President Biden Pardons SS Agent Abraham Bolden

 Biden pardons former Secret Service agent and 2 others

 President Kennedy appointed Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden to the White House Detail 

President Joe Biden has granted the first three pardons of his term

By AAMER MADHANI and DON BABWIN Associated Press

April 26, 2022, 2:35 PM ET

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/wireStory/biden-pardons-secret-service-agent-84311666

WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden has granted the first three pardons of his term, providing clemency to a Kennedy-era Secret Service agent convicted of federal bribery charges that he tried to sell a copy of an agency file and to two people who were convicted on drug-related charges but went on to become pillars in their communities.

The Democratic president also commuted the sentences of 75 others for nonviolent, drug-related convictions. The White House announced the clemencies Tuesday as it launched a series of job training and reentry programs for those in prison or recently released.

Many of those who received commutations have been serving their sentences on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several were serving lengthy sentences and would have received lesser terms had they been convicted today for the same offenses as a result of the 2018 bipartisan sentencing reform ushered into law by the Trump administration.

“America is a nation of laws and second chances, redemption, and rehabilitation,” Biden said in a statement announcing the clemencies. “Elected officials on both sides of the aisle, faith leaders, civil rights advocates, and law enforcement leaders agree that our criminal justice system can and should reflect these core values that enable safer and stronger communities.”

Those granted pardons are:

— Abraham Bolden Sr., 86, the first Black Secret Service agent to serve on a presidential detail. In 1964, Bolden, who served on President John F. Kennedy's detail, faced federal bribery charges that he attempted to sell a copy of a Secret Service file. His first trial ended in a hung jury.

Following his conviction in a second trial, key witnesses admitted lying at the prosecutor's request, according to the White House. Bolden, of Chicago, was denied a retrial and served three years, nine months in federal prison. Bolden has maintained his innocence and wrote a book in which he argued he was targeted for speaking out against racist and unprofessional behavior in the Secret Service.

Bolden in an interview said he believed Biden “sympathized” with him and "saw a need to honor due process in my case.” The pardon came nearly 61 years after he joined the Kennedy detail. He said he asked off of the detail after enduring racial slurs from fellow agents and small nooses were left around his workplace.

“I met President Kennedy on April 28, 1961 and on April 25 I got word of the presidential pardon," said Bolden, who first petitioned the White House for a pardon during the Nixon administration. "That’s pretty close.”

— Betty Jo Bogans, 51, was convicted in 1998 of possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine in Texas after attempting to transport drugs for her boyfriend and his accomplice. Bogans, a single mother with no prior record, received a seven-year sentence. In the years since her release from prison, Bogans has held consistent employment, even while undergoing cancer treatment, and has raised a son.

— Dexter Jackson , 52, of Athens, Georgia, was convicted in 2002 for using his pool hall to facilitate the trafficking of marijuana. Jackson pleaded guilty and acknowledged he allowed his business to be used by marijuana dealers.

After Jackson was released from prison, he converted his business into a cellphone repair service that employs local high school students through a program that provides young adults with work experience. Jackson has built and renovated homes in his community, which has a shortage of affordable housing.

Civil rights and criminal justice reform groups have pushed the White House to commute sentences and work harder to reduce disparities in the criminal justice system. Biden’s grants of clemency also come as the administration has faced congressional scrutiny over misconduct and the treatment of inmates in the beleaguered federal Bureau of Prisons, which is responsible for inmates serving sentences of home confinement.

Biden, as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, helped shepherd through the 1994 crime bill that many criminal justice experts say contributed to harsh sentences and mass incarceration of Black people.

During his 2020 White House run, Biden vowed to reduce the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. and called for nonviolent drug offenders to be diverted to drug courts and treatment.

He also has pushed for better training for law enforcement and called for criminal justice system changes to address disparities that have led to minorities and the poor making up a disproportionate share of the nation's incarcerated population.

Inimai Chettiar, federal director of the criminal justice reform advocacy group Justice Action Network, called Biden's first pardons and commutations “just modest steps” and urged Biden “to meet the urgency of the moment.”

“President Biden ran on a promise to help end mass incarceration, and he has broad public support for that promise,” Chettiar added.

Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, granted 144 pardons and clemency to 238 during his four years in office.

Some criminal justice advocates are pressing for Biden to act with more haste, calling on the president to establish a permanent clemency review board. More than 18,000 clemency petitions are pending, according to the Justice Department. A White House official said that the administration continues to review clemency petitions.

Trump sought the advice of prison reform advocate Alice Johnson, a Black woman whose life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense he commuted in 2018. He was also lobbied by celebrity Kim Kardashian as well as advisers inside the White House, including daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, as he weighed applications for clemency.

The Republican used his pardon authority to help several political friends and allies, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Republican operative Roger Stone and Charles Kushner, the father-in-law of Ivanka Trump.

Among Trump's final acts as president was pardoning his former chief strategist Steve Bannon and Al Pirro, the husband of Fox News host and Trump ally Jeanine Pirro.

Prosecutors alleged that Bannon, who had yet to stand trial when he was pardoned, had duped thousands of donors who believed their money would be used to fulfill Trump’s chief campaign promise to build a wall along the southern border. Instead, Bannon allegedly diverted more than $1 million, paying a salary to one campaign official and personal expenses for himself. Pirro was convicted in 2000 on tax charges.

With the slate of pardons and commutations announced Tuesday, Biden has issued more grants of clemency than any of the previous five presidents at this point in their terms, according to the White House.

In addition to the grants of clemency, Biden announced several new initiatives that are meant to help formerly incarcerated people gain employment — an issue that his administration is driving home as key to lowering crime rates and preventing recidivism.

The Labor Department is directing $140 million toward programs that offer job training, pre-apprenticeship programs, digital literacy training and pre-release and post-release career counseling and more for youth and incarcerated adults.

The $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed by Congress last year includes a trio of grant programs that the administration says promote hiring of formerly incarcerated individuals. And the Labor and Justice Departments announced on Tuesday a collaborative plan to provide $145 million over the next year on job skills training as well as individualized employment and reentry plans for people serving time in the Bureau of Prisons.

Biden said the new initiatives are vital to helping the more than 600,000 people released from prison each year get on stable ground.

"Helping those who served their time return to their families and become contributing members of their communities is one of the most effective ways to reduce recidivism and decrease crime," Biden said.

———

Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board members confirmed, finally.

 Newly Formed Board To Review Civil Rights –Era Cold Cases Faces Time Crunch

Emmett Till - one of those murdered whose case will be reviewed and opened. 

https://www.courthousenews.com/newly-formed-board-to-review-civil-rights-era-cold-cases-faces-time-crunch/

 [ BK NOTES: This is the law that New Jersey high school teacher Stu Wexler and his civics class drew up and got Congress to enact, an amazing achievement for anyone let alone a school class. But like the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) - created by the JFK Act on which this law was based, the review board is only a temporary institution that must be extended, or made permanent. As one CIA official told the ARRB, you will be gone in a year or so, while the CIA will continue. ]

(CN) — Years after legislation creating it was signed into law, the Senate has finally confirmed members to a board whose task is to help compile and release records surrounding the racially motivated crimes that have lain unsolved since the Civil Rights era.

For decades, investigators, journalists and victims’ families have long sought answers surrounding bombings and shootings committed during the struggle for civil rights whose perpetrators were never caught or who skated through the justice system.

They’ve waited on record requests filed through the Freedom of Information Act. They’ve tried to piece together what happened by poring over the all-caps, teletype dispatches that pinged between FBI offices that, when initially released, were run through with blocks of redactions.

In 2019, President Donald Trump signed into law a bipartisan piece of legislation originally drafted by a group of high schoolers that treats records of these cold cases that happened between 1940 to 1979 like the records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which were compiled at the National Archives and made available to the public.

In mid-February, the Senate confirmed four individuals to the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board: a former journalist who won the Pulitzer-prize in history, a law professor who was the first Black female judge in Massachusetts, an instruction archivist and a history professor at University of California, Los Angeles.

Their task? To determine just what records fall under the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act of 2018 and whether a document’s release should be delayed.

But before that work begins in earnest, the members must be sworn in and there’s paperwork to do, staff to hire. 

“That will take some time,” said William Bosanko, chief operating officer for the National Archives and Records Administration.

But time is not on the board’s side.

As the administration in Washington changed hands, the board remained unfilled. The clock is ticking, as the law says the review board’s work will end four years after the law first passed, although the board could vote to extend that time for a year further.

“Absent congressional intervention and a change in the law, the board doesn’t really have a fighting chance. They’re going to need more time in order to deal with these very important and very weighty issues around these cold cases,” Bosanko said.

Those weighty issues include the act’s scope. A couple years ago, the federal government compiled and reviewed 161 unsolved homicides carried out during the struggle for civil rights. The cases included the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and the Mississippi Burning case involving the deaths of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney.

But Bosanko said the Cold Case Records Collection Act was written to encompass more than those cases and could include, say, violations to the Fair Housing Act.

There’s also the sheer volume of records, where Department of Justice documents stored at the National Archives that could fall under the act is not measured in the thousands of pages, but in the thousands of cubic feet.

Bosanko said the National Archives has already identified some of the low hanging fruit, some of the most notable Civil Rights-era cold cases, cases that the administration suspects may be of interest to the board and whose records they could quickly get in front of the group.

The archives, however, is stymied when it comes to crafting and issuing guidance to other federal agencies because it does not yet know what the board will determine is the scope of the act.

In the meantime, some departments have been at work. For instance, in a footnote of a report, the Criminal Section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division said between July 2019 to September 2020 it spent nearly 1,800 hours working on issues surrounding cold cases, including compliance with the records collection act.

In June 2021, the White House announced nominations to the five-member board. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a confirmation hearing for four nominees in mid-January.

Introducing the nominees during the remote hearing conducted over teleconferencing software, former Senator Doug Jones said he couldn’t think of a better group for the committee to consider.

The former prosecutor who helped try two of the Klansmen responsible for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, said the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Act was one of his signature pieces of legislation.

“There have been a handful of people over the last 20 or 30 years … that have taken a real interest in these cold civil rights cases,” Jones said in a later interview, and two of those individuals were former journalist Hank Klibanoff and law professor Margaret Burnham.

Klibanoff, a professor at Emory University, is director of Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at the university and Burnham, a law professor at Northeastern University School of Law founded the school’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project.

“They were just naturals to me because of their interest. And they see this in a bigger picture,” Jones added, saying the two educators see the importance a complete record for truth and reconciliation for the communities affected by the old violence.

During the hearing, Burnham said the nomination to the board was the highlight of her career working for civil rights. In 1977, Burnham became the first Black woman to sit on the bench in Massachusetts. She sat on Boston’s municipal court, “Serving ordinary working people in their disputes that arise in their lives,” she said.  

After a career as a civil rights attorney and a law professor, Burnham said in an interview the nomination to the review board brought her full circle back to public service.

Burnham began looking into Civil Rights-era cold cases after President George W. Bush signed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act in 2007, legislation that directed the federal government to take another look at many of the cold cases from that time.

She said she realized the act wouldn’t reach every case of racial violence that ended up with a death. Working with students, she began investigating, relying on legal expertise to navigate the FOIA system to obtain documents from the government.

Burnham said she wanted to learn how the law failed, and how federal prosecutors at the time managed professional ethics.

“I was interested in what federal prosecutors in these local areas did,” Burnham said. “They had to thread a needle between satisfying the local power structures with whom they were quite connected and upon whom they were sometimes dependent, while at the same time, meeting the new interests that were emanating from Washington to these cases.”

Klibanoff said in his prepared statement to the committee that the board’s task was not to solve crimes, but to make government records more readily available.

“I have seen with my own eyes and felt in my own heart the extraordinary good that can come when families of those who were killed sit down with a couple of hundred pages of government records and unlock decades of mysteries, myths and misunderstandings,” Klibanoff wrote in his written testimony to the committee.

Gabrielle Dudley, an instruction archivist at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library told the committee she understood how there was a balance between the release of records while protecting individuals’ privacy.

When Dudley was in high school, growing up in the Birmingham area, some of klansmen responsible for the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing faced prosecution. As an intern at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, she collected oral histories from individuals, some of whom would mention the people they knew who were murdered, she said in an interview.

“You would call and they would just, it was almost like they were just ready to tell these stories,” Dudley said.

As the board is preparing to begin its work, lawmakers are trying to give it more time. In February, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, introduced a bill that would buy the board three more years, extending the time it meets from 2024 to 2027.

At the end of March, the Civil Rights Cold Case Investigations Support Act of 2022 passed the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

A spokesman for Cruz said in a statement that the senator was pleased to work on this bill and he hoped the extension would allow victims and their families to find justice.

Stuart Wexler, the history teacher at Hightown High School in New Jersey whose students originally drafted the bill that became the cold case records act, said the most pressing issue surrounding the act and the release of the cold case records is the extension being considered by Congress.

“That’s obviously the number one priority because the board is not going to have time to do its work,” Wexler said.

As a high-schooler, Wexler was fascinated by the JFK assassination and he followed the early meetings of the board formed to review those assassination records in the 90s. That review board, in its hunt for records, accepted letters from the public offering tips and called witnesses, Wexler said.

For the board reviewing the JFK assassination records, “a big issue for them was trying to find autopsy materials and to authenticate what autopsy materials they had,” Wexler said. “So they call a bunch of people like the photographer involved with the autopsy, the autopsy doctors.”

According to the legislation, The Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board has the ability to issue subpoenas for records and its members receive security clearances.

Meanwhile, National Archives COO Bosanko said he hopes that the records once released will allow people more accessibility to the records. No longer will people have to plan a trip to the National Archives’ facility at say, College Park, Maryland.

Once the project is complete, with records of old cold cases posted online, he hopes that, for instance, a rural schoolteacher could drive home lessons surrounding the struggle for civil rights by examining events that happened in that locale.

“For me, being the most open and transparent we can as a nation with our history,” Bosanko said, “and then making it discoverable and usable, that’s what this act is about.”

xxxxxxxx

HSCA Evidence of Conspiracy

 HSCA  Evidence of Conspiracy

In an email correspondence among some of the top researchers in the country, W. Tracy Parnell  replied to  Brian Bender’s fine article on the December 2021 NARA release of records under the JFK Act, that is linked here:

[    https://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2021/12/bryan-bender-on-new-released-records.html      ]

Bender used to be a staff reporter for the Boston Globe and covered the Kennedy family and wrote a number of important articles on the assassination, rare for a mainstream media journalist.

Parnell, one of the numerous die hard lone nutters who still tries to contend the President was killed by a deranged loner for no apparent reason, posts a blog that attempts to debunk every conspiracy theory that comes down the pike, and is finishing a book length report on what he perceives as the David Atlee Phillips – Antonio Veciana – Maurice Bishop “Hoax” that I will eventually get to.

[ http://wtracyparnell.blogspot.com/ ]     

Parnell tried to contest Bennder’s mentioning the fact that the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) conclusion that there was probably a conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy, saying the only evidence of conspiracy that the HSCA came up with was the acoustical study, that has since been debunked.

That of course is a Lone Nut factoid that is often stated and repeated, when the true fact is the HSCA came up with dozens if not hundreds of conspiracy leads that they asked the Justice Department to pursue, but have since been left to independent researchers to try to resolve.

And the acoustical echo analysis, though often disputed, has never been debunked because the only way to prove or disprove a scientific study is to repeat it, and the HSCA acoustical echo analysis has never been duplicated. The scientific team that conducted the study consisting primarily of major defense contractors and scientists stick by their guns, as demonstrated by Dr. Barger’s conversations with Josiah Thompson and published as an appendix to Thompson’s recently published book – Last Second in Dallas  (University Press of Kansas 2021).

I think that the idea the acoustics study was the only evidence of conspiracy developed by the HSCA stems from one of the congressmen who sat on the Committee, as the acoustical study results were not revealed to anyone until the very last public hearing of the Committee. The committee was shortly thereafter disbanded because it was only a temporary committee and not a permanent one. As usual, not all of the committee members attended every meeting, and few of them kept up with the investigations conducted primarily by the staff lawyers and investigators.

As for evidence of conspiracy other than the acoustical study, it was developed by HSCA investigators in the field and reported to the Chief counsels, both of whom believed there was a conspiracy to kill the president. First chief counsel Richard Sprague thought the CIA had its hand in what happened at Dealey Plaza, while the second Chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey wrote a book about how the Mafia was responsible.

Since then however Blakey has changed his tune. With the revelations that former CIA officer and agency liaison to the committee George Joannides was previously the case officer for the DRE anti-Castro  Cubans,  some of whom got into a scuffle in New Orleans with the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and that Joannides was called out of retirement by the CIA to serve as their liaison to the Committee, Blakey has decided the CIA were involved, at least in the cover-up of the truth. Blakey now says that if he knew then what he knows now, Joannides would have been questioned under oath as a suspect rather than being the middleman between the Committee and the CIA.

The first Chief Counsel, Richard Sprague, Esq., was a former Philadelphia District Attorney who successfully prosecuted Tony Boyle for the conspiracy murder of United Mine Workers boss Jock Yablonski. Sprague wanted to conduct a real homicide investigation, and hired New York City assistant DA Robert Tannenbaum, who prosecuted many big city homicides and was named to head the JFK team of investigators. Sprague also hired former Philadelphia reporter Gaeton Fonzi on the basis of a recommendation by Senator Richard Schweiker (Rep. Pa.), as Fonzi had previously worked as an investigator for the Schweiker-(Gary) Hart sub-committee of the Church Intelligence Committee on the JFK Assassination.

Schweiker himself leaned towards CIA involvement in the assassination as he said “there’s fingerprints of Intelligence” all over the assassination story.

As a member of the Church Intelligence Committee, and half of the Schweiker-Hart subcommittee on the assassination of President Kennedy, Schweiker would be disapointed today to learn that many of the Church committee’s records, especially key interviews with subjects have been erased or are outright missing.

Bob Tannenbaum wrote a series of popular detective fiction, one of which recounts his experiences working for the HSCA, especially his displeasure of Sprague being fired for trying to conduct a real homicide investigation. Tannenbaum went on to become mayor of Beverly Hills, California, but has always maintained his interest in the assassination, making a presentation on Oswald’s innocence before the CAPA-South Texas Law School Mock Trial in Houston in 2017.

Sprague had also hired another big city detective Jack Moriarity, who investigated what the HSCA called “TheWise allegation,” named after former Dallas TV reporter and Mayor Wes Wise, who first learned about JD Tippit’s good friend Carl Mather and his car being seen near the site of Tippit’s murder, with the accused assassin behind the wheel.  While the FBI was reluctant to investigate this lead, and for good reasons, Jack Moriarity was the only official to visit Collins Radio and learn what Carl Mather’s job was there. It turns out that Mather’s job at Collins was to install and monitor the radios in the Executive fleet that was used by Vice President LBJ.

The more we learn about Collins Radio the more questions are posed, and lead to even more questions of a conspiratorial bent. As the November 1, 1963 edition of the New York Times revealed in a front page article, Collins Rado leased the CIA raider shop The Rex, that deposited anti-Castro Cuban JMWAVE trained assassins in Cuba with high powered rifles who were caught and confessed to being trained by the CIA to kill Cuban leaders.

Art Collins, the founder of the Cedar Rapids, Iowa  radio company, was the only person capable of receiving the radio broadcasts of artic explorer Navy Admiral Richard Byrd, cousin of the owner of the Dallas oil man D. H. Byrd, who owned the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) at the time of the assassination. He then got major military contracts and became good, personal friends with Air Force General Curtis LeMay, a HAM radio buff who arranged for all of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) nuclear bombers to be outfitted with Collins sideband radios, as well as the Executive Air Fleet, including Air Force One, all of which used Collins’ “Liberty” station in Cedar Rapids as a relay center for all of their radio communications, including those on the day of the assassination.

My file on Collins Radio grew to such an extent that I delivered a report at a COPA conference and wrote an article on The Collins Radio Connections  -  [   https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-collins-radio-connections-to.html   ]

David Montague, one of the HSCA investigators and now a university professor, addressed the 2021 CAPA conference in regards to the JFK Act and still withheld records. He too is an avid conspiracy believer whose work for the HSCA came up with numerous leads of conspiracy, most notably that the wife of a federal judge flew on a Military Air Transport (MAT) flight from McGuire AFB in New Jersey to France, sitting alongside a Marine in full dress uniform with the name Oswald, who said his name was Lee Harvey Oswald, from New Orleans, who was on an important mission that made him very nervous.  And it took place at precisely the same time Oswald was supposed to be on a tramp steamer defectng to USSR.

[    https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2014/06/oswald-takes-macs-flight-to-defect.html    /    https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2014/07/flight-from-mcguire.html   ]

The Fonzi – Church Committee – Veciana – Marurice Bishop – that Parnell has delved into in depth and we will get into later, after I read Parnell’s book on the subject.

Fonzi also interviewed Mitch Werbell – a tape recorded session the tape  of which – as discovered by Malcolm Blunt, has been erased, but we still have Fonzi’s notes, which mention Werbell’s acknowledgement that the Pan Am Bank of Miami was used by the CIA. Of course we already knew that from the HSCA report that Jack Ruby, on his return home from Havana, did a favor for his friend Lewis McWillie and deposited a suitcase full of cash in the Pan Am bank for McWillie’s casino bosses, Fox brothers.

And a point that I don’t expect Parnell to address in his mythical interpretation of Antonio Veciana’s story, is how David Atlee Phillips, as Maurce Bishop, took Veciana to an office in the Pan Am Bank building in Miami in order to sign a security oath and begin his lessons in psychological warfare.

Then there’s Robert McKeown, who delivered arms to Fidel Castro in the mountains and testified before the HSCA that he was paid in cash bundled in Pan Am Bank wrappers.  So there’s certainly something shady going on at the Pan Am Bank of Miami, that the HSCA discovered but nobody has bothered to investigate.  

[ https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmckeown.htm   /   https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/04/happenstance-coincidence-enemy-action.html      ]

After retiring to his Texas ranch McKeown was visited by a victorious Fidel Castro who offered him a position in the new Cuban government, which McKeown declined. But Castro’s visit sparked two other visitors, Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald, bot h of whom wanted McKeown’s assistance in regards to weapons and Cuba.

After Sprague was fired, G. Robert Blakey, the head of the Cornell University Law School Institute on Organized Crime was brought on. Blakey had written the RICO statute that was being used by prosecutors to attack organized crime, and should have been used in the Kennedy assassination but wasn’t. Blakey brought along some of his Cornell law school students, including Ed Lopez and Dan Hardaway, who he sent over to the CIA to review what records they had on the assassination. They also went to Mexico and wrote the long censored Lopez Report, that details many of the conspiracy leads that Parnell won’t even recognize. Both Lopez and Hardaway, to this day, are dedicated and proud conspiracy theorists.

In any case, Parnell’s statement that the HSCA did not come up with any evidence of conspiracy is belittled by the HSCA work of both chief counsels Richard Sprague and G. Robert Blakey, and those they hired to conduct the investigation – Tannenbaum, Moriarity, Montague, Fonzi, Lopez and Hardway, most of whom are still living and stand by their conspiratorial beliefs.

Comments welcome: Billkelly3@gmail.com

12 Reasons Why Oswald Wasn't the 6th Floor Shooter

JFKcountercoup Thursday, March 24, 2022 

12 Reasons Why Oswald Wasn't the 6th Floor Shooter. 

 1) There is no evidence Oswald ever bought or owned bullets or ever shot that rifle at any time. 

 2) Oswald's brother Robert wrote in his book - "If Lee did not practice with that rifle in the days and weeks before the assassination he didn't take the shots that killed the president and wounded governor Connally." And the WC says the rifle remained in the blanket in the Paines garage from the time it was brought back from New Orleans until the morning of the assassination, and was never used for practice. 

 3) Both persons - the only persons to eyeball the package Oswald put in the back seat of Frazers car, Fraser and his sister said the package was too small to contain the rifle, even when broken down. 

 4) When breaking for lunch the floor laying crew raced down on both elevators and Oswald told them to send one back up for him, clearly indicating his intention to return to the lower floors. 

 5) Shelley saw Oswald on the first floor at 12 noon standing by the telephone, as if waiting for a call. 

 6) Oswald said that while reading a newspaper in the Domino Room on the first floor, where his jacket was later found on a window sill, he noticed two black workers walk past who were on the way to the 5th floor. They later testified they did walk past the Dominio Room, so how did Oswald know they went by if he wasn't there? 

 7) A secretary said she saw Oswald on the lower floors at 12:15, when people on the street saw a man with a rifle on the 6th floor, a man who could not have been Oswald if he was on the lower floors. 

8) After watching the motorcade from the curb, TSBD VP Ochis Campbell told a reporter that when reentering the building he saw Oswald standing next to the storage cabinet under the stairs to the second floor.

 9) If Oswald or anyone ran down the back stairs from the 6th floor they would have had to pass Dougherty on the 5th floor landing and the secretaries supervisor on the 4th floor landing, but didn't. 

 10) When DPD officer Baker arrived on the 2nd floor following Roy Truly, he noticed Oswald through the window of the closed door that led to the lunchroom and investigated. If Oswald was the 6th floor shooter and came down those steps, he would have had to go through that door, but didn't or Truly, ahead of Baker would have seen him moments before Baker saw him through the window. But Truly didn't see him because Oswald entered the hallway to the lunchroom from the secretaries office, the same way he left with a coke. 

 11) If Oswald had been the 6th floor gunman, blew the president's head open, ran across the 6th floor, ditched the rifle, ran down the steps in less than 90 seconds, he would have been hyperventilating and out of breath, as Marina said he was an hour after the Walker shooting. But Truly, Baker and a secretary who saw him said Oswald was cool, calm and collected, and not like anyone who just killed someone and ran across a floor and down 4 flights of steps. 

 12) Both eye witnesses to the 6th floor gunman said he wore a white shirt, while Oswald wore brown. 

 13) Bonus item - Amos Eunis, one eye witnesses, said numerous times in his short WC testimony, that the 6th floor gunman had a very distinctive bald spot, a characteristic not shared with Oswald. 

 14) Brennan, the other eyewitnesses, told a policeman that if he saw the gunman again he would recognize him. Standing at the bottom of the front stairs next to a police car Brennan saw, recognized an d pointed out to a policeman the black workers from the 5th floor window, who were taken in for questioning. Moments later however, he didn't recognize Oswald as the 6th floor shooter as he walked out the door, went down the steps and walked east on Elm. 

 15) Going against those who claim he did it for historical recognition, Oswald denied committing the deed and told his brother not to believe "the so called evidence," and I think we should take that advice. ''

BK Notes: Those who continue to maintain that Oswald was the lone shooter and there was no conspiracy must resolve each of these items, while if one is correct, Oswald is exonerated. And these are some of the reasons why most people do not believe Oswald was the lone assassin or the assassin at all and was what he claimed to be – a Patsy.

West Side Story with a JFK Twist

 West Side Story w/ a Twist

Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood 

The recent Steven Spielberg film revival of West Side Story also presents the opportunity to address the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald attended a Twist Party in Mexico City where he was encouraged by Cuban embassy personnel to kill the President.

The original Broadway play, 1961 movie and a recent revival of West Side Story all feature music by classical composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. While Bernstein said he didn’t vote for Kennedy, Bernstein introduced seven year old Chinese cellist Yo-Yo Ma at a 1962 concert at the White House, and Kennedy and Bernstein became friends.

Two days after the assassination Bernstein conducted Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 Resurrection in a televised tribute to the slain president.

In 1980 Bernstein was booed and hissed on stage when he said, “We don’t dare confront the implications. I think we’ve all agreed there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, and we just don’t want to know the complete truth. It involves such powerful forces in what we call high places that if we do know, everything might fall apart. We don’t dare confront the implications.”

Some of the implications regarding the complete truth involve another aspect of West Side Story, as it becomes entwined with the allegation that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of the President, attended a Twist Party in Mexico City hosted by Silvia Duran, the Mexican national who worked at the Cuban embassy.

While Oswald ostensibly dealt with Duran when he attempted to get a visa to Cuba, she has continually denied meeting with Oswald outside the embassy, even though there are a number of questionable reports that she did so. All of these reports attempt to portray Oswald as being influenced by pro-Castro Cuban Communists and encouraged by them to kill the President.

One report has Silvia Duran taking Oswald to a fancy Mexico City restaurant where he is introduced to the Cuban ambassador to Mexico who encourages Oswald to kill the President.

Another report that resurfaces ever so often, most recently by former New York Times reporter Phil Shenon in his book A Cruel and Shocking Act – The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (MacMillan, 2013), has Oswald attending a Twist Party hosted by Duran where Cuban embassy officials were allegedly overheard talking to Oswald about killing Kennedy.

For those who missed the Sixties, Chubby Checker’s hit song The Twist sparked a new dance craze that Duran and others used to host house parties.

At the party in question, besides Duran and the Cuban embassy officials, there was Duran’s cousin, Mexican poet and writer Elena Garro de Paz, communist writer Emilio Carballido, Jose De Jesus Clark Flores, Oswald and  “two American Gringo beat nicks.”

For most people the story originates with Viola June Cobb, an American who was fluent in Spanish and translated Castro's History Will Absolve Me speech as well as Guatemalan president Juan Jose Arevalo's story The Shark and the Sardines, which she had printed and copies of which were given out by Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans, along with his Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets. 

When Fidel Castro went to New York to address the United Nations Cobb visited him at his hotel and gave him copies of the translations and he hired her to be a translator at his headquarters at the Havana Hilton. 

After Batista fled Cuba on New Year's eve 1959, the DRE - Cuban Student Directorate, based at the University of Havana, took over Batista's city hall and Dr. Rolando Cubella (aka AMLASH), one of the DRE founders, sat at Batista's desk and smoked his cigars. When Castro arrived in Havana and learned of this, he took up the suggestion of the General Manager of the Havana Hilton, Frank Maryan "Brandy" Brandstetter, to take up residence in the penthouse of the newly built Hilton. Brandstetter was from Dallas and a Colonel in Jack Crichton's U.S. Army Reserve intelligence unit, but reported directly to Col. Rose at ACSI (Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence) at the Pentagon. 

[For more on Brandy see: Havana Hilton by Render and Reiser /  JFKcountercoup: Brandy's Band of Bros at Dealey Plaza  /  JFKcountercoup: Col. Frank M. Brandstetter  ]

June Cobb was also on the CIA's payroll at $200 a month, and after leaving Castro's entourage, she moved to Mexico where she moved in with Elena Garro de Paz as a housemate. There she learned of Duran's Twist Party with Oswald, and reported it to the CIA and a US State Department official at the Mexican Embassy Charles Thomas. Thomas duly reported the story of the Twist Party to his superiors, and much of Shenon's book has to do with Thomas, how he lost his job ostensibly because of the Twist Party story and eventually committed suicide. 

In a 24 page CIA report to the Rockefeller Commission, Elena Garro de Paz is quoted as saying, “At the party she saw three Gringos, not drinking, not mixing or more or less just standing around together like bumps on a log. They were so obviously out of place that she asked someone in the Cuban Embassy about them and was told that ‘they were just passing through.’” One of the Gringos was said to be Oswald, while one of the other two was an American film actor who Duran would not name. 

On the day of the assassination Elena Garro de Paz was whisked away to a hotel by Mexican security officer Manuel Calvillo, “for her own protection.” Duran was twice arrested and violently interrogated by Mexican security offices until she confessed to having a sexual affair with Oswald.

In his book Shenon says that Duran acknowledge knowing the two American Gringos, one of whom was an American film actor, but she wouldn’t reveal his name because he was still alive and she wanted to protect him.

Although Shenon, with all his resources, editors, publisher, secretaries and researches couldn’t learn their identities, there are a number of CIA documents, primarily telephone wire tap reports that identify the American film actor as Richard Beymer, who starred as the lead in the first West Side Story movie opposite Natalie Wood.

Besides Natalie Wood Beymer was also associated with actress Sharon Tate, who also died under suspicious circumstances. 

It was not difficult to locate Beymer living in the Midwest, and he answered the phone when I called. Yes, he confirmed he went to Mexico in the fall of 1963 with a friend, Bradley Pierce, a New York City bar owner, who had become a Catholic priest. While they went to attend an Acapulco film festival that featured West Side Story, they also went to Mexico City where they applied for visas to Cuba.

But no, he did not recall attending a Twist Party, though that was something they would have done as they were two foot lose, single Americans looking for a good time below the border.

And no, he did not recall meeting or knowing Silvia Duran, though I think he was lying about that as one of the CIA wire taps, shortly after the assassination, reveals that he asked for her personally, and inquired as to whether she was all right, apparently knowing she was arrested and violently interrogated by Mexican authorities.

And no, he did not recall meeting or knowing Lee Harvey Oswald, someone he would have remembered as the accused assassin of the President.

Bradley Pierce, Father Bradley Pierce, was also easily located at a seminary in New England, and he too recalled visiting Mexico with Richard Beymer, attending the Acapulco film festival and applying for visas to Cuba.

                                                                  Bradley Pierce 

[For more on Bradley Pierce: JFKCountercoup2: Father Bradley Pierce RIP /https://patch.com/connecticut/northhaven/obituary-rev-bradley-pierce-82-formerly-north-haven ]

I mentioned to Father Bradley that he must have lived an interesting life as the owner of a big city bar frequented by rock musicians and movie stars, and then becoming a Catholic Priest. Yes, he acknowledged, he had lived a fascinating life, having spent time with Sister Terresa in the slums of Calcutta, India before entering the seminary rather late in life.

But no, he did not recall attending a Twist Party, though he too thought that would have been something on their itinerary, and no, he did not recall meeting Lee Harvey Oswald, though he did recall the assassination in detail.

In fact, he said, they were in Mexico at the time of the assassination, learning of it as they got off their hotel elevator and entered the lobby.

And since they were only in Mexico for a few weeks, they could not have been there in late September and early October when the historic Oswald was allegedly in Mexico City, so they did not attend a Twist Party with Silvia Duran when Oswald was there, if he ever was.

But don’t think this is the end of the story, as the idea that the accused assassin of the President was in cahoots with Castro Cuban Commies is a theme that is continually resurrected whenever we get close to the truth, and we will certainly here more of it in the future. It is part of an on going psychological warfare ploy, a certified black propaganda disinformation campaign, what the CIA calls an “active measure,” that was essentially a part of the plan to kill the president. What Peter Dale Scott calls the “Phase One” cover story, with the deranged lone nut case being the “Phase Two” cover story that is also routinely brought out whenever the truth is near.

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=1134154

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=8967#relPageId=2

JFKcountercoup: Twisting With Oswald in Mexco City

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2018/03/leonard-bernstein-and-jfk-we-dont-dare.html?m=1

Oswald in Mexico City:  Shenon and the Twist Party > JFK Facts

Father Bradley Pierce RIP 
JFKCountercoup2: Father Bradley Pierce RIP

Top Ten Record Released Under the JFK Act

TOP TEN JFK ASSASSINATION RECORDS - SMOKING DOCS

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2018/11/top-ten-jfk-assassination-records.html

TOP TEN JFK ASSASSINATION RECORDS RELEASED UNDER THE JFK ACT

It has been repeatedly said that there have been no significant records released under the JFK Act, at least said by those who haven't bothered to read what has been released. These are just my personal favorites. If you ask Peter Dale Scott, John Newman, Rex Bradford, Malcolm Blunt, Larry Hancock, Russ Baker, Jim Lesar or anyone who is actually reading these records, they will come up with their own Top Ten documents, and I hope someone will take the time to do that. 

1)      Higgins Memo.

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=10246 - relPageId=1&tab=page

http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-July2017/jfk-july_2017_release-formerly_withheld_in_full-3of9/DOCID-32358065.PDF

1) The Higgins Memo - is the Number One Smoking Document released under the JFK Act for the following reasons:

THE KEY paragraph is (13) "He commented that there was nothing new in the propaganda field. However, he felt that there had been great success in getting closer to the military personnel who might break with Castro, and stated that there were at least ten high-level military personnel who are talking with CIA but as yet are not talking to each other, since that degree of confidence has not yet developed. He considers it as a parallel in history, i.e., the plot to kill Hitler, and this plot is being studied in detail to develop an approach.' 

D.C. attorney Jim Lesar, head of the Assassinations Archives and Research Center (AARC) and Dan Alcorn filed an FOIA request for that "detailed study" and the CIA apparently have lost it  

Other items of relevance include: 

a) It concerns a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting at the Pentagon on a significant date - Sept. 25, 1963 a key time in the JFK Assassination Chronology as it occurs around the same time as some other key events, including:

1- the day Oswald left New Orleans for Mexico City,
2-  the estimated timing of the Odio incident, and
3- Michael Paine's wife Ruth Hyde Paine picks up Marina, the daughter and their belongings - including the rifle, and took them to Texas
4- after visiting Michael's mom - Ruth Forbes Paine Young - Mary Bancroft's close friend.
5-  It is also the day President Kennedy signs NSAM - National Security Action Memorandum on the advice of National Security advisor McGeorge Bundy approving "Four Leaves," - a secret military communications project.
6-  JFK then left on his "Conservation Tour," the first stop being the Northeast Pennsylvania home of the mother of Mary Pinchot Meyer, JFK's paramour who accompanied him.
7-  Oswald's name turns up on the list of those who visited the Tenn. nuclear museum and news cliips of the tour are found in a box at Oswald's rooming house.

8- Richard Case Nagel shot a gun in a bank in El Paso, Texas and waited to get arrested, ostensibly to be in federal custody at the time of the assassination.

So a lot of significant chronological events occurred in that 24 hour span.

b) Because Chef of Staff Gen. Maxwell Taylor was on a special mission to Vietnam, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay chaired the meeting.

c) The author of the memo - Colonel Walter Higgins was the adjunct of Gen. Victor Krulak (USMC), the director of the military detachment responsible for providing any assistance requested by the CIA in the course of their covert intelligence operations.

d) Desmond FitzGerald, the CIA officer who briefed the Chiefs on CIA covert operations against Cuba, had replaced William Harvey as chief of Task Force W - the Cuban project based in the basement of CIA HQ, and was the case officer for Dr. Rolando Cubella (AMLASH), a founder of the DRE who the CIA considered their  best bet to fit the disgruntled Cuban military officer who would lead the assassination attempt and coup.

e) Fitzgerald said this adaption of the plot to kill Hitler was considered a part of the Psychological Warfare area, which included David Atlee Phillips, George Joannides and the DRE agents who were arrested with Oswald in New Orleans.

f) LeMay also introduces an Air Force communications officer who had devised a way to influence radio communications that were to be adapted for use against Cuba.

g) The PENDELUM project is mentioned - and described as the code name of the Security net that surrounded the covert Cuban projects they were operating.

h) The NSAM that JFK signed approving "Project Four Leaves" - a military communications system, is only mentioned once - in JFK's daily desk dirary at the JFK Presidential Library.

i) There is also mention of a textual letter that it so secret it could only be read and immediately returned to the messenger. This could possibly be a message from McGeorge Bundy regarding security for the Cuban operations then underway or being considered. 

2)  HSCA Interview w/ WC attorney Sam Stern (From Howard Weisberg’s Collection )

http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg Subject Index Files/A Disk/Agent Oswald Office Files/Agent Oswald Office Official Records Subject File/Item 07.pdf

http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2017/02/hsca-sam-stern-interview-smoking-doc2.html

"I am less certain now that at the time we wrote the Report. Less certain that Oswald acted alone. Actually, I wasn't all that certain at the time. I thought the best evidence supported the final findings, and I agreed with them, but I wasn't tremendously firm or immovable in that, in my own mind. I just thought there were a lot of straws left.....I have become more skeptical about the Warren Commission findings and everything else that is a part of official life, I suppose. Everything has become discredited over the years since 1963. You don’t really believe in things the way you did back then."……

Mr. Stern stated that “at the outset we realized that there was no possible way to penetrate any official involvement in a cover-up or conspiracy if there was such complicity.” Stern stated that he and several of his Commission colleagues discussed what they regarded as “the fact that the agencies – the FBI and CIA – could formulate and maintain a cover-up which no one would ever penetrate. We of course did not believe that was so. And I still don’t. But we realized what we were dealing with, in the power of these agencies…

Stern stated that he had been told of FBI Agent Hosty’s allegedly threatening note received from Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the assassination, he “would have regarded it as greater identification of the possibility of potential danger in Oswald – of violence.” Stern stated that if the staff of the Commission had discovered that the Hosty note had existed and had been destroyed by the FBI in Dallas, that “if we had found out that happened, we would have gone to a full Commission meeting immediately, and would have made the big decision regarding any future relationship between the Commission and the FBI. It just would have gone to the heart of the whole relationship and the Bureau’s motivation. The destruction of that note would have resulted in the ultimate brouhaha.”

…Stern stated that had the Commission learned of the CIA-Mafia conspiracies to assassinate Fidel Castro, “we would have gone much more into Cuba, the CIA, and the Mafia. We would have had a whole host of new avenues calling for investigation. And we would have obviously had to develop some new sources of information – other than the agency.”

….When shown the CIA memorandum of November 1963 in which a CIA officer wrote that the Agency had once considered using Oswald for intelligence purposes, Stern stated that “I have never seen this. I was never given this, and we had asked for and were supposed to be given anything of relevance like this.” In reading the memo, Stern stated that “that would have definitely been relevant. If they (the CIA) were taking him that seriously, then you might think that others could or did also. If we found that had been withheld, that would have been a major explosion also.”

When shown a copy of the 1960-61 memos regarding “the possibility of an Oswald impostor,” Stern stated that he had never seen those three memos either, despite the fact that “they would have certainly been relevant. I was supposed to have been given all relevant Bureau information and files on Oswald in the pre-assassination period. They said I had everything.”

This leads us to the CIA document that was kept from the Warren Commission that indicated Oswald was considered for “operational use.”  

3) CIA Soviet Division memo – 104-10067-10212 – That says Oswald was once considered for operational use. Also known as the Cassin Memo.

http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-July2017/JFK-July_2017_Release-Formerly_released_in_part/DOCID-32347922.PDF

Also see: The CIA Man who considered using Oswald:”

https://www.tpaak.com/tpaak-blog/2017/9/14/the-cia-man-who-considered-using-oswald

“25 November 1963. “…REDWOOD (CIA Soviet Division) had at one time an OI (Operational Interest) in Oswald….”  

4)  Secret Service Preventive Research Section File

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32241845.pdf

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2017/10/secret-service-protective-research.html

Former Secret Service Agent Gerald Blaine, in his book “The Kennedy Detail” (Gallery Books, 2010, p.59) writes: “The first stop before any advance was always the PRS. Located in the Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, the PRS office were the nerve center for tracking threat cases. Any time there was a threat made against the president’s life – whether it was a written letter, a phone call, details gathered from an informant, field investigation, or an unstable person trying to get inside the Northwest Gate of the White House – an investigative report was initiated and a case file number is issued. A PRS agent would type the report on carbon paper so there would be multiple copies, noting the threat maker’s name, last known address, a synopsis of the threats made, a description of the person, and their medical history, if known. Cases are analyzed and categorized according to the seriousness of the threat.”

“The records room of the PRS office contained row and rows of gray metal four-drawer file cabinets that held thousands of threat suspect files, organized by case number. There were smaller file cabinets where index cards of each suspect were organized both geographically and alphabetically. The cards were cross-referenced to the case files. Thus if you knew either the name of the suspect or their last known location you go to the small index drawers, locate the card, which would have a case number on it, then go to the large filing cabinets to get the master file.”

(p.76) “…Win Lawson had checked PRS for threat suspect in Texas, specifically in the Dallas area, and had been pleasantly surprised to find that there weren’t any.”  More likely than "pleasantly surprised, he was incredulous, considering US Ambassador Stevenson had been physically assaulted a few weeks previous and known threats were coming in on a daily basis. 

5)  Collins Radio – 104-10107-10191 - ARRB considered “NBR” – Not Believed relevant

http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-July2017/jfk-july_2017_release-formerly_withheld_in_full-3of9/DOCID-32358065.PDF

[ Also see:the Collins Radio Connections:  JFKcountercoup: Collins Radio Connections ]

While this document seems unconnected to the assassination in any way, Collins Radio comes up again and again throughout the JFK assassination narrative, especially in regards to the Air Force One Radio Transmissions and the Tippit murder, as J.D. Tippit’s good friend worked at Collins Radio and his car was seen near the scene of Tippit’s murder, with a man resembling Oswald behind the wheel. This document, lawyer’s briefs for the taxing of American defense contractors working at a top secret ELINT base in Australia (Alice Springs), provides the proof that Collins Radio, LTV, General Dynamics et al, had a very close working relationship 

6)  Drew Pearson dinner with Khrushchev - 104-10003-10064 

http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-July2017/JFK-July_2017_Release-Formerly_released_in_part/DOCID-32105956.PDF

Soviet Primer Khrushchev told Pierson and his wife over dinner that he disbelieved the Warren Report and criticized and suspected American intelligence agencies of involvement in the assassination. Rather than write a “Washington Merry-Go-Round” Column on this incredible scoop Pearson reported it to the FBI, who noted:  "Pearson repeated that the reaction of Chairman Khrushchev and his wife was one of flat disbelief and archtypical of the universal European belief that there was some kind of American conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Oswald....(He) could not believe that the affair had happened as it apparently did and Mr. Pearson made no headway whatsoever in trying to change their belief that something was not on the level. Chairman Khruschev greeted Mr. and Mrs. Pearson's efforts with a tolerant smile..."   

7)  Jack Anderson on Jim Garrison – Tolson – DeLoach Memo of 4/4/67

http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2016/04/jack-anderson-on-jim-garrison.html

Tolson (FBI): Pierson’s protégé also reported to the FBI rather than write a column after dinner with Jim Garrison According to the FBI report: “Jack Anderson came to see me at 11:55 a.m. today. He has just returned from New Orleans where, at the invitation of District Attorney Jim Garrison, he interviewed Garrison for approximately six hours at his home. Anderson and Garrison later had dinner at the Latin Quarter restaurant in New Orleans. Anderson stated that he went to New Orleans fully prepared to present a hostile viewpoint to Garrison. After listening to Garrison for approximately 90 minutes, he began to believe Garrison’s story. Anderson described Garrison as a very convincing talker who has considerable facts at his disposal. Anderson now believes there is some authenticity to Garrison’s claims and future plans. Garrison told Anderson that he will undoubtedly hold a full-scale trial within six months….Shaw at this point already had been approved by the CIA, through an appropriate cut-out, to engineer a plot that would result in the assassination of Fidel Castro…..I also told Anderson that, while we of course would accept any information that was voluntarily given to us, we at the same time would not take over Garrison’s ‘dirty laundry.’

Anderson told me that if the Bureau had any change of policy in the above regard he would appreciate knowing about it. I told him we would keep his offer in mind; however there would be no change of policy.

Anderson told me that he had discussed this entire matter with George Christian, the President’s Press Secretary, at the White House. He stated that Christian was also convinced that there must be some truth to Garrison’s allegations. Christian told Anderson to get in touch with the FBI. Anderson stated that he had already been planning to do this, but that he now especially wanted to advise us of the full facts because of Christian’s request.

8) The Rosselli Chronology File – RIF 157-10014-10236

http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-July2017/JFK-July_2017_Release-Formerly_released_in_part/DOCID-32423624.PDF

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2018/06/roselli-chronology-file-rif-157-10014.html

Drew Pearson's protege Jack Anderson also interviewed John Rosselli immediately after he testified in secret Congressional hearing about his CIA Cuban activities, four plots to kill Castro and his case officer William Harvey. "The CIA has maintained throughout that the Oswald 201 file was a complete compilation of the material related to the assassination of President Kennedy. However, information relating to who Lee Harvey Oswald was, and what he was doing are not included in their files. The Oswald 201 file does not attempt to question Oswald's connection with both pro-Castro and anti-Castro groups or any of the AMLASH information. The most notable subject missing was information relating to CIA/U.S. Government attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro." 

Note: Anderson's story beings on page 27 and the Rosselli Chronology begins on page 38. Anderson: "So here is Rosselli's own account of a real-life 'Mission Impossible' - the attempt to kill Castro. It is a story of cash payments, poison pellets, high-powered rifles and powerboat dashes to Cuba."   

9) NSA Defectors Martin and Mitchel  - 104-10219-10088. 

http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-July2017/JFK-July_2017_Release-Formerly_released_in_part/104-10219-10088.pdf

Report from inside Russia on NSA defectors William H. Martin and Beron F. Mitchell, confirmed they went to Moscow via Mexico and Cuba, the same route Oswald wanted to take. It also shows how the CIA and NSA dealt with real defectors.  

10) NPIC PATHFINDER DOCUMENT – SECU122 SECURITY FILE ON FRANK STUGIS - Record Number 199308.05.14:42:12:750028 – JFK Record Series Agency Number 80T01357A (BK Notes: I don’t know why this records doesn’t have a RIF # number. And Many thanks to Malcolm Blunt for providing me with document in 2013 - and I'm sorry it took me so long to recognize its significance. 

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=104139&relPageId=14

In this document, improperly inserted in the middle of Frank Sturgis’ Security File, it is noted that:

1)      On 19 March, Dino A. Brugioni, Chief, Western Geographic Division (NPIC), informed me (CIA Operational Division Chief) that three personnel assigned to his division had told him that while serving at JMWAVE, Miami, Florida or in the Imagery Analysis Service in Washington during the 1960’s, they had heard references to assassination plans on Fidel Castro.

2)      On 20 March, I met with the following NPIC personnel who had either served in the Imagery Analysis Service or at JMWAVE on Cuban related problems: Gordon Duvall, Earl Shoemaker, Tom Helmke, Bruce Barrett, Reyes Ponce, George Arthur, Eugene Lydon, and William Hanlon. The purpose of this meeting was to ascertain whether their participation was related to case officer generated materials or bona fide operations.  [ Note: that's eight witnesses, not three]. 

3)      There appeared to be two plans involving Fidel Castro and an incident that may have been related to Raul Castro…….

4)      The incident involving Raul Castro was not a formalized plan. It consisted of a paramilitary raid on Santiago de Cuba harbor. There was a rumor at JMWAVE that, while exiting the harbor, Raul Castro’s home had been fired upon by a paramilitary case officer named “Rip” Robertson. 

5)      To the best of my knowledge these facts represent the totality of any participation by our personnel in these matters. We have no further knowledge that the Fidel Castro operation ever advanced beyond the planning stage. 

SIGNED Edward S. Cates, Chief, Imagery Exploitation Group,  NPIC

While it may not have officially  “advanced beyond the planning stage” and was not implemented against the original target - Fidel Castro, Pathfinder was an off-the-shelf tactical plan that could have, and I believe was redirected to JFK at Dealey Plaza, and further analysis can prove me right or wrong,

It appears that “Rip” Robertson’s ride-by shoot up of Raul Castro’s home had already taken place, and the two Fidel Castro operations were formalized into distinct plans that, according to the Imagery Exploitation Group at NPIC, didn’t advance beyond the planning stage.

And there were plans to kill Castro known to the NPIC techs  – two of them specifically. According to this NPIC chief the plans involving Fidel, to the knowledge of our people were: 

(a)    A folder stored in the Photo interpretation area at JMWAVE contained materials relating to a plan to assassinate Castro in the Bay of Pigs resort area where he maintained a yacht and was known to vacation. The plan, possibly with the code word PATHFINDER, apparently had been disapproved and was not under active consideration at the time. Our people did not participate actively in the plan in any regard. 

(b)   While assigned to the Imagery Analysis Service, a number of our photo interpreters supported Carl Jenkins of the DD/P concerning a plan to assassinate Castro at the DuPont Varadero Beach Estate, east of Havana. Castro was known to frequent the estate and the plan was to use a high powered rifle in the attempt. The photo interpretation support was restricted to providing annotated photographs and line drawings of the estate. To our knowledge, this plan also was never implemented.

Bonus Doc. #11) In Response the CIA wrote (1993.08.05.14:4212;750028)

[ https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=104139 - relPageId=13&tab=page ] 

SUBJECT: Assassination Plans Against Castro
REFERENCE: Memorandum for the Record dated 21 March 1975 from Mr. Cates, NPIC 

1.      On receipt of reference memorandum, we reviewed the official folder on Mr. Carl Jenkins, a retired Agency employee, and asked the Directorate of Operations for any available information on PATHFINDER. Both efforts were fruitless – no one in the Directorate of Operations recognized the cryptonym PATHFINDER. 

2.      In our search of other files in connection with other staff activities, we came, just by chance, a reference to Pathfinder in an FBI memorandum dated 20 January 1961 concerning Frank Anthony Sturgis. We are unable to offer any speculation, reasonable or otherwise, on its significance in this memorandum or in the NPIC memorandum…..[End CIA Response]

Because these were "in house" agency communications between one division of the CIA and another, and was not shared with the Church Intelligence Committee, the "official folder on Mr. Carl Jenkins" that was reviewed was not subject to the JFK Act and is not in the JFK Collection at the National Archives and available to the public. And because Jenkins is still alive, it is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). But because Jenkins is still alive, we can and will try to interview him.

Bonus Doc #12 - [ Carl Jenkins:  http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2018/10/carl-e-jenkins-vita.html /

http://www.publicrecordmedia.org/wp content/uploads/2015/09/whea/WHEA_pd_GW26005.pdf]

When the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) interviewed former NPIC secretary Velma Reumann, she said that RFK had ordered her to box the NPIC records on the assassination (apparently including the Pathfinder documents) and convey to them to the Smithsonian Institute rather than the NARA where they belonged. 

Bonus Doc. #13 Interview with NPIC Secretary: http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2017/02/smoking-doc-5-npic-records.html

So the missing Pathfinder operational records were intentionally misfiled at least three times – 1) At JMWAVE the NPIC employees said the Pathfinder files were kept in their section of the station instead of the Operational Files, where they belonged; 2) the NPIC memo to CIA officials calling attention to the Pathfinder files (#1) were misfiled in the middle of Frank Sturgis’ Security File instead of being passed on to the Church Intelligence Committee; 3) the NPIC assassination records were ordered by RFK to be sent to the Smithsonian instead of the NARA.

As we have seen here, the best records lead to new names, new events and new records