April 10, 1963 - The USS Thresher and JFCOTT

 April 10, 1963 - The USS Thresher and JFCOTT

                                                               USS Thresher (SSN-593) 

April 10, 1963 was the occasion of two events that had a bearing on, or at least were connected to the assassination of President Kennedy - the sinking of the nuclear submarine USS Thresher and the General Walker shooting. 

The Thresher went down in deep water in the North Atlantic during a trial dive, with the loss of all hands. 

A ship with a deep dive robotic sub out of the Woods Hole institute later discovered the remains of the Thresher on the ocean floor, and one of the studies on the cause of the accident blamed the faulty manufacture of the O - "Oh" rings. 

Although I presume it was just a coincidence, Woods Hole is just across the channel from Forbes Island, where owned by the Forbes family and used as a seasonal retreat, including Ruth Forbes Paine Young, Michael Paine's mother, a Forbes, and her close friend Mary Bancroft - Allen Dulles' OSS assistant and paramour. 

The private island  is also a port of call for sailor Walter Cronkite, a supporter of Cord Meyer, Jr.'s World Federalists, an organization he founded to support the United Nations and one that sought a world government. 

Michael's mother was reportedly in residence at the island when she wrote to the pregnant Marina Oswald in New Orleans inviting her to live with her in Texas until she had the baby. If Marina agreed she was to write to Ruth Forbes Paine Young in care of c/o Arthur Young, Paoli, Pa., the inventor of the Bell Helicopter who was married to Michael's mother and obtained the job for him at Bell in Texas. 

Marina agreed, with Oswald's consent, and Ruth Paine, after visiting the Youngs, drove to New Orleans and picked up Marina, the daughter and the Oswald's belongings, including the rifle, and took them to Texas while Oswald ostensibly went to Mexico City to get a visa to Cuba. 

The Oswalds moved to New Orleans shortly after the Walker shooting, an act attributed to Oswald after the assassination. 

The Woods Hold institute in Massachusetts is a world renown oceanographic center that does a lot of work for the U.S. government, especially the Navy. The acoustic scientists who were commissioned to do the study of the Dallas police dictabelt for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) - Barger, Weiss and Ackensasy also did work at Woods Hole, as their acoustics work also had a bearing on the Navy's submarines. 

The sinking of the Thresher was a major catastrophe in the Kennedy administration, though it was overshadowed by the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis and his assassination. 

From what I understand, the faulty O rings were manufactured by the Bendix corporation on the West Coast, and according to some court papers there was a case presented against Bendix by one of its former employees named Bray. 

A former associate of mine who read a microfilm of the court testimony said that in the trial it was mentioned that there was a connection between the sinking of the Thresher and the assassination of President Kennedy, and a film of the assassination - not the Zapruder film, was mentioned. 

In addition, Mr. Bray claimed that he was visited at home by three men in suits and ties who claimed to represent a group called JFCOTT - Justice For the Crew of The Thresher, and in the course of seeking justice, they said that the Secretary of the Navy - then John Connally, should be killed. 

Now this is a bit outlandish, but who could make up the name JFCOTT, and the whole deal sounds peculiarly like the Cubans who visited Sylvia Odio with an ex-Marine named Oswald who could kill the Secretary of the Navy or the President. 

It appears to me that someone is setting up alternative possible motives for the assassination - a trial balloon or setting out bait for a trap, and James Reston, Jr. bought it. The son of the renown New York Times editor James Reston, Sr., Reston, Jr. proposed that Oswald was not shooting at the president but rather John Connally was his target, and his motive was Connally's failure to address Oswald's less than honorable discharge. Reston, Jr. even wrote a book about this theory and managed to obtain much mainstream press at the time. 

While Reston, Jr. might be taken in by this ruse, I don't think for one minute that Oswald took any shots from the Sixth Floor of the TSBD that day, and the head shot(s) were taken by first class trained snipers who didn't miss but hit their bull's eye in the head, as they intended to do. 

But in searching the key word submarine from all of the JFK assassination records, there are a number of references that are worth noting. 

For starters, Clay Shaw, accused of complicity in the assassination by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, wrote an unpublished and unproduced play about a submarine crew who were stranded at the bottom of the ocean. 

In addition, George deMohrenschildt, during World War II, shared a room in Washington D.C. with a US navy submarine captain. 

Then there's US Navy Lt. Commander Thomas Narut, who told a London Sunday Times reporter that the US Navy had a special study of and training program for assassins who were tested in the MMPI as "Passive-Aggressive," as Oswald was, and were especially selected from certain branches of the military - paratroopers, marines and submarine crews. 

And finally, there's retired US Navy Admiral Chester Bruton, a former nuclear submarine commander who was working for Collins Radio Corporation when his friend George deMohrenschildt brought Marina Oswald to his home to swim in Bruton's backyard pool and have lunch. Oswald unexpectedly showed up and was invited to lunch. DeMohrenschildt asked Bruton if he could arrange for Oswald to obtain a job at Collins Radio - (after all he did work in a radio factory in Minsk) but Oswald's attitude towards Bruton - who was considered "Brass" because of his rank, did not make a good impression. So Oswald didn't get the job. (For more on Bruton and Oswald see the HSCA volumes.) 

[ Henry Chester Bruton (1905 - 1992) - Genealogy  ]

By the way, some years ago I did obtain Bruton's home phone number in Washington D.C. from somewhere. When I called his daughter answered the phone and said she was sorry, but her father had just died and she was taking care of his personal belongings. 

I did learn however that Bruton's job at Collins was to develop a new means of communication with submerged submarines. 

After reading Loren Singer's book The Parallax View, on which the Warren Beaty movie was based, I noticed that the end of the book is quite different than the ending of the movie, where Beaty is killed in the rafters of the Dallas Trade Mart, where JFK was heading to for a luncheon when he was killed. 

Singer, by the way, was a former OSS officer during World War II, and the tests that are part of the book and movie, he told Len Osanic on Black Op radio, were based on his OSS experiences.

I also found it interesting that when I obtained the Annual Reports for Collins Radio 1962-1964, it is reported that Collins received a US government military grant to study the parallax phenomena - which is described as "the apparent displacement or the difference in apparent direction of an object as seen from two different points not on a straight line with the object," a problem that often affects pilots and is considered a possible blame for the crash and death of John Kennedy, Jr. 

The Parallax View book ends with an attempt on the life of the reporter who was run off a marsh road that runs just north of Cape May, New Jersey, just south of Wildwood, near where I just happened to live when I read the book. 

So I drove there, and among the miles of back bay waters and marshes that were lined with a high security fence, where the closed and locked gate read: US Navy Research Center. 

Stopping at the local bar - the Wildwood Crest Tavern, I had a beer and inquired about the Navy research center, and the bar tender said that some of the technicians came in there for lunch, and that it was an experimental station with special antennas used to communicate with submerged submarines at sea. 

Now I don't know what to make of any of this, but I thought I would throw it out there, as it all appears to be coincidence and in some cases non-sense, but I do like what Ian Fleming said of such things - the first time it's coincidence, the second time happenstance, though the third time it's enemy action.

And I'm not done with Oswald and the Walker shooting yet, as there's more to that story than has yet met the eye.