Thursday, March 28, 2024

Undercover of Night: The USAF and the Assassination of JFK

 

Undercover of Night: The United  States Air  Force  and the Assassination of President Kennedy – Two Volumes (Arlington, Wy,  2024), By Sean Fetter.

I probably wouldn’t have been so disappointed in these books if Sean Fetter hadn’t promised so much and delivered so little. After watching his promotional podcast in which he claims to have interviewed dozens of Air Force personnel; about what they did, saw and heard on November 22, 1963, I contacted Fetter about getting a digital version to review, but he said there were no digital or review versions available, and that I would have to purchase the books.

At almost $100 with shipping, that was out of my book budget at the moment though a West Coast associate ordered them for me (thank you PM)  though it took a month to arrive.

For starters I agree with Fetter that what occurred at Dealey Plaza was a coup d’etat, that the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had little to do with, and the Air Force angles are extremely important.

I didn’t know Billy Lovelady was dismissed from the USAF for stealing and selling 38 revolvers, only used by military police and B-52 pilots – interesting in light of the fact that the sling on the rifle found on the 6th floor was from a B-52 pilot’s shoulder holster for a 38 revolver.

And like Fetter, I also think its important to determine the whereabouts of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. LeMay at the time of the assassination, but disagree with his conclusion.

And we part ways when it comes to anointing LBJ as the mastermind of the plot, since he didn’t have the intellectual capacity or knowledge of black propaganda and  covert intelligence operations to organize the Dealey Plaza operation. Nor do I believe that Sam Rayburn, who had died two years before, had anything to do with the assassination. And I don’t believe, because LBJ ordered the pilot of AF1 not to file a flight plan means LBJ was going to flee to Mexico to avoid being arrested for complicity in the assassination when the arrived in Washington.

Nor do I believe Jackie Kennedy placed her wedding ring on the finger of the wrong body, that Secret  Service Agent Roy Kellerman mutilated the body of JFK with a fire ax when a scalpel would be  necessary. The ax, says Fetter, was the one used to remove the handle of the ornate casket in order to get it into the door of Air Force One, the casket that didn’t contain the body of the slain president but it did contain a body, but Fetter doesn’t say who it is.

It’s true, as Fetter tells us, there were no such plane as Air Force Two, and Air Force One was whatever plane the president was in. But then he goes on to call the backup plane used by LBJ as Air Force 2, and continues to name other Special Air Mission planes AF3-4-5, and lists the planes he suspects as being the one used to transport of JFK’s body back to Andrews and Bethesda, including the Cargo plane, the Press plane, and a Silver Dollar Command  and Control plane that he says was ordered to pick up the body but  didn’t.

Fetter says that all of the Silver Dollar planes were based at Andrews, but Colonel Lowrey, in Louisiana is identified as a Silver Dollar commander who gave former USMC Thomas Blackmon, who was involved in the Big Easy Houma Bunker raid, a base pass. But Fetter says chasing the New Orleans  aspects of the assassination is a waste of time.

In discussing the tapes discovered among the effects of  the President’s military aide US Army General Chester Victor (“Ted”) Clifton Fetter says: "….following the cleaning and enhancement by a private third party, routine messages involving Silver Dollar Two, the airborne NEACAP backup  plane , were now audible.”

Since my name isn’t listed in the index at the end of Volume II, I  thought I might have gotten away clean, but when he mentions the General Clifton version of the AF1 radio recordings, he mentions me in footnote #172:

“JFK investigators (sic) Bill Kelly deserves universal thanks for making that valuable project happen: audio expert and engineer Edward J. Primeau and his colleague Brad Finegan (plus Ed Primeau’s son Michael) deserve enormous praise for actually performing the technical task.”

Well thank you Sean. But since I was responsible for getting it cleaned up and personally transcribed it, I don’t recall any mention of Silver Dollar, a Command and Control plane that we know was flying over Dallas at the time of the assassination because they called in for a radio check as detailed in the article by Larry Happanen  -  The Call That Came In Out of the Blue.

Kennedy Assassination Chronicles, Volume 8, Issue 2

Fetter says that the USAF pilots he talked to liked the Collins Radios on their planes, and correctly credits Gen. LeMay for placing them on all SAC and SAM planes, but fails to point out all of the other Collins Radio connections to the assassination that reveal the extent of the covert network that was responsible for the assassination.

[   JFKcountercoup: The Collins Radio Connections to the Assassination of JFK - Updated  ]

Fetter is full of himself and promotes his analytical ability, over and over, and calls himself an American historian and investigative journalist, but he neglects to utilize their basic practices, principles and procedures. He doesn’t like or trust documents and fails to document what he says, or the AF personnel he claims to have interviewed.

Most of his footnotes – hundreds of them simply read: “Author’s exclusive original discovery,” which isn’t a footnote at all, one that should give you a name, a book, a document, RIF#, date, etc., so  they can  be sourced  and followed up.

At first I went looking for the dozens of interviews he claimed to have conducted with AF personnel, but there are only his reports of what they say, and even Fetter admits that the significant things he attributes to them is something they themselves didn’t recognize as important. And almost all of the interviews- conversations with Air Force personnel took place in 1994- thirty years ago.

As Doug Horne has noted in his review of this book (reposted in another thread): “The claims by Sean Fetter’s admirers that he has justified every claim and provided evidence for all of his findings are premature, to say the least. He has provided many tantalizing and exciting claims that supposedly come from the mouths of former members of Air Force flight crews that he has interviewed: pilots, co-pilots, flight engineers, stewards, radio operators, and one on-the-ground refueling technician. At first blush, and upon first reading, many of the words and statements he has ascribed to them are quite exciting to read. BUT…and this is a big “but”…unless his claims of what they have said to him are properly established, they cannot be treated as fully credible. Where are the audio tape recordings and/or video recordings, and the transcripts, which support the recorded audio or video? His readers need to see and hear those, before his claims about what they have said are worthy of belief. Without that supporting documentation, unsupported “witness statements” in his book are inherently suspect. The burden of proof for Fetter’s extraordinary claims of what they have said is on HIM. Only when Sean Fetter proves that his witnesses actually said these things that he ascribes to them, can we then began to seriously ponder what their statements might mean.”

The fact is Fetter did not record and transcribe any of his interviews. He takes one sentence of what was said to him, and repeats it, over and over to make sure you get it. Then he jumps to a wrong conclusion based on simple facts.

My former associate John Judge is listed 10 times in the index, but is actually mentioned in only four of those.

While Fetter hates his former mentor, the late David Lifton with a passion, repeatedly mentioning his name and how he got things wrong, he likes John Judge, and talked with him on the phone a number of times. John told him about reading a news clip at the Archives II that falsely reported the death of Gen. LeMay in a plane crash.

From that Fetter concludes – “LeMay faked his own death.”

Well I was with John Judge at the Archives that day, as we often went together, and while I made photo copies of the Andrews Log Book for 11/22/63 that was fetched from a trash bin by a janitor, Judge had requested the records they had on Gen. LeMay. The archives staff wheeled out a cart with a dozen boxes of documents, news clips and magazine articles that John waded through while I copied the Andrews Log.

When I was finished, I went over to John and he showed me the news clip that falsley reported his death.

Instead of doing what John Judge did – go to Archives II, request the LeMay papers and read through them, he just asked Judge what was in them.

Fetter began his quest into the Air Force connections to the assassination at Maxwell AFB in Alabama, where the Air Force historical archives are kept, and that’s where he learned about Special Air Mission SAM Fox, an association of retired SAM officers.

He should have known that Maxwell was the site of a special two day conference of all active duty Air Force Generals chaired by AF Chief of Staff General LeMay, a week before the assassination, the agenda and minutes of which I’d like to read.

After the conference LeMay took a hunting and fishing vacation. Picked up by TV and radio personality Arthur Godfrey, also an Air Force Reserve General and pilot, Godfrey flew LeMay to Detroit in his private plane, a gift from Eastern Airlines President Eddie Rickenbacker, David Ferrie’s former boss. 

In Detroit, Godfrey talked with a local journalist who reported that Godfrey and LeMay were headed for a hunting and fishing resort in Michigan. Godfrey also said that the rumors of his death were greatly exagerated, possibly the source of false report of LeMay’s death, since they were both flying together.

After a few days at the resort Godfrey flew back East to resume his radio and TV shows while LeMay went to North Michigan to resume his vacation. 

LeMay’s wife was from Michigan, she attended the University of Michigan, and her family had a lake house that LeMay occassionally used. LeMay also stayed at a lake cabin in Michagan owned by Teamster Union boss Jimmy Hoffa that we know of because LeMay was on their guests Christmas card list. Some suggest that LeMay was possibly at the spy school known as Camp X.

The most likely place LeMay was at the time of the assassination was a remote lodge owned by Detroit auto industrialists, that could be reached by boat or small plane, and while it didn’t have a telephone, it did have a HAM radio, LeMay’s favorite means of communication.

From the Andrews AF base log retrieved fron the trash by a janitor, we know immediately after the assassination LeMay requested the Andrews SAM to send a plane to pick him up in Toronto, then had the plane- a Jet Star C-140 executive – what Fetter calls AF-5, redirected to Wiarton, Canada, apparently a close former military base near where he was.

Now Fetter places LeMay at the NORAD – North American Air Defense command HQ base at North Bay. According to Fetter, he was assigned to go there by LBJ with advance knowledge of the assassination, in order to prevent rabid SAC commander Gen. Powers from using the assassination as an excuse to spark WWIII in a Dr. Strangelovesque like Wing Attack Plan R.

But that was already covered by removing the code books from B-52s and SAM planes, as John Judge also discovered.

And the NORAD HQ was 350 miles from Wiarton, so I discount Fetter’s theory on LeMay’s whereabouts at the time of the assassination.

Fetter is one of the few who does note that the Warren Commission Report text and narrative was written by the official US Air Force historican Alfred Goldberg, who I have interviewed and believe is still alive.

In the end, I could find no significant nuggerts worth citing in either of these volumes, and it is quite clear that the full story of the US Air Force and the assassination has yet to be written.

BillKelly3@gmail.com

Relevant links:

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-collins-radio-connections-to-dealey.html?m=1

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2013/10/andrews-log-112263-salvaged-from-trash.html?m=1

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2013/11/thursday-november-21-2013-rebroadcastof.html?m=1

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2019/12/general-lemay-on-11-22-63.html?m=1

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2022/05/seven-days-in-lemay-updated.html

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2023/07/tales-of-af1-radio-tapes.html?m=1

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2013/09/alfred-goldberg-and-rudolph-winnacker.html?m=1

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