Situation Room 11/22/63
While I have been away from JFKCountercoup, I have maintained communication with my key friends and assocites and continue to respond to serious questions, like this one:
Hi Bill
Several years ago, I sent you an email which I saved concerning the call placed
from the situation room to the cabinet plane enroute to Japan on
11-22-63. Who placed the call? Was it McGeorge Bundy, Oliver Hallet or someone
else? Was it one call or multiple calls? What time were these calls? Who said a
suspect is in custody and there was no evidence of conspiracy?
Thanks, Jim Purtell
Hi Jim, good to hear from you.
In answer to your questions, the person who placed the call from the Situation Room in the basement of the White House to the Cabinet plane over the Pacific was code named STRANGER, who orded them to turn around and return to Washington DC immediately.
When Pierre Salinger got that message over the radio, and relayed it to the senior cabinet member aboard Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Rusk asked Salinger who STRANGER was.
When Salinger went to the plane’s safe for the code book, it was missing.
Rusk said they couldn’t take orders from anyone, especially someone named STRANGER, and he requested Salinger identify STRANGER. On the Clifton Air Force One radio transmission tapes, we can hear Salinger request the identity of STRANGER, and shortly there after the name Harold Patterson, a White House Communications Agency (WHCA) officer was named in the clear. Salinger told Rusk he personally knew Patterson and could vouch for him.
When I was transcribing the Clifton tape and combining it with the previously released LBJ Library tape, Harold Patterson was a new name for me, and I located him in Virginia. Calling him on the phone Patterson answered and I told him I was listening to him on the AF1 radio transmission tapes. Patterson confirmed that he was in the Situation Room at the time of the assassination, did use the code name STRAGER, and talked with Salinger over the radio. He also confirmed that the code book on the Cabinet Plane was missing.
We had a pleasant half hour conversation, but when I gave his name and phone number to Jeff Morley a day or so later, Morley called him and Patterson clamed up and wouldn’t talk at all. I suspect someone to him.
While it appears that McGeorge Bundy was the senior official in the Situation Room at the time and was calling the shots, Oliver Hallet was also there. Hallet was a military atache who was also in Snyder’s office at the America Embassy in Moscow when Oswald appeared and turned over his passport to Snyder and announced his defection. So when Oswald’s name was first announced over the commercial radio news, Hallet knew who Oswald was.
Thereis no mention of Oswald on either of the two versions of the AF1 radio transmission tapes, but according to three respected journalists – William Manchester, Theodore White and Pierre Salinger, who were permitted to read a transcript of the unedited tapes, there is mention of Oswald and that there was no conspiracy. LBJ permitted Manchester (The Death of a President) and White (The Making of a President 1964) to read and quote from the transcript at the White House. Salinger was given a copy by the JFK Library in Boston while he was writing his book of memoirs.
Philadelphia attorney Vince Salandria wrote extensively about this in his Tale of the Tapes, and he communicated with Salinger, who told Salandria he returned his copy to the JFK Library, but when Salinger asked them about it he was told they no longer have the transcript. The Dealey Plaza Clean Up Crew was working overtime.
Both John Judge and I attended the University of Dayton, near Wright-Pat Air Force Base where JFK’s AF1 is now located. John said that while attending a reception at Wright-Pat he met some B-52 bomber pilots who told him that when they learned of the assassination they immediately went to the plane’s safe to get the code books but they were missing. Other B-52 pilots said they had the same experience. So the case of the missing code books was not confined to the Cabinet Plane.
For more on this see:
https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2013/11/thursday-november-21-2013-rebroadcastof.html
https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/05/stranger-missing-code-books.html
https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/01/tale-of-tapes-by-vincent-salandria_31.html
Thaniks to Dave Ratcliff for posting this: https://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/FalseMystery/Original-TaleToldByTwoTapes.pdf
