1963. Within weeks of John F. Kennedy's murder, Richard Nixon is suddenly back on the national stage, criss-crossing the country at conservative political rallies, fervently campaigning for Republican Party candidates. The media spotlight is intense, with many in the press now speculating that Richard Nixon has finally resurrected his political career.

7. RICHARD NIXON RUNS FOR PRESIDENT (1968)
1968. With the renewed support of his secret financial backers, Richard Nixon announces his candidacy for President of the United States. For the Democratic Party, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey emerge as the obvious front-runners, with Kennedy, a man of enormous political savvy, winning the crucial California Primary vote. Harnessing the tumultuous mood of the nation, Kennedy appears capable of narrowly defeating Humphrey for the Democratic nomination, thus once again pitting Richard Nixon against a Kennedy in the race for the presidency. On June 4, however, Senator Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles, receiving a fatal gunshot wound at point blank range to the back of the head, although his alleged assassin fired upon Kennedy only from the front. Subsequently, and to little fanfare, Richard Milhous Nixon is elected 37th President of the United States.

8. THE CIA, THE BAY OF PIGS, AND RICHARD NIXON (1969)
1969. With the Nixon Presidency just beginning, new Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman approaches President Nixon, suggesting "an investigation into the [John F.] Kennedy assassination", a project Haldeman "had always been intrigued with." Nixon, however, rejects Haldeman's suggestion, quashing the idea outright. Unbeknownst to Haldeman, though, Nixon has already discussed his thoughts on this subject with longtime friend, FBI Division-Five Chief William C. Sullivan, with Nixon voicing his deep suspicion of a CIA-ZR/RIFLE plot against Kennedy in Dallas. Recollecting his direct involvement in the construction of the ZR/RIFLE Project, Nixon grows paranoid, fearing that somehow he may be implicated in the Kennedy assassination itself.

1969. Within days of the Haldeman meeting, "immediately after [he had] assumed office", President Nixon meets with his Domestic Counsel, John D. Ehrlichman, and orders Ehrlichman to obtain "all the facts and documents the CIA [has] on the Bay of Pigs, a complete report on the whole project." The CIA, however, refuses to comply with the President's request, preferring to "dig in their heels and say the President can't have it", indicating that "from the way they're protecting it, it must be pure dynamite." Angered, Nixon summons CIA Director Richard M. Helms to a private meeting at the Oval Office, giving Helms "a direct order to turn over [the Bay of Pigs] document". Engaging in a "long, secret conversation", Nixon finally emerges, telling Ehrlichman to "forget all about that CIA document", ordering him to "cease and desist from trying to obtain it". US Senator Howard Baker later comments: "Nixon and Helms have so much on each other, neither one of them can breathe."

1970. President Nixon's deep mistrust of the CIA continues to consume him. In June, he meets with the directors of the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Security Agency (NSA), announcing a major restructuring of United States intelligence operations. Called the Huston Plan, the directive calls for the formation of a new intelligence facility, a "super agency", combining the resources of the CIA, FBI, DIA and NSA, and, once established, placing this new organization under the direct control of the President himself. Other aspects of the Huston Plan call for (1) intensified electronic surveillance on both domestic security threats and foreign diplomats; (2) the monitoring of American citizens using international communications facilities; (3) increased legal mail coverage and a relaxation of the restrictions on illegal mail coverage; (4) more informants on college campuses; and (5) the lifting of restrictions on surreptitious entry. In many ways reminiscent of President Kennedy's NSAMs 55, 56, and 57 for its unashamed removal of CIA powers, the Huston Plan is met with extreme resistance from the respective agency directors. Nixon, fearing further mistrust and division, immediately aborts the proposal. Unfortunately, though, the damage has already been done.

1971. In a growing climate of civil unrest, sparked by the ferocious opposition to the Vietnam War, President Nixon suspects ideological traitors exist within his own White House staff. To counter this, Nixon has a secret taping system installed in the Oval Office, thus safeguarding against the "faulty recollections" of administration officials, officials who may refute conversations held with the President at some later point in time. Only a handful staff members are aware of the surveillance equipment, including Chief of Staff Haldeman, his assistant Lawrence M. Higby, Deputy Assistant to the President, Alexander P. Butterfield, and another man, General Alexander M. Haig, Jr.

9. THE WATERGATE BURGLARY (1971 - 1972)
1971. Robert F. Bennett, a former Nixon Administraion official, becomes president of Mullen & Company, the CIA front established under Major General Edward G. Lansdale during Operation MONGOOSE. Through his close connection to President Nixon's Special Counsel, Charles W. Colson, Bennett is asked to secretly report on the business activities of a newly signed Mullen client: Howard Hughes. Within days of Bennett assuming his role at the Washington firm, Colson issues a top secret White House memo stating: "I'm sure I need not explain the political implications of having Hughes' affairs handled here in Washington by a close friend."

1972. Charles Colson receives startling information from his Washington source, Bob Bennett. As outlined in a top secret White House memo, it appears that Howard Hughes' Las Vegas operation "is in serious financial difficulty", with longtime Hughes associate Robert Maheu "criminally skimming huge profits from casino operations" for his own benefit. According to the memo, the relationship between Hughes and Maheu "has gone completely sour", with Hughes corporate officials only now "becoming aware of the extent of the monies being stolen. It is feared that substantial millions are involved".

1972. Robert Maheu, the original liaison in the ZR/RIFLE assassination plots, is dismissed from the Hughes organization for his embezzlement of Hughes' Las Vegas funds. Fearing retribution, Maheu drops out of sight, returning to Washington and making contact with longtime associate Lawrence F. O'Brien, "a friendship which dates back to the early or pre-Kennedy days." In a move designed to insure him against the inevitable vengence of the Hughes camp, Maheu entrusts his long time friend with a cache of secret documents, including sensitive details of Hughes' business dealings in which Maheu himself has been intimately involved. Also included are Maheu's personal diaries, which contain the detalied recollections of his involvement in the formation of the ZR/RIFLE Project. O'Brien, who serves as chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), places these secret documents in his office safe at the Watergate Hotel.

1972. Robert Bennett, the original source of the Hughes/Maheu split, secretly meets with his CIA Case Officer, Martin J. Lukasky, informing Lukasky of the "liason between O'Brien and Maheu", and providing his CIA contact with the details of the secret document exchange. The CIA, fearing President Nixon "because of his known distaste for the Agency and his effort[s] to bring them in line via the Huston Plan", seizes upon a fateful opportunity: desperate to acquire possession of Maheu's ZR/RIFLE memoirs, a still heavily classified operation, the Agency moves to manipulate President Nixon himself. Through surreptitious channels, CIA Director Richard Helms instructs Bennett to notify the White House as to the location of the ZR/RIFLE documents, documents which contain detailed references to Richard Nixon's involvement in the assassination project. Accordingly, Bennett does so, outlining the Maheu/O'Brien scenario for "close friend" Charles Colson; Colson, in turn, meets privately with the President.

1972. President Nixon, fearful of the political ramifications arising from his involvement in the ZR/RIFLE Project, authorizes a burglary of the Watergate Hotel, specifically targeting DNC Chairman Lawrence O'Brien's office safe. Utilizing resources already available within the White House, former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, Jr., a man already known to the President as a particpant in the John F. Kennedy assassination, is authorized to assemble a break-and-entry team. Subsequently, Hunt recruits former CIA contract agents Frank A. Sturgis, Bernard L. Barker, Virgilio R. Gonzalez and Eugenio R. Martinez into the "black-bag" plot. The CIA, however, also installs "a plant onto the team" in the form of CIA surveillance expert, James W. McCord, Jr. McCord, once described by ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles as "my top man", is given specific instructions from DCI Richard Helms to sabotage the operation - after the ZR/RIFLE documents have been recovered. Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman later comments: "This time the CIA was ready. In fact, it was more than ready. It was ahead of the game by months. Nixon would walk into what I now believe was a trap."

1972. May 27, the White House break-in team, led by Bernard Barker, enters the office of DNC Chairman Lawrence F. O'Brien and retrieves the Maheu documents from O'Brien's office safe. In addition, undercover CIA agent James W. McCord installs two miniature wiretaps on the phones of O'Brien, and R. Spencer Oliver, the DNC Executive Director. The mission is declared a success, with a victorious E. Howard Hunt, Jr. immediately placing the top secret Maheu documents in his personal White House safe. Days later, however, problems arise. The transmissions from McCord's wiretaps "[don't] even have the range to reach across the street where the receivers [are] installed", thus rendering the listening devices inoperable. Within days, a decision is made to re-enter the Watergate complex, with new listening devices to be installed on the respective telephones.

1972. June 17, the White House break-in team returns to the Watergate Hotel. For this second attempt, CIA agent James McCord volunteers to secure the hotel's various door locks with masking tape, a trick used to ensure easy access into the DNC offices. However, McCord, in following his orders to lay a trap for his fellow burglars, applies the masking tape in a horizontal fashion "so that large swatches [of tape are] exposed on either side". By the time McCord finishes, "the doors on [all] eight floors [are gleaming] with new tape for a guard to discover". As a result, security guard Frank Wills is immediately alerted to the burglars' presence, and within minutes, an unmarked police car is at the scene. This prompt arrival is observed by E. Howard Hunt, who is stationed as a look-out in his private hotel room across the street. Hunt, who is maintaining radio contact with the burglars, frantically attempts to alert the break-in squad via walkie-talkie, but his attempts are thwarted when James McCord turns the opposing receiver off. Minutes later, the burglars are arrested.

1972. June 23, H.R. Haldeman meets with President Nixon, briefing the President as to the state of the FBI's newly initiated Watergate investigation. Desperate to stop this investigation, Nixon discusses the possibility of applying White House pressure on the CIA, who in turn could apply appropriate pressure on the FBI to halt the inquiry. To reinforce his point, Nixon states: "Look, the problem is that this will open the whole...Bay of Pigs thing...[and it's] very bad, to have this fellow [E. Howard] Hunt...he knows too damn much and he was involved [in the Bay of Pigs], we happen to know that. And that it gets out that...this is all involved in the Cuban thing, that it's a fiasco, and it's going to make the...CIA look bad, it's going to make Hunt look bad, and it's likely to blow the whole...Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate for [the] CIA and for the country at this time, and for American foreign policy. I would just say, `Look, it's because of the Hunt involvement.'" As a result of this conversation, Haldeman meets with CIA Director Richard Helms, with Haldeman stating: "The President asked me to tell you this entire affair may be connected to the Bay of Pigs, and if it opens up, the Bay of Pigs may be blown." Several hours later, Haldeman reports back to the President, stating: "Helms...got the picture. He said, `We'll be very happy to be helpful...we'll handle everything you want [in regard to stopping the FBI investigation].'" Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman later comments: "It seems that in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination."

10. THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON (1972 - 1974)
1972. Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are assigned to investigate the Watergate Burglary case, initially stating that "the thought that the break-in might somehow be the work of the Republicans seemed implausible", with the two instead preferring to investigate the arrested burglars' obvious connections to the CIA. This tact is discarded, however, when Woodward makes contact with a highly- placed "source in the Executive Branch" who steers the young reporter away from the CIA's involvement and, instead, eagerly pushes him towards the less-sensitive illegal activities of the Republican Party. This source, referred to by Woodward as "Deep Throat", is none other than General Alexander M. Haig, Jr., a senior official in the Nixon White House. Haig, an old acquaintance of Woodward's, had previously sat as a member of the top secret 54-12 Special Group, working side-by-side with then Vice- President Richard Nixon on the construction of the infamous ZR/RIFLE Project. With an implicit CIA order to direct the Washington Post investigation away from the truth behind the burglary, Haig succeeds in protecting the secrets of the ZR/RIFLE operation, moving instead to furnish Woodward with appropriate information regarding other illegalities within the Nixon Administration. As a result, the Woodward/Bernstein investigation team pursues the Nixon White House with a dogged determination, an investigation that results in dire consequences for President Nixon himself.

1973. Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman receives a four a.m. phone call from President Nixon. With the Senate Watergate Inquiry snagging numerous Nixon officials in an endless array of illegal covert acts, spurred on in part by the on-going Washington Post investigation, the trail to Nixon himself is growing tighter each day. Nixon, however, has finally made the connection between the bungled Watergate burglary and the "CIA trap", now fully aware of the CIA's intention to ensnare him in a national scandal for his attempts to "gain complete political control over the Agency". Speaking in "hushed, almost supernatural" tones, Nixon fires off a series of questions to his loyal Chief of Staff: "Do you know anything about the Bennett P.R. firm, the Mullen Company? Did you ever employ them at the White House? Were they ever retained by us for any purpose? Did you know they were a CIA front? Did you know that Helms ordered Bennett to hire Howard Hunt? Did you know that Hunt was on the payroll at the Bennett firm at the same time that he was on the White House payroll?" Justifiably, Nixon's fear of E. Howard Hunt, Jr. was paramount: if Hunt ever confessed to his particpation in the John F. Kennedy assassination, he could concievably reveal the identities of the Corsican assassins; assassins, of course, originally procured as part of a Nixon operation. To this end, E. Howard Hunt, Jr. had begun a series of blackmail demands aimed directly at the President himself. Within days of the break-in, Hunt had a note delivered to the President, stating: "The writer has a manuscript of a play to sell", with Hunt subsequently promising not to reveal Nixon's real motivations behind the Watergate burglary if his lucrative demands were met. As a result of these demands, Nixon meets with Legal Counsel John W. Dean III, who informs the President of Hunt's request for a further $1,000,000 in "hush money". Nixon states: "That would be no problem", going on further to discuss the option of providing Hunt with executive clemency. On December 8, however, the Nixon plan to buy Hunt's silence goes disasterously awry: whilst fulfilling her role as the "hush money" conduit, Hunt's wife, Dorothy, is killed in an horrific plane crash in Chicago. Investigators at the disaster sight sift through the wreckage, finding Mrs. Hunt's handbag "stuffed full of $100 bills." Within days of this tragedy, E. Howard Hunt, Jr. pleads guilty to his participation in the Watergate crimes, confessing to a further array of illegal acts performed on behalf of the Nixon White House.

1973. As the Senate Watergate investigation continues, the trail to President Richard Nixon appears to be faltering. With no decisive evidence of Nixon's particpation in the planning or cover-up of the crime, Nixon's chances of survival are gaining pace. However, with the resignation of H.R. Haldeman from his role as Chief of Staff, Bob Woodward's "executive source", General Alexander M. Haig, Jr., is appointed to replace him. In a final move designed to deliver Nixon's "coup de grace", Haig instructs his "old Pentagon sidekick" Alexander P. Butterfield to reveal the existence of the secret White House taping system. Butterfield does so, and in shocking testimony to the Senate Caucus Room, the presidential aide discloses that every Oval Office conversation relating to the Watergate conspiracy has been preserved on the President's private surveillance equipment. At last "the central question of presidential guilt or innocence could be resolved." Unbeknownst to either President Nixon or the Senate investigators, though, was Alexander Butterfield's motivation for revealing the existence of the tapes: Butterfield, in his years before joining the White House, "had considerable experience with clandestine operations" whilst working on "assignments" with "the Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs." Alexander Butterfield, it was revealed years later, had been working for the CIA.

1974. August 5, as a direct result of Alexander Butterfield's testimony, the Nixon/Haldeman conversation of June 23 is revealed to the American public for the first time, exposing President Nixon's implicit desire for the FBI to "stay the hell out of this [case]". The tape, revealing Nixon's clear intent to promote an obstruction of justice, leads directly to the House Judiciary Committee passing articles for the President's impeachment and subsequent trial. Nixon vows to fight on, privately declaring that he "will not be forced out [of office] by a coup." Faced with his impending criminal conviction, however, the President contemplates suicide.

1974. August 9, Richard Milhous Nixon resigns the office of President of the United States, the first man ever to do so. Vice-President Gerald R. Ford is promoted to the presidency, immediately granting Nixon a full pardon "for any crimes he may have committed whilst in office." Ford, a former member of President Johnson's Warren Commission, quickly moves to quash any further investigations into the Watergate conspiracy, urging the nation to "put our long national nightmare behind us." Finally, the entangled web of the ZR/RIFLE Project is partially revealed in November, 1975, with the publication of a Senate investigation, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. However, the report fails to make any connection to the Kennedy assassination, and at present, the murderers of President John F. Kennedy remain at large.

Quid Pro Quo - Who Speaks for Roscoe White? by David B. Perry

In early July, 1990 I was having lunch at a Dallas restaurant with Bud Fensterwald of the Assassination Archives and Research Center of Washington, D.C., retired Dallas police officer Jim Leavelle, Gary Shaw and Larry Howard of the JFK Assassination Information Center of Dallas, and Baltimore researcher Gus Russo. During that lunch, Bud looked at me and said, "In a few weeks you and Gus will need new avocations." As Gus and I returned to my house, we reviewed what we had heard and learned. We became convinced that the JFK Center and the AARC had the Kennedy case solved.

On August 6, 1990 I was invited to a press conference in Dallas. The conference was sponsored by the JFK Center and the AARC. At this conference a young man, Ricky Don White, announced that his late father, Roscoe Anthony White, was the "Grassy Knoll" assassin.

The opening remarks by Bud Fensterwald (AARC) left me somewhat puzzled. He stated that this was neither the JFK Center's nor the AARC's story, but Ricky White's story. He explained that if the "information...checks out upon further investigation," we would have additional insight into the "crime of the century." I expected they would announce the solution.

After the press conference, I spoke to Ricky with respect to statements he made about his father's shooting of fellow police officer J.D. Tippitt. Ricky's scenario was too pat and seemed to resolve every question related to the Tippit incident. I sensed potential problems. Two days later, I volunteered my services (I'm an ex-worker's compensation insurance claims investigator, Texas License # 000-12- 6679) to the JFK Center. My resume was reviewed and accepted by Gary Shaw. I set to work. Within weeks I was having difficulty in verifying any of Ricky's statements with factual information. I spent enormous amounts of time in the Dallas library, courthouse and records building. My photocopy, fax and phone bill went sky high.

By January, 1991 I had spoken with thirty-six individuals, six of whom personally knew Roscoe White. I had written reports and developed enough information to fill a two drawer file cabinet, traveled over six hundred miles conducting interviews, lost friends, made new ones and in the end discovered that some researchers are researchers in name only.

I presumed the researcher's duty was to accumulate factual evidence and, with that evidence, reach a conclusion. In the case at hand, I found the conclusion, Roscoe White was the assassin, immediately taken for granted. If facts not supporting that conclusion were brought to light, trouble ensued. On one occasion, after I indicated that statements made by Ricky concerning Roscoe's death could not be verified, Gary Shaw told me, "Stop looking at the peanut and start looking at the shell." This clearly reminded me of the famous "...we're supposed to be closing doors, not opening them" remark.

Another researcher asked what he probably thought was a rhetorical question: "Why would anyone want to do this to Roscoe White?" The simple answer, once I found out about the book and movie deals, "To make money!"

This "story" was not easy to follow. However, there is a common thread. Each part is similar to a building block. Those blocks should have been fully verified. I found this was not the case. In the end, the exaggerated and unproven remarks piled up upon one another and the whole scenario collapsed.

Why, then, do I continue to work on this case? For two reasons.

First, there still might be something there. There are several interesting coincidences: (1) White and Oswald travelled on the same ship, the U.S.S. Bexar; {2) White was a member of the Dallas Police Department on November 22, 1963 and (3) the third Oswald backyard photograph {CE 133-C) was in the possession of Roscoe White's wife, Geneva.

Second, because of an interview with one of Roscoe White's closest friends. They worked together at M&M Equipment Company, the location where Roscoe received his fatal burns. He was a pallbearer at White's funeral. He said, "They are treating him the way they claim the government treated Oswald. Roscoe is dead and can't defend himself. Who speaks for Roscoe?"

For now, I guess it will be me.

What follows are five monographs and comments. Each represents a major "building block" of the story. I report what I have discovered during my investigations. The conclusions are my own. As a researcher, I am willing to modify my conclusions when faced with factual information which contradicts that discovered. What you are about to read represents a small part of the total investigative "package."

1. Did Roscoe White and Lee Oswald serve together in the United States Marine Corps?

Background
This statement first came to light at the Ricky White press conference, held August 6, 1990. "White served in the Marine Corps with LEE HARVEY OSWALD. The two were stationed together in Marine Air Wing 1 at Japan's Atsugi Air Base, home of a highly secret CIA operation. Ricky White claimed to have a photograph of Oswald and Roscoe White together.

Facts
I was provided with a copy of Roscoe White's military record: a duplicate of the records Ricky claimed to have discovered in his father's footlocker in 1982. Research comparing Oswald's and White's records shows the statement "they served together" to be partially correct but highly amplified.

Both Oswald and White were in the Marines. They both embarked for Japan on the U.S.S. Bexar on August 21, 1957 They left San Diego and arrived at Yokosuka, Japan on September 12, 1957. The ship held hundreds of servicemen.

Both Oswald and White were part of Marine Wing 1. However, Marine Wing 1 operations encompassed extensive territory including Japan, Okinawa, Iwo Jima and Guam. White was part of the Marine Observation Squadron-2, Marine Air Group 16. On September 19, 1957 he left Tachkawa, Japan for Kadena Air Base, Okinawa. He served as an auto vehicle operator. Oswald reported to Marine Air Control Squadron-1, Marine Air Group 11 at Atsugi, Japan on September 13, 1957. He obtained a security clearance and worked with the U-2 project.

With respect to the Oswald/White photo Ricky claimed to possess: at first I thought it was a copy of the John Marcxx photograph that appears in Epstein's "Legend". However, additional investigation shows the photo in question to be copied from the November 28, 1988 issue of "Time" magazine. Another version of the Marcxx photo, cropped differently, appears in "Life" magazine. Ricky White claimed Roscoe is the Marine in the background, leaning against the tree with the bill of a cap covering his face in the John Marcxx photo. This is incorrect. The photograph was taken when Oswald's group was on the northern end of the Philippine archipelago as part of "Operation Strongback." White was in Naha, Okinawa acting as a vehicle operator.

Conclusion
Oswald and White did serve in the Marines. They travelled together to Japan on the U.S.S. Bexar. They were assigned to different units and had different vocations. White was never stationed at Atsugi. Oswald had at least a "Confidential" security clearance. I can find no record of White having any security clearance. White and Oswald could not have been photographed together in the photo exhibited by Ricky White, as they were in different places at the time of the photograph.

2. Was there a relationship between the Whites and Jack Ruby?
Background
The press kit synopsis states, "Geneva White, Roscoe's wife, was employed by Jack Ruby at his Carousel Club for several weeks in September, 1963. During that period, she overheard her husband and Ruby discussing plans for the assassination. Roscoe photographed Geneva and Ruby together (see press kit).

Ricky White underwent a polygraph examination on 01/27/90. He stated his mother worked for Ruby. His answer was deemed to be truthful.

Facts
The press kit photograph is not a photograph at all. It is a laser photocopy of a photograph that appeared in the 11/28/88 issue of "Time" magazine. The press kit attributes the photo to Roscoe White. The statement is incorrect. The photo was taken by Jimmy Rhodes. Rhodes was employed by Ruby.

I have interviewed friends of the White family who identify the woman in the photograph as Geneva White. The JFK Center claimed Geneva was a rail girl. However, Time/Life indicates Rhodes labeled the photograph, "Ruby with stripper."

No authenticated evidence has been presented by Ricky White or the JFK Center (i.e., an original of the Rhodes photo, payroll stub, canceled check, autograph or family snapshot) that Geneva White worked for Ruby or more specifically that a relationship of any kind existed between the White family and Ruby.

Conclusion
While it is possible that Geneva White did work for Ruby, there is no evidence that a personal relationship existed. Someone, in my opinion, distributed tainted evidence and made incorrect statements to support a pre-conceived conclusion. To distribute spurious material at a press conference as "evidence" is inexcusable.

The purpose of the Ricky White polygraph test is also suspect. On November 26, 1990, I called The Integrity Center. This company conducted the polygraph examination of Ricky White. I spoke with the examiner, Billy Wingo. He commented, "Joe West (a former investigator for the JFK Center) had about twenty questions, but some were duplicates. We threw out the duplicates and re-phrased some, so the questions were set up correctly for the polygraph. In the end there were only fifteen questions. Joe West and I put them together."

"I provided two ex-law enforcement officers, experienced with the administration of polygraph examinations, copies of the exam. Both concluded the questions were poorly framed. The exam was incomplete in that appropriate follow up and "blind" questions were not asked. "It's as if the next question was never asked. Instead of asking Ricky if the FBI took the diary, they asked if he knew where the diary was! I can't consider this a competent exam. It's totally unacceptable." On February 14, 1991, I recontacted The Integrity Center to requestion Billy Wingo. I was curtly told, "Wingo no longer works here." To date I have been unable to contact Mr. Wingo at his last known address.

If one cannot prove Geneva White worked for Ruby, then the statement, made later, that Geneva "overheard Ruby and her husband discussing the assassination of Kennedy" fails. A major point of the "story" disintegrates.

3. Did Roscoe White die in a "mysterious" fire because he wouldn't perform one more assignment?
Background
The press kit states, "White died under suspicious circumstances in a 1971 fire. This fire occurred just months after Roscoe, according to a local minister, made known his desire to sever his affiliation with U.S. Intelligence. Reverend Jack Shaw said White told him "the explosion was no accident."

Facts
Roscoe White and Richard Adair were both burned in an industrial accident (fire) while working at M&M Equipment. The fire report shows the accident happening on 09/23/71 at 4:30 p.m. Adair survived. White died on 09/24/71 at 5:50 p.m. "of severe burns of the body."

Both Adair and the Estate of Roscoe White filed lawsuits against Arrow Chemical to recover for damages. Each lawsuit described how the loss occurred. Adair's is more specific, as he lived through the ordeal. What follows are the descriptions of the loss as found in Adair's lawsuit.

Richard Adair was helping White "to weld a piece of metal by holding the piece of metal while White did the actual welding. They were working on a metal table which had been constructed for that purpose and under this metal table was stored a can of liquid compound known as PC-68...a substance which is highly volatile and inflammable and explosive in nature." Arrow Chemical marketed this compound which they claim "was of merchantable quality, safe, and fit for the purpose for which it was used." Adair claims that the defendant (Arrow Chemical) failed "to test its product and provide an adequate warning of any dangerous propensity..." of the product PC-68.

As to the claim of the Estate of Roscoe White: "Retired Dallas lawyer Lamar Holley represented the White family in a lawsuit against the manufacturer of a flammable chemical that apparently caused the explosion that resulted in Mr. White's death. Mr. Holley said he considered the lawsuit nothing more than a product liability case."

Conclusion
There was a fire, but the record shows it was not intentional. A can of volatile liquid with the warning label missing was stored under a workbench for an indeterminate period of time. No one knew of its dangers until metal slag dripped onto the top of the can, burned through, and the liquid exploded.

I have interviewed four witnesses to the fire (including Adair) and the widow of a fifth witness. Not one person indicated the fire mysterious, only accidental. One witness stated "Roscoe was in the driveway, totally burned. He said he was sorry for causing the accident and felt it would cost him his job."

4. Were photos, including the famous third backyard photograph, stolen from Geneva White?
Background
The press kit states, "1975...JFK assassination photographs belonging to the late Roscoe Anthony White are taken during a break-in of the White home in Paris, Texas. The materials are recovered in Arizona and returned to Roscoe's widow Geneva (by now remarried) who notifies the FBI.

An article in TEXAS MONTHLY states, "Two men broke into the White home in Paris, beat up Geneva, and took, among other things, the packet of pictures. The men were arrested a few days later in Florida on an unrelated charge, and FBI agents sent the pictures to Washington."

Facts
The Paris, Texas police department have no record of any burglary, robbery or attack at the White (Dees) home in 1975. They have records of burglaries in February, 1974 and January, 1976. The 1974 report mentions a "strong arm robbery" and theft of jewelry. Neither report mentions the theft of photographs.

The March 19, 1976 issue of NEW TIMES reports, "Some months ago, the widow surrendered the pictures to a pair of would-be con artists. Schweiker's staff was tipped to the case by a Texas law enforcement official and managed to track the con men -- and the pictures -- down.

Conclusion
It appears this portion of the story was never fully investigated, nor were any of the "facts" verified prior to the press conference. Ricky's version to the JFK Center mentions a break-in and capture of the culprits in Arizona. For TEXAS MONTHLY, it becomes a break-in and beating of Geneva White; the thieves are apprehended in Florida. In NEW TIMES there is no beating or burglary, only some con-men. The Paris police have no record of a break-in, beating or theft of photographs on or near the date given by Ricky White.

The NEW TIMES article, written within a year of the episode, is probably the closest to actual events.

5. What is the status of the three cables ordering Roscoe White to assassinate Kennedy?
Background
The press kit states, "1990 (June 9)...Using a cryptic message left by his father, Ricky White travels to Paris, Texas, to his grandparent's empty house. There in the attic, shielded by boards, Ricky discovers an unusual steel container...Inside he finds three messages similar to cable grams which allude to the Kennedy assassination.

The press kit contains copies of the cables. It appears some governmental authority placed White on the Dallas police department and later ordered White to shoot Kennedy, deemed to be a "national security threat to worldwide peace."

Facts
In August, 1990 a former investigator for the JFK Center, Joe West, obtained the cables. He was not authorized to do so. At that point, Matsu, a company financing Ricky's investigation, filed suit for the return of the cables. Pending trial, West turned the cables over to a forensic laboratory in Arizona. The laboratory discussed the authenticity of the cables in a report dated August 19, 1990.

Because of pending litigation and the fact that the cables were sealed in .0008 inch plastic, only non destructive testing could be used. Still the cables were reviewed as to type of paper (inexpensive newsprint), instrument used for typing (manual typewriter using 10 character per inch Pica style font), evidence of involvement in a fire (Ricky's grandfather's house had partially burned -- no smoke residue was discovered) and content.

Conclusion
Matsu did get the cables back from Joe West. They have not publicly refuted the test results, nor have they given the impression they will submit the cables for non destructive or destructive testing by a qualified laboratory. Until new testing is done, we have only the results of this test:

"Based on these findings, I have concluded Items A(1-3) are not genuine, but are the enabling products of a potential hoax."

Additional notes and comments
What follows are common questions asked in relationship to the White case. I include them here as some are unsupported by documentation.

1. Who is Matsu? Matsu is a group of Midland, Texas oil men who became interested in the White story after being approached by Ricky and Ricky's friend, Andy Burke. Matsu was incorporated in Texas on January 25, 1989. The agent of record was Jack Ladd. Matsu takes its name from the Island of Matsu, off Taiwan. Handling of the island was a subject covered in the Kennedy/Nixon debates. Matsu funded Ricky and Andy's "research efforts."

2. Who is Andy Burke? Andy worked with Ricky in West Texas for Orkin Pest Control. He and Ricky worked on the White investigation. At some point, Ricky felt "Andy was looting the story." Matsu bought out Burke for an undisclosed sum of money.

3. Who is "Bill X?" "Bill X" is a long time friend who resides in Paris, Texas. He is an interesting character. Based on Ricky's recollections: (a) "Bill X" hid the packet of photographs, including the Oswald backyard photograph, for Roscoe for several years. He later returned them to Geneva. (b) Geneva White knew "Bill X" before she knew Roscoe. (c) Shortly before the HSCA report was to come out in 1979, "Bill X" warned Ricky that his father might be implicated in the Kennedy assassination. (d) Some people in Paris, Texas think "Bill X" is a former Navy intelligence agent. (e) "Bill X" owns an auto upholstering shop in Paris, Texas.

I understand Kevin Walsh interviewed "Bill X." He denied the Naval Intelligence background. He did serve in the regular Navy, however. He claims he is often mistaken for a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agent, who has a similar name. "Bill X" also believes Ricky has a rather fertile imagination.

On October 25, 1962, "Bill X" received a commendation from the Navy. He saved the life of an infant by applying mouth to mouth resuscitation. This makes it difficult to believe he was a "Naval intelligence" operative within a year of this event.

4. Was there a book deal? Yes. Matsu signed a contract with local author Richard Abshire. Abshire did produce a synopsis of the Roscoe White story prior to November 1, 1989. Representatives of the Whites (including Ricky) met with a Viking/Penguin representative at the Melrose Hotel, New York City in early 1990. The synopsis and future book rights were rejected by Viking/Penguin.

5. Was there a movie deal? I'm not sure. The JFK Center was working with Oliver Stone. On October 12, 1990, the Houston Chronicle reported "Alex Kitman (Stone's producer) has a contract with the JFK Assassination Information Center..." The Center's staff were to act as consultants to Stone. This does not mean they were to provide Stone with the White scenario.

Summation
There are only four people who could shed light on this "story:" Roscoe White, Geneva White, Reverend Jack Shaw and the family friend known as "Bill X." Ricky was three at the time of the assassination and about eleven at the time of his father's death. As a researcher, I cannot accept childhood recollections as fact without some documentation. Factual documentation has never been presented.

I sadly report Geneva White died in February, 1991. The list is reduced to two: two who were on the fringes of what went on within the White household during many critical days. We may never know.

I am sure we all would like to see the Kennedy assassination resolved. To date I have found nothing linking Roscoe White to that event. I have received little cooperation from Ricky White, Matsu or the JFK Assassination Information Center. I must assume that is because I could find no supporting evidence.

Have you ever gone to some social event, and been introduced as a Kennedy researcher? If so, what happens? Some people roll their eyes and give you the "here we go again" look. It may be because of the sheer volume of sublime to ridiculous "stories" they have heard over the years.

We now have Roscoe Anthony White's name added to the list of "grassy knoll" assassins. Unbelievably, Gary Shaw held a press conference in May, 1990, just three months before the Ricky White conference. There he named Charles Nicoletti as the "grassy knoll" assassin. One reporter, at the White press conference, referred to the presentation as "the assassin of the month club." We can ill afford this type of publicity if we expect people to take us seriously.

It is our responsibility to properly investigate allegations and let the narratives stand or fall on the merits. We should be opening doors not closing them.

ADDENDUM
I finished the article you just read in February 1991. It has been over a half year since the report was completed. What follows is an update.

Defenders of the Roscoe White story have claimed that statements made by the "military man" (Gordon Arnold) support what was written in the diary. Based on this "evidence," we are encouraged to believe that Roscoe White was the grassy knoll assassin. For that reason, a closer look at the record is warranted.

On September 4, 1990 Ricky White appeared at the University of Texas at Arlington. He was questioned by Jim Marrs' class extensively about his father's diary. At some point he was asked, "What did the diary say your father did after he shot the President?" Ricky's response was, "The diary said after my father shot the President he handed his 7.65 Mauser to the man standing beside him, hurled over the fence, took the film from the military man, whirled around the fence and went through the parking lot."

During September 1990 Ricky was interviewed by Woody Woodland of "Manchester" magazine. Woodland had two telephone conversations with Ricky (9/27/90 and 9/30/90). The calls were the basis for an article Woody wrote to the December 1990 issue under the title, "Woody Interviews Ricky Don White."

White: "That (fatal shot) was fired by the man behind the stockade fence."
Woodland: "Okay. And then you read that and --"
White: "Then it states that he hands the rifle to a man to the right of him. And he has to hurl over the fence. He hurled over it, so therefore he jumped over the fence. There was a man that was evidently standing just right in front of him that was filming the motorcade because he talks about a military man that he had to hurl over the fence and obtain his film. And this man is Gordon Arnold, I don't know if you are familiar with Gordon Arnold."
Woodland: "No, I'm not. You say he had to obtain his film you say?'
White: "Obtain. Obtain."..."And he had a small Bell and Howell camera that he was sitting there shooting this motorcade that was coming by. Well, when the shots were fired -- now I know what happened, it's because Gordon Arnold said he heard these shots come from the right side of his ear..."

Ricky has always maintained the diary indicated his father shot from what has come to be known as the House Select Committee acoustic position: approximately 10 feet west of the southern corner of the picket fence.

Gordon Arnold was first interviewed by Earl Golz of the Dallas Morning News. Golz's article appeared in the August 27, 1978 issue under the caption, "SS 'Imposters' Spotted by JFK Witnesses.' Here is what Arnold said about the event:

"He said he 'felt' the first shot come from behind him, only inches over his left shoulder. He said he heard two shots 'and then there was a blend. For a single bolt action, he had to have been firing darn good because I don't think anybody could fire that rapid a bolt action.' 'The next thing I knew someone was kicking my butt and telling me to get up,' Arnold said, 'It was a policeman. And I told him to go jump in the river. And then this other guy -- a policeman -- comes up with a shotgun and he was crying and that thing was waving back and forth. I said you can have everything I've got. Just point it someplace else.' Arnold took his film from the canister and threw it to the policeman."

Ricky claims Roscoe was in the acoustic position when he fired. The military man "heard these shots come from the RIGHT side of his ear." Arnold said the first shot was "inches over his LEFT shoulder." Roscoe handed his Mauser to an accomplice to his right and "hurled" over the fence (from the acoustic position). That would put him on the embankment to the south side of the fence. Arnold did not say specifically where the first "policeman" came from. However, if this individual came from Roscoe's alleged position, he would have been in full view of the witnesses headed for the grassy knoll. This person would also have been visible to the workers on the railroad overpass who already had seen a puff of smoke in the acoustic area.

The diary makes mention of White handing the gun off "to the right." There is no indication of what the accomplice does next but if he accompanied Roscoe in "hurling" over the fence both would certainly be noticed.

Ricky has been quick to point out that Arnold had a Bell and Howell camera. This story, not linked to the diary, surfaced because he found an 8 mm reel of film in the foot locker. Later we were told this was possibly Arnold's film. There are two problems here. (1) Arnold referred to a canister, not a reel of film. (2) In September l990 Nigel Turner ("The Men Who Killed Kennedy") checked with Arnold to find out if his mother's camera (the same one he used that day) was a Bell and Howell. It was not!

Since this is such a major part of the story, why the discrepancies? Could Roscoe White be that far off in his diary? Could Gordon Arnold be that confused? One possibility is that the diary is a hoax created by an individual with some knowledge of the Arnold incident but not enough to get the details straight. That individual would have no knowledge of the Golz article. This leads to several questions: (1) Are there references to the Arnold story elsewhere? (2) Are they as accurate as the Golz story or do they only give partial information? (3) If there is incomplete information, does it dovetail with the story as related in the diary? (4) If there are other stories, when were they available to the public?

Since Arnold's story came out in 1978 and the diary was found in 1982, then a forgery could be developed during that four year window. However, if the stories do not match, someone had to work on the diary AFTER an incomplete or erroneous version of the story surfaced.

Richard Abshire wrote a manuscript on Roscoe White's life for Matsu. It was completed prior to November 1, 1989. From the Woodland interview of Ricky White, it appears Matsu was satisfied with the work. What is interesting is that the manuscript MAKES NO MENTION OF THE ARNOLD STORY BUT IT DOES MENTION AN "8 MM REEL OF UNDEVELOPED FILM."

There are four places I find references to the Arnold story.
(1) In Jim Marrs' Crossfire (1989) the Arnold story is almost verbatim to the Golz article. The major difference in Crossfire is that the policeman "pulled out the film." No mention is made of the canister.
(2) In Anthony Summers' Conspiracy (1980) the story is of two policemen approaching. "Arnold said he gave the police his film and then left..."
(3) The story also appears in the video, "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" (1988). Arnold is interviewed and if you don't pay close attention you could infer only one policeman was there. The problem is that "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" was not released for viewing in the United States until late September 1991 on the Arts and Entertainment Network.
(4) I find a reference to Arnold in High Treason. The first edition of the Groden/Livingstone book has a publishing date of March, 1989. On pages 399-400 I found the following:
"Gordon Arnold, a service man, tried to film the motorcade from the carpark behind the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll, and was chased away by a man in a suit showing CIA credentials. Arnold moved away and filmed from an area close to the stairs, and he seems to appear in enhanced versions of the Moorman photograph shown on the broadcast, standing close to a rifleman firing. He said a shot whistled close by his left ear and he hit the dirt as he had been trained to do. A second shot was fired close 'over my head,' and he was then confronted by a gunman in a blue policeman's uniform, without a hat, and with dirty hands, who kicked him and asked Arnold if he was filming, and then took his film away from him."

It is obvious from the above that the authors of High Treason related their summation of the interview of Arnold from "The Men Who Killed Kennedy." Note the reference to "carpark" and "photograph shown on the broadcast." They also made the mistake of not listening closely enough. Arnold talks about two policeman not one.

So in my opinion the Arnold episode as related in the diary is a forgery -- one that fooled many researchers. I conclude this because the version in the diary most matches the incomplete version printed in High Treason, which was published in March of 1989. The Abshire manuscript (which does not mention the incident) was published in November, 1989. So it would seem this part of the "diary" was created sometime between November, 1989 and August 6, 1990, the day the JFK Assassination Information Center surfaced the tale.

Of some importance is the fact that fellow researcher Gary Mack and I succeeded in contacting Linda Wells, Roscoe White's sister. Additionally we gained indirect contact, through Linda, with Merle Rogers, White's mother. Gary and I conducted a four hour video taped interview with Linda in late June. Her comments put some of this "story" in perspective.

For example: other investigators were working on the theory, originally advanced by the JFK Assassination Center, that Roscoe White was responsible for forging the "backyard photos." The Center indicated that White was a photography enthusiast, had a darkroom, and printed trick photos such as his children floating in mid-air or a bowling ball landing in the wrong alley. This led to the claim that it was White who stuck Oswald's head on photographs of Roscoe's body.

We asked Linda Wells and, through her, her mother what they knew about this. Linda and Merle never knew Roscoe to have a photographic hobby. They had never seen any examples of his work. Originals or copies have been requested from Ricky White and the JFK Center for months, but examples have never been provided.

In a related episode, Merle Rogers was shown a copy of the Philippines photo which supposedly shows Roscoe and Oswald together. She could not identify her own son as the Marine in the background. She felt the physique was somewhat similar, but the hat was so far down over the face...no one could tell for sure.

In April, two local researchers were contacted by a military associate of White. He related a story that White broke his right wrist during a howitzer recoil accident. While looking at the backyard photographs, he pointed out a bump on White's right wrist supposedly the result of the accident.

My copy of the military records shows no accident resulting in a broken wrist. Merle Rogers told Linda that Roscoe did break his wrist, but not in the service. He broke it in a sawmill accident before he entered the Marines. A drive belt had snapped that caused the fractured wrist. If you look at your own wrists, you will find bumps. In my opinion they are caused by the common protrusion from the ulna bone.

More information from the Linda Wells interview: Roscoe was a rookie in the fingerprint department. He told his mother and sister he was getting to see evidence brought in. He saw the gun used to kill Kennedy -- hardly the statement of one of the assassins.

Roscoe told Linda that he got his set of photographs, those later provided the Schweiker committee, while on his job with the Dallas police department. He felt that he was not supposed to have copies and he believed he might get into trouble if his superiors knew. Again, hardly the statement of an assassin.

As an interesting aside, the JFK Center indicated that the additional "backyard" photo (CE-133 C) was one "...which [had] never before surfaced..." This is not true. The HSCA Appendix to Hearings, Volume VI, page 180, shows another version of this photograph was supplied by Dallas police officer Richard Stovall.

Linda Wells claims Gary Cartwright quoted her out of context in his article "I Was MANDARIN..." for the December 1990 issue of Texas Monthly magazine. The quote later appeared in Newsweek on December 10, 1990:
"I think he was the Oliver North of his time. He was just doing what he thought was best for our country." "Texan LINDA WELLS, sister of the late Roscoe Wells (sic). She is one of the several conspiracy theorists who think he was the actual killer of John Kennedy."

Linda states Cartwright asked her a series of questions concerning Roscoe's role in the assassination. Linda maintained her brother could not be involved. Cartwright asked if she was shown absolute proof, what would she say? It was only at that point that she said "I think he was the Oliver North...etc."

In May 1991, Gary Mack and I were given copies of a newspaper article on the Patterson-Rogers wedding. It reported Linda Merle Rogers married John Patterson. The ceremony was performed at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Dees. Mrs. Dees was the former Geneva White. The best man was Ricky White. The matron of honor was Mrs. Ray Tippit. Since Ray Tippit was the nephew of J.D. Tippit, we were told the wedding announcement was proof Roscoe White was a friend of J.D. Tippit.

Since Linda Wells is the former Linda Patterson, we asked about the connection. Linda felt this was preposterous. "Using this 1974 article to make a connection between J.D. Tippit, my brother and me is foolish. It was only Ray's wife that was a friend, not the whole Tippit family! Ray Tippit never even showed up. How irresponsible can these people be?"

Since November 1990, the JFK Assassination Information Center promised an interim report on the White case. The report was to be prepared by the office of the Texas Attorney General. It came, not as a report, but as an article by Earl Golz in the February 2, 1991 edition of the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman.

"MORALES TO CLOSE FILE ON OFFICER
LINKED TO KENNEDY ASSASSINATION"

"'So far everything we have looked at has not given any credibility to anything these people have been trying to say about the documents and that whole affair,' said Morales' aide Ron Dusek."

Linda now says Ricky feels abandoned. Andy Burke tried, in Ricky's words, "to loot the story" and was asked to leave by Matsu. Joe West was fired by the JFK Center at the time of the press conference. Ricky believed West used their friendship to obtain the "cables," which West then held for safekeeping. Matsu finally obtained the "cables" from West, but only after filing a temporary restraining order (Harris County #90-053893). The state of Matsu is unknown. Three weeks after the Ricky White press conference, Reverend Jack Shaw denied hearing a death bed confession from Roscoe White. He has made no further comment. Linda says Tony White, Ricky's brother, almost lost his job over this episode. Geneva White died in February 1991.

Not mentioned at the press conference was the fact that Ricky White flew to California a few weeks earlier to meet with Oliver Stone. I also determined the JFK Center did have an $80,000 agreement with Stone to consult on a movie about the assassination. That contract may have been signed shortly after the press conference.

The existence of the contract was made public by Jerry Urban of the Houston Chronicle. Urban had been interviewing Gary Mack about the Stone film. During the course of their conversation, Mack revealed he had a copy of a draft contract between Stone and the JFK Center. When Urban asked for a copy, Gary declined to provide one. Urban then called Bud Fensterwald of the AARC and Kitman Ho, Stone's executive producer. Both confirmed the agreement's existence.

In an October 1990 letter to Mack's employer, KXAS-TV, the JFK Center threatened both Gary and the station with a lawsuit. The lawsuit was based on the belief that the contract between the JFK Center and Stone might be cancelled because Mack had divulged some terms of the agreement to the Houston Chronicle. If the contract were to be canceled, the JFK Center would demand restitution in the amount of $80,000 for the contract and $5,000,000 in damages.

With respect to Oliver Stone's film, "JFK": you may have learned that Warren Commission critics Harold Weisberg and David Lifton as well as defender David Belin are concerned about the movie. On May 19, 1991 George Lardner's critical article "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland" appeared in the Washington Post. Stone replied to the Post two weeks later with "Stone's 'JFK': a Higher Truth? The Post, George Lardner and My Version of the JFK Assassination."

With all the charges and counter-charges, little attention has been paid Stone's change in ideology before and after gaining access to the former Texas School Book Depository. When the film's advance staff was in Dallas, they tried to obtain approval for access to the building from the Dallas County Commissioners. At that time Stone was stressing the need for accuracy in reports to the media. For example, there appeared in the April 14, 1991 edition of the Dallas Morning News the following quotes from Oliver Stone: "It's a question of accuracy. It's always better to be accurate if you can."..."And these are native Texans. They say, 'We want the truth to be known. We're glad you're making it here.'"..."There is a younger generation of people that want some element of truth to come out."

Once filming in Dallas was nearly complete and the company moved on to New Orleans, Stone's statements about the film changed. This from a story by Elaine Duta in the Los Angeles Times Calendar for June 24, with a story headlined OLIVER STONE FIGHTS BACK: "...His 'JFK' is still being filmed but critics are already assailing its accuracy and motives. 'This isn't history, this is moviemaking,' the director rejoins -- and star Kevin Costner agrees."

Why do I bring this up? On April 19, 1991 I received an invitation to observe some of the filming. This was during the film company's "need for historical accuracy" period. I observed the crew filming an actor in a Dallas policeman's uniform shooting from the acoustic position---exactly where Ricky White claimed the diary said his father was. I also saw the Gordon Arnold character. For the shot to pass over Arnold's left shoulder as he revealed to the Dallas Morning News in 1978, Stone had Arnold standing much closer to the street than he really claimed he was.

Unless that scene is edited or cut, we will see Roscoe White -- not necessarily by name but by implication. Oliver Stone can claim it's only a movie, not a documentary, but that scene will have a profound impact on the audience. By innuendo, Roscoe White, without any proof, has been charged with the killing of President John F. Kennedy.

To paraphrase one of Roscoe White's best friends, who was also a pallbearer at this funeral: some "researchers" have done to Roscoe White exactly what the Warren Commission did to Lee Harvey Oswald.

Further Updates
The "Witness Book" or "Witness Elimination Book" as it was originally called purported to list individuals Roscoe White killed to cover up his crime. The book contains a photograph of one such victim Perry Raymond Russo. Russo's an important witness in the Garrison/Shaw trial, is not only very much alive but was featured as an angry bar patron in Oliver Stone's JFK!

The doctor responsible for giving Geneva White shock treatments stated flatly that those treatments were given for depression. Additionally, Roscoe White's military file reveals Geneva White was receiving shock therapy years before the assassination. Therefore, statements that Jack Ruby demanded she receive the treatments so she would "forget everything" are suspect.

Reverend Jack Shaw, after questioning by Richard Ray of Dallas TV Channel Four (KDFW), admitted he never heard a deathbed confession from White and everything he heard about White's activities he "heard from Geneva."

The Dallas Police Department pre-employment background check on Roscoe White reveals that at the time Geneva White claimed employment for Jack Ruby she was out of work as a waitress at the Cattleman's Restaurant. She sustained a head injury in a slip and fall accident, was disabled and unable to work.

Ricky White asserted he obtained his father's military footlocker filled with papers documenting his father's role in the assassination from "two of my aunts while attending my grandfather's funeral in Paris, Texas." Both his aunts, Geneva White's sisters by the way, deny the incident took place. They claim Roscoe gave the footlocker to their brother who "stored tools in it." I have also contacted the brother who claims his sisters' report is accurate and "Ricky got my footlocker while I was away."

All three of Geneva's relatives indicated they didn't believe the story and were never shown any evidence of their brother-in-law's involvement. One sister claimed Ricky told her "if you go along with this we're all going to get rich."

Ricky maintained he discovered his father's military records in the foot locker. Under a Freedom Of Information Act request I ascertained it was Ricky who ordered the records from the government. The US Navy/Marine Record Center in St. Louis, MO. forwarded the documents on December 2, 1988.

A Dallas Police memo stamped "Top Secret" reveals Ricky originally told Midland and Dallas, Texas police as well as the FBI that his father had an affair with a woman named Hazel "who worked at the Texas School Book Depository." Ricky later changed the story claiming Hazel "worked for Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall." I must assume someone, knowing that researchers have lists of every employee at the TSBD on November 22, 1963, coached Ricky to change the account. No person with the first or last name Hazel appears in TSBD records.

In the Spring of 1990, Ricky unearthed a canister in the attic of his grandfather's "burned out" house in Paris, Texas. We were led to believe the container was probably secreted there by White before his death in 1971. This was the same canister that held the "military cables" shown by the Northern Arizona Forensic Laboratory to be fabrications. Curiously, included in the canister was at least one of Roscoe White's dog tags. There is a problem. When White entered the service he received two dog tags. Upon separation from the Marines, White gave both tags to his mother, Merle H. Rogers. Mrs. Rogers gave one dog tag to Ricky and another to Roscoe's sister, Linda Wells in January 1989. Linda Wells gave her dog tag to Ricky in the presence of J. Gary Shaw and Joe West, the later two of The JFK Assassination Information Center, in June of 1990. This occurred a few months before the press conference (August 8, 1990) when the contents of the canister ware shown. The question remains: if White hid the container before his death how did one of his dog tags get in the canister?

I could go on and on about this. Actually I already have. By early 1991 I was disillusioned. The very researchers I looked up to for many years remained silent on an issue I felt was their responsibility to expose as a hoax. Why did the act this way? Was it because they were trying to sell the story to Oliver Stone for three quarters of a million dollars?

What was the outcome? What resulted from The JFK Assassination Information Center's lack of response to the story?

From Oliver Stone's book JFK: The Book of the Film, page 20:
[Note: In what appears to be nothing more than a publicity- seeking hoax, a Texas group that included White's son and widow presented "evidence" in 1990 that White was the real assassin behind the picket fence. Many of their claims have been debunked. (See David B. Perry "Who Speaks for Roscoe White?," The Third Decade, November, 1991.)]

The JFK Center presented the same "evidence" to the Texas State Attorney General. In the end what was the reaction from the State of Texas?
"So far everything we have looked at has not given any credibility to anything these people have been trying to say about the documents and that whole affair."
Ron Dusek
State Attorney General Aide
February 1, 1991

No wonder we are called "buffs." This is the stuff that diverts us from the real purpose of our efforts. To resolve the case.

The Man Oswald Missed - In his last interview, Gen. Edwin Walker defended his place in history by Robert Wilonsky

When Dallasites read the news that Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker died peacefully at 83 in his modest North Dallas home, most of the city's residents struggled to remember who he was.

If they remembered the general at all, it was for his brief brush with infamy.

Walker narrowly survived a bullet from Lee Harvey Oswald's Mannlicher- Carcano rifle, only seven months before Oswald would cut down John Kennedy with the same weapon a few miles away in Dealey Plaza.

A front-page obituary in the Dallas Morning News and a large one in The New York Times helped Dallasites fill in the blanks, bringing the general into uncomfortable focus, particularly when they recalled the Dallas of the 1960s that Walker personified: Commie-bashing, anti-desegregationism, Kennedy- baiting, and right-wing fanaticism.

Walker's Halloween death from lung disease, no doubt from a chain-smoking habit, was a surprise only to those who thought the general - for so many years silent - had died long ago. He spent the last years of his life like an aging boxer, too tough and too proud and too punch- drunk to hear the bell.

As Walker told the Dallas Observer in an interview given just weeks before his death, "Our fight is not necessary now in the way it was then. It was bringing out an understanding of what the enemy was and what a communist was and was capable of. Even the Kennedys couldn't understand that.

"You can't understand the demise of communism unless you saw it in action," Walker said. "You're living in an age that's trying to back out of all the things it did. It was a vicious time. Everything was deceitful, from bottom to top. It got into everything, politics; and everybody doesn't get straight in one day."

Whether you liked him or hated him - if only because he was a grim reminder of an ugly, mean-spirited time - there's no denying Walker's place in Dallas' history.

For one brief but indelible moment in the early 1960s, for the world at large, retired Maj. Gen. Edwin Anderson Walker was Dallas. The ramrod straight general embodied the city's attitude and ideology at a time when men like congressman Bruce Alger and businessman H.L. Hunt had Dallas' rich and powerful running around like frightened children, fretting about the Red Menace and the threat of weak-kneed liberals like Kennedy and Johnson. Walker took Dallas' eccentricities to a national audience in 1961 when Newsweek featured his stately face on its cover, casting him as an important spokesmen of the extreme right-wing.

Yet with just a few notable exceptions - like those two times in the 1970s when he was caught and charged with trying to pick up male undercover cops in Dallas park bathrooms - Walker's name hadn't been in the papers in three decades. The days of the Kennedy Camelot, communism, and the Berlin Wall have passed. And the John Birch Society, the National Indignation Committee, the Christian Crusaders, the Minute Men, and every other extremist right-wing movement that Walker founded or drew strength from are dead or moribund. And, finally, the general himself has died, in obscurity.

When reached by phone in late September, Walker refused to be interviewed. He said he had had enough of the media, which was "always getting things wrong." Visitors weren't allowed to his house and weren't allowed to call - though, till his dying day, the general's phone number and address were listed in the city directory, and he'd usually answer the phone when you called.

But Walker, perhaps sensing his nearing death, finally relented and agreed to an interview. For two hours he talked, often incoherently, about his place in history, touching on communism, the importance of the Warsaw Pact, John Kennedy's ineffectual presidency, Walker's failed run for Texas governor in the 1960s, and Oswald's attempt on his life. Sometimes the obviously ailing Walker was insightful, especially when it came to the Kennedy assassination: he would raise questions about the FBI's lack of assistance to the Dallas police, mentioning the long-known fact that Hoover had it in for the bungling local cops and wouldn't grant them jurisdiction on the shooting.

Other times, Walker mumbled gibberish, particularly when he spoke about his historic legacy. Did his actions change the course of this country, or even his city? Walker answered with a rambling discourse on the impact of communism, adding, "You can't understand any of that unless you discuss the three Warsaw Pact objectives put out by Khrushchev, and only by assessing those against the Kennedy administration do you get a clear picture of what the result is." The more he would elaborate, the more murky the answer would become.

Here he was, grudgingly giving what would be his last interview, and most of it was an unintelligible mishmash of right-wing code words, out-of-date rhetoric, rallying cries long ago forgotten, and half-remembered snippets of anticommunist, antidesegregation speeches he gave decades ago in places like Shreveport and Jackson, Mississippi.

The leader who rallied people by the thousands to hear him speak - his "U.S. Day" speech at the Dallas Memorial Auditorium on October 23, 1963 being one of the most memorable, when he assembled every right-wing nut in the region from the Birchers to the Christian Crusaders - now struggled to finish a sentence.

Though he repeatedly insisted he was "doin' all right, feeling fine," Walker would not allow a face-to-face interview. And, the longer the general spoke over the phone, the shakier his voice became.

It was the quivering, brittle, phlegmy voice of a nearly deaf 83-year-old man who had seen his share of bloodshed and fighting, in and out of uniform. In it was only a distant echo of the brash, determined voice of a soldier who thought it was worth sacrificing his military career for his belief that America must be saved from communists without and within.

Where he once toured the country giving speeches about the relentless Red threat to freedom, espousing Christian verse and rightist propaganda, Walker spent his final days phoning state and local politicians to tell them Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison got a raw deal and that the state income tax was a bad idea.

Three decades after rallying thousands against communism, Kennedy, and desegregation, the general's issues were tame by even moderate Republican standards.

One of the things lost to history is that Walker was a fine soldier, a West Pointer who was awarded the Bronze and Silver stars and the Legion of Merit.

Born in Center Point, Texas, on November 10, 1909, Walker graduated from West Point (where he was a first-rate polo player) in 1931 and slowly worked his way through the peace-time Army's ranks until, in 1943, he assumed his first command, leading a special service force of airborne, amphibious, and ski troops. It was his unit, the 3rd Regiment, that led the assault on the Japanese at Amchitka during the Aleutian campaign in May 1943, countering the only foreign invasion of America soil since the War of 1812.

The 3rd also participated in the attack on Naples, the Anzio beachhead, the Battle of Cassino, and several battles in southern France. In 1944, he commanded the 474th Infantry Regiment, which participated in several German and European campaigns as part of General George Patton's Third Army.

After World War II, Walker returned, to the U.S. and eventually became Secretary of the General Staff, Fourth U.S. Army, stationed at Fort Sam Houston. He would go on to train airborne Ranger companies for each Army division, but by the early 1950s Walker was itching for combat.

In 1951 he was sent to Korea, where he eventually became the Deputy Chief of Staff for prisoner-of-war affairs. Then he hopscotched from Korea to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Taiwan (where he became advisor to the commander-of- chief of the Chinese Nationalist Army), to Hawaii, to Arkansas, and to Heidelberg, Germany - each time as a commanding officer and an increasingly revered soldier.

Yet while stationed in Germany in 1961, Walker found himself in trouble with the Army and his commander in chief for distributing right-wing John Birch Society leaflets to his troops; it was part of his "pro-blue" training program, which he claimed was "based on years of personal study, expert counsel, and official Cold War directives." As the general explained it, to be pro-blue was to be anti-red; it was patriotism (if not McCarthyism) taken to the extreme: Walker's strong belief that Commies had infiltrated the U.S. government. Kennedy himself became involved in the Army's investigation of Walker and reprimanded him publicly.

Fed up with the military, Walker sent the Chief of Staff his letter of resignation on October 1, 1961, claiming that "connection or affiliation with the United States Army may continue the jeopardies to which I have recently been subjected."

In one of the many ironies of Walker's life, he found himself defying a liberal president who wanted him to fight communists. But Walker refused to fight in what he believed was a dirty, ill-advised war: Vietnam.

"With 30 years of military service I made the decision I would not honor the Kennedy order of October 13, 1961," Walker said during his interview with the Observer, "that reassigned me from NATO Germany to an undeclared war against a second-rate Soviet satellite in the jungles of Asia. The New York Times said I was forced out of the Army, but the Army was running a hell of an operation if the war was so bad they were forcing me out by assigning me to it.

"John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara were kind of mixed up in their military affairs. If they could use their own dirty war as a means of getting me out of the Army, I don't think that's much credit, do you? I just had a Kennedy on top of me who said I had to be eliminated from the Army because of my anticommunist stance, and I did what I had to do."

After his resignation he moved to Dallas and became the symbol of the right wing. From Dallas, he was going to launch a conservative revolution with the help of people like evangelist Billy Hargis (who would tour the country fighting Commies with Christ) and local billionaire and well-dressed religious zealot H.L Hunt - who, Walker claimed, "was just someone I talked to a couple of times," despite history books that have them closely allied.

To Walker, Dallas was a "communist cell" that needed to be purged, and his forces were ever-growing. Yet when he ran for governor in 1961, he finished sixth out of six in the Democratic primary; two years later he considered running again - "because it is the cause for Christ and the world," he explained at the time - but then abruptly dropped the idea.

Walker didn't realize that his moment in history had already passed, in 1957. He was named the commander of the U.S. Military District in Arkansas, and under President Dwight Eisenhower's orders he led the troops that forced integration on Little Rock's Central High School. His presence helped keep calm and order at a turning point in American history and make him a hero to the civil rights movement. But the general rejected history - he was commanding in Little Rock, he said, "against my wishes."

"I didn't think American troops on top of American people was the right way to do that," Walker said. "I asked Doug MacArthur what he thought about it, and he said Eisenhower made him do a lot of things he didn't want to do, too." Walker's Little Rock dilemma may have struck a deeper chord with MacArthur, who, under orders from another president, used cavalry in 1932 to break up the Bonus Army, a group of disgruntled World War I veterans camped in Washington.

In 1962, Walker would make up for his Little Rock "error" when he led a riot on the campus of the University of Mississippi at Oxford to protest the admission of black 29-year-old Air Force veteran James Meredith. On September 30, Walker issued a statement to the national media claiming that Meredith's enrollment at Ole Miss was "the conspiracy of the crucifixion by the Supreme Court in their denial of prayer and their betrayal of a nation."

The riot on Oct. 1, 1962, which involved thousands of antidesegregationists - some armed and wearing Confederate uniforms - left Ole Miss in shambles and landed Walker in the custody of U.S. marshals. To the end, he maintained that he was simply part of the melee, not its leader.

He was charged with acts of "rebellion, insurrection, and seditious conspiracy" - all of which were later dropped after a high-profile legal battle and batteries of psychological tests, including one that led an SMU professor to proclaim Walker had a "superior level of intelligence."

In one way, Walker equated Little Rock and Ole Miss: both events were "too badly messed up, too questionable."

"There's a difference between integration and desegregation, and that's never been taken into account," Walker said in his final interview. "One infers force and the other one doesn't. That's all I have to say on the subject."

In 1982, Walker was reinstated by the Army and given back his title of major general - not to mention his full annual pension of $45,120 and all benefits. "I got everything back," Walker said, quite proudly.

"I don't have any fights with the Army," he added. "I was never fed up with the Army. I was fed up with the Kennedy administration."

Even with Little Rock and Ole Miss, Edwin Walker would have become little more than a footnote had Lee Harvey Oswald not embarked on his own rendezvous with history. "When Oswald shot at Walker," says author Gerald Posner (Case Closed), "he dragged Walker into the history books in a more prominent way."

It was on April 10, 1963 that Lee Harvey Oswald narrowly missed putting a bullet through Walker's head. Had it not been for a window frame that deflected the 6.5 mm bullet harmlessly onto a stack of papers, the general would have died three decades ago, a martyr for his right-wing cause. As it is, his history is forever intertwined with that of the president he despised.

Walker, in his own mind miraculously spared JFK's fate, was left with an obsession with the assassination, convinced that Oswald was part of a communist plot to kill both himself and the president.

Walker believed the Warren Commission Report was "85 percent right" and that Oswald alone killed JFK. But he also maintained that not only did the Kennedys know that Oswald shot at him, but that the Dallas Police Department had arrested Oswald the night of the shooting and that Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had ordered Oswald's release from custody. How Oswald could be part of a communist plot to kill a right-wing radical and JFK - and be protected by the president's brother - Walker couldn't quite explain.

The FBI claimed it didn't learn of Walker's attempted murder until December 3, 1963, when Marina Oswald, Oswald's widow, told the feds that Oswald had plotted to kill the general. She not only turned over a note from Oswald that instructed her on what to do in case he was captured, but also revealed that when Lee returned home that night, he was "nervous," saying he had just tried to kill Edwin Walker. She also gave the agents copies of surveillance photos Lee had taken of the general's old Turtle Creek mansion.

According to a December 26, 1963, letter sent from the Secret Service to Jesse Curry, then the Dallas police chief, Oswald told his wife, "It was best for everybody that I got rid of Walker."

The general has spent three decades turning over in his mind why Oswald would have targeted him and Kennedy, two men who, to most people, appeared at odds with each other and at political poles. But Walker figured it differently: he and JFK weren't so different. Both were fairly conservative when it came to matters of foreign policy, Walker said, and he never really saw himself as the right-wing extremist portrayed in the media.

"There are similarities in everything," Walker said, laughing. "But I wouldn't make a newspaper article out of it."

And, of course, it could have been that Oswald, obsessed in his own way, thought Gen. Edwin Walker was a more powerful, influential figure than he really was. One of the hundreds of theories swirling around the assassination holds that Oswald believed that by killing Walker, whom he considered to be racist and anti-Semitic, he would wreak havoc on the Dallas political scene - the hoped-for effect of the Kennedy assassination on a smaller scale.

But for Walker it was simple: The Commies wanted him dead, and the Kennedys didn't much like the general either, so they sent their boy Lee to kill him. History would tell us Oswald's act that April night (and November afternoon) was out of calculated, illogical violence, but Walker would tell you it was part of some grand international scheme to bury the right, to bury God.

"I completed 30 years of military service and made my home in Dallas when the president gets shot by a Communist," Walker said. "How do you younger people explain it? The policy was wrong. I couldn't prosecute a communist because he knew Khrushchev and because he knew Kennedy, and in my opinion Oswald was a ward of both states. You know bloomin' well he was a ward of the Kennedy state and a ward of the Khrushchev state."

Then, and to his dying day, Walker was convinced communism, whether it finally had been beaten by Jesus or the cash register, had left scars that affect us every day. "Everything's a little off-keel," he said. "A little abnormal.

"You know, I can't systematize the whole world, but you can do it one person at a time," he said, perhaps the only time in the conversation when he really reflected on his life's work. "But back then, I had a bit more influence than that. 'Course, you young people don't remember that."

The Paper Maze by Anna Marie Kuhns-Walko

Update on new releases at the National Archives.

In May the FBI released field office files from New Orleans, Miami, Dallas, Washington, and Mexico City. Along with the Senate Select Intelligence Agency Files.

In June they released more Field Office Files of the above plus, some from Pittsburgh. This material is all original material. Both of the releases have dynamite materials. What is interesting is that even the press finally conceded that the FBI had PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of Lee Harvey Oswald's whereabouts.

In the most recent release, which I am still in possession of, is the Secret Service copy of the Zapruder film. This film is color, in EXCELLENT CONDITION, has sprockets only on one side. The date they received it was: 11/23/63. We are currently not allowed to copy this film or other photos released, till the preservation views it first. Another envelope within this release states: Shell 7.5 found in Dealey Plaza 11/22/63. The shell is not in the envelope. It states on the envelope: DETERMINED OF NO VALUE AND DESTROYED. Right - no value to their theory/conclusion.

Still another find is a 7 page letter marked 'Secret' showing who took the pictures, when they obtained them, and the agents involved. There was Powers from the 112th Intelligence Unit taking pictures within Dealey Plaza. This ledger is the size of a map. Still another is a MURDER MAP handed to the FBI from H.L. Hunt! Interesting MAP.

Last, but not least: Photos of bullet removed from President Kennedy's body. There is more than one, and definitely it is not the one I have seen before. I could go on further, but I am definitely making this short this time.

In parting, have they released a "smoking gun" as our critics like to say? Yes, they have released "an armory full of smoking guns, complete with attachments." Whatever you do, don't lose sight of what we all are fighting for, and that is: THE TRUTH & SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT !!!

"Farewell America" - How French Intelligence wrote a book about the Kennedy Assassination by William Turner (reprinted from The Rebel, February 13, 1984) and an extract from the book

He was slight and fidgety, with a wispy mustache and fingertips yellowed by countless Gitanes. He called himself Herve Lamarr, but in the twilight world of intelligence that may not have been the name on his baptismal certificate. The Frenchman had called the day before, long distance, saying he had to see me. It was September 1968, three months after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. I was familiar with Lamarr's project: a book titled Farewell America, which contended that the assassination of John F. Kennedy at Dallas on Nov. 22 was a conspiracy that robbed America of her future.

As we sat in the coffee shop of the Fairmont Hotel on top of San Francisco's Nob Hill, I wondered what the great urgency was. Lamarr chitchatted earnestly, but had no punch line. I introduced Lamarr to Jim Rose, who was driving me to the airport to catch a plane for New York. Rose was a pilot who had flown CIA missions against Fidel Castro and Belgian Congo insurgents in the early 1960s. He had come in from the cold and done some chancy investigative work for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, whose damn-the-torpedoes- full-speed-ahead probe of the JFK murder had fascinated the world until it grounded on an evidentiary reef.

The punch line came that night when Lamarr called Rose and instructed him to pick up a package at the St. Francis Hotel, at the bottom of Nob Hill. Rose approached the bell captain, gave a password, and was handed a sealed can of film. When I returned from New York we screened what turned out to be a motion picture version of Farewell America. As a sonorous narrator chronicled John Kennedy's political career, still photos of the President with kings and kids, pols and the people, rolled along with shots of his grim-faced enemies: Dallas oil croesus H.L. Hunt; the pro-Blue General Edwin A. Walker whom Kennedy had cashiered; the Big Steel executives he had forced to rescind price hikes; FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who considered Camelot subversive; Richard Nixon; and on and on. There were digressive interludes, as when Frank Sinatra was heard singing "It's the wrong face" while visuals suggested secret amours. Then the music became dramatically somber as actual footage showed John and Jacqueline Kennedy boarding Air Force 1 in Fort Worth for the short hop to Dallas. There was the motorcade to downtown, spliced together from the home movies of spectators lining the route. And then -- the Zapruder film.

Garment manufacturer Abraham Zapruder was a spectator at Dealey Plaza who captured the entire shooting sequence with his cheap movie camera. Life magazine immediately snapped up the film for an untold sum. Although Life ran several frames in its cover story on the Warren Commission Report, the motion picture itself had never been shown in public (not even members of the Commission had seen it). Now it had surfaced, courtesy of La Bell France.

The Zapruder film is horrifyingly graphic. It shows Kennedy clutching his throat as a shot from the rear goes through his neck. There are agonizing moments as he slowly slumps forward in the limousine. Then his head literally explodes, sending up a blood-mist halo. The force of the hit rocks him back so violently into the rear seat cushion that it is compressed. He bounces forward as Jackie grabs for him. There is no mistaking that he was killed by a shot from the front. Suspect Lee Harvey Oswald was at the rear.

I rushed to Hollywood with the film to have it analyzed by experts. They pronounced it authentic, probably a second or third generation copy. I then understood why Life, which had taken a stand in support of the Warren Report and featured Gerald Ford's rendition of how the no--conspiracy conclusion was arrived at, had kept the film sequestered. In fact an anonymous caption writer at the magazine had described the head-shot frame as a shot from the front, and a number of subscribers received copies with that caption. But the press run was quickly stopped at tremendous expense, and the offending plate broken and replaced by one whose caption was in conformity with the official position.

An explanation of how the French had pierced Life's tight security over the film was offered by Richard Lubic, at the time a staffer on Life's sister publication Time. He told me that very early in 1968 the film was missing for several days from its vault in the Time-Life headquarters in New York. There was quite a stir. The FBI and CIA investigated, and even Mayor John Lindsay came over to ensure that the New York police gave it their best Kojak try. Although the obvious conclusion was an inside job, no suspects were ever hauled on the carpet.

The Zapruder film was offered to the major networks, but perhaps fearful of treading on Life's proprietary rights, all declined to air it. Bootleg copies were a smash hit on college campuses, however, and in time the film became so widely shown that it fell into the public domain. It became a kind of McGuffey's Reader of the assassination, a socko illustration that there were at least two shooters.

L'affaire Farewell is a story so convoluted it seems borrowed from John LeCarre. Gen. Charles de Gaulle, the haughty President of the Republic bent on restoring France as a world power, never believed that Oswald acted alone. "You're kidding me," he scoffed to an interviewer. "Cowboys and Indians!" De Gaulle, himself the target of an assassination attempt by right-wing military officers the year before Dallas, reflected the deep-seated skepticism that prevailed in Europe following publication of the Warren Report. From London to Moscow American travelers were braced with the question: Who was behind it? In politically-sophisticated Europe, the "lone nut" theory was as ludicrous as square wheels.

But it was not until 1967, when Jim Garrison burst upon the scene, that an inner circle of the French government, including de Gaulle and his secret service chief, Andre Ducret, made a move. The fast overt act came in the form of a phone call from New York to Garrison. The caller identified himself as a representative of Frontiers Publishing Company of Geneva, Switzerland. He said that his firm had an important work in progress on the Kennedy assassination which would soon be published in Europe, and wondered if Mr. Garrison would be interested in taking a look. It was like dangling a carrot in front of a rabbit.

Within days the D.A.'s mailbag brought three black- bound volumes of manuscript. The title of this opus magnum, Farewell America, seemed to say that the rest of the world should bid adieu to the country it had known. The author of record was James Hepburn, whose name was nowhere to be found in the Writer's Directory. A brief bio of Hepburn stated he attended the London School of Economics and Institute of Political Studies in Paris "where he prepared for the public service." It claimed he had lived briefly in the United States, making the acquaintance of Jacqueline Bouvier (Kennedy) and Sen. John Kennedy. The 1,000-odd pages were impeccably typed on an IBM machine, a clue that Hepburn was not an impecunious freelancer. The text was sprinkled with European metaphors, such as the description of the Presidential Limousine swinging into Dealey Plaza: "Then the leaves began to fall, and soon the traces disappeared."

The manuscript borrowed liberally from published critics of the Warren Report, but it also displayed a remarkable breadth of Knowledge about the roots of the Cold War, the interlinkage between the large corporate and banking interests and ever-growing American intelligence apparatus, and the inner workings of the international petroleum cartels. Brought alive by sinister portraits of CIA spymaster Allen Dulles, the cantankerous H.L. Hunt, Roy Cohn and a bevy of military, brass and Mafia chieftains, the manuscript clearly was staff-written or at least scribed by Hepburn with the aid of resources far beyond the reach of the ordinary author. This was later confirmed when the manuscript saw the light of print and the dust jacket declared: "Farewell America was begun in the spring of 1967 and written in New York, Spain and Paris with the assistance of various European and American specialists."

The theme of the manuscript was that JFK was killed by an amalgam of powerful interests, both public and private, that had nightmares about a Kennedy dynasty that might extend through a Teddy presidency. This amalgam. which is called The Committee, perceived Kennedy as a menace to the global superiority of the United States by his weak-kneed stand on relations with the Soviet Union and his determination to bridle the nuclear arms race. Despite his uppercrust upbringing he had caved in to the racial-equality rabble-rousers such as Martin Luther King. And he had landed on such mighty corporations as U.S. Steel with the memorable line: "The American people will find it hard, as I do, to accept a situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans." As Farewell put it, "There is no better way for a President to contract a growing number of enemies than to express himself too explicitly on the multitude of subjects with which he is concerned."

One of the opening chapters in the manuscript, called simply "King" and dealing with John and Jackie's White House, offers a sharp contrast between the style and substance of the Kennedy Administration as opposed to Reagan's. There was elegance and wit - and care. The gossips, Farewell noted, complained that "the Kennedys spent $2.000 on the food for one of their parties, neglecting to add (or perhaps they did not know) that the President donated his entire salary to charity." Another chapter, "Warriors," was a telling expose of the might of the military-industrial complex in its straggle with the Presidency. It began with a quote from Sen. J. William Fulbright: "There is little in the education, training or experience of most military officers to equip them with the balance of judgment necessary to put their own ultimate solutions ... into proper perspective in the President's total strategy for the nuclear age."

Farewell's bottom line was that JFK's enemies. collaborating with CIA headquarters and other parties at interest, moved to exorcise the Kennedy curse. As engineered by The Committee, it was a scheme of Machiavellian complexity that at the same time was diabolically simple: a sponsorship level, a supervisorial level, a "gun" level - possibly professional assassins recruited from the ranks of Cuban exiles embittered over Kennedy's failure to supervene with military forces in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and to invade the Red island during the 1962 missile crisis. According to Farewell, "President Kennedy's assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with accessories and fake mirrors, and when the curtain fell, the actors, and even the scenery, disappeared .... The plotters were correct when they guessed that their crime would be concealed by shadows and silences, that it would be blamed on a 'madman' and negligence."

When Jim Garrison began to pore through the black- bound manuscript he wondered whether it was as false as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or The Right Stuff. The more he read, the more he found that it squared with his own theory; the very core of the government was riddled with moral corruption right down to its CIA spooks. If the manuscript was not entirely forthcoming in pinning proper names on dirty deeds, that was Garrison's job. Bringing in the suspects is what prosecutors are for.

Garrison was hooked. He sent one of his corps of young volunteer investigators, Steve Jaffe, to Europe to track down the mysterious James Hepburn. Jaffe went first to the address of Frontiers Publishing in Geneva, only to find that it was the office of a large law firm specializing in Swiss banks. Frontiers was incorporated in Liechtenstein, he was told, but its editorial suite was in Paris. Again he found himself in a prestigious law office, but this time his entreaties produced Herve Lamarr. Lamarr informed Jaffe that, regretfully, James Hepburn was not available. In fact, the Frenchman finally confessed over Pernods, Hepburn didn't exist as such. He was a composite. Lamarr had concocted the name out of flaming admiration for actress Audrey Hepburn. The James had come from j'aime -- I love.

As they bistro-hopped Jaffe discovered that the Frenchman's background was every bit as exotic as his taste in actresses. He had been in the French Army, attended Harvard, served in the French diplomatic corps in Vietnam -- and was highly connected with French intelligence. This last bit of biography was confirmed when Lamarr took the young American to the Elysee Palace to see if Gen. de Gaulle was busy. He was, but Andre Ducret, the secret service head whose office adjoined de Gaulle's, graciously made time to see them. Ducret told Jaffe how vital his mission was, and how France appreciated what was being done. Then he ducked into de Gaulle's office and returned with the general's personal card on which was written in French: "I am very moved by the confidence you have expressed in me."

Jaffe left the City of Light with more than a calling card. Lamarr had confided to him that on the day after the assassination, Bobby Kennedy called in one of the family's most trusted aides, Daniel Moynihan (now the senior senator from New York), and instructed him to quietly assemble a small staff to explore two possibilities: that Bobby's mortal enemy Jimmy Hoffa was behind it, and that the Secret Service had been bought off. In due time Moynihan submitted a confidential report concluding that Hoffa was not involved, and the Secret Service had not been bribed. But the report was highly critical of the Secret Service's performance. Through "personal friendships" with Kennedy insiders, Lamarr said, the report was delivered into the hands of French intelligence.

Indeed, the Farewell chapter called "Secret Service" detailed the "glaring errors of the President's guards, even to the number of bourbons and water they downed the night before." But it also credited the agents with professionalism in recognizing the work of other professionals. "They were the first in the President's entourage to realize that the assassination was a well-organized plot," the chapter disclosed. "They discussed it among themselves at Parkland Hospital and later during the plane ride back to Washington. They mentioned it in their personal reports to Secret Service Chief James Rowley that night. Ten hours after the assassination, Rowley knew that there had been three gunmen, and perhaps four, at Dallas that day, and later on the telephone Jerry Behn (head of the White House detail) remarked to Forrest Sorrels (head of the Dallas Secret Service), 'It's a plot.' 'Of course,' was Sorrels' reply. Robert Kennedy ... learned that evening from Rowley that the Secret Service believed the President had been the victim of a powerful organization."

This pretty well explained a cryptic passage in the chapter, "Only Daniel F. Moynihan, a former longshoreman, had some idea of such things."

Not long after Jaffe's Parisian sojourn Farewell was published in France under the title America Brule (American Burns), perhaps a takeoff on Is Paris Burning? German and Italian editions followed. L'Express termed it "the hope of one America against another," and Bild, Germany's largest daily, serialized it with the blurb "explosive as a bomb." Unfortunately, there was no author's promotional tour. But Frontiers Publishing began searching for an American distributor. By this time a one-page sequel had been added which was headed "The Man of November Fifth." "The choice made by the people of the United States on Nov. 5th, 1968, will have profound and far-reaching consequences for the life, liberty and happiness of the universe," it began. "The peoples of the earth are awaiting new decisions." The whole tone conveyed the hope that Bobby Kennedy would be successful in his Presidential bid.

But then, as if the clack of the typewriter had been interrupted by a news bulletin, the text lapsed into the past tense. "There was another funeral. Once again the Green Berets formed the honor guard; once again the Stars and Stripes flew at half-mast. On an evening in June, Robert Kennedy joined his brother beneath the hill at Arlington, and those who pass by can bring them flowers.

"The tombs are splendid, but the scores have not been settled.

"Who killed them?

"And why?"

When Bobby was shot the Farewell project seemed to die with him, as if its sole purpose of life was to boost his candidacy. Lamarr's visit to the United States a few months later appears, in retrospect, to have been a settling of the estate, a passing of the torch. When he phoned Jim Rose to arrange getting the Zapruder film into our hands, he declared. "You're both professionals. There's an important package I want you to have."

There was, finally, an American edition of the book, but it was never displayed in the windows of Brentano's and Doubleday. At the coffee-shop session at the Fairmont Hotel Lamarr had casually replied, "Sure." A few weeks later a notice arrived from a freight forwarder in San Francisco that a consignment of books from Montreal was waiting to be picked up. The shipping bill of $282 had not been prepaid, but the money to pay it was on deposit in a Swiss bank in San Francisco. To the end Lamarr was playing at foreign intrigue.

There were six cartons of some 100 books each, which I stashed in the garage next to the lawn mower and rakes. Farewell took on an afterlife, copies finding their way to the Library of Congress, college bookstores and municipal libraries (the Los Angeles Library has five, the Australian Embassy one) as a kind of underground National Archives.

Although Frontiers Publishing vanished as quickly as it had sprung up and Herve Lamarr slipped back into the intelligence shadows, a flicker of the Camelot flame still burned.

"Slaughter" (an excerpt from Farewell America)

"Hail to the Chief who in Triumph advances!
Honor'd and bless'd be the evergreen pine..."

Secret Service advance man Lawson met with Police Chief Curry in Dallas on November 13. Together they visited the Trade Mart, where Curry suggested the November 22 banquet be held. Lawson forwarded a favorable report to Washington, and the next day, November 14, O'Donnell confirmed his choice.

That same day, Curry held a meeting with his deputies, Batchelor and Fisher, Lawson, and Sorrels to study the problems raised by the President's visit. The meeting continued into the next day, November 15, with the participation of members of the local host committee. Sorrels and Lawson were preoccupied with security problems in and around the Trade Mart, and Curry promised massive reinforcements.

That weekend, or Monday morning at the latest, J. Edgar Hoover received a TWX (inter-office telegram) from special agent James W. Bookhout of the FBI's Dallas office. The Warren Commission was never informed of the existence of this message. On Monday, November 18, Lawson and Sorrels drove over the motorcade route from Love Field to the Trade Mart for the first time. Curry stressed the fact that it could be covered in 45 minutes, and even suggested that a short section along the Central Expressway be eliminated because of the security risks it offered. After they had driven through the center of the city and reached Dealey Plaza, Curry pointed down Main Street past the railroad overpass and said, "And afterwards there's only the freeway." But instead of turning right into Houston Street in the direction of Elm Street, as the motorcade did on November 22, Curry turned left in front of the Old Court-house, and neither Lawson nor Sorrels followed the parade route past that point, where they would have been obliged to make a 90 degree right turn into Houston Street, followed 70 yards later by a 120 degree turn to the left into Elm Street. Had they done so, it might have occurred to them that the big Presidential Lincoln would be obliged to slow down almost to a stop in order to make that second turn. This type of double turn is contrary to Secret Service regulations, which specify that when a Presidential motorcade has to slow down to make a turn, "the entire intersection must be examined in advance, searched and inspected from top to bottom." Curry, however, brought the reconnaissance to an end at the very point where it became unacceptable (as well as unusual) from the point of view of security.

On Tuesday, November 19, the Times Herald and the Morning News of Dallas ran stories about Friday's motorcade, but neither of these papers published a map, which would have brought the curious hairpin turn coming at the end of a long straight route to the attention of even a non-observant person like Lawson. That same day, Kennedy asked his secretary, "Where are those clowns?" The "clowns" were O'Donnell, O'Brien, and Powers, who were resting at home that morning after their trip to Florida with the President. At any rate, O'Donnell's presence at the White House that day wouldn't have made any difference. He was only interested in the political aspects of the motorcade - how many people would be there, and where. On the other hand, Kennedy's perspicacious press secretary, Pierre Salinger, might have noticed the curious hairpin turn had he seen it in one of the newspapers, but it didn't appear in the Dallas papers, and Salinger left that same morning for Honolulu.

The hairpin turn was as ideal a set-up for an ambush as any potential assassin could hope for. The Committee was not going to let a chance like this go by. The attack was to be carried out by a team of ten men, including four gunmen, each seconded by an assistant who would be responsible for their protection, evacuation, and radio liaison, and who would retrieve the shells. The ninth man would serve as a central radio operator, and the tenth was to create a last-minute diversion to enable the gunmen to get into position.

The lay-out of the site determined an optimum firing zone within which the shots would have to be concentrated, but a target riding in a moving vehicle raised a number of special problems. The first concerned the speed of the vehicle. The Presidential car was watched and timed during Kennedy's trips in September, and its minimum speed was estimated at 10 miles an hour. The sharp turn into Elm Street was expected to slow it down even more, but as Dealey Plaza marked the end of the motorcade and the approach to the freeway, the driver would probably accelerate as he came out of the turn. The estimate was therefore cautiously revised to 15 miles an hour.

Fifteen miles an hour is the equivalent of approximately 22 feet per second. That is extremely slow for a car, but extremely fast for a gunman, particularly if he is placed in a perpendicular or even a lateral position. The positions of the gunmen were determined with this in mind. The best possible position for an ambush of this sort (when neither explosives nor bazookas or other powerful weapons are used) is in front of and perpendicular to the car. The lay-out of Dealey Plaza offered several possibilities. The gunman in position no. 1 would have the car coming straight towards him, on a level with him, as it came out of the turn 400 feet away. This position offered a wide firing angle and the possibility of shooting at the President up to a very close range (approximately 100 feet). It seemed so ideal that it was decided to station another gunman, no. 2, beyond no. 1 and close to the railroad overpass. Both would be firing from approximately the same angle. The other two gunmen, 3 and 4, occupied less favorable positions. They could not fire at the President and hope to hit him until a precise instant determined by a number of different factors.

The first was the obstacle presented by the two Secret Service men who habitually rode on the back bumper of the President's car. The second was the fact that the shots of the four gunmen must be carefully synchronized. After studying these factors and others (distances and angles), the organizers delimited an exact firing zone 60 feet long which took into account the distance of each gunman from his target and the trajectory of his bullet, and which offered the maximum chances for success.

Accuracy was, of course, essential. The gunman were chosen for their marksmanship, and they were provided with excellent weapons. But they, had to aim at the President's head, and they had to be sure to kill him. No plans were made for a second round of fire. It was assumed that the first shots would set off instantaneous reactions. Roy Kellerman, in the front seat of the President's car. would throw himself over Kennedy. The President himself might collapse or drop to the floor of the car. In a fraction of a second the driver could accelerate and the car would roar out of sight.

But the reaction on November 22 was one of total surprise. Not only did Kellerman and the driver fail to move (they turned to look at the president), but when agent John Ready wanted to jump off the running board of the backup car, agent Emory Roberts ordered him back. It would seem, then, that some Secret Service agents did have the impulse to jump, but that they felt obliged to ask permission!

What had been planned as a salvo wasn't really a salvo. The first shot was clearly distinct, and the second narrowly preceded the third and fourth, which blended into one. The four shots thus formed three distinct detonations, but the acoustical phenomena at Dealer Plaza led many witnesses to believe that they had heard only two shots. The first shot, fired in the open, was muffled, and the second and third, separated by only 2 seconds, had the effect of an echo.

The first bullet came from no. 1 and struck the President in the throat. The second apparently came from no. 4 and hit the President in the back. No. 3 hit Connally and no. 2's bullet went through a traffic sign between him and the car.

Then, as Youngblood covered Johnson and spectators began to scream, there was a pause. Four seconds after they opened fire, the gunmen must have been dumbfounded. When the first shot strangled the President, no one moved. At the sound of the second, Governor Connally turned around and was wounded, and the driver still didn't budge, and Kellerman barely turned his head. The final shots awakened the agents in the back-up car, but Kellerman was still lost in his dreams, and Greer failed to react even to the whine of Halfback's siren. Four shots had been fired, and the car was still moving at the same speed. Despite the careful preparations and the skillful marksmanship, not only was the President alive, but he was not mortally wounded. His life depended literally on Greer's reflexes, but the old driver was drugged by 35 years on the job.

The gunmen weren't dreaming, however. They were professionals. The car continued towards 1 and 2. It was 2 who hit the President, and from very close range. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, strangled by the first shot and knocked forward by the second, was thrust backwards. The bullet pierced his temple and penetrated his brain, and his skull literally exploded.

There were two principal reasons why they missed. In the first place, the average spread of an accurate rifle is about 2 inches to either side for every 100 yards. In the second place, in the instant between the time the gunman presses the trigger and the impact of the bullet, a moving target shifts positions. For the fastest rifles, such as the Winchester 284 or the Cold AR 15 233, this interval is approximately 1/11th of a second at a distance of 100 yards. In 1/11th of a second, a car moving 10 or 11 miles an hour advanced about a foot and a half. The angle at which they were placed (15 or 20 degrees) reduced this displacement somewhat, but it still amounted to several inches, which was easily doubled by their reflex time. A few inches is enough to miss a target the size of a head. Moreover, it is one thing to shoot on a firing range and quite another to fire from a rooftop or a window over- looking a public park amidst the noises of a crowd.

The feat attributed to Oswald at Dallas was impossible for any but a world champion marksman using a high- precision semi-automatic rifle mounted on a carriage and equipped with an air corrector, and who had practiced on moving targets in similar set-ups.

The rifles used for the assassination were Mausers without scopes. An optical scope has the advantage of bringing the target 3 or 4 times closer, but it needs frequent adjustment and must be handled with care. Furthermore, it is unnecessary for a target 200 feet away.

There was some question as to whether heavy rifles with large-caliber bullets or lighter weapons making it easier to follow a moving target should be used. An example of the latter-type weapon is the Colt AR 15.223 mentioned by Manchester, who notes (p. 167) that there was one on the back seat of Halback, the back-up car, between Secret Service agents George Hickey and Glen Bennett. Manchester states that this rifle has a muzzle velocity so powerful that should a bullet strike a man's chest, it would blow his head off (sic), thereby showing (though elsewhere in the book he describes himself as an expert marksman who, "like Oswald," was trained in the Marine Corps at Parris Island) how little he knows about firearms. The .223 caliber 21 barrel Colt AR 15 Sporter is a powerful weapon with the same shock power as the NATO 7.62 at a distance of 300 feet, but it has never been known to strike a man's chest and knock his head off. The principal advantages of the AR 15 (known to the military as the M16) are its light weight (8 lbs.), rate of fire (900 to 1,000 shots per minute), initial speed (3,000 feet per second), range (8,000 yards) and fiat trajectory at close range.

The bullets used were frangible bullets specially cast from a lead and silver alloy with no jacket, so that they would disintegrate on impact. The bullet that killed Robert Kennedy was also a frangible bullet.

It would never have happened if the bubble-top had been used that day. The plexiglas would not have stopped the bullets, but it would have deflected them, interfering with the gunmen's aim. But on the morning of November 22, Ken O'Donnell glanced up at the sky at Fort Worth and noted with satisfaction that "It was going to be a day with a halo around it, a glittering lacuna of a day. There would be no bubbletop." He was right. The sun was shining in Dallas.

In 30 years on the job, J. Edgar Hoover has developed an intelligence system which nothing -- no racket, and certainly no conspiracy -- can escape. Through its extensive network of informers, the FBI knows everything worth knowing that is going on in the United States, even in areas that lie outside its legal jurisdiction. The Dallas conspiracy was born and took root in places where the FBI was well represented. Its informers include former FBI agent James RowIey, chief of the Secret Service, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, DIA agent Guy Bannister, also a member of the Minutemen, and Lee Harvey Oswald. H.L. Hunt used former FBI agents as bodyguards, and Dallas Police Chief Curry was in contact with several FBI men and was under surveillance by the FBI which had no fewer than 74 agents in Dallas.

By mid-October, Hoover had been informed of the existence of a plot and was familiar with many of the details. The FBI often launches an investigation on the strength of a rumor, and the information it received that fall from Boston, Chicago and Dallas was based on far more than hearsay. These reports were checked out and verified. The week before the President's departure for Texas, Hoover knew exactly what was going to happen. Why did the FBI fail to intervene?

It is true that the FBI bore no responsibility for the security of the President. It is also true that every year dozens of investigations are made of threats against the life of the President. Moreover, the FBI is an investigative agency, not a national police force. Nevertheless, a section of the FBI Manual issued to each agent stipulates that:

Investigation of threats against the President of the United States, members of his immediate family, the President-Elect, and the Vice-President is within the exclusive jurisdiction of the U.S. Secret Service. Any information indicating the possibility of an attempt against the person or safety of the President, members of the immediate family of the President, the President- Elect or the Vice-President must be referred to the most expeditious means of communication to the nearest office of the U.S. Secret Service. Advise the Bureau at the same time of the information so furnished to the Secret Service and the fact that it has been so disseminated. The above action should be taken without delay in order to attempt to verify the information, and no evaluation of the information should be attempted. When the threat is in the form of a written communication, give a copy to the local Secret Service and forward the original to the Bureau where it will be made available to the Secret Service headquarters in Washington. The referral of the copy to local Secret Service should not delay the immediate referral of the information by the fastest available means of communication to Secret Service locally."

The regulations, however, were ignored.

Hoover, "the man who is almost a legend" (in the words of Rep. Gerald Ford) would probably not have agreed to cooperate with the Committee, but he did absolutely nothing to stop it. He may not have approved of the assassination, but he didn't disapprove of it either. Hoover preferred to stay out of other people's fights, especially when they involved business circles over which he exercised little control. Faced with a choice between his professional duty and his abhorrence of anything that President Kennedy represented, he chose the latter alternative. He also hoped that the affair would tarnish the reputation of the CIA and shatter his Attorney General.

After the assassination, the FBI pulled out its files and submitted its report. It laid the blame and designated the culprits. Texas got back at Hoover by declaring, on January 24, 1964, that Lee Harvey Oswald had been on the FBI payroll as an informer since 1962. Neither the FBI nor the CIA were ever called upon to clear themselves. The assassination was bigger than both of them. It was rooted in a system that had produced a Senator named Lyndon Johnson, and it was suppressed by the same system, now presided over by the same Lyndon Johnson. In the belief that he was acting for the good of the country, Chief Justice Warren agreed to perjure himself.

Regardless of the cost to the country, the FBI's maneuverings paid off. Since 1963 it has been steadily shortening the CIA's lead in the intelligence race. It has reinforced its control in the field of counter-espionage and branched out into the overseas activities that were once the CIA's private reserve.

But although he recognizes its technical competence, President Johnson apparently doesn't trust the FBI with his life. On November 22, 1964, a board presided over by Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon and including Attorney General Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, White House assistant McGeorge Bundy, and CIA Director John McCone examined ways of strengthening Presidential security. It rejected the suggestion that the FBI be given overall responsibility for the protection of the President, including prevention and investigation, leaving the Secret Service with the limited responsibility for his physical protection.

Exactly one year earlier, the stern and hard-working Mr. Hoover had already had his lunch and been back at work for more than 30 minutes when the first news flash clattered over the UPI wires at 1:34 p.m. E.S.T. But does Mr. Hoover ever learn anything from the wire services?

The following day, November 23, the White House received a package sent over by his remarkable bureau. It was a piece of President Kennedy's skull.

No Smoking Gun, But Something Smells by Jerry Policoff and John Judge

While there is not yet a "smoking gun" revelation in the government files released to date, researchers are uncovering important new information. Not even a third of the documents we know exist have been made public, and certain files hold the promise of unlocking the truth. Much that is new will be revealed in up-coming articles and books by Anthony Summers, John Newman, et al, and at the Three Decades of Doubt conference this fall. In the meantime, researchers report that available material includes:

- ClA reports on interviews with Priscilla McMillan (nee John- son) describe her as a "witting collaborator" of the Agency. This adds to the suspicions of many researchers that she had close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, a role she has always denied. McMillan, then Moscow correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, interviewed the "defector," Lee Harvey Oswald in the Soviet Union -- at the suggestion of the American Embassy. She later became a confidante of Oswald's widow and co-authored Marina and Lee with her. This book, and many Freudian OP-ED pieces written by Priscilla over the years have helped to reinforce the image of Lee Harvey Oswald as a hapless, maladjusted, lone assassin in the public's mind. Priscilla McMillan also played a prominent role in the 1993 "Front Line" special that painted a similar portrait of Oswald.

- Recently declassified files add new weight to previous speculation that medical evidence in the JFK case might have been tampered with. Autopsy Surgeon Pierre Finck, for example, told the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that certain photos of the skull entrance wound are not among current material he was shown at the National Archives. He repeatedly insisted that a photo that is in the collection does not depict the wound he saw and directed to be photographed. The files also confirm, in the HSCA testimony of five witnesses, including all three autopsy pathologists, that photos were taken of the interior of President Kennedy's chest cavity. These photographs, if they still exist, are not among the supposedly complete collection of autopsy photos and X-rays housed at the National Archives. The presence of this testimony in the record brings into serious question the integrity of the findings of the HSCA, as well as casting further doubt on the official government findings.

- A recently declassified transcript of the HSCA's interview with former ClA agent turned Agency-critic, Phillip Agee, contains some tantalizing gossip. Agee confirms that he had heard "ru- mors" at the Agency that Lee Harvey Oswald "was our agent." Agee notes that, if so, the critical files would not name Oswald. "You are always referring to them by cryptonym." Agee adds that if Oswald had an operational relationship with the Agency, "They would have taken that file and put it somewhere where nobody could find it."

- A new document shows that on November 24, 1963, the day Oswald died, and two days after the Dallas murders, a memo passed from FBI agent Belmont to Clyde Tolson, DeLoach, Mohr and Rosen concerning plans to prepare a memo to U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach about Lee Harvey Oswald. They wanted to show that "...Oswald is responsible for the shooting that killed the President. We will show that Oswald was an avowed Marxist, a former defector to the Soviet Union and an active member of the FPCC [Fair Play for Cuba Committee], which has been financed by Castro." Before the Warren Commission had even been formed, the FBI seems intent on painting Oswald as an agent or dupe of Castro.

They planned to rely on the investigative findings of Dallas Special Agent in Charge, Gordon Shanklin, and sent two agents, Rogge and Thompson to secure the evidence and fly back "by Air Force plane" that night. Katzenbach was busy trying to "keep the Chief of Police and Lieutenant Fritz off television and radio," but wanted to put out a statement blaming Oswald, but noting that "the investigation...is continuing." Cartha "Deke" DeLoach, working with William Sullivan in Division V (Domestic Operations), "advised...that the FBI [was] opposed to any statement being put out along this line." Was their investigation finished?

- Jack Ruby's name appears in many of the documents. Perhaps the most interesting is an FBI form memo, sent to the Special Agent in Charge from agent Charles Alyer in Dallas, giving background on a "PCI", or Potential Criminal Informant. The "date developed" is March 11,1959, and the informant described in detail is Jack Ruby, owner of the Vegas Club in Oak Lawn, Texas.

Why not continue and read issue 9 of Probable Cause Australia?

Backcopies of all issues, including all photographs, are still available. Just contact the editor via the Feedback link on the Probable Cause Australia welcome page.

N.B. The opinions expressed above are not necessarily those of the editor but all comments will be passed on to the relevant authors.

Credits

Editor-in-Chief : Steve Gerlach

Art Editor : E. Burton Mercer

Managing Editor : Paul Jones

Contributing Editor : Stephen Webb

Photographic Analysis : Tony Skomina

Internet : Steve Gerlach

Contributors : Gary L. Aguilar, David B. Perry, Rebecca Sherman, L. Fletcher Prouty, E. B. Mercer, Robert Wilonsky, William Turner, Anna Marie Kuhns-Waldo, Walt Brown, Dallas JFK-AIC, Steve Gerlach, Paul Jones, Tony Skomina, Steve Webb, Jerry Policoff, John Judge.

Art Direction : Louie Louie Enterprises Australia

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