A Dealey Plaza Homily - A Spiritual Dimension to the Assassination

A DEALEY PLAZA HOMILY - A Spiritual Dimension to the Assassination 




Father Albert Pereria and the Catholic missal used to swear in LBJ as president 

There is a spiritual dimension to what occurred at Dealey Plaza, as brought out by a number of priests who became entwined in the assassination drama.

The term “propaganda” stems from the department of the Vatican responsible for the propagation of the faith. 

On JFK’s last morning on earth he woke up at the Fort Worth Hotel, and took off his St. Christopher and Miraculous medals while he took a shower, and acidently left them there, where they were retrieved by a Secret Service agent, to be returned to JFK, but not before he was killed.

When Federal Judge Sarah Hughes arrived aboard Air Force One to administer the oath of office for the President, they frantically looked for a bible, and instead found a Catholic prayer missal on the table next to the president’s bed and used that instead – “so help me God.”

Hughes then handed the missal to someone and left the plane, as LBJ said, “Now let’s get airborne.”

The missal disappeared for some years and then turned up in Texas and is now on display at the LBJ Library.

It is believed the missal was a gift to the president from Father Albert Pereira, who administered to the small parish of St. Stephen the Martyr in Millersburg, Virginia, population 1,000, where JFK and his family spent their weekends away from Washington.  Millersburg is considered “horse country,” where Jackie and the kids would ride while the president relaxed or played golf. At first they leased an estate called Glenn Ora, where RFK would also visit, and where Desmond FitzGerald said he often called RFK to discuss covert operations against Castro, including CIA plots to kill Castro. Father Pereira became a spiritual advisor to both JFK and RFK and presided over the baptism of some of RFK’s kids.

With the president in attendance, every Sunday in October and November 1963, the church was renovated to include an area enshrined in bullet proof glass and a direct telephone line to the White House.

When the Kennedys arrived in Millersburg in 1961 the small but wealthy town was segregated, as was most of the South, and when one of the Kennedy’s black servants was refused service at a local lunch counter, word got around and the local NAACP planned a sit in. Father Pereira then went to all of the local business owners and convinced them that it would be best for them to end the segregation and to serve blacks, and they agreed to cooperate, ending the threat of a sit-in.

So it is believed that JFK’s Catholic missal, used to swear in LBJ as president, was a gift to the president from Father Pereira, who died on March 8, 2004 at the age of 88. The son of a carpenter, one of eleven children born on May 12, 1915 in Funchal, Maderia island, a territory of Portugal, he came to the United States as a child in 1920 and attended St. Charles seminary in Baltimore, where my uncle Skip Haynes was also trained as a priest.

[Note: it is not believed that Father Pereira is related to Victor Pereira, Jim Braden’s partner in crime, but he could be.]

A Jesuit priest Father Quintin Walsh instigated my interest in politics by teaching a 1968 political science class at Camden Catholic high school. Walsh chain smoked, drank wine and cursed frequently while making us read the classic Greek and European philosophers and requiring us to write a constitution for a fictional country. I chose a dictator, a benevolent one. 

The Cambridge spy ring was run and controlled for many years by Theodore Maly, a Catholic priest. Cambridge had been a recruiting ground for centuries, as in 1581 Robert Persons, a Catholic cleric and head of the Jesuit order wrote that, "At Cambridge I have insinuated a certain priest into the very university, under the guise of scholar or gentleman commoner," who was a successful recruiter. 

Just as the Russian Orthodox Church inside the Soviet Union was considered a branch of the KGB, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia was embraced by the CIA, and financed in part by the CIA's Catherwood Foundation. 

The use of refugees for intelligence purposes is older than the CIA as Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen, as head of intelligence for the German Armies on the Eastern Front, he established Operation Wringer, to debrief refugees from Russia and Eastern European countries. It was reported that they sometimes obtained the best intelligence from children. 

Obtaining intelligence from exiled refugees from Communist countries was incorporated into the founding of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), led by Leo Cherne, a close personal friend of Conservative commentator and spy William F. Buckley, Jr..  From Russia former Marine defector wrote to Cherne and the IRC on three occassions seeking aide in returning home. 

In Dallas there were two Orthodox churches, the St. Nicholas parish, which was composed entirely of exiled White Russians who took measures to prevent their infiltration by communists agents, and St. Seraphim, which catered to Russians and Orthodox from other countries, including Mexico. 

And while Lee Harvey Oswald’s family was under the care of exiled White Russians in Dallas, his daughter June Lee was baptized in that Church by Father Dimitri Royster.  Royster joined the Army in 1943 and served as a Japanese interpreter on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines and Japan. 

FATHER SKIP'S HOMELY 

My late uncle Father Steven “Skip” Haynes, became a Catholic priest late in life, after working at the Philadelphia Bulletin newspaper for over 20 years. After I attended his first mass at a Baltimore, Maryland seminary, he sent me a homily he wrote and delivered at a later mass, one that described my work as a JFK assassination researcher.

A homily is “a religious discourse that is intended primarily for spiritual edification rather than doctrinal instruction; a sermon.”

Father Skip, as we called him, said that the work I was doing in trying to get the release of all of the government’s records on the assassination of President Kennedy was very much like the biblical story of the blind men and the elephant, in which each of the blind men described a different part of the elephant in very different terms – but each accurately described a portion of the body.

In a sense what we are doing now in reviewing the most recently released records from the Archives is much like that of the blind men and the elephant, as we feel out and learn more about how JFK was killed, putting together the pieces to the puzzle of the elephant in the archives. Which is very similar to what are doing by reading and reassembling the government’s records on the assassination.

Jim Douglas, author of “JFK-And the Unspeakable – Why He Died and Why it Matters,” was inspired to write his book by his correspondence with a Catholic priest – Thomas Merton, a monk whose correspondence with Douglas led to the idea of the “unspeakable.”

In 1961 Douglas began a correspondence with Merton, then at the monastery of the Abbey of Gehsemani in Kentucky. According to Douglas, "'The Unspeakable,' is a term Thomas Merton coined at the heart of the sixties after JFK's assassination - in the midst of escalating Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, and the further assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. In each of those soul-shaking events Merton sensed an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe."

In 1965 Merton wrote: Öne of the awful acts of our age is the evidence that the world is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable. Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of the Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see." 

"Ït is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said," Merton wrote, "the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss."

As Douglas explain it, "By overlooking the deep changes in Kennedy's life and the forces behind his death, I contributed to a national climate of denial. Our collective denial of the obvious, in the setting up of Oswald and his transparent silencing by Ruby, made possible the Dealey Plaza cover-up. The success of the cover-up was the indispensable foundation for the subsequent murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy by the same forces at work in our government - and in ourselves...The cover-up of all four murders, each leading into the next, was based, first of all, on denial - not the government's but our own. The unspeakable is not far away."

Douglas dedicates his book to Vincent Salandria, the Philadelphia attorney who adamantly fought Arlen Spector, and then, before he died, had lunch with and buried the hatchet with a mutual understanding of what really happened, not only at Dealey Plaza, but with the cover up of the true facts of the assassination.

Actor Richard Beymer, best known for his starring roles in The Longest Day and West Side Story, is mentioned in some of the recently released records because he contacted the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, a phone call that was picked up by a CIA listening post. Like Oswald, Beymer wanted to travel to Cuba, contacted Sylvia Duran and was said to have been at the Twist Party that Oswald allegedly attended. Beymer was accompanied by another Yankee Gringo, Bradley Pierce, who at the time owned a New York City bar, but is now Father Bradely, a Catholic priest.

Sylvia Odio and John Martino, both implicated in the assassination, were advised by Father McChann, a Catholic priest assigned to cater to the Cuban refugee community in Dallas and New Orleans.

Odio confessed to McChann that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of the President, had visited her with two Cubans, a fact that she also told her father about in a letter she wrote to him in a Cuban prison, where he was incarcerated for harboring an assassin who planned to kill Castro.

After sharing a stage in Dallas with John Martino, who was promoting his book “I Was Castro’s Prisoner,” Father Machann disappeared shortly after the assassination and surfaced at a Catholic school in New Orleans, and cooperated with the Secret Service in questioning Odio about Oswald and the Cubans. 

In New Orleans Machann went to Loyola University and visited Dr. Agustin Guitart, a physics professor and associate of the Cubans arrested with Oswald, who attended the court hearing. 

MacChann then left the priesthood and moved to Thailand.

In an Irish Echo (November 2017) article about his survey of the recently released and previously secret files on the assassination, Professor James Kelleher wrote about what he calls “junk” among the recently released records. Kelleher wrote:  “I also found a significant number of documents that left me questioning why the documents were included in a records release dealing with the assassination of President Kennedy, and why it was necessary to have kept them secret for so many years. Some of the documents appear to be totally unrelated to the assassination and deal with matters such as medical care reimbursements for Cuban exiles working with the CIA. Such documents offer little more value than that of wasting the researcher’s time.”

While there are many documents unrelated to the assassination among the recently released records, such as the many records on Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights and anti-war demonstrations and those considered and labeled NBR-Not Believed Relevant by the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB), as Judge John Tunheim recently noted, many of these records are indeed relevant to the assassination.

For instance the documents on Collins Radio were labeled NBR by the ARRB but since Collins Radio made the radios and monitored the Air Force One radio communications, the recently released records are relevant in that they reflect the close association Collins Radio shared with other major defense contractors such as LTV and General Dynamics. 

As for the example Professor Keheller gives – the records on the medical expenses of exiled Cubans working for the CIA, they reflect an important part of the intelligence network responsible for what happened at Dealey Plaza.

Although Kim Philby knew about CIA’s use of ostensibly philanthropic foundations to finance covert operations, such as the Catherwood Fund, the American people didn’t know about it until the Ramparts magazine expose. When I first learned about the Catherwood Fund being a CIA conduit I went to the newspaper archives and read all of the news reports about its activities, and was not surprised to see that the CIA, through the Catherwood Fund, established organizations such as the Cuban Aid Relief to assist refugees.

And since most if not all of the Cuban refugees who worked with the CIA were Catholic, it wasn’t surprising to see the CIA’s financial support of Catholic Welfare and the funding of a number of medical clinics to cater to the Cuban refugees in Miami, New Orleans and Dallas.

Just as CIA agents and operatives use CIA connected lawyers, when they need one, they also use CIA dentists and doctors, and hence, the CIA supported medical clinics that catered to the refugees is relevant to the assassination, in that it is a branch of the network that is responsible for the murder of the president.

A Cuban in New Orleans Luis Rebel Nunes, used a laundry truck borrowed from the Catholic Church relief society to remove the arms and ammunition in the Houma Bunker raid shortly before the Bay of Pigs, a truck that was also said to be at Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination.

In Miami, shortly after the assassination, Dr. Jose Ignorzio, the chief of clinical psychology for the CIA financed Catholic Welfare Service, contacted the White House to inform the new administration that the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had met directly with Cuban ambassador Armas when he was in Mexico City, a story also propagated by associates of Sylvia Duran. 

That Oswald was the assassin and Castro was behind the assassination were very detailed and elaborate black propaganda operations, - that failed, but because they failed they give us some insight into the network that was responsible for what happened at Dealey Plaza.

So there is hope, and the belief that the assassination is not an unsolvable crime that can't be understood, but thanks in part to the release of the once secret records, we can put the pieces of the Dealey Plaza puzzle together and figure it out to a legal and moral certainty.

Martin Luther King, Jr., who was inspired to make civil rights a part of his ministry, once gave a speech on non-violent protests to a conference of Quakers in which he quoted an old Baptist minister who didn’t have command of the King’s English, but got his point across when he said: “Let judgement rain down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. Lord, we ain’t what we want to be, we ain’t what we ought to be, we aint’ what we wanna be, but thank God we ain’t what we were.”

In a sense that’s where we are, much more wiser than we were in 1963, but we don’t yet have a clear picture of the elephant in the archives that tells us what really happened at Dealey Plaza that day.

Jeff Morley's "Ghost"

Bill Kelly’s review of Jefferson Morley’s Ghost – the biography of James Jesus Angleton (St. Martin’s Press, 2017)

“A house has many rooms. I was not privy to who shot John.” – James J. Angleton

The spy was known as ARTIFICE – a fly fisherman and grower of champion orchids. 

I first took interest in him while reading David Martin’s “Wilderness of Mirrors,” that gave new insight into the secret mechanisms of the espionage game during the Cold War, which I am convinced, is at the heart of the assassination of President Kennedy, a still unresolved mystery. This book makes it less so.

Along with Bill Simpich’s “State Secret” and John Newman’s new series of books on the assassination, there should be great interest in Jeff Morley’s “Ghost – The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton” (St. Martin’s Press, NY, 2017), especially after the official CIA historian’s objections, which make the book so much more glaringly brilliant. It reminds me of the attacks on Oliver Stone’s film “JFK” before it was released and exposes those who still defend those who got away with killing a president.

After working as a reporter and editor at the Washington Post in its glory days, Morley has written a few really good books – Our Man in Mexico – and Snow Storm in August – both of which sufficiently fit their roles in explaining important but previously ignored persons and incidents in American history.

Angleton hasn’t been that ignored, but until now we have not really understood his many roles in the OSS – Office of Strategic Services during World War II, CIA Counter-Intelligence chief during the Cold War, primary liaison to the Isralie’s Mossad, monitoring defectors, especially the accused assassin of President Kennedy, and his contributions to the Warren Commission and the cover-up of the true account of what happened at Dealey Plaza.

What Morley brings out clearly is the fact that Angleton’s primary OSS mentor at British Intelligence in the early days of World War II was Kim Philby, one of the most notorious double-agents of all time, and after the war, it was Angleton’s job as chief of Counter-intelligence to expose those double-agents. But he didn’t.

It was Philby who revealed in his book “My Silent War,” that Frank Wisner explained to him how the infant CIA was going to use ostensibly philanthropic non-profit foundations as cover for the disbursing of funds for covert intelligence operations – like the Catherwood Foundation. That was something the Russians knew from the beginning, but kept secret from the American people for years.

Philby wasn’t alone but was part of a Soviet intelligence network started at Cambridge University where also included Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess, among others, and they all got together again in Washington where Philby was posted as MI6 representative to the CIA. Philby and Angleton had daily three martini lunches, and it was at a party at Philby’s flat where Burgess had moved in, and where William Harvey began to unmask Philby as a double agent.

A notorious homosexual drunk, Burgess was his usual self at the January 1951 party at 5100 Nebraska Ave., when Burgess drew an unforgiving profile of Harvey’s wife, that almost resulted in a fist fight, and like the Twist Party in Mexico City and the other party with an assassin’s twist where Oswald was encouraged to kill General Walker, this party remains a classic as it was the end of Philby’s best role.

As Morley notes, “After the war Harvey had identified a network of supposedly loyal Americans including a handful from OSS – who were actually reporting to Moscow.”

After Harvey set his sights on Philby and his friends, Burgess and MacLean suddenly disappeared and surfaced in Moscow, followed shortly thereafter by Philby, Angleton’s mentor and friend.

Another good friend of Angleton, Cord Meyer, Jr., also fits into the Dealey Plaza story at different times and places, and Angleton’s possession of Mary Meyer’s diary has yet to be fully explained.

According to someone who worked with him, Angleton “had the ability to raise an operation discussion – not only to a higher level, but to another dimension,” and that dimension is something we must come to know before we can really understand what happened at Dealey Plaza and the continuing implications today.

As Angleton himself said, “I don’t think the Oswald case is dead. There are too many leads that were never followed. There’s too much information that has developed.”

Among the too much new information that has developed is the fact that Oswald’s file was kept by Angleton in the CI office at CIA, rather than the Soviet Division section where it rightfully belonged.

Angleton’s office kept close track of Oswald, from Moscow to Minsk, Fort Worth to New Orleans, Mexico City and Dallas, they knew where he was and what he was up to, if they didn’t actually control his movements, as they could if he was an agent, operative or asset, as many believe he was.

As Morley asks: “All of which begs the harder question: was Angleton running Oswald as an agent as part of a plot to assassinate president Kennedy? He certainly had the knowledge and ability to do so.”

Morley’s conclusion is inescapable: “Whether Angleton manipulated Oswald as part of an assassination plot is unknown. He certainly abetted those who did. Whoever killed JFK, Angleton protected them. He masterminded the JFK conspiracy cover-up.”

There are a few key books necessary for understanding what we now know about what happened at Dealey Plaza, and this book is one of them.

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton - Kindle edition by Jefferson Morley. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

View from the Sniper's Nest

Dealey Plaza - View from the Sniper's Nest

Embedded w/ Snipers

By William Kelly

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2014/02/view-from-snipers-nest.html

     The Sniper's Perspective of Dealey Plaza  

“In a free society, counter-espionage is based on the practice most useful for hunting rabbits. Rather than look for the rabbit, one posts oneself in a spot where the rabbit is likely to pass."

       - Alexander Hamilton (as attributed by Allen Dulles)

The lead Humvee in the convoy suddenly comes to a halt as it slips under a tree on the edge of town, an empty tin can, hanging from a branch by a thread, dangles in the breeze.

To the untrained eye it is an empty tin can hanging from a tree, but to the trained eye it’s a sure sign of danger – a makeshift wind gauge, a sniper’s wind gauge, indicating a Level 2 or Level 3 sniper is operating in the area and they were about to enter the sniper’s kill zone.

When Uncle Sam contacted me for a special mission recently, I answered the call and spent a few weeks in the field helping to train American soldiers, including expert snipers, from whom I learned some things that can be applied to a better understanding of the mechanics of what happened at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

Before trying to figure out who the Sixth Floor Sniper was and why he did the things he did, a few things must be understood about the nature of the sniper profession.

Not a new idea, the historical development of the sniper as a key surgeon in the course of battle has only been perfected in the last half of the twentieth century.

During the Revolutionary War, at the Battle of Brandywine, near Philadelphia, Patrick Ferguson a British sniper had General George Washington in his sights, but decided not to shoot him in the back as he thought it ungentlemanly to do so, thus sparing the life of the man who would be the first president of the American republic.

http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.ca/2017/02/washington-at-brandywine-sniper-that.html

At Saratoga, a few months later, an American sniper with a Kentucky long rifle shot and killed a British general, decisively altering the outcome of not only that battle but the war.

On eighteen and nineteenth century war ships, the marines were issued long barrel rifles and placed in high mast nests from where they would shoot select targets during battles, so friendly forces were forced to wear identifying marks on their hats so not to be accidentally hit by the marine marksmen.

As European gunsmiths refined the rifle and ammo, the abilities of marksmen increased, though applying the weapon for assassination purposes didn’t become effective until World War II, and increased steadily through the Korean War and Vietnam, when the sniper came into his own.

Snipers played pivotal roles on the Russian front during World War II, and refined their abilities in Korea, but it wasn’t until Vietnam (1965-1973) when the Level One sniper came into his own, especially recruited, trained, equipped and sent into the field on specific missions.

Historically snipers were responsible for killing mobster Bugsy Siegel, civil rights activist Medgar Evers, and the Texas Tower murders, as well as failed attempts to kill Charles deGaul and Fidel Castro.

Traditionally snipers have been measured by the ultimate yardstick – confirmed kills, as well as the longest shot, most difficult shot and high target value. 

As for confirmed kills, there is Simo Hayha on top, and no one else really close. Although relatively unknown outside of his native Finnland, where he is a national hero, you can thank Hayha for popularizing the Olympic sport that combines cross country skiing and accurate shooting, as that’s the way he attacked and killed over seven hundred invading Russians in 1939.

A lone wolf with no military chain of command, Hayha used his intimate knowledge of the terrain to attack and evade the Soviets, who kept track and confirmed his kills and sent Level 1 sniper teams and eventually a hole brigade to stop him.

Following Hayha, there’s a Fyodor Okhlopkova, a World War II Russian sniper with 423 kills, and Francis Pegahmagabow, a Canadian native American Indian scout and sniper credited with 378 kills during World War I.

A World War II German, Matthaus Hetzenauer comes in at number four with 345 kills, while his Russian front antagonists Lyudmila Pavlichenko (309 kills) a women, is fifth on the all time snipers list.

Vasikly Zaytsev, who shared Lee Harvey Oswald's nickname – “the Rabbit,” (242 kills) is sixth, and probably one of the best known snipers thanks to the movie “Enemy at the Gate,” which depicted the personal battle between the best German and Russian snipers during World War II. Zaytsev went on to instruct snipers at a special school he established and his students were known as "little rabbits" and accounted for another 3,000 confirmed kills. 

Red Chinese sniper Zhang Tyaofang (214 kills) fought in Korea, is number seven.

The Americans don’t rank until number 8 with Chris Kyle, a US Navy SEAL whose 160 confirmed kills during the Iraq war just outrank Australian Billy Sing, whose 150 kills during World War I and American Adelbert F. Waldron II, whose 109 kills in Vietnam round out the top ten snipers of all time.

Two other American Marines deserve notice however, as Chuck Mawhinney (103 kills) and Carlos Hathcock (93 kills) in Vietnam are almost celebrities, as the USMC has an award named after Hathcock, while Mawhinney is known for being humble about his achievements, as not even his wife, family or friends knew of his Vietnam exploits until they were revealed in a book over twenty years later.

Top Twelve Snipers of All Time - Based on Confirmed Kills 

1-  Simo Hayha – 705 kills (505 w/ rifle) Finnland 1939 WWII

2-  Fyodor Okhlopkov – 423 kills – Russian WWII

3-  Francis Pegahmagabow – 378 kills - Canadian WWI

4-  Matthaus Hetzenauer – 345 kills – German WWII

5-  Lyudmila Pavlichenko – 309 kills - Ukraine WWII

6-  Vasikly Zaytsev – the rabbit - German 242 kills WWII

7-  Zhang TYaofang – 214 kills Chinese - Korea

8-  Chris Kyle – 160 kills – US Navy SEAL – Iraq War

9-   Billy Sing – 150 + Australian during WWI

10-  Adelbert F. Waldron III – 109 kills US Navy/Army 1968 Vietnam

11-  Chuck Mawhinney – 103 kills USMC 1968

12-  Carlos Hathcock – 93 kills USMC 1968

Longest Shot

As for the longest shot, the long standing record once held by Canadian Corporal Rob Furlong – 2,430 meter (1.51 miles) was recently eclipsed by Craig Harrison, of the Royal Marines at 2,475 meters.

Carlos Hathcock is said to have taken the most difficult shot ever, killing an enemy sniper by shooting him through his scope as he was aiming at Hathcock. Waldron once shot an enemy sniper in a tree from a moving boat, and an American in Iraq made a successful shot through a brick wall.

According to the snipers, Oswald is a Level Three sniper who is officially credited with making the most difficult shot of all time at the highest priority target, and that's why they don't believe it. 

Before the Dealey Plaza analysis begins however, for starters, you must understand that there are three categories of snipers. From the Sniper’s Manual (Based on the Canadian Army TTP – Training, Techniques and Procedures.

Level One – the Specially Trained Sniper

The most dangerous sniper is the one who is individually selected, trained and equipped with an accurate sniper rifle outfitted with a modern scope, night vision device and thermal imager, an expert trained to select key personnel as their target and can hit the bull’s eye accurately at great ranges (1,000+ meters).

These snipers are accompanied by a spotter-security aide and are skilled in avoiding detection. This sniper is the most difficult to effectively counter.

The Level One sniper doesn't take multiple shots at a target when one shot is all that’s needed. As they say, “One shot one kill,” is their motto.

This level sniper is portrayed in the Hollywood movie “The Shooter," which exemplifies the training, discipline, pride and professionalism exhibited by expert snipers at this level.

Level Two Snipers

Level Two Snipers are trained marksmen, often found in the national armies of the world and commonly utilized in urban combat, equipped with a standard issue weapon and with fair to good field craft skills, he is difficult to detect. May be deployed alone or in teams, with women snipers effective against the Nazis on the Russian front during World War II.

The Level Three Sniper

The Level Three sniper is the armed irregular, with little or no formal military training, who may or may not wear a distinguishing uniform, and may or may not carry his weapon openly. He will go to great lengths to avoid identification as a sniper.

The 6.5 mm Manlicher Carcano with cheap Japanese scope and custom US Air Force holster sling (Where did Oswald get the sling?)

The gunsmith at Klines Sporting Goods in Chicago who mounted the scope on the rifle recently came out and acknowledged that Oswald got "very, very lucky," if in fact he used that gun to kill Kennedy.

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=226036]

The Sixth Floor Sniper, whether it was Lee Harvey Oswald or someone else, would be classified a Level Three Sniper by his weapon – the Mannlicher Carcano, a standard issue Italian weapon, and if Oswald, by his limited US Marine Corps training.

                                                   Winchester Model 70 - Circa 1963 

As explained to me, a Level One sniper wouldn’t use that weapon and wouldn’t need or take more than one shot. In 1963, a Level One sniper would probably use a state of the art custom weapon and scope, or a prized Winchester Model 70  [http://en.wikipedia.og/wiki/Winchester_Model_70][ or Remington Model 700 rifle [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_Model_700], top of the line models.

              Remington Model 700 - Circa 1963 

Since the weapon and MO – modus operandi – identifies the Sixth Floor Sniper as a Level Three Sniper, Level One snipers say the Sixth Floor Sniper probably didn’t take the fatal head shot that killed President Kennedy.

There are also indications that the bullet that struck JFK in the head was a different type of bullet than those fired from the Mannlicher Carcano, and that shot was probably taken by a Level One sniper with a different style of weapon, different type of bullet from a different location.

From the Sixth Floor sniper’s nest, the best shot was when the target was approaching the window on Houston Street, as it slowed down for the turn onto Elm Street, and from then on the shots get harder, as the target moves from left to right on a downward slope and interference by a tree.

The U.S. Army Sniper’s Manual says under Engaging Moving Targets that: “Engaging moving targets not only requires the Sniper to determine the target distance and wind effects on the round, but must also consider the lateral and speed angle of the target, the rounds time of flight, and the placement of a proper level to compensate for both. These added variables increase the chance of a miss. Therefore, the Sniper should engage a moving target when it is the only option.” 

[www.cybersniper.com]

To calculate leads, you take the Time of Flight (in seconds) x (times) target speed (in feet per seconds) which equals = lead (in feet) x (times) .3048 = meters x 1000 = mil. lead divided by range.

Of course familiarity with the weapon and practice shooting at moving targets increases the ability and skill of the shooter, but if Oswald was the Sixth Floor Sniper there is no indication that he ever shot that rifle before, didn’t practice or even purchase ammo for it.

As Lee Harvey Oswald’s brother Robert, who was familiar with his shooting abilities said, “If Lee did not spend a considerable amount of time practicing with that rifle in the weeks and months before the assassination, then I would say that Lee did not fire the shots that killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally.” (p. 208, “Lee – A Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald by his Brother, Coward-McCann, Inc., NY, 1967)

For the Fiftieth anniversary of the assassination, the gunsmith at Kline’s in Chicago who placed the scope on Oswald’s rifle was interviewed and quoted in a news article saying that if Oswald used that rifle and scope he was “very lucky,” and the snipers agree.

All of the snipers agree that whoever fired those shots with that rifle from the Sixth Floor window he did not use the scope, which was not properly aligned and not necessary at that distance, where the manual sight would be sufficient.

While the Sixth Floor sniper didn’t take the best shot from that location, as the nearly stationary target came towards him, the head shot was most probably taken by a Level One Sniper from either in front or behind so there was no lateral movement as the target came towards or was going away from him.

From what the Level One snipers tell me, the purpose of the Sixth Floor Sniper was to provide diversion and deception, put ballistic evidence incriminating Oswald into the car while the Level One sniper did what such snipers are trained to do – kill the high priority target (HPT) with one shot.

They say the Sixth Floor Sniper, whoever he was, was a Level Three sniper and his standard issue weapon, while capable of firing three shots in the allotted time and get out of three hits on target, was incapable of taking the fatal head shot from that position with that weapon. Not a “lucky” shot, it couldn’t happen. So there must have been a Level One sniper who took the fatal head shot from another location, using a different type of weapon and ammo, and stationed in front of or behind the target.

Integral aspects of the Level One sniper attack, the diversion and deception not only ensures the escape of the sniper and his spotter, but also protects the actual sponsors, as one of the reasons for using a sniper to commit an assassination is permit the escape of the shooter and to protect the sponsor.

The diversion and deception were needed because there would be limited suspects if a Level One sniper killed the President with only one shot, incriminating those few military and intelligence agencies capable of putting a Level One sniper in the field and taking out the highest priority target in the world without getting caught. The Level Three sniper firing openly at the same time diverted attention from the Level One sniper, expanded the suspect pool in general and incriminated Oswald in particular.

In the Marines Oswald’s nickname was “Ozzie Rabbit,” which they said was based on a cartoon character popular at that time, and like Alice goes Through the Looking Glass and into the Rabbit’s Hole to begin her adventure, those who devised the Dealey Plaza operation incorporated Oswald, not as the real assassin or the Sixth Floor sniper, but as the patsy and rabbit that would be set loose to set a false trail and keep the official investigators from the real perpetrators of the crime.

In his book, “A Sniper Looks at Dealey Plaza,” Craig Roberts concurs saying, “I analyzed the scene as a sniper,….(and concluded)…it would take a minimum of two people shooting. There was little hope that I alone, even if equipped with precision equipment, would be able to duplicate the feat described by the Warren Commission,” so neither could Lee Harvey Oswald, or any Level Three sniper.

“I would have never put anyone in the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) with so many locations that were much more advantageous,” Roberts said, “unless I needed a diversion. If I did, it would be a good place for red herrings to be observed by witnesses.”

As seen from the street below, the Sixth Floor Sniper, according to all witnesses who saw him, wore a white shirt (Oswald wore brown), and according to one witness (Amos Eunis) who got a clear view of him, the sniper in the window had a very distinctive bald spot on the top of his head, not a physical characteristic shared by Oswald. Like Oswald, the Sixth Floor Sniper probably had good reason to be there, possibly worked in the building or as a subcontractor or delivery person familiar with the area, one who it wouldn’t seem suspicious for other employees to see him there.

Nor did he leave immediately, as the Warren Commission Report has Oswald running down four flights of stairs to get to the Second Floor lunchroom in time to be seen there by Dallas Police officer Marion Baker ninety seconds after the last shot. The Sixth Floor Sniper took his time, did not run, and instead, as the photo evidence proves, he moved boxes around, putting one on the window sill that was mistakenly believed to have been used as a gun rest. He was still in the window nearly four to five minutes after the shooting when seen by a secretary from across the street. If not a TSBD employee or contractor, the Sixth Floor Sniper was possibly a police or sheriff’s officer who just stayed nearby and blended in with the other investigators when they began a search of the building. 

The sniper’s analysis is that the Sixth Floor, Level Three sniper’s job was to divert and deceive, not to kill, and he did not take the fatal head shot, which was probably taken by a Level One sniper from a location in front of or behind the target, with a different style weapon and type of bullet, one that shattered on impact.

This sniper’s analysis is supported by the 1998 report by U.S. Attorney John Orr that indicates the bullet that hit JFK in the head was a different type of bullet than CE399 and other bullets fired from the Mannlicher Carcano rifle found in the TSBD. Orr’s important report convinced the Department of Justice, the FBI, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to conduct further tests of CE567, bullet fragments from the limo, no mean feat.

[http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2012/03/re-wc-ce-567-bullet-fragment-found.html]

Like the snipers, when a veteran deer hunter visited Dealey Plaza he was immediately drawn to the area behind the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll and said that’s where he would set up his deer stand.

But a Level One sniper could take that fatal head shot from hundreds of yards away, tucked back in a room away from the window so that no one could see him. Level One snipers are the most difficult to detect and to counter.

According to the Canadian Army Sniper Manual, the best way to stop a sniper is for another sniper to kill him. The manual says: “The best way to stop the sniper is to kill the sniper. Let them escape and they will attack someone else, somewhere else.”

Counter-snipers are instructed to “Have a plan and rehears it. Do Not fixate on casualties! Kill the sniper, then attend to casualties.”

When under fire the response policy is to keep moving, get out of the Kill Zone as quickly as possible and move in a swerving S or Z pattern, identify the sniper’s location, return fire, maneuver, attack and kill them. “Do not fixate on casualties, kill the sniper!”

Although Will Greer, the Secret Service driver was trained in these same procedures he inexplicably slowed down after the first shot and came to almost a complete stop precisely at the moment the head shot was taken. A Protestant Irishman from Northern Ireland, Agent Greer was an Orangeman who belonged to the secret order that fought the IRA and worked closely with the British MI5 and MI6 intelligence agencies.

Ian Fleming, in the short story “The Living Daylights,” has 007 assigned to kill a sniper expected to try to shoot a defector running across the no-man’s land at the Berlin Wall, and James Bond is surprised to see through his scope a beautiful women sniper, and he is reprimanded when he only wounds and doesn’t kill her.

The President’s security sometimes included counter-sniper snipers. Such precautions were taken a few weeks before Dallas when the President visited Tampa and traveled through the city in a similar motorcade, and over a dozen Tampa Sheriff’s deputies were deployed with rifles on roofs along the motorcade route. But no such precautions were taken in Dallas.

It has been alleged (by Penn Jones), that Dallas Deputy Sheriff Weatherford was on the Records Building roof overlooking Dealey Plaza with a rifle at the time of the assassination, and there are published reports he returned fire. But Weatherford’s official statement reflects that he was on the Houston Street sidewalk with other deputies. Weatherford said that he was with Deputy Allan Sweatt, whose statement confirms Weatherford’s story that they ran to the Grassy Knoll before entering the back of the TSBD and searched the building.

Weatherford assisted in the search of the sixth floor that discovered the shells and the rifle, but failed to find Oswald’s clipboard, and he also participated in the search of the Paine’s house and garage when the backyard photos were found depicting Oswald holding the murder weapons and communist publications, which was part of the cover-story, a failed black propaganda operation that attempted to blame the assassination on Fidel Castro. 

    Fidel Castro with sniper rifle 

Just as the dangling tin can was sign indicating there was a sniper operating in the area, there were similar signs of danger before JFK entered Dealey Plaza, but they went unheeded or were intentionally ignored. 

Of the Dealey Plaza danger signs, a few stand out, especially those who expressed foreknowledge of the assassination, the Walker shooting, the recorded Alpha 66 threat, the Stevenson incident and Umbrella Man.

While each of these danger signs should be reviewed in depth, the Umbrella Man was right there at Dealey Plaza, and he admits that his umbrella was intended to be a sign – a silent protest, a signal and message that President Kennedy would recognize and understand – a sign that referred to his father’s isolationist stand at the beginning of World War II, the image of Chamberlain’s umbrella at Munich that represented the failed policy of “appeasement” with the Nazis, which the Umbrella Man implied was JFK’s policy towards communists.

Louie Steven Witt, a Dallas insurance office worker who claimed to be the Umbrella Man, told the HSCA that the umbrella was a visual protest of JFK’s father’s policies of appeasement of Hitler at Munich when he was ambassador to the UK (1938-39), with the umbrella being a reference to Nevelle Chamberlain. Witt told the HSCA that it was someone in his insurance office - the Rio Grande National Insurance Co., told him that the Kennedys were sore about the umbrella being used as protest sign. “I was going to use the umbrella to heckle the president’s motorcade….I just knew it was a sore sport with the Kennedys. I just knew the vague generalities of it. It had something to do with something that happened years ago with the father Joe Kennedy when he was the Ambassador to England.”

      

The Umbrella Man at Dealey Plaza

Who planted the seed in Witt’s mind to heckle the president? Perhaps it was someone who also shared an office in the Rio Grande building, - which included the Secret Service, Army Intelligence and the Emigration and Naturalization Service, where Oswald visited numerous times. Witt’s references to Chamberlain’s umbrella and appeasement at Munich are echoed exactly by General LeMay at the White House a year earlier.'

 Chamberlain - Appeasement at Munich 

At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, on October 19, 1962, President Kennedy met in the Oval Office with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when Air Force Chief Gen. Curtis LeMay was recorded as saying, “…I don’t see any other solution for it [other than direct military action].….This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.(Pause)...”   Sheldon Stern: “The general had gone well beyond merely giving advice or even disagreeing with his Commander-in-chief. He had taken his generation’s ultimate metaphor for shortsightedness and cowardice, the 1938 appeasement of Hitler at Munich, and flung it in the President’s face. President Kennedy, in a remarkable display of sang froid, refused to take the bait; he said absolutely nothing.”

A few minutes later JFK did reply to LeMay’s remark that, “…In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”

“What did you say?” Kennedy asked.

“You’re in a pretty bad fix,” LeMay repeated. And in a response that the Miller Center’s transcriptionists got wrong, JFK told LeMay that, “You’re in it with me.”

And the pretty bad fix that JFK and LeMay were in together then was not about Munich but Cuba.

Then, as JFK entered Dealey Plaza and the sniper’s Kill Zone, the Umbrella Man's sign may have been the last thing Kennedy saw before his head was shattered by a bullet fired by a Level One sniper who was not Lee Harvey Oswald. 

Joe Kennedy - US Ambassador to the Court of St. James

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2014/02/view-from-snipers-nest.html