Coalitions - Citizen's Guide to Politics

COALITIONS

 (From: Rubin, Barry R.; “A Citizen’s Guide to Politics…” M.E.Sharpe)

p. 132:  “A coalition is an alliance, usually limited in time and purpose, between organizations with different agendas, working together for a common policy advocacy goal. The term coalition encompasses a great diversity of alliances formed to advance a shared public policy goal. Coalitions can be formal or informal, permanent or temporary….Coalitions can unite diverse civil rights or environmental groups as they formulate and advance complex, long-term agendas. Or they can provide a mechanism to coordinate short-term activities, such as opposing a Supreme Court nomination…or supporting the balanced budge amendments to the Constitution…”

“Networks often precede coalitions, just as individuals or organizations sharing information and common concerns may gradually coalesce into an association or organization – an interest group – designed to influence policy.”

“A coalition is an alliance between organizations, each of which brings its own agenda and decision-making processes to the coalition table. Since coalition members are organizations, not individuals, they do not have the same freedom of movement that individuals have. Interest groups that join coalitions must be sure that the coalition shares the fundamental goals of the organization and its members.…Coalitions are at the mercy of their members and can achieve only what the members permit them to achieve. Their only resources-people and money – are those that members provide.”

“Large, permanent coalitions, such as trade associations, have permanent staff, office space, and resources, all dedicated to achieving the coalition’s goals. Member organizations pay substantial dues to support the coalition and its infrastructure.”

“But most coalitions are ad hoc, voluntary assemblages of organizations, with little power to compel the member organizations to commit time and resources to the coalition or to fulfill their coalition commitments. They are usually staffed by ‘volunteers’ from the member organizations, some of whom may even be detailed to work exclusively on coalition projects.”

“The all coalitions are composed of different organizations with different agendas working together, there are numerous ways to organize and manage coalitions. The best coalitions are flexible enough to adapt to their members’ needs and the common goal that has brought them together…”

p.140:  “Coalitions begin with organizations whose issue agendas largely overlap. The initial recruitment process locates those whose agendas, while different, still show substantial areas of agreement. Finally, coalitions attempt to recruit organizations whose agendas rarely overlap with those of core coalition members. In some cases, core coalition members may even try to persuade other organizations to stretch their issue agendas to include the coalition’s issue.”

“Why would coalitions recruit so widely for allies, even going so far as to include organizations with whom they have never worked on any issue? Just imagine the reaction of a legislator who opens his office door only to find lobbyists on both sides of the abortion issue working together on another issue. ‘Unlikely alliances’ make decision makers and the public sit up and take notice: If people who disagree on so many things agree on this issue, then maybe there’s some merit in their position.”

John Judge: Stirring the Plot

Stirring the Plot

By Molly Redden • September 7, 2012

Conspiracy Cheery: Judge wants to educate, not agitate.

Photograph by Darrow Montgomery

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/43149/stirring-the-plot/

John Judge first utters the word “conspiracy” 37 minutes into our hour-and-a-half conversation, but the word has floated over our table in a crowded Starbucks near the Capitol from the moment we sat down.

Judge, 64, is a longtime fixture of what could be called the alternative history circuit—a space brimming with earthly explanations for UFO sightings and sinister hypotheses about U.S. involvement in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But there are academics on the spectrum of alt-history, too, who, calling their field “parapolitics” or “deep history,” defy mainstream history through scholarship. Judge bridges the pseudo and scholastic ends of the alt-history world—at least, that is how he would like to be seen, as he hastens his ambitions to open the Museum of Hidden History.

With his scraggly white beard, Judge resembles a slightly worse-for-wear Santa Claus. “The Museum of Hidden History will be three things,” he says, speaking so softly I strain to hear him. “History that we’ve made assumptions about and have been miseducated about. History that goes beyond our paradigms or for which we lack counternarratives. And history that has been stolen from us by the national security state.” Some examples include exhibits on what is known, and what is still unknown, about the political assassinations of the 1960s, or on shortchanged minority and female perspectives on history. He also has plans for a research library, with thousands of documents wrested from federal agencies by good government groups.

Judge’s goal is to open a brick-and-mortar museum in 2017. In the meantime, he’s scouting sites in D.C.—the unoccupied Franklin School downtown is among his desired locations—and making plans for a mobile exhibit on the assassination of John F. Kennedy to raise awareness and money. The museum’s website boasts a clean new logo and a page for making tax-deductible donations. He has already secured a $10,000 grant from an unnamed family foundation.

But as a well-known figure in his field, Judge has an appropriately bizarre paper trail. He has argued on obscure websites that George W. Bush’s 2000 election victory was prearranged by the powers-that-be before a single vote was cast, and he has written several treatises insisting on CIA involvement in the deaths at Jonestown. His more legitimate work isn’t much closer to the mainstream. Judge’s work on the 9-11 Citizens Watch, a group established by a yacht captain to monitor the 9/11 Commission, led to a stint as a kind of roving assistant to then-Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who famously told the commission that Bush may have known about the impending attacks. Little of the scholarship on his resume would be welcome in any traditional museum.

Yet Judge’s work for McKinney, and on the Coalition on Political Assassinations, has nonetheless connected him to a handful of iconoclastic luminaries who have lent their names and occasional advice as board members, including the late historian Howard Zinn; James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me; Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg; and Cyril Wecht, the lone forensic pathologist to dispute the single-bullet theory of Kennedy’s death before Congress.

Judge’s dream, of a museum to educate some of the millions of tourists who pass through D.C. each year on the intricacies of the Warren Commission and the gaps in their knowledge on the national security state, seems to be on its way to fulfillment. But would Judge create a space for serious scholarship, or a temple to the questionable side of alt-history, with all its misbegotten suspicions?

The child of two Pentagon employees, Judge grew up in that bedroom community of the defense establishment, Falls Church. His father supervised loading docks at the Pentagon, where Judge remembers observing paper-pulping machines churn out raw material for thousands of books and binders. (Today, one of his obsessions is overclassification.) His mother was a manpower analyst who projected draft needs with the help of a hand calculator. Judge dates his interest in hidden history to an early age: Snatches of conversations between tipsy Pentagon employees at holiday parties—and his visits to the unclassified stacks of the Pentagon library—led him to believe there was vastly more to the federal government than most understood. A subscription to Flying Saucers magazine at age 10, a gift from his uncle, didn’t hurt, either.

Judge attended college at the University of Dayton, where he double-majored in broadcast journalism and theology, with an emphasis on saints, mystics, and religious leaders. He’s not religious, calling himself “a recovering Catholic since about age 10,” when he discovered for himself the Crusades and the Inquisition. He later worked as an activist, with a long stint warning D.C. high school students not to join the U.S. Armed Forces. That’s his career to this day—his salary from his time with McKinney, he confides sheepishly, is about the most he’s ever made.

The road to Judge’s rustic, three-story rattletrap in Hillcrest is so steep that as his Oldsmobile Royale struggles into the driveway, I feel I should be pedaling. Here he keeps his collection of 4,000 rare books and papers—counterhistories and conspiracy tracts, declassified documents and musty paperbacks—that form the nucleus of his life’s work.

Judge stores about half of his collection in his basement, a dim room packed with crispy old newspapers, haphazard stacks of typed papers, and hundreds of bound volumes. The straining shelves bear the odd decoration here and there, like a bumper sticker announcing, “Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed.” He points out some highlights: The Sept. 11 volumes. The anthrax volumes. The JFK shelf. The RFK shelf. Malcolm X. Martin Luther King Jr. Row after row of scholarly tomes, indiscriminately mixed with kookier ones.

The rest is housed on the top floor, which teeters over his garage. This is the Ralph McGehee Intelligence Library, a collection of documents and books belonging to the disaffected CIA agent and bestselling author of the 1983 tell-all Deadly Deceits. Judge’s housemate sleeps on the floor, on a thin pallet nestled among crowded bookcases bearing government reports and obscure periodicals obtained by McGehee. “I’m sort of a packrat with this stuff,” Judge says, smiling. “That’s part of why I want a museum—so it’s not just me who can access all this, sitting like Smaug over my gold pile.”

For someone who has spent his career opposing what he believes to be a patronizing, overbearing national security state, Judge is weirdly uncynical. In describing his various conclusions about history, he comes off like an earnest, precocious teenager, but one without a tendency to get hot and bothered about his passions. That’s part of what makes him engaging in spite of some of his wilder notions. He is unconcerned with present-day Washington’s viciously partisan debates over the intrusions of government. When Judge pitches his museum, he does not describe a reimagining of national narratives so much as a bizarro Smithsonian.

His supporters can be a little more aggressive. Wecht, the forensic pathologist—who has gone on to be a best-selling author and TV commentator on the deaths of celebrities—sees Judge’s museum as a breakthrough in the campaign to reveal what he says is the truth about the Kennedy assassination. He begins to shout when asked how Judge could design exhibits in a way that avoided association with “conspiracy theories” and the easy dismissal that attends the term. “How can that appellation be made with any validity?” he yells. “Where does anybody have the chutzpah to make that kind of condescending statement when a majority of the American public don’t believe the Warren Commission Report gave them the full story?”

In fact, it is because so many people doubt the veracity of official rulings on JFK’s assassination that Judge has been such a successful agitator. That was the conclusion of Rebecca Moore, chair of the humanities department at San Diego State University, writing in 2002 for the Journal of Popular Culture. Calling Judge a “professional conspiracist,” Moore argues that when ambiguity surrounds an event like Jonestown, the opportunity is ripe for someone to come along and capture imaginations with a grand explanation, even though he is challenged by almost all scholarly accounts.

Judge, though, always remains soft-spoken. Ronnie Dugger, the founder of the Texas Observer and a board member of the Museum of Hidden History, thinks this is part of what makes him so compelling. “In the miasma of the material that is out there, you really have to decide who you trust among the researchers,” Dugger says. He trusts Judge, at least in terms of what he brings to annual meetings of the Coalition on Political Assassinations, because he is “a serious man” capable of screening others for “trash research.”

The point, Judge says, is not communicating an absolute point of view, but “having an open, informed society.” (Although there are a few things Judge is clear he does not believe in, such as honest-to-God extraterrestrials and the arguments of Sept. 11 truthers.) For him, the Museum of Hidden History is less about an alternative truth than about caching and presenting everything that precedes truth—the specific tapes, documents, and outré research that Judge thinks are a must for anyone who wants to investigate, for example, the Malcolm X assassination from scratch.

“This history is going to be lost if it’s not archived and retained and looked into,” Judge says. “I think history in general has been untold, and not just the covert history. All the time, in different areas, history is being unearthed that gives us different perspectives. We’re slipping into a posthistorical and postliterate age, where history isn’t seen to be central.…Without an active effort to preserve our history, it is not going to be preserved. And without an active effort to unearth it from our own intelligence agencies, we’re not going to know enough of it to make decisions about our future.”'

This might be the appeal of the Museum of Hidden History, despite Judge’s many strange beliefs. The idea that history hasn’t been properly assembled—whether because of who wrote it or what they were working with—is a notion that harangues every former grade schooler who grew up to learn, say, that Woodrow Wilson was one of the greatest facilitators of institutional racism and not exactly the world peacenik we learned about when we were young. What makes Judge’s vision attractive is the ever-tantalizing possibility that government conspiracies might exist, and the chilling evidence that they do. 

The last decade of history alone is lousy with government scandals: warrantless wiretaps; revelations that, in the 1940s, NIH-funded researchers infected unknowing Guatemalan soldiers, mental patients, and sex workers with syphilis. Museums are meant to be educational, and Judge’s track record suggests that, in the strictest sense, his might not be. But giving yourself over to the notion that there was a second shooter, just for an afternoon, could be a kind of education, too.

Washington Post on John Judge

John Judge, independent investigator of historic events, dies at 66

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/john-judge-independent-investigator-of-historic-events-dies-at-66/2014/04/24/a20f91aa-caf8-11e3-a75e-463587891b57_story.html

- “I tell people you can call me a conspiracy theorist if you call everyone else a coincidence theorist,” Mr. Judge, who died at 66, once remarked.  Photo: Bob Gray 

By Emily Langer, Published: April 24 E-mail the writer

John P. Judge, an independent researcher who tirelessly amassed and disseminated evidence supporting alternative explanations — some called them conspiracy theories — for President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and other historic events, died April 15 at a nursing facility in the District. He was 66.

Through years of investigation and activism, Mr. Judge developed a devoted following in the community of skeptics who question official or commonly accepted narratives of the past. He co-founded and directed the Coalition on Political Assassinations, an organization whose activities include investigating the deaths in the 1960s of John Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and black nationalist leader Malcolm X. News outlets, with some frequency, featured Mr. Judge and his work.

He turned his Washington home into a repository of thousands of volumes and documents on political assassinations and other matters, supporting himself over the decades through odd jobs and fundraising work. He was once described as a “professional conspiracist,” but he considered himself an “alternate historian,” according to his Web site,judgeforyourself.org.

“I tell people you can call me a conspiracy theorist if you call everyone else a coincidence theorist,” Mr. Judge quipped to the publication National Journal.

His most noted work involved President Kennedy’s death in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Like legions of others doubters labeled conspiracy theorists, Mr. Judge rejected the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald had been the lone gunman.

Mr. Judge’s working theory, he told interviewers, was that the assassination had been organized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I don’t think this is an insoluble parlor mystery,” he once told the Dallas Morning News. “I don’t think we are just flailing in the dark.”

Mr. Judge helped organize in Dallas annual commemorations of Kennedy’s death. He and others gathered on the grassy knoll, the spot where another gunman, according to some theories, was stationed. Those memorials became the subject of controversy last year, when Dallas marked the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death.

After contentious discussions with event organizers, the Coalition on Political Assassinations agreed to hold its ceremony in a parking lot several blocks away from the usual spot, which was restricted to ticket-holding participants.

“We’ll be here,” Mr. Judge had said. “We may have to crawl through the sewer system and pop our heads up where the assassin was, but we’ll be here.”

In his work regarding more recent history, Mr. Judge cofounded the 9/11 Citizens Watch to monitor the operations of the official 9/11 Commission, the independent and bipartisan body created by congressional legislation to prepare a full account of the attacks.

He briefly worked as an assistant to then-U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.), who was widely rebuked when she suggested that President George W. Bush’s administration might have had advance notice of the terrorist strike.

Former congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio), who met Mr. Judge during his Capitol Hill employment, described him as “brilliant” and said he had been “very impressed” by Mr. Judge’s research abilities.

“I may not have agreed with him on everything,” Kucinich said of Mr. Judge in an interview, but he was “an original, independent thinker and someone who immersed himself in hidden history.”

At the time of his death, Mr. Judge was working toward the establishment in Washington of the Museum of Hidden History, which would include an archive and library. Among other missions, according to its Web site, it would “inform and educate the public about little-known aspects of local, national and international history.”

“It erodes the rational approach when you talk of conspiracies involving a small cabal in a board room controlling world history,” Mr. Judge once told the Boston Globe. “But it’s a common human trait to want an explanation for all the unexplained things that are happening — some kind of grand unified theory.”

John Patrick Judge was born Dec. 14, 1947, in the District, and he grew up in Falls Church, Va. Both his parents worked at the Pentagon.

Mr. Judge graduated in 1970 from the University of Dayton in Ohio, where he studied theology and where he recalled being obliged to participate in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He later joined the American Friends Service Committee as a draft counselor during the Vietnam War.

In the District, Mr. Judge became what the Washington City Paper described as “the voice of military dissent in D.C. public schools.” He sought to counter military recruiting efforts by attending career days and informing students of what he alleged were discrimination and deprivation of rights within the military.

Mr. Judge’s survivors include his companion of four years, Marilyn Tenenoff of York Haven, Pa. She said that Mr. Judge had a stroke in March but that the cause of death had not been determined. The D.C. medical examiner’s office had not ruled on the case, according to a spokesman.

Tenenoff said she plans to request an outside review of the autopsy report, when it is available, to assuage the concerns of anyone who may doubt its accuracy.

John Judge, Mae Brussell and Don Norton

Posted by John Judge on the Education Forum - JFK Assassination Debate - July 31 2000

Bill Kelly requested that I relate the meeting I had with a man using the name Don Norton at the University of Dayton in Ohio in the 1970’s.

I had helped to make arrangements for researcher Mae Brussell to speak on campus. Kelly was also going to school there at the time, and attended her talk. After the crowd broke, I headed home with Mae and two roommates at our off campus house. Coming out of the Student Union, I noticed a man handing back, but following us down the hallway, and into the elevator. Mae was surrounded by a small group, including Bill Kelly, who were asking her questions. The man held back while she stopped outside in the dark to finish talking to them. Then Mae, myself and my roommates began to head toward home and stepped into the light of street lamps at the edge of campus.

At this point, the man came out of the shadows from behind us and came up to Mae, saying, “Mae, don’t you know who I am?” Mae turned, looked at him for a moment and said, “You look like Lee Harvey Oswald.”

And to my amazement, he did. Add ten years to his life, some receding hairline, but the resemblance was clearly there. He looked at his feet and said, “A lot of people tell me that. I’m Don Norton.”

At this Mae became effusive. “Oh Don, I’m so glad you come. John, this is Don Norton. He wrote to me to say he was going to drive down from Columbus to hear the talk. He’s the only researcher in the country who sends me money to do my work.” Again, the man looked at his feet and said, “It’s my conscience money.” I was still flabbergasted at his resemblance to Oswald and intrigued about who he was, so I invited him to come down to the house and visit with Mae and have a cup of coffee. He followed us there.

Inside, the resemblance was even clearer to me. He looked like the round, cherubic faced Oswald who was in the Soviet Union photos and on the passport photo, but not like the Oswald killed in Dallas. I expected him to ask questions of Mae, but instead he began a long recitation about Marxism and communist ideology. Finally, Mae got up from knitting and said, “I’m going to bed.” I offered to send my research writings to the man, and he told me to write to him at “General Delivery, Columbus, Ohio.” He bid goodnight to my two roommakes and myself and left.

The next day, on the way to visit a correspondent in a state prison in Ohio, Mae turned to me in the car and said, “Don’t you think that was Oswald who visited us last night?” And I said, “Well, it sure looked like Oswald,” Mae, but Oswald is dead.”  

“Not according to his mother,” Mae responded, “she told me that the man shot in the basement of the Dallas jail was not her son.” I was astounded. “Didn’t you notice what he was doing last night?”

I said, “Well, I thought it strange that he didn’t ask any questions or really talk to us.” 

“He was reciting verbatim the speech Oswald gave on the radio in New Orleans about communism and Marxism,” she explained. I had never heard the text of the speech, so it had not run a bell for me.

“I’m going to go home and check his signature on his letters to me. I have a whole collection of Oswald signatures, and they re not all the same person.” Mae said. She was clearly excited that she had met a living Oswald.

Resemblance.

I have now repeated this story to many researchers. Jack White and others took a special interest in it and followed down leads on a Don Norton in Columbus, but the early photo they showed me of that man did not resemble the person I saw. Later, I saw a photo of a man that lived in Florida and used the name Don Norton, and it was clearly the same person. I am convinced that the man I met that night was either the Oswald who lived with Marina in the Soviet Union, or a dead ringer for him. I do not know if his real name was Don Norton, of course, that is just the name he gave us. District Attorney Jim Garrison believed that someone using that name was involved in the Kennedy assassination conspiracy.

I later was a custodian of Mae Brussell’s library and correspondence files for a period. I never found the Norton letters, but they may still exist in her collection. Mae died in 1988. Bill Kelly and my old roommates sill recall the incident, but no additional details. Bill didn’t talk to the man calling himself Norton, he had parted from us before the man really talked but, of course, I will never forget the incident.

Lee Harvey Oswald had been a key in my work to understand who killed Kennedy and who set him up to take the blame. I realized early on that there was more than one Oswald,  that a “double” operation was going on prior to the assassination. I believe the man I met was Marguritte’s son, the real Oswald, back from the Soviet Union at some point. But until that night, Oswald had been a ghost to me, a name and a set of facts, not a person. Until the specials released about Oswald in the 1990s, I had never heard Oswald’s voice, save in the few stressed moments he is interviewed in the Dallas jail, his voice is terse and angry. Finally, he is heard in one documentary on tapes preserved by an English speaking teacher in the Soviet Union who befriended Lee, laughing and dramatizing a reading, and his persona comes through in a completely different way. These two voices are not the same in my view.

I also relayed this story to the Cuban intelligence officers who COPA arranged for researchers to meet in the Bahamas a few years ago, and Felix Rodriguez was intrigued. He told me a story of his own, from the days when he was trained in the 1950s by the KGB in Moscow. He said their officers were behind a clothing store just off Red Square, and that you entered in the back room by way of a concealed elevator, Like Maxwell Smart,” he joked. He said that his key KGB trainer had told him that Lee Harvey Oswald was still living in the Soviet Union, years after the Kennedy assassination had occurred. I wondered if this was the man I me so many years ago.

Did the “defector” Oswald stay in the Soviet Union and a double “Return” to the US? Is there still a living Oswald? Could he tell us anything about those who set him up as the patsy? Is Don Norton still alive? Others have done much more research than work on Norton than I have, and it’s worth studying. I live with this small piece of history. Ever since I began my work on the JFK assassination, it has created a web of synchronicity and serendipity for me, chance meetings with key individuals who know a piece of the puzzle.

For my purposes, the case is solved, but not yet finally proven.

I point the finger at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and at the Office of Naval Intelligence, who ran the young Marine “defector,” Lee Harvey Oswald, and those were among the last forthcoming agencies approached by the Review Board for the JFK assassination files.

In the early 1990s, before Oliver Stone’s film, Bill Kelly and I started the Committee for an Open Archives to press for the full release of the government files. We actually had found sponsors to introduce the bills and for a full and immediate release, among them Rep.  Henry Gonzales, who had been in the motorcade that day. Stone’s film created the groundswell of public outcry that led to the passage of the JFK Records Act of 1992. And the Committee for an Open Archives was one of the founding groups of the Coalition on Political Assassinations.

“

DONALD P. NORTON –

As summarized from interview notes taken by investigators (Charles Ward/R. Billings) for the New Orleans District Attorney (NODA) and newspaper clips, released by the NARA under the JFK Act.

Born on January 23, 1932, a native of Columbus, Georgia, Donald P. Norton was raised and educated in Georgia before entering the U.S. Air Force in October, 1949. A musician who played the organ and self-described TV personality, Norton enlisted with the understanding he would play in the Air Force Band, which he did until 1952 when he was discharged over what he described as a "personal involvement" and an "indiscretion" that led to him being sentenced to six months in a federal prison.

Returning to Georgia he continued his musical education at a conservatory where he earned a bachelor and master degrees and in 1957 a job playing at the officers club at Fort Benning, Columbus, Georgia, where he performed for and met generals and other officers and officials. While there he was approached by a man who claimed to be representing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who told him "we want to know who does what to whom," which the NODA investigator surmised, "the obvious implication being that it would his duty to ferret out homosexuals in high military places."

The money, Norton said, was good, $500 a month, and Norton continued what he called his "witch hunting" assignment until 1958, when the colonel who employed him was charged with embezzlement.

Norton then moved to Atlanta where he performed on weekends at the officers club, whose secretary Norton was convinced, was also a government agent, continuing to turn over information about homosexuals, proof "based on experience."

In early 1958 he received a phone call from his contact who asked him if he would like to take a trip to Cuba.  He met "Hugh Pharris" at the Easter Airline ticket counter at the Atlanta Airport. "Pharris" gave him a case of phonograph records, saying "it is in the jackets," samples of which he was to take to Carlo Media, a Cuban television personality, who was also working for the CIA at the time. "Pharris" was described as a man who wore sun glasses and a very sloppy wig, who Norton is convinced was David Ferrie. A young lady was with him, Carlotta Roth, a dancer at the Domino Lounge in Atlanta. After traveling to Cuba, Norton returned to Georgia via Miami and New York and reported to his CIA contact in Atlanta.

Norton said his next assignment was to infiltrate the Fulton County jail, where he was placed in the same cell with Robert Bolling, accused of dynamiting a synagogue. Other assignments were more his specialty, to determine the existence of homosexuals in government jobs.

In 1960, while on a pleasure trip to New Orleans, Norton said he went to the My-O-My Club, a homosexual hangout, where he saw "Hugh Pharris" (aka David Ferrie), though he didn't break operational security and talk to him.

According to the NODA investigation report of the interview with Norton, "…it should be noted that the man's (Norton's) physical appearance and his behavior indicate at a glance his sexual nature. A man of rather delicate features, slightly overweight, he is extremely nervous, a chain smoker, which may well be explained by the fact that he is indeed frightened. On the other hand, he is a fast-talking, well rehearsed witness, although his testimony is often confusing due to his penchant for inconsequential gossip. He has a very inflated ego about his musical talents and his ability to decipher weaknesses of others. He describes himself as a passive homosexual who is really a bisexual, although the latter terminology must be considered doubtful. On observation it must be stated that it seems unlikely that a man of such homosexual tendencies would be employed by the intelligence agency, but, as he described the nature of his work, this was exactly the reason they hired him. He described the reason for going to work for the agency as two-fold. One, 'they had something on me,' he says, and two, 'the money was good.'"

Norton said he was paid on an assignment-by-assignment basis, received his orders by phone from a man who was only identified as "the Captain," and never heard the term "CIA" by the initials used to describe the agency, and the first reference was the last reference to the company. He was tightly insulated from other CIA operatives and only knows of a few others who have worked for the agency.

In September, 1962, Norton said he was given the assignment of delivering $50,000 to the Hotel Yamajel, in Monterray, Mexico. Driving in his own 1956 Buick, he registered under his own name.

According to the NODA investigator's report, "It should be noted here that Norton's knowledge of Cuban policy of this country is extremely vague. He is able to theorize as if it were some revelation that the United States or CIA was behind the overthrow of Batista, but then when Castro threw out the CIA, it in turn, and the U.S. government turned against Castro. He does however say that Carlo Media, the CIA-employed Cuban is now in a Castro prison, so he thinks. He says that after the Castro overthrow his only assignment involving Cuba was this courier trip to Monterray to turn over $50,000 to Harvey Lee…"

After registering at the Yamajel Hotel, Norton said he was met by "Harvey Lee" before he could even get to his room. They went into the bar and had a few beers. Norton described "Harvey Lee" as "a man of slight build who dressed casually, who appeared identical to Oswald except for the fact that his hair was not as thin as the hair of the man he saw in pictures identified as Lee Harvey Oswald."

Norton also noted that "Harvey Lee" refused to look him in the eye. When asked where he was from, Norton recalled the answer, he thinks, was New Orleans. In return for the case of money, in return Norton was given a case of documents in manila envelopes, "the nature of which he does not know."

From Monterray, Norton said he then drove to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where he became a television personality and played at the bar of the Georgian Terrace restaurant. "There he was met by a man he can only describe as resembling Oral Roberts, the evangelist, and says this man came to him and used the code identification 'the weather is very warm in Tulsa," and Norton turned over the documents to him in the parking lot, where the man was driving a Volkswagon.

Returning to the United States, Norton was arrested at the behest of Albert Penn of Five Points, Alabama, who Norton knew as a homosexual, and from whom he received some of his instructions. Penn accused Norton of stealing checks, but he was acquitted of the charge and released.

In 1965 Norton went to Albany, Georgia, where he was contacted by "the Captain," who may be also known as "Del Merton." In Albany in 1966 he saw a man he now knows to be Clay Shaw with James A. Gray, an extreme right-wing political power, talking together at the Double Gate Country Club. Gray then offered to help establish Norton in Albany with a $6,000 loan, which was ostensibly and surreptitiously repaid by the CIA. Norton described Gary as a dangerous person and moneyman behind the Continental Room, where Gordon Leonard was the front man. Norton later crossed paths with Clay Shaw once again at the Domino Bar in Atlanta.

In Albany, Norton was told to recruit the services of an ex-Marine police officer, John Stickler, and a friend, Jack C. White, Jr., but failed to follow through on the assignment.

In late November 1966 Norton was instructed to go to Freeport, Grand Bahamas Island, where he was to get the names of the homosexuals working at the missile tracking station on Grand Bahama, his last assignment for the CIA. After a week he returned to Miami where he called his contact, a "Mr. Green," who informed him that "something was brewing in New Orleans and…he should take a long, quiet vacation."

According to the NODA report, "Norton claims he had no idea as to the nature of the New Orleans development, and that he had no idea why he was being told to take this vacation. It worried him a great deal, so he went on a long circuitous trip attempting to find out what was happening, shy he had been summarily dismissed, so to speak. He suspected that he had done something wrong but did not know the nature of the misdeed.

He first went to Key West to contact a CIA friend there, but was unsuccessful. He returned to Miami but was unable to reach Green again. He then drove to Savanna, and by this time was really frightened. He got in a plane and flew to Dallas and tried to contact a man named Stanley Walsh, who he had known in Houston, a man he describes as a former trapeze artist, a former paratrooper who had been working for the agency…"

Flying to Honolulu, Norton contacted a retired naval captain, a doctor then in private practice, who told Norton to forget the problem. Another CIA contact, Bill Rusk, came from Texas, an alcoholic with Mafia connections who ran a liquor store in the Pioneer Hotel, who told him, "Join the party or get out."

From there Norton went to Canada to hide out, but inexplicitly talked to a reporter, John Taylor of the British Columbia Vancover Sun, requesting that Taylor put him in contact with the New Orleans District Attorney's office. On August 5, 1967, the headline read: "AMERICAN, 'NOWHERE ELSE TO GO' COMES HERE TO TELL FANTASTIC TALE LINKS CIA WITH OSWALD, CLAY SHAW."

"A link between Lee Harvey Oswald, Clay Shaw, David Ferrie and the Central Intelligence Agency is claimed by a man now in Vancover. Donald P. Norton, 35, told The Sun he encountered all three while he was on the payroll of the CIA, the U.S. espionage agency."

"Norton has been interviewed here and in New Orleans by officials of the New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrision, whose investigation has been questioned by many sources, alleged a conspiracy between Shaw and Oswald in the assassination of former U.S. president John F. Kennedy."

"…Norton first came to see The Sun, July 8. Since then many details of Norton's story have been confirmed. But the authenticity of his central claims defy verification by normal newspaper investigation…"

xxxxyyyyzzz

CARP vs. COPA

 CARP vs. COPA 

JFK II: What REALLY Happened

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 28, 2001; 12:53 PM

Here at the Conspiracy and Assassination Research Project (CARP), we've had some difficult times of late. The mainstream media showed absolutely no interest in our groundbreaking revelation that Lee Harvey Oswald was the youngest of identical triplets. Our so-called "three Oswalds" theory rocked the assassination community, but the major newspapers and TV networks ignored us as though we were a bunch of nuts.

So, too, did we get zero publicity for unearthing compelling evidence that the real target in Dallas in November 1963 was the driver of the limousine. Total news blackout on that one. And did anyone give us any pub when we demonstrated that at least one of the shots came from high overhead? Didn't our theory of the "stealth blimp" deserve SOME attention?

Even our non-controversial work -- such as our three-volume analysis of the Zapruder film's influence on the early work of Martin Scorcese -- was dismissed as (to quote Assassination Conspiracy Daily) "bizarre."

Why has CARP been shunned? Because we don't just challenge the Status Quo, we dynamite it and then ground the fragments into powder. No one wants to know the truth: That the tragedy in Dallas was a conspiracy involving the FBI, the CIA, the Mob, Lyndon Johnson, Ho Chi-Minh, anti-Castro Cubans, pro-Castro Cubans, the John Birch Society, the Audubon Society and the Friends of the National Zoo.

I'm not saying we've got the whole story figured out. That'll never happen. If that happened, I'd cry. There will always be an incremental new development to report, another blurry photograph to analyze, another bullet flight-path to triangulate. I have 32 overflowing filing cabinets and there's something under the pile of papers on my desk that smells.

Much of what you hear in this business is, I'll be the first to admit, truly outlandish. I think the UFO-invasion connection to the Kennedy assassination remains unconfirmed, if highly suggestive. The notion that the aliens were hoping to obtain Kennedy's DNA for use in a hybridization experiment strikes me as a bit of a leap.

In any case, this week the whole field of assassinology got a tremendous boost. You probably read about it: The grassy knoll theory has been proved.

D.B. Thomas, an assassination researcher, has re-analyzed the controversial dictabelt recording that captures the sound of gunfire in Dealey Plaza. He has concluded that there were four gunshots that day, and that one, the killshot, came from the grassy knoll. Read it. This refutes a previous analysis by the National Academy of Sciences, which itself refuted a previous analysis by the famous House Select Committee on Assassinations back in the late 1970s.

There are sounds on the dictabelt recording that could be gunshots. Thomas says there is a 96.3 percent chance that one of the sounds is a gunshot from the grassy knoll -- and that this was the shot that killed Kennedy. Thomas's report states, "One of the sounds matches the echo pattern of a test shot fired from the Grassy Knoll. The shock wave precedence associated with this pattern is consistent with the muzzle velocity of a .30 calibre rifle." G. Robert Blakey, the general counsel for the House committee, said this week, "We thought there was a 95 percent chance it was a shot. He puts it at 96.3 percent. Either way, that's 'beyond a reasonable doubt.'"

I know what you're thinking: "How could someone possibly listen to an old tape recording full of ambient noises and say that there is precisely a 96.3 percent chance that one sound is a lethal gunshot from a specific place?" The answer, my friends, is "Science." There are scientific methods that we researchers employ. Indeed, I have a special bit of explosive information I would like to impart at this time:

If you listen closely, you can tell the shooter was LEFT-HANDED.

The confidence level of this conclusion is, I should note, 93.25 percent.

There is also a 71.9887 percent chance that the shooter was wearing a hat.

I'll admit that I'm a bit jealous that Mr. Thomas got so much publicity with this latest scoop. Times have been so lean here at CARP that we've had to move our headquarters four times in the last six months, to ever more humble surroundings. I'm incredibly grateful to Vern and Bob, the owners of Vern & Bob's Body Shop in Arlington, for allowing me to use the shed back by the scrap heap. It's a modest location, but a lovely fringe benefit is that, whenever I get stressed out, I can purge my anxiety by pounding on metal with a sledgehammer.

Whatever you do, I urge you to be on guard against disinformation. Ask yourself: How solid is this evidence? Are there other explanations? What is this person's agenda? I have put my own credibility under scrutiny and can tell you that I am not entirely persuaded that I can trust my own judgment.

These thoughts that I have -- are they mine, or are they somehow planted in my brain?

Who do I really work for?????

(Rough Draft appears every so often at washingtonpost.com and is a little knoll, a mound, a knob of rationality in a limitless plain of illogic. Please join Joel today at 2 p.m., right HERE, for a Live Online discussion.)  © 2001 The Washington Post Company

Friends,
What follows is my reply to the author of the Post piece, sent to his
email, and the article that appeared making fun of all of us and the new
revelations on the dictabelt.
John Judge

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6018-2001Mar28.html

Joel,

I don't know you, but I do head up COPA, which is the national association of researchers who actually work on political murders, the Coalition on Political Assassinations. We are a network of ballistics and forensic experts (including Dr. Cyril Wecht, former president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences), medical doctors and academics, independent researchers and interested citizens who have studied the major political assassinations of the 1960s. 

We don't much resemble CARP, except through the distorted lens of the media which likes to pretend that all conspiracies are created equal (and equally incredible). Your parody seems to be a parody of that straw man the media itself created, but ends up discrediting the serious and scientific work that has been done in these murder cases. I know, you were only joking.

I don't believe in any Unidentified Flying Objects, especially not the single bullet that Arlen Spector claims exists. I don't think aliens killed JFK, unless you count certain German nationals imported here at
the end of WWII. And the only kind of conspiracy I believe in is the one that can be proven in a court of law, an illegal act planned and taken in concert by more than one person. I was glad to see the Post article
conclude that even Oswald could not be in two places at once, no matter how ambivalent he might have been about being an assassin that day.

That's a step up from the New York Times, which actually tried to suggest that a second gunman on the Grassy Knoll did not prove a conspiracy, because it could have been two lone nuts arriving at the same time and location by coincidence. I am not a coincidence theorist, either.

There is such a thing as a fact of conspiracy, legally, scientifically and historically. They happen, ask any good lawyer. But the media can't seem to separate conspiracy and theory into two words.

The dictabelt tape is, in my view, the flimsiest piece of evidence in the case, and Lardner tries to suggest that the proof of the case comes down the to percentage of probability that a sound can be identified on
the tape as a gunshot and located in relation to the events. There is lots of unequivocal evidence of a gunshot from the Grassy Knoll that day, visual, audible and causal. Eye and earwitness accounts of that location far outnumber any other reputed location. Crowds and police converged there first to look for the shooter. Railroad workers saw smoke rise from that location. The physical damage to the limousine could only have been done by a shot from the front. The physical reaction of President Kennedy and his actual wounds as described by aides and doctors in Texas that day can only be explained by such a shot. Several films document that reaction, back and to the left at over 100mph. The location of the brain fragments recovered from the trunk and the street also show a shot must have hit from the front of the limousine. Officer Hargis, to the left rear, was hit so hard with bone fragment that he got off his motorcycle and asked if he had been hit,
seeing blood all over his jacket. The timing of the reactions visible to the various wounds in JFK and Governor Connally requires a second gun to be firing at them. The single bullet THEORY falls apart upon simple examination.

Of course, taking real evidence into account of an actual event makes me a "conspiracy theorist" since the government officially pronounced the killer as a lone nut in an upper window. The same best evidence
exonerates Oswald, who was not at the window, did not own the rifle, and did not fire a weapon that day. But even if you think him a guilty party, he cannot do it all by himself, which means conspiracy.
I know as well as anyone that there are wild theories abounding, and not just in this area. I also know some of them are spread by the government itself. The study by Thompson, which is worth the reading that Lardner fails to give it in his article, does support the work of two separate scientific teams that listened to the dictabelt tape for the HSCA, which makes it three to one against the NSA panel, who do not make a very vigorous defense of their position. But in the end, none of that debate matters to a real researcher.

I was glad to see the article in the Post. I called to see why AP was   not moving it, and they assured me they were editing it for distribution that day. It never appeared anywhere but the Post, save for a piece in USA Today with an editorial to boot. To those not alive at the time, perhaps it seems ludicrous to try to solve these murders so many years after the fact. But history and justice have their claims. And it's not

that I can't laugh about it or even at myself and other researchers, believe me I have. There is just something ironically strange about your piece, which relies on mocking the very situation those who print you have helped to create over these many years. I wish we could trade a serious item on the still emerging evidence in the JFK case for every snide reference to conspiracy theories or Oliver Stone that has appeared.

Our organization led the way for the creation and implementation of the JFK Assassination Records Act, which secured public release of over 6 million pages to date, with more to come. It was the largest release of
classified documents to date, just surrounding the JFK assassination and it's historical context. The independent board that reviewed the files for release noted in their final report that several key agencies had
not complied with the act. The papers relating to Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are still not fully released. And no one has read the whole JFK release, but new interpretations are coming out in books (Oswald and the CIA by John Newman for example) and films (13 Days was based on the new files about the crisis). And there is new evidence supporting Garrison's investigation and the critics there as well.

If you have time and want a different perspective, maybe you could contact me and talk about what is really known in these cases. After all, humor is nothing but a shift of paradigm. And I have a sense of humor, I have to. I hope that the media will someday open to serious consideration and coverage of new evidence as it emerges, instead of damage control for the official theorists. Of course, it won't be without repercussions. Tom Wicker got it right when he said that if you believe Oliver Stone's version, you had to change your whole perspective on America and the government. But, then, what is a brain for?

In any case COPA is not CARP, and there was a conspiracy on November 22, 1963 to kill President Kennedy. We laugh so as not to cry.

John Judge
Coalition on Political Assassinations
P.O. Box 7147
Washington, DC 20044
202-583-5347

James Mastrovito - Destroyed USSS Records and JFK Evidence

Assassination Records Review Board 

The Players

Who called whom? Joan Zimmerman called James M. Mastrovito of Witnesses/Consultants

Description of the Call

Date: 04/01/97

Subject: USSS Records

Summary of the Call:

James Mastrovito called Dave Montague in response to information about ARRB that dave had sent at the beginning of March 1997. I wanted to speak to James Mastrovito because he was in charge of the JFK assassination file at the Secret Service in 1975. Mastrovito said he started working at the Secret Service in 1959 and retired in 1979. From 1960 to 1962, Mastrovito was on the White House Detail. In the summer of 1962, Mastrovito was in the USSS field office in Charleston, West Virginia. After the assassination, he was called to headquarters. He became a Deputy in the Intelligence Division (formerly Protective Research Section PRS) for 10 years before becoming the director of the Intelligence Division a few years before he retired. He worked with Walter Young, who replaced Robert Bouck. According to Mastrovito, Bouck moved out of PRS in the reorganization of the Intelligence Division after 1963.

When Mastrovito took charge of the JFK Assassination file, it consisted of 5 or 6 file cabinets of material. After Mastrovito finished “culling” irrelevant material, the collection was down to one five-draw file cabinet. Mastrovito guessed that his purging of extraneous material took place around 1970. He said that the extraneous material consisted of records of 2000-3000 “mental cases” who called the Secret Service after the Kennedy assassination to claim responsibility for the shooting. Mastrovito offered that Robert Blakey questioned him about this destruction of documents and threatened legal action. Mastrovito pointed out that Chief Rowley’s August 1965 memo directed him to remove irrelevant material. Blakey had obtained index cards from the Secret Service for what were then called “White House cases” and/or CO2 cases. These cares had been sent to the Warren Commission in a card index file. From these cares, Warren Commission members had requested specific Secret Service reports. Blakey had also sought specific files based on his examination of these index cards. Apparently, Mastrovito had destroyed some files that Blakey had wanted to see. Mastrovito decided which files to keep and which files to destroy.

Mastrovito said no one had access to the assassination file except people in the Secret Service. Some reports were copied for the FBI and the Warren Commission. Mastrovito said protective surveys were not in the assassination file but were kept in the operations division.

Mastrovito said that a “CO2” number referred to Intelligence Division or PRS numbering. He speculated that a “CO-S” would go directly to the Chief’s office. CO2 cases did not go to the Chief’s office unless there was a particular or special reason for the Chief’s attention.

Mastrovito mentioned that Thomas Kelley was an Assistant Director of the Secret Service when Mastrovito knew him. Kelley interviewed Oswald in the DPD jail. Mastrovito used to kid Kelly because he never wrote a final report on the case.

I asked Mastrovito if he had viewed or obtained any artifacts while he was in charge of the assassination file. Mastrovito replied that he had received a piece of President Kennedy’s brain. Mastrovito offered that this item was contained in a vial with a label on it identifying its contents. The vial was the size of a prescription bottle. Mostrovito did not remember if it was glass or plastic. The vial was from the Air Force (sic) Institute of Pathology. (Armed Forces Institute of Pathology) Mastrovito said this vial from the AFIP lab came into his possession “about 3 or 4 years later.” i.e. after the assassination.

(Then Mastrovito said it was about “1969 or 1970”) The label said the vial had been sent from the autopsy at Bethesda; there was no other explanation with it. Mastrovito said he could not see what was special about the portion in the vial. I asked Mastrovito who gave him the vial, and he replied that his supervisor, Walter Young (first Chief of the Intelligence Division), gave it to him when he (Young) resigned from the Secret Service. Young had apparently received it from someone at AFIP. Mastrovito offered that Walter Young died last year. Mastrovito said he destroyed the vial and its contents in a machine that destroys food.

Mastrovito offered more information about Secret Service records as follows: He said that after the assassination, the Secret Service change its policy regarding its records in presidential libraries. Before November 1963, the Service had sent its records to the federal records centers and to presidential libraries. That is, Secret Service criminal files were available to the public, for example, in the FDR library and the Truman library. After the assassination, the Secret Service recalled its criminal files from the Truman library saying that the agency wished to review them in light of the assassination. Instead of returning these files to the Truman library as promised, as Mastrovito put it, “the Secret Service kept the files, and we destroyed them.” In those days, according to Mastrovito, the feeling at the Secret Service was that people’s criminal files should not be available to the public. The Secret Service also recalled selected files from the FDR library.

Mastrovito was quite agreeable to the suggestion of future contacts from me, and he provided his travel itinerary and telephone numbers for the next several months.

Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann in “Legacy of Secrecy” (p. 766, Counterpoint Press, 2008) wrote, “In November 1994, the authors informed the Review Board very generally about JFK’s 1963 plans for a coup in Cuba,…and about the attempt to kill JFK in Tampa four days before Dallas. Six weeks later, the Review Board learned that – in violation of the JFK Act – the Secret Service had just destroyed files covering JFK’s Tampa trip, and other important files. That destruction would not become public knowledge until 1998, and even today, most members of Congress remain unaware of it.”

Doug Horne, the chief analyst for military records for the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) wrote more extensively about the deliberate destruction of Secret Service records in his book, “Inside the ARRB” (2009, Volume V, p. 1451)

DOUG HORNE:

THE DESTRUCTION OF KEY DOCUMENTS BY THE SECRET SERVICE IN 1995 SUGGESTED THAT THE SECRET SERVICE COVER-UP OF ITS OWN MALFEASANCE CONTINUED, MORE THAN 30 YEARS AFTER THE ASSASSINATION  

In 1995, the Review Board Staff became aware that the U.S. Secret Service had destroyed protective survey reports related to John F. Kennedy’s Presidency, and that they had done so well after the passage of the JFK Records Act, and well after having been briefed by the National Archives (NARA) on the Act’s requirements to preserve all Assassination Records from destruction until the ARRB had made a determination that any such proposed destruction was acceptable

I reported to work at the ARRB on August 7, 1995, and I still distinctly recall that this controversy was raging full force during the first two weeks I was on the job. I recall both General Counsel Jeremy Gunn and Executive Director David Marwell being particularly upset; they were seriously considering holding public hearings in which the Secret Service officials responsible for said destruction would be called to account and castigated, in an open forum, with the media present. The thinking at the time was that doing so would: (a) cause the Secret Service to take the Review Board and the JFK Act seriously; and (b) send a warning to other government agencies, such as the FBI and CIA, to also take the Review Board and the JFK Act seriously, lest they, too be dragged into public hearings that would cause great discomfiture and professional embarrassment.

Eventually – and unfortunately – tempers cooled and no public hearings were held. I suspect that Board Chair Jack Tunheim played a major role in finessing the matter;presumably, the Board Members believed that since the ARRB was still in its first year of its three-year effort to locate and review assassination records, that we would get more out of the Secret Service in the future with honey, than with vinegar.

Stern official letters levying charges and counter-charges were exchanged; a face-to-face meeting between high-level officials of the ARRB and Secret Service was held; tempers cooled; and no public hearings were ever held. Relations with the Secret Service remained testy throughout the remainder of the ARRB’s lifespan. It was my impression, during my ongoing discussions with my fellow analysts on the Secret Service Records team for the next three years (from September 1995 to September 1998), that the Secret Service never “loosened up” and reached a comfortable working accommodation with the ARRB like the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon (or, at least the Joint Staff Secretariat) did. The Secret Service and the ARRB remained wary adversaries for four years.

The Review Board itself consciously soft-pedaled the dispute in its Final Report, devoting only one paragraph (and virtually no details whatsoever) to the incident, on page 149:

Congress passed the JFK Act in 1992. One month later, the Secret Service began its compliance efforts. However, in January 1995, the Secret Service destroyed Presidential protection survey reports for some of President Kennedy’s trips in the fall of 1963. The Review Board learned of the destruction approximately one week after the Secret Service destroyed them, when the Board was drafting its request for additional information. The Board believed that the Secret Service files on the President’s travel in the weeks preceding this murder would be relevant.

And that was it – that was the only mention of the entire imbroglio in the Final Report of the Assassinations Records Review Board. My intention here is to give the reader as much additional and relevant, information as I can at this writing, 14 years later. I was never “on the inside” of this problem, but I do have a correspondence file of letters exchanged, and will quote from them liberally to give the reader a sense of what it feels and sounds like when two bureaucracies go to war inside the Beltway. This is of more than mere academic interest, since the evidence presented in this chapter has shown that several Secret Service officials on the White House Detail were complicit in both the President’s death – due to willful actions that greatly lessened the physical security around President Kennedy during the Dallas motorcade – and in the coverup of the damage to the limousine, which if left in its original damaged condition, would have proved JFK was caught in a crossfire, and therefore killed by a conspiracy.

A Summary of the Records Destroyed by the Secret Service in January of 1995.

The Protective Survey Reports destroyed by the Secret Service in January 1995 were part of a group of records transferred by the Secret Service to the General Services Administration’s Washington National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland on August 7, 1974 under accession number 87-75-4. The instructions on the SF-135 (“Records Transmittal and Receipt” form) were: “Retain permanently for eventual transfer to the National Archives or a Presidential Library.” There were six boxes transferred under the accession number, and the two that were destroyed in January of 1995 contained the following files:

Box 1 Protection of the President (John F. Kennedy)

-         Andrews Air Force Base 1961 (Arrivals and Departures)

-         Andrews Air Force Base 1962 (Arrivals and Departures)

-         Andrews Air Force Base 1963 (Arrivals and Departures)

-         Arlington National Cemetery

-         Camp David

-         The Capitol

-         Churches

-         D.C. National Guard Armory

-         D.C. Stadium

-         Departures from South Grounds

-         Dulles International Airport

-         Embassies

-         Executive Office Building

-         Golf Clubs

-         Griffith Stadium

-         Homes of Friends

-         International Inn

-         Mayflower Hotel (three folders, for 1961-63)

-         National Press Club

-         Other Places Folders (#s 1-4, from January 1961-December of 1962)

Box 6 Protective Survey Reports for the following trips:

-         Duluth, Minnesota (9-24-63)

-         Ashland, Wisconsin (9-24-63)

-         Billings, Montana (9-25-63)

-         Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (9-25-63)

-         Cheyenne, Wyoming (9-25-63)

-         Grand Forks, North Dakota (9-25-63)

-         Laramie, Wyoming (9-25-63)

-         Salt Lake City, Utah (9-26-63)

-         Great Falls, Montana (9-26-63)

-         Hanford, Washington (9-26-63)

-         Tongue Point, Oregon (9-27-63)

-         Redding, California (9-27-63)

-         Tacoma, Washington (9-27-63)

-         Palm Springs, California (9-28-63)

-         Las Vegas, Nevada (9-28-63)

-         Heber Springs, Arkansas (10-3-63)

-         Little Rock, Arkansas (10-3-63)

-         University of Maine (10-19-63)

-         Boston, Massachusetts (10-26-63)

-         Amherst, Massachusetts (10-26-63)

-         Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (10-30-63)

-         Chicago, Illinois (11-2-63): Three Folders [TRIP CANCELLED]

-         New York City (11-8-63)

In addition, one folder of vital records was missing from Box 2 in this accession, titled: “Other Places Folder #6” (for the period July-November 1963)

Clearly, withholding these two boxes of materials from any investigator would have kept that investigator from learning about normal protective procedures and concerns related to everyday activities throughout the Kennedy Presidency, and would furthermore have denied the investigator comparative knowledge regarding how JFK was protected in numerous venues just prior to the trip to Texas. Perhaps the reader can better understand now why Jeremy Gunn and David Marwell were so upset with the Secret Service. The records were destroyed in the fourth month following the establishment of the ARRB, and furthermore had originally been tagged: “Retain permanently for eventual transfer to the National Archives or a Presidential Library.”

Their destruction occurred long after the Secret Service was initially briefed on the requirements of the JFK Records Act in December of 1992 by the NARA staff, and required willful action by officials within that agency; it was hardly an accident. The Secret Service clearly didn’t want the ARRB poking into its past procedures and practices; the agency had been the recipient of severe criticism in the HSCA’s 1979 Report, and apparently did not wish to repeat that experience, or to have its sealed records released to the Archives for placement in the JFK Records Collection, for all JFK researchers to peruse in the future.

Chronology of Letters Exchanged Between the ARRB and the U.S. Secret Service Over the Destruction of Protective Survey Reports

On July 25, 1995 Review Board Chairman John R. Tunheim sent a powerfully worded letter to the Director of the Secret Service registering the Review Board’s displeasure about its recent discovery that the two boxes in question had been destroyed over a half a year previously. A letter from Board Chair Jack Tunheim (rather than David Marwell or Jeremy Gunn) addressed directly to the Head of the Secret Service (instead of to the administrative officials with whom the ARRB staff had been dealing) was a powerful signal that the Review Board was immensely displeased and took the matter very seriously. Some key passages in Jack Tunheim’s letter are quoted below:

            In January of this year, Dr. Jeremy Gunnn of the Review Board staff requested of John Machado and Ann Parker of the Secret Service that the six boxes in the accession be made available for his review to evaluate the importance of the material for the JFK Collection in the Archives. Although four of the boxes were made available, we were not provided with boxes (1)and (6), the two most important boxes. On February 7, 1995 – and several times thereafter – Mr. Machado and Ms. Parker informed us that theFederal Records Center “could not locate” the two missing boxes….Although we repeatedly were told that special requests for these records had been made at the Federal Records Center, Ms. Ann Parker of the Secret Service finally informed Dr. Joan Zimmeman of the Review Board staff, on July 19, 1995 – six months after we had first requested the boxes – that the records had in fact been destroyed in January of this year at approximately the same time that we had requested them.

Tunheim’s letter requested full accounting of what had happened to the two boxes; a listing of all other Secret Service records pertaining to President Kennedy that had ever been destroyed; and instructed the Secret Service not to destroy any records of any kind relating to President Kennedy or his assassination without first allowing the Review Board and its staff to review them for relevance. For added emphasis a copy of the letter was sent to the Chief Counsel of the U.S. Secret Service, as well as to John Machado, the apparent culprit who presumably gave the orders to destroy the records.

The Secret Service made an immediate attempt to de-escalate the matter by assigning an official named W. Ralph Basham, its Administrative Director of Administration, to reply. Basham’s reply, dated July 31, 1995, was a five-and-one-half page single spaced attempt at obfuscation, the administrative equivalent of a Senate filibuster, to use a legislative analogy. In addition to saying, in some many words, ‘Hey, we didn’t do anything wrong, we were following routine destruction procedures established years ago,’ the Secret Service attempted to wiggle out of its predicament by simultaneously suggesting that perhaps the destruction was really the Review Board’s fault because it was not in receipt of the ARRB’s expanded definition of what constituted an “assassination record” until February 1995, after the records were destroyed. Perhaps most disturbing of all was the narrow definition that the Secret Service had used commencing in December 1992 (following its NARAbeefing on the JFK Records Act) to define what constituted an assassination record:namely, White House detail shift reports only for the period November 18, 1963 to November 24, 1963. Mr. Basham also tried to downplay the significance of the missingChicago protective survey reports for the cancelled November 2, 1963 trip (during which conspirators had planned to assassinate President Kennedy) by writing:

The folder concerning the canceled trip to Chicago would only have contained a preliminary survey report, if any document at all, since final reports are not conducted when a trip is cancelled. This report, if in fact it was even in the prepared folder, would have been of limited scope. [Author’s comments: there were 3 folders on the cancelled Chicago trip, not one, and this attempt to portray the Chicago file as one folder was duplicitous; furthermore, how did Basham presume to know that any reports written about the cancellation of the Chicago trip would have been “of limited scope?” It is easy to make such  claim after evidence is destroyed, because there is no way you can be challenged.]

The ARRB’s response to this “in your face” piece of administrative obfuscation was signed out by Executive Director David G. Marwell on August 7, 1995, and showed no mercy. Rather than simply allow the matter to “go away” or “die,” as the Secret Service had hoped, Marwell’s leter (co-drafted by him and Gunn) resurrected the seriousness of the matter in no uncertain terms. I quote below, in part:

Although you concluded your letter by stating that you “trust this explanation will clarify any misunderstandings that may have arisen,” I regret to say that not only does your letter not allay our concerns, it compounds them.

The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFK Act) forbids the destruction of any documents “created or made available for use by, obtained by, or [that] otherwise came into the possession of …. The Select Committee on Asssassinations…of the House of Representatives.” It is our understanding that the records in Accession 87-75-0004 that the Secret Service destroyed were examined by the House Select Committee on Assassinations and thus were “assassination records” under the JFK Act and they apparently were destroyed in violation of law. [emphasis in original, which is most unusual in official government correspondence – it is the equivalent of shouting at someone during a conversation]

We see the destruction of these assassination records as particularly ominous in light of the fact that the Secret Service revised its destruction schedule after passage of the JFK Act and that it targeted for destruction records that, at the time the law was passed, were slated to be held “permanently.” [emphasis in the original]

Rather than refereeing to and applying the standards of the JFK Act, your letter suggests that the responsibilities of the Secret Service extend no further than complying with standard records disposal schedules. After acknowledging that the Secret Service in fact destroyed records in 1995 from Accession 87-75-0004 (related to the protection of President Kennedy), you state that they were “processed in accordance with National Archives and Records (NARA) procedures, and in full compliance with approved records disposition schedules.” The JFK Act, it should be clear, supercedes any law or any disposition schedule related to “assassination records.”

This was a “right back in your face” response that told masters of obfuscation at the Secret Service that the ARRB wasn’t going to be rolled, and wasn’t going to go away. Marwell’s letter then upped the ante by requesting a ton of information which any Federal agency would have had a difficult time finding the resources to accomplish. Marwell’s letter ended with these words:

…we specifically request that you assure us that no Secret Service records related to Presidential protection between 1958 and 1969 or to the assassination of President Kennedy be destroyed untilthe Review Board has received prior written notice and has had an opportunity to inspect the records [emphasis in original] 

Sensing that the ARRB was flexing its muscles and was about to “go nuclear” [which was true – public hearings were being considered], Mr. Basham replied on August 15, 1995 with a calming one-page letter and requesting a meeting to discuss the “additional issues” which he said were raised by Marwell’s letter. That meeting was held the very next day (August 16, 1995) on ARRB turf, in our offices at 600 E Street, in Northwest WashingtonD.C.

Following the meeting, which lasted several hours, Jeremy Gunn (our General Counsel and Head of Research and Analysis) signed out a letter on August 21, 1995 to Mr. Basham and Mr. Personnette (Deputy Chief Counsel) of the Secret Service. Gunn recognized for the record that the Secret Service now had a much better understanding of what constituted an assassination record – the ARRB set the definition for this, not the agencies holding records, who all wished to minimize their work – and noted for the record that the Secret Service had agreed that no records related to Presidential protection for years 1958-1969 would be destroyed until after the ARRB had a chance to review them to verify that no assassination records were included. Gunn also recorded the agreement reached on August 16, 1995, that Dr. Joan Zimmerman of our staff would henceforth have full access to all Secret Service records upon demand, not just partial and limied access, as previously. The ARRB threw a face-saving bone to the Secret Service in Gunn’s letter, as well:

As acknowledged in the meeting, we fully understand and accept your interest in ensuring that no documents are released that would compromise Presidential protection. As we have mentioned before, our professional staff is in possession of current security clearances and we will take all appropriate measures to safeguard the records and ensure full compliance with the law.

On the same date, August 21, 1995, Gunn signed out a letter to the miscreant John Machado (who had ordered the two boxes destroyed), which was much less friendly in tone and which bored in on him with a number of questions about dubious statements previously made by Machado, and made additional requests for information and records.

The crisis had abated, and the Secret Service had avoided embarrassing public hearings which would have exposed their perfidy. The public was not to learn of this business until that one cryptic paragraph was published in the ARRB Final Report in late September of 1998, three years later. Unlike poor JFK, whom corrupt individuals in the Secret Service had helped set up in Dallas in 1963, the Secret Service in 1995, had ‘dodged a bullet.’

END HORNE                                                   

THE BLAINE DOCUMENTS 

The Gerald Blaine documents consist of 28 pages – mostly duty assignments and travel vouchers, but there is a brief statement, a denial of having consumed any alcoholic beverages at the Press Club or the Cellar in Ft. Worth, and two survey reports – one for Tampa and the one for a post assassination State Department reception between foreign dignitaries and LBJ.

All of these documents will be posted at JFKCountercoup.blogspot.com and given to Rex Bradford for posting at Mary Ferrell.

There are also three pages of handwritten notes, two pages written over an assignment schedule dated from Nov. 8 to November 30 that reads in full:

Blaime’s Statement regarding drinking at the Ft. Worth Press Club and Cellar reads:

December 6, 1963

I Gerald S. Blaine do make the following statement:

         In Fort Worth, Texas, I worked the 12:00PM – 8:00AM shift at the Hotel Texas onNovember 22, 1963.

        During my stay in Fort Worth, Texas, I consumed no Alcoholic beverages at either the Press Club or at the Cellar Inn.

         Before my tour of duty started I had stopped by the Press Club for about 10 minues. This was prior to the 11:00PM on the 21st of November.

          At 5:00AM to 5:10AM I was at the Cellar Inn for a coffee break, but had no beverage at all, coffee or otherwise.

Respectfully Submitted,

(UNSIGNED)

These 28 pages of documents the NARA recently released as those recovered from Blaine and previously thought destroyed, consists of assignments, travel vouchers, a Ft. Worth drinking statement and two survey reports, one for Tampa and one for LBJ’s visit to the State Department.

These 28 pages just don’t jive with what Blaine says in his book – “he had kept all of his personal reports for all these years…..the boxes were important, he found the box from 1963 and…it was all there, pages and pages of information that refuted all the claims this guy was making” (that they had been destroyed).

In “The Kennedy Detail” (p.357) Blaine, via McCubbin wrote: “It had been a long time, butBlaine was compelled to pull out his files to make sure his memory was serving him correctly. Like any good investigator, he had kept all his personal reports for all these years. Every time they moved to a new house, with his various jobs, (his wife) Joyce had asked him why couldn’t he throw all that stuff out, but he’d insisted the boxes were important. He found the box from 1963 and started going through it. It was all there. Pages and pages of information that refuted all the claims this guy (Abraham Bolden) was making. He was holding in his hands the Tampa advance report that had supposedly been destroyed.”

Where are the “boxes” of his personal reports he had kept for all these years?

Did the NARA only ask him for the documents related to Tampa and Dallas?

Did Blaine turn over all of his records to the Secret Service who in turn culled from them the 28 pages that were turned over to the NARA, or did the NARA receive more records and only released these 28 pages?

Or was Blaine exaggerating and these 28 pages are really the only official records he kept in the boxes for so many years?

http://vincepalamara.com/2014/01/07/secret-service-destroys-jfk-assassination-related-documents-what-was-destroyed-and-what-gerald-blaine-donated/

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Secret Service destroys JFK assassination related documents: what was destroyed and what Gerald Blaine “donated”

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Vince Palamara

Secret Service destroys JFK assassination related documents: what was destroyed and what Gerald Blaine “donated”

Gerald Blaine turned over to the National Archives documents ALREADY MADE AVAILABLE- the Final Survey Report for the Tampa, FL trip of 11/18/63. Blaine mistakenly thought THESE were the documents “conspiracy theorists” thought were destroyed…as usual, he is wrong.

THESE were the ONLY records released by the Secret Service, all in the late 1990′s. I have them all, as 

any citizen with the money can order copies via the collection at the National Archives:

The November 1963 Secret Service shift reports;

RIF #154-10002-10417:

Final Survey Report Philadelphia, PA trip 10/30/63;

RIF#154-10002-10418 :

Final Survey Report Elkton, MD trip 11/14/63;

RIF#154-10002-10419 :

Final Survey Report SECOND New York City trip 11/14-11/15/63;

RIF#154-10002-10420:

Final Survey Report Palm Beach, FL trip 11/18/63;

RIF#154-10002-10421:

Final Survey Report Cape Canaveral, FL 11/18/63;

RIF#154-10002-10423:

Final Survey Report Tampa, FL 11/18/63;

RIF#154-10002-10422:

Final Survey Report Miami, FL 11/18/63;

RIF#154-10002-10424:

Final Survey report San Antonio, TX, 11/21/63;

Here is what was destroyed, Gerald:

A Summary of the Records Destroyed by the Secret Service in January of 1995.

[special thanks to Bill Kelly and the ARRB's Doug Horne]

The Protective Survey Reports destroyed by the Secret Service in January 1995 were part of a group of records transferred by the Secret Service to the General Services Administration’s Washington National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland on August 7, 1974 under accession number 87-75-4. The instructions on the SF-135 (“Records Transmittal and Receipt” form) were: “Retain permanently for eventual transfer to the National Archives or a Presidential Library.” There were six boxes transferred under the accession number, and the two that were destroyed in January of 1995 contained the following files:

Box 1 Protection of the President (John F. Kennedy)

- Andrews Air Force Base 1961 (Arrivals and Departures)

- Andrews Air Force Base 1962 (Arrivals and Departures)

- Andrews Air Force Base 1963 (Arrivals and Departures)

- Arlington National Cemetery

- Camp David

- The Capitol

- Churches

- D.C. National Guard Armory

- D.C. Stadium

- Departures from South Grounds

- Dulles International Airport

- Embassies

- Executive Office Building

- Golf Clubs

- Griffith Stadium

- Homes of Friends

- International Inn

- Mayflower Hotel (three folders, for 1961-63)

- National Press Club

- Other Places Folders (#s 1-4, from January 1961-December of 1962)

Box 6 Protective Survey Reports for the following trips:

- Duluth, Minnesota (9-24-63)

- Ashland, Wisconsin (9-24-63)

- Billings, Montana (9-25-63)

- Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (9-25-63)

- Cheyenne, Wyoming (9-25-63)

- Grand Forks, North Dakota (9-25-63)

- Laramie, Wyoming (9-25-63)

- Salt Lake City, Utah (9-26-63)

- Great Falls, Montana (9-26-63)

- Hanford, Washington (9-26-63)

- Tongue Point, Oregon (9-27-63)

- Redding, California (9-27-63)

- Tacoma, Washington (9-27-63)

- Palm Springs, California (9-28-63)

- Las Vegas, Nevada (9-28-63)

- Heber Springs, Arkansas (10-3-63)

- Little Rock, Arkansas (10-3-63)

- University of Maine (10-19-63)

- Boston, Massachusetts (10-26-63)

- Amherst, Massachusetts (10-26-63)

- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (10-30-63)

- Chicago, Illinois (11-2-63): Three Folders [TRIP CANCELLED]

- New York City (11-8-63)

In addition, one folder of vital records was missing from Box 2 in this accession, titled: “Other Places Folder #6” (for the period July-November 1963)