WHAT I’VE DONE - WITNESSES I'VE INTERVIEWED – SO FAR
As I have decided to devote much of my time of this
year (2019) to completing my life long study of the assassination of President
Kennedy, I thought it would be prudent to outline some of the things I have
done, as I specialize in tracking down and interviewing obscure witnesses and even a few suspects in the case.
So I’ve compiled a list of those I have talked to,
and links to some of the articles I wrote about them before setting my sights
on what needs to be done to wrap this case up to a legal and moral certainty,
as we can if only the effort is made.
As a Research Committee Coordinator for CAPA –
Citizens Against Political Assassinations, and a member of the Steering
Committee for the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC), I am in the unique
position of being able to put the necessary information together and will
attempt to do so.
I remember that Friday in November, the day of the assassination,
being told of it by the principle - a nun over the St. Joseph’s grammar school
intercom and being left out of school early. The weather was mild so I was at
home in my backyard swinging on the mimosa tree when the phone rang and I ran
in the house to answer the kitchen wall phone. It was my father, a Camden, NJ
policeman who instructed me to stay in the yard and not go out, as the
president was shot “and we don’t know what this is all about.” I just couldn’t
understand how the death of the president could affect me.
Six years later, as a freshman at the University of
Dayton in Ohio, I met John Judge. He gave me a copy of New Orleans District
Attorney Jim Garrison’s interview in Playboy magazine, which inspired me to
read a few books and then, I discovered, there in our school library was a copy
of the encyclopedia sized 24 volumes of Warren Commission supporting testimony
and documents that I began to read through.
After you read books, and research documents, the
next step is to contact and interview witnesses, though it is often difficult
to get them to talk, especially about a subject as sensitive as the President’s
murder.
Anthony Summers once told me the Irish word for
being able to obtain the confidence of strangers, and while I can’t remember
the Irish word, I know there is a very fine line between those who can get
people to believe and open up, and disbelieve and clam up.
The following is a list of some of the most
important witnesses – and a few suspects – I have tracked down and talked to,
and most of them I believe confided in me honestly.
MRS. MARGARET HOVER and JULIO FERNANDEZ (Corrected version)
As I was taking a class in Latin American history
with Dr. Bruce Taylor, and doing a paper on the Bay of Pigs, I immediately
noticed the numerous Cuban connections to the assassination and began to focus
on those documents, one of which concerned a Mrs. Margaret Hoover of
Martinsburg, Pa., who was investigated by the Pennsylvania State Police and FBI
because she claimed to have seen a paper with the names of Lee Oswald and Ruby
before the assassination.
She said she found the papers in her backyard, and
thinking Lee and Ruby were women her recently separated husband was seeing,
showed them to her daughter who confirmed the names. Then she said, she
realized the papers came from her neighbor’s yard, where he was burning his
trash, and some of the papers blew over to Hoover’s yard.
With that, the investigation led to the neighbor
– Julio Fernandez, a Cuban refuge and
former Cuban newspaper publisher who was teaching Spanish at the local high
school. Fernandez said he was burning his trash, but was not a communist and
had nothing to do with the assassination.
There are various levels of people who study the
assassination – those who read about it in books and magazines, those researchers
who read the original records at the Archives, and investigators - those who reach
out to phone or knock on the door of witnesses to ask them questions.
It was in late 1969 or early 1970 when I obtained
the phone number of Mrs. Hoover and called her on the phone from Dayton. She
acknowledged everything in the reports I had read, and added a few interesting
details – shortly after the assassination and the police inquiry he left town
suddenly, some say to Rye, New York. In addition, Fernandez had a wife and son,
the son an art student at Penn State University. The police report noted that
an AMTRACK train ticket, that Mrs. Hoover had found and kept, indicated someone
had traveled from Philadelphia to Miami in the summer of 1963. Fernandez said
that was his son, who attended a conference of exiled Cuban journalists at the
University of Miami (JMWAVE). Mrs. Hoover also said that a few years after the
assassination and the departure of Fernandez, two men in black suits came
knocking at her door asking if she knew anything else about Fernandez, so
others were on this trail too.
It was years later when I learned about Clare Booth
Luce and her support for some JMWAVE Cuban commandos – including Julio
Fernandez, who called her on the night of the assassination saying he had an
audio tape and documents concerning Oswald, the accused assassin. And then US
Ranger Capt. Bradley Ayers wrote about training the Cubans – including Julio
Fernandez, a team leader.
When the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB)
requested CIA records on Julio Fernandez, they supplied a list of over a dozen
Cubans named Julio Fernandez they had files on, but neither the journalist, his
son or the JMWAVE Cuban team leader were among them. I believe Julio Fernandez,
Jr. is still alive in Florida.
KEN KESEY
The University of Dayton Student Council had a
significant budget, which the radical Student president Kevin Keefe used to
bring in some top level guest speakers – including Mae Brussell, Margaret Meade
and Ken Kesey. As the head of the Merry Pranksters Kesey had experimented with
LSD before it was made illegal, and after writing “One Flew Over the Cookoos
Nest” and another well received novel, bought a bus – named “Further,” and
traveled cross-country to meet Timothy Leary, another LSD advocate, as
documented in Tom Wolf’s “Electric Koolaide Acid Tesst.” After his talk before
a few hundred interested students, Kesey went to John Judge’s apartment where we
talked for hours. He told me how Kurt Douglas gave him $10,000 for the film
rights to “Kookoos Nest,” a deal written out on a bar napkin, but then when the
movie was such a big hit with Jack Nicholson in the lead role, he had to sue
Douglas to get the writer’s royalities, and indeed the movie would not have
been so good if it wasn’t for the great story. Kesey also told me that he was
first turned on to LSD by a CIA backed professor during a collegiate “study”
that paid him to be a guinea pig. And besides students, they also hired
prisoners and soldiers to be part of the LSD tests, the results of which we
will probably never know.
DON NORTON
Around 1970 John Judge arranged for Mae Brussell of
Carmel, California to visit Dayton and give a lecture on her research on the
assassination. After her well attended talk in the main ballroom of the John F.
Kennedy Student Union, I helped carry her books to John’s car in the parking
lot. As we approached the car in the dark lot a man stepped out of the darkness
and said hello to Mae, startling us a little. He said hi to Mae, and said “I’m
Don Norton.”
Mae smiled and shook his hand and thanked him for
the checks he had sent her to support her research – “That’s my conscience
money,” he said.
While I didn’t go with Mae, John and Don back to
John’s apartment, I later learned that Norton had met Oswald, and was
considered one of his doubles, or impersonators. I read some records that said
he was a former gay soldier who played piano in an officer’s club and was
recruited by military intelligence to inform them if any military officers were
gay. Norton got involved in the Garrison investigation and in Canada, gave an
interview that was published about his experiences.
There are two others named Don Norton – one a
fisherman also suspected of being an Oswald impersonator, and another Don
Norton who wrote a book on the history of a major defense contractor.
MAE BRUSSEL
Mae was one of the first housewife to pay attention
to the assassination of President Kennedy, and became one of the most
knowledgeable of researchers who had a weekly radio talk show out of her
hometown of Carmel, California. She accumulated a large collection of books,
newspaper articles and documents that she wanted to form the basis of the Mae
Brussel Research Center. Before she passed away she instructed John Judge to
set up such a center, and I drove Judge’s U-haul truck to Carmel where we rented
a house and began to assemble the research center. Not long afterwards however,
Mae’s daughter took over and put all of her mother’s work in storage, where I
believe it remains today.
PENN JONES
In the mid to late 1970s the New York University Law
School held a major conference on the Kennedy assassination that featured all
of the major critics – including Sylvia Meagher, Mae Brussell, Penn Jones,
Fletcher Prouty and Ralph Schoeman, all of whom I met through John Judge. Penn
Jones was then the publisher of the Midlothian, Texas Mirror newspaper, which
chronicled all of the JFK assassination witnesses who died suspiciously. While
I admire Penn, and his work, there are enough witnesses who were victims of
certifiable homicides to work on rather than debating whether or not someone
was murdered or not. I also recall John Judge saying that Penn had separated
from his wife, and she sold off his 24 volumes of Warren Commission exhibits
and testimony one at a time at a garage sale. John said he didn’t want that to
happen to his research collection, but it did.
RALPH SCHOEMAN
At the NYU conference Ralph held up a number of
documents he obtained from the archives and said they were proof that one of
the Cuban guys Oswald was arrested with in New Orleans was a Puerto Rican union
organizer and mob connected gangster. I asked him and he gave me copies of his
documents, and when I got home I wrote one of
my first requests for JFK assassination records from Marion Johnson –
the curator of the JFK records at the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA). The records I obtained on the Cuban arrested with Oswald
– Minguel Cruz – indicated that he was only 17 years old in 1963, while the
documents on the Union organizer with the same name indicated he was much
older, and therefore a different person. I called Schoeman on the phone and he
asked me to come visit him so I drove from my Ocean City, NJ home to Princeton
where I shared my new documents with him and he acknowledged he was wrong about
Minguel Cruz. But more recently Donald Trump accused Texas Senator Cruz’s
father of being involved with Oswald in New Orleans. While Minguel Cruz is not
related to Senator Cruz, he is probably still alive and is an important
witness. And it was decades later when I met and began to work with Ralph
Schoeman’s wife Joan Mellen.
FLETCHER PROUTY
It was at the NYU conference where I entered a large
class room and sat at a desk with a few dozen others as Col. Fletcher Prouty
stood at a podium in front of a blackboard where he had written some basic covert
intelligence procedures – use of codes, ciphers, cut-outs, etc., saying that
you will never understand what happened at Dealey Plaza until you learn the
crafts and techniques of intelligence, as the assassination was a covert
intelligence operation. John Judge was a close friend of Prouty, so when Prouty
was identified as the mysterious “Mr. X” portrayed by Donald Sutherland in
Oliver Stone’s film “JFK,” Judge arranged for Prouty to be interviewed live on
the Diane Ream show over the NPR station at American University. Judge used to
say that where he started his research on the Kennedy assassination at the
bottom, Prouty started at the top at the Pentagon, and they met at the Joint
Chiefs of Staff.
RALPH COX
Another good friend of Prouty was Ralph Cox, a
former US Navy pilot during WWII who after the war purchased a dozen Air Force
Cargo planes as surplus and started the US Overseas Airlines out of Wildwood,
NJ. A major player in the air cargo business for over a decade, active during the
Berlin airlift and in the creation of the state of Isreal, US Overseas airlines
suddenly lost all of the government contracts to a number of new airlines that
Cox later learned were wholly owned subsidiaries of the CIA, and he sued the
CIA over it.
DAVID ATLEE PHILLIPS
I always had the highest respect for Gaeton Fonzi
and followed his career closely and became friends before the end, though I was
disappointed he never tried to interview David Atlee Phillips outside of his
Congressional inquiry. One day on a whim I looked up Phillips’ phone number and
found it listed in Bethesda, Md. I called him off the cuff and he talked to me
for about a half hour, denying he was “Maurice Bishop” or that he knew Oswald.
This conversation took place shortly after the publication of a long article in
Washingtonian Magazine by Fonzi, that instigated a libel suit by Phillips. “Do
you know where I worked at the time?” Philllips asked. At Washingtonian, where
he had an office just down the hall from Fonzi, who never bothered to try to
talk to him. In any case I believe Phillips knew Oswald, but like Oswald,
Phillips was also hung out to dry by the CIA and Veciana, while the real truth
remains buried, though we are still digging.
JOHN MARTINO’S SISTER AND BROTHER
While Anthony Summers was in Florida interviewing
John Martino’s widow and son, establishing Martino’s foreknowledge of the
assassination, I was at an old house on the beachblock of Ventnor, NJ,
interviewing Martino’s elderly sister and brother. They gave me a 33/1/3 RPM
record of John Martino reading portions of his book – “I Was Castro’s
Prisoner,” that he wrote with Nathanial Wheil.
NATE WEYL
I eventually got Weyl’s phone number and called him
up cold, and was surprised at how open he was and willing to talk, as he did
later with John Simkin. Weyl was the ghost writer for Martino’s book and while
having a high opinion of Martino, he said they had a falling out after the book
was published and Martino took a book signing tour sponsored by the John Birch
Society. That was a tour that took Martino to Dallas in the fall of 1963,
allowing him to share a stage with Loretta Odio and Father Walter Machann, who
catered to the needs of the Cuban exiles in Dallas. But before the month was
out, Machann would leave the priesthood and retreat to New Orleans where he
would hook up with a friend of Odios, who happened to also be a friend of
Carlos Bringuier and was one of those who attended the court hearing that
resulted from the altercation between Oswald and Bringuier (and Minguel Cruz)
JAMES BOND
It was in the summer of 1976 when I first read about
the Catherwood Foundation – a CIA philanthropic front that backed the
anti-Castro Cuban group Cuban Aide Relief (CAR). Catherwood was described as a Philadelphia
millionaire who started his charity foundation by buying a boat – The Vigilant
– and using it for exploration and research purposes – one voyage including
James Bond – an American ornithologist (Bird specialist) whose book “Birds of
the West Indies” inspired Ian Fleming to appropriate Bond’s name for his
special agent 007. I met Bond and talked to him a number of times, along with
his wife Mary Wickham Bond. Bond, it turns out, was at what would become known
as the Bay of Pigs – a few months before the invasion, scouting for birds.
HENRY PLEASANTS
Former classical music critic for the Philadelphia
Evening Bulletin, husband of Virginia Pleasants for Cello player for the
Philadelphia Orchestra, Pleasants enlisted in the OSS during the war and served
as a translator and debriefer, his most famous debriefing was former Nazi
General Reinhard Gehlen, who would become chief of the West German Intelligence
Service, as the behest of Allen Dulles and the CIA. Like Cummings Catherwood
and James Bond, Pleasants was also character Ian Fleming made fun of by casting
him as Felix Leiter, 007’s recurring CIA sidekick.
VOLKMAR SCHMIDT
German oil geologist, who was working in Canada when
I talked with him at length over the phone, was one of the hosts of a Dallas
house party set up for Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife to meet Michael Paine and
his wife Ruth. While Michael Paine didn’t make the party, Oswald talked for
hours with Schmidt, who acknowledge to me that he used a “reverse psychology”
technique on Oswald taught to him by a German psychologist. Schmidt said he
talked to Oswald about General Walker, and suggested that Walker was a fascist
who should be assassinated before he got too powerful, much like Hitler should
have been killed, specifically mentioning the July 20, 1944 failed attempt to
kill Hilter. Schmidt said he felt guilty for planting the seed in Oswald to
shoot Walker, and he felt bad every time he drove through Dealey Plaza.
BEVERLY OLIVER
I met Beverly Oliver in Dallas on the set of Oliver
Stone “JFK” when he was filming the final scene – an old black man and young
black boy visiting JFK’s grave, which they were able to film in Dallas because
of a duplicate of the building behind JFK’s grave, another faked film sequence.
I also read her book, and was impressed, not because she is the Babuska Lady,
or how Gary Shaw came to find her, but because of her story of being with Jack
Ruby on Thursday night – the night before the assassination. With Ruby she
visited the Cabana Lounge to meet Larry Meyer and then went to dinner at
Campisi’s Egyptian Lounge. Oliver also had a boyfriend who worked for Kodak at
their booth at the State Fairgrounds, who is an interesting character worth
investigating further.
WES WISE
Wes was a former TV reporter and mayor of Dallas
(who drove a Volkswagon Bug), who was given one of the most important leads in
the Tippit murder. Wise was told about a man who resembled Oswald who at the
time of Tippit’s murder was driving around Oak Cliff in a 1957 Plymouth, with a
Texas license tag that was traced to Carl Mather – a close friend and former
neighbor of Tippit. Mather’s alibi was that he was at work at Collins Radio – a
major defense contractor who provided the radios for Air Force One, Two and SAC
bombers, and also provided the cover for the CIA raider ship the Rex. The Rex
was exposed by a New York Times page one story on November 1, 1963, after some
Pathfinder commandos were captured after they attempted to infiltrate Cuba with
high powered rifles – “that weren’t going to be used to hunt rabbits.” I
recorded a two hour plus audio interview with Wes Wise as he drove me around
the assassination hot spots in Dallas.
CHAUNCEY HOLT
I met Holt during my cross-country train trip at his
home in San Diego, high in the hills where he too talked at length as I audio
recorded him, and later posted a transcript on line. While many of the leads he
gave me panned out, and I confirmed, I don’t believe he was one of the tramps,
as he is a self-acknowledge con artist. He’s also a very fine artist – and took
me to his studio and gave me a copy of a drawing he did of Oswald’s execution. Holt
told me that Warren Commission attorney Joe Ball – was a close associate of a
northern California lawyer named Twombly, who directed him – Holt in many of
his covert activities.
ADELE EDISEN
After reading her story in the Third Decade Magazine
– that she wrote under an alias, I checked out her allegation that she first
met Dr./Col. Jose Rivera (USAR) at an Atlantic City medical convention, and
confirmed that convention did indeed take place at AC Convention Hall, where
the JFK statute is now located on the boardwalk. From there I confirmed almost
everything she said, and through Dick Russell, even got a picture of Rivera at
Fort Ditrick, Md. I also confirmed that Rivera’s military unit – ASCI –
Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence was engaged in early MKULTRA research
at Ditrick, Not Cuban, Rivera was born in Lima, Peru. His longest military
assignment was in New Orleans, where he taught at Loyola. The only thing I
couldn’t confirm was Edisen’s call to Oswald at his New Orleans residence the
first week he arrived there in April 1963. Edisen said Rivera gave her the
phone number weeks before Oswald himself knew he would be living there, so how
did Rivera know that number? I came to know Adele personally over the years,
met her in Dallas, believe her, and was sorry to hear she passed away.
WAYNE SMITH
Wayne Smith was a senior state department diplomat
stationed at the US Embassy in Havana when Castro took over in 1959. Smith said
that he worked closely with David Morales and knew Colonel Samuel Kail, the
Army attaché, as well as David Atlee Phillips, who while not working out of the
embassy, was in Smith’s amateur theater group who produced plays. I met Smith
at one of the first COPA conferences in Washington, and he asked me to attend
the summit in Rio between JFK researchers and the Cuban intelligence officers.
Though I didn’t make that meeting, my associates John Judge and Antony Summers
did. Smith was later used to falsely identify Morales and another JMWAVE
officer Gordon Campbell, as the persons in a film from the Ambassador Hotel on
the day RFK was killed. I believe Wayne Smith is still alive.
BRADLEY AYERS
After reading his book “The War that Never Was” many
years ago, I finally got to talk to former US. Army Ranger Captain Ayers a
number of times on the telephone. Ayers also wrote “The Zenith Secret,” about
his time training anti-Castro Cuban commandos at JMWAVE. Ayers and Captain
Edward Roderick were assigned by General Brute Krulak to train the Cubans under
CIA operational control. The leader of the team Ayers trained was Julio
Fernandez, the same name as the Cuban I was originally searching for. Ayers’
first book was published by Bobbs-Merrell, an company from Indiana that had an
office in the Texas School Book Depository and hired William Harvey after
Harvey left the CIA. And while the CIA didn’t vet Ayers’ book, Harvey did,
excising the name of Gordon Campbell as well as making other editings. Like
Wayne Smith, Ayers was show the video of the Ambassador Hotel on the night RFK
was killed and he too falsely identified two of the men as David Morales and
Gordon Campbell. Ayers recently died, but his books say a lot. Ayers was
talking with the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) when they were
interviewing Gene Wheaton, and Ayers warned the ARRB that Wheaton was going to
give them disinformation – though Wheaton himself didn’t know it.
BILL TURNER
The late Bill Turner, former FBI agent and original
JFK assassination investigator, was in Dallas on the day after the
assassination, and continued his inquiry until he died. His articles in
Ramparts and books – “The Fish is Red” and “Rearview Mirror” documents his work
on the case, especially the New Orleans angles and JMWAVE, where he was the
first to mention the name of Gordon Campbell – the JMWAVE maritime operations
chief. It was Turner, at a COPA conference in Dallas who said, “We now have a
good idea as to what happened at Dealey Plaza. The motives were piling up – Bay
of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, backchannel negations with Castro, and there was
already a mechanism in place to kill Castro that was turned around and redirected
to JFK in Dallas.” Thus focusing on the JMWAVE commandos who were paid by the
CIA and trained to kill Castro – the Pathfinders.
ARTHUR YOUNG
After reading two of his books – one on the history
of the Bell Helicopter and the other on his philosophy of process, I visited
Arthur Young at his home in Brandywine, just outside Philadelphia. The inventor
of the Bell Helicopter is a very interesting guy, who did my horoscope as we
talked – on the record as I recorded it on an audio cassette. As a genius
inventor who argued with Einstein at Princeton, Young set about to solve the
problems of vertical flight, and after nearly two decades, succeeded in developing
the first commercially approved helicopter -–the Bell 47B – the MASH helicopter
with glass cockpit and girders – that is now hanging in the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City. As an eccentric muse who dabbled in astrology, ESP and
Remote Viewing, Young hooked up with an equally eccentric women – Ruth Forbes
Paine – an independently wealthy Forbes family heiress who was previously
married to Lyman Paine – a founder of the American Trotskyite Party and father
of Michael Paine – the chief benefactor of Lee Harvey Oswald the accused
assassin. It was Arthur Young who arranged for his stepson Michael to work at
the Bell Helicopter factory in Dallas, where he moved with his Quaker wife Ruth
Hyde Paine, who he met at a Philadelphia folk dance. It isn’t Arthur Young who
is the real key to this case – but rather his wife, Michael’s mom.
RUTH FORBES PAINE YOUNG
Ruth Forbes Paine Young was present when I met Arthur
Young at their colonial era farmhouse in Brandywine, and I did meet her, but
she was suffering from an advanced case of altimizers disease, so I didn’t ask
her any questions, and she just sat there and smiled. As a Forbes, she has a
cottage on the Forbes family island off Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and stressed
her eccentricity by marrying Lyman Paine, who was not just a communist but a
Trotyskite – follower of Trotsky, who was exiled by the Soviet Communists to
Mexico City where he was assassinated by a Soviet agent – as described in the
book by Issac Don Levine. The thing about Ruth Forbes is her close association
with Mary Bancroft – the equally eccentric granddaughter of the founder of
Barrons and the New York Stock Exchange. While on a steamship to Europe with
Ruth Forbes, Mary Bancroft met a Swiss businessman who she married, which put
her in a position to meet Allen Dulles in Berne, where she became Dulles’
secretary and principle agent in developing Nazi officer Hans Bernd Gisivious.
Gisivious was a main participant in the July 20, 1944 Valkyrie plot to kill
Hitler that failed. With the assistance of Dulles and Bancroft Gisivious
escaped Berlin to Berne, and after the war relocated to Dallas where he worked
for a major defense contractor.
MRS.MARY DORMAN
When the Clifton copy of the Air Force One radio
transmission recordings from 11/22/63 were released, I immediately compared it
to the copy I had transcribed, and noticed some important aspects that were
edited out of the copy of the tape I had received from the LBJ Library years
earlier and transcribed. On the new tape, a man identifies himself as “Colonel
Dorman – General LeMay’s aid” who wanted to get an important message to LeMay,
who was flying back to DC from Canada, where he was said to be on a fishing
vacation. While we don’t know what the message was, I identified Dorman and
found he was from near Trenton, where I also was living at the time, and found
a phone number for him. While Dorman had died in combat in Vietnam, his widow
answered the phone and acknowledged that she was the wife of Colonel Dorman,
General LeMay’s aide. She said that on the day JFK was killed she was working
in the White House on the historic restoration project begun by Mrs. Kennnedy.
She worked for a man named “Castro,” who when informed of JFK’s death, closed
all the curtains and told them to leave. Mrs. Dorman said she went to a chapel
to pray, and then went home. She said she lived on General’s Row alongside
Arlington Cemetery.
MRS. DORMAN’S SON
I also talked on the phone with Mrs. Dorman’s son,
who was about ten years old at the time of the assassination who recalls
climbing a tree in Arlington Cemetery and watching the burial of JFK from a
high perch. He also said that his father once took him on a tour of General
LeMay’s private command and control plane – nicknamed “Speckled Trout,” that
was an airborne command post.
MAJOR HAROLD R. PATTERSON – AKA “STRANGER”
Also on the Clifton tape is an excerpt edited out of
the LBJ Library version of the tape, in which Pierre Salinger – the President’s
Press Secretary – aboard the Cabinet Plane over the Pacific, receives a radio
call from the Situation Room in the White House to return to DC immediately.
Salinger took the message to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the senior officer
aboard, who wanted to know who was giving this instruction. Salinger said it
was from an officer who identified himself as “STRANGER” in the White House
Situation Room. Rusk said they couldn’t take orders from someone named
“STRANGER” and wanted to know who it was. Salinger went to the pilot and
requested the code book, but when the pilot opened the plane’s safe, the code
book was missing! So Salinger went back on the radio to the Situation Room and
requested the full identify of “STRANGER.” After a little while, the Situation
Room responded saying “STRANGER” was Major Patterson, who Salinger knew and
could vouch for. As I now had his name, I looked Patterson up and found him in
Virginia and called him on the phone. He acknowledged being in the Situation
Room at the time of the assassination, working for the White House
Communications Agency (WHCA). He also acknowledged talking with Salinger and
the fact that the code book aboard the Cabinet Plane was missing. We talked for
a little while and he was quite honest and open with me, but when Jefferson
Morley called him a few days later he clammed up, and wouldn’t talk, as someone
must have got to him.
RICHARD BULLOCK
Former USMC Richard Bullock was stationed at Atsugi,
Japan with Oswald and knew him well. I met Bullock at an Elks barbeque, and
talked with him on other occasions as well. Bullock said he often played
football with Oswald in their “skivvies” when off duty. Oswald he said, while
officially a radar operator, usually worked out of the communications shack.
Bullock also didn’t recognize the guy killed by Jack Ruby as the same guy he
served with. Bullock is still alive.
STEVE KENAN
When Anthony Summers interviewed a Mexican attorney
who told him about meeting Oswald at Sanborn’s Restaurant in Mexico City in
1963, he said Oswald took off for the Cuban consulate on the back of a motorcycle
with another American, a Philadelphia college student. After searching for this man on the
motorcycle for years with others, we gave up, but I posted an article about it
on line and received an email from “Mony” – a German girl whose mother met
Steve Kenan, a Philadelphia college student who rode a motorcycle. With her
additional information, we located Kenan in the Southwest, and notified Anthony
Summers, who contacted Kenan and talked with him on the phone. I also found
Kenan’s articles about visiting Cuba in the Temple University student newspaper
– which included a photo of Kenan and Castro together! Kenan said that he was
indeed in Mexico City, and wrote an article about his adventures in Motorcycle
Magazine (that I acquired). But – he believed he left before September 1963, so
he wasn’t there when Oswald was there, and didn’t remember giving him a ride
from Sanborn’s restaurant, although he was there too. It is also suspected that
Kenan could be the mysterious LICOZY-3 – a student from Philadelphia and CIA
asset.
RICHARD BEYMER
When Phil Shenon’s book came out that focuses on
Oswald’s presence at a “Twist Party” in Mexico City hosted by Sylvia Duran –
the Cuban embassy receptionist Oswald dealt with, he tries to make the case for
Cuban embassy personal encouraging Oswald to kill JFK at that party. He also
says that there were two other American “gringos” at the party – who Duran
would not identify because one was a famous American film actor who was still
alive and she wanted to protect him. Well records recently released under the
JFK Act include a CIA report of a telephone conversation between an American –
Richard Beymer, and the Cubans, asking about Duran. Beymer was an American film
actor who starred in West Side Story and The Longest Day, and was in Mexico at
the time to attend a film festival. I tracked Beymer down and talked with him
on the phone, and he acknowledged being there at the time and trying to get a
visa to Cuba. He didn’t recall any Twist Party, though that was something he
would have done being a footloose American below the border. With him he said,
was Bradley Pierce, a former New York City bar owner, now a Catholic priest.
BRADLEY PIERCE
Father Bradley is now at a seminary in New England,
and acknowledged in a phone conversation, that he was indeed with Richard
Beymer in Mexico, but he too does not recall a “Twist Party,” or meeting
Oswald. They were there however, at the time of the assassination, as Father
Bradley recalls learning about the assassination as they got off an elevator in
a hotel lobby in Mexico. Since they were there for only a few weeks, and were
there on the day of the assassination, they were not there when Oswald was
there in late September – early October.
Just goes to show that we have to move on
interviewing the remaining living witnesses because they won’t live forever.
POLK COUNTY SHERIFF CHERRY
When JFK’s personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln passed
away, she left in her will two trunks of effects that she ordered sent to her
cousin – a Nebraska attorney who became a judge. The attorney informed the
Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) that he gave the trunks to Polk
County Sheriff Cherry for safe keeping, but the ARRB never followed up on this
and the contents of the trunks remain unknown and out of the JFK Collection at
the NARA, where they belong. I contacted the current Polk County, Nebraska
attorney and he said that he checked the evidence locker and the two trunks are
no longer there. I then obtained the email and phone number of former Polk
County Sheriff Cherry – who acknowledge recalling the trunks and knowing their
disposition, but refused to tell me what became of them, unless I get a
subpoena and he has a witness present. With the TRC – it has been suggested
that RFK, Jr., the rightful heir to the trunks, should request to know what
became of them.
NEXT UP – WHAT I INTEND TO DO -
