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.
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
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