Julio Fernandez

JULIO FERNANDEZ

On the night of President Kennedy’s assassination, Clare Booth Luce, the wife of Time-Life publisher Henry Luce, received a telephone call from Julio Fernandez, a crew member of an anti-Castro Cuban attack boat that she financially co-sponsored with William Pawley.

Pawley, a Miami multi-millionaire, staunch right-wing conservative and former owner of the Havana bus system and airlines before Castro, had helped General Claire Channault form the original Flying Tigers during World War II. He also served as U.S. Ambassador to Brazil and Peru, and persuaded Clare Booth Luce to help finance a fleet of motorboats that attacked Cuba like the Flying Tigers fought the Japanese.

According to a Congressional Report, "Pawley envisioned them as Cuban ‘Flying Tigers’ flying in and out of Cuba on intelligence gathering missions." Luce agreed to sponsor one boat and its three-man crew, one of whom was Julio Fernandez. She met with her Cuban commandos in New York on three occasions and published a story about them in Life Magazine.

She referred to them as "my boys," but until the night of the assassination, hadn’t seen or heard from them since the October, 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the raids were said to have been discontinued.

On the night of the assassination however, Julio Fernandez called Luce on the telephone and told her he had some information on Lee Harvey Oswald, the President’s alleged assassin. Luce claimed Fernandez told her that Oswald had approached the anti-Cuban group that Fernandez belonged to and offered his services as a potential assassin.

"The Cubans however, didn’t trust Oswald," the report continues, "and suspected him of being a communist, and decided to keep tabs on him. They eventually penetrated Oswald’s ‘cell’ and tape recorded his talks, including his bragging that he could shoot anyone, even the Secretary of the Navy."

Fernandez told Luce that Oswald came into some money, went to Mexico City and then Dallas. Fernandez said that he still had tape recordings of Oswald as well as photographs of Oswald and samples of the handbills he had distributed on the streets of New Orleans.

Luce later said that she advised Fernandez to contact the FBI immediately, and didn’t think about the incident again until the Garrison investigation in 1967. She then recontacted Fernandez, and he told her that one of the members of his group has since been suddenly deported and that another had been murdered. He himself, wanted nothing more to do with the Kennedy assassination.

When Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi tried to track down Fernandez, Luce said that "Julio Fernandez" may have been the Cuban’s "war name," like those used by Sylvia Odio’s visitors, "Angelo" and "Leopoldo," and the Congressional report concludes, "no such individual was every found."

But there is a Julio Fernandez, a suspicious suspect investigated by the Pennsylvania State Police and the FBI and whose records are published among the exhibits of the Warren Commission. This Julio Fernandez was a Cuban professional who may have known about an association between Jack Ruby and Lee Oswald before the assassination.

On November 27, 1963, Corporal Theodore Lezar was stationed at the Hollidaysburg, Pa. State Police barracks when Robert Steele, of Altoona, Pa., stopped in and advised that he had some information that might have a bearing on the assassination of President Kennedy.

Steele, the brother of Mrs. Margaret Hover, of Martinsburg, Pa., told Lezar that sometime in the third week of October, 1963, his sister found some items in the dry leaves immediately below her porch. The items included an envelope, a used train ticket and a throwaway trailer advertisement, which had hand, scrawled notes on the back that might have a relation to the assassination.

The envelope was from the Seaboard Airline Railroad Company of Miami, Florida. The used ticket indicated the holder had a coach reservation on the railroad for seat #48, Car #3E, on a train leaving Miami at 12:40 pm on September 29, 1963, arriving in Washington D.C. the following day.

The back of the trailer advertisement contained the names "Ruby" "Lee Oswald" and the "Silver Slipper," as well as some drawings of a window, some other names and a six-digit number.

When the State Police interviewed Mrs. Margaret Hover at her home she confirmed what her brother had told them, saying that at first she thought the items belonged to her estranged husband, who was in the trailer business and she showed them to her daughter, remarking that "Ruby" and "Lee" were probably women her recently divorced husband was seeing.

She then realized however, that the items came from her neighbor’s yard, where similar items were being burned in a trashcan.

The FBI then got involved and interviewed Mrs. Hover’s daughter, who also confirmed the fact that her mother found the items and showed them to her, and indeed the names "Ruby" and "Lee Oswald" were written on the back of the advertisement.

Of course, this is the FBI at work, so instead of going over to the neighbor’s house right away, they talk to the daughter’s husband, who told them his wife tends to exaggerate, was on tranquilizers and believed everything her mother told her, effectively discrediting her.

Mrs. Hover then produced the envelope and train ticket, but could not locate the trailer advertisement with the names on the back. Interviewed again, the daughter continued to maintain the names were there and wouldn’t back down under FBI pressure.

So, Special Agents of the FBI J. Edward Kern and Richard Randleman of the Pittsburgh, Pa. Field Office reluctantly went to the door of the neighbor who burned his trash in his backyard. Their report became Warren Commission Exhibit #3076.

Mrs. Hover’s neighbor, Dr. Julio Fernandez, explained to the FBI that he was a Cuban refugee and former editor and publisher of La Nacion newspaper in Cuba. As Minister of Information in the regime of Carlos Prio Soccaras, he at first welcomed the Castro revolution, but then turned against it when Castro became a communist.

Fernandez said that his brother-in-law, Antonio Larraz, had been a Captain of Police under Batista, but the Batista government was oppressive. Fernandez emphasized to the FBI that he was not a communist and was not on welfare, but working as a Spanish language teacher at the local high school and was trying to build a better life for himself in the United States.

In addition, Fernandez told the FBI that his sister-in-law, Aurora Fernandez was the mayor of a small rural town in Cuba and his wife, a Spanish attorney, worked for a Cuban refuge relief organization in Miami, and with the Catholic Welfare Society.

Although Fernandez didn’t know anything about the trailer advertisement with the names on the back, nor did he know Lee Oswald or Jack Ruby, he did acknowledge that his son Julio Fernandez, Jr., had used the train ticket to travel from Miami to Washington.

The official investigation ended there, but I called Mrs. Hover on the telephone in the early 1970s after reading the reports published in the Warren Commission, when she still lived at 105 South Walnut St., Martinsburg, Pa., and she reiterated the facts as they occurred and added some new information. Mrs. Hover said that Fernandez often worked late into the night typing a manuscript, and that his son Julio Fernandez, Jr. was an artist and often away at School, Penn State. She also noted that Fernandez had signed a three year teaching contract with the high school and recently purchased a home in Martinsburg which he began to renovate when suddenly he sold the home and left town, possibly relocating to Rye, New York.

In addition, Mrs. Hover said that years after the FBI interviewed here two men in suits came around asking more questions about the incident, indicating that there was still some investigation of Fernandez years after the FBI lost interest, yet before Fonzi began looking for him.

According to Royce Bierma, Dr. Julio Fernandez, who was born on January 3, 1909, died on August 2, 1992 in Miami, Florida. [Can someone provide an obituary on Fernandez?]

JULIO FERNANDEZ AT POINT MARY

Bradley E. Ayres, in his Zenith Secret, identifies Julio Fernandez as a team leader from the Point Mary safe-house and Karl, a CIA case officer, as being director of the Elliot Key Project. Shortly after the assassination, Clare Booth Luce said she received a phone call from Julio Fernandez.

Also shortly after the assassination a Julio Fernandez, Sr. was investigated by Pennsylvania State Police and the FBI after a Martinsburgh, Pa. neighbor considered his burning of papers and typing late into the night suspicious. She retrieved some of the burnt papers which included the names Lee and Ruby and a train ticket to Florida, showed them to her daughter and told her brother, who notified the State Police of a possible connection to the assassination.

Fernandez told the police that he was a Cuban exile, former Cuban newspaper publisher, who was teaching Spanish at the local high school. His son, Julio, Jr., an art student at nearby Penn State University, used the train ticket that summer to attend a conference of Cuban exile journalists at the University of Miami, a conference that lasted five weeks.

Shortly thereafter Fernandez packed up and left town, later pursued fruitlessly by HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi.

Fernandez, Jr. however, was enrolled at Penn State when the relatively small art school there received as a guest lecturer, Sir Athony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, and former MI5 counter-intelligence agent who was later revealed to be the fifth man in on the Cambridge Spy ring.

If in fact, the anti-Castro Cuban commando operations run by the CIA were indeed infiltrated thoroughly by pro-Castro Cuban G2 intelligence, and shared such information with their Soviet allies at the KGB, does Blunt’s sudden and surprising visit to the obscure Pennsylvania art school have a connection with at least one particular student there – Julio Fernandez, Jr.?

And is this Julio Fernandez or his father of the same name, identical with the Julio Fernandez of the Point Mary safe-house and lived near who worked with Bradley Ayers at JMWAVE?

And is this the same Julio Fernandez supported by Clare Booth Luce, who called her on the night of the assassination?

Cuban Aid Relief

CUBAN AID RELIEF

Of all the activities financially supported by the CIA conduit Catherwood Foundation, the Cuban Aid Relief (CAR) is one of the most interesting.

In the waning days of the Batista administration in Cuba, American diplomatic support shifted away from Batista to Fidel Castro. Once in power however, some of those who fought with Castro were disenchanted with his regime and left Cuba. Some of the Cuban refugees were professional businessmen whose holdings were nationalized, others were gangsters and prostitutes. Some had fought with Castro or supported him in various ways.

They created refugee problems in some cities, particularly Miami, Florida, but they also settled in Tampa, New Orleans, Dallas, Chicago, New York, North Jersey and Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia the Cathewood Foundation established the CAR "to provide assistance to Cuban exiles with no connection with the deposed Batista regime, …and to make as wide use as possible for the professional men, artists and businessmen who fled the Castro forces."

In 1961 the directors of the CAR were Cummins Catherwood, former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Arthur Gardner, E. Wharton Shober of ATEC corporation, Harrison Wood and Enrique Menocal, the only Cuban national among the directors.

With a sense of history, they officially named the organization "The General Leonard Wood Fund for Cuban Aid Relief," in honor of the U.S. Army surgeon who was the first American governor of Cuba.

Lt. Leonard Wood had organized the 1^{st Volunteer Cavalry with Teddy Roosevelt. After the battleship Maine mysteriously blew up in Havana harbor – The Tonkin Gulf of the Spanish-American war, the 1st Volunteers saw action. Wood received a promotion after the first engagement and Roosevelt succeeded him as the leader of the regiment. Under Roosevelt’s command the 1st Volunteers achieved notoriety for its famous charge up San Juan Hill, which was led by both Roosevelt and Wood, effectively destroying the moral of the Spanish and making Roosevelt and Wood American heroes.}

After spending two years as Governor of New York, Roosevelt’s political opponents had his name placed in nomination for Vice President under William McKinley, a ploy to get Roosevelt out of the limelight of power. The plan worked when McKinley won the election, but then backfired when he was shot and killed by a "glassy-eyed" anarchist while attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Although anarchist publications printed a warning about the assassin, Leon F. Czolgosz five days before he shot McKinley, Czolgosz claimed he acted alone. He was convicted and executed in the electric chair within a month of the murder.

One of the first things Roosevelt did as President was to name General Leonard Wood the first American Governor of Cuba. Besides Wood’s grandson, Harrison Wood, the Cuban Aid Relief also enjoyed the support of Theodore Roosevelt III and Samuel P. Wise, who was writing a book on the career of General Wood.

Other members of the CAR included Roland Taylor Ely of Princeton, N.J., Reeves Wetherall, an executive of Wanamakers Department store, Richard P. Sellder, Ivan Oblinsky and CAR co-directors E. Wharton Shober and Enrique Menocal.

A boyhood friend of Fidel Castro, Menocal had a unique position in the Cuban revolution. Menocal’s family, like Castro’s, was well off. They owned huge sugar plantations in the Cuban countryside. As successful businessmen, their parents were wealthy aristocrats and part of Cuba’s elite society. Fidel and Enrique attended the best schools, and were trained with refine tastes, but came to despise the Batista regime and became revolutionaries.

Both Castro and Menocal attended the University of Havana, where Castro studied law and Menocal economics. Menocal eventually became a professor of economics at the University, which became a center of anti-Batista activity in Havana. When Batista left Cuba on January 1, 1959, Castro was still eight days away, so the leaders of the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE), including Dr. Rolando Cubella, took over Batista’s offices and smoked his cigars until Castro arrived.

One of the first things Castro did when he assumed power was to name Enrique Menocal the director of the Cuban Sugar Institute. On October 17, 1960 however, Menocal, his wife and four children sought refuge at the Brazilian embassy in Havana. Once safe in the United States, in January, 1961, Menocal held a press conference in Philadelphia where he said, "…the bearded dictator will be ousted within three or four months." Exactly four months later, the exiled Cuban brigade stormed ashore at the Bay of Pigs.

Menocal said the last time he saw Castro at a dinner party in Havana, "The man looked strong and healthy, but was neurotic, schizophrenic and had the glassy-eyed stair of a madman."

Newspaper articles indicate that the CAR also ran outreach programs in Florida, providing medical care to exiled Cubans at a Miami field office staffed by five doctors, which worked closely with the Catholic Welfare Services charity.

Also in Florida, the CAR worked with the Pan-Am Society of America, which also received money from the Catherwood Foundation. Before the Guatemalan Coup of 1954, the director of the Pan-Am Society, Curtis Wilgus, organized a conference at the University of Florida’s School for Latin American Studies that was funded by the United Fruit Company.

The Pan Am Society’s liaison with the CAR, Miss Carmelita Manning, met often with CAR other co-director E. Wharton Shober, and the two organizations co-sponsored a seminar for exiled Cuban journalists at the University of Miami (See: JMWAVE) in July, 1963.

At the time E. Wharton Shober was director of the ATEK corporation, which sold printing machinery and provided financial services to anti-communist publishers in Latin and Central America. For his work with ATEK in 1963 Shober received the President’s "E" Award from Asst. Sec. of Commerce Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., for excellence in Export, though it more likely was for Espionage.

Shober, a nephew of former Pennsylvania Governor George H. Earl, attended Princeton before service in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II.

Before Shober, the director of ATEK was Dr. Ralph Deshan, who left Philadelphia and ATEK with his wife to raise beef cattle in Nicaragua with Manuel Artime.

When Shober left ATEK he became president of Hahneman Hospital in Philadelphia, replacing Dr. Charles Cameron, a cancer specialists, who had received a $400,000 research grant from U.S. Army Intelligence.

At Hahneman Shober worked with New York psychiatrist Dr. Albert A. Laverne, establishing a controversial drug treatment program that experimented with giving pure carbon dioxide to junkies, which led to the death of Robert Brown, a black man married to a Main Line heiress.

Philadelphia Magazine described Shober as, "…the polo playing, perennially controversial president of Hahneman Hospital, another fixture at the Main Line balls and debuts, and good friends with Nicaraguan dictator Gen. Anastasio Somoza, one of the godfathers of the Bay of Pigs invasion." In June 1972 Shober arranged for Somoza to receive an honorary degree from Hahneman medical college, over the objections of faculty and students. Shober left Philadelphia in 1978 to work in Saudi Arabia in the hospital administration field.

Besides Enrique Menocal, another Cuban exile who was assisted by the Cuban Aid Relief was Dr. Julio Fernandez, who was relocated to rural Martinsburg, Pa., where he taught Spanish at the local high school until he was implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy and became the subject of the subsequent investigation.

Xxxxyyyzz

Catherwood Fund

Catherwood, Cummins. 1910-. Financier, philanthropist. Formerly co-owner, Evening Public Ledger; director, Bryn Mawr Trust Co. President, Mineral Production Corp. President, Catherwood Foundation. Trustee, Academy of Music; Board of Governors, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Board of Directors, Philadelphia Orchestra Association. Residence: Gladwyne.

CATHERWOOD FOUNDATION

From the clipping files of the now defunct Philadelphia Evening Bulletin [now located at the Urban Archives, Paley Library, Temple University in Philadelphia], it was reported on November 28, 1947 edition that, "A petition for a non-profit corporation to be known as the Catherwood Foundation was filed in common pleas court today…to establish a fund, or funds, the income from which will be used exclusively for religious, scientific, literary and educational purposes."

With an address in Bryn Marr, Pennsylvania, [14 Elliott Ave., Suite 10, Bryn Marr, 19010 / (215) 525-3720] on the Philadelphia Main Line suburban train route, the Catherwood Foundation was originally directed by Cummins Catherwood, his wife Mrs. Ellen Cowen Catherwood, his sister, Mrs. Charles G. Chaplin, Othelia Aarnolt, William Hamilton and I.F. Dixon-Wainright.

Independently wealthy from a family inheritance that was accumulated in the munitions industry during the industrial revolution, Cummins Catherwood married the former Ellen Cowen Coats and lived in an estate they called "Baja Sumantaga," an East Indian word that means, "welcome weary traveler." Along with his family, Catherwood was quoted as saying that golf, sailing, bridge, skiing and travel were his unchanging interests."

During World War II Catherwood went on a special air mission to Germany, about which he later said, "I had a feeling that much could be done by individuals towards international understanding that couldn’t be done by governments."

The main feature of the Catherwood Foundation is the Catherwood Fund, ostensibly a philanthropic fund; it also served as a conduit for the funding of covert CIA operations during the Cold War.

Catherwood’s sister, Mrs. Charles G. Chaplin, one of the Fund’s directors, knew Peter Fleming, the British MI6 agent and brother of Ian Fleming, author of the 007 James Bond novels. Peter was an amateur ornithologist and is said to have been one of the models for Fleming’s fictional hero, whose name was appropriated from James Bond, the renowned Philadelphia ornithologist and author of the classic ornithological work, "Birds of the West Indies."

Ian Fleming must have also known or knew about Catherwood, as he based one of his villains – Milton Krest of the "Hildebrand Rarity" [From: "For Your Eyes Only"] on Catherwood’s unique profile. Fleming quotes "Krest" explaining the Foundation system to James Bond while they are aboard Krest’s yacht fishing for rare species. "Ya see, fellers, it’s like this. In the states we have this foundation system for lucky guys that got plenty of dough and don’t happen to want to pay it into Uncle Sam’s Treasury. You make a Foundation – like this one, the Krest Foundation – for charitable purposes – charitable to anyone, to kids, sick folk, the cause of science – you just give the money away to anyone or anything except yourself and your dependents and you escape tax on it."

"So I put a matter of ten million dollars into the Krest Foundation, and since I happened to like yachting and seeing the world, I built this yacht with two million of the money and told the Smithsonian that I would go to any part of the world and collect specimens for them. So that makes me a scientific expedition, see?"

In 1948 Catherwood had a yacht built in New England to his personal specifications, "The Vigilant," and sailed frequently to the Caribbean with friends, associates and on occasion, with some scientists who collected specimens for the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and the Smithsonian. On one particular Vigilant expedition in 1948, Catherwood was accompanied by ornithologist James Bond, who collected rare bird species on the various out islands they visited.

But Catherwood’s fund was not just a tax loophole, as Fleming implied, but rather, it also served as a secret conduit for funding covert CIA operations. David Wise and Thomas Ross, in their groundbreaking book "The Invisible Government," (Vintage, 1977, p. 247n), exposed the CIA’s network of Blue Blood benefactors when they reported that, "…conduits for the CIA money included the Cathewood Foundation."

Since then, other writers, such as Joseph B. Smith ("Portrait of a Cold Warrior"), have mentioned the CIA use of the Catherwood Foundation as a front for CIA activities as well. The activities of the Catherwood Foundation created a web of intrigue that extended behind the Iron Curtain into Russia, as well as Cuba, the Philippines and Vietnam. Although the full extent of these activities have yet to be publicly explored, and much of it is still classified and kept from the public record, the Soviets knew about the secret relationship between the CIA and the philanthropic foundations from the very beginning.

Created by the National Security Act of 1947, an outline of the charter of the CIA was written by Ian Fleming when he visited Washington with his boss, Admiral Godfey, the Chief of British Naval Intelligence.

The British MI6 liaison with the CIA and FBI in Washington after the war was Harold Adrian "Kim" Philby, the notorious KGB double-agent who wrote his memoirs from Russia, "My Silent War" (Grove Press), in which he describes the meetings he attended with Frank Wisner, the head of the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, responsible for Covert Operations and Dirty Tricks.

According to Philby, "Wisner expiated on one of his favorite themes – the need to camouflage the source of secret funds supplied to apparently respectable bodies in which we were interested…"

Philby quoted Wisner as saying, "…It is essential to secure the overt cooperation of people with conspicuous access to wealth in their own right."

Cummins Catherwood was one of those people, and his Catherwood Foundation was one of those respectable bodies.

In July, 1956 Catherwood, like the fictional Milton Krest, went "looking for new fish" off the Bahamian reefs. In May 1958 Catherwood announced that he had given financial aid to projects in the mental health field at the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital. He also gave money to the Granary Fund of Boston, which was directed by George H. Kidder, who is listed in "Who’s Who" as "with General Counsel, CIA, 1952-1954," as well as being on the board of directors of Collins Radio, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

In his book, "Portrait of a Cold Warrior," Joe Smith wrote: "…former ambassador to the Philippines Myron Cowen joined Cummins Catherwood in persuading a few staunch friends of the Philippines, such as Gen. Leland S. Hobes, ex-Joint Military Advisory Group chief; Charles V. Griffiths, the publishers, and Gen. Hugh Casey of the board of Schenley Distillers, to set up the Committee for Philippine Action in Development, Reconstruction and Education. Somehow, this just happened to form the acronym COMPADRE – the one word that held more meaning than any other for a Filipino. Gabe Kaplin was resident director of COMPADRE, on the spot to carry out all sorts of good works, backed by a bankroll the size of which Filipinos could only guess."

The Catherwoods enjoyed traveling as well. In March 1957, Mrs. Catherwood toured North Africa with the former first lady, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt as guests of the Sultan of Morocco. In June 1960, Catherwood and his wife traveled to Helsini, Finland, taking the Oswald Route on the first leg of their journey to the USSR and behind the Iron Curtain. On their return, Mrs. Catherwood was quoted as saying, "Moscow is as drab as Akron, Ohio, but Leningrad is glorious."

As Main Line Blue Blood personages, the Catherwoods frequently made the society pages. On March 27, 1970 the Catherwoods attended the wedding of the season, between Princess Jane Obolensky of Grosse Point, Michigan and Dean Rucker, with the reception being held at Great Harbor Cay, owned by Canadian Midas Lou Chesler.

One of Catherwood’s corporations, Visions, had offices in New York, England and Central America, providing Latin American publishers with a Spanish language news and feature wire service. On December 26, 1977 the New York Times reported that, "Another major foreign news organization that CIA officials said they once subsidized was Vision, the weekly news magazine that is distributed throughout Europe and Latin America. However, none of those associated with the founding of Vision or its management over the years said they ever had any indications that the CIA had put money into the magazine." Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza bought into Visions after the CIA connections became known.

Catherwood also sponsored the International Division of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In December 1960, Nicolas Chatelain, the U.S. correspondent for the Paris daily Fiagaro, became the first recipient of the Columbia/Catherwood Award for journalists. The second recipient, John Bertram Oaks of the New York Times, used the occasion to urge support for French President Charles deGaul against the revolt of the French generals in Algeria.

Among those aspiring foreign student journalists to receive grants from the Catherwood Foundation was Leona Shluder, then 23 years old, of Rio de Janerro, Brazil, who was quoted as saying she, "was impressed especially with the news coverage given President Kennedy’s assassination." Indeed.

The Catherwood Foundation also financially supported the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, including the Dallas parish to which Marina Oswald had her children baptized, possibly without the knowledge of her husband, Lee Harvey, the accused assassin of President Kennedy.

Another organization of interest that was funded in its entity by the Catherwood Fund is the Cuban Aid Relif, established to assist Cuban refugees, specifically professionals who had previously supported the Castro revolution against Batista.

xxxyyyzzz

False Mystery & the Transparent Consiracy

"False Mystery" and the Transparent Conspiracy – William E. Kelly, Jr.

Yet to be fully realized is the significance of the essays on the assassination of President Kennedy by Vincent J. Salandria, now compiled and available in "False Mystery – An Anthology of Essays on the Assassination of JFK," (1999, Edited by John Kelin, with an Introduction by Christopher Sharrett and an Essay by E. Martin Schotz. Spiral bound, 152 pages, w/index. $20).

The first printing of this edition is currently available exclusively from Andy Last Hurrah Books [849 W. Third St. #1, Williamsport, PA., 17701/ (570) 321-1150], but eventually other editions should be more widely available.

Salandria’s contributions to the case will be more widely recognized when the Kennedy assassination is studied as an historic, rather than as a contemporary event, but Salandria has had an affect on the thinking and approach of many independent researchers and investigators. When the total truth is eventually brought out and some semblance of justice is achieved, these essays will be recognized for contributing to not only what has already been chronicled about the assassination, but for shaping the philosophical, moral and legal bullets that have yet to be fired.

Well known among the researchers who have grown up studying the case, Salandria is another Philadelphia attorney who play important roles in this drama - along with Warren Commissioner John J. McCloy, assistant counsels William Coleman, Sam Stern and Arlen Specter and the first chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations Rirchard Sprague.

As Seton Hall professor Christopher Sharrett notes in his Introduction to "False Mystery," Salandria wrote one of the earliest criticisms of the Warren Commission’s conclusion regarding the forensic evidence (in the Legal Intelligencer on Nov. 2, 1964), in which he personally challenges Sen. Arlen Specter (R. Pa.) with pertinent questions, a challenge that has thus far gone unanswered.

For those interested in a minute analysis of the forensic details, the first six chapters should suffice, including "Shots, Trajectories, and Wounds," "The President’s Back and Neck Wounds," "The Impossible Tasks of One Assassination Bullet," "The Separate Connally Shot" and "Life Magazine and the Warren Commission," which were previously published in "Liberation Magazine" or "A Minority of One." For me things get interesting when you get to "The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy – A Model of Explanation," which is where I first read Salandria in 1971 in the small, unique and then influential journal "Computers and Automation."

Salandria explains that, "While the researchers have preoccupied themselves with HOW the assassination was accomplished, there has been almost no systematic thinking of WHY President Kennedy was killed.…Much valuable time has been lost; it is becoming increasingly clear that our delay has cost mankind dearly. I urge that no one drop this question, for to do so is to abandon the serious search for peace internationally and for domestic tranquility….Since November 22, 1963…there has been a great deal of research into the micro-analytic aspects of the assassination. I have been among the earliest and guiltiest of the researchers in my protracted analyses of the shots, trajectories and wounds of the assassination. The ransaking of the facts of the assassination is not a source of pride for me but rather of guilt…We have neglected this essential work of constructing a model of explanation which fits the data of the assassination and explains the why of it."

"One who takes the trouble to study the micro-analytic material provided by the federal government must immediately conclude that there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. How foolish it was of us to dwell so long on these governmentally supplied pacifiers, rather than to put them aside and undertake the serious work of constructing a model of explanation. In this connection, it is important to take note that the very organization which made that mass of detailed micro analytic evidence available to us – the federal government – contended from the first that there was no conspiracy. But, the federal government’s intelligence agencies must have known that the material which the government issued would indicate a conspiracy existed. Then why did we get the evidence?"

"This question presents a serious theoretical problem. Why would the federal government on the one hand wish to provide us with data which prove a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy and simultaneously contend on the other hand that there was no conspiracy? So overwhelming and voluminous is the evidence of conspiracy provided for us by the government that we are compelled to conclude that if not THE, at least A NUMBER OF POSSIBLE plots, were meant by the conspirators to be quasi-visible. The federal government has deluged us with evidence that cries out conspiracy."

"Because of the covertness of the coup, I propose the explanatory thesis that the new government rulers were eager to reveal their work at differing levels of certainty to diverse people and at different times. In this way, they could avert a concerted counter thrust to their illegitimate seizure of power. Democratic forces could not unite against the new illegitimate government apparatus because of timing. The insights of what had occurred dawned in the minds of decent citizens at different times and with different degrees of clarity. The transparent aspects of the conspiracy were permitted to flash signals to various elements of our population, much in the fashion of spot ads slanted at different times for selected audiences. The new rulers carefully and selectively orchestrated revelations of their bloody work, so as to gain there from the deference to which they felt they were entitled by their ascendancy to absolute power. I have long believed that the killers actually preempted the assassination criticism by supplying the information they wanted revealed and also by supplying the critics whom they wanted to disclose the data…Where evidence of a conspiracy….surfaced – and much did – thanks in the main to the government’s disclosures, that same government from the very first and continuously to date has publicly refused to act on the evidence."

"So the transparent nature of the assassination in a very real sense framed us all; made us feel guilty, and served to paralyze us in a gripping sense of inadequacy. The transparent conspiracy paves the way for our despair and demoralization of the people. It eroded our trust in the nation states. But he alienation was deeper and more personal than the separation of people from confidence in their governments. The transparency of the assassination effectively destroyed politics…And thus a post-Orwellian, Huxlyian world was assured in by the new rulers…We should have broken early and cleanly from the micro analytic – or nitpicking – approach in the assassination inquiry. We should have immediately undertaken the vital work of developing an adequate model of explanation, an adequate hypothesis, in order to pursue the reasons for the assassination. We here and now belatedly begin this vital work."

Like most conspiracy theorists, Salandria then asks the hypothetical question, "Which Group Was Responsible?" He lists a number of the usual suspects, J.E. Hover and the FBI, the Left, the Right, the Pentagon, CIA, Russians, Cubans and LBJ.

Under "The Russian or Cuban Model," he dismisses them with, "Would Castro have selected Oswald,…as the killer? Would the Russians have chosen Oswald who had been ostensibly a defector to the Soviet Union? Would Castro or the Soviet Union have risked the transparent nature of the assassination in killing Kennedy so as to invite hydrogen war? Was it worth killing liberal John F. Kennedy for Cuba and Russia to get very conservative L.B.J. as the head of the United States government? Would the FBI or the CIA have covered for the Cuba or Russian governments? Would Warren have lent his liberal name, long attached to human rights, to a Warren Report which had as its purpose to protect collectivist totalitarian governments? Would our military remained silent, especially when so much of the blame for the cover-up was heaped on the military, if the Cuban and Russian governments were behind the killing? No, Cuba and Russia did not kill Kennedy."

As with the Ruskies and Cubans, Salandria dismisses most conspiracy theories as illogical – though acknowledging, "There is much evidence to indicate military involvement in the assassination." But he rejects LBJ as the primary sponsor because, "…it would be impossible to conceive of President Johnson and his Texas cronies arranging to have the President killed in their own bailiwick where the world’s suspicions would at once be directed against them. No, many careful studies show absolutely no evidence that President Johnson was involved in producing the assassination."

Well, someone will just have to show Mr. Salandria the evidence linking LBJ directly to Billie Sol Estes, Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace in the murder of federal agent Henry Marshall, and the fingerprint from the assassin’s lair that some forensic specialists have matched to Wallace, together the fact that Carter and Fred Korth were in on the earliest planning of the Texas trip at the Cortez Hotel meeting with LBJ and JFK. The ascension of LBJ to the Presidency WAS the Coup d’etat, so LBJ had to be a party to the taking over of the government if he was the new head of the state.

In a Coup d’etat, ALL of the state security agencies as well as the military must either be part of the operation, compromised or neutralized. Instead of following all of the evidence to the guilty parties, Salandria focuses in on the CIA as the chief culprit, not only for the killing, but for the coverup, "…in order to insure that the nation would be so divided ideologically there could be no coalescence of forces which would seek retribution for the killing,"

Those interested in maintaining a divided ideology have supported both sides of the debate, and have tried to keep it a simple matter of branding everyone either a Lone-Nuter who believes Oswald did it alone psycho reasons, or a Conspiracy Theorists, those who know there was a conspiracy and marshal all of the evidence that supports their pet theory, with the chief suspects usually being an acronym organization – KGB, CIA, DIA, MAFIA, G2, ONI….or whatever.

There is however, a small, but growing and clearly distinguished Third Force – of Independent Researchers who are neither Lone-Nuters nor Conspiracy Theorists, who keep an open mind, read all of the books and documents, aren’t paid to do it, don’t have an axe to grind and don’t target suspects, but rather, follow the evidence where-ever it leads, and they realize that JFK was not killed by an agency or organization but by Real People, individuals with names, jobs, addresses, phone numbers and bank accounts.

Salandria is one of those Conspiracy Theorists who blame the Ancronym Agencies in general, sometimes calling them "the National Security State," but he does get specific and names names, and when he does, his suspects are also mine. Specifically focusing in on former CIA director and Warren Commissioner Allen Dulles and the suspicious and pivotal activities of JFK’s national security advisor McGeorge Bundy, Salandria takes us into the bowels of the conspiracy and puts his finger on the main artery from which the cracks in the case allow us to peek into mechanics of the crime.

Under "Dulles Suppressed Evidence of Oswald’s Soviet Intelligence Connections," Salandria writes, "On January 21, 1964, in a secret executive session, the Warren Commission had to deal with the problem of Marina Oswald giving evidence that Oswald was a Soviet agent…we learn from the transcript of the secret executive session that Isaac Don Levine was helping Marina Oswald write a story for Life Magazine, which never got published. Allen Dulles….said simply: ‘I can get him in and have a friendly talk. I have known him.’ Does that sound as if Allen Dulles was contemplating suppression of information?"

Salandria is one of the first to point to the work of the ‘guerrilla journalism’ of Life Mag, and he acknowledges the past work of Life Mag’s Isaac Don Levine, who played a central role in the Alger Hiss case, exposed Trotsky’s assassin as a Soviet agent, bought and suppressed the Zapruder film for Life Mag and wrapped up the publishing rights to Marina’s story from the gitgo.

Since Dulles was retired from the CIA in November, 1963, and thus out of the official loop, Salandria looks to JFK’s national security advisor McGeorge Bundy, and his "Ties to the CIA." Salandria on Bundy: "With the Kennedy Administration, McGeorge Bundy was a foreign policy hardliner who had little use for Adlai Stevenson’s idealistic approach to foreign relations. McGeorge Bundy was one of the planners of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Allen Dulles was in Puerto Rico, so Richard Mervin Bissill, Jr. was the CIA’s man in charge of the planning. As happenstance would have it, McGeorge Bundy, the President’ Assistant for National Security Affairs, had been a student of Bissell’s at Yale. He also had worked for Bissill on the Marshall Plan in 1948. Also in on that planning, as coincidence would have it, was General Charles P. Cabell, the CIA’s deputy director, who is brother of Mayor Earle Cabell, the Mayor of Dallas at the time of the assassination. McGeorge Bundy was – in the Kennedy and early Johnson Administration – the presidential representative and key man on the Special Group which makes key intelligence decisions for the country. It has operated as the hidden power center of government."

The intertwining of CIA cover corporations in the assassination drama – the Catherwood Foundation, the San Jacinto Fund, etc., are important, and Salandria goes to great lengths to show that Bundy’s work as director of the Ford Foundation was merely an extension of his other work for the criminal bureaucrats at other agencies. McGeorge Bundy was also the senior White House official in the Situation Room at the time of the assassination, and Salandria thinks it is extremely significant, as I do, that the first official confirmation of the assassination being accomplished by a lone-nut and not a conspiracy came not from Dallas but from McBundy in the White House basement.[A topic that I will elaborate on in a separate article on "The Tale of the Tapes" – BK].

As for "The CIA’s Follow-up Tactics," Salandria writes, "If our model of explanation, our hypothesis of the assassination of John F. Kennedy accurately interprets the data of the assassination, then it should also be useful in ferreting out current operations in which the Central Intelligence Agency would have had to involve itself domestically as a natural and necessary follow up to the Dallas assassination." And there is evidence that establishes the fact that the intelligence network responsible for what happened at Dealey Plaza is still operational today. As Peter Dale Scott phrased it, the forces responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy are not "benign."

Salandria makes the observation, "Of course, secret elitist police organizations such as the CIA do not thrive on peace, democracy, and a contented and informed people. The power of the intelligence agencies increases in direct proportion to the degree of sickness of a nation…"

And in the end he blames the CIA: "This is the lesson to be learned from the killing of President Kennedy and the overthrow of the Republic of the United States by the CIA: …let us turn away from the horror of the killing of John F. Kennedy. Let us join together….to tell the truth about the killing of Kennedy. Through this refusal to live a great lie we will come together to understand and love ourselves and society better. Let us not delay in this union of truth. If we do not join together in the search for the truth, then guns back up cover-story lies will pick us off one by one and ultimately join us together – in death."

"What Are We to Do?" Salandria asks. "Each of us can draw strength from the past. From the past we must draw upon the traditions which offer mankind purpose identity and love of his fellow man. Each of us must draw strength from the present. From the present we must seek to understand power and the tools of mind control…In studying the present we must raise the threshold of fear so that we can face hard truth. Hard truth will tell us that everywhere power seeks to defeat man’s individuality, to program man to be alienated from all other men; to manipulate man to seek pleasure and not responsibility. The present task of those who love humanity is to get men and women to move, work and join together in common love of human freedom, knowledge and justice….As a first small effort towards these ends, let us engage now in a discussion wherein we will use the Kennedy assassination not as a mechanism for practicing a debilitating exercise in double-think, but rather let us use the assassination as a means of expanding our understanding of our times."

Salandria’s Anthology ends with the text of a speech Salandria gave to the National Conference of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA), on November 20, 1998.

On November 18, 1998, I was in the COPA Command Post in Washington D.C. helping to plan that conference, sending faxes to news organizations, when word came in that Salandria wanted two hours to speak, more than an hour longer than anyone else. After a number of cross continental phone calls, Salandria was accommodated, and as the primary speaker on the opening night of the Dallas conference, he gave the speech of his life.

As Sharrett described it in his introduction: "The essay entitled ‘A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes,’ is Salandria’s speech before COPA – at the Coalition On Political Assassination’s 1998 conference, and is a summary statement of his work. It exhorts the reader not to participate in the false, debilitating debate that refuses to say President Kennedy was the victim of a state-sanctioned coup. Salandria asks that we use this murder as an instruction for our times, a lesson concerning the bankruptcy of our way of life, as we engage in then difficult task of building a more just society. The speech, which took Salandria nearly two hours to deliver at COPA, received a prolonged standing ovation, heartening him greatly after a long period of believing assassination research had become an intellectual hobby horse and taken a disastrously pointless turn. The next evening, COPA gave Salandria a long-overdue lifetime achievement award."

It was an incredible speech, is an important essay, and should be read by everyone interested in the assassination of the 35^{th President. Now you can either read it, thanks to John Kelin in "False Mystery" or at his "Fair Play" web magazine, or watch the video for the dramatic presentation. I will only quote a few paragraphs from it:}

"No viable democratic government that was free of guilt and that was in control of civilian authorities would have permitted a sham autopsy of the President’s body. In accepting the orders of the generals and admirals not to probe the neck wound of the President the military doctors who were performing the autopsy effectively aborted it. Those doctors were guilty of malfeasance. The admirals and generals present in the autopsy room who were responsible for those orders were simply criminals, guilty of the crimes of conspiracy to obstruct and obstruction of justice. They were also criminal accessories after the fact to the murder of the President…."

"Ruth and Michael Paine could not have been Soviet, Castro or Mafia agents. They had to be agents of the killing force, our U.S. intelligence. If they had been Soviet or Castro agents, an innocent government would have swooped down on them and seen them as clear beacons leading to the killers. Our government did not cause them any trouble. The Paines are criminal co-conspirators in the killing of President Kennedy and would and should now be prosecuted by a guiltless government…."

In conclusion, Salandria said, "By coming to understand the true answer to the historical question of who killed President Kennedy and why, we will have developed a delicate and precisely accurate prism through which we can examine how power works in this militarized country. By understanding the nature of this monumental crime, we will become equipped to organize the struggle through which we can make this country a civilian republic in more than name only. Until we understand the nature of the Kennedy assassination, and until we express the truth openly on this vital aspect of our history, we will continue to be guilty participants in the vast amount of state criminality involved in the killing of President Kennedy and its coverup."

"We can no longer afford to shield ourselves by asserting that the murder of President Kennedy is a mystery. There is no mystery regarding how, by whom and why President Kennedy was killed. Only when we strip away our privileged cloak of denial about the truth of the killing will we be able to free ourselves for the hard global work of changing our unfair and brutal society to one that is more equitable and less violent."

After Salandria’s speech, I was talking to Fair Play editor John Kelin in the hall when Salandria walked passed. I thanked him, shook his hand and asked him for a copy of his speech, which he kindly provided to both me and John, who posted it on his web site, beginning the process that led to the publication of this fine Anthology.

It also led to a few rounds of exchanged emails and faxes between myself, Kelin, Salandria, Sharratt and E. Martin Schotz, a psychiatrist whose book, "History Will Not Absolve Us," is also an important contribution to the JFK assassination literature. Schotz gave a talk at the same COPA conference called "The Waters of Knowledge versus The Waters of Uncertainty – Mass Denial in the Assassination of President Kennedy," which is published as an Appendix in "False Mystery."

While I disagree with Schotz on the role of COPA and the Assassinations Records Review Board, I do agree with him when he says, "The Warren Report was an obvious act of criminal fraud" and that "Senator Arlen Specter should be indicted for criminal obstruction of justice…" I also want to thank E. Martin Schotz for calling attention to the April 25, 1998 assassination of Guatemalan Bishop Juan Jose Geradi Conedera, the day after he spoke these words:

"The root of humanity’s downfall and disgrace comes from the deliberate opposition to truth…To open ourselves to the truth and to bring ourselves face to face with our personal and collective reality is not an option that can be accepted or rejected. It is an undeniable requirement of all people and all societies that seek to humanize themselves and too be free….Truth is the primary word, the serious and mature action that makes it possible for us to break the cycle of death and violence and open ourselves to a future of hope and light for all….Discovering the truth is painful, but it is without a doubt a healthy and liberating action."

And something to die for.

That such assassinations still occur today is a crime we have allowed to continue to be committed because those responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy have gone unchallenged, thus far.

If Salandria’s hypothesis is correct - criminals within the government were responsible for the murder of the President, then I say they should still be held responsible and accountable for that crime. There is a moral responsibility on the shoulders of everyone who realizes this, not only to ask and try to answer the questions of How and Why the 35th President of the United States was killed, but an historical imperative to identify WHO IS responsible, present the evidence against them and not just request, but REQUIRE the laws of the land be enforced and upheld to the fullest extent possible.

Bill Kelly

THE DIVINE SKEIM

THE DIVINE SKEIM

The assassination of President Kennedy was a Watershed event in modern American history, the ramifications of which have yet to be fully realized.

The details of the crime, the ballistics, acoustics, autopsy and medical evidence are covered elsewhere. This report concerns the covert intelligence operations that resulted in the death of the President, and the black propaganda operations that continue to this day to manipulate the news and the judicial system to shield those responsible.

The time and the place – 12:30 pm, Houston and Elm streets, Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, Friday, November 22, 1963, are firmly etched in our national subconscious, and the picture of that square acre of time and place are constantly played back in the media and in our minds.

If Dealey Plaza were pictured as a giant mosaic wall mural, broken into pieces like a puzzle, we would have a pretty good idea of what occurred there. Only a few pieces are still missing – the faces in the shadows, the names of which are not even necessary to understand what happened there.

Although there are many theories as to what transpired at Dealey Plaza that day, the events, as they actually occurred, only happened one way, and it is the job of the social scientists, the independent researcher, journalists, teachers and historians to determine that truth as closely as possible.

Some people might consider this crime ancient history even though it is still such a current event that indictments can still be brought down by a grand jury for crimes related to the assassination - destruction of evidence, obstruction of justice, perjury, homicide and conspiracy, if not treason.

Besides the issues of justice and historical perspective, it is important to know for oneself as well as for our mutual national security, whether the murder of the president was an unplanned, spontaneous psychological act of a homicidal maniac or a very well planned and executed coup d’etat.

John F. Kennedy was either killed by a deranged lone-nut, as the Warren Report has concluded, or he was the victim of a conspiracy by a clandestine action team of covert agents, as much of the evidence suggests. The truth must either be one way or the other, and cannot be both.

If the assassination of JFK was the work of one deranged, lone-nut, the lessons to be learned from the tragedy are far less significant than what we can learn from it if Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. If the President was not killed by a lone-nut, the ramifications extend from our own curious need to know into the realms of justice and our national security today.

While the Secret Service and national security apparatus have taken the lone-nut contingency into protective consideration, the covert conspiracy must be unraveled and understood in order to prevent it from happening again.

Those who believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone on his own perverted psycho impulses can close the book on the case and go home, and let the psychologist take over, while those who want to pursue the truth behind the conspiracy that killed the president can continue. While the quest does seem like falling into a rabbit hole and bumping into the wilderness of mirrors, you can find the way with an understanding of the history and techniques of intelligence networks.

Not for the sake of argument, but for the sake of analysis, a competent homicide investigator would proceed first by assuming that JFK was killed as an act of elimination, and it was not only a conspiracy, but a more distinctly defined covert intelligence operation.

Although anyone with the training and knowledge can conduct such clandestine operations, because of the extensive cover-up that occurred after the fact, the plot to murder the President must have had its origin in the very heart of the United States government.

But because a covert operation, by its very name and nature is meant to be concealed, you must look through a special spectrum to see it. This crystal ball, as my associate John Judge describes it, is similar to an onion, with layers of meaning that can be peeled off, and only understood if you are trained and educated in the crafts, techniques, means, methods and history of such special covert intelligence operations.

Allen Dulles, author of "The Craft of Intelligence," once said that the biographical method of study is a good way to approach any subject, and Lee Harvey Oswald is one of the first individuals you have to come to know to understand the assassination of JFK.

While a homicide investigator on the street may not have the historical background or training, let alone the resources to identify and investigate state supported intelligence operations, basic instincts will tell you something and give you a clue. Every homicide investigation begins with a body, and leads to a suspect, who can usually be identified as one who had the means, motive and opportunity to commit the crime.

Oswald had the means, the U.S. Marine Corps training, experience and the tools to kill. Having worked in a building at the scene of the crime must make JFK the first assassination victim to ever go to the scene of his murder, rather than be stalked by assassins. [This has become known as "The Chris Matthews" MSNBC Hardball question issued with guests Vincent Bugliosi and David Talbot.] And indeed, the idea the assassin actually worked at the scene of the crime, and the motorcade route was designed to pass his window is certainly suspicious, if not evidence of high-level conspiracy itself.

The problem with Oswald as the assassin is that he had no motive. He actually liked JFK. Not even the Warren Commission would try to apply a motive to Oswald, who they concluded killed JFK alone.

The more you learn about Oswald the more you realize he is not the most important character in the assassination drama, but a pawn in the game of bloodthirsty power politics.

Although Oswald may have been a loner, he was seldom alone and not deranged. He was definitely an agent, but for whom has yet to be determined.

SUN TZU – THE ART OF WAR – THE DEVINE SKEIN

Allen Dulles took a book with him to the first meeting of the Warren Commission, a book about American assassins and how they, historically, all appear to be psychologically deranged lone-nuts, which he recommended the other commissioners read. If he was more interested in determining the truth about the assassination he would have them read his own book, "The Craft of Intelligence," in which he promotes Sun Tzu’s ancient manual "The Art of War."

In the chapter "The Employment of Secret Agents," Sun Tzu says, "Now the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy wherever they move, and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men, is foreknowledge."

"What is called foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from the gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor from calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the situation."

"Now there are five sorts of agents to be employed. These are: native, inside, double, expendable and living." A native agent is one of the nationality of the enemy. An inside agent is one who lives and works in the enemy’s camp. A double agent is an enemy agent who works for both sides. An expendable agent is one that can be cut loose after achieving his goal, while a living agent is one that can get into the enemy camp and return with information."

Sun Tzu writes: "When these five types of agents are all working simultaneously and none knows their message of operation, they are called ‘The Devine Skeim," and are the treasure of the sovereign."

And even today in the world of satellite and communication intelligence, human intelligence is still an indispensable method of determining motives and anticipated action, and the nature of the clandestine network in action is still the most reliable means of learning the intentions of other people and governments.

In the case of the assassination of President Kennedy, individuals had foreknowledge of the event because of their affiliation with such a network, and such foreknowledge itself is evidence that there was a conspiracy behind the assassination.

In this regard, little has changed. The same type of agents are classified and utilized today as they were in Sun Tsu’s day, as well as at Dealey Plaza. Their method of operation is known as compartmentalization, where each man knows only his job, and may not even know who is paying him to do it.

Thus, if the assassination of JFK was the work of a covert action team, the men who pulled the triggers probably didn’t know who they were working for, and did it because they were well trained, paid professional marksmen and killers.

Those who maintain Oswald was the lone-assassin also portray him as a low life loser, who couldn’t hold a job, beat his wife and hated authority and society, while actually, if he was the lone-gunman, was, if nothing else, and as Sam Giancana more correctly described him, a great marksman and assassin.

Born in New Orleans and raised there in his formative years, Lee Harvey Oswald worked as a messenger on the docks for Leon Trugaque, served in the Civil Air Patrol, enlisted in the US Marine Corps, like his older brother. Oswald served as a radar operator at a U2 base in Japan and at San Diego before being discharged and defecting to the Soviet Union. Returning a few years later with a Russian wife and daughter, Oswald lived in Texas, supported by a group of White Russians who worked for oil companies and defense contractors. After working at Jaggers-Chiles-Stoval graphics firm, Oswald was implicated in the shooting of Gen. Ed Walker, and relocated back to New Orleans. There he worked for Reilly Coffee and instigated Fair Play for Cuba Committee activities before going to Mexico City in a failed attempt to get a visa to Cuba. Returning to Dallas, Oswald worked at the Texas School Book Depository, and owned the rifle found at the scene of the assassination.

Without knowing anything else about Oswald, every intelligence analyst worth their salt would proceed by assuming that Oswald, the alleged assassin of the President, was a covert operative and part of a foreign or domestic state-supported intelligence network.

Oswald was a covert operative and clandestine agent, trained in what Allen Dulles calls "the crafts of intelligence" – foreign language, electronics, communications, codes, ciphers and tradecraft – avoiding surveillance, microdot photography and the writing of clear, concise reports.

In Sun Tzu’s terms, Oswald served as both an inside and double agent, in Russia and against the Cubans.

But Oswald was not a very good gunman. Rather, as the evidence indicates, Oswald was just what he claimed to be, a patsy, and fall guy – framed for a crime he didn’t commit, and killed as the expendable agent.

It is not the technicians, the gunman or hit men who killed JFK, rather it was the covert operators at the top of the clandestine pyramid who arranged for the assassination of the President. The intelligence officers, the knights, bishops and rooks, to use their own analogy, were the kingpins who pulled the chains of puppets and pawns like Oswald.

Sun Tzu calls the men at the top "the wise general and the sovereign," and the network of agents "the Devine Skein," giving it a sort of deity, or god-like connotation, since only the patriarch at the top knows all that is going on during the game. He is like a God, looking down on the mortals below and controlling their destiny at his whim.

But actually, crimes committed by men can be solved by men, and now over 40 years after the fact, ordinary people can look down, peak through the glass onion, and see The Big Picture. It’s a moving picture that leaves Dealey Plaza on the trail of the assassins, and leads to the individuals who changed history by getting away with murder.

The names of the real assassins will never become as famous as Lee Harvey Oswald, but I am convinced that we will come to know them. Will it even matter, especially if they are all dead? Probably not. We look through the glass onion not to name the guilty, but to see today’s circumstances in the proper perspective. If Oswald was just crazy, nothing else would make sense. But when you see the Devine Skein through the glass onion, what happened at Dealey Plaza comes into focus and more clearly seen.

William Manchester, who failed to find a conspiracy in writing "The Death of the President," wrote, "…if you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of the scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something. A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever that there was one."

But the evidence is there if you know what to look for. It isn’t a conspiracy theory, but rather a covert understanding of events.

We might not have the piece of the puzzle with a "smoking gun," (though there are many "smoking documents" found at the National Archives), but the overwhelming circumstantial evidence fits very nicely with the covert history of current events.

When Oswald’s criminal personality profile is seen as a covert intelligence operative, part of a network and a player in the Great Game, the psychological makeup of that "wretched waif" is of little consequence, while the Devine Skein quite nicely balances out the scales of history and understanding, if not justice.

And because they set it up so they remain anonymous no-name figures in the shadows doesn’t mean we can’t figure out who put together what happened at Dealey Plaza.

The tools of the social scientist are limited. We can read and interview. In the end we must judge for ourselves what is real and what is not. A homicide detective once emphasized that even if you know who the murder is, you still need to acquire the evidence necessary to convict him in a court of law.

But the journalist, historian and intelligence analysis do not have to meet those same standards to know the truth. The majority of the American people have always known, almost assumed there was a conspiracy, even if they couldn’t see through the glass onion clearly. They know in their hearts that something was wrong with the official version of events, and that there is more to the assassination than one lone-nut, that "wretched waif" Oswald.

At one of the last meetings of the Warren Commission, Allen Dulles argued against the publication of the Commission’s records and documents, preferring them to be kept classified and locked away. Finally he relented, saying, "Okay, go ahead and publish the stuff, the people won’t read it anyway."

More and more people are now reading those records, and deciding for themselves who killed Kennedy, and someday they may even do something about it.

John Judge says that the people who killed JFK were merely telling us, "We killed the son of a bitch and you can’t do anything about it."

Philadelphia attorney Vincent Salandria calls it the "Transparent Conspiracy," where it was prearranged for anyone who took up the trail of the assassins to be led into a labyrinth of never ending trails, dead ends and Machiavellian intrigues.

Even though you may not be able to do something about it, in order to learn the truth you have to jump into the rabbit’s hole, get into the "House of Mirrors" and figure out how the magic trick was done.

You can’t get caught up the details of the ballistics, trajectories, acoustics, autopsies and caskets. Forget the "single-bullet theory," and quit arguing about the details.

Whatever happened at Dealey Plaza was a conspiracy and coup d’etat, a magic trick that you can’t be told how it is done, you have to figure it out.

In order to see the Transparent Conspiracy through the glass onion, you have to follow the leads out of Dealey Plaza, take up the cold trail and follow the evidence where ever it leads.

End Part 1

A Brief History of COPA

A BRIEF HISTORY OF COPA

There at the conception, I can accurately describe the origins and early history of COPA – the Coalition on Political Assassination.

Having a profound interest in the assassination of President Kennedy, and disenchanted with the sealing of the records of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), I co-founded the Committee for an Open Archives (COA) with my old college mate John Judge.

We had attended the University of Dayton, Ohio together, and after focusing my History and Latin American Studies research on Cuba and the Bay of Pigs, I began to notice the common attributes and same players involved in the assassination of President Kennedy and Watergate. With John Judge and many others, we had lobbied Congress to reinvestigate the assassination, but were annoyed when the HSCA locked their records away for 50 years in 1978.

There were many conferences on the assassination over the years and decades, and a number of significant organizations that led to the HSCA investigation, including one founded by Mark Lane and another Assassination Information Bureau out of Boston, which opened a DC office for awhile.

But with the impending release of Oliver Stone’s movie "JFK" and a new flurry of books on the subject, the most popular conferences were held in Dallas, the most significant organized by Gary Shaw at the Omni Hotel. Shaw may have had a hand in the establishment of the Assassination Information Center (AIC), which ran out of storefront mall in the West End district behind the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD).

After Shaw’s original conference, a professional conference company from Texas organized and presented two, may three conferences under the title ASK. During the second conference, at which there were some conflicts between the organizers and researchers and presenters. It was then suggested that instead of paying a commercial, for-profit firm to attend conferences, so they can make money off of us, we considered forming our own researcher-oriented organization and hold our own conferences.

On the last day of the three day conference, those who expressed obvious dissatisfaction with the way the ASK conferences were run were invited to a special lunch meeting at the West End Pub. About a dozen or so people attended, and put some tables together so business could be discussed while we had lunch.

John Newman, Bill Turner, John Craig, myself and others discussed the vision of what a new organization of assassination researchers would be like and what it could accomplish. After much discussion, John Newman gave an inspiring speech and endorsement, emphasizing that with the passage of the JFK Act of 1992 and the establishment of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), such an organization would necessarily be based in Washington D.C., where the expected Congressional hearings would be held, the National Archives (NARA) were located, and where all the future action would be. "We need researchers with boots on the ground in Washington," is the way Newman put it.

That’s about all that was decided at the first meeting in Dallas, but word quickly spread through the ASK participants and lists of names and contact numbers were passed around and collected.

The first meetings in Washington D.C. were held over the course of a two-day, Saturday-Sunday weekend at the Quaker Meeting House on Capitol Hill, as arranged by John Judge. This group of about two dozen, invited individuals, sat facing each other around tables arranged in a square.

Dr. Cyril Wecht, if I remember correctly, chaired the first meetings, asking everyone to take turns introducing themselves, their name, where they were from and interest in the organization and why it should be formed.

This group, primarily professionals – lawyers, doctors, academics, with research into political assassinations being the primary bond between them, laid the groundwork for the formation of the organization.

From New Jersey I drove to DC with Bob Danello, a Cherry Hill, N.J. police lieutenant who had previously joined the Committee for an Open Archive (COA) and had a keen interest in the assassination of JFK, the Cuban angles in particular.

I sat next to Professor Peter Dale Scott, who I met for the first time. Also present were others who I would come to know well over the next decade or so – Jim Lesar of the Assassinations Archives Research Center (AARC), FOIA attorney Dan Alcorn, Bill Davis, of the Christic Institute and John Newman, among others.

The first meeting, on Saturday, included two guys from Philadelphia, one of whom was invited and the other a hanger on, who began to disrupt the meeting by agitating other participants, espousing divisions of opinion, expressing opinions on every topic and monopolizing the discussion. John Judge made sure those who disrupted the first session were not at the second, and things ran a lot more smoothly.

I went to lunch on the first day of the meetings with Bill Davis, who I knew was a Catholic Jesuit priest and with the Christic Institute, a radical, pro-active organization that had filed a RICO suit against those involved in the Iran-Contra scandal with Dan Sheehan.

Most of the participants on both days walked around the corner from the Quaker Meeting House to a row of bars and restaurants, and settled on The Hawk & the Dove, where we took up most of the tables in a back room, continuing the discussions from the meeting.

As the least known and most quiet participant, my most notable contribution was in the last session on the second day, when someone finally asked if there any other items that need to be considered, and I said that we still had to come up with a name for the organization.

Sitting next to Scott, I had scribbled a series of acronymns, trying to find one that made sense and was easy to say. At first "political assassination" was all I had to work with but after awhile it came down to Committee on Political Assassination or Coalition on Political Assassination – COPA. Which I passed to Scott to have him make the suggestion.

A few months later another major, two day, series of weekend meetings were held at a hotel in DC’s Chinatown, where further details of COPA were ironed out. There were probably close to a hundred people at this series of meetings, which included a number of important individuals who were not at previous meetings, like Jim DiEugenio of Citizens for Truth in the Kennedy Assassination (CTKA), a California based group of researchers.

At one of these meetings it was decided to make COPA a coalition of the three existing organizations – the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), the Committee for an Open Archives (COA) and CTKA, with the idea that other non-profits organizations with similar goals and ideals would be included later.

The first Governing Board consisted of Gary Aguilar, MD, Daniel S. Alcorn, Esq., Walter Brown, Ph.D., Jim DiEugenio, James Lesar, Esq., Phil Melanson, Ph.D., John Judge, Janette Rainwatear, Ph.D, Josiah Thompson, Ph.D., Professor Peter Dale Scott and Dr. Cyril Wecht.

The Advisory Board included Gaeton Fonzi, Patrick Fourmy, Robert Groden, Ed Lopez Soto, David Mantick, M.D., Ph.D., Sarah McClendon, Wallace Milan, John Newman, Ph.D., Michael Parenti, Ph.D., Dick Russell, Wayne Smith, Ph.D., Oliver Stone, Robert Tanenbaum, Esq., William Turner, Jack White.

When Peter Dale Scott resigned from the Governing Board, he was replaced by Carol Hewett, Esq., who later went over to LANCER.

There was a lot of enthusiasm in the air with the belated establishment of the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) and of COPA’s new role of citizen overseers of the Review Board, with the first and second COPA national conferences in DC being the best and most significant.

Held at the Washington Sheraton and Omni Shoreham Hotels in consecutive years (1994-1995), the early COPA conferences had committees that reviewed abstracts that were submitted for presentation and a series of speakers that were carefully planned out.

The main speakers addressed hundreds of people in the main ballroom, while other presentations were made by researchers in side rooms, with Judge Tunheim, the head of the ARRB, addressing both DC conferences and recognizing COPA as the primary research organization that was monitoring the work of the Review Board.

Peter Dale Scott, John Newman, John Armstrong, Dick Russell, Bill Turner, Phil Melanson, Cyril Wecht and others who had written or were writing books on the assassination spoke in the main room, while Ed Haslem, Frank Debenedictis, Martin Shackelford, Hal Verb, Carol Hewett and myself gave additional talks or held panel discussions on special subjects in the side rooms.

It was at the second conference at the Omni when I was called over to a side table where Prof. George Michael Evica and Debra Conway were talking. They told me that they were thinking of starting another organization, "to educate the next generation of researchers," and I said that COPA needed more organizations to enlarge the umbrella of groups we worked with and increase our numbers and power. I didn’t realize that Debra would start a privately held for-profit organization JFK LANCER that would end up competing with COPA in holding annual conferences in Dallas for the next decade.

It was at the second COPA meeting when I met personally with Wayne Smith, who I asked about his experiences working in the Havana embassy when Castro came to power. Smith told me that he worked there with David Atlee Phillips, and participated in an amateur acting troupe with Phillips.

It was out of that COPA conference that Wayne Smith began to organize a series of meetings between COPA members and the Cubans, held in Rio and the Bahamas.

[For transcripts of some of these talks see: Cuban Archives ].

One of the most important COPA conferences was held in Dallas at the Hotel Lawrence and Union Station in November 1998, the 35^{th anniversary of the assassination. While the speakers on the Grassy Knoll were terrific, the news media chose to ignore us, though I did tape record the speeches and typed out a transcript that I later posted on the internet [See: The Event that Didn’t Happen].}

COPA was in disarray however, and more and more COPA members were defecting to LANCER, which was holding competing conferences in Dallas at the same time. So with the ARRB dissolving and LANCER taking members and money, and the three COPA organizations being strapped for money – particularly AARB, which has a huge archives that needed storage rent, and CTKA, which published PROBE magazine, there was an effort by some members of the governing board to dissolve COPA.

While I understood the motivations behind the move, I urged those on the governing board – Dr. Gary Aguliar, Jim DiEugenio and Cyril Wecht, to try to keep COPA going because the situation may change in the future and we could never start from the beginning again. By this time John Judge, COPA secretary with no voting power, didn’t care if COPA kept flying or crashed, as he was disscusted with all the work he was putting in and getting only grief – from those who didn’t have enough time to make their presentations, didn’t want to pay for the dinner, felt they were slighted for some reason or another, etc.

Although I thought my arguments to keep COPA going may have made a difference, I later learned that when the move to dissolve COPA was made, COPA attorney Dan Alcorn said that an on-going civil suit with the Department of Defense had been filed under COPA’s name – COPA vs. DOD, for the US Army After Action Reports from Memphis during the assassination of Martin Luther King. They didn’t dissolve COPA at the time because of the suit, which turned out to be pretty significant.

Although the Appeals Court ruled against COPA, the Army ended up leaking the After Action Report (AAR) Summary to a Memphis newspaper, and the negative publicity from the COPA suit is acknowledged as the reason behind the release of the previously secret records. [See: Phil Melanson ].

Phil Melanson, John Judge, Dan Alcorn, Dr. William Pepper and other COPA members took an active role in the Martin Luther King assassination civil trial, which developed evidence of a conspiracy and won in court in Memphis.

Led primarily by John Judge, COPA has continued to hold annual regional conferences in Memphis in April and Los Angeles in June and Dallas in November.

JFK Assassination Grand Jury - Basis for Legal Action

THE JFK ASSASSINATION – BASIS FOR LEGAL ACTION -Updated December, 2008

It is a myth that the assassination of President Kennedy will always remain an enduring mystery. Though justice may never be served, the murder of John F. Kenney is not an unsolvable crime, but rather a homicide that can be solved to a moral and legal certainty by traditional detective work.

To keep people questioning, to allow multiple theories to abound, to let time slip away and drag on before applying the basic and routine legal procedures for investigating and solving such a crime is only a reflection of the institutional unwillingness, resistance and refusal to challenge the powers that took over the government on November 22, 1963.

The feeling of citizen helplessness is reflected in the subtitle of the book by one of the living victims of the same criminals – James Tague, whose book is called The Truth Withheld – A Survivor’s Story – Why We Will Never Know the Truth About the Assassination. But those responsible for JFK’s murder win and go free only if they die before being exposed, and escape justice.

The reason for the Congressional law that established the “50 year rule” on the classification of all Congressional documents is that is the amount of time it is estimated for the people mentioned in the documents to be dead. Since it is not yet 50 years after the assassination of President Kennedy, some of those suspects are therefore still alive.

It is simply not true that the murder of JFK will forever remain a mystery, and we’ll never know the truth, since thanks to the JFK Act, we have most of the evidence, the documentary records and witness testimony in the public domain.

Despite the institutional unwillingness to make the effort to solve the crime, a strong regiment of independent researchers, determined investigators, honest witnesses and ordinary citizens have taken upon themselves to determine the truth, solve the crime, but justice has yet to take its course.

“We need not accept (the) view that mankind…..is doomed,” JFK said in his landmark June 10, 1963 ‘Peace Speech’ at American University. We need not accept, “that we are gripped by forces we cannot control…Our problems are manmade – therefore, they can be solved by man….No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable – and we believe man can do it again.”

American political assassinations and murders were committed by men, and therefore can be solved by men, if only the effort is taken to do so. However belatedly, there is a new trend to at least attempt to resolve the civil rights and political murders of the 1960s, with the assassination of Medgar Evers, the murders of the Philadelphia, Mississippi Freedom Riders, the York, Pennsylvania race riot killings, the MLK assassination civil trial, and the passage of the Emmett Till Bill to establish a permenant department dedicated to such murders and assassinations all utilized the judicial system to solve crimes that were thought to be untouchable a decade ago.

The assassination of President Kennedy was not an accident of history or an act of God, but the act of man, and men can therefore solve the crime if only the effort is made to do so.

Whether the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman as the official report alleges or a patsy as he claimed, he was a former U.S. Marine who worked with the U2 program in Japan, was trained in the Russian language, defected to the USSR, returned with a Russian wife, reportedly took a shot at General Walker, participated in covert Cuban operations in New Orleans and Mexico City, and fits the covert operative profile that makes the assassination a covert intelligence operation. As former Senator Richard Schweikder (R. Pa.) put it, the case has “the fingerprints of intelligence,” and it must be properly investigated with that assumption.

Just because covert operations are designed to conceal the actual perpetuators doesn’t mean that they can’t be exposed, identified and brought to justice, just as other, similar covert crimes have been exposed – Watergate, Iran-Contra, the assassination of the former Chilean ambassador to the U.S. in Washington, and more recent mob and terrorist conspiracies.

How can ordinary citizens force the hand of an entrenched judicial system? The system is changing, and a new guard are now at the ramparts, working on behalf of the taxpapers and citizens instead of the old political machine. There are examples of how other such political assassinations were solved through the system, and despite the system.

An examination of how the assassination of Medgar Evers and the other civil rights murders of the 1960s were resolved presents a road map to follow, and one of the first stops on the way to justice is the grand jury.

“As a general policy,” former Justice Department official Ben Civiletti testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in its last session, “the Department of Justice seldom turns down at least exploring, or reviewing a petition or reasonable request,…(and)…to some extent it becomes a matter of public will…but also a matter of judgment that falls within the duties of any particular department or agency of government…as to how far questions…can be explored to a useful or fruitful purpose.”

Getting questions answered, getting questions answered honestly and under oath is one thing, getting the proper questions asked in a proper legal venue is another thing all together.

Besides determining the truth and seeking justice, it would be useful and fruitful to determine who killed President Kennedy, why they did it, and how they accomplished it, so such a thing can never happen again. If the assassination of Medgar Evers was immediately pursued and justice resolved, President Kennedy would not have been killed in the same way, and if JFK’s assassination was properly resolved immediately, RFK and MLK would never have died the way the did.

Political assassination remain an effective tool for controlling policy only because the true perpetuators of these crimes are permitted to remain hidden in the background, pulling the strings of the puppets and moving the pawns as they have for decades and centuries. The assassination of President Kennedy has maintained its watershed mark as the single most significant political event of the past century because it remains unresolved. Despite the tremendous amount of information that is now available, it remains an unresolved enigma and unsolved cold case homicide because there is no institutional willingness, motive or desire to simply solve it.

Unsolved cold cases, especially homicides, are usually reviewed every few years, sometimes by a new detective who looks over old evidence to see if there is anything that has been overlooked, or if there is any previously unknown evidence or witnesses, or recently developed scientific tools that could be used to help solve the crime. There is no statute of limitations on murder, under the rules of criminal procedure, homicide is given precedence over all other crimes, and once accumulated, the evidence in a homicide is presented to a grand jury by a prosecutor, district attorney, who represents the people.

Independent researchers, journalists and ordinary citizens can identify evidence, uncover conspiracies and witness crimes, but if there is no case, no grand jury, no place to present the evidence, then there is no justice. As Mr. Civiletti explained to the HSCA, the DOJ “seldom turns down exploring at least, or reviewing a petition or reasonable request…”

Towards the development of a legal case, the grand jury Petition-Request is a citizen’s petition to a District Attorney responsible for prosecuting offenders to request a grand jury be convened to review the facts of a case and determine if there is enough evidence to indict someone for a crime.

A grand jury is asked to decide, not guilt or innocence, but whether there is enough evidence to have a person brought to trial for a crime. The grand jury only hears evidence of guilt, but does not render a verdict. Its decision is whether to indict, which is merely an accusation, or not to indict. Guilt or innocence is determined in a court of law; where the rules of evidence preclude hearsay evidence and allows the defense attorney the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses. Before a grand jury, hearsay is allowed, and witnesses must testify without counsel, as all attorneys, other than the prosecutor, are not permitted in the grand jury room.

If the grand jury determines there is enough evidence, they vote a “True Bill” and indict someone for a crime.

The DA can simply ignore such a citizen’s petition and request and not present the evidence to a grand jury, or even if a grand jury votes to indict, it is still up to the DA to issue the indictment and proceed to take the matter to court.

The Grand Jury process, which stems from English Cannon law, has been refined by the United States Constitutional system as an extension of the prosecutor’s will, though historically the grand jury can investigate official corruption, review and develop evidence, attempt to answer questions, subpoena records and witnesses, order forensic autopsies and specialized tests and follow the evidence where ever it leads.

While grand juries composed of ordinary American citizens do not have the knowledge of the history and powers of a grand jury, and are often merely tools of the prosecutors, and just do what he instructs them to do. Though sometimes a prosecutor will lose control of a grand jury, one that begins to ask questions and make requests of its own. Such a grand jury is called a “Runaway Grand Jury,” and often goes beyond the original intent of the prosecutors, such as the Rocky Mountain Flats Runaway Grand Jury. When the Colorado prosecutors refused to issued the indictments against major defense contractors for environmental contamination, the grand jury leaked its report to the press [See: Westword Rocky Mountain Flats ]

The previous reluctance of district attorneys to prosecute political assassinations, especially decades old crimes, is being overcome by new, young and diversified blood in official positions of authority. Although those District Attorneys at the top of their profession know that investigating political assassinations is detrimental to furthering their careers, and witness what happened to New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, there is a younger generation of assistant prosecutors who look upon solving such major crimes as an achievement that will advance their future careers.

Former HSCA attorney, Dean Browning Webb, Esq., who specializes in RICO litigation, said that such indictments are possible and that, “I am especially interested in developing an approach to seek indictments of those who conspired to murder the President.”

“I believe that a prosecution is feasible,” says Webb, “especially when invoking the Pinkerton Doctrine,” which holds that “a person associated with a conspiracy culpable for any criminal act committed by a co-conspirator if the act is within the scope of the conspiracy and is a foreseeable result of the criminal scheme.” Agency theory holds that “all conspirators act as the agent or represent the other conspirators involved in the criminal scheme, and are liable for all criminal acts committed by the other conspirators.”

Another reason that District Attorneys are reluctant to investigate and prosecute political assassination, besides opposing the criminal effort behind the murder, is the effort and manpower it takes to solve it, which takes away from the normal, day-to-day prosecutions that the District Attorney is also responsible for.

This can be compensated by including the most significant evidence, lists of documents and witnesses, and outstanding questions with the Petition-Request, laying out the case for crimes and conspiracy and reducing the work of the prosecutors. Such a convincing attachment would also help persuade a prosecutor to accept the case and take it to a grand jury.

It will only take one such JFK grand jury, and there are dozens of potential jurisdictions, with Federal, State and County grand juries, each with many assistant district attorneys who work under the District Attorney, providing dozens of individuals in which to present the Petition Request.

Establishing jurisdiction in any particular district will not be difficult. Although some will argue that it was not a federal crime to kill the president in 1963, it was a federal crime to conspire to kill a federal employee, whether it is a postman or a president.

Besides the local Dallas district, there are Texas State grand juries, as well as the North Texas Federal District court, which is located in Dallas. The reluctance of any Dallas or Texas official to investigate the assassination will probably make other jurisdictions more inviting, but new, young, district attorneys have been elected in both Dallas and New Orleans, where special grand juries could be convened.

Of the dozens of the potential jurisdictions, it will be easiest to convene a Special Federal Grand Jury in Washington D.C., where most of the original evidence is located at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and the body of the victim can be exhumed for a proper forensic autopsy.

Although conspiracy and homicide are the crimes being investigated, once the grand jury begins to subpoena records and require the sworn testimony of witnesses, other crimes, such as perjury, destruction of evidence, obstruction of justice come into play, and help persuade witnesses to tell the truth.

One aspect of the grand jury proceedings is their secrecy, which prevents the testimony from being made public before a trial. If there are no indictments, and there isn’t a trial, the grand jury could issue a report explaining what it learned and the reasons behind its action or inaction.

Historically, traditionally and legally according to the Constitution of the United States, the evidence in a homicide is presented to a grand jury, which is where the evidence in the murder of John F. Kennedy must go before there can be justice.

“That we live as a nation of laws, and are not a ‘Banana Republic,’” said Warren Commissioner John McCloy, “requires us as individuals and as a society, to purse truth and justice, ‘even if the heaven’s may fall.’”

It is not too late now, but soon, this case will slip slowly from an unsolved homicide to an historical mystery, unless we act now, and present the best evidence in a Petition-Request to convene a special JFK Grand Jury, and let the legal take its course, wherever it may go.

Grand Jury Petition.

Federal Grand Jury Petition (Request) to evaluate the existing evidence and investigate the homicide of John F. Kennedy, the attempted murder of John B. Connolly, the wounding of James Tague and the murders of J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas in Nov. 1963.

[Note: Although the assassination of the President was not a federal crime in 1963, it was a federal crime to conspire to kill a federal official in the line of duty. Therefore we are submitting this petition, with evidentiary exhibits of conspiracy to Special Federal Grand Juries in the Northern District of the State of Texas, in New Orleans Parish in Louisiana and Washington D.C. requesting that a Special Federal Grand Jury be convened especially for these particular cases, guided by a Assistant U.S. Attorney and assisted by a Task Force of independent researchers, professionals, investigators, law enforcement officers and judicial officials.]

To: Richard B. Roper, U.S. Attorney for Federal District of North Texas, Earle Cabell Federal Building, 1100 Commerce St., 3rd Floor, Dallas, Texas, 75242-1699


We citizens of the United States of America do hereby petition you Richard B. Roper [U.S. Attorney for Federal District of North Texas] to fulfill your obligations [Under U.S. Code : Title 18, Section 3331(Summoning and term) –3332 (Powers & Duties) & 3331 (Reports); Or appropriate statute for correct jurisdiction]; See: Documentary Exhibits #1 (a), (b), (c)] and carry out your duties to convene a grand jury of American citizens to “operate as an investigative agency…in cases of civic corruption or misconduct by public officers….to look into the criminal conduct prior to the arrest of any suspect…(since)…the inquisitorial power of the grand jury may operate to develop evidence against civic corruption, organized crime, or a broad array of criminal activity.”

This request is being submitted for the purposes of:

1)Completing previously impeded official investigations; by the Dallas Police, Texas State, Secret Service, FBI, the Warren Commission, Church Intelligence Committee, Rockefeller Commission, Pike Committee, House Select Committee on Assassinations, Assassinations Records Review Board; Justice Department of the United States;

2)To determine the disposition and establish the provenance of all relevant evidence, records and witnesses;

3)To answer all outstanding questions that can be reasonably answered by basic inquiry and independent investigation (and not by agencies or departments of the government that have been implicated in the crime);

4)To have qualified experts review the available acoustic, ballistic, medical and autopsy evidence and to order new, independent studies and tests you deem necessary, including proper forensic autopsies of victims;

5)To review the available documentary records and hard evidence, subpoena witnesses, take their testimony, determine what crimes have been committed and whether there is enough evidence to indict those individuals responsible for crimes related to the assassination, including but not limited to conspiracy, homicide, treason, destruction of evidence, obstruction of justice and perjury;

6)To conduct a thorough oversight review of how and why this case was permitted to go unresolved for so long and to determine the national security implications;

7)To help restore public confidence in government, the law and the legal and
judicial systems of this country; The public confidence in the government of the United States is lower now than ever before and began to decline, according to public opinion polls, in December, 1963, directly as a result of the assassination of the President, and has never been regained, and will not be regained until the remaining questions are properly answered.

We citizens of the United States hereby present you with this petition, along with the relevant discovered evidence, records and exhibits, and respectfully request that you carry out your responsibilities under the law to convene and present them to a grand jury.

When you are finished we ask you to publicly report [Under Sec. 3333] what steps you have taken, what you have discovered and whether you have determined if indictments should be brought against any individuals for crimes related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States.

Attached: Evidence List; Exhibits; Living Material Witness List; Living Expert Witness List; Outstanding Questions; List of Related Crimes;

William E. Kelly, Jr. –

List of names of co-signers to petition.
To have your name added to petition email: Bkjfk3@yahoo.com

Petition on line:

http://www.petitiononline.com/jfkgjury/petition.html
Posted by Bill Kelly