The Collins Radio Connections Revisited

 The Collins Radio Connections

Collins Radio by Bill Kelly
Back Channels Magazine,
Volume 1, No. 4. Summer, 1992 p. 1-2.
Edited By Peter Kross
https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/02/collins-radio-connections-to.html?m=1

According to the former chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), “the principal impetus for the overwhelming support…establishing the HSCA…came from another source – the … Senate Committee on Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. In this report, dated April, 1976, the Senate committee published revelations that raised in the minds of many, serious possibilities of government complicity in the assassination.”

“Two astonishing facts had been developed by the Senate investigations,” the counsel noted, “- the CIA, as part of an assassination of foreign leaders (executive action) program, had enlisted the cooperation of top underworld figures in the United States in an effort to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba. In addition, word of the CIA/Mafia plots had been withheld by the Agency from the Warren Commission.”

In a sense, at least one member of the Warren Commission, former CIA director Allen Dulles, knew of the plots to kill Castro, but did not inform the other commissioners. Instead, he provided them all with a book about American assassins, and how they are, historically, mentally deranged loners.

The final report of the HSCA concluded that, “in the judgment of this committee, the CIA/Mafia plots, like the AM/LASH plots, should have been aggressively explored as part of the 1963-64 investigations.”

Both the CIA/Mafia and the AM/LASH plots to kill Castro were extensively evaluated by the Congressional committees, and the CIA eventually admitted to partaking in at least six different plots to kill Castro.

But three respected researchers – Gaeton Fonzi, Timothy Crouse and Paul Hoch, separately questioned why the CIA would admit to its attempts to kill Castro with flashy shellfish toxins, exploding cigars and dart gun pens, yet fail to mention the October 1961 and the November 1971 plots involving Antonio Veciana.

Yet another plot, the Rex raid of October 31, 1963, which is on the public record, is another example of the government’s failure to affirm secret operations to kill Castro that are directly entwined with the assassination of President Kennedy.

The Rex episode first came to light on October 31, 1963 when Fidel Castro announced that a team of assassins were arrested on a beach in Cuba. They had high powered rifles and other assassination weapons and confessed that the CIA had organized arm shipments to Cuban insurgents and had trained them to kill Cuban leaders.

According to Castro, the men arrived in Cuba aboard two small motor launches, marked with the name “the Rex.” A New York Times reporter in Florida confirmed that the Rex, a ship docked at Palm Beach, Florida, was indeed missing two of its launches. It was later written, “President Kennedy had expressed his great annoyance to the CIA at the fact that the Rex, one of the CIA’s boats used in raids on Cuba, docked at Palm Beach while he was there on vacation.”

This raid also took place against the clearly stated policy of the U.S. government that, “no raids against Cuba were to originate from U.S. shores.” The CIA even launched the Bay of Pigs invasion from bases in Nicaragua and Guatemala.

The New York Times published a photo of the Rex in its November 1, 1963 edition, and identified the 174 foot vessel as registered out of Bluefields, Nicaragua, “but in fact operating out of West Palm Beach, Florida.”

A decommissioned U.S. Navy sub-chaser, the Rex, captained by Aiejandro Brooks, was the flagship of the CIA’s operation JM/WAVE fleet. It was outfitted with searchlights, a crane for lifting its speedboats aft, elaborate electronic gear amidships, and had an arsenal that consisted of two 40 mm cannon, a 57 cal. Recoilless rifle, two 20 mm cannon and two 50 caliber machine guns.

The Belcher Oil Company of Miami, had bought the Rex from Paragon, a company owned by Luis Somoza of Nicaragua. The New York Times reported that, “dockage for the ship was said to be paid by Sea Shipping Co. from a post office box.”

In November, 1963, the ship was being leased to the International Division of the Collins Radio Company of Richardson, Texas, to be used for possible ELENT (electronic intelligence) gathering activity.

What is significant about the Rex and its mission to deposit assassins in Cuba on October 31, 1963, is that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President Kennedy, once visited the home of retired Admiral Chester Brouton, then an executive of Collins Radio, the company that leased the Rex. So someone associated with accused assassin of JFK worked for a company that was actively engaged in an assassination attempt against Castro just three weeks before the President was killed.

Oswald’s association with Brouton is cited in a HSCA report, specifically in the document, “I’m a Patsy,” written by George DeMohrenschildt, who knew Brouton personally and took Oswald and his wife to Brouton’s home in suburban Dallas where they had lunch by the pool.

Brouton’s position with Collins is also mentioned in Legend: The Secret Life of Lee Harvey Oswald by Edward J. Epstein, but the Rex incident is ignored by the HSCA as well as by Epstein.

Although the associations between Oswald and Brouton, Brouton and Collins and Collins and the Rex should have been enough to warrant an investigation of the corporate structure of Collins Radio, Inc. yet another Collins Radio employee was investigated immediately after the murder of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit on November 22, 1963.

Tippit was killed in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas within an hour of the President’s death and his murder was also attributed to the President’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The final report of the HSCA claims that, “…the committee’s investigation uncovered no direct evidence of a relationship between Oswald and Tippit, nor did it attribute any activity or association to Officer Tippit that could be deemed suspicious…”

But the items listed under the Committee’s report Section 11, Volume XII – Oswald-Tippit Associates, are indeed suspicious. This is a serious discrepancy between the stated conclusions of the HSCA and the evidence it developed and published as part of the public record.

As former Warren Commission counsel David Belin put it, “the Tippit murder is the Rosetta Stone of the Kennedy assassination,” and although he meant it to convict Oswald as the lone assassin, it may assist in the unraveling of the covert conspiracy.

Under Section XI – Austin’s Barbecue, it is revealed that besides being a Dallas policeman, Tippit also held a job moonlighting as a bouncer at Austin’s Drive-In restaurant. The owner of Austin’s was a partner with Bert Bowman, who owned money to and lived with Ralph Paul, Jack Ruby’s financial backer.

Ruby also owed money to Paul – an estimated $15,000, and the $3,000 Ruby had with him when he shot Oswald was reportedly Paul’s cash. Although Ruby might not have known officer Tippit, both men worked for the same Bowman/Paul combine.

Both Oswald and Tippit also frequented the same Dobb’s House restaurant in Oak Cliff, and both sat at the same counter for breakfast together on the morning of the day before the assassination. Although they weren’t seen conversing together, Oswald complained loudly about his eggs being too well done, and the waitress said that Tippit “shot him a glace.”

The HSCA reports also show that shortly after Tippit’s murder, Oswald was seen sitting in a parked car that belonged to Tippit’s best friend, Carl Mather, who worked for Collins Radio.

Listed in the HSCA reports as “The Wise Allegation,” because it originated with former Dallas newsman and mayor Wes Wise, the report reads: “Wise…had received information that a car near the scene of the Tippit shooting was traced to Carl Mather, a close friend of Tippit’s….A mechanic who worked across the street had observed a car in a parking lot of the El Chico restaurant on the afternoon of November 22, after radio reports were being broadcast about the shooting in Dealey Plaza. The mechanic told Wise that after the assassination there were sirens blaring and police cars all over the area near the garage.

“He noticed,” the report continues, “a man sitting in an irregularly parked car in the restaurant parking lot; the car was slightly hidden by a billboard. The man in the car appeared to be hiding, all the circumstances seemed so suspicious that the mechanic went across the street to get a better look.”

“When the mechanic saw news accounts of the assassination on television, he saw Lee Harvey Oswald and recognized him as being the man he had seen in the car that afternoon.”

So on the afternoon of JFK’s murder, the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald is seen sitting in a car belonging to a close friend of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit, who Oswald is also accused of killing. That friend, Carl Mather, worked for Collins Radio, a company that was actively engaged in at least one plot to assassinate Fidel Castro three weeks earlier.

According to Professor Peter Dale Scott, the Rex mission of October 31, 1963 was sponsored by the anti-Castro Cuban group known as the MDC – the Movement Democrato Christiano, which also ran a commando training camp near Lake Ponchartrain in Louisiana that Oswald had previously tried to infiltrate. The FBI raided that camp, and made some arrests and stirred up some publicity.

Scott also says that the Rex mission may have included Watergate burglar Rolando Martinez.

Like may other unsolved mysteries surrounding the Kennedy assassination, the secret mission of the Rex is yet to be fully explained.

William Kelly, Jr. is the Co-Founder of the Committee for an Open Archives (COA). His research on the assassination of President Kennedy is supported in part by a grant from the Fund for Constitutional Government, Investigative Journalism Project.

From Crime & Cover-up by Peter Dale Scott:

“An MDC-Somoza anti-Castro mission of October 1963 fro a Florida-based ship the Somozas called the Rex, involved both Martinez as skipper (according to Sturgis) and very probably Sturgis himself as well. This Florida based raid violated President Kennedy’s publicly announced prohibition of Cuban exile raids ‘launched, manned, or equipped from U.S. territory.’ It came only one month after Sturgis himself had been publicly warned by U.S. government officials to desist from such activities.” (Note NYT Sept. 16, 1963, p. 39)

In Harpers Magazine, R. Crile and Taylor Branch interviewed Martinez:

“Although Rolando Martinez was in many ways typical of the Agency’s Cuban volunteers, he was more accomplished and experienced than most. When he surfaced in 1972 as one of the Cuban-Americans captured at the Watergate break-in, Martinez was still on the CIA payroll an had 354 missions to Cuba recorded in Agency files. As a boat captain in the clandestine navy of JM/WAVE, he completed fifty missions before the Bay of Pigs and would complete some seventy-five more during the first four years of the secret war.” (Harpers, p. 56)

Rolando Martinez: “….I took a lot of weapons to Cuba. Some were very special weapons for very special purposes. They were powerful rifles with sophisticated scopes – Springfields with bolt action, rifles used only by snipers. They were not sent to shoot pigeons or kill rabbits. Everyone in the underground was plotting to kill Castro, and the CIA was helping the underground. I was with the underground as well as the CIA, so you could say I was involved in the plots too, but that is all so obvious.” (Harpers, p. 83)

Collins Radio & the JFK Assassination 1994

In October 1994 I gave a talk at the national conference of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) in Washington D.C. on the Collins Radio Connections to the assassination of President Kennedy.

Unlike the main speakers – Dr. Cyril Wecht, John Newman, Fletcher Prouty, Michael Parenti, Mark Lane and Judge John Tunheim who were the featured speakers, my talk was in a side-room big enough for only a hundred or so people, but the room was full, and I was glad to see that Peter Dale Scott, Bill Turner and others I respected went out of their way to listen to my short, 20 minute presentation.

While most of what I talked about took place in the 1960s, thirty years previous, Washington was in the middle of a major big time government scandal which dominated the front pages of the Washington Post concerning the emergence, over the previous three years, of a huge $310 million federal building on a 68 acre site near Dulles Airport.

The official cover story was that this was the new national headquarters of the Collins Radio Division of Rockwell International, but eventually it was discovered that it would be the new headquarters for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), jointly operated by the Air Force and the CIA.

The very existence of the NRO was not officially acknowledged until 1992, and former CIA director R. James Woolsley testified that he was concerned that he had committed a serious security breather by uttering the initials “N.R.O.”

On August 10, 1994, NRO director Jeffrey Harris and deputy director Jimmy Hill “nervously and reluctantly joined in the first public testimony in the agency’s 34-year history,” the New York Times reported on page one the next day.

“For four years, the reconnaissance office, the agency that builds and maintains the nation’s multibillion dollar fleet of spy satellites, concealed the money for the headquarters by breaking it up into different accounts in its operating budget, its leaders testified….This was normal, they testified. Building the new headquarters….was in effect, a covert operation.”

“We have been negligent, clearly negligent, for not showing the budget breakdown for this project,” Roger Marsh, project manager for the new headquarters said.

John M. Broder, of the Los Angeles Times (Aug. 10, 1994) wrote that even former budget director Leon E. Panetta, who became White House Chief of Staff (and is now Sec. of Defense), “had no idea the four mid-rise office towers belonged to the government.”

Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D. Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that committee members knew the building was being constructed but “budget estimates and details were given to the committee piecemeal and buried in larger intelligence accounts.”

When DeConcini told Clinton, Panetta and national security advisor Anthony Lake, after they read about it in the news papers, DeConcini said the three “were caught by surprise.”

The President ordered the building project declassified, released construction costs, but when DeConcini “urged Clinton to name independent auditors to conduct an inquiry into the project,” the President instead “put the review in the hands of the CIA and Pentagon, who were responsible for hiding the project’s spending in their budgets.”

DeConcini, still fuming at the betrayal by the intelligence agencies, said he had no idea whether the investigation would uncover other multi-million-dollar clandestine operations. “For all we know, they might have a battleship floating around out in the Pacific with a bunch of communications on it that we don’t know about.”

Then it got even better, when the 3rd Anniversary issue of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s George Magazine (Oct. 1998) included an article called “The Spys Who Lost $4 Billion,” by David Wise, who had previously co-authored groundbreaking book “The Invisible Government.”

“The NRO is a top secret spy organization whose satellites…can photograph a license plate from outer space,….so how did it lose billions of dollars from its own budget?, Wise asked.

According to Wise, “With some 3,000 employees and an annual budget of around $6.2 billion,….the NRO spends far more money than any of the government’s 13 primary intelligence agencies. It’s budget is twice that of the CIA….and has played a key role in virtually every major foreign policy event of the last 35 years.”

“Yes, Virginia, there is a NRO.”

And 35 years after its cover was blown by a front page story in the New York Times for fronting for the CIA in the operation of the Rex, the NRO pulled Collins Radio off the shelf to cover for the NRO’s new headquarters, which they thought they could just build out in the Virginia suburbs without anybody knowing or asking what they were doing. And they tired to do it without the knowledge of the President, the head of the federal budget, the national security advisors or the head of the Congressional oversight committees.

Frank B. Strickland, Jr., deputy program manager of NRO’s Support Office said, “Our adversaries will change tactics, and the adversaries themselves have changed. Now we have terrorists, rogue nations, nuclear proliferation. The NRO has to keep pace.”

Collins Radio Connections

THE COLLINS RADIO CONNECTIONS to the Assassination of President Kennedy
By William E. Kelly – Revised from report originally published in Backchannels magazine and presented at the national conference of the Coalition On Political Assassination (COPA), October 10, 1994.

If the assassination of President Kennedy was the result of not only a conspiracy, but a covert action and coup d’etat, as many people believe, there should be evidence of this from both the scene of the crime(s) as well as from the highest echelons of power among those who took over the government. This would be especially so if the assassination was not the actions of a lone-nut or a foreign attack by Cuban or Soviet intelligence service sponsors, but an internal manipulation of policy and control, an inside job.

As Edward Luttwack describes in his "How-To" book Coup d’etat – A Practical Handbook(Alfred A. Knopf, 1968, p. 117), "Control over the flow of information emanating from the political center will be our most important weapon in establishing… authority after the coup. The seizure of the main means of mass communication will thus be a task of crucial importance."

At the scene(s) of the crime, eyewitness testimony is always suspect. Homicide detectives prefer more solid leads that provide documented evidence that can be introduced in court, such as fingerprints, telephone and automobile license records.

There are a number of automobile license records of significance in regards to the assassination of President Kennedy, including the tampered photo among the possessions of Lee Harvey Oswald of the license on 1957 Chevy in General Walker’s driveway, plus the license numbers of cars seen in Dealey Plaza photos immediately before and after the assassination.

Most significant however, is the Texas plate PP4537. This number was jotted down on a piece of paper by an elderly Oak Cliff mechanic T. F. White, who noticed a man acting suspiciously behind the wheel of a 1958 two tone Plymouth sedan shortly after the murder of Dallas Policeman J.D. Tippitt in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas. The car was parked behind a billboard in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant, with the driver, like White, watching the flurry of Dallas police cars racing down the street with sirens blaring, called to the nearby scene of the shooting of Tippit.

White walked across the street to get closer and exchanged glances with the man, who quickly drove away. White wrote down the license tag PP4537 on a piece of paper and forgot about it until later that day when he saw Lee Harvey Oswald on television and recognized him as the man he saw acting suspiciously in the Plymouth earlier that afternoon.

A few weeks later, when Dallas radio reporter and later mayor of Dallas Wes Wise gave a talk at the Oak Cliff restaurant, the owner of the garage where Mr. White worked mentioned the suspicious Plymouth to Wise, who then met White. White reluctantly told his story, but was reluctant to get involved, and Wise had to use all his powers of persuasion to convince White to share the information with him. Wise promised White he would not be brought into the investigation, but tat he, Wise, would handle it. "Do you have the piece of paper with the license number on it?" Wise asked, and sure enough, White had it right there in his pocket and gave it to Wise. It read: PP4537.

White told Wise that nobody knew who or what was really behind the assassination of President Kennedy and he really didn’t want to get involved, but he handed over the paper to Wise, who passed it on to the police and FBI.

A quick check of the Texas plate #PP4537 indicated that it was assigned to Carl Mather, of Garland, Texas. When the FBI went out to the listed Garland address they found the two tone 1958 Plymouth right there in the driveway and knocked on the door. Mrs. Mather answered, acknowledged the car belonged to her husband, who was then away at work at Collins Radio, in nearby Richardson, Texas. When asked where her husband and the car was on Friday, November 22, 1963, she said that the car was in the parking lot at Collins Radio until sometime in the afternoon when her husband returned home and picked up the family to go to the Tippit residence to pay their respects to the widow and family of their good friend, who was murdered that day.

Instead of going out to Collins Radio to interview Mather however, the FBI went first to Mr. White, who Wes Wise had promised wouldn’t be involved, and took additional statements from him, changing his story for the official reports and exchanging the two tone Plymouth to a red Ford Falcon. CBS News made a polite inquiry years later, leaving Carl Mather out of the documentary program they aired but listed Mrs. Mather in the programs credits. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) briefly looked into the affair, granted Mather immunity from prosecution to testify and then failed to question him under oath. The HSCA published a short report they titled "The Wise Allegation," when in fact Wes Wise made no allegations, and merely followed up on his reporter’s instincts. He came up with an automobile license plate number that was scene near the murder of a Dallas policeman that was traced to one of the victim’s best friends, Carl Mather, whose alibi is that he was at work at the time, at Collins Radio.

Documents later released under the JFK Act indicate that Mather was questioned by HSCA investigators and claimed that he worked on electronics at Collins, his specific job being the installation of the radio equipment aboard Air Force Two – the Vice President’s plane.

That this lead was not properly investigated, and remains uninvestigated today, is because such an inquiry actually does lead to the heart of the plot to murder not only Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit, but as many believe, is tied directly to the assassination of President Kennedy. If the Tippit murder is connected to the assassination of the President, as the official stories alleges, then the Tippit murder may be the "Rosetta Stone" that could explain the mysteries of both murders.

The significance of the Collins Radio connections becomes apparent with a quick review of the published record, and that:

1. On November 1, 1963 the New York Times published a photograph of the ship the Rex, which Fidel Castro identified as the boat that dropped off a team of assassins in Cuba a few nights previous. The Rex was docked at Palm Beach, Florida, near the JFK family compound, and the Rex’s Halloween eve mission was in clear violation of President Kennedy’s March 1963 edict that no para-military raids against Cuba were to originate from U.S. shores. According to the article in the NYTs, the Rex had been sold by the Somoza regime in Nicaragua to the Belcher Oil Company, its dock fees paid by the CIA front company Sea Ship Inc., with the Rex then being leased to the Collins Radio Company of Richardson, Texas, "for scientific research."

2. Founded by Arthur Collins, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Collins Radio first made news headlines when young Collins was an amateur radio buff with the only (home made) radio receiver who could pick up the radio transmissions of Navy Commander Richard E. Byrd from his polar exploration expedition. [Richard Byrd is the cousin of the founder of the Civil Air Patrol and owner of the Texas School Book Depository building].

3. Collins Radio became a major defense contractor during World War II, and following the war, participated in Operation Paperclip, hiring Dr. Alex Lipisch, the former Nazi scientist who developed the Delta I glider and ME 163 Komet jet fighter. For Collins, Lipisch was assigned to the boat development program that worked with General Dynamics in attempting to build and refine a sleek, swift speedboat – the V20 - that could be used for Cuban infiltration missions like the Rex mission. It was later used in Vietnam.

4. David Ferrie’s telephone records reflect that in the weeks before the assassination he made frequent calls from the New Orleans law office of G. Ray Gill to the Belcher Oil Company of Dallas, Texas, the company that was the listed owner of the Rex.

5. In the week before the assassination, a reservation was made at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club for a large party of Collins Radio employees.

6. The Dallas P.D. Intelligence Division maintained a paid informant who worked at Collins Radio and reported on fellow employees who appeared suspicious or subversive, including one who was reported to subscribe to the leftist I.F. Stone Weekly.

7. When Lee Harvey Oswald returned to Texas from Soviet Russia, George DeMohrenschildt introduced him to retired Navy Admiral Chester Bruton, an executive at Collins Radio, with the idea of Oswald getting a job there, as he had worked in a radio factory in Minsk, USSR. Oswald and Marina visited Bruton with DeMohrenschilt.

8. At the time of the assassination Adml. Bruton was working on a top-secret nuclear submarine communications project for Collins, with the Navy’s nuclear sub radar and communications HQ being based at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, close neighbors of Michael Paine’s family island.

9. In 1963 Collins Radio began receiving large military contracts including one for the construction of a microwave communications network in Southeast Asia, specifically Vietnam.
10. After Oswald was murdered while in Dallas police custody by Jack Ruby, his widow Marina P. Oswald married former Collins Radio employee Kenneth Porter.

11. In Miami, Florida, a Cuban exile, and former executive of Collins Radio, was murdered, assassinated in a still unsolved homicide.

12. Collins Radio supplied and maintained the equipment used by the Voice of America, all manned NASA space flights, the Strategic Air Command (SAC), as well as all equipment used for the CIA’s Guatemalan and Cuban operations. Most significantly, Collins Radio was responsible for installing and maintaining all radio equipment aboard Air Force One, Air Force Two and the Cabinet’s plane.

13. According to the Collins Radio Annual Report to stockholders for 1963-64, Collins Radio not only installed and maintained the radios aboard most military and executive branch planes, they also operated the station known as "Liberty" at their Cedar Rapids, Iowa headquarters, which served as a relay station for all radio communications between the White House, the Pentagon, Air Force One, Air Force Two, the Cabinet plane and Andrews AFB in Washington.

[This "Liberty" station is misidentified on most transcripts of the edited version of the radio transmissions from Air Force One on 11/22/63. "Air Force One, the Presidential airplane, was placed in service in 1962 using communications equipment developed and manufactured by Collins. The aircraft…was modified to meet special requirements…In 1962, the station many remember as "Liberty" was opened and operated from the new communications building….(in Cedar Rapids, Iowa)…Collins had a contract with the Air Force to serve as either the primary communications station or as a backup whenever Air Force One, the presidential aircraft, and other aircraft in the VIP fleet carried cabinet members or high ranking military officers. Over the airwaves the station’s call word was ‘Liberty.’" – From Collins Radio – the First 50 Years.]

In his book The Making of a President – 1964, Theodore H. White wrote: "There is a tape recording in the archives o the government which best recaptures the sound of the hours as it waited for leadership. It is a recording of all the conversations in the air, monitored by the Signal Corps Midwestern center ‘Liberty,’ between Air Force One in Dallas, the Cabinet plane over the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs’ Communications Center in Washington….On the flight the party learned that there was no conspiracy, learned the identity of Oswald and his arrest; and the President’s mind turned to the duties of consoling the stricken and guiding the quick."

According to the analysis of E. Martin Schotz and Vincent Salandria (in History Will Not Absolve Us, 1996), "And yet the White House had informed President Johnson and the other occupants of Air Force One, all of them witnesses to the hail of bullets which had poured down on Dealey Plaza, that as of the afternoon of the assassination there was to be no conspiracy and that Oswald was to be the lone assassin. If White’s report were correct this would mean that federal officials in Washington were marrying the government to the cover-up of Oswald as the lone assassin virtually instantaneously. This could have occurred only if those federal authorities had had foreknowledge that the evidence would implicate Oswald and that he would have ‘no confederates.’ An innocent government could not have reacted in such a fashion internally."

Unfortunately, there is no longer "a tape recording in the archives of the government," as the original, unedited, multiple tape recordings of the AF1 radio transmissions cannot be located despite an Act of Congress, the request of the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) and numerous Freedom of Information Act requests. Our government seems to have simply lost the recordings, with no records being kept of their whereabouts or destruction, if in fact they were destroyed.

The Final Report of the ARRB (p. 116) notes: "6. White House Communications Agency. "WHCA was, and is, responsible for maintaining both secure (encrypted) and unsecured (open) telephone, radio and telex communications between the President and the government of the United States. Most of the personnel that constitute this elite agency are U.S. military communications specialists; many, in 1963, were from the Army Signal Corps. On November 22, 1963, WHCA was responsible for communications between and among Air Force One and Two, the White House Situation Room, the mobile White House, and with the Secret Service in the motorcade."

"The Review Board sought to locate any audio recordings of voice communications to or from Air Force One on the day of the assassination, including communications between Air Force one and Andrews Air Force Base during the return flight from Dallas to Washington D.C. As many people are now aware of, in the 1970s, the LBJ Presidential Library released edited audio cassettes of the unsecured, or open voice conversations with Air Force One, Andrews AFB, the White House Situation Room, and the Cabinet Aircraft carrying the Secretary of State and other officials on November 22, 1`963. The LBJ Library version of these tapes consists of about 110 minutes of voice transmissions, but the tapes are edited and condensed, so the Review Board staff sought access to unedited, uncondensed versions. Since the edited versions of the tapes contain considerable talk about both the forthcoming autopsy on the President, as well as the reaction of a government in crisis, the tapes are of considerable interest to assassination researchers and historians."

"Given that the LBJ Library released the tapes in the 1970s, the paper trail is now sketch and quite cold. The LBJ Library staff is fairly confident that the tapes originated with the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). The LBJ Library staff told the Review Board staff that it received the tapes from the White House as part of the original shipment of President Johnson’s papers in 1968 or 1969. According to the LBJ Library’s documentation, the accession card reads: "WHCA?" and is dated 1975. The Review Board staff could not locate any records indicating who performed the editing, or when, or where."

"The Review Board’s repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes."

At the time I delivered my report on "The Collins Radio Connections" to the National COPA Conference in Washington in October, 1994, the Washington Post had just then exposed the true occupant of a new, mammoth, suburban Virginia building. It was not the headquarters for Collins Radio/Rockwell International as had been previously reported, but they had just been the cooperating cover company for the super secret National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), just as Collins Radio had served as a cover for the CIA in the operation of the Rex in Cuba in1963.

Also, in the October, 1998 issue of John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s George Magazine, - David Wise reported on how the NRO had "lost" $6 billion in U.S. taxpayer’s money, and specifically mentioned the fiasco surrounding the construction of the HQ building, or which Collins/Rockwell served as a cover company.

[William E. Kelly is a freelance journalist whose research into the assassination of President Kennedy is partially sponsored by the Fund For Constitutional Government Investigative Journalism Project. He can be reached at: billkelly3@gmail.com ]

Colonel Fletcher Prouty Re-Considered

 Fletcher Prouty Re-Considered

I think Col. Fletcher Prouty sometimes gets a bad rap, especially from the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) and those Lone Nutters who are threatened by what he has to say. But there are certain undisputable things you can’t take away from him.

Prouty is a part of the composite character “Mr. X,” portrayed by Donald Sutherland in Oliver Stone’s “JFK.” 

Prouty was a Colonel in the Air Force, and he most certainly worked in the Pentagon, with an office just down the hall from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as the focal point officer (1955-1963) responsible for coordinating special operation activities between the Pentagon and the CIA. He was a close associate of General Victor “Brute” Krulak, a major player in the JFK assassination story.

After he retired Prouty wrote an important book The Secret Team (Prentice-Hall, 1973-1992-1997, Skyhorse 2008-2011)in which he describes how the CIA was originally established to serve as a government Think Tank, analyzing intelligence, but quickly became involved clandestine and covert operations.  The Secret Team, or ST, is a phrase coined by L. Fletcher Prouty in 1973, alleging a covert alliance between the United States' military, intelligence, and private sectors to influence political decisions.    

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Team   ]

I first met Prouty through my Committee for an Open Archives (COA) and Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) associate John Judge, and my knowing Prouty played a big part in obtaining the cooperation of Ralph Cox in writing the story of the CIA propriety airlines – CIAir.    

 [https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/ciair.html  ]

Back in 1992, with the impending release of Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” the media blitz sparked an American University professor to host a conference of the subject of films and politics, and when one of the speakers couldn’t make a planned panel on the subject, the moderator asked John Judge to fill in.

That was a major boost for our fledging organization the Committee for an Open Archives (COA), as John Judge certainly stood out and his opinions were widely appreciated, especially so because the event was carried live and archived by C-SPAN TV.

Shortly thereafter National Public Radio host Diane Rehm whose show was then broadcast from studios at American University, asked John to be a guest, and John brought Fletcher Prouty along with him, another successful media boost for COA.

[  https://www.npr.org/2016/12/23/506653136/radios-diane-rehm-a-mainstay-of-civil-discourse-signs-off   ]

American University is also the home of history professor Peter Kuznick, who worked with Oliver Stone in making a series of alternative history programs. 

Faculty Profile: Peter Kuznick

Anna Kasten Nelson Collection | American University, Washington, DC

Anna K. Nelson (1933–2012) | Perspectives on History | AHA

Anna K. Nelson - JFK Assassination Debate - The Education Forum

One of the Assassination Records Review Board members Anna Kasten Nelson, also taught there, as well as Max Holland’s wife, Professor Alana Holland, who once advised him “to look for patterns,” something that Max doesn’t seem to bother doing. But I certainly do – as seeing such patterns has led me to Collins Radio, Bell Helicopter, Civil Air Patrol, Defense Language Institute, Pan Am Bank of Miami, and other such subjects that reoccur throughout the JFK assassination story. I will later outline how these subjects fit into the assassination story. 

As for Colonel Prouty, he appears to be a sort of like the Colonel Martin Casey, “Jiggs” character in Seven Days in May, who begins to perceive what he believes is a coup d’etat in the works and blows the whistle on it.

Prouty believed that because he was out of the loop on the JFK assassination plans, he was sent on a mission to the South Pole, and was on his way home in New Zealand when the assassination occurred. There he read of the basic background of Lee Harvey Oswald – Civil Air Patrol, USMC, stationed at Atsugi U2 base, learned Russian language, defector to Soviet Union, returns with no consequences, Fair Play for Cuba Committee, visits to Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City, etc., and like most intelligence analysists worth their salt, concluded Oswald was some sort of covert operative, and therefore the assassination was a covert intelligence operation.

Unlike most conspiracy theorists who try to pin the blame for the assassination squarely on the shoulders of the CIA, Prouty believed the plan for the assassination originated at the Pentagon. John Judge used to say that, “I started from the ground up and Prouty started from the top and worked down and we met at the Pentagon.”

While I don’t dismiss the role of the CIA in the assassination, especially what came out of their Miami JMWAVE station, they worked closely with the military that supported their covert operations, especially those against Cuba.

The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) interviewed Prouty and tried to discredit him, focusing on his allegation that military intelligence agents were often used in presidential security, as they were in Mexico City when the president visited there, and an phone call Prouty received from a former military intelligence agent sometime after the assassination, which Prouty himself says was an almost “Irrelevant issue,” as reflected in their published reports.

 [  https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.onthetrailofdelusion.com/amp/fletcher-prouty-s-interview-with-the-arrb-part-eight   /  https://www.onthetrailofdelusion.com/post/fletcher-prouty-and-army-intelligence-in-dallas   ].

Those who poo-poo any conspiracy in the assassination often use those reports to discredit Prouty, and illogically conclude that if he was wrong about one thing everything else he says is invalid. Well that’s just not the case.

Military intelligence may not be directly involved in domestic presidential security, they are required to keep the Secret Service informed of any threats against the President they are aware of, and they just didn’t do that. And military intelligence was all over Dealey Plaza that day, as Army Intelligence agent James Powell took photos of the TSBD and was caught inside during the dragnet. As the ARRB was informed at a public session, an Army intelligence officer from Fort Sam Hood said that he was part of a communications unit that filmed or video taped the assassination as an assignment, so they must have had foreknowledge of not only the assassination but when and where it would occur, as Phil Ochs put it, “national security observers.”

And it was an Army intelligence officer who notified the Dallas Police that they had a file on Oswald that included the alias Alec Hidel.

The whole military intelligence angle needs to have it’s own article, and will.

Prouty wrote another post-JFK movie book - JFK – The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (Skyhorse, 2013), with an introduction by Oliver Stone and a Foreward by Jesse Ventura.

He also confirmed the CIA’s propriety ownership of ostensibly commercial airlines like Air America, but there were others – as I wrote about in CIAir and Gene Wheaton confirmed as he was named president of one of them – National Cargo, where he worked closely with Carl Jenkins, one of the Bay of Pigs and JMWAVE trainers.

It is indisputable that Prouty was a Colonel in the Air Force and personally knew and worked closely with others who are entwined in this story, Generals Edwin Lansdale and Victor “Brute” Krulak to name two.

I had never heard of Krulak until Prouty mentioned him, but now recognize that he was very much in the thick of things as Special Assistant for Counter-Insurgency Activities – responsible for military support for the CIA covert ops against Cuba. Krulak worked directly for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but had an office in the White House where he refused to wear a suit and tie instead of his military uniform. A personal friend of the President, JFK’s PT-109 took some of Krulak’s marines off an enemy held beach under fire, as portrayed in the book and film PT-109.

[ For more on Krulak see: https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2021/04/brute-life-of-victor-krulak-us-marine.html?m=1 ]

It was Krulak’s deputy – Colonel Walter Higgins, who wrote the memo of the September 1963 meeting when the head of CIA’s Cuban desk – Desmond FitzGerald briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff – the document that I consider the most significant smoking record released under the JFK Act.

[ https://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-signifiance-of-higgins-memo.html ]

When Prouty first saw the photos of the Dealey Plaza tramps he thought he recognized then recently retired Gen. Lansdale walking in the background, and sent the photo to Krulak, who wrote back to Prouty that it most certainly was Lansdale, same haircut, same walk, same ring, and wondered what he was doing there?  I think that is something we should be wondering too.

[ Krulak letter: https://prouty.org/letter.html ]

[https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/appD.html ]

I don’t put much faith in photo identification evidence, as they are all controversial and subject to opinions, but then John Newman told me that when he was researching the background of Lansdale at that time, he traced Lansdale to Fort Worth, Texas, where he was a few nights before the assassination, as was the President. So he was in the area at the time.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that Prouty sometimes gave talks to some questionable groups, as many others have, and you can’t be judged by those you share a stage with – as those who have with Fetzer, JV Baker, LaRouche and Roger Stone.

[https://www.pinterest.com/pin/162129655321187041/]

So Colonel Fletcher Prouty gave us a lot of good leads that can be independently corroborated, and while he may have exagerated certain aspects of the story and came to some wrong conclusions, many of the leads panned out and far exceed those negative things.

 [Spartacus on Prouty: https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKprouty.htm ]

One of Prouty’s biggest supporter, Len Osanic has some of his interviews archived on line including two with John Judge one of which may be the NPR talk show:

http://www.blackopradio.com/video.html

Collected Works of Fletcher Prouty:

http://www.umsl.edu/~thomaskp/prouty.htm

Political Assassination Just Prior to 9-11

 Political Assassination Prior to 9-11

The recent media blitz on the 20^th anniversary of the September 11^th attacks reminded me of my own reporting, as I was a working journalist at the time. I interviewed a New Jersey Air National Guard 177^th air wing fighter pilot who was with his wingman on the tarmac at Atlantic City airport at the time the first plane hit the World Trade Center tower, and was ordered not to take off an return to their base headquarters, where they learned of the attack.

If they had taken off there was no doubt they would have crossed paths and could have intercepted the second plane, but they were only armed with bombs as they were going on a practice bomb run in upstate New York. They later speculated they could have tipped the wings of the plane and forced it to crash without hitting its target, but that would have probably been suicidal for themselves as well.

I also knew Kurt Loder, my first editor, whose apartment was in the shadow of the World Trade Center, who left his windows open when he fled, and when permitted to return a few weeks later found everything covered with inches of dust and debris. Charlie Montgomery, an ex-Marine and former editor of mine at the Atlantic City Sun, was then working for the magazine tabloids out of Florida, and was suspected of being infected with anthrax, the poison powder sent to their offices that killed a few fellow workers. The main suspect in that chemical attack was a scientist who worked for a US military lab, much like the Wuhan, China lab the French built that is the suspected source of the COVID 19 virus.

Shortly after September 11^th I went back to my pile of Philadelphia morning Inquirer newspapers and took out the Tuesday, September 11, but of course there was no mention of the terrorist attacks that occurred later that morning, after the paper had went to press. I was looking for any possible clues that were missed that could have indicated the attacks were coming, and found a small, one column few inches long news report buried deep in the paper about the assassination of the leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.

It is now known that the September 9^th assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud was engineered by Osama Bin Laden, also believed to be the mastermind of the September 11^th attacks two days later.

The suicide bombers posed as television media journalists whose bombs were planted in their camera equipment, a Modus Operandi very similar to the planned assassination of Fidel Castro when he visited South America, a plan devised by David Atlee Phillips and Antonio Veciana, both of whom have been implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy. That plan failed when the anti-Castro Cuban bombers didn’t feel like killing themselves, and didn’t believe they would escape alive if they tried to carry it out.

My point is that whenever a political assassination occurs, it should set off alarms as it is a forerunner of bad things to come. 

I haven’t seen any media references to the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, except in the short reports that his son is now leading the resistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan, though he lacks the military experience his father had in fighting the Soviets and Taliban.

Then I came across this article from France that tries to put it all together:

Death of an Afghan icon: 20 years since the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud

https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20210909-death-of-an-afghan-icon-20-years-since-the-assassination-of-ahmad-shah-massoud

Two days before 9/11, an Al-Qaeda suicide squad posing as journalists sat down for an interview with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the last major commander resisting the jihadist group's Taliban allies in northern Afghanistan.

Before he could answer a question, they detonated explosives that investigators later said had been cunningly disguised in their camera equipment.

Twenty years on, Massoud's assassination and the September 11 attacks on the United States are for many Afghans the twin cataclysms that started yet another era of uncertainty and bloodshed -- and which continue to reverberate following the Taliban's return.

The charismatic Massoud, known as the Lion of Panjshir after his native valley, built his name during the 1980s as a brilliant guerrilla commander repelling Soviet forces.

By the late 1990s, he was fighting the Taliban -- and their Al-Qaeda allies.

Both wanted him gone.

The audacious hit was ordered by Osama bin Laden himself.

The assassins pretended to be filming a documentary, and secured the Massoud interview by presenting a concocted back story printed on a letterhead from an Islamic centre in Britain. They used stolen Belgian passports to travel.

Then they hit a wall -- Massoud was too busy to sit down with them when they arrived in August 2001 at his base in Khwaja Bahauddin village.

"They spent 10 days with us calmly and patiently waiting, and never unnecessarily insisting on the interview," Fahim Dashti, a journalist and close Massoud aide, told AFP a few weeks after the assassination.

Dashti was setting up his own camera to record the interview as the two Al-Qaeda operatives relayed their questions in Arabic to the commander's close aide, Masood Khalili, for translation.

"We were not feeling comfortable," Khalili told AFP in October 2001, especially because they had asked questions about bin Laden.

"The 'cameraman' had a nasty smile. The 'journalist' was very calm," he said.

Just as Massoud heard the translation, the explosives went off.

'Your leader is dead'

The killing sent shockwaves across Afghanistan and the world.

Massoud was seen as the last big hope by anti-Taliban Afghans at the time, and by Western governments as a potent ally against even more hardline Islamists.

With his Northern Alliance resistance already on the back foot against the Taliban, his aides hid his death for days.

A week after he was killed, Massoud was buried in his home district of Bazarak -- his body shrouded in the colours of the Afghan flag and with thousands of followers in the funeral procession.

A marble tomb was built attracting huge numbers of devotees.

"When (Massoud) was killed, I was in Panjshir. The resistance forces were...surrounded from all sides," a 47-year-old resident of the area told AFP on Monday, requesting anonymity because of security fears.

"The Taliban even announced on the radio: your leader is dead and you're done. But... the death of the leader gave the people another reason to fight harder."

The tables were turned within weeks as the United States, looking to punish the Taliban for harboring the 9/11 perpetrators, invaded Afghanistan.

The Taliban regime fell by the end of 2001, pummelled by American bombers guided by Northern Alliance fighters.

Al-Qaeda, hoping to get the upper hand both against the United States and in Afghanistan with their two major attacks, was on the run.

Panjshir falls

The Taliban launched a lightning offensive as the last US-led troops left Afghanistan this year, capping their 20-year insurgency with the capture of Kabul on August 15.

Once again, the main opposition emerged in Panjshir -- led this time by Ahmad Massoud, who was 12 years old when Al-Qaeda killed his father.

But the Taliban swiftly sent fighters to surround the area, claiming eventually on Monday that they had captured Panjshir.

Among the resistance dead in the heavy fighting was Fahim Dashti, the journalist who survived the Massoud bombing 20 years ago.

One Taliban account posted a picture of fighters in Panjshir standing in front of a vandalised Ahmad Shah Massoud poster.

Ahmad Shah Massoud's brother Ahmad Wali said in Geneva Tuesday that while their National Resistance Front was "wounded", thousands of fighters can come back at any time.

It is a difficult scenario for Mohammad Sana Safa, a 63-year-old who worked with Massoud in the 1980s when there were daily attacks by the Soviets.

"Ahmad Massoud is a young man, patriotic, but he has no military experience like his father," Safa said Monday.

"Had (his father) been alive today, we would have not witnessed this... the fall of Panjshir to the Taliban."

(AFP)

CAPA Conference Update

 CAPA UPDATE

As everyone knows who has been studying political assassinations for any length of time, things happen very slowly, then a lot happens at once. Sometimes we can predict the events, sometimes not.

Now we know every November 22 anniversary there will be news and special media reports, but this year, we also know that something big will occur on Tuesday, October 26, 2021, as that is the deadline for the president to decide whether to continue with holding JFK assassination records or release them in full as required by the JFK Act of 1992.

Either way it will be a big news day and covered by all the major media networks and there will be commentary in the Washington Post and New York Times as well as by anyone interested in this case. I will be writing a preview and a review after the fact.

Therefore something will happen, and we can at least prepare for it. Towards that end I am working with CAPA, David Talbot’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee, the Assassination Archives and research Center, Mary Ferrell, JFK Facts and others interested in this subject. At first we sent letters to the Chairwomen of the House Oversight Committee Rep. Carolyn Maloney, and President Biden, requesting they hold oversight hearings and release the records in full. But at this point in time I don’t think either will happen, unless the public can be generated to contact their representatives in Congress and demand it, as they did after the release of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK.

[ https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2021/03/free-thejfk-files-during-sunshine-week.html ]

Attorney Mark Zaid put together a letter that received a positive response from the Public Interest Declassification Board, a branch of the National Archives. He got a number of others with a variety of viewpoints to co-sign on, emphasizing the fact that this is not about conspiracy but about releasing all of the records as the law requires.

[ https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2021/06/letter-to-public-interest.html ]

I tried to lease a room at the JFK Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC in order to hold a press conference on October 26, but it now appears that if we do hold such a press conference it will be done virtually.

November 22, 2021 is a Monday, and as far as I can tell there will be three conferences, one in person conference sponsored by Judith Vary Baker at the Magnolia Hotel in Dallas. Randy Benson, the college film professor and director of the award winning documentary The Searchers, about independent researchers focusing on John Judge, will be the keynote speaker. JVB has also announced that this will be her last in person conference in Dallas, and I assume she will also conduct the memorial service at 12:30 pm at Dealey Plaza that Monday.

Debra Conway and Larry Hancock will be hosting a virtual on line conference though the dates have yet to be announced. I have been asked to make a presentation for them, and will probably do so, the topic of which has yet to be determined. I will report on this as the information becomes available.

Last March, as things seemed to be getting better, and looked like they would continue in that direction, the CAPA board decided to hold an in person conference in Dallas in November, but the Marriot Courtyard, where we held a successful conference two years ago, was already booked. We then reserved the Sheraton, where a lot of JFK Assassination activities occurred.  But that didn’t work out and the third hotel we reserved had a pipe leak and will not be ready in time.

So with all that in addition to the rise in COVID cases, and the fact that Texas is one of the nation’s hot-spots, the CAPA board decided to not have an in person conference in Dallas this year because of the problems with the hotels and COVID, so we will be having another virtual conference that is shaping up nicely, as CAPA secretary Glenda Devaney explains here:

GREETINGS FROM CAPA!

We hope all of you are in good health and doing well.

We regret to announce that CAPA will be having a virtual conference instead of an in-person one this year. So far only a handful of people have registered for the conference. We suspect that most people wanted to wait until closer to the time of the conference because of all the confusion and unpredictability. But we fear that things will probably get worse, not better -  too much uncertainty and too many obstacles in our way.

We are extremely disappointed about this as we were looking forward to seeing all of you. Our online schedule and registration will be available soon. We believe we have an excellent program lined up and hope you all can access it. If, for some reason, you are not able to access the program on the days it will be streamed, we will have a package of the presentations available after the conference.

We will provide information on how to register for the conference soon.

Here is the program for the virtual conference:
 
Since the JFK/Media Panel was so successful last year, we are planning on having it again with some new participants. We are planning to have a half-day on the subject of “The JFK Assassination and the Media,” a topic that has not been discussed and investigated by the mainstream media. Andrew Kreig will chair the panel. Participants in the panel will be Dr. Cyril Wecht, Russ Baker, James Wagenvoord, and Jacob Hornberger.
 
Tink Thompson and Gary Aguilar will speak about Tink’s new book, “Last Second in Dallas.”
 
Dr. Cyril Wecht will be our keynote speaker – topic to be announced closer to the conference.
 
James Wagenvoord will speak about his experiences working at Life magazine in 1963. He has much to share since he was at the epicenter of the magazine responsible for much of the news about the assassination. Title of the talk is “My LIFE Story and LIFE’s Life Story.”
 
Russell Kent, who spoke last year about the House Select Committee on Assassinations Forensic Pathology Panel, will speak about his new book, “JFK: Medical Betrayal.”
 
Stephen Jaffe is the last living investigator on the staff of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in the 60's. Jaffe was also one of the producers of the feature film “Executive Action” in 1973. And, for the first time, for the CAPA audience, Jaffe will show a new documentary that he produced with his late partner, author and attorney Mark Lane. It’s entitled, “A Rush to Judgment,” after Lane’s best-selling book and includes some rare interviews with witnesses Lane interviewed in 1966. It also includes historic new interviews. Jaffe will also show a brief, almost never seen documentary film about the making of “Executive Action” with interviews of the stars (Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan and Will Geer, as well as the executive producer Edward Lewis). Jaffe will take questions about his time with Garrison.
 
David Montague was head of investigations for the United States JFK Assassination Records Review Board and will speak about his time in that position.
 
Andrew Kiel will speak on J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ, and the Secret Service presenting additional information not included in his previous talk.
 
We will also have a panel on the history and status of withholding of the JFK assassination records. David Montague will chair the panel; participants so far are Michael Nurko, Bill Kelly and Jacob Hornberger.
 
We are again planning a special day for high school, college, and law school students. This will be held online, as it was last year, on Friday, November 19.  We want to get more young people interested in this tragic event that changed the course of our country and hopefully enlist them in our cause. We are planning a program that will give them the opportunity to see what President Kennedy was like as a person and a president and educate them about the truth of the assassination. The event will be free to students attending high schools, universities and law schools. If anyone has suggestions for schools or national organizations you think might be interested, please let me know and I will send out invitations.
 
Thank you all for your support of CAPA and its  worthy cause -
Pursue the release of withheld records -  Find the Truth -  Seek Justice.
 
Best regards
Glenda de Vaney
CAPA Program Chair

In addition the CAPA Research Committee, that I head, will be presenting some of the most advanced research on a number of topics, including General LeMay on 11/22/63, Valkyrie and Pathfinder at Dealey Plaza, and synopsis of the inter-related stories of Gene Wheaton and Carl Jenkins, including reports on recent interviews with Jenkins.

In addition, CAPA is already preparing for an in person conference in Dallas next November, and has reserved the Marriott Courtyard, where we held the successful 2019 conference, and if JVB lives up to her word and will not be in Dallas next year, CAPA will try to obtain the permit for Dealey Plaza for 11/22/22 and hold a traditional 12:30 memorial service in the Penn Jones-John Judge style.

In the meantime there’s a lot to be done before this year is out, especially in regards to October 26 and November 22, and I will be in the thick of it.

Billkelly3@gmail.com

Sirhan B. Sirhan and Luis Angel Castillo

 Sirhan B. Sirhan and Luis Angel Castillo

Sirhan B. Sirhan and Luis Angel Castillo 

The possibility of Sirhan B. Sirhan (SBS) being paroled in the assassination of RFK has reignited the debate over his role in the murder and whether he was a programed assassin, in the Manchurian Candidate mold.

LA coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi, who performed the autopsy, said in his report that RFK was killed by a bullet to the back of the head that was shot from inches away, so SBS, feet in front of him when he was wrestled to the ground, did not kill RFK.

But his general attitude and behavior clearly indicate he was out of his mind at the time and probably programed to do what he did.

That, to me, is reminiscent of another programed assassin – Luis Angel Castillo.

While Castilo comes into the JFK story on a number of levels, Robert Lipka is the best.

Lipka was a National Security Agency (NSA) file clerk when he was recruited by the Soviet KGB to turn over documents in exchange for money. He went undetected however, and retired to eastern Pennsylvania. And there he lived undisturbed until Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist, defected as the Soviet Union began to fall apart. At first Mitrokhin offered his services to the Americans, but they turned him down so he fell into the arms of the British MI-5, counter-intelligence branch.

In order to establish his bonafides, Mitrokhin gave up Lipka and the MI5 informed the FBI. They tracked Lipka down to a small town outside of Philadelphia, and an FBI agent posed as a Soviet who slipped up to the seat next to Lipka at a bar and requested his services once again, in exchange for money. While Lipka explained he no longer worked for NSA, he accepted the deal, and was promptly arrested.

Luckily there was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer present in the court where Lipka was arranged, and listened to the charges against him. When given the opportunity to say something, Lipka confessed and said that one of the documents he read as an NSA file clerk “named the real assassin of President Kennedy.”

With that the judge banged his gavel and ended the proceedings. As Lipka was being led away, the reporter asked him the name of JFK’s real assassin, and Lipka replied – Luis Angel Castillo.

Now there is a new book about Lipka and Mitrokhin, that goes into many details, and I’ve ordered it, but someone who read it informed me that it doesn’t mention the Castillo reference at all.

In any case, I learned, many years ago, that there was a Congressional invesigative document regarding Castillo that was at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Michigan, and wrote to them about it, but was informed that it was classified. After the JFK Act of 1992 was passed however, I was informed that it was now available, and obtained it from a then research associate Todd Vaughn.  Vaughn has since flipped and is now an anti-conspiracy and lone nut advocate in league with a dozen others, all of whom claim to be former silly conspiracy theorisits who have since seen the light. Another former independent researcher who I worked with and is now in league with Vaughn is attorney Mark Zaid, who I worked with at the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) in DC when we were lobbying for the JFK Act. And he comes into play in this story as well.

And the document from the Ford Library is a WOW!

Castillo was arrested in the Phillipines for attempted assassination, and it was there his mental programing was diagnosed. Back in the USA he was incarcerated at a Bordentown, New Jersey detention center where an MKULTRA doctor ran things. He was either paroled or escaped from there, and when the FBI tracked him down to his mother’s house, she said that some men in suits had picked him up and drove away with him. She said she didn’t expect to ever see him again. 

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/luis-angel-castillo.html

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2020/05/luis-angel-castillo-revisited.html?m=1

http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2016/09/nsa-kennedy-assassination-records.html

A faithful reader of my blog and now research associate Richard Booth contacted me and informed me that a former FBI agent involved with the Lipka case wrote a book about it – “Fool’s Mate,” a 380 page book that for some reason fails to even mention the name Luis Angel Castillo, even though that was part of his original arrangement in court proceedings.

https://www.turningthepagebooks.com/book/9780465003129

As Richard Booth said to me, “The only reason that the book would omit the fact that Lipka mentioned Castillo or said he saw the name of JFK's assassin in NSA files would be if that information were indeed seen on classified documents due to the laws in this country relating to classified information and pre-publication review of books.”

In the epilogue of his book, FBA SA John Whiteside wrote this: "Special thanks go out to my attorney Mark Zaid who has stood by me in my dealings with the pre-publication review units during the second round of reviews. Following Jenny’s editing of the original manuscript, I was again required to run the manuscript through the pre-publication review process at NSA and the FBI. This time it took ten months before the manuscript was approved once more for publication. Mark is one of the finest and best known attorneys in the Washington, DC area and his assistance was invaluable to me.”

So the references Lipka made about Luis Angel Castillo at his arrangement, which was also covered and reported on by another Pennsylvania paper besides the Philadelphia Inquirer article I read. 

Full news report from the Harrisburg Patriot-News: JFKCountercoup2: Article from newspaper about Lipka

These news reports re: Castillo and JFK were intentionally censored by FBI and NSA redactors, as overseen by Whiteside’s finest and best known attorney in Washington D.C. – Mark Zaid.

While Zaid has recently been promoting the full release of the JFK records in open letters, he is also proud of the fact he is a national security lecturer at the Center for International Studies, where David A. Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Ed Lansdale, Joe Smith and others received their training in psychological warfare, black propaganda and covert operational procedures.

Zaid has also made a reputation for himself for representing CIA and military whistle blowers, but when I called him during the 9/11 Congressional Hearings and asked him to represent one of former FBI agent John O’Neill’s undercover operatives, he said, “They can’t afford my fees.”

Well, right then and there I knew where Zaid rated.

And when the NSA records on the assassination of President Kennedy were released, a number of records known about from news reports – such as the documents on Luis Angel Castillo, were not among them. 

Back from the Front

I was driving a Hummer at a military base on July 28, my 70th birthday. 

My helmet reads: S&TCD
 C5ISR Center U.S.ARMY CCDC | S&TCD

While I was away and failed to post many new articles, a faithful reader, Marshall Hester, emailed me:  "Hi Bill. Have not seen a post lately on JFKCountercoup to further educate me. In hopes you are doing well." 

Well its nice to know someone was concerned, and yes, I am doing okay. It's just that after more than two years of inactivity, Uncle Sam finally called me back to duty, and for the month of July I was very busy working with the military at JBMDL -Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, driving a Hummer to assist them in testing equipment. 

When I mentioned this on Facebook, someone asked if it was a conflict of interest to be employed by the military-industrial-complex while working as a research director for an anti-assassination organization (CAPA-US.org). I said, No, I was infiltrating them. The same thing I told John Judge about a decade ago when he objected as I began working for the military part-time as a COB - Citizen on the Battlefield. 

Usually we do role playing scenarios working closely with Op4 - Opposition Force, creating situations that the soldiers will most likely encounter on the battlefield, mainly training national guardsman and reservists before they are deployed overseas. I enjoy the work and try to do my best, just following orders. Working in training gave me some good insight into how they trained the JMWAVE Pathfinders. 

This time was different however, and driving Hummers and assisting in testing equipment was sometimes stressful, but exciting at the same time. We worked for 10 sometimes 12 hours a day, though there was some down time, when I had an hour or so to catch up on my reading, and wrote reviews I posted earlier. 

What have I learned that I can apply to my JFK research? Well for one the Army's unofficial motto is "Hurry up and wait." Which allowed for some of the downtime and reading. Another thing is they do everything over and over again until it is done right. At first things are a little sloppy, but with good instructors and operational leaders, things begin to fall into place, and in the end, they said they were happy with the tests and the demonstrations they conducted. I think it is my contribution, however small, to enhancing our national security. 

I usually work for a sub-contractor to the main contractor, which is usually General Dynamics, a company that fits into the JFK assassination story on a number of levels. In addition, some of the radios that we handled that were being tested, when you turn them on read: Rockwell International. That's the company that merged with Collins Radio, the company that made and serviced the radios aboard AF1 and SAC planes, and the company that Gene Wheaton worked for when he earned a Presidential citation for security work in the Middle East. 

While I can' get into the details of what we did, a few years ago I worked as a COB alongside some first class Army snipers and wrote an article that I think deserves review: JFKcountercoup: View from the Sniper's Nest

Well that exercise is over now, it was only part time, so I am back to my primary mission JFK research and will be contributing more frequently to JFKCountercoup, hopefully on a daily basis.

Among the things I am working on is a review of the US Marine Guidebook, that Oswald supposedly memorized before he enlisted, and gave his copy to Carlos Bringuier, who was asking six figures for it over the internet a few years ago. 

I will also be writing an article on Fletcher Prouty, and try to set the record straight on him. There's also one coming up on the October 26 deadline for the President to decide whether to release the remaining JFK assassination records according to the JFK Act of 1992, or to continue with holding them, as well as a follow up after that decision is made. 

Then there's previews of the CAPA conference in November that is being prepared, as well as the LANCER conference coming up, and Judyth Vary Baker's Dallas conference at the Magnolia hotel, that she promises will be her last in person conference in Dallas, though that's hard to believe. 

The next article I am preparing now is on Sirhan B. Sirhan and another programed assassin who fits in to the JFK story - Luis Angel Castilo.

In any case, I'm back, and will be posting more frequently, and hope you stick around for the fireworks. 

If you want you can contact me anytime at: 

Billkelly3@gmail.com 

Jackie: "LBJ did it."

 Jackie: “LBJ did it.”

Pamela Turnure and Pam and Eddie Fisher 

After reading and writing a review of Phil Nelson’s “JFK Mastermind of the JFK Assassination,” I came across an interesting Facebook post by Robert Morrow, who I mention in the Nelson review as a protégé of Roger Stone and a proponent of the LBJ did it theory.

As in most cases, there are two Robert Morrows involved in this one, a Robert Morrow from Baltimore, who wrote two books on the assassination of JFK that he claims are based on his firsthand knowledge.

Then there is this Robert Morrow from Texas, whose recent post supports his LBJ theory that is very intriguing.

Morrow posted a page of Eddie Fisher’s autobio “Been There Done That,” in which he quotes Pamela Turnure, Jackie Kennedy’s Press Secretary, from when they were flying back to DC from Dallas with Jackie Kennedy.

Fisher, a popular 1950s era singer and actor, is best known for having five wives, three of whom were Hollywood supestarts – Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds and Connie Stevens.

Apparently Fisher also found time to have an affair with Pam Turnure Jackie Kennedy’s personal secretary and publicist when she was First Lady in the White House.  Before that Turnure had been Senator Kennedy’s receptionist and it was the President who hired her.

Undoubtedly during pillow talk, Turnure confided to Fisher that on the Air Force One plane trip from Dallas, Jackie said, “LBJ did it.”

Now we know Jackie Kennedy knew LBJ very well, as was quite aware of his trecherous ways, and suspecting him would be a natural first impression after such a tragic day.

It is reminiscent of RFK’s first reaction to the assassination was to ask CIA director John McCone if his people were responsible. While McCone naturally said no, he was intentionally kept out of the loop on a number of significnat CIA black ops that have a direct bearing on the assination including ZRRIFLE and the JMWAVE’s Pathfinder plans.

Then RFK called his close personal friend Luis Wililams and asked him if the Cubans were responsible.

On page 258 of Fisher’s book “Been There Done That,” he writes: “On the flight back to Washington after the murder, Pam told me, Jackie Kennedy told her, ‘Lyndon Johnson did it.’ Words I will never forget.”

“Of all he women I was with afer Elizabeth, Pam Turnure was the one my friends thought I should marry. Jennie Grossinger loved her. And maybe I would’ve, but Pam did the one thing I really couldn’t handle. She fell in love with me. I needed an independent women, a women who could live happily without me. But after we fell in love she started canceling her own plans so we could be together. That was the wrong thing to do if you wanted to be with me. Most of my relationships ended in some sort of friendly fashion, but not this one.”

“One night Pam had too much to drink. We argued about something and she warned me that if we didn’t stay together she was going to commit suicide. That was the wrong thing to say to me. I walked out angrilly. I wasn’t doing such a great job being responsible for my own life, and I had no intention of being responsible for hers. The next morning, when I wlked into the living room at the Pierre, every gift I’d given her was lying on the couch. I  never saw her again.”

One thing that Turnure did was to assist in Jackie's historical renovation of the White House and the popular TV tour. A Mr. Castro was responsible for overseeing the restoration and he was assisted by Mrs. Dorman, wife of Col. Dorman, General LeMay's aide who can be heard on the Clifton AF1 tapes. 

The thing that makes this so important is that Pam Turnure is still alive. She married New York investment banker Robert N. Timmins and now resides in Edwards, Colorado.

If anyone gets her contact information and tries to interview her, please don’t bother asking her about her affair with JFK, as it has been thoroughly documented elsewhere, but like most secretaries, she must know a lot of the secrets.