JFKcountercoup

ARRB Search for AF1 Radio Tapes

2012-02-01T09:46:00.001-08:00

Douglas Horne, the senior analyst for military records for the Assassination Records Review Boad (ARRB) writes about the Air Force One radio tapes in his book Inside ARRB (Chapter 13) The "Air Force One" Audiotapes.

HORNE: One of the most intriguing, and frustrating, records of the assassination are the heavily edited "Air Force One" audiotapes available from the LBJ Presidential Library in Texas. Colleague Joan Zimmerman, who was as curious about the autopsy and the role of the Secret Service the night of the autopsy as I was, spent two whole days with me at the Archives II facility in College Park, Maryland—October 10-11, 1995—studying the tapes. The result was my first ARRB "research memo," completed on October 17, 1995. I am referencing it now as I write up this brief section.

The tapes were recorded by the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), which is responsible for coordinating all Presidential communications. The total length of the edited conversations on the three audiocassettes is approximately 2 hours; a disclaimer at the beginning says the tapes are "edited and condensed," but does not indicate who did the editing or how much material was deleted.

The tapes are recordings of in-flight conversations that occurred on November 22, 1963 between SAM 26000 (Air Force One), SAM 86972 (the aircraft carrying several Cabinet officials and Press Secretary Pierre Salinger from Hawaii to Japan when JFK was assassinated), Andrews AFB, "Liberty" (the "Fish Bowl," run by Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids, Iowa—the outfit patching all of the radio calls back and forth between the different parties), and "Crown" (the White House Situation Room in the West Wing of the White House).

The purpose of the 2-day visit to the Archives was to determine whether there were any significant reasons to pursue the unedited, full length version of the recordings. There were; we did; and neither the Air Force nor the White House Communications Agency exhibited any interest or cooperation whatsoever. The ARRB's inability to locate the unedited recordings was my second biggest

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disappointment while working there. (My biggest disappointment, of course, was not taking the depositions of the Dallas doctors in the presence of the autopsy photographs.) Four frequencies were identified on the tape as being in use that night, and a memo written by USAF Master Sergeant John C. Trimble (the radio operator aboard Air Force One on 11/22/63) stated that he "...had three phone patches going simultaneously for much of the time..." during the flight back to Andrews AFB from Love Field. Since the flight time from "wheels up" to "on the blocks" at the final destination was 2 hrs. 17 min., it is possible that the total duration of recorded conversation, on all four channels, was anywhere from seven to nine hours long. One of the problems when listening to the tapes is that the listener does not know which "patch" he is listening to at any one time, or whether or not the various conversations on the edited tapes are recorded in the right time sequence in relation to each other (since there were three circuits in use almost continuously).

Some of the 'investigative leads' I noted in my memo of October 17, 1995 are summarized below:

• Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman, and later U.S. Army General Ted Clifton (Military Aide to President Kennedy) make it clear on the radio that their desire is for an ambulance and a limousine to take President Kennedy's body to Walter Reed (not Bethesda) for autopsy "...under guard...," as specified by General Clifton.

• Gerald Behn, Head of the Secret Service White House Detail (speaking from "Crown"), counters that a helicopter has been arranged to take the President's body to the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda for autopsy, and that all other personnel will be choppered to the south grounds of the White House.

• Ultimately, Dr. Burkley (onboard Air Force One) sides with Gerald Behn (at the White House) in support of a Bethesda autopsy, and persuades General Heaton (the Surgeon General of the Army, in Washington) to cancel arrangements for a Walter Reed autopsy.

• After Bethesda has been selected as the autopsy site, the mode of transportation to Bethesda is discussed. Burkley and Clifton insist that JFK's body be transported by ambulance (vice helicopter), even though JFK's Naval aide, CAPT Shepard, has assured Behn that it would be no problem for a helicopter to carry the heavy casket.

• Unaccountably, even though ambulance transport had been selected for JFK's body, Gerald Behn directs Kellerman on the radio: "You accompany the body aboard the helicopter." [Question: Was Behn aware that the bronze Dallas casket was empty and that JFK's body was in the forward luggage compartment?]

• General Clifton insists upon, and then repeats, in great detail, orders for the following ground support at Andrews AFB upon arrival: a forklift and platform at the left rear of the aircraft for the casket; a personnel ramp at the left front of the aircraft for the debarkation of President Johnson and the other passengers; and another personnel ramp at the right front of the airplane (the dark, unlit side where there is a galley door)for the departure of Jacqueline Kennedy. [Mrs. Kennedy did not use the forward starboard galley door to leave the aircraft in secret; she insisted on staying with the Dallas casket, which threw a monkey wrench in the conspirators' likely plans to reunite JFK's body with the Dallas casket at Walter Reed hospital prior to taking the bronze coffin to Bethesda.]

•At one point Roy Kellerman says to Gerald Behn: "I'm sure the Volunteer boys will go over his car and so forth." ("Volunteer" was the WHCA code word used for LBJ.) Late in the flight, as Air Force One nears Andrews, someone is heard discussing the status of the flight carrying the two vehicles—the Presidential limousine and the Queen Mary—back to Washington. [The "Volunteer boys" is surely a reference to Secret Service agents assigned to LBJ; I wonder whether Kellerman was discussingan impending search of the Presidential limousine, in an attempt to remove any of the 'wrong' kind of evidence—such as evidence of shots from the front striking the automobile?]

• Background chatter can be heard at one point, discussing a "limousine and ambulance at Andrews," and at another juncture, as part of this same background chatter, the phrase "black Cadillac" can be heard. [A hearse is a black Cadillac.]

• During the flight, "SAM Command Post" (undefined) calls Air Force One and a Colonel 'Arnbuck' (phonetic spelling) expresses a concern from the Chief of Staff (almost certainly Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay) as to whether President Johnson and Mr. Kennedy's body are onboard the aircraft.

• During the flight, several players make plans to separate Mrs. Kennedy from JFK's body [i.e., the Dallas casket] after landing. General Clifton is the person who asked for a personnel ramp after landing at the forward starboard galley door for Mrs. Kennedy's debarkation. Gerald Behn attempts on two occasions to separateall passengers aboard Air Force One from JFK's body after landing (desiring to send 'the body' to Bethesda via helicopter, and all other passengers to the south grounds of the White House via helicopter also). [Since we now know—thanks to the Boyajian document—that the Dallas casket had to be empty when it was offloaded from Air Force One, the repeated interest in separating JBK from the Dallas casket indicates an intention to reunite the body with the casket prior to the autopsy.]

• Immediately after Behn ordered Kellerman to "...accompany the body aboard the helicopter," the following exchange took place:
Kellerman: I was unable to get ahold of Payne and Bob Burke (names are phonetic approximations).
Kellerman or Behn: ...Payne and Burke at the ranch...
Unidentified: ...Payne and Burke were not notified...

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• Finally, "Wing" (Kennedy's Air Force aide, General Godfrey McHugh) asks "Crown"(the White House situation room) to contact "Slugger" (USAF Captain Cecil Stoughton), and to direct him to meet the aircraft as soon as possible on the ground at Andrews. A reason is not given, but the urgency and importance of the matter to General McHugh is quite clear because of his tone of voice. "Crown" later informs "Wing" that "Slugger" remained on the ground in Dallas. [Cecil Stoughton took the now infamous photo of Congressman Al Thomas of Houston smiling and winking at LBJ immediately after Johnson had been sworn in as President onboard Air Force One, just prior to takeoff from Love Field. Could LBJ have been concerned about the possibility of the 'wink' photo getting published? He need not have worried;

Cecil Stoughton had better discretion than that. However, he was aware of the political significance of the photograph. When David Lifton called him to ask him about the photo just prior to its publication inBest Evidence, Stoughton expressed surprise and alarm, and asked Lifton how he knew about it. Apparently, the LBJ Library had printed it for Lifton by mistake; Stoughton clearly thought it had been suppressed. Author Richard Trask writes (on page 47 of Pictures of the Pain) that the negative of the 'wink photo' has now disappeared from the LBJ Library.]

DOUG HORNE IARRB p. 1660

THE AIR FORCE ONE TAPES: MORE EVIDENCE OF A U.S. GOVERNMENT COVERUP

In his 1996 book History Will Not Absolve Us, author E. Martin Schotz writes of Vincent Salandria's discovery in 1966 of an extremely early Government attempt at a simplistic whitewash, placing the sole blame for the assassination on a lone malcontent, Lee Harvey Oswald, before Air Force One even landed at Andrews Air Force Base on November 22, 1963. Salandria's discovery came from Theodore H. White's book The Making of a President, 1964 – in which White wrote on page 20:

There is a tape recording in the archives of the Government which best recaptures the sound of the hours as it waited for leadership. It is a recording of all the conversations in the air, monitored by the [Army] Signal Corps Midwestern center "Liberty," between Air Force One in Dallas, the Cabinet plane over the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs' Communication Center in Washington.

White continued on page 48:

On the flight the party learned that there was no conspiracy, learned of the identity of Oswald and his arrest; and the President's mind turned to the duties of consoling the stricken and guiding the quick.

Corroboration for White's claim can be found in the 1993 oral history edited by Gerald S. and Debroah H. Strober, Let Us Begin Anew: An Oral History of the Kennedy Presidency. On pages 450-451, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Manning – who was aboard the Cabinet plane to Japan with Secretary of State Rusk and Presidential Press Secretary Pierre Salinger – is quoted as saying that the White House situation room was in continuous voice contact with the Cabinet aircraft, and not only informed Rusk that "Lancer [the President] is dead," but also told the editors of the book: "The news then came in that someone named Oswald who had been in the Soviet Union had done this."

This is most curious, since on November 23, 1963 (the next morning) the Dallas Morning News printed the following, quoting District Attorney Henry Wade from the previous day:"…preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting…the electric chair is too good for the killers."

For the Dallas District Attorney to say that preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting was quite understandable, given that the suspect's rifle was found in the Book Depository (behind the motorcade at the time of the shooting), and yet numerous eyewitnesses indicated shots had unmistakenly come from the Grassy Knoll, to the right front of the vehicle at the time of the shooting. What is truly strange is that anyone in the White House Situation Room could pass on a solution to the crime while Air Force One was in the air enroute from Dallas to Washington the day of the assassination – before the sun had even set – when no one in Dallas had solved the crime, or had even yet claimed to have solved the crime. At the time the information White and Manning referred to was passed to Air Force One, suspect Oswald had not even been charged with the murder of the President. If the White House Situation Room had been an honest broker in all of this, its report should have said: "a suspect has been arrested in the shooting of a policeman, and a rifle has been found in a building along the motorcade route." Either someone was feeding the White House Situation Room the desired "legend" about the assassination, or someone in the White House Situation Room was in on the conspiracy.

What was unclear then, and remains unclear now, is whether journalist Theodore H. White listened to these tapes himself, or whether he was indirectly fed some of the information on the tapes by LBJ aids while researching and writing his book. White tries to give the impression that he was privy to the tapes himself, but as subsequent events revealed, this was extremely unlikely. It is much more likely that he was simply told what was on the tapes by an LBJ aid 'on background.' Vincent Salandria's dogged attempts to obtain access to these audio recordings – through Theodore White, the National Archives, Pierre Salinger, and ultimately, the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) – were fruitless.

The White House Communications Agency turned out to be the correct point of contact, but WHCA only hinted at this, neither confirming nor denying that such a tape from 11/22/63 existed, and simply replied to Salandria that any such tapes would not be made available to US citizens:

January 2, 1968

Dear Mr. Salandria:

I have been asked to respond to your letter, addressed to the White House Communications Agency, concerning a tape recording to [sic] Air Force One, November 22, 1963.

Logs and tapes of the radio transmissions of military aircraft, including those of Air Force One, are kept for official use only. These tapes are not releasable, nor are they obtainable from commercial sources.

I am sorry my response cannot be more favorable.

Respectfully,
(Signed)
James U. Cross
Armed Forces Aide to the President"

This response – which undoubtedly was coordinated with LBJ – makes it a virtual certainty that Theodore H. White never listened t the tapes himself, but instead was given a summary account of some of the content material in the recordings by an insider who had listened to them.

As a member of the Military Records Team on the staff of the Assassinations Records Review Board, I did my best to locate the original, unedited Air Force one tapes; ultimately, I had no more success than Vincent Salandria. But by this time – by 1995, when I first became involved in the search – the landscape had changed considerably.

A commercial version – a heavily edited version – of the tapes of in-flight recordings made on 11/22/63 by the White House Communications Agency had surfacedsubsequent to Salandria's search, so the existence of the tapes was no longer subject to question. I visited Archives II on October 10-11, 1995 with colleague Dr. Joan Zimmerman, and listened to the version of the Air Force One tapes released by the LBJ Library. The NARA recordings available at Archives II in College Park, Maryland – sent to them by the LBJ Library – appeared to be identical to what I had purchased through the mail a few years previously through a small Texas bookstore. The very first voice audible on the tape is a member of the Army Signal Corps, who announces that the recording is "edited and condensed." Large portions of the 3 cassette tapes at Archives II consist of blank space, but I would estimate that the total length of spoken material on the 3 cassettes is somewhere between 110-120 minutes, or a maximum of two hours. The information reported below is from the staff memo I wrote about the experience on October 17, 1995.

A so-called "transcript" of the 3 cassette tapes is available in the JFK Records Collection, 67 and is not to be trusted, since it is incomplete, and is not verbatim.

Any interested researcher is advised to request copies of the audiotapes themselves from the audiovisual branch of Archives II in College Park, Maryland (or the LBJ Library itself). One Warren Commission document, a typed statement signed by the radio operator on Air Force One on 11/22/63 – Master Sergeant John C. Trimble, USAF – reveals that four radio frequencies for voice communications had been set up by him the day of the assassination for the flight from Love Field back to Andrews AFB, and that 3 of them were in almost constant use. I quote from his statement: "I ….had three phone patches going simultaneously most of the time."

As an ARRB staff member I was very concerned with determining whether or not a significant portion of time had been excised from the original recordings. Anyone concerned with this exercise must begin with the flight time from Love Field to Andrews AFB: 2 hours 17 minutes. Next, since Trimble had written that he had "three phone patches going simultaneously most of the time," it is wise to take a conservative approach to his statement "most of the time." I interpreted "most of the time" as 2 hours out of the total flight time of 2 hours, 17 minutes. Continuing with this calculation, the reader should multiply 2 hours ('most of the time') times 3 radio circuits ( 'going simultaneously'), i.e., 2 x 3 = 6, which conservatively yields six hours of unedited voice conversationsas the length of the unedited Air Force One tapes

67 In LBJ Library box # 19

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from November 22, 1963. Since the tapes at Archives II are a maximum of two hours in length, approximately 4 hours have been excised. It appears safe to say, then, that the amount of time edited out of the existing tape is twice as long as the length of the information released by the LBJ Library.

This is extremely disturbing.

Furthermore, there is no mention on the edited version of the Air Force Once conversations (with either the White House Situation Room, or the Cabinet plane), of the crime being solved, or of the assassin being captured and identified, as referenced by Theodore White and Robert Manning. I can only conclude from this that the information passed to Air Force One was premature, in that it was too detailed for the information available on the ground in Dallas at the time, and therefore had to be excised from the historical record to protect the conspirators who passed along this information. To have released the unedited tapes would have revealed, directly or indirectly, the identity of one of the conspirators.

One prominent voice that is present on the tapes is that of Gerald Behn, the Head of the White House Detail of the U.S. Secret Service, who had chosen to take leave during the President's trip to Texas, but was nevertheless present in the White House Situation Room coordinating arrangements. In one conversation that did survive on the edited version, Behn is heard ordering ASAIC Roy Kellerman (who was in charge of the Dallas trip, who was in the front right-hand seat of the limousine in Dallas, and who subsequently monitored and partially controlled entrance to the morgue during the autopsy), "You accompany the body [of the President] aboard the helicopter." This is particularly interesting, since the Dallas casket was transported by a Navy Ambulance, containing Greer, Kelleman, RFK, JBK, and others. 68.

There can be heard on the existing tape what appear to be crude edits and breaks in the conversation, as well as references to other conversations which are not on the tape available today. The indecision, or rather tug-of-war, over whether the President's autopsy should be performed at Walter Reed Hospital or Bethesda Naval Hospital is one of the subjects of interest on the edited tapes, as is interest by the White House in the limousine and follow-up car being transported back to Washington D.C. in a C-130 aircraft. In another tantalizing fragment of a conversation on the edited tapes, there is discussion of a "limousine and ambulance at Andrews," and an indistinct reference to a "black Cadillac" at one point. It is unclear whether this is a reference to a hearse (which is indeed a black Cadillac), or to the follow-up car in the Dallas motorcade, the so-called Queen Mary, which was itself a black Cadillac convertible. In one fragment of conversation, a Colonel from OPS expresses a concern from the Chief of Staff (General LeMay?) as to whetherPresident Johnson or Mr. Kennedy's body is onboard the aircraft. One would have expected the Chief of Staff of the Air Force to be concerned with the overall DEFCON status, or the alert status of SAC's bombers and ICBMs, not the whereabouts of JFK's body. This seems to me

[68 It is still unknown today whether JFK's body was helicoptered from Andrews to the grounds of Bethesda and then placed in a black hearse, or whether a black hearse spirited it at high speed, uninterrupted, directly from Andrews to the loading dock outside the Bethesda morgue. The fact that President Kennedy's body actually arrived at 1835 (6:35 PM) at the loading dock outside the Bethesda NNMC morgue, whereas the Andrews motorcade did not arrived until about 6:55 PM (twenty minutes later), strongly implies that a helicopter was used to transport it to the Navy complex, and that it was united with the Gawler's hearse containing Hagen and Robinson a short distance from the hospital complex itself. ]

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a pretty damning statement, given the fact that LeMay disobeyed orders from the Secretary of the Air Force to proceed to Andrews AFB; instead proceeded to the Natinoal Airport near downtown Washington D.C.; and was reported by autopsy technician Paul O'Conner to have been at President Kennedy's autopsy.

The White House Communications Agency played 'dumb' with the ARRB on the subject of the Air Force One tapes, as did the LBJ Library. Neither entity professed to having any knowledge as to who edited the tapes, when they were edited, or the whereabouts of the unedited version, if it even existed (which I seriously doubt).

As the Final Report of the ARRB states:

The Review Board sought to locate any audio recordings of voice communications to or from Air Force One on the day of the assassination, including communications between Air Force One and Andrews Air Force Base during the return flight from Dallas to Washington, D.C. As many people are now aware, in the 1970s, the LBJ Presidential Library released edited audio cassettes of unsecured, or open voice conversations with Air Force One, Andrews Air Force Base, the White House Situation Room, and the Cabinet aircraft carrying the Secretary of State and other officials on November 22, 1963. The LBJ Library version of these tapes consists of about 110 minutes of vice transmissions, but the tapes are edited and condensed, so the Review Board staff sought access to unedited, uncondensed versions. Since the edited version of the tapes contains considerable talk about both the forthcoming autopsy on the President, as well as the reaction of a government in crisis, the tapes are of considerable interest to assassination researchers and historians.

Given that the LBJ Library released the tapes in the 1970s, the paper trail is now sketchy and quite cold. The LBJ Library staff is fairly confident that the tapes originated with the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). The LBJ Library staff told the ARRB that it received the tapes from the White House as part of the original shipment of President Johnson's papers in 1968 or 1969. According to the LBJ Library's documentation, the accession card reads: "WHCA?" and is dated 1975. The Review Board staff could not locate any records indicating who performed the editing, or when, or where.

The Review Board's repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communication Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes.

I was the person on the staff driving the effort to find the original, unedited Air Force Once tapes, and I do not mind admitting that our inability to obtain any information whatsoever from WHCA was extremely frustrating, and disappointing. Not only was the paper trail extremely old (and cold), but the attitude of the WHCA official responsible for ARRB liaison was one of amusement, and barely concealed contempt for the Review Board's concern over this issue.

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FINAL REPORT OF THE ARRB, CHAPTER SIX

6. White House Communications Agency

WHCA was, and is, responsible for maintaining both secure (encrypted) and unsecured (open) telephone, radio, and telex communication between the President and the government of the United States. Most of the personnel that constitute this elite agency are U.S. military communications specialists; many, in 1963, were from the Army Signal Corps. On November 22, 1963, WHCA was responsible for communications between and among Air Force One and Two, the White House Situation Room, the mobile White House, and with the Secret Service in the motorcade.

The Review Board sought to locate any audio recordings of voice communications to or from Air Force One on the day of the assassination, including communications between Air Force One and Andrews Air Force Base during the return flight from Dallas to Washington, D.C. As many people are aware, in the 1970s, the LBJ Presidential Library released edited audio cassettes of unsecured, or open voice communications with Air Force One, Andrews Air Force Base, the White House Situation Room, and the Cabinet Aircraft carrying the Secretary of State and other officials on November 22, 1963. The LBJ Library version of these tapes consists of about 110 minutes of voice transmission, but the tapes are edited and condensed, so the Review Board staff sought access to the unedited versions. Since the edited version of the tapes contains considerable talk about both the forthcoming autopsy on the President, as well as the reaction of a government in crisis, the tapes are of considerable interest to assassination researchers and historians.

Given that the LBJ Library released the tapes in the 1970s, the paper trail is now sketchy and quite cold. The LBJ Library staff is fairly confident that the tapes originated with the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). The LBJ Library staff told the Review board staff that it received the tapes from the White House as part of the original shipment of President Johnson’s papers in 1968 or 1969. According to the LBJ Library’s documentation, the accession card reads: “WHCA?” and is dated 1975. The Review Board staff could not locate any records indicating who performed the editing, or when, or where.

The Review Board’s repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes.

FINAL REPORT ARRB Chapter Six p. 116

"Pentagon taking its own steps..." - Bundy

2012-02-01T09:40:00.000-08:00

JFK's Military Aide Gen. Ted Clifton with President Kennedy in the Oval Office

While aboard AF1 "Ted Clifton talked to Bundy, too, asking again whether an international plot was emerging. It was not a discreet inquiry. Trimble's patches were not secure....Bundy replied crisply that the Pentagon was talking its own steps..."

In his book Death of a President (p. 341) William Manchester wrote:

"Aft of the cockpit Signalman John Trimble was too busy to brood. He had three phone patches going to the communications shack, and he was using Hanson's UHF and VHF sets, yet it wasn't enough. Every official in Washington it seemed, wanted to talk to Air Force One...Several conversations were trivial....Lem Johns was forwarding instructions to the White Hosue Communications Agency, and Bill Moyers was talking to Walter Jenkins and Mac Bundy. (Ted Clifton talked to Bundy, too, asking again whether an international plot was emerging. It was not a discreet inquiry. Trimble's patches were not secure. They could be bugged. Bundy replied crisply that the Pentagon was taking its own steps.) But the bulk of the verbal traffic was about President Kennedy..."

Footnote 9 (p. 371)

9. "That Friday Lyndon Johnson did not know that John Kennedy had ordered the taping of all Angel conversations while the plane was in flight. On April 21, 1964, this writer learned that the Love-to-Andrews tape still existed. Since security was not involved, it was first thought that a complete transcript of it would serve as a useful appendix to this book.Presidential consent was withheld, however. On May 5, 1965, the author was permitted to read an edited transcript at the White House. Doubtless the tape will be available to future historians."

Gen. James U. Cross, LBJ's Loyal Military Aide and AF1 Pilot.

January 2, 1968
Dear Mr. Salandria:

I have been asked to respond to your letter, addressed to the White House Communications Agency, concerning a tape recording to [sic] Air Force One, November 22, 1963.

Logs and tapes of the radio transmissions of military aircraft, including those of Air Force One, are kept for official use only. These tapes are not releasable, nor are they obtainable from commercial sources.

I am sorry my response cannot be more favorable.

Respectfully,
(Signed) James U. Cross
Armed Forces Aide to the President

James U. Cross served as Lyndon Johnson's pilot from 1962 until mid-1968. Cross retired from the Air Force as a Brigadier General and commander of Bergstrom Air Force Base in 1971. Today he lives in Gatesville, Texas.

"What a delightful, honest, and entertaining story Jim Cross tells. Here is a man who was so close to power he would come down with a cold if the President sneezed (and could have brought a lot of us literally down with him), but he never forgot his roots in rural Alabama. A man whose daddy worked for the Horseshoe Lumber Company grows up to serve the most powerful man in the world, and his account of that amazing journey —some of it scarily bumpy, as I can testify — is a bird's-eye view, from the cockpit of Air Force One, of why character counts." -Bill Moyers

"General Cross is an American hero and the hero of generations of Johnsons. Daddy used to say there are two types of people; the talkers and the doers. General Cross was always a "can do" presence in our lives. No job was too great or too small for God, country, and his friends. Jim Cross has led a dynamic life in service for others, and I have no doubt generations yet to come will be enriched by his worthy story, as our family always has been." - Luci Baines Johnson

When Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted to go somewhere, there was no stopping him. This dynamic president called for Air Force One as others summon a taxi—at a moment's notice, whatever the hour or the weather. And the man who made sure that LBJ got his ride was General James U. Cross, the president's hand-picked pilot, top military assistant, and personal confidante. One of the few Air Force One pilots to have a position, simultaneously, in the White House, General Cross is also the only member of LBJ's inner circle who has not publicly offered his recollections of the president. In this book, he goes on the record, creating a fascinating, behind-the-scenes portrait of America's complex, often contradictory, always larger-than-life thirty-sixth president.

General Cross tells an engrossing story. In addition to piloting Air Force One around the globe, he served President Johnson in multiple capacities, including directing the Military Office in the White House; managing a secret two-million-dollar presidential emergency fund; supervising the presidential retreat at Camp David, the president's entire transportation fleet, and the presidential bomb shelters; running the White House Mess; hiring White House social aides, including the president's future son-in-law, Charles Robb; and writing condolence letters to the families of soldiers killed in Vietnam. This wide-ranging, around-the-clock access to President Johnson allowed Cross to witness events and share moments that add color and depth to our understanding of America's arguably most demanding and unpredictable president.

BRIGADIER GENERAL JAMES U. CROSS

Retired May 1, 1971.

Brigadier General James U. Cross is commander of the 75th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing at Bergstrom Air Force Base, Texas.

General Cross was born in Andalusia, Ala., in 1925. He attended local schools in the Andalusia area and graduated from Pleasant Home High School. He began his military career by enlisting in the U.S. Army for pilot training and was commissioned a second lieutenant, Army Air Corps, in November 1944.

During World War II in November 1944, he went to the China-Burma-India Theater where he was a transport pilot flying "the Hump." He was relieved from active military duty in April 1946 and became a member of the Air Force Reserve.

He attended Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University), Ala., for two years until he was recalled to active duty in October 1948 to serve at Clark Air Base, Republic of the Philippines. Subsequently he has served in Tactical Air Command, the Northeast Air Command, Military Air Transport Service, and Military Airlift Command.

His next assignment was to Headquarters Eighteenth Air Force, Donaldson Air Force Base, S.C., where he served successively as flying safety officer, inspector, and then pilot with the 63rd Troop Carrier Wing. In February 1956 he went to Goose Bay Air Base, Newfoundland, as operations officer with the 6606th Air Base Group.

General Cross was a pilot with the 40th Air Transport Squadron at Dover Air Force Base, Del., from February 1957 to September 1958. He next went to Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C., where he served as a pilot for VIP aircraft.

In July 1961 he was selected to serve as pilot and military aide to the vice president of the United States and in February 1962 as pilot of Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base, Md. He was appointed as Armed Forces Aide and personal pilot to the president of the United States on July 15, 1965.

In July 1968 he was assigned to Twelfth Air Force at Bergstrom Air Force Base, Texas, where he completed RF-4C aircraft training prior to a short tour of duty in the Republic of Vietnam. In February 1969 he returned to Bergstrom Air Force Base as commander of the 75th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing.

His military decorations include the Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal, Air Force Outstanding Unit Award Ribbon with oak leaf cluster, and Presidential Service Badge. He has more than 10,000 flying hours in various military aircraft.

His hometown is Andalusia, Ala.

He was promoted to the temporary grade of brigadier general effective Feb. 1, 1969, with date of rank Jan. 31, 1969.

Retired Brig. Gen. James U. Cross, who now lives in Gatesville, served as Lyndon Johnson's pilot from 1962 until 1968. He has written a book about his experiences, "Around the World with LBJ" (University of Texas Press, $26.95 hardcover, with Denise Gamino and Gary Rice).

The book's subtitle pretty well outlines the story: "My wild ride as Air Force One pilot, White House aide, and personal confidant."

Cross tells the story in his own words and in an easy-reading, entertaining style.

"My Secret Service code name was Sawdust," Cross writes. As LBJ's pilot, "I bucked the inviolate military chain of command to fly where and when he wanted. Protocol, rules, and red tape couldn't stop us. We did it his way, obstacles be damned. He wasn't always the most pleasant personality to be around, but he was best co-pilot in adventure anyone could ever have had."

But, Cross adds, "Flying was just the half of it. I was the only Air Force One pilot in history to have one foot in the cockpit and the other in the White House. I flew the plane and joined the political ground crew, too."

Cross writes in first person about his time with Vice President and then President Johnson. "One day," he said, "he ordered me to fire a general - and I was only a major." Later, as a colonel, Cross was again ordered to fire a general.

Cross said Johnson confided his thoughts about how much he disliked being vice president and how he looked forward to going back to his Texas ranch after his term ended. He said he only took the job because Democratic leaders insisted that Richard Nixon would win the 1960 election if he didn't.

Of course, all that changed on Nov. 22, 1963. Cross continued to serve as LBJ's pilot and confidant until 1968, after Johnson announced he would not run for re-election. Johnson promoted Cross to brigadier general and got him appointed commander of Bergstrom Air Force Base at Austin.

"I was a one-man army in service to LBJ and my country," Cross reflects. "To have been given the opportunity to build a relationship with this uncommon common man was the gift of a lifetime."

Tale of the Tapes - By Vincent Salandria

2012-01-31T10:59:00.000-08:00

The Tale of the Tapes
by Vincent J. Salandria, Esq.

Vince Salandria, one of the earliest critics of the Warren Commission's conclusion, gave a stirring keynote speech at the 1998 Dallas COPA conference, of which this is a partial excerpt that is elaborated on. He calls attention to the references by T.H. White and Pierre Salinger to transcripts and parts of the Air Force One radio transmissions of 11/22/63 that are not contained in the extant tapes and transcripts.

http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/Kelin34/tapes.html

On November 21, 1998, I delivered a two-hour speech in Dallas (at COPA) espousing the thesis of a high-level national security state plot to kill President Kennedy, and that any concept of a renegade conspiratorial killing was irrational.

On November 23, 1998, I sent a copy of that speech to Professor Noam Chomsky, who had long declared a high-level conspiracy to be irrational. I wrote him: "I have that kind of perverse nature that only benefits from negative criticism. Could you find time to provide some?"

On February 16, 1999, Professor Chomsky replied: "It [the speech] is a lucid presentation of the conclusions that you and others have reached." Lucid in dictionaries is defined as rational. Therefore, Professor Chomsky no longer shares the view that a high-level institutional conspiracy explanation of the assassination is irrational.

I would like to excerpt one concept from that speech which compels the conclusion of a high-level national security conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Readers will no doubt recall the 18 1/2-minute gap in the Watergate tapes which served to prove the institutional guilt of and brought down President Richard M. Nixon and his cohorts. I will demonstrate how the U.S. national security state destroyed not 18 1/2 minutes of tape, but about 5 1/2 hours of three tapes which proved their guilt in the killing of President Kennedy.

In November of 1966, I read Theodore H. White's The Making of the President, 1964. On page 9 of the book I came across the following:

There is a tape recording in the archives of the government which best recaptures the sound of the hours as it waited for leadership. It is a recording of all the conversations in the air, monitored by the Signal Corps Midwestern center "Liberty," between Air Force One in Dallas, the Cabinet plane over the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs' Communications Center in Washington.

Then on page 33 I read the following about the flight back to Washington, D.C. from Dallas:

On the flight the party learned that there was no conspiracy, learned of the identity of Oswald and his arrest; and the President's mind turned to the duties of consoling the stricken and guiding the quick.

I knew that on November 23, 1963, The Dallas Morning News had informed its readers that the Dallas District Attorney, Henry Wade, stated: "Preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting...the electric chair is too good for the killers."

Despite the evidence of conspiracy of which Dealey Plaza reeked, the White House Situation Room had informed President Johnson and the other occupants of Air Force One that, notwithstanding what they may have smelled, seen and felt in Dealey Plaza which spoke of a conspiratorial crossfire, Oswald was to be designated as the lone assassin.

I wrote to Mr. White. Mr. White replied by letter that the communications to Air Force One and the Cabinet Plane were "By government radio --- all relays go through a big Signal Corps center in the Midwest --- and the White House was in constant communications with the plane."

I then wrote to Dr. Robert Bahmer, Archivist of the United States, requesting access to the tape. Dr. Bahmer replied:

We have no knowledge of the existence or location of the tape recording mentioned by Mr. White, despite having made some efforts since the receipt of your letter to obtain some information about it.

I then noted that Pierre Salinger in his book, With Kennedy, reported what the party on the Cabinet Plane heard: The message kept coming off the wire service machine and finally one started grinding out the story of Lee Harvey Oswald and his previous life, in Russia...

So, I wrote to Pierre Salinger on December 3, 1966: In your fine work, With Kennedy, you make mention of radio communications with the White House and the cabinet plane over the Pacific on November 22, 1963 (pp. 212-25) You identify "Stranger" as Major Harold R. Patterson.

Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1964, also refers to these conversations but particularly related to those dialogues with the Presidential plane, Air Force One.
I have asked the National Archives for a copy of this tape. Dr. Bahmer, the excellent Archivist of the United States, cannot locate it, although Mr. White states on page 9 of his book: "There is a tape recording in the archives of the government." I enclose Dr. Bahmer's letter; Mr. White will not provide any further information.

Specifically what I am about is the verification of what Mr. White states was on the tape, to wit: "On the flight the party learned that there was no conspiracy; learned of the identity of Oswald and his arrest; and the President's mind turned to the duties of consoling the stricken and guiding the quick." If such was said, before there was any evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin, and while there was overwhelming evidence of a conspiracy, then the White House is in the interesting position of being the first to designate Oswald as the assassin and the first to have ruled out in the face of impressive evidence to the contrary, that there could have been a conspiracy.

Now, Mr. Salinger...That tape is being denied only to the American public...Will you render this service to civilian rule and democracy for which President Kennedy gave his life?

Respectfully yours,
(signed) Vincent J. Salandria

Mr. Salinger replied on December 26. He was most willing to serve civilian rule and democracy:

The section of my book dealing with the conversations between the White House and the Cabinet plane were taken from a transcript of the tape of those conversations made by the White House Communication Agency. I have never either read or heard the tape to which Mr. White refers, i.e. the conversations with Air Force One. Since the tape with which I worked was provided by the White House Communication Agency, it would seem to me that the tape of the conversation to which you refer would emanate from the same source, if such a tape, in fact, exists.

As to the conversation with the cabinet plane, the transcript of that conversation is in my personal files which have been turned over to the National Archives for placement in the Kennedy Library. I certainly have no objection to your seeing that transcript...

I again wrote to Dr. Bahmer, who replied:

After receipt of your letter of December 28, a careful examination was made of the papers that Mr. Salinger has sent to us for storage. We have not, however, been able to find anything in the nature of a transcript of the tape recording that you are searching for.

So I wrote directly to the White House Communication Agency requesting access to the tape recording. James U. Cross, Armed Forces Aide to the President, replied:

I have been asked to respond to your letter, addressed to the White House Communication Agency, concerning a tape recording to Air Force One, November 22, 1963.

Logs and tapes of the radio transmissions of military aircraft, including those of Air Force One, are kept for official use only. These tapes are not releasable, nor are they obtainable from commercial sources.

I am sorry my response cannot be more favorable.

Of course, Cross lied. They were obtainable by Theodore H. White and Pierre Salinger for non-official use.

The content of these messages was confirmed in 1993 by Robert Manning, Kennedy's Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, who on November 22, 1963 was on the Cabinet plane over the Pacific. He reported having heard the same account of Oswald being designated as the presumed assassin. (Gerald S. and Deborah H. Strober, Let Us Begin Anew, An Oral History of the Kennedy Presidency, Harper Collins Publisher, 1993).

Mr. Douglas P. Horne, a staff member of the Assassination Records Review Board, spoke at the Lancer conference in Dallas in November, 1999. He spoke at length of the Review Board's fruitless attempts to locate the audio taped communications to Air Force One. He informed the audience that it was a shame that the 6 or 7 hours of three separate tapes appear to be gone from this world. 18 1/2 minutes of missing tapes was a fatal matter which caused the Nixon Presidency to unravel. A 90 minute, edited tape of Air Force One communications is extant. The disappearance of some 5 1/2 hours of this vital tape which was made to disappear by the U.S. military leaves our national security state, the force behind the assassination of a peace-seeking President John F. Kennedy, undisturbed and still the preeminent power extending U.S. military hegemony throughout the globe.

We know from the three sources which we have supplied what is contained on that tape and what that tape proves with respect to the institutional involvement of our national security state in the killing of President Kennedy.

John Kelin: Vincent J. Salandria wrote one of the earliest critiques of the Warren Commission's published data, an article appearing in The Legal-Intelligencer, Philadelphia's daily law journal, in 1964. Salandria was convinced early on that there was much more to the assassination than was reported in the press. "Dealey Plaza," he said, "reeked of conspiracy."

In the summer of 1964, he went to Dallas with his then-brother-in-law Harold Feldman, and Feldman's wife Immie (see above). Among the witnesses they interviewed was Helen Markham, the Warren Commission's star witness in the murder of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit. They came away convinced that Markham had been intimidated into giving testimony that conformed to the Warren Commission's lone gunman thesis.

Salandria later published incisive articles in Liberation and The Minority of One. He served in an advisory capacity to Jim Garrison during the New Orleans' DA's investigation into the Kennedy assassination.

See John Kelin's Praise From A Future Generation.
http://home.comcast.net/~johnkelin/author.html
http://home.comcast.net/~johnkelin/praise.html

Horne Memo AF1 Radio Tapes

http://jfkcountercoup.wordpress.com/2010/01/03/horne-memo-af1-radio-tapes/

MEMORANDUM
October 17, 1995
To: Jeremy Gunn
cc David Marwell
Joan Zimmerman
Anne Buttimer
Dennis Quinn
From: Doug Horne
Subject: Air Force One Audiotapes from November 22, 1963

1. As directed, Joan Zimmerman and I visited Archives II to listen to audio recordings of the November 22, 1963 Air Force One tapes. Our initial effort lasted two working days, October 10-11, 1995.

2. The Air Force One tapes presently held by NARA are 3 edited cassette copies provided by the LBJ library, and are identified as follows:

LBJ Library Cassette No. Identifiers
NLJ 3 SRT 969-1
NLJ 4 SRT 969-2
NLJ 5 SRT 969-3

An unidentified voice informs the listener at the outset of the first cassette (NLJ 3) that the recording is “edited and condensed.” The agency or organization which performed the editing is not identified either. Total length of the recorded material on these edited tapes is estimated at about 2 hours; without running a stopwatch a more precise estimate is not possible, since the 3 cassettes used for the transfer by the LBJ library are not uniformly filled with material. For example, the second side of tapes NLJ 4 and NLJ 5 are almost 100% blank, and the first side of tape NLJ 3 is not completely filled.

3. Procedures: The audiotapes at NARA must be listened to in Suite 4000 at Archives II. The tapes are requested in suite 4000; they are not held by Steve Tilley.

An imperfect, Horne e:\wp-docs\AF1.wpd File: 4.0.4 [...An] incomplete “transcript” of the edited audiotapes can be found in LBJ library box # 19. It is highly recommended that anyone listening to the tapes first check out this item from Steve Tilley on the sixth floor, and run off a photocopy of the transcript.

4. Joan Zimmerman and I took voluminous notes, noting the many occasions when spoken word on the tapes is not accounted for on the LBJ transcript. We also took notes in an attempt to expand on areas of the “transcript” which are only summations of conversations (vice verbatim accounts), and attempted to correct occasional inaccuracies found in the LBJ “transcript.” We both feel that it would be premature, at this time, for the ARRB to attempt to create a true, verbatim transcript of the edited Air Force One tapes, since the Review Board is engaged in a search to locate the unedited tapes from which the LBJ variant is condensed. If-and-when a complete audio record of these conversations is located, it may be considered worthwhile for the ARRB to expend the resources necessary to create a complete and precise transcript for inclusion in the JFK Collection at NARA.

5. The Air Force One tapes commence when the Presidential aircraft (Special Air Mission, or “SAM” 26000) is still on the ground at Carswell AFB near Fort Worth, Texas on the morning of November 22, 1963; as the tape begins, President Kennedy has not yet boarded the aircraft following the Fort Worth breakfast event, so the aircraft is not yet referred to as “Air Force One.”

The LBJ tapes include the flight from Carswell AFB to Love Field outside Dallas before the assassination, and the flight from Love Field to Andrews AFB outside Washington DC after the assassination.

The various parties (or “patches,” to use military communications jargon) include the following, listed exactly as spoken on the tapes:

Name/Call Sign Remarks

SAM 26000 - The Presidential aircraft, when the President is not onboard.

Air Force One - The Presidential aircraft, when the President is aboard.

SAM 86972 - The State Department aircraft carrying Press Secretary Salinger, Secretary of State Rusk, Secretary of Agriculture Freeman and other Cabinet members and Administration officials. When the assassination occurred, this aircraft was enroute from Hawaii to Japan; subsequent to the assassination, the aircraft returned to Hawaii to refuel, and then flew directly from Hickam AFB in Hawaii to Andrews AFB Washington.

(At) “Andrews” An “Airman Gilmore” answers for Andrews AFB throughout the tape and appears to be the central player attempting to facilitate all “patches.”

“Liberty” - Precise definition unknown, but through context, “Liberty” appears to be the party controlling radio frequency assignments among 26000, 86972, and the various parties in Washington DC who are talking with Government officials on Air Force One while it is enroute Andrews AFB.

[BK Notes: Now we know "Liberty" to be "the Fish Bowl" at Collins HQ, Cedar Rapids, Iowa – On the newly discovered tape – “Cedar Rapids” is mentioned, and refers to the "Liberty" station at Collins Radio HQ station at Cedar Repids.]

“Command Post” - Command Post’s location is never specified.

“Air Force Command Post” - Air Force Command Post’s location is never specified.

“SAM Command Post” - SAM Command Post’s location is never specified.

“Crown” - White House Situation Room.

6. The LBJ transcript from LBJ box # 19 has appended to it many of the USSS-WHCA code names used by personnel onboard SAM 26000, SAM 86972, and at the White House situation room; additional code names found on the tapes can be found on pages xxi and xxii of Death of a President, by William Manchester.

Nevertheless, there are still some code names used in the tape which Ms. Zimmerman and I could not decipher using the research tools mentioned above. Two of these unidentified dramatis personae on the tapes are “Stranger” and “Dagger”. It was interesting to note that on November 22, 1963 following the assassination, presumably due to the great stress induced by the day’s events, use of the USSS-WHCA code names was sloppy and inconsistent, with many speakers interchanging their code names and real names during the same conversation (thus compromising the purpose of the code names).

7. As a result of our review of the LBJ library’s edited and condensed version of the Air Force One tapes, many noteworthy observations were made which clearly justify ARRB’s pursuit of the unedited versions of these audiotapes, or of other records which could shed light on the ambiguities inherent in the incomplete and intriguing record constituted by these taped conversations.

These “investigative leads” are summarized below in no particular order or priority, and regardless of how they are eventually resolved or clarified, any assassination records which could shed light on these sometimes confusing and controversial passages belong in the JFK Collection at NARA:

A. Four radio frequencies were identified as the means of communications between parties onboard aircraft SAM 26000, SAM 86972, and the White House Communications Agency in Washington, namely:
11176 MHZ (Upper sideband)
15011 MHZ (Upper Sideband)
13247 MHZ (Upper sideband)
18027 MHZ (Lower sideband)

Part of the LBJ library collection donated to the JFK Collection at NARA includes a typed summary prepared by Master Sergeant John C. Trimble, USAF (the WHCA technician who was the radio operator onboard Air Force One during the flight from Dallas to Washington on November 22, 1963). In his statement, he says: “I…had three phone patches going simultaneously most of the time.” Since total fight time, from takeoff from Love Field, until “on the blocks” at Andrews AFB was 2 hours and 17 minutes, the unedited audiotapes could conceivably be as long as 7-9 hours in total duration, although how much of this time would be “dead time” is unknown. One serious problem with the edited Air Force One tape is that the listener does not know which frequency (i.e., “patch”) he is listening to at any one time, or whether or not the various conversations which are condensed onto the tape are recorded in the proper time sequence.

B. Onboard Air Force One on the return flight to Washington, Secret Service Agent Kellerman, and later General Ted Clifton (Military Aide to the President) make it clear that their desire is for an ambulance and limousine to take President Kennedy’s body to Walter Reed General Hospital for autopsy “...under guard...,” as specified by General Clifton. Gerald Behn, Head of the White House Secret Service Detail, counters that a helicopter has been arranged to take the President’s body to the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda for autopsy, and that all other personnel will be choppered to the South Grounds of the White House. Ultimately, the President’s physician, Admiral George Burkley (on Air Force One), sides with Gerald Behn (at the White House) in support of a Bethesda autopsy and persuades the Surgeon General of the Army, General Heaton (in Washington) to cancel arrangements for a Walter Reed autopsy. Once it becomes clear that Bethesda is to be the site, two things happen: first, both Admiral Burkley and General Clifton insist that the President’s body be transported to Bethesda by ambulance (vice helicopter), even though Gerald Behn at the White House informs General Clifton that President Kennedy’s Naval Aide, CAPT Shepard, has assured him that it will be no problem for the helicopter to carry the heavy casket; second, even though Admiral Burkley and General Clifton insist on ambulance transport of JFK’s body to Bethesda, Gerald Behn at the White House subsequently orders Roy Kellerman: “You accompany the body aboard the helicopter.” Finally, General Clifton insists and then repeats, in great detail, orders for a forklift and platform at the left rear of the aircraft for the casket, a personnel ramp at the left front of the aircraft for President Johnson and other passengers’ debarkation, and another personnel ramp at the right front of the airplane (the dark, unlit side of the aircraft where there is a galley door) for the departure of Jacqueline Kennedy. These concerns are mirrored at flight’s end in a conversation from Colonel Swindal (Air Force One pilot) to Colonel Cross (USAF also) on the ground.

(Editorial notes: (1) The fact that Jacqueline Kennedy never used the ramp at the right front of the aircraft has caused at least one researcher to question the real motivation for its placement; (2) An Air Force document titled: “Historical Highlights of Andrews Air Force Base, 1942-1989″ states that “...the body of the slain President was removed to Walter Reed General Hospital...,” which further fuels the controversy over the movements of the President’s body after Air Force One landed at Andrews. )

C. On one occasion on the tape, Admiral Burkley states to Gerald Behn at the White
House, “I have called General Heaton and asked him...,” but on the LBJ edited audiotape, there is no previous conversation recorded with General Heaton, leading one to the conclusion that a conversation took place which is not present on the edited tape. The first conversation between Burkley and Heaton on the tape comes after this remark.

D. On 4 different occasions on the edited tape, “Crown” (the White House Situation Room) attempts to put “Witness” (CAPT Tazewell Shepard, President Kennedy’s Naval Aide) in communication with Air Force One (and the Air Force One patch with General Heaton) in order to resolve the confusion over the arrangements for the President’s autopsy. There are so many crude edits and breaks on this edited and compressed audio recording that it is unclear whether CAPT Shepard “never got through” to Air Force One at all, or whether he perhaps did on one or more occasions, but those conversations have simply been omitted from of the present version of the recording.

E. Concerning the President’s limousine, SS-100X, two remarks of interest can be heard on the tape. In the first, Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman says to Gerald Behn (at the White House), “I’m sure the Volunteer boys will go over his car and so forth.”

(Note: “Volunteer” was the USSS-WHCA code name for Vice-President Johnson.) Second, apparently late in the flight to Andrews, someone onboard Air Force one is informed about the status of the plane carrying the two cars from Dallas (SS-100X and the Secret Service follow-up car), namely that “...373 (a tail number) departed at 2141 Zulu…the one with the Presidential cars onboard.” Near the end of the flight Air Force One can be heard inquiring if there is an ETA for “the C-130 with the vehicles.”

F. Background chatter can be heard at one point, discussing a “limousine and ambulance at Andrews,” and later in the same background conversation, something about a “black Cadillac”. This is probably an indication of simultaneous conversations taking place onboard Air Force One on different frequencies, which only highlights the importance of obtaining unedited tapes of all of the conversations.

G. During the flight from Dallas to Washington, “SAM Command Post” calls Air Force One and a “Colonel Arnbuck (phonetic) from OPS” expresses a concern from the Chief of Staff (General LeMay?) as to whether President Johnson and Mr. Kennedy’s body is onboard the aircraft. This question is followed immediately on the tape by the confusing tug-of-war over who will control autopsy arrangements, etc.

H. On more than one occasion during the flight, personnel in Washington specifically ask whether Mrs. Kennedy is onboard. “A.F. Command Post” first asks this question, immediately before the “Chief of Staff’s Office” inquires about the whereabouts of President Johnson and Mr. Kennedy’s body. Subsequently, “Air Force Command Post” asks who the top people onboard are. “Winner” (a Mr. Hatcher at “Crown”) later asks if Mrs. Kennedy is onboard. During the flight Admiral Burkley assumes that Mrs. Kennedy will accompany the body, General Clifton very carefully arranges separate debarkation arrangements from the aircraft for Mrs. Kennedy, and Gerald Behn (Head of White House Secret Service Detail) attempts on two occasions to separate all passengers on Air Force One from JFK’s body after arrival (desiring to send the body alone to Bethesda on a helicopter, and all other personnel to the South Grounds of the White House). The significance of this repeated concern about Mrs. Kennedy’s whereabouts and her plans upon landing is a source of controversy among some researchers and is another reason to pursue unedited audiotapes of these flight conversations.

I. Immediately after Behn orders Kellerman to “...accompany the body aboard the helicopter”, the following exchange takes place:

Kellerman: “I was unable to get ahold of Payne and Bob Burke (names are phonetic approximations).” After a break, the words “...Payne and Burke at the ranch…” are heard; it is unclear whether the speaker is Kellerman or Behn. Finally, an unidentified speaker says, “…Payne and Burke were not notified…”. The meaning or possible significance of this exchange, if any, is not known.

J. Immediately after the above exchanges, an unidentified voice twice says, “...is on 6970...”. (Note: Aircraft #86970 was the Vice-Presidential aircraft, which also flew back to Andrews AFB from Love Field on November 22, 1963.)

K. One last noticeable exchange worth reporting is from “Wing” (Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, USAF, President Kennedy’s Air Force Aide) to “Slugger”(Capt. Cecil Stoughton, USAF, White House photographer who photographed both the swearing-in of LBJ onboard Air Force One in Dallas, and the onloading of JFK’s casket at Love Field): Wing asks that Crown relay to Slugger that he must meet the aircraft as soon as possible after arrival Andrews, and that if he cannot do this, he is to see Wing as soon as possible after arrival, or contact him in any way feasible. The urgency and importance of this matter to Wing is very clear from his tone of voice. Later, Crown informs Wing that Slugger remained on the ground in Dallas. One of the many conversations not on the LBJ transcript which is on the edited tape reads as follows:

Andrews(?): “Air Force One, this is very important.”

Slugger: “This is Capt. Stoughton in Dallas.”

Air Force One: “Warrior advises he is unable to speak with you at the present time and asks would you please call the White House in about 30 minutes.”(Note: It is unclear what this is all about, and additionally unclear why Warrior is the party unable to speak with Slugger, when it was Wing who asked to speak with him in the first place.)

END.

Gen. Clifton's AF1 Radio Transmission Tape

2012-01-31T08:08:00.000-08:00

Gen. Clifton's AF1 Radio Transmission Tape from the Raab Collection

THE ORIGINAL WHITE HOUSE VERSION OF THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION AIR FORCE ONE TAPE, NOT PREVIOUSLY KNOWN TO EXIST

The foremost new addition to the historical record in one the most important events in American history, this tape predates the National Archives / Johnson Library version, is more than 30 minutes longer, and contain new names and incidents.
$500,000

IT ALSO CASTS LIGHT ON THE NUMBER OF VERSIONS OF THE TAPES, AND THE LATER CREATION OF THE PUBLIC VERSION IN THE DAYS OF THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION

Years before the creation of the LJB Library version, thought until now to be the only surviving one, another tape existed of conversations aboard Air Force One on November 22, 1963. This crucial piece of history has been long sought. White House records revealed nothing. The discovery of this, the earliest version known to exist, and the events and names it discloses, will change the way we view this seminal event of the 20th century.

SELECTED CLEAR DISCREPANCIES BETWEEN THE FIRST AIR FORCE ONE TAPE AND THE JOHNSON LIBRARY VERSION, WITH NEW TEXT QUOTED

Ours was a non forensic process; differences were identified solely from professionally digitized files using standard audio equipment

THE ANXIOUS EFFORT TO REACH KENNEDY’S ADVERSARY, GENERAL CURTIS LEMAY.

All references to LeMay have been deleted from the Johnson version. His aide wanted to reach him badly and immediately, and was trying to interrupt Air Force One transmissions to do so. (see below for more on LeMay). “Colonel Dorman, General LeMay’s aide. General LeMay is in a C140. Last three numbers are 497, SAM C140. His code name is Grandson. And I want to talk to him.” Any delay, he said, “would be too late.” LeMay’s precise location at the time of the assassination and after have been a subject of open speculation. This places him.

Audio clip excerpt – LeMay’s aide urgently attempts to reach the General

NEW NAMES, MISSING IDENTITIES

Someone code-named “Monument,” someone referred to as “WTE,” and someone named “John” referred to. “Hello? Can you get me Secretary Rusk? Hold on please…Cedar Rapids, give me 972. Stand by we are having a State Dept. join now. I’m showing a…I’ll have John give you a call soon as he’s done. WTE wants him. OK. Hold on line. 1102 3000 1104.” Talking about Rusk: “He is talking to Mr. Ball. Stand by one. State Dept is talking to Mr. Salinger at this time. Do everything on there. You talk to Ball. Number one is trying to break in…” “…november alpha bravo 90. I’d like to talk to Monument who’s aboard that aircraft.”

REVEALING THE IDENTITY OF CODE NAME STRANGER, OMITTED IN THE LBJ VERSION

He was identified by Pierre Salinger in his book. “Andrews, The answer to your request is Maj. Harold R. Paterson, I think. Maj. Harold R. Paterson.”
Excerpt: “Stranger”

THE DISPOSITION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S BODY, AND THE AUTOPSY. THE 1ST REFERENCE TO TAKING THE PRESIDENT’S BODY TO WALTER REED

There is additional discussion as to whether it should be taken to Walter Reed or Bethesda, on procuring an ambulance, and on whether Mrs. Kennedy would also going there. These were areas of disagreement. “Andrews supplying ambulance for body to take to Walter Reed. Repeat please, repeat please. Walter Reed for body, Walter Reed. Over. Say again, say again.”

THE HEAD OF THE SECRET SERVICE, TRANSPORTING KENNEDY’S BODY, AND BRINGING THE NEW PRESIDENT’S PARTY TO THE WHITE HOUSE.

There is expanded discussion of which vehicles would pick up the body: Gerald Behn, the head of the Secret Service, is overheard giving his frank opinion on the matter, discussing the cars, a “black Cadillac,” and/or ambulances. “… a black Cadillac…I would get them out there anyways regardless Henry, get them out there anyways regardless of the maybe. Maybe is what they said…” Later, a separate voice remarks, “I am trying to order White House car 102 and 405x. I understand you are ordering two cars, is that a roger?” The ARRB report noted a later reference to a “black Cadillac” but since this conversation was omitted noted that it lacked context and might be important. This discrepancy is just one of a handful of such specific circumstances the ARRB notes.
Excerpt: The head of the Secret Service on the disposition of the body

THE PRESIDENT’S REMAINS; SURGEON GENERAL HEATON AND ADMIRAL BURKLEY. “MRS. KENNEDY WILL ALSO BE GOING”

There are expanded discussions with him. “Air Force One, Crown, I’m putting General Heaton on the line, over. Air Force One, Crown, go ahead. General Heaton on the line. Hello, General Heaton… General Heaton, this is Admiral Burkley…You…the military district of Washington in regards to the taking care of the remains of the President Kennedy, and we are planning on having the President taken to directly to Walter Reed and probably Mrs. Kennedy will also be going out there.”
Excerpt: General Heaton and Admiral Burkley planning the disposition of the President’s body

TEXAN CONGRESSMEN

Someone was looking for Texan Congressmen who were there during the assassination. “Air Force 1970, John D. needs to know here on the ground if you have Congressmen Thomas, Thornberry and Brooks aboard. Can you check them out for us? Say again, Robby…The…need to know…”

Excerpt: Looking for the Congressmen from Texas

STATE DEPARTMENT COMMUNICATIONS

There is additional material relating to the communications with State Dept. officials, coordination of their return information, and concern about information they were being given.

RADIO BANDS, LOGISTICS

There is expanded conversation about what bands they will speak on, information valuable in assessing the process of communication on board Air Force One during the flight home.

These are just a few of the points of difference we found, using the acoustic equipment at our disposal. Forensic equipment could certainly reveal more. Moreover, this discovery permits the application of new technologies to the original film and not simply to a digital file. It is the most significant piece of audio/visual history ever to reach the public market.

Note on Curtis LeMay: He was the Air Force Chief and a particularly staunch opponent of the Kennedy administration. Robert McNamara stated that LeMay was a staunch advocate of “preemptive nuclear war to rid the world of the Soviet threat.” Air Force Chief Curtis LeMay, who had been advocating nuclear war with the Soviet Union since the early 1950s, thought Cuba was a “sideshow” and told the President that the United States should “fry it.” LeMay, himself a member of the Joint Chiefs, “was in the habit of taking bullying command of Joint Chiefs meetings,” and with LeMay leading the charge for war, “the other chiefs jumped into the fray, repeating the Air Force general’s call for immediate military action.” Around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy told an aide that the administration needed to make sure that the Joint Chiefs did not start a war without his approval. Thirteen days after that crisis began, the Soviets announced that they would remove the missiles from Cuba, with the US agreeing to remove missiles from US bases in Turkey and “pledging not to invade Cuba.” At the announcement of the end to the crisis, General LeMay told Kennedy, “It’s the greatest defeat in our history,” and that, “We should invade today.” Lyndon Johnson had better relations with General LeMay.

MAJOR EVENTS TIMELINE:

November 22, 1963 – John Kennedy is assassinated, and the conversations on board AF1 are recorded. These conversations will eventually become one of the most important primary resources in the investigation

Late 1963-1965 – A copy is created for Ted Clifton, Senior Military Aide to John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson military aide

1966-1968 – A shorter, edited version is created during the Johnson Administration, which was later given to the LBJ Library and distributed by it to the National Archives and the John F. Kennedy Library. By the time LBJ leaves, all other versions go missing.

1970s – The LBJ version is released to the American people

1990s – A governmental agency’s efforts to discover any other version of this tape in governmental repositories are unsuccessful, even under penalty of perjury

2011 – The original, longer copy belonging to Clifton is discovered

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

President Kennedy was murdered while riding in a motorcade in Dallas at 12:30 pm CST on Friday, November 22, 1963. Several photos and films captured the assassination, including the famous Zapruder Film. JFK was rushed to Parkland Hospital, where a tracheotomy and other efforts failed to keep him alive. After he was pronounced dead around 1 pm, his body was flown back to Washington aboard Air Force One, on board which were his wife Jackie and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Upon landing his body was taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where an autopsy was performed, and he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday the 25th.

Meanwhile, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested around 2 pm at the Texas Theatre in the Oak Cliff suburb of Dallas and charged with murdering a police officer named J.D. Tippit. Protesting that he was “a patsy,” Oswald was paraded in front of the world’s gathering cameras and accused of murdering President Kennedy as well. He was interrogated throughout the weekend, though no recordings or transcriptions were made. During an intended transfer to county facilities on Sunday morning the 24th, Oswald was shot and killed on live television in the basement of the Dallas Police station. His murderer was a local nightclub owner with alleged connections to organized crime named Jack Ruby. People were stunned by all this and there was a wide-spread call for investigation of the Kennedy assassination and aftermath.

Who killed Kennedy and why

In 1964, the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, named by President Johnson and known as the Warren Commission, found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby were part of “any conspiracy, domestic or foreign…” The issuance of the Warren Report was followed about two months later by 26 volumes of hearings and exhibits, the “supporting evidence” on which the Report and one-assassin conclusion were based. Soon people who read the tomes were claiming that despite its lengthy report the investigation was half-hearted and incomplete, that there were discrepancies in the evidence, that information tending to place the commission’s conclusion in doubt had been ignored or withheld, that important witnesses had not even been interviewed, etc. They maintained that the official story did not stand up to scrutiny, and there must have been some conspiracy at the heart of the assassination. This led to widespread allegations of a government cover up, and a plethora of theories were proposed about who killed President Kennedy and why. The percentage of Americans who doubted the Warren Commission’s conclusion leaped from 39% after that report was issued to 60% in 1967.

A demand for answers 30 years after the event

In 1991 Oliver Stone released the film “JFK,” which examined the events leading to the assassination and the alleged subsequent cover-up. The film was very popular, showing again the enduring fascination of the public with this quintessential story of tragedy and conspiracy. It also proved to be a landmark moment politically, as it ignited an outcry for answers about the assassination that led to the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The act set up the U.S. Assassination Records Review Board to search for, collect and re-examine for public release assassination-related records held by federal agencies. The Board finished its work in 1998 and issued a final report, which though not containing findings on the assassination of President Kennedy, did result in the release of previously withheld government records and the exposure of some new additional information through its depositions of eyewitnesses. Yet for all the excitement and good intentions, the Board’s work spotlighted more the important information that was still missing than what it had been able to find.

The famed Air Force One Tapes

There is just a trio of important sources of primary evidentiary material in the Kennedy assassination. Two of these are the evidence created or found in Dallas (such as acoustic evidence, ballistic evidence, and physical findings in the Book Depository), and the medical evidence (such as coroner’s photographs and reports). Essentially everything about these materials is known, and they have been analyzed and reanalyzed. They have not been significantly augmented for decades, and not much can be expected in the way of new discoveries.

The third important source of evidence in the Kennedy assassination are the famous Air Force One tapes, which recorded conversations between that plane, the White House Situation Room, and other places in the immediate wake of the assassination.

The matters discussed included the disposition of the President’s body, where it should be taken and how it should be removed from the plane and transported, the details of disagreements about these key facts, plans for where Mrs. Kennedy would be taken, attempts to organize a conversation about the President’s autopsy, mentions of cars, limousines and ambulances, plus innumerable other topics. The tapes also placed the various parties, allowing the public to learn where they were, at what time, and what they were saying.

These tapes were released by the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, and they start with an announcer stating: “The following recording has been reproduced from ground recorded non-high fidelity tape to re-cord record patch communications of Air Force One.” He continues, “This tape has been edited and condensed to contain only pertinent information relative to events during 22nd of November, 1963. Only material available from radio circuits used is available.” The tapes at the National Archives and John F. Kennedy Library are the version provided by the Johnson Library, and no other version of the tapes has been known to exist. So with the only tapes available an edited version, and no answer to the questions of who ordered the edits or what had been edited out, the tapes themselves poured fuel on the fire and became a central part of the controversy.

ARRB expressed a great deal of interest in these tapes, and in a lengthy memo stated that they contained important observations that would “clearly justify” its pursuing them. It was concerned about the accuracy of the edited version, “crude edits and breaks,” and its known discrepancies, like a conversation with General Heaton that was referenced at one spot but not recorded anywhere. Plus there were the questions of what code names, locales and call numbers were missing, and what may have been the significance of others statements. And most obviously, what was edited out and why.

The ARRB went looking for the unedited tapes. It went so far as to issue a targeted request to the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) under penalty of perjury, and to the Air Force, seeking all additional records or versions of the Air Force One tapes. Neither had any such records nor knowledge of the disposition of any such records. So again all that was left was the Johnson Library version.

The Discovery of the first Air Force One Assassination tape, not previously known to exist; Timeline of the versions of the Kennedy assassination tapes

So the prevailing state of affairs has been that the LBJ tape is the only one that exists, that it was edited from original tapes that are presumed lost or destroyed, and that we would learn nothing else.

Who possessed the newly discovered tape, one that is longer than the LBJ Library tape
President Kennedy never appointed a chief of staff, but the man who undertook many of the responsibilities of that office was his senior military aide Chester (Ted) Clifton. Clifton was in the Dallas motorcade and was aboard Air Force One on that fateful day and involved in the discussions. Following the assassination, he was in charge of dealing with military and national security affairs in the aftermath. He retained his position for a while in the Johnson administration. He served from January 20, 1961 to his retirement on August 3, 1965.

The raw tapes

The ARRB established that the WHCA was responsible for communications between Air Force One, the White House Situation Room, and other sites on the day of the assassination. It tape recorded those actual communications. These were the raw tapes. They would have been at least 4 hours and 20 minutes long, as known portions of the tape commence no later than 1:45 EST and conclude on wheels down for Air Force One at approximately 6:05. The version states that it had been edited down from these.
The first Air Force One Assassination tape

Sometime between the end of November 1963 and July 1965, the raw WHCA tapes from November 22, 1963 were used to create an Air Force One Assassination tape that was 2:22 minutes long. The WHCA labels the tape as “For General Clifton,” and it is the first identifiable White House Version of the tape produced. Two originals of this version were made for General Clifton at that time. That this version was made prior to General Clifton’s retirement in August 1965 is indicated by the fact that Pierre Salinger was given access to at least some portions of it to research his book, “With Kennedy,” which was published in 1966.

The Johnson Library edited version

During the Johnson presidency, at some time between the end of 1965 and January 1969 when LBJ left the White House, a different, shorter and edited version was created. The preparer of this still had access to the raw tapes, showing that they existed then, and may well also have had access to the first Air Force One Assassination tape. In this edited version, dozens of deletions were made from the first Air Force One Assassination tape. This edited version went back to Texas with LBJ (leaving no version in the White House records), and it was given by him to the Johnson Library, where it resides today. This version is the one that both the Kennedy Library and National Archives have, and is the one that was made available to the public in the 1970s.

The loss and/or destruction of the raw tapes and the first Air Force One Assassination tape

The raw tapes never resurfaced after 1965-6, and the very existence of the first Air Force One Assassination tape was forgotten. Over the years all efforts to find the raw tapes or any other original version proved fruitless. They are no longer with the White House Communications Agency, where they were created.

General Clifton’s first Air Force One Assassination tape rediscovered

General Clifton’s effects were recently disposed of by his heirs, and his copies of the original first Air Force One Assassination tape were among them. The reappearance of this tape is a major event in the Kennedy assassination case, and makes possible for the first time a complete understanding of the versions of the tapes and their chronology. We had the tapes professionally digitized, so they are now in both digitized and reel-to-reel form.

THE IMPACT OF THE ASSASSINATION

The long term impacts of this proved to be profound. The assassination left people more cynical and distrustful than before, an attitude still in evidence today. And though the Kennedy years were not really part of the era that followed known as the Sixties, they set off various chain reactions that led it off.

The phenomenon of interest in the Kennedy assassination, which never seems to die
The event took place in 1963, 48 years ago. Yet people still have a keen interest in it and very definite opinions. A 2009 CBS poll found that only one in 10 Americans believes that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. By 74% to 13%, the public thought there was an official cover-up to keep the public from learning the truth about the assassination.
This discovery is the first major change in the availability of primary resource on the assassination since the Commission finished its deliberations in the 1990s and the most important since the 1970s.

The sale of the original first Air Force One Assassination tape and donation of the digitized content

In January 2012, one of the two originals officially went to the National Archives at a Press Conference to the Kennedy Assassination Records division which has a Congressional mandate to collect important history and is the nation’s repository for Kennedy Assassination records.

For sale is the other original, identical, tape. The buyer will receive the original reel-to-reel, and the high definition digitized copy. It is the only original known to be in private hands.

THE RAAB COLLECTION

The Raab Collection is a leading international dealer in important historical documents for sale and has worked with the families of great historical figures for decades to discover, save, preserve, and sell original history.

The Raab Collection
http://www.raabcollection.com/kennedy-air-force-one-tape/
(800) 977-8333
questions@raabcollection.com

NARA Releases Clifton Copy of AF1 Radio Transmissions

2012-01-31T08:02:00.000-08:00

US Archives releases longer audio tape from Air Force One after Kennedy assassination

01/30/2012 4:23 PM
http://www.boston.com/Boston/politicalintelligence/2012/01/archives-releases-longer-tape-air-force-one-after-kennedy-assassination/icxEaGi6Ad72c8Xr3zq3PN/index.html?s_campaign=8315

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff

WASHINGTON -- The Kennedy assassination was one of the most heart-wrenching and chaotic events in modern American history -- and one still replete with mysteries.
But now a little more light has been shed on one of them: What was edited out of the flight deck recording from Air Force One as it carried John F. Kennedy’s body and the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, from Dallas to Washington.

The National Archives and Records Administration today released a newly discovered recording – running about 2 hours and 20 minutes -- that is nearly 40 minutes longer than the only version previously known to exist.

The more complete recording was discovered last year by the Raab Collection, a manuscript collector in Pennsylvania, after one of its agents purchased at auction a box of personal effects from the estate of General Chester Clifton, who was Kennedy’s military aide.

The whereabouts of the complete Air Force One radio transmissions from Nov. 22, 1963, still remain a mystery. But what makes this a historically significant find is that it is an earlier version of the raw transmissions than the one housed at the LBJ Library, which was more heavily edited and runs only about an hour and 40 minutes.

Clifton, who died in 1991, left the White House in 1965, while the LBJ Library version was made public in 1971.

“This is the earliest that likely exists,” said Nathan Raab, vice president of the Raab Collection in Ardmore, Pa.

The newly found tape, a copy of which was donated to the Archives, includes never-before-heard transmissions between the White House Situation Room and another plane taking Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other Cabinet members to Tokyo at the time of Kennedy’s shooting and was turned back. It also contains an urgent request to locate the head of the Air Force, General Curtis LeMay, whose whereabouts in the immediate aftermath of the assassination have remained an obsession for generations of conspiracy theorists.

Some of the newly discovered radio traffic is raw and uncensored, such as when Rusk and his party are informed of the shooting while flying over the Pacific.

“Kennedy apparently shot in head,” the male radio operator in the Situation Room reports. “He fell face down in back seat of his car, blood was on his head, Mrs. Kennedy cried ‘oh, no’ and tried to hold up his head.”

Also heard are more mundane things, such as the pilots of Air Force One discussing how to avoid tornados in Arkansas and Mississippi along the flight path from Dallas to Washington, D.C.

Raab said he was most intrigued by the portion involving LeMay. Kennedy and the hawkish Air Force chief were widely known to mistrust each other and all references to LeMay were deleted in the Johnson Library version of the recording.

In the longer version, one of LeMay’s aides, a Colonel Dorman, contacts the White House Situation Room seeking to reach the general, who he tells them is flying in a C-140 aircraft with the last three numbers 497 and whose code name is “Grandson.”

“And I want to talk to him,” the colonel says. Any delay, he adds, “would be too late.”

But he is told they will have to interrupt transmissions with Air Force One to do so. The Situation Room reports that they are using both frequencies available to communicate with the presidential aircraft.

Summarizing the portions of the tape not made public before, the National Archives cited “references to new code names and incidents; a private conversation between Jerry Behn, the head of the Secret Service, and an unidentified individual about the disposition of the president’s body; an urgent effort by an aide to Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay to reach [him]; and attempts to locate various members of Congress from the Texas delegation.”

Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero said the recording “provides additional documentation concerning the immediate response of the US Government on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination.”

The tape, added, Raab, “will allow the public a more complete view of the chaotic circumstances following the assassination of President Kennedy.”

But the recording only goes so far. Several hours of raw tape are still missing. The transmissions heard on Air Force One that day should cover more than four hours -- from before 2 p.m. Eastern time to after 6 p.m., when the new president and the casket bearing JFK arrived at Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland.

“The raw tapes never resurfaced after 1965-66, and the very existence of the first Air Force One assassination tape [found among Clifton’s papers] was forgotten,” said the Raab Collection. “Over the years all the efforts to find the raw tapes or any other original version proved fruitless.

They are no longer with the White House Communications Agency, where they were created.”
The Raab Collection is selling the original copy of the reel-to-reel recording for $500,000, along with other items found among Clifton’s estate, including an autographed photograph of President Kennedy.

Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com

YAHOO NEWS: New audio tape sheds light on JFK assassination

http://news.yahoo.com/audio-tape-sheds-light-jfk-assassination-235325491.html

Long-lost audio recordings of the aftermath of president John F. Kennedy's assassination have been made public, captivating historians and stirring fascination about that fateful day.

Almost 50 years after the November 22, 1963 assassination, a two hour and 22 minute reel was found among the personal effects of JFK's senior military aide, Major General Chester Clifton, who died in 1991.

The reel contains more than 30 minutes of previously unheard footage of conversations on board Air Force One as Kennedy's body was being transported back to Washington from Dallas.

It includes new code names and incidents, including a private conversation by the head of the Secret Service, Jerry Behn, about where to take the body and plans for where the First Lady,Jacqueline Kennedy, would be taken.

There is also an urgent effort by an aide to Air Force chief of staffCurtis LeMay, a well-known hawk and Kennedy critic, to reach Clifton; and attempts to locate various congressmen from Texas.

The material was acquired by the Raab Collection, a rare documents dealer based in Philadelphia, who donated a digitized copy to the National Archives, made public at gpo.gov/fdsys.

Experts say the tapes will stir debate among conspiracy theorists, especially about LeMay, a major Kennedy adversary whose name was conspicuously missing from an edited version of the original tape.

"People have always wanted to know where was Curtis LeMay on the day Kennedy was shot and there have been mixed messages about it. This tape provides exactly where he was," Kennedy historian Douglas Brinkley told CNN.

The Raab Collection is looking to sell on the original box and tape -- which has a label reading "Radio Traffic involving AF-1 in flight from Dallas, Texas to Andrews AFB on November 22, 1963" -- for $500,000.

"As Americans have looked to the history of the Kennedy assassination in search of answers, somewhere in an attic there existed a tape, made years before the only known surviving version, of the conversations on Air Force One on that fateful day," vice-president Nathan Raab says in a sale flier.

"This longer, more complete tape is a crucial discovery, and a landmark piece of American history."

The recording is a longer, unedited version of audio produced by the library of president Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy after the assassination.

AARC Letter to US Archivist

2012-01-22T08:06:00.002-08:00

The Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), in a letter dated January 20, 2012, requested that the National Archives and the CIA release some 50,000 pages relating to the JFK assassination that remain withheld in full from the public, as well as an undisclosed number of partially deleted records. The letter maintains that release of such records well before the 50th anniversary of the assassination on November 22, 2013, is essential to having a full and robust national discussion of this event and its significance. The working group that produced the AARC's letter consisted of three AARC Board Members and two leading attorneys who have a profound interest in the subject. The letter was also signed by Professor G. Robert Blakey, the former Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

- Rex Bradford at Mary Ferrell Archives [http://www.maryferrell.org/] Please visit MFA at: http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Featured_AARC_Letter_to_US_Archivist_on_CIA_Records

Rex Notes: In short, the AARC has advised NARA and the CIA that fifty years of secrecy is enough. The working group is currently discussing how best to develop a plan of action to get NARA and CIA to expedite disclosure of the withheld records. Stay tuned.

The majority of the over 1 million pages of records in the MFF's Document Archive come from the files of the AARC, whose President Jim Lesar along with other members have worked tirelessly and successfully for release of JFK assassination records over the decades.

"What’s past is prologue" is a quotation by William Shakespeare from his play The Tempest. The phrase means that history influences, and sets the context for, the present. The quotation is engraved on the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. See: [I]

AARC
Assassination Archives and Research Center

Jim Lesar, President
1003 K Street N.W., Suite 640
Washington, D.C. 20001
Tel (202) 393-1921

January 20, 2012

United States Archivist David S. Ferreiro
National Archives and Records Administration
700 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
Washington D.C. 20081-0001

BY CERTIFIED MAIL NUMBER
7011 1570 0000 4139 8117

Dear Mr. Ferreiro:

In 1992, Congress passed the “President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992” (“JFK Act”) which requires “the expeditious public transmission to the Archivist and public disclosure of” all records designated as assassination relate. The clear design of the legislation was to declassify and release to the public as many of the records as possible, holding back only a few of the most highly-classified documents until 2017. At that time the only way in which a record could continue to be withheld would be if the President of the United States personally approved the continued withholding of specific records under mandated strict standards. The legislative motivation behind the JFK Act was to enable the American public to review as many as possible of the entire original body of more than 5 million government pages pertaining to the assassination to allow full scholarly and historical analysis of it, and to assess its impact by and on the historical events surrounding it.

Yet despite the passage of nearly 20 years since the Act was passed, it was only recently that scholars learned that there are not just a few CIA records missing from the public records, but approximately 50,000 pages which remain classified. (The volume of partially withheld pages is unknown but is also quite substantial.) This contravenes both the letter and spirit of the JFK Act and is unacceptable as a matter of law.

Enforcement of the JFK Act’s disclosure mandate originally repose in a five-member panel of citizens, the Assassinations Records Review Board (“ARRB”). Upon demise of the ARRB, the Act delegated NARA to carry out its provisions “until such at time as the Archivist certifies to the President and to Congress that all assassination records have been made available to the public…” 1. The Act further provides that “all postponed or redacted records shall be reviewed periodically by the originating agency and the Archivist consistent with the recommendations of the Review Board...” 2.

Since the expiration of the ARRB, the CIA and NARA have upheld the purpose of the JFK Act and facilitated the public disclosure of many thousands of records. According to a press release on NARA’s JFK Act website, the CIA speeded up its processing of withheld documents through 2010. As a result, for example, in 2004, two volumes of the CIA’s Jack Pfeiffer report on the Bay of Pigs were reviewed and released under JFK Act standards. But, with all due respect, NARA now appears to be disregarding its mandate and is not fulfilling its responsibilities to enforce the provisions and intent of the JFKAct.

In 2010, NARA held a public forum to discuss the plan of a National Declassification Center (“NDC”) to declassify historical records. Pursuant to an Executive Order issued by President Barack Obama, the NDC was instructed to release 400 million pages of backlogged historical records by 2013. It was at this NARA forum that Deputy Archivist Michael Kurtz revealed that the CIA continues to withhold approximately 50,000 pages of JFK assassination-related records. He also stated that as part of the NDC’s plan to release historical records, these records would be reviewed for release prior to 2013.

However, at a subsequent public forum the NDC reneged on this commitment. Without providing reasoning or justification under the JFK Act, it now takes the position that the JFK records will not be part of the declassification of historical documents project but will need to wait for further evaluation by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2017.

First, while the goal of declassifying the general backlog is highly laudable, NARA has seemingly lost sight of the fact that the JFK Act Collection continues to be of paramount interest to scholars, historians, and the American public. Indeed, we understand that NARA receives as many or more inquires on this Collection than any other discrete subject of historical research at NARA. The American public has maintained that elevated level of interest for almost 50 years.

Second, the nature of the public’s interest in the rapid declassification of the JFK assassination records – which warrants giving priority to the disclosure of these records above others – is reflected in many ways. Foremost is the unanimous vote by Congress to mandate that disclosure be given urgent attention. Congress also decreed that these documents be released under perhaps the most liberal and wide-ranging disclosure standards ever enacted.

Third, dozens of new books and articles on the subject of the assassination and the concomitant history of the United States continue to appear regularly nearly five decades after President Kennedy’s murder.

With the 50th anniversary of the assassination less than two years away, there is little doubt that public interest will only increase as November 22, 2013 approaches. A new spate of books and films and news articles is already beginning to reflect the depth of this phenomenon once again. The 50th anniversary will be the occasion of a renewed national debate on the assassination and the investigations into it, and the significance of the new information which has emerged as a result of the JFK Act releases will be studied and analyzed. This debate will occur in the context of the hard political truth that poll after poll reflects that there has been a precipitous decline in public confidence and American citizens have come to profoundly distrust their institutions and leaders. This national debate needs to be as fully informed as possible lest public distrust be further increased and – equally antithetical to democratic principles – lest purveyors of theories not based on documentary evidence continue to spread doubt and confusion about the case. (Conversely new records can point to areas of research where further scrutiny is warranted.)

Knowledge of our history is an essential feature of democratic accountability. The Founding Fathers were profoundly absorbed with the study of historical events and the political lesson to be learned from them. Exemplifying this tenet, NARA’s motto states: “The Past Is Prologue”. But since the advent of the Cold War, knowledge and accountability have been greatly shrouded by pervasive secrecy surrounding the most critical aspects of our governance. This point is forcefully illustrated by what has recently been learned as a result of JFK Act disclosures.

For example, we now know that the CIA was confronted with inquires from the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) about the pre-assassination contacts of alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald with the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (“DRE” or “Cuban Student Directorate”). Declassified documents show that the DRE was a CIA – “conceived, created and funded” Cuban exile organization in the 1960s. In the late 1970’s the CIA brought a retired CIA officer, George Joannides, out of retirement to act as liaison with HSCA when it sought records from the CIA regarding the Oswald/DRE activities and requested the identity of DRE’s case officer. Neither the CIA nor Joannides ever informed HSCA that Joannides himself had been the DRE’s case officer at the very time Oswald was in contact with the DRE; and neither the CIA nor Joannides provided the information sought by the Congressional committee.

Professor G. Robert Blakey, who served as Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the HSCA, has stated in a sworn affidavit that the CIA’s conduct in inserting Joannides “undercover” into the HSCA investigation “constituted not only a breach of the written memorandum of understanding the HSCA in good faith entered with the Agency,...., but a manifest, and hardly minor matter, a criminal violation of 18 U.S.C. & 1505”, which proscribes conduct that “impedes….the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry....of an committee of either House’....”

Similarly, in a sworn affidavit addressing the CIA’s withholding of records pertaining to Joannides from the ARRB, Prof. Anna Nelson, a Professor of History who was a member of the ARRB stated:

By its actions, the CIA has thus destroyed the integrity off the probe made by Congress, influenced the ARRB which was required by the legislation to use the records of that investigation and cast additional doubt upon itself. It is important that all additional information which bears upon the CIA’s conduct regarding both the congressional investigation and itself be made public as soon as possible so that Mr. Morley and others may continue to research these matters. Moreover, Congress itself may wish to investigate the CIA’s alleged corruption of its inquiry into the Kennedy assassination.

In order for the American public to be fully informed about the type of questions raised by the HSCA Chief Counsel Blakey and ARRB Nelson, the records currently withheld by the CIA should be reviewed and released under JFK Act standards before the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. The Archivist of the United States is authorized and required by the JFK Act to undertake such action. The undersigned respectfully and urgently request that you do so.

In view of the need for prompt action on this matter, I would appreciate a response from you at your earliest possible convenience.

1. 44 U.S.C.A. 2107, &12(b)
2. Id., &5(g)(1.).

Sincerely yours,
(Signed)
Jim Lesar, President AARC
Brenda Brody, AARC Board of Directors
Daniel Alcorn, Esq., AARC Board of Directors
Mark Zaid, Esq.
Charlie Sanders, Esq.
Prof. G. Robert Blakey, Esq. Former Chief Counsel and Staff Director
For the House Select Committee on Assassinations

CC:
John Fitzpatrick, Director, Information Security Oversight Office
Gen. David Howell Petraeus, Director, CIA
Rep. Michael Rogers, Maj. Leader, House Permanent Committee on Intelligence
Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, Min. Leader House Permanent Com on Intelligence
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
Sen. Patrick Leahy, Majority Leader Senate Judiciary Committee
Rep. Lamar Smith, Majority Leader House Judiciary Committee
Rep. Darrell Issa Majority Leader House Oversight and Govt. Reform Committee
Rep. Trey Gowdy Majority Leader Subcommittee on Healthcare, DC, NARA
Sen. Saxby Chambliss Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
Sen. Chuck Grassley Minority Leader Senate Judiciary Committee
Rep. John Conyers, Minority Leader House Judiciary Committee
Rep. Elija Cummings Minority Leader House Oversight and Govt. Reform Committee.
Rep. Danny K. Davis Minority Leader Subcommittee on Healthcare, DC, NARA

Note: [I]. The phrase "The Past is Prologue" is also commonly used by the military when discussing the similarities between war throughout history. Historical meaning. Although the phrase is now commonly used to mean what's stated above, as the phrase was originally used in The Tempest, Act 2, Scene I, it means that all that has happened before that time, the "past," has led Antonio and Sebastian to this opportunity to do what they are about to do, commit murder. In the context of the preceding and next lines, "(And by that destiny) to perform an act, Whereof what's past is prologue; what to come, In yours and my discharge" Antonio is in essence rationalizing to Sebastian, and the audience, that he and Sebastian are fated to act by all that has led up to that moment, the past has set the stage for their next act, as a prologue does in a play. Therefore, this phrase might be better used in situations where people are attempting to rationalize wicked acts based on the past. It can also be taken to mean that everything up until now has merely set the stage for Antonio and Sebastian to make their own destinies; in this context it does not indicate that their future acts are fated, but rather that everything up to that point was merely like a prologue, not the important story.

Wiki Blackout Forces Issa to Cancel Internet Hearing

2012-01-22T08:06:00.000-08:00

Issa Statement on #SOPA & #PIPA Website Blackouts
http://oversight.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1560:issa-statement-on-sopa-a-pipa-website-blackouts&catid=22:releasesstatements

WASHINGTON, DC – House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) today issued the following statement on the blackouts of many popular websites – including Wikipedia, Craigslist, Google and thousands of others– in response to the serious threats to an open Internet and digital innovation in America posed by theProtect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA):

"The Protect IP Act and SOPA are threats to the openness, freedom, and innovation of the Internet. I applaud the Internet community, including the thousands of blogs and websites that have decided to go dark today, for participating in our democracy and opening up the debate on legislation to the public.

"This unprecedented effort has turned the tide against a backroom lobbying effort by interests that aren't used to being told 'no.' I know suspending and changing access to sites was not necessarily an easy decision, but this is a responsible and transparent exercise of freedom of speech. I applaud those participating in today's protest for their sturdy defense of American innovation, openness and Internet freedom."

The Oversight Committee had originally scheduled a hearing on DNS blocking for today. The hearing was postponed after assurances from Leader Cantor and the removal of DNS blocking provisions from SOPA were made. Even with this alteration, Chairman Issa continues to oppose SOPA as well as PIPA.

Analysis: Legislators should note anti-SOPA feeling
January 17, 2012
http://press2reset.com/2012/01/17/analysis-legislators-should-note-anti-sopa-feeling/

Laws should strengthen our freedoms, not undermine them

If there is anybody left on the internet, gamer or otherwise, who is unaware of or unconvinced by the passion within the online community to oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or the Protect Intellectual Privacy Act (PIPA), consider this: starting tomorrow at 12 AM EST, Wikipedia will participate in a collaborated global protest of the bills with a worldwide, 24-hour blackout of their entire English-language site.

The blackout is happening even after House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) announced this week that a Senate hearing relating to SOPA would be indefinitely postponed, halting the legislation’s movement toward a vote in Congress.

Wikipedia will blackout their English-language site for 24 hours

While such announcements have not swayed opponents of the two bills, the lawmakers behind them do appear to be moved, at least somewhat, by the outrage expressed by the online community. Just last week the author of SOPA, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), announced that he would heed industry warnings to change the bill.

In a statement, Smith said, “After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision.”

DNS blocking would have given intellectual property holders such as film studios, record labels and game publishers the ability to demand that certain foreign websites suspected of piracy be blocked from US viewers. Most disturbing to SOPA’s critics is that IP holders could block such websites without ever needing the approval of a judge, or without even entering a courtroom.

While this seemed easily opposable for many, including some game companies such as Nintendo, Sony and Bungie, the Entertainment Software Association, of which most top game publishers are members, still supports the bill. Given the outpouring of blatant bashing of SOPA by a vast number of independent gamers, bloggers and developers, this could and likely will be interpreted as a relative disregard toward consumers.

ESA’s support of SOPA also puts members that disagree with the legislation in a tough spot, as they must carefully consider the consequences of contradicting the ESA before going public.

The ESA supports the bill but some members are dissenting

That means that even if Capcom, Konami, SEGA, Square Enix and countless other video game companies do oppose SOPA, they may never contribute to the collective dissonance, lest they create a conflict with the ESA.

The same can be said for media outlets that are owned by holding companies such as Newscorp, which is the world’s second largest media conglomerate and has openly expressed support for SOPA. This is particularly unfortunate since freedom of the press ranks right up there with freedom of speech as an American right that, in a perfect world, would always go unhindered.

Despite the absence of companies stepping forward to oppose SOPA, and despite the fact that the Senate is set to vote on PIPA on January 24, some headway is being made in terms of developing an alternative.

In the statement announcing the postponement of the SOPA senate hearing, a spokesperson for representative Issa said the lawmaker “intends to continue to push for Congress to heed the advice of internet experts on anti-piracy legislation and to push for the consideration and passage of the bipartisan OPEN Act.”

The OPEN act is already garnering far better reviews than either SOPA or PIPA, but they are far from glowing. Where Issa hit the nail on the head is where he called for Congress to “heed the advice of internet experts on anti-piracy legislation.”

Whether legislative ideas come from experts at giant corporations such as Google or Apple, or from independent gamers and bloggers who navigate the most remote reaches of the internet on a daily basis, these are the people that Congress must be collaborating with right now. The internet cannot be regulated in a vacuum of legislators, nor in a vacuum called the United States. A US bill that proposes how to fight global online thievery must be drafted with global consequences in mind.

As Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner indicates on the organization’s announcement of their upcoming blackout, the problem is much bigger than what goes on in Washington.

“SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem,” said Gardner, “All around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation intended to fight online piracy, and regulate the internet in other ways, that hurt online freedoms.”

There’s no doubt that piracy is bad. It’s stealing. The trick in fighting online piracy is to find the ways that don’t hurt our freedoms, but strengthen them.

Congress shelves anti-piracy bills

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/congress-shelves-anti-piracy-bills/story?id=15405646
By Roger Yu, USA Today January 20, 2012

The controversial anti-piracy legislation that fueled a wide-scale Internet protest earlier this week is on life support as Senate and House leaders retreated Friday and called for a compromise.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he was postponing a vote set for Tuesday "in light of recent events."

"There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved," he said in a statement, referring to the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), a Senate bill that would crack down on websites that violate copyrights and sell counterfeit goods. "I am optimistic that we can reach a compromise in the coming weeks."

House Judiciary Committee chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who introduced the House version known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also called for a delay.

"I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy," Smith said in a statement. "It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products."

The bills' advocates, including media companies, movie studios, book publishers and music recording companies, say granting U.S. attorneys general and copyright holders more power to enforce punitive actions against rogue websites would save jobs, ensure consumer safety and increase revenues.

Large and small Internet companies, including Google, Facebook and a wide array of Silicon Valley startups, say current laws are sufficient and that the proposed legislation will lead to censorship and kill the entrepreneurial spirit that fuels technology innovation.

To raise awareness and urge Internet users to call their representatives, thousands of Internet companies staged a blackout Wednesday. Some sites, like Wikipedia and Reddit, shut down for a day, while others placed prominently displayed black banners on their pages. An online petition drive by Google attracted more than 7 million participants.

Their battle over the Internet and the right of content use — as well as the limit of enforcement powers — were illustrated starkly Friday when U.S. and New Zealand officials shut down Megaupload.com, a popular cyberlocker that stored online movies and music, and arrested its founder Kim Dotcom (originally named Kim Schmitz) and some employees.

Hackers responded by taking credit for attacking the Justice Department's website and that of Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America.
That law enforcement officers were able to coordinate internationally to take action demonstrates that current laws targeting copyright violators work, says Art Brodsky, a spokesman for Public Knowledge, a Washington D.C.- based communications and technology advocacy group.

"They roped in New Zealand police and the FBI flew down there," he says. "So why do you need more laws?"

In a statement. Chris Dodd, CEO of the MPAA, said the failure to move forward with the bills will ensure continued copyright infringement, but expressed hope that the delay will start a new round of negotiations.

"As a consequence of failing to act, there will continue to be a safe haven for foreign thieves," said the former senator from Connecticut. "With today's announcement, we hope the dynamics of the conversation can change and become a sincere discussion about how best to protect the millions of American jobs affected by the theft of American intellectual property."

The bills' opponents applauded the bills' postponement Friday.

SOPA-PIPA opponents anticipated changes to the bills after several lawmakers withdrew their support following the protests. But few expected a seemingly indefinite delay to be announced so quickly, Brodsky says.

"We knew it was a possibility, but the better probability was that Reid (and several others) were going to come up with something. We hoped they wouldn't do that," he says. "This is not a bill meant for tinkering. This was a bill that, at minimum, must start from scratch."

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who introduced PIPA, said he respects Reid's decision but called out those who backed off from their early support. "The day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem," he said in a statement.

"Somewhere in China today, in Russia today, and in many other countries that do not respect American intellectual property, criminals who do nothing but peddle in counterfeit products and stolen American content are smugly watching how the U.S. Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy."

Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., both sponsors of PIPA, withdrew their support a day after the Internet blackout. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, also backed out, urging his colleagues on his Facebook page to slow down the process.

There have been some early signs that the bills' sponsors were willing to negotiate. Late last week, Smith said he planned to scrap a provision in the bill that would have allowed copyright holders and law enforcement officials to block foreign websites accused of online piracy.

But the Justice Department and copyright holders could still ask the courts to force advertisers to pull ads from rogue websites, have credit card companies stop payments and get search engines to stop listing such sites.

The fate of the twin bills remains unclear, Brodsky says. Lawmakers could make revisions and bring them back for vote, scrap them entirely or pursue alternative bills.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., joined Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in proposing an alternative anti-piracy bill that is more friendly to technology companies, called the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN Act).

OPEN Act would give power to the U.S. International Trade Commission to investigate complaints and, unlike SOPA and PIPA, does not grant copyright holders "a private right of action" to target rogue sites.

Wikipedia Editors Question Site's Planned Blackout

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/wikipedia-editors-question-sites-planned-blackout-15383749 - .TxwuhqXOV2A
By PETER SVENSSON AP Technology Writer
NEW YORK January 18, 2012 (AP)

Can the world live without Wikipedia for a day? The shutdown of one of the Internet's most-visited sites is not sitting well with some of its volunteer editors, who say the protest of anti-piracy legislation could threaten the credibility of their work.

"My main concern is that it puts the organization in the role of advocacy, and that's a slippery slope," said editor Robert Lawton, a Michigan computer consultant who would prefer that the encyclopedia stick to being a neutral repository of knowledge. "Before we know it, we're blacked out because we want to save the whales."

Wikipedia's English-language site shut down at midnight Eastern Standard Time Tuesday and the organization said it would stay down for 24 hours.

Instead of encyclopedia articles, visitors to the site saw a stark black-and-white page with the message: "Imagine a world without free knowledge." It carried a link to information about the two congressional bills and details about how to reach lawmakers.

It is the first time the English site has been blacked out. Wikipedia's Italian site came down once briefly in protest to an Internet censorship bill put forward by the Berlusconi government. The bill did not advance.

AP
FILE - In this Nov. 1, 2011

The shutdown adds to a growing body of critics who are speaking out against the legislation. But some editors are so uneasy with the move that they have blacked out their own user profile pages or resigned their administrative rights on the site to protest. Some likened the site's decision to fighting censorship with censorship.

One of the site's own "five pillars" of conduct says that Wikipedia "is written from a neutral point of view." The site strives to "avoid advocacy, and we characterize information and issues rather than debate them."

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales argues that the site can maintain neutrality in content even as it takes public positions on issues.

"The encyclopedia will always be neutral. The community need not be, not when the encyclopedia is threatened," he tweeted.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which administers the site, announced the blackout late Monday, after polling its community of volunteer contributors and editors and getting responses from 1,800 of them. The protest is aimed at the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect Intellectual Property Act under consideration in the Senate.

"If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States," the foundation said.

Both bills are designed to crack down on sales of pirated American products overseas, and they have the support of the film and music industry. Among the opponents are many Internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, eBay and AOL. They say the bills would hurt the industry and infringe on free-speech rights.

Social news website Reddit.com is shutting down for 12 hours on Wednesday, but most companies are staying up. Google Inc.'s home page linked to a petition urging Congress: "Don't censor the Web."

Dick Costollo, CEO of Twitter, said he opposes the legislation as well, but shutting down the service was out of the question.

"Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish," Costollo tweeted.

Since Wikimedia depends on a small army of volunteers who create and update articles, it's particularly concerned about a lack of exemptions in the bills for sites where users might contribute copyrighted content. Today, it has no obligation under U.S. law except removing that content if a copyright holder complains. But under the House version of the bill, it could be shut down unless it polices its own pages.

The plans for the protest were moving forward even though the bill's prospects appeared to be dimming. On Saturday, Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, said the bill would not move to the House floor for a vote unless consensus is reached. However, Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, said work on the bill would resume next month.

The White House raised concerns over the weekend, pledging to work with Congress to battle piracy and counterfeiting while defending free expression, privacy and innovation in the Internet. The administration signaled it might use its veto power, if necessary.

That the bill seems unlikely to pass is another reason Lawton opposes the blackout.

"I think there are far more important things for the organization to focus aside from legislation that isn't likely to pass anyway," he said. He's been contributing to Wikipedia for eight years.
Danny Chia, another contributor to the site, said he had mixed feelings about the blackout. The neutrality applies to the content, but a lot of people interpret it as being about the site as a whole, said the Los Altos, Calif., software engineer.

In an online discussion, others raised the same point about the blackout: Appearances matter, and if the audience sees Wikipedia taking a stand, it might not believe the articles are objective, either.

Wikipedia has seen a small decline in participation, from a peak of 100,000 active editors a year ago to about 90,000 now. Wikimedia Foundation blames this mainly on outdated editing tools, and believes it can get the number growing again with software upgrades.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/qa-contested-internet-anti-piracy-bills-15391
460

A Q&A on Contested Internet Anti-Piracy Bills
By JIM ABRAMS Associated Press

WASHINGTON January 19, 2012 (AP)

Online piracy costs U.S. copyright owners and producers billions of dollars every year, but legislation in Congress to block foreign Internet thieves and swindlers has met strong resistance from high-tech companies, spotlighted by Wikipedia's protest blackout Wednesday, warning of a threat to Internet freedom.

House and Senate bills that once seemed to be on a path toward approval now face a rockier future. House Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday it was "pretty clear to many of us that there is a lack of consensus at this point."

Amid the high-tech campaign against the bills, several lawmakers came out in opposition. At least four Senate Republicans who had previously cosponsored the Senate bill — Orrin Hatch of Utah, Roy Blunt of Missouri, John Boozman of Arkansas and Charles Grassley of Iowa — issued statements Wednesday saying they were withdrawing their support. Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland last week said that, after listening to constituent concerns, he could not vote for the Senate bill as it is currently written.

On the House side, Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., issued a statement that he had heard from many of his constituents and had come to the conclusion that the House and Senate bills "create unacceptable threats to free speech and free access to the Internet."

Here are some of the some of the questions being raised about the bills being considered:

Q. Why is legislation needed?

A. There's no argument that more needs to be done to protect artists, innovators and industries from copyright thieves and shield consumers from products sold on the Internet that are fake, faulty and unsafe. Creative America, a coalition of Hollywood studios, networks and unions, says content theft costs U.S. workers $5.5 billion a year. The pharmaceutical industry loses billions to Internet sellers of drugs that are falsely advertised and may be harmful.

Q. What is Congress trying to accomplish?

A. The two main bills are the Protect Intellectual Property Act, or PIPA, in the Senate, and the similar Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, in the House. There are already laws on the books to combat domestic websites trafficking in counterfeit or pirated goods, but little to counter foreign violators.

The bills would allow the Justice Department, and copyright holders, to seek court orders against foreign websites accused of perpetrating or facilitating copyright infringement. While there is little the United States can do to take down those websites, the bills would bar online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as credit card companies and PayPal from doing business with an alleged violator. It also would forbid search engines from linking to such sites.
The original bills would have let copyright holders and Internet service providers block access to pirate websites. Critics and Internet engineers complained that would allow copyright holders to interfere in the behind-the-scenes system that seamlessly directs computer users to websites. They said that causing deliberate failures in the lookup system to prevent visits to pirate websites could more easily allow hackers to trick users into inadvertently visiting websites that could infect their computers. The White House also took issue with that approach, saying, "We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet."

Responding to the critics, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said he is taking the blocking measure out of his bill. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., also is reworking his bill to address those cybersecurity issues.

Q. What are other concerns with the bills?

A. Critics say they would constrain free speech, curtail innovation and discourage new digital distribution methods. NetCoalition, a group of leading Internet and technology companies, says they could be forced to pre-screen all user comments, pictures and videos — effectively killing social media. Search engines, Internet service providers and social networks could be forced to shut down websites linked to any type of pirated content.

In addition, critics contend that young, developing businesses and smaller websites could be saddled with expensive litigation costs. And they contend existing rights holders could impede new investment in the technology sector.

The White House said it would "not support any legislation that reduces freedom of expression ... or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."

Leahy responded that there is nothing in the legislation that would require websites, Internet service providers, search engines, ad networks, payment processors or others to monitor their networks. He said his bill protects third parties from liability that may arise from actions to comply with a court order.

Michael O'Leary, a senior vice president at the Motion Picture Association of America, a key supporter of the legislation, said his industry is built upon a vibrant First Amendment. "We would never support any legislation that would limit this fundamental American right," he said. Neither PIPA nor SOPA "implicate free expression but focus solely on illegal conduct, which is not free speech."

Q. Who else supports the bills?

A. The most visible supporters are entertainment-related groups such as the MPAA and the National Music Publishers' Association. But the bills also enjoy support from the pharmaceutical industry, which is trying to shut down illegal online drug operations, and electronic and auto industries concerned about people going online to buy counterfeit parts that may be substandard. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and several law enforcement groups also back the legislation.

Q. Who are the opponents?

A. In addition to Wikipedia, many major Internet and technology companies, including Google, Yahoo!, Amazon.com and eBay, are part of the NetCoalition group opposing the bills. Disparate political groups such as the liberal Democracy for America and the conservative Heritage Action have also voiced concerns about censorship.

Q. What is the status of the bills?

A. Momentum for the bills has slowed, giving the edge to Silicon Valley over Hollywood. The Senate, as its first major business when it returns to session next Tuesday, is to vote on whether to take up the bill. Sixty votes are needed to clear that legislative hurdle. It's unclear whether supporters have the votes.

Six Republicans on the Judiciary Committee last week wrote Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., saying that while the problem of intellectual property theft must be addressed, "the process at this point is moving too quickly" and a vote on moving to the bill "may be premature."

Reid replied that the vote will occur as scheduled, saying that while the bill was not perfect and he had urged Leahy to make changes, the issue was "too important to delay."

In the House, Judiciary Committee Chairman Smith said his panel would resume deliberations on SOPA in February. Meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and an ally of the high-tech industry, said he had received assurances from GOP leaders that anti-piracy legislation would not move to the House floor this year unless there is a consensus on it.

Issa and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., are pushing an alternative to SOPA and PIPA that would make the International Trade Commission, which already is in charge of patent infringements, responsible for taking steps to prevent money and advertising from going to rogue sites.

Issa formally introduced his bill Wednesday, saying the Internet blackout had "underscored the flawed approach taken by SOPA and PIPA" and his bill was "a smarter way to protect taxpayers' rights while protecting the Internet."

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/protect-ip-act-stop-online-piracy-act

The Protect IP Act (PIPA) is a U.S. Senate bill introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy. Along with its House counterpart Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the bills are designed to provide the government and copyright holders with powers to block access to “rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods,” especially those registered outside the United States. Since its introduction on May 11th, 2011, the proposed bill has been met by opposition from various digital rights activists and bloggers for its encroachment in online activities protected under the first amendment of free speech. Congressional hearings for both bills began on November 16th.

Background

If passed by Congress, Protect IP Act would allow the government to curb public access to websites that have “no significant use” other than infringing copyright, enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. It would also make unauthorized media streaming an act of felony and hold the web publishers and hosting services responsible for curbing their users from posting copyright-infringed content.

In addition, Stop Online Piracy Act would effectively rid of the safe harbor provisions in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which grants Web sites immunity from prosecution as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content upon notice. Under strict interpretation, a wide range of online communities and social networks including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook would have to censor users or get shut down and ordinary users could be imprisoned for five years or posting any copyrighted work.

Developments

Online Reaction

The legislation has been opposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Yahoo!, eBay, American Express, Google, Reporters Without Borders, and Human Rights Watch. EFF’s blog post titled “What’s On the Blacklist?” listed media-sharing services Vimeo and Flickr and e-commerce community Etsy as websites that could be put at risk under the Stop Online Piracy Act. Fight for the Future published a 3-minute infographic video explaining the basics of the bills and their impact on everyday activities of online interactions.

A number of online entrepreneurs like Reid Hoffman of Linkedin, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley signed a letter to Congress expressing their opposition to the legislation.

December 15th: Markup Hearing of SOPA

On December 15th, The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee held a meeting for markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which was met by much divided opinions on the bill. According to Politico[14], the markup debate didn’t break down by partisanship, but a number of Democrat and Republican Representatives including Zoe Lofgren (D-California) and Dan Lungren (R-California) argued that the bill was being processed in a rush in the absence of input from technical experts regarding the legal impact of SOPA on the structure of the Internet.

On the other side of the line, Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia), John Conyers (D-Michigan) and Howard Berman (D-California) argued for an immediate measure to protect copyright holders from sites that profit from offering illicit and illegally copied content.

“All we’re trying to do here is stop online piracy. Since when did opposition get so fierce against this? What could be behind the motives of people or organizations that don’t think stopping online piracy is something that we need to deal with?” Conyers said.

Meanwhile, the all-day marathon hearing of the bill abruptly came to a temporary halt when Representative Shiela Jackson Lee (D-Texas) raised issue with a tweet that was posted by congressman Steve King (R-Iowa). According toCNET[17], Representative King wrote via his Twitter account:
We are debating the Stop Online Piracy Act and Shiela Jackson has so bored me that I'm killing time by surfing the Internet

Upon discovering the mention of her name in King’s tweet shortly after, Jackson Lee responded to the tweet on congressional record that it is inappropriate “to have a member of the Judiciary committee be so offensive.” When the House Judiciary Committee’s senior member Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) suggested that the clerk expunge the word “offensive” from the official transcript, Jackson Lee repeatedly refused to agree before finally permitting the replacement of the word “offensive” with “impolitic and unkind."

Alternative Proposal: OPEN Act
An alternative version of the bill known as the Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN Act)[17]was proposed by a bipartisan group of congressman during the hearing, which would utilize the International Trade Commission (ITC) as the authoritative venue for enforcement of copyrights and trademarks against foreign-based rogue websites that are outside of U.S. jurisdiction. Sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), the alternative bill as explained on KeepTheWebOpen.com[15] states: “The OPEN Act is built to protect creative ownership in America while securing the open, accessible Internet you deserve. We’re going further by actually opening up the legislative process with a new tool named Madison.”

In an official blog post[40] on January 14th, White House cyber-security czar Howard Schmidt and two other officials responded to the official anti-SOPA petitions, which has received over 100,000 signatures combined, by stating that the administration will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression and increases cybersecurity risks, particularly measures that will involve manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS) to block services.

Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.
The statement by White House officials quickly spread through the newsvine and blogosphere. Following the official statement, Newscorp CEO Rupert Murdoch[42] took his reactions to Twitter where he expressed his criticisms of Google and the current administration:

Murdoch, who is an outspoken supporter of anti-piracy bills, asserted that White House’s response was made to appeal Google, the company that he accuses of indexing sites offering illegal downloads of copyrighted material.

January 15th: SOPA Hearing Postponed

After sponsors of the bill agreed to remove a controversial provision requiring service providers to block access to users by manipulating the Domain Name Service (DNS), it was reported by several news agencies including New York Time that another hearing of SOPA will be shelved indefinitely until a clearer consensus could be reached. According to the statement released by House Oversight Chairman Representative Darrell Issa: “While I remain concerned about Senate action on the Protect IP Act, I am confident that flawed legislation will not be taken up by this House. …Majority leader Cantor has assured me that we will continue to work to address outstanding concerns and work to build a consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote.”

Related Protests

October 19th: Free Bieber Campaign
On October 19th, 2011, “Free Bieber” campaign was launched by Fight for the Future. According to the satire website FreeBieber.org, Justin Bieber could be technically sent to prison for the videos he had uploaded to YouTube prior to stardom.

A new bill in Congress makes posting a video containing any copyrighted work a felony-- with up to 5 years in prison. But wait… didn’t Justin Bieber get famous by posting YouTube videos of himself singing copyrighted R&B songs? Yep. If this bill passes, he could get 5 years in jail.
The campaign was subsequently covered on BoingBoing[26], Torrent Freak[27], and TechDirt[28] the same day.

November 16th: American Censorship Day
In a joint effort to raise the awareness of the congressional hearings scheduled to begin on November 16th, a day of online protest dubbed “American Censorship Day” was launched on the same day at 12:00 a.m. (ET). Organized byEFF and a network of supporter groups including Free Software Foundation, Fight For the Future and Creative Commons, the campaign asked its participants to place a censorship badge over the site’s logo in display of solidarity against the legislation of the bill. On Twitter, participants of the protest tweeted links to their websites with the hashtags #sitecensored, #dontbreaktheinternet and #blacklist.

Some of the notable partipants in the American Censorship Day include a wide range of online communities like Wikimedia, Reddit, Tumblr, Mozilla, BoingBoing and Creative Commons among others. On Reddit, an official announcement titled “Stop the ridiculous PROTECT IP Act right now. Sign this petition for the love of the internet” was posted on the frontpage. Tumblr also took part in the protest by censoring dashboard content in black and providing a link with contact information of U.S. Representatives.

On the next day, Fight For the Future published an infographic chart illustrating the turnout of American Censorship Day, which reported over 6,000 participating websites, over 1 million e-mails and over 3,000 handwritten letters sent to Congress about the bills. According to a tweet posted from Tumblr’s Twitter account, an average of 3.6 calls per second was observed during its peak.

California Representative Zoe Lofgren (D) also participated in the American Censorship Day by displaying the badge on her homepage. Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi also revealed her stance against the bill via Twitter, in responding to a tweeter who asked: “Where do you stand on internet censoring and #SOPA?” Pelosi’s tweet was also mentioned by California Republican congressman Darrel Issa, who suggested in an interview with The Hill newspaper there’s little hope for the legislation of Stop Online Piracy Act.

December 10th: Wikipedia’s Strike Proposal

On December 10th, 2011, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales asked the readers’ opinions on a potential blackout of the website in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act. In an impromptu straw poll launched on his user talk page[13], Wales announced that while there are no immidiate plans to blank out Wikipedia, he noted the Italian Wikipedia blank out in early October 2011 as a precedent, in which the parliament backed down on the privacy law after Italian Wikipedia took all of its pages offline.

December 11th: I Work For the Internet

On December 11th, 2011, a single topic blog titled “I Work for the Internet”[10] was launched to compile a long list of user-submitted webcam portraits in display of solidarity against the legislation of SOPA. Launched by one of the central anti-SOPA protest organizers Fight for the Future, the photo project has drawn participation from a number of notable people in online media, including TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld, Tumblr co-founder David Karp and designer Peter Vidani, early Facebook developer Dave Morin, Vimeo’s co-founder Zach Klein and Texts from Last Night Co-founder Lauren Leto among others.

The news of the site was covered by The Atlantic[11] in an article titled “A Web Celebrity-Spotting Guide to the Latest Anti-SOPA Site.” Gawker[12] also covered the news with a hint of criticism towards its vanity-driven nature.

December 22nd: GoDaddy Boycott Campaign

On October 31st, 2011, TechDirt[18] and the Domains[19] both published articles stating that Christine Jones, the general counsel and corporate secretary from GoDaddy.com submitted a piece to Politico stating the company’s support of SOPA, then called the E-Parasite Bill. TechDirt countered the statement by posting screen shots of how GoDaddy itself encourages people to violate SOPA by suggesting domain names that would infringe on other established sites’ copyright and name trademarks. The day before the bill was set to be heard in the House ON November 15th, GoDaddy filed an official statement[20] breaking down exactly why they were supporting SOPA, claiming that “there is no question that we need these added tools to counteract illegal foreign sites that are falling outside the jurisdiction of U.S. law enforcement.”

This information was relatively unknown until December 22nd when Redditor selfprodigy[21] posted about GoDaddy’s statement to the Politics subreddit, suggesting GoDaddy users move their domains on December 29th to protest the company’s support of the bill. In response, CEO of Zferral Jeff Epstein provided a step-by-step guide on how to transfer domains from GoDaddy to another host[28] and Fight For the Future launched a special pledge page for the would-be boycotters.[30]

A number of major Internet companies vowed to drop their GoDaddy accounts including Wikipedia and the image hosting service Imgur. Additionally, Cheezburger’s CEO Ben Huh stated[27] that he would move the company’s 1000+ domain names off of GoDaddy if they did not change their stance on the bill. The news quickly spread to The Escapist[23], Ars Technica[24], Gizmodo[25] and the International Business Times[26].

Following the news coverage of boycott campaign on December 23rd, GoDaddy[29] released a statement by CEOWarren Adelman announcing that they will no longer be supporting the act and pulled down a post outlining the reasons they had previously supported it: “Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better… It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."

Despite GoDaddy’s decision to withdraw its support for SOPA, Internet users reportedly waged the boycott campaign with an estimated figure of over 37,000 domains dropped within the first 48 hours and over 70,000 domains by December 29th, including the internet culture blog BuzzFeed.[31] Many news publications and blogs reported on the phenomenon as the Internet users’ punishing GoDaddy for their “flip-flop” stance on the bill.

December 29th: Nuclear Option Rumors

On December 29th, CNET[31] published an article about a possible “nuclear option” that would have other popular online websites like eBay, Google, Facebook and Twitter join Wikipedia in a simultaneous blackout urging users to contact their congressional representatives to stop SOPA and Protect IP. NetCoalition leader Markham Erickson was questioned about the blackout rumors and revealed that “there have been some serious discussions about that.” The following day, articles appeared on Fox News, the International Business Times[33] and the tech blog Geekosystem[32] examining how successful the proposed tactic would be.

The New York Tech Meetup, an organization of nearly 20,000 people who work in the technology industry throughout New York City, is planning a protest on January 17th outside the Manhattan offices of New York Senators Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten E. Gillibrand, who co-sponsored some of the proposed legislation.

January 4th: Chaos Communication Congress

On January 4th, a team of hacktivists gathered at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, Germany and announced a plan to launch satellites into orbit to put the Internet beyond the reach of censors. The story was covered by the BBC[35] and questioned hacker activist Nick Farr about the purpose of the satellites: “The first goal is an uncensorable internet in space. Let’s take the internet out of the control of terrestrial entities,” Mr Farr said. He cited the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) in the United States as an example of the kind of threat facing online freedom. If passed, the act would allow for some sites to be blocked on copyright grounds.
The Hackspace Global Grid[36] hacker hobbyist group was subsequently formed to “understand, build and make available satellite based communication for the hackerspace community and all of mankind.”

January 10th: #BlackoutSOPA

On January 10th, 2012, SF Gate[37] published an article about the #BlackoutSOPA Twitter campaign in which Twitter users changed their profile images to have black banners captioned with “STOP SOPA” in protest of the bill. Users had been using the BlackoutSOPA[38] web application that automatically edits the Twitter profile picture after being given access to the account.

The same day, Reddit announced on their official blog[39] that they would be blacking out Reddit on January 18th from 8am to 8pm EST, the same day Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian would be testifying before congress.

Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action. We will showcase the live video stream of the House hearing where Internet entrepreneurs and technical experts (including Reddit co-founder Alexis “kn0thing” Ohanian) will be testifying.

On January 16th, Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that the English-language Wikipedia will be participating in a 24-hour blackout on January 18th, joining the pledges of several other Internet companies like Reddit, Cheezburger, Wordpress, Zynga and Mozilla among others. The 24 hour shutdown of Wikipedia will be replaced with instructions on how to reach out to your local US members of congress:

January 12th: SOPA Sponsor’s Copyright Infringement
On January 12th, Vice Magazine published an article titled “The Author of SOPA is a Copyright Violator,”[41] pointing out that Congressman Lamar Smith had used a nature photograph as a background image for his website without the artist’s permission, as shown in an archived screenshot from July 24th, 2011. Upon tracking down the photographer DJ Shulte who took the photograph, it was discovered that no request for permission was given.

On the following day of the post, Vice launched an open campaign known as “Shop a SOPA” Copyright Hypocrite Hunt in order to catch other copyright infringement associated with supporters of the bill.

January 18th: Blackout Protests

At midnight on January 18th, the English version of Wikipedia went offline and Google featured a censored out logo on its homepage, linking to its own call for action page in protesting against PIPA and SOPA. The well-known tech blogs BoingBoing went offline for the day and Wired blacked out its text on the frontpage. The blogging platform Wordpress also featured a grid of “censored” thumbnails in place of the regular blog thumbnails. Mozilla featured a similar call to action on its homepage. Reddit also participated in the blackout protest, going offline for 12 hours from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Cheezburger sites went dark with a pop-up message encouraging visitors to contact senators regarding the bills. The reverse image search engine Tineye also went offline in protest. Image hosting service imgur also went offline. Quickmeme posted a bulletin message with links to external pages on homepage.

The news of websites’ blackout protests were immediately picked up by CNN, New York Times and other news agencies, including several mainstream publishers who have written little about the ongoing debate in Congress. On the following day, the organizers behind the protest released a report explaining the turnout in numbers: at least 115,000 websites participated in the strike, 10 million signatures were signed to Google’s homepage petition and over 3 million e-mails (excluding ones sent from Wikipedia) were sent to Congress. In addition, thousands of demonstrators attended real-life protests in New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

January 20th: SOPA / PIPA Hearings Postponed

On January 14th, CNET[43] reported that senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) asked to postpone the vote on PIPA: “We have increasingly heard from a large number of constituents and other stakeholders with vocal concerns about possible unintended consequences of the proposed legislation.”

On January 18th, the New York Times[44] reported that congressmen Marco Rubio (R-FL) and John Cornyn (R-TX) had abandoned support for the bill. The same day, the LA Times[45] reported that co-sponsors of SOPA Lee Terry (R-NB) and Ben Quayle (R-AZ) pulled their names from SOPA House bill.
By January 20th, seven co-sponsors of PIPA and a total of 45 Senators had either withdrawn their sponsorships or opposed the legislation of the bills, according to a count by OpenCongress. Later that day, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid released a statement indefinitely postponing the vote on SOPA and PIPA, originally scheduled for congressional hearings on January 24th.

In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT IP Act #PIPA. There’s no reason that legitimate issues raised about PROTECT IP can’t be resolved. Counterfeiting & piracy cost 1000s of #jobs yearly #pipa. Americans rightfully expect to be fairly compensated 4 their work. I’m optimistic that we can reach compromise on PROTECT IP in coming weeks.

Dear Mr. Chairman Darrell Issa (R. Calf.)

2012-01-01T03:24:00.000-08:00

Meet the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, the one man who can schedule an oversight hearing on the JFK Act of 1992, which hasn't had an oversight hearing since 1997, and should have one now that the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy is approaching.

We only have to convince one man to hold the hearing - Issa - a conservative Republican from north San Diego, California, who is the richest man in the House of Representatives.

But he's a poker playing Republican, as can be seen by the picture on the wall of his office, and we can play poker with him, as we have a few aces in our hand.

From the same artist Andy Thomas:

We are starting a "Please tell me when?" campaign to get Rep. Issa to schedule a long overdue JFK Act Oversight Hearing by asking him to please tell us when he schedules one.

If everyone who contacted their congressman after seeing Oliver Stone's "JFK" and complained about the secret JFK Assassination records will once again ask their representative why so many thousands of JFK assassination records are still being withheld, why many were deliberately destroyed after the Act was instituted and why there are so many missing? Why? And why hasn't Congress held an oversight hearing to ask that question of any responsible person?

Be direct and frank but not rude.
Please Facebook, phone, write, email, fax and send a letter via the US Mail to:

Rep. Darrell Issa
Chairman, House Oversight Committee
2157 Rayburn HOB
Washington D.C. 20515

(202)225-5074
Fax:(202) 225-3974
http://www.facebook.com/darrellissa
http://twitter.com/ - !/darrellissa
https://forms.house.gov/issa/webforms/contact.html

Washington DC Office • 2347 Rayburn House Office Building • Washington, DC 20515 • Phone: 202-225-3906 • Fax: 202-225-3303
California District Office • 1800 Thibodo Road, #310 • Vista, CA 92081 • Phone: 760-599-5000 • Fax: 760-599-1178

Dear Mr. Chairman Issa, Please inform me when you schedule an oversight hearing on the JFK Act, as I am interested in the proceedings. Can you tell me why there are so many still-withheld government records on the assassination of President Kennedy, and why, 50 years afterwards, the public still cannot read them? Thank you,

Join our Facebook JFK Act Lobby Group:
http://www.facebook.com/groups/jfkactlobby/

Sign our petition On Line -
http://www.petitiononline.com/112263/petition.html

Sponsored By: Committee for an Open Archives (COA)
To: U.S. Congress House Oversight Committee
2157 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20513
(202) 225-5074(202) 225-3974 (Fax)
Re: Congressional Oversight of JFK Act

To: Rep. Darrel Issa (R. Calf.), Chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee and Rep. James Lankford (Rep. Ok.5) Chairman of the Sub-committee on Technology, Information Policy, Governmental Relations and Procurement Reform and members of the relevant sub-committee - Vice Chari Rep. Mike Kelly (R. Pa.3), Jason Chaffetz (UT. 3), Tim Walberg (MI-7), Paul Labrador (ID-1), Pat Meehan (PA.7), Blake Farentold (TX-27), Gerald Connolly (D. Va.), Christopher Murphy (D. Conn.), Stephen Lynch (D. Mass)].

Congress passed the JFK Act of 1992, requiring the release of all government records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in order to regain the publics confidence in government, which has been in steady decline since November 1963. That has not happened.

The House Oversight Committee has not held one hearing on this issue in nearly 15 years (June 1997), despite the destruction of Secret Service documents, the loss of national security records and the continued wrongful withholding of records that Congress has ordered released to the public.

It is imperative that Congress take some action to ensure that the law is enforced, the work mandated by the JFK Assassination Records Act is completed, and the government regain the confidence of the American public.

Therefore, we, the undersigned citizens of the United States and the free world, do hereby request the House Oversight Committee do its duty and hold public oversight hearings on the JFK Act.

SIGNED

William Kelly
Edward Sherry
Jim DiEugenio
Dennis R. Bartholomew
Walt Rollins
Allan Eaglesham
Edgar F. Tatro
David G. Healy
Abraham W. Bolden, Sr.
Richard E. Bergeron III
Larry J Hancock
Jonathan Burak
Greg Burnham
Peter Dale Scott
Annunziata Varela
Jim Glover
John Judge
The Coalition on Political Assassinations supports such hearings and the adoption of similar acts to release files on other historical events, including the life and death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. See our website at www.politicalassassinations.com.
Dawn Meredith
Bill Cheslock
David Andrews.
William Roberson
David Giammarco
Gary Craig
Michael Nurko
Adele Edisen
Cliff Varnell
James Marzano
Gregory D. Wagner
Seamus Coogan
Stephen Kober
Otto Cornejo
Andrew Wiessner
Rex Bradford
Jeffrey Worcester
Rich Hocking
Susan Klopfer
William Paris
Dan Alcorn
The Congress should require the National Declassification Center to process withheld JFK assassination related records as a high priority and before the 50th anniversary in 2013.
Eric Sneary
Anthony Hunt
Staffan H Westerberg
Alan Kent
Steven G. Foster, CMP, CTA
Denise Martin
Christoph Messner
Ann Stockdale
Michael Morrow
Alfred Fordiani
Rev. Carter A. Dary
Jessica Fern
Steven R Duffy.
Michael W. Flower
Deanna Juntila
Craig Merrihue
frankie vegas
Magda Hassan
Frank Vamos
pete johnson
Raymond Carroll
William King
Mike Artunian
Roy Lee Schaeffer
Carole Wilson
Randolph Benson
Don J Hall
bill roberson
Gary Severson
Paul Hemming
Linda Minor
Angela May Jackson
Susan McLucas
John W. Eleazere
Jack Colhoun
I have done research in the JFK Assassination Collection since 1994. I find it frustrating that there are still documents that have not been declassified. I have also found documents that are redacted but their cover sheets state that they have been fully declassified.
Karen Levine
jerry craig
John Sanders
Sherry Morez
Frank Capplett
Thomas J. Moony
Donald Jeffries
Ruth Elkin
Patrick G. Murphy
Paris Flammonde
Since near noon in Greenwich Village on November 22, 1963, when with Eric Norden, later many others including working with Jim Garrison I have spent the intervening years researching and writting five books and more than 2500 printed pages pursuing the inquiry and so any further query re the murderers (while dead) would be much appreciated.
Chris Scally
Nicholas Anez
Frank Perri
Kalman Palnicki
Vincent J. Salandria
Patricia Simons
Todd W. Vaughan
Douglas P. Horne
Marley Greiner
William Finzel
Patricia Sikora
Tom Dietrich
Paul J. Kuntzler
I have worked in the John F. Kennedy research community since 1991 The company which I owned, Miller Reporting, Inc., reported the hearings and press conferences of the Assassination Records Review Board. On Tuesday, July 31, 2007, I placed a two-page advertisement in The New York Times about the government-wide conspiracy that resulted in the muder of President John Kennedy and the role which the American news media played then - and continues to play-in assisting the CIA , FBI and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in covering up this most atrocious crime in U.S. history.
Shane O'Sullivan
Susan Lindauer
Louise C. Baker)
Tekla Lewin
Dan Sutton
Lis Hansen
John Burik
Jon Olsen
Brad Johnson
John B. Gooch III
Christopher Pike
Jan Johnson
Rodger A. Remington
Theresa C. Mauro
There have been no hearings held since 1997, despite new and critically important information accumulating on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Many relevant documents have been destroyed or have not been declassified and released to the public by government agencies despite the JFK Act and Freedom of Information Act requests.
Wilbur & Bette Hurst
Peter Fox
Diane Roller
Paul Leavitt
dr. xylem galadhon
Lisa Pease
Joel Seaqton
Joel Seaton
Vickie Muskin
Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D
Ben Wecht
James R. Hanson
Please make it possible to see and hear all items related to JFK's assasination so history can be updated and corrected. History should reflect the correct people involved in this horrible act.
terry warner
Mary Kay Paulson
Kenn Thomas
John M. Morgan
John C Walker
Susan Douthit
Lee Gephart
Evan Stout
Cynthia Gephart
Joseph Horner
Juan B. Giusti
Gary Galyon
Tony Monico
WE THE PEOPLE deserve to have all files declassified. If Oswald didn't do it, then shame on our government for hiding that, despite all the evidence that could have vindicated him.
Melinda Robare
Gerald Robare
James E. Phelps
Thomas Wilson
There cannot possibly be anything held in the JFK files that are top secret 48 years after the murder
Deborah de Lorenzo
Martin Hinrichs
Ian Kingsbuy
Cigdem Gole
denise martin
Rachel Sullivan
Richard Cruthers
David Manning
Nolan Hicks
Martin Mizzi
Greg Parker
accountability and oversight are two of the biggest issues today for government
Robert K. McFadden
Don Jeffries
Robert Hyatt
Every person, whether poor or rich, good or evil deserves a fair and proper inquiry into the circumstances surrounding their death. John Kennedy deserves this not only as President of the United States, but as a common man. Get over the politics, and solve the crime.
fergus obrien
Kathy Becket
David F. Barnhart
jim pomerville
Jason Adair
Teresa Browne
Jeff Shaw
Bjorn K. Gjerde
Dr. Gerald D. McKnight
As someone who has worked with government documents I am painfully aware of our govt's pathological addiction to secrecy. For example--this is a howler--the Dept of Defense only last month declassified the Pentagon Papers, available to the public over these past four decades. Can we try and strike a blow for sanity in this matter? Secrecy is for losers.
William S Knowles
Bill Simpich
Tony Ellsworth Darrington
ted rubinstein
Robert Howe
Paul Hnarakis
Mark Anderson
Tom Hanford
Patricia Anderson
Peter D Antill
Scott Kaiser
Bill Code
Sam Turnbull
Bob Gray
we need the truth, our country back if Oswald acted alone what is there to hide ?
Zach Robertson
laurie adkins
Chris Bradford
DAVID YENNIOR
This assassination changed the history of the world and politics in the United States. The truth about President Kennedy's assassination must come out now.
THOMAS ROSSLEY
Catalina Carvajal
Tony Darrington
Marge Griffith
Ray Mitcham

We have a core 200 signatures and need to get a key 1,000. Be one of us.
Sign Your Name By emailing me: bkjfk3@yahoo.com or sign the petition on line at:

http://www.petitiononline.com/112263/petition.html

The Conspiracist

2011-12-15T22:10:00.000-08:00

The conspiracist

BY MIKE MILIARD | January 11, 2007

Gay-rights crusader Paul Kuntzler turns a sharp mind for detail to the JFK assassination

http://thephoenix.com/Boston/news/31507-conspiracist/?page=1

“Assassination-conspiracy theorist” is a relatively recent addition to Paul Kuntzler’s résumé. For much longer, he has been one of Washington, DC’s most prominent gay firebrands. Over the phone following a lunch meeting near his Capitol Hill–area office, he pinpoints the important moments of his activist career as if flipping through a mental calendar.

“On the first Tuesday in April, 1962, I was elected to the Mattachine Society executive board,” he says, referring to the oldest homophile group in America. “On Saturday, April 17, 1965, I was a participant in the world’s first demonstration for gay civil rights in front of the White House. In January of 1966, the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club” — the still-extant mouthpiece for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Democrats in DC — “was founded in my living room.”

In March of 1971, Kuntzler managed the congressional campaign of Mattachine president Franklin E. Kameny — the first openly gay candidate running for Congress — who was seeking a non-voting seat representing the District of Columbia. In April of that year, he helped found another equal-rights group, DC’s Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA), the US’s oldest continuously active gay and lesbian civil-rights organization.

Kuntzler, 65, has near-total recall of the momentous dates in his life. (Within three minutes of meeting him at his office, he’s told me the date and day of the week of his birth, and the Grosse Pointe, Michigan, hospital in which he was born. Later, navigating the wide avenues around Capitol Hill, he tells me that he first arrived in DC two days after his 20th birthday, on Thursday, December 28, 1961. And that he met Stephen Brent Miller, his late partner of 42 years, “on Friday, March 28, 1962, at 11 o’clock pm.”)

But in recent years, Paul Kuntzler has been fixated on another point in time: 12:30 pm, November 22, 1963 — the moment President John F. Kennedy was mortally wounded by gunshot in Dallas, Texas. For the past year and half, the long-time gay-rights activist has been waging a one-man, self-financed campaign to publicize what he believes was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, as well as the media’s complicity in covering it up.

In a four-page letter sent last April to Washington Post chairman Donald E. Graham — and subsequently reprinted in its entirety as a four-page ad, purchased for $4000, in the LGBT weekly the Washington Blade — Kuntzler laid out his sweeping, Byzantine theory.

“President John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” he contends, “was murdered by Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson in a widespread, incredibly complex and brilliantly planned conspiracy that involved the Federal Bureau of Investigations directed by J. Edgar Hoover, the Central Intelligence Agency directed by David Atlee Phillips, the Secret Service, the United States Navy, General Curtis LeMay of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Ford Motor Company, the Dallas Police including Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, big oil of Texas, the Texas political establishment, the mafia, and the anti-Castro Cubans.”

Since May 2005, in a ceaseless flurry of typed letters, scrawled faxes, printed e-mails, and underlined photocopies sent not just to Graham but to New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., Kuntzler has lobbied to get his theory some ink in the country’s two most important newspapers. His crusade so far has been met, perhaps predictably, with almost deafening silence.

Still, he continues his quest. It’s the “morally correct thing to do. I always wanted to make a contribution,” he says.

When asked why he cares so keenly about this issue, why he’s devoted so much time and money to something most people just shrug away with a rueful frown, his normally even-keeled voice rises considerably. “Because it changed the course of history. The last 43 years! There would have been no Vietnam war, where 57,000 Americans died and 300,000 were injured, including my brother. Two million Vietnamese. Nixon wouldn’t have been president. There wouldn’t have been any Bushes. There wouldn’t have been an Iraq War. It’s a matter of integrity. I think the American people, once they learn the truth, will take a big broom and clean house.”

Birth of an obsession

Paul Kuntzler became president of Miller Reporting Co. in 2004. Founded in 1960, and bought in 1980 by Kuntzler’s late partner, Stephen Miller, it is one of the largest court-reporting and transcription services in the world, stenotyping congressional testimony and the proceedings of other high-profile federal agencies.

In 1998, the company transcribed the records of the Assassination Records Review Board, which served as a dragnet for the gathering and release of government records concerning the JFK assassination. It was Kuntzler’s work on this project that, in part, turned what had been a subject of keen curiosity into a near obsession.

And it’s on Miller Reporting letterhead that Kuntzler writes most of his letters to the editors and publishers at the New York Times and the Washington Post. (According to a July article in the Washington Times, Kuntzler racked up nearly $25,000 on his corporate credit card in relation to a Kennedy-assassination roundtable that he sponsored this spring at the famous Willard Hotel, in Washington.)

Two days after I began reporting this story, I received a large box weighing 10 or 12 pounds, mailed from Kuntzler’s office. In it was a folder the size of a small phone book, stuffed with his correspondence with the brass at the Times and the Post. There was a copy of Jim Marrs’s hefty tome Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, a primary source for Oliver Stone’s film JFK; a dog-eared and marked-up copy of Dr. Charles Crenshaw’sJFK: A Conspiracy of Silence (Crenshaw, an emergency-room doctor at Parkland Memorial Hospital, treated President Kennedy’s wounds); and Gerald Posner’s anti-conspiracy work Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK.
There were also six VHS volumes of The Men Who Killed Kennedy, an incendiary British documentary series that began airing on A&E in 1988; a DVD of fresh footage from Dallas’s WFAA-TV, called JFK: The Story Behind the Story; and some crumbling, yellowing newspapers, one of them the November 23, 1963 issue of the New York Times, screaming: KENNEDY IS KILLED BY SNIPER AS HE RIDES IN CAR IN DALLAS; JOHNSON SWORN IN ON PLANE.

The package contained another issue of the Times, this one dated November 25, 1963, the day after Jack Ruby pumped Lee Harvey Oswald’s stomach with a hot .38 slug. PRESIDENT’S ASSASSIN IS SHOT TO DEATH IN CORRIDOR OF JAIL BY A CITIZEN OF DALLAS: KENNEDY ADMIRER FIRES ONE BULLET, the headline reads. President’s assassin. Not “alleged” assassin, or “accused” assassin. Less than 72 hours after John F. Kennedy was killed, the Times was already sure of its man. Maybe Kuntzler is on to something when he accuses the Gray Lady of whitewashing the truth.

November 22, 1963

“When I was a boy, I was interested in President Lincoln’s assassination. I actually staged a production at Saint Joan of Arc grade school,” says Kuntzler, who looks a little like LSD guru Timothy Leary, but has a taste for finely tailored suits and a delicate, patrician manner. “I built the set, and played John Wilkes Booth. I was interested in why he was shot,” he continues over lunch at his favorite restaurant on Washington, DC’s 8th Street.

He never imagined the same thing could happen to John F. Kennedy, the handsome and charismatic senator for whom he’d campaigned as a teenager in Michigan, the candidate whose “big, very strong hand” he shook at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport in 1960. (“The back of my head appeared in the Detroit News the next day,” Kuntzler says with wry pride.)

Kuntzler first came to Washington, on January 18, 1961, on the Baltimore & Ohio train. He was bound for Kennedy’s presidential inauguration.

Eleven months later — “on Thursday, December 28, 1961” — he would move to Washington, DC. “We lived then in an age of innocence,” Kuntzler says of the closing months in 1963. War and depression notwithstanding, America had spent the previous three decades under great or near-great presidents — Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy — who were decent men. There was a fundamental belief that the American government was essentially good.

“It was inconceivable to anybody that there would be a conspiracy to murder a president of the United States.”

So it was an existential shock for Kuntzler to walk into his office at Structural Clay Products Institute after lunch on a Friday in 1963 to see his co-workers crowded around a large black-and-white TV, to see Walter Cronkite take off his glasses and announce gravely that President Kennedy had died.

He cried, of course. And on Sunday, when the casket lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda, he lined up with hundreds of thousands of others at 10 pm, in near-freezing temperatures, and finally paid his respects at 7 am. “It was like a death in the family,” Kuntzler says. It took me a year to get over it.”

Like the rest of the country, Kuntzler also watched in deadened silence as the peripheral dramas unfolded on TV in the days after. “I saw Oswald on television,” he says. “I didn’t see him get shot, live on NBC, but I saw when he said, ‘I’m just a patsy.’ But it never crossed my mind that the government wasn’t telling the American people the truth.”
The sum of all theories

Reading about the Kennedy assassination is like sliding down a rabbit hole, or wandering drunk through a hall of mirrors. Everywhere you turn, there’s another face in a rogue’s gallery of con-men and G-men, small-time hoods and heads of federal agencies, oil men and mob guys, Communists and anti-Communists. There’s so much evidence, so many potential players, so many pieces to the puzzle, and so many ways they could all fit together.

The assassination, Kuntzler says now, “is the pivotal event of my life.” But it wasn’t until 1991, when a friend sent him a video documentary on the conspiracy theory, that he began studying it in earnest. He bought Crossfire, by assassination theorist Jim Marr. And the first set of The Men Who Killed Kennedy. He spent the next four years buried in evidence. Finally, he says, “I came to two conclusions: Lee Harvey Oswald killed no one — neither Dallas police officer Jefferson Davis Tippit nor President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And that the government had restructured evidence to bring it in line with their version of events.”

Anyone who’s been schooled in Kennedy conspiracy theories is familiar with their common touchstones. The clumsy, bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle Oswald allegedly used to fire three shots in six seconds. The Grassy Knoll. The “Umbrella Man.” The “Babushka Lady.” The three tramps. “Back, and to the left.”

Kuntzler knew about these too. And, like many Americans (about 70 percent, according to several polls), he harbored deep suspicions that they could be plausibly woven together into an account of conspiracy, of whatever size or scope. Still, he says, “I hadn’t crossed the line to understand.”

In his 20s, Kuntzler had supported seemingly populist Texas Democrat Lyndon Johnson. He campaigned for him in 1964, heading into the Deep South with stacks of “LBJ for the USA” stickers. Nearly 40 years later, a friend gave Kuntzler a copy of Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate, the third of a proposed four-volume biography of this very complex politician.

“One third of the way through, I realized that Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the assassination,” Kuntzler says plainly. “I learned that he was utterly corrupt. He was always on the take. That he had an overpowering ambition for being president, and he would stop at nothing.”

Later, Kuntzler tracked down Barr McClellan’s book Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K. in an Atlanta bookstore, which confirmed his suspicions. The scales dropped from his eyes. The disparate parts of the assassination synthesized into a coherent whole, each actor’s role and motive crystal clear.

• LBJ helped put the plot into motion and was apprised of its workings. He “was largely a bystander, but he was a beneficiary.”

• J. Edgar Hoover threw in his hat because of Kennedy’s plans to oust him as FBI chief.
• The CIA brass was incensed by Kennedy’s plan to scale back the agency to the size envisioned by Harry Truman.

• The Texas oil industry was furious about Kennedy’s desire to reduce the lucrative oil-depletion allowance.

• The Mafia, who’d helped JFK win the 1960 election, was apoplectic at his brother Robert’s redoubled efforts to smash organized crime as attorney general.

• Cuban exiles, still smarting from the Bay of Pigs disaster and being sold out to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis, were also mad.

That’s not all, says Kuntzler.

• Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, whose Brother, Charles, was forced by Kenned to resign as deputy CIA director after the Bay of Pigs, signed off on the last-minute change in the parade route that would bring Kennedy directly into the line of fire.

• The upper echelon of the Secret Service was aware of what was going down, and some rank-and-file agents were told to stand down just before the motorcade entered Dealey Plaza.

• The Ford Motor Company secretly patched up the limousine, so as to erase evidence of bullets fired from the front.

• And Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay, who clashed with Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was reportedly seen smiling and smoking a cigar at the slain president’s hasty autopsy — held at Maryland’s Bethesda Naval Hospital, where documents suggest two different brains may have been examined.

Hovering over it all, the theory goes, was the specter of war in Southeast Asia. “Eisenhower warned against the dangers of the military-industrial complex,” Kuntzler says. “War means money. Then and now. The whole military complex was involved. They wanted the war in Vietnam. Kennedy had signed the document, in October of 1963; he was going to pull about 14,000 advisors out.”

Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed a patsy, Kuntzler alleges, drawn into the plot as a fall guy. What’s more, he was an FBI and CIA employee ($200 a month) who tried to warn bureau superior James Hosty of the plot 10 days before the assassination. Kuntzler also swears by Dr. Charles Crenshaw’s assertion that newly sworn-in president Lyndon B. Johnson called the operating room of Parkland Hospital after Oswald was mortally wounded, demanding a deathbed confession be extracted from him.

Kuntzler says he was also surprised to learn of the purported roles of gays in the Kennedy assassination. “In the summer of ’63,” he says, “the people who were involved in setting up Oswald — Clay Shaw, David Ferrie — were homosexuals.” The two of them, some have alleged, were CIA-connected anti-Communists who knew Oswald through the agency and set him up as the perfect dupe.

Years ago, it never would have occurred to Kuntzler that the Kennedy assassination could have taken shape, in part, in the low light of French Quarter gay bars. In the 1960s, he says, it would have been “inconceivable that a group of homosexuals would be involved in the murder of a president of the United States.” Yet these two worlds intersected in a number of ways. “After the assassination, naval intelligence was always picking up gay people, looking for people who might be working in government,” he explains. “In July of ’65, they picked up Stephen [Miller, who worked as a stenographer on Capitol Hill]. But I later came to realize that what they were really doing was looking for people who might have an insight into the Kennedy assassination. They were afraid.”

As Kuntzler finishes laying out the particulars of this many-faceted plot, my head is spinning. I’ve never believed Oswald acted alone, but this is rather astounding. Maybe Lyndon Johnson was ruthless, corrupt, and power mad, I suggest. But there’s a world of difference between stuffing a few ballot boxes and helming such a complex and far-reaching coup d’état. Never mind that, as Kuntzler alleges, “there are still people in government today who were involved in the murder — and lots of people who were involved in the cover-up.” It’s a lot to swallow.

“Yes,” he says. “I know.”

Deaf ears

Kuntzler not only wrote to Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. (who never wrote back and declined to comment for this piece). He also wrote more than once to Times public editor Byron Calame. Calame acknowledges that he “[doesn’t] remember very much” about their written correspondence, but recalls that Kuntzler’s “original contact with me was by phone and was very secretive, very demanding of secrecy.”

No question, the tone of some of Kuntzler’s letters has a certain cloak-and-dagger ring. While sailing from Southampton to New York, he sent a fax to a Washington Post editor on Cunard Line stationery: “As we agreed, I will call you from the Queen Mary 2 at 9:59 am.” In the attached letter, he writes, “I arrived home from Rio de Janeiro on United Airlines early Sunday morning. I could fly to New York as early as next Monday or Tuesday, January 30 or 31, for discussions. You would have a much better understanding of me if we met in person. . . . P.S. It is now 5 a.m.”

Kuntzler is adamant that Gerald Posner’s book, the anti-conspiracy Case Closed — which drew some of its material from Posner’s sources inside the CIA — is an agency con job on the American people. And, he says, the New York Times, which “heaped extravagant praise on Posner’s book” but “discredited Oliver Stone’s film [JFK] before it was even released to the public” — is guilty by association. Posner has also written an occasional article for the Times.

“It is my theory that [the Times and the Post] are directing conspiracies of silence,” Kuntzler says. The Times knows the truth, but, even 43 years removed, is “scared to death” of the American people learning the true facts about the assassination. Once Kuntzler finally “understood the full comprehensive truth” about the conspiracy, he knew he was duty bound to sound the alarm. “My company reported the Assassination Records Review Board. “I was willing to put this on my own company stationery and sign my name to it,” he says. “It’s the biggest story of our lifetime.”

I ask Kuntzler how he thinks his quest will end. Will the New York

Times and/orWashington Post ever come clean and splash the long-hoped-for revelations on the front page?

It doesn’t matter anymore. “Aren’t you publishing the story? Your newspaper is highly respected. I think what you’re doing is an extraordinary thing. When you publish this, it will break open like a volcano. The whole history of the last 43 years changed with this, Michael. And finally someone in the media is going to publish this.”

Kuntzler says that after he FedExed that first letter to a Times exec in 2005, he tossed and turned all night, drenched in sweat, “because of the consequences for my life.” He got an unlisted number. He suspects the CIA was in attendance at his press conference. In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, “they murdered people. I would have been murdered myself if I had done this 35 years ago.”

I tell him I hope the CIA has more pressing issues on its hands these days. “I had tremendous opposition to this,” he says, “family, friends, people I know trying to prevent me from doing this. But I’ve decided to accept the consequences, whatever they may be.”

In the end, says Paul Kuntzler, this work had to be done. “Back in the 1960s when I was involved in gay rights, I realized if I didn’t do something, there was nobody else to do it. And I realized if I never did this, it would never happen.”

Community Pioneers
Creators of Washington, DC's Gay Community
PAUL KUNTZLER (2007)
http://www.rainbowhistory.org/kuntzler.htm

ACTIVIST PAUL KUNTZLER BUYS JFK ASSASSINATION COVERAGE
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/News_Archive_-_Aug_2007
Aug 3, 2007: Paul Kuntzler, owner of the Miller Reporting Company, has taken out a two-page ad about the JFK assassination in the New York Times. The ad reproduces a July 27 letter he wrote to the Washington Post, concerning "conclusive evidence that there was a government-wide conspiracy resulting in the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas." The letter goes on to name LBJ, the FBI, Gen. Curtis LeMay, and many others as participants in the conspiracy, and mixes factual revelations with a variety of theorizing about the case. Kuntzler had published the letter in June 2006 in the Washington Blade, and had a month prior to that hosted an event in Washington DC featuring assassination experts.

MILLER REPORTING COMPANY, INC.
STEPHEN BRENT MILLER
FOUNDING PRESIDENT, 1980-2004

PAUL KUNTZLER, PRESIDENT

COURT REPORTERS
TRANSCRIBERS
Established 1960

735 8th Street, SE
Washington, DC 20003

July 27, 2007
Mr. Donald E. Graham
Chairman of the Board
The Washington Post
1515 15Th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20071

Dear Mr. Graham:

As you know, I wrote to you on April 4, 2006 about the conclusive evidence that there was a government-wide conspiracy resulting in the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on Friday, November 22, 1963. You thanked me on April 7, 2006 for sending you my letter about the Kennedy assassination and told me that you would pass on the material to Leonard Downie Jr., The Post’s Executive Editor.

My communications with the The Post began on January 12, 2006 when Milton Coleman, The Post’s Deputy Managing Editor arranged for me to meet with Michelle Garcia, Post reporter. During my meeting I gave Ms.Garcia various materials related to the assassination, including the two censored videos, The Men Who Killed Kennedy, The Final Chapter, Volumes 1 and 2.

Subsequently, I began having conversations with The Washington Post’s New York bureau. On March 30, 2006, I had a meeting in the New York office on West 57th Street.

But later, The Washington Post after repeated requests had never returned the Kennedy assassination material. I then had to ask my Washington attorney, Roy Kaufmann of Jackson & Campbell, P.C. to write to The Post requesting the return of my property. After repeated requests, I then had to retain the services of John J. Janiec, an attorney with offices in The Empire State Building. It was not until Mr. Janiec filed summons against The Washington Post in the Supreme Court of the State of New York did The Post finally relent and returned most of my property during November 2006.

But The Post has still not returned the important video, The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Final Chapter, Volume 1.

The Post’s actions are symptomatic of how the American newsmedia has worked to keep the truth from the public about the most atrocious crime in U.S. history.

With a few exceptions such as journalists Helen Thomas and Robert McNeil, the media—both individually and collectively --- have safeguarded the government’s false version of what happened on that terrible day in November 1963.

Indeed, David Talbot in his new book, Brothers, wrote that in 1965 “the press was rushing to close the case on the assassination of President Kennedy.”

The media, including The New York Times, allowed themselves to be infiltrated by the CIA. Talbot reported that “the CIA alone had over four hundred American journalists on its payroll.”

The best example is Gerald Posner. His 1993 book, Case Closed, was written for an elite audience, primarily journalists, predisposed to believe the government’s false version of events. In my opinion, Posner’s book is full of inaccuracies. Random House editor Robert Loomis solicited Posner to write this book with the promise of full CIA cooperation.

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered by Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson in a widespread, incredibly complex and brilliantly planned conspiracy that involved the Federal Bureau of Investigations directed by J. Edgar Hoover, the CIA directed by David Atlee Phillips, the Secret Service, elements of the United States Air Force, including General Curtis LeMay of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the United States Army, the United States Navy, Henry R. Luce’s LIFE Magazine, the Ford Motor Company, the Dallas Police, including Dallas Mayor Earle Cabel, big Oil of Midland, Texas, the Texas political establishment, the mafia, the anti – Castro Cubans, Southern racists, including retired General Edwin Walker, and others. President Richard M. Nixon was also involved.

Miller Reporting Company did the reporting for the Assassination Records Review Board. Congress created the John F. Kennedy Records Act in 1992 that created a five-civilian member board entrusted with the responsibility to review and declassify documents held by the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, etc. President Bill Clinton made the appointments to the board.

On Monday, November 9, 1998, the National Archives released to the public all the working files of the Assassination Records Review Board and its staff covering the recently completed 4-year effort of that independent Federal agency to find and release government records related to the Kennedy assassination. Among the internal records released that day was a 32-page research paper, written by AARB’s Chief Analyst for Military Records, which provide compelling evidence that there were two different brain specimens examined following the autopsy on the body of JFK—President Kennedy’s brain, as was expected, and a fraudulent, substituted brain specimen at a later date—and that the brain photographs in the National Archives today in the so-called “autopsy collection” are not images of President Kennedy’s brain, but are images of someone else’s. All photographic records of President Kennedy’s brain have disappeared, since its pattern of damage was consistent with being shot from the front; the images of the substituted specimen show damage generally consistent with the official version of what happened of being shot from above and behind.

The final shot that killed President Kennedy came from the front from an assassin in the storm sewer to the right of the limousine, entered his right temple and exited from the back causing a massive hole in the back of Kennedy’s head. The assassin used an explosive bullet that flattens out and doesn’t leave a trace. This explains the massive hole in the back of Kennedy’s head. The small hole in the right temple was covered up, and in the forged photographs, a soft-matte insert was put in its place to cover up the massive hole in the back of his head.

The reasons why President Kennedy was murdered were varied: First of all, as President Dwight Eisenhower warned about at the end of his administration was the military-industrial complex. On October 11, 1963 Kennedy issued White House Directive NSAM 263. Kennedy planned to withdraw 1,000 military advisors from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the balance of 15,000 military advisers would be withdrawn by late 1965. There would have been no Vietnam War.

Secondly, Kennedy planned to get rid of J. Edgar Hoover in his second term. He also planned to scale back the CIA to the manner that President Harry Truman envisioned the agency: as an intelligence agency---not one that sponsors wars and assassinations.

It was also known that Kennedy thought that the oil depletion allowance was too generous. He planned to lower it thus angering the oil people. The anti-Castro Cubans were enraged because of Kennedy’s refusal to invade Cuba. Southern racists were bitter because Kennedy supported civil rights. The mafia were out to destroy Kennedy because John and Robert Kennedy had targeted the mafia.

Then there was Vice President Lyndon Johnson who was exceedingly corrupt, possessed an overpowering ambition to be president, and would stop at nothing to obtain his goal.

Robert A. Caro, the renowned biographer of Lyndon Johnson has already published three of his four volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Caro published this paragraph in the introduction to his first volume, The Path to Power. The introduction is called “Patterns.”

The dark thread was still present after college. It would be present throughout his life. The Path to Power, the first of three volumes that will constitute The Years of Lyndon Johnson, ends in 1941, when Johnson is only thirty-two years old. But by 1941, the first major stage of his life is over. A young man—desperately poor, possessed of an education mediocre at best, from one of the most isolated and backward areas of the United States--- has attained the national power he craved. He has won not only a seat in Congress but influence that reaches far beyond his district’s borders. And by 1941, also, the major patterns of his life are established and clear. In attaining this influence, he has displayed a genius for discerning a path to power, an utter ruthlessness in destroying obstacles in that path, and a seemingly bottomless capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal in moving along it. In every election in which he ran---only in college, but thereafter—he displayed a willingness to do whatever was necessary to win: a willingness so complete that even in the generous terms of political morality, it amounted to amorality.

After Lee Harvey Oswald was shot, President Lyndon Baines Johnson called Parkland Hospital. Phyllis Barlett, Chief Telephone Operator for Parkland Hospital remembers the call: “The call came in and said “hold the line for the President,” and for a second I was still thinking Kennedy, and I didn’t... I was kind of taken aback for a minute and a few seconds. It was just a matter of a second, that’s when he came on in a loud voice and said: “This is Lyndon Johnson. Connect me to the accused assassin’s doctor.” It sounded the same as it had been on newcasts when I would hear him speak.”

Ms. Barlett then put the President through to an office adjoining the operating room, where Dr. Charles Crenshaw was urgently called to answer the phone. He recalls: “I picked up the phone and it was there that I heard this voice like thunder that stated: “This is President Lyndon B. Johnson.” And he asked: “How is the accused assassin doing?” I was so startled the only thing that I could say was: “He is holding his own. He has lost a lot of blood.” He said: “Would you take a message to the chief operating surgeon?” It was more of an order than a question. “There is a man in the room, I would like for him to take a deathbed confession.” And all of a sudden the phone went off. I returned to the operating room, I tapped Dr. Shires on the shoulder, he looked at me like “What are you talking about?” Everyone was working feverishly in the operating room trying to correct the wounds there. I said: “Guess who I have been talking to? The President of the United States called and he wants that man over there to take a deathbed confession.” And Shires looked at me like I was crazy. And we both realized that Lee Harvey Oswald, had he survived, would not have been able to give any testimony until two or three days after the procedure. But still in all, the President had called and I did relay the message.”

The Assassination Records Review Board obtained a 14-page document from the Russians on March 6, 1995. The document was once a top-secret KGB intelligence report. On page 9 of the report is this statement:

“On September 16, 1965, this same source reported that the KGB residence in New York City received instructions from KGB headquarters in Moscow to develop all possible information concerning President Lyndon B. Johnson’s character, background, personal friends, and family and from which quarters he derives his support in his position as President of the United States. Our source added that “now” the KBG was in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy.”

Turning now to President Richard M. Nixon. Nixon authorized the break-in at the Watergate Complex during the night of June 16-17, 1972 because Nixon was fearful that National Chairman Larry O’Brien might have documents in his files indicating that Nixon was involved in the Kennedy murder—he was. Richard Nixon had been at the party of Clint Murchison’s, the Dallas oil billionaire, and he had gone into the private meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ, Edward Clark, Johnson’s attorney (and the secret boss of Texas) in the early morning hours of Friday, November 22, 1963, about eleven hours before President Kennedy was murdered.

On page 21 Ira David Wood III wrote in his chronology in Murder in Dealey Plaza (edited by James H. Fetzer) the following:

“Later that morning, Nixon flew out of Dallas Love Field at 9:05 a.m. on American Airlines Flight 82. He was then legal counsel for Pepsi-Cola and was allegedly in Dallas to attend a company meeting.

CIA agent Russell Bintliff will tell The Washington Star in 1976 that Pepsi-Cola had set up a bottling plant in Laos in the early 1960’s... One of the immediate consequences of the JFK assassination will be the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, in theory providing the alleged Pepsi-Cola plant with a great deal more business”.

LIFE Magazine played a major role in The Conspiracy beginning with the photograph of President Kennedy’s limousine. LIFE cropped the photograph on page 23 of the November 29, 1963 issue so that the bullet hole in the left windshield is not visible.

In this same issue (written during Saturday and Sunday, November 23 and 24, 1963) Thomas Thompson wrote a long story about Lee Harvey Oswald which may have deceived the American people:

Thompson wrote the following:

“But slowly, methodically, the police were building their case. (They were not.) ---connecting Oswald with the mail-order purchase of a rifle like the one that fired the bullet (Oswald never owned a rifle.) placing him on the scene with a long parcel the size and shape of a rifle (It wasn’t. The package was only two-thirds that size and contained curtain rods.) comparing his palm-marks with the one found on the murder weapon.” This is Thompson’s most appalling lie. The FBI flew the cheap Italian carbine rifle to Washington and then flew it back to Dallas. On Monday morning, November 25, agents took the rifle to the Dallas funeral home where Oswald’s dead body was. Paul Grudie, the funeral home director, reported that agents asked to have the preparation room to themselves. Afterwards, Grudie had to clean the ink from Oswald’s dead hand. The FBI then announced that they had found Oswald’s palm print on the rifle!

In the subsequent issue, December 6, 1963, Thompson continued his lies. In the February 21, 1964 issue, LIFE magazine published on its front cover the fraudulent photograph showing Oswald’s head superimposed on someone else’s body holding the cheap Italian carbine rifle.

Regarding the Ford Motor Company’s involvement, Henry Ford II and LBJ were friends. The Secret Service secretly flew Kennedy’s limousine to Detroit’s Willow Run Airport on Sunday, November 24, 1963 and took it to the Ford River Rouge Plant. On Monday morning, November 25, the windshield with its hole was stripped from the car and replaced with a new windshield. The limousine was then secretly flown back to Washington and returned to the White House garage. Detailed information about the Ford Motor Company’s involvement can be found in The Men Who Killed Kennedy, The Final Chapter, Volume 1, as well as from numerous other sources.

Evidence of the Secret Service’s involvement in The Conspiracy is clearly demonstrated in the film of Kennedy’s motorcade at Dallas Love Field. Secret Service Agent, Emory P. Roberts, in the limousine in front of Kennedy’s car, waves away the Secret Service agent Henry J. Rybka from Kennedy’s limousine. Rybka throws up his arms in astonishment with the implied message: “This is not what I was trained to do!”

David Talbot writes about LBJ’s distrust of the Secret Service: “Just honestly, Mike,” LBJ told Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield in a September 1964 phone conversation recorded by the president’s Oval Office taping system,--“ and I wouldn’t have this repeated this to anyone—my judgment is that they’re more likely to get me killed than they are to protect me.”

In the opening and lead story by journalist Tom Wicker in the Saturday, November 23, 1963 edition of The New York Times is conclusive evidence of The Conspiracy. On page 2 Wicker reports Acting White House Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff’s press conference at Parkland Hospital at 1:30 p.m. (Central Standard Time). Kilduff said: “President John F. Kennedy died at approximately one o’clock Central Standard Time here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot to the brain, Dr. Burkley told me.” (Burkley was Kennedy’s personal physician) “It was a simple matter at the time of a bullet right through the head.” (Kilduff raised his right arm and used his right index finger to point to the entrance wound in the right temple.)

In the second column on page 2, Wicker wrote this: “Later in the afternoon, Dr. Malcolm Perry, an attending surgeon, and Dr. Kemp Clark, Chief of neurosurgery at Parkland Hospital gave more details: Mr. Kennedy was hit by a bullet in the throat, just below the Adam’s apple, they said. This wound had the appearance of a bullet’s entry.

Mr. Kennedy also had a massive, gaping wound in the back and one on the side of the head. However, the doctors said it was impossible to determine immediately, whether the wounds had been caused by one bullet or two.”

Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, which is about 98% accurate, shows a superb frame-by-frame analysis of the Zapruder film showing the six shots. Two of the eight assassins were in the lower part of the Dal-Tex Building. Another two assassins were on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository Building. One of the assassins was Malcolm Wallace. His finger print was found on one of the boxes in the sniper’s nest. Another assassin was on the fourth or fifth floor of the Texas Book Depository Building.

The CIA had the mafia hire three killers from Marseilles, France. Two of those killers were behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll. The third assassin was in the storm sewer to the right of the limousine. The first shot came from an assassin on the left side of the Stemmons Freeway, crashed through the front windshield and hit Kennedy in the neck. The second shot came from behind from an assassin in the Dal-Tex Building and hit Kennedy in the back. The third shot came from behind from the fourth or fifth floor of the Texas Book Depository Building and hit Governor John Connolly. The fourth shot came from an assassin in the Dal-Tex Building and flew over the motorcade and hit cement. A concrete fragment hit by-stander James T. Tague in the cheek. The fifth shot came from an assassin in the Texas Book Depository Building and hit Kennedy in the side of the head. And the sixth and final shot came from the assassin in the storm sewer; hit Kennedy in the right temple, blasting out from the back of his head killing the President.

Both the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations were cover-ups. Allen W. Dulles was an active member of The Conspiracy as well as the cover-up. Gerald Ford was a forceful member of the cover-up and acted as an FBI informant regarding some of the secret proceedings of the Warren Commission. Senator Richard Russell privately knew that the Warren Commission’s findings were absurd, but Congressman Hale Boggs had his papers eviscerated by the FBI and he was murdered by the CIA, as were dozens of others during the 1960’s and 1970’s in the ongoing effort to cover-up The Conspiracy.

Connie Kritzberg was a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald. She conducted a telephone interview a couple of hours after Kennedy’s death with the two principal doctors among the 16 doctors who attended Kennedy at Parkland Hospital. Both doctors, as did all 14 other doctors and four nurses reported that he was shot twice from the front, first in the neck and finally in the right temple.

Kritzberg talked to Dr.Williams Kemp Clark, head of neurosurgery, and Dr. Malcolm Perry. She asked the two doctors how many wounds there were in Kennedy’s body. Dr. Clark told Kritzberg that he was working on the gaping hole in the head, and Dr. Perry said he was working on the entrance wound in the neck. Kritzberg said that Dr. Perry said three times that “there was an entrance wound from the front.”

Connie Kritzberg then said she wrote “a simple story, only about 12 inches long, titled “Neck Wound Brings Death” and turned it in.”

The next morning, Saturday, November 23, Kitzberg found that the story she filed had been changed. She found in the story “an unprofessional sentence” in the third paragraph. It said, “A doctor admitted that it was possible there was only one wound.”

“I was very upset,” Kritzberg said. “I called the city desk and talked one of the assistant city editors. I asked him ‘Who changed my story?’ Kritzberg said. “He knew immediately what I meant,” She asked him, “ Who put in that sentence?” The assistant city editor said, “The FBI.”

Arlen Specter, now Senator Specter, who was a lawyer on the Warren Commission, invented the single bullet theory known as the “magic bullet.” Kenneth O’Donnell, JFK’s special assistant, recalls Specter’s effort at another deception:

“I distinctly remember that when Johnson and I talked at the hospital there was no mention of which of the two planes he should use. Nor was there any mention that he was considering waiting for Jackie and the President’s casket to be on the same plane with him before he left Dallas. Later as a lawyer for the Warren Commission, Arlen Specter, pointed out to me that according to Johnson’s testimony, I had told him to board Air Force One, Specter asked me, to my amazement, if I would change my testimony so that it would agree with the President’s. Was I under oath?’ I asked Specter, as, of course, I was. Certainly I wouldn’t change anything I said under oath.”

President George Herbert Walker Bush, as a former director of the CIA, continues to this day to be intensely involved in the cover-up of the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. President Bush strenuously opposed passage of the J.F.K. Records Act and refused to make the appointments to the five civilian-member board. The appointments had to wait until Bill Clinton became President. Indeed, at the funeral for President Gerald Ford on January 2, 2007, Bush falsely charged that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy.

There are many reasons why the Kennedys remained quiet all these years. David Talbot wrote in Brothers that Robert Kennedy in 1965 told an old family friend: “If the American people knew the truth about Dallas, there would be blood in the streets.” Robert Kennedy was also concerned about his own personal safety. He also shared a sense of guilt about his brother’s death. Kennedy set up in his office an operation to assassinate Castro, but the government took over that operation to kill his brother. RFK also intended to break open the case once he became president, but he was assassinated on June 5, 1968.

Lee Harvey Oswald was working for the FBI at the time of the assassination making $200 a month. He was also working for the CIA. On or about Tuesday, November 12, 1963, Oswald delivered a note to his FBI supervisor, James P. Hosty, Jr., warning him that the assassination was about to take place. Hosty sent out a wire on November 17, 1963 to all FBI Offices. The wire read: “Bureau has determined that a militant revolutionary group may attempt to assassinate President Kennedy in his proposed trip to Dallas, Texas, November 22, Nineteen Sixty-Three.” After the assassination, all the wires were destroyed except the one in the New Orleans Office. The Warren commission, whose members were appointed by LBJ, held an emergency, executive session on Saturday morning, January 22, 1964 to discuss Oswald’s FBI number and FBI salary. While the two assassins on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository Building were shooting the president, Oswald was in the second floor lunch room. He briefly stepped out on the steps of the Texas Book Depository Building and was photographed. Oswald was already in the Texas Theater before Officer Jefferson Davis Tippitt was killed.

In a very real sense, Lee Harvey Oswald was an American hero. At great personal danger to himself, Oswald entered into The Conspiracy in an effort to prevent President Kennedy’s murder. Jack Ruby who was a member of The Conspiracy then murdered him. Oswald was then made a villain and the self-serving and deceptive American news media has perpetuated this lie for now for than 43 years.

In Brothers Benjamin Bradlee, Executive Editor of The Washington Post acknowledged to David Talbot that he didn’t do more to investigate the assassination because he was concerned that further reporting might harm his career.

Sincerely,

Paul Kuntzler
President
For more information write to:
619 G Street, S.W.
Washington, DC 20024
Or call 202-484-0330

Red Roses at the Grave of the Patsy

2011-12-08T17:39:00.001-08:00

Grave of the Patsy - Lee Harvey Oswald

2011-12-08T17:38:00.001-08:00

JFK Assassination Records Act Internet Symposium

2011-12-05T17:44:00.000-08:00

From: William Kelly Bkjfk3@yahoo.com

To: Select Group of Specialists in JFK Assassination Records
Re: Invitation to participate in the first JFK Assassination Records Act Internet Symposium
When: To be aired live in January, 2012 and archived on line.

Dear Friends and research associates,

Because of your special interest and knowledge in this subject, you are invited to participate in the first JFK Assassinations Records Act Internet Symposium (JFK ARAIS I), and are requested to present a paper on a specific aspect of the records or a case study, one that you can deliver live on computer camera and streamlined over the internet, and also as a written paper that can be posted on line.

You will also be requested to answer questions afterwards and participate in at least one live panal with two or three others in an area of special interest and have a dialog and/or debates on a particular subject that's related to the JFK Assassinations records. The focus of the JFK ARAIS will be strictly limited to discussion of the records, and will not concern who killed JFK or why and how they did it, but can address any issue related to the records that were destroyed, are missing, were released or are still being withheld.

We hope to conduct the JFK ARAIS I over a weekend in January (possibly the 13-16 MLKDay weekend)or early February, with the idea of building up public interest in the release of all of the remaining files by November 2013 and getting Congress to conduct required JFK Act oversight hearings. If hearings are held they will obtain new sworn testimony and determine the disposition of certain records.

If you want to participate, please email me and sign on to our Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/groups/jfkactlobby/ and I will forward additional information, including a list of those who have also been invited to participate. Also please consider what specific topic you would like to address and I will give you a list of panels to see which one you would like to be on.

You may pass this invitation on to any of your associates who might like to participate and have them email me and sign on to our Facebook page for further directions.

If you or if you know anyone who has special knowledge of the JFK Assassination Records, the JFK Assassination Records Act, the work of the Assassinations Review Board (ARRB) or the disposition of the records and would like to participate in any way, please sign on to our Facebook page and email me as to what level you want to participate.

Besides those who have been or will be especially invited to make presentations and be on a panel, there will be a limited number of observers and other on-line participants who will be able to ask questions, make comments, and provide information that can be included in the discussions.

Please register at Facebook and email me before January 1 if you want to participate.

Thanks to all, and any ideas or technical assistance will be greatly appreciated, as I hope you are as excited about the possibilities as we are,

Bill Kelly
Bkjfk3@yahoo.com

Return of Umbrella Man

2011-12-04T12:27:00.000-08:00

Russ Baker - Author of Bush Family of Secrets, takes issue with the NYTs and the airing on their web sits of six minutes of a six hour Errol Morris interview with Joshiah "Tink" Thompson, author of "Six Seconds in Dallas." Although Thompson and his book promote healthy skepticism of the official conclusion that the assassination was the result of one lone assassin, in this segment, Thompson dismisses the idea the Umbrella Man was connected to any possible conspiracy.

At the web site Whowhatwy.com, Russ Baker gives the issue more due attention.

http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/11/28/ny-times%E2%80%99-umbrella-man-exposed/

Russ Baker writes:

More and more, one is struck by the extent to which the New York Times is disassociated from reality. One might judge the paper’s publishing of official falsehoods as the occasional and accidental byproduct of the pressure to produce so many articles, were it not for the consistency and rigidly sclerotic way it loyally foists patently untrue material upon the public.
I say this as someone who still reads the Times, still has friends working there, and still retains some isolated pockets of fondness for it.

But it is hard to overlook these constant transgressions. As we note here at WhoWhatWhy, these range from ignoring the real reasons for the invasion of Libya to apologizing for fraud perpetrated by its favorite Afghanistan propagandist (and theauthor of Three Cups of Tea). It surely includes the paper’s failure to share with its readers overwhelming and constantly refreshed documentation of an organized coup that resulted in the death of President John F. Kennedy and the end of meaningful reform in America. I addressed that latter issue in the article, “NY Times’ Ostrich Act on JFK Assassination Getting Old.”

Far from proper journalistic curiosity, the paper sees its job as enforcing orthodoxy, and shutting down consideration of anything untoward. According to the New York Times’s peculiar brand of journalism, coups and plots happen with regularity abroad, but never, never, in the United States.

It is important to include the pejorative phrase “conspiracy theorist” in every article, even acknowledging concern about the health of democracy in America. It is important to have a good laugh at the expense of those poor souls who trouble themselves inquiring into the darker precincts of this country’s history.

So it is with the 48th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. Instead of assigning a single reporter to scrutinize the hundreds or thousands of meaningful, documented facts that do suggest more than “the lone nut did it,” the Times gets busy with the disinformation business.

Here are two Times “contributions” on this occasion:

UMBRELLA MAN

On the 48th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder, the Times ran an op-ed piece and short film by documentary maker Errol Morris about another man’s research into “umbrella man.” Umbrella Man is the nickname for a fellow who famously brought an umbrella on a sunny day for the president’s visit to Dallas November 22, 1963, stood on the “grassy knoll,” and, just as the president’s car passed, he opened the umbrella and pumped it in the air. Many have speculated as to the significance, or lack of significance, of this strange behavior. Some wonder if Umbrella Man was part of the assassination scenario, perhaps signaling to shooters. There was even the September 1975 Senate intelligence committee testimony by Charles Senseney, a contract weapons designer for the CIA, that the agency had perfected an umbrella that shoots undetectable poison darts that can immobilize and kill, raising questions about whether this was in play that day. (See P. 168 in the Senate committee testimony, where Senseney explains specifically about the agency’s use of a toxin and the ability to fire it from a modified umbrella.)

The self-described Umbrella Man, Louie Steven Witt, came forward to offer his testimony in 1978, or three years after the CIA expert provided this now forgotten testimony on umbrellas as weapon. Umbrella Man came forward just as a special House Select Committee on Assassinations was focusing on the possibility of a conspiracy (which, it concluded in its final report…was likely.) (You can order a video of a report on Witt’s testimony, by then ABC News reporter Brit Hume, here)
The counsel for the Assassinations Committee, remarkably, does not mention the prior Senate testimony by the CIA weapons expert that such an umbrella device did exist, and instead quotes a more shaky claim by an “assassinations critic” regarding such a device.

Mr. GENZMAN. Mr. Witt, exhibit 406 is a copyrighted diagram
drawn by assassinations critic Robert B. Cutler which shows two
umbrellas with rocket and flechette attachments. Mr. Witt, do you
know what a flechette is?
Mr. WITT. I do now. I did not prior to our interview yesterday
evening.
Mr. GENZMAN. Did the umbrella in your possession on November
22, 1963, contain a flechette, or a rocket or a dart?
Mr. WITT, No, It did not.
Mr. GENZMAN. Has exhibit 405, the umbrella, ever contained -a
flechette, rocket. or dart?
Mr. WITT. No. Not since it’s been in my possession.
Mr. GENZMAN. Did the umbrella in your possession on November
1963; contain a gun or weapon of any sort?
438
Mr. WITT. No.
Mr. GENZMAN. Has exhibit 405 ever contained a gun or weapon
of any sort?
Mr. WITT. This umbrella?
Mr. GENZMAN. Yes.
Mr. WITT. No.
Mr. GENZMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Witt.
Mr. Chairman, I have no further questions.

Is the Times at all interested in the credibility of this purported umbrella-bearer? Absolutely not.

Instead, the Morris video presents the idea that sometimes, the most ridiculous scenarios are the truth. And so it presents the ridiculous, and asks us to believe it. Cutting to the chase, the man seen opening an umbrella comes forward to explain why he did it. Reason: in 1963, he was still mad at Britain’s pre-war Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement of Hitler, and held JFK’s father to blame as US ambassador to England in that period. Chamberlain was famed for carrying an umbrella. So—get this—Umbrella Man, hoping to make a statement about what happened in the late 1930s to JFK in 1963, pumped his umbrella at the time the fatal shots were fired…only for this obscure purpose.

The Times passes the responsibility for this travesty to Morris, who passes it along to Josiah Thompson, a former Navy underwater demolitions expert turned Yale philosophy professor turned private investigator, who appears on-screen to ruminate about “Umbrella Man.” He is happy to accept the Chamberlain story as “delightful weirdness.”

Watching this, one gets the sense that Thompson believes there was no conspiracy in JFK’s death. But what the Times implies with this little piece is false. In fact, Josiah Thompson is known for documenting the exact opposite. He wrote a serious investigative book in 1967, “Six Seconds in Dallas,” full of evidence and specifics, in which he concluded there was a conspiracy to kill JFK—involving three different shooters. But the New York Times is not interested in that, only in this new, droll dismissal of another piece of the puzzle.

I called Thompson to ask him about the Morris video, and he pronounced himself delighted with it. I asked him how he knew that the man who came forward to identify himself as Umbrella Man and present the Neville Chamberlain story was actually the same man in the fuzzy photo of many years earlier. By way of explanation, he mentioned hearing a story from a well-respected JFK researcher who in turn had heard that Umbrella Man had told his dentist years earlier that he was umbrella man. Pressing Thompson, I learned that the man who came forward as Umbrella Man never provided proof that he was in fact the man with the umbrella. Even the dentist story is third, fourth, or perhaps fifth hand, not verified by Thompson or his researcher friend. All of which proves nothing, and all of which suggests that maybe, just maybe, the man’s improbable, “delightful” story of Neville Chamberlain is, indeed, fabricated.

Just because Errol Morris is a master of the documentary art does not make him any kind of authority on what should be the province of careful investigators. Just because a story is absurd does not make it real, or “delightful”, as the Times video would like us to consider—and many did, with thousands emailing the Times piece to friends. This is something well understood by the game-players of the covert operations house of mirrors: the jesuitical contortions that can be made to twist any credible scenario.

Here are some things you should know about the man who came forward to identify himself as Umbrella Man and tell this ludicrous Neville Chamberlain story:

His account of his activities that day don’t track with what Umbrella Man actually did, raising questions as to whether this man who volunteered to testify to the assassination inquiry is even the real umbrella-bearer, or someone whose purpose was to end inquiries into the matter.
The man who came forward, Louie Steven Witt, was a young man at the time of Kennedy’s death. How many young men in Dallas in 1963 even knew what Neville Chamberlain had done a quarter-century before?

In 1963, Witt was an insurance salesman for the Rio Grande National Life Insurance company, which anchored the eponymous Rio Grande Building in downtown Dallas. It’s an interesting building. Among the other outfits housed in the building was the Office of Immigration and Naturalization—a place Lee Harvey Oswald visited repeatedly upon his return from Russia, ostensibly to deal with matters concerning the immigration status of his Russian-born wife, Marina. Another occupant of the Rio Grande Building was the US Secret Service, so notably lax in its protection of Kennedy that day, breaking every rule of security on every level.

A major client of Rio Grande was the US military, to which it provided insurance.

It’s worth considering the roles of military-connected figures on the day of the assassination. These include Dallas Military Intelligence unit chief Jack Crichton operating secretly from an underground communications bunker; Crichton’s providing a translator who twisted Marina Oswald’s statement to police in a way that implicated her husband; and members of military intelligence forcing their way into the pilot car of Kennedy’s motorcade, which inexplicably ground to a halt in front of the Texas School Book Depository (where Lee Harvey Oswald’s employer, a high official with the local military-connected American Legion, managed to find a “job” for Oswald at a time when his company was otherwise seasonally laying off staff.) Oh, and it’s worth contemplating JFK’s titanic, if under-reported, struggle with top Pentagon officials over how the US should interact with Russia, Cuba, and the rest of the world. You can read more about all this in my book Family of Secrets.

Is this concatenation of facts too crazy to consider? More crazy than that Neville Chamberlain story?

THE JACK AND JACKIE LOVE STORY

Not content with having Morris, who is no Kennedy expert, put out this misleading video on Umbrella Man, the Times earlier featured Morris’s book review of Stephen King’s novel imagining Lee Harvey Oswald. So now you have a man who knows little about the real story, getting people to read the imaginings of one who also knows little of the real story. Another way to look at this is that the New York Times is really, really interested in an occult novelist’s take on the death of a president, but just totally uninterested itself in looking into that death.

You must read Errol Morris’s review of King’s book, and please explain to me what he is talking about, because I have no idea. One of the few things that registered at all from this confusing mess is a comment about Jack and Jackie:

King has said that he struggled with the idea for this book for more than 30 years. One can see why. In fiction, we can decide who did or did not kill Kennedy. Writer’s choice (and King chooses). But he pays his debts to history in other ways — by showing the machine and, at the same time, the simplest human knots, the love stories behind history: Sadie and George[characters in the novel], Jack and Jackie.

Um, “the love stories behind history…Jack and Jackie”?

This is part and parcel of the Times’s approach: to maintain a feeble, People Magazine-like focus on the JFK-Jackie Camelot love story—which never actually existed. Anyone who has read any of the books featuring interviews with close friends of the couple know that the marriage was a political match for the reticent JFK, never for a minute a fairy tale romance, and that by 1963 the duo could barely stand to be in each other’s presence. If this is news to you, come out of your New York Times cave and read….practically anything else. (One worthwhile account—including Jackie explicitly ignoring JFK’s request that, for appearances’ sake, the First Lady not take off to cruise on the yacht of the caddish Aristotle Onassis in the fall of 1963—can be found in Peter Evans’s book, Nemesis. By the way, Onassis hated—and I mean hated—the Kennedys; RFK had blocked a big Onassis business deal years earlier.)

Or read in Family of Secrets how, since childhood, Jackie had been a friend of George de Mohrenschildt, the “father figure” to Lee Harvey Oswald, or how, the night after de Mohrenschildt’s testimony to the Warren Commission, he was invited to dinner at Jackie’s mother’s house, along with the Machiavellian intriguer Allen Dulles, whom JFK had fired as CIA director and whom Johnson so shockingly appointed to the Warren Commission investigating Kennedy’s killing—a man who surely is at the top of most people’s lists of those behind the assassination.

If you appreciate these sorts of things, it is striking to learn that Onassis was a business partner in oil deals in the Caribbean prior to Castro’s revolution, with….Oswald’s best friend George de Mohrenschildt, and that Onassis’ brother-in-law was the cover employer of CIA coup plotter Al Ulmer, who just happened to be visiting the Dallas area the week of Nov 22 1963 from abroad.

So, please, can we get past this “love story” pabulum and at least do just a teensy bit of investigating these odd and flagrantly suggestive connections? Maybe they’re all odd coincidences, but at least they seem, intuitively, worth pursuing, at least as much as those “delightfully weird” Neville Chamberlain umbrella stories.

The real danger of a video like the one about the Umbrella Man is that it encourages people to stop questioning, stop

It’s time to stop treating the New York Times as the slightly daffy uncle who is hard of hearing. There’s something more insidious going on, and every single person who works there and refuses to care bears some responsibility. Ditto with the rest of the media, which still takes this institution as its guide on what to cover—and what not to uncover.

http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/11/28/ny-times%e2%80%99-umbrella-man-exposed/

WhoWhatWhy plans to continue doing this kind of groundbreaking original reporting. You can count on it. But can we count on you? We cannot do our work without your support. Please click here to donate; it’s tax deductible. And it packs a punch.

investigating. Just laugh it all off. There’s no trouble here in the land of the free, the home of the brave. Nothing to see here, folks, move along, move along.

View from the Grassy Knoll

2011-12-03T23:33:00.000-08:00

Knoll: Dark Forces Silencing JFK Conspiracy Folk
http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-12-01/news/gassy-knoll-dark-forces-silencing-jfk-conspiracy-folk/

Dallas is playing to its City of Hate stereotype for assassination's anniversary.
By Jim Schutze Thursday, Dec 1 2011

The 50th anniversary of the murder of President John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza is still two years off, but somebody is already trying to shut down the plaza for the entire week of November 22, 2013. I'm not sure who yet. It's either the Sixth Floor Museum or City Hall.

This follows a decades-old campaign by the city to close the assassination site to so-called "conspiracy theorists" — that would be anyone who espouses a view of the assassination other than the official version purveyed by the assassination museum (Oswald did it, not Dallas).

Why?

Who is it who thinks this is the way for Dallas to project an appealing image of itself? In the zeitgeist of Tahrir Square and Occupy Wall Street, does someone actually believe Dallas will make itself look better by jumping with both jackboots on freedom of expression at the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination here?

There's something missing. It's something somebody doesn't get. Is it about conspiracy theories? Where would America be without conspiracy theories?

Take one iconic chapter, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. In the months leading up to the 50th anniversary on December 7, 1991, American and British publishing companies cranked out a river of conspiracy-theory books about the Japanese sinking of America's Pacific fleet.

For a half century American schoolchildren had been taught that Japan's surprise bombing attack was what drew the United States into war, so one company reissued a book for the anniversary saying that the official version was a lie. In A Time for War, author Robert Smithy Thompson argued that long before Pearl Harbor, America had thrown the first punch by covertly assisting China against Japan. Pearl Harbor, he said, was just Japan defending itself.

In Infamy: Pearl Harbor And its Aftermath, John Toland joined an entire list of authors arguing that the American military had cracked the Japanese secret codes and was reading all their mail long before Pearl Harbor. The accusation of these authors was that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted the Japanese to sink his Pacific fleet and kill 2,402 Americans so he would have an excuse to go to war.

Now that's a conspiracy theory. Might as well write a book saying the Bible was written in 1952 by Lenny Bruce.

In the autumn 1991 issue of MHQ, a quarterly journal of military history, David Kahn, the leading American expert on the subject of Japanese codes and Pearl Harbor, said that all of these theories were (and the wording that follows is mine, not his) complete and unadulterated bullshit.

In his article, Kahn said the Japanese never sent out a message, coded or uncoded, that said, "Big attack on Pearl Harbor coming up December 7." The coded messages we did intercept were drops of obscure water in a vast river of intelligence — things that have special meaning only if you're looking back with the microscope of hindsight from a vantage point 50 years later, and you're trying to hawk a book.

And maybe that's where a lot of conspiracy theory comes from. People get their scales of significance all whomper-jawed. You forget and turn your telescope around backwards, and all of a sudden that guy at the next table about to spear a stewed carrot on his plate looks like a Croatian malefactor on the roof across the street about to squeeze off a heat-seeking missile in your direction.

But that's OK. This country was founded on the belief that we can take anybody's book standing up, even the most wrong of the wrong, and we'd much rather do that than give up our freedom of speech.

And yet Dallas continues to make itself an ugly exception to this rule. I have written before about the struggles of Robert Groden, a best-selling author and recognized expert on the famous Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, whom the city clapped in cuffs and hauled off to jail for the sin of selling his books from a table at Dealey Plaza, even though such sales were explicitly allowed under city codes in force at the time.

Groden is now suing the city in federal court for violations of his basic civil rights. It was Groden's attorney, Bradley Kizzia, who informed me of the attempt to take over Dealey Plaza for the 50th.

This was after an odd little story in The Dallas Morning News on October 30 — one of those weird sort of out-of-the-blue, doesn't-quite-make-sense Morning News stories you have to have a magic decoder ring to understand — about how the assassination museum never used to have anything to do with anniversaries of Kennedy's murder in Dallas, but for the 50th they were going to take over the whole thing.

Why is that weird? You have to know the context. Right after the assassination, publishing companies cranked out a slew of blame-it-on-Dallas books, and some of the authors said even more pointedly that some of the blame should go to the Morning News for fomenting a right-wing screwball atmosphere. Like right-wing screwballs get that way from reading the paper. But anyway, that's what they said, so the paper has always had a thin skin about these matters.

The October story in the News said, "... to avoid the carnival atmosphere that has often prevailed at previous anniversaries on the plaza, museum officials are planning to take over commemoration activities there."

It quoted assassination museum director Nicola Longford as saying: "We have reserved Dealey Plaza for that date. I think, for the 50th anniversary, we have an opportunity to offer a dignified, appropriate event for the city of Dallas."

But Longford didn't seem to have much concrete detail to offer. Later in the story she said, "I don't think we know yet what will take place. It may be simply a moment of silence."

OK, you ask what's wrong with "dignified" and "appropriate." What evil plot can there be in a moment of silence? I shall explain. But, first, please put this on your head. It's a tinfoil hat. Just like mine. We need to be on the same wavelength.

After asking nicely for information about the planned event and being brushed off, Kizzia filed a legal demand under the Texas public records law for the application for an event permit and related correspondence and emails. What came back was a six-page document showing that the assassination museum wanted full control of all the Dealey Plaza area from November 18 through November 24, 2013, from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., for seven days.
For a moment of silence? A bit of arithmetic here, and I come up with a moment of silence under this formulation that would be 98 hours long. That's a heck of a lot of silence.

The permit application is typed and filled out in Longford's name, but it is unsigned.
Oh, now I'm really getting out into wig-land, right? Well, hold on to your tinfoil for a second. There is more. One of the emails Kizzia obtained from the city was from Jill Beam, the person in the Parks Department who hands out such permits, to a person who had asked if his own group of assassination buffs could hold their own brief moment of silence on the plaza for the 50th, as they have in years past.

The sad news, apparently, was that the moments of silence were all taken. The museum, with its 98-hour moment of silence, had pretty well silenced any other moments.

But here's the juicy part, conspiracy-wise. Beam tells the inquiring citizen at one point: "I am in touch with the folks from the City, who are actually requesting the site for 2013, to see exactly where they will be hosting their event."

Catch that? She didn't say, "the folks from the museum." She said, "from the city." So who's behind this deal, anyway?

Now here's my favorite part. I tried eight ways to Sunday to get the people at the assassination museum and the people at City Hall to talk to me about this. What did I get? I want you to guess. It's one word. It's a kind of wall. A very hard wall. Yup. I got ...
Stonewalled!

Oh, it's what we tinfoil hatters just live for. There's almost nothing better than getting stonewalled. It's so deeply and fundamentally confirmatory.

Frank Librio, the spokesman for the city, always calls me back. Not this time. Wouldn't talk about it. Busy. Too many meetings. And, of course, it was close to Thanksgiving. People always get so crazy close to Thanksgiving.

We're almost done here. Would you mind taking off that goofy hat? We need to be serious now.

The accusation was always that some dark shadowy group in Dallas was behind the assassination. Dallas resented that. I understand. Dallas still wants that impression to go away. I think maybe in 50 years it probably has gone away, but some people here are still sensitive.

Here's the problem. Let's say you're accused of being a dark shadowy group. The way to get out from under that accusation is not by going around behaving like a dark shadowy group.

Just for example: You don't send out the jackboots to arrest authors who disagree with you. In the world of dark shadowy groups, that's called "playing to your stereotype."

Here's another suggestion. Don't announce that you're going to hold a 98-hour moment of silence so nobody else can have even a 30-second moment of silence. It's just ... I don't know ... it sounds like a line from a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

And what do you think will happen on November 22, 2013, anyway? I have spoken with members of some of the groups that are being shut out, and they are already kicking around the phrase "Occupy Dealey Plaza."

Ah, well, maybe ... just forget it. A half century later, and we're still walking straight into it. Can't argue with destiny.

The Battle of Dealey Plaza

2011-11-26T19:12:00.000-08:00

Raising the flag at Dealey Plaza on the anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.

George Bannerman Dealey, publisher of the Dallas Morning News (DMN).

A few blocks away, just across the street from the Union Train Station, the DMNs building has enscribed on the side of the wall: "Build the news upon the rock of truth and righteousness. Conduct it always upon the lines of fairness and integrity. Acknowledge the right of the people to get from the newspaper both sides of every important question."
- George Bannerman Dealey, publisher of the Dallas Morning News.

Rock of truth, righteousness, fairness and integrity.

Former Minnesota governor and TV show host Jesse Ventura at Dealey Plaza on the 40th anniversary of the assassination.

The 48th anniversary of the assassination included annual weekend conferences by the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) [http://politicalassassinations.com/] and JFK LANCER. Then on Tuesday, November 22nd, people who attended both conferences met at Dealey Plaza where John Judge, the director of COPA, has continued the tradition established by Penn Jones in 1964 of holding a minute long moment of silence at 12:30pm, the moment JFK was killed. At first only Penn Jones and a few people were there to honor the occasion, but over the years the affair has grown considerably, especially for the 30th and 40th anniversaries.

This year however, the 48th anniversary, a controversy has erupted over the announcement that the Sixth Floor Museum has been granted the permit to hold the ceremony on November 22, 2013, the 50th anniversary, when thousands of people are expected.

For some reason the museum asked the Kennedy family about holding such an official ceremony, when they refused to abide by the Kennedy family request not to place a web cam in the sniper's window, which they did anyway [http://www.earthcam.com/usa/texas/dallas/dealeyplaza/].

Now the Sixth Floor museum people say they want to hold a nice ceremony, not like the circus of conspiracy theorists who usually show up every anniversary, and they suggest they do something respectful, like holding a moment of silence.

Of course they are being accused of trying to stifle the free speech that conspiracy theorists and the circus bring to the Plaza.

Besides attempting to take over the ceremony on the anniversary, the city, some say prompted by the Sixth Floor Museum, has been harassing Robert Groden, the photo expert, conspiracy theorists and author of a half-dozen books on the assassination who celebrates his birthday on November 22, and sells his books off a card table he sets up there. Groden has been ticketed dozens if not hundreds of times, but has a lawyer and is fighting the city. It seems like the harassment is indicative of an attempt by the city and Sixth Floor administrators to take over Dealey Plaza and promote their own agenda, as well as the official story that the President was killed by a lone nut and there was no conspiracy.

Jesse Ventura sits down on the Grassy Knoll after addressing the crowd at Dealey Plaza on the 40th anniversary of the assassination.

John Judge, the director of COPA, who has been leading the moment of silence at half past noon since Penn Jones passed away, says that the Battle of Dealey Plaza isn't just about the space and the time, but is a battle for the hearts and minds of those who recognize Dealey Plaza as sacred ground and what happened there not the murder of the president, but a theft of democracy, the government and in a sense, the nation itself.

Bradley Kizzia, an attorney who represents noted assassination author Charles (sic – Robert) Groden, made a Public Information Act demand for documents and correspondence dealing with the 50th. When the city sent him the stuff, it appeared from certain emails that Longford and the assassination museum may not be who's really behind the takeover attempt. They could be cutouts for the real anti-conspiracy conspirators. I'll get into more of that in a column for next week's newspaper.

But hence the shadowy group references. And just think: The shadowy group thing is what started everything. Most of the assassination conspiracy theorists believe a shadowy group in Dallas was behind the assassination. Now they think a shadowy group in Dallas is trying to take over the 50th in order to shut down the discussion of shadowy groups.

You think it sounds crazy? Sure, but think about it. Longford won't talk. Neither will Librio. Perfect. Talk about playing to your own stereotype.

Sometimes you hear people here ask why Los Angeles doesn't have the same shadow over it for the murder of Robert F. Kennedy. Maybe people should think about that question a little harder.

Tomorrow we will see the 48th anniversary. That's a long time for one shadow. I think the Japanese got out from under the shadow of Pearl Harbor faster than this. We seem to have a genius for keeping our shadows alive.

Anyway, if you happen to see Mr. Librio out and about, would you tell him I'm trying to reach him? Tell him to look out his window. I'll be the guy out there with the umbrella and the Super 8 wind-up movie camera. It's sort of a uniform.

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/downtown-dallas/headlines/20111122-crowd-marks-kennedys-assassination-with-moment-of-silence-at-dealey-plaza.ece

From: via DallasNews.com
Crowd marks John F. Kennedy’s assassination with moment of silence at Dallas’ Dealey Plaza

By MARK RAMIREZ
Staff Writer
mramirez@dallasnews.com

Published: 22 November 2011 12:56 PM

To Dealey Plaza they came, the young and old, marking the 48th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — mourners, tourists, conspiracy theorists and the simply curious.

Shortly after 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, as dictated by tradition and history, many bowed their heads in silent remembrance, a small crowd of three or four dozen wrapped in jackets and hoodies against a November day that fought against the warmth.

It was a far cry from the event’s 30th anniversary, when more than 4,000 people showed.
But lurking beneath the surface of the proceedings was the wee specter of Penn Jones Jr., the diminutive former publisher and editor of the Midlothian Mirror who made it his life’s mission to crusade against lone-gunman explanations of the assassination.

It was Jones, some say, who launched the annual moment of silence, and while its origins remain officially unclear, it lives on in Jones’ absence.

“He’s definitely the one who started the tradition,” said John Judge, co-founder of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA), one of two research groups that continue to hold annual conferences in Dallas, similarly dissatisfied with the Warren Commission’s conclusions.

While the city of Dallas and The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza have traditionally steered clear of any kind of official ceremony commemorating the assassination, Jones and others who question whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone have carried on the tradition — not only to honor a fallen president but to stoke the fires of conspiracy theory.

“We’ve tried to hold it every year regardless of the conditions around us,” Judge said. “We don’t feel that holding up a banner and asking questions is a carnival or circus atmosphere.”

Sixth Floor officials won’t confirm either the tradition’s origins or whether Jones had any part in it.

“We can’t document it well enough that the museum is comfortable with it,” said Gary Mack, the museum’s curator. “We’ve seen it referred to in several places, but the sources seem to be people who did not know him.”

Jones died in 1998 at age 83.

Judge said Jones asked him to continue the tradition as he fell increasingly ill with Alzheimer’s, and since 1994 — the year Judge founded the coalition — he has done so as part of the group’s annual meeting.

Jones was what conspiracy-minded groups call a first-generation researcher, someone who hit the ground running in the wake of Kennedy’s killing, whose newsletters on his findings and skepticism were published with the aid of a manual typewriter.

“I have all the issues of his magazine except for one,” said Debra Conway of JFK Lancer, another research group that, like COPA, holds its annual meeting around the anniversary of the assassination.

Jones, a World War II veteran who found success in real estate, eventually purchased the Midlothian Mirror, where he earned a reputation as a feisty researcher unafraid to buck the area’s conservative leanings.

The assassination — and his interpretation of events — would change his life forever, starting with the release of the Warren Commission’s report in 1964.

“He really spent time reading that whole thing,” said his son, Michael Jones of Dallas. “It was just so unsatisfactory to him. It helped give him the evidence he needed to conclude it was a conspiracy.”

While official findings attributed Kennedy’s murder to Oswald, Jones spent the latter part of his life pursuing a Sisyphean mission to convince the world otherwise.

Among his contributions to conspiracy lore is the “storm drain theory,” which holds that one of numerous gunmen hid in an Elm Street manhole, then escaped through a drain that once connected to the basement of an old jail. The drain has been since sealed with concrete.

Jones would espouse such theories on the anniversary of the assassination, energetically acting them out for anyone who was interested.

“He was a tiny little guy,” Conway said. “He’d stand up there on the [Dealey Plaza] pedestal where [Abraham] Zapruder had filmed so people could hear and see him, for no other reason except that he was 5-foot-3.”

As far as she knows, Jones was the person behind the moment of silence. “If someone did it before him, I don’t know about it,” she said.

Though the gesture was meant to honor Kennedy’s passing, Jones’ son Michael said it was also about his father’s growing disillusionment as he began to question the government’s findings.

“He saw it as a coup d’etat,” Jones said. “He felt the government had been taken away from the people. So the moment was kind of a protest to make that statement and get it back somehow.”

Among Tuesday’s crowd were Greg and Sandra Lewis, who had driven in from Lubbock for a family reunion. As Greg walked around taking photographs, Sandra waited with their terrier in the chill of the November day.

“It seems wrong to celebrate such a horrid thing,” she said.

“It used to be just a gathering,” Greg said. “Now it’s a tourist attraction.”

Nonetheless, the crowd had begun accumulating on the grounds near the foot of the former Texas School Book Depository — where Oswald had hidden on the sixth floor — recalling where they were on Nov. 22, 1963, or pointing out notable landmarks to their children.

Afterward, they continued to remember, wandering the grassy knoll or, like Susan Lazarow and Jessica Baxter of Boca Raton, Fla., snapping photos of the painted X on Elm Street, thought to be the approximate spot where Kennedy was hit.

“I think it’s neat to know,” Baxter said. “I’m going to put that on my Facebook page.”
“It’s a little eerie,” Lazarow said. “I don’t want to make light of it.”

But it was speeches like the one given by Judge of the political assassination coalition that drew most gawkers.

“We don’t know the truth about our own history,” Judge said, his jabbing finger and booming delivery drawing a growing crowd and eventual applause.

He then called for the moment of silence in keeping with Jones’ tradition.

With the city and The Sixth Floor Museum beginning to plan 50th anniversary proceedings for 2013, someone asked whether Judge and his group planned to return next year.

“We’ll be here,” he said. “We may have to crawl through the sewer system and pop our heads up where the assassin was, but we’ll be here.”

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/downtown

FROM THE DALLAS OBSERVER -

Pinpointing the Shadowy Figures Behind the JFK Conspiracy
... the Other Conspiracy, That Is

By Jim Schutze Mon., Nov. 21 2011 at 1:55 PM
Categories: Get Off My Lawn

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2011/11/pinpointing_the_shadowy_figure.php
http://htmlimg4.scribdassets.com/5xivfjyav419hey1/images/1-5d87b082eb.jpg

Excuse me. Pardon me. Sorry to bother you. Got a second? Hey, I'm not asking for money. I just need a favor. Do you know this guy, Frank Librio? Would you be able to get in touch with him for me?

He's the spokesman for the city of Dallas. Very intelligent man, professional, used to be in television. I'm a newspaper reporter. I'm just standing out here on the street asking people if they know him, in case somebody might be able to help me get through to him.
Five days ago I asked him a question about the Kennedy assassination, and I can't get him to reply. Maybe you could do better. No, not one of those questions. This was legitimate.
This was about an attempt by a shadowy group to seize control of Dealey Plaza, where the assassination happened, in advance of its 50th anniversary on November 22, 2013. City Hall is involved in some way, as is the Sixth Floor assassination museum. I'll show you the document. It's attached.

The suspicion on the part of conspiracy theorists is that the group behind the attempted takeover wants to lock down Dealey Plaza so the conspiracy theorists won't be able to go there and get attention from all of the media somebody thinks will flock here for the 50th. The group may also want to bar the presence of any souvenir guys standing around accosting people on the street, like I'm doing here. So this is sort of a conspiracy theory about an anti-conspiracy conspiracy.

Hey, look, what do you expect? This is Dallas. This is our cottage industry. I'm sure before I'm done here somebody will accuse me of having a tin-foil-hat, anti-anti-conspiracy conspiracy. We do this stuff like the French make lace.

If you look at the attached event application, it shows that the Sixth Floor assassination museum wants to control all of Dealey Plaza for an entire week leading up to the 50th, from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. I have tried to get Nicola Longford, director of the assassination museum, to tell me what she plans to do for that much time, but she won't talk to me, either.

It's tough. That's why I'm asking you.
END OF DALLAS OBSERVER COMMENTARY

Here's a transcript of the speeches given on the 35th anniversary in 1998

The Event That Didn't Happen.
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=8605

DEALEY PLAZA MEMORIAL SERVICE - Sunday, 11/22/98 THE 35TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY. By Bill Kelly

I placed a tape recorder on Zapruder's peragoda/pedistal and taped the proceedings and then transcribed them. I hope somebody gets something out of this. - Bill Kelly

"Build the news upon the rock of truth and righteousness. Conduct it always upon the lines of fairness and integrity. Acknowledge the right of the people to get from the newspaper both sides of every important question." - George Bannerman Dealey, publisher of the Dallas Morning News.

CNN news reported that for the first time in 35 years that nothing was happening and there was to be no memorial service at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1998, the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

CBS News with Dan Rather reported that the Final Report of the JFK Assassinations Records Review Board "did find enough evidence to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only gunman," while the Final Report never concluded any such thing.

Then the Associated Press (AP) reported from Dallas on November 22 that, "JFK assassination hype fades" and that "other than the usual handful of curious people milling about Dealey Plaza, the day was expected to be uneventful..."

Bob Porter of the Sixth Floor Museum told a reporter that nothing was scheduled to happen at Dealey Plaza that day, even though, if he looked out his office window, he could see over a thousand people gathering around the Grassy Knoll for a memorial service in honor of the slain president.

Well, what actually occured was that from noon until 1pm, the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) took a break from their fifth annual conference at Union Station, two blocks away, to hold a memorial service that was attended by a sea of people who filled the both sides of the street of the entire plaza. Participants in the JFK LANCER conference, also held in Dallas that weekend, also attended, as well as ordinary tourists, interested citizens and passersby.

COPA is an organization that was originally dcomposed of three independent groups - the Assassination Records and Research Center (ARRC) of Washington D.C., the Committee for an Open Archvies (COA) and the Citizens for the Truth about the John F. Kennedy Assassination (CTKA). They are professional associations composed of people interested in developing the truth about the assassination, who lobbied extensively for the passage of the JFK Assassination Records Review Act and have met with Cuban officials in the Bahamas to obtain information about the assassination from Cuban sources.

In an address before COPA the previous day, the chairman of the Assassinations Records Review Board, John Tunheim reiterated the Final Report's first paragraph that, despite Rather's statement, it "will not offer conclusions about what the assassination records released did or did not prove." Tunheim and his final report also note that significant documents were missing and some were even destroyed by federal agencies after the board began its business of identifying and releasing records to the public.

Others who spoke at the COPA conference included Philadelphia attorney Vincent Salandria, history professor John Newman, former FBI agent William Turner and others who have been instrumental in reviewing the recently released documents and attempting to make sense of what the government wants to maintain a mystery.

At noon on Sunday, November 22, 1998, COPA board member, and Washington D.C. attorney Dan Alcorn began the memorial service at Dealey Plaza.

Dan Alcorn : The federal board - The JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) discovered that many of the records have been destroyed, and we do not have a complete record. Yet we have a much more of a documentary record than we have had ever before.
There's a memorial down on the street that has a quotation from the bible: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."

That quote is also inscribed on the wall of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in McLean, Virginia, so there is a commonality of thought there. Many of us are here today because we have never believed that the government has told us the truth about the assassination, and we believe that unless we know the truth, we are not free.

Unless we know the truth about these events we are not a free people and we have not been a free people as long as we have been lied to about the events that occured here. The spirit of our commemorative event is to take those words to heart, and until we know the truth and the full truth of what occured in the street before us today on a day very much like today, a clear, sunny day in the fall of 1963.

On behalf of our organization I will make a challenge to you. Everyone here must be here because you care very deeply about the meaning of this event and what it means to our history as a nation. I will make the challenge to you to join us in our efforts in seeking the full truth about the assassination of President Kennedy. And not just the truth as pieced together by citizens who put in the time and effort to this, but to actually cause the government to tell the truth about this event, and for the government to come forward and give us a full and truthful accounting of what happened here in 1963. Otherwise, we in fact are not the free people we want to be, have been and we should be as a nation.

You know, it is a crime for a citizen of this country to tell a lie to a federal investigator, but it is not a crime for your government to lie to you. And we feel this is an unfair relationship. If it's a crime for us to lie to our government, it should be a crime for us t o lie as well.

It is in that spirit of investigation and of honest inquiry that our organization has worked closely with the Assassinations Records Review Board to get materials out. They ran into an obstructive wall of secrecy at the federal agencies. They told us that they ran into a Cold War system of secrecy that refused to relent on the documents and information as it related to this event. And this was thirty-five years after the event occured, and after a federal board was set up by the Congress to try to get information released about what happened here.

So we call on you to join us in our efforts. We think that great nations and civilizations cannot survive the kinds of doubt and turmoil that have been raised by the events that happened here. If you study the history of great civilizations you will find that when they lost their way in terms of truth, self-governing, democratic and republican institutions began their decline and was one of the reasons for their ultimate collapse. We do not want the decline and decay of our public and political system. We want to be a part of a healthy revival of those institutions.

We have experienced a decline in the public's trust in government since November,1963, a blimp in the charts that notes the significance of these events. Today a majority of people don't even bother to vote. The largest turnout of voters in American history was in 1960. The decline in public confidence in the government began with the ambush at Dealey Plaza and has continually declined since then. These trends are very troubling.
So we ask you to join us and support the effort we have started to try to pursue the truth of these events, to try to pursue credibility, honesty and openness on behalf of our governmental institutions. And by that effort to try to turn our nation in a healthy direction, to build stronger democratic institutions, to build a stronger faith between the pubic and its government. We feel that is essential, and we call on you as free citizens of this nation to join us in that effort.

I'm going to introduce to you a series of speakers who have been very involved in this issue and can give you the benefit of their experience as well. The first is Mark Lane, one of the earliest researchers in this case who did tremendous ground-breaking work, recorded much of his work for posterity and has written extensively about this case.

Mark Lane: I remember coming here thirty-five years ago and there were no crowds on the grassy knoll. But now, after all of these years, although they have a museum over there on the 6th Floor, which is a museum dedicated to a place where nothing happened. They don't have a plaque over here, on the grassy knoll, and they should.

Thirty-five years ago today the Dallas Morning News published a full page ad with the sarcastic heading: "Welcome To Dallas Mr. President," and then went on to practically call him a communist and a trator. That was then.

Today's Dallas Morning News has an editorial: "Kennedy's Legacy - The Time Is Ripe For Idealism," with no references to him being a communist or a traitor. Now he's a great man. They'll tell us everything about John Kennedy, everything, except who killed him. Because look at the rest of the Dallas Morning News, thirty-five years later, when every survey in America shows that 75 to 95% of the people are convinced that there was a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy, here we go in the guise of a book review in today's Dallas Morning News: Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy, Oswald Alone Killed Tippit, One Man Two Murders, they're sticking with the same story. I have but one word for the Dallas Morning News:

Shame. Shame on you, you are discracing the city of Dallas, and it is not fair to do that.
I'll tell you where there should be plaques in this city. There were a number of brave, courageous residents of this city, longtime residents of Texas, who had the courage to speak the truth to power in the face of intimidation and threats. Right over there was Jean Hill, and she's still there thirty-five years later, one of the first to tell the truth that shots came from behind that wooden fence. And they attacked her and ridiculed her. There should be a plaque over there commemorating her right on the spot where she is standing...

The Grassy Knoll should be called "Lee Bowers Memorial Park," the railroad bridge should be the Holland-Dode-Symmons Underpass - that's the monuments that should be named after the people of this state, people who had the courage to come forward with the truth, while the Dallas Morning News lied thirty-five years ago and continues to lie thirty-five years later.

This is the place where our leader was murdered. This is hollowed grown, and the people of this country know it. It is supose to be the largest tourist attraction in Dallas. There's people here all the time, at the grassy knoll, nobody looks for the truth from the 6th floor of the Book Depository building, because the people of America know the truth, even though the Dallas Morning News is unwilling to share the information with us.

That day in Dallas, in this city, at this location, when the government of the United States executed its own president, when that happened, we as a nation, lost our code of honor, lost our sense of honor. And it can only be restored when the government of the United States - and it will not do it without us insisting, and marching and fighting and voting, and putting this matter on the agenda,...but when that day comes that the government of the United States tells us the truth and all the factual details about the assassination, including their role in the murder. When that day comes, honor will be restored to this nation. Thank you.

Dan Alcorn: Our next speaker is a member of the Board of Directors of COPA, a medical doctor from San Francisco who has researched this issue and has written about it in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Columbia Journalism Review, Dr. Gary Agular.

Dr. Gary Agular: It's hard to follow such a powerful speaker as Mark Lane and I certainly can't hope to match his eloquence, wit or command of this case, but what I can share with you is evidence...that autopsy photos are missing. This is something that you will not read in the Dallas Morning News, Time or Newsweek, but is something that is very clearly established, the ARRB releases are very clear on the point, the autopsy pathologists have described autopsy photographs that are missing. One of them defiantly stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which was supposed to tell us the truth about the assassination...which not only did not report that, it wasn't released until the ARRB came along.

There is enormous evidence in the forensic, in the medical area alone that indicates there was more assassin, but what is most shameful of all is the government's willingness, even in subsequent investigations, to lie about that evidence. Thank God there was an Assassinations Records Review Board, thank God they did the work they did, because now we no longer have to rely on government appointed authorities to tell us that we can trust the government's original conclusions, because we know we can't.

We know they've destroyed evidence, not only in the medical-autopsy area, not only among photographs, we know that witnesses have been intimated, and it is ashame that you won't read about that. No credible journalist will touch the story. It is a story not unlike the story of the CIA and crack cocaine, which led to the downfall of Gary Webb, before two volumes of the CIA Inspector's Report that confirmed much more than what Gary Webb even alleged about the CIA's complicity in the cocaine importation. But you won't read about that in the Dallas Morning News. You barely get a small column about it in the New York Times after they devote many, many column inches defamined journalists who talk about the subject.

I think it is important that those of you who are here today continue to insist that your government is accountable to you and does not conduct its operations in secrecy, that it does not deny you the evidence that is collected in its investigations and that it be as accountable to us as it insists we be accountable to it.

I hope you will continue to work with us to force the government to be responsible and admit the full truth about the assassination of President Kennedy.

Dan Alcorn: Our next speaker is a member of the Board of Directors of COPA, a professor at Dartmouth, and the author of a number of books about the assassination, Dr. Phillip Melanson.

Dr. Phillip Melanson: Thank you. As we commemorate the 35th anniversary of this terrible political tragedy that so negatively affected our lives, our policies, our political system and our faith in our own government, we should remind ourselves that the tragedy of the President's assassination is compounded by a separate but related tragedy - the failulre of our law enforcement institutions, the failure of our political institutions and the failure of the media to affectively discover the truth of who killed President Kennedy and why. And until that happens, and it is never too late to find the truth if the citizens demand it, and until that happens the original tragedy will be compounded like a bad political debt into the next millenieum, and the faith in our political system will continue to erode.

I think also the failure to come to grips with who killed President Kennedy and why is related to the other assassinations in the 1960s, and that's why Martin Luther King's is begging the Justice Department to look for justice in that case, and we hear from Siran's lawyer in the case of Robert Kennedy.

If we had come to terms with what happened here at Dealey Plaza, discovered the truth and admitted it, the whole history of the 1960s would be different.

If the vast majority of the public believes this case is an unsolved conspiracy, who are the minority in officialdom to deny us the truth and to cling to the lone-assassin theory like it was an absolute religion in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Thank you.

Dan Alcorn: Our next speaker is an acclaimed author and professor of history at the University of Maryland. His books include JFK and Vietnam and Oswald and the CIA, Dr. John Newman.

Dr. John Newman: I would like to say a few words about the media, and a couple of new developments for all of you gathered here. When I come here at this time of the year, I remember another place, a place connected to this place, and without the events that happened here, the other place would not exist, and that's the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C., which is like no other war memorial in the world. I've been to other war memorials in Russia, China and Germany, and people frequent those memorials, they eat lunch there and talk and its a nice place to be. I don't how many of you have been to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C., but nobody hangs out It's a very, very somber place because there's still something going on there, something deep, something that's still in our psyche, and our culture and it connects directly to Dealey Plaza. And I think most people know that.

I'm not going to give a speech on the Vietnam War, but I think it is clear now that John F. Kennedy was on his way to pulling us out of Vietnam when he died, and the events that happened here catapulted us to that devistating debacle called the Vietnam War.

I'd like to echo what Mark Lane said about the media. I just heard that CNN this morning said that for the first time in all these years there were no events planned for Dealey Plaza on this day. So you are not here, this gathering does not exist. Furthermore, the evening before last, none other than Dan Rather, the major icon of the network television, made the announcement that the Review Board had conducted this very large investigation and looked at all these millions of pages of documents and had discovered that the lone-nut hypothesis was true, which was attributed to Judge Tunheim. Judge Tunheim was here in Dallas and refutes this story, and all of you who have followed this story know that the Review Board has taken no such position.

But it never ceases to amaze me how the media can twist and turn and obfuscate and block this mass movement to find the truth. Let me close by giving you a few examples of the information that is flowing out of these new files, and I think these are appropriate because of what happened here at Dealey Plaza. I am thinking particularly of a tape recorded conversation between President Johnson and Senator Russell, one of the Warren Comissoners. At great length they were able to save the situation and preserve the lone-nut hypothesis with that wonderful, sine qua non - CE399, the magic bullet that broke seven bones and came out prestine on a stretcher.

The newly released tape is very interesting because Sen. Russell calls the President to explain to him what this single-bullet theory is, and at the end of it he says distinctly, "I don't believe a word of it." And President Johnson said, "I don't either."

And I think that is appropriate thing to share with you the types of things that are coming out of the files. Then there is the galley proofs of the Warren Report where our estimed President Ford moved the bullet hole up, and these are the types of things that are in the newly released documents, but the mainstream media is not there to put them on page one.

Occasionally they get noted, but its like ships passing in the night. I am heartened to see by the turnout here today, that with respect to the American people, this is not passing in the night and I hope as we stand here today and think about the events that happened here, we pass the torch to a younger generation, which we are doing, our movement and our desire for the truth in this case carries on. Thank you very much.

Dan Alcorn: We are approaching the time in our program which is a memorial to the events that happened here thirty-five years ago, so for that purpose I'd like to introduce to you the executive secretary of COPA, a man who has devoted himself for a number of years to working on the projects we have as an organization, but has also done his own independent research on the assassination. I think that those who have had the experience of working with John Judge know of his serious and sincere commitment to investigating the issues that are at stake here and to his contribution that he has made to the the history of the investigation of the assassination. He has really been the heart and soul of the work we have done through COPA. He has put in a tremendous volunteer effort and sacrificed and suffered a great deal for the efforts he has made, which have gone largely uncompensated. So let me introduce to you the executive secretary of COPA, John Judge.

John Judge: It is interesting to see such a large crowd. For the better part of the last 25 years, I have come out here every year, usually with only five or six people, often in worse weather than this, with researcher and newspaper editor Penn Jones, who some of you know as having done work on the death of the witnesses, who passed on this year.
From the inception of the national security and military-intelligence state in the late 1940s, the history of this country has been a commodity that has been owned by that state. The people who don't own their own history are a conquered people.

Much of the effort I put in has to do with the idea of taking our own history back, of owning it ourselves, since much is still locked up in government vaults and hidden from us and we are really the only ones who can restore it. 35 years ago, in my view, there was a coup d'etat here in Dealey Plaza, and the government has not recovered in any significant way, towards democracy, since that day. Kennedy began to represent for many people, hope and change and a response from the top level of government to the popular movements at the time for civil rights, for arms limitations, for an end to the Cold War, and Kennedy was responding to popular movements in a way that presidents after him rarely have. So what was assassinated here that day was not just a particular man or a particular president, but a sense of hope by the American people. And I think that the government has let us know over the years, fairly consistently, that they did kill the president, and they killed him from a very high level, and that if they can kill the president and get away with it that they can kill anyone of us that they would like to and that we should sit down and shut up and get out of the way.

But I'm hoping that there is enough decency left in people in America, and I see evidence of that all the time, that we can understand that there are more of us, and that we can think, and we can take back our own democracy, if we want it.
It is now 12:30, and 35 years ago President Kennedy was assassinated here, so lets have a moment of silence.

[Two minutes of silence]

Thank you.

Peter Dale Scott, a researcher who could not be with us here today, sent an e-mail in which he said a few interesting things. He said that we've come into a new era in that one of the major tasks ahead of us right now is to focus on getting the government documents that are still locked up on the Martin Luther King assassination. The other thing he noted was a government statute that makes it illegal for a citizen of this country to lie to the government, and he suggested that a similar statute be passed that would make it illegal for the government to lie to its people.

I hope you will take this topic seriously and continue to act to get the full release of the files and to get the truth, and you are welcome to join us at COPA in fulfilling the remainder of our agenda and what is to be done in the future. You are welcome to join us and take your democracy back.

Dan Alcorn: We have a few other speakers here, including former FBI agent William Turner, whose books have been translated into Russian, German, Japanese, French and Spanish. He is currently working on a new book entitled: "Rearview Mirror - Looking back at the FBI, CIA and Other Tails.

William Turner: Thank you Dan. It's been exactly 35 years ago and two days that I came here on assignment for a national magazine to do an article on the breakdown in security that resulted in the assassination being successful. I was assigned to it because of my background as a former FBI agent. I can tell you that when I arrived the mood was really somber, the floodlights were on, reporters from all over the world were converging, people had left floral wreaths along the curbstone where the shooting took place, and it was very erry. The headquarters of the Dallas Police Department was a feeding frenzy of reporters trying to find out what happened. I was on a very tight deadline, I could only contend with the security breakdown issue at the time, which was that Oswald had worked as an informant for the FBI and that was the reason they had not furnished his name to the Secret Service prior to the presidential visit.

One thing I remember was talking to a Dallas patrolman named Malcolm Eugene Barnett who had been posted in front of the School Book Depository for crowd control at the time of the assassination. He told me that a women came running from the grassy knoll who told him that shots were fired from here. That being the case, I became very critical of the Warren Commission and when it's report came out I read it and realized it was pretty much a fairy tale. I am proud to say that I was associated with District Attorney Jim Garrison in New Orleans who tried to reopen the investigation into the assassination. Jim was a great American and was on the trail of the assassins, as his book says, when he was destroyed by the media at the Clay Shaw trial. The Garrison investigation paved the way for what we know today, and I believe that we know to a good degree of journalistic certitude what happened.

First the motives were piling up, John Kennedy had supposidly with held air cover for the Bay of Pigs, motive number one. John Kennedy had failed to invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, motive number two. John Kennedy had promised to withdraw from Vietnam, motive number three. Motive number four is that John Kennedy, at the time he was assassinated, was on a second track, which was to secretly carry on negotiations with Cuba to bring about a detente. These motives piled up to the point where it became necessary to assassinate him. And I think it is very obvious with the compilation of information that we have today that the whole mechanism of it came out of the allegiance between the CIA and the rabid Cuban exiles and the Mafia, who already had an assassination apparatus set up to kill Castro. They switched targets and hit Kennedy.

And I hope you will join us, in recognizing the significance of the events that happened here, and try to do something about it. Thank you.

Hal Verb: The saying on the wall at the CIA: "Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free," is wrong. When you know the truth, the truth makes you MAD!"

Biography: http://educationforu...?showtopic=5214

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/

Oswald Legend Maker #9 George DeMohrenschildt

2011-11-26T17:01:00.000-08:00

Bill Simpich, San Francisco attorney, is the author of this series of article on those who helped frame Oswald as the assassin of President Kennedy.

THE JFK CASE: The Twelve Who Built The Oswald Legend
(Part 6: White Russians Keep An Eye On Oswald In Dallas)

You should read it where the links work:
http://www.opednews....110814-415.html
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=17471&pid=239093&st=0&#entry239093

Oswald Legend Maker #9 – George DeMohrenschildt -

By Bill Simpich

Bill Simpich is a civil rights attorney and an antiwar activist in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Read all eight of Bill Simpich's series of articles on the JFK assassination. http://www.opednews....uthor41722.html

After Oswald returned home from the USSR, George de Mohrenschildt became Legend Maker #9

The Dallas-Fort Worth community of Soviet and Eastern European emigres - referred to as "White Russians" - took Oswald and his family under their wing upon their arrival from the USSR in May 1962. Consider the importance of White Russian defectors as spies. A re-defector like Lee Harvey Oswald was even more exotic.Theability of a defector to report what is happening behind enemy lines is the ultimate counterintelligence prize.

The White Russian community settled on using George deMohrenschildt as Oswald's mentor, one of the few liberals in the community who enjoyed spending time with the man. This chapter will focus on deMohrenschildt's intelligence connections with Radio Free Europe, key RFE officials Allen Dulles and Cord Meyer, and CI chief James Angleton.

Max Clark, an attorney and former industrial security supervisor at General Dynamics, was a mentor for de Mohrenschildt and this community. Clark was part of a network of security personnel that put the squeeze on the Kennedy Administration that year to get General Dynamics' TFX project in Fort Worth approved over their Boeing competitors At the time, this deal to churn out the F-111 fighters was one of the largest military contracts in history.

The White Russian community harbored an underground anti-Soviet movement known as the NTS.

The Dallas White Russian community was tightly aligned withan anti-Soviet movement known by its Russian initials of "NTS"(National Alliance of Russian Solidarists). NTS was founded in 1930 by "second generation" White Russian emigres. At that time, most of them were living in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Yugoslaviais where Mr. and Mrs. Igor Voshinin met and married in early 1940 - they moved to Dallas, were active in NTS, and knew Oswald. During this era, "Solidarism" was a quasi-fascist ideology that saw corporations as an ideal and Benito Mussolini as a model of leadership.

In the 1940s, NTS was thoroughly enmeshed with Hitler's war effort. After Germany attacked the USSR during World War II, NTS was allowed to set up a Berlin headquarters and encouraged to proselytize in Soviet territories under German control among both POWs and civilians. When the tides of war shifted, NTS swung back into alliance with the Americans.

After World War II, the CIA included NTS within the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty organization. Radio Free Europe focused on the East European Soviet satellites, while Radio Liberty focused on the USSR itself. A House report described Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Liberty as "thebest known CIA proprietaries". These were pet projects of International Organizations chief Cord Meyer, who headed these radios from 1954 to 1971. Meyer consulted directly and frequently to CIA director Allen Dulles before making any controversial decisions. As described earlier in this series, CI chief Jim Angleton and Cord Meyer were the best of friends. Meyer described Angleton as his hero. They were also Legend Makers #1 and #2 for Lee Harvey Oswald, as they had very special relationships with the people who either befriended or studied Oswald.

After meeting with Meyer, Radio Liberty decreed that anyone adhering to NTS' "organizational discipline" would not be allowed to work at RL. NTS infiltrated and dominated groups that challenged its supremacy. NTS members tried to sabotage the installations and intimidate the exile staffs. Meyer saw it as part of his responsibility to "try to provide the radio with the counter-intelligence protection against this continuing intimidation...it was a never ending task".

During the 1950s, the famed anti-war Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin (the inspiration for the Rev. Scott Sloan in Doonesbury) joined the CIA. Coffin worked with the NTS to smuggle their spies into the USSR by parachute in a program known as REDSOX. Most of them were killed. Coffin looked back on the experience: "It was a fundamentally bad idea...we were quite naive about the use of American power."

At its peak, NTS had about 100,000 members and its headquarters near Berlin in Frankfurt. In 1958,Soviet consul Gregoriy Golub confided that it was"a great step in his career" when he was successful in halting NTS'campaign of writing harassing letters to the Soviet personnel in Helsinki.

William Blum, the author of Killing Hope, says that CIA decided that the NTS provided the best analysis about the Soviet Union, and became their main financial backer: "From North Africa to Scandinavia, the CIA network confronted Soviet seamen, tourists, officials, athletes, even Soviet soldiers in East Germany, to present them with the Truth as seen by the "Free World," as well as to pry information from them, to induce them to defect, or to recruit them as spies." By 1963, the State Department was helping NTS send broadcasts to Soviet troops in far-flung places such as the Dominican Republic. Although the NTS' power waned over time, the Soviet Communist Party admitted its fear of the NTS and other groups working with Western security agencies as late as 1990.

The intelligence background of George deMohrenschildt and his role in the Dallas-Fort Worth White Russian community

The CIA-funded NTS network greeted the Oswald family upon their arrival to Fort Worth. Lee Oswald, however, was a little bit too weird for this community to embrace. It took another outsider - the eccentric baron George de Mohrenschildt -- to bring Lee towards the fold as Legend Maker #9.

De Mohrenschildt's father was Russian, of German and Swedish descent, and was a marshal of nobility of the Minsk province. Similarly, his Russian mother was of Polish and Hungarian descent. The Bolsheviks ran the family off their Russian home, and they were forced to move to Poland and consolidate their land holdings. One story is that de Mohrenschildt's father was killed by the Bolsheviks; another story is that his father was arrested but escaped. De Mohrenschildt observed that "most of the colony in Dallas is more emotionally involved in Russian affairs then we are, because they are closer to them. All of them have been relatively recently in Soviet Russia -while my wife has never been in Soviet Russia in her whole life, and I was 5 or6 when I left it. So to me it does not mean very much."

De Mohrenschildt had an extremely deep background with the intelligence community, going back for more than twenty years. His handler appears to have been Thomas Schreyer, identified as"the acting chief" of the Cord Meyer's International Organizations Division back in 1956. This means that Schreyer worked very closely with Cord Meyer. In April1963, the Domestic Operations Division asked for traces on de Mohrenschildt, with Schreyer's name provided as the source for any follow-up.

The CIA admitted before the assassination that de Mohrenschildt was "of interest" to them. CIA Dallas resident agent J. Walton Moore stayed in touch with de Mohrenschildt, which will be discussed later in this series. Covert action chief Richard Helms acknowledged that de Mohrenschildt and his wife provided useful foreign intelligence in 1957. His brother Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, described by the CIA as being "employed in a confidential capacity by the U.S. government," is said to have been one of the founders of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. A lengthy CIA-created list entitled "Companies and People Known to be Associated with deMohrenschildt" includes only one political group: "Dallas Committee Radio Free Europe."_DeMohenschildt's wife in Philadelphia, Phyllis Washington, also worked for RadioFree Europe in the early fifties.

The Radio Free Europe connection is an important link between Cord Meyer and George de Mohrenschildt. George couldn't get OSS credentials during World War II because of security disapproval. He was subjected to five separate investigations by intelligence during the 1940s and 50s. Officers like Meyer and Schreyer, however, understood the nature of his relationship with people such as the Jacqueline Bouvier family and the White Russian community. A CIA memo notes that George knew the families of the Kennedys and the Oswalds better than anyone else.

One of George's contacts exposes his hidden CIA connections. In 1954, a young oil lawyer named Herbert Itkin wrangled a meeting in Philadelphia with Allen Dulles, the first chief of Radio Free Europe and future CIA chief. Dullesset him up with a meeting with de Mohrenschildt, who told Itkin he was"from that man in Philadelphia" and that his name was Philip Harbin. William Gaudet verified at an HSCA deposition that he knew George under his alias as Philip Harbin. De Mohrenschildt's beloved and soon-to-be new wife, Jeanne,was from Harbin, China. Angleton testified that Dulles was a very close friend of his own family. Angleton had both an Itkin file and a "Mike/Portio/Haiti" file (Itkin's code name was Portio). Itkin claimed he met "Harbin"in 1954, while CIA general counsel Larry Houston claimed that he could not find any Itkin files prior to 1964 after thousands of hours of search. This was probably because Angleton's personal Itkin and Portio files were kept apart fromthe CIA records system, and were only discovered after Angleton was fired in1974. All indications are that de Mohrenschildt was provided to Dulles by Angleton.

Working under the Harbin alias, deMohrenschildt worked with Itkin in oil matters as a nonpaid, voluntary agent between 1954 to 1960, before Itkin moved on to work with another agent. Itkin's skills enabled US Attorney Bob Morgenthau to win convictions against New York political boss Carmine DeSapio and city commissioner James Marcus. Morgenthau's office described Itkin as "probably the most important informer the FBI ever had outside the espionage field. He never lied to us. His information was always accurate."

By May 1963, Itkin became the attorney for the Haitian government-in-exile. CIA documents show that Itkin's handler in 1963 was Mario Brod, who was recruited in Italy by James Angleton during World War II and had operational involvements in Haiti. Before his brother was killed, Bobby Kennedy himself was relying onmob tips from Itkin. In 1966, Itkin was reportedly researching under his code name "Portio," while Angleton held onto his private "Mike/Portio/Haiti" file. In 1968, CIRA (CI research and analysis chief) Ray Rocca sworethat the "CI Staff definitely never was in contact" with Itkin.By 1971, CIRA's bird-dog investigator Paul Hartman was asking to review Itkin's CIA file, no doubt to educate himself on some fine points.

De Mohrenschildt's relationship with the NTS in Dallas

De Mohrenschildt knew all about NTS, telling the Warren Commission about "This group of Russian refugees (who) called themselves Solidarists. And Mr. and Mrs. Voshinin in Dallas belonged to that group and tried to make me join it. Not being interested, I refused, but I read some of their publications. And it is apro-American group of Russian refugees who have an economic doctrine of their own. And they seem to have some people working in the Soviet Union for them, and all that sort of thing. It is a pretty well-known political party that - their headquarters is in Germany."

The NTS was very active in Dallas. When the group's leader was interviewed in New Yorkin 1957 by the FBI, the two Dallas people he knew were oil man Paul Raigorodsky and NTS activist Igor Voshinin. Raigorodsky, known as the "Czar" of the White Russian community, was the head of the Office of Petroleum Coordination for War for two years during the forties. Igor Voshinin and his wife Natalie lived in the New York City area between 1947-1955, and then moved to Dallas. When Mrs. Voshinin was interviewed by the FBI on Dec. 10, 1963, less than three weeks after the Kennedy assassination, she made it clear just how serious the Solidarist movement was in the Dallas area:

"She and her husband are members of NTS - Russian Solidarists, which she stated is known as the National Union of Working People, which organization has a representative in Washington D.C. She stated this organization exists in the form of an underground movement in Russia and also has groups in the rest of the world; that its objectives include the abolishing of Communism and the establishment of private enterprise."

Jenner was careful not to ask her any questions about theNTS at the Warren Commission hearing. But the irrepressible Natalie Voshinin still managed to flip the script. When Jenner was probing for communistic connections by de Mohrenschildt, she exclaimed that "George repeatedly hinted that he was performing some services for the State Department, you know,of the United States, yes. And under those circumstances, you just don't feel like asking any questions". Jenner quickly changed the subject.

De Mohrenschildt once made a presentation at a lecture hall about General Vlasov's Russian POWs that fought on the side of the Germans atthe end of World War II, discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Just to shock his Jewish friends at the club, de Mohrenschildt quipped "I came to the conclusion that Himmler wasn't a bad boy at all". Raigorodsky agreed that de Mohrenschildt was a "prankster". De Mohrenschildt settled down as a member of a political grouping that is virtually extinct - a liberal Republican. He said that Kennedy was the first Democrat he would ever vote for. Both De Mohrenschildt and Oswald were attracted by the union of opposites.

Look at de Mohrenschildt's musings about Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev: "He is gone now, God bless his Bible-quoting soul andhis earthy personality." On the plight of the poor, George brought up his bond with LeeOswald: "I am from New Orleans,as a kid I met refugees from all these banana republics. No better sourceof information. In this way, Lee and I were non-conformist, even revolutionaries...A younger man, I was career and money mad, a hustler...But Lee was the same since his childhood, which made him such a beautiful and worthwhile person to me."

As an aristocratic liberal from a mixed ethnic background, de Mohrenschildt was an outsider in the White Russian community. DeMohrenschildt turned to George Bouhe for guidance in how to get things done. Bouhe was an old-school kind of guy - born in Leningrad when it was still St. Petersburgand a bit of an aristocrat himself.

Bouhe was an accountant for one of the local oil barons and served as a patriarch in the community. Bouhe testified that Paul Raigorodsky was the 'godfather' of the group, while he himself did the organization work.

Bouhe formed the St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Parish, one of the two Russian Orthodox parishes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in 1963. Also known as the "Bouhe group," they met in individual homes with a priest from Houston visiting every five or six weeks and had services in Church Slavonic, an old Slavic language that is different from modern Russian language. De Mohrenschildt was part of St. Nicholas' choir when married to his Philadelphia wife. The other church, St. Seraphim's, was located at 4203 Newton Street in Dallas, where Igor Voshinin attended and services were in English. Voshinin didn't like Bouhe because he was very publicly in everyone's business, saying things like "Well, you know, I forget things - so I keep a file on everybody."

De Mohrenschildt's attorney Max Clark had an intelligence background, doubling as an industrial security supervisor at General Dynamics.

When the White Russian community heard about Oswald, they sought out Max Clark's opinion as how they should respond to Oswald. DeMohrenschildt considered Clark to be his lawyer.

De Mohrenschildt testified that he thought Clark was connected with the FBI in some way. Clark referred to his interviewing agent Earle Haley as "Earl," and told the Warren Commission that he was familiar with Haley and the FBI from working with them when he worked security at General Dynamics.

"Everyone was discussing that as to whether or not they should (associate with Oswald) especially when he first came back and all of them asked me and I said, "In my mind he is a defector and you know what he is..."

Clark was an industrial security supervisor at the Convair wing of General Dynamics and well-versed in the ways of intelligence. In 1951, Convair had landed the Air Force contract for the first funded ICBM study contract. Max's wife, Gali Clark, was an excellent Russian speaker sought out by Oswald to help his family get situated after their return from the USSR. Her name was in Oswald's address book.

Max Clark had a close relationship to General Dynamics supervisor I. B. Hale

Three years earlier in 1959, Max Clark had received a CIA "covert security approval" in "Project ROCK" during the same time period that then-foreign intelligence chief Bill Harvey of Staff D worked on the U-2 related Project ROCK.

A covert security clearance with the CIA gives the CIA officer the right to share classified information with a civilian. A CSC is telling evidence of strong interactions between the subject and the CIA, whether the subject is witting or unwitting.

Max Clark's file states that he "worked closely" with I. B. Hale, a former FBI agent who was the chief of industrial security at General Dynamics. I. B. Hale had been married to Virginia Hale, who got Oswaldhis sheet metal worker job at Leslie Whiting during July 1962. When interviewed after the assassination, Virginia Hale said that she remembered Oswald "quite well".

The Hale family was involved with blackmailing the Kennedy Administration in the TFX scandal

During this time, the Hale family was involved in a brazen campaign of extortion designed to force the Kennedy Administration into approving General Dynamics as the prime contractor to build the TFX bomber at their Fort Worth plant. This plane is now better known as the F-111. At the time, this 7 billion dollar contract was the largest military contract in history.

Two weeks after I.B.'s wife Virginia got Oswald a job, their sons led a break-in at Judith Campbell's house. Campbell was the girlfriend of not only John F. Kennedy, but also Mafia chieftains Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli.

Attempted blackmail around the TFX contract would appear to be the motive. Two months later, in October 1962,General Dynamics won the 7 billion dollar contract over the heavily favored Boeing. Thiscontroversial decision dogged the Kennedy Administration from that day.

In Part 7: Some fancy Cuban dance steps by the CIA, de Mohrenschildt, and Army Intelligence

Endnotes:

NTS was founded in 1930 by "second generation" White Russian emigres. At that time, most of them were living in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria: Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, (Autonomedia: Brooklyn, 1999), p. 572.

Yugoslavia is where Mr. and Mrs. Igor Voshinin met andmarried in early 1940 - Dallas emigres, active in NTS, and knew Oswald: Testimony of Mrs. Igor Voshinin, 3/26/64. Warren Commission Hearings, Volume8, p. 427.

After Germany attacked the USSR during World War II, NTS was allowed to set up a Berlin headquarters: Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), p.160.

After World War II, the CIA included NTS and its journal Possev (Seed) within the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty organization: Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, p. 573.

A report by the House Select Committee onAssassinations described Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Liberty as "the bestknown CIA proprietaries": Narration by G. Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel, HSCA Appendix Volumes/ HSCA Report, Volume IV, p. 3.
Cord Meyer was the division chief in charge of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty from 1954 until 1971: Puddington, p. 24.

After meeting with Meyer, Radio Liberty decreed that anyone adhering to NTS' "organizational discipline" would not be allowed to work at RL, because of NTS' history of infiltrating organizations and dominating them: Puddington, p. 162.

NTS had itsheadquarters near Berlin in Frankfurt: Memorandum by Thomas A. Parrott to the Special Group, 4/26/63, p. 3, Miscellaneous CIA Series / NARA Record Number:104-10306-10024.

Meyer saw it as part of his responsibility to "try to provide the radio with the counter-intelligence protection against this continuing intimidation"...: Cord Meyer, Facing Reality,pp. 120-121.

Coffin looked back on the experience: "It was a fundamentally bad idea...we were quite naive about the use of American power." Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (New York, Doubleday: 2007), p. 47.

Soviet consul Golub confides that it was "a great step inhis career" when he was successful in halting NTS...: Memo from CIA's Helsinki Chief of Station to Chief, Western Europe, 1/24/58.The CIA network confronted Soviet seamen, tourists, officials, athletes, even Soviet soldiers in East Germany...to induce them to defect, or to recruit them as spies: William Blum, Killing Hope, p. 116-118.On August 5, Marilyn Monroe died in Brentwood, an affluent LA suburb, with a Kennedy phone number near herbed.There are many well-known stories tying her with close relationships with both JFK and RFK. The next day, August 6, JFK mistress Judith Campbell twice called the White House. A note in the White House log shows that Kennedy was in conference, with the scrawled addition "no." Knowing of these relationships, the Hoover FBI had created a stake-out across the street from Campbell's home. While Special Agent William Carter was on duty, he saw two young men in their 20s come to Campbell's apartment. Campbell was not home, and the FBI later verified that she was elsewhere. One of the perpetrators went inside the apartment, while the other one stood as lookout on the balcony. Agent Carter obtained the license plate numbers for the car, which matched Hale's car. The FBI agent concluded that the perpetrators were Hale's sons based on their age (early 20s) and their physical description. The perpetrators left after about 15 minutes without taking anything. It is reasonable to assume that they had planted a listening bug. The reason for the stakeout is right in the FBI report: The FBI had heard the stories that Judith Campbell was thegirlfriend of Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, and JFK.The FBI wanted no part of this case and declined to take any further action after running out a few leads.

By 1963, the NTS was broadcasting to Soviet troops in far-flungplaces such as the Dominican Republic: Memo by Thomas Parrott to the 303Committee Group, 4/26/63,Miscellaneous CIA Series / NARA Record Number:104-10306-10024.J

In 1990, the Communist Party within the Soviet Union admittedits fear of the NTS and other groups working with Western security agencies inpreparation for the collapse of the Soviet government: JPRS Report – Soviet Union Political Affairs,1/9/90, pp. 16-17.

DeMohrenschildt's father was Russian, of German and Swedish descent, and was amarshal of nobility of the Minsk province...: Warren Commission testimony of George deMohrenschildt, Volume 9, pages 168-169.
The Bolsheviks ran the family off their Russian home, and theywere forced to move to Poland and consolidate their land holdings: Nancy Wertz, "George de Mohrenschildt, Who Are You?", The Fourth Decade, Volume 5, Issue 5, July 1998.

One story is that de Mohrenschildt's father was killed by theBolsheviks: Statement of Igor Pantoroff, an NYC portrait artist, who knew de Mohrenschildt since the early 40s. See report of SA James Morrissey, 2/28/64,p. 18, Reel 5, Folder M -- George de Mohrenschildt, NARA Record Number: 1994.04.25.14:02:25:940005.

Another story is that his father was arrested, but escaped: Statement of Igor Voshinin. See memo of SA James K. Fresney, 3/12/64, Reel 5, Folder M -- George deMohrenschildt, NARA Record Number:1994.04.25.14:02:25:940005.

De Mohrenschildt observed that "most of the colony inDallas is more emotionally involved in Russian affairs then we are...So to meit does not mean very much." Warren Commission Hearings, Testimony of George de Mohrenschildt, Volume 9, p. 266.
De Mohrenschildt had an extremely deep background with theintelligence community, going back for more than twenty years: A good source on his background is Nancy Wertz, "George de Mohrenschildt, Who AreYou?", Fourth Decade, Volume 5, No. 5, p. 8, July 1998.

His handler appears to have been Thomas Schreyer, identified as "the acting chief" of the IO Division back in1956...: 7/6/56 memo from Thomas Schreyer to DCI, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 14 /NARA Record Number: 1993.07.14.17:33:14:000480.

Schreyer also signed the Fitness Reports during the sixties erafor E. Howard Hunt, who was a key contact for the Cuban exiles: 12/20/73 memo by DDO, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 37 / NARA Record Number: 104-10105-10233.

It is curious Hunt advanced so far in the agency, as he was described as "unstable" to CIAsecurity officer Robert Bannerman as early as 1949.

In April 1963, C. Frank Stone at the Domestic OperationsDivision asked for traces on de Mohrenschildt. Background information wasprovided, and Schreyer's name was provided as the source for any follow-up: 5/9/63, Response to Request for Traces by REDACTED .Russ Holmes Work File /NARA Record Number: 104-10436-10014.

TheCIA admitted before the assassination that de Mohrenschildt was "ofinterest" to them: Memo by Richard Helms to Warren Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin, 6/3/64,HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 62 / NARA Record Number: 1993.08.06.15:03:12:400028.

CIA Director Richard Helms complimented de Mohrenschildt for providing valuable foreign intelligence in 1957: Id.

His brother Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, described by the CIA asbeing "employed in a confidential capacity by the U.S.government": Memo, "#775 Subject was Investigated by Federal Agencies", p.2, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 41 / NARA Record Number: 104-10112-10454.

He is said to have been one of the founders of Radio FreeEurope and Radio Liberty: All Experts website: http://en.allexperts...hrenschildt.htm . Also see Joseph Trento, The Secret History of the CIA.

This CIA bio of George states that "Dimitri is stated tobe employed in a confidential capacity by the U.S.Government." Memo, "#775 Subject was Investigated by Federal Agencies", p. 2,HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 41 / NARA Record Number: 104-10112-10454.

Records indicate that Dimitri was approved to work with the OSSand that he provided intelligence services for the CIA in the 1950s: Biographic information on George De Mohrenschildt, 12/21/67, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 41 / NARA Record Number: 104-10112-10442.

Here's a 1968 CIA document looking at using Dimitri at thatlate date as a source: 11/1/68,Interoffice Memorandum, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection (microfilm - reel 5: Conte - DeMohrenschildt) / NARA Record Number: 104-10244-10132.

A lengthy CIA-created list entitled "Companies and PeopleKnown to be Associated with De Mohrenschildt" includes only one politicalgroup: "Dallas Committee Radio Free Europe.": See title page and p. 5, Reel 5, Folder M, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection (microfilm - reel 5: Conte - DeMohrenschildt) / NARA Record Number:1994.04.25.14:02:25:940005.

ACIA memo notes a New York Times article and a de Mohrenschildt quote indicatingthat George knew the families of the Kennedys and the Oswalds better thananyone else: Office of Security background information on George de Mohrenschildt, 4/28/75, p. 2, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 34 / NARA Record Number: 1993.07.20.11:12:53:400530.

Georgecouldn't get OSS credentials during World War II because of security disapproval: Memo from M.D. Stevens to Chief/Research Branch/SRS/OS, 12/30/63, p. 2,HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 47 / NARA Record Number: 1993.07.31.08:46:41:900046.

He was subjected to five separate investigations byintelligence during the 40s and 50s: Memo, "#775 Subject was Investigated by Federal Agencies", p. 2, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 41 / NARA Record Number: 104-10112-10454.

One of the recruitments of de Mohrenschildt exposes his rootsin Pennsylvania from back in the day with his Quaker wife Phyllis Hamilton: See the passport information inRuss Holmes Work File / NARA Record Number: 104-10431-10041.

On Phyllis Washington's employment at Radio Free Europe: See memo from M.D. Stevens to Chief/Research Branch/SRS/OS,12/30/63, p. 2, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 47 / NARA Record Number:

On Dulles setting up Itkin's meeting with "PhilipHarbin" in 1954: See Memorandum for the Record by CIAcounsel Lawrence Houston, 11/20/68,p. 2, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 38 / NARA RecordNumber: 1993.07.20.16:58:46:960340 .

CIA chief Allen Dulles was the first chief of Radio Free Europe after World War II: Puddington, p. 25.
William Gaudet verified at an HSCA deposition that he knew De Mohrenschildt under his alias as Philip Harbin: Gaudet's 6/15/78 deposition is at the National Archives,JFK Document 010347.

Nancy Wertz discusses Gaudet's claim that de Mohrenschildt was"Philip Harbin" in her article, "William Gaudet – Make Room for the Man at the Front of the Line", Kennedy Assassination Chronicles, Volume 5, Issue 2.

DeMohrenschildt's beloved and soon-to-be new wife, Jeanne, was from Harbin,China: FBI memo, 2/28/64, p. 69, Reel 5, Folder M -- George deMohrenschildt, NARA Record Number:1994.04.25.14:02:25:940005.

Angleton testified that Dulles was a very close friend of hisfamily: Deposition of James Angleton, p. 31, Church Committee Boxed Files / NARA Record Number: 157-10014-10003.

LawrenceHouston said in a 3/20/70 Memorandum for the Record that "everything wecould determine after thousands of hours of research was that the first contactwith Mr. Itkin was in 1962": HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 38 /NARA Record Number: 104-10106-10434.

There was a 1974 discovery of an Itkin file and a"MIKE/PORTIO/HAITI" file in Angelton's possession, just two files ofmany that Angleton kept out of the CIA records: Memo from David H. Blee, Chief, CI Staff, to Chief, Information Management Group,11/29/79, Miscellaneous CIA Series / NARA Record Number: 104-10303-10000

Itkin's Story of His Work for the CIA: As related by notes, by Warren Donovan, 1/17/68, NARA Record Number:104-10107-10116; for a broader overview, see Time Magazine, 10/17/69;and how he got his CIA code name "Portio" and more in the New York Times, 12/15/69.

Itkin brought down Carmine DeSapio and city commissioner JamesMarcus: Martin Arnold, "Marcus, DeSapio Trophies for Shadow Worker Itkin", New York Times, 1/2/70, NARARecord Number: 1993.07.24.08:41:29:500310

During May of 1963, Itkin became the attorney for the Haitiangovernment-in-exile, and filed papers with the State Department to register asthe group's foreign agent: Memo from C/WH/7/CI to Chief, WH/FI, Subject: Herbert Itkin, 9/19/68, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 38 / NARA Record Number: 1993.07.20.16:58:46:960340

Itkin's handler in 1963 was Mario Brod, who was recruited in Italy by James Angleton during World WarII and had operational involvements in Haiti: Notes re memo from Jerrold B. Brown for Inspector General, "Possible Questionable Activity", 7/1/75, pp. 1-2, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection (staff notes) /NARA Record Number: 180-10143-10196.

Before his brother was killed, Bobby Kennedy himself was relying onmob tips from Itkin : Memo from Jerrold B. Brown for Inspector General, "Possible Questionable Activity", 7/1/75, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 43/ NARA Record Number:104-10119-10002. , 7HSCASegregated CIA Collection, Box 43 / NARA Record Number: 104-10119-10002.

In 1966, Itkin was reportedly researching the case of theSovi et spy George Blake, under his code name "Portio," whileAngleton held onto his private "Mike/Portio/Haiti" file:"Noteson People", New York Times, 2/23/72 HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 43 / NARA Record Number:1993.07.24.08:41:29:500310.

"Mike" at the CIA got the articleabout"Itkin/Portio" anonymously in the mail, according to Ray Rocca: Note by DC/CI Ray Rocca on Routing and Record Sheet, 2/29/72,HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 38 / NARA Record Number: 104-10106-10341.

Angleton held onto his private "Mike/Portio/Haiti"file: The Mike/Portio/Haiti file was held in Angleton's office and not integrated with CIA documents. Memo from David H. Blee, Chief, CI Staff, 3/29/79, Miscellaneous CIA Series /NARA Record Number: 104-10303-10000.

By 1971, Paul Hartman from CIRA was asking to review Itkin'sCIA file, no doubt to educate himself on some fine points: 6/4/71 request by Paul Hartman for Itkin's security file, NARA Record Number:1993.07.24.08:41:29:500310.

Thisgroup of Russian refugees called themselves Solidarists: Warren Commission testimony of George DeMohrenschildt, Vol. 9, p. 267.

When the group's leader was interviewed in New York in 1957 bythe FBI, the Dallaspeople he knew of that were active at that time wereIgor Voshinin and oil man Paul Raigorodsky: Memo by SA Paul Garrity, New York, to Director, FBI, 10/21/57, FBI - HSCA Subject Files, Q - R/ FBI - HSCA Subject File: Paul M. Raigorodsky / NARA Record Number: 124-90123-10010.

Raigorodsky, known as the "Czar", served as the chiefof the Petroleum Coordinator for War during two years in the forties: 9/16/52 memo by St. Louis FBI. FBI - HSCA Subject File: Paul M. Raigorodsky /NARA Record Number: 124-90123-10089.

Igor Voshinin and his wife Natalie lived in the New York Cityarea between 1947-1955, when they moved to Dallas: Testimony of Igor Voshinin, Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 8, p. 450.

The NTS - Russian Solidarists...exists in the form of anunderground movement in Russia and also has groups in the rest of the world:FBIinterview by SA Kenneth B. Jackson with Mrs. Igor Voshinin, 12/10/63, Dallas, Texas;Oswald 201 File, Vol 16/, CD 205, Part 1.

George repeatedly hinted that he was performing some servicesfor the State Department...Mrs. Igor (Natalie) Voshinin, Warren Commission Hearings. 8, p. 442, 3/26/64.

DeMohrenschildt made a presentation at a lecture hall about General Vlasov's Russianarmy that fought on the side of the Germans: Testimony of Igor Voshinin, Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 8, page 468.

Raigorodskyagreed that de Mohrenschildt was a "prankster": Testimony of Paul Raigorodsky, 3/31/64,Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 9, p. 20. When asked if de Mohrenschildt was a "provocativepersonality", Natalie Voshinin said "definitely". Id., Vol.8, p. 443.

Hesaid that Kennedy was the first Democrat he would ever vote for: George de Mohrenschildt, manuscript of I'm a Patsy! I'm a Patsy! HSCA Report, Volume 12, p. 225.

Lookat de Mohrenschildt's musings about Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev: "He is gone now, God bless his Bible-quoting soul and his earthypersonality": George de Mohrenschildt, I'm aPatsy!, p. 204.

On the plight of the poor, George brought up his bond with LeeOswald: George de Mohrenschildt, I'm a Patsy!, p. 187.

Bouhetestified that Paul Raigorodsky was the'godfather' of the group, while hehimself did the organization work: Warren Commission Hearings, Testimony of George Bouhe, Vol. 8, p. 358.

GeorgeBouhe formed the St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Parish, one of the two RussianOrthodox parishes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in 1963: FBI interview by James Hosty of Igor Voshinin,12/12/63, Commission Document 205 - FBI Report of 23 Dec 1963 re: Oswald,p. 593.Testimony of George Bouhe, Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 8, p. 357.

The "Bouhe group" met in individual homes with apriest from Houston visiting every five or six weeks and had services in ChurchSlavonic, an old Slavic language: Mrs. Igor Voshinin, Vol. 8, p. 430, 3/26/64.

De Mohrenschildt was part of St. Nicholas' choir when marriedto a Philadelphi woman from the prominent Sharples family: Warren Commission Hearings, Testimony of Igor Voshinin, Vol. 8, p. 455.

The other church, St. Seraphim's, was located at 4203 NewtonStreet in Dallas,where Igor Voshinin attended and services were in English: FBI interview by James Hosty of Igor Voshinin, 12/12/63, Commission Document 205 - FBI Report of 23 Dec 1963 re: Oswald,p. 593.

Bouhewas in everyone's business, saying things like: "Well, you know, Iforget things - so I keep a file on everybody." : Warren Commission Hearings, Testimony of Igor Voshinin, Volume 8, p. 454.

DeMohrenschildt considered Clark to be his lawyer: Interview by Norman E. Warner, First Secretary of the American Embassy in Haiti, of George DeMohrnschildt, 12/4/63

Clarkreferred to his interviewing agent Earle Haley as "Earl": Testimony of Max Clark, Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 8, pp. 349, 352.

Everyonewas discussing whether or not they should (associate with Oswald): Testimony of Max Clark, Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 8, p. 351.

Back in 1951, Convair had also won the Air Force contract for the first funded ICBM study contract: George Michael Evica, A Certain Arrogance, (Xlibris, 2006), p. 205.

Her name was in Oswald's address book: See the Office of Security memo, with Max Clark'sbio and OSI file: RIF# 104-10419-10316, pp.1-5.

Clark received a "covert security approval" by theCIA in April 1959 for use in what was referred to as "Project ROCK": RIF# 104-10419-10316.

William Harvey was part of Project ROCK during this timeperiod: HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 42/ RIF# 104-10106-10581.

Also see M. D. Stevens memo to file, 1/30/64, "Lee Harvey Oswald/Address Book", HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 47, NARA Record Number: 104-10132-10011. Re the U-2 (Aquatone) tie-in with Project ROCK.

Max Clark worked closely with I.B. Hale, the chief ofindustrial security at General Dynamics: HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, Box 40; NARA Record Number: 1993.08.02.10:25:15:250060; Office of Security File on Clark, Max Edward.

I. B. Hale had been married to Virginia Hale, who got Oswaldhis sheet metal worker job at Leslie Whiting during July 1962...she rememberedOswald "quite well": Interview by SA Earle Haley and SA Robley D. Madland with Virginia Hale, Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 23, p. 694, Exhibit 1891.

At the time, the 7 billion dollar contract for the TFX was the largest military contract in history: Peter Dale Scott, in The Dallas Conspiracy, Chapter 3.

The next day, August 6, JFK mistress Judith Campbell twice called the White House: Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential, (G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1993), p. 301.

On I.B. (Insall Bailey) Hale's role with the break-in at homeof Judith Campbell, girlfriend of both JFK and gangster Sam Giancana: Report of SA William R. Carter, 8/8/62, FBI - HSCA Subject File: John Roselli/NARA Record Number: 124-10220-10433. Carter was interviewed by Sy Hersh in The Dark Side of Camelot.

Controversy over the decision to award the contract to GeneralDynamics: George C. Wilson, "Twining's Book Backs" Washington Post, 9/18/66.

All 8 Articles

http://www.opednews....uthor41722.html
Tuesday, November 22, 2011

THEJFK CASE: The Twelve Who Built The Oswald Legend (Part 6: White Russians KeepAn Eye On Oswald In Dallas)
(2 comments) Part 6 in the continuing series of Oswald and the twelve legend makers that either befriended him or watched over him prior to the assassination. In this chapter, Oswald has returned to the USAand is monitored by a right-wing organization of Soviet and Eastern European emigres with close ties to Cord Meyer's International Organizations wing of the CIA, as well as to the emigre-friendly Radio Free Europe.

Monday, December 27, 2010
THEJFK CASE: THE TWELVE WHO BUILT THE OSWALD LEGEND (Part 5: The Double Dangle)
(2 comments) Lee Oswald and Robert Webster were "dangles", brought together by the FBI and the CIA to entice the Soviets. Robert Webster defected to the USSR to learn more about the Soviet defense program. Radar operator Oswald defected to learn what the Soviets knew about the U-2. Descriptions of the two men weresubtly altered for use in "mole hunt" exercises designed to look for leaks and capture spies who repeated these descriptions.

Monday, December 6, 2010
THEJFK CASE: THE TWELVE WHO BUILT THE OSWALD LEGEND (Part 3: Counterintelligencegoes molehunting with Oswald's file)
Third in the series. This chapter focuses on how Lee Harvey Oswald threatened to reveal military secrets to the Soviets about the U-2, andhow UScounterintelligence used his file as a "marked card" to capture supposed Communist spies who were trying to infiltrate the CIA.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010
THEJFK CASE: THE TWELVE WHO BUILT THE OSWALD LEGEND (Part 4: When the U-2 GoesDown, Oswald is Ready to Return)
This chapter reveals the story behind the 1960 U-2 incident.A renegade NSA agent, Jack Dunlap, tipped off the Soviets about flights overthe USSR...whichled to the Soviets shooting down the U-2. Oswald's boss at the radio/TV factory in Minsk, Don Alejandro Ziger, was ostensibly an alienated White Russian. Oswald used to work on the U-2. The legend is that Ziger tipped Oswald that his work was done and he should gohome.

Thursday, September 2, 2010
THEJFK CASE: THE TWELVE THAT BUILT THE OSWALD LEGEND (Part 2: An Instant Visa GetsThe Marine Into Moscow)
Second in a series that discusses the twelve people thatcreated the Oswald legend. Here: Oswald's experience with the U-2 while in theMarines, how Oswald managed to cadge an instant visa from the Soviets to enter the USSR, how American officials protected Oswald after he told them he would give radarsecrets to the Soviet Union. And what was therelationship between Oswald and defector Robert Webster? They could be twins.

Sunday, August 22, 2010
THEJFK CASE: THE TWELVE WHO BUILT THE OSWALD LEGEND (Part One: Mother, Meyer, andthe Spotters)
This is the first in a series of essays explaining the background of the twelve handlers of Lee Harvey Oswald during the last four years of his life. It is agripping story of espionage, based on documents in the National Archives. Ask the House Oversight Committee to release both the JFK files and the MLKfiles. UShistory should not be wrapped in mystery. Many of the key issues have alreadybeen resolved.

Thursday, March 11, 2010
TheJFK Case; the Office that Spied on its Own Spies
Documents reveal that the CIA used LeeHarvey Oswald's visa requests for espionage purposes in shadowboxing with theSoviets before the JFK assassination. During Sunshine Week March 14-20, take action to free the JFK files and other files as well. Informants can beinterviewed or released from their oaths while they are still alive. The HouseOversight Committee can do the right thing and open the vaults.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009
THEJFK CASE: WHAT INFORMANTS ARE STILL OUT THERE?
There are many questions about the JFK assassination that can easily be answered - but only by eyewitnesses who aren't going to be alive for much longer.

The Holy Grail of the JFK Assassination

2011-11-22T21:54:00.000-08:00

The holy grail of the JFK story

Seven steps to unlocking the historical truth about the assassination in Dallas

BY JEFFERSON MORLEY

Please go to the Salon site and follow the links.
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/22/the_holy_grail_of_the_jfk_story/singleton/

By Jefferson Morley - Washington editor - Salon

Two years from today Americans will observe the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It is likely to be a moment of national introspection, as well as an opportunity to complete the historical record of one of the most painful days in American history. Yet, incredibly enough, the Central Intelligence Agency is likely to object to declassifying all of its records related to the murder of the 35th president in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. The question on the 48th anniversary of the tragedy is whether the CIA’s extreme claims of JFK secrecy — reiterated in federal court filings this year — will be allowed to stand.

The tediously unresolved case of the assassinated president never quite goes away as some would wish. Stephen King’s new book, “November 22, 1963,” is yet another imaginative retelling of a critical day in American history, a densely layered epic that appeals to the enduring impulse to understand how the president of the United States was gunned down in broad daylight, and why no one was ever brought to justice for the crime.

The official story, still defended by an articulate minority, was heard in aNational Geographic special last weekend. Kennedy’s death was said to be the tragic result of the psychotic actions of one individual. But as the NatGeo special demonstrates, the defense of that perspective is growing more eccentric. The program offered a novel interpretation of the photographic and forensic evidence from historian Max Holland that has been cogently addressed by independent researchers and is not shared by many JFK scholars, whether pro- or anti-conspiracy. Holland’s theory merely confirms what has long been obvious to many: There are a lot implausible theories of who killed JFK, and the notion that a “lone nut” was solely responsible is one of them.

More likely, Kennedy was ambushed by enemies who sought to avoid detection. That is what JFK’s widow, Jacqueline, and his brother Robert believed. As David Talbot demonstrated in his 2007 book “Brothers,”Bobby Kennedy concluded within hours of the gunfire in Dallas that his brother had been killed by anti-Castro Cubans. For the rest of his life, RFK never abandoned a conspiratorial interpretation of his brother’s death. (Full disclosure: Talbot is my boss and friend.)

The story is well-documented. Within a week of the assassination, RFK and Jackie Kennedy sent a friend to Moscow with a message for the leadership of the Soviet Union. As historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Tim Naftali reported in their 1999 book on the Cuban missile crisis, “One Hell of a Gamble,” Bobby and Jackie wanted the Soviet leadership to know that “despite Oswald’s connections to the communist world, the Kennedys believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents.” This finding is worth repeating on the 48thanniversary of JFK’s death: Jackie and Bobby Kennedy “believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents.”

Naftali, now the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California, told me in an email that he and his co-author learned the story from a Soviet diplomat, Georgi Bolshakov, and found his written account of Bobby and Jackie’s message in the Soviet archives. In that message Bobby and Jackie sought to assure the Soviet leadership that they did not believe that Oswald acted at Castro’s behest. The clear implication of the message was that Bobby and Jackie held the American right, not the international left, responsible for the crime in Dallas. “I was a little surprised what little reaction the … story got,” Naftali wrote.

No doubt inadvertently, the National Geographic JFK special fostered a reassuring yet false view of American history: that there is little reason to doubt the official story blaming a “lone nut.” In fact, Bobby and Jackie were not alone in suspecting conspiracy in Dallas. At the time, 60 percent of Dallas residents suspected a plot. JFK’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, privately suspected a plot emanating from JFK enemies in Cuba or Vietnam. In Havana, Fidel Castro, a man whose peaceful dotage is proof positive he knows something about detecting CIA conspiracies, concluded JFK had been killed by a right-wing faction within his own government. More recently, University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato, a mainstream political pundit and author of a forthcoming book on the legacy of Kennedy’s assassination, has joined critics of the official JFK story.

“Critical documents that could explain more about what happened are being hidden, and aggressively so,” Sabato told me in an email. “It’s no wonder a large majority of Americans believe in various conspiracy theories. There’s plenty to be suspicious about.”

Sabato has company in academia. There is a growing scholarly consensus that JFK was killed by a conspiracy. Since 2000, five tenured historians at U.S. universities have published scholarly studies that addressed the causes of JFK’s death. Four of the five concluded there was a conspiracy (though they did not all agree on who was responsible).

Thus the enduring conundrum of JFK’s assassination story. While a confident minority in the opinion-making class dismisses any consideration of conspiracy, the majority of the public is left to ponder a bewildering array of theories without much guidance about what is actually the most plausible explanation of how the president came to be killed.

As someone who has written about the JFK story for 28 years without advocating any ”theory” of the case, I recommend seven steps for those who want to understand the causes of JFK’s death.

Step 1: If you are looking for evidence of a JFK conspiracy, do as prosecutors and law enforcement do: start in the middle and work your way up.

It is tempting but foolish to start your personal JFK investigation by seeking to identify the gunmen or the intellectual authors of the crime. Start by identifying the people who were less involved and use them to identify those who were more complicit.

As a reporter for the Washington Post, I started by investigating those employees of the CIA most knowledgeable about the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Over the years, I found a dozen or more CIA officers who had sent or received cables about Oswald while President Kennedy was still alive. I interviewed some of them, as well as their surviving descendants, friends and associates. My goal was to answer the investigative reporter’s basic question: What did these CIA people know about Oswald? And when did they know it?

Step 2: Understand the intense psychological resistance to Step 1.

Some people cannot distinguish between serious journalism about the JFK story and the meretricious conspiracy theories peddled by the 9/11 truthers. This is unfortunate. Such resistance to conspiratorial thinking, while sometimes useful, too often rationalizes a kind of anti-journalistic defensiveness that actually prevents discussion of the JFK story.

Talk show host Chris Matthews, a decent liberal and huge fan of JFK,grows agitated at the suggestion that a serious person might disagree with the official story. Cass Sunstein, an otherwise sane senior advisor to President Obama, has proposed that the government infiltrate JFK conspiracy chat groups to dispel the allegedly dangerous and delusional ideas discussed there. Former New York Times editor Bill Keller recently admitted he deletes all emails on JFK assassination without reading them, but offhandedly noted, “There’s always has been something fishy about that assassination.”

In the face of such denial and indifference, the interested citizen must turn to books such as David Kaiser’s “The Road to Dallas,” and James Douglas’ “JFK and the Unspeakable” to get the latest evidence on JFK’s assassination. Fortunately, the public can now visit quality websites, such as that of the Mary Ferrrell Foundation — which has the largest online collection of JFK records – JFKLancer, and the home page of professor John McAdams. The sites seek to identify the most reliable information about the JFK story and encourage debate about the key questions, a chore most U.S. news organizations have long disdained.

Step 3: If you want to get into the conspiratorial weeds, educate yourself on Operation Northwoods.

This is story that the likes of Chris Matthews and Bill Keller don’t care to engage too closely. It emerged from a wealth of new information released as a result of Oliver Stone’s all-too-believable 1992 movie “JFK.” Among the new records were a batch of long-secret records about a Pentagon scheme known as Operation Northwoods. These documents showed that by mid-1963, U.S. military planners had developed a uniquely devious approach to advancing their preferred policy of “regime change” in Cuba. The Northwoods concept called for CIA operatives to mount “terrorist” actions on U.S. soil that would then be blamed on the Castro government. By framing Cuba as an irresponsible and violent actor, the U.S. could justify an invasion of Cuba — something that the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously favored. JFK emphatically rejected such pretext operations in a tense meeting with the JCS in March 1962. Yet the Northwoods planning continued, with CIA input, through the summer of 1963, according to the documents.

The Northwoods documents lend credence to Stone’s depiction of Kennedy’s death as the work of a high-level national security cabal that sought to blame the crime on a communist to avoid detection. That sort of scenario was not the ex post facto invention of a Hollywood screenwriter. It was Pentagon policy circa Nov. 22, 1963.

Step 4: Understand the CIA’s role in the JFK story as it emerges from files declassified since Stone’s movie.

The new JFK files do not prove there was a conspiracy but they do prove this: There was a group of senior Agency officers who knew much more about Lee Harvey Oswald in late 1963 than they ever said publicly or shared privately with colleagues.

In Langley those knowledgeable about Oswald while JFK was still alive included James Angleton, the chief of the Agency’s Counterintelligence (CI) Staff. Angleton was a protean character whose penetrating intellect and obscure exploits have inspired a small library of books and several Hollywood movies. He was also an alcoholic, ultra-right-wing paranoiac who ran covert operations with no oversight from anyone. At least three of his closest aides, Jane Roman, William J. Hood and Birch D. O’Neal received pre-assassination intelligence on Oswald.

In Mexico City, Winston Scott, the trusted chief of the CIA’s Mexico City Station (the subject of my book “Our Man in Mexico”), his aide Anne Goodpasture, and his not-so-trusted deputy David A. Phillips oversaw the surveillance of Oswald’s visit there just six weeks before JFK was shot dead.

In the CIA’s Miami station, the chief of the psychological warfare branch, George Joannides, was running a network of Cuban agents who exposed and denounced Oswald for his pro-Castro political activities in New Orleans.

Most of these officials were not involved in any plot to kill JFK. I interviewed Roman, Hood and Goodpasture at length and came away certain they had nothing to do with any JFK conspiracy. I wrote a book about Win Scott and came to the same conclusion. As for Jim Angleton and David Phillips, I presume their innocence but have much less certainty about it.

The newly declassified CIA’s records show that Angleton’s CI staff kept track of Oswald constantly from October 1959 to November 1963. At Angleton’s direction, more than 40 reports about Oswald’s travels in the communist world, his family life and his political views were funneled to a secretive office in the Counterintelligence Staff known as the Special Investigations Group. The SIG was headed by Birch O’Neal, a loyal aide who had served as CIA station chief in Guatemala during the CIA-sponsored coup d’etat in 1954.

The CIA files show that the pace of intelligence gathering around Oswald quickened in mid-1963. In August 1963, Joannides’ assets started reporting on Oswald’s antics in New Orleans. When Oswald visited the Cuban consulate in Mexico City a few weeks later, he was surveilled by Phillips. When CIA and FBI reports on Oswald were sent to the SIG, they were signed for, and read by Angleton’s staff. No, this isn’t Internet fable: The routing sheets with their signatures can be found in the National Archives, and Roman and Hood confirmed their authenticity in separate interviews.

Six weeks after Angleton’s aides reviewed the Oswald file, JFK was shot dead and Oswald was arrested for the crime. These CIA officers did notinvestigate and conclude that Oswald had acted alone. Some, including Phillips and Joannides, took actions to insure that blame for the crime of Dallas would fall on Cuba. Others, like Scott, scrambled to learn more about Oswald. Angleton blandly disavowed his long-standing interest in Kennedy’s accused killer and concealed the paper trail that proved it.

Step 5: See the crime of Dallas as people in the CIA saw it.

In the course of writing my book about Win Scott, a math teacher from rural Alabama who transformed himself into one of the best CIA officers of his generation, I found that he knew there was something very wrong with the Agency’s handling of information about Oswald.

Scott knew that deputy CIA director Dick Helms had lied to the Warren Commission about the Agency’s pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald. And he learned that Angleton, a longtime friend, had kept him “out of the loop” on the latest intelligence about Oswald in October 1963.

Scott also harbored doubts about his deputy Phillips, the chief of the agency’s covert operations against the Castro government at the time. After Kennedy’s assassination, Scott downgraded Phillips on his job evaluation, and came to question his reporting on Oswald. When Scott privately aired some of his misgivings to a colleague in the British intelligence service a few years later, Angleton intercepted the message and sent a warning to Scott: Do not talk about JFK’s assassination with anyone.

In the upper echelons of the CIA, Lee Harvey Oswald was not regarded as a “lone nut.” At the level of Jim Angleton, Win Scott and David Phillips, Oswald was regarded as an extremely sensitive operational matter. It is inevitable that historians will view him the same way.

Step 6: Understand how U.S. national security operatives organized political assassinations in the 1960s and 1970s.

David Phillips was still alive when I arrived in Washington in the 1980s. He had retired from the Agency to found a pro-CIA lobbying group, the Association of Foreign Intelligence Officers. Phillips was a charming, cunning man, and a lively writer, even penning the occasional column for the Washington Post Outlook section where I later worked. One colleague at the Post, well-versed in the intelligence world, once told me that he had gotten to know Phillips. “He wasn’t the type” to be involved in a plot against JFK, this colleagues assured me.

A couple of years later, the nonprofit National Security Archive obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) a cache of CIA records about a notorious political assassination in October 1970. The documents showed President Richard Nixon had ordered the CIA to take action to prevent leftist Salvatore Allende from assuming the presidency of Chile. The assignment was given to a task force directed by Phillips, by then one of the most senior operative in the Agency’s Latin America division, which identified a target: Gen. Rene Schneider, the commander in chief of the Chilean armed forces. Schneider’s crime: He had decided that Allende, winner of a recent election, should take office.

If you want to know how the CIA went about killing a political enemy at that time, study the records of this operation. Phillips brought in a team of four Agency operatives to organize a group of Chilean co-conspirators who were supplied with “three sterile 45 caliber machine guns.” The Agency’s operatives consulted with the Chileans about when to act and how they might justify the crime. The conspirators ambushed Schneider’s car in traffic, smashed the window with a sledgehammer, and shot him with the U.S.-supplied guns. After Schneider died a day later, Chile scholar Peter Kornbluh notes that Phillips co-authored a cable saying the CIA station had “done [an] excellent job of guiding [the] Chileans.”

Perhaps David Phillips was not the type to participate in the assassination of a U.S. president. But he did orchestrate the murder of a Latin American commander in chief. And his operational expertise in political assassination was never disclosed to congressional JFK investigators in the late 1970s.

Of course, this appalling episode in 1970 does not prove that Phillips participated in a JFK conspiracy in 1963. But if the CIA is interested in quelling long-standing conspiratorial speculation about Phillips, it should practice full disclosure to set the record straight.

Step 7: Return to Step 1; start in the middle of the alleged conspiracy and work your way up.

Thanks to CIA records declassified since 1998, we now know much more about a key aspect of the JFK story: the Agency’s underappreciated role in spreading the story that JFK had been killed by a communist.

As David Phillips mounted covert operations against the Castro government in the summer and fall of 1963, he was assisted by George Joannides, a dapper, 40-year-old spy from New York City. In Miami Joannides handled the CIA’s contacts with a network of anti-Castro Cuban students whom Phillips had recruited on the campus of the University of Havana before Castro’s revolution.

Within hours of JFK’s murder in Dallas, Joannides’ agents got his approval to alert reporters to the fact that Kennedy’s accused killer was a member of a pro-Castro group called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Their revelation generated headlines in the Washington Post, New York Times and dozens of newspapers across the country asserting what some still believe: JFK was killed by a pro-Castro communist.

We can now see that the aftermath of JFK’s assassination bore an eerie resemblance to the schemes envisioned in Operation Northwoods: After a terrible crime was committed in the United States, CIA operatives covertly sought to arrange for the blame to fall on Castro, the better to justify a U.S. invasion.

Was the CIA’s post-assassination propaganda about Oswald (to use Bill Keller’s word) “fishy”? The likes of Chris Matthews and Cass Sunstein (and even Keller himself) may try to dismiss the thought. But Jackie and Bobby Kennedy could not. They “believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents.”

It certainly seems fair to ask: Did Angleton, Phillips or others who were well-informed about Oswald before the assassination simply misunderstand and underestimate him as he made his way to Dallas with a gun? Or is it possible that one or more of them participated in some kind of covert operation — sponsored by the Agency or the Pentagon — to manipulate Oswald before Nov. 22, 1963, for the sake of advancing the U.S. policy of overthrowing Castro?

Thanks to CIA secrecy, such questions cannot be answered.

One view is that there is not much more to learn about the CIA and the JFK assassination. On the National Geographic show, Max Holland was asked if there was a “holy grail” of JFK assassination researchers. He cited Oswald’s tax records, which remain private at the request of his widow, Marina, who still lives in Texas (and believes her first husband innocent of JFK’s murder).

I think most published JFK authors would find Holland’s assessment too narrow. There are other important JFK records that remain at large. Diplomatic historian David Kaiser has identified several. Researcher William Kelly has shown that Office of Naval Intelligence (which had responsibility for tracking Oswald, an ex-Marine) possesses assassination-related files that it has never released.

James Lesar, a veteran Freedom of Information Act litigator in Washington (and, more full disclosure, my pro bono attorney), has a larger holy grail: the 50,000-plus pages of unreleased JFK assassination records now held by the National Archives. Much of this material has been classified as “Not Believed Relevant” to JFK’s assassination — and most of it is. But within the NBR records, and elsewhere in CIA archives, are still-secret files of some of those officers who were knowledgeable about Oswald before Kennedy’s murder — and they are quite relevant to understanding how JFK was killed. At least 1,000 pages of such material remains secret.

How do we know? In 2003 I sued the CIA for the records of George Joannides, a secondary character in the JFK story. Eight years later, the Agency is still fighting the release of some 330 records on him, a legal defense that the New York Times aptly described in 2009 as “cagey.”Agency lawyers are scheduled to appear in federal court later this year to argue that none of this antique material can be made public in any form — supposedly for reasons of “national security.”

With Lesar’s help, I discovered that the National Archives retains 605 pages of CIA records about David Phillips in the JFK Assassination Records Collection in College Park, Md. The Archives also has 222 pages about Birch D. O’Neal, Angleton’s aide who received reports on Oswald regularly between 1959 and 1963. The Agency says it will not release the Phillips and O’Neil material until at least 2017.

(Anyone can view what is known about these files by searching the National Archive’s JFK Assassination Records Collection here. Enter “David Phillips” or “Birch O’Neal in the first search field and “NBR” in the second. Then click on “Display Search Results.” To view more details about the withheld files, click on “Display All/Selected Hits.”)

These records can and should be made public by the 50thanniversary of JFK’s death in 2013. The National Archives is now embarked on a crash course to declassify some 400 million pages of classified U.S. government records. Two years ago, Michael Kurtz, a senior official at the Archives, said in a public hearing in Washington that the still-secret JFK assassination records would be a priority for release by 2013, a position that the Archives has since backed off. In the risk-averse culture of Washington, there is little appetite for full JFK disclosure. President Obama’s laudatory executive order on open government has provenentirely ineffectual in the case of assassination-related records.

Thus on the 48th anniversary of the Dallas tragedy, we have the usual dispiriting situation: the public remains confused, and the prospects for full disclosure are not bright. We collectively wonder if there is a “holy grail” of the JFK assassination story and the CIA refuses to share. The courts are acquiescent, and what remains of the press cannot be bothered to address the obvious questions.

Nonetheless, I prefer to experience Nov. 22 as a day of hard-won hope. Public interest in JFK and Jackie Kennedy (and to a lesser extent, Bobby) remains intense and widespread. Thanks to the Internet, public access to the full historical record of the JFK assassination story has never been greater. Many people sense that JFK died for a reason and want to know what it was. We’re not delusional. We’re realistic. We want the real history of our country.

Jefferson Morley is the Washington editor of Salon. More Jefferson Morley

Warren Commission Got It Wrong

2011-11-22T10:47:00.000-08:00

Committee says Warren Commission got it wrong in JFK assassination

http://www.thereporteronline.com/articles/2011/11/22/opinion/doc4ecad980ea628135711161.txt

By Dennis Bartholomew

As the anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy approaches, the debates will resume about "whether the Warren Commission got it right." But what most people do not realize is the United States Congress already decided, many years ago, that the Warren Commission did not get it right.

In the late 1970's, the Congress formed the House Select Committee on Associations (HSCA) to investigate the assassinations of President Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King. The HSCA had access to much more information than was available to the Warren Commissions and spent two years researching and reviewing the relevant issues. Its final conclusion regarding President Kennedy was that the President's assassination was "probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy."

In effect, the HSCA determined that the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald "acted alone" was incorrect. But equally important was the HSCA's explanation of why the Warren Commission was incorrect. The HSCA emphatically stated that the CIA and the FBI had not provided complete and accurate information to the Warren Commission. The HSCA summarized the CIA's performance by stating that "the Central Intelligence Agency was deficient in its collection and sharing of information both prior to and subsequent to the assassination." With respect to the FBI, the HSCA stated that it "failed to conduct an adequate investigation into the possibility of a conspiracy in key areas, and it was deficient in its sharing of information with the Warren Commission."

To be fair to the Warren Commission, its conclusion recognized its dependency on the investigative agencies, as the final report stated "[o]n the basis of the evidence before the Commission, it concludes that Oswald acted alone."

Another issue of great importance in the HSCA report was its discussion of Oswald's association in New Orleans with the right-wing anti-communist community. Oswald was found to have had well-substantiated contacts with Guy Banister, an ex-FBI agent, and David Ferrie, both of whom were extreme right-wingers who worked with the anti-Castro Cubans in their effort to overthrow the Castro regime. The HSCA expressed puzzlement about why Oswald, the alleged disaffected Marxist who defected to the Soviet Union, would be associating with the anti-Castro community. In all likelihood, the HSCA was aware of an obvious explanation for Oswald's confusing behavior, but, as a committee of the House of Representative, it could not state everything it knew for political reasons.

The obvious explanation is that Oswald was not a disaffected Marxist, but was really an intelligence operative working in that role in New Orleans. In the late 1950's and early 1960's, several U.S. citizens defected to the Soviet Union, then changed their minds and returned home. These individuals are now believed by many to have been part of a false defector project that was intended to get CIA operatives into the Soviet Union.

Assassination researchers have long noted the ease in which Oswald received an early dismissal from the Marines, the lack of an explanation or how he was able to find his way into the Soviet Union, and the ease in which he was able to return to the U.S. Clearly, Oswald has assistance from some organization in getting into and out of the Soviet Union. His activities in New Orleans were undoubtedly part of another intelligence operation. Then, in the fall of 1963, Oswald abruptly left New Orleans and made a strange visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. After leaving Mexico City, he did not return to New Orleans, but instead went to Dallas, where he became involved with the Kennedy assassination. It is still not clear whether he was a willing participant or merely a patsy, as he claimed.

All of the above information is well-know to assassination researchers. It can easily be found by reading the HSCA reports or by reading any of a number of books on the assassination. So why do many government officials and members of the news media continue to focus on the Warren Commission, ignoring the more recent HSCA findings? Is it because people are reluctant to admit that one of our intelligence operatives somehow got mixed up in the assassination of President Kennedy?

Anyone who performs a through and unbiased review of the available information, will clearly see Oswald's involvement with what appear to be various covert operations. Isn't it time for the intelligence community and the media to admit the Kennedy assassination was not the work of one "lone nut"?

The Doomsday Project and Deep Events

2011-11-21T20:47:00.002-08:00

The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11
Peter Dale Scott
Dallas COPA November 2011

For links that work please visit:
http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3650

I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
-- Senator Frank Church (1975)

I would like to discuss four major and badly understood events – the John F. Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11. I will analyze these deep events as part of a deeper political process linking them, a process that has helped build up repressive power in America at the expense of democracy.

In recent years I have been talking about a dark force behind these events -- a force which, for want of a better term, I have clumsily called a “deep state,” operating both within and outside the public state. Today for the first time I want to identify part of that dark force, a part which has operated for five decades or more at the edge of the public state. This part of the dark force has a name not invented by me: the Doomsday Project, the Pentagon’s name for the emergency planning “to keep the White House and Pentagon running during and after a nuclear war or some other major crisis.”1

My point is a simple and important one: to show that the Doomsday Project of the 1980s, and the earlier emergency planning that developed into it, have played a role in the background of all the deep events I shall discuss.

More significantly, it has been a factor behind all three of the disturbing events that now threaten American democracy. The first of these three is what has been called the conversion of our economy into a plutonomy – with the increasing separation of America into two classes, into the haves and the have-nots, the one percent and the 99 percent. The second is America’s increasing militarization, and above all its inclination, which has become more and more routine and predictable, to wage or provoke wars in remote regions of the globe. It is clear that the operations of this American war machine have served the one percent.2

The third – my subject today -- is the important and increasingly deleterious impact on American history of structural deep events: mysterious events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the American social structure, have a major impact on American society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.

There are any number of analyses of America’s current breakdown in terms of income and wealth disparity, also in terms of America’s increasing militarization and belligerency. What I shall do today is I think new: to argue that both the income disparity – or what has been called our plutonomy -- and the belligerency have been fostered significantly by deep events.

We must understand that the income disparity of America’s current economy was not the result of market forces working independently of political intervention. In large part it was generated by a systematic and deliberate ongoing political process dating from the anxieties of the very wealthy in the 1960s and 1970s that control of the country was slipping away from them.

This was the time when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, in a 1971 memorandum, warned that survival of the free enterprise system depended on “careful long-range planning and implementation” of a well-financed response to threats from the left.3 This warning was answered by a sustained right-wing offensive, coordinated by think tanks and funded lavishly by a small group of family foundations.4 We should recall that all this was in response to serious riots in Newark, Detroit, and elsewhere, and that increasing calls for a revolution were coming from the left (in Europe as well as America). I will focus today on the right’s response to that challenge, and on the role of deep events in enhancing their response.

What was important about the Powell memorandum was less the document itself than the fact that it was commissioned by the United States Chamber of Commerce, one of the most influential and least discussed lobbying groups in America. And the memorandum was only one of many signs of that developing class war in the 1970s, a larger process working both inside and outside government (including what Irving Kristol called an “intellectual counterrevolution”), which led directly to the so-called “Reagan Revolution.”5

It is clear that this larger process has been carried on for almost five decades, pumping billions of right-wing dollars into the American political process. What I wish to show today is that deep events have also been integral to this right-wing effort, from the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963 to 9/11. 9/11 resulted in the implementation of “Continuity of Government” (COG) plans (which in the Oliver North Iran Contra Hearings of 1987 were called plans for “the suspension of the U.S. constitution”). These COG plans, building on earlier COG planning, had been carefully developed since 1982 in the so-called Doomsday Project, by a secret group appointed by Reagan. The group was composed of both public and private figures, including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

I shall try to show today that in this respect 9/11 was only the culmination of a sequence of deep events reaching back to the Kennedy assassination if not earlier, and that the germs of the Doomsday Project can be detected behind all of them.

More specifically, I shall try to demonstrate about these deep events that

1) prior bureaucratic misbehavior by the CIA and similar agencies helped to make both the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 happen;
2) the consequences of each deep event included an increase in top-down repressive power for these same agencies, at the expense of persuasive democratic power;6
3) there are symptomatic overlaps in personnel between the perpetrators of each of these deep events and the next;
4) one sees in each event the involvement of elements of the international drug traffic – suggesting that our current plutonomy is also to some degree a narconomy;
5) in the background of each event (and playing an increasingly important role) one sees the Doomsday Project -- the alternative emergency planning structure with its own communications network, operating as a shadow network outside of regular government channels.

Bureaucratic Misbehavior as a Factor Contributing to both the JFK Assassination and 9/11

Both the JFK assassination and 9/11 were facilitated by the way the CIA and FBI manipulated their files about alleged perpetrators of each event (Lee Harvey Oswald in the case of what I shall call JFK, and the alleged hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in the case of 9/11). Part of this facilitation was the decision on October 9, 1963 of an FBI agent, Marvin Gheesling, to remove Oswald from the FBI watch list for surveillance. This was shortly after Oswald’s arrest in New Orleans in August and his reported travel to Mexico in September. Obviously these developments should normally have made Oswald a candidate for increased surveillance.7

This misbehavior is paradigmatic of the behavior of other agencies, especially the CIA, in both JFK and 9/11. Indeed Gheesling’s behavior fits very neatly with the CIA’s culpable withholding from the FBI, in the same month of October, information that Oswald had allegedly met in Mexico City with a suspected KGB agent, Valeriy Kostikov.8 This also helped ensure that Oswald would not be placed under surveillance. Indeed, former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that the CIA’s withholding of information was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963.9

A more ominous provocation in 1963 was that of Army Intelligence, one unit of which in Dallas did not simply withhold information about Lee Harvey Oswald, but manufactured false intelligence that seemed designed to provoke retaliation against Cuba. I call such provocations phase-one stories, efforts to portray Oswald as a Communist conspirator (as opposed to the later phase-two stories, also false, portraying him as a disgruntled loner). A conspicuous example of such phase-one stories is a cable from the Fourth Army Command in Texas, reporting a tip from a Dallas policeman who was also in an Army Intelligence Reserve unit:

Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow, Intelligence Section, Dallas Police Department, notified 112th INTC [Intelligence] Group, this Headquarters, that information obtained from Oswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in 1959 and is a card-carrying member of Communist Party.”10

This cable was sent on November 22 directly to the U.S. Strike Command at Fort MacDill in Florida, the base poised for a possible retaliatory attack against Cuba.11
The cable was not an isolated aberration. It was supported by other false phase-one stories from Dallas about Oswald’s alleged rifle, and specifically by concatenated false translations of Marina Oswald’s testimony, to suggest that Oswald’s rifle in Dallas was one he had owned in Russia.12

These last false reports, apparently unrelated, can also be traced to officer Don Stringfellow’s 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.13 The interpreter who first supplied the false translation of Marina’s words, Ilya Mamantov, was selected by a Dallas oilman, Jack Crichton, and Deputy Dallas Police Chief George Lumpkin.14

Crichton and Lumpkin were also the Chief and the Deputy Chief of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.15 Crichton was also an extreme right-winger in the community of Dallas oilmen: he was a trustee of the H.L. Hunt Foundation, and a member of the American Friends of the Katanga Freedom Fighters, a group organized to oppose Kennedy’s policies in the Congo.

We have to keep in mind that some of the Joint Chiefs were furious that the 1962 Missile Crisis had not led to an invasion of Cuba, and that, under new JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor, the Joint Chiefs, in May 1963, still believed “that US military intervention in Cuba is necessary.”16 This was six months after Kennedy, to resolve the Missile Crisis in October 1962, had given explicit (albeit highly qualified) assurances to Khrushchev, that the United States would not invade Cuba.17 This did not stop the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the JCS Directorate of Plans and Policy) from producing a menu of “fabricated provocations to justify military intervention.”18 (One proposed example of “fabricated provocations” envisioned “using MIG type aircraft flown by US pilots to … attack surface shipping or to attack US military.”)19

The deceptions about Oswald coming from Dallas were immediately post-assassination; thus they do not by themselves establish that the assassination itself was a provocation-deception plot. They do however reveal enough about the anti-Castro mindset of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit in Dallas to confirm that it was remarkably similar to that of the J-5 the preceding May – the mindset that produced a menu of “fabricated provocations” to attack Cuba. (According to Crichton there were “about a hundred men in [the 488th Reserve unit] and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department.”)20

It can hardly be accidental that we see this bureaucratic misbehavior from the FBI, CIA, and military, the three agencies with which Kennedy had had serious disagreements in his truncated presidency.21 Later in this paper I shall link Dallas oilman Jack Crichton to the 1963 emergency planning that became the Doomsday Project.

Analogous Bureaucratic Misbehavior in the Case of 9/11

Before 9/11 the CIA, in 2000-2001, again flagrantly withheld crucial evidence from the FBI: evidence that, if shared, would have led the FBI to surveil two of the alleged hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaz al-Hazmi. This sustained withholding of evidence provoked an FBI agent to predict accurately in August, 2001, that “someday someone will die.”22 After 9/11 another FBI agent said of the CIA: “They [CIA] didn’t want the bureau meddling in their business—that’s why they didn’t tell the FBI.... And that’s why September 11 happened. That is why it happened. . . . They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands”23 The CIA’s withholding of relevant evidence before 9/11 (which it was required by its own rules to supply) was matched in this case by the NSA.24

Without these withholdings, in other words, neither the Kennedy assassination nor 9/11 could have developed in the manner in which they did. As I wrote in American War Machine, it would appear that Oswald (and later al-Mihdhar) had at some prior point been selected as designated subjects for an operation. This would not initially have been for the commission of a crime against the American polity: on the contrary, steps were probably taken to prepare Oswald in connection with an operation against Cuba and al-Mihdhar [I suspect] for an operation against al-Qaeda. But as [exploitable] legends began to accumulate about both figures, it became possible for some witting people to subvert the sanctioned operation into a plan for murder that would later be covered up. At this point Oswald (and by analogy al-Mihdhar) was no longer just a designated subject but also now a designated culprit.25

Kevin Fenton, in his exhaustive book Disconnecting the Dots, has since reached the same conclusion with respect to 9/11: “that, by the summer of 2001, the purpose of withholding the information had become to allow the attacks to go forward.”26 He has also identified the person chiefly responsible for the misbehavior: CIA officer Richard Blee, Chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit. Blee, while Clinton was still president, had been one of a faction inside CIA pressing for a more belligerent CIA involvement in Afghanistan, in conjunction with the Afghan Northern Alliance.27 This then happened immediately after 9/11, and Blee himself was promoted, to become the new Chief of Station in Kabul.28

How CIA and NSA Withholding of Evidence in the Second Tonkin Gulf Incident, Contributed to War with North Vietnam

I will spare you the details of this withholding, which can be found in my American War Machine, pp. 200-02. But Tonkin Gulf is similar to the Kennedy assassination and 9/11, in that manipulation of evidence helped lead America – in this case very swiftly – into war.

Historians such as Fredrik Logevall have agreed with the assessment of former undersecretary of state George Ball that the US destroyer mission in the Tonkin Gulf, which resulted in the Tonkin Gulf incidents, “was primarily for provocation.”29 The planning for this provocative mission came from the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the same unit that in 1963 had reported concerning Cuba that, “the engineering of a series of provocations to justify military intervention is feasible.”30

The NSA and CIA suppression of the truth on August 4 was in the context of an existing high-level (but controversial) determination to attack North Vietnam. In this respect the Tonkin Gulf incident is remarkably similar to the suppression of the truth by CIA and NSA leading up to 9/11, when there was again a high-level (but controversial) determination to go to war.

Increases in Repressive Power After Deep Events

All of the deep events discussed above have contributed to the cumulative increase of Washington’s repressive powers. It is clear for example that the Warren Commission used the JFK assassination to increase CIA surveillance of Americans. As I wrote in Deep Politics, this was the result of the Warren Commission’s controversial recommendations that the Secret Service’s domestic surveillance responsibilities be increased (WR 25-26). Somewhat illogically, the Warren Report concluded both that Oswald acted alone (WR 22), . . . and also that the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, should coordinate more closely the surveillance of organized groups (WR 463). In particular, it recommended that the Secret Service acquire a computerized data bank compatible with that already developed by the CIA.31

This pattern would repeat itself four years later with the assassination of Robert Kennedy. In the twenty-four hours between Bobby’s shooting and his death, Congress hurriedly passed a statute — drafted well in advance (like the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 and the Patriot Act of 2001) — that still further augmented the secret powers given to the Secret Service in the name of protecting presidential candidates.32

This was not a trivial or benign change: from this swiftly considered act, passed under Johnson, flowed some of the worst excesses of the Nixon presidency.33

The change also contributed to the chaos and violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Army intelligence surveillance agents, seconded to the Secret Service, were present both inside and outside the convention hall. Some of them equipped the so-called “Legion of Justice thugs whom the Chicago Red Squad turned loose on local anti-war groups.”34

In this way the extra secret powers conferred after the RFK assassination contributed to the disastrous turmoil in Chicago that effectively destroyed the old Democratic Party representing the labor unions: The three Democratic presidents elected since then have all been significantly more conservative.

Turning to Watergate and Iran-Contra, both of these events were on one level setbacks to the repressive powers exercised by Richard Nixon and the Reagan White House, not expansions of them. On the surface level this is true: both events resulted in legislative reforms that would appear to contradict my thesis of expanding repression.

We need to distinguish here, however, between the two years of the Watergate crisis, and the initial Watergate break-in. The Watergate crisis saw a president forced into resignation by a number of forces, involving both liberals and conservatives. But the key figures in the initial Watergate break-in itself – Hunt, McCord, G. Gordon Liddy, and their Cuban allies -- were all far to the right of Nixon and Kissinger. And the end result of their machinations was not finalized until the so-called Halloween Massacre in 1975, when Kissinger was ousted as National Security Adviser and Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller was notified he would be dropped from the 1976 Republican ticket. This major shake-up was engineered by two other right-wingers: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in the Gerald Ford White House.35

That day in 1975 saw the permanent defeat of the so-called Rockefeller or liberal faction within the Republican Party. It was replaced by the conservative Goldwater-Casey faction that would soon capture the nomination and the presidency for Ronald Reagan.36 This little-noticed palace coup, along with other related intrigues in the mid-1970s, helped achieve the conversion of America from a welfare capitalist economy, with gradual reductions in income and wealth disparity, into a financialized plutonomy where these trends were reversed.37

Again in Iran-Contra we see a deeper accumulation of repressive power under the surface of liberal reforms. At the time not only the press but even academics like myself celebrated the termination of aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, and the victory there of the Contadora peace process. Not generally noticed at the time was the fact that, while Oliver North was removed from his role in the Doomsday Project, that project’s plans for surveillance, detention, and the militarization of the United States continued to grow after his departure.38

Also not noticed was the fact that the US Congress, while curtailing aid to one small drug-financed CIA proxy army, was simultaneously increasing US support to a much larger coalition of drug-financed proxy armies in Afghanistan.39 While Iran-Contra exposed the $32 million which Saudi Arabia, at the urging of CIA Director William Casey, had supplied to the Contras, not a word was whispered about the $500 million or more that the Saudis, again at the urging of Casey, had supplied in the same period to the Afghan mujahedin.40 In this sense the drama of Iran-Contra in Congress can be thought of as a misdirection play, directing public attention away from America’s much more intensive engagement in Afghanistan – a covert policy that has since evolved into America’s longest war.

We should expand our consciousness of Iran-Contra to think of it as Iran-Afghan-Contra. And if we do, we must acknowledge that in this complex and misunderstood deep event the CIA in Afghanistan exercised again the paramilitary capacity that Stansfield Turner had tried to terminate when he was CIA Director under Jimmy Carter. This was a victory in short for the faction of men like Richard Blee, the protector of al-Mihdhar as well as the advocate in 2000 for enhanced CIA paramilitary activity in Afghanistan.41

Personnel Overlaps Between the Successive Deep Events

I will never forget the New York Times front-page story on June 18, 1972, the day after the Watergate break-in. There were photographs of the Watergate burglars, including one of Frank Sturgis alias Fiorini, whom I had already written about two years earlier in my unpublished book manuscript, “The Dallas Conspiracy” about the JFK assassination.

Sturgis was no nonentity: a former contract employee of the CIA, he was also well connected to the mob-linked former casino owners in Havana.42 My early writings on the Kennedy case focused on the connections between Frank Sturgis and an anti-Castro Cuban training camp near New Orleans in which Oswald had shown an interest; also in Sturgis’ involvement in false “phase-one” stories portraying Oswald as part of a Communist Cuban conspiracy.43

In spreading these “phase-one” stories in 1963, Sturgis was joined by a number of Cubans who were part of the CIA-supported army in Central America of Manuel Artime. Artime’s base in Costa Rica was closed down in 1965, allegedly because of its involvement in drug trafficking.44 In the 1980s some of these Cuban exiles later became involved in drug-financed support activities for the Contras.45

The political mentor of Artime’s MRR movement was future Watergate plotter Howard Hunt; and Artime in 1972 would pay for the bail of the Cuban Watergate burglars. The drug money-launderer Ramón Milián Rodríguez has claimed to have delivered $200,000 in cash from Artime to pay off some of the Cuban Watergate burglars; later, in support of the Contras, he managed two Costa Rican seafood companies, Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money.46

It is alleged that Hunt and McCord had both been involved with Artime’s invasion plans in 1963.47 It was I believe no accident that the organization of Hunt’s protégé Artime became enmired in drug trafficking. Hunt, I have argued elsewhere, had been handling a U.S. drug connection since his 1950 post in Mexico City as OPC (Office of Policy Coordination) chief.48

But McCord not only had a past in the anti-Castro activities of 1963, he was also part of the nation’s emergency planning network that would later figure so prominently in the background of Iran-Contra and 9/11. McCord was a member of a small Air Force Reserve unit in Washington attached to the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP); assigned “to draw up lists of radicals and to develop contingency plans for censorship of the news media and U.S. mail in time of war.”49 His unit was part of the Wartime Information Security Program (WISP), which had responsibility for activating “contingency plans for imposing censorship on the press, the mails and all telecommunications (including government communications) [and] preventive detention of civilian ‘security risks,’ who would be placed in military ‘camps.’”50 In other words, these were the plans that became known in the 1980s as the Doomsday Project, the Continuity of Government planning on which Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld worked together for twenty years before 9/11.

A Common Denominator for Structural Deep Events: Project Doomsday and COG

McCord’s participation in an emergency planning system dealing with telecommunications suggests a common denominator in the backgrounds of almost all the deep events we are considering. Oliver North, the Reagan-Bush OEP point man on Iran-Contra planning, was also involved in such planning; and he had access to the nation’s top secret Doomsday communications network. North’s network, known as Flashboard, "excluded other bureaucrats with opposing viewpoints…[and] had its own special worldwide antiterrorist computer network, … by which members could communicate exclusively with each other and their collaborators abroad."51

Flashboard was used by North and his superiors for extremely sensitive operations which had to be concealed from other dubious or hostile parts of the Washington bureaucracy. These operations included the illegal shipments of arms to Iran, but also other activities, some still not known, perhaps even against Olof Palme’s Sweden.52 Flashboard, America’s emergency network in the 1980s, was the name in 1984-86 of the full-fledged Continuity of Government (COG) emergency network which was secretly planned for twenty years, at a cost of billions, by a team including Cheney and Rumsfeld. On 9/11 the same network was activated anew by the two men who had planned it for so many years.53

But this Doomsday planning can be traced back to 1963, when Jack Crichton, head of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas, was part of it in his capacity as chief of intelligence for Dallas Civil Defense, which worked out of an underground Emergency Operating Center. As Russ Baker reports, “Because it was intended for ‘continuity of government’ operations during an attack, [the Center] was fully equipped with communications equipment.”54 A speech given at the dedication of the Center in 1961 supplies further details:

This Emergency Operating Center [in Dallas] is part of the National Plan to link Federal, State and local government agencies in a communications network from which rescue operations can be directed in time of local or National emergency. It is a vital part of the National, State, and local Operational Survival Plan.55

Crichton, in other words, was also part of what became known in the 1980s as the Doomsday Project, like James McCord, Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney after him. But in 1988 its aim was significantly enlarged: no longer to prepare for an atomic attack, but now to plan for the effective suspension of the American constitution in the face of any emergency.56 This change in 1988 allowed COG to be implemented in 2001. By this time the Doomsday Project had developed into what the Washington Post called “a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing ‘continuity of operations plans.’”57

It is clear that the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP, known from 1961-1968 as the Office of Emergency Planning) supplies a common denominator for key personnel in virtually all of the structural events discussed here. This is a long way from establishing that the OEP itself (in addition to the individuals discussed here) was involved in generating any of these events. But I believe that the alternative communications network housed first in the OEP (later part of Project 908) played a significant role in at least three of them: the JFK assassination, Iran-Contra, and 9/11.

This is easiest to show in the case of 9/11, where it is conceded that the Continuity of Government (COG) plans of the Doomsday Project were implemented by Cheney on 9/11, apparently before the last of the four hijacked planes had crashed.58 The 9/11 Commission could not locate records of the key decisions taken by Cheney on that day, suggesting that they may have taken place on the “secure phone “ in the tunnel leading to the presidential bunker – with such a high classification that the 9/11 Commission was never supplied the phone records.59 Presumably this was a COG phone.

It is not clear whether the “secure phone” in the White House tunnel belonged to the Secret Service or (as one might expect) was part of the secure network of the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). If the latter, we’d have a striking link between 9/11 and the JFK assassination. The WHCA boasts on its Web site that the agency was “a key player in documenting the assassination of President Kennedy.”60 However it is not clear for whom this documentation was conducted, for the WHCA logs and transcripts were in fact withheld from the Warren Commission.61

The Secret Service had installed a WHCA portable radio in the lead car of the presidential motorcade.62 This in turn was in contact by police radio with the pilot car ahead of it, carrying DPD Deputy Chief Lumpkin of the 488th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.63 Records of the WHCA communications from the motorcade never reached the Warren Commission, the House Committee on Assassinations, or the Assassination Records Review Board.64 Thus we cannot tell if they would explain some of the anomalies on the two channels of the Dallas Police Department. They might for example have thrown light upon the unsourced call on the Dallas Police tapes for a suspect who had exactly the false height and weight recorded for Oswald in his FBI and CIA files.65

Today in 2011 we are still living under the State of Emergency proclaimed after 9/11 by President Bush. At least some COG provisions are still in effect, and were even augmented by Bush through Presidential Directive 51 of May 2007. Commenting on PD-51, the Washington Post reported at that time.

After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers [including Cheney] to rotate secretly to [COG] locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time to ensure the nation’s survival, a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing “continuity of operations plans.”66

Presumably this “shadow government” finalized such long-standing COG projects as warrantless surveillance, in part through the Patriot Act, whose controversial provisions were already being implemented by Cheney and others well before the Bill reached Congress on October 12.67 Other COG projects implemented included the militarization of domestic surveillance under NORTHCOM, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Project Endgame—a ten-year plan to expand detention camps at a cost of $400 million in fiscal year 2007 alone.68

I have, therefore, a recommendation for the Occupy movement, rightfully incensed as it is with the plutonomic excesses of Wall Street over the last three decades. It is to call for an end to the state of emergency, which has been in force since 2001, under which since 2008 a U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team has been stationed permanently in the United States, in part to be ready “to help with civil unrest and crowd control.”69

Democracy-lovers must work to prevent the political crisis now developing in America from being resolved by military intervention.

Let me say in conclusion that for a half century American politics have been constrained and deformed by the unresolved matter of the Kennedy assassination. According to a memo of November 25 1963, from Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, it was important then to persuade the public that “Oswald was the assassin,” and that “he did not have confederates.”70 Obviously this priority became even more important after these questionable propositions were endorsed by the Warren Report, the U.S. establishment, and the mainstream press. It has remained an embarrassing priority ever since for all succeeding administrations, including the present one. There is for example an official in Obama’s State Department (Todd Leventhal), whose official job, until recently, included defense of the lone nut theory against so-called “conspiracy theorists”71

If Oswald was not a lone assassin, then it should not surprise us that there is continuity between those who falsified reports about Oswald in 1963, and those who distorted American politics in subsequent deep events beginning with Watergate. Since the deep event of 1963 the legitimacy of America’s political system has become vested in a lie -- a lie which subsequent deep events have helped to protect.72

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here http://www.peterdalescott.net/q.html

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, 'The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11,' The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 47 No 2, November 21, 2011.

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• Tim Shorrock, Reading the Egyptian Revolution Through the Lens of US Policy in South Korea Circa 1980: Revelations in US Declassified Documents
• C. Douglas Lummis, The United States and Terror on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11
• Peter Dale Scott, Rape in Libya: America’s recent major wars have all been accompanied by memorable falsehoods
• Peter Dale Scott, The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System
• Peter Dale Scott, Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?
• Herbert P. Bix, The Middle East Revolutions in Historical Perspective: Egypt, Occupied Palestine, and the United States

Notes
1 Tim Weiner, “The Pentagon’s Secret Stash,” Mother Jones Magazine Mar-Apr 1992, 26.
2 J.A. Myerson “War Is a Force That Pays the 1 Percent: Occupying American Foreign Policy,” Truthout, November 14, 2001, link. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 6, etc.
3 Scott, Road to 9/11, 22, 29, 98.
4 Scott, Road to 9/11, 22, 97.
5 Scott, Road to 9/11, 21, 51-52; Kristol as quoted in Lewis H. Lapham, “Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, a Brief History,” Harper’s Magazine, September 2004, 36.
6 E.g. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 204-05.
7 Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy, 354.
8 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33; Scott, The War Conspiracy, 387; Scott, American War Machine, 152.
9 Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City, MO:
Andrews, McMeel, and Parker, 1987), 268, quoted in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 389.
10 Scott, Deep Politics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129n; HSCA Critics Conference of 17 September 1977, 181,link. Stringfellow worked under Jack Revill in the Vice Squad of the DPD Special Services Bureau. As such he reported regularly to the FBI on such close Jack Ruby associates as James Herbert Dolan, a “known hoodlum and strong-arm man” on the FBI’s Top Criminal list for Dallas (Robert M. Barrett, FBI Report of February 2, 1963, NARA#124-90038-10026, 12 [Stringfellow]; cf. NARA#124-10212-10012, 4 [hoodlum], NARA#124-10195-10305, 9 [Top Criminal]). Cf. 14 WH 601-02 Ruby and Dolan]. Robert Barrett, who received Stringfellow’s reports to the FBI, had Ruby’s friend Dolan under close surveillance; he also took part in Oswald’s arrest at the Texas Theater, and claimed to have seen DPD Officer Westbrook with Oswald’s wallet at the site of the Tippit killing [Dale K. Myers, With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit (Milford, MI: Oak Cliff Press, 1998), 287-90]).
11 It was sent for information to Washington, which received it three days later (Scott, Deep Politics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129n; Scott, War Conspiracy, 382).
12 Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383. (Marina’s actual words, before mistranslation, were quite innocuous: “I cannot describe it [the gun] because a rifle to me like all rifles” (Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383; discussion in Scott, Deep Politics, 168-72).
13 Stringfellow himself was the source of one other piece of false intelligence on November 22: that Oswald had confessed to the murders of both the president and Officer Tippit (Dallas FBI File DL 89-43-2381C; Paul L. Hoch, “The Final Investigation? The HSCA and Army Intelligence,” The Third Decade, 1, 5 [July 1985], 3),
14 9 WH 106; Scott, Deep Politics, 275-76; Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 119-22.
15 Rodney P. Carlisle and Dominic J. Monetta, Brandy: Our Man in Acapulco (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 1999), 128.
16 Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 12. Cf. pp. 15-16: “The United States should intervene militarily in Cuba and could (a) engineer provocative incidents ostensibly perpetrated by the Castro regime to serve as the cause of invasion…”
17 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 568; James A. Nathan, The Cuban missile crisis revisited, 283; Waldron and Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy, 9.
[18 Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 12.
19 “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” NARA #202-10002-10018, 20. I see nothing in this document indicating that the President should be notified that these “fabricated provocations” were false. On the contrary, the document called for “compartmentation of participants” to insure that the true facts were not leaked (“Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” NARA #202-10002-10018, 19).
20 Quoted in Baker, Family of Secrets, 122. One of these, DPD Detective John Adamcik, was a member of the party which retrieved a blanket said to have contained Oswald’s rifle; and which the Warren Commission used to link Oswald to the famous Mannlicher Carcano. Adamcik was later present at Mamantov’s interview of Marina about the rifle, and corroborated Mamantov’s account of it to the Warren Commission. There is reason to believe that Mamantov’s translation of Marina’s testimony was inaccurate (Scott, Deep Politics, 268-70, 276).
21 See James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008).
22 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower:
Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 352–54 (FBI agent).
23 James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004, 224. For a fuller account of the CIA’s withholding before 9/11, see Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots; Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski, “Insiders Voice Doubts about CIA’s 9/11 Story,” Salon, October 14, 2011,link.
24 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 7-12, 142-47, etc.
25 Scott, American War Machine, 203.
26 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95. Quite independently, Richard Clarke, the former White House Counterterrorism Chief on 9/11, has charged that "There was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information" (Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski, “Insiders Voice Doubts about CIA’s 9/11 Story,” Salon, October 14, 2011).
27 Coll, 467-69.
28 Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 107-08.
29 James Bamford, Body of Secrets, 201. Cf. Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 200, citing John Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 51.
30 “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 1, 1963, JCS 2304/189, NARA #202-10002-10018, link.
31 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 280.
32 Public Law 90-331 (18 U.S.C. 3056); discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L.
Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random
House, 1976), 443–46.
33 Army intelligence agents were seconded to the Secret Service, and at this time there was a great increase in their number. The Washington Star later explained that “the big build-up in [Army] information gathering…did not come until after the shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King” (Washington Star, December 6, 1970; reprinted in Federal Data Banks Hearings, p. 1728).
34 George O’Toole, The Private Sector (New York: Norton, 1978), 145, quoted in
Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 278–79.
35 Scott, Road to 9/11, 52-53.
36 Scott, Road to 9/11, 53-54.
37 Scott, Road to 9/11, 50-64.
38 Peter Dale Scott, “Northwards without North,” Social Justice (Summer 1989). Revised as "North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011.
39 Scott, Road to 9/11, 132.
40 Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 13 (Contras); Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 93-102 (mujahedin).
41 Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 457-59, 534-36,
42 According to testimony from CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters, only “Hunt and McCord had ever been CIA full-time employees. The others [including Sturgis] were contract employees for a short duration or a longer duration” (Watergate Hearings, 3427). Cf. Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 45 (casino owners).
43 Peter Dale Scott, “From Dallas to Watergate,” Ramparts, December 1973; reprinted in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond, 356, 363.
44 Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 20.
45 Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 25-32, etc.
46 Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (London: Verso, 1998), 308-09; Martha Honey, Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994), 368 (Frigorificos).
47 Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974), 96-97.
48 Scott, American War Machine, 51-54. Hunt helped put together what became the drug-linked World Anti-Communist League. Artime’s Costa Rica base was on land whose owners were part of the local WACL chapter (Scott and Marshall,Cocaine Politics, 87, 220).
49 Woodward and Bernstein, All the President’s Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 23
50 Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York: Random House, 1984), 16, citing Department of Defense Directive 5230.7, June 25, 1965, amended May 21, 1971.
51 Peter Dale Scott, "North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, "Northwards Without North: Bush, Counterterrorism, and the Continuation of Secret Power." Social Justice (San Francisco), XVI, 2 (Summer 1989), 1-30; Peter Dale Scott, "The Terrorism Task Force." Covert Action Information Bulletin, 33 (Winter 1990), 12-15.
52 Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 140-41, 242 (Iran, etc.); Ola Tunander, The secret war against Sweden: US and British submarine deception in the 1980s, 309 (Sweden).
53 Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87.
54 Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 121.
55 “Statement by Col. John W. Mayo, Chairman of City-County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission at the Dedication of the Emergency Operating Center at Fair Park,” May 24, 1961, link.
Six linear inches of Civil Defense Administrative Files are preserved in the Dallas Municipal Archives; a Finding Guide is viewable online here. I hope an interested researcher may wish to consult them.
56 Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87.
57 Washington Post, May 10, 2007.
58 9/11 Report, 38, 326, 555n9; Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, 224.
59 Scott, Road to 9/11, 226-30. A footnote in the 9/11 Report (555n9) says:
“The 9/11 crisis tested the U.S. government’s plans and capabilities to ensure the continuity of constitutional government and the continuity of government operations. We did not investigate this topic, except as needed to understand the activities and communications of key officials on 9/11. The Chair, Vice Chair, and senior staff were briefed on the general nature and implementation of these continuity plans.”
The other footnotes confirm that no information from COG files was used to document the 9/11 report. At a minimum these files might resolve the mystery of the missing phone call which simultaneously authorized COG, and (in consequence) determined that Bush should continue to stay out of Washington. I suspect that they might tell us a great deal more.
60 “White House Communications Agency,” Signal Corps Regimental History, link.
61 The Warren Commission staff knew of the WHCA presence in Dallas from the Secret Service (17 WH 598, 619, 630, etc.).
62 Statement of Secret Service official Winston Lawson, 17 WH 630 (WHCA radio).
63 Pamela McElwain-Brown, “The Presidential Lincoln Continental SS-100-X,” Dealey Plaza Echo, Volume 3, Issue 2, 23,link (police radio); Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 272-75 (Lumpkin).
64 In the 1990s the WHCA supplied statements to the ARRB concerning communications between Dallas and Washington on November 22 (NARA #172-10001-10002 to NARA #172-10000-10008). The Assassination Records Review Board also attempted to obtain from the WHCA the unedited original tapes of conversations from Air Force One on the return trip from Dallas, November 22, 1963. (Edited and condensed versions of these tapes had been available since the 1970s from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.) The attempt was unsuccessful: “The Review Board’s repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes.” See Assassinations Records Review Board: Final Report, chapter 6, Part 1, 116, link. In November 2011 AP reported that Gen. Chester Clifton’s personal copy of the Air Force One recordings was being put up for sale, with an asking price of $500,000 (AP, November 15, 2011, link).
65 See Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 347-48, 385-87.
66 Washington Post, May 10, 2007.
67 Dick Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 348: “One of the first efforts we undertook after 9/11 to strengthen the country's defenses was securing passage of the Patriot Act, which the president signed into law on [sic] October 2001.” Cf. “The Patriot Act, which the president signed into law on October 2001,″ link; “Questions and Answers about Beginning of Domestic Spying Program; link.
68 Scott, Road to 9/11, 236-45; Peter Dale Scott, "Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution? Continuity of Government Planning, War and American Society," November 28, 2010, http:/1/japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3448.
69 “Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1,” Army Times, September 30, 2008, link. As part of the Army’s emergency plan GARDEN PLOT in the 1960s, there were until 1971 two brigades (4,800 troops) on permanent standby to quell unrest.
70 “Memorandum for Mr. Moyers” of November 25, 1963, FBI 62-109060, Section 18, p. 29, link. Cf. Nicholas Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 131-36.
71 Leventhal’s official title is (or was) “Chief of the Counter-Misinformation Team, U.S. Department of State” (link). In 2010 the U.S. State Department “launched an official bid to shoot down conspiracy theories….The "Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation" page… insists that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F Kennedy alone, and that the Pentagon was not hit by a cruise missile on 9/11” Daily Record [Scotland], August 2, 2010, (link). The site still exists here, (“Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored.”) The site still attacks 9/11 theories, but a page on the Kennedy assassination has been suspended (link). Cf. Robin Ramsay, “Government vs Conspiracy Theorists: The official war on "sick think,” Fortean Times, April 2010, link; “The State Department vs 'Sick Think'
The JFK assassination, 9/11, and the Tory MP spiked with LSD,” Fortean Times, July 2010, link; William Kelly, “Todd Leventhal: The Minister of Diz at Dealey Plaza,” CTKA, 2010, link.
72 For Nixon’s sensitivity concerning the Kennedy assassination, and the way this induced him into some of the intrigues known collectively as Watergate, see e.g. Scott, Hoch, and Stetler, The Assassinations, 374-78; Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-up (Santa Barbara, CA: Open Archive Press, 1993), 33, 64-66.

JFK, ONI & Captain Kirk

2011-11-19T18:20:00.000-08:00

Captain Alan Kirk - US Naval Attache - US Embassy, London - Later Director ONI

Kirk was later appointed US Ambassador to the Soviet Union and worked in psychological operations, organizing the staff of Radio Liberty and AMCOMLIB - the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism.

JFK, ONI and Captain Alan Kirk

According to the Raab Collection abstract related to the sale of the Air Force One Radio Transmission tape, JFK enlisted in the Navy with the help of Captain Alan Kirk, the Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence and a friend of JFK's father.

From his official record, Alan Kirk was indeed a Naval attache stationed at the US Embassy in England when JFK's father was the US Ambassador to the Court of St. James.

JFK was himself attached to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) until his escapades with a European beauty queen and North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) correspondent caught the attention of J. Edgar Hover. Since JFK's girlfriend had previously known Hitler from the Berlin Olympics, Hover suspected she was a spy, and reportedly tape recorded their interactions during a weekend at Charleston, South Carolina, after which JFK left ONI and assumed the command of PT-109 in the Pacific.

Alan Kirk also went on to become an important Naval officer during the war, commanding all US navy actions in the English Channel during he D-Day invasion of France.

Here's what the Raab report has to say, and the official background on Captain Kirk.

http://www.raabcollection.com/art-of-collecting/the-young-kennedy/

...seeing (as most did not) that the war was inevitably coming to America too, he determined to join the U.S. Navy. Since he had a bad back and was really a candidate for 4F status, Kennedy only managed to enlist with the active help of Captain Alan Kirk, the Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, a friend of his father, Joseph Kennedy. In October 1941, Kennedy was appointed an Ensign and joined the staff of the Office of Naval Intelligence. By the start of 1943, he was in the combat zone and was given command of a torpedo boat named PT-109…..

Alan Goodrich Kirk (born October 30, 1888, Philadelphia,Pennsylvania; died October 15, 1963, Washington, D.C.) was anadmiral in the United States Navy and an American diplomat.

Biography

He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1909 and served in the United States Navy during World War I and World War II. During his wartime naval service, Alan Kirk became the U.S. naval attaché in London (1939 to 1941). He was Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence from March 1941 but, obstructed and opposed by Rear Admiral Richmond Turner, he was unable to develop the office into an effective centre along the lines of the British Royal Naval Operational Intelligence Centre (which he had seen whilst in London). Eventually, he requested a transfer to an Atlantic destroyer squadron.

Kirk served as an amphibious commander in the Mediterranean in 1942 and 1943 (the Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy). In addition, he was the senior U.S. naval commander during the Normandy landings of June 6, 1944 embarked on the heavy cruiser USS Augusta (CA-31), and as Commander U.S. Naval Forces, France during 1944 and 1945. He retired from the Navy as a full admiral in 1946.

After retirement from the United States Navy, Kirk embarked on a diplomatic career, and subsequently served in several United States embassies abroad, beginning with the combined posting of U.S. Ambassador to Belgium/U.S. Envoy to Luxembourg (resident in Brussels, Belgium), 1946–49; as U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, July 4, 1949 to October 6, 1951; and finally as United States Ambassador to Taiwan, June 7, 1962 to January 16, 1963.

Admiral Alan G. Kirk took his post as the second president of Amcomlib, in February 1952. As a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, he oversaw the recruitment of emigres in New York and Munich, a group that would later form the core of Radio Liberty's staff. Less than a year after taking office, Kirk was forced to resign due to poor health. Also in 1952, he served briefly as Director of the Psychological Strategy Board, which planned for and coordinated government psychological operations.[2]

Gannon, Michael (1991). Operation Drumbeat. New York: Harper Collins. pp. 160–161. ISBN 0-06-092088-2.
"Staff Member and Office Files: Psychological Strategy Board Files". Harry S. Truman Presidential Library.
Kohnen, David, “Alan Goodrich Kirk: U.S. Navy Admiral of Intelligence and Diplomacy” in John Hattendorf and Bruce Elleman, eds., Nineteen Gun Salute: Profiles in U.S. Navy Leadership in Wartime Operations (Newport, Rhode Island: Naval War College Press, 2010), 75-92.

Media related to Alan Goodrich Kirk at Wikimedia Commons

Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio ... By Arch Puddington

http://books.google.com/books?id=bElE1TT5xFgC&pg=PA155&lpg=PA155&dq=Amcomlib&source=bl&ots=asoSBBVNHN&sig=gidTJbpEE4G8tOBiji__wi4OMak&hl=en&ei=ambITraLDoT10gHrv4j5Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=Amcomlib&f=false

The American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism began operations in 1950 and was officially incorporated in January 1951. Amcomlib did not begin operations with the fanfare and high visiblity that had marked the launching of the Radio Free Europe Committee. There were no public campaigns or crusades on Amcomlib's behalf. It did not send leading exiles on public speaking tours, nor did its board of directors consist of a blue-ribbon roster of eminent leaders from business, labor, the military, the press, and the entertainment world. Amcomlib's funds were provided exclusively by the American government through the budget of the Central Intelligence Agency. To question the source of the revenue, Amcomlib officials would say that the money was donated by wealthy individuals who were interested in the organization's mission. No names were mentioned, and reporters did not press the matter further.

The man responsible for assembling Amcomlib's board of directors was Franklin A. Lindsay, an aide to Frank Wisner at the Office of Policy Coordination. Whereas board members for the Free Europe Committee were selected for their wealth, public visibility, and influence in Washington, the principal criterion for membership on Amcomlib's board was familiarity with conditions in the Soviet Union.

The first chairman was Eugene Lyons, a Reader's Digest editor and former correspondent in Moscow who, having become disillusioned with the Soviet system, had written The Red Decade, a classic study of Communist influence in American culture....

Also on the board: William H. Chamberlain, William Y. Elliott (Harvard), William L. White (publisher of the Emporia Gazette in Kansas), Allen Grover (asst. to Henry Luce at Time)...

In announcing its formation, Amcomlib was blunt about its purpose: to provide assistance to anti-Communist exiles who were working for the overthrow of the Soviet regime...

Williams was soon replaced by Isaac Don Levine,...

Thomas Braden and Cord Meyer were the CIA officials responsible for the freedom radios.

The man responsible for assembling Amcomlib's board of directord, Franklin A. Lindsay, an aide to Frank Wisner at the Office of Policy Corrdination.

Howland H. Sargeant was the fourth Amcomlib chief, succeeded by Adm. Leslie C. Stevens

Also see:

Sparks of Liberty: An Insider's Memoir of Radio Liberty By Gene Sosin

http://books.google.com/books?id=d3u9Y3zuP5EC&pg=PA31&lpg=PA31&dq=Amcomlib&source=bl&ots=sKV1VsRBwD&sig=_TctSLrif4EPL3sOsZYLGy91gFY&hl=en&ei=ambITraLDoT10gHrv4j5Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CFYQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=Amcomlib&f=false

.

Air Force One Radio Call Signs/Code Key

2011-11-16T21:08:00.000-08:00

Radio Call Sign Code Identification Keys
(In the order of their use on the AF One Radio Tapes)

Zulu – Greenwich Mean Time – (Military 24 hour time)
AP - Associated Press (aka “the ticker”)
ETA – Estimated Time of Arrival.
On the block – Time of plane arrival at destination.

SAM 26000 - Two Six Thousand - The Presidential aircraft, when the President is not aboard.

Air Force One – AF1 - The Presidential aircraft, when the President is aboard.
Capt. James Swindal, pilot (AKA Tiger)
Master Sgt. John C Trimble and Joseph Ayres, radio operators.

SAM 86972 – (AKA 972) The State Department aircraft carrying the Press Secretary Salinger (Wayside), Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Agriculture Orville Freeman and other Cabinet members and Administration officials. When the assassination occurred, this aircraft was enroute from Hawaii to Japan; subsequent to the assassination, the aircraft returned to Hawaii to refuel, and then flew directly from Hickam AFB in Hawaii to Andrews AFB near Washington DC.

Andrews - Andrews Air Force Base (Md/DC). Airman Gilmore answers for Andrews AFB throughout the tape and appears to be the central player attempting to facilitate all patches.

Tanker - Major Michael Cook - Also at Andrews
Air Force Command Post – Sgt. Phillips. Major Benson
SAM Command Post - Special Air Mission, SAC Offut AFB, Omaha, Nebraska Col. Hornbuckle.
National Military Command Post – Pentagon, Washington DC
Crown – White House (aka Front Office)
Situation Room (Basement at Crown) – Oliver Hallett, USN/NSA McGeorge Bundy
Carswell – Carswell Air Force Base, Fort Worth, Texas.
Dallas – (Love Field, Dallas, Texas)
Hic Cup – Hickam Field, Hawaii.
CINCPAC – Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Command HQ.
Tokyo – Destination of Cabinet Plane (86972)
Valley – The Elms, LBJ DC Residence.
Liberty – Sideband Radio Relay Station – Collins Radio, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Wayside – Pierre Salinger, aboard 86970
Dagger – Rufus Youngblood, USSS
Digest – Roy Kellerman, USSS (Aboard AF1)
Duplex – Jerry Behn
Wing - Gen. McHugh. President's personal physician.
Watchman – Gen. Chester Clifton (Aboard AF1)
Slugger – Capt. Cecil Stoughton
Stranger – Major H. R. Patterson (White House Communications Agency WHCA)
Tanker – Air Force Major Michael Cook (Andrews)
Tiger – Col. Swindal, pilot, AF1.
Warrior – Malcolm Kilduff
Winner – Andrew Hatcher. Aka Andy. At Crown.
Witness – Capt. Tazewell Shepard (USN)
Volunteer – LBJ
Victoria – Lady Bird
Lancer - JFK
Charcoal - Present location of the President
Castle - Presiden't Naval Aid Taz Shephard
Lace – Mrs. Jackie Kennedy
Race - Unidentified
Tillerman - Unidentified
Sing Sing – Unidentified
Dean Rusk – Secretary of State (aboard 86972)
George Ball – Undersecretry of State
McGeorge Bundy – National Security Advisor to the President
Bromley Smith – Executive Secretary, National Security Council
Murray Jackson – State Department
Malcolm Kilduff – Assistant Press Secretary
Dr. John Walsh - D.C. Jackie Kennedy’s physician.
Vigilant - Walter Jenkins – LBJ’s Deputy (in DC)
Colonel Toomey – AF1
Col. Holland - AF1
Admiral Burkley – JFK’s private physician (Aboard AF1)
General Leonard Dudley Heaton – Surgeon General US Army (in DC)
Mrs. Rose Kennedy (JFK's mother in Massachusetts)
Mrs. J. B. Connally (Dallas)
Governor John Connally – (Parkland Hospital)
Scott - Radio Operator
Airman Stanz - Radio Operator
Newport Jerry – Radio Operator
Roy - Radio Operator
Weather Officer (at AF Command Post)

Additional Radio Communication Codes

Grandson - AF Gen. Curtis LeMay

LOCATIONS

Andrews AFB - Acrobat aka Andrews.
Auchincloss Estate - Hamlet
Camp David - Cactus
Command Post - SAM Special Air Mission CP - Offut AFB, Nebraska
Site R- Ft. Ritchie - Cosmic
Glen-Ora - Chateau (JFK's rural Va. residence)
Hic Cup - Hickam Field, Hawaii
High Point - Crystal
Liberty - Radio Relay Station, Collins Radio HQ, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Net Control – WHCA - Crown - White House
Olmstead AFB - Astro
Washington Field Office - Hedge
VP EOB - Valdosta
VP Capitol Office - Vendor
VP Senate Office - Valentine
VP Residence (Elms) - Valley LBJ's Home.
White House - Crown

CARS

Pres. Follow-up -Halfback
VP Follow-up -Varsity
Bomb Disposal -Hammer
Bomb Patrol -Halo

AIRCRAFT

Presidential - Angel SAM 26000 aka Air Force One when President on board
Vice Presidential - Angel Two

HELICOPTERS

Army-Davidson Field - Pat
Army-Anacostia - Alpha
Marine-Anacostia - Nighthawk
Air Force - Botany

FIRST FAMILY

President -Lancer
Mrs. Kennedy -Lace
Caroline -Lyric
John Jr. -Lark

VICE PRESIDENT’S FAMILY

Vice President -Volunteer
Mrs. Johnson -Victoria
Lynda Johnson -Velvet
Lucy Johnson -Venus

STAFF & AIDES

Kenneth O’Donnell -Wand
Pierre Salinger -Wayside
Andrew Hacker -Winner
Malcolm Kilduff -Warrior
Evelyn Lincoln -Willow
Dr. George Burkley -Market
Secretary Dean Rusk -Freedom
General Chester Clifton -Watchman
Capt. Tazewell Shepard -Witness
Gen. Godfrey McHugh -Wing
Walter Jenkins -Vigilant

CHIEF’S OFFICE

Chief Rowley -Domino
Deputy Chief Paterni -Diamond
Asst. Chief Wildy -Debate

WASHINGTON FIELD OFFICE

SAIC Geiglein -Diesel
ASAIC Dahlquist -Driftwood

WHITE HOUSE DETAIL

SAIC Behn -Duplex
ASAIC Boring -Deacon
ASAIC Kellerman -Digest
ATSAIC Stout -Dipole
ATSAIC Roberts -Dusty
ATSAIC Godfrey -Dangle
ATSAIC Rodham -Dogwood
SA Clint Hill -Dazzle
SA Paul Landis -Debut
SA Lynn Meredith -Drummer
SA Mugsy O’Leary -Dapper

VICE PRESIDENT’S DETAIL

SAIC Stuart Knight -Dividend
ASAIC Rufus Youngblood -Dagger
SA Paul Rundle -Dixie
SA Jerry Kivett -Daylight
SA Lemuel Johns -Dandy
SA Glen Weaver -Derby

BOATS

Crashboat PT 109 -Novice
Honey Fitz -Nomad
Patrick J -Neptune
Marlin -Marlin
Presidential chase -Horsewhip
Jet boats -Guardian 1 & 2
86’ Coat Guard -Waterwagon
33’ Navy -Rockfish
Vice President -Vanguard
VP Chase -Village

ABBREVIATIONS

AP - Associated Press (aka “the ticker”)
AFAUSSS -Association of Former Agents of the USSS
ASAIC -Assistant Special Agent in Charge
ATSAIC -Assistant to the SAIC
BOSSI -Bureau of Special Services and Investigations
EOB -Executive Office Building
ETA – Estimated Time of Arrival.
SAIC -Special Agent in Charge
PRS -Protective Research Section
WHCA -White House Communications Agency

[Some of these are from the Appendix of The Kennedy Detail – JFK’s Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence by Gerald Blaine with Lisa McCubbin (Gallery, Simon & Schuster, 2010).]