The Strange Crash of John F. Kennedy, Jr.

John F. Kennedy Jr. planned to announce his plans to run for U.S. Senator from New York or president on August 1, 1999. Young Kennedy had already employed a security firm to protect him. He was America’s Golden Boy in many ways, including being a compelling speaker. His plane was lost on Friday, July 16, 1999. His wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister, Laurin Bessette, died with him. He was flying into Martha’s Vineyard to drop off Laurin before going on to Hyannis. He had not flown over open water and had been hugging the coasts.

A few seconds after Kennedy identified himself to the Martha’s Vineyard airstrip at 9:39P.M., his plane descended in excess of 6,000 feet per minute. The UPI reported that just before the dive, he told the airport he was dropping off a passenger before going on to Hyannis. The report also said there was 8 miles visibility. The UPI first reported the 8 mile visibility and JFK Jr. calmly talking to the tower. Later the press was reported that Martha’s Vineyard was hammered with heavy fog. The weather reports that Kennedy Jr. used were not found. The F.B.I. report on the accident cannot be declassified until 7/22/29

The FAA rules are that if a plane does not land 5 minutes after it has contacted a tower, the search must begin immediately. Planes were not sent to search until 14 and a half hours had elapsed.

The National Transportation Safety Board quickly ruled that the crash was due to “pilot error” and speculated that he suffered’spatial disorientation.”The Pentagon took the lead in reporting that Kennedy had not used his radio before approaching. Witnesses said visibility was reasonably good, but the NTSB did not say there was 8 miles visibility. Its report quoted the Martha's Vineyard tower operator as saying the stars were out. According to him, visibility was 10 to 12 miles.

According to the media, the airstrip was blanketed with haze. Boston TN news reported that he used his radio; now the story was that he was lost. The official story added that he stalled his engine, but the tracks show the plane was going too fast for that. It was said that his instruments went out, but earlier reports were that the radar was getting good data from his altimeter. Some said his vacuum pump went out, but there was a back up vacuum pump which would have permitted him to still know where the horizon was. The plane also had autopilot and could have been kept on it for quite some time. It also had a black box, very rare for a private plane. The NTSB said its battery had been removed.

The report said the Emergency Locater Transmitter was turned off. This cannot happen by accident as there is a safety switch.The fuel valve was turned off. To do so at a high speed would kill the engine. It would have been suicide, or it was somehow disabled.

The flight log book was missing. The public was told told he was a bad pilot. Two, Andrew Goldman of the New York Observer and Cindy Adams of the New York Post checked out the story and suspected they had been lied to. The tale was also circulated that he had only 40 hours flying experience. The number was actually 400. Three flight instructors who had taught Kennedy said he was a very good pilot. The official story plus these other claims have been termed “classic media disinformation, if not outright lies.”

By following the mainstream press, we only learn that there were several serious problems with what came to be the accepted story of the accident. To go beyond that, we must consult sources that are sometimes reliable and sometimes miss the mark.

Sherman Skolnick reported that an explosive device was attached to the tail luggage compartment. At the end, the plane was front heavy because the tail was gone. He also reported that satellite images showed what could have been an explosion. He and Tom Flocco have a history of using dissident elements in the USD intelligence community and information from the French. However, Flocco accuracy rate is not as good as that of Slolnick. A problem with both is that they refuse to name their sources. Flocco printed the testimony of a former F.B.I. and Interpol agent B. Delbert: JFK Jr.’s plane broke in half just aft of the cabin. The damage was caused by a plastique (C 4) shape charge which was formed along the bottom of the fuselage and up along both sides of the walls. The charge was caused to be set off or exploded with a large spark generated by a barometric switch device triggered by the altitude of the plane. In other words, the assassins chose the altitude for the explosion of the plane a standard procedure to make the target’s murder look like an accident.

Wayne Madsen, using an unnamed law enforcement source, says the F.B.I. agents fanned out around the point of departure to see if anyone in the earea had purchased epoxy that day. The French magazine France Dimanche quoted someone who had watched Kennedy take off as saying he heard a strange sound eminating from the plane. It is theorized that someone could have attached a whistle that would emit a sound that could help someone on the ground zero in on the plane. There was odd boating activity in the area around Martha’s Vineyard Airport, and the boaters the bureau found were fishing for spriped bass in an area where they are not found.

Kennedy had published an Oliver Stone piece about the assassination of his father, and young Kennedy admitted that his father died as a result of a conspiracy. Thee could be little doubt he was interested in pursuing the matter. In 1998, a nutritionist Dr. True Ott gave a copy of the Gemstone Files to a representative of George Magazine. The files contained documentation on the murder of John F. Kennedy and ten collateral assassination needed to clean up details. John F. Kennedy Jr. Later called Ott and said he would publish information about the assassination and that he had paid private investigators to check out the Gemstone Files. Those papers placed George. H. Bush at the center of the assassination. They are essentially the notes of an investigator who hung around an intelligence safehouse/bar in San Francisco, listening to relaxed agents tell stories. It is unclear how much of the material represent what the bartender hears. A great deal of the information in these rambling notes could only bne known to intelligence people or students of the black bag operations. The overall interpretations are best ignored.

Ten witnesses said they saw Michael Harari and another Mossad agent standing next to Kennedy’s Cessna at the New Jersey airport. If Mossad were involved, it probably was as an agent for some element in power in the US. It has often been employed to do US dirty work. It is not to be assumed that Israel had anything against young Kennedy.

It was probably only coincidental that George W. Bush was near the New Jersey airport Kennedy used when John-John took.off. Bush disappeared three days before Kennedy’s death and his staff was never able to say where he was. He could have been off with a lover, but some invbestigators insist he disappeared to coordinate the hit on Kennedy.

Some might recall that Ted Kennedy escaped a potentially deadly plane crash in June, 1964. His plane had been sabotaged.

On July 9, 1999, three planes were accidentally vectored by FAA Chicago air control in Aurora into the path of Air Force Two, carrying Al Gore. The Secret Service was supposed to have people on duty in that air traffic control center, but none were there. The Chicago-Sun Times was the only paper to cover the event; it did not include it on its internet offering. On July 29, Admiral Engen, a top FAA official , died when his air glider disintegrated. The relavant weather radar reports could not be found.

We know that two weeks before the crash, John Jr. had a telephone conversation with a Dr. True Ott, who had provided George Magazine with a copy of a controversial manuscript called the Gemstone Papers, which included an account of who killed JFK. John Jr. had taken time with it and thought the account was valid. There is a substantial body of evidence that John was preparing to reopen the story of the assassination of his father. He was also tracking down more information on the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

The Death of John F. Kennedy: How Many Shots?

Some witnesses said they herd more than four shots, and UPI reporter Merridian Smith said in a dispatch 25 minutes after the shooting that ‘some of the Secret Service agents thought the gunfire was from an automatic weapon fired to the right rear of the president’s car, probably from a grassy knoll to which police rushed.” This would mean they heard many more than four shots. This testimony has led one investigator to suggest that the shot came from the trunk. This is unlikely, and it cannot be checked out in any event. Three days later, the Lincoln was completely stripped and rearmored by Hess and Eisenhardt.

Some insist that the assassination of Kennedy marked the accession of a secret cabal that has run our government ever since. If this were true, it would seem that if such a cabal were in control, that Richard Nixon would not have had to rely upon his own plumbers unit to carry out black bag jobs. Nixon’s goals and priorities were, after all, very much in line with what writers have assumed were those of the alleged secret government. Nixon’s plumbers unit was financed through mechanisms created by George H.W. Bush, who Nixon would appoint head of the Republican National Committee.

The names of the people who shot Kennedy and the details on C.I.A. involvement will never be known . The story is an endless rabbit hole strewn with all sorts of red herrings. St. John Hunt, son of E. Howard Hunt has said that it is even possible that there were as many as three simultaneous plots to Kill Kennedy. It is generally assumed that the hit team had at least four members. There is a December 6, 1978 memorandum from the sheriff of Sarasota County, Florida to the F.B.I. in Tampa advising them that Stempeh Ruth told a deputy in 1960 or 1970 that he went to Cuba in 1969 to kill one of the four or five men on the Kennedy hit team. Ruth wass supposed to be a C.I.A. asset, but he got a 60 prison term in 1988 for moving drugs.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy was a huge historical event, and there still is not enough evidence to piece together what actually happened. There is more than enough evidence to suspect that the official story was essentially a fabrication, but it still proves very difficult to sort out all the contradictions and identify and deal with deliberate disinformation. This is probably true with the respect of many other contemporary events. For example, no one can prove for certain why the US invaded Iraq. Historians, due to a methodology inherited from Leopold von Ranke, may find themselves with no choices but to repeat the official or default stories about the assassination and Iraq, perhaps adding that some have questioned these accounts. Its an endless rat hole.

The people who planned Kennedy’s murder could have accomplished this
without so much fanfare. It could have been done in a way to arouse almost no suspicion. Rather it was accomplished in the Dealey Plaza shooting gallery, with all sorts of messy details, and an explanatory theory that would only be accepted by the weak-minded. It was a way of announcing to the citizens of a one-time democracy that other forces were now in control and that ordinary citizens might as well swallow hard and accept it.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy is surrounded with so much contradictory evidence and deliberate misinformation that the true picture of what occurred on November 22 will probably never emerge. Given this situation, many still find that the “lone nut” or default position should be accepted. Yet, It is clear that more than 3 shots were fired, that the autopsy evidence was inaccurate and partly changed or removed, and that a great deal of effort has been exerted to muddy the picture and generate piles of misleading disinformation. Oswald was clearly tied to the intelligence community as was George De Mohrenschildt . The latter must have had a good idea of what happened, but it is not at all certain that he ever told the truth.Democracies depend upon transparency and the free flow of information . We can conclude that the transformation of the US into a banana republic began that day.

The Death of John F. Kennedy: Problems with Physicial Evidence

The official story of the Kennedy Assassination is that Lee Harvey Osawald fired three rounds from a Mannlicher-Carcano bolt-action rifle in 8.3 seconds. The weapon was considered crudely made, inaccurate, and dangerous. Many witnesses heard three shots. Few considered that silencer fitted guns could have been used. Recently, Italian experts were unable to do the same in less than 19 second. The Warren Commission said that two bullets hit Kennedy while the first, the “magic bullet” also hit Governor John Connolly. The second bullet missed, and the third disintegrated after it hit Kennedy’s head. The Commission did not reveal where in the head Kennedy was hit. Oswald was only 80 yards away, so the Italians think it could not have disintegrated. Two of the spent cartraged found at the scene could not have been used in a Carcano rifle. The unspent cardradge was for the Italian rifle.

Army rifle experts reported that they were able to duplicxate what Oswald was supposed to do with an identical rifle. It later turned out that they did not do it in 8.3 seconds and they had to add three shims to the sight before they could hit the target.

Basic problems still surround Kennedy’s wounds. The official story is that Oswald was hit by two bullets from above and behind. One is supposed to have exited through the throat and the other hit the head and was fatal.

Head

Originally, the autopsy doctors found two lacerations in the mid brain, positioned as though the entry wound or wounds were coming downward and on the right and rear. Much has been said about a jerking motion on the part of the President. He seemed to first move forward and then back and to the left. Some have suggested he was first hit in the back of the head and then almost simultaneously from the front. Some witnesses thought they heard four shots, the last two coming almost at the same time. The jerking back, could suggest a fourth shot coming from the wall or stockade atop the famous grassy knoll. Many witnesses thought they heard a shot come from there and several saw a wisp of smoke at the stockade. A policeman checking the parking lot behind it found a Secret Service man there with the proper credentials. The problem was there was no Secret Service man up there. With the loss of Kennedy’s brain and the confusion over photographs, this matter cannot be cleared up.

There was unanimity among the Parkland doctors and the agents who saw Kennedy’s body that there was a “rear skull/scalp defect.” Vincent Bugliosi dismissed the views of the Parkland doctors because some of them were young and inexperienced, but this was not true of all of them. Even the younger ones had seen their share of gun wounds. Other witnesses included Jackie Kennedy and agent Hill, who first saw the wound.

Two of the Bathesda doctors insisted in 1978 that that the wound in the back of the head was an an entrance would. The Parkland doctors said it was an exit would, which seems to make more sense. If the Parkland doctors were correct, at least that shot came from the front. Of course, Oswald was behind the limousine, on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Analysis of four frames of the Brennan pictures clearly show a square object in Oswald’s window. The first fram showed it fairly large; it got smllaer in the third frame and still smaller in the fourth frame. It is unclear what this could mean

The measurement of Kennedy’s head wound at Bathesda was considerably larger than the Dallas measurement. Zapruder frame 374 shws a massuve head wound. The autopsy record shows that Dr. Holmes found a hole in the back and below the shoulder, just two inches on the right of the spine. He probed it with his finger and found that the trajectory went down. But Dr. Finck later testified before Congress that an admiral forbade him to probe the would, which is now called a neck would. The bullet in the neck had no exit wound, and the doctors were unable to find it. It came in at a 45 to 60 degree angle. Two of the Bathesda doctors, Boswell and Burkley, probed for it, and Burkley said that no one ordered them not to look for it. The doctors were also unable to find the bullet that entered the right sholder blade. It would have been going upward and could have exited through the neck, but that possibility ws ruled out. . Nor was the bullet from the back wound found. This is partly why there were whole body x-rays.

They believed that one bullet entered the back of the head and went out the right side. Forty witnesses said they saw a massive blow out on the head. That has prompted people to thing there was more than one shot there. So much of the head was taken away that there was discussion of two bullets hitting it simultaneously.However, Dr. Marshall Nichols, a University of Kansas pathologist testified that the bullet to the head might have come from the front.

James Angleton, a C.I.A. deputy director, had Nichols checked out for giving this testimony. The six Parkland doctors said the shot came from the front, as the Kennedy’s press secretary’s comments. .


Gurney bullet
Another bullet was found at Parkland on a guerney or table. The official story is that this bullet passed through both Kennedy and Connally. However, Governor Connelly was holding his Stetson hat after Kennedy was hit by the bullet that was supposed to also hit Connally’s hat hand. He and his wife Nellie insisted that ghe was not hit by the same bullet that entered Kennedy. A close examination of the Zapruder film makes it clear that Connally was hit by another bullet a second after Kennedy was first hit.

Connally
We also know that a metal fragment was taken out of Connally’s arm. Some suggest thatr due to its size, it did not come from Oswald’s rifle. Yet the government produced scientific evidence that this fragment came from the spent cartrage on the Parkland table. That argument is not convincing to this writer because the smashing process would have made it larger than the barrel of that rifle. The more interesting question is, how does this fit with the magic bullet theory? The government used Neutron Activation Analysis to claim that all metal fragments came from the same rifle, but subsequent research has called into question these findings. Connally said, “There were either two or three people involved, or more, in this – or someone was shooting with an automatic rifle."

Back bullet

Some believe the second bullet went from the chest to the throat. Using that theory, people studied the photos in the seventies, and the experts said the upward trajectory of the bullet from the chest to throat was 11 degrees. So Oswald, shooting from the sixth floor somehow lands a shot that enters the back and moves upward? The Select Committee in 1978-1979 tried to solve the problem by claiming the president was leaning forward. But the Zapruder film showed JFK sitting erect.
Agent O’Neill thought that the bullet that entered the back somehow came out the back. O’Neill and some of the doctors discussed the possibility that the bullet that hit the back was an “ice” or plastic bullet that dissolves after contact. There was no exit would, and this was the bullet that was supposed to hit Governor Connally. There was even talk of getting a metal detector to find the missing bullet.

The Magic Bullet
Autopsy notes show that the alleged exit would in the throat was higher than the supposed entry would in the back. How could that be? This magic bullet made seven wounds in two men and did not disintegrate. Another bullet, allegedly fired from the same gun, disintegrated in Kennedy’s head. John Connally maintained he was not hit by the same bullet that hit Kennedy. Nellie Connally saw Kennedy hit and then heard another shot that, she believed, hit her husband.

The Warren Commission, determined to prove the single bullet theory, solved the problem by showing the back wound as being in back of the neck. Gereald Ford corrected the final draft to eliminate the last reference to back wound, changing it to neck wound. The Magic Bullet theory depends on the bullet coming in there—at the base or bottom of the back of the neck and to the right of the spine. The hole in Kennedy’s jacket was five inches below the collar, and the shirt hole lined up a little more than 5 and a half below the collar . The diagram done by Lt. Commander J. Thornton Boswell shows the same thing. Admiral George G. Burkley, Kennedy’s physi C.I.A.n, said the bullet entered “between the third and fourth thortic vertebra.” The reports of the two F.B.I. men at the autoposy are consistent with these findings. The Dallas morti C.I.A.n, Thomas Evan Robinson, said the wound was five or six inches below the neck. If all these reports are true, the Warren report is wrong and the magic bullet did not strike Connally.

We know that the bullet did not enter at the base of the neck. If it entered where there was a hole in the back it could not have come even near the path that the Warren Commission suggested. It would have been anatomically impossible because cervical vertebrae intervene. Very simply the bullet entered too far down the back ( 5 ½) inches for it to come out the throat.

Some go a step farther, hypothesizing that JFK was hit four or more times from three directions. We will not go that far.

The official account states that Kennedy was hit by high velocity bullets fired from a high velocity weapon, and the Mannlicher–Carcano does not fall into that category. The weapon was not high velocity; but the weapon was not. This poses a problem.

Pierre Finck, then a lieutenant colonel and consultant at the Bathesda autopsy, later ridiculed the single or magic bullet theory saying there was more lead left in John Connally’s body that was missing from Exhibit 399, the Magic Bullet. One shell, that of Arlan Specter’s magical single bullet theory, passed through the president—hung in midair for a second—then went through the front seat of the car and into Governor John Connelly’s back., and then into his wrist, shattering a bone. It left behind bullet freagments that were picked up on x-rays. This bullet was found in pristine condition on a stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital. At one time, some thought the bullet was planted on the stretcher. Now it is said it may not be the same bullet that was found there. The two secret service agents who were given the bullet later were unable to state definitely that Exhibit 399 was the one they found. Further digging revealed that the claim that they thought it similar to the one they were given was not true. Moreover, the agent who was said to have heard one of them say it was similar has denied ever interviewing the subject or hearing any such thing. A written report states they could not identify it. O.P. Wright, one of two men who received the bullet , was to state that a picture of #399 was not the bullet he found. He was to become Deputy Chief of Police and it can be assumed he had learned to distinguish one bullet from another.

Three co-workers at the Texas School Book Depository gave evidence that they saw Oswald in the first floor lunch room withing minutes before and after the shooting. They changed their testimony after visits from the F.B.I.

The Bathesda radiologist insisted that the bullet had to exit from behind. Two of the Bathesda doctors said they were forbidden to probe the neck wound, and they refused to answer some questions before Congress. They were still in the Navy and were probably under orders. In 1968, a panel appointeed my Ramsay Clark believed the head wound came from behind. The Clark panel also raised the location of the wound. This made the would more consistent with the single shooter theory.
One of the Bathesda doctors found a second wound in the head, which he first called a punctore and then a laceration. There is no way to check this out as the relevant photos were stolen from a House of Representative safe in 1978. The Dallas mortitcian also spoke of a second head wound , a small one in the right temple. This could have been the entry wound for the projectile that caused the big blow out.
None of the people at Bathesda recall photographs being taken of the president’s head wound, and they do recall other pictures that are now lost, along with the president’s brain. But the most puzzling problem is that there are now pictures of Kennedy’s skull that are thought to conflict with what people originally saw. From the beginning, of course, the Parkland doctor impressions of what they saw were sharply at variance with what the Bathesda doctors insisted was true.

The problem comes when their testimony is compared with the photographs and X-Rays taken at Bathesda. Most of the doctors involved agreed that the main head would was on the right, and the Zapruder film shows this. One of the Parkland physi C.I.A.ns thought it was on the right and made a drawing that day. None of the Parkland evidence was consistent the hypothesis that the shooter was behind and well above the president. Later, there was much confusion as to whether two of the Parkland physi C.I.A.ns changed their views to fit the Bathesda photographs and X Rays that showed the wound being much higher than they found it.

Sometimes the analysis of the photos and the recollections of the doctors involved suggests there were two different sets of photographs. There is also evidence that Kennedy’s body was brought into Bathesda in a simple casket and body bag before a ceremonial casket was brought in the front door. Witnesses noted that the president was not wrapped in a cloth or “additional wrapping” as he was at Dallas. Two F.B.I. agents, James Sibert and Francis O'Neill, at Bathesda later said the head was now rapped in a nother cloth that was soaked in blood. It was apparent that there had been ‘surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull." Former Warren Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler wrote a memorandum on this for Robert Kennedy, the president, and the commission members.

Several Bathesda personnel thought the body in the ordinary coffin was being brought from Walter Reed. Perhaps the body went from the airfield to Walter Reed to Bathesda, but this contradicts the official account. David Lifton, usually a good researcher, thinks the body was altered somewhere between Parkland and Bathesda because it was important that it not appear that JFK was hit from the front.

There is also a question of who took the pictures. The records do not show Lt. William Pitzer being present at the autopsy, but several said he was there filming. However, he never claimed to be actually in the room, and his name was not listed among those present.

Pitzer was working that night, but we don’t know where. It is true that he was often at Walter Reed, doing medical photography. Lt. Commander Pitzer later showed Dennis David, an assistant, motion picture film and color slides of Kennedy’s body that made it clear that JFK’s head was shot from the front. It is known now that there was a closed circuit television system in the NNMC morgue, and that tape could have been put onto motion picture film. Pitzer had done that on other occasions.

In any case, he committed suicide at Bathesda on October 29, 1966. His death took place at the same time that the Kennnedy family agreed to give the National Archives the records of the autopsy. His family has never been given the autoposy result or any other material on his death. For some reason, his left hand was somangled they could not give his wife his wedding ring. Though left handed, he had the gun in his right hand. There prints on the gun “are not identical with the finger and palm prints of victim Pitzer.”

Later, a Dr. David W. Mantik, a physics Ph.D. and radiation oncologist, thought there were two wounds in the head—one coming from the front and one from the back. Mantik studied the X Rays and suggested that a patch had been added to the right cranial picture to reduce the size of the blow-out. He believed there were separate wonnds in the back and throat, making four shots. If the Zapruider film is correct, the shot to the back of the head must have come from a slightly upward trajectory, thus it did not come from above where Oswald was.

Dr. Robert B. Livingston, a prominent expert on the head, insists that the X Rays now claimed to be of JFK’s head cannot be images of the slain president.

If Kennedy was shot twice in the head, it is likely it occurred when his limo pulled to the left and stopped for about two seconds. Some think it only slowed down. Either move was in contravention of official policy. The accepted version of the film shows the stop so sudden that the occupants were jolted forward. Those who study the Zapruder film closely believe this is what happened and point to the fact that driver William Greer’s two head turned faster than is humanly possible. Studies, using a tennis pro, indicate that Greer’s head turned twice as fast as humanly possible. That is to say a few frames must have been removed. There has also been a study of Frame 323, which must have been sloppily recreated because it includes a lamppost and sign that actually belong on another frame.

Geer’s stopping the car makes little sense, but much that the Secret Service did in connection with the event accords with common reasoning. Manhole covers were not welded down. And two agents was left behind at Dove Field. They would have been covering the rear of the vehicle. Motorcycle police were kept away from the front of the vehicle being told to go farther forward than the rear wheels. The 112th Military Intelligence unit was told to stand down. And of course, there is the matter of a route that was not secure and included the long slow turn that was an assassin’s delight. But there is no evidence that any of this was anything more than coincidental, even in view of the two known attempts planned for Chicago and Tampa.

The Death of John F. Kennedy: Was It a Communist Plot?

Mrs. Dorothy Gravitis was a Latvian who was teaching Ruth Paine Russian. Mrs. Gravitis distanced herself rom Marina Oswald after Marina said that Lee was in the process of becoming a member of the Communist party. She used a Russian term that meant he was in a phase in which he had to do somethingto prove himself. There is no way of knowing if Marina was just bragging, of Lee was gaming the Soviets, or if it was an accurate statement.

We know that Colonel Philip J. Corso of Army Intelligence was busily spreading the word that Oswald was tied to a communist ring within the C.I.A.. Corso had been involved in a number of black operations and was active in Operation Paperclip, bringing Nazi scientists to the US. Was Corso spreading this rumor on behalf of Army Intelligence or on behalf of the ultra-right Shickschinny Knights of Malta. He as a active member oif this group which was dominated by White Russians. Of course, White Russians pop up time and again in this asdsassination story. These people were tied to the partty of the intelligence community that was to the right of the C.I.A.. They had a more favorable view of the F.B.I. than the C.I.A., which was tied to big oil and its dreams of global power. Their allies were dissident generals who disliked civilian control and independent oil men like H.L. Hunt. Like their hero J.Edgar Hoover, they represented an Americanized form of fascism.

Mahai Pacepa, head of the Rumanian intelligence service, defected to the United States in 1978 and wrote that Oswald was working for the Cubans. His account also suggests tht the communists had something to do with Ruby’s death, three years after the death of Oswald.

There is thin evidence that Luis Angel Castillo could have been a shooter. He was arrested in 1967 in a failed plot to kill the President of the Philippines and told authorities that he had been involved in an assassination in the United States four years before. He told Philippine authorities that he was one of 14 sent to the US by Castro to kill Kennedy. He sometimes went into some sort of hypnotic trance and rambled a great deal. His employer was a John Dolf, who hypnotized him and put him on the second floor of a building with a rifle. But Kennedy wa shot by someone else in the operation. A cable from the US embassy in Manila indicates the State Department considered him unbalanced. Later, he said he worked for the C.I.A. in the Bay of Pigs invasion. . It is not known if he was sent to the US for questioning. He returned to Chicago in 11968 and seems to have disappeared. As a youngster, he did time in a New Jersey reformatory for burgulary. In 1996, Robert Stephen Lipka, a captured Soviet spy who had worked at NSA, said that he saw a document at the NSA identifying one of Kennedy’s assassins and said it was Castillo.

One of the most prominent Russian defector, Yuri Nosenko, insisted that Oswald was a double agent, working for the Soviets. Richard Helms told Congress this was a good possibility.

We have known for some time, that Kennedy had opened back channel negotiations with General Fabian Escalante, head of Cuba’s G-2 intelligence service to normalize relations with Cuba. Then, as now, he was close to Fidel Castro. At the 1995 Nassau conference, the Cuban delegation believed that the US military had a role in Kennedy’s death because they objected to normalization of relations.

The Death of JFK: The HSCA

The HSCA
The House Select Committee on Assassinations half-heartedly looked into the assassination in the seventies. It had few inv estigators, and their travel was severely hemmed in.

For some reason, Congressional supporters of the Pentagon forced the ouster of the first counsel, Richard Sprague. It was also known that the Army was in charge of the Kennedy autopsy and there is a great deal of evidence that it was , at the least, badly botched. He also thought the C.I.A. could be involved and that events in New Orleans were central to the assassination.

A re-examination of physical evidence was a disaster. It turned out that Kennedy’s brain had been lost . A comparison of what the doctors in Texas and others there saw with the official autopsy leads to the conclusion that somethings were changed on photographs and that the head wound was changed so it would appear that the bullet came from the back.

Much information had been lost, including tissue samples, and serious questions have been raised about the x-rays and photographs that have been purported to be those of the dead Kennedy. It also told that one doctor did not dissect the neck because he was ordered not to do so.

The investigation was hampered by many things—bickering over the hiring of staff, much time spent on writing operational procedures and working out delicate relationships with government agencies, and the purge of many staffers to save money at a crucial time.

In the end, the committee decided that more people than Oswald were involved but it failed to put key witnesses to this fact on the stand. It also decided that at least four shots were fired. The holes in the back of Kennedy’s shirt and coat made the single shooter and magic bullet theories untenable. It found strong evidence that the F.B.I. knew in 1963 that information that Lee Harvey Oswald had telephoned and visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City was very doubtful. Yet the committee fudged its conclusion on this and did not pursue the matter. Studying what went on in the committee led many connected to it to wonder if those who led it really wanted to learn what had happened on November 22. An investigation conducted by the Attorney General of Texas, Waggoner Carr, was to show that Oswald was also acting as an F.B.I. informer since 1962.

The committee wasted a great deal of time running down a red herring offered by Clare Booth Luce. The source of her information soon shot himself. She turned out to be an officer of the Retired Intelligence Officers Association. After November 22, Mrs. Marina Oswald broke off ties with her friend Ruth Paine on the advice of the Secret Service. They told her that Mrs. Paine was’sympathizing with the C.I.A..” Her husband Michael Paine worked at Bell Aircraft, a Defense Department contractor. He worked for General Walter Dornberger, an alleged Nazi war criminal who was head of research and development. Mr. Paine took Lee Harvey Oswald to a meeting with General Edwin Walker. Walker had been removed from the Army by Kennedy because he was indoctrinating soldiers with German Bund doctrines.

The possible involvement of Cuban exiles was only traced around the periphery. Rolando Otero told an investigator that he had repeatedly heard that the C.I.A. was involved and that about 30 C.I.A. personnel were in Dallas that day. He was soon shipped off to prison with a forty year sentence. The chief witness against him was Ricardo “the Monley” Morales, a C.I.A. hit man. A Treasury man from Minnesota came into Miami to instruct other witnesses, who had been rounded up and taken to a safe house, in what they should say in court. The committee investigator traced Otero’s two sources, “Carlos” and “Ten-One,” but he was forbidden to look closely into their backgrounds or what they were doing in the mid-1970s.

Fabian Escalante, probably a Cuban government asset, claims that Antonio Cuesta, while being held by the Cubans, confessed to being involved in the assassination. He named three others who were part of the Forty: Eladio Del Valle, Rolando Masferrer and Hermino Diaz Garcia. John Martino confessed to a Miami Newsday reporter that he had been involved in the logistics of the assassination, mainly making payments. He thought two Cubans were directly involved, one being Garcia

The other was Virgilio Gonzalez, who was also connected with the Forty. Florence Martino , wife of John, said her husband told her on the morning of November 22 that Kennedy would die that day. Martino also said before his death in 1975 that he had spread false stories about Oswald being the shooter and that he himself was involved as a facilitator, which included delivering money. Martino was close to William Pawley and they involved together in an anti-Castro effort called “Operation Tilt.” Fred Claasen told the House Committee that Oswald thought he was working for the Cubans. He was to meet a contact at the Texas Theater and helped to leave the country, but he made a mistake shooting the policeman. Ruby had to eliminate Oswald.

The Death of JFK: The New Orleans Connection

Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who was deeply involved in US operations concerning Cube believed that the assassination was the work of “That gang down there,” Guy Banister, David Ferrie, Barry Seal and others. Later District Attorney Jim Garrison explored the same theory.

The late Jim Garrison had much to say about Oswald’s connection to New Orleans. Whether he was right about Clay Shaw being Oswald’s controller will never be known. Oswald had a small office in the office suite of detective Guy Bannister (d 1964). Bannister owned the building that housed Division Five of the F.B.I. and the Free Cuba Committee. He was involved in virtually every anti-Communist organization and was a Minutemen coordinator. A former F.B.I. special agent, he had done many things including telexing a number of reports on UFO sightings to the bureau’s Security Matter-X file—perhaps the origin of the term “X Files?” Oswald knew Bannister well, but the Warren Commission never interviewed him. Bannister was a former F.B.I. agent and an ONI operative and a member of the John Birch Society. Oddly enough, C.I.A. scientist Michael Riconosciuto had built some listening devices for the detective agency. Riconosciuto and Bannister had a mutual interest in cancer research, and David Ferrie said he thougfht Judyth Baker would soon coolaberate with Bannister in his anti-cancer efforts. Bannister’s Bannister’s widow said their basement had a n supply of “Hands Off Cuba” literature.

There are so many loose ends and contradictory evidence involving the role of New Orleans that a clear picture likely will not emerge. One of the first puzzles is that so many people in gangsterland and among Cuban exiles predicted the assass ination in advance. During a conversation in Homer Echevarria predicted there would be an assassination. He had worked for CJ Simpson de Cuba. The Secret Service in Chicago pursued the matter and tried prepared to place someone in the Cuban group connected to Echevarria. That effort was almost immediately shut down when the F.B.I. took control of the assassination investigation. Had a mole been successful, there would have been information about the cabal's ties to a paramilitary camp near Lake Pontchartrain and to Oswald's ties to it.

Some of the evidence tangles seem to have been placed there to discourage careful investigation. Two of them involved the four Bowens who seem to have been connected and all the information about the strange David Ferrie, a key New Orleans figure.. A former Eastern Airlines pilot, he once built two miniature submarines used to infiltrate people into Cuba. He spoke fluent Italian and Greek and had been an agent since the Second Waorld War, sometimes working for front Southern Air Transport and an oil company in South America. He flew weapons to support Castro before the Castro took over, as did other C.I.A. contract pilots, and then assisted the opposition after the take-over.

Ferrie and other C.I.A. contract pilots had moved arms to Castro and then to Castro’s opponents, and mob people helped them and were doing the same. There is an F.B.I. document on C.I.A. pilot William Robert Plumlee that proves that the C.I.A. was assisting Castro. The operation was known as M-26-7. Earl Smith, US ambassador to Cuba then and a Batista friend, was to write that the C.I.A. and the State Department helped bring Castro to power. John F. Kennedy had an extended affair with the ambassador’s wife, Florence Prichett, and even visited Cuba six times to be with her. It continued into his presidency.

For reasons that are very unclear, C.I.A. pilots and mob people were assisting Castro for a time in 1957 and 1958. Castro was getting money from former Cuban President Carlos Prio , who in turn got funds from the C.I.A. and Meyer Lansky.All this changed when Castro took power. In 1956, 1957, and 1958, the C.I.A. and the mob was moving weapons to Castro. One center of operations was the CL Simpson de Cuba Drilling Company, which had three rigs in Cuba. The Americans eventually concluded they were wrong to bet on Castro. In March, 1959, the State Department clamped an arms embargo on Cuba, which deprived Batista of weapons coming through legitimate channels.

Mob guys like Jack Ruby were moving weapons into Cuba to assist the anti-Castro people. It is clear that the mob people and the C.I.A. contract operators knew each other; they were all in the same business. Ferrie was involved in the arms trade, and was involved in raiding a munitions depot at the Schlumberger plant in Houma , Louisiana in 1961. When Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested on November 22, 1962, they found Ferrie library card on Oswald. Oswald and Ferrie were often together in 1963, and six witnesses saw them together with Clay Shaw in Clinton, Louisiana.

Ferrie was a Captain in the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol, where Barry Seal and Lee Harvey Oswald had served under him. He was a brilliant man with a photographic memory and many interests, including boys. Ferrie spoke fluent Italian and Greek and was involved in arms dealing. In 1942, at age 23, he went to Latin America to work in oil drilling. He was most likely an OSS agent gathering intelligence upon oil resources and the Germans' interest in tapping into them. A former NSA agent said Ferrie worked for the C.I.A. in Latin America after it was formed. Ferrie experimented with cancer cures, injecting cancer into mice, and was an accomplished hypnotist. Some find significance in the fact that Ferrie, a successful hypnotist, was in the company of Jack Ruby near the time of the assassination. For that matter, hypnotist Billie Del Mar was performing at the club then.

There was a great effort to claim that the three men did not know one another, but now there are photographs and other evidence to establish their ties, Seal quickly followed Ferrie into intelligence work. By the time he was 18, he owned two airplanes. He was first fly weapons into Cuba for Castro and then flew weapons to opponents of Castro. In both capacities, he was working for the C.I.A., which played both sides of the street in the beginning. There have also been many efforts to claim Oswald had no ties to intelligence work, but Senator Richard Schweiker, a Republican, had it right when he said, “Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence.” Edward Voebel, another member of the the patrol group trained by Ferrie spent 1963 in Mexico City. Seal, Ferrie, and Oswald were also there at times. Voebel was to die at age 31 in 1971.

David Ferrie and Guy Banister's names continually turn up in any discussion of efforts to aid the anti-Castro rebels. Gerald Patrick Hemmings, a sometime C.I.A. contact operative or agent, said that Banister asked him to assassinate John F. Jennedy. Ferrie and cigar chomping Banister were probably being paid then by the US government, which wanted the arms sent to two French colonies in the Carribean, where they would be used to frustrate rebellions. At about that time, he told the New Orleans chapter of Military Order of World Wars that someone should shoot Kennedy.

Banister is another key figure in New Orleans. Aa former ONI man, he had been a major force in assembling people and supplies for the Bay of Pigs invasion and what there was of the Provisional Government of Cuba operated out of his 544 Camp Street office in New Orleans. He worked closely with Mannie Gambino, newpew of Carl Gambino and Murray Kessler, a Gambino family member. He was also a major force in the right-wing minute men, and he employed at one time or, a number of men who were active in fighting Castro. E. Howard Hunt also established his Cuban Revolutionary Council office in that building.

Kessler had quite a rap sheet including interstate theft, conspiracy to possess heroin, and bookmaking. He was often a guest at Richmond Harper’s ranch. Harper had toes to Herman Beebe, a Carlos Marcello operative, who had close ties to the Nixon White House. Beebe ran Palmer National Bank in Washington, and had many connections to people in the White House. Later, in the 1980s, Beebe was Associated with “burning out” 13 Texas savings and loans.

In 1967, according to Victor Marchetti, Richard Helms told other C.I.A. agents that Clay Shaw and Ferrie should be protected against the investigation of New Orleans DA Jim Garrison. According to Robert Morrow, he gave Ferrie two 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano rifles before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Morrow probably thought the guns would be used in some way in the effort to off Castro. A Chicago mail order firm said it sold Oswald the weapon.

Garry Patrick Hemming had handled the rifle the week before and told Oswald he wanted to purchase it. He offered twice its value. Oswald brought the disassembled weapon to work and stashed it on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Those who do not believe Oswald fired any of the shots hypothesize that Hemming could have asked him to bring the gun to work to be picked up. It has been established that Hemmings was in Miami that day.

Richard E. Sprague theorizes that the planning for the assassination of John F. Kennedy began in New Orleans among Cuban exiles and people who were C.I.A. assets. They were angry that Kennedy was not planning another invasion of Cuba. The discussions soon shifted to Mexico City in the apartment of Guy Gabaldin who was either a C.I.A. agent, or more likely an asset. Lee Harvey Oswald attended these meetings, probably as an F.B.I. informer. He had been working for the F.B.I. since mid-1962. Through Gabaldin, contact was made with the agency. It is believed that E. Howard Hunt was acting station chief there, though he testified that he was not in Mexico City at the time. However, there is evidence that he was at least from time to time and stayed in an anti-Castro safe house. Central to the operation were William Seymout, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw, all of whom were tied to the agency’s directorate for plans. Those who take this approach assume that the assassination did not have the support of the entire agency. We know that James Jesus Angleton had George De Mohrenschildt’s mail intercepted after the assassination and that the latter was certain he was being watched. This might suggest that the assassination could have had rogue C.I.A. involvement.

David Ferrie was a C.I.A. contract pilot and private investigator who was also involved in moving drugs and guns, perhaps sometimes on his own. At one time Barry Adler Seal was on his payroll, but Seal eventually became a major figure in moving drugs for the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s. In the period before the Bay of Pigs, Ferrie was being paid by Double-Check Corp. of Miami, a C.I.A. front. He also trained pilots for Castro's opponents, the Cuban Revolutionary Front. Ferrie also knew Lee Harvey Oswald. In the fall of 1963, Ferrie flew Clay Shaw to Montreal and to Cuba. On an April 8, 1963 flight plan, dug out by by the House Select Assassinations Committee, for a trip to Garland Texas, his passengers bore known aliases for Oswald ( Hidell) and Shaw (Lambert) In 1965, he was managing a small fleet of planes out of the C.I.A.'s FBO (fixed base of operations) at the New Orleans airport. .

In 1969, a judge forbade Jim Garrison from revealing evidence that Oswald and Ferrie knew each other. In 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations showed that they were in contact in 1963. In 1993 Gerald Posner insisted they did not know each others when Oswald was in the Civil Air Patrol, but PBS Front Line later found photographs of them together at that time. So much was done to discredit Garrison and shutr down his investigation, that one is compelled to wonder if he had some of it right. On September 26, 19699 a plane crashed on take-off outside Clinton, Louisiana. It was piloted by Jerry Sylvester, who had just spoken with Garrison investigators. He and his passenger were killed. Sylvester would have been able to shed light on many things, including the possible involvement of the Louisiana teamsters.
Ferrie grew up in Cleveland, attended St. Ignatius High School, studied for the priesthood in Carthegena, Ohio, and then attended Baldwin- Wallace College. He taught aviation at St. Benedict High School, before being fired for taking boys to a house of ill fame. He met Lee Harvey Oswald in 1955, when Oswald joined his Cadet Squadron in New Orleans. In August, 1961, he lost two squadrons because of his problems with ephebophilia. He worked as a private investigator trying to gather evidence to block the deportation of Carlos Marcello, a Mafia leader and he was also an of detective Guy Banister.

The role of David Ferrie is unclear in all this. David Ferrie had known Oswald from their Civil Air Patrol Days, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations established that Oswald contacted Ferrie in New Orleans. Another was Barry Seal, later of C.I.A. drug trafficking fame. David lost most of his hair and wore false eyebrows and a red toupe. He flew bombing runs over Cuba in 1961 and took great chances to land and evacuate freedom fighters. He turned into a Kennedy hater after the Bay of Pigs disaster.

Jack Martin, a Ferrie friend, speculated that Ferrie could have hypnotized Oswald in some way. Ferrie had a substantial library on hypnotism, and the C.I.A. later admitted that it had experimented with mind control, MKUltra. Ferrie was seen with Jack Ruby before the assassination, and a hypnotist was performing at the clum at the time.

Ferrie was also connected to private investigator Guy Banister, who was in the Office of Naval Intelligence and had long been an F.B.I. agent and police official . When a SAC on the West Coast, he was one of the fewofficials to seriously look into Flying Saucer stories. Banister had also been cleared for the C.I.A.’s project QK/Enchant—whatever that was. Banister’s Camp Street office in New Orleans was at least a mail drop for Oswald, and some say Oswald worked for Banister Jack Martin, a drunk with severe mental problems, was an investigator for Banister. Thomas Jude Baumler, a lawyer and admitted fascist, worked there briefly and later worked briefly for District Attorney Jim Garrison. A Thomas Beckham and Carl Stanley also hung out there. Beckham was bishop of the Universal Life Church and Stanley, who had a long rap sheet for many things including mailing pornography and was a bishop of a schismatic Old Catholic sect.

Ferrie was in contact with an old Catholic bishop in Toronto, who denies any ties to Ferrie or New Orleans. However, Toronto police provered he was in New Orleans in 1963. Martin’s real name was Edward Stewart Suggs and worked as a back alley abortionist in Houston. He liked to pass himself off as an F.B.I. or C.I.A. agent. Whatever he was, he was able to get F.B.I. files on candidates for the old catholic priesthood long after November 22, 1963. Martin and Ferrie were both into medical experimentation (especially for cancer), hypnosis, chiropracticm, and homeopathy. Ferrie maintained a cancer laboratory on Louisiana Avenue. After the assassination, Stanley went to the F.B.I. and said that Ferrie and Jack Martin were involved. At that time, Martin told authorities that Ferrie was involved. Martin thought Ferrie hypnotized Oswald into acting against Kennedy. Later, in 1966 when DA Jim Garrison began looking into the matter, Ferrie and Baumler joined in the mutual finger-pointing. Oddly, Ferrie, Martin, Beckham, Broshears ( a hanger-on) and Baumler were all ordeained into the American Orthodox Catholic Church, of which Carl Stanley had become a bishop

Ferrie clearly knew Oswald, but his role in the assassination is unclear. With he and his associates pointing fingers at one another, it could all be an elaborate disinformation effort. Or Perhaps they were. Ferrie had been introduced at a civic club meeting as one of the Bay of Pigs pilots. One investigator claimed Ferrie drove to Texas to serve as a get-away pilot. Ferrie admitted the trip to Texas but said he went ice skating in Houston. Eladio del Valle, a former Cuban Congressman, who had funded anti-Castro activities soon turned up dead, tortured with an axe and shot in the head. Ferrie claimed to he a hypnotist and psychotherapist, and there are reports that he weas indeed a capable hypnotist.

David Ferrie, a Garrison target, admitted he was a C.I.A. agent and implicated Clay Shaw. He died one day before Shaw was arrested. Carl Stanley died of an apparent heart attack and subsequently became’ “saint Christopher Maria” in their strange church.. Ferrie’s Cuban friend, Eladio del Valle was murdered the same day that Ferrie died. Seven days after the arrest.


Clay Shaw ran the New Orleans International Trade Mart which was started by local investors. He was involved as a director of Centro Mondiale Commer C.I.A.le (CMC) which was formed in Montreal and moved to Rome. It was supposed to be a trading organization, and was comprised of former Italian fascists, right wing elements, C.I.A. and Defense Department people , and representatives of the European paramilitary right. Ferenc Nagy, a former Hungarian premier and Nazi puppet, was a director and was tied to the C.I.A. and the Miami Cuban colony. He was also the asset of famed agent Frank Wisner. At one time he was president of Permindex, an entioty backed by the CIA. Nagy also provided money for the Secret Army Organization, which was to attempt the assassination of Charles De Gaulle. Giorgio Mantello was Nagy’s partner in Permindex. Mantello used the name “George Mandel’ because he was a war criminal, having traded in Jewish refugees.

This organization funneled money into European elections. Nagy was seen on the grassy knoll in Dallas on November 22, 1963, closing his umbrella as John Kennedy’s limousine went by.Delphine Roberts said in New Orleans that she say Nagy in Guy Banister’s office.

CMC was closely tied to Permindex, a Swiss trading corporation. And was essentially a union of fierce anti-Communist elements. A major stockholder was Geneva’s Banque De Credit International , whose founder by Tibor Rosenbaum. The bank was a Mossad front, and Rosenbaumpurchased arms on behalf o f the Mossad. This bank was the chief launderer for Meyer Lansky, an American gangster. Joseph Bonano, another gangster was also tied to Permindex. Tied to Permindex were the Free Cuba Committee, H.L. Hunt and the American Council of Christian Churches, and east European Solidarists. Major Louis Bloomfield of Montreal, who was also involved in CMC, was a leading figure. He was a highly decorated a former OSS officer and leading Zionist, one time Haganah soldier. From 1947 to 1970, he did contract work for the C.I.A. and State Department and was tied to Division Five of the F.B.I. He was a friend of J. Edgar Hoover. He was also closely tied to the very wealthy Bronfmans, allegedly Canada’s leading crime family.

Using Permindex, he managed the business affairs for members of a Corsican assassin ring. Max Hagerman, editor of a West German Neo-Nazi magazine, does administrative work for Permindex.

Permindex was mainly financed by oil companies and Halliburton. The petrolium firms had reason dislike Kennedy because he supported, but had not sponsored, legislation to reduce the oil depletion allowance. Texas oil men, like Hunt, could not have been happy with Kennedy’s effort to bring Texas off shore leases under federal control. One of the oil companies was owned by H.L. Hunt. George and Herman Brown of Brown and Root also invested in Permindex. Also involved were attorney Roy Cohn and former German General Walter Dohrnberger.

Cohn was a close friend of J. Edgar Hoover and H.L. Hunt and Cohn and Hoover seemed to defer to Lewis Rosenstiel, head of the Schinley conglomerate and a major right wing leader. Schinley contributed to Permindex. It was also tied to NASA security division in Columbus Ohio and Muscle Shoales, Alabama. Permindex and CMC most likely enjoyed profits from bringing heroin from the Golden Triangle to Europe, and it is likely that they worked with a number of intelligence services in this activity. British Far Eastern shipping and drug magnates were also involved. It was also involved in casinos and hotels in the Carribean and Europe . It worked closely with New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello, whose fleet of planes shared mechanics and pilots with Peermindex. David Ferrie was one shared employee. Marcello probably handled the sabotaging of the plane of Italian oil minister, Enrico Mattei. But the case officer for the project was Charles “Lucky” Lu C.I.A.no, who had long worked with Bloomfield and the British Secret Intelligence Service. After the death of John F. Kennedy, Marcello gave Ferrie a large Gulf gas station on Airline Highway, which was used as a C.I.A. cover. During the two weeks before the Kennedy assasination, Ferrie stayed at Churchill Farms, Marcello 's countryside estate. It was said he was there as part of Marcello's legal defense team. Perhaps that was because he had a phenomenal memory.

Contractors tied to the Defense Industrial Security Comman also contributed. The Defense Industrial Security Command was the creature of Division Five of the F.B.I. and the Defense Intelligence agency, but it also had ties to NASA and the AEC. The DISC was directly commanded by J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy, William Sullivan.Its nominal head was Lt. General Joseph Carroll, a former F.B.I. officer. Carroll’s liason to Robert F. Kennedy was Walter Sheridan, who later was employed by NBC to investigate Jim Garrison. Sheridan had headed the Kennedy Justice Department’s squad entrusted with nailing Jimmy Hoffa. The New Orleans DA believed the plot to kill JFK was run by the military industrial complex, not Texas oil men.

Some believe that the DISC created Permindex and that some of the entities connected to it, like the American Council of Christian Churches, the Solidarists, and the Free Cuba Committee were created by DISC. Former MI6 agent John Coleman has theorized that Permindex orchestrated the assassination, claiming they used an international squad that is used when all else fails.

Shaw was a director Permindex and Prince Gutierez de Spadafora was head of firm and a former subcabinet minister under Mussolini . On March 4, 1967 Paesa Sera reported that CMC was a C.I.A. creation. There is evidence that in gave information to the C.I.A. from 1948 to 1956 and that the C.I.A. paid for one of hjis trips in 1955. The Italian government in 1962 had expelled the Centro Mondiale Commer C.I.A.le and Permidex for engaging in subversive intelligence activity. Switzerland expelled them at the same time. Permidex financed the Secret ARMY organization, which opposed Charles De Gaulle’s efforts to give Algeria independence and attempted to assassinate the French president. After the attempt on De Gaulle’s life, CMC moved to South Africa to make it more difficult to be investigated. Some believe that its parent company was Permidex. In any event, the two were intertwined..The French president’s intelligence people traced the financing of the assassination to Permindex and CMC. De Gaulle thought Mossad was also involved, and it had to move its operations to the Netherlands and Belgium. Some believe Permindex has ties to the old Nazi spy network of Otto Skorzeny. He was Hitler’s bodyguard and the son-in-law of Hjalmar Schacht, the Fuehrer’s financial genius. Skorzeny also helped run ODESSA (Organization der Ehemalige SS. Angehorige) which spirited SS people out of Europe and estgablished “Internationale Fascista” in Madrid. It was in the same building that housed the Spanish Intelligence and the C.I.A.’s Madrid section.

Shaw was deeply involved in anti-Castro activities and gave one anti-Castro group free space in the International Trade Mart. In 1967, Shaw still had a secret clearance for Operation Qk/Enchant, but we know nothing about it other than that agent E. Howard Hunt was involved. At the time of Kennedy’s death, Shaw was visiting Monroe Sullivan, another person cleared for the mysterious Qk/Enchant. Newly released documents show he was involved in a secret project known as ZRCLIFF or ZR/Rifle, which was run byWilliam Harvey. Harvey also ran Staff D, which did secret assassinations. Jonathan Blackmer , an HSAC staffer wrote in a Septemner, 1977 memo, “ We have reason to believe Shaw was heavily involved in the anti-Castro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and possibly one of the high-level planners or 'cut out' to the planners of the assassination."

Shaw’s connections to Nazis and neo-Nazis iw fascinating. Helene van Damme , Reagan’s appointments secretary at the time, had ties to an intelligence network of former Nazis in the US. Garrison believed that businessman/intelligence operative Clay Shaw masterminded the assassination. Shaw’s address book had the names of pro-Nazi European royalty and people in the Bildberg Group. Garrison seems to have been correct on many of the details, and Shaw clearly new some of the people who had involvement. There is no evidence that he masterminded the event. His exact role is unclear to this writer, who suspects he may have been involved in arranging a back-up escape route for the shooters. But this is only an educated conjecture.

The importation of former Nazis into the United states has received some attention insofar as it involved scientists, mind control experimenters, and intelligence agents. However, other former Nazis were admitted who seemed to play small roles in assisting in intelligence operations and in elections. Between 1948 and 1950, the Displaced Persons Commission arranged for almost half a million Europeans to come to the United States. At first Nazis and their collaborators were barred, but in 1950 members of the Baltic Legion ( or Baltic Waffen SS) were taken off the barred list. This was the beginning of the process of admitting many former Nazis who possessed no scientific or military talents. The C.I.A. subsidized the migration of many of these people in order to build a strong anti-communist bloc to offset the American left. The Republican Party formed an Ethnic Division , which became the Heritage Groups Council in 1969, to harvest this support.

This Council focused on the far right ethnic groups rather than mainstream white ethnics. After a Reagan rally, Nicholas Nazarenko, an SS Cossack officer who later worked for US Army Military Intelligence, showed people many Nazi mementos and told how former colleagues in the US , members of “Nazi organizations,”often greeted him with a “Heil Hitler.” Many of the eastern European groups in the Heritage Groups Council have roots that go back to entities and militias established by the SS during World War II. In 1988, these groups rounded up 86,000 aging volunteers for the George H.W. Bush campaign. Some of their leaders had to leave the campaign when their sordid backgrounds were revealed. One was Father Florian Galdau , formerly of the Iron Guard, who claimed he helped the C.I.A. bring 15,000 pro-Nazi Romanians to the US. Some of these exchange programs still exist, and, as is well known, terrorist Mohammed Atta came to the US through a program the State Department and the German Ministry of Cooperation and Dcevelopment operate. Atta, as the Research of Daniel Hopsicker shows, was very close to the Germans who were connected to the Venice, Florida aviation scene. The small airport there had been the secne of C.I.A. activities since 1959. Atta, as a German student was shy and timid, and uncomfortable around women. His friends refrained from sw2earing around him. He reported his passport stolen in 1999. In America, he was out-going, profane, a drinkier, and a ladies man. Amanda Keller, a stripper and sometime girlfriend of Atta, said he referred to them as his “brothers.” One was Wolfgang Bohringer, a member of a neo-Nazi group called the Flying Club of Munich.

It is known that Clay Bertrand ( Shaw ) contacted New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews on November 23, 1963 in an effort to obtain legal representation for Lee Harvey Oswald. Earlier, Clay Bertrand asked Andrews to help Oswald with some of his wife’s citizenship problems. According to Andrews’s Warren Commission testimony, Oswald once brought two gay Mexican young men to him, seeking legal help with immogration issues. Andrews avoided saying Bertrand was Shaw and gave different estimates of the man’s height. It was later established that Betrand was most likely Shaw. Andrews evidence is useful because he said Shaw talked to him about Oswald. However, some think that the Oswald he actually met was William Seymour, who many have been going about impersonating Oswald. Seymour is found in the famous photograph of the 40 Committee that was taken in a Mexico City night club. For example it could have been Seymour using Oswald’s name at a target range. This Seymour was seen running from the assassination scene and getting into a car driven by another man. Hew was well known as an employee of Guy Banister and as a recruiter of C.I.A. pilots in New Orleans.

The Warren Commission Report noted that Lee Harvey Oswald entered Mexico on a Red Arrow bus at Laredo, Texas on September 26, 1963. Sitting next to Oswald on the bus was Albert Osborne, alias John Howard Bowen. Six witnesses said he and Oswald were companions that day. On October 10, 1963 he was seen in both the offices of Clay Shaw and Guy Bannister. He was next seen in Mexico City on September 17 or 18.

Since 1934, this man , Albert Bowen-Osborne, a missionary for the American Council of Christian Churches ( of which he was a charter member), had been running a school for marksmen or assassins in his orphanage in Oaxaca, Mexico. Born in Grimsby, England or Chester , PA (?), he was ordained a minister in Trenton in 1916. He was in Knoxville working for a boys club for a number of years and was fired for homosexual activities with his charges. He then became a “ a missionary” in Mexico and elsewhere. F.B.I. kept reports on him going back to 1942, when he organized a Nazi group called the Campfire Council in Tennessee. He claimed to travel the world as a missionary, but there are no records of his travels and his means of making a living are not known. He opposed the US going to war with Nazi Germany, and his young people were taught to stomp on the American flag. At any one time, there were about twenty riflemen at his Oaxaca mission. Division Five of the F.B.I. had funneled money to Oaxaca through the American Council of Christian Churches. That organization was formed in 1941 by Rev. Dr. Carl Mc Intyre, an F.B.I. asset and friend of J. Edgar Hoover. In 1952, two of his men, Mario (El Turko) Sapet and Alfredo Cervantes, accepted a private contract to kill Judge Jake Floyd in Alice, Texas. They mistakenly killed the judge’s 19 year-old son Buddy. One of the killers told Texas law enforcement that their colleagues had carried out murders all over North and South America as well as in Russia and Eastern Europe.

It was later shown that this Bowen had ties to Clay Shaw’s CMC and to division 5 of the F.B.I.. . Shaw was a former Army Major who fronted as a major businessman and has been clearly tied to the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Operations. During the war he spent time in Army Counter Intelligence. Shaw was probably also Colonel René Bertrand and Colonel Beaumont in the secret espionage organization (SDECE) of the Free French. In that capacity he would have known the Corsican Assassin, Christian David.

Richard Sprague, a well placed assassination investigator, thinks that one of the hit men was called “Frenchy” and that this man was also the Raoul that was seem with James Eararl Ray and who was seen with Ray.

There were three other Bowens possibly involved in the assassination. One was John Caesar Brossi, aka Jack Leslie Bowen. Grossi/Bowen did time and worked for a firm that provided maps for the Defense Department. Since 1961 he was in Fort Worth and knew Oswald, who wrote his name and address on his library card. This man disappeared after the assassination. The third was Martin Grassi, Fred Lee Crisman, Jr. or , Jack Bowen. Garrison received letters accusing this man of being involved. Later a Texas attorney connected this John Bowen to the mission assassin training academy and claimed that J. Edgar Hoover acquired assassins there. A Syrian immigrant, he had been tied to Osborne since the 1920 and he also claimed to be a missionary. He had been seen traveling with Osborne in 1963.

In the late 1970s the HSAC paid photo analysts to look over photographs from the assassination. They found Crisman posing as a tramp. Crisman had Associated with gypsies and may have been one. He was also a business partner of Thomas Beckham, an ordained Old Catholic priest , ordained by Jack Martin of Guy Banister’s Detective agency. The fourth possibility was Dave Ferrie. The F.B.I. picked him up after November 22 because they thought he might have been the Bowen on Oswald’s library card. The Old Catholic bishop in Toronto used that name and had ties with the circle on Camp Street. Some think Ferrie and the Toronto Bowen were the same person but that seems doubtful. The JFK assassination is riddled with dozens of confusing evidence tangles like this. It is as though someone wanted confusion to reign supreme.

Ferrie would accuse Clay Shaw of being involved in the Kennedy Assassination. Shaw, a bisexual went by the name “Clay Bertrand” in the New Orleans gay community. Victor Marchetti, former assistant director of the C.I.A., acknowledged that Shaw was Bertrand. Richard Helms testified under oath that Shaw was sometimes a source for the C.I.A.’s Domestic Contacts Division. In 1978, the House and Senate Committee on Assasinations established that Ferrie were seen together in New Orleans bars, at an airport, and at Jackson and Clinton, Louisiana. Ferrie had talked to people about killing Kennedy and blaming it on Fidel Castro. Garrison believed Ferrie could have been the get-away pilot in the plot.

Ferrie told his roommate Broshears that he thought Oswald was a patsy who thought he was working for Castro but was really being manipulated by anti-Castro people. Ferrie said there would be four shooters, aiming from different angles. In 1964 he added that one fired from a manhole cover, another from the grassy knoll, and another from behind the motorcade. Marcello funded the plot and Clay Shaw knew some of the details. Ferrie was in Houston on November 22, waiting to hear from one of the shooters. Witnesses thought the last shot sounded different, as though it was echoing in a tunnel or sewer. Kennedy rose up after that shot and the way his head was hit was consistent with the idea that he was hit from front and below.

David Ferrie died of a brain hemorrhage. While under protective custody before he could testify. On the same day, Eladio Cerefine de Valle, a Ferrie and Oswald , died of a split skull and gunshot wound. Then Dr. Mary Stults Sherman was found burned and stabbed in her apartment. She had worked with Ferrie on cancer research. Officer Paul Dyer died of a sudden case of cancer one month after interviewing Ferrie.

Garrison’s claim that there was someone impersonating Oswald seemed far-fetched at the time, but some have now gathered information to support the claim. Perhaps someone who was the second Oswald demonstrated expert marksman skills and drove a car at 80 miles, while there is evidence the real Oswald could not drive. There is a great deal of speculation on all this, with many loose ends and unanswered questions. The only thing that is clear is that another man claiming to be Oswald appeared in Mexico City before Oswald was there. They had tapes of the second Oswald calling Russian embassy and telling someone that he had talked to a man named Valeriy Kostilov, who was a consul and KGB. There wre subsequent claims that he called the Russian Embassy from the Cuban Embassy. An Oswald sent a letter from Irving Texas on November 12 to the Soviet Embassy in Washington about his meeting with Kostilov. Of course, all mail that went there was read first by US intelligence people. The Soviets said it was a forgery and noted it was typed, unlike other Oswald letters. Ruth Paine conveniently produced a handwritten draft of the letter attributed to the real Oswald. Six words spelled correctly in the draft are misspelled in the typed version. Maybe someone was trying to link Oswald to the KGB. Mrs. Paine was the daughter of a Trotskyite leader who hated soviet communists, and she shared his views. Marina Oswald lived with Paine for a time and Lee Oswald sometimes stayed there. Paine would not have let a communist in her home, and said someone told her Oswald was ok. Her sister was a C.I.A. employee, and the agency had considered using her father.

The white Russians, many of whom were US intelligence operatives, likewise would not have welcomed Oswald into their ranks if they thought he was a communist. Somehow they were sure they could trust him.

There are also mysterious claims that an Oswald visited the Soviet Embassy on September 28, but it was closed that day. It was also said that this man spoke very poor Russian, but Oswald was reasonably fluent. This same person visited the Cuban Embassy around that time. This matter deserves to be mentioned, but is so muddled that only the Oct 1 contact and tape will be discussed.

People at the F.B.I. station in Mexico City suspected this was a second person but had problems obtaining a picture of Oswald through Washington authorities from the Navy. A day after the assassination, the C.I.A. in Mexico City had the tapes flown to where F.B.I. agents listened to the tape and knew it was not Oswald. After that some were denying that the tape ever existed and others were saying it had been erased. In the official story the two Oswald became one even though it became clear days after the assassination that they were different people. Its just another of those coincidences Associated with the case . In April, 1964 two Warren Commission staffers listened to the tape in Mexico City of the man supposed to be Oswald. They were not told about the mix-up. Fourteen years later, the House Select Committee on Assassinations reported that the Warren Commission had never heard or received the tape.

Winston Scott was C.I.A. station chief in Mexico City then. He retired in 1969 and started a memoir about his days in the OSS, F.B.I. and C.I.A.. He died April 26, 1971, four days before he was to discuss the book with Richard Helms. According to his son, Michael, James Jesus Angleton took the manuscript as well as three cartons of files, including a copy of the tapes of Oswald’s voice. One C.I.A. source told him his father was murdered. The manuscript was eventually returned, with 150 pages missing. There was nothing about Winston’s life after 1947. The contents of Scott’s wife’s safe were destroyed in January 1986.

The C.I.A. told the Warren Commission that it had no interest in nor knowledge of Oswald before November 22 and that it did not know of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City until after Kennedy’s death. Both statements were lies. Scott revealed in his memoir that the C.I.A. knew of the visit and was interested in what Oswald was doing there. An agency loyalist, he did not add that other parts of the agency were also interested in Oswald and had not been very honest with Scott when he asked for information about Oswald, and received an answer on October 10, 1963. The cable demonstrated that there was a lot of interest in Oswald and that he had been kept out of the loop. The cable to Scott was edited by six different C.I.A. offices before it was sent.

Among those keeping trach of Oswald were James Jesus Angleton, head of counter-intelligence; David Atlee Phillips, who ran anti-Castro operations in this hemisphere; and deputy director for covert operations Tom Karamessines. George Joannides , who worked for Phillips, could have been involved. At the time he was working with anti-Castro Cubans. He was brought out of retirement to coordinate C.I.A. interaction with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and the agency has refused to reveal anything about his activities in 1963. Phillips was operating out of Mexico City at the time. Later in life, Phillips said that rogue C.I.A. agents probably killed JFK and Scott’s son agrees.

The Death of JFK: Oswald and Judyth Baker

Judyth Vary Baker, briefly Oswald’s lover and a C.I.A. contract scientist, appeared on The History Channel’s The Men Who Killed Kennedy ( 2003), claiming that Oswald knew that the oil men and some mafia figures were putting up money to help finance the assassination of Kennedy. She did not have the names of the oil men but was sure the Chicago and Louisiana mobs were involved as well as anti-Castro Cubans, and some in the C.I.A. and Secret Service. Oswald thought he was penetrating that ring to expose it. There was a terrible uproar over the documentary, and the History Channel promised to never show it again.

There is no question she worked at the Reily Coffee Company in New Orleans ( as a front) at the same time Oswald did. She was working on the “Project Freedom” aimed at creating a bioweapon cocktail to knock out Castro’s immune system and infect his with cancer. . The Warren Commission printed a photograph of Baker and Oswald standing together, and one mutual acquaintance confirmed that she and Lee dated. After the assassination, David Ferrie called to warn her to keep quiet. Ferrie, who knew Oswald since 1955 , had joined Oswald in teaching Cuban exiles combat techniques at a Lake Pontchartrain camp run by the C.I.A.. ,Ferrie later committed suicide in 1964. Ferrie, often called “the professor,” worked for New Orleans mob leader Carlos Marcello, was overheard in March 1963 by F.B.I. informer Eugene De Lapparra, talking about the purchase of a foreign-made rifle to “get the President.” Much of her story is difficult to confirm. We do know that mobster Charles “Dutz” Murret, Oswald’s maternal uncle, worked under Marcello as a bookmaker. Lee Oswald spent the first four years of life in Murret’s home and sometimes borrowed money from him.

A few investigators agree with Baker that some in the Secret Service were in on the plot. Much depends upon one frame in the Zapruder film which this aging writer simply cannot see very well. The official records show that the motorcade route was changed and then published in the Dallas Morning News.. Before the Kennedy limousine approached the Texas School Book Depository, it executed a slow 120 degree turn, which placed the car in a perfect position to be fired upon. There were no agents on the back bumper as was customary. As they left Love Field, the two back agents were ordered not to follow. One of those agents, Henry J. Rybka, was obviously confused and extended his hands in confusion while looking at his boss, Emory P. Roberts. He was left at the airport. The other agent did not question the order and got into the Roberts’ car. As they stood down, they deprived Kennedy of protection from the rear. The right side of the back of the president’s head was then blown off. As the first rifle shots rang out, Roberts then ordered agent John D. Ready not to run to the president’s car, later claiming that he could not have caught up with it. Roberts told the other agents not to move, but one Secret Service agent rushed to the limousine and covered Kennedy’s body. Roberts and three other on the shift had been drinking in Fort Worth the night before, but he wrote there was no doubt they were ready for duty. Rybka was not mentioned in the preliminary report.

William Manchester later wrote that an agent told him Kennedy told the two agents to withdraw, but that agent said he had never spoken to Manchester. Ten agents told historian Vincent Palamara that JFK did not order the agents off the car at that time. Historians have blamed the F.B.I. for stripping the usual 6 motorcycles surrounding the car, but there is really no evidence explaining why this happened. Four of the agents and the DNC advance man later said the president died due to a conspiracy.

Abraham Bolden, the first African American Secret Service agent, had helped prevent assassinations before November 22, and was sent to prison for 6 years after he tried to get on the witness list of the Warren Commission to tell them of previous efforts to kill Kennedy. Agent Bolden also wanted to talk about on-duty drinking by Secret Service agents. Bolden was involved in investigating an earlier plot in Chicago ( November 2), three weeks before the assassination. Kennedy was to have been in a parade prior to the Army-Navy game. Thomas Vallee, a known opponent of Kennedy, was to be the patsy and was found with an M1 rifle. There were also four suspicious Cuban nationals who were not apprehended. The chief investigator for the Chicago police then was a made member of the mafia who also had C.I.A. ties. Later, a plot was found in Tampa ( November 18). Lee Harvey Oswald had met with one of the Tampa plotters. The F.B.I. destroyed records of both investigations. When prisoner Bolden tried to arouse interest in his case, he was placed in solitary confinement In Ultimate Sacrifice, Lamar Waldron and Thjom Hartmann wrote that the Chicago mob had framed Bolden. They did not want the story to get out that there were efforts to kill Kennedy in Chicago and Tampa. After a report on the Tampa attempt was shown on the History Channel, the Secret Service destroyed its records on it.

The Death of JFK: Could LBJ Have Been Involved

In a recent book, Barr McClellan claims that LBJ, one month before his death, told his friend Don Thomas that he had instructed Edward A. Clark to arrange Kennedy’s assassination. It should be noted that Clark was an enemy of McClellan. A Clark operative recruited Lee Harvey Oswald as a shooter and patsy. Clark and Johnson were also responsible for the murder of the Department of Agriculture agent who was investigating Billy Sol Estes. Even if this scenario has value, the C.I.A. would have had knowledge of the plot through Oswald and could have acted to make certain it was successful. The account’s only strength is that a 14 point identification of a print belonging Clark’s shooter, Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, has been found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

A letter on behalf of Billy Sol Estes by his attorney Douglas Caddy seems to confirm parts of the McClellan theory. Billy told Caddy that LBJ admitted to him an involvement in the plot to kill Kennedy. Estes claimed Cliff Carter engineered the assassination. Wallace’s fingerprint was identified in 1998. Estes claimed that Johnson was involved in the Kennedy murder and in conspiring to commit eight others, including that of USDA investigator Henry Marshall, who turned up evidence damaging to Johnson and Estes.

Two women, one LBJ’s main mistress and the other Oswald’s lover have offered some information that confirmed parts of De Mohrenschildt’s story about the involvement of big oil. Madeleine Duncan Brown, LBJ’s mistress, told an interviewer that Lyndon Johnson started planning Kennedy’s death after the Democratic convention of 1960. Brown claimed that the final decision to kill Kennedy was made he night of November 21, at a party hosted by Clint Murchison. Present were Dallas oil men ( including H.L. Hunt), F.B.I. and C.I.A. leaders like J. Mc Cloy and J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson, and mob bosses. Also present were Richard Nixon who was in town for a Pepsi Cola meeting, George Brown of Brown and Root, and Jack Ruby, who could arrange entertainment for people.

After LBJ arrived, some of the guests went into a conference room. When Johnson came out he allegedly squeezed hard the hand of his mistress Madeleine Duncan Brown and said that after tomorrow JFK would no longer be a problem, “ After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedys would never embarrass me again - that's no threat - that's a promise.'".” According to Brown, LBJ called her the next morning and repeated these words. However, some writers have demonstrated that Johnson was in Houston the night of November 21 and that Nixon was in Dallas but not at Murchison’s house. Some claim there was not even a party there. She said the event was documented by the society editor of the Dallas Times Herald , but the story cannot be found. While there is evidence that Nixon and Hoover were in Dallas then, there is no evidence that there was a Pepsi Cola board or stockholders meeting. On some occasions, Nixon has said he could not remember where he was when Kennedy died. Possible the only other person in America who has said that is George H.W Bush. She claimed that she often walked with H.L. Hunt, and that he would brag about the Kennedy matter, saying, 'Well, we got him out of office.' That was it."

It is always possible that Mrs. Brown mistakenly placed the party on another day, or that other factors explain the discrepancies in her story. Former C.I.A. contract operative Robert D. Morrow backed her account of the evening of November 21. He said a topic of discussion was the political futures of Hoover and Nixon if JFK were assassinated. Morrow says that David Ferrie came up with the suggestion that Lee Harvey Oswald be used as a patsy. While Oswald was in Minsk, Robert Morrow was a C.I.A. contract agent working for Permindex, a firm partly funded through the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, a CIA backed trade association in Rome that funded Italian politicians. . He was then ordered to go to Paris to pick up for the C.I.A. some papers from an American couple in Minsk and mentioned a Harvey of Minsk. Of course, Marina was not an American.

Morrow thought the C.I.A.’s main reason for going after Kennedy was that JFK was working with Robert McNamara to reign in the agency. Morrow ordered the rifles and transceivers for the assassination team, and Ferrie picked them up. He knew there was planning to kill Kennedy but they thought these weapons were for the assassination of Juan Bosch. At the end of the book, he described how Nixon made a deal with Warrren Commission member Ford to conceal Nixon’s role. Three months before the assassination C.I.A. contract pilot was seen in public with Oswald and Clay Shaw.

The Death of JFK: Was Oswald a Government Agent?

It is likely that Oswald was working for both the F.B.I. and C.I.A. There has been speculation that Lee Harvey Oswald had been trained by the Office of Naval Intelligence to become an agent in the Soviet Union. V ictor Marchetti said the ONI trained as many as 40 young men for this task. The operation was run out of Nag’s Head, North Carolina. Twice on the night of his arrest, Oswald tried to call a man named Hunt in the Nag’s Head vicinity, but the prison authorities did not let the calls go through. Oswald’s Marine medical record said he contracted gonorrhea “in the line of duty” and that it was not his fault. One explanation is that even back then he was working for ONI.

When Oswald was found, he had Sturgis’s telephone number under his real name, Fiorini. Sturgis, of course, was a C.I.A. asset. Oswald probably also knew White as both hung around the Interpen training camp for Cuban exiles maintained by Garry Hemming, a sometime C.I.A. contract agent and soldier of fortune. White shared a Havana jail cell with Hemming in 1960.

James Jesus Angleton ran a top secret false defectors program as a means of getting people into the Soviet Union. As head of Counter-Intelligence, Angleton also ran the super-secret Special Investigations Group in that the C.I.A. said it had no ties to Oswald , which had a 201 file on Oswald before the assassination. SIG dealt with enemy efforts to recruit government employees. There was no reason SIG should have had an interest in Oswald. When he “defected” a file should have been opened because he had knowledge of the U-2 areal surveillance program. No file was opened then. The file was opened a year later. Oswald was not debriefed when he returned from the Soviet Union. When the HSCA committee probed the reasons for having the file, Ray Rocca’s answer could be construed to mean that Oswals may have had some connection to the Directorate of Plans.

Joan Mellen has found an F.B.I. document that indicates that Lee Harvey Oswald was part of that program and that he communicated with the agency through Michael Jelisavcic at American Express. Otto Orepka, who investigated defectors at the State Department, found something odd in Oswald’s paperwork and put it aside in his security safe for further review. As a result of a nighttime burglary, the Oswald file vanished and Otepka was demoted, consigned to tedious paperwork. It is possible that Angleton was just interested in removing evidence about the false defector program. It is also known that the New Orleans C.I.A. office used Oswald as a courier. In 1981, Hunter Leake, former number two man there, told historian Michael Kurtz that he had paid Oswald for courier services and that Oswald came there in April because the agency planned to deploy him in unnamed operations. The agency got him a job at the Reily Coffee Co. and Oswald was worked out of Guy Banister’s office. Leake claimed that after the assassination Richard Helms ordered him to rent a trailer and haul all papers relating to Oswald to Langley, Virginia. We know that Oswald was in constant contact with C.I.A. people and agency assassins up to the time of the assassination.

A March 3, 1964 memo from John McCone to James J. Rowley proves that Oswald had been trained by ONI for service in the Soviet Union Oswald’s Marine Corps G-2 files remain classified as do some F.B.I. materials. It is likely that he was on the C.I.A. payroll while stationed at Atsugi. While there, he frequented the Blue Bird Cafe. It has been speculated that it had some connection to “Bluebird,” a C.I.A. mind control program that prepared assassins. There was a large C.I.A. operation there. Some Russian spies recruited by the Gehlen organization were trained here before they were parachuted into the Soviet Union. Former C.I.A. finance officer James Wilcott told the HSCA that Oswald was a C.I.A. asset while in Japan.

It is also clear that for some reason the C.I.A. suppressed records about Oswald’s visit to Mexico City and that the F.B.I. later learned of about this and went along. At the time, the C.I.A. knew that Oswald was supposed to have met with someone from the KGB there, but did not notify the F.B.I.. It was known for certain that someone impersonating Oswald called the soviet mission in Mexico City and that the photos of Oswald entering the embassy were not reliable. As late as January, 1964 C.I.A. Counterterrorism Chief James Angleton was using this discredited evidence to attempt to sell the Warren Commission on the idea that Oswald worked for the KGB. Yet, Angleton kept a pre-assassination file on Oswald and did not keep it in the counter-intelligence files. Rather he kent it in his super-secret, mole-hunting files, as part of his Special Investigations Group—Staff D. Not only did the C.I.A. track Oswald before the assassination, it lied to othere agencies about him.

. On March 28, 1878, the House Select Committee on Assassinations learned from former C.I.A. accountant that Lee Harvey Oswald was on the C.I.A. payroll. Hunter Leake, number two man in the C.I.A. station in New Orleans, told historian Michael Kurtz, that the station used Oswald as a courier. He told Kurtz that a trailer would have to be used to transport all the paperwork on Oswald’s involvement with the agency . Evidence developed later that Oswald was also an F.B.I. informer.
There is circumstantial evidence to suggest Oswald could have been operating under mind control. Jerry Leonard, a physicist, has argued on The Perfect Assassin: Lee Harvey Oswald, The C.I.A. and Mind Control (Author House, 2004) that Lee Harvey Oswald was under mind control when he played his role in the dreadful drama in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Some of his theory is based on a declassified C.I.A. document dating from a decade before the assassination which describe a mind-controlled defector killing an American official . Then someone kills the defector while the police were holding him. Operation Artichoke was mentioned. Leonard thinks Oswald’s bizarre, maybe bipolar, behavior consistent with that of someone who was unwittingly hypnotized.

ARTICHOKE certainly existed in the 1950s. There were rumors then that Oswald operated under some kind of mind control. Government research in that area had made great progress by 1963 and it would have been possible to program and control an actor at an assassination. The questions and answers in the Warren Commission clearings make this abundantly clear.

Harlan Jensen, a Wisconsin insurance and investment broker, has written Atsugi Assassins about his time in the Marines with Lee Harvey Oswald. He did not know until later that he had been subjected to Mind Control and believes the same was true of Oswald He claimed that Atsuqi was a C.I.A. mind control base and also the location for launching spy planes. He maintains that both he and Oswald were placed under mind control. Insisting he is not a “nut job,” Jensen said he simply wanted to clear Oswald’s name. They first met in a mess hall and later served together in a secret mission in the mountains of Taiwan.
He does not claim an exact memory, saying some memories were somehow remove ed. But he showed the book to others who served and said they support his account.
Once subjected to mind control, Jansen thinks it would have been much easier to do the same to Oswald again. When Oswald said he was a “patsy.” Jensen thinks Oswald sealed his own fate. Controllers would have thought that the man remembered more than he should have.

There is only circumstantial evidence to support the case. Oswald came from an unstable family environment. These are the places that best breed candidates for mind control. He knew agent David Ferrie since he jouned the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol in 1958. Ferrie and Oswald spent time together before November 22, 1963. Ferrie was a skilled hypnotist. At least one C.I.A. agent suspected Ferrie was hypnotizing Oswald. When Oswald was arrested, he had Ferrie’s current library card.
He might have been doing intelligence work for the Marines at age 18 when he was seen several times with a sleek Eurasian woman in the entertainment district of Tokyo. His medical files say he contracted a STD while on some sort of assignment. She was thought to be a prostitute and Russian spy.

Some theorize that Oswald’s stays in the brig were part of mind-control conditioning and that the strange death of his best friend on guard-duty was fortuitous in the sense that it set Oswald up for psychological manipulation. . At least it is an interesting theory-- Even back then, he seemed given to strange behavior, temporary physical break-downs and crying jags. Were these the signs of mental instability—invitations to psychological conditioning—or the results of the drugs he had been given. We can document that in 1962 he as making inquiries about the legality of openly using LSD. Others suggest that Ruby acted under hypnosis. He was seen with hypnotist Ferrie befoe the assassination; and hympnotist Billy Del Mar was performing in the Carousel at the time. Del Mar then disappeared and was not sought by the Warren Commission. Another odd piece of information about Oswald is that, upon his return from Russia, he spent some time in Grenich Village with a notorious right-winger named Stephen H. Landesberg, a native of Mississippi.

In April, 1963, Oswald met Volkmar Schmidt, who studied under Wilhelm Kuetemeyer , a professor of psychosomatic medicine. Schmidt and Oswald discussed shooting General Edwin Walker.

In 1976, the House Select Committee on Assassinations heard a taped comment by Michael Paine, whose wife had taken in the Oswalds, saying that Oswald shot Kennedy but he was not responsible.

Richard Case Nagell later told author Dick Russell that he thought that 'Hairy de Fairy' ( David Ferrie) probably hypnotized Oswald. In 1962, he went to work for the C.I.A. and was active in the Communist Party. In September of that year, Nagell was in Mexico City operating as a triple agent. Later, the KGB asked him to watch Oswald and his wife. He was also told to penetrate the Cuban exile community. He claimed to have recorded two of the Cubans manipulating Oswald, but the F.B.I. later seized what he said was the tape. An F.B.I. memorandum shows he met Oswald both in Texas and Mexico City. Nagell had foreknowledge of the plot, and claimed to have warned both the C.I.A. and F.B.I. When his warnings were ignored, and got himself arrested so he could expose the plot.