I HAVE UPDATED THIS AT JFKCountercoup.blogspot.com
Twenty-six Seconds – A Personal History of the Zapruder Film (Hachette Books, NY, 2016) By Alexandra Zapruder.
The Provenance of the Z-Film
By William Kelly
Alexandra is the granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder,
who took the most famous home movie of all time, a 26 second - 486 frame film of the assassination
of President Kennedy. And she is the daughter of Henry, a Harvard-Oxford
educated lawyer who served in the Kennedy Justice Department and oversaw the copyright
fight for the film.
Alexandra Zapruder
Alexandra Zapruder
Alexandra herself is no slouch. She has a Masters
degree from Harvard, is a founding staff member of the Holocaust Museum in
Washington D.C. and is author of “Salvaged Pages” – young writers of holocaust
diaries. But in writing this ostensibly non-fictional account of the film they
neglect to include an index, so I had to read the whole book to get to the part
I was interested in – the Zapruder Film’s time at the National Photo Interpretation
Center (NPIC).
But this book is not a history of the film itself, it
is personal account from the family’s point of view, and the film’s impact on
culture and society, while neglecting its political and historic implications.
As Alexandra notes, “He had know almost immediately
that this (media frenzy) would be the dilemma of the film. The very night after
the assassination he was visited by nightmares, some of which would haunt him
for the rest of his life. But the one that pressed in on his dreams the most
that night was not about the murder of the president but about the film. He
dreamed he was walking in Times Square in New York, surrounded by the theaters
and the flashing marquee lights. There, on the street corner, in front of a
sleazy theater, stood a man in ‘a sharp double-breasted suit,’ hawking tickets
to his home movie, shouting to all those who passed by, ‘Come inside to see the
president murdered on the big screen!’ From deep inside his subconscious, it
was his anxiety about what to do with the film that rose most prominently to
the surface…The crux of the dream’s horror, in my mind, is that he would become
the hawker on the street himself.”
According to Alexandra, “The reel of film that was
loaded in the camera on November 22, 1963 was Kodachrome II safety film, a
color film that was less grainy,…but was not easy to develop and had to be sent
to a Kodak lab for processing.”
That would be at 3131 Manor way, near Love Field,
where at the same time LBJ was being sworn in as President aboard Air Force
One.
The original film was given the identification number
0183, but the three duplicates were numbered 0185 (below optimum) – Copy 1, 0186
(optimum) – Copy 2 and 0187 (above optimum) – Copy 3, none of the copies
containing the visual information between the sprocket holes, and the original
remained unslit. What was 0184, and why wasn’t that number used?
According to Alexandra,
Secret Service Agent Max Phillips at the SS office on Ervay Street was given
two copies, retaining Copy 1 in Dallas, “while Copy 3 was put on a plane that
very night, bound for Chief Rowley at Secret Service headquarters in Washington
D.C.,” sometime after 9 p.m.
Zapruder writes: “As early as Saturday morning,
November 23, there was no single life of the ‘Zapruder Film.’ There were four
versions – the original and three duplicates – each of which travel their own path, creating its own
reverberations and consequences…”
Saturday morning the Dallas FBI “borrowed” Copy 1 from
the Dallas Secret Service, but d idn’t
inform their bosses in Washington, who when they learned about the film from
Time Magazine, had their Special Agents James Bookhout and Robert Barrett to make
a duplicate of Copy 1, but claimed to have been unable to make a duplicate and
returned it to the SS Dallas office.
Then Copy 1 was put on commercial American Airlines
Flight 20 that departed Dallas at 5:20 p.m. that Saturday, November 23, 1963
bound for Washington D.C., where additional copies were made at a commercial lab on
Monday, November 25 and Copy 1 returned to Dallas SS on Tuesday, November 26,
along with a duplicate third generation copy.
The original was sent by “courier” to Life Magazine’s
Chicago printing plant R.R. Donnelley where it arrived on Saturday while the
Life crew were tearing up the 200,000 printed copies of the original November
29th edition of the magazine that featured a story on the Bobby
Baker scandal that threatened to take down LBJ, now President of the United
States.
In Chicago they pretty much butchered the original
Z-film, splicing out entire frames, and taking a photo of what appears to be
the unslit original that is now at the Sixth Floor museum in Dallas, which
means there is no indication when exactly the original 16 mm with two running
8mm strips was slit and made into the 8mm film that exists today at the
National Archives.
Much of this book concerns money and Alexandra’s defense
of her family’s parlay of the original $50,000 to $150,000 and then, after
buying it back for $1, re-selling it to the US government for many millions,
while keeping the copyright and donating it to the Sixth Floor Museum, which
she admirably does.
It has also been pointed out that she neglects to
mention that the leading copyright authority of his time Melville Nimmer gives
the Z-film as an example of a work whose copyright would not be protected
because it would be overridden by the First Amendment.
Wait a minute, I thought that’s what we were doing –
trying to isolate the hard evidence and write a conclusive narrative of events
as they really occurred. Isn’t that what we are trying to do? And while the
crazy conspiracy theorists have failed to do that, so does Zapruder.
For starters, it wasn’t “at some point in early
December,” it was the day after the assassination – Saturday, November 23, and
Sunday November 24 when the Z-film in its various incantations visited the NPIC
on two entirely different occasions where very detailed events occurred.
Alexandra actually leaves out the endearing story of
how we came to meet these men and get their stories on the record, as it was the April 2, 1997 Assassination
Records Review Board (ARRB) public “Hearing on the Status and Disposition of
the Zapruder Film,” that was aired on CSPAN cable TV.
That program got low general ratings but was seen by a
suburban Washington DC housewife who learned about the ARRB interest in the
Zapruder Film and called them to inform them that her husband Ben Hunter had
mentioned that he had worked on the film at NPIC on the weekend of the assassination,
called in to do special work for someone important.
While Hunter, McMahon and Brugioni were all interviewed
on the record by the ARRB, she only quotes Doug Horne, the military analyst on
the ARRB staff from an interview he gave Dick Russell that I posted on the
internet, [ JFKcountercoup: Doug Horne Interview with Dick Russell ], when she could have read his exhaustive analysis of what is known about the Z-films two visits to NPIC in Chapter 14 - The Zapruder Film Mystery in Book IV (of five volumes - Inside the ARRB).
Instead Alexandra Zapruder defers to Richard Trask.
“After getting lost in this labyrinth more times than
I could count, I eventually found a guide in Richard Trask, author of National
Nightmare on Six Feet of Film: Mr. Zapruder’s Home Movie and the Murder of
President Kennedy, and a measured and reliable historian of these events. According
to Trask, the likely scenario so as follows: As we know, the Secret Service had
flown Copy 3 of the film from Dallas to Washington on Friday night, November 22.”
“The agency then urgently enlisted the help of the CIA
to make copies of certain frames of the film. Late Saturday (or possibly
Sunday) night, Ben Hunter and Homer McMahon, two employees of the CIA’s
National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), were called to the lab. The
NPIC was a little-known office charged with solving national intelligence
problems by using photo interpretation and imagery analysis.”
This is an understatement, as the NPIC was founded in
the CIA by Art Lundahl, who had previously headed the Navy Photo Interpretation
Center and was hired by the CIA to develop their National Center, that operated
out of the upper floors of a downtown Washington D.C. Ford mot or dealership.
The primary responsibility of NPIC was to receive U2 – spy plane (and later CORONA spy
satellite) photos that were processed at the secret Hawkeye Works plant
affiliated with the KODAK camera company headquarters in Rochester, New York. When
Homer McMahon was tape recorded saying the person who brought the film to NPIC
mentioned that the film was processed at the Rochester facility and he used the
Hawkeye Works code name for the secret plant whose name was still classified in
1997 and had to be excised from the recorded interview with McMahon.
Art Lundahl, the founder and head of NPIC, was first
recognized for his analysis of UFO films and photographs in the Navy, but made
his mark during the Cuban Missile Crisis when his briefing of the President in
October 1962 provided conclusive proof of long range soviet nuclear missiles in
Cuba and sparked the crisis. Kennedy was so impressed by Lundahl’s briefing he
sent Lundahl to London to brief the American Ambassador David Bruce and then on
to Paris to brief deGaulle and ensure their support in the crisis.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis was resoved with the
loss of only one U2 pilot, the President and Attorney General visited Lundahl’s
NPIC offices and labs above the Ford dealership and immediately ordered that
they be provided quarters in Building 213 on the grounds of the Anacosta Navy
Yard and given the budget and latest technology they needed.
“Hunter and McMahon were put to work making enlargements
of the film, a task that was described as ‘above top secret.’”
Trask: “The work done on the film was accomplished
using the special ’10-20-40 processing enlarger’ with a full-immersion
‘wet-gate’ used to create internegative prtints forty fimes the original size.
These internegatives were then utilized to produce multiple color prints of
selected frames.”
Alexandra Zapruder says, “It’s not clear what, if
anything, the Secret Service did with these reproductions of the film until
early December, when they – again in conjunction with the CIA and NPIC – seem
to have analyzed the film more thoroughly.”
Well we know that two separate sets of briefing boards
were made during two separate Z-film visits to the NPIC – one attended by
Hunter and McMahon and the other by Dino Brugioni, with neither party privy to
the other’s activities.
We also know that Art Lundahl used one set of the briefing boards to brief
CIA director John McCone on Monday
morning because when he got back to his office Lundahl said that the briefing
went well and thanked all of those who assisted him. While we have some of the
original briefing boards, we
don’t know what Lundahl told McCone in the briefing.
We do know that after the NPIC briefing using the
Z-film photos on briefing boards, McCone told Robert Kennedy the CIA concluded
that there were two shooters, as RFK related that information to Arthur
Sclesinger, who dutifully noted it in his journal.
But who was briefed by whoever used the second set of
briefing boards?
And what became of the documentary record of what
Alexandra Zapruder says, “amid rising questions about whether the early FBI and
Secret Service accounts of the assassination were correct, the CIA and NPIC
undertook a more comprehensive analysis of the enlargements from the film in
order to try to establish the timing and impact of the shots fired at the
motorcade.”
What became of that “more comprehensive analysis”?
Alexandra Zapruder apparently doesn’t care.
“Who cares when it happened?” she says. “After all, a
report of two security agencies working together to glean as much information
as they could about the president’s assassination seems innocuous enough. But
don’t be fooled.”
She says this link to the CIA has become fodder for
elaborate conspiracy theories that she blames on “the very different readings
of the testimonies provided by these aging former NPIC personnel.”
After he was interviewed on tape, and uttered the
“Hawkeye Works” code name for the secret Kodak plant in Rochester, [ Undercover: Covert photographic operations center existed at Kodak plant | Rochester Business Journal New York business news and information ]
Then McMahon was
brought back, apparently after being reprimanded for his original candid testimony.
But this time he sang another tune, telling Jeremny Gun (on July 14, 1997) that
he was a recovering drug addict and alcoholic with “senile dementia,” thus
attempting to destroy the credibility of his previous statements.
Brugioni can’t be so easily dismissed, as he wrote the
CIA book on photo forgery, and a synopsis of the Z-film event for the official
history of the NPIC, a several hundred page long, still classified document. But
rather than asking what became of all the missing official records on these
events, and what is the true provenance of the original Z-film and the three
first generation copies, Alexandra Zapruder simply blames silly conspiracy
theorists for muddling up the works.
She mentions that one copy of the Z-film was brought
to the NPIC by a Secret Service Agent identified as “Bill Smith,” and of course
there is no Secret Service Agent named Bill Smith, and it has been speculated
that it was just a common name made up for the moment. But there is a NPIC officer
named Bill Smith, a longtime employee who married a high level CIA officer who
had also worked a NPIC and had been implicated in a social scandal with another
government official.
This Bill Smith attended annual NPIC employee picnics,
but denied in a phone conversation that he was the “Bill Smith” who brought the
Z-film to NPIC, though in retrospect it seems he could have got the same memo
Homer McMahon got, that discussion of such matters is not the party line.
PATHFINDER was described as a CIA plan to kill Castro
using snipers with high powered rifles with scopes shooting at him as he rode
in an open jeep enroute to Xandau, the DuPont estate, which just happened to be
next door to the home of Rolando Cubella (AMLASH), who the CIA’s Desmond
Fitzgerald was briefing in Paris at the time of the assassination of President
Kennedy.
While PATHFINDER was reportedly “disapproved” by
Higher Authority, NPIC had provided he CIA with aerial photos of the area and
detailed floor plans to assist them in the operation that appeared suspiciously
similar to what happened at Dealey Plaza.
And what became of all the official NPIC records that
should have been responsive to the JFK Act and included in the JFK Collection
at the NARA where all interested parties could read them and decide for
themselves what happened to JFK?
Why isn’t Dino Brugoni’s report on the Z-film event at
NPIC from the NPIC official history not included in the JFK Collection at the
Archives?
According to a ARRB
report with an NPIC secretary, Robert F. Kennedy himself ordered all the
NPIC records related to the assassination compiled and sent to the Smithsonian
Institute instead of the NARA, where they should have been sent, apparently into
the black hole – memory tube where missing records are deep sixed.
Alexandra also apparently ignores the well known fact
that Jean DeMohrenschildt, a close personal friend of the accused assassin had at
one time worked for her grandfather in the dress business, a coincidence that
could have drawn out some interesting mitigating factors that remain to be
explored.
And so the bottom line is Alexandra Zapruder’s book “Twenty-Six
Seconds” is “a personal history” and not a definitive account of the provenance
of the Z-film, and the resulting repercussions of that history, yet to be
realized.
NPIC Photo Analysis Booths
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