Correcting
Max’s Nothing
Much Ado
About Nothing
On October 26, the National Archives was supposed to
release the last of its remaining records on the 1963 assassination of
President John F. Kennedy. The date was chiseled in a 1992 statute. Around 88
percent of the records had already been made public, but there were still 3,200
documents that had never been available and nearly 35,000 more that had only
been released in redacted form.
As the date neared, Representative Walter B. Jones
(R-N.C.) declared, “It’s time to let people know the truth.” Jones believes
(like a majority of Americans, according to polls) that accused assassin Lee
Harvey Oswald had confederates and that important facts about that “awful afternoon”
are still hidden away.
BK:
No, most Americans don’t believe the accused assassin had confederates, they
don’t believe that the assassination was the work of one man alone, - Oswald
didn’t have “confederates,” he didn’t commit the crime – was not the sixth
floor sniper, and did act alone, he just didn’t kill anyone.
Martha Wagner Murphy, chief of the special access
and Freedom of Information Act staff at the National Archives, repeatedly
cautioned that the documents would add only incremental information to what was
already evident.
BK:
Yes, the newly released documents add incremental but significant information
to what was already evident – JFK was murdered as a result of a covert
intelligence operation conducted by a domestic intelligence network. And Martha
Wagner Murphy does not know what records are significant and what are not.
But few in the general public and fewer still in the
“research community,” as Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theorists prefer to
be known,
BK:
There is no such thing as a “research community” and it isn’t up to Max Holland
to say what Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists prefer to be known.
were willing to believe her.
BK:
Oh, I believe her, and I believe she doesn’t know what the significant records
are, as John Newman, Peter Dale Scott, Bill Simpich and others do recognize
their significance.
After five decades, occasions for challenging the
official verdict are few and far between.
BK:
Wait a minute, as Thomas Powers would say. After five decades we have learned a
lot of new information – beginning with the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro and
their entanglements with the assassination – that alone is an occasion to
challenge the official verdict – you don’t need few, you just need that one.
The community knew the disclosures could gin up
interest, and the excitement reached all the way to the White House.
Donald Trump created much of the drama by tweeting
his inclination to align with those calling for full disclosure: No more
postponements, no more deletions, damn the Deep State, he seemed to be saying
on October 21. At the eleventh hour he deferred to the U.S. intelligence
agencies and gave them an extra six months to make their cases for continuing
to redact or withhold a tiny portion of the record. But documents were to be
released as fast as they could be processed.
Murphy has been proven right; the pages released in
five document dumps so far this year (there was a release on July 24 that
attracted no fanfare) haven’t told us anything of moment we didn’t already
know. The pseudo-drama surrounding the October date has only served to
illustrate what H.L. Mencken once called “the virulence of the national
appetite for bogus revelation.”
BK:
Neither Murphy nor Max Holland have bothered to even read the newly released
records, and those of us who have – have found some very significant documents,
records not yet even mentioned or recognized by the mainstream media. And they
aren’t bogus. Max Holland is whose bogus.
* *
Press reports propagated the misperception that
these “classified Kennedy assassination files” had never seen the light of day.
That was a half-truth. The records had been pried out of federal agencies more
than two decades ago and closely parsed by the Assassination Records Review
Board (ARRB), an entity created by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records
Collection Act of 1992. The statute was Congress’s response to widespread
public dismay over a closing line in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK, which
noted that many federal documents pertaining to the assassination were sealed
until 2029. The legislative remedy provided that all the records from the
federal government’s investigations be gathered in one place and opened up once
and for all. It’s important to stress the plural—investigations. Everyone knows
about the Warren Commission’s 1964 report, but it was preceded by the FBI’s
December 1963 report and followed by probes undertaken by the 1968 Clark Panel,
named after then-attorney general Ramsey Clark; the 1975 Rockefeller
Commission; the 1975-76 Senate Church Committee; and the 1978-79 House Select Committee on Assassinations.
And those are only the major investigations.
BK:
And every one of those official investigations were compromised – and none of
them achieved their goals or accomplished their missions, and the assassination
of President Kennedy remains uninvestigated, except by a small “community” of
independent researchers, Max Holland excluded.
The language in the 1992 act stated that all records
concerning the assassination would “carry a presumption of immediate
disclosure” unless the originating agency could make a compelling argument for
continued secrecy. This simple-sounding directive turned out to be more
complicated in practice.
The National Archives started fulfilling its
responsibilities right away. It already housed the Warren Commission documents,
and it soon developed a computerized finding
aid to facilitate research.
BK:
The NARA has ignored the JFK Act requirement that they publish an informative
and accurate index and guide to the JFK Collection, something that they refuse
to do, and their computerized finding aide does not facilitate research, but
hinders it, as it has not been updated in years. Many years.
Executive
branch agencies began to identify, review, and transfer to the archives all
pertinent records in their custody. The CIA was the first to comply,
transferring 50 boxes of documents—most generated after November 22, 1963—on
Lee Harvey Oswald, constituting his so-called “personality” or “201” file.
BK:
The CIA, and other agencies of government – especially the ONI, NSA and WHCA
have refused to turn over other significant records relevant to the
assassination – including the ONI Defector file, NSA intercept records and the
Air Force One radio recordings and transcripts. And it isn’t Oswald’s
“personality” or “201” file that we want, it is the CIA “operational” files,
and not only on the Patsy, but also the operational files of William Harvey,
John Rosselli, David Atlee Phillips and other suspects in the assassination.
The FBI, which had been the lead agency in
investigating the assassination, soon followed suit with the case files of what
had been an unprecedented probe in terms of manpower, scale, and scope.
BK:
Unprecedented probe in terms of manpower, scale and scope, yet insufficient in
determining what really happened and the network responsible for the Dealey
Plaza operation.
But it wasn’t until early 1994 that the ARRB got
going. The law asked the president to pick at least four of the five board
members from names forwarded by the American Historical Association, the
Organization of American Historians, the Society of American Archivists, and
the American Bar Association. The eventual nominees were U.S. district court
judge John R. Tunheim; Henry F. Graff, professor emeritus of history at
Columbia University; Kermit L. Hall, professor of history and law at Ohio
State; William L. Joyce, associate university librarian for special collections
at Princeton; and Anna K. Nelson, a distinguished historian at American
University. (It then took another six months for them to get confirmed and to
hire a staff of around 30 for the duration of the project.)
BK:
The late Anna K. Nelson was not familiar with the basic facts of the
assassination, as she published an article that had a number of basic facts of
the case wrong. Her former colleague at American U. – Max Holland’s wife,
advised him to look for patterns, and that’s what we do, and we find them, allowing
us to piece together the intelligence network responsible for the murder.
The ARRB’s first task was to determine what
constitutes an assassination record. The statute was deliberately vague on this
point. Records from the federal investigations were a given (release of the
Warren Commission’s records had begun in 1965, and they were 98 percent
available by 1992), along with the records generated internally by the Secret
Service, FBI, and CIA, working in conjunction with (and sometimes in opposition
to) these probes. Records from several presidential libraries were also
obviously included. But how far afield should the ARRB go beyond that? Were
Lyndon Johnson’s tape-recorded telephone conversations, ostensibly closed until
at least 2023, assassination records?
BK:
All the records reviewed by the official investigations – were considered
assassination records, but many of them are missing – especially the Church
Committee recorded interviews – gone. WTF? And yes, LBJ’s recorded
conversations, especially those from the night of the assassination, are
relevant, but not available. Why not?
What about the copious notes taken by William
Manchester during interviews for his Kennedy-family-sanctioned book The
Death of a President (1967)? These were under lock and key at the Kennedy
Library.
BK:
Absolutly. They should be public records. And the Kennedy family had to go to
court to get Manchester to change key aspects of his book. And his interviews
with witnesses should be made available, and not be withheld, as his deed of
gift requires. Deeds of Gifts are not written in stone, and courts and judges
have overturned them.
Or how about
the district attorney’s investigative files from the only criminal trial of an
alleged conspirator, that of Clay Shaw in New Orleans in 1969?
BK:
They are available, as are the New Orleans Grand Jury records that former DA
Harry Connick ordered destroyed, but were instead turned over to the ARRB, and
remain open to the public as required by a US Supreme Court decision.
For that matter, were the KGB files on Lee Harvey
Oswald’s Soviet sojourn assassination records?
BK:
ARRB Chairman requested these KGB files, some of which were turned over to
Norman Mailer, whose former assistant has kept them and refused to turn them
over to the ARRB despite the JFK Act.
These were among the most pertinent records the ARRB
could possibly gather, yet the board succeeded only half the time, even armed
with subpoena power. The far-seeing director of the Johnson Library, Harry
Middleton, persuaded Lady Bird Johnson to revoke her husband’s will and
release, first, the assassination-related tapes and eventually all the Johnson
tapes.
BK:
But the LBJ Library and the WHCA refuse to release the Air Force One radio
transmission tapes or the complete transcript – or even acknowledge they exist.
After some contentious wrangling with the Orleans
Parish district attorney,
BK:
Harry Connick
the ARRB secured former D.A. Jim Garrison’s
investigative files and the transcripts from the grand jury that had handed
down the Shaw indictment.
BK:
The new presidential directive excludes grand jury records from being public
records, even though the New Orleans grand jury records have been open for
decades.
But Manchester steadfastly refused to waive his deed
of gift and Caroline Kennedy would not even let the ARRB’s staff review records
from the Manchester interviews she controlled, those of Robert F. Kennedy and
Jacqueline Kennedy. The Manchester documents remain sealed for 100 years.
Finally, lacking support from the White House and State Department, the ARRB
fared no better in retrieving copies of the files from the KGB’s aggressive and
comprehensive surveillance of Oswald between 1959 and 1962.
BK:
Norman Mailer’s associate Schiller – has them and he refuses to turn them over
to the NARA, as the ARRB requested.
What genuinely changed the terms of engagement,
however, was the ARRB’s final definition of an assassination record,
promulgated in the Federal Register in June 1995. The designation was
all-encompassing, a direct result of the ARRB’s having embraced the very
broadest definition of “assassination-related” owing to pressure from the
research community. This decision raised by an exponential number the volume of
records various federal departments, agencies, and bureaus would be digging out.
BK:
Yet, the agencies of government – especially the military, has refused to turn
over relevant records that remain outside of the JFK Collection and thus
unavailable to the public.
The JFK Assassination Records Collection at the
National Archives thus became a vast repository of documents on topics ranging
from CIA operations in Mexico City during the Cold War to the functioning of
congressional investigative committees. Dozens of dissertations are waiting to
be written based on the records there.
BK:
Every major work on US history of the cold war makes use of the records from
the JFK Collection, so it is the most important repository of government
records available to the public.
Yet if one looks at the collection through a
different lens—in terms of documents germane to an actual political murder—any
criminal court would deem 99 percent of the collection inadmissible by virtue
of being irrelevant or immaterial.
BK:
Since most of the records are – were – in the words of the ARRB “not believed
relevant” – NBR – they have since been determined to be relevant, though maybe
not to Max Holland. And since we are no longer conducting a criminal
investigation that will end up in court, it doesn’t matter if they would be
admissible. We are now conducting a CI – Counter-Intelligence investigation, as
we recognize the murder of the president was the result of what Thomas Powers
calls the “Intelligence Wars.”
The CIA-supported Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in
1961 is at best tangential to the Kennedy assassination, but the ARRB included
thousands of pages about not only that episode, but also about every CIA
attempt to destabilize Castro in the early ’60s.
BK:
In fact, I believe, and my research indicates that those who conducted the
Dealey Plaza Operation – the “wet work” on the ground – were anti-Castro Cubans
trained by the CIA at JMWAVE to kill Fidel Castro, a plan that was redirected
to JFK at Dealey Plaza. So the JMWAVE records are significant.
Assassination-related and directly
pertinent to the assassination are quite different things. The great bulk
of the records vetted by the ARRB are best described as snapshots of how Washington was waging the Cold War before
and after 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963.
BK:
Yes, absolutely. The great bulk of the records vetted by the ARRB and now in
public view, are snapshots of not only how Washington waged the Cold War, but
how Cold War covert operational procedures were used to kill the President, and
how those responsible got away with it.
During the ARRB’s four years of operation (1994-98),
it gathered records from all the obvious federal agencies and many that don’t
immediately come to mind when thinking about the killing of John Kennedy (the
Department of Labor, for instance, or the Social Security Administration).
Having identified and amassed these records, the ARRB then devoted its efforts
to full disclosure. The most vexing issues arose, predictably, with respect to
records from the intelligence agencies and the Secret Service.
BK:
The Secret Service intentionally destroyed assassination records AFTER the
passage of the JFK Act, and NO ONE was even reprimanded, let alone charged,
tried and convicted. They even admitted doing so, and were not called on the
carpet, or even before congress, as they should have.
The hush-hush National Security Agency—its initials
were once said to stand for “No Such Agency”—turned out to be relatively
relaxed about releasing the communications it had intercepted before and after
the assassination, according to David Marwell, executive director of the ARRB
for three of its four years of existence. The NSA had gone into overdrive after
the Dallas shooting, rushing to decipher intercepts of telephone conversations,
cable traffic, and radio communications from the highest levels of the Soviet
and Cuban governments. Tasks that normally took months were completed in days.
Particularly focused on Cuba, the NSA gathered a fair amount of primary
information that showed the Cuban regime was not involved with the
assassination, was caught quite by surprise, and was, more than anything,
worried about being blamed because of Oswald’s express support for Castro’s
1959 revolution.
BK: But then
why does former CIA agents like David Atlee Phillips, Brian Lattell, Bob Baer
and dozens of others (Phil Shenon) continue to attempt to pin the blame for the
Dealey Plaza operation on Castro, even though the NSA exonerates them?
The number of NSA documents at issue was small—in
the low hundreds—and what the agency wanted to conceal were the headers and
footers, which indicated transmission times, geographic locations, and even how
the intercept was routed internally. These are clues to how the NSA goes about
its business, and the ARRB generally went along with NSA requests to elide such
information. But the substantive contents of NSA documents were rarely at
issue.
* *
The Secret Service was probably the most difficult
agency, in that it actually tried to classify documents in an effort to keep
some information secret. The service wanted to withhold the names of
individuals listed on its “threat sheets” from 1963, which is how it used to
keep track of persons believed to pose a danger to the president. Many, if not
most, of these people had mental-health issues.
BK:
Here’s a link to this files – and not all of those included have mental health
issues but have covert operational personalities (COP) profiles - On the list are Gerry Patrick Hemming, Homer Echevarria, Orlando Boch, Thomas Arthur Vallee, Richard Case Nagell, Joseph Milteer - all political, not mental threats to the president.
JFKcountercoup: Secret Service Protective Research File
JFKcountercoup: Secret Service Protective Research File
The service went so far as to appeal to the White
House to reverse the ARRB’s decision to make the names and associated files
available—which the 1992 statute permitted agencies to do if they disagreed
with the vote taken by the five board members to release a document in full or
even in redacted form. The service’s argument was that releasing names so long
after Kennedy’s death served no public interest and could interfere with the
quiet cooperation it still depends on from the mental-health community.
BK:
It wasn’t the mental-health community that the SS was trying to protect but the
covert intelligence community.
The CIA consented to the release of 3,172 documents,
but had objections of one kind or another with respect to 14,079 more. These
had to be vetted by the board and amounted to nearly half of the 29,000
documents that came up for a vote. The agency’s approach was to send in wave
after wave of officials to lobby the ARRB and explain why this or that
redaction was necessary. Langley’s objections centered on three areas: its
relationships with other intelligence agencies and the information that had
been gleaned through such liaisons; details about its presence in foreign
countries or its domestic facilities; and the names of CIA officers and
informants. In the end, the ARRB generally released the names of CIA employees,
while details about domestic assets or informants were disclosed on a
case-by-case basis. Meanwhile, the identities of foreign nationals who served
as informants or assets were generally protected, although their codenames or
“crypts” were not (and these, in turn, allowed the true identities of many
confidential sources to be ferreted out by diligent researchers). Surveillance
methods were disclosed if directly relevant to Oswald’s peregrinations, but
documents that disclosed the existence of active domestic CIA facilities were
redacted. The records over which the CIA lobbied most vigorously—reflecting its
work with foreign intelligence agencies—were almost entirely deferred by the
board.
BK:
If they wanted to protect their agents, operatives, assets and sources, why did
they release the CIA files on Priscilla Johnson McMillan and others who
cooperated with the Agency? Why protect some and not others?
Board member William Joyce recalls that it took
several months for the ARRB to hone its process for reviewing the documents and
develop its own “common law” about what to disclose and what to protect. As
time passed, not only did the board become more confident about what it was
doing, but so did the agencies. “From their initial posture of ‘trust us,’ ”
Joyce says, “they, too, evolved quite a bit in their attitude and cooperation
with us.” Not all documents at issue were redacted or postponed until October
2017 either; in many cases earlier release deadlines were mutually agreed upon.
BK:
Yes, they released many thousands of records, documents that were not scanned
and put on line as the most recently released records are, so researchers have
to go to the Archives II at College Park, Maryland and manually request and
review the documents.
The FBI had an equal amount at stake—the possible
exposure of the entire counterintelligence toolkit it deployed during the Cold
War. A great obstacle to overcome was the use of confidential informants, the
FBI’s lifeblood.
BK:
Yes, and these informants included Jack Ruby and if you believe their New
Orleans contacts such as Orest Pena – Lee Harvey Oswald.
After the assassination, the bureau had pulled out
all the stops and milked anyone in its vast network who had the slightest
chance of knowing anything. This included not only CIs in Dallas, but mob
snitches in Chicago, where Jack Ruby hailed from; a member of the Soviet
delegation to the U.N.; persons affiliated with the New York-based Fair Play
for Cuba Committee (a cause Oswald championed); high-ranking members of the
American Communist party; and countless others here and abroad.
BK:
Yes, and now these reports, at least the ones they have given us, are assisting
us in piecing together the intelligence network responsible for the Dealey
Plaza Operation – as the FBI should have done in 1963.
The FBI had fallen out of contact with most of these
informants over the decades. It didn’t know where they lived, or even if they
were still alive, and certainly didn’t want to expend the manpower to find out
if belated exposure of their informant status might put them in danger.
Ultimately, as with the CIA, the bureau reached an
accommodation with the ARRB that balanced the former’s interest with the
latter’s statutory obligation. The FBI consented to ARRB processing of 21,509
documents, while 10,013 were subjected to a vote by the board. In general, the
ARRB postponed naming human sources who were foreign nationals. Foreign
government information was withheld unless it was deemed directly relevant. The
FBI appealed to the White House because it disagreed with a few of the board’s
decisions, chiefly regarding counterintelligence surveillance against foreign
countries. Ultimately, information about such activities against Communist
countries was generally released, while records concerning surveillance of
non-Communist countries were postponed.
By the time the ARRB closed down in September 1998,
its JFK assassination collection consisted of more than 319,000 discrete
records totaling approximately five-million pages: Only 1 percent of the
documents were withheld in full.
BK:
One percent of five million pages is a lot of pages.
Although this category sounds alluring, the 3,200
withheld records include many designated “not believed relevant” to the assassination,
having been simply swept up in the ARRB’s expansive definition.
BK:
While the ARRB declared many records NBR – many of them have turned out to be
relevant – such as the NBR document on Collins Radio, that revealed the
extensive cooperation between defense contractors and their work for not only
the NSA and CIA but friendly foreign governments like Canada and Australia.
Over the next 19 years, as the National Archives
took over from the ARRB, the JFK collection remained generally stable, adding
only bits and pieces here and there.
BK:
Stable, and bits and pieces, like the SS records of Agent Blaine, who
acknowledged in his book that he kept the advance reports on Tampa – that the
SS had destroyed, in a box under his bed, that the NARA obtained. But they have
still failed to obtain the HSCA records of the first chief council Richard
Sprague or the ONI Defector files and the dozens of missing records.
All of these facts are readily learned from the
ARRB’s final report—published in 1998 and available online—and in a
September article in Prologue, the quarterly journal published by the
National Archives.
BK:
Yes, we’ve known most of this since 1998. But have learned much since then.
But little to none of the background and context
made it into the overheated press coverage that preceded the October 26
release. And the single most important point was almost entirely overlooked. As
Marwell repeatedly stressed to me during a recent interview, if at any time
during its four years of operation, the board had run across information
directly pertinent to the assassination—including any fact that challenged the
official verdict—its release would have been approved instantly.
BK:
Yet, they failed to get the directly pertinent information contained in the AF1
radio tapes, the ONI Defector file, the HSCA chief council’s records, the KGB
files or bothered to look for the copies of the SS records that they
intentionally destroyed. All of which challenges the official record.
The ARRB was in the business of building an archive
not fact-finding, and its final report does not explicitly endorse the Warren
Commission’s conclusions.
BK:
The JFK Act and ARRB did release many significant records that prove that the
Warren Commission’s conclusion that the assassination was the result of one man
alone is wrong. Incorrect.
But no document the board saw disproved that Oswald
fired all three shots in Dealey Plaza
BK:
No document or witness proves that Oswald fired any shot that day, as he was
certainly not the Sixth Floor Sniper, or the person who shot officer Tippit.
BK:
Federal attorney John Orr’s report concludes that the bullet that struck
Kennedy in the head was of a different type than that fired by the rifle found
on the sixth floor:
that no bullet entered his body from a direction
other than from behind;
BK:
Orr’s report concludes that the head shot was fired from a location other than
the Sixth Floor of the TSBD.
that there was no evidence of Oswald’s involvement
with a domestic or foreign conspiracy;
BK:
There is no evidence Oswald was involved in the assassination other than being
set up as the fall guy and patsy he claimed to be,
that Oswald had never worked in any capacity for the
FBI or CIA;
BK:
FBI agent Orest Pena said that Oswald was an informant for the FBI agents in
New Orleans in the summer of 1963, and Antonio Veciana says that Oswald
associated with CIA officer David Atlee Phillips.
and, finally, that neither agency had any
pre-November 22 inf
ormation that should have landed Oswald on the Secret
Service’s threat sheet.
BK:
The ONI had a large file on Oswald that has never been made public, and the CIA
had a “keen operational interest” in Oswald before the assassination, and
Oswald was intentionally kept off the SS threat sheet by the FBI.
There was no “smoking gun” that genuinely
contradicted the Warren Report, and had the AARB discovered one, its release
would never have been postponed until 2017.
BK:
There may not be a smoking gun, but there are a number of “smoking Report’s conclusion
that one man alone was responsible for the assassination. I will be posting a
list of such Smoking Records soon.
The whole premise of the October 26 coverage was
preposterous, evincing a complete lack of understanding of how the ARRB
functioned, how broadly “assassination-related” had been defined, and why a
tiny fraction of the documents still remained at issue.
There was a logical inconsistency, too. If the
federal government was capable of a crime as heinous as many conspiracy
theorists claim, why would it ever release documents showing that it had lied
starting with release of the Warren Report?
BK:
It wasn’t the “federal government” that committed the crime, it was a covert
intelligence operation conducted by a very powerful, yet small intelligence
agency and network, one that still functions today.
Why not just destroy the incriminating records or,
BK:
The list of destroyed records is long and telling, beginning with the autopsy
records, SS records and AF1 radio tapes.
better yet,
forge exculpatory documents?
BK:
There have been a number of forged records – including the Oswald-Ruby Dallas
Police Arrest Report, the Monroe-Kilgallon phone tap document and the
Rowley-McCone report on Oswald, all of which look official and real, but are
forged. How come tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice are not
applied to those who created these false records?
There had been plenty of time to go over the paper
trail with care. The argument that the withheld records would finally expose a
government cover-up revealed either a quaint belief that Washington would
grudgingly admit to a new truth or naïveté bordering on stupidity.
BK:
If anything, the extant records prove there was a cover-up, and if there was a
cover-up, what were they covering up?
* *
‘We live in a state of opinion trusteeship,” Victor
Navasky observed in 2010. “None of us have the time and few of us the ability
to do our own research” on historically problematic cases such as the
Sacco-Vanzetti affair, the Rosenberg espionage case, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s
security clearance, or the Kennedy assassination. As citizens, we depend on
historians and investigative journalists to be our proxies and make sense of
these complex events. Specialized knowledge is hard-won, and expertise on one
subject rarely transferable to another. For the media, however, too
often any historian will do as commentator on a controversy so long
as he cooperates in ratcheting up the rhetoric and suggesting a story where
none really exists.
BK:
Then why are Gerald “The Plagerist” Posner, Mad Max Holland, Phil “Castro did
it” Shenon always brought out and paraded before the mainstream media when the
real researchers are ignored? The real
researchers being Peter Dale Scott, John Newman, Bill Simpich, Rex Bradford,
Malcolm Blunt, Jefferson Morley, Larry Hancock, et al. They know where the REAL
STORY exists.
When NPR’s Morning Edition asked
Robert Dallek, a biographer of both Kennedy and Johnson, to speculate on
October 25 about the contents of the records to be released the next day, he
suggested they “might demonstrate that the FBI and the CIA were somehow
incompetent or had fallen short in their assessment of what someone like Oswald
was doing and that maybe they fear embarrassment from the revelation of these
documents. I think that would be closer to the truth of what we’re going to see
than any additional information about some conspiracy.”
Yet documents revealing incompetence or neglect
were precisely the kind of records the ARRB would have released and
never held back.
BK:
And the records that have been released reveal that it wasn’t just
incompetence, but intent on the part of the intelligence agencies to allow JFK
to be killed by a covert intelligence operation conducted by one of their networks.
What Dallek hinted at was scarcely different from
the conspiracy theorist and Trump confidant Roger Stone’s suggestion that the
records “must reflect badly on the CIA.”
BK:
Roger Stone is a Republican political operative and dirty trickster who
published a book blaming the assassination on LBJ, not the CIA.
Again, the bulk of the redactions requested by the
agency concerned intelligence-gathering mechanisms in Mexico City, a beehive of
intelligence operations during the Cold War, and had nothing to do with
foreknowledge of Oswald’s intentions or capacities.
BK:
Oswald’s intentions and capacities had nothing to do with the assassination,
only with the fact that he was framed for a crime he didn’t commit.
Dallek’s innuendo also ignored the fact that the
State Department and CIA had impressed upon the ARRB that U.S.
intelligence-sharing arrangements with the Mexican government—as well as
activities undertaken without local authorities’ knowledge or
permission—still had the potential to destabilize the ruling PRI, which had
been in power in Mexico for more than 60 uninterrupted years.
BK:
But as Judge Tunheim said at the CAPA Press Conference in 2017, they are no
longer in power and the intelligence sharing arrangements have changed, as the
Mexican government has. Trump doesn’t care about embarrassing the Mexicans
either.
For an anodyne observation, there was Michael
Beschloss in a New York Timesarticle published the morning of the release.
He was quoted saying, “We just have to realize that there is never going to be
an explanation of the Kennedy assassination that will satisfy everyone. That
will never happen. At the same time, there are still mysteries on which these
files might shed some light.”
BK:
I disagree. I believe there will be a narrative of the assassination that will
fit all of the facts and satisfy most intelligent people.
Insofar as conspiracy theorists will never accept
that Oswald acted alone,
BK: Oswald did act alone. He just didn’t kill
anyone.
Beschloss, the author of numerous books about the
postwar presidency, was correct. But he was neglecting his responsibility as a
historian when he suggested that there are “still mysteries.”
The Times article noted, “most people have never accepted the
official version of events. A poll by Gallup in 2013, at the time of the 50th
anniversary, found that 61 percent of Americans still believed that others
besides Oswald were involved.” When leading historians pretend there are
unexplained mysteries where there are none, it contributes to the public’s
confusion.
BK:
Yes, there are few unexplained mysteries in regards to the assassination of
President Kennedy, we are now only filling in the blanks, and figuring out the
names of those who actually accomplished the deed, but not contributing to the
public confusion. Max Holland does that.
Journalists compounded the problem with articles
that demonstrated a lamentable ignorance of the basics of the event. Fifty-four
years after the Kennedy assassination and the Washington Post doesn’t
know if Oswald fired two or three shots
BK:
The basics of the event indicate Oswald didn’t fire any shots.
The newspaper
also asserted on October 27—erroneously—that conspiracy theories have dogged
the Warren Report because alleged “marching orders” given to the commission by
Johnson effectively short-circuited the investigation.
BK:
LBJ short-circuited the investigation, as did the FBI and CIA.
The Wall Street Journal alluded to the
“CIA’s failed pursuit of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald” in Mexico City just weeks
before the assassination. Oswald was never a CIA target; to the degree he was
captured on surveillance it was incidental, via the agency’s routine monitoring
of the Cuban and Soviet embassies there.
BK:
The work of John Newman and Bill Simpich have conclusively demonstrated that
the agency’s monitoring of Oswald and his files were not incidental but in
their term “operational,” as was his being set up as the fall guy and patsy in
the murder.
The New York Times, for its part,
described the Warren Report as “contested” and carried on as if that were
synonymous with “false.” The paper of record resurrected two of the hoariest
fictions of them all: the notion that Oswald did not have sufficient time to
fire all three shots and that there was something “magic” about a fully
jacketed bullet wounding both Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally.
The Times seems to want readers to believe that there might have been
a shot from the grassy knoll after all. These faults stemmed from the familiar
news practice of false equivalence—the equal presentation of positions of
unequal merit in order to project balance. Here it lent undeserved credence to
conspiracists.
BK:
If I am a conspiracist, then Max Holland is an “coincidentalist.”
Similarly problematic is the media’s hunt for
instantaneous commentary and analysis. The National Archives JFK collection is
vast and its provenance unusually complicated. Anyone who tried to satiate the
press’s demand for speedy answers did so at some peril.
Nothing illustrates this point better than the storm
over a document that the National Archives accidentally designated as having
been previously withheld in full. The press generally described this document
as an FBI memorandum of conversation dated just two hours after Oswald had been
killed by the self-appointed vigilante Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963. In the
three-page “memcon,” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover is quoted as saying, “The
thing I am concerned about . . . is having something issued so we can convince
the public that Oswald is the real assassin.” No single document released on
October 26 received more attention, and several media outlets even suggested
this memcon was proof the government was only interested in pinning
responsibility on Oswald rather than fully investigating the assassination.
BK:
I will be fulfilling Holland’s request for more significanat records that have
been released.
There is no question that the memcon is significant.
It represents the first communication from the FBI director to the president
following Oswald’s murder on national television and reveals Hoover’s
opposition to the notion of an independent commission that would sit in
judgment of the FBI’s investigation—something that was already being discussed
within and without the government. Hoover’s choice of words, which could be
twisted into advocacy for a directed verdict, mean something quite different
once one takes into account something mentioned elsewhere in the document: that
the FBI laboratory had already matched the bullets that struck Kennedy with
Oswald’s rifle to the exclusion of all others. The memcon, moreover, isn’t an
FBI document but one generated in the White House. It was written by Walter
Jenkins, one of LBJ’s top aides, as he talked to Hoover (Johnson being
unavailable). Jenkins was renowned for his ability at shorthand, which accounts
for the complete sentences and the memcon’s thoroughness.
BK:
Walter Jenkins was one of the top three LBJ aides with him in the Executive
Office Building VP office when LBJ made the decision not to follow the Phase
One cover story that the assassination was the result of a Castro Cuban Commie
conspiracy and instead go with the Phase Two – deranged lone nut case scenario.
Jenkins was later arrested for homosexual activity in a public restroom.
I quoted from this document in my 2004
book, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes.
BK:
Like Max Holland, I have focused much of my research on the assassination
tapes, the Air Force One radio communications tapes in particular, and unlike
Holland, I include the Collins Radio’s “Liberty” station in the transcripts I
personally prepared. Holland’s book fails to include or even note the most
significant aspects of the AF1 radio tapes, that I include in my work.
The Jenkins memcon had been released in redacted
form as far back as 1978, when the House Assassinations Committee was
conducting its probe. The once-sensitive portions (fully restored by the ARRB
and released in July 1998) referred to the interception of a phone call from
Oswald to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City; to a letter Oswald sent to the
Soviet embassy in Washington, which the FBI had intercepted, read, and resealed;
and to the issue of whether Oswald wittingly or unwittingly also sent a letter
to a KGB officer in charge of covert activities.
BK:
That someone impersonating Oswald phoned the Cuban embassy in Mexico City is
beyond dispute, but not mentioned by Holland, and whether Oswald was a
wittingly or unwitting asset of the agency or network that framed him should be
of interest.
If news is defined as what we don’t know, the memcon
was not news in 2017. But none of the talking heads consulted during that
frantic news cycle knew this. And the next day, the New York
Times featured “Hoover’s memo” as part of the new “treasure trove” open to
investigators, and the Washington Post highlighted it in an October
28 article.
Even genuine expertise didn’t necessarily afford protection
against wince-inducing mistakes. Few experts will forgo an opportunity to be
quoted in the New York Times or Washington Post even when
discretion might be in order—I myself ventured to say the hype over the
document release was overblown in the same Times article that quoted
Beschloss. When the Washington Post contacted Peter Kornbluh, an
analyst at the nonprofit National Security Archive and coauthor of a 2014 book
on secret U.S. diplomacy with Castro’s regime, he agreed to supply reactions to
the documents for the October 28 Post story. He singled out the
“never-before-seen” Hoover memcon as an example of over-classification. “What
is the secrecy around that document really about?” he asked, referring to a
document released in full 19 years ago. But Kornbluh also pointed
the Postreporter to a 31-page memo written by White House counsel Philip
Buchen in 1975, which described assassination plotting in general and listed
financial rewards that had been contemplated for anyone eliminating Castro and
friends.
BK:
Kornbluh and the National Security Archives are primary sources for anyone
interested in these affairs, especially Cuba.
“The price list appears to be new,” Kornbluh told
the Post—except that nothing about “Operation BOUNTY,” as it was dubbed in
1962, is unknown. The plan was first disclosed in the 1975 Church Committee
report and described in detail in documents the ARRB released in 1994. A
January 1962 memo about Operation BOUNTY, complete with the price list, was
published in a 1999 book about the CIA’s psychological warfare against Cuba.
Nonetheless, Kornbluh told the Washington Post that because it
included a price list, Buchen’s memo “is one of the most comprehensive
summaries of real and proposed assassination operations against Castro that I
have ever read, and I have read all of them.” The 1975 Church report, with more
than 120 printed pages devoted to plots against Castro, is far more detailed
than Buchen’s memo.
BK:
But many – more than a dozen Church Committee interviews have gone missing or
have been erased. WTF?
* *
Of all the elements that went into the spectacle,
perhaps the most predictable was the role played by proxy authors with a vested
interest in stirring the pot, aided and abetted by a press that treats them
with far more respect than they deserve thanks to their ability to generate
column inches. This is an old problem that has dogged the official verdict on
the Kennedy assassination since the mid-1960s; it might be labeled Lane-Epstein
syndrome after the first authors to so benefit, Mark Lane and Edward Jay
Epstein.
Lane was a struggling 36-year-old lawyer in November
1963 when he appointed himself the Emile Zola of a modern-day Dreyfus case: the
“railroading” of a Dallas Marxist for the killing of the president. After just a
few days of investigation, Lane penned his “J’accuse!,” which eventually found
a home in the National Guardian, a leftist weekly run secretly by U.S.
Communist party members.
The Guardianclaimed to be independent of
Communist orthodoxy and was revered by fellow travelers.
That one issue of the Guardian turned out
to be a sensation, and Lane never looked back. His 1966 book, Rush to
Judgment, was a runaway bestseller, and the following year he threw in his lot
with New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, a silver-tongued demagogue.
Perhaps the most-telling indicator of Lane’s audacious mendacity in denigrating
the Warren Report was that the KGB chose to funnel money to Lane’s “Citizens’
Committee of Inquiry.” The goals of the KGB and Lane dovetailed nicely.
In contrast to Lane, Edward Jay Epstein was the
model of the nonideological critic of the Warren Commission. As a 30-year-old
graduate student in political science at Cornell University, he decided to
write his master’s thesis on the functioning of the commission. Staff members
and five of the seven commissioners cooperated.
BK:
I share Holland’s views of both Mark Lane and Edward J. Epstein, but like them,
Holland himself is a proxy author with a vested interest in the assassination,
as he is well paid to write about.
My first exposure to Epstein’s methodology occurred
when I asked one of those staffers, Alfred Goldberg, about something that was
sourced to him in Epstein’s 1966 book, Inquest: The Warren Commission and
the Establishment of Truth—another bestseller. He told me that Epstein had
taken no notes during their interview, and he didn’t seem to have a tape
recorder up his sleeve. Goldberg was thus surprised to find that he was cited
or quoted 15 times in the book; on 13 of those occasions, Goldberg said with
some vehemence, he did not know the information attributed to him.
Epstein’s argument was that the commission had
fashioned a verdict regardless of the facts, with the overriding purpose of
pacifying the American people. This thesis appealed enormously to the American
intelligentsia, which could not bring itself to believe that a left-winger had
assassinated a liberal president.
But Epstein had it backwards. There was, of course,
a political tinge to the Warren Report—a federal commission could hardly be
without one. But in this instance it was entirely benign, though perhaps
ill-advised, and was only applied retroactively, after the evaluation of all
the facts. Primarily owing to its chairman, Chief Justice of the United States
Earl Warren, the commission sought to take the political out of what was a
political murder. Warren feared that if the public perceived Oswald as a
Communist under Russian or Cuban control, rather than just a self-styled one,
there would be another round of hysteria akin to the worst of the McCarthy era.
Contemporary equivalents to Lane and Epstein exist,
exemplified by Jefferson Morley and Philip Shenon, both of whom are prolific,
all too available, and trade on their establishment credentials to a credulous
press.
Morley, a former reporter and editor at the New
Republic and the Washington Post, has adopted Lane’s practice of
repeating a falsehood until it acquires the veneer of truth. Morley operates a
website, JFKfacts.org, and is the conspiracy theorist par excellence. His idée
fixe is that Oswald was not only the target of aggressive CIA surveillance
before the assassination, but was used for covert purposes that implicate the
agency in the assassination—if not as an accomplice before the fact then as
“legally culpable” for the “wrongful death of JFK.” It is also no small tribute
to Morley that just as Lane (together with Jim Garrison) was able to posit a
vast conspiracy involving a shadow government in cahoots with the
military-industrial complex, Morley has succeeded in injecting his “Deep State
culpability” theory into the New
York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Politico,
and the Daily Beast, either by writing for them directly or being relied
upon as an expert. Russia, under Putin, continues to recycle the KGB canard
that “American special services” participated in a political conspiracy
directed against Kennedy. Morley makes for a useful ally.
Philip Shenon, by contrast, presents himself as
having no ideological axe to grind. A former New York Times reporter,
he has donned Epstein’s mantle as the reasonable and respectable critic of the
official verdict on the Kennedy assassination. And, like Epstein before him, he
was able to win the cooperation of several Warren Commission staffers for a
book, A Cruel and Shocking Act (2013).
BK:
While I have shown that the “Twist Party” Oswald ostensibly attended with Cuban
embassy personnel actually occurred when Oswald was not in Mexico, there was a
party where Oswald was encouraged to kill Gen. Edwin Walker, a crime he is also
accused of committing, and one that neither Shenon nor Holland care to address.
At last, they must have thought, an experienced
reporter who would tell their story accurately. They were wrong. When the late
Richard Mosk, one of the staffers who cooperated, upbraided the
former Times-man for his irresponsible claims, Shenon’s response was, “I
gotta make a living.”
Shenon focuses on Oswald’s six-day visit to Mexico
City seven weeks before the assassination. “All roads lead to Mexico City,” he
averred recently. Shenon asserts that the notoriously prudish and socially
awkward Oswald abruptly turned into a social butterfly on the leftist party
circuit, attending a twist party in the company of Sylvia Duran, a Mexican
national who worked at the Cuban embassy. Oswald had met her while trying to
obtain a visa, and on the basis of no solid evidence whatsoever, Shenon says
they had an affair. Cuban intelligence officers Oswald met at the party, Shenon
goes on, subsequently recruited—or, at a minimum, inspired—Oswald to kill Kennedy.
This theory appeals to everyone still hoping to find a larger meaning in the
assassination: Castro via Oswald killed Kennedy because Kennedy was trying to
kill Castro. Shenon is free to engage in such flights of fancy largely because
Havana has never opened its archives on Oswald, leaving a void. But we have
learned enough to know that the only secret power center Oswald ever worked for
was the one “in the privacy of his own mind,” as Norman Mailer, an early
conspiracist, reluctantly concluded.
BK:
That Castro was behind Oswald was built into the original crime as a
cover-story, one that didn’t take hold and one that gives us insight into the
crime.
Shenon was ubiquitous during this autumn’s release
spectacle and coauthored one prominent preview article for Politico. His
partner for the piece was the political pundit and University of Virginia
professor Larry J. Sabato. The author of The Kennedy
Half-Century (2013), Sabato told the Dallas Morning News before
the October 26 release, “My guess is if there ever were telltale documents,
they were destroyed long ago.” If the documents are opened and don’t prove a
conspiracy, the records must have been destroyed!
BK:
No, the records that were destroyed were destroyed for a reason, and not
because they prove that Oswald killed JFK all by himself.
The gap between Sabato’s knowledge of the Kennedy
assassination and his willingness to discuss it in public is perhaps the widest
of anyone who is accepted by the media as an expert. He couldn’t wait to use
his Twitter account to highlight his discoveries of “obscure clues and shiny
objects” in the National Archives releases, which he likened to “an unassembled
million-piece puzzle.” One of his first observations, as reported in
the Times on October 27, was, “What I’ve learned so far is you can’t
understand the Kennedy assassination or the Kennedy presidency or Oswald unless
you understand the ’50s and early ’60s.”
BK:
And I would add you can’t understand the Kennedy assassination or presidency or
Oswald without understanding the “Intelligence Wars” that Thomas Powers writes
about, as JFK was certainly a victim of those wars.
Sabato noted one document he deemed particularly
exciting. Sent to the NSA after the assassination, the Air Force message
referred to an alleged plot to kill Kennedy and one of his sisters and
recommended that NSA intercepts “be researched to determine a possible
connection between cited CRITIC and the slaying of President Kennedy.”
The Washington Post, which was hanging on every Sabato tweet, reported
that the professor “believes the potential assassin was code-named CRITIC.”
What Sabato didn’t know is that beginning in 1958, “CRITIC” was a term used to
designate intelligence messages of high precedence that required
urgent handling in Washington, ideally within 10 minutes of receipt.
Shenon and Sabato’s article
in Politico warned the records release was likely to “help fuel a new
generation of conspiracy theorists.” Thank you, but no. The current crop will
do nicely.
* *
David Marwell, the former executive director of the
ARRB, says he found press coverage of the records release “quite depressing.”
The combination of media hype and phony revelations made it seem as if the
board’s work had been in vain. Years of good-faith effort and millions of dollars
had been expended to create the collection; the goal was not just preservation
and transparency, but closure.
BK:
Many share Marwell’s depressing view of the media coverage of the
assassination, especially Max Holland’s “coverage.”
I have been writing about the Kennedy assassination
for almost 25 years, in publications ranging from the New York Times to obscure peer-reviewed technical
periodicals (the Journal of the
Association for Crime Scene Reconstruction).
BK:
Well lets begin there – with a crime scene reconstruction of Dealey Plaza and
the Texas School Book Depository.
My first major article argued that the assassination
and subsequent investigations could not be understood without placing them in
the context of the Cold War—a novel argument in 1993.
BK:
And Holland should place the assassination in the context of the Cold War, as
it most certainly was, and not the result of a deranged lone nut.
I have written about the pernicious effects of Moscow’s dezinformatsiya on
American perceptions of the assassination,
BK:
The most prolific disinformation – false information produced and promoted by a
government intelligence agency – is the false attempt to blame the
assassination on Oswald and Castro. All of those who promote this blatant black
propaganda disinformation – as the HSCA investigator Dan Hardway has observed,
can be traced back to the CIA and more specifically assets of David Atlee
Phillips.
including the successful placement of a Soviet-era
lie in Oliver Stone’s Hollywood blockbuster. Most recently, I harshly
criticized the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee for their
fundamental misreading of the Zapruder film,
which contributed greatly to the undoing of the government’s official
explanation. I recite this list to suggest that I am not among those who
believe there is nothing important or interesting to say anymore about Lee
Harvey Oswald’s murder of John F. Kennedy. I am an assassination buff just as
surely as the most devoted conspiracy theorist and have my own vested interest
in continued public fascination.
BK:
If Lee Harvey Oswald – who fits the Covert Operative Persoanlity (COP) profile,
had anything to do with the assassination, then the MO – modus operandi was
that of a covert intelligence operation conducted by a domestic intelligence
network with which he was affiliated.
I wasn’t surprised by the hoopla surrounding the
October release or the feeble understanding of what the ARRB was all about and
why a small number of documents had been deferred for release. Yet as Jack
Schlossberg observed in Time—and presumably he has more than a passing
interest in the assassination of his grandfather—the files contain “no
particularly revealing or transformative insights: A newsworthy story without
much newsworthy information.”
BK:
Jack Schlossberg has not read the latest records and is not particularly
interested in who killed his grandfather or why, but rather is interested in
promoting the Kennedy policies and legacy – that got him killed.
Still, I would argue that something is different
about this latest installment in the long-running assassination saga. To
research and write about the Kennedy assassination is to go through the
looking-glass, to a world where words mean whatever the filmmaker or author
uttering them decides they mean. It is downright nauseating to sit through a
presentation by Oliver Stone at a research conference. But it used to be that I
could compartmentalize the madness, keep it in its corner. When I left the
event where Stone spoke or got up from my desk after a day of writing about the
assassination, I could count on reentering a world where sanity prevailed.
BK:
The “Wilderness of Mirrors” isn’t the one created by Oliver Stone, but the one
created by Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton, and is one that we are now
familiar with and have been mapping out with some sanity, and one that includes
the Dealey Plaza Operation – one that is no longer a mystery.
Now, given a president who cites the National
Enquirer to suggest that a U.S. senator’s father was involved with
Kennedy’s murderer; leans on advice from someone like Roger Stone, who believes
Lyndon Johnson orchestrated the assassination; and accepts the word of Vladimir
Putin, who insinuates that the CIA killed Kennedy, there is no safe space.
The old saw that good information eventually crowds
out bad doesn’t seem to work anymore. Reality is optional everywhere.
Max Holland is the author of The Kennedy
Assassination Tapes (2004).
