Max Holland vs the nation

I wrote this in response to Max Holland's awful piece about last fall's JFK conference in DC, which I also attended and wrote up at Robert Parry's site. Sometimes I write a letter to the editor hoping to get published. Sometimes I write hoping to actually inform someone of something. The latter was my motivation in this particular case. Here it is. I know those of you who share my passion for Real History will agree with the sentiment at the end. (I've also added a few links for the curious.)

Dear Editors,

I was shocked that you allowed Max Holland to comment on the recent JFK Conference. He’s already shown his lack of journalistic integrity on the subject. In the current piece, he made the bald-faced lie that “In point of fact, 99.99 percent of the HSCA’s report improved upon or underscored the accuracy of the Warren Report’s key findings.” It did nothing of the sort, as those of us in the research community who have actually READ the HSCA’s report know very well. Is there no fact checker at The Nation?

When you rightly avoided publishing his article espousing the notion that the KGB caused Americans to suspect CIA involvement in the JFK case, he took it to the CIA, which published it happily, since it exculpated them of any involvement in the Kennedy assassination. But that’s not necessarily a new relationship. Holland got his early start with the Voice of America, a well-known outlet for the CIA’s propaganda during the Cold War.

In fact, that was the pattern at the conference, which I also attended. While most leading researchers on the case believe elements of the CIA were directly involved, those who take the opposite view, like Holland, invariably end up having a cozy relationship with the chief suspect.

It should embarrass you to learn that Holland omitted mention of the most interesting and heated exchange at the conference. Two speakers rose to debate the acoustic evidence on which the HSCA based its conclusion of “probable conspiracy.” The first, Richard Garwin, said the sound evidence was off by a second, and therefore proved nothing. The second, Don Thomas, said that Garwin was using a different copy of the audio tape, proven by the number on the tape, and that the discrepancy was attributed to its being a copy. Thomas then showed how the sound evidence matched perfectly with all the extant video evidence. It was a stunning refutation of Garwin’s weak defense of the non-conspiracy view.

Would it surprise you to learn that Garwin was, as he admitted publicly when challenged, a CIA man? As a conference participant, I found that confession stunning. As a “journalist”, Max Holland didn’t even find that worthy of mention.

Is Max Holland a CIA asset at The Nation? If he is, that’s a tragedy for the nation and The Nation. If he isn’t, he’s simply a guy who, for whatever private reason, is more comfortable repeating the assertions of others than uncovering the truth. And his “99.99%” statement shows he’s willing to lie to do so. So it hardly matters if he’s CIA or not. Whatever he is, he sure doesn’t belong at The Nation.

We continue to learn every day how official lies bring heinous tragedy upon the innocent. His perversions of history do no less damage. We can’t learn the lessons of history when he presents a false version of it.

Lisa Pease

Max Holland's Weird "Science"

Max Holland is at it again, trying to "solve" the Kennedy assassination and "prove" that Oswald was the only actor in that drama. But to do so, he literally perverts all scientific technique.

When conducting an investigation, I think we can all agree on the following:

You find a conclusion that fits the facts.
You don't change the facts to fit the conclusion.

But what Max Holland does in the New York Times today is such a perversion of scientific method, I have to call it out.

Over the years, one of the many ways in which the lone nut scenario in the JFK assassination falls apart is this: If Oswald only had three shots, how could he make them in the time allotted by the Zapruder film? All credible experts on this matter have conceded, he can't.

Now, a scientist would say, if the only scenario that would make Oswald the lone assassin doesn't work, scientifically, than it had to be a conspiracy.

Max Holland has a different method, one which the Bush Administration seems to live daily: If the facts don't fit the desired conclusion, alter the facts. This is exactly what Holland does in his column today, co-written with Johann Rush:

If one discards the notion that Zapruder recorded the shooting sequence in full, it has the virtue of solving several puzzles that have consistently defied explanation. The most exasperating one is how did Oswald, who was able to hit President Kennedy in his upper back at a distance of around 190 feet, and then in the head at a distance of 265 feet, manage to miss so badly on the first and closest shot?

A first shot earlier than anyone has ever posited gives a plausible answer.

Incredible. The reason no one has posited a first shot earlier is because there's never been any evidence to support that!

So who does Holland turn to to support the insupportable?

Amos Euins.

I have a decent memory of all that I've read over the years, and as soon as I saw Euins referenced, I started laughing. Evidently Holland didn't bother to read Euins testimony, or was praying no one else had, because Euins is not the witness he wants to highlight.

Euins heard FOUR shots, which means there was a conspiracy. And Euins saw a man with a big white bald spot fire a gun, which means it wasn't Oswald on the sixth floor!

Now - at this point, you have three options, only one of which is useful. You can believe Holland. You can believe me. Or you can actually go look at the data yourself. I highly recommend you always choose option three. Don't just believe. Find out. On any topic.

Because most of you don't have access to the Warren Commission hearing evidence, I've summarized the key points here. You can check this out by going to a library and double checking this for yourself. But here is what Euins had to say. Interestingly, the man questioning Euins, who took his testimony re a fourth shot, was none other than Arlen Specter, the current Senator from Pennsylvania, and the man who ultimately gave the world the "magic bullet" scenario in which, like Holland, Specter simply remade the facts in the image of the conclusion he wanted.

Here are the relevant bits, from Euins testimony, WCH Vol 2, pp. 204-205:

Euins: …I seen this pipe thing sticking out the window…I could see his hand, and I could see his other hand on the trigger, and one hand was on the barrel thing.

… After he shot the first two times, I was just standing back here. And then after he shot again, he pulled the gun back in the window …

…I seen a bald spot on this man’s head, trying to look out the window. He had a bald spot on his head. I was looking at the bald spot. I could see his hand, you know the rifle laying across in his hand. …

Specter: The question I have for you now is where you were when he fired on that fourth time.

Euins: I was still behind point B [Euins identified on a map where he was at the time of each shot].

Specter: You were still at point B when he fired the fourth time?

Euins: Yes, sir. Then he pulled the gun back in the window.

Specter: Did you see him pull the gun back in the window after the fourth shot?

Euins: Yes; he just come back like this.

On page 207, Specter asks for more description of the man. Euins can’t say if he was black or white, could not tell what clothes he was wearing. Couldn’t tell if he was slender or fat. This confuses Specter. From page 208:

Specter: …Let me ask you about a couple of specific things here, Amos. In the statement [to the Sheriff’s department] you say here that he was a white man. …

Euins: No, sir; I told the man I could see a white spot on his head, but I didn’t actually say it was a white man. I said I couldn’t tell.

And hilariously, because Holland depends on Euins for the first shot, Euins didn’t even SEE the first shot, and just assumed it came from the same place. From page 209:

Specter: Amos, when you heard the first shot, did you have any reaction or impression as to where the noise was coming from at the exact time?

Euins: No, sir; not at the exact time. You know, because everybody else started looking around. [I haven’t checked the frames, but I’ve never heard anyone credibly posit a shot at the frame Max posits. I suspect people are NOT looking around at this time.] So I just started looking around, thinking it was a backfire, just like everyone else.

Specter: Did you look up towards that window before the second shot, or just when the second shot occurred?

Euins: I think—just a little before, because as soon as I did, I looked up at it—pow.

Specter: You heard a pow?

Euins: Yes, sir.

Specter: Now, as you were watching and heard, did you have the impression that the noise you heard was coming from that rifle [on the sixth floor]?

Euins: No, sir; I didn’t, because I wasn’t thinking of the rifle at first—you know, because it looked like a pipe at first.

Specter: When you say the second—when you heard the second shot, when you say you were looking at the rifle, did you have the feeling that the noise came from the rifle when you heard the second shot, when you were looking at it?

Euins: No, sir; I did not.

Specter: Well, did you have any impression at all about where the noise was coming from?

Euins: No, sir; not on the first shot.

Specter: How about the second shot?

Euins: Yes, sir.

Specter: Where did you think the noise was coming from on the second shot?

Euins: I seen him shoot on the second shot.

Specter: So you thought the noise was coming from the rifle on the second shot?

Euins: Yes, sir.

So Euins is not a good witness for when or from where the first shot was fired. He saw a man too bald to be Oswald. And ultimately, he heard enough shots to verify a conspiracy.

Great witness for the first shot, Max, eh?

Who Better, Indeed?

Dr. Gary Aguilar is a longtime Kennedy assassination researcher. I have not read Joan Mellen's work myself, and took issue with her publicly on some parts of her book as she presented it at a conference in DC last fall. But the issues I challenged her on have nothing to do with the point Gary is making here. Mel Ayton's ridiculous stance is at issue, not Mellen's book, per se. I asked Gary if I could repost his article here, and he consented.

Mel Ayton is about to publish a book on the RFK case. I'm sure it will be as honest - or dishonest - as his previous work, which is why Gary's information here is important. Gary wields a pen like men of old used to wield a rapier, disarming his opposition with speed and precision. Enjoy! - LP



Who Better to Defend the CIA than the CIA?
Gary Aguilar, San Francisco

Among myriad ironies in Mel Ayton's review of "A Farewell to Justice," perhaps the greatest is Mel Ayton's offering author Max Holland's CIA-published work as an answer to Joan Mellen's exhaustive elucidation of the myriad CIA ties to the Kennedy case.

For example, Ayton trots out Holland's remarkable discovery that the sole reason Jim Garrison had for suspecting the CIA in the events in Dallas was because he'd been duped by fiendishly clever KGB dezinformatsiya planted in a Rome daily, Il Paese Sera. Ayton apparently has more faith in the theory than even its supposed author does. For Holland refused to defend it in a public debate with me last September in Washington, D.C. before a live audience and rolling C-SPAN cameras. [1] On why he might have chosen not to, one scarcely knows where to begin.

But perhaps it's worth starting with the fact that Holland's famous breakthrough isn't Holland's, something he has never disclosed (apparently even to Ayton), but was forced to admit when I confronted him during our debate. Steve Dorril was the first one to make "Holland's" argument in an article published by Lobster Magazine in 1983, something Ayton could have easily found in a simple search of the web. [2] "Holland's" discovery apparently next surfaced when Warren Commission defender, John McAdams, ran it in a 1999 newsgroup post, [3] two years before Holland presented it for the first time.

The "proof" Dorril, McAdams and Holland offered that Il Paese Sera was a communist conduit consisted mostly of testimony the CIA's Richard Helms delivered during a 1961 Senate appearance. [3] As this author has shown, Helms's sworn assertions during this 1961 Senate appearance are no more credible than the testimony he gave during another Senate hearing that led to his conviction and the page 1 New York Times headline, "Helms Is Fined $2,000 and Given Two-Year Suspended Prison Term--U.S. Judge Rebukes Ex-C.I.A. Head for Misleading (Senate) Panel." [4]

Without offering a shred of proof, Ayton recycles Holland's dubious claim that, "the (Il Paese Sera) articles were NOT (sic) already in the works long before Shaw's arrest, as Mellen claims - It was Shaw's arrest that prompted [Il Paese Sera to write] those stories." How Ayton knows that the articles "were NOT already in the works long before Shaw's arrest," he does not say. But had Ayton (or Holland) bothered to contact Il Paese Sera's editors, they would probably have told him what they have told others: that the six-part series had nothing to do with (and said nothing about) the KGB or the JFK assassination; that they had never heard of Jim Garrison when they assigned the story six months before [which was also six months before Garrison had charged Shaw]; and that they were astonished to see that Shaw might have any connection to the assassination.

Finally, echoing Holland, Ayton claims that the Italian articles were Garrison's sole reason for suspecting the Agency. If they really were the sole source of his seduction, one would have expected some contemporaneous evidence of it. But there is none.

As Edward Epstein has pointed out, during his twenty-six-page interview in Playboy Magazine's October 1967 issue, Garrison's most comprehensive review of his case that year, the D.A. ticked off eight reasons to suspect the CIA. None of them included Il Paese Sera or the subject of the articles, the still-mysterious Rome World Trade Center, Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). [5] Nor did he even mention Clay Shaw, although perhaps because of the pending legal wrangle. [6] Moreover, Garrison wrote the foreword to Harold Weisberg's 1967-published book, entitled "Oswald in New Orleans--Case of Conspiracy with the CIA." (my emphasis) Despite the perfect opportunity, as with Playboy, Garrison again uttered not a word about Il Paese Sera, Shaw or the CMC. [7]

Finally, it is unhelpful for the central role Holland and Ayton have the Rome daily playing that Garrison never once cited or referred to those reports during the Shaw trial. Nor did he even use them as a basis for questioning Shaw. He never asked Shaw, for example, whether he had worked for CMC or for the CIA, both of which were the focus of all six stories. [8]

Ayton next rallied to the defense of a former Miami Herald reporter, Donald Bohning, who Mellen had described as "CIA linked." In response, Ayton quoted from a complaining email from the man: "(I) never took a cent from the CIA," Bohning apparently wrote, "and was outraged by the implication - along with the terms 'writer asset' and 'utilized' - Top editors at the [Miami] Herald were well aware - and approved - of my contacts with the CIA during the 1960s."

Tellingly, Ayton omits the most damning portion of Mellen's account. Even if money never changed hands, and Mellen nowhere suggests it did, Bohning's relationship with The Agency was far from the routine and casual relationship reporters have with government insiders. As Mellen points out, Bohning was apparently so useful to The Agency it gave him his own, unique cryptonym, "AMCARBON-3." Bohning "had received his Provisional Covert Security Approval as a CIA confidential informant on 8/21/67," Mellen wrote, "then Covert Security Approval itself on 11/14/67." And no less than the CIA's Deputy Director of Plans himself "approved the use of Bohning in the CIA's Cuban operations." [9]

For those who have forgotten Carl Bernstein's cautionary tale about the corrosive effect such relationships can have on credible and honest journalism [10], or the New York Times's Christmas week 1977 mea culpa for having compromised itself and its readers by engaging in similar unhealthy relationships with the CIA, a recent scandal is worth mention.
Judy Miller, the recently disgraced New York Times reporter, was such a darling of the Bush Administration and the military that she was granted a security clearance not unlike Bohning's. [11] Her bogus, prewar scare stories about the imminence of the Iraqi threat that the "leftist" New York Times published on the front page were a boon to the Neocons in the Bush Administration bent on manufacturing consent for war.

That Bohning's higher-ups at the Miami Herald knew and approved of his cozy relationship only compounds the impropriety. At least The New York Times' "top editors" publicly donned hair shirts and apologized to readers for betraying their trust. And not without reason. Bernstein documented that the problem wasn't the occasional tainting tie between the rare, lowly stringer and the CIA. It was the myriad, compromising arrangements between The Agency and the higher-ups in outfits such as CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The L. A. Times, etc. that really took the bark out of our press watchdogs. This is not to say Bohning was corrupt, but that Mellen's concern is well founded.

Ayton puts Holland in service of downplaying the links Mellen details between Clay Shaw and The Agency. "In reality, Clay Shaw had simply been one of thousands of businessmen who had once been a source for the CIA through its Domestic Contact Service - Shaw was a Kennedy supporter (and a) decorated war veteran."

Here, flag-waving is substituted for dealing with Mellen's great spadework on this interesting question. Ayton does not dispute that, as Mellen reported, Shaw had been cleared by the Agency for project QKENCHANT (which) authorized trusted CIA personnel for clearance to recruit or enlist 'civilians,' people not officially with the Agency, to discuss 'projects, activities and possible relationships.'" [p. 133]

If Ayton is right that Shaw's arrangement was unexceptional, and that "thousands" of other American businessmen had similarly been empowered by the CIA to "recruit or enlist 'civilians,'" there is no record of it. Moreover, the CIA called QKENCHANT an "operational project," not an intelligence-gathering project. And Shaw's records were kept in The Agency's "operational files," not with the "innocent" Domestic Contact files that housed the routine debriefings of 'simple' returning American businessmen.

Ironically, Ayton ignores what even Max Holland has acknowledged: Shaw lied under oath in denying his association with the CIA. "Have you ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?" Shaw's own defense attorney F. Irvin Dymond asked him. "No, I have not," replied Shaw." [11] Against the interests of his own Agency, CIA director, Richard Helms, put the lie to that. Holland relates that Shaw had had an [at least] eight-year relationship with the CIA, sending The Agency information on 33 separate occasions that the CIA invariably graded as "of value" and "reliable." [12]

One might have expected that, if only for political reasons, a Warren Commission loyalist bent on diverting suspicion from the CIA and focusing it instead on Garrison would have avoided citing Holland's essay, "The Lie That Linked the CIA to the Kennedy Assassination." For that poorly conceived, anti-Garrison tirade was published by the CIA itself after his fellows at The Nation Magazine, where Holland works as a contributing editor, rejected the paper from their magazine. [13]

To undermine the important revelations of Thomas Edward Beckham, a House Select Committee witness Mellen features, Ayton describes him as a "semi-literate," implying that the memory of a poor reader could be safely ignored. During a visit to New Orleans, Mellen interviewed former House Select Committee investigator, L. J. Delsa, a murder investigator with more than 30 years experience working variously as a federal, state or local official. In an interview on December 7, 2005, Delsa opined that, on the basis of his personal knowledge, he believed that Beckham was a credible witness.

Similar problems mar the rest of Ayton's review. But at the end of the day, still standing are Mellen's demolitions of the myths that the CIA played no part in JFK's demise and that Oswald was a loner. And she has established quite convincingly that Clay Shaw's International Trade Mart in New Orleans was a hornet's nest of activity undoubtedly related to The Agency in ways known only to those with access to still-sealed files.

With what we've already learned from declassified files, it's no mystery why the government has remained so passionate about maintaining secrecy concerning JFK's demise. For it is information that has been painfully extracted from once-secret files over the past 41 years that has steadily eroded the fables upon which the Warren Commission built its case. Mellen's book has completed a demolition that Ayton's valiant efforts can't hope to stave off.

It's past time he understood that. For when keepers of the flickering flame have to resort to Agency-abetted disquisitions to defend The Agency's innocence, the gig is up and it's time to sent up a white flag.

Gary L. Aguilar, San Francisco

[1] The proposition, "Was Garrison Duped by the KGB?" was the subject of our debate held during a conference hosted by the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, September 18, 2004 at the Marriot Wardman Park Hotel. Holland was to have defended that proposition but did not. He chose instead to argue that Jim Garrison had "lied" when he said in his book, "On the Trail of the Assassins," that he'd not heard of the Il Paese Sera articles until after the Clay Shaw trial. While Holland established that Garrison had indeed seen the Il Paese Sera articles before trial, he was less convincing that Garrison's inaccurate statement was really a lie rather than a mistake. As noted in the text, Garrison never used any of the material in the articles during the trial, and his book was published 21 years after he'd seen them.

[2] Steve Dorril, Permindex: The International Trade in Disinformation. Lobster: the journal of parapolitics, intelligence and State Research, #3, 1983. On-line at: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/lobster.htm [Had Ayton but google-searched the obvious words, "Il Paese Sera, CMC," the second "hit" would have taken him directly to this article.]

[3] See: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/siss.txt

In its entirety, John McAdams's newsgroup post read as follows:

From - Fri Oct 15 12:22:19 1999
From: 6489mcadamsj@vms.csd.mu.edu (John McAdams)
Newsgroups: alt.assassination.jfk
Approved: jmcadams@execpc.com
Subject: IL PAESE SERA and Communist disinformation
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 17:19:56 GMT
Message-ID: <38075e84.4563189@mcadams.posc.mu.edu>
X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.11/32.235
NNTP-Posting-Host: 134.48.30.18
Lines: 79
Path: mcadams.posc.mu.edu!134.48.30.18

From "Communist Forgeries," a Senate Internal Security
Sub-Committee hearing on 2 June 61, testimony of Richard Helms, pp.
2-4:

In recent days we have seen an excellent example of how the Communists use the false news story. In late April rumors began to circulate in Europe, rumors
charging that the Algerian-based generals who had plotted the overthrow of President De Gaulle had enjoyed support from NATO, the Pentagon, or CIA. Although this fable could have been started by supporters of General Challe, it bears all the earmarks of having been invented within the bloc. In Western Europe this lie was first printed on the 23rd of April by a Rome daily called Il Paese.

Senator KEATING: Is Il Paese a Communist paper?

Mr. HELMS: It is not a Communist paper, as such. We believe it to be a crypto-Communist paper but it is not like Unita, the large Communist daily in Rome. It purports to be an independent newspaper, but obviously it serves Communist ends. The story charged --

"It is not by chance that some people in Paris are accusing the American secret service headed by Allen Dulles f having participated in the plot of the four 'ultra' generals * * * Franco, Salazar, Allen Dulles are the figures who hide themselves behind the pronunciamentos of the 'ultras'; they are the pillars of an international
conspiracy that, basing itself on the Iberian dictatorships, on the residue of the most fierce and blind colonialism, on the intrigues of the C.I.A. * * * reacts furiously to the advance of progress and democracy * * *."

We found it interesting that Il Paese was the starting point for a lie that the Soviets spread around the world. This paper and its evening edition, Paese Sera, belong to a small group of journals published in the free world but used as outlets for disguised Soviet propaganda. These newspapers consistently release and replay anti-American, anti-Western, pro-Soviet bloc stories, distorted or wholly false. Mario Malloni, director of both Il Paese and Paese Sera, has been a member of the World Peace Council since 1958. The World Peace Council is a bloc-directed Communist front.

On the next day Pravda published in Moscow a long article about the generals' revolt.

Senator KEATING: May I interrupt there? Did Pravda pick it up as purportedly from Il Paese? Did they quote the other paper, the Italian paper, as the source of that information?

Mr. HELMS: Pravda did not cite Il Paese. But instead of having this originate in Moscow, where everybody would pinpoint it, they planted the story first in Italy and picked it up from Italy and this is the way it actually went out in point of time [sic].

This is important context for understanding the PAESE SERA articles that linked Clay Shaw (correctly) to CMC/Permindex, and connected CMC/Permindex (falsely) to support for the OAS attempts against De Gaulle, various fascist and Nazi forces, etc. The PAESE SERA stories were quickly picked up and repeated by leftist journals in France, Moscow, and Canada.

This by no means proves that the CMC/PERMINDEX stuff was a KGB disinformation operation. The left-wing journalists at the paper would have been happy to smear what they considered to be the "forces of capitalist imperialism" without any direct orders from Moscow. Indeed, Helms is only *inferring* that the earlier story about anti-De Gaulle generals was a KGB operation.

But this episode does put the 1967 articles on Shaw/Permindex into context. The articles were, in one way or another, motivated by a communist ideological agenda.

.John

[4] * Anthony Marro. Helms Is Fined $2,000 and Given Two-Year Suspended Prison Term--U.S. Judge Rebukes Ex-C.I.A. Head for Misleading Panel. New York Times, 11/5/77, p.1.* See also: Gary Aguilar. Max Holland Rescues the Warren Commission and The Nation. Probe Magazine, Sept-Oct. 2000 (vol. 7 No.6) On-line* See also Richard Helms' obituary.

[5] In: The Assassination Chronicles--Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend by Edward J. Epstein. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992, p. 250--263.

[6] Playboy interview of Jim Garrison is on-line at: http://www.jfklancer.com/Garrison2.html, ff

[7] Harold Weisberg. Oswald in New Orleans--Case of Conspiracy with the C.I.A. New York: Canyon Books, 1967, p. 7--14.]

[8] See the text supported by footnotes 138 to 146 in the essay, "Max Holland Rescues the Warren Commission and the Nation" by Gary L. Aguilar. Probe Magazine, Sept-Oct. 2000 (vol. 7 No.6) On-line at: http://www.webcom.com/ctka/pr900-holland.html#_edn151

[9] Joan Mellen. A Farewell to Justice. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005, p. 253.

[10] Carl Bernstein. The CIA and the Media. Rolling Stone Magazine, 10/20/77. Excerpts available on line at: http://www.webcom.com/~lpease/media/ciamedia.htm

[11] William E. Jackson, Jr.. The Mystery of Judy Miller's 'Security Clearance' Deepens. Editor & Publisher, 10/26/05. On-line.

[12] Max Holland. The Lie that Linked the CIA to the Kennedy Assassination. On-line at the CIA's website at: http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/fall_winter_2001/article02.html

[13] On condition I not disclose his identity, a former editor at The Nation told me that Holland's CIA-published article had been rejected by Holland's fellow editors. I asked Holland about the rejection in person at a Washington, D.C. JFK conference on November 19 2005. "Politics," he said, explained the rejection.

JFK disinformationists gather on one site!

Wow. Even I didn't think they could be this dumb. The CIA's most friendly defenders on the JFK Assassination are now all together, in one site called "Washington Decoded."

I mean, how silly can they get? Consider the posters there:

1. Priscilla Johson McMillan. Her CIA file listed her at a "witting collaborator." And not only did she write a book about Marina Oswald and her husband Lee Harvey Oswald that Marina called a pack of lies, McMillan also claims to have slept with JFK. Yep. I saw that in a tabloid one day. Makes me wonder how many other of JFK's paramour's are also "witting collaborators" with the CIA.

2. Max Holland. Max Holland published his anti-New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison screed in the CIA's internal publication "Studies in Intelligence" after The Nation turned his piece down, despite the fact that he was a regular writer there.

3. John McAdams. Went to a JFK conference under an alias, lied about who he was and what he did in an interview with a reporter, and was liaison to an institute whose predecessor institute , according to Christopher Simpson, "functioned as a sort of outpost of the federal government." He is the Internet's most prolific disinformationist on the JFK case. And he's a flat out liar. He accused Dr. Gary Aguilar of being a drug user when nothing could be further from the truth. He accused another poster of being a pedophile simply to scare him out of the forum (it worked, despite McAdams never offering any evidence.) I had an argument with McAdams that was about a week long, by the end of which he had to concede my point. Then he dishonestly started the exact same disinformation I had just successfully rebutted in a different forum, as though our conversation had never taken place. I've never seen such a clear cut example of dishonesty in my life.

4. Mel Ayton. Mel Ayton is the British equivalent of the above. Mel couldn't recognize a cover-up if it fell on his car. His work on the RFK case in particular is ridiculous. He heavily sources a member of Sirhan's defense team as if he's a credible observer, when the guy he references was in such trouble with the law there could be only one reason he was on Sirhan's defense team: to inform on the defense to the police. That's a long story I have yet to write up, but will, because it's important. And it's not like this guy's background was hard to find. It's right there in the LAPD's files, which are well organized and easily cross-referenced.

Now that Gerald Posner was fired (he says he offered his resignation, but Jack Shafer, who broke the news of his plagiarism, says Posner was dismissed) for plagiarizing his articles, I wouldn't be surprised to see his work (or someone's, under his name) show up here, too. Then the circle would be complete.

Posner wrote Case Closed, a book which plagiarized the work of a law firm to attempt to make the case for Oswald being the lone assassin, a case the FBI disproved before the Warren Report was even published, although they wouldn't admit it.

What the FBI found was this: They could not fire Oswald's rifle and not get nitrate on their cheeks. But Oswald had no nitrate on his cheek. So one of their own went before the Warren Commission and made the spectacular evasion that, in his "opinion" the impossible was possible. Never mind that he had no facts to back that up. His "opinion" was then cited as "proof" that Oswald was simply exhibiting a 'false negative' - no nitrate even though he had fired that rifle. Yes, folks, that's really what happened. That wouldn't pass a fifth grade science course. But science and the needed version of history were incompatible, so guess which one was sacrificed?

By the way - the FBI actually traced the ammunition in the so-called murder weapon and found that it came from a large order placed by the Marines. The problem was, the bullets didn't fit any Marine weapons, and the FBI memo writer speculated this could have been a CIA order using military cover, a common practice. Pretty nice, eh? The FBI wasn't dumb. But J. Edgar Hoover was being blackmailed by James Angleton, the CIA's counterintelligence chief, and had no power to go up against the CIA. And so the false history was created, and continues to be reinforced by the above and others.

People who disseminate false history are chart switchers. Imagine you go to the hospital with cancer. But someone switches your chart, and you are suddenly being treated for diabetes, even though you don't have diabetes. And your cancer is not being treated, because the doctors are looking at the wrong chart.

You'd be so upset, wouldn't you?

That's what's happening to our country. We're given all this false history, and then we're offered the "cure" which, as we've seen, is just a disaster. Every time the CIA is caught in a scandal, they plead ineptitude and say if they only had more money, they could do a better job. I guess they learned from all those small countries who only had to claim Communists were gaining strength there to (cha-ching!) get some immediate funding from the USA. I read recently that the CIA's black budget in 2004 was triple that of the Pentagon's! I also read that the Church Committee found out the CIA's media budget was greater than that of the AP and Reuters combined. And while it's illegal to directly propagandize the American public, they have provably done it. And no one has ever been held accountable.

Is it any wonder our country is swirling the drain? We citizens have been lousy parents. Remember - government employees answer to us, not the other way around. We've never stepped up to our responsibility to demand an appropriate level of accountability and transparency. And if you never discipline your children, they can easily become criminals. You disincentivize your child through "consequences." But we routinely give members of the intelligence community a free pass. How many of us even know where our money goes? How many of us realize how MANY intelligence agencies we have? Along with Homeland Security, the FBI, and the CIA, we also have the NSA, NRO, NGA, FBI, DIA, DEA, DARPA, and of course, all the military branches of intelligence. And that's just a few of the ones we're allowed to know about. There are still others.

And we're losing our ability to exercise any accountability. While you rail against Obama or Cheney, while you watch the Olympics, or play with your children, your vote is quietly going all-digital. That means there won't be any way to get a recount that is meaningful. Your vote will only ever say not what YOU said, but what the PROGRAMMER DECIDED YOU SAID. You really need to understand this because what may be the very last chance we'll ever have to fix this is slipping away and will be gone, perhaps forever, in a few months. And then we'll never know. We'll have the illusion, always, of free and fair elections. But those of us who have looked under the hood know that will be an unprovable illusion, if we move to voting over the Internet, voting by phone, voting on computers, or any other method where someone can intercede between you and your vote.

I also read recently that the largest part of the CIA's budget has historically gone to election manipulation operations (ostensibly abroad, but it's hard to believe that they didn't try that at home, as well).

A lot of people thought getting Obama into office would change the world. We all can see now that is not at all the case. It's going to take a lot more than Obama to change this country. It's going to take the active participation of many more of us. US. There is no one else. We have to be leaders. And we have to join groups, because we have more power collectively than separately. But similarly, we have to hold our group leaders accountable. When they run off a cliff, we must not follow them. Remember that, in the 1960s, the FBI and CIA ran operations that enabled them to not just infiltrate, but in some cases to lead so-called opposition groups. They led them in unproductive directions.

Are you in a group that is floundering in unproductive directions? Maybe it's time for a new group leader.

There is much to do. I hope you are still awake, still energized, still fighting. The notion of what America should be is so powerful. We all grew up with that myth. We have the power to make that myth a reality. All we need is the will, and commitment to make it happen.

My comments on the JFK and the media panel at the Duquesne "Passing the Torch" conference

The following are my prepared remarks for the special program I spoke on last week during the “Passing the Torch” conference on the JFK assassination at the Senator John Heinz Heinz History Center. The other participants included writers Jeff Morley, David Talbot, Russ Baker and Jerry Policoff and our special guest, film director Oliver Stone.

I skipped the paragraph on Max Holland, below, because he was in the front row and I feared he would use that as an excuse to disrupt the event. But I got him the next day, with a shout-out from the stage re winning the CIA’s “Studies in Intelligence” award, “the first person outside the government” to do so, and said I was glad the love went both ways.

---------

My interest in the JFK case was initially sparked, ironically, by the mainstream media. I had been working on Jerry Brown’s presidential campaign and saw up close how the press completely misrepresented things that happened. I thought, if the media could be that wrong about a presidential campaign, what else might they be wrong about?

Early in my research, it became clear that the notion that Oswald acted alone was simply not supported by the evidence. I read Arlen Specter’s questioning of Parkland doctor Malcolm Perry and was shocked to find Specter leading the witness. Perry clearly thought the wound in Kennedy’s neck indicated a shot from the front. Specter clearly didn’t want Perry saying that.

My first thought was that Specter’s agenda was so obvious no serious journalist could have missed it. My second thought was, no serious journalist ever read this.

But the more I learned, ignorance alone could not excuse the shoddy reporting on this case. The media could talk at length about the theories I call collectively, the “anybody but the CIA did it” theory. But the media has never addressed the myriad and strong evidence that high-level people in the CIA planned the assassination of a president they had come to see as a threat to their very existence. Why couldn’t the media go there?

I found the answer in Mark Lane’s book “Plausible Denial.” He talked about Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who had interviewed Oswald before the assassination and written an inaccurate book about him after. Lane made a strong, if circumstantial, case that she worked for the CIA. We’ve since found out she did - her handler wrote that she could be “encouraged to write” pretty much whatever the CIA wanted, and her file listed her as a “witting collaborator,” which begs the question, what is an “unwitting collaborator?”

I then read that now-famous memo the CIA sent its media assets instructing them how to discredit critics of the Warren Report. I found this stunning. Here was the chief suspect, the CIA, having the power to destroy the credibility of anyone who might factually accuse them.

So I formed a theory. If the CIA really had killed Kennedy, anyone devoting a lot of time and energy to tell me that they hadn’t was likely working for the CIA. The value of any theory is its predictive value. This particular theory has proven remarkably accurate over time.

One journalist in particular, James Phelan, author of a famous book about Howard Hughes, had gone out of his way – to the point of bribing a witness – to sabotage New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw back in the 60s. That was WAY beyond the bounds of professional journalism, so naturally, I figured Phelan was likely connected to the CIA. I started digging and it didn’t take me long to find a significant connection.

I was the first to note the relationship between Phelan and Robert Maheu, the man the CIA had tapped to run its Castro assassination plots. During the Garrison investigation, Phelan had met with Garrison in Las Vegas. Garrison trusted Phelan because he had previously written a favorable article about him. But rather than using the nearest copy machine, Phelan had taken Garrison’s documents to Maheu’s office to be photocopied. Given Maheu’s relationship with the CIA, which was ongoing during the entire period he worked for Howard Hughes, I thought that was pretty stunning. Essentially, Phelan was making Garrison’s key files available to the CIA.

When I posted about Phelan’s relationship with the CIA online, Phelan called me up at home and tried to threaten me with a lawsuit. But I knew I had only told facts, so he’d have no case. I also figured he wouldn’t dare enter into a process where I could legally learn even more about his life. I was right. I never heard from him again.

When Gerald Posner wrote his factually inaccurate “Oswald did it” book “Case Closed” that got a lot of attention on the fortieth anniversary, I figured he probably had connections to the CIA. I found his previous nonfiction books had all been written with help from the intelligence community, and his sole fiction work at that point was a novel about the CIA that lauded the old guard covert operators over the new guard bureaucrats. Indeed, Posner even said he’d been promised CIA cooperation for Case Closed by his editor Bob Loomis (who, by the way, had been James Phelan’s editor).

Edward Epstein, who attacked Garrison and later tried to pin the assassination on the Soviets, turned out to be a protégé of the man who held the most secret files on Oswald – CIA counterintelligence legend James Angleton, one of the top suspects for a direct CIA conspirator!

My theory’s holding up pretty well, isn’t it? Funny what you can find when you ask the right question.

What’s scary is how naïve the press is. They never seem to consider that members in their own ranks could be deliberately misleading them. For example, reporter Hugh Aynesworth holds sway over the JFK case in Dallas, despite the fact that Aynesworth has openly bragged about how he lied to a reporter about a key item regarding Oswald. Why would you take seriously someone who brags he misled other journalists?

Would it surprise you to learn that Aynesworth applied to work for the CIA a month before the assassination? We have his application. Of course, on the record, the CIA rejected him. But as anyone who knows the CIA understands, that’s also standard operating procedure. As Gordon Novel once put it, “no one ever works for the CIA,” even when they do.

Does Max Holland work for the CIA? All I know is that he writes for them. When he couldn’t get an anti-Garrison article published by his former employer, The Nation magazine, he found a ready publisher at CIA in their “Studies in Intelligence” newsletter. He even won their award, claiming to be “the first person outside the US government to do so.” Curiously, his vita shows a lot of fellowships from foundations, which have often been conduits for CIA funding. Maybe he was just an “unwitting collaborator.”

But it’s not just individual journalists who work hand in hand with the CIA. It’s entire media organizations. The president of CBS for decades worked with the CIA directly. The New York Times was the CIA’s most powerful asset. The Washington Post under Katherine Graham and later Ben Bradlee kept the CIA’s secrets. ABC, NBC other major media sources have documented relationships with the CIA.

When the Church and Pike Committees started investigating the CIA’s media operations, that was the one thing the CIA refused to give up. Congress could not pry that information from the Agency.

By 1991, the CIA had become so all-powerful in the media that pretense was no longer necessary. In December of 1991, less than a year before the 40th anniversary of the JFK assassination, CIA Director Robert Gates laid out, in a memo titled “Greater CIA Openness,” that its Public Affairs Office:

“has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories, and it has contributed to the accuracy of countless others. In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods.”

It should be clear that any organization that brags about its ability to change “intelligence failures” into “intelligence success stories” is, at its heart, an anti-democratic organization. The public simply cannot make intelligent choices about politics when failures are misrepresented as successes. No business could survive such misrepresentation for long. But intelligence agencies get away with it.

We have to know the truth about our past and present in order to plan adequately for our future. And it’s hard. Sorting good information from bad in this case isn’t easy. It took me years to understand just how solid the scientific evidence is that Oswald never fired a rifle on November 22. And I was actively interested in the case. I can see why journalists would shy away from that. It takes a Herculean effort.

And that’s the unfairness of ridiculing “conspiracy theorists.” Some of them are the ones who have done the heavy lifting, the historical mining that the mainstream media has failed to do. To group the nuttiest with the most informed is labelism at its worst. Imagine reading this in the New York Times: “these Jews should be ridiculed, even shunned. It’s time we marginalized Jews the way we’ve marginalized smokers … make [them] stand in the rain with the other outcasts.” That’s what Bryan Burrough in the New York Times wrote about conspiracy theorists, not Jews. But we hear the problem more clearly when we substitute a different group of people. It’s intolerable. It’s actually hate speech.

Conspiracies happen. I was a juror on a conspiracy trial. Pretending they don’t is not only ahistorical, it’s irresponsible.

And conspiracy theories serve a useful purpose. They ask, essentially, what if we’re being lied to, and that’s a question that, as history has shown, journalists should be asking far more often than they do. WMD, anyone?

If the press had looked seriously into the Kennedy assassination, they would found a conspiracy. Had the press then reported the conspiracy, there could have been prosecutions. Had there been prosecutions, we might not have lost Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. NOT challenging the official story was the same as giving future conspirators a blank check, which was taken and cashed, several times over.

The media has been an accessory to these crimes and more through silence, ignorance and misrepresentation. My hope is that journalists get more diligent and less naïve. My other hope is that the public gets savvier, and treats the news as the stage-managed affair it all too often is. After fifty years, it’s time we grew up.

Disinformation season is officially open on the JFK and RFK assassinations

As I predicted, the disinformation campaign about the RFK assassination is kicking into high gear. How did I know this would happen? Because the 40th anniversary of the case is right around the corner. June 5 of this year marks the 39th anniversary. The same thing is happening in the JFK case, as next year will mark the 45th anniversary of that tragic event as well. In other words, the disinformation needs to be put in place THIS year so that specials can repeat and amplify it NEXT year. That's how it works. But of course, you already understand that. That's why you read this blog.

I believe the CIA was the primary force behind the assassination of both Kennedy brothers. I believe they killed Bobby for two reasons: 1) he was even more progressive and peacemongering than his brother by that time, and 2) Bobby was quietly pursuing the trail of his brother's killers (and he too strongly suspected the CIA's hand. More on that in a later post.)

As I demonstrated a few days ago, the CIA sent an operational memorandum to its vast media network (called the "Mighty Wurlitzer" because it could be played so dominantly when needed) and gave them talking points on the JFK assassination. If you haven't seen this particular 'playbook' memo before, it's worth a careful read. There were others. This was not the sole document of its kind. Because we've never had a high level investigation of the Robert Kennedy case, we don't know if similar memos were sent by the CIA regarding his particular case.

I also noted, in that same post, how common it has been for CIA assets in the media to take up the cause of the lone assassination. As I wrote:

you can scratch the background of nearly every writer on this case who has claimed there was no conspiracy, and find a CIA link in their past or present. James Phelan, a respected Saturday Evening Post reporter who attacked Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw in the only trial ever brought on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, turned out to be not only an FBI informant, but a close friend of the CIA’s point man on the anti-Castro plots. Hugh Aynesworth, responsible for nearly all the original Dallas coverage of the event, who later repeated his coverage for Newsweek, had applied to work for the CIA the month before the assassination. Reporter Hal Hendrix, called “the Spook” because of his intelligence agency connections, was the one who supplied Seth Kantor with background info on Oswald in record time right after the assassination. Hendrix was a close friend of David Atlee Phillips, the CIA man most often fingered as a conspirator due to the extensive documentary record, and the man whom all the Castro did it” stories that surfaced originally can be traced to.

Gerald Posner? He came to fame by writing a book that excused the CIA for its failure to find Mengele. He also wrote a fictional book which featured a Cold War CIA hero pitted against a newfangled government bureaucracy. Max Holland? He got his start at the Voice of America, long acknowledged as a propaganda outlet for the CIA abroad. And when “liberal” Holland couldn’t get his regular employer, The Nation, to run one of his lone-nut screeds, whom did he turn to? Why, the CIA, of course, which was more than happy to publish his work in their in-house publication “Studies in Intelligence.”

So along comes Mel Ayton. He appears to be cut from the prototypical mode of the people mentioned above. He's pompous, self-righteous, and wrong. He hasn't done his homework, or if he has, he's lying about what he found. He blames the victims. The people in the pantry were too traumatized by what they saw to report on it correctly, he asserts. It's a shop-worn tactic, which begs the question: whom or what does Mel Ayton really serve?

Over at the (misnamed) History News Network, Ayton takes up the case of "the girl in the polka dot dress," the most intriguing unsolved mystery of the case. I have a very large file of witness statements of people who saw a girl in a white dress with dark polka dots (black or dark purple/navy by the vast majority of accounts) who was seen by a few witnesses with Sirhan literally just before he started shooting. They were talking, and she was almost holding him. Then she released him, and Sirhan stepped forward and starting shooting...something. I believe he was firing blanks, but that's a topic for another day.

So who was this mystery girl? Oh my, I've accumulated a lot of new information on her since I first wrote about her. But I'm saving that for the moment. Here's what I have written in the past, which I present her to show you how much Ayton did not tell you in his own piece:

One of the most intriguing figures in this case has been "The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress" who was seen with Sirhan immediately prior to the shooting, and who was subsequently witnessed running from the scene crying "We shot him! We shot him!" The LAPD tried to shut down this story by getting the two most public witnesses to retract their stories. But there were so many credible sightings of this girl that the police were forced to take a different tack. They identified first one, then a second woman as "the" girl, despite the fact that neither bore much of a resemblance to the girl described. Meanwhile, languishing unnoticed in the LAPD’s own files is the name of a far more likely candidate, someone who leads to a host of suspicious characters.

Over a dozen witnesses gave similar descriptions of a girl in a polka-dot dress who for varying reasons drew their attention. The two most famous of these were Vincent DiPierro, a waiter at the Ambassador Hotel, and Sandy Serrano, a Kennedy volunteer. DiPierro first noticed Sirhan in the pantry because of the woman he saw "following" him. The LAPD interviewed him the morning of the shooting (Kennedy was shot at 12:15 A.M. the morning of June 5th). During one interview, DiPierro gave the following information about the girl:

A (DiPierro): The only reason that he [Sirhan] was noticeable was because there was this good-looking girl in the crowd there.

Q: All right, was the girl with him?

A: It looked as though, yes.

Q: What makes you say that?

A: Well, she was following him.

Q: Where did she follow him from?

A: From--she was standing behind the tray stand because she was up next to him on--behind, and she was holding on to the other end of the tray table and she--like--—it looked as if she was almost holding him.

DiPierro reported that he saw Sirhan turn to her and say something, to which she didn’t reply, but smiled. He said Sirhan had a sickly smile, and said "When she first entered, she looked as though she was sick also." He described her as Caucasian and as about 20 or 21 years old, definitely no older than 24. She was "very shapely" and was wearing a "white dress with—it looked like either black or dark violet polka dots on it and kind of a [bib-like] collar." He said her hair color was "Brown. I would say brunette," "puffed up a little" and that it came to just above her shoulders. DiPierro told the FBI that she had a peculiar-looking nose.

That same morning, Sandy Serrano had described to the LAPD a "girl in a white dress, a Caucasian, dark brown hair, about five-six, medium height...Black polka dots on the dress" in the company of a man she later recognized as Sirhan and another man in a gold sweater. She had seen this trio walk up the back stairs to the Ambassador earlier in the night. Sometime later, the girl and the guy in the gold sweater came running down the back stairs. Serrano recalled to the LAPD this encounter:

She practically stepped on me, and she said "We’ve shot him. We’ve shot him." Then I said, "Who did you shoot?" And she said, "We shot Senator Kennedy."

She described the girl’s attitude in this manner:

"We finally did it," like "Good going."

Serrano thought the girl was between the ages of 23 and 27, with her hair not quite coming to her shoulders, done in a "bouffant" style, wearing a polka dot dress with a bib collar and ? length sleeves. She also recalled that the girl had a "funny" nose.

Ultimately, the LAPD pressured Serrano and DiPierro into backing down on these stories, getting each to admit they had first heard of the girl from the other, an impossibility the LAPD hoped would go unnoticed. Across page after page of witness testimony cover sheets Pena scrawled "Polka Dot Story Serrano Phoney", "Girl in Kitchen I.D. Settled", "Wit[ness] can offer nothing of further value" or "No further Int[erview]." But the interviews behind these sheets tell a different and compelling story.

Dr. Marcus McBroom was in the pantry behind Elizabeth Evans, one of the shooting victims. He exited the kitchen through the double doors at the West end and noticed a brunette woman aged 20-26, medium build, "wearing a white dress with silver dollar size polka dots, either black or dark blue in color." The report of his LAPD interview records what drew McBroom’s attention to the girl:

This young lady showed no signs of shock or disbelief in comparison to other persons in the room and she seemed intent only on one thing—to get out of the ballroom.

George Green was also in the pantry during the shooting, and reported seeing a girl in a polka dot dress (early 20s, blond hair) and a young, thin, taller male with dark hair. He saw this couple earlier in the night and after the shooting. Afterwards, Green stated, "They seemed to be the only ones who were trying to get out of the kitchen...Everyone else was trying to get in."37

Ronald Johnson Panda told the LAPD that a good-looking girl, about 5’6", in a polka dot dress ran by him in the Embassy room immediately after the shooting yelling "They shot him." He had seen her earlier that night carrying some drinks.

Eve Hansen had talked to a girl in a "white dress with black or navy blue polka dots approximately the size of a quarter" who had dark brown hair that hung just above the shoulders, who had a "turned-up nose." The girl gave Hansen money for a drink and Hansen ordered the drink. When she brought it back to her, the girl made a toast "To our next President" and shortly thereafter left the bar.

Earnest Ruiz reported something he thought was odd to the police. He had watched a man and a girl in a polka dot dress run out of the hotel, but said the man later came back as Sirhan was being removed and was the first to yell, "Let’s kill the bastard."

Darnell Johnson, another pantry witness, told the police the following:

While I was waiting [for Kennedy], I saw four guys and a girl about halfway between Kennedy and where I was standing. The girl had a white dress with black polka dots. During the time that a lady yelled, "Oh, my God," they walked out. All except the one...this is the guy they grabbed [Sirhan]. The others that walked out seemed unconcerned at the events which were taking place.

Johnson also told the police that he had received threatening phone calls and that his car brakes had been tampered with, causing a near-accident.

Roy Mills also observed a group of five people, one of which was female, standing outside the Embassy Room as Kennedy was speaking. He claimed that Sirhan was one of the four males in the group, remembering him distinctly for his baggy pants. He thought one of the other men was a hotel employee. He couldn’t remember anything about the girl except that she was wearing a press pass. Curiously, Conrad Seim—who, like Serrano, DiPierro and Hanson, had noticed the girl’s "funny nose"—reported being asked by a girl in a white dress with black or navy polka dots for his press pass. He refused her request, but she came back about 15 minutes later. "She was very persistent," he told the police. He thought the girl’s nose might have been broken at one time, and described her as Caucasian but with an olive complexion.

Bill White saw a female Latin and two male Latins near the door of the embassy room. Their dress looked out of place. He also noticed a busboy wearing a white button-down jacket in the Anchor Desk area sweeping up cigarette butts where there were no butts to be swept up. He wasn’t sure this was really a busboy.

Earnest Vallero was a job dispatcher for the Southern California Waiters Alliance. He reported that a man resembling Sirhan appeared at the union office two or three weeks prior to the assassination and requested placement as a waiter at the Ambassador Hotel. Vallero said the man got upset when he was refused, and flashed an Israeli passport.

A Hungarian refugee "with absolutely no credentials at all"38 named Gabor Kadar had been turned away from the Embassy Room during the night, but found a waiter’s uniform, and donned it. Kadar later involved himself directly in the struggle to wrest the gun from Sirhan.

Booker Griffin, another pantry witness who had reported seeing a woman in a polka dot dress,39 asked Richard Aubry, a friend of his who was also in the pantry during the shooting, "Did they get the other two guys?"40

At about 9pm the night of the 4th, Irene Gizzi noticed a group of three people who "just didn’t seem to be dressed properly for the occasion." Her LAPD interview report summarizes the events as follows:

[Gizzi] saw a group of people talking who did not seem to fit with the exuberant crowd. Observed the female to be wearing a white dress with black polka dots; approximately the girl was standing with a male, possible Latin, dark sun bleached hair gold colored shirt, and possible light colored pants, possibly jeans. Possibly with suspect [Sirhan] as a third party...."

A friend of Gizzi’s who was also present, Katherine Keir, gave a very similar description of this group, describing a male in a "gold colored sport shirt" and blue jeans, another man of medium build with a T-shirt and jeans, both with dark brown hair, and a girl in a black and white polka dot dress. Keir was standing at a stairway when the polka dot dress girl ran down yelling, "We shot Kennedy." The police were able to persuade Keir to consider that she had heard the girl say instead, "Someone shot Kennedy."

Jeanette Prudhomme also saw two men, one of which looked like Sirhan and the other of which was wearing a gold shirt, in the company of a woman who appeared to be 28-30, with brown, shoulder length hair, wearing a white dress with black polka dots.

A couple of people even recalled seeing this girl on the CBS broadcast. A Mr. Plumley, first name unrecorded, claimed he had seen a polka dot dress girl in the CBS broadcast the night of June 4th. Duncan Grant, a Canadian citizen, wrote the LAPD when he heard they were canceling their search for the polka dot dress girl, stating that he had seen her on the CBS broadcast. He wrote:

"We could hear two shots fired and then another burst of shots. At this moment someone shouted that the Senator had been shot. There was more confusion and at this moment a young lady burst in on the picture and she shouted We have shot Kennedy then shouted again We have shot Senator Kennedy. She was what I would call half-running and she crossed right in front of the camera from left to right and disappeared from view."

Sirhan himself remembered talking to a girl shortly before he blacked out that night. According to Kaiser, one of Sirhan’s last memories is of giving coffee to a girl of "Armenian" or "Spanish" descent in the pantry:

"This girl kept talking about coffee. She wanted cream. Spanish, Mexican, dark-skinned. When people talked about the girl in the polka-dot dress," he figured, "maybe they were thinking of the girl I was having coffee with."41

Sirhan had been at the Ambassador the Sunday before election night. A girl matching the description of the polka dot dress girl was also seen there Sunday. Karen Ross described her to the LAPD as having a nose that had been "maybe fixed", a white dress with black polka dots, ? length sleeves, dark blond hair worn in a "puff" and with a round face. Sirhan and a girl were also recorded as behaving suspiciously at a previous Robert Kennedy appearance in Pomona on May 20th.

One man may have spent the last day of Kennedy’s life with this girl. While his tale is extraordinary, it is eerily credible for the nuances and details which matched other evidence of which he could not possibly have been aware. Kaiser and Houghton referred to this man by the pseudonym of "Robert Duane." His real name is John Henry Fahey.42

June 4th with the Mystery Girl

At 9:15 A.M. on June 4th, Fahey entered the back of the Ambassador Hotel. He had planned to meet another salesman there 45 minutes earlier, but had left late and been held up in traffic. On his way up the back stairs, he noticed two men he thought looked Spanish. When they spoke, however, he realized it wasn’t Spanish because he knew Spanish. He presumed they were kitchen workers.

While in the lobby area, he spotted a pretty girl and made a flirtatious comment to her. She asked him where the Post Office was, and he couldn’t help her, and she left. About ten minutes later, she returned. He invited her to join him for breakfast in the coffee shop at the hotel. She spoke "very good English" but also had a "slight accent" that he couldn’t place. He asked her where she was from. She said she had only been there three days, and that she was from Virginia. Fahey had a relative in Virginia, and asked her if she knew Richmond, whereupon the girl said she really had come from New York, and before that a middle-eastern country ("Iran" or "Iraq", Fahey thought). She mentioned specifically Beirut. (Fahey had to ask his interviewer if there was a place named "Beirut".) She also mentioned "Akaba". When he asked her name, she gave him one, and soon another, and another. He didn’t know what her real name was. She, meanwhile, pumped him for as much information as she could get, asking his name, his occupation, and his business at the hotel. When he asked her about her own business, she said "I don’t want to get you involved...I don’t know if I can trust you to tell you the whole thing."

She told him that they were being watched, and indicated a man near the door of the coffee shop. Fahey saw a man he thought might be Spanish or Greek, resembling one of the men he had seen on the back stairs when entering the hotel. He thought the man resembled Sirhan, except that this man was taller and had sideburns. When later shown pictures of Sirhan’s family, Fahey said the man was not one of the Sirhan brothers.

The girl wanted Fahey to help her get a passport. Fahey said he had no idea how to do that, at which point she explained to him that you just find a deceased person, use their Social Security Number and write to the place where he was born to get a passport. He said she seemed shaken, and very nervous, with clammy hands, and that she seemed to be genuinely in some sort of trouble.

He described her as "Caucasian" but with an "Arab complexion, very light." He called her hair "dirty-blond" and guessed her age might be 27-28. He said her clothes, shoes and purse were all tan. In addition, he felt the purse and stockings looked foreign. He also said "Her nose was of—on the hooked fashion where you can realize that she was from the Arabic world." Asked if the nose was what one might call prominent, Fahey answered affirmatively.

Fahey had business calls to make in Oxnard, and invited the girl to come along for the ride with him, since she seemed so troubled. When they got up to leave, she wanted to pay the bill, and opened a purse where he saw a fistful of money in her wallet—"big stuff—50 dollar bills—hundred dollar bills."

They drove up the coastal route through Malibu. Two different tails followed them for part of the way. At one point, Fahey was so nervous he pulled off the road, thinking the tail would leave him. As he started to get out of the car, he noticed the girl eyeing his keys, and thinking she might run off with his car, decided not to get out after all. During the ride, she said the people tailing them were "out to get Mr. Kennedy tonight at the winning reception." He thought they should call the police to get rid of the tail but she insisted they should not call the police, and asked to be taken back to Los Angeles. In the end, although they drove to Oxnard, Fahey opted out of his sales calls and returned with the girl to the Ambassador Hotel. After driving and eating meals, they returned at around 7pm, where he dropped her off. She wanted him to come into the hotel with her. When he refused, she got angry.

Fahey might not have thought of this incident again had it not been for the assassination and the story of the strange woman who ran out into the dark afterwards. A frightened Fahey called the FBI and told them he thought he might have spent the day with that woman. After talking to the FBI, Fahey read a story by journalist Fernando Faura in the Valley Times about the polka dot girl. He called Faura and told him he might know something about the girl. Faura was hot on the trail of the mystery girl, and took Fahey’s detailed description of the girl to a police artist. Fahey tweaked the image with the artist until he saw a match.

Faura then showed the drawing to Vincent DiPierro. "That’s her," DiPierro responded. "She’s the girl in the polka-dot dress. The girl’s face is a little fuller than this sketch has it, but this is the girl."43 Faura then brought in Chris Gugas, a top Los Angeles polygraph operator, who put Fahey and his story through a lie detector. Faura told Fahey he passed the test "like a champion."44

Jordan Bonfante, the Los Angeles Bureau Chief of Life magazine, was interested in publishing Faura’s account. Hank Hernandez of SUS, however, was busy trying to crack Fahey under his own polygraph test. Under pressure from Hernandez, Fahey told an untruth, saying it was Faura who had persuaded him to connect the girl he was with to the polka dot girl. But Fahey had made the connection to the FBI long before he ever spoke with Faura. But this lie was pronounced "true" by Hank Hernandez, proving again that a polygraph’s value depends a great deal upon the integrity of the operator. Sgt. Phil Alexander tried to persuade Bonfante that Fahey was not credible, and that Life shouldn’t run the story on the girl. Kaiser amusingly recounts this incident:

"I don’t think you’ve really proved that [Fahey] was mistaken," said Bonfante. He was right. It was practically impossible to do so. But if the police didn’t do so, the implications were that there was a girl who knew something about the Kennedy assassination and that the police couldn’t find her. That was a black eye for the department.

To Bonfante, this sounded too much like Catch 22 to be true. He decided to discover how important this was to the LAPD and let Alexander talk. Six hours later, Alexander was still talking, and had not yet managed to persuaded Bonfante there was no "girl in the polka dot dress."45

[Note: to see the footnotes that correspond to the numbers in the text, refer to the original article here.]

(By the way, several commentators on this case, even Bill Turner, have dismissed Fahey as unreliable. But I have information on Fahey they did not that explains the seeming inconsistencies and adds important new information which I will reveal at another time.)

If you compare Ayton's account to the above, you are in a better position to make up your own mind about the truth. I'm not in the least afraid to stand the accounts side by side because most people are very skilled at recognizing the truth when it's put up beside a lie. I am equally certain he dares not link to my evidence because he knows this to be true as well.

As I said - I wrote the section above years ago, and have almost doubled my knowledge relating to the girl in the polka dot dress. The new evidence continues to be entirely consistent on the major points (e.g., she was wearing a white dress with dark polka dots. Who cares if the dots were described as the size of a dime or a quarter? That kind of inconsistency is meaningless as people are not good judges of size, whereas they tend to be good judges of overall color. And again, the nuances of hair color do not matter -- I've been called a "dark blonde" and a "brunette" all my life. Is that an inconsistency? No. People just call the same hair color by different names. Hair color is more subject to interpretation than stark colors like white or black.)

As for Valerie Schulte, ah, so much more later. Even the police knew she wasn't the girl. If Mel Ayton read more he'd know exactly what I'm talking about. (Whether he'd be honest about that of course remains to be seen. But at this point I think it's a safe bet he has no idea what I am referring to here. But he will. In time.)

Ayton needs to go look at the record and stop his ridiculous theorizing. When the witnesses are that consistent, it's only appropriate to assume they were right, not wrong, and to deal with the consequences of that.

By the way. A while back, I wrote about Shane O'Sullivan's work positing the presence of three CIA agents at the Ambassador hotel the night Kennedy was shot. I expressed extreme skepticism right away, and according to recent research conducted by David Talbot and Jeff Morley, it appears I was right. Talbot put some of that in his book "Brothers", about which I will have more to say later; I also understand Morley is seeking an outlet for recounting his part of that investigation as well.

Yes. Disinformation season is open. Mud is being mixed into the water to make the truth that much harder to find. It will take strong, educated, and courageous minds to resist the propaganda intensive and to stand up for what we know to be true. As most people learned in high school, the desire to be popular often outweighs the desire to be truthful. But the only path worth traveling, on all kinds of material and spiritual levels, is the one that comes from choosing the latter over the former.

Rest up, my friends. We have a long year ahead.

Nominated for a Cliopatria award!

Guess what? Jeremy Young of Progressive Historians nominated me for the Cliopatria award for Best Individual (History) Blog. How cool is that? You can add your voice too, if you feel so inclined!

I'm honored, if tired. I've been sick for the past couple of weeks - on round two of antibiotics. I feel there's so much that needs to be discussed, but I haven't had the energy to post. So I'm giving you links to some of my favorite posts from the past. Browse at will.

Dragonfly Spies, Brain Prints, and DCCC Priorities

The EPA, 9/11, and the Bush Administration

Tim Weiner's "history" of the CIA

Reclaiming history from Vince Bugliosi

Disinformation Season is Officially Open

Alger Hiss in the News Again

Missing Bill Hicks Today

The Dangers of Wikipedia

A Brief History of Blood Diamonds

What he didn’t know killed him

The Real History of Gerald Ford, Watergate, and the CIA

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November

A Brief History of Labor

Living in a Dali Painting

Of Jonestown, Maquiladoras, and Elections

When Strangers Were Welcome Here

Was Milosevich Poisoned?

Dubai to Take Over the Secret Service

Can’t we jump the track?

Max Holland vs. the nation

Freeport McMoran's Corruption of Indonesia

History Repeats with Spy Scandals

Of Chavez, Economic Hit Men, and Wildflowers

Hey, hey, USA. How many coups did you plan today?

War is a Racket for the Rich

Is “Nemesis” a Black Book?

Gary Webb’s Memorial Service

Dear readers,

I was incensed enough with a horrible attack on the research community that I sat down and fired this off to the editors of The Atlantic, a print magazine. I hope if you read the article and find yourself similarly incensed that you'll drop them a note as well. Here is what I sent off, with minor punctuation and formatting changes:

-----------------------------

Dear Editors:

Thomas Mallon’s recent article on the JFK assassination found its way to me accompanied by a subscription offer. Why did I not subscribe? Because you let a disinformationist pose as a book reviewer in your pages.

Not that I should be surprised. There's a precedent for this. At the New York Times, for years, whenever a new book on the JFK assassination came out, the review was often farmed out to Priscilla Johnson McMillan, herself the author of an anti-conspiracy book. Of course, we know now what the public was not told then: by her own admission, Priscilla Johnson McMillan was a "witting" asset of the CIA who, according to her superior, Donald Jameson, could “be encouraged to write pretty much the articles we want." (Source - CIA contact report signed by Jameson dated 11 December 1962.)

I say this to put Mallon's comments on the case and those who continue to research this case in context. Mallon is flat out wrong on several points. So why is he allowed to publish? Does no one fact check things any more? Or does he, like Priscilla, have special access because he is a favorite of the agency that still controls the media’s reporting on this topic, the CIA?

Let’s look at some specific examples of Mallon’s dishonesty or bias, whichever you wish to call it. Mallon calls Ruth Paine "virtuous Quaker woman who became, quite innocently, enmeshed in the assassination." He does not mention that during the Iran Contra war, her Quaker activities in Nicaragua got her shunned from her group because the peace activists believed her to be a CIA spy, documenting their every move. He does not mention that she had a big "x" in her calendar the day Oswald ostensibly bought the rifle (which provably, by the documentary record, Oswald didn't buy) and that even the Warren Commission expressed disbelief at her explanation that that X, the only X in her whole calendar, marked the start of one particular menstrual cycle. He does not mention that Ruth Paine's own daughter has suspicions about her mother's involvement in the JFK case, and that this caused a falling out between them. But then, if Mallon were a CIA apologist in the media, this would be expected.

Mallon also inaccurately states that the Kennedys believed in the Warren Report. As David Talbot's new book "Brothers" makes abundantly clear, Robert Kennedy’s first-day suspicion that the CIA was involved in his brother’s death continued until his own death. He had planned to reopen the investigation into his brother’s assassination and had been conducting his own very serious investigation. (The CIA, for their part, considered spying on Robert Kennedy equally important to spying on the Soviet Union, according to CIA documents revealed by the New York Times).

I’m particularly incensed that the Atlantic would stoop to allowing Mallon to smear a lot of really smart, good people who have spent years doing what the government failed to do: seriously investigate the Kennedy assassination on the basis of hard, documented evidence. Bugliosi has it right on that point, at least. The most serious researchers are indeed some of the most patriotic people I’ve ever met. When asked are if they are “real scholars, professors, [and] historians,” instead of giving the correct answer of yes, The Atlantic allows Mallon to make this completely untrue and ridiculously propagandistic smear:

I think it’s a truly dark, morbid fascination to them. Hmm. How inflammatory do I want to be here? On some level—subconscious in some, conscious in others—they find the assassination thrilling. And their preoccupation with it is, I would say, unhealthy. There are a few supposedly respectable academics who have gone way out there in conspiracy theory, but I would say that most of them are kind of gumshoes, amateurs, and people who probably were impacted by the assassination. Their emotions were impacted by it in what was originally a genuine way, but somehow the tissue around that impact has become infected, and it’s become something that they don’t want to let go of. The thing that they would hate most is for anything that they would have to regard as definitive proof to come along. I think we do have definitive proof that Oswald killed Kennedy, but if definitive proof of their own theories came along somehow, I think they’d be terribly bereft. They’d have to forfeit. They’d have a terrible, massive depression—and would go on to something else.

Let’s see. Here are a group of people who have seriously researched this case:

- Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy, Jr., before their untimely deaths.
- Professors: John Newman (formerly an intelligence analyst), Phil Melanson, Gerald McKnight, David Wrone, and many others.
- MDs, JDs and PhDs: Cyril Wecht, Peter Dale Scott, Gary Aguilar, Michael Parenti, Mark Lane, Dawn Meredith, and many others.
- Journalists: David Talbot (founder and editor in chief of Salon.com); Jefferson Morley of the Washington Post, Anthony Summers (formerly with the BBC), Josiah Thompson (formerly with LIFE), Fred Cook (formerly with The Nation), and many others.

The reason we believe there was a conspiracy is simply because we’ve read the evidence. The evidence is so clear in this regard that only the terms ignoramus or liar apply to those who claim otherwise. One only needs to realize that the back wound did not penetrate all the way through Kennedy’s body to realize how big the lies surrounding this case have become. Hitler was right on that point. It’s easier to believe a big lie than a small one, because who among us is so bold as to make up such egregious lies?

If the back wound did not go through, no “single bullet theory” is possible, and therefore, there had to be a conspiracy, because a non-penetrating back wound would have required four shots, and the Zapruder film shows there was only time to get off three shots from a single location in the time permitted.

There was no exit wound until it became politically necessary to come up with one to validate a lone shooter scenario. And because there was no exit wound, the doctors spent a good amount of time looking for the bullet that had to be lodged in his wound. Here’s a sampling of statements from Kennedy’s doctors and other medical professionals at Parkland and Bethesda to make this point very clear:

[QUOTING from Warren Commission, HSCA and ARRB documents]

“According to BOSWELL, HUMES probed the neck wound with his little finger (indicating a point on the little finger which did not go past the first knuckle, less than one inch). He said HUMES also probed it with a metal probe. He said no one gave orders that they not probe that wound.”

From Boyers’ signed affidavit:

“Another wound was located near the right shoulder blade, more specifically just under the scapula and next to it. ... During the autopsy many X-rays and photographs were taken. The pathologists kept searching for the missile which entered the right shoulder, but could not locate it. ... I recall during the autopsy there was much use of metal probes trying to locate the passage of the bullet from the right shoulder entrance. I donot [sic] believe the actual passage was proven to have exited, at the site of the tracheotomy, i.e., by probing - due probably to deflection by bone structure. This was the reason for the whole body x-rays [sic] - in trying to ascertain if the missile was still present in the body.”

From Boyers’ handwritten notes:

“Many X-rays were taken trying to locate the bullet which entered the president's [sic] right shoulder area.”

Mr. Jenkins said he believes Dr. Humes attempted to probe the back wound. He said he didn't believe the doctor found the probe "...penetrated into the chest." Mr. Jenkins said he believed the organs had already been taken out. He said the body was "...repeatedly X-rayed because they felt there should be a bullet or something there."
“Mr. Jenkins recalls Humes trying to probe the wound with his finger which enabled him to reach the end of the wound.”

Jenkins recalls Humes discussing with someone the problem of finding the bullet. He said this discussion amounted to a "disturbance." Jenkins had the impression that everything "...seemed like it was predesignated...seemed they had an answer and wanted to prove it."

Jenkins said the back wound was "...very shallow...it didn't enter the peritoneal (chest) cavity."

Kellerman recalls Dr. Finck probing the wound about 4 - 5 inches as he was trying to "...get the probe to come out..." Kellerman said the doctors didn't probe the wound with his finger first, saying it was "not that big."

Lipsey says that he recalls the doctors discussing the third bullet which he believes entered low in the neck and was deflected down into the chest cavity. [This matches the account reported in the New York Times that first day.]

Lipsey said that the doctors were using the angle from the extrance [sic] in the rear of the head to the throat to look for the other bullet that entered high in the back. He said that both entrances looked the same. Lipsey mentioned that the doctors spent more time looking for the bullet that entered high in the back than anything else. He recalls that he said that the bullet could have gone anywhere. The doctors were also frimly [sic] convinced that this bullet did not exit in the front of the neck. Lipsey said the doctors followed the path of the bullet for a short distance until they lost the track at which point they removed the organs in an attempt to locate it.

[END QUOTES]

One of the FBI agents present at the autopsy even speculated about the use of ice bullets because that would explain both the non-penetrating wound and the lack of a bullet.

I could go on and on. I’ve read this stuff. Clearly, the editors at The Atlantic haven’t. But that’s no excuse for allowing Mallon to so misrepresent not just the evidence, but the people who feel strongly that by allowing the lies about Kennedy’s death to go unchallenged, tragedies like the Iraq war -- a war built on official lies -- became possible. We pursue the truth because we think the truth matters. If the truth really will set us free, it follows that lies keep us imprisoned in a false history, from which no useful lessons can be determined.

My own introduction to the case started when I found a set of Warren Commission hearings (a 26-volume set) at a local library. I pulled off a volume at random and started reading. It was a passage where Arlen Specter was questioning Dr. Perry about Kennedy’s wound in the front of his neck. It was so obvious that Specter was not trying to elicit information, but to lead the witness to the desired answer, that I literally shuddered. It was so obvious. That was the first time I realized how utterly the media had failed us in this country. Anyone who seriously looks and is honest can find evidence of conspiracy rather quickly. Pinpointing the blame is a far more difficult exercise, but it doesn’t take anything near rocket science to prove conspiracy.

So I have to ask again. Does Mallon have friends at the CIA? Has he worked for them? Because you can scratch the background of nearly every writer on this case who has claimed there was no conspiracy, and find a CIA link in their past or present. James Phelan, a respected Saturday Evening Post reporter who attacked Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw in the only trial ever brought on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, turned out to be not only an FBI informant, but a close friend of the CIA’s point man on the anti-Castro plots. Hugh Aynesworth, responsible for nearly all the original Dallas coverage of the event, who later repeated his coverage for Newsweek, had applied to work for the CIA the month before the assassination. Reporter Hal Hendrix, called “the Spook” because of his intelligence agency connections, was the one who supplied Seth Kantor with background info on Oswald in record time right after the assassination. Hendrix was a close friend of David Atlee Phillips, the CIA man most often fingered as a conspirator due to the extensive documentary record, and the man whom all the Castro did it” stories that surfaced originally can be traced to.

Gerald Posner? He came to fame by writing a book that excused the CIA for its failure to find Mengele. He also wrote a fictional book which featured a Cold War CIA hero pitted against a newfangled government bureaucracy. Max Holland? He got his start at the Voice of America, long acknowledged as a propaganda outlet for the CIA abroad. And when “liberal” Holland couldn’t get his regular employer, The Nation, to run one of his lone-nut screeds, whom did he turn to? Why, the CIA, of course, which was more than happy to publish his work in their in-house publication “Studies in Intelligence.”

Consider for just a moment. Why is it that everywhere you look in the media, the voices telling us that Oswald was a lone assassin (and therefore, the CIA didn’t do it) all seem to have ties to the CIA?

This was brought home yet again at a conference in DC a couple of years ago. One man got up to attempt to prove that famous “dictabelt” tape, recorded by a policeman whose microphone was stuck on, did not in fact capture shots in Dealey plaza. (Because if it did, it captured four shots, and hence, at least two shooters.) At the end of his presentation, I challenged his presentation, because he relied on science provided by a Nobel prize-winning scientist who also drew a paycheck from the CIA. The man then said sure, his source was CIA, but so what? “I am too,” he said. In other words, yet again, the people most actively pushing a lone nut scenario were directly connected to the CIA.

If The Atlantic wants to show journalistic credibility and independence, they need to publish a companion piece by David Talbot, Jefferson Morley, or someone equally suited to the task. Mallon’s work was outrageously biased and patently dishonest by omission. The truth should be allowed at least equal space in your pages as well. But I’m not holding my breath. I know that journalistic integrity belongs to an era that died sometime before the start of the Cold War. I fear I will never again see its like in any major publication in my lifetime.

I’ll leave you with these excerpts from a CIA memo that instructed its media assets how to discuss the CIA assassination. Perhaps some of you have seen it before?

This document caused quite a stir when it was discovered in 1977. Dated 4/1/67, and marked "DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED", this document is a stunning testimony to how concerned the CIA was over investigations into the Kennedy assassination. Emphasis has been added to facilitate scanning.

This is CIA Document #1035-960, marked "PSYCH" for presumably Psychological Warfare Operations, in the division "CS", the Clandestine Services, sometimes known as the "dirty tricks" department.

RE: Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report

1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy's assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report, (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission's published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission's findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission's report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse results.

2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination. Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.

3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active [business] addresses are requested:

a. To discuss the publicity problem with [?] and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.

b. To employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (II) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher [?] article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane's book is much less convincing that Epstein's and comes off badly where confronted by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.)

4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful:

a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joesten and Bertrand Russell) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the attack on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics. (A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire of 1933, which some competent historians (Fritz Tobias, AJ.P. Taylor, D.C. Watt) now believe was set by Vander Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists, but the latter have been more successful in convincing the world that the Nazis were to blame.)

b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent--and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) and less on ballistics, autopsy, and photographic evidence. A close examination of the Commission's records will usually show that the conflicting eyewitness accounts are quoted out of context, or were discarded by the Commission for good and sufficient reason.

c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy's brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald R. Ford would hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his control: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, the risk that the assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have arranged much more secure conditions.

d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other. Actually, the make-up of the Commission and its staff was an excellent safeguard against over-commitment to any one theory, or against the illicit transformation of probabilities into certainties.

e. Oswald would not have been any sensible person's choice for a co-conspirator. He was a "loner," mixed up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service. [Archivist's note: This claim is demonstrably untrue with the latest file releases. The CIA had an operational interest in Oswald less than a month before the assassination. Source: Oswald and the CIA, John Newman and newly released files from the National Archives.]

f. As to charges that the Commission's report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms.

g. Such vague accusations as that "more than ten people have died mysteriously" can always be explained in some natural way e.g.: the individuals concerned have for the most part died of natural causes; the Commission staff questioned 418 witnesses (the FBI interviewed far more people, conduction 25,000 interviews and re interviews), and in such a large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected. (When Penn Jones, one of the originators of the "ten mysterious deaths" line, appeared on television, it emerged that two of the deaths on his list were from heart attacks, one from cancer, one was from a head-on collision on a bridge, and one occurred when a driver drifted into a bridge abutment.)

5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission's Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.

What’s sad is that, even when the CIA admits publicly (they never denied this was their document when it first surfaced) that they’ve used book reviews to attempt to shape the debate in their favor, editors at a place like The Atlantic Monthly can still be played for suckers.

Disappointedly,

Lisa Pease
15+ year researcher on the Kennedy Assassination
Contributing author and co-editor of the book “The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X” (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003)
Featured authority on the Discovery Channel show “Conspiracy Files” in the “CIA Mind Control” segment.
A patriotic American and a normal human being who does not have any “morbid fascination” with this case, does not find the thought of assassination “thrilling” in any regard, and has a solid reputation for honesty in this field.

Bcc’d to about a hundred serious researchers in this case, none of whom find this case morbidly thrilling either.