ACSI - Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (USAR)

                                                                    ACSI

There were approximately 17 federal intelligence agencies in 1963 and even more state and local (county, city) agencies, and many of them were at Dealey Plaza and inside the TSBD within minutes of the shooting, including the FBI, Secret Service, Army Intelligence, ONI, the Dallas Police Special Services Bureau, Dallas Sheriff, the Texas Rangers and even the Texas Fish Game & Wildlife. Each agent on the scene should have written a full and detailed report on where they were and what they did at the time of the crime.

While the intelligence agencies listed above are well known, one lesser known intelligence agency stands out as having its fingerprints all over the place – ACSI – the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence of the US Army Reserve.

Because the CIA cannot legally function within the United States, during the civil rights riots of the sixties, the US Army Reserves were called out to support overwhelmed local police departments, and their intelligence arm kept close track of the protesters.

As the US Army After Action Report (AAR) summary for Memphis at the time of the assassination of Martin Luther King clearly indicates, he was under very tight surveillance by the Army, who had an infiltrator and informant in the motel room with King and they watched him being murdered.

In Dallas it has been reported that most of the Dallas Police Department officers in the Special Services (Intelligence) bureau were active US Army Reserve officers, including Deputy Chief George Lumpkin, the driver of the Pilot Car in the motorcade that traveled a half mile ahead to look for and report on any possible trouble. They didn’t see any but pulled to the side of the road at the intersection of Houston and Elm to tell the traffic cop on the corner – and the Sixth Floor sniper 60 feet above him, that the motorcade was coming a few minutes away.

Because of his position in both the Dallas PD and the Army Reserves, Lumpkin arranged for his military superior Lt. Col. George L. Whitmeyer to ride in the back seat of the Pilot Car, the only person in the motorcade who is not listed on the Secret Service check list, and was not supposed to be in the motorcade without the Secret Service knowing or doing a basic background check.

If they had they would have learned that the US Army Reserve intelligence officers for Texas reported to Lt. Colonel William B. Rose, the commander of ACSI, who operated his intelligence network out of an office in the Pentagon.

Other US Army Reserve officers in the Dallas PD at the time include Capt. Pat Gannaway, who raided the home of a TSBD employee at midnight on the night of the assassination, believing that his leftist literature and activist background made him a possible co-conspirator of the main suspect when a communist conspiracy was still being actively pursued.

Yet another US Army Reserve officer in the Dallas PD Detective L. Don Stringfellow falsely reported that Oswald was a communist who had defected to Cuba in a cable sent to the US Air Force Strike Force at MacDill AFB in Florida that, as Peter Dale Scott notes was, “poised for a possible retaliatory attack against Cuba.”  

Documents released under the JFK Act indicate that ACSI was also the Army agency involved in MKULTRA mind control experiments, and in early November 1963, informed the rest of the military that an undercover informant in Cuba (falsely) reported that Castro was going to attack the US Navy base at Guantanamo, that was put on alert.

These ACSI associations could just be their basic intrusion into the situation of the day, and not an indicator of any sinister involvement except for the other extensions of their tentacles, including ACSI officer Col. Sam Kail debriefing the accused assassin’s good friend George deMohrenschildt before he traveled to Haiti, and “Our Man in Acapulco,” – Colonel Frank Maryan “Brandy” Brandstetter, the head of the Hilton Hotel in Havana where Castro stayed in the early days of his reign.

Brandy was from Dallas, and reported directly to General Rose at ACSI at the Pentagon. One of Brandy’s employees at the Havana Hilton, Manalo Ray, co-founded an anti-Castro Cuban group JURE with the father of Sylvia Odio, who Oswald and two Cubans visited after Oswald left New Orleans.

Then there’s the mysterious US Army Reserve Colonel who visited Marina and Ruth Paine at their Irving home a week before the assassination, checking out the scene and reporting back to General Rose on what the situation there was.

Jack A. Crichton is the clincher though. Col. Crichton was a 488^th Military Intelligence Detachment US Army Reserve intelligence officer who ran the Dallas Emergency Civil Defense Communications center in an underground bunker below the Dallas Health and Science Museum at the Dallas State Fairgrounds, where the Dallas PD Special Services Bureau (Lumpkin, Stringfellow, Gannaway) also had their offices – away from the regular police department at Dallas City Hall.

At his emergency center Crichton could monitor the police and motorcade (Secret Service) and White House Communications Agency (WHCA- AF1) radio transmissions, and communicate with them. And it was Crichton who, after the arrest of Oswald, arranged for the Russian language translation of Marina Oswald’s original interrogation, which led to the false reports to the military issued by Stringfellow.

In any case, of the many intelligence agencies present in the motorcade and at Dealey Plaza, the ACSI is the one that had the most feet on the ground gathering intelligence and passing it all along to one man – General Rose, back at his office in the Pentagon.

MTC