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Playboy Magazine Founder Hugh Hefner Published News Making Interviews
He commissioned articles by some of the world’s most celebrated writers — Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin and Joyce Carol Oates, to name a few. . .
The magazine’s in-depth interviews with leading figures from politics, sports and entertainment — including Muhammad Ali, Fidel Castro and Steve Jobs — often made news. One of the magazine’s most newsworthy revelations came in 1976, when presidential nominee Jimmy Carter admitted in a Playboy interview, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” — The Washington Post, Matt Schudel,
Playboy interviews were already established as news making and unafraid of controversy when an in-depth conversation with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was published in the October 1967 edition:
Playboy founder Hugh M. Hefner
Judge Jim Garrison
Jim Garrison: Interview with Playboy:
Introduction
On February 17, 1967, the New Orleans States–Item broke a story that would electrify the world — and hurl district attorney Jim Garrison into a bitter fight for his political life. An enterprising reporter, checking vouchers filed with the city by the district attorney’s office, discovered that Garrison had spent over $8000 investigating the assassination of President Kennedy.
“Has the district attorney discovered valuable additional evidence,” the States–Item asked editorially, “or is he merely saving some interesting new information that will gain for him exposure in a national magazine?” Stung, Garrison counter–attacked, confirming that an inquiry into Kennedy’s assassination was under way and charging that the States–Item’s “irresponsible” revelation “has now created a problem for us in finding witnesses and getting cooperation from other witnesses and in at least one case has endangered the life of a witness.”
New Orleans and the JFK Assassination
On February 18, newsmen from all over the world converged on New Orleans to hear Garrison announce at a press conference: “We have been investigating the role of the city of New Orleans in the assassination of President Kennedy, and we have made some progress — I think substantial progress.… What’s more, there will be arrests.”
As reporters flashed news of Garrison’s statement across the world, a 49–year–old New Orleans pilot, David Ferrie, told newsmen that the district attorney had him “pegged as the getaway pilot in an elaborate plot to kill Kennedy.” Ferrie, a bizarre figure who wore a flaming–red wig, false eyebrows and make–up to conceal burns he had suffered years before, denied any involvement in a conspiracy to kill the President. Garrison, he said, was out to frame him.
Four days later, Ferrie was found dead in his shabby three–room apartment in New Orleans, ostensibly of natural causes — though he left behind two suicide notes.
The press had greeted Garrison’s initial claims about a conspiracy with a measure of skepticism, but Ferrie’s death was front–page news around the world. Garrison broke his self–imposed silence to charge that Ferrie was “a man who, in my judgment, was one of history’s most important individuals.” According to Garrison, “Mr. Ferrie was one of those individuals I had in mind when I said there would be arrests shortly. We had reached a decision to arrest him early next week. Apparently we waited too long.”
But Garrison vowed that Ferrie’s death would not halt his investigation, and added, “My staff and I solved the assassination weeks ago. I wouldn’t say this if we didn’t have the evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt. We know the key individuals, the cities involved and how it was done.”
The Arrest of Clay Shaw
On March 1, Garrison eclipsed even the headlines from his previous press conference by announcing the arrest of Clay Shaw, a wealthy New Orleans businessman and real–estate developer, on charges of conspiring to assassinate John F. Kennedy. One of New Orleans’ most prominent citizens, Shaw was a founder and director of the city’s prestigious International Trade Mart from 1947 to 1962, when he retired to devote his time to playwriting and restoring historic homes in the old French Quarter.
The day after Shaw’s arrest, Garrison declared that “Shaw was none other than Clay Bertrand,” the shadowy queen bee of the New Orleans homosexual underworld, who, according to attorney Dean Andrews’ testimony before the Warren Commission, called him the day after the assassination and asked him to rush to Dallas to defend Oswald.
Shaw heatedly denied his guilt: “I never heard of any plot and I never used any alias in my life.” But New Orleans society, which had long counted Shaw one of its own, was stunned.
On March 14, a panel of three judges heard Garrison’s case in a preliminary hearing to determine if there was enough evidence against Shaw to bring him to trial. Perry Raymond Russo, a 25–year–old life–insurance salesman from Baton Rouge who had once been Ferrie’s “roommate,” testified that in mid–September of 1963, he had attended a meeting at Ferrie’s apartment where Shaw, Lee Harvey Oswald and Ferrie discussed means of assassinating the President in a “triangulation of cross fire.”
Garrison’s second witness, Vernon Bundy, a 29–year–old former narcotics addict, testified that in the summer of 1963, he saw Shaw pass a sum of money to Lee Harvey Oswald on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. On March 17, after a four–day hearing, Judges Malcolm V. O’Hara, Bernard J. Bagert and Matthew S. Braniff ruled there was sufficient evidence to hold Clay Shaw for trial.
Garrison’s hand was further strengthened on March 22, when a 12–member grand jury of prominent New Orleans citizens, empaneled to hear Garrison’s case, also ruled there were sufficient grounds to bring Shaw to court. Pending trial — which is scheduled to begin sometime this month — Shaw was allowed to go free on $10,000 bail.
Support for Garrison’s Investigation
The American press remained dubious about Garrison’s ability to prove his charges in court, and domestic coverage of and commentary on the district attorney’s case thereafter was, at best, low–key — at worst, contemptuous. But as Newsweek reported on March 20, “In Europe, where thousands still cling to the conspiracy theory in spite of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone Garrison and his investigation have been the stuff of page–one headlines.”
“I’m encouraged by the support Europe is bringing me,” he told a Paris–Match reporter. “Every day, I receive letters and telegrams from all the capitals. I’ve even had six telephone calls from Moscow.” One was from Literaturnaya Gazeta, a Prestigious Moscow literary magazine, which ran an interview with Garrison concluding that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy but that Oswald “definitely wasn’t the key figure in it.”
Garrison also had his supporters in the U. S. Boston’s Richard Cardinal Cushing, father–confessor to the Kennedy family, said of the New Orleans probe on March 16: “I think they should follow it through. I never believed that the assassination was the work of one man.” And Representative Roman Pucinski, an Illinois Democrat, said: “I’m surprised more attention hasn’t been paid to the ruling that Clay Shaw go on trial for participating in a plot to assassinate President Kennedy. These aren’t nuts but three judges talking. It’s a new ball game.”
Senator Russell Long of Louisiana also backed up Garrison — an old political ally — contending that he was only doing “what a district attorney should do.” And perennial Warren Report critic Mark Lane (himself a Playboy interviewee last February), whose best–selling Rush to Judgment helped persuade Garrison to launch his investigation, said after a conference with Garrison in New Orleans that the D.A.’s probe would “break the entire case wide open.”
If nothing else, Garrison was certainly affecting public opinion. A Louis Harris poll of May 29 revealed that 66 percent of the American public now believes there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, and “a major contributor to this swelling doubt is the investigation into the assassination by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison.”
Even with public opinion on his side, Garrison was running into difficulties on several fronts by early summer. Three witnesses he wished to question about their complicity in the assassination had fled Louisiana, and he was unable to obtain their extradition to New Orleans — a seldom–encountered roadblock he credits to the CIA, “which knows that some of its former employees were involved in the Kennedy assassination and is doing everything possible to frustrate my investigation in order to preserve the Agency’s good name.” The CIA refuses to comment on Garrison’s charges.
DOCUMENTS AND DOSSIERS
Truth vs Evasion
The AARC presents a new feature relevant to our continuing acquisition and dissemination of significant documents and files. Left click on images to expand OR, right click and select View Image.
16 January, 2018: Agency Mafia penetration: Mario Brod, Herbert Itkin; joint FBI CIA coordination in NY; James Angleton’s long time links with organized crime. Memo for the Inspector General dated 1 July, 1975 stating that, according to James Angleton, in 1963 Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy authorized an Agency Mafia penetration.
The document includes the following: 1) a CIA agent was used in support of a 1963 FBI investigation of Jimmy Hoffa; 2) a link is introduced between the agency and organized crime; 3) reference is made to James Angleton’s activities as a recruiter in Italy during WW II; 4) reference to questions about details regarding a joint FBI-CIA operation as being run in New York; 5) Agency operational involvement in Haiti; 6) reference to a connection between the Chicago Teamsters Union and the Mafia which is allegedly reported to RFK as it relates to Jimmy Hoffa; 7) Ray Rocca is mentioned as having prepared a full book on the Itkin/Brod case although they are mentioned only in pseudo; 8) Scott Breckinridge, OLC, is described as having not seen the “black book” (of which we have no record) and claims that he was unaware of the Brod-Mafia link prior to June, 1975. The memo concludes with a request for “advice” as to whether the information contained therein might include “questionable activity” and whether the chain of command (DCI George H. W. Bush), the White House (President Gerald R. Ford), and the SSC (Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities — The Church Committee) should be alerted. As of this posting, we do not have subsequent documentation to know the answers to those questions.
Related: From 22 November, 1968: Herbert Itkin/Mario Brod, et. al.
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13 December, 2017: Courtesy of Dr. David Kaiser, an important 1978 deposition to the HSCA released to the National Archives in the year 2000 through the efforts of researcher and AARC Board member, Malcolm Blunt: HSCA 180-10075-10167 SWORN TESTIMONY OF ORESTES PENA 06/23/78. LEFT click on image to expand.
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27 November, 2017: CIA documents 104-10014-10056 and 104-10014-10061 released 9 November.
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20 November, 2017: FBI document which describes an IRS informant for the Dallas office who alleged that prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, Jack Ruby asked if he would, “like to watch the fireworks?” The informant claimed to have been with Jack Ruby at the corner of the Postal Annex Building facing the Texas School Book Depository at the time of the assassination. The subject of Jack Ruby has been addressed by many authors including Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Seth Kantor.
DOWNLOAD the entire 19 page document HERE.
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7 November, 2017: STATEMENT OF ROBERT M. GATES, DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE BEFORE THE COMMITTEE OF GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, U.S. SENATE, 12 MAY, 1992 [Incomplete draft copy with annotations, 5/6/92] Director Gates expresses his views on The Assassination Materials Disclosure Act of 1992, describes the nature of assassination related documents held by the CIA, and declares his support of efforts to declassify and make available to the public as quickly as possible government documents relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
16 October, 2017: SANCA: Data base acronym: Security Automated Name Check Activity. Memo from 22 March 1977 on an incident sometime between May 1975 and January 1976 in the Security Records Division file room concerning an unusual covert Office of Security file on Lee Harvey Oswald. A subsequent review of SANCA found no record of the original item which resulted in the Deputy Chief, Security Analysis Group stating that the Security Analysis Group would make the matter of official concern and would begin official inquiries. REDACTED was cautioned not to vocalize allegations regarding possible erasures of SANCA entries or possible destruction of official files. This report is unrelated to Volume V of Oswald’s OS files which had not yet gone missing. [See Analysis and Opinion: ‘Shell Games’ by Malcolm Blunt]
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13 October, 2017: On the subject of Yuri Nosenko and the division his case created within the Agency: HSCA Testimony of Tennent H. (Pete) Bagley, 16 November, 1978. “I have come before your Committee to reply to the testimony of Mr. John Hart who represented the Central Intelligence Agency here on September 15, a testimony which misled you and misused me.”
CONTINUE READING THE COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT HERE
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12 October, 2017: Memo for the Record, Scott Breckinridge, OLC, on his telephone conversation with James J. Angleton, 24 November, 1978. A very rare example of one senior (retired) CIA officer, James Angleton, describing statements made during sworn testimony for the record by another senior CIA officer, John Hart, as “slandered and perjured.” This memo is recorded against a backdrop of serious contention between those who wish to focus on Yuri Nosenko’s treatment by Agency authorities and those who want to focus upon his legitimacy.
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11 October, 2017: In this document extract we see a report gathered by the FBI from an informant who tells of a high level meeting of SNFE/Alpha 66 representatives at the office of Elliot Roosevelt. Among the participants who include Antonia Veciana are two Americans,”a Mr Bishop and a Mr Petrie both lawyers, allegedly from Orlando.” [Emphasis added]
It is inconceivable that such a meeting would not be monitored by representatives of U.S. intelligence. The FBI have their informant monitoring the meeting which leaves the two American lawyers “allegedly from Orlando” as the probable monitors. The FBI give us a great fat clue pointing towards Mr Bishop and Mr Petrie when they use the word allegedly.
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10 October, 2017: The Casasin Memo:
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5 October, 2017: Three documents relating to HSCA interest in Yuri Nosenko and CIA’s willingness to accept the blame for Nosenko’s treatment rather than have HSCA pursue the question of bona fides.
Document 1: Scott Breckinridge in paragraph 3 sums up CIA’s position on the HSCA interest in Nosenko; the indication that the harsh treatment to which Nosenko was subjected will be the focus rather than any investigation into his legitimacy as a bona fide defector.
Document 2: CIA staffer Ben Pepper, a Len McCoy acolyte, gets very angry that CIA was caught hiding Peter Deriabin’s information about Nosenko’s summer of 1965 debriefs. HSCA was concerned that the Agency would take action against Deriabin.
Document 3: G. Robert Blakey’s concern that Deriabin was under CIA pressure as a result of cooperating with HSCA and that Deriabin possessed transcripts from his summer of 1965 debriefs at which he sat down one-on-one with Nosenko for a period of 6 weeks.
It is very clear that CIA was nervous about any investigation by an outside body into Nosenko’s bona fides. As Breckinridge writes, “One swallow does not make a spring, but this may be an indication that the HSCA is now focusing on the treatment of Nosenko rather than the issue of bona fides.”
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3 October, 2017: In these two documents, again from the Soviet Branch report on Nosenko’s bona fides, one is able to deconstruct the Casasin memo. Here we see Philip R Nielson (AE/OCEAN 3) and his future wife Tamara Kungarova; Nielson was a CIA tourist agent. Interestingly, Nosenko gave up Kungarova’s name to his interviewers as being a KGB agent.
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2 October, 2017: This document is a page from the CIA Soviet Division report on the bonafides of Yuri Nosenko and shows that the KGB months before Lee Oswald and Robert Webster defected had in their possession the “nuts and bolts” of both the U.S. and British tourist agent programs, aka the “Legal Travelers” program. The importance here is that this is much earlier than published in some of the espionage tomes. The British spy George Blake passed on this information following a meeting where attendees were briefed. So we must look at Oswald’s defection with a different focus; in other words, KGB was prepared for Americans posing as tourists. Whilst they clearly were aware of tourist agents prior to Blake’s treachery, they did not have the specifics.
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28 September, 2017: 189-10001-10048 | 11/27/63 | President Kennedy’s personal physician, Admiral George Burkley: REPORT ON PARTICIPATION IN ACTIVITIES SURROUNDING ASSASSINATION
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27 September, 2017: Courtesy of AARC Board member Malcolm Blunt: 5 pages which expose CIA policy in the 1960s and 70s relevant to understanding the deniability of utilization and employment by use of a specific classification. Students of Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans during the summer of 1963 will find a new light by which to consider reports that he was seen in the company of INS and US Customs officers.
JFK Had Ordered Full Withdrawal from Vietnam: Solid Evidence
PBS Vietnam Series: Glossing over JFK’s Exit Strategy
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, General Maxwell Taylor and President Kennedy, January 25, 1963. Photo credit: JFK Library
CONTINUE READING AT WHOWHATWHY.ORG
MUST HEAR: Dr. John M. Newman, KUT Views and Brews with Rebecca McInroy and Professor James. K. Galbraith, 2 May, 2017 LISTEN
MUST READ: JFK and Vietnam, second edition
Plane crash that killed UN boss ‘may have been caused by aircraft attack’
The Guardian| Julian Borger World affairs editor Tuesday 26 September 2017 05.41 EDT
The scattered wreckage of the Douglas DC-6 carrying Dag Hammarskjöld in a forest near Ndola, Zambia. Photograph: AP
A UN report into the death of its former secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld in a 1961 plane crash in central Africa has found that there is a “significant amount of evidence” that his flight was brought down by another aircraft.
The report, delivered to the current secretary general, António Guterres, last month, took into account previously undisclosed information provided by the US, UK, Belgian, Canadian and German governments.
Its author, Mohamed Chande Othman, a former Tanzanian chief justice, found that the US and UK governments had intercepted radio traffic in the area at the time and suggested that the 56-year-old mystery could be solved if the contents of those classified recordings were produced.
“I am indebted for the assistance that I received, which uncovered a large amount of valuable new information,” Othman said in an executive summary of his report, seen by the Guardian. “I can confidently state that the deeper we have gone into the searches, the more relevant information has been found.”
Dag Hammarskjöld was on a mission to try to broker peace in Congo when he died in 1961. Photograph: REX
Hammarskjöld, a Swedish diplomat who became the UN secretary general in 1953, was on a mission in September 1961 to try to broker peace in Congo, where the Katanga region had staged a rebellion, backed by mining interests and European mercenaries, against the newly independent government in Kinshasa.
His plane, a Douglas DC-6, was on the way from Kinshasa to the town of Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), where the British colonial authorities were due to host talks with the Katanga rebels. It was approaching the airstrip at about midnight on 17 September when it crashed, killing Hammarskjöld and 15 others on board.
Two inquiries run by the British pointed to pilot error as the cause, while a UN commission in 1962 reached an open verdict. In recent years, independent research by Göran Björkdahl, a Swedish aid worker, and Susan Williams, a senior fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London and author of a 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjöld?, persuaded the UN to reopen the case. A panel convened in 2015 found there was enough new material to warrant the appointment of an “eminent person” to assess it. Othman was given the job in February this year.
Among Othman’s new findings are:
- In February 1961, the French secretly supplied three Fouga warplanes to the Katanga rebels, “against the objections of the US government”. Contrary to previous findings, they were used in air-to-air attacks, flown at night and from unpaved airstrips in Katanga.
- Fresh evidence bolsters an account by a French diplomat, Claude de Kemoularia, that he had been told in 1967 by a Belgian pilot known as Beukels, who had been flying for the rebels as a mercenary, that he had fired warning shots to try to divert the plane away from Ndola and accidentally clipped its wing. Othman said he was unable establish Beukels’ identity in the time available for his inquiry.
- The UK and Rhodesian authorities were intercepting UN communications at the time of the crash and had intelligence operatives in the area. The UK should therefore have potentially crucial evidence in its classified archives
- The US had sophisticated electronic surveillance aircraft “in and around Ndola” as well as spies, and defence officials, on the night of the crash, and Washington should be able to provide more detailed information.
Othman found that earlier inquiries had disregarded the testimony of local witnesses who said they saw another plane and flashes in the sky on the night of Hammarskjold’s crash. They had also “undervalued” the testimony of Harold Julien, a security officer who survived for several days who told medical staff he had seen “sparks in the sky” shortly before the DC-6, known by its registration number SE-BDY, fell out of the sky.
“Based on the totality of the information we have at hand, it appears plausible that external attack or threat may have been a cause of the crash, whether by way of direct attack causing SE-BDY to crash, or by causing a momentary distraction of the pilots,” Othman concludes.
“There is a significant amount of evidence from eyewitnesses that they observed more than one aircraft in the air, that the other aircraft may have been a jet, that SE-BDY was on fire before it crashed, and/or that SE-BDY was fired upon or otherwise actively engaged by another aircraft. In its totality, this evidence is not easily dismissed.”
Othman argues that the “burden of proof” was now on member states “to show that they have conducted a full review of records and archives in their custody or possession, including those that remain classified, for potentially relevant information”.
The Tanzanian judge said that the most relevant pieces of information were radio intercepts and called for countries likely to have relevant information, such as the UK and US, to appoint an “independent and high-ranking official” to comb the archives.
CONTINUE READING AT THE GUARDIAN
Related: United Nations: Death of Dag Hammarskjöld, 18 September 1961, 1961: 18 September-28 October
Related: Do Spy Agencies Hold Answer to Dag Hammarskjold’s Death? U.N. Wants to Know
Related: UN chief: Tanzanian to lead Hammarskjold air crash review
Related: Book Review: Spies in the Congo by Susan Williams
Related: U.N. Chief Presses to Unlock Mystery of Dag Hammarskjold’s Death
Related: The Hammarskjöld Commission – Witness Statement of Lisa Pease
Related: The Mysterious Death of a UN Hero
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