Key Witness Walter J. Machann RIP August 2023
"...You can see how I was pulled into this maybe as a distraction or confusion to muddle the picture. Something like that. I really feel like I was a spectator like everyone else. ..But you see, that’s like all the bloodhounds following the false scent somewhere. And I think that was deliberate on someone’s part, to put up all these distractions. Whereas the real culprits escaped.” - Walter J. McChann
Walter J. Machann - RIP August 2022 - Photo from Gayle Nix Jackson
Attorneys of record in the Mary Farrell v. Joseph Biden and NARA case, that will meet in court in San Francisco later this week, asked me if I knew of any witnesses who have passed away since October 26, 2017. That's when the JFK Act required all of the government records on the assassination be released in full, but weren't. As for those who passed away since the 2017 deadline. I came up with a few:
Dr. Rolando Cubela (aka AMLASH) recruited by the CIA to kill Castro as part of the Valkyrie plot.
Legendary CIA JMWAVE trainer John "I.F." Harper, whose name is redacted from documents still, so we only know of his involvement from others. He died in Colorado in 2020:
Maggie Craine - Wm Harvey and Ted Shackley secretary died a few years ago, is seldom if at all mentioned in records;
Bradley Pierce - reportedly attended Twist party with Oswald in Mexico City.
Norman Katz - Continuity of Government Army officer at White House at the time of the assassination;
Maj. Harold Patterson - (STRANGER) speaks on the AF1 radio transmissions is identified on the longer Gen. Clifton tape but edited out of the copy released to the public.
All these people have died since 2017 and their identities protected in early releases.
Now I learned of another one - Walter Machann, the former Catholic Priest who catered to the Cuban exile community in Dallas for the Catholic Welfare Society, that was funded by the CIA's ostensibly philanthropic Catherwood Fund out of Philadelphia. They also funded the Catholic Welfare Society in New Orleans and Miami, where they ran medical clinics for the Cubans.
The CiA"s Catherwood Fund also bankrolled the Dallas Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia where Marina had her daughters baptized without telling her husband.
Walter Machann was born in Dallas and raised by his mother to be a priest. Tall, calm and handsome, Father Machann apparently had affairs with a number of women in his parish, including Syliva Odio and Maryanne Sullivan, who wrote a Harlequin Romance type of book about it.
When John Martino stopped in Dallas on his "I Was Castro's Prisoner" book tour, sponsored by the John Birch Society, Machann was the host of a Martino lecture that was also attended by Odio and other Cubans, when Martino mentioned the fact that he knew Syliva Odio's father in the Isle of Pines prison, where Odio was serving time for being part of a plot to kill Castro with a bazooka with Antonio Veciana.
Machann was having his doubts about being a priest and was visiting his mother when news came of President Kennedy's assassination. Machann decided to leave the priesthood and the Bishop allowed him to, so he went to New Orleans, enrolled at a Catholic University and associated with a professor there who just happened to be a friend of DRE Cuban leader Carlos Bringuier and attended Oswald's court hearing.
Machann then relocated to Thailand, got married to a Thai women, and had a son who became a US soldier who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and apparently suffered from Delated Stress Syndrome. .
Gayle Nix Jackson tracked Machann down when he was visiting him mother in Texas, and he was quite open with her, answering all of her questions in a number of sittings, and they remained friends. She devotes a chapter in her important book on the Kennedy assassination (her grandfather shot the Nix film), and shared his contacts with me.
I exchanged emails with Machann a number of times, and he really is a very cool guy, one of a number of Catholic priests who get tangled up in this affair - the others being the priest of the Northern Virginia parish where JFK's rural home Wexford was built, and where Mrs. Kennedy kept her horses. The priest of this small, rural parish gave President Kennedy a Catholic missile - not a bible, but a book of prayers, that JFK kept in his bedroom on AF1, that was used to swear in LBJ as President.
Then there's Father Bradley Pierce, who accompanied American film actor Richard Beymer (West Side Story, The Longest Day) to Mexico to attend a film festival. Pierce then owned a New York City bar that he told me was popular with rock and movie stars, like Beymer.
JFKCountercoup2: Father Bradley Pierce RIP
While in Mexico City Beymer went to the Cuban embassy to try to get a visa to Cuba and there he met Sylvia Duran, just like Oswald.
When it later came out that Duran hosted a Twist Party attended by Oswald, Cuban embassy personnel and two gringo Americans, one a film actor, as Phil Shenon writes in his book - "A Cruel and Shocking Act" - he doesn't identify Beymer and Pierce, but implies Oswald COULD have been enticed to kill JFK by the Cubans at the party.
Well the CIA tapped the Cuban embassy's phone and a transcript of a call Beymer made trying to get to Duran, was released and published under the JFK Act, that identifies him as Richard Beymer, who apparently knew Duran more than she acknowledged. So I tracked Beymer down in his hometown and he told me about Father Pierce, who I also contacted and talked to. Neither could recall a twist party, but that was something the two footlose Americans below the border would have done, but Pierce recalled being there at the time of the assassination, so they couldn't have been there when Oswald was said to be there.
In any case, when Walter Machann was a Catholic priest in Dallas he knew Syliva Odio and her visitors, one of whom was said to be an ex-Marine marksman Leon Oswald, as she told him. And he knew John Martino from the Martino's book tour lecture, and Dutz Murret's friend in New Orleans who attended Oswald's hearing. So Machann is a central but obscure witness in all of this.
Most of Machann's story is in the relevant chapter of Gayle Nix Jackson's book "Pieces of the Puzzle: Anthology," and I took that and other sources of info on Machann and wrote about it in a synopsis that Jimmy DiEugenio posted over at Kennedys and King, that you can link to. (Thanks Jim!)
Walter Machann Interview Synopsis
I'm really glad that Gayle got to McChann and made friends with him so we have much more info on him than what is in the government records. Gayle usually talks to Machann on their birthdays, but yesterday, he would have been 89, when she called Machann's sister in Texas she was sadly informed that he passed away last August 2022.
God Bless Father Machann, as the Cubans in Dallas knew him as a good priest, and Gayle knew him as a good friend.
Gail notes that the women who wrote the Harlequin
Romance type book “Kennedy Ripples” was really named
"Leicht," not Sullivan, but that, “She too has since passed away, in
fact, everyone involved with Dallas Society at the time has gone now, except
for Silvia Odio and for the life of me, I cannot find her."
"I knew after that first interview with Machann
that he had a "tell" when he wasn't being upfront. He was an
intelligent, highly intelligent, calm man.”
The Assassination
As for the assassination itself, Machann said: “I thought there was a conspiracy. Though Oswald was very left-wing and pro-Castro, none of it seemed to make sense. I still think there is something more to the assassination but I have no idea what … After the Bay of Pigs, there were many upset Cubans, they were patriots. They missed their homes. But I don’t believe they were upset enough to kill the President.”
“At that time
(Oswald) was doing crazy things …I heard a radio interview he had once in New
Orleans … The guy talked very honestly like he was involved in these causes for
a reason. He was convincing. He didn’t sound stupid, he just sounded confused
or misguided or mixed up.”
“The thing that really blows my mind is they really
put the story across that using that weapon, he fired those shots you have to
really twist everything around upside down and inside out to make that stand
up. Only power can do that … We still don’t know some of the secrets of the
Roman Emperors. You know, this is almost like a thorough kind of reduxia ad
absortum [sic; = reductio ad absurdum] as if there are other possible
explanations, other than a top down kind of conspiracy, deliberate type plan.
These things don’t just happen like this.”
“I didn’t see that (JFK) movie for a long time. When
I did see it, I thought it was pretty well made … but then … it finally made up
my mind, you know, I could never believe their story. I was convinced there was
a conspiracy.”
“I think it was something far out of my realm and my
hands. I think it was power at the very highest levels. That’s one thing I
learned about Greek history and civilization—trouble always began when the
power and wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few. That’s what’s
happened in the US now. Very few have wealth and power, elected or not. So, I’m
just afraid this was a power elite type of conspiracy. They have the confidence
of power. They can do all kinds of things.”
“Let’s face it, there is room somewhere in the real world that somethings are not what they seem to be and the story we get told and we are led to believe aren’t always true. The American Dream is not all real … But you can see how I was pulled into maybe as a distraction or confusion to muddle the picture. Something like that, I really feel like I was a spectator like everyone else … But you see, that’s like all the bloodhounds following the false scent somewhere. And I think that was deliberate on someone’s part, to put up all these distractions. Whereas the real culprits escaped.”
Here's a vita he gave her that fails to mention his days in Dallas as a Catholic Priest working with the Cuban exile community and being paid, unknowingly by the CIA through the Catherwood Fund.
JFKcountercoup: Catherwood Fund
Walter J
Machann
Management
Officer, National Co-ordinator World Health
Organization 1975-1991 Bangkok, Thailand, Colombo, Sri
Lanka Public Health Administration and Development
Senior
Quantitative Analyst-NYC-Dept of Health New York,
NY 1970-1975 Preventative and Chronic Disease Control
Executive
Director Palm Beach County Mental Health
Association 1966-1967 Florida, USA Planning, Management and Fund
Raising
Senior
Field Representative Louisiana Association for Mental
Health 1965-1967 New Orleans, LA Program Development and
Organization
Caveat
Emptor: Lucille Connell helped with jobs from 1965-1970 as did Sylvia Odio per
Father Machann.
Education: Columbia
University M.P.H. Public Health=Planning and Management 1969-1970
Stockholm
University Certificate-Social Welfare, Swedish Language 1968-1969
Tulane
University New Orleans Non-degree, Anthropology, Political
Science 1965-66
Loyola
University New Orleans BA Sociology/Philosophy 1964-65
St Johns
College San Antonio Texas/Assumption BA Philosophy/Theology=Theology and
Religious Vocations 1950-1957
U.N.A.M.
Mexico DF Credit: Spanish Language, Colonial History, Architecture,
Phonetics 1956
AND ON A FINAL NOTE: Parting Shot - here's a SS document that is pertinent, found by our British friend Malcolm Blunt and shared with us from Bart Kamp.
JFK Act Document RIF # 124-10002-10286 USSS mentions Father Machann extensively.
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