BOSTON GLOBE: RFK's Children Divided

RFK’s children divided over calls for a fresh investigation of his assassination

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/05/31/rfk-children-divided-over-calls-for-fresh-investigation-his-assassination/B5ubwQd9GFDttwNxJOAn6N/story.html

By Michael Levenson GLOBE STAFF  MAY 31, 2018

Two of Robert F. Kennedy’s children are calling for a new investigation into their father’s assassination, opening a rift in the famous family as it prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death next Wednesday.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, told the Globe this week that she supports a new investigation, joining her brother Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who revealed last weekend that he visited convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan in prison and believes someone else killed RFK.

But two other children of Robert F. Kennedy said this week that they would not support a re-investigation, underscoring how divisive the second-gunman theory continues to be, a half-century after the presidential candidate, former attorney general, and senator from New York was killed in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

“As we approachthe 50th anniversary of my father’s passing, I think what is most important is that our country and my family reflect on what my father stood for and fought for — a legacy promoting global peace, social justice, and civil rights,” Joseph P. Kennedy II, the former congressman from Massachusetts, said in a statement.

Kerry Kennedy, the president of a human rights organization named for her father, also indicated that she opposes a fresh examination of the evidence that, critics say, shows Sirhan could not have acted alone.

“The reason that people are interested in the circumstances of my father’s death is because of what he did with his life,” she said. “And I think we should focus on his life and not so much on his death — his moral imagination, his capacity for empathy, his quest to heal divisions, and his belief that one person can make a difference.”

At the center of the emotional debate is Ethel Kennedy, RFK’s 90-year-old wife, who is preparing to join the family next week for a ceremony honoring her husband’s legacy at Arlington National Cemetery. Former president Bill Clinton is expected to speak, along with RFK’s grandson, Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III of Massachusetts.

But Ethel Kennedy “will not comment” on the call by two of her children for a new investigation into the assassination, said Kerry Kennedy. Joseph P. Kennedy III also declined to comment, as did Rory Kennedy, a filmmaker and the youngest of RFK’s children, whose assistant pointed to “the sensitive nature of this topic” when declining the request.

Kennedy’s shooting on June 5, 1968, shocked the nation, coming just two months after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis and nearly five years after Kennedy’s older brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas.

Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, was apprehended immediately after the shooting when he was wrestled to the ground with a .22-caliber revolver in his hand. Kennedy, who had been celebrating his victory in the California Democratic primary, died the following day. Five others who were shot survived.

At his trial in 1969, Sirhan admitted that he shot Kennedy and was convicted and sentenced to death. His sentence was changed to life in prison when California abolished the death penalty in 1972. Now 74 and incarcerated in state prison in San Diego, Sirhan has lost all his legal appeals and 15 bids for parole, most recently in 2016.

Though overshadowed by the conspiracy theories surrounding JFK’s death, the theory that Sirhan was not responsible for the assassination of RFK has persisted for years, fueled in large part by Paul Schrade, a former United Auto Workers official who was shot in the head as he walked behind Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel.

Schrade believes Sirhan couldn’t have killed his friend because an autopsy report showed RFK was shot from near point-blank range from behind and eyewitnesses saw Sirhan standing in front of Kennedy. Schrade also points to an analysis done about a dozen years ago of a reporter’s audio recording of the assassination that indicated 13 shots were fired. Sirhan’s revolver only held eight bullets.

Schrade shared the evidence with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental advocate and the third oldest of RFK’s 11 children, who found it persuasive. In an article published in The Washington Post on Saturday, RFK Jr. disclosed that, after reading the autopsy report, the police report, and other documents, he visited Sirhan in prison for three hours just before Christmas and emerged convinced Sirhan did not kill his father.

“There were too many bullets,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the Post. “You can’t fire 13 shots out of an eight-shot gun.”

RFK Jr., who declined an interview request from the Globe, added in his interview with the Post that, “My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”

Sirhan has contended that he does not remember the shooting, and his lawyers have argued that he was the victim of a mind-control plot by a mysterious girl in a polka-dot dress, a theory that was based on statements Sirhan made to a Harvard professor while under hypnosis.

Such claims have not held up in federal court.

In a 2012 decision, US Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich found that the acoustic analysis indicating 13 shots were fired “raises doubts as to the number of bullets fired, but it does nothing to diminish the overwhelming evidence of guilt.” He noted that other audio engineers who have analyzed the recording have identified only eight shots.

The autopsy that found Kennedy was shot from behind while eyewitnesses saw Sirhan in front of the senator “fails to address the chaos that ensued once [Sirhan] began shooting and the subsequent movements of the senator and [Sirhan] in reaction to the shooting,” Wistrich wrote. And the claim that Sirhan was manipulated into the shooting by a mind-control plot is a “diverting — albeit farfetched — theory. But it is no more than that,” Wistrich wrote.

Ultimately, even if a second shooter’s bullet killed Kennedy, Sirhan would still be liable for the murder “as an aider and abettor,” Wistrich wrote. And the idea that someone other than Sirhan shot Kennedy “at close range with the same type of gun and ammunition as Sirhan was using, but managed to escape the crowded room without notice of almost any of the roomful of witnesses, lacks any evidentiary support,” the judge wrote.

Such rejections have made Schrade, 93, skeptical that a new investigation will ever be launched.

“At this point, the prosecutors are frozen in their position and have been for many years. and it’s going to take a lot of leverage for them to do anything,” he said.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s involvement could also prompt some to dismiss the issue as a conspiracy theory because he has for years promoted a link between vaccines and autism — a claim debunked by medical experts.

But Schrade said the support of two of RFK’s children could help the second-gunman theory gain new traction. 

“The fact that Robert Kennedy Jr. would say, ‘Sirhan did not kill my father,’ I think that’s very effective,” Schrade said. As for Townsend’s support, he said: “I found it not only surprising but wonderful she would do this because I’ve talked to her over the years and she said she did not want to get involved.”

Dan Moldea on RFK, Jr.

[ BK: In this Boston Globe response to RFK, Jr.'s interview in the Washington Post - 
Dan Moldea is interviewed extensively, and says RFK, Jr. has been "misled" by the "conspiracy crowd," when in fact, Modea himself wrote a book blaming the Mafia for the murder of President Kennedy. In this article, Nik DeCosta-Klipa should have fully disclosed the fact that Dan Moldea is a close personal friend of Eugene Thane Cesar, the security guard hired the day before who was in the pantry, and who liked about owning a 22 revolver, similar to Siran's, and that Moldea is the godfather to Cesar's son, which does not make Moldea an objective and honest observer. ]

[BK: In addition, Boston Globe reporter Brian Bender, who has reported accurately on the release of the JFK assassination records, has said that "RFK,Jr.'s name carries no weight," when in fact it is Dan Moldea's name that carries no weight and RFK, Jr. is well recognized and respected as an environmental attorney.] 

BOSTON GLOBE - May 31, 2018 

Bobby Kennedy’s son thinks he was killed by a second shooter. Is there anything to it?

Or has RFK Jr. "launched a whole new generation of conspiracy nuts" 50 years later.

https://www.boston.com/news/history/2018/05/31/rfk-assassination-conspiracy-theory-second-shooter

By  Nik DeCosta-Klipa

May 31, 2018

Another alternative Kennedy assassination theory?

Conspiracies surrounding President John F. Kennedy’s death may be most widely circulated. However, one theory questioning our understanding of Robert F. Kennedy’s murder in 1968 has arguably gained more recent traction, including from those closest to the assassination and even one immediate member of Kennedy’s family.

“My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently told The Washington Post. “I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”

According to the Post, Kennedy’s second oldest son now believes, after months of research, that his father was killed by a second gunman.

RFK Jr. even visited Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of shooting and killing his father, because he was “curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence.” He isn’t the only one. But others who’ve deeply investigated the case say the second-shooter explanation is a shallow theory that irresponsibly lets Sirhan off the hook.

“If you believe the LAPD reports about this case, there is no way that Sirhan did it and did it alone,” Dan Moldea, an investigative journalist and author of The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, told Boston.com.

“But if you assume that the LAPD f—ed up — not crimes of commission, but crimes of omission,” Moldea says the theory begins to unravel.

“What Bobby Kennedy Jr. has done, he’s launched a whole new generation of conspiracy nuts who are going to believe that Sirhan didn’t do it and that somebody else did,” he said.

Here’s what we know happened

Kennedy was assassinated almost exactly 50 years ago, on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy awaits medical assistance as he lies on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after he was shot.

The 42-year-old Brookline native had just finished speaking to supporters in the hotel ballroom after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary. After finishing his address, Kennedy was walking through the hotel kitchen pantry amid a crowd of people when Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, began shooting his .22-caliber revolver.

Kennedy, who was hit three times, and five others were shot. However, the ascendant candidate was the only one for whom the gunshot wounds would prove fatal. He died the following day at a nearby hospital.

Sirhan was almost immediately tackled at the scene by witnesses and arrested on several charges, including murder. Police found an article in his pocket critical of Kennedy’s support for Israel, which appeared to be his motive. A Christian Palestinian, Sirhan was forced to flee Jerusalem with his family in 1948, after their home was seized by Jewish insurgents. A notebook was also found in Sirhan’s apartment with an entry, just two weeks earlier, asserting that Kennedy “must” soon be assassinated.

Sirhan has long maintained that he has no recollection of the assassination, though he did go to a shooting range earlier in the day of the assassination. During his trial, he actually admitted to the assassination, but later recanted and now says the confession was part of his defense lawyer’s strategy to spare him from the death penalty, rather than argue his innocence.

“I went along with him because he had my life in his hands,” Sirhan told Moldea in 1993. “I was duped into believing that he had my best interests in mind. It was a futile defense. ”

Sirhan was convicted by a jury and sentenced to death. However, his sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972 when California abolished the death penalty.

“Everyone agrees Sirhan was a gunman, with the dispute being whether he was the only one,” Larry Tye, an RFK biographer, told Boston.com in an email.

Why do people think there could have been a second gunman?

Skeptics of the accepted narrative of what happened in the Ambassador Hotel kitchen pantry center around the ballistic evidence.

First, Kennedy was shot from behind at point-blank range, according to the autopsy report. The fatal shot entered behind his right ear, the report said. But witnesses say that Sirhan approached from the front, on Kennedy’s right, and that his gun never got closer than about a foot-and-a-half away.

Second, according to the official reports, eight total shots were fired. Kennedy was hit three times and five others were also shot. After all, Sirhan’s .22-caliber revolver carried a maximum of just eight bullets. And yet, there’s evidence that suggests more than eight shots were fired.

According to the FBI’s crime scene report, there were four bullet holes in the wall and door frame in the direction Sirhan was shooting. Photos of the door frame, which were reportedly destroyed after the trial, showed each of the holes circled by Los Angeles police.

Additionally, a low-quality audiotape of the shooting revealed up to 13 shots, according to electrical engineer Philip Van Praag.

“You can’t fire 13 shots out of an eight-shot gun,” RFK Jr. told the Post.

However, there’s disagreement among the the audio analysts who have studied the tape. A group of five experts who studied the tape after Van Praag’s claim could find no more than eight shot signatures. As CNN reported in 2012, several witnesses said they heard between five and 12 shots.

And lastly, in 1975, a Los Angeles court appointed a firearms panel to re-fire Sirhan’s gun and match the bullets to the three that hit Kennedy. Even though the original investigation (which was highly criticized for its handling of the evidence) seven years earlier said the bullets found had matched Sirhan’s .22-caliber revolver, the reinvestigation was unable to do the same.

So what are the holes in this theory?

Moldea — who interviewed Sirhan three times, talked to more than 100 police officers involved in the investigation, and scoured countless pages of official reports for his 1995 book — also used to believe in the second-shooter theory. He even sold his book proposal on that premise.

“I was wrong,” he said in a recent interview.

According to Moldea, all the evidence for a second shooter can be explained away by shoddy police work and conspiratorial thinking.

On the first point, Moldea says everyone agrees with the autopsy report’s conclusion that Kennedy was shot at close range and from behind. But just because Sirhan approaches him from the front doesn’t mean there was a second shooter.

“As he’s attacking Kennedy, he’s lunging and going, ‘Kennedy, you son of a bitch,'” said Moldea, citing eyewitness accounts of the shooting. Moldea says Kennedy’s natural reaction would have been to turn away from Sirhan, which would explain the angle of his gunshot wounds.

“The conspiracy people will have you believe that Kennedy is standing there, putting his chest out,” he said. “If you see someone running at you, shouting ‘You son of a bitch,’ he’s got a gun in his hand, what are you going to do? You’re going to turn defensively.”

In his reconstruction, Moldea says Paul Schrade, a labor activist who was walking on Kennedy’s left, was hit with the first bullet and collapsed into the senator, incidentally pushing him back toward Sirhan, who was then able to reach him at point-blank range.

But what about the four bullet holes in the wall and door frame? Moldea says it doesn’t take a ballistics expert to know the suggestion of additional bullets was problematic.

“An eight-shot revolver can’t fire more than eight bullets,” he said. “That I know. Now you got the FBI identifying four extra bullets in the walls and door frame in Sirhan’s line of fire. That’s a problem.”

In the process of researching his book, Moldea said he was able to identify the Los Angeles officer who marked the bullet holes, Walter Tew, who was a deputy patrolman with no expertise in firearms identification.

Furthermore, Moldea found a report in the state archives from Alfred Greiner, the FBI agent who included the holes in the bureau’s report, that said a hotel clerk had given him a tour of the pantry. According to Greiner, it was the clerk who originally identified the bullet holes.

“This is a hotel clerk, who I’m sure knows how to take a great reservation, but know absolutely nothing about bullet holes,” Moldea said.

Moldea says the holes were likely the result of any number the kitchen’s carts banging into the wall and said the pantry was “full of holes” when he visited the hotel years later. DeWayne Wolfer, the original lead investigator of the shooting, has also said the holes weren’t caused by bullets and that no extra bullets were ever found.

And as for the bullets not matching Sirhan’s gun when it was re-fired in 1975, Moldea says he visited the crime lab to ask why they couldn’t replicate what they had done several years later. Moldea said employees at the lab told him that they had taken Sirhan’s gun following the 1969 trial and, figuring the case was over, shot it hundreds of times for fun.

“The problem is that when you shoot a gun, the barrel changes,” he said. “The lands and grooves change. And when you fire the gun a hundred times, you change the barrel of the gun. Therefore, a match with bullets that were fired a hundred shots earlier, you’re not going to be able to make a match.”

Who would the second gunman have been?

The man conspiracy theorists most commonly point to is Thane Eugene Cesar. Cesar was a security guard who hated the Kennedys and supported George Wallace, the former Alabama governor and segregationist presidential candidate in 1968.

Cesar was also walking with Kennedy when the shooting occurred and was carrying a .38-caliber revolver, which he says he never fired. However, he also owned a .22-caliber similar to Sirhan’s gun, which he initially told police he sold before the assassination, but had actually, it was later found, sold three months after the shooting. There’s no evidence he had the gun with him when the shooting took place.

Moldea, who at the time was pursuing the second-shooter theory, confronted Cesar about the inconsistencies in his story in 1987. Cesar categorically denied shooting his gun, no less the fatal bullet.

“I got caught in a situation I can’t get out of,” he told Moldea. “But no matter what anybody says or any report they come up with, I know I didn’t do it. The police department knows I didn’t do it. There’re just a few people out there who want to make something out of something that isn’t there—even though I know that some of the evidence makes me look bad.”

Cesar later even agreed to be polygraphed by a professional expert and “passed with flying colors.”

So why has this theory resurfaced?

Sirhan, who continues to serve his life sentence in a San Diego prison, has repeatedly been denied parole, most recently in 2016. The convicted murderer and his lawyers have embraced other assassination conspiracy theories — from the mysterious “girl in the polka-dot dress” to a supposed mind control plot — as they try to argue his case. According to the Post, Sirhan’s defense team is launching “a long-shot bid” to get a hearing with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Schrade, the labor activist who was shot during the assassination, also now believes there was a second shooter, after long having been critical of law enforcement’s handling of the case, which both sides agree was sloppy.

“Yes, [Sirhan] shot four other people and aimed at Kennedy,” the 93-year-old told the Post. “The important thing is he did not shoot Robert Kennedy. Why didn’t they go after the second gunman? 

They knew about him right away. They didn’t want to know who it was. They wanted a quickie.”

Moldea says the second-shooter theory persists because authoritatively making the case that Sirhan was the sole shooter isn’t a clean and easy task. The 68-year-old journalist says he talked to RFK Jr. earlier in the year after he visited Sirhan and tried to explain that Sirhan’s team was promoting the theory to increase the odds he might get released from prison.

“I would not want to take the blame for this crime as long as there is exculpatory evidence that I didn’t do the crime,” Sirhan admitted to Moldea in 1993.

Moldea said he is “livid” with how the Post treated the recent story and imagines Sirhan is “in his jail cell right now spiking the football.” Quoting from his book, he reiterated his point that nearly every murder can be made to look like a conspiracy if “occasional official mistakes and incompetence” are not taken into account.

“I think [RFK Jr.] has been misled, conned, and corrupted by the conspiracy crowd to believe this garbage that the man that murdered his father is innocent,” Moldea said.

"We now know" - Bill Turner

We Now Know - Bill Turner

At one of the COPA Conferencces in Dallas, former FBI agent and original JFK assassination investigator Bill Turner said:

"We now know to a fairly good degree of certainty what happened at Dealey Plaza. The motives were piling up - the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the backchannel to Cuba, - the motives were piling up to the point they had to assassinate him. I think its' pretty obvious, with the compilation of the information we have today, that the mechanizm of the crime came out of the alligence between the CIA and the Mafia. They already had an assassination apparatus set up for killing Castro, and they just switched targets and killed Kennedy instead."

So of all the theories about the assassination, the one that holds water is the one that looks closely at the CIA - Mafia plots to kill Castro.

As we have seen and others have detailed, the CIA first began to consort with the Mafia dons - John Rosselli and Sam Giancana during the Eisenhower administration, and with the sanction of CIA director Allen Dulles, himself no stranger to assassination plots.

That began the first part of the CIA - Mafia association, and included a number of plots to poison Castro, none of which came to frutation.

Then the CIA-Mafia plots reaached as second stage, when William Harvey returned to the US from Germany, where he ran the Berlin tunnel operation, and was promoted to head the special Cuban Task Force set up in the basemen of the CIA HQ and called Task Force W.

Giancana was dumped from these plans - as the plottings were replaced by contingincy plans - and Harvey himself replaced Jim O'Donnell as Rosselli's case officer and good friend.

From poinson, the Castro plans moved on to more reliable means of execution, including shooting Castro with a high powered rifle as he rode around in an open jeep, as he often did.

In developing a contingency plan you must review previous, similar plans that have been used and serve as historical models - and two such examples exist - the British MI6 assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Hydrich in Check on June 4, 1942 in Prague, Czech Rep., and the failed August 22, 1962 attack on French President Charles deGaulle by French military disenchanged with plan to free colonial French Algeria.

The attack on Hydrich was orchestrated by Czech agents trained by MI6, and utilized a tight turn in the road that required the motorcade and car he was riding in to slow down when the attack from multiple assailants succedeed, as caan be seen in the popular movie, Anthropoid.

The name Anthropoid comes from the MI6 code name for the operation, as one thing that distinguishes a plot from a planned covert operation is an operation is given a code name that is only  know among the perpetuators.

But the backlash against the successful Anthropoid operation was so great in the ruthless Nazis taking of human life against everyone who knew or associated with assailants, thousands of innocent civilians were tortured and killed, that the British MI6 declined the later opportunity to have a sniper kill Hitler as he daily walked through a rose garden.

The French affair is also a significant role model for what happened at Dealey Plaza, though it failed, as there were lessens to be learned.

President Kennedy had urged President deGaulle to free Algeria as a colony, and he was inclined to do so, but the French generals balked at the idea, as they had developed the French Foreign Legion from an army of misfits to  one of the most famous fighting forces in the world, and they didn't want to lose their sandbox battlefield.

The Organisation armee secrete or OAS - Secret Army Organization that staged an attack on deGaul's motorcade in Paris on August 22, 1962.

In one of documents released under the JFK Act, a State Department report from the Paris office of Security, refers to a meeting with M. Andre Ducret, the Commissaire divisionnaire de Police concerning the attempted assassination of deGaul. Ducret  "disclosed that the ambush had been organized and directed by a person of military experience and this was immediately noticed. The tactics employed were similar to those used by the infantry in attacking convoys...."

Like the attack on Heidrich, this OAS attack on deGaulle was at an intersection where the motorcade of cars and motorcycles had to slow down to almost a complete stop, much like Dealey Plaza.

And sure enough, Jean-Marie Bastien, a French Air Force aeronautical engineer, was apprehended and admitted having organized the attempt. President deGaulle pardoned a few of those convicted for their participation in the attempted assassination - but Bastien was executed in March 1963, a week after the trial. 2,000 policeman were posted along the route used to take him to his execution. Bastein may have been the last person to be executed in France.

The attempt to kill deGaulle was made into a movie, The Day of the Jackel, though the shooting of deGaulle as he gave a speech replaced the "military style attack on a motorcade," that included 187 spent shell casings and 15 bulletl holes in deGaulle's car (a Citroen DS) Two other bullets hit the tires (Michelin), yet the car was able to escape at nearlly full speed.

President deGaulle and the security chief credited the endurance of the car and the tires for saving his life.

The OAS assassination attempts on deGaulle are connected to what happened at Dealey Plaza by the Houma Bunker Raid on Jean deMeniel's Schulumberger munitions bunker at an old Louisiana Navy base that included a number of New Orleans characters who associated with Oswald. Those munitions were taken to Guy Bannister's office and David Ferrie's apartment and were said to be set for use by the anti-Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs or the OAS in France.

While these two historical examples were known and studied by the CIA, just as it studied in detail the July 20, 1944 German military plot to kill Hitler, the one CIA contingency plan to kill Castro that interests me the most was code named PATHFINDER.

PATHFINDER, according to the records of it that have survived, was a CIA contingency plan presented to the National Security Council (NSC) for approval, but was "disapproved by higher authority."

We know that JFK himself, or RFK in his place, reviewed most if not all of the proposed covert operations against Cuba, as JFK was asked to approve a relatively harmless propaganda leaflet drop, a psychological warfare operation, that he "disapproved" after consulting with William Morrow, the head of the US Information Agency. So if he reviewed and disapproved that minor operation, he must have been asked to approve the PATHFINDER plan to kill Castro, and disapproved that one too.

We only know about PATHFINDER because of the reports of National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) technicians who were stationed at JMWAVE told the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) that the CIA kept the PATHFINDER files in their files section of the station rather than where it should have been.

PATHFINDER was a plan to kill Castro with a high power rifle while he rode past in an open jeep near "Xandau," the exquisite DuPont estate that Castro confiscated, and where he  was known to frequent.

The JMWAVE NPIC technicians provided the contingency planners with U2 photos of the area and architect drawings of the estate. Nearby was a residence of Rolando Cubella (AMLASH), who was to be provided with a rifle with a scope, but the job required a trained and reliable first class sniper, one trained by the CIA at their JMWAVE sniper training base at Point Mary, near Key Largo, Florida.

The teams that were trained there by a US Army Ranger major (Roderick), who was transferred to the CIA for the job by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were infiltrated into Cuba by the JMWAVE Maritime ships.

Some of the anti-Castro Cuban commandos trained at the CIA's JMWAVE station bases were also supported financially and fanatically by a number of wealthy Americans - William Paley, Clare Booth Luce and John Rosselli.

While Luce's "boys," as she called them were led by a team leader - Julio  Fernandez, and trained by US Ranger Capt. Bradley Ayers, Rosselli's team was trained at Point Mary, and included the snipers, whose names should be among the JMWAVE records inspected by the Church and HSCA and released by the JFK Act.

Rosselli later said, and as he reports to Jack Anderson in the Rosselli Chronology file that was recently released by the NARA, that one of his teams was infiltrated into Cuba, but never returned or reported back, and he assumed they were among those captured by Castro forces.

What became of the PATHFINDER file from JMWAVE's NPIC section?

In 1996 two AARC staff talked to Velma Reumann, who worked at the NPIC from 1963-1966. According to their report, "She has a strong, independent recollection of NPC personnel boxing-up all photographic materials related to the assassination on the orders of Robert Kennedy and sending them to the Smithsonian Museum for permanent storage sometime within 6 months or so after the assassination."

"She cannot remember whether the orders from Robert Kennedy were in writing, or oral, but she was quite firmly of the impression in 1996 that the direction had come from Robert Kennedy.

"In order to test the strength of her Smithsonian recollection (she) was asked whtehr she may have been confusing the Smithsonian and the National Archives or some other government body; she replied emplatically that she knew the difference between the National Archives and the Smithsonian, and reiterat that the boxed material (from NPIC) went to the Smithsonian. She said that she was certain of this because she, herself, was required to call an offical at the Smithsonian to discuss the imminent transfer, and recalls that the individual to whom she spoke was surprised by the selection of the Smithsonian as she was."

In any case, we now know, to a fairly good degree of certainty, that the Dealey Plaza Operation was originally devised as a contingency plan to kill Castro, it involved the Cuban military as it was strategically based on the German VALKYRIE plan to  kill Hitler, and the tactically the PATHFINDER plan to shoot Castro with a high powered rifle as he rode in an open vehicle, or a similar plan. And as with both VALKYRIE and PATHFINDER included the psychwar disinformation twist to blame the murder on Communists.

As Bill Turner put it, the mechanism was in place to kill Castro, and they just switched targets.

Theory

THEORY

Theory - The analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another; a belief, policy or procedure proposed or followed as the basis of action - a plausible or scientifically accepted general principle or body of principles offered to explain a phenomena - a hypothesis assumed for the sake of argument or investigation - an unproven assumption.

    There are many theories that spring from the assassination President Kennedy, but only one of them can be true.

  Determining that truth is the difficult part.

    We can begin by eleminating a number of those theories that have been proven false - or cannot possibly or plausibly be true, starting with the original cover-story that Cuban Castro Communists were behind the blatent covert-action conspiracy that Peter Dale Scott refrrs to as the Phase One part of the cover-up.

   After a careful analysis of the evidence at the scene of the crime, we can also eleminate the Phase Two aspect of the cover-up, that a deranged loner was soly responsible for the crime.

Final Release

As I predicted, the mainstream media headline on the day after President Trump's deadline for the release or continued withholding of JFK assassination records is: Cleveland Browns draft a Quarterback as the first pick in the NFL Draft.

And that's what it is.

There's also the response to Trump's decision to release 19,045 assassination records, 

15,584 with redactions, and withhold in full 520 records under sections 10-11 and 6103 of the IRS tax code. 

Sections 10-11 deal with grand jury records, that are supposed to remain secret forever, but in reality we already have the New Orleans grand jury records that are open in full, and deeds of gift - such as Jackie Kennedy's oral history and William Manchester's papers. 

The key paragraph in the official announcement appears to be an oxymoron, but not if you read it carefully. 

"All documents subject to section 5 (National) of the JFK Act have been released in full or in part. No document subject to section 5 of the JFK Act remain withheld in full. The President has determined that all information that remains withheld under section 5 must be reviewed again before October 26, 2021 to determine whether continued withholding from disclosure is necessary."

The key words here are "have been released in full or in part." In part - refers to the 15,584 records that have been released with redactions. 

In my first quick perusal of these records I found every one significant in some way, and not like the other batches that were previously released that contained many records NBR - Not Believed Relevant. 

Of the dozen documents I reviewed so far, every

Two Ace of Spies

TWO ACE OF SPIES - James Bond - Henry Pleasants

I have come to meet more than a few interesting characters in the course of my reserach into the assassination of President Kennedy, and a few stand out as exceptionally eccentric or notorious, especially James Bond - the world's most famous spy, and music critic spy Henry Pleasants - who debriefed Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen.

It was the summer of 1976 when I first came across a published reference to the real James Bond in a 1948 Philadelphia Bulletin newspaper article about millionaire philantropist Cummins Catherwood, who I had just learned had served as a secret CIA bursar for covert activities.

Catherwood's CIA connection was exposed by David Ross and Thomas Wise in their groundbreaking book "The Invisible Government," and I was at the Bulletin clipping morgue, reading dozens of newspaper clips that mentioned Catherwood. His CIA activities were readily transparent in the news coverage of his activities, including the support of the anti-Castro Cuban Aid Relief (CAR), providing cover for CIA agent Joseph Smith in the Philllipines, tourist travels behind the Iron Curtain, including the Soviet Union, and the construction of the Vigilant, a yacht that he had built to his personal specifications and as a tax write off - used for scientific and research explorations under the auspicies of the Catherwood Foundation.

In the course of reading the news clips about Catherwood, there was one report of his expedition to some Caribbean out-islands that included a number of scientists, one of whom was identified as "James Bond - whose main interest is birds."

Now that jumped out at me, and I looked at the date of the paper - 1948 - years before Ian Fleming began writing his 007 novels, but the year Philadelphia ornithologist James Bond published his classic work "Birds of the West Indies."

Those familiar with the official and deceptive biographies of Ian Fleming know that the author of the Double-Oh-Seven spy novels appropriated the name for his hero from James Bond - the American author of "The Birds of the West Indies," a copy of which Fleming kept on his breakfast table at Goldeneye, his Jamaican beach house where he wrote all of his 007 stories while on his annual winter vacations. 

So - as opposed to those who claim similiar adventurous exploits, or another person named James Bond, there is only one real James Bond - the American ornithologist and author of the book "Birds of the West Indies."

Readers of Ian Fleming's original fiction know that he appropriated names and characters from real people he knew - as in Dr. No where 007 poses as a bird watcher using the alias Ivor Bryce, Fleming's OSS and NANA associate.

But besides James Bond himself, I was surprised to see Fleming portray a character Milton Krest, who closely resembles Cummins Catherwood, - the rich sportsman whose yacht and expeditions are tax deductable research missions just as Catherwood bankrolled the Vigilant.

While Fleming and his man Krest don't expose the supposedly secret CIA connections to such millionaires and their foundations, the Ruskies knew about it all along, as Kim Philby revealed in his autobiography "My Silent War.``

In his book written from Russia Philiby recalls the CIA's Frank Wisner explaining to him (and his KGB masters) how the "Foundation System" worked - ostensibly philanthropic non-profit organizations were to be used to fund secret CIA covert operations worldwide.

So Ian Fleming based two ostensibly fictional characters on real people from Philadelphia - ornithologist James Bond and philantropic CIA bursar Cummins Catherwood, that made it easier to find another, as when things happen twice they usually happen a third time.

In the course of reading Ian Fleming's New York adventure in which 007 and his CIA sidekick Felix Leiter go to Harlem jazz joints, Leiter is described as being a music critic and writing about jazz and classical music as a cover for his covert CIA shennigans. That got a WOW out of me, as I still had David Wise and Thoms Ross' "The Invisible Government" right there next to me.

And there it was: Henry Pleasants, former OSS interrogator and CIA agent, who debriefed Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen, also wrote classic and jazz music. Besides writing reviews and critiques of classical performances, he wrote a book that declared classical music dead and jazz the future of serious music.

It just so happened that before Henry Pleasants moved to London, he was the chief music critic of the Philadelphia Bulletin, whose clipping morgue I routinely mined, and his wife Virginia played the cello in the Philadelphia Orchestra.

While attending a concert at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, the former home of the orchestra, I asked an old black usher if he remembered Henry Pleasants and got a positive response.

Wearing a uniform, and in a very proper English voice, the usher snapped to attention, almost clicked his heals, saying, "Yes. Mr. Pleasants the writer and critic, and his wife Virginia, are now living in London, sir."

And so it was, a few years later, enroute home from Berlin after the collapse of The Wall in 1990, I just happened to be in London in a pub with a phone directory that listed Henry and Virginia Pleasants, and called them on a whim.

Mrs. Pleasants, very polite, said that Henry was at a music festival in Vienna, but as I was an American from Philadelphia, she said that Henry would be in New York in a few weeks, and she arranged for me to meet him there.

It was in the basement of an old church where Pleasants had scheduled a lecture, a well attended talk on the earliest recordings of opera singers - as they could be heard on old player piano type rolls, and a fascinating class it was. After which, I approched him, introduced myself and asked if I could have an interview. Sure he said, but back at his hotel, a few blocks away a little later. 

There, he poured us each of us a drink of whiskey over ice, and sat down and asked what I wanted.

Well, I said I read many of his Philadelphia Bulletin music reviews, and wrote about a weekly music column myself, but I was really more interested in Gehlen and Ian Fleming, to which he bristled a bit and sat back.

It was no secret that he had debriefed Gehlen, but he said, standing up and walking across the room, opening the door - he said he was expecting someone else. - But it just wasn't a subject that he could talk about. It was all still classified and he just shrugged and said he couldn't talk about it.

What about Fleming?

Well, I showed him the reference to him in "The Invisible Government," and then quoted the lines from Ian Fleming's Harlem adventure.

"That's me all right," he acknowledged with a smile, as I asked him how he knew Fleming, or how Fleming knew him?

Pleasants thought about it for awhile and then he said, almost to himself in wonder, "My wife Virginia played the cello in a chamber group with Ian Fleming's sister, who also played the cello," but otherwise he couldn't explain it.

Then I found another character in one of Fleming's short stories - "The Living Daylights," in which 007 is assigned a sniper's rifle and assigned to kill a Soviet sniper who will attempt to shoot someone escaping East Berlin.

It turns out the Soviet sniper is a women, a beautiful women, who kept her rifle in the cello case, so instead of killing her Bond only wounds her in the hand so she can't fire.

It should also be noted that President Kennedy was in the audience when Leonard Bernstein introduced a teenage cellest Yo Yo Mass to the world at a Washington concert, so the cello comes into play a number of times in this story. 

So Ian Fleming took the name for his secret agent from an American ornithologist, and based two other characters on Philadelphia personages - Cummins Catherwood and Henry Pleasants, and adapted his sister and Virginia Pleasants for the cello playing sniper.

But what did all this have to do with the assassination?

Well there was Michael Straight - an ex-patriate American at Cambridge where he was recruited into a communist spy ring by Guy Burgess, one of the bevy of KGB spies - the others being Kim Philby, Donald MacClean and Sir Anthony Blunt, the surveyor of the Queen's pictures.

When JFK nominted Straight for appointment as the head of the national federation of the Arts, the FBI background investigation led to the Cambridge ties, and Straight confessed. The problem was that while Burgess and MacClean had fled to Moscow, Philby and Blunt were still on the loose.

Straight was a close friend of Fleming, and it was Fleming's primary liason to MI5 who was given the responsiblity of informing Kim Pilby of Straight's confession and his implication.

Of course when J. E. Hoover found out about the Cambridge spy ring he ordered an investigation of every American who attended Cambridge - and that would include American ornithologist James Bond, who was also a member of the Cambridge Pitt Club, Guy Burgess' fraturnity.

The plot thickens.

MLK Fifty Years Gone

MLK - 50 Years Gone

                                                                                                                       Patrick Duff inspects the MLK House in Camden
Michael King

There's a lot to be said on this 50th anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr..

As James Douglas concluded in his book "Why JFK Was Killed and Why It Matters," the nation, including you and me were in denial over the murder of President Kennedy, and blandly accepted the government's cover-story, which set the stage for the subsequent murders of MLK and Robert F. Kennedy.

Douglas contends that if the accused assassin lee Harvey Oswald wasn't himself killed while in police custody, and JFK's murder was properly investigated and prosecuted, MLK and RFK would not have been killed in the way they were, with set-up patsies to take the fall while we all look the other way.

And I will take that a step further as I believe that if Brian DeBeckwith didn't shoot Medgar Evers in the back as Evers got out of his car after watching JFK give a civil rights speech, and get away with it for decades, then JFK would not have been killed the way he was.

King was killed as he leaned over the railling of a second floor balcony of the Loraine Motel in Memphis, where King was supporting a sanitation workers strike. Well King would be glad to know that those municiple sanitation workers were just awarded $70,000 each when it was noticed that they were the only municiple employees who didn't get a pension. One guy, eighty some years old, who was on strike when King was killed, is still driving a truck today because he didn't get a pension.

King's last words, as he called them down to the band and choir director in the parking lot, was a request for a favorite gospel song "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," that Elvis even covered.

Take My Hand Precious Lord

Elvis Presley

Precious Lord, take my hand
Lead me on, let me stand
I'm tired, I'm weak, I'm lone
Through the storm, through the night
Lead me on to the light
Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home

When my way grows drear, precious Lord linger near
When my light is almost gone
Hear my cry, hear my call
Hold my hand lest I fall
Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home

When the darkness appears and the night draws near
And the day is past and gone
At the river I stand
Guide my feet, hold my hand
Take my…

All I remember of MLK's death is the riots where young blacks took to the streets, turned over cars, set fires and stores as my father, a Camden policeman, carried my grandmother out of her North Camden house, and she lost everything she had.

While the official investigators continue to blame James Earl Ray, another deranged loner framed for the crime, Loranne Motel cafe proprietor Loyd Jowers has testified in a Memphis trial that the real sniper was a Memphis police lieutenant. Former Oxford professor and British barrister William Pepper brought that trial to court, and wrote a book "Act of State," that sets much of the record straight.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded there was a conspiracy, and then locked away their MLK records for fifty years, records not included in the JFK Act of 1992 that freed the HSCA JFK records, though many of the MLK records are among the batches of JFK Act records released in 2017.

There are a number of MLK connections to South Jersey. King's personal attorney Clarence Jones, was the song of the cook and servants of the wealthy Quaker Lippincott family who owned the Chalfont-Haddon Hall and lived in Longport, where the future attorney for King recalls his first racist experience as a child.

In 1958, as King was studying Ghandi's non-violent civil disobedience tactics in freeing India of British colonial rule, MLK gave a speech to a Cape May, NJ conference of Quaker Friends on using non-violence techniques in the Civil Rights movement to end segregation. On April 4, 1968 Walter Cronkite began his national news cast announcing the death of King, who he called "the Apostle of non-violence in the civil rights movement."

King's first civil act occurred in South Jersey in June 1950 when he was refused service at Mary's Place in Maple Shade, where when King and three friends refused to leave when they were refused service, and the bar owner, a German World War I veteran Ernest Nichols, pulled out a gun, opened the door and fired the gun in the air. That was enough and King and company left but went to the police station where they pressed charges against Nichols for refusing service and weapons violation.

King was assisted in he case by Camden Dr. Ulyssis Wiggins, but the case was dismissed when the parents of three college students who were sitting at the bar pressured their kids not to testify. Today, MLK boulevard in Camden ends at the Delaware River waterfront park named after Dr. Wiggins.

Patrick Duff, a South Jersey car salesman, deserves much of the credit for researching the published records of MLK's time in South Jersey, especially the incident in Maple Shade, where the site of Mary's Place will soon have an historic plaque to recognize what occurred there.

Duff found a copy of the original report signed by "Michael King," as he was yet to be known as Martin Luther King, Jr., and they called him Mike.

That report also lists King's legal address as 753 Walnut Street, Camden, New Jersey, where King and his best friend, fellow Crozier seminary student Walter McCall lived as the row house was owned by McCall's uncle and his cousins lived there.

That row house was boarded up and slated for demolition until Duff called attention to its historical significance and King's friend Rep. John Lewis (D. Ga.) said the house should be preserved for future generations, so they will know the story behind it.

Duff interviewed a number of people who also lived at the house at the same time and they recalled Michael King living there, but that was before he was famous and he was just another guy passing through, a friend of their cousin. King also gave sermons at the local Baptist Church when he lived in the small bedroom in the back of the second floor while one of the sons was away in the Army.

Duff recently came up with a newspaper story about King''s time in Camden that included an interview with the young man who said he just got out of the Army that very day in June 1950 and was still in his uniform when King told him they were going to Maple Shade to get something to eat. The young soldier warned King that he wouldn't get served in Maple Shade, but King replied, "We'll have to change that so we can go anywhere."

So King and his friends went to Maple Shade because they knew they wouldn't get served, and they provoked that incident and wanted to test the relatively recently passed New Jersey state civil rights law that ended segregation.

One of the old houses still standing on MLK Boulevard is the Walt Whitman house, owned and run by the NJ Department of Environmental Protection Agency - Parks and Recreation Department. It is still standing today despite the race riots of the sixties and seventies because of its late caretaker Elizabeth Ray. Ray was a local neighbor who graduated from Rutgers and worked at the Whitman House, where during the height of the riots she stood out front swinging a broom stick at any rioter who came near the place.

Now the NJ state DEP is taking nominations for the 28th annual NJ Historic Preservation Awards [ nj.gov/dep/hpo ], that should be named after Elizabeth Ray and I intend to nominate Patrick Duff for the 2018 Award as I can think of no one more deserving.

As Acting DEP commissioner Catherine R. McCabe has said, "We look forward to honoring the many projects being done in communities across the state to preserve priceless pieces of New Jersey's legacy. Our history is being preserved because of the efforts undertaken by people who are moved to action because they care so much about the indelible mark these places and people have had on their communities. These efforts have contributed significantly to the preservation and understanding of our treasured past."

And nothing fits that description better than MLK's Camden house and the role Patrick Duff played in preserving it and calling attention to an important chapter in King's life that has so far escaped his biographies and the history of the civil rights movement.