Jim
Garrison and the Still Secret JFK Files – Bill Kelly
When it
was suggested that a conference be held in New Orleans on the 2017 anniversary
of the Garrison investigation into the New Orleans aspects of the assassination,
I thought New Orleans a great place to hold a conference, as I look forward to
visiting all of the French Quarter bars that are mentioned in Garrison’s book
“On the Trail of the Assassins,” some of which are featured in Oliver Stone’s JFK
movie, which is based in part on that book.
There’s Tortorich’s
on Royal Street, where Garrison watched the breaking news of the assassination
on TV, the Katzenjammer Bar on Camp Street where Guy Bannister and Jack Martin
got drunk at the same time, the Bourbon House at Bourbon and St. Peter Streets
where Barbara Reid sat down with ex-marine buddies Kerry Thornley and Lee
Oswald over burgers and beers, Ryder’s Coffee House at Vieux Carre where
Thornley hung out, Broussard’s Restaurant where Garrison had lunch with Dean
Andrews, Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop where Garrison investigated the background
of “Clem Bertrand,” Cosimo’s on Burgandy Street where “Bertrnad” was identified
as Clay Shaw, the Masquerade Bar on St. Louis Street where Shaw was known by
the “Bertram” alias, and the Absinthe House, where Shaw and David Ferrie were
seen together. I was in New Orleans when Stone was filming JFK and visited some
of these haunts, but the Habana Bar, where Oswald was also known to drink
lemonade with the Cubans, is no longer there.
The
suggested date of a New Orleans conference – 2017, I noted, is also when,
according to the JFK Act of 1992, the still-sealed government records on the
assassination are scheduled to be released, and I recalled Garrison saying he
asked his son to be there when the secret records are released.
In
response, Don Carpenter wrote: “Bill, Just to add a little context, Garrison
died in Fall of 1992, before ARRB even began to crank up its very basic
operations. Garrison may have made the statement about all the still-sealed
documents as of 1992, or probably years before when he made the statement
(probably in the 1967-69 period), but most of whatever he was talking about has
already been released. He was not talking specifically about what is left to be
declassified, although I think we all are anxious to see if there is anything
in there.”
Carpenter
also said that he didn’t think “Garrison was on to something,” though he is
willing to be persuaded otherwise.
Well I
don’t think that the New Orleans crew that Garrison “was on to” – the same
Yahoos who carried out the Houma Bunker raid [ http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/05/houma-bunker-raid-revisted.html],
could have successfully pulled off the relatively complex Dealey Plaza covert operation,
which included the framing of Oswald, a professional Level One sniper taking
the head shot, a Northwoods-type disinformation twist to blame Castro and the
officially sanctioned cover-up that continues today. That’s a very
sophisticated operation, one well planned out in advance and not one that some
New Orleans Yahoos or the Mafia could have successfully pulled off. The Dealey
Plaza operation was successfully conducted by a domestic anti-Communist
intelligence network closely affiliated with the military-industrial complex that
continues to function today.
And I
think that what Garrison was “on to,” wasn’t the Bannister, Ferrie, Clay Shaw
and the Yahoos, but rather Garrison eventually realized was that Kennedy wasn’t
killed by a deranged lone nut, or even by the New Orleans contingent he tried
to prosecute – but what happened at Dealey Plaza was a covert coup conducted by
JFK’s rich and powerful enemies in Washington who were beyond his jurisdiction.
You can
argue over whether Garrison was “on to something” or not, but what he says
rings true –
“More
than anything,” Garrison wrote, “what has changed in the years since President
Kennedy’s assassination is our national consciousness. We have been through so
much. There were, for example, the assassinations of Medgar Evers, MLK, RFK and
Malcolm X. There were assassination attempts on presidential candidate George
Wallace and presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. We lived through nine horrifying
years of the Vietnam War, the trauma of Watergate, the revelations during the
1970s about the CIA, and more recently the Iran/contra affair. This
extraordinary succession of events has ended our innocence. Looking back today
with new information and new insights, it is possible to put together an
informed historical speculation of what happened to President Kennedy and why.
I believe that what happened at Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963 was
a coup d’etat. I believe that it was instigated and planned long in advance by
fanatical anticommunists in the U.S. intelligence community, that it was
carried out, most likely without official approval, by individuals in the
C.I.A.’s covert operations apparatus and other extra-governmental
collaborators, and covered up by like-minded individuals in the F.B.I., the
Secret Service, the Dallas Police Department, and the military, and that its
purpose was to stop Kennedy from seeking détente with the Soviet Union and Cuba
and ending the Cold War.”
“This
coup d‘etat had accomplished its objective with clock-work precision. The life
had been ripped from the chief executive of the United States government, and
major changes in American foreign policy would be arriving not in months or
weeks, but in the next several days. Meanwhile, the cover-up was progressing…As
soon as the non-participating elements in the intelligence community saw that a
coup d’etat had occurred, they moved quickly to support the official story.
Motivated in some instances by self-preservation and in others by a belief that
Kennedy had brought the assassination on
himself by compromising too often with the Soviets, the remainder of the
government – from high elected officials to heads of departments and agencies –
lined up to add their solemn voices to the growing chorus chanting the great
lie.”
“With
the murder plainly unsolved, a succession of Presidents and attorneys general,
each with the resources of the F.B.I. and the entire federal government at
their command, made no effort to get to the truth. …dissemination of
disinformation is the last element necessary for a successful coup d’etat, and
it also happens to be one of the specialties of the C.I.A. For many years the
Agency secretly had on its payroll journalists ostensibly working for the major
media but in fact disseminating propaganda for consumption by the American
people…”
“The
original false sponsor was the scapegoat himself, Lee Harvey Oswald…formally
endorsed by the Warren Commission…However, over time it became increasingly
apparent that the lone assassin fairy tale had fallen apart, and most of its
supporters simply fell silent…One of the most intriguing false sponsors is
Fidel Castro…Of course, the primary and most lasting false sponsor has been
organized crime, the Mafia, the mob….Upon close examination,…the false sponsors
all fall of their own weight. What remains as the only likely sponsor with both
the motive and the capability of murdering the President is the covert action
arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. Invisible as it is dangerous, the
covert operations apparatus of the C.I.A. has become the most powerful element
in the intelligence community….Is all of this possible? It might not have
seemed so 25 years ago. However, now that we know some of the true history of
the C.I.A. and its covert operations, the answer is a distinct yes.
Assassination is precisely what the Agency knows how to do and what it has done
all over the world for policy ends.”
“With
the passage of time, we can see the enduring results of President Kennedy’s
assassination…The Justice Department, knowing all that we know now, still refuses
to conduct an honest investigation intot he most important political
assassination of our time….It may be too late. However it is not too late for
us to learn the lessons of history, to understand where we are now and who runs
this country…”
From “On the Trail of the Assassins” (Chapter
20, The Secret Sponsors, p. 320-347)
While I
disagree with Garrison in that the C.I.A.’s covert operational branch was the
only intelligence network capable of such covert operations – the military is
also proficient at such tactics, recognizing the assassination as a coup d’etat
and the Modus Operandi of the murder as that of a covert intelligence operation
are significant steps in figuring out what really happened and determining the
truth.
And what
Garrison says about the sealed government files is pertinent and significant, and
I quickly found the correct quote thanks to Dave Reitzes, who also thought
important enough to quote and try to denigrate when wrote “The JFK 100 – Suppressed
Investigative Files” http://www.jfk-online.com/jfk100files.html,
where he refers to the part of Oliver
Stone’s JFK film where Garrison mentions the secret files. Reitzes specifically
quotes the part I was referring to when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison
(Kevin Costner) delivers a monologue about evidence being concealed by the
federal government:
“Let’s
ask the two men who have profited the most from the assassination – your former
President Lyndon Baines Johnson and your new President, Richard Nixon – to
release 51 CIA documents pertaining to Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby, or the secret
CIA memo on Oswald’s activities in Russia that was ‘destroyed’ while being
photocopied. All these documents are yours – the people’s property – you pay
for it, because the government considers you children who might be too
disturbed to face this reality, because you might lynch those involved, you
cannot see these documents for another 75 years. I’m in my 40s, so I’ll have shuffled off this moral coil by
then, telling my 8-year old son to keep himself physically fit so that one
glorious September morning in 2038 he can walk into the National Archives and
find out what the CIA and FBI knew. They may even push it back then. It may
become a generational affair with questions passed down from father to son,
mother to daughter, in the manner of the ancient runic bards. Someday,
somewhere, someone might find out the damned Truth. Or we might just build
ourselves a new Government like the Declaration of Independence says we should
do when the old one ain’t working....” (1)
Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK:
The Book of the Film (New York, Applause, 1992), p. 178.
Rather
than pushing the release date back, as Garrison surmises, public pressure generated
by Stone’s filim made them move it forward, so the 75 years the Warren Commission
records were sealed, and the 50 years the HSCA records were sealed, have been superseded
by the JFK Act of 1992 that stipulates all the records be released by 2017 – or
withheld only by an order from the president, whoever she may be.
So
Garrison’s son doesn’t have to wait as long as Big Jim thought.
And I
like Garrison’s suggestion that we ask the President to release the still
secret records, something Obama can easily do with a simple Executive Order.
In his
article Reitzes asks, “Has the government really been withholding evidence of
conspiracy?”
And the
answer clearly is yes, even if one sticks only to the Warren Commission era
records Garrison was talking about – and I will only mention three – the
document that the Warren Commission lawyer was reading when he was recorded as
saying: “We’ll have to find out what Oswald studied at the Monterey Institute” (now
the Defense Language Institute), and the ONI and USMC investigative records and
reports, but there are others.
Reitzes is
a one-time Conspiracy Theorist who is now a Lone Nutter, and like many religious
converts, he is a true believer who quotes Gus Russo and John McAdams. And I take exception to John McAdams’
statements about Garrison, specifically the comparison of Garrison’s reference
to “51 CIA documents pertaining to Oswald and Jack Ruby” and Joe McCarthy’s bogus
communists in the State Department, as McCarthy’s number was made up and the
communists boogey men didn’t really exist, while the secret records Garrison
refers to do exist, and in fact he lists some of them. Rather than Joe
McCarthy, Garrison’s role in the Kennedy assassination is more comparable to
the cases of Sacco and Vanzetti or the Dreyfus Affair, in which the truth
eventually emerges over time, as it is with the assassination of President
Kennedy.
Reitzes
also quotes McAdams’ examples of the NARA declassification of other government
records, specifically those of the Fish and Game Commission, but I wonder if
Reitzes, McAdams or any JFK researcher has investigated the presence of Texas
Fish and Game officers in the Texas School Book Depository within minutes of
the assassination, and whether or not any of them testified or wrote reports of
what they were doing and what they discovered there?
SOMETHING
FISHY IN THE FILES
As for
Garrison’s references to the secret records, in his books Heritage of Stone and On the
Trail of the Assassins (p. 54-55), Garrison lists a series of Warren
Commission documents that were still sealed away from public view when he wrote
those books, including:
CD 321
Chronology of Oswald in USSR (Secret)
CD 347
Activity of Oswald in Mexico City (Secret)
CD 384
Activity of Oswald in Mexico City (Secret)
CD 528
re: Allegations Oswald interviewed by CIA in Mexico City (Secret)
CD 631
re: CIA Dissemination of information on Oswald (Secret)
CD 674
info given to the Secret Service but not yet to the Warren Commission (Secret)
CD 698
Reports of travel and activities of Oswald & Marina (Secret)
CD 871
Photos of Oswald in Russia (Secret)
CD 931
Oswald’s access to information about the U2 (Secret)
CD 1216
Memo from Helms entitled “Lee Harvey Oswald” (Secret)
CD 1222
Statement by George de Mohrenschildt re: assassination (Secret)
CD 1273
Memo from Helms re: apparent inconsistencies in info provided by CIA (Secret)
Garrison
also writes (On the Trail of the
Assassins, p. 72) that, “As a routine matter, I wanted to examine the
income tax records of Ruth and Michael Paine, but I was told that they had been
classified secret. In addition to the Paine’s income tax reports, Commission
documents 212, relating to Ruth Paine, and 218, relating to Michael Paine, also
had been classified as secret on the grounds of national security. Classified
for the same reason were Commission documents 258, relating to Michael, and
508, relating to Michael Paine’s sister, as well as Commission documents 600
through 629, regarding relatives of Michael Paine. What was so special about
this particular family that made the federal government so protective of it?”
“This
provocative listing,” Garrison wrote, “made it appear more to me than ever that
something was fishy. Next I decided to focus on Oswald’s movements immediately
after he left the Marines.”
Now I’m
pretty sure some of these “secret” records have been released under the JFK
Act, and will check with Mary Ferrell Archives and NARA to see if they are now
available, but I too am interested in focusing on Oswald’s movements
immediately after the assassination, which I will get to.
But
first, it should be noted that Reitzes falsely answers his question “Has the
government really been withholding evidence of conspiracy?” by quoting longtime
researcher and JFK movie consultant Gus Russo, who says that the film he
consulted on is “misleading,” and Russo has since been exposed as a witting CIA
asset who continues to promote the discredited original operational cover story
that Castro was behind the assassination.
Reitzes
quotes Russo as saying that when he heard Stone talk about “the sinister
sealing of the Warren Commission records for seventy-five years. I was stunned.
Although that had been President Johnson’s original intention, public pressure
had actually forced the release of most of the Commission’s records within
three years of the 1963 murder.”
Actually,
it wasn’t public pressure – like that generated by Stone’s film that resulted
in the JFK Act, but many of the Warren Commission records were released because
of the single letter from Cedar Rapids, Iowa mayor Johnson that led to the
reversal of the seventy-five year policy.
A disgruntled
Allen Dulles reluctant said, “Go ahead and release them, nobody will read them
anyway.”
Russo
relates in his book http://www.mtgriffith.com/web_documents/russo.htm, how he “managed to pull Stone aside,
and informed him that the records we investigators really coveted were the
HSCA’s sealed files, numbering hundreds of thousands of pages, as well as those
of other federal agencies whose holdings could be in the millions of pages….”
I was
among those infuriated when HSCA chief counsel G. Robert Blakey declared the
committee records “Congressional records,” which sealed them for fifty years
and since Congress exempted itself from the FOIA Act, kept them from the
public. Blakey did this while saying, “I’ll rest on the judgment of historians
in fifty years.”
Indeed,
“we investigators” weren’t going to rest on the judgment of historians in fifty
years, and particularly coveted the House Select Committee (HSCA) records, and devised
congressional legislation specifically to get the HSCA records exempted from
the congressional rule that mandated all congressional records be sealed for
fifty years.
When I
asked Marion Johnson, the NARA archivist then responsible for the JFK
assassination records, - why fifty years? Why not thirty five or seventy
years?, Johnson replied “that is the estimated amount of time the people
mentioned in the documents would be dead.”
So they
time the release of these documents so that the people mentioned in them are
dead and can’t be questioned.
But under
public pressure sparked by the release of the JFK movie, which mentions the
secret and sealed records at the end of the film, Congress passed a law that released
not only the House Committee records we asked for, but all government records
related to the assassination, which is much more than we had requested. That was
still limiting though, as the HSCA MLK records remain sealed to this day.
But yes,
we investigators coveted the HSCA records more than the Warren Commission
documents, most of which have been released, but those that are still withheld
are among the most sacred secret records that are still threatening to our
national security today, over fifty years after the assassination.
Russo says
that he conferred with respected Washington investigator, the late Kevin Walsh,
who gave him a letter that “corroborated” what Russo had been saying, a letter Russo
hand delivered to Stone – but not shared with us. And it is a shame on Russo
that we can’t take his word for it.
BK
Notes: Is Kevin Walsh’s letter to Oliver Stone about the still secret
assassination records on the public record and available today? Someone sent me
scans of dozens of letters written by Walsh, and I will check to see if that
one is among them, but I don’t think it is.
And to
show why the HSCA records are more valuable than the Warren Commission records
I refer to the one HSCA document that I am working on at the moment, a once
sealed document that indicates Lee Oswald, USMC flew to Europe on a Military
Air Transport flight out of McGuire Air Force Base NJ in on his way to defect
to the Soviet Union in October 1959, which contradicts the official version of
events that he took a tramp steamer.
But
incredibly enough, the records of that flight may still exist, and two of the
people mentioned in the official congressional report may still be alive to
confirm this story, over fifty years after it occurred.
In any
case, the HSCA records are much more valuable than the Warren Commission
records and the still secret Church Committee documents are probably even more
enlightening, but we have to wait until 2017 to see them, and as Garrison says,
when 2017 rolls around, their release may be pushed back even further by the
sitting president.
Reitzes also
quotes Michael R. McReynolds, of the NARA Textual Reference Division, who said that
as of 1992, 98 percent of the Warren Commission records had been released.
Of
course the 98 percent of the Warren Commission records released so far don’t
include the Monterey Language Institute document or the ONI and USMC
investigative reports we seek, and they are now saying the same thing about all
of the government records released under the JFK Act - millions of them - 98
percent of all government records on the assassination are now in the public
domain, but they don’t tell you that there are so many documents still being
withheld that they can’t tell us how many there are.
“Since
that time, of course,” Reitzes falsely writes, “some may have noticed that
Oliver Stone hasn’t said a word about those files. That’s because they prove his JFK monologue to be little more than hot
air, there were no documents withheld because they were ‘smoking guns’ proving
the existence of a conspiracy.”
If
Garrison’s monologue is little more than hot air, then Reitzes’ is hog’s breath,
and only proves that he hasn’t bothered to read the documents released so far.
Of course Stone has talked about those files – he testified before Congress about
them [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddlSwJ3uuuM
] and continues to talk about them [See: Stone at Wecht Conference]. Stone said
he didn’t expect any “smoking gun” documents to be found, but instead thought
that the existing records would be like the frame of a Mercedes Benz left on a
street in Harlem for thirty years, stripped of all its value, which is exactly
what we found.
And even
though Reitzes is unaware of them, there certainly are “smoking” documents
among the secret and once-sealed records that support, if not prove the fact
there were criminal conspiracies committed – such as ONI Director Rufus
Taylor’s November 27th memo.
It indicates there is a large and still missing ONI file on the assassination and Col.
Higgins’ report of the September 24 1963 CIA briefing of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff
It confirms that the military was
giving support to the CIA Cuban operations and that they were conducting a
Valkyrie type plot aimed at Castro – one based on the German generals’ plan to
kill Hitler, the specific operation that I believe was diverted to Dealey
Plaza.
Where
there’s smoke there’s fire, not fish, and if they’ve released such smoking
documents already, you can be sure the records still being withheld for reasons
of national security will certainly threaten the very nature of the state.
As for
Don Carpenter saying “we’re all anxious to see what’s there,” well we pretty much
know what’s there, as we have all of the denials of requests for documents –
such as the ONI Defector file, the documents on Ruth and Michael Paine, Collins
Radio, Air Force One and not dozens, but hundreds of similar records that have
been denied researchers since the passage of the JFK Act.
So now I’m
going to try to take Garrison’s advice and try to stay healthy so in late September
2017 I can stand with his son and if the president will let us, we will finally
get to read some of the records that the government refuses to let us see today.
William
Kelly is a freelance writer and historian, author of “300 Years at the Point”
and “Birth of the Birdie,” co-founder of the Committee for an Open Archives
(COA) and an original member of COPA – the Coalition On Political Assassinations
[COPA | Coalition on Political Assassinations ]. He can be reached at Billkelly3@gmail.com.
.jpg)
