Friday, November 29, 2013

Fabracate CIA Story


“Fabricate Big Story to Take Play Away” –

This guy tells the story of how they got past the three cop cars waiting for them in the parking lot across the street. “We’d call the police station and report a knife fight in a bar across town, and right away, they would all take off, their lights flashing and sirens wailing, while we got away clean.”

It seems like the CIA had the same idea when their role in the Guatemalan coup in 1954 became public knowledge – create a media diversion – UFOs, Sextuplets….- “to take the play away” from the real political action.

Some say this was the real motive behind the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. in the days following the assassination of President Kennedy.

The role of the CIA in the 1954 Guatemalan Coup is detailed in some government records released a decade ago and the New York Times reported on them.

In 2003 the State Department released a collection of previously classified documents, one in particular reflects on the CIA’s role in the 1954 Guatemala coup that ousted president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman and replaced him with Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, the CIA operation code named PBSUCCESS.

One memo reads: “At 1500, 18 September 1953, a meeting was held at the office of [Allen W. Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence] to discuss the present status of PBSUCCESS and to consider future plans for this operation…Cabell [Gen. Charles P. Cabell, the agency’s deputy director] stated that he concurred in approval of the general plan but felt that the budget estimate should be increased to $3,000,000 to provide more adequately for contingencies. Mr. Dulles agreed.”

A week later, Col. J. C. King, chief of the Western Hemisphere division, CIA Directorate of Operations, in a memo outlining tasks for the Guatemalan Chief of Station included collecting data “which could be used for character assassination….,” and “transmit all rumors re Arbenz officials...” and “prepare a weekly ‘psychological barometer’ report on local conditions.”

Among the rumors “combining fact and fiction, which ought to be circulated” included “A group of Soviet commissars…have landed…the government has issued orders to devalue the quetzal,…all boys and girls 16 years old will be called for one year of labor duty in special camps,…food rationing is about to be introduced….Arbenz has already left the country….announcements from the National Palace are actually made by a double, provided by Soviet intelligence….lessons in atheism,…add rumors of your own, following the day-by-day changes in the situation.”

“Paramilitary Action: An initial shipment of approximately 15 tons of arms and ammunition is now ready for shipment from [DELETED} and subsequent transshipment to [Col. Castillo Armes in] Nicaragua…This material is intended for use by [Col. Castillo Armas] in his Nicaraguan training center and to test facilities for clandestine introduction of arms into Guatemala.”

A November 5, 1953 memo from CIA Headquarters notes: “Station was instructed to mail ‘mourning cards’ for 30 successive days to Arbenz and top Communist leaders. Cards were to mourn the purge or execution of various Communists in the world and to hint forthcoming doom to recipients.”

A Telegram from PBSUCCESS HQ in Florida to CIA HQ on January 30, 1954 specifically ordered the fabrication of sensational news stories in order to serve as a media distraction “to take play away” from the coup.

“White Paper [issued by the Guatemalan government] has effectively exposed certain aspects of PBSUCCESS….If possible, fabricate big human interest story, like flying saucers, birth sextuplets in remote area to take play away.”

 

From: New York Times, July 06, 2003, By Stephen Kinzer.

Word for Word/Coup Control; The CIA’s Cover Has Been Blown? Just Make Up Something About UFO’s.


 

Still Secret JFK Files Get Attention


Still-secret JFK assassination files draw increasing attention and White House petition

November 29, 2013 (MMD Newswire) - - The biggest news to emerge from all the coverage of the 50th anniversary of assassination of President John F. Kennedy are reports of the huge number of US government files about the murder that still remain secret.
Even Secretary of State John Kerry recently called for the release of the files, telling NBC News "it is totally appropriate for a country like the United States to open up the files."

This week's extensive report in the Boston Globe is only the latest detailing the many troubling US government files about JFK's assassination that still remain secret, more than fifty years after his murder. Among those are FBI files and tapes about a godfather's confession to JFK's murder and a secret Naval Intelligence investigation of the assassination that reached a conclusion different from the Warren Commission.

Joining the Globe in reporting on the important CIA, FBI and Naval Intelligence files that remain secret are the Chicago Tribune, NBC News, MSNBC, the New York Post, the Guardian, the BBC, and UPI.

Cited as an expert by all of those was author Lamar Waldron, whom Variety called "the ultimate JFK historian" in matters about the assassination. Waldron has just petitioned the White House to release all the files immediately, instead of waiting until the year 2017 or beyond, as is currently planned.

As Waldron points out in his newest book, The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination, the National Archives has so far refused to say how many pages remain secret. While some journalists estimate that number at 50,000 pages, NBC News reported several years ago that "millions" of page remain secret. Washington think-tank OMB Watch, which interviewed officials involved in releasing 4.5 million pages of JFK assassination files in the 1990s, said even after that effort "well over a million CIA records" remain unreleased. Waldron's book points out the CIA figure doesn't included the many FBI, Secret Service, and Naval Intelligence files and tapes about JFK's murder that remain unreleased.

Waldron noted that the Warren Commission was only the first, and least informed, of six government committees that investigated JFK's assassination. The fifth investigation--the House Select Committee on Assassinations--had access to much information that federal agencies had withheld from the Warren Commission. The House Committee officially concluded after a two-year investigation that JFK was "likely" killed by a conspiracy, and that two Mafia godfathers, Santo "Trafficante [and Carlos] Marcello had to motive, means, and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy."

The most recent government committee, the JFK Assassinations Records Review Board, was created when Congress unanimously passed the 1992 JFK Act with the support of then-Senator John Kerry and Senator Edward Kennedy. Among the files released by the Review Board were almost a hundred pages of uncensored files detailing how the FBI used a secret undercover operation, code-named CAMTEX, to obtain the JFK assassination confession of Louisiana/Texas godfather Carlos Marcello.

Waldron obtained addition information from the FBI's informant, Jack Van Laningham, and from key FBI agents involved in the operation. The FBI files show that Marcello talked about his control of Jack Ruby and meeting Lee Oswald, while Van Laningham detailed Marcello's account to him of importing two hit men from Europe to do the actual shooting. FBI files and personnel confirm that Van Laningham, who was Marcello's cellmate in the Texarkana federal prison, put a court-authorized bug in their cell that recorded "hundreds of hours" of audio tape of Marcello talking about his many crimes. Yet the FBI refused to turn over any of those tapes to the Review Board and still refuses to release the tapes, the transcripts, and their many additional files about CAMTEX and Marcello's admissions.

Waldron's book documents many little-known aspects of JFK's murder, all of which point to the existence of many thousands of pages of still-unreleased FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and Naval Intelligence files. This includes the documented attempt to assassinate JFK from a tall building with a high-powered rifle during his motorcade in Tampa, Florida, four days before Dallas, and the afore-mentioned Naval Intelligence investigation of Oswald. One of the Naval Intelligence investigators said their report concluded that Oswald was "incapable of masterminding the assassination or of doing the actual shooting."

According to Waldron, The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination is able to reveal so much about the still-secret files because he got the full story directly from many of those involved, including more than two dozen associates of John and Robert Kennedy, starting with JFK's Secretary of State, Dean Rusk.

Many sensitive files, like those about the Tampa attempt and the Naval Intelligence investigation, were withheld not just from the Warren Commission, but from the later five government investigating committees as well. Regarding CIA files withheld from the House Select Committee, its director, Robert Blakey, told PBS that it "amounted to obstruction of justice." The Chairman of the JFK Review Board, Judge John Tunheim, talked to the Boston Globe about those same files, saying "It really was an example of treachery. If [the CIA] fooled us on that, they may have fooled us on other things."

Waldron says this decades-long pattern of agencies withholding files from investigating committees and the public is why he started a White House petition, to release all of the JFK assassination files immediately. The petition can be found at https://petitions.whitehouse.gov or from the link atwww.thehiddenhistoryofthejfkassassination.com.

###

Contact: Lorna Garano

Counterpoint

510-280-5397

lornagarano@gmail.com

Copyright © 2011 Mass Media Distribution LLC - 33

 

CIA During Guatemala Coup - Fabricate UFO Story


“Fabricate Big Story to Take Play Away” –

This guy tells the story of how they got past the three cop cars waiting for them in the parking lot across the street. “We’d call the police station and report a knife fight in a bar across town, and right away, they would all take off, their lights flashing and sirens wailing, while we got away clean.”

It seems like the CIA had the same idea when their role in the Guatemalan coup in 1954 became public knowledge – create a media diversion – UFOs, Sextuplets….- “to take the play away” from the real political action.

Some say this was the real motive behind the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. in the days following the assassination of President Kennedy.

The role of the CIA in the 1954 Guatemalan Coup is detailed in some government records released a decade ago and the New York Times reported on them.

In 2003 the State Department released a collection of previously classified documents, one in particular reflects on the CIA’s role in the 1954 Guatemala coup that ousted president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman and replaced him with Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, the CIA operation code named PBSUCCESS.

One memo reads: “At 1500, 18 September 1953, a meeting was held at the office of [Allen W. Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence] to discuss the present status of PBSUCCESS and to consider future plans for this operation…Cabell [Gen. Charles P. Cabell, the agency’s deputy director] stated that he concurred in approval of the general plan but felt that the budget estimate should be increased to $3,000,000 to provide more adequately for contingencies. Mr. Dulles agreed.”

A week later, Col. J. C. King, chief of the Western Hemisphere division, CIA Directorate of Operations, in a memo outlining tasks for the Guatemalan Chief of Station included collecting data “which could be used for character assassination….,” and “transmit all rumors re Arbenz officials...” and “prepare a weekly ‘psychological barometer’ report on local conditions.”

Among the rumors “combining fact and fiction, which ought to be circulated” included “A group of Soviet commissars…have landed…the government has issued orders to devalue the quetzal,…all boys and girls 16 years old will be called for one year of labor duty in special camps,…food rationing is about to be introduced….Arbenz has already left the country….announcements from the National Palace are actually made by a double, provided by Soviet intelligence….lessons in atheism,…add rumors of your own, following the day-by-day changes in the situation.”

“Paramilitary Action: An initial shipment of approximately 15 tons of arms and ammunition is now ready for shipment from [DELETED} and subsequent transshipment to [Col. Castillo Armes in] Nicaragua…This material is intended for use by [Col. Castillo Armas] in his Nicaraguan training center and to test facilities for clandestine introduction of arms into Guatemala.”

A November 5, 1953 memo from CIA Headquarters notes: “Station was instructed to mail ‘mourning cards’ for 30 successive days to Arbenz and top Communist leaders. Cards were to mourn the purge or execution of various Communists in the world and to hint forthcoming doom to recipients.”

A Telegram from PBSUCCESS HQ in Florida to CIA HQ on January 30, 1954 specifically ordered the fabrication of sensational news stories in order to serve as a media distraction “to take play away” from the coup.

“White Paper [issued by the Guatemalan government] has effectively exposed certain aspects of PBSUCCESS….If possible, fabricate big human interest story, like flying saucers, birth sextuplets in remote area to take play away.”

 

From: New York Times, July 06, 2003, By Stephen Kinzer.

Word for Word/Coup Control; The CIA’s Cover Has Been Blown? Just Make Up Something About UFO’s.


 

Lisa Pease on the Media and JFK


MONDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2013

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

LISA PEASE - REAL HISTORY BLOG

http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/2013/10/my-comments-on-jfk-and-media-panal-at.html

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.

 

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Release the JFK Records Now! - Stu Bykofsky

Release the JFK records, now!

Stu Bykofsky, Daily News Columnist
POSTED: Monday, November 18, 2013, 12:16 AM
http://media.philly.com/designimages/partnerIcon-DailyNews.jpg
MY 9/11 WAS 11/22.
I remember where I was - each time in a newspaper office.
For Nov. 22, 1963, I was the boss of four weekly newspapers in Brooklyn. I ordered my reporters to hit the streets while I pulled together everything we had on every visit John F. Kennedy made to Brooklyn, where he was idolized.
For Sept. 11, 2001, I was a gossip columnist here, sidelined by the tragedy. I watched it unfold on TV, with horror and anger, just like you. Some of you felt fear, but I felt fury and the dreadful realization that our oceans no longer protected us. On 11/22, I felt a bottomless sadness and the sickening realization that our decency no longer protected us.
Sept. 11 and Nov. 22 didn't get an unforgettable epithet, such as my parents' Day of Infamy, Dec. 7, 1941.
America changed after Dec. 7 and Sept. 11. Those galvanized us for war. We won the first in four years; we are more than a decade into the second. The first was fought without remorse, the second hamstrung by rules of engagement.
11/22 changed us, too, but differently. The assassination shattered our national psyche. I could not foresee that the assassination would begin the slide of our self-assurance as the greatest nation. With brief interludes, we have been in decline ever since. We are now content to lead from behind. If America were a stock, analysts would hang a "sell" tag on it.
Tragedy struck 50 years ago this Friday, and when I write "50 years," it seems like 50 centuries, but it feels like 50 weeks.

In the days after 11/22, I sat my infant son in my lap as we watched black-and-white images beamed from Dallas, and later from D.C., as America displayed her grief. More for me than him, I tried to explain what had happened, but he was too young to understand my words, and I barely understood what happened myself. JFK. Lee Harvey Oswald. J.D. Tippit. Jack Ruby.
Then came the accusations and the questions, and the Warren Commission with the answers, but . . . The answers were insufficient and, to this day, some material is suppressed.
How much?
Depends on whom you ask.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration says it is a "misconception" that the assassination records are "in some way sealed." It says, "The records are largely open and available to the research community."
"Largely" open. That's like being "almost" a virgin.
Although about 5 million records are open, the Associated Press reports that "thousands of pages of investigative documents" are unavailable, some of which might shed light on nagging mysteries, such as 300 pages devoted to CIA caseworker George Joannides.
The Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 requires all records to be released by 2017, but a loophole allows agencies to petition to withhold records if they might compromise "military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement" or foreign relations.
What could possibly be compromised a half-century after the act? The secrecy serves to fire conspiracy theorists with their fantasies about regime change. Gallup reports 61 percent of Americans don't believe Oswald acted alone.
The best-informed people I've read doubt there's a smoking gun hidden there. I don't expect evidence that those who have been chum for conspiracy theorists - Fidel Castro, the Cosa Nostra, the CIA, the generals, Lyndon Johnson - will be found with bloody hands.
I could be wrong. There could be something really ugly under that rock. Why make Americans wait until 2017?
The whole truth, no matter how bitter, is an appropriate way to mark the horrible anniversary.
Release the JFK records now.


Phone: 215-854-5977
On Twitter: @StuBykofsky
Blog: ph.ly/Byko
Columns: ph.ly/StuBykofsky


Friday, November 8, 2013

John T. Orr - the Last DOJ Attorney to Investigate the JFK Ballistics

How I investigated President John F. Kennedy's assassination

By John T. Orr

I remember clearly what I was doing the moment President Kennedy was assassinated. I was a 17-year-old college freshman, throwing a football with a friend outside my dorm. 
Someone came out on the second floor landing and said the president had been shot. We ran up the steps and into his room and watched Walter Cronkite on the small black-and-white TV as the tragic events unfolded.
Two days later, on Sunday morning, I was watching live televisioncoverage of Lee Harvey Oswald being brought out into the basement garage of the Dallas police building and stared at the screen in disbelief as Jack Ruby pointed a pistol at Oswald's chest and murdered him. Those moments that weekend are forever burned in my memory.
The report proves beyond a reasonable doubt that four shots were fired during the assassination.
The August 30, 1993, issue of U.S. News & World Report carried a cover story on "Case Closedhttp://global.fncstatic.com/static/v/all/img/external-link.png," a new book by Gerald Posner. The book, like the Warren Commission report, concluded that Oswald assassinated the president acting alone.
Based on the casual research I had done to that point, I believed that there had to have been at least two shooters firing into the limousine. 
It was disturbing that a respected news magazine was proclaiming "Case Closed" to be the ultimate truth about the assassination and trying very hard to close the book on the subject once and for all.
After reading the article, and the book itself, I set out on a personal odyssey that consumed me for over 18 months. 
On my own time, completely separate from my Justice Department job, and using my own money, I began a research project with the goal of uncovering every speck of original, raw evidence that existed of the gunshots in Dealey Plaza. 
If I did not accomplish that goal, I came very close. 
I went to Dallas and walked around Dealey Plaza, inspecting it from every angle, including from Oswald's sixth floor window, from the roof of a nearby building, and from the grassy knoll. 
I made numerous trips to the National Archives and read every document and studied every photo they had related to the events in Dealey Plaza.
Based on a preliminary report of my analysis of the gunshot trajectories, I became one of the few private citizens ever allowed by the Archives to examine in person original pieces of evidence in the case--the president's bloody shirt, coat, and tie, the magic bullet, the bullet fragments from the limousine, and the section of curb that a bullet struck.
I also read thousands and thousands of pages of private books, magazines, and reports on the assassination. 
On April 17, 1995, I mailed a 72-page report on the final results of my research project to Attorney General Janet Reno. 
It presented what was then, and I believe still is, the only completevisual reconstruction of the gunshots together with all of the evidence supporting it. 
The report proves beyond a reasonable doubt that four shots were fired during the assassination.
Oswald fired three shots--the first wounding the President in the back and neck, the second missing the President completely and hitting Governor Connally in the back, chest, and thigh, and the third missing the 25-foot-long limousine entirely.
While Oswald was spraying bullets wildly, another shooter, an expert marksman on the top of another building, fired a fourth shot, a near-perfect fatal hit at the center of the back of the president's head that exited the right side of the head and struck the governor's right wrist.
In the report, I recommended a number of things the Justice Department could do to further confirm my analysis. 
The Department directed the FBI to do only one of those things -- examine important forensic evidence I had pointed out on one of the bullet fragments found in the limousine. It took about five years to complete that examination and report the results.
In the end, the FBI did only a portion of the fragment examination I had requested, and the results were incomplete and inconclusive. The Department permanently shut down any further investigation of my analysis.
John T. Orr is the author of "Analysis of Gunshots in Dealey Plaza." Orr's independent research convinced the FBI to conduct additional testing on JFK evidence as late as 1997. Results were inconclusive, but he suggests that even more testing should be done.


Thursday, November 7, 2013

American Actor at Duran's Twist Party


Richard Beymer was identified as an American movie actor who attended the Siliva Duran's Twist Party in Mexico City that also included Lee Harvey Oswald 


According to the website below Richard Beymer dated Sharon Tate, from circa 1961-1963 and who was ostensibly murdered by members of the [Charles] Manson “family.” And Beymer also dated the actress Tuesday Weld........

Document # 104-10018-10002 is a one page cable dated 12/09/63. It is from CIA to FBI. "Richard Beymer, American Movie Actor was in touch with Cuban embassy, Mexico City."1. The Mexico City News of 5 December 1963 carried a picture of Richard Beymer, American movie actor, who was a delegate to the film festival being held in Acapulco."2. Beymer was in touch with the Cuban embassy in Mexico City on 2 December, and a person believed to be Beymer was in touch with the embassy on 30 November. He wanted to speak to Silvia Duran, who was not at the embassy. Another employee told him that no reply had been received from Cuba. "3. This office has no information on Beymer."This is signed by Jane Roman, as the releasing officer, L.N. Gallery, as the authenticating officer, and a B. I. R. or B.E. R handwritten in. END

There are 13 docs which pullup under simple search “actor” @ NARA.....It appears 9 of these docs pertain to the actor Richard Beymer


Saturday, November 2, 2013

Jeff Morley Questions Tony Summers

Jeff Morley Questions Tony Summers

http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/experts/anthony-summers-the-absence-of-decent-reproting-on-the-facts-of-the-case-shocked-me/#more-7941

Anthony Summers, biographer and former BBC correspondent, has been writing about JFK’s assassination for three decades for publications ranging from The Times of London to Vanity Fair. In my possibly biased opinion, I think his book, “Not In Your Lifetime,” is the best single volume on the JFK assassination and its confusing investigatory aftermath.

I sent him some questions by email and he responded as follows:

JFKFacts: You started reporting on the JFK story in the late 1970s. You were one of the first professional journalists to look deeply into the JFK assassination story. What did you discover?
Anthony Summers: At the time of the assassination occurred, I’d been a student at Oxford. I had reporting ambitions, and Dallas was almost the first real story I covered. I’d been working for a TV program during the vacations, and the program’s editor phoned within an hour of the assassination – it was early evening in the UK – to say he was gathering a team and chartering a plane to Texas. Could I drop everything and come?

I said “yes” of course – only for the editor’s secretary to call back later to say my trip was off, they’d “found someone with more experience.”

So much for me. Then, as time passed and as I watched the story unroll from afar, I cooled on the notion of ever working the story. First there was the unedifying sight of Mark Lane posturing on a BBC program, making a scene by walking out of the studio for no good reason. I’d been underwhelmed, moreover, by his book “Rush to Judgement.” The Jim Garrison caper in New Orleans, in the late 1960s, seemed more circus than serious investigation. (When I met the man years later – he asked, all cloak and dagger, that I should meet with him in a sauna. The disquieting experience did nothing to improve my opinion of Garrison.) Like many other journalists, I came to think that the Kennedy case was a quagmire in which reputations sunk without trace.

Only in the late 1970s, when word reached me that the House Assassinations Committee was heading towards a conspiracy finding, did I get drawn in. The BBC commissioned a television documentary, and I did most of the interviews. The first impression that left was not about evidence. It was the realization of how poorly the case had been covered by the media back in 1963 and 1964. Most media had covered the hell out of the “tragedy,” the assassination saga itself, then trusted the Warren Commission, which in turn appeared to have trusted the FBI and the CIA and other agencies on most things. The media had not hammered away at the story as they would years later, say, after Watergate. There had been no Woodward, no Bernstein.

Anthony Summers Not in Your LIfetime
Updated with new reporting

JFKFacts: Can you explain the reticence of American journalists to report on events leading to JFK’s assassination?

Summers: The absence of decent reporting on the facts of the case – not only in your country, but by and large worldwide – shocked me. Two factors, I think, explain why they flunked it. The first was the apparent certainty from the outset that things were cut and dried. Oswald had a gun. He had worked in a building from which shots appeared to have come, where a rifle and spent shells were found. Sufficient means and opportunity, then. Inconveniently, he had no known motive. He seemed, however, to be that catch-all Bad Person – a Leftist. Oswald’s death in his turn at the hands of Ruby jolted millions. Ruby came over, though, as a mere oddball. By the time the Warren Commission delivered its finding that Ruby had no real organized crime connection – a finding that was entirely false – most minds had closed.

The other factor in the media’s failure was generational. The assassination occurred in an America that was emerging from the Eisenhower era, an America sure of itself, comfortable with Authority. People tended to trust the government, had for generations been brainwashed into the notion that the FBI was super-reliable, not subject to influence from outside sources. The CIA, to the average man in the street, was pretty much a blank – an agency that dealt with foreign stuff. And with none other than the Chief Justice himself heading the Warren Commission, what cause was there for concern?
The best part of two decades later, then, I made my BBC documentary. Because I had gathered far more information than could be included in a TV program – and because I was ashamed of my profession’s failure back in 1963/4 – I decided to go on and do a book. By the time I was done with it, I had learned enough to think sane citizens had reason to doubt the Oswald-dunnit-alone-without-a-motive thesis.

JFKFacts: Why should our kids care who killed Kennedy?

Summers: It’s hard to answer without sounding like a schoolmaster. The hoary old Henry Ford quote “History is bunk” is inaccurate – if it’s truthful history. History matters. The assassination is now as far from us in time as was Lincoln’s murder to people alive in World War I, but the killing in Dallas still haunts America and the wider world. Even for young people, as I write in the Preface to this reworked edition of Not in Your Lifetime,” it seems still to have “a spectral presence” in our lives.

No other death of a single individual – one so young, embodying the hopes of a new generation – so traumatized an era. It stays with us, too, because Kennedy was killed at the height of the Cold War, at a time when nuclear war seemed a real and constant threat. Finally, it matters still because of a perception by millions – 70% of Americans, according to a poll this year – that the full truth as to what happened on 11/22/63 remains unknown. If that perception is correct, and if what remains unknown should turn out to indicate a person or persons other than Oswald – or in addition to Oswald – killed the President, justice was not done.

JFK in Ireland
JFK in Ireland (U.S. State Dept.)

JFKFacts: Do you think being Irish (or not being American) had any influence on your thinking about JFK’s assassination?

Summers: It’s certainly true that the Kennedy family is held to be special here in Ireland. His portrait still hung on the living room wall of many homes, next to that of the Pope, long after his death. Years ago, while sheltering from a torrential downpour in a boggy field on our Atlantic coast, I encountered an old farmer – dirt was engrained in his pores – who, one might have thought, had never mastered reading in his life. As the sideways rain continued, however, I gathered that this was a well-read man who received the Boston Globe on a regular basis, who knew a vast amount about the Kennedy presidency, and was a fount of knowledge on what – to him – had been the “world catastrophe” of the assassination. He had detailed knowledge that surpassed, I dare say, that of most ordinary Americans. This year, because it is the 50th anniversary, a large platoon of Kennedys have made the pilgrimage to the Kennedy home place near New Ross – not far from my home – and been welcomed on a national scale.

That said, to answer your question, the Irishness of John F. has not affected my thinking about the assassination. It is worth reflecting, though, given our national addiction to music, poetry, and theatre, that this was a man who had a instinctive feeling for Alan Seeger’s poem about having “a rendezvous with Death.” This was, too, a man who – hours before his death occurred – crouched down in his hotel suite and mimed how an assassin with a rifle might take aim at him. (That incident is evidence of a sort – Kennedy was apparently aware, as was his Secret Service detail, that his life was more than usually under threat at that time.)

Carlos Marcello

JFKFacts: In Not in your Lifetime, you track down the FBI men who oversaw the surveillance of New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello in the 1980s when he allegedly spoke about his role in JFK’s assassination. What’s your bottom line about the involvement of organized crime figures in the assassination?

Summers: My bottom line on the Mafia is what any sensible bottom line has to be on the whole damn thing. This is, as the lawyers say – or used to say – a case where the verdict is – non liquet – “not clear”. More simply put, there’s smoke but no fire – nothing that’s provable guilt.

Marcello, whom you mention, was the Sicilian mafioso who at the time controlled organized crime in New Orleans and the U.S. Southeast. The other principal Mafia name often linked to the case is that of Santo Trafficante, who ran Florida. Each man had ample motive to kill Kennedy – the Kennedy administration was pursuing the Mafia as never before, hounding some of them out of the country. JFK’s brother, the Attorney General, had at one point had Marcello deported – though he managed to return. Snippets of information suggest both men spoke in advance of JFK’s coming death – in ways that indicated they had foreknowledge.

There’s more. Oswald was born in New Orleans, and his mother and her family had links to organized crime. In the summer of 1963, when Oswald was arrested following a fracas involving anti-Castro exiles – bail was arranged by an associate of one of Marcello’s henchmen. As or more important, for me, is the fact that – time and again – figures who featured in the case had links to Trafficante.

I don’t have much time, however, for claims that either mob boss admitted to a role in the assassination before they died. I explain why carefully in the book. As to allegations that Marcello may have made an admission in prison, the burden of information – including what former FBI employees say today (in this matter they all come over as stand-up, credible guys) – does not confirm it. Marcello may, moreover, have been senile by the time he allegedly made such comments. The supposed Trafficante admission, virtually on the eve of his death, doesn’t have legs either. At the time and place he is supposed to have made the admission, he was somewhere else.

JFKFacts: In the new edition of “Not in Your Lifetime,” you report that a prisoner in a Cuban jail in 1966 told a fellow prisoner that a man they both knew named Herminio Díaz, had been involved in the assassination. Are you saying that Díaz was shooting from behind the stockade fence on the grassy knoll?

Summers: No, I’m not, and that is not what I have written in “Not in Your Lifetime.” On this as on other matters – and especially because in this instance the possible implications are sensational – I have tried to record the development exactly as it occurred.

In 2007, former Assassinations Committee chief counsel Robert Blakey told me of a call he had received from a Cuban exile in his eighties living in Florida – a man who said he wanted to get something off his chest before he died. Having talked with the man on a lengthy conference call, Blakey and I thought he sounded potentially credible. We flew to Florida and interviewed him over two days.

What the witness said, in essence, was about the closest friend of his youth, Herminio Díaz. While working in a Castro prison infirmary in 1966, he told us, he had given treatments to a much celebrated anti-Castro fighter named Tony Cuesta. Cuesta, terribly injured and traumatized, mentioned that Díaz had spoken with him of his “participation” in the JFK assassination. That’s the kernel of the account, which has its strengths and weaknesses. The suggestion that Díaz was involved has been made before. Now, however, it is evident that he ticks several boxes. He had, the record shows, previously committed one political assassination and attempted others. He was a marksman, expert in the use of both rifle and pistol. He had worked for Mafia boss Trafficante. He was deep into the Cuban exile fight against Castro – and many in that movement saw JFK as a traitor. He was in the U.S. in 1963.

Former chief counsel Blakey and I agree that this is a persuasive lead that points more firmly to the possibility that Herminio Díaz had a role in the Kennedy assassination. None of the handful of people previously named as allegedly having taken part have had the “qualifications” Díaz had. I did a videotape interview with the witness and – should the TV networks wake up between now and the anniversary – the tape will be aired in the coming weeks. Whether today’s media is really interested in authentic reporting on the case, however, is another matter. Perhaps nothing has changed since 1963.

JFKFacts: When your JFK book first came out in 1980, its title was “Conspiracy.” In later editions, it has been “Not in Your Lifetime.” Why?

Summers: It was much against my will that the book was first issued as “Conspiracy.” My then publisher was addicted to one-word titles and thought that title timely, in tune with the House Assassinations Committee’s finding of probable conspiracy. I thought it would mean I’d be branded a “conspiracy theorist,” the last thing I needed. Mercifully, however, the book was treated as sensible and revelatory and praised across the board. Even by the New York Times, which infamously has rarely given a serious hearing to the very notion that Kennedy may have been killed as the result of a conspiracy.

Why did I pick “Not in Your Lifetime as the new title? Because Chief Justice Warren, asked whether his Commission’s documentation would be released, replied that some records – notably material that came under the rubric of national security – would not be released in the lifetime of his audience. Fifty years, however, have passed since the assassination. Why, if President Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, are thousands of documents still withheld in 2013?