The AARC presents a new series of lectures commemorating and honoring the legacy of President Kennedy, the inspirational meaning of his term of office, and the consequences of his assassination sixty-one years ago.

In the words of the distinguished British scholar Malcolm Blunt, “Jesus Christ, what we lost when we lost that man.”

With the permission of the author, following is David Talbot’s unpublished response to a November 2023 request from the OpEd page editor of the New York Times to submit an OpEd piece on the JFK assassination story for the 60th anniversary.  Without comment or explanation, this summation, written by an informed and uncommon historian whose expertise on the tragic power and poignancy of the subject is indisputable, was rejected and has not been published until now.

Courtesy of David and his indefatigable research assistant, Karen Croft, here is David’s essay from one year ago:

The JFK Assassination at 60: What Did We Know and When Did We Know It?

By David Talbot

The official story of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination is finally falling apart, nearly 60 years after gunfire erupted in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza. The mother of all conspiracies turns out to be true, according to a media barrage this anniversary season, including a new film, podcast, book, scholarly conference and news revelations.

That “lone gunman” version always stretched credulity, relying on a “magic bullet” that allegedly caused seven entry and exit wounds in President Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally before emerging in nearly pristine condition on a hospital stretcher. In his recent book, The Final Witness, former Secret Service agent Paul Landis asserts that he found the bullet on the back seat of the presidential limousine after it only slightly penetrated the back of the president. In other words, there was nothing magic about the bullet at all.

Despite the shaky case for a single assassin, this story was promoted by government authorities as soon as Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the shocking crime on November 22, 1963. And it was embraced by the Warren Commission, the inquiry panel of distinguished public figures appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, when it released its report the following year.

The press, too, eagerly applauded the Warren Report, with Washington Post reporter Robert J. Donovan acclaiming it as a “masterpiece of its kind” and Anthony Lewis of the New York Times predicting the report would “completely explode” conspiracy theorists like Mark Lane, author of the skeptical Rush to Judgement.

Privately, prominent people like French President Charles de Gaulle and Robert F. Kennedy, President Kennedy’s brother and attorney general, dismissed the Warren Report as a publicity exercise – or “baloney” in de Gaulle’s contemptuous estimation, designed to head off a potential “civil war.” (TDC, 567-8)

“Better an injustice than disorder,” the French president said of Oswald’s silencing by triggerman Jack Ruby. “In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States.”

Robert Kennedy and his grieving sister-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy were worried that President Kennedy’s assassination could spark something even more catastrophic. To avoid a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, a week after the president was killed, the Kennedys dispatched close family friend and painter William Walton, who was due to meet with Russian artists as part of an exchange mission, to confer secretly at a Moscow restaurant with Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet intelligence agent. The two Kennedy brothers had come to trust Bolshakov — whom Newsweek called “the Russian New Frontiersman” (Brothers, 31) — as a back-channel to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at critical times like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Over their meal — which took place during the height of the Cold War, when suspicions between the superpowers were high — Walton passed a remarkable message to Bolshakov. Bobby and Jackie Kennedy believed that JFK was the victim of a high-level domestic conspiracy, not a Communist plot, as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had told them. Walton also told the stunned Soviet agent that RFK planned to pursue a political career and he would resume his brother’s policy of détente with Moscow if he made it to the White House. (Brothers, 25-33)

Bobby Kennedy — who was elected to the Senate from New York in 1964 and ran for president in 1968 before he too was cut down by an assassin’s bullet – was the first prominent JFK conspiracy theorist. “With that amazing computer brain of his, he put it all together on the afternoon of November 22,” RFK’s friend, journalist Jack Newfield, told me for my 2007 book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, which chronicled Bobby’s confidential search for the truth about Dallas. RFK –who was his brother’s principal emissary to the dark side of power – suspected that the plot against JFK grew out of the CIA’s unsavory operations against Cuba, which employed gangsters, anti-Castro militants and other ruthless characters.

Over the years, other leading men and women of the time came to share Bobby Kennedy’s suspicions about the JFK assassination, including philosopher Bertrand Russell; comedian Mort Sahl; musician David Crosby of the Byrds; poet Allen Ginsberg; and writers Robert Graves, Katherine Anne Porter, Ray Bradbury and Paddy Chayevsky. Terry Southern — who cowrote the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove, which conveyed the darkly macabre humor of the nuclear doomsday era – bitterly denounced the official version of President Kennedy’s assassination in a survey mailed to over 300 prominent citizens in the 1960s. “The absurdity of the Warren Report is patent and overwhelming,” Southern wrote at the bottom of the survey. “One has only to browse through any of the 26 volumes to know at once what a complete farce, charade, and incredible piece of bullshit it is.”   (Brothers, 316)

Even at least three members of the Warren Commission itself – Senators Richard Russell and John Sherman Cooper as well as Representative Hale Boggs – did not buy their own report’s lone gunman conclusion. But the persuasive Lyndon Johnson and devious commission chief counsel J. Lee Rankin herded the dissenters into unanimity.

By the 1970s, following the Vietnam War debacle and the Watergate revelations, Senator Frank Church established some supervision over the CIA, at least for a time. In late 1975, as the Church investigation was winding down, Senator Richard Schweiker, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, persuaded Senator Church to let him set up a subcommittee on the JFK assassination. After his brief but intense investigation, he concluded “Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence.”

That spirit of inquiry led to the formation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which found in its 1979 report that President Kennedy was indeed the victim of a “conspiracy,” a historic break from the government’s lone gunman dogma. But the HSCA’s conclusion was vague about the likely culprits, leaving the CIA off the hook, and it was overshadowed by the earlier Warren Report.

In 2001, journalist Jefferson Morley informed G. Robert Blakey, the House assassination panel’s chief counsel, that his investigation had been sabotaged by its CIA liaison, an agency official named George Joannides, who turned out to have a shadowy connection to the Kennedy case. “Joannides’s behavior was criminal,” said the furious Blakey, who is now an emeritus professor at Notre Dame University’s law school. (Brothers, 388) The revelation about Joannides turned Blakey’s focus more on the CIA and its web of contractors.

In 2019, Blakey and other prominent JFK experts – including Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the surgeons who worked on the mortally wounded president at Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital – signed a public statement that I helped arrange, which concluded that “the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy was organized at high levels of the U.S. power structure, and was implemented by top elements of the U.S. national security apparatus using, among others, figures in the criminal underworld to help carry out the crime and cover-up.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/01/25/kennedy-king-malcolm-x-relatives-scholars-seek-new-assassination-probes/.

Polls since the JFK assassination show that the American public consistently views the lone gunman story with skepticism. While the Warren Report convinced most Americans, by the 1970s there was a growing suspicion that elements of the government itself were involved in the plot, as revealed in a Newsweek poll taken 20 years after the crime. Since then, the poll numbers have fluctuated, but a solid majority still believe Oswald was not the sole assassin.

https://www.history.com/news/why-the-public-stopped-believing-the-government-about-jfks-murder

Strangely, one of the few holdouts for the official version of the JFK assassination is the mainstream media. But even there, support for the Warren Report has grown shaky. During my research for Brothers, 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt and former Washington Post executive editor, Ben Bradlee — two of the grand men of U.S. investigative journalism (both now deceased) – told me of their own dark suspicions about Dallas. “I just never believed (the official story) for one second,” Hewitt told me in 2005, the year after he stepped down at 60 Minutes. He suspected “disgruntled CIA types” were responsible for JFK’s murder, but he claimed his investigative team could never nail it down. (Brothers, 393-4)

I asked Bradlee in 2004 why the Washington Post didn’t devote investigative resources to the JFK murder story. After all, Bradlee wrote a warm 1975 memoir of his companionship with the president, Conversations with Kennedy. Bradlee initially sidestepped the question. But by then occupying an emeritus position at the newspaper, he leveled with me. It would have damaged his budding journalism career, he admitted, if he had explored who killed his friend. He feared “that I would be discredited for taking the (Post newsroom) down that path.” (Brothers, 392-3)

The New York Times, too, has grown less confident in the Warren Report over the years. By 1992, even Times reporter and columnist Anthony Lewis evolved from scourging the report’s critics to a less certain position. “Maybe with all that happened, Vietnam and Watergate, today’s reporters would have come to it with more resistance,” he told the Village Voice that year.

In recent months, Peter Baker, the Times’s White House correspondent, has covered two important developments in the Kennedy case, the Landis revelation about the magic bullet and the discovery that the CIA was secretly reading Oswald’s mail before the Kennedy assassination. This was an eye-popping story because the agency had long claimed that Oswald was off its radar before the assassination — a dubious assertion about a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union, threatening to reveal military secrets, and then returned to this country with a Russian wife. Baker is clearly open to new information about the JFK case.

Despite the public’s ongoing suspicions about the Kennedy case, which led to the febrile conspiracy culture in this country, and the media’s belatedly aroused interest, the government continues to stonewall. In direct violation of the 1992 JFK Records Collection Act, which sought to release all government documents related to the Kennedy assassination, Presidents Trump and Biden repeatedly delayed declassification of some 4,000 documents, most of them stubbornly held by the CIA. After nearly six decades, when all the key players are dead, there is no “national security” justification for this government secrecy. By law, this historical material belongs in the hands of the press and the public.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/jfk-assassination-documents-national-archives.html

I’m among those researchers who’ve sued the government for access to these records. While working on The Devil’s Chessboard, my 2015 book about Cold War-era CIA Director Allen Dulles, I filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the CIA and State Department for the passport and travel records of William Harvey, the spy agency’s assassinations chief. Before the JFK assassination, Harvey – an impassioned Kennedy opponent – was spotted on a plane to Dallas by his deputy, F. Mark Wyatt, even though Harvey was stationed in Rome at the time. Wyatt later concluded that Harvey played a role in the assassination. But the government agencies successfully blocked my legal effort at transparency.

https://casetext.com/case/talbot-v-us-dept-of-state-1

(The Devil’s Chessboard 474-8)

And yet, as we approach the 60^th milestone of the JFK assassination, we are finally shaking free the truth about this purposely mysterious case. Amid the avalanche of JFK memorials this season, there are some worth tuning into.

Hollywood actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner teamed up with longtime Kennedy assassination author Dick Russell to produce the podcast Who Killed JFK? On November 22, documentary filmmakers John Kirby and Libby Handros will release Four Died Trying, their film series on the major assassinations of the 1960s, starting with the episode on JFK. This follows the 2021 documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by director Oliver Stone, the man whose 1991 movie JFK inspired the current generation of Warren Report skeptics.

On November 15 through 17, the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University will sponsor a scholarly conference titled “The JFK Assassination at 60,” featuring speakers like former Secret Service agent Landis, presidential historian Barbara Perry, retired Army intelligence officer and author John Newman, Dealey Plaza forensics experts Josiah Thompson and Dr. Gary Aguilar and me.

Meanwhile, journalist Jefferson Morley, who’s been working the Kennedy beat for over 30 years and now edits a Substack blog called JFK Facts, continues to report on the historic events in Dallas as a hot news story, working closely with Rex Bradford at the Mary Ferrell Foundation – the leading electronic repository of Kennedy records – to break big headlines.

As I’ve long said, quoting the musician Leonard Cohen, there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. Nowadays, it seems like the light is pouring through.

*********

Courtesy of David Talbot

David Talbot is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government and Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.

The AARC presents a new series of lectures commemorating and honoring the legacy of President Kennedy, the inspirational meaning of his term of office, and the consequences of his assassination sixty-one years ago.

In the words of the distinguished British scholar Malcolm Blunt, “Jesus Christ, what we lost when we lost that man.”

Bill Simpich continues with part 2 of his research into the complicity of journalists in the JFK assassination, the careers that profited from this crime, and what happened to the journalists who tried to take a stand – with a special focus on two Dallas/Fort Worth journalists, Kent Biffle (Part 1) and Thayer Waldo (Part 2), and their relationship with both the case and the Oswald family from 1959 to 1967.  There will also be an emphasis on how a few law enforcement officers like Dallas police officers George Lumpkin, Pat Gannaway, and Jerry Hill, Assistant DA Bill Alexander, and local Secret Service agent Mike Howard succeeded in manipulating the national media into demonizing Lee Oswald as the lone assassin in the first hours after the assassination and afterwards.

The Dallas Journalists & Law Enforcement that Molded the Assassination Coverage

By Bill Simpich

You thought that story was wild. Wait till you hear this story.

Okay, I’m Bill Simpich and I’m going to offer you the biography of Dallas reporter Thayer Waldo, a story that has never been told properly. I think you’re going to enjoy it and really be thinking hard after you hear it.

Thayer Waldo wrote for the Dallas Morning, or rather the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and he claims to have been the last individual to shake hands with President Kennedy at Love Field before his car drove off. And Mr. Waldo is reported in this police report I’ve got here, as being at the Trade Mart waiting for the motorcade to arrive.

“Mr. Waldo, accompanied the captain to the police car. Mr. Waldo stated to me that he heard the first bulletin which came over the Dallas police radio, and it was, ‘Bulletin. The president has been shot. It is feared that others in his party have been wounded. The shots came from a triple overpass in front of the presidential automobile.’”

And for those of you who are geographers, that’s also the same direction as the grassy knoll. The sixth-floor of the Book Depository, conversely, is behind the automobile.

If you take a look at the dispatch, the dispatch says just that. You hear Jesse Curry saying, “Go to the hospital, Parkland Hospital, have them stand by. Get a man up on top of the triple underpass and see what happened up there.”

Then you turn to the newspaper the following day and unlike all the other stories, what you see is Mr. Waldo’s article saying, “Security Question Remains Puzzler.  Behind the tangled web of tragic circumstance surrounding the assassination one unanswered question: How could it have been permitted to happen?”  Nobody else is asking that question. Nobody.

Now, Mr. Waldo had a very interesting background. His wife in the late 1930s was a woman named Grace Clements. She was not only a head of what’s known as the surrealist painter’s movement, she was an artist, but she was also a member of the local communist movement in the Oakland area. So, he saw the communist movement, if you will, firsthand. And he also—it’s kind of like Mr. Oswald, Mr. Waldo had an interesting background, because his father was a business manager at the Stars and Stripes. He was a captain of infantry during the previous war, World War I. And the Stars and Stripes, of course, is a daily newspaper of the United States Armed Forces. He was a president and editor of McClure Newspaper Syndicate. He was well -connected, very tied to the military. And Mr. Waldo is very familiar with the communists.

Now, he went to South America after World War II. And here’s from the FBI reports. “Thayer Waldo reported to Stringer for Drew Pearson.” Remember Drew Pearson, famous journalist for the Washington Post, had the racier stories, more liberal type stories? “In Uruguay in 1948, where he known for inaccurately reporting embassy events, he allegedly friendly with a group of Spanish communists in Uruguay. Reports from Uruguay also disclosed that Waldo derogatory remarks regarding U.S. policy in Latin America and expressed himself as sympathizer in Soviet politics.”

Then it goes on, “Waldo also reportedly served as correspondent to Pearson and Ecuador in Colombia. After being invited to Ecuador by President Galo Plaza, Subject took steps in 1950 to renounce U .S. citizenship…” Like Oswald, sound familiar? “… and obtained Ecuadorian citizenship in order advance official position with latter government. Later decided retain US citizenship…” Again, just like Oswald. “In 1953 was administrator of El Sol, leftist daily in Quito.” That’s Ecuador. “Then he launched the Pacific Post newspaper later that year with a man named Francis Sutherland. That lasted for a small time, only until the two men had a falling out. This falling, the feeling was aggravated when Sutherland charged that Waldo had raped his wife. After the breaking of the partnership, Mrs. Sutherland is reported to have stated that Waldo carried with him his CP (Communist Party) membership card and that he had tried to convert her to communism.”

All this business about the Sutherland’s, I question how much of this is true, whether it is true. So much of this, I think, Waldo and maybe working with Mr. and Mrs. Sutherland, I think all this deserves a lot more investigation to find out why he’s getting painted with this broad brush.

“In June ’53, Waldo deported from Ecuador by the new president. They changed presidents quite a bit for writing derogatory articles concerning the Ecuadorian government.” So, first he’s invited, then he’s kicked out, he’s deported from Uruguay, and we’re gonna see more deportations in his history to come. “January ‘60, Havana Station reported Waldo as American newsman from Mexico City in Havana, who might be offered editorship of the English Language Times in Havana.”

So, he’s, and then late January ‘60, “Mexico station reported subject discussed six-week tour of Cuba with a embassy officials. And then the files show he resided in Mexico City for two years prior to late 1960.”

So, there’s that piece of story, but then here’s another; here’s an FBI or CIA story. This is “1960, Waldo is identified as an overt contact of the Office of Naval Intelligence and he was living in New York City with the BCIU First Avenue, New York City.” The BCIU has lots of guests like the ambassador, George Allen, like the director of the USIA, US Information Agency, Intelligence -oriented, and the executive editor of the Washington Post.

What’s the BCIU? it is the Business Council of the International Americas, and he’s their media consultant. He’s tape recording dozens of interviews with dozens of individuals for Spanish language radio programs where the council will broadcast for medium wave outlets in that area, and the English version is going to be used by the Voice of America. So, you can tell this guy is somehow working both sides of the street.

Here’s the San Francisco Chronicle article saying, “This reporter,” (Waldo reporting to himself about himself) “… spent the first half of 1960 in Cuba. At that time, with the U.S. Embassy, still in operation, fully staffed, eight of its personnel were CIA agents, three worked for the FBI, each of the armed services have from one to five operatives assigned to intelligence work. No special effort was required to learn these facts or to identify the individuals so engaged. Within 30 days of arrival in Havana, their names and agency affiliations were made known to me without solicitation by other correspondents or embassy employees. The latter included one CIA man who volunteered the identities of all three persons accredited to the FBI and a Cuban receptionist, outspokenly pro-Castro, who ticked off the names of three CIA agents with entire accuracy, a later check confirmed. In addition to embassy staffers, the CIA had a number of operatives. I knew 14, but I’m satisfied there were more among the large colony of resident U.S. businessmen.”

He is giving away the company store in the newspaper! In the newspaper. This is highly treacherous material that’s not supposed to be out there.

So, this is really, really, bizarre for him to be putting this in the paper. If he’s putting this in the paper, he’s doing it on purpose to, at the directions of people in intelligence, otherwise they literally wouldn’t be doing it.

Okay, now, from July 1963 to October 1964, Waldo is serving as the feature editor of the Morning Star-Telegram in Fort Worth, Texas. And furthermore, I think it’s worth mentioning here that in 1956, while working for the El Paso Herald Post, he became acquainted with a man named John Sutton, who was then a lieutenant in the U.S. Army in Fort Bliss, Texas, assigned to special communications. He did not see Sutton again until Waldo, having spent about a year and a half in the Dominican Republic on a BCIU project, and as correspondent for a number of U.S. papers, accepted that job of feature editor for the Fort Worth Morning Star-Telegram. Again, that’s the middle of 1963. So, he’s got this working relationship with Sutton, which is going to come up soon here.

Now, Waldo, not only does he shake hands with JFK, claims to be the last guy, but he went directly from the Trade Mart to the police headquarters, the afternoon of November 22, within 30 minutes after learning the president was shot. “When I arrived to Dallas police headquarters, I was the first reporter in any medium so far as I know. Certainly, there was no other evidence to reach the third floor of headquarters. No one attempted to stop me or ask for any identification at that time.”

So, but he’s had quite a day there.

George Butler

And over the next couple of days, his big contact becomes a man named George Butler, who was a lieutenant or captain, as he describes it, in the Dallas Homicide Division. On the day that Oswald is, shot two days later, the 24^th, “Butler came to the Commerce Street end of the ramp, and called out the reporters, “Come in.” Waldo said he and the other reporters entered the ramp at which time a uniformed officer checked their credentials. He said that Butler was an extremely nervous man, so nervous that “when I was standing asking him a question after I’d entered the ramp and gotten down to the basement area,” (and Butler is the head of security according to Waldo) “… just moments before Oswald was brought down, he was standing profile to me and I noticed his lips trembling as he listened and waited for my answer.” Waldo said that when the Dallas detectives escorted Oswald out of the hallway and into the ramp, “it was necessary for them to walk within a few feet of the rear end of the parked police car where Waldo was standing with the ABC man.” Waldo said, as they passed, “the ABC man pushed the microphone out in front of Oswald’s face and asked, ‘Do you have anything to say?’ A man in a hat made one long lunging step from Waldo’s right to the front of Oswald, shoved out his hand, and shot Oswald.”

Now, so Butler, in my mind, is one of the key suspects of this entire plot involving JFK, Oswald, Tippit, you name it.

After a week after the assassination, this man I mentioned, the Army officer in El Paso, John Sutton, who is now living in Fort Worth, he asked Waldo if they could meet at the Dallas Press Club. When they met, Sutton told him he had an informant that had seen Ruby and Tippit and Bernard Weissman together at the Carousel Club.

Remember this story?

This is not the same story, by the way, as the Jarnigan story. This is another story. And he was reluctant to come forward because he had an affair with a stripper that the informant did, and feared he would lose his work and his family if it got out.

Now, as I mentioned earlier when I was talking about Commission Document 1, the FBI report that came out in early December, that report said that Oswald, “a loner all his life, acted by himself.” So, it got leaked to the press. And the question got out pretty quickly, why was the FBI probe leaked to the press?

Very, very good question people were asking that at that time the FBI etc, look pretty sweet with this kind of thing going on. Meanwhile, Sutton and Waldo get together and Sutton introduces him to his informant.

He tells him his informant is Phil Burns, white male late thirties five foot eight, hundred forty-five pounds, chestnut hair glasses, employed at an advertising agency on account of one of Sutton sponsors. Sutton told Waldo a little bit later that he had called the advertising agency and learned Phil Burns’ actual name; his actual name was Paul Bridewell.

Burns said to Waldo that Ruby introduced him to J.D. Tippit and Bernard Weissman. They shook hands. Burns walked away. Heard nothing.

If you want to know my opinion about this whole story about Paul Bridewell, Phil Burns, whether it was made up by Sutton or made up by somebody else. I don’t think Waldo made it, but I’ll tell you this much, I think the whole story about Ruby introducing him to Tippit and Weissman was made up by Burns. It was to get Waldo engaged in red herring type stories.

Dorothy Kilgallen

Waldo said that he was too scared to publish the story and other information that he had about the assassination. He’d been working with Mark Lane at this point. Mark Lane introduces Waldo to Dorothy Kilgallen. Her article about the Tippit, Ruby and Weissman meeting appeared on the front page of the Journal American. And this is like December 8th, two weeks or so, I think, after the assassination.

Around that same time, Marguerite Oswald’s in the paper. She’s going, “I know my son.” And she thinks, as we know, that her son is an agent for American intelligence.

And so, this whole article, December 8th, just attacks Marguerite Oswald up and down the street. And the Journal American picks it up from the AP. The Journal American loves dirt on a variety of subjects. They are really a dangerous outlet in terms of foisting crazy stories.

And you see they’re at the top of the list of press that Hoover watches very carefully. He’s got a little stamp. The stamp has the Washington Post, the Daily News, the Evening Star, the Washington Papers. Then you got the Herald Trib, Journal American, Mirror, Daily News, Post, New York Times. Then you got the communist press, The Worker, The New Leader. Then you got the capitalist press, the Wall Street Journal. You got the popular press, The National Observer, which is nowhere anymore and back to the communist press of People’s World. Those are the 12 people he thought were most important, those papers were the most important on the JFK case.

Can you imagine? It shows you what his agenda is. Meanwhile, more nonsense is getting into the press courtesy of Lonnie Hudkins. Hudkins Advises on December 17th, he’s just returned from a weekend in Dallas where he’s talked to Allan Sweatt from the Chief Criminal Division He’s the Chief, Sheriff’s Office. It’s his opinion Oswald’s being paid $200 by the FBI as an informant in connection with their subversive investigations. He furnished the alleged informant is S-172.

I mean, this is a kind of informant that Jim Hosty worked with all the time. They got paid $200.

Here’s another letter from Hoover to the Warren Commission Rankin.

Who’s doing this, spreading this story? Joe Goulden, who’s writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He uses 179. Goulden is the guy, by the way, who handles the documents of the Estate of David Atlee Phillips. Goulden is not the guy who I consider a truth teller. And the other people who work with Hudkins to spread this story was Bill Alexander and Hugh Aynesworth, who said they made it up to try to prove that their phones were being tapped by the FBI. I don’t believe these gentlemen for a single moment about anything for a variety of reasons, most of which I think you already know.

Now, here’s the National Guardian, which is the left-wing newspaper in the United States, Progressive News Weekly. Their headline is “A Grave Doubt Plagues the United States” and “Is Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer’s Brief,” and they run Mark Lane’s brief attacking the evidence, where some of this evidence is now getting squirreled right inside Mark Lane’s stuff, which I think actually wound up hurting Mark Lane’s credibility. He’s got a lot of good stuff and the bad stuff, I think, is this kind of nonsense.

Now shortly after Rankin writes Marguerite a letter saying,

“I would like to acknowledge receipt of your telegram requesting your attorney be permitted to cross -examine any witnesses whose testimony is taken by this commission, in particular testimony Marina Oswald, and I enclose a copy of your letter to your attorney, Mark Lane.”

Mark Lane and Marguerite want him to have the right to cross-examine these witnesses.

And here is one of the great, great events of dirt, and it comes right from Marguerite’s testimony to the Warren Commission. She’s going to fly out in early February of ’64 to testify, her and Marina. And so, she told Mr. Mark Lane, “I’m not going in the car with Mr. Mike Howard.” He’s the Secret Service guy. And there was another Mr. Howard, by the way, who came that day, and that was Pat, Mike’s brother. I don’t know whether he was his brother or not. We’ll have to find out.

“Sir, that day I was going to leave for Washington. And I said, ‘Mr. Lane, I’m scared to death.’ He says, ‘Don’t worry. I will call Mr. Walden …’“ That’s Mr. Waldo who is the Star-Telegram reporter, “’… and ask him to accompany you.’ And Mark Lane called Mr. Waldo of the Star-Telegram and asked him to company me and Mr. Walden did accompany me with these two Secret Service men to the airport. And when Mr. Walden entered my home, I told him I’m so glad you were here because I didn’t want to go with this agent by myself.”

And I’ve got a photo here courtesy of, none other than Dale Myers, where he superimposes Waldo’s picture with the headline on the Star-Telegram, “Witness to Assassination Aaits to Name Oswald. Negro to Give Details.” Who was that witness? Who was that Negro? Well, here’s Mark Lane quoting from what Mike Howard said to him after he dropped off Marguerite.

Mike says to Mark Lane, “Wait till that old black boy gets up in front of the Warren Commission and tells his story. That will settle everything. Yes, sir. He was right there on the same floor looking out that next window, and after that first shot he looked and saw Oswald and then he ran. I saw him in the Dallas Police Station. He was still the scaredest cat “n” I ever saw him. I never saw him tell the officer, ‘Man, you don’t know how fast and fast is ’cause you didn’t see me run that day.’ He said he ran and hid behind the boxes ’cause he was afraid Oswald would shoot him.” Mike Howard then explained that the Negro witness had been arrested by the Special Services Office of the Dallas Police for gambling. And since he was familiar with that branch of the Dallas Police, he immediately gave himself up to that branch. Mr. Howard alleged that he had visited the Negro witness while he was in custody of the special services in the Dallas jail.

And then what happened was, Thayer Waldo ran that article the next day, not with those exact words, but saying that there was a witness who was in protective custody by the Dallas Police. And it was a six-column piece and it made a lot of headlines that you can imagine and lots of letters and this and that. And then Thayer Waldo wound up writing the declaration after Lane tipped off the paper that– and others, I might add– as to Waldo’s identity.

And Mike Howard was his informant. Mike Howard had really pulled a fast one up on Waldo is what had happened.

Waldo writes a declaration.

Well, the way he told it was, “Well, when that old black boy—(this is coming again from Mike Howard)– well, well, then when that old black boy gets before the Warren Commission and tells what he knows, that will stop them all talking.” Pat Howard turned half around in his seat and gave me an elaborate wink with raised eyebrows as if to say, ‘So here’s what I was telling you about.’ He looked and saw Oswald kneeling at the next window with a rifle aimed at the street. Mike Howard said the Negro later told the Dallas police officers to whom he surrendered, ‘I was scared to death. I thought he would kill me too. I just turned and ran way over to the far side of the room and squeezed me down beyond some empty crates.’”

So yeah, Mark Lane pretty well accurately got what Thayer was told by Mike Howard. And Waldo wrapped up his statement to his editor saying under penalty of perjury, “They slapped a vagrancy charge on him so they could hold it, Mike said. He was still just about the scaredest negro I ever saw, nothing but whites to his eyes.” About as racist as you can get. “They have now transferred him somewhere else, I understand. I don’t know where.”

So, here’s the letter Mike Howard wrote, and we just dug this out of the archives a couple weeks ago. Thank you very much, Chad Nagel, for the hard work. What Mike told Forrest Sorrell’s back in February ’64 was, “He was supposed to have heard the shots just above him and had hidden for fear that he might have been shot also. When the Negro found out someone had shot the president, for fear of getting involved, he allegedly had a record of vagrancy or some other minor violation with the Dallas Police Department. My brother and I were laughing about it, not paying any attention to our passenger till he leaned from the back seat and said, ‘Is this Negro going to testify before the Warren Commission?’ I laughed. I said, I didn’t know; that I had never talked to the man and wasn’t even assigned to the assassination investigation. My brother said, ‘I don’t know the name of the Negro or where he was now.’ My brother said, ‘They’re probably holding him in protective custody on a vagrancy charge.’ We all laughed. And then Mike goes, ‘I did not know Waldo was a reporter at the time, he was riding in my car. I knew him only as a friend of Mark Lane, the lawyer of Oswald and his mother, Marguerite.’”

But Pat Howard testified about many months later to the FBI, and Pat admitted, “Mrs. Oswald identified this individual who was to accompany them as Thayer Waldo, a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.” Period.

So, the Howard’s couldn’t even get their own story straight, but they didn’t think they were going to get in trouble, and you can bet they did not get in trouble.

The Waldo report to the FBI after this happened, after the article ran a couple days later, Waldo told the FBI that after the story was originally written, the source, Mike Howard, called him on the phone, and the only change in the story was the fact that the witness was not on the sixth floor but on the fifth floor.

He had to massage that little bit and that was the part he massaged and told Forrest Sorrels and then he changed it and then he told Thayer that he got that little part wrong. A pretty important part to get wrong, I might add.

“Jack Revill, Special Services Bureau, Dallas Police, advised he knows of no witness was being held in protective custody. He stated that in his opinion with respect to the story in the Fort Worth Star telegram, the witness referred to may possibly be Charles Douglas Givens.”

Charles D. Givens

Now, who’s Charles Douglas Givens? I’ll tell you who Charles Douglas Givens is. He was on the fifth floor during the morning filling orders with Lee Oswald on November 22. Lee was standing by the elevator in the building at 11:30 when Givens went to the first floor. When he started down in the elevator, Lee yelled at him to close the gates in the elevator so Lee could have the elevator returned to the sixth floor. On the morning of November 22nd. Givens observed Lee reading a newspaper in the Domino room where the employees eat lunch about 11:50 AM.

So here we are 11:50 AM; Given sees Lee eating lunch, reading the paper.

Now, Givens was only one of four witnesses who stated they saw Oswald on the first floor during lunchtime. William Shelley, supervisor of the floor laying crew said, “I do remember seeing him when I came down to eat lunch about 10 to 12,” as did the building’s janitor, Eddie Piper, who said he saw Oswald just at 12 the clock. Carolyn Arnold saw him at about 12:20. Pat Speer points out that Givens began to change his story within days of Howard’s talking to Waldo.

The February 21st ’64 cover story of Life Magazine, which treated Oswald’s sole guilt as a proven fact, revealed a few minutes after noon as the president and his wife were pulling away from the airport in the open presidential limousine, an employee in the School Book building, Charles Givens, saw Oswald on the sixth floor and said, “Let’s go down and watch the president go by.” “Not now,” Oswald responded. “Just send the elevator back up.”

So, what that means is that now, instead of seeing Oswald in the lunchroom at 11:50, they’re saying, “Oh, right after noontime, Mr. Givens saw Oswald up on the sixth floor and staying on the sixth floor.” That’s pretty serious.

Marguerite Oswald

So, here is the exchange between Marguerite and Earl Warren. I want people to understand just how strong Marguerite was during this period of time before we finish the Givens story.

Earl Warren: “It’s not an accusation about your son. It’s an accusation about your son in Texas courts. That’s an entirely different proceeding. We’re here to do justice and be fair to everyone. And it’s our main and only purpose in serving on this commission. None of us cherish this responsibility.”

Mrs. Oswald: “I’m sure, sir.”

Earl Warren: “And the only satisfaction we can derive is to be fair to all concerned. And I assure you that’s our objective.”

Mrs. Oswald again: “I do not imply this commission will not be fair; I know about the men on the commission; they’re all fine men including yourself Chief Justice Warren. But I do state a fact that I do not think that you can come to a true conclusion. I want that for the record.”

And she says, “I implore you, I implore you in the name of justice, to let my son, Lee Harvey Oswald, accused of assassinating the president, I the mother of this man who’s the accused mother, be represented by counsel.”

Chairman: Before you leave Mrs. Oswald, may I say to you first the commission’s not here to prosecute your dead son, it is not here and it was not established to prosecute anyone.”

And Marguerite says, “I’m not in agreement with you. One thing I want to make clear, we do not know the questions you’re asking to myself or Marina or the other witnesses and I contend that you cannot ask him the pertinent questions because you don’t know what I know and what Mr. Lane knows. And so, you will have an analysis in the long run, a conclusion.”

And then Rankin says to Mrs. Oswald, “He was being prepared to become an agent inspired by his recruiting officer?”

Marguerite Oswald: “Yes, sir.”

Rankin: “By what you have told us about reading the Communist literature and this one pamphlet and also the manual of the Marine Corps?”

Marguerite Oswald: “Yes, sir, and then living to when he’s age 17 to join the Marines, which I knew and which he did at age 17 on his birthday.”

Now Rankin goes, “What else do you base your idea that he was ever an agent or became an agent on?”

Mrs. Oswald: “Many many things. We always watched I Led Three Lives, the program about Philbrick, we always watched that, and when Lee returned from the Marines in the service, the three days he was there with me, the program was on and he turned it off. He said, ‘Mother, don’t watch that. That is a lot of propaganda.’”

We’ve heard Robert say he watched it, but that’s Mrs. Oswald. And she also tells us that after he came back from the Marines, he said it’s propaganda, which of course was true.

Mark Lane

Mark Lane talks about the Warren Commission’s refusal to appoint him, he said the dead and absent were tried in the courts of Nuremberg as a last resort to prevent embarrassment, they appointed the president of a bar association to conduct the defense of Oswald. And then they forgot all about it.

And Lane added, “It is the first time in history that counsel has been appointed forgetting about the counsel retained by the family.” The guy did nothing. He sat there like a, you know, like a mannequin.

In April, Givens changes his story to the FBI. No longer Oswald’s alibi witness. Givens was now the Warren Commission star witness. He alone, among all the witnesses, is supposed to have seen Oswald on the sixth floor of the Book Depository by 11:55 and never saw him downstairs between 11:30 to 12:30. And this comes from Don Thomas’ essay, Rewriting History, “Hence Givens gave two accounts of Oswald’s whereabouts, one in November that tended to corroborate Oswald’s alibi, and a second in April that tended to incriminate him, yet his statement in November contained no mention of Oswald on the sixth floor, while the statement in April contains a denial that he’d seen Oswald elsewhere.”

So, that’s the Givens wrap up, and that’s the way the Givens story has been told for the last 60 years, as not an alibi, but rather the great accuser.

Now, Waldo, about a month later, in May, he gave a deposition to the Warren Commission and he told the FBI later on that he didn’t get into all these events and the reason why was because he was enjoined before beginning his formal declaration please confine yourself exclusively to the events of November 24th 1963.

Now as damning as it was about George Butler, you don’t read anything else about George Butler anywhere. And Waldo’s statements about all these other events, which were incredibly important, were not allowed to be part of the testimony.

Now, what did Waldo do? He offered an Warren Commissioner interview person, Leon Hubert, a manuscript he wrote with reporter Ed Johnson, called The Dallas Murders. He offered it to him on the record. Hubert didn’t want it. So, who did he work with instead? Dorothy Killgallen.

That’s who he gave his story to, as I mentioned. And that was published, I had the date wrong. It was actually not published until September the 3rd, 1964.

Who else was he working with? He was working with people like Jim Koethe and Bill Hunter. And Ed Johnson. Koethe was the one focused hardest on the book publicly. Waldo did not want to be publicly associated. He was scared for his life, scared for his family. Koethe’s associates were Waldo, Johnson and Bill Hunter. Koethe, Waldo and Johnson covered the presidential visit for their papers and all three of them covered the assassination and the ruby trial. Koethe’s task for the book was an in -depth study of the leaders in Dallas. Koethe was killed supposedly with a karate chop coming out of his shower later in September 64, days after Kilgallon’s heart attack and then falsely accused of being gay. Bill Hunter, who had been assisting on the book, had been killed five months early, shot while sitting down in a police station by a Long Beach officer who first said he had dropped his revolver and then changed his story and said he was playing quick draw like Quick Draw McGraw with his partner when the gun went off.

Within a week, I’ve done work on grand with around grand jury proceedings and arrest and this is unbelievable what I’m gonna tell you here. Within a week, a 22-year-old ex-con from Alabama named Larry Earl Reno was picked up selling Koethe’s personal effects and held on suspicion of murder.

As opposed to his personal effects he had in his house, the notes of his book. They were never found, just like Dorothy Kilgallen a year later. When the Reno case came before the grand jury, district attorney Henry Wade secretly instructed the jurors not to indict an extraordinary move for a chief prosecuting officer with as strong a case as he had. So, he put on a whole case and then he told the jurors not to indict.

Can you imagine? And the jurors went along with Wade. And then, you know, Dorothy Kilgallen went on to write a column a month later saying, Maybe You Didn’t Know. And she was furious about the whole situation involving the Warren Commission report, which just came out days earlier, days after the Koethe killing.

At any rate, the whole thing smells a bit fishy. It’s a might too simple that a chap kills the president of the United States, escapes from that bother, kills a policeman, eventually is apprehended in a movie theater under circumstances that defy every law of police procedure, and subsequently is murdered under extraordinary circumstances.

Now, as a result of this terrible drama with the article that blew up in his face in May of ’64, Waldo was asked, basically, to depart from his newspaper, and then he was asked to depart, as we’ll see, from Mexico himself in 1967.

How did this series of events occur? Bill Turner was quoted in the Mexico City paper in ’67 telling this story. Waldo explained his resignation from the University of the Americas in Mexico City as resulting from pressures applied to university officials by powerful American business interests following his talk at the Foreign Correspondents Club, debunking the war on reporters. Waldo went on vacation in Los Angeles. In July, Turner said he wired his resignation and then followed up with a letter to the head of the university.

So, he wound up writing for the local paper in Illinois called the Alton Evening Telegraph, a real step down.

From then, Waldo had a pretty tough life. He wound up living in Mexico in the 1980s. I found a good article about reuniting a child he gave up for adoption two years before he died. He died in 1989 under mysterious circumstances in the embassy in Mexico City.

And the question has to be asked, was he one of ours or was he one of theirs?

And by ours, I mean the research community as opposed to theirs, meaning the people who were involved in the cover-up of this assassination, if not worse.

And I am confident in walking through this material that Thayer Waldo was one of ours and the other side spent its time packing the record, or attempting to pack the record through him.

And the last thing I want to say is that Bridwell story, the informant, the fellow who Waldo wound up telling the story to, he was already out of the business and he was a guy in. He said, maybe you can do something with it. And the guy he gave the Bridewell story to was no one else other than Larry Shiller, who wrote all those bogus books with poor Norman Mailer, who was forced to do it because he hadn’t paid his taxes, needed to curry favor with the powers that be. So, he wrote Oswald’s Tale and all those other books.

I love Norman Mailer. I’m not a fan of Larry Shiller for obvious reasons. And Larry worked with the FBI trying to find this guy and they had nothing but bogus leads, like him living in Oregon and this and that. But I found a guy who I think really was Bridwell and which led me to believe that Sutton was probably on the level and Waldo was probably on the level ’cause I found a guy named Paul Bridwell who had Texas connections, had Texas lineage. Although he didn’t grow up there, he had spent time there. And in fact, he left the service in July of 1963 and probably found himself at that advertising agency in Dallas.

The guy’s name, Paul Bridwell.  Well, he was there at Guadalcanal and he was out there in Saipan. And years later, its commanding officer had the duty of protecting the CIA headquarters out there on Saipan.

And so, when they were out there looking for all people, you’re not going to believe this, Amelia Earhart. He gave them some good leads and at the same time, he made their job very difficult. He was security -oriented. I don’t think Bridwell was involved in killing JFK. And I don’t think he probably wasn’t even wittingly involved in the cover. He may have been unwittingly. He may have been wittingly. His job was security. He was a security guy. He made sure people were not able to get to the far side of the island where the CIA facility was. He did give our local reporter a couple of helpful leads on the Earhart story, I believe, I don’t believe they were phoney.

So, there it is. It’s wheels within wheels. I think Waldo was one of ours.

Thank you.

NOTABLES:

Jim Koethe – Dallas reporter, murdered Sept 1964 by a karate chop by an unknown assailant in his home.  The notes to his book on the assassination were never found.

Bill Simpich: Civil Rights attorney, author of ground-breaking articles focusing on the hidden intricacies of the CIA, a leading and insightful analyst of the intelligence files associated with Lee Harvey Oswald’s enigmatic episode in Mexico City seven weeks prior to President Kennedy’s assassination. Bill’s eBook, State Secret, was published in 2013 and may be read in its entirety courtesy of Bill and the Mary Ferrell Foundation:  State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald.

The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend is the story of twelve individuals with intelligence connections who shaped the life and stories around Lee Oswald – who built his “legend.” From Oswald’s sojourn to the Soviet Union to his time as a re-defector in the US South, Bill sifts through the record to uncover surprising truths about the man and his legend.

This series is the backstory of the research that culminated in Bill’s book State Secret. A brand-new preface, epilogue, and the text of each essay – including links to the primary documents in the National Archives – can be read by clicking HERE.

Copyright © AARC. All rights reserved.

The AARC presents a new series of lectures commemorating and honoring the legacy of President Kennedy, the inspirational meaning of his term of office, and the consequences of his assassination sixty-one years ago.

In the words of the distinguished British scholar Malcolm Blunt, “Jesus Christ, what we lost when we lost that man.”

Autumn Too Long: Observations in a Time of Fading Light

by Charles R. Drago

a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand.  I think i too have known
autumn too long

— e. e. cummings

Submitted for your approval…

Envision a flickering television screen:

FADE IN

EXT. LIMBO – NIGHT

WILL TANNER, early forties, passes warily through a waterlogged curtain of fog and its fifty-one shades of gray.  He is drawn toward distorted voices.  As in most dreams, colors are dull, point-of-view perspective comes and goes absent apparent reason.  The terrain is surreal, figures with bloody wounds materialize along Will’s route, wave like spectral Windsors at a parade, then dissolve into the enveloping mist.

Will is dressed entirely in black – turtleneck sweater, pants, athletic shoes.  Strapped onto his torso is a black shoulder holster in which a pistol is visible. As the curtain slowly parts, Will begins to make out, just a few feet away and square on its mark, the outline of a short human figure holding a rifle.

Will approaches and sees not a living person, but a four-foot-tall cut-out of Lee Harvey Oswald lifted from one of the infamous “backyard” photos.  Hanging from its neck is a sign that reads, “YOU MUST BE TALL AS LEE TO RIDE.”

Will passes the cut-out as the sound resolves into children’s excited laughter.  The air clears.  He steps up to a chain link fence.  Within its confines is an amusement park ride.  Scaled down models of the Lincoln limousine in which President John F. Kennedy was assassinated move along twin tracks.  In each car there are two rows of two seats.  Two children are in each of the first two rows.  The rear bench seat is occupied by metal figures of JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy as they appeared in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

The cars move past Animatronic statues of waving motorcade onlookers.  The children wave back.  As the cars pass beneath a two- dimensional mock-up of the Texas School Book Depository, Oswald’s face and a rifle barrel emerge from the sixth-floor “sniper’s” window.  Loud blanks are discharged.

The metal presidential heads, set on hinges, snap forward, then automatically pop back.  The children are laughing. Will, now dressed impeccably in a gray Saville Row business suit, raises his eyes to the Oswald window.  Again and again the face of the Dallas patsy emerges.

Finally the face is not Oswald’s.  It is Will’s.

*********

Have all of our labors and sacrifices come to this?  Reducing the study of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy to the equivalent of an amusement park ride for eternal adolescents?  Should it be our faces that appear in the window?

The opening dream sequence from Episode One of my limited series Autumn Too Long purposefully poses more questions than it can possibly answer.  We shall address at least a few of them now.

In order to begin honorably with a set of my own First Principles that inform this essay, I am obliged to pay homage to “Meditations,” that most profound and durable work of Marcus Aurelius.  In it he offered this First Principle: “Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself, in its own constitution?  What is its causal nature?” For nearly 30 years, alone and in the company of souls great and small, I’ve attempted to answer those questions as they pertain to the long solved/unsolved murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Thus I offer the following:

Anyone with unfettered access to the evidence in this case who does not conclude to the degree of metaphysical certitude — “infallible assent to a proposition recognized as necessarily true” — that President Kennedy was assassinated by criminal conspirators is cognitively impaired and/or complicit in the crime.

And this:

Our goals as radical historians now must be to define and effect justice for President Kennedy and the untold millions, past, present and future, collaterally damaged by his assassins.

And this:

To attain these goals, we must abandon regurgitation and instead commit to cogitation — abandon all efforts to re-investigate long-explained phenomena and then declare established truth with an air of discovery.

And finally this:

We are at war with President Kennedy’s assassins, we have yet to return the fire from Dealey Plaza with lethal accuracy, and those who choose to seek profit from promoting what they know we already know open themselves to characterization as war profiteers.

How can we explain the insistence of a vast majority of celebrated Kennedy assassination researchers upon endlessly planning a route without having identified a destination?  What is their end game?  What are they after?  Why do they bother?

This phenomenon hardly is restricted to our shared inquiries. Writing in The End of Science of what he perceives to be scientists’ fear of reaching for absolute answers, John Horgan notes: ” …after one arrives at The Answer, what then? There is a kind of horror in thinking that our sense of wonder might be extinguished, once and for all time, by our knowledge. What, then would be the purpose of existence? There would be none … Many scientists harbor a profound ambivalence concerning the notion of absolute truth. Like Roger Penrose, who could not decide whether his belief in a final theory was optimistic or pessimistic. Or Steven Weinberg, who equated comprehensibility with pointlessness. Or David Bohm, who was compelled both to clarify reality and obscure it. Or Edmund Wilson, who lusted after a final theory of human nature and was chilled by the thought that it might be attained. Or Freeman Dyson, who insisted that anxiety and doubt are essential to existence … ”

Maybe.

Or is it greed and/or ignorance driving the regurgitators?

A word may be in order concerning Keats’ currently fashionable Negative Capability ” quote, “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without irritable reaching after fact or reason.” End quote. The usefulness of this quality as a medium for the refinement of our investigative focus is defensible: so many possibilities, so little time. Yet it is the very discomfort of which the poet speaks that gives birth to the resolve required to overcome the bastards who would mire us in mystery. And since both “fact” and “reason” remain firmly within our reach, the adoption of Negative Capability as a defining principle for our efforts would be at least stupid, if not immoral. We have no right to the luxury of not knowing.

George Michael Evica

Let us leave behind, at least for a few blessed moments, those out-of-tune, regurgitating castrati.  Permit me to re-introduce to all who truly seek to define and effect justice for President Kennedy my beloved friend, mentor, spiritual guide and now spirit guide, Professor George Michael Evica.

George Michael ascended 17 years ago, but always I refer to him in the present tense.  George Michael is a polymath of the highest order.  Among his areas of expertise which he discussed from classroom

and conference podiums as well as on the printed page and via electronic media are Myth and Ritual in Literature, Genre Studies in Literature, Literary Criticism, Consciousness Development and the Symbolic Process, Linguistics, Film Studies, Creative Writing, and Investigative Reporting. He pursued Advanced Studies in Linguistics and Anthropology at Columbia University and Advanced Studies in Myth and Literature at the Hartford Seminary Foundation. All of these disciplines and areas of inquiry and expertise — in the aggregate a furious storm of inspirational influences unsurpassed before or since — thoroughly inform his Kennedy-related endeavors.

Only the great knight errant Peter Dale Scott stands shoulder-to-shoulder with George Michael at the forefront of our battalion of Satyagrahi.

It is all but forgotten that George Michael organized and hosted the first national conference on the Kennedy assassination in October, 1975, at the University of Hartford.  Jim Garrison was the keynote speaker, and he made certain to praise George Michael’s incomparable scholarship and absolute commitment to the searches for truth and justice.

George Michael is the first to understand the Kennedy assassination and other intelligence operations as by-design dramatic constructs, replete with all of the form’s essential elements.

James J. Angleton.

Evidence? Literati — storytellers — proliferate within the ranks of Kennedy assassination suspects.  A most compelling example: While a Yale undergraduate, James Jesus Angleton edited the literary magazine Furioso.  He carried on and published correspondence with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, and T.S. Eliot, among other justly celebrated writers.  At the risk of committing criminal understatement, I surmise that by the time Angleton assumed the duties of CIA Chief of Counterintelligence, he had become capable of exhibiting at least seven types of ambiguity.

Among other professional writers who, fairly or not, crowd the line-up of suspects are David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Edward Lansdale, and Clay Shaw.

Within A Certain Arrogance: The Sacrificing of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Cold War Manipulations of Religious Groups by U.S. Intelligence, his final book-length historical inquiry into the assassination and certain related pre- and post-event actions, George Michael supports and refines this assertion.

“Psychological manipulations of individual groups, whatever the procedures may have been called in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, drew upon discoveries in anatomy, mesmerism, hypnotism, counseling, studies in hysteria, rhetorical theory, psychoanalysis, advertising, behavior modification, and psychiatry.  In the same periods, the literary forms of irony, satire, and comedy and the less reputable verbal arts of slander, libel, and manufactured lies were applied.”

Now, before we are tempted to argue that the harsh realities of war often require an honorable combatant to mimic, for a limited period and with noble intent, the darker designs of an evil foe, George Michael reminds us that, “Most of these genres and strategies were enlisted in the service of social, class, and political power.”

Haunting the pages of A Certain Arrogance is a revelation so menacing in its assaults on convention as to provoke a reflexive shielding of our eyes from its searing illumination.  Yet George Michael could not spare us the psychic pain that is the unavoidable side effect of his radical scholarship insofar as such suffering remains the sine qua non for the eradication of the common malady we would treat.

Within the nucleus of the disease, George Michael discovers and reveals “a treasonous cabal of hard-line American and Soviet intelligence agents whose masters were above Cold War differences.”

Combined with lessons taken from my own decades of study, George Michael’s conclusion contributes to my certainty that the assassination of President Kennedy was a supra-national operation

George Michael and his brilliant, beautiful wife Alycia Brierley Evica welcomed me into their family, and I eagerly returned the compliment.  The stories I could tell … but they are for another campfire.  For our purposes, I shall often refer to the Evicas’s influence on my assassination research and, indeed, on the development of my modest skills as an investigator and evaluator of deep phenomena.

For now … November is a cruel month, and one that figures all too prominently in the life and times of George Michael.

It was on a brilliant, unnaturally warm November morning in 2007 that loved ones laid him to rest.

As I carried the incongruously small urn that contained his physical remains, my thoughts drifted to another November day, when George Michael and I had found ourselves in Dealey Plaza at dusk, far from the madding crowd.  Light was filtered thinly through brittle leaves and sorrow.  And I asked if he too sensed the presence of unquiet spirits.

As usual, George Michael was light years ahead of me.  He said that he had experienced such feelings on many occasions in that terrible place.  He spoke at length, his voice quiet yet redolent with conviction, about his certainty that the fight against the forces that assassinated President Kennedy, the same forces that today prowl the killing fields of the Middle East and eastern Europe and Africa and Asia and the Americas, endure into the next world.

The peace within Saint John’s churchyard where George Michael and Alycia find their rest represents but a temporary respite.

Permit me to offer two original hypotheses for your consideration.  First up, what I have termed within the context of the Kennedy assassination, and by extension, in intelligence operations in general, as the “Doppelganger Gambit.”

“Doppelganger” classically is an unrelated human double and, in literature, often a harbinger of evil and even doom.  “Gambit” may be defined as “a clever action in a game or other situation that is intended to achieve an advantage and usually involves taking a risk.”  What I am describing finds two or more iterations of the same operation, individual, object, or occurrence that, upon examination, lead investigators to irreconcilable conclusions that ultimately promote internecine, inquiry-stymying conflicts.

Note, as revealed in our studies, the presence — with apologies to crows everywhere — of a double-murder of doppelgangers: Oswalds, rifles, Zapruder films, brains, autopsy films and reports, two official U.S. government investigations producing conflicting conclusions, identifications of conspiracy Sponsors, Facilitators and Mechanics (more on those categories in a moment), and attack scenarios.

This is not to discount the related manifestations of “natural doppelgangers,” which may best be appreciated as examples of “high strangeness.”

Thus the foundational objectives of the Kennedy cover-up are brilliantly served: endlessly prolong debate of the undebatable, afford to the lone nut lie the illusion of a level playing field with the conspiracy truth, and generate a paralytic sense of “we’ll never know” helplessness among all but the most impassioned, astute investigators.

Which leads us to focus on my second original hypothesis: my suspicions regarding the so-called “Chicago plot” Dallas doppelganger. I am doing so at greater length insofar as the research community majority’s egregiously superficial and complacent acceptance of the subject’s ludicrous paper-thin official narrative speaks powerfully to my regurgitation-cogitation observations.

My primary source is “The Plot to Kill JFK” by Edwin Black, as published in “The Chicago Independent” of November,1975.

President Kennedy is scheduled to attend the Army/Air Force football game in Chicago on November 2, 1963.  As best can be discerned, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the U.S Secret Service (SS) — receive two tips alerting them to a plot to assassinate the chief executive as he rides in a motorcade from the airport to the sports stadium.  Its route includes a 90-degree turn during passage through a warehouse district with multiple tall buildings.

The tips are said to come from an informant known to history only as “Lee”.  The source of a separate tip identifying as an assassin one Thomas Arthur Vallee remains unknown to this day.

The “Lee” tip describes a four-man hit team of “organized, paramilitary assassins”.

On Thursday, October 31, a rooming house landlady reports to law enforcement authorities her discovery of rifles with telescopic sights and a map of the presidential motorcade route laid out on the bed of one of the “organized, paramilitary team’s” members (all four of the Latino suspects were staying at her facility).  In response, 24-hour surveillance by the CPD and SS is ordered.

Surveillance is blown when an SS agent follows the vehicle of two men fitting the landlady’s description down a dead-end alley.  The suspects turn around and pass the agent, whose window is lowered and the volume of his official radio is turned up.  Hearing official chatter, the suspects realize that their cover has been neutralized.

Early the next day, two of those sloppy housekeepers from the “organized, paramilitary team” are picked up and brought to the SS.  They never were arrested. There are no known records of their interrogations — if any were conducted.  Are bells ringing?

Now we focus our attention on aspects of the life of Thomas Arthur Vallee — our story’s Lee Harvey Oswald doppelganger.

It seems that Vallee …

• Joined the United States Marine Corps in the mid-1950s.
• Was assigned to a U-2 base, Camp Otsu, in Japan.
• Home in the States, was assigned to recruit and train anti-Castro guerrillas for a return to Cuba, where they will assassinate The Beard.
• Held extreme conservative military views.
• Owned an M-1 Rifle.
• Gained employment in a warehouse building overlooking the presidential motorcade route.

More bells ringing? …

Based on the aforementioned anonymous tip, CPD officers Daniel Groth and Peter Shurla are assigned to follow Vallee, who they are determined to “get off the street.”  On the morning of November 2, they get their chance.  They pull over Vallee in his white Ford Falcon for a minor traffic violation.  They observe a knife on the passenger seat.  They arrest Vallee, charge him with unlawful use of a weapon, and proceed to search his vehicle’s trunk.  In it they find 750 rounds of M-1 ammunition.

Allegedly under duress, Vallee consents to a search of his home by Groth and Shurla, where sure as shootin’ they discover the M-1.  There are no known records of the serial number of Vallee’s weapon ever having been checked.

Two members of the four-man “organized, paramilitary team” remain at large.  The threat level is heightened.  Accordingly, the SS recommends that President Kennedy’s Chicago trip be cancelled.  And so it is.  The official excuse presented to the public: The president must remain in Washington to monitor events in Southeast Asia in the wake of the coup in South Vietnam that resulted in the murders of the Ngo brothers.

Are you sitting down?  The two detained members of the “organized, paramilitary team” are released and disappear from history.  And it gets better.

Subsequent to the unraveling of the Chicago charade, President Kennedy is allowed to make his previously scheduled trip to New Orleans — even after a “credible” warning of an assassination attempt in the Crescent City had been received, and with the certain knowledge that Chicago’s Modern Assassins Quartet remained at large.

I mention in passing that Thomas Arthur Vallee was not called to testify before the Warren Commission.

James W. Douglass reminds us that a contemporaneous attempt to check Vallee’s auto registration found that it was “frozen,” or classified, and available only to the FBI.

By 1975, Officer Shurla had been elevated to the force’s highest level intelligence unit.

Officer Groth, known to maintain significant intelligence connections, commanded the CPD team that assassinated Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

Northern Illinois University Professor Dan Stern discovered that Groth received FBI and CIA high-level training, and that the CPD and CIA were “very tight.”

Thus my hypothesis holds that the Chicago charade is suggestive of the storytelling genius of one or more of the assassination conspiracy’s key Facilitators.  It was, I submit, a designed doppelganger — crafted in its beyond-coincidence yet superficial mirror images of Dallas plot-related components to function as a bodyguard of lies protecting the one true operation from damage caused by anticipated all-but-inevitable leaks.

Leaked threats of a Dallas hit involving a trained team of assassins shooting the president from a warehouse with the aid of a former Marine who helped control U-2 missions from a secret CIA base in Japan plausibly could be attributed to the alleged Chicago operation and its doppelganger elements.

The results?  Chicago was blown, Dallas was safe.  Heightened security measures on November 22 were deemed unnecessary.

There simply is no other satisfactory explanation in terms of operational requirements for why Thomas Arthur Vallee, the Chicago patsy, would be so closely modeled on Lee Harvey Oswald.  And it must be noted that those similarities, in the case of the alleged Windy City shooter, were paper thin — just close enough to cover Dallas leaks. The deeper elements of Oswald’s background that qualified him to be the “perfect patsy” were absent from the Vallee profile.

And why was a key Chicago charade informant publicly identified as “Lee”?

So does my Chicago hypothesis stand to reason?  The late H.P. Albarelli, Jr. may have agreed with me, given his revelation, on page 325 of his A Secret Order: an intelligence officer who declined to be named in the book told him, “It’s a common ploy within the CIA.  Sometimes there can be three or four operations in play at one time but only one is actually fully planned and intended to go forward.”

Another bit of admittedly circumstantial evidence must be noted.  On what would be the last night of his life, President Kennedy responded to Texas Congressman Henry Gonzalez’s urgent plea for him to cancel his Dallas visit due to active serious threats, with an assurance that I paraphrase: “Don’t worry, Henry.  The Secret Service has taken care of it.”

Indeed they had.

To my knowledge, challenges neither to my Doppelganger Gambit nor my Chicago plot hypotheses — nor, for that matter, any challenges to the stale, conventional interpretations of these matters — has been forthcoming

Regurgitators regurgitate.

A final point regarding the post-Chicago career advances of CPD officers Groth and Shurla.  Can we detect a pattern developing?  A rewards system?  Captain William Westbrook of the Dallas Police Department has been linked to the fatal shooting of Officer J. D. Tippit.  He later turns up in Laos and involved in CIA actions.  Marrell ‘Mac’ McCollough, the Memphis police officer with intelligence connections clearly visible in photos kneeling next to the fallen, fatally wounded Martin Luther King, Jr., soon thereafter secured gainful overseas employment with the CIA.  The odyssey of Thane Eugene Cesar, who as you will recall was the uniformed security guard positioned directly behind Robert Kennedy when he was assassinated — a journey that delivered Cesar to the Philippines where he comfortably lived out his days — has yet to be fully examined.

At this point, reconsideration of the Dallas patsy may be of value.

Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?  What was Lee Harvey Oswald?  A poetically insightful answer to those questions was provided by American novelist James Lee Burke — although he likely was not thinking of the accused assassin when he wrote, in Rain Gods:

“If an individual, through either his own volition or events over which he had no control, found himself taking up residence in a country undefined by flags or physical borders, he could be assured of one immediate and abiding consequence: He was on his own, and solitude and loneliness would probably be his companions unto the grave.”

And Graham Greene, long before “Oswald” became a household curse, nailed it with precision and concision in The Quiet American:

“Innocence is a kind of insanity.”

George Michael now must take a second curtain call.  Not long before his ascension, he was approached by a young, full-of-herself graduate school filmmaker and asked if he would cooperate in the making of a documentary focused on his academic career in general and his Kennedy assassination research in particular.  He agreed, and filming soon commenced.

All that has survived the wee documentarian’s sudden and shocking abandonment of the project are brief outtakes in which George Michael shares his thoughts on important areas of Kennedy-related investigations.  They are available on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website.  Offered here is a transcript of George Michael’s views on Oswald.

“We’re looking at a multiplicity of characters and characterizations.  And Oswald was a self-characterizer.

“People think the whole essence of ‘I want to be a spy’ defines him.  Not necessarily.  There’s a kind of openness to experience, there’s an intelligence there, there’s a need to know, there’s duplicity, a kind of serious quietness about the person, and transformations which are very curious, very important.

“I’m interested in his speech patterns … grammar and rhetoric … logic or illogic …and how he goes right to the point, for example, incredibly and accurately pinpointing where he has to go.

“There is one-half a degree of separation between Lee Harvey Oswald and covert operations of the CIA.

“Once you have worked in the ‘field’ of Oswald and studied Oswald, you begin to see how many diverse and interesting and sometimes major contradictions there are in the Lee Harvey Oswald story.”

A third Evica curtain call?  Why not?

In JFK Lancer’s Kennedy Assassination Chronicles, Volume 4, Issue 1, George Michael wrote, “In 1992, at the ASK Conference in Dallas, Charles Drago, novelist and investigative historian, first proposed an amnesty/immunity commission program relative to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  Drago, now a contributing editor [to this publication], reached sympathetic ears in both the media and the assassination research community.  I began a close association with Drago at that time, and we both prepared for the moment when an amnesty proposal would have the greatest impact.”

That moment arrived when arguably the most prestigious JFK research conference series not called ASK — let’s refer to it as “Bengal” — at its 1997 Dallas event, announced its support of our formation of an independent task force to draft legislation establishing a legislative amnesty initiative.  Its goal would be to encourage surviving material witnesses in the assassination to come forward.

The sole founders of that original JFK Truth and Amnesty Commission are George Michael, attorney William Xanttopoulos, researcher Chris Courtwright, and this writer.

We designed the initiative to be the logical successor legislation to the historic JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.  It was modeled on the South Africa Commission of Truth and Reconciliation, and was intended, in the words of George Michael, “ … to make historical sense of the flood of new and important documents made available by the Assassination Records Review Board.”  He added, “We are offering what most likely will be the last opportunity for these witnesses to clear their consciences, serve their country, and tell the truth.”

Bengal generously allowed the founders to conduct an informal introductory meeting in one of its conference’s break-out rooms.  More than 50 conference attendees were extraordinarily excited about our plans to the point where, unasked, they wrote checks to support them.  George Michael accepted the checks for safekeeping and took responsibility for setting up a non-profit corporation, including its financial component.

Then a top Bengal executive to whom we shall refer as “Kerr,” who had promised to provide live-or-die financial and logistical support to our effort, determined that a surprise was just what the moment called for. Kerr marched onto the break-out room’s dais with a well-known Kennedy researcher in tow and, without our permission, installed him as the putative Commission’s executive director.

George Michael privately informed Kerr that the addition to the Commission’s leadership structure she demanded was, for numerous reasons, unacceptable.  The response: he stays, or our support goes.

Within 48 hours, George Michael and I secured unanimous agreement among Commission founders to withdraw from the Bengal affiliation.  George Michael ripped up the checks and returned them to the original donors.

I strongly suspect that those with the most to lose if the Commission had moved forward had acted swiftly and effectively.  And I can’t help but wonder if the same forces have blunted the more recent efforts to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

I note for the record that none of the founders of that second attempt took the time and effort to research, let alone acknowledge our earlier effort.  So I conducted a comprehensive education campaign, recounting our origin story every time I saw a Social Media announcement touting the current work.  Only Professor Peter Dale Scott, a member of the later commission’s board, stepped forward to state publicly that, in his opinion, our groundbreaking initiative was worthy of the JFK research community’s attention and respect.

No one followed his lead.

The later commission, comprised of a “Who’s Who” (or as I prefer, “Who’s What?”) of Kennedy assassination researchers, apparently chose for its first formal act the submission of a petition to the United States government demanding release of all relevant sequestered files and physical evidence.

Years later, presuming a petition was ever submitted, a response remains … anticipated.

If these handkerchiefs-in-their-sleeves warriors had been on the march in Germany in 1940, they likely would have submitted to the Reich the following:

Dear Chancellor Hitler,

We the undersigned respectfully request that you reconsider your policies regarding the Jews of Europe.

Kindly,

What they and others have yet to understand is that speaking truth to power is almost always an exercise in frustration.  Instead we must speak truth about power to those who are victimized by it.

Let us conclude by restating and reexamining my marching order with which I opened this essay — an order I have not the slightest authority to impose.

We are obliged, morally and professionally and as a matter of personal honor, to apply all that we have learned through our investigations to define and effect justice for John Fitzgerald Kennedy and for all collaterally damaged by his assassins.

Rest assured that I am not arguing for an abandonment of new research into the Dealey Plaza attack, including its preparations, execution, and ongoing cover-up, and the identity and motives of its Sponsors, Facilitators and Mechanics.

After all, please recall that earlier I made reference to the Kennedy assassination as a “solved and unsolved” case.  Conspiracy has been proven.  Justice has not followed.

“The CIA” is most frequently — and incorrectly — identified as the assassination’s Sponsor.  The mindless assigning of guilt to a soulless corporate entity is, in this instance, the equivalent of crediting the chisel for the sculptor’s creation.

The CIA is, in my opinion and that of many others, nothing other than a secret police force servicing the global agendas of those individuals and families that, unencumbered by flags, anthems, pledges, and lines on maps, inhabit the highest levels of economic, political, and cultural power and influence.

You know — the Sponsors of the Kennedy assassination.

So what of justice?

I have neither the wisdom nor the temerity to attempt to define justice in this case — at least not without the collaboration of individuals far wiser and confident than am I.  The late novelist and poet Jim Harrison was similarly flummoxed by his own search for justice’s very definition.  He presented the problem in this heart-wrenching, brilliant passage from his novella Legends of the Fall:

“People finally don’t have much affection for questions, especially ones so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishments on earth.  The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being so otiose, so naïve.  And we are not concerned with the grander issues: say the Nez Perce children receiving the hail of cavalry fire in their sleeping tents.  Nothing is quite so grotesque as the meeting of a child and a bullet.  And what distances in comprehension: the press at the time insisted we had won.  We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle at such a monstrosity: the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping.  Of course not: immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private manner dashes his brains against the long-suffering question that is so luminously obvious.  Even gods aren’t exempt: note Jesus’s howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity.  And we can’t seem to go from large to small because everything is the same size.  Everyone’s skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.”

Jim Harrison.

And what if somehow we can arrive at a definition of justice and a methodology to effect it?  Won’t the Manichean world view re-assert its dominance and drag us back to states of ignorance and injustice and suicidal, unresolvable conflict?

Won’t the “Wayang Kulit,” the Indonesian shadow play in which leather puppets represent good and evil locked in eternal conflict, continue its endless series of revivals?

Some years ago, sickened by images of great white trophy hunters grinning emptily as they posed with the innocents they had slaughtered, I wrote the following brief poem — a hopeful conjuration to summon salvation and justice:

beauty beyond repair

the fabric of the heart,
torn by the gentlest rain,
are the innocent spared pain
by the god of bullets

is the fading thought of the den,
where cries dissolve to light,
and then reunion, as if night
were just a story

take them for your wall,
seek their courage from seasoned hearts,
where you end is where the wolf starts
the elk soars the pheasant gallops the elephant walks on water

How dare we think that we can end the madness?  Forget Lee Harvey Oswald — who do we think we are?  Are we, as I once naively boasted from a conference podium, the Lakota of AIM … the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising … the Viet Cong of Tet … the Palestinian resistors of Gaza?

How does our quest end for us?  We turn again to novelist James Lee Burke for guidance. In this ruminative passage, written in the voice of his fictional Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux, he seems to tell us that the universe has no arc, but rather is a circle on which we run through eternity.

Burke:

“Down the canyon, smoke from meat fires drafted through the cedar and mesquite trees, and if I squinted my eyes in the sun’s setting, I could almost pretend that Spanish soldiers in silver chest armor and bladed helmets or a long-dead race of hunters were encamped on those hillsides.  Or maybe even old compatriots in butternut brown wending their way in and out of history — gallant, Arthurian, their canister-ripped colors unfurled in the roiling smoke, the fatal light in their faces a reminder that the contest is never quite over, the field never quite ours.”

FADE TO BLEAK.

THE END

Charles R. Drago is an author, screenwriter, jazz critic, media host and festival producer, and radical historian focused on the political assassinations of the 1960s and related deep events. He has lectured and published widely on the latter topics at scholarly conferences and meetings and in scholarly journals throughout the United States.

Mr. Drago contributed the “Introduction” to A Certain Arrogance by George Michael Evica, a book-length investigation of U.S. intelligence manipulations of liberal religious and educational institutions during the Cold War.  Professor Evica referred to him as “the conscience of JFK research community.”  He is also the author of the “Afterword” to Coup in Dallas, by H.P. Albarelli, Jr..

Mr. Drago is the creator of Autumn Too Long and Phantoms of the 7^th, limited series for premium cable, and the author of the novel Mairh: A False History, all works in progress.

Copyright © AARC. All rights reserved.

The AARC presents a new series of lectures commemorating and honoring the legacy of President Kennedy, the inspirational meaning of his term of office, and the consequences of his assassination sixty-one years ago.

In the words of the distinguished British scholar Malcolm Blunt, “Jesus Christ, what we lost when we lost that man.”

By Dan Alcorn

Earlier this year, the  Assassination  Archives  and  Research  Center  filed  a  petition  with  the  U.S. Supreme  Court  to  bring  a  freedom  of  information  case  before  that court.  The  case  involved a freedom  of  information  request  for  individuals  that  are  related  to  the  assassination  of  President  Kennedy  in  1963.

There  are  three  subjects  of  the  Freedom  of  Information  request:  the  first  is  David  Harold  Byrd,  who  was  the  owner  of  the  Texas  School  Book  Depository  building  in  1963.  That’s  where  the  shots  were  said  to  have  been  fired  at  the  president.  The  second  subject  of  the request  is  Werner  von  Alvensleben,  who  had  been  an intelligence asset – a double agent  for the  U.S.  OSS  in  World  War  II, and  who  was  associating  with  David  Harold  Byrd,  the  owner  of  the  Book  Depository  building  around  the  time  of  the  assassination. The  third  subject  of the  request  was  the  Doolittle  Report  in  1954.

General James Doolittle

President  Eisenhower  commissioned  Jimmy  Doolittle, a World  War  II  hero,  to  examine  the  covert   activities  of  the  CIA  with  the  goal  of  making  them  more  effective  and  efficient.  [See The Doolittle Report] Jimmy  Doolittle  conducted  a  fairly  quick  review  of  CIA  activities  and  then  made  certain  recommendations.  This is of interest because  Jimmy  Doolittle  and  David  Harold  Byrd  were  substantial  friends  according  to  General  Doolittle  and  so  that  is  another  connection  that  we have that we  are  interested  in.

We  have  not  been  able  to  get  access  to  the  operational  files  of  the  CIA;  they’ve  refused  to  give  us  access  to  any  of  the  operational  files  about  these  three  subjects  of  the  investigation.  This  is  important  to  us  because  we  have  sourcing  from  the  Dallas  Morning  News  that  Werner  von  Alvensleben  was  in  Dallas  in  late  1963  as  the  guest  of  David  Harold  Byrd.  And  this  is  important  as  we  get  into  the  background  of  Werner  von  Alvensleben  because  at  one  time,  earlier  in  his  career  in  1933,  he  had  been  an  assassin  for  Heinrich  Himmler,  the  Nazi  leader  in  Hitler’s  Germany,  and  that  makes  it  relevant  to  exploring  what  was  going  on  in  1963.

Back  to  a  little  background  of  the  owner  of  the  Book  Depository  building;  it  is  surprising  that  not  all  of  these  facts  have  been  known  until  this  point  because  we’re  61  years  beyond  the  assassination,  yet  there  are  key  relevant  facts  that  are  still  emerging.  I  saw  the  name  of  David  Harold  Byrd  on  the  historical  plaque  on  the  side  of  the  building,  the  Schoolbook  Depository  building,  when  I  was  in  Dallas,  maybe  20,  25  years  ago,  and  I  noticed  David  Harold  Byrd,  BYRD,  spelled like the  famous  political  family  in  Virginia,  the  Virginia  political  Byrds,  who  basically  controlled  the  politics  of  the  state  in  almost  the  entire  20th  century.

When  I  saw  that  name,  I  thought  they  couldn’t  possibly  be  connected  in  any  way,  but  I  was  wrong.  It  turns  out  that  they  were  related,  they were  distant  cousins,  but  they  were  related  and  they  developed  a  relationship  through  David  Harold  Byrd,  the  owner  of  the  Book  Depository  building, who  became  a  financial  supporter  of  the  activities  of  Admiral  Richard  Byrd,  who  was  the  brother  of  U .S.  Senator  Harry  F.  Byrd.

Who  was  David  Harold  Byrd,  the  owner  of  the  Book  Depository  building?  We  know  that  he  was  a  founder  of  the  Civil  Air  Patrol  in the entire country, and  he  served  as  one  of  the  leaders  of  the  Civil  Air  Patrol  on  a  national  level.  He  was  on  the  National  Executive  Committee,  which  had  about  11  people  on  it.  He  was  the vice  chairman  for  a  good  period  of  time  and  chairman  at  another  time.  This  is  relevant  because  Lee  Harvey  Oswald  was  a  cadet  in  the  Civil  Air  Patrol  when  he  was  in  New  Orleans  in  High  School  and  that  has  led  some  to  believe  that  there  might  be  some  meaning  in  Oswald’s  membership  in  the  Civil  Air  Patrol.

Why  are  we  interested  in  David  Harold  Byrd  as  the  owner  of  the  Book  Depository  building?  It’s  because,  after  the  assassination,  Byrd  ordered  the  sniper’s  window  removed  from  the  building  and  set  up  in  his  mansion  in  Dallas  as  a  display  item.  And,  it  was  reported  that  various  social  events  thereafter  occurred  in  front  of  that  window.  As  seen  in   photographs  of  the  window  in  Byrd’s  house,  there  are  various  depictions  of  the  single  bullet  theory  that  are  taped  to  the  window  panes,  and  it’s  clearly  made  as  a  display  item  that  supports  the  official  Warren  Commission  version  of  the  assassination  and  the  single  bullet  theory.

As  I  mentioned,  there is  also  interested  in  Byrd’s  relationship  with  Jimmy  Doolittle.  Jimmy  Doolittle  turns  out  to  have  been  a  high-ranking  intelligence  advisor  to  President  Eisenhower  and  a  substantial  friend  of  David  Harold  Byrd.

Among  other  people,  our  research  has  found–  were  known  to  David  Harold  Byrd,  was  an  Ernst  Udet.  U -D -E -T,  and  he  was  the  number  two  in  the  Luftwaffe  to  Hermann  Göring  in  Nazi  Germany.  Byrd  describes  Udet  as  a  close  friend  in  Byrd’s  autobiography,  and  Udet  was  in  charge  of research  and  development  for  the  Luftwaffe,  which  is  the  theme  that  seems  to  run  through  some  of  these  connections:  the  forward -looking  research  and  development  process  for  aviation  and  aerospace.  Aviation  was  the  basis  for  the  relationship  between  Byrd  and  Ernst  Udet  of  the  Luftwaffe.

Our  interest  in  Werner  von  Alvensleben  is  that  he  ran  a  big  game  hunting  concession  in  Portuguese  East  Africa  called  Safarilandia.  This  was  said  to  be  the  largest  big  game  hunting  operation  in  Africa.  Von  Alvensleben  had  gone  to  Africa  in  World  War  II  where  he  ultimately  served  as  a  double  agent  for  the  OSS  in  Portuguese  East  Africa.  After  the  war  he  tried  to  come  to  the  United  States,  but  he  was  denied  permission  to  migrate  to  the  United  States,  and  he  stayed  in  Portuguese  East  Africa  and  created  the  big  game  hunting  operation.  He  had  an  elite  clientele,  King  Juan  Carlos  of  Spain  was  an  example,  Stavros  Niarchos,  the  shipping  magnate,  was a client.  David  Harold  Byrd  was  reported  to  be  a  client  at  Safarilandia.  And  the  Dallas  Morning  News  reported  that  Byrd  was  at  Safarilandia  on  November  22, 1963.  And  that  is  a  story  that  places  Byrd’s  location  at  the  time  of  the  assassination.

There  is  some  corroborating  evidence  for  that  in  the  form  of  a  photograph  of  an  elephant  with writing on it saying “shot  by  Harold  Byrd  December  7th  1963.”  This  is  part  of  a  photo  series  that  was  produced  on  the  hunt  that  Byrd  was  said  to  have  attended.  And  this  photo  series  was  created  by  von  Alvensleben’s  nephew,  Christian  von  Alvensleben,  and  he  has  posted  it  on  the  internet  under  the  website  as  “Mozambique  1963.”

However,  this  photo  series  raises  some  troubling  questions.  One  is  that  Christian  von  Alvensleben  shows  a  photograph  that  he  identifies  as  David  Harold  Byrd  arriving  at  Safarilandia  for  the  November  22nd  Safari  hunt.  But, the  person  in  the  photograph  is  not  David  Harold  Byrd,  it’s  just  clearly  not  him.  It’s  an  older  gentleman,  but  not  David  Harold  Byrd.  We  don’t  know  who  this  individual is.

There  are  no  photographs  in  the  Christian  von  Alvensleben  photo  series  that  are  identifiable  as  David  Harold  Byrd,  nor  is  he  in  the  photograph  with  the  elephant  that’s  been  shot.  David  Harold  Byrd  is  not  in  that  photograph,  though  it  says  the  animal  was  shot  by  him.  So,  it  has  raised  a  question  about  whether  David  Harold  Byrd  was  in  fact  in  Safarilandia  in  Portuguese  East  Africa  at  the  time  of  the  assassination,  as  there  seemed  to  be  another  individual  there  identified  as  Byrd.  There’s also someone  in  the  photo  series  named  Tom  May  who’s  identified  as  a  Dallas  schoolbook  publisher  and  it’s  not  known  who  this  individual  is  as  well.

In  researching  Werner  von  Alvensleben  and  his  big  game  hunting  operation,  I  came  across  the  information  that  von  Alvensleben ‘s  favorite  rifle  was  the  Mannlicher-Schoenauer  rifle. Of  course,  I  was  familiar  with  the  Mannlicher  -Carcano  because  that’s  the  rifle  said  to  have    been  used  to  kill  President  Kennedy.  I  wasn’t  aware  of  the  Mannlicher-Schonauer.  I  did  some  research  and  it  turns  out  that  the  Mannlicher-Schonauer  was  the  finest  hunting  rifle  of  that  era,  it  was  an  Austrian  rifle.

It  was  said  on  numerous  sites  devoted  to  guns  and  ammunition.  that  the  Mannlicher-Schonauer  and  the  Mannlicher-Carcano  rifles  used  essentially  identical  ammunition. Very  difficult  to  tell  the  two  cartridges  apart.  There  are  sources  among  the  blogs  that  say  the  ammunition, some  ammunition  was  manufactured  with  the  purpose  of  being  used  interchangeably  between  the  two  rifles.  Well, this  rifle  was  the  favorite  rifle  of  Werner  von  Alvensleben,  the  big  game  hunter.  It  was  also  favored  by  other  big  game  hunters  of  the  time because  of  its  ability  to  stop  large  animals;  that  was  what  it  was  particularly  effective  for.  In  researching  the  Mannlicher-Schoenauer  rifle  I  came  across  testimony  to  the  Warren  Commission; it came  up  before  the  Warren  Commission in the following way: Warren  Commissioner  John  McCloy  was  at  a  session  in  which  the  FBI  ballistics  expert, Robert  Frazier,  testified.  John  McCloy  interrupted  the  questioning  to  ask  his  own  question,  which  was  whether  the  three  hulls (cartridges)  that  were  found  on  the  sixth  floor  of  the  Book  Depository  building  could  have  been  fired  by  a  Mannlicher-Schonauer  rifle  rather  than  a  Mannlicher-Carcano  rifle.  FBI  expert  Frazier  responded  that  he  was  not  familiar  with  the  Mannlicher-Schonauer  rifle,  and  so  he  could  not  express  an  opinion  because  he  just  did  not  have  sufficient  knowledge  to  answer  the  question.  John  McCloy  responded  that  he  himself  owned  a  Mannlicher-Schoenauer  rifle  and  that  he  was  familiar  with  it.

The  question  never  was  answered in  the  Warren  Commission  testimony  on  ballistics.  It  was  left  unanswered  and  it  leaves  open  the  possibility  for  further  investigation  whether  the  shells  that  are  at  the  National  Archives  that  came  from  the  6th  floor,  whether  they  are  indeed  Mannlicher-Carcano  hulls (cartridges).

In  understanding  the  background  of  David  Harold  Byrd  and  how  he  came  to  be  the  person  that  he  was,  I  came  across  the  fact  that  he  was  a  significant  U.S. government  contractor  in  the ownership  of  companies  that  contracted  with  the  U.S.  government.  His  company, TEMCO,  was  set  up  after  World  War  II  to  continue  aviation  manufacturing  in  the  Dallas-Fort  Worth  area.  Dallas-Fort  Worth  had  been  the  site  of  some  of  the  factories  in  World  War  II  that  manufactured bombers during  the  Roosevelt  administration.  When  the  war  ended,  the  people  who  ran  these  plants  wanted  to  continue  the  work,  and  they  approached  David  Herold  Byrd  about  obtaining  financing  to  be  able  to  continue  building  planes  for  the  government.  And  he  did  finance  and  took  a  large  ownership  stake  in  TEMCO,  which  stood  for  Texas  Engineering  Manufacturing  Company.

Research  showed  that  TEMCO  became  a  prime  contractor  for  the  Air  Force  in  the  field  of  electronic  warfare.  This  began  in  the  early  1950s  when  with  the  Korean  War  there  was  a  big  step -up  in  military  contracting  and  the  Air  Force  picked  five  contractors  to  do  sole source  contracting  for the  Air  Force  to  outfit  the  secret  electronics  onto  Air  Force  planes  that  could  be  used  then  to  fly  into  hostile  airspace  or  near  borders  of  hostile  countries.  This  was  the  important  reconnaissance  function  of  the  Air  Force.  These  planes,  the  jet  version  that  came  out  later  in  the  50s,  was  the  RC -135  reconnaissance  plane  and  TEMCO,  Byrd’s  company, financed and performed  the  electronics  outfitting  of  the  RC -135.  The Air  Force  set  up  a  sole  source  non-compete  contracting  arrangement  for  five  companies.  TEMCO  was  one  of  the  five  companies  that  performed  this  work.

Out  of  this  work  from  TEMCO  developed  a  company  called  E-Systems  and  E-Systems  stood  for  the  part  of  TEMCO  that  was  working the  electronics  for  electronic  warfare.    TEMCO  merged  with  Ling  and  Vought  in  1960  creating  a  company,  LTV,  Ling  TEMCO  Vought,  that  became  a  large  defense  contractor  in  the  1960s.  Out  of  Ling  TEMCO  Vought  Electro  Systems  developed  doing  this  electronics  work  and  then  the  name  was  changed  to  E-Systems  in  the  1960s.  E-Systems  is  well  known  as  a  very  large  CIA  contractor  and  one  of  the  significant  ones  of  that  era.

Research  showed  that  in  1975,  because  of  the  Church  Committee  investigation,  the  CIA  needed  to  sell  its  Air  America  proprietary  airline; CIA decide it would be best to unload it because of the controversy, so the CIA asked  E-Systems  if  they  would  buy  Air  America  from  the  CIA.

E-Systems  decided  that  they  did  not  want  all  of  Air  America,  but  they  would  take  the  Air  America  ground  maintenance.  function.  And  so,  they  bought  Air  Asia  from  the  CIA  in  1975.  There  are  documents  on  the  CIA  website  that  show  this,  and  this shows how  close  E-Systems  was  to  the  CIA.  There  are  also  documents  on  the  CIA’s  website  that  indicate  that  when  Robert  Gates  was  appointed  deputy  director  of  the  CIA  in  the  late  1980s,  he  was  making  goodwill  trips  around  the  country  to  various  cities,  and  there  was  a  proposed  itinerary  for  Dallas  when  he  went  to  Dallas  and  the  proposed  itinerary  began  with  a  trip,  a  visit  to  E-Systems  corporate  facility  in  Dallas  and  then  on  to  the  Dallas  Morning  News  and  then  to  an  appearance  at  the  World  Affairs  Council  in  Dallas.  So, another  indication  that  E-Systems  was  closely  aligned  with  the  CIA  and  as  I  say,  E-Systems  came  out  of  a  company  financed  by  David  Harold  Byrd  doing  electronic  warfare  mechanical  work.

In  addition,  the  Carswell  Air  Force  base  in  Fort  Worth  was  the  headquarters  of  the  Eighth  Air  Force,  and  the  Eighth  Air  Force  was  the  primary  bombing  organization  from  the  United  States  that  was  sent  to  England  during  World  War  II  to  bomb  Germany.  It  was  really  the strongest  bombing  power  that  the  U.S.  military  had.  And  the  Eighth  Air Force  was  commanded  at  times  in  World  War  II  by  Jimmy  Doolittle.  And  it  was affiliated  with  the  Strategic  Air  Command  under  Curtis  LeMay.   Research found  a  photograph  of  a  VIP  inspection  of  the  Carswell  Air  Force  Base  in  1949.  And  that  photograph  shows  Curtis  LeMay,  Richard  Russell,  Senator  Richard  Russell,  who  was  Chairman  of  the  Armed  Services  Committee  of  the  Senate  and  was  on  the  Warren  Commission.,  Ramey,  who  was  the  head  of  the  8th  Air  Force,  Stuart  Simington,  who  was  Secretary  of  the  Air  Force  in  1949,  Lyndon  Johnson,  U.S.  Senator  from  Texas  at  the  time,  and  Homer  Thornberry,  who  was  a  member  of  the  U.S.  Congress.  The  caption  for  this  photograph  said  there  were  two  other  VIP’s present who  weren’t  in  the  photograph.  One  was  Amon  Carter,  the  famous  businessman  from  Fort  Worth,  and  the  other  was  D.  Harold  Byrd,  Vice  Chairman  of  the  Civil  Air  Patrol.  This  gathering  occurred  at  the  inspection  of  Carswell  Air  Force  Base  in  1949.

So,  the  conclusion of the research has  indicated  there  are  connections  from  the  ownership  of  the  Schoolbook  Depository  building  to  some  of  the  most  secret  elements  of  the  government,  classified  elements,  and that  these  are  significant  connections  and  they may  have  significance  in  our  research  and  analysis  of  the  information.

Thank you.

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Dan Alcorn: Formerly a law partner of AARC co-founder, the late Bud Fensterwald, has served on the AARC board since 1991, and was a founding director of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) and served on COPA’s board until the end of the Assassination Records Review Board process in 1998. Dan has represented requesters in precedent setting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) cases in the trial and appellate courts in Washington, D.C., including cases related to the JFK assassination, the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination, allegations of misconduct in the FBI crime laboratory, death squad activity in Central America, and intelligence abuses, among other issues.

Partner 1985-1999, Fensterwald & Alcorn, A Professional Corporation specializing in Litigation, Constitutional Law/Freedom of Information, International Law, Labor & Employment/Security Clearances.

Admitted to the bar, 1980, Virginia. 1984, District of Columbia.

Director: Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, 1990-1996.

Vice-Chairman, 1994-1996 . Member: District of Columbia Bar, Virginia State Bar.

Founder, Dulles Corridor Rail Association, 1998.

Director, Assassination Archives and Research Center, 1992- 2023.

President, Assassination Archives and Research Center, 2023.

DANIEL ALCORN has been listed as an AV lawyer by Martindale-Hubbell. Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Executive Director Stuart Statler called Mr. Alcorn, “a lawyer’s lawyer” after his work on the FBI Crime Lab FOIA case.

On the C-SPAN Networks:

Daniel S. Alcorn, as a Board Member for the Assassination Archives and Research Center is featured on three videos in the C-SPAN Video Library; the first appearance was a 1997 House Committee as a Counsel for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

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