Hello all,
I was asked to write an article about my film by the
Independent Weekly, one of the largest in the country. It centers on the local
connection - Oswald's Raleigh Dallas Raleigh
See you in Dallas
Randy
http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/jfk-oswald-and-the-raleigh-connection/Content?oid=3192079
The call slip showing Oswald tried to place a collect call
to John Hurt of Raleigh
click to flip through (5)
A staggering 6 million documents have been released under the JFK Records Act, as well as mountains of independent research.
Although many were professional investigators, photo analysts, pathologists, journalists, historians or lawyers, most approached the assassination not as a vocation but as an avocation.
It was 11:30 on a
foggy night in Raleigh Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963 . The
previous afternoon, President John F. Kennedy had been shot on the streets of Dallas
That night, nearly 1,200 miles away at the Dallas
Municipal Building New York
Oswald rang the switchboard at a quarter till 12 , Raleigh
"I was dumbfounded at what happened next," Treon
later told a former Senate investigator. "Swinney told [Oswald], 'I'm
sorry, the number doesn't answer.' Swinney then unplugged and disconnected
Oswald without ever really trying to put the call through."
Afterward, Swinney tore the sheet from her note pad and
threw it into the trash. She left, her shift having ended.
Treon retrieved the wadded piece of paper from the trash and
copied the information onto a standard long-distance telephone call slip to
save as a souvenir. The slip reveals that Oswald had given Treon the name
"John Hurt of Raleigh , N.C.
After the release of the Warren Report, the U.S. U.S.
In the nearly 50 years since President Kennedy's
assassination, hundreds of respected researchers have dedicated decades of
their lives in their search for the truth, not just about the assassination but
for what they describe as America's hidden history: How the "official
version" of events is promoted by the U.S. government and perpetuated by a
cooperative, if not complicit media.
Although many are professional investigators, photo
analysts, pathologists, journalists, historians or lawyers, most approach the
assassination not as a vocation but as an avocation. An engineer conducted
crucial studies of the president's autopsies. A flight attendant performed
respected research into Oswald's ties to military intelligence. A high school
teacher uncovered important information about the Texas Vietnam Southern California
real estate agent.
Grover
Proctor, a Raleigh Cary
In fact, because of Proctor, Oswald's attempt to reach out
to John Hurt has become known as theRaleigh Call.
Nine years after the assassination, Proctor, then a graduate
student at Wayne State
University Michigan
"Every evening, several of my friends and I would sit
glued to the news, fascinated by the unfolding constitutional drama,"
Proctor said. "Late-night discussions inevitably gravitated to the
conspiracy being brought to light by the televised hearings—and to the wider
subject of political conspiracies in general."
A friend of Proctor handed him a paperback copy of A Heritage of Stone, a book by New Orleans District Attorney
Jim Garrison that concluded that the Kennedy assassination was plotted and
executed by the CIA .
"Until then, I had never given the assassination a
second thought," Proctor recalled. "I reasoned, 'They know who did
it, right? What's the big deal?' But both Watergate and this book told me to
ask, 'Could there have been a conspiracy in Dallas
"Already disturbed by the high crimes and misdemeanors
of a fallen president as a result of the Watergate scandal, I was shaken to the
core. Watergate had already convinced me that the government could lie to its
own people. This book forced me to ask the question whether sometimes it also
kills them."
It was through the work of independent researcher Michael
Canfield that a copy of the Raleigh Call slip first became public. He secured a
copy of the slip, which became available as the result of a Freedom of
Information lawsuit filed by a civil rights activist, while conducting research
for the 1975 book Coup d'Etat in America. The book, co-authored with Alan
Weberman, was the first major work to deal with the Raleigh Call, and the slip
was reprinted in the appendix.
On the slip were two numbers attributed to a "John
Hurt": one for a John W. Hurt, one for a John D. Hurt. Canfield called
both numbers. John W. Hurt turned up nothing of interest. However, when
Canfield spoke to John D. Hurt, he sat stunned, silent when Hurt revealed,
"I was in the counterintelligence corps in the Army during World War
II."
That Oswald called a former military intelligence officer
from jail—only to be assassinated by Jack Ruby a little more than 12 hours
later—was notable and, to that point, publicly undisclosed.
Proctor became aware of Oswald's attempted call while riding
on a train from Hartford New
York
from jail: "The note preserved by Mrs. Treon reportedly
shows that Oswald booked a call to Area Code 919."
Proctor says: "I remember being pulled up short after
reading that, thinking, 'Something about that sounds familiar.' It took a few
seconds, but then I realized the area code 919 was Raleigh
Proctor later dialed the first number on the phone slip and,
to his surprise, John D. Hurt answered and confirmed the revelations in
Canfield's book.
In the way in which researchers have built upon one
another's work to add to the wealth of information about the assassination,
Proctor took the Raleigh Call a step further: Suspecting that Oswald
had intelligence connections, he interviewed a former CIA
agent.
Victor Marchetti was a 14-year veteran of the CIA
who had served as executive assistant to then-Deputy Director Richard Helms.
Marchetti had also written extensively about the Raleigh Call in The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, the first book on the
assassination censored by the U.S.
In an interview with Proctor, Marchetti stated that in
calling Hurt, Oswald was clearly following standard procedure for a CIA
asset under duress. This includes contacting his case officer through a
"cut-out," an intermediary with no direct involvement in an
operation—John Hurt.
"[Oswald] was probably calling his cut-out. He was
calling somebody who could put him in touch with his case officer,"
Marchetti told Proctor. "He couldn't go beyond that person. There's no way
he could. He just had to depend on this person to say, 'OK, I'll deliver the
message.' Now, if the cut-out has already been alerted to cut him off and
ignore him, then ..."
Here is an excerpt from Proctor's interview with Marchetti:
Proctor: OK, if someone was an agent, and he was involved in
something, and nobody believes he is an agent ... He is arrested, and trying to
communicate, let's say, and he is one of you guys. What is the procedure?
Marchetti: I'd kill him.
Proctor: If I was an agent for the [Central Intelligence]
Agency, and I was involved in something involving the law domestically and the
FBI, would I have a contact to call?
Marchetti: Yes.
Proctor: A verification contact?
Marchetti: Yes, you would.
Proctor: Would I be dead?
Marchetti: It would depend on the situation. If you get into
bad trouble, we're not going to verify you. No how, no way.
Proctor: But there is a call mechanism set up.
Marchetti: Yes.
Proctor: So it is conceivable that Lee Harvey Oswald was
....
Marchetti: That's what he was doing. He was trying to call
in and say, "Tell them I'm all right."
Proctor: Was that his death warrant?
Marchetti: You betcha.
Whether the switchboard operator connected Oswald's call is
irrelevant, especially since there appeared to be government agents monitoring
the activity. His intentions were enough. As Marchetti told Proctor: "This
time [Oswald] went over the dam, whether he knew it or not, or whether they set
him up or not. He was over the dam. At this point it was executive
action." Assassination.
Proctor says he remembers thinking, as he had Marchetti on
the phone: "I have really stepped over into a place where I have NO
referent at all. I had no background for the necessarily dirty world of
spycraft. I suppose now, 30-plus years later, I have just about the same
reaction."
Marchetti wrote that the program created "young men who
were made to appear disenchanted, poor, American youths who had
become turned off and wanted to see what communism was all about."
The existence of the Nags Head base was confirmed in
the 2004
testimony of former CIA pilot
William "Tosh" Plumlee:
"When I later learned [in November 1963] that Oswald
had been arrested as the lone assassin, I remembered having met him on a number
of previous occasions which were connected with intelligence training matters,
first at Illusionary Warfare Training in Nags Head, North Carolina, then in
Honolulu at radar installation and at Oahu's Wheeler Air Force Base, then in
Dallas at an Oak Cliff safe house on North Beckley Street run by Alpha 66's
Hernandez group, who had worked out of Miami prior to the assassination."
Oswald's intelligence connections were further verified in a
1975 congressional investigation.
In September of that year, U.S. Rep. Richard Schweiker was
appointed to chair the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with
Respect to Intelligence Activities. Schweiker had the credentials for the job:
He had served on the Church Committee, which revealed gross misconduct of the CIA ,
FBI and the military in their surveillance of U.S.
The Select Committee was tasked to investigate intelligence
agencies with respect to the JFK assassination. Afterward, Schweiker revealed:
"We do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with
him, there are the fingerprints of intelligence."
A year later, Congress launched another investigation, this
one by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), also charged with
probing the assassinations of JFK and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Surell Brady was on the committee's staff and investigated
the Raleigh Call. Brady wrote an exhaustive28-page
report outlining Canfield and Weberman's findings. Although the report
clearly states that Oswald attempted to call a former military intelligence
officer with whom he had no identifiable ties, that detail was omitted from
the HSCA Final Report.
The trend of ignoring provocative evidence in government
investigations continued.
The Raleigh Call remains one of the most disturbing,
unexplained and ignored aspects of the JFK assassination. In an interview
Proctor conducted with HSCA Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey, he reaffirmed what
has become the last official word on Oswald's attempted call. "I consider
it unanswered," Blakey said, "and I consider the direction in which
it went substantiated and disturbing, but ultimately inconclusive. The bottom
line is, it's an unanswerable mystery."
As we enter the 50th year after the assassination, expect an
onslaught of books, television programs and movies pertaining to the
assassination. Virtually every network will produce a show purporting to have
the definitive word on the JFK assassination. Judging from previous efforts,
they will likely support the conclusions of the Warren Commission and not those
of the government's more recent investigations. And odds are good that
researchers who have uncovered key documents will be, at best, dismissed.
You can find the enormous body of work at Andy
Winiarczyk's Last
Hurrah Bookshop in Williamsport , Pa.
The rest document the indefatigable work of independent
researchers such as Proctor, whose findings have added up into a coherent and
compelling counter-narrative. "In many cases, researchers fight the
institutions for years—FOIA request after FOIA request—trying to get one
document pertaining to one tiny piece of evidence," said Andy, as he's
known among his fellow researchers. "When they finally get that piece of
information, they piece it together with their previous research or with the
research of others, and then write a book. And while that one book might be
incomplete, taken in toto with the work of the research community, the truth
behind the assassination becomes quite clear."
Despite the 2,000 titles at the Last Hurrah, most of the
national attention given to books about the assassination has focused on just
two works that defend the government's official version: MSNBC contributor
Gerald Posner's best-seller Case Closed, published in 1993, and 2007's Reclaiming History by former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent
Bugliosi.
Posner's Case Closed was released in time for the
30th anniversary of the assassination. "It caught this incredible
wave," Andy says. "It appeared on the desks of all the major media
who would say, 'We don't have to read anymore, we don't have to trouble
ourselves, here's someone who's sorted it all out.'"
But Posner's research was selective. Although he reviewed
the 26 volumes of the Warren Report, Andy says, "he found what he wished
to find. But he didn't go really much beyond that."
Nonetheless, Posner made the press rounds: 60
Minutes, network specials, the Sunday morning political roundtables and
even the morning shows. Posner appeared on the Today Show in the now
infamous segment "Truth or Conspiracy." Host Katie Couric
proclaimed that the three to four years Posner spent on the case amounted to
"tons and tons of research."
While Case Closed was a best-seller, Bugliosi's
1,648-page defense of the Warren Report hovered at No. 800 in the Amazon
rankings. Yet even at that length, the book ignores the staggering 6 million
documents that have been released under the JFK Records Act, as well as the
mountains of independent research.
The book's dismal sales didn't dissuade media outlets from
booking its author. A staunch supporter of the Warren Report, Bugliosi appeared
on The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, C-Span and 20/20 to
herald his confirmation of the government's version of events—and in doing so,
marginalizing the work and evidence that counters that view.
"The dismissal and ostracizing of the pro-conspiracy
group—including independent researchers, members of Congress and congressional
investigators—continues [to this day]," Proctor says.
The media's role in perpetuating the official government
version is significant—and very effective. And for good reason: Reporters and
editors have helped the government itself.
Among the revelations of the Church Committee hearings was CIA
Document #1035-960. This document, dated Jan.
4, 1967 , and marked "PSYCH" for Psychological Warfare,
directs CIA agents to counter critics of the
Warren Report by using "liaison and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians
and editors)" and "to employ propaganda assets to answer and refute
the attacks of the critics."
Those cozy relationships were revealed in 1977,
when Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein—who had earned fame from
his groundbreaking Watergate coverage—wrote extensively on information released
by the Church Committee. His article detailing revelations of the committee
hearings, The CIA and the Media, appeared in the Oct. 20, 1977 , issue of Rolling Stone. The
article exposed details of Operation Mockingbird, the CIA's effort to control
the media.
Through documentary evidence, Bernstein revealed a list of
high-profile media organizations that willingly cooperated with the CIA :
These include ABC, NBC, the Associated Press, Reuters, Newsweek, The
Miami Herald and even The Saturday Evening Post. "But the most
valuable of these associations, according to CIA
officials, has been with The New York Times, CBS, and Time Inc.,"
Bernstein wrote. Quoting an unnamed CIA
agent, Bernstein added, "One reporter is worth 20 agents."
Yet some of the most strident voices against the idea of
conspiracy have recanted, Proctor said. Case in point: Robert MacNeil of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,
who recently stated in a filmed interview for the documentary Beyond JFK: "We've seen revealed one conspiracy after
another. Anybody would have to be a fool, nowadays, to dismiss conspiracies.
And perhaps we lived in a fool's paradise before the Kennedy
assassination."
Even New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, a former
defender of the Oswald-as-lone-nut theory, reconsidered his position. "I think there's enough
evidence now that there's certainly doubts about that," wrote Wicker, a North
Carolina
There are many psychological theories that people innately
need to believe in conspiracies. However, Walt Brown, author of numerous books
on the JFK assassination and a college history professor, offers a counter
view: "Imagine the police come to your house to tell you that, God forbid,
your daughter has been killed. Once you get it together, you ask, 'What
happened?' Well, the cop tells you, we're not sure. It's either a psycho that
got loose from the asylum or a bunch of Hell's Angels that killed her.
"In this scenario, the guy from the asylum was just one
of those fluke things that happens: an accident. At least it wasn't systemic,
institutional and organized. Well, Lee Oswald is the accident and conspiracy is
systemic. As a father, I'm going to pray for the accident."
John Judge, co-founder and director of the Coalition on
Political Assassinations, put it best: "The political paralysis in America
Will we ever know the truth? We may already. "Who is to
say that, somewhere in that morass of opinion and deception, the real answer
hasn't already been revealed?" Proctor says. "The government and the
press—by abrogating their responsibilities—have deprived us of the normal and
official venues for discerning the truth."
It's important to know the truth about the Kennedy
assassination not only to correct the historical record but to reveal the
motivations for obscuring it in the first place. The knowledge should prompt us
to be circumspect about what we "know," and to question other
official versions of contemporary events.
"Why is it important?" Proctor asks. "For the
same reason it was important to Galileo to correct the prevailing official
position that the sun revolved around the earth. Those who have devoted their
lives, resources and intellect to trying to uncover the truth about the Kennedy
assassination have decided that, twice now, the U.S. United States
Randolph Benson is an award-winning, Durham-based filmmaker.
His films have garnered the Gold Medal in the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts
His current project, The Searchers, is a portrait of
researchers of the Kennedy assassination. The film is slated for a spring release.
A graduate of Wake
Forest University North Carolina School Duke
University
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