Witnesses I've Interviewed

Witnesses I've Interviewed

WHAT I’VE DONE - WITNESSES I'VE INTERVIEWED – SO FAR 

As I have decided to devote much of my time of this year (2021) to completing my life long study of the assassination of President Kennedy, I thought it would be prudent to outline some of the things I have done. One of the things I’ve done is to  specialize in tracking down and interviewing obscure witnesses and even a few suspects in the case.

So I’ve compiled a list of those I have talked to, and links to some of the articles I wrote about them before setting my sights on what needs to be done to wrap this case up to a legal and moral certainty, as we can if only the effort is made.

As a Research Committee Coordinator for CAPA – Citizens Against Political Assassinations, and a member of the Steering Committee for the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC), I am in the unique position of being able to put the necessary information together and will attempt to do so.

I remember that Friday in November, the day of the assassination, being told of it by the principle - a nun over the St. Joseph’s grammar school intercom and being left out of school early. The weather was mild so I was at home in my backyard swinging on the weeping willow tree when the phone rang and I ran in the house to answer the kitchen wall phone. It was my father, a Camden, NJ policeman who instructed me to stay in the yard and not go out, as the president was shot “and we don’t know what this is all about.” I just couldn’t understand how the death of the president could affect me, a kid playing in my back yard.

Six years later, as a freshman at the University of Dayton in Ohio, I met John Judge. He gave me a copy of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s interview in Playboy magazine, which inspired me to read a few books and then, I discovered, there in our school library was a copy of the encyclopedia sized 24 volumes of Warren Commission supporting testimony and documents that I began to read through.

After you read books, and research documents, the next step is to contact and interview witnesses, though it is often difficult to get them to talk, especially about a subject as sensitive as the President’s murder.

Anthony Summers once told me the Irish word for being able to obtain the confidence of strangers, and while I can’t remember the Irish word, I know there is a very fine line between those who can get people to believe and open up, and disbelieve and clam up.

The following is a list of some of the most important witnesses – and a few suspects – I have tracked down and talked to, and most of them I believe confided in me honestly.

MRS. MARGARET HOVER and JULIO FERNANDEZ

John Judge took me up to the law research library at the University of Dayton and introduced me to the 26 volumes of Warren Commission records. As I was taking a class in Latin American history with Dr. Bruce Taylor, and doing a paper on the Bay of Pigs, I immediately noticed the numerous Cuban connections to the assassination and began to focus on those documents, one of which concerned a Mrs. Margaret Hoover of Martinsburg, Pa., who was investigated by the Pennsylvania State Police and FBI because she claimed to have seen a paper with the names of Lee Oswald and Ruby before the assassination.

She said she found the papers in her backyard, and thinking Lee and Ruby were women her recently separated husband was seeing, showed them to her daughter who confirmed the names. Then she said, she realized the papers came from her neighbor’s yard, where he was burning his trash, and with that, the investigation led to the neighbor – Julio Fernandez, a Cuban refuge and former newspaper publisher who was teaching Spanish at the local high school. Fernandez said he was burning his trash, but was not a communist and had nothing to do with the assassination.

There are various levels of people who study the assassination – those who read about it in books and magazines, those researchers who read the original records at the Archives, and investigators - those who reach out to phone or knock on the door of witnesses to ask them questions.

It was in late 1969 or early 1970 when I obtained the phone number of Mrs. Hoover and called her on the phone from Dayton. She acknowledged everything in the reports I had read, and added a few interesting details – shortly after the assassination and the police inquiry he left town suddenly, some say to Rye, New York. In addition, Fernandez had a wife and son, the son an art student at Penn State University. The police report noted that an AMTRACK train ticket, that Mrs. Hoover had found and kept, indicated someone had traveled from Philadelphia to Miami in the summer of 1963. Fernandez said that was his son, who attended a conference of exiled Cuban journalists at the University of Miami (JMWAVE). Mrs. Hoover also said that a few years after the assassination and the departure of Fernandez, two men in black suits came knocking at her door asking if she knew anything else about Fernandez, so others were on this trail too.

It was years later when I learned about Clare Booth Luce and her support for some JMWAVE Cuban commandos – including Julio Fernandez, who called her on the night of the assassination saying he had an audio tape and documents concerning Oswald, the accused assassin. And then US Ranger Capt. Bradley Ayers wrote about training the Cubans – including Julio Fernandez, a team leader.

When the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) requested CIA records on Julio Fernandez, they supplied a list of over a dozen Cubans named Julio Fernandez they had files on, but neither the journalist, his son or the JMWAVE Cuban team leader were among them. I believe Julio Fernandez, Jr. is still alive in Florida.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/julio-fernandez.html

KEN KESEY 

The University of Dayton Student Council had a significant budget, which the radical Student president Kevin Keefe used to bring in some top level guest speakers – including Mae Brussell, Margaret Meade and Ken Kesey. As the head of the Merry Pranksters Kesey had experimented with LSD before it was made illegal, and after writing “One Flew Over the Cookoos Nest” and another well received novel, bought a bus – named “Further,” and traveled cross-country to meet Timothy Leary, another LSD advocate, as documented in Tom Wolf’s “Electric Coolaide Acid Test.” After his talk before a few hundred interested students, Kesey went to John Judge’s apartment where we talked for hours. He told me how Kurt Douglas gave him $10,000 for the film rights to “Cookoos Nest,” a deal written out on a bar napkin, but then when the movie was such a big hit with Jack Nicholson in the lead role, he had to sue Douglas to get the writer’s royalties, and indeed the movie would not have been so good if it wasn’t for the great story. Kesey also told me that he was first turned on to LSD by a CIA backed professor during a collegiate “study” that paid him to be a guinea pig. And besides students, they also hired prisoners and soldiers to be part of the LSD tests, the results of which we will probably never know.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2016/12/into-rabbits-hole-with-john-judge.html

DON NORTON

Around 1970 John Judge arranged for Mae Brussell of Carmel, California to visit Dayton and give a lecture on her research on the assassination. After her well attended talk in the main ballroom of the John F. Kennedy Student Union, I helped carry her books to John’s car in the parking lot. As we approached the car in the dark lot a man stepped out of the darkness and said hello to Mae, startling us a little. He said hi to Mae, and said “I’m Don Norton.”

Mae smiled and shook his hand and thanked him for the checks he had sent her to support her research – “That’s my conscience money,” he said.

While I didn’t go with Mae, John and Don back to John’s apartment, I later learned that Norton had met Oswald, and was considered one of his doubles, or impersonators. I read some records that said he was a former gay soldier who played piano in an officer’s club and was recruited by military intelligence to inform them if any military officers were gay. Norton got involved in the Garrison investigation and in Canada, gave an interview that was published about his experiences.

There are two others named Don Norton – one a fisherman also suspected of being an Oswald impersonator, and another Don Norton who wrote a book on the history of a major defense contractor.

http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2014/04/john-judge-mae-brussell-and-don-norton.html

MAE BRUSSEL

Mae was one of the first house wife to pay attention to the assassination of President Kennedy, and became one of the most knowledgeable of researchers who had a weekly radio talk show out of her hometown of Carmel, California. She accumulated a large collection of books, newspaper articles and documents that she wanted to form the basis of the Mae Brussel Research Center. Before she passed away she instructed John Judge to set up such a center, and I drove Judge’s U-haul truck to Carmel where we rented a house and began to assemble the research center. Not long afterwards however, Mae’s daughter took over and put all of her mother’s work in storage, where I believe it remains today.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2014/04/

PENN JONES

In the mid to late 1970s the New York University Law School held a major conference on the Kennedy assassination that featured all of the major critics – including Sylvia Meagher, Mae Brussell, Penn Jones, Fletcher Prouty and Ralph Schoeman, all of whom I met through John Judge. Penn Jones was then the publisher of the Midlothian, Texas Mirror newspaper, which chronicled all of the JFK assassination witnesses who died suspiciously. While I admire Penn, and his work, there are enough witnesses who were victims of certifiable homicides to work on rather than debating whether or not someone was murdered or not. I also recall John Judge saying that Penn had separated from his wife, and she sold off his 24 volumes of Warren Commission exhibits and testimony one at a time at a garage sale. John said he didn’t want that to happen to his research collection, but it did.

RALPH SCHOEMAN

At the NYU conference Ralph held up a number of documents he obtained from the archives and said they were proof that one of the Cuban guys Oswald was arrested with in New Orleans was a Puerto Rican union organizer and mob connected gangster. I asked him and he gave me copies of his documents, and when I got home I wrote one of  my first requests for JFK assassination records from Marion Johnson – the curator of the JFK records at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The records I obtained on the Cuban arrested with Oswald – Minguel Cruz – indicated that he was only 17 years old in 1963, while the documents on the Union organizer with the same name indicated he was much older, and therefore a different person. I called Schoeman on the phone and he asked me to come visit him so I drove from my Ocean City, NJ home to Princeton where I shared my new documents with him and he acknowledged he was wrong about Minguel Cruz. But more recently Donald Trump accused Texas Senator Cruz’s father of being involved with Oswald in New Orleans. While Minguel Cruz is not related to Senator Cruz, he is probably still alive and is an important witness. And it was decades later when I met and began to work with Ralph Schoeman’s wife Joan Mellen.

FLETCHER PROUTY

It was at the NYU conference where I entered a large science class room and sat at a desk with a few dozen others as Col. Fletcher Prouty stood at a podium in front of a blackboard where he had written some basic covert intelligence procedures – use of codes, ciphers, cut-outs, etc., saying that you will never understand what happened at Dealey Plaza until you learn the crafts and techniques of intelligence, as the assassination was a covert intelligence operation. John Judge was a close friend of Prouty, so when Prouty was identified as the mysterious “Mr. X” portrayed by Donald Sutherland in Oliver Stone’s film “JFK,” Judge arranged for Prouty to be interviewed live on the Diane Ream show over the NPR station at American University. Judge used to say that where he started his research on the Kennedy assassination at the bottom, Prouty started at the top at the Pentagon, and they met at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Fletcher_Prouty

RALPH COX

Another good friend of Prouty was Ralph Cox, a former US Navy pilot during WWII who after the war purchased a dozen Air Force Cargo planes as surplus and started the US Overseas Airlines out of Wildwood, NJ. A major player in the air cargo business for over a decade, active during the Berlin airlift and in the creation of the state of Isreal, US Overseas airlines suddenly lost all of the government contracts to a number of new airlines that Cox later learned were wholly owned subsidiaries of the CIA, and he sued the CIA over it.

https://jfkcountercoup.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/ciair/

DAVID ATLEE PHILLIPS

I always had the highest respect for Gaeton Fonzi and followed his career closely and became friends before the end, though I was disappointed he never tried to interview David Atlee Phillips outside of his Congressional inquiry. One day on a whim I looked up Phillips’ phone number and found it listed in Bethesda, Md. I called him off the cuff and he talked to me for about a half hour, denying he was “Maurice Bishop” or that he knew Oswald. This conversation took place shortly after the publication of a long article in Washingtonian Magazine by Fonzi, that instigated a libel suit by Phillips. “Do you know where I worked at the time?” Philllips asked. At Washingtonian, where he had an office just down the hall from Fonzi, who never bothered to try to talk to him. In any case I believe Phillips knew Oswald, but like Oswald, Phillips was also hung out to dry by the CIA and Veciana, while the real truth remains buried, though we are still digging.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2010/10/david-atlee-phillips.html

JOHN MARTINO’S SISTER AND BROTHER

While Anthony Summers was in Florida interviewing John Martino’s widow and son, establishing Martino’s foreknowledge of the assassination, I was at an old house on the beachblock of Ventnor, NJ, interviewing Martino’s elderly sister and brother. They gave me a 33/1/3 RPM record of John Martino reading portions of his book – “I Was Castro’s Prisoner,” that he wrote with Nathanial Wheil.

https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmartino.htm

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/10/atlantic-city-new-jersey.html

NATE WEYL 

I eventually got Weyl’s phone number and called him up cold, and was surprised at how open he was and willing to talk, as he did later with John Simkin. Weyl was the ghost writer for Martino’s book and while having a high opinion of Martino, he said they had a falling out after the book was published and Martino took a book signing tour sponsored by the John Birch Society. That was a tour that took Martino to Dallas in the fall of 1963, allowing him to share a stage with Loretta Odio and Father Walter Machann, who catered to the needs of the Cuban exiles in Dallas. But before the month was out, Machann would leave the priesthood and retreat to New Orleans where he would hook up with a friend of Odios, who happened to also be a friend of Carlos Bringuier and was one of those who attended the court hearing that resulted from the altercation between Oswald and Bringuier (and Minguel Cruz)

.https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKweyl.htm'

JAMES BOND

It was in the summer of 1976 when I first read about the Catherwood Foundation – a CIA philanthropic front that backed the anti-Castro Cuban group Cuban Aide Relief (CAR). Catherwood was described as a Philadelphia millionaire who started his charity foundation by buying a boat – The Vigilant – and using it for exploration and research purposes – one voyage including James Bond – an American ornithologist (Bird specialist) whose book “Birds of the West Indies” inspired Ian Fleming to appropriate Bond’s name for his special agent 007. I met Bond and talked to him a number of times, along with his wife Mary Wickham Bond. Bond, it turns out, was at what would become known as the Bay of Pigs – a few months before the invasion, scouting for birds.

http://jamesbondauthenticus.blogspot.com/2008/11/goldeneye-jamaica-1952-theft-of-james.html

HENRY PLEASANTS

Former classical music critic for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, husband of Virginia Pleasants for Cello player for the Philadelphia Orchestra, Pleasants enlisted in the OSS during the war and served as a translator and debriefer, his most famous debriefing was former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen, who would become chief of the West German Intelligence Service, as the behest of Allen Dulles and the CIA. Like Cummings Catherwood and James Bond, Pleasants was also character Ian Fleming made fun of by casting him as Felix Leiter, 007’s recurring CIA sidekick.

http://jamesbondauthenticus.blogspot.com/2008/11/felix-leiter-henry-pleasants.html

VOLKMAR SCHMIDT

German oil geologist, who was working in Canada when I talked with him at length over the phone, was one of the hosts of a Dallas house party set up for Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife to meet Michael Paine and his wife Ruth. While Michael Paine didn’t make the party, Oswald talked for hours with Schmidt, who acknowledge to me that he used a “reverse psychology” technique on Oswald taught to him by a German psychologist. Schmidt said he talked to Oswald about General Walker, and suggested that Walker was a fascist who should be assassinated before he got too powerful, much like Hitler should have been killed, specifically mentioning the July 20, 1944 failed attempt to kill Hilter. Schmidt said he felt guilty for planting the seed in Oswald to shoot Walker, and he felt bad every time he drove through Dealey Plaza.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/volkmar-schmidt-interview.html

BEVERLY OLIVER

I met Beverly Oliver in Dallas on the set of Oliver Stone “JFK” when he was filming the final scene – an old black man and young black boy visiting JFK’s grave, which they were able to film in Dallas because of a duplicate of the building behind JFK’s grave, another faked film sequence. I also read her book, and was impressed, not because she is the Babuska Lady, or how Gary Shaw came to find her, but because of her story of being with Jack Ruby on Thursday night – the night before the assassination. With Ruby she visited the Cabana Lounge to meet Larry Meyer and then went to dinner at Campisi’s Egyptian Lounge. Oliver also had a boyfriend who worked for Kodak at their booth at the State Fairgrounds, who is an interesting character worth investigating further.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/thursday-night-at-cabana-lounge.html

WES WISE

Wes was a former TV reporter and mayor of Dallas (who drove a Volkswagon Bug), who was given one of the most important leads in the Tippit murder. Wise was told about a man who resembled Oswald who at the time of Tippit’s murder was driving around Oak Cliff in a 1957 Plymouth, with a Texas license tag that was traced to Carl Mather – a close friend and former neighbor of Tippit. Mather’s alibi was that he was at work at Collins Radio – a major defense contractor who provided the radios for Air Force One, Two and SAC bombers, and also provided the cover for the CIA raider ship the Rex. The Rex was exposed by a New York Times page one story on November 1, 1963, after some Pathfinder commandos were captured after they attempted to infiltrate Cuba with high powered rifles – “that weren’t going to be used to hunt rabbits.” I recorded a two hour plus audio interview with Wes Wise as he drove me around the assassination hot spots in Dallas.

http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2012/05/wes-wise-tour-of-dallas-hot-spots.html

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2019/02/wes-wise-carl-mather-documents.html

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/02/james-douglas-wes-wise.html

CHAUNCEY HOLT

I met Holt during my cross-country train trip at his home in San Diego, high in the hills where he too talked at length as I audio recorded him, and later posted a transcript on line. While many of the leads he gave me panned out, and I confirmed, I don’t believe he was one of the tramps, as he is a self-acknowledge con artist. He’s also a very fine artist – and took me to his studio and gave me a copy of a drawing he did of Oswald’s execution. Holt told me that Warren Commission attorney Joe Ball – was a close associate of a northern California lawyer named Twombly, who directed him – Holt in many of his covert activities.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/12/chauncey-holts-execution-of-oswald.html

https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKholt.htm

ADELE EDISEN

After reading her story in the Third Decade Magazine – that she wrote under an alias, I checked out her allegation that she first met Dr./Col. Jose Rivera (USAR) at an Atlantic City medical convention, and confirmed that convention did indeed take place at AC Convention Hall, where the JFK statute is now located on the boardwalk. From there I confirmed almost everything she said, and through Dick Russell, even got a picture of Rivera at Fort Ditrick, Md. I also confirmed that Rivera’s military unit – ASCI – Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence was engaged in early MKULTRA research at Ditrick, Not Cuban, Rivera was born in Lima, Peru. His longest military assignment was in New Orleans, where he taught at Loyola. The only thing I couldn’t confirm was Edisen’s call to Oswald at his New Orleans residence the first week he arrived there in April 1963. Edisen said Rivera gave her the phone number weeks before Oswald himself knew he would be living there, so how did Rivera know that number? I came to know Adele personally over the years, met her in Dallas, believe her, and was sorry to hear she passed away.

 

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/12/new-oswald-witness-goes-public.html

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/12/dr-jose-rivera-at-ft-detrick.html

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/arrb/index65.htm

https://kennedysandking.com/obituaries/adele-edison-passes-away-at-88

WAYNE SMITH

Wayne Smith was a senior state department diplomat stationed at the US Embassy in Havana when Castro took over in 1959. Smith said that he worked closely with David Morales and knew Colonel Samuel Kail, the Army attaché, as well as David Atlee Phillips, who while not working out of the embassy, was in Smith’s amateur theater group who produced plays. I met Smith at one of the first COPA conferences in Washington, and he asked me to attend the summit in Rio between JFK researchers and the Cuban intelligence officers. Though I didn’t make that meeting, my associates John Judge and Antony Summers did. Smith was later used to falsely identify Morales and another JMWAVE officer Gordon Campbell, as the persons in a film from the Ambassador Hotel on the day RFK was killed. I believe Wayne Smith is still alive.

https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKsmithW.htm

BRADLEY AYERS

After reading his book “The War that Never Was” many years ago, I finally got to talk to former US. Army Ranger Captain Ayers a number of times on the telephone. Ayers also wrote “The Zenith Secret,” about his time training anti-Castro Cuban commandos at JMWAVE. Ayers and Captain Edward Roderick were assigned by General Brute Krulak to train the Cubans under CIA operational control. The leader of the team Ayers trained was Julio Fernandez, the same name as the Cuban I was originally searching for. Ayers’ first book was published by Bobbs-Merrell, an company from Indiana that had an office in the Texas School Book Depository and hired William Harvey after Harvey left the CIA. And while the CIA didn’t vet Ayers’ book, Harvey did, excising the name of Gordon Campbell as well as making other editings. Like Wayne Smith, Ayers was show the video of the Ambassador Hotel on the night RFK was killed and he too falsely identified two of the men as David Morales and Gordon Campbell. Ayers recently died, but his books say a lot. Ayers was talking with the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) when they were interviewing Gene Wheaton, and Ayers warned the ARRB that Wheaton was going to give them disinformation – though Wheaton himself didn’t know it.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2011/09/brad-ayers-us-ranger-trained-cubans-at.html

http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-resurrection-of-bradley-ayers.html

BILL TURNER

The late Bill Turner, former FBI agent and original JFK assassination investigator, was in Dallas on the day after the assassination, and continued his inquiry until he died. His articles in Ramparts and books – “The Fish is Red” and “Rearview Mirror” documents his work on the case, especially the New Orleans angles and JMWAVE, where he was the first to mention the name of Gordon Campbell – the JMWAVE maritime operations chief. It was Turner, at a COPA conference in Dallas who said, “We now have a good idea as to what happened at Dealey Plaza. The motives were piling up – Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, backchannel negations with Castro, and there was already a mechanism in place to kill Castro that was turned around and redirected to JFK in Dallas.” Thus focusing on the JMWAVE commandos who were paid by the CIA and trained to kill Castro – the Pathfinders.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2016/01/william-weyand-turner-1927-2015.html

ARTHUR YOUNG

After reading two of his books – one on the history of the Bell Helicopter and the other on his philosophy of process, I visited Arthur Young at his home in Brandywine, just outside Philadelphia. The inventor of the Bell Helicopter is a very interesting guy, who did my horoscope as we talked – on the record as I recorded it on an audio cassette. As a genius inventor who argued with Einstein at Princeton, Young set about to solve the problems of vertical flight, and after nearly two decades, succeeded in developing the first commercially approved helicopter -–the Bell 47B – the MASH helicopter with glass cockpit and girders – that is now hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. As an eccentric muse who dabbled in astrology, ESP and Remote Viewing, Young hooked up with an equally eccentric women – Ruth Forbes Paine – an independently wealthy Forbes family heiress who was previously married to Lyman Paine – a founder of the American Trotskyite Party and father of Michael Paine – the chief benefactor of Lee Harvey Oswald the accused assassin. It was Arthur Young who arranged for his stepson Michael to work at the Bell Helicopter factory in Dallas, where he moved with his Quaker wife Ruth Hyde Paine, who he met at a Philadelphia folk dance. It isn’t Arthur Young who is the real key to this case – but rather his wife, Michael’s mom.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-last-interview-with-arthur.html

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/12/arthur-young-with-model-helicopter.html

RUTH FORBES PAINE YOUNG

Ruth Forbes Paine Young was present when I met Arthur Young at their colonial era farmhouse in Brandywine, and I did meet her, but she was suffering from an advanced case of altimizers disease, so I didn’t ask her any questions, and she just sat there and smiled. As a Forbes, she has a cottage on the Forbes family island off Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and stressed her eccentricity by marrying Lyman Paine, who was not just a communist but a Trotyskite – follower of Trotsky, who was exiled by the Soviet Communists to Mexico City where he was assassinated by a Soviet agent – as described in the book by Issac Don Levine. The thing about Ruth Forbes is her close association with Mary Bancroft – the equally eccentric granddaughter of the founder of Barrons and the New York Stock Exchange. While on a steamship to Europe with Ruth Forbes, Mary Bancroft met a Swiss businessman who she married, which put her in a position to meet Allen Dulles in Berne, where she became Dulles’ secretary and principle agent in developing Nazi officer Hans Bernd Gisivious. Gisivious was a main participant in the July 20, 1944 Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler that failed. With the assistance of Dulles and Bancroft Gisivious escaped Berlin to Berne, and after the war relocated to Dallas where he worked for a major defense contractor.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2015/10/valkyrie-at-dealey-plaza-re-visited.html

MRS.MARY  DORMAN

When the Clifton copy of the Air Force One radio transmission recordings from 11/22/63 were released, I immediately compared it to the copy I had transcribed, and noticed some important aspects that were edited out of the copy of the tape I had received from the LBJ Library years earlier and transcribed. On the new tape, a man identifies himself as “Colonel Dorman – General LeMay’s aid” who wanted to get an important message to LeMay, who was flying back to DC from Canada, where he was said to be on a fishing vacation. While we don’t know what the message was, I identified Dorman and found he was from near Trenton, where I also was living at the time, and found a phone number for him. While Dorman had died in combat in Vietnam, his widow answered the phone and acknowledged that she was the wife of Colonel Dorman, General LeMay’s aide. She said that on the day JFK was killed she was working in the White House on the historic restoration project begun by Mrs. Kennnedy. She worked for a man named “Castro,” who when informed of JFK’s death, closed all the curtains and told them to leave. Mrs. Dorman said she went to a chapel to pray, and then went home. She said she lived on General’s Row alongside Arlington Cemetery.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/02/col-george-stanton-dorman.html

MRS. DORMAN’S SON

I also talked on the phone with Mrs. Dorman’s son, who was about ten years old at the time of the assassination who recalls climbing a tree in Arlington Cemetery and watching the burial of JFK from a high perch. He also said that his father once took him on a tour of General LeMay’s private command and control plane – nicknamed “Speckled Trout,” that was an airborne command post.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/02/jfk-general-lemay.html

MAJOR HAROLD R. PATTERSON – AKA “STRANGER”

Also on the Clifton tape is an excerpt edited out of the LBJ Library version of the tape, in which Pierre Salinger – the President’s Press Secretary – aboard the Cabinet Plane over the Pacific, receives a radio call from the Situation Room in the White House to return to DC immediately. Salinger took the message to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the senior officer aboard, who wanted to know who was giving this instruction. Salinger said it was from an officer who identified himself as “STRANGER” in the White House Situation Room. Rusk said they couldn’t take orders from someone named “STRANGER” and wanted to know who it was. Salinger went to the pilot and requested the code book, but when the pilot opened the plane’s safe, the code book was missing! So Salinger went back on the radio to the Situation Room and requested the full identify of “STRANGER.” After a little while, the Situation Room responded saying “STRANGER” was Major Patterson, who Salinger knew and could vouch for. As I now had his name, I looked Patterson up and found him in Virginia and called him on the phone. He acknowledged being in the Situation Room at the time of the assassination, working for the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). He also acknowledged talking with Salinger and the fact that the code book aboard the Cabinet Plane was missing. We talked for a little while and he was quite honest and open with me, but when Jefferson Morley called him a few days later he clammed up, and wouldn’t talk, as someone must have got to him.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/05/stranger-missing-code-books.html

RICHARD BULLOCK

Former USMC Richard Bullock was stationed at Atsugi, Japan with Oswald and knew him well. I met Bullock at an Elks barbeque, and talked with him on other occasions as well. Bullock said he often played football with Oswald in their “skivvies” when off duty. Oswald he said, while officially a radar operator, usually worked out of the communications shack. Bullock also didn’t recognize the guy killed by Jack Ruby as the same guy he served with. Bullock is still alive.

https://jfkcountercoup.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/which-oswald-was-at-atsugi/

STEVE KENAN

When Anthony Summers interviewed a Mexican attorney who told him about meeting Oswald at Sanborn’s Restaurant in Mexico City in 1963, he said Oswald took off for the Cuban consulate on the back of a motorcycle with another American, a Philadelphia college student.  After searching for this man on the motorcycle for years with others, we gave up, but I posted an article about it on line and received an email from “Mony” – a German girl whose mother met Steve Kenan, a Philadelphia college student who rode a motorcycle. With her additional information, we located Kenan in the Southwest, and notified Anthony Summers, who contacted Kenan and talked with him on the phone. I also found Kenan’s articles about visiting Cuba in the Temple University student newspaper – which included a photo of Kenan and Castro together! Kenan said that he was indeed in Mexico City, and wrote an article about his adventures in Motorcycle Magazine (that I acquired). But – he believed he left before September 1963, so he wasn’t there when Oswald was there, and didn’t remember giving him a ride from Sanborn’s restaurant, although he was there too. It is also suspected that Kenan could be the mysterious LICOZY-3 – a student from Philadelphia and CIA asset.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2011/08/man-on-motorcycle-in-mexico-city.html

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-man-on-motorcyle-in-mexico-city.html

https://www.maryferrell.org/php/cryptdb.php?id=LICOZY-3

RICHARD BEYMER 

When Phil Shenon’s book came out that focuses on Oswald’s presence at a “Twist Party” in Mexico City hosted by Sylvia Duran – the Cuban embassy receptionist Oswald dealt with, he tries to make the case for Cuban embassy personal encouraging Oswald to kill JFK at that party. He also says that there were two other American “gringos” at the party – who Duran would not identify because one was a famous American film actor who was still alive and she wanted to protect him. Well records recently released under the JFK Act include a CIA report of a telephone conversation between an American – Richard Beymer, and the Cubans, asking about Duran. Beymer was an American film actor who starred in West Side Story and The Longest Day, and was in Mexico at the time to attend a film festival. I tracked Beymer down and talked with him on the phone, and he acknowledged being there at the time and trying to get a visa to Cuba. He didn’t recall any Twist Party, though that was something he would have done being a footloose American below the border. With him he said, was Bradley Pierce, a former New York City bar owner, now a Catholic priest.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2013/11/twisting-with-oswald-in-mexco-city.html

BRADLEY PIERCE

Father Bradley is now at a seminary in New England, and acknowledged in a phone conversation, that he was indeed with Richard Beymer in Mexico, but he too does not recall a “Twist Party,” or meeting Oswald. They were there however, at the time of the assassination, as Father Bradley recalls learning about the assassination as they got off an elevator in a hotel lobby in Mexico. Since they were there for only a few weeks, and were there on the day of the assassination, they were not there when Oswald was there in late September – early October.

OBIT: https://patch.com/connecticut/northhaven/obituary-rev-bradley-pierce-82-formerly-north-haven

Just goes to show that we have to move on interviewing the remaining living witnesses because they won’t live forever.

POLK COUNTY SHERIFF CHERRY

When JFK’s personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln passed away, she left in her will two trunks of effects that she ordered sent to her cousin – a Nebraska attorney who became a judge. The attorney informed the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) that he gave the trunks to Polk County Sheriff Cherry for safe keeping, but the ARRB never followed up on this and the contents of the trunks remain unknown and out of the JFK Collection at the NARA, where they belong. I contacted the current Polk County, Nebraska attorney and he said that he checked the evidence locker and the two trunks are no longer there. I then obtained the email and phone number of former Polk County Sheriff Cherry – who acknowledge recalling the trunks and knowing their disposition, but refused to tell me what became of them, unless I get a subpoena and he has a witness present. With the TRC – it has been suggested that RFK, Jr., the rightful heir to the trunks, should request to know what became of them.

http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2018/12/mrs-lincolns-trunks-nara-never-got-them.html

Harry Dean – FPFCC officer in Chicago, Harry visited Cuba and was interogated by Cuban officials. He was also an informant for the FBI and CIA in regards to his FPFCC and Cuban activities, and suspects Lee Harvey served a similar role. He was personally associated with a number of individuals who became involved in the JFK assassination story.

USAF Reserve officer Maj. Ralph Ganis, who purchased at an internet auction, the private papers of Nazi commando legend Otto Skorzeny, who escaped prosecution at Nurenberg and continued his intelligence operations into the Cold War, working mainly out of Spain and Ireland. His wife worked closely with him, and according to the private papers purchased by Ganis, who I met at a JFK Conference in Dallas a few years ago, his business interests extended into Texas, especially Dallas, where he became entwined with a number of businesses and individuals involved in the assassination drama, expecially, USA Reserve Colonel Jack Crichton.

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-skorzeny-papers-evidence-for-plot.html

More to come on witnesses I’ve interviewed – BK