ASSASSINATION ARCHIVES

AND RESEARCH CENTER

Malcolm Blunt: What NARA could do that would assist in the JFK case

In anticipation of an impending announcement by the White House on President Biden’s 15 December deadline regarding the release and/or continued withholding of the remaining JFK assassination documents being held by the National Archives and Records Administration, AARC Board member Malcolm Blunt offers the following as a wish list:
1. Perform an Electrostatic Detection Device (EDD) test on Oswald’s notebook to bring out indentations from each page. When one handles this hand-written notebook, one cannot help but notice that Oswald pressed down very hard when he wrote in this little book. It seems inexplicable that such a potentially valuable examination has never been performed.
2. Transcribe all  Warren Commission stenotype reporter’s notes. We cannot trust the bound witness testimony at the Archives because in many instances there are gaps where portions of pages are blank, (e.g. Jessie Curry’s testimony). Jim Martin’s HSCA testimony describes how Chief Justice Warren ordered parts of his testimony, those regarding Marina’s activities in Russia, to be struck from the record.
3. Explain the blanket denial by NARA of there being any NSA material in WC files, when the Army Chief Historian told the review board (ARRB) staffers, and Max Holland, that “they, ” the Warren Commission, got a hell of a lot of intercept material from NSA. There are no such documents extant in the WC files at NARA.
4. Key CIA material (memos) from Bruce Solie to Warren Commission attorney David Slawson RE Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko are also missing, although Slawson’s marginalia indicates that it clearly once existed; maybe NARA could ask CIA to check their Executive Registry where they hold copies of ALL documents relating to the various commissions (WC, Rockefeller, SSCIA, HSCA).
5. Ask (NARA) whether or not they have an internal finding aid of HSCA documents which tracks to the separate CIA numbering system used by CIA for ALL HSCA documentation (see 104-10431-10063).
6. Request that NARA provide a proper index/finding aid for the thousands of denied documents quietly placed by them into the Warren Commission collection by Archivist James Mathis commencing in year 2004. Assistance with any of these issues would enhance our understanding and benefit our research community.
Addendum:
A much deserved tip of the hat to a previous Chief Archivist at NARA, John W. Carlin, who really did an exceptional job and tried very sincerely to pull NARA out of its sloth-like habits. His efforts on behalf of researchers were real and valuable. Somewhere around 2003 there was a massive interfile of documents into the CIA Segregated File collection that was copied from Microfilm, once again supervised by James R. Mathis. Unfortunately, no index/finding aid for this huge dump of previously denied and redacted material was made available. I pleaded with Mr. Mathis and we had a frank exchange of views culminating with him providing 24 boxes of RIFs! So, with that, a finding aid of sorts, (but not researcher friendly) was released. Then, as with the massive WC interfile, there clearly had to have been an index to work from. When asked about the massive WC interfile, Mr. Mathis admitted that, yes, he did have an index/finding aid but, as it was part of his working papers, he was allowed to destroy it!!!
I have to emphasize that it was not all bad with Mr. Mathis, but it was a bit of an uphill fight. The ARRB “7” series was screened by him after I got the “clear off” message from the Special Access Staff (JFK) head honcho, Martha Murphy. After requesting assistance, I eventually did receive a finding aid from NARA, then I was told that the 7 series could not be released because of too many personal and privacy issues. Finally, when I started inundating NARA with multiple FOIA requests based on the 7 series finding aid which they sent me, James Mathis was tasked to do the screening job. The end result: another 24 boxes of material! Hallelujah!
Finally, a couple of concluding thoughts: I feel we urgently need some accounting from FBI and NARA as to why no post-1993 FBI JFK Investigation and/or Lee Harvey Oswald files have made it into NARA, (I last looked in 2016/2017). It’s also fair to say that I asked NARA, more than once, to take another look at the Church Committee files. We have had 40 boxes released by Charlie Battaglia’s staff in the Senate, then the ARRB took 5 interns for a week, (only one week!), and got 16 more boxes from the repository at Archives 1. The direct quote from the ever unhelpful Martha Murphy was, “We won’t be looking anytime soon.”
So, there you go. One may be tempted to ask, is this the attitude towards researchers we deserve? Is this the attitude towards researchers we should expect? Is this the attitude towards researchers we should find acceptable?

Courtesy of Bart Kamp: The Malcolm Blunt Archives

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/search?q=nara%20malcolm%20blunt

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22 November 1963 – 22 November 2022

To commemorate living with loss and suspicion for 59 years, the AARC offers the following, with an introduction by distinguished Professor Peter Dale Scott:

I do not believe that the JFK assassination should be described as a CIA plot; other agencies may have played as great or even greater role. Yet very relevant to the alleged visit of Oswald to Mexico City, two months before 11/22, is the fact that, at this time, the CIA opened a counterespionage operation, LCIMPROVE, which consisted in large part of falsified information about the defector Lee Oswald, planted by the CIA in its own files.

The CIA took elaborate steps to conceal these LCIMPROVE documents from the Warren Commission, culminating in CIA Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms’s testimony to the Commission on which Dulles sat. His answer to a carefully crafted question, as to whether the CIA had supplied all its information “in regard to Lee Harvey Oswald” (5 WCH 122), arguably constituted perjury. It was certainly obstruction of justice.

The JFK assassination was an example of what I call a deep event, one wrapped in mystery, obfuscated by lies, attributed to marginal forces, yet permanently affecting the nation’s polity. 1963 was the first year of what came to be called the Doomsday Network, a governmental emergency network designed to be used by those in power if regular communications were incapacitated. This network played a role in Dallas on 11/22/63. (One minor example: it included the radio channel used by the Secret Service in Dealey Plaza, though no transcript of their messages was supplied to the Warren Commission.) It is relevant that the Doomsday Network, now part of Continuity of Government (COG) operations, also played a key role in a later deep event, 9/11/2001.

The successful cover-up of the facts about the JFK assassination has been followed by still other deep events in which the COG Doomsday Network again played a key role. In the 1990s, commenting on this, I predicted that we might see even more such deep events. Within a decade, America experienced 9/11.

Can we expect the House Committee to report to us on the role played by COG on January 6, 2021?

Peter Dale Scott|22 November 2022|peterdalescott.net

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Paul Schrade dies; union leader survived bullet to the head when Robert F. Kennedy was killed

Paul Schrade, his head swathed in bandages, speaks to reporters.
Paul Schrade, hit by one of the bullets fired the night Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated, holds a news conference in 1968.
(AP)
By Steve Marble Obituaries Editor 

Paul Schrade soaked up the excitement as the crowd roared and Robert Kennedy smiled and leaned into the microphone: “So my thanks to all of you, and on to Chicago we go.”

Kennedy had just won the 1968 Democratic presidential primary in California, and there was a palpable sense inside the old Ambassador Hotel that the young New York senator had seized enough momentum to carry his suddenly super-charged campaign through to the convention in Chicago.

And then everything went to hell.

An auto workers union leader who had introduced Kennedy to powerful labor figures such as Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, Schrade was walking a pace or two behind Kennedy when the first shot was fired.

“I got hit by the first shot,” Schrade told The Times. “I was right behind Bobby. It was meant for him and got me. I thought I had been electrocuted. I was shaking violently on the floor and saw flashes.”

When he looked up, Schrade saw Kennedy slumped on the ground, a young busboy cradling the dying senator’s head in his hands. By the next morning, Kennedy was dead and a young Jordanian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan was behind bars, accused of killing the senator.

Kennedy’s death hung over the nation for decades, altering the course of American politics and forming a dismal closing chapter to a turbulent decade. To some, it marked a farewell to a generation’s innocence.

Schrade slid into depression, lost reelection to his union leadership post and returned to the auto assembly line. He also became convinced that there was more than one gunman in the hotel ballroom that June night and that Sirhan — who has repeatedly been denied parole over the last half century — did not fire the shot that killed Kennedy.

An authority on the Kennedy assassination who testified on Sirhan’s behalf at parole hearings, Schrade died early Wednesday after a brief illness at his home in Los Angeles, according to his brother-in-law, Martin Weil. Schrade was 97.

A white-haired Paul Schrade holds photos of a gun.
Paul Schrade holds photos of Sirhan Sirhan’s revolver. Schrade became an authority on the assassination and testified on Sirhan’s behalf at parole hearings.
(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)

While he believed police and prosecutors had bungled the assassination probe and had failed to earnestly look for a second shooter, he spent the bulk of the energy chasing the causes Kennedy had embraced — ending the war in Vietnam, fighting for the marginalized, dampening the racism that still flared in plain view.

Schrade also helped lead the effort to transform the Ambassador Hotel into a school complex, upending Donald Trump’s plan to build what the future president pledged would be the tallest building in the country. The library at Robert F. Kennedy Communities Schools is now named in Schrade’s honor.

Born Dec. 17, 1924, Schrade was raised in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and briefly attended Yale before heading west for a job at North American Aviation in Los Angeles and then rising up the ranks of the United Automobile Workers Union. He struck up a friendship with Kennedy when the future senator’s brother was on his way to becoming president.

In 1965, he joined Chavez and Huerta in the farm workers’ struggles and twice arranged for Kennedy to travel to Delano to support striking farm workers. The connection between the New England-bred politician and the charismatic Chavez may well have helped propel Kennedy to victory in California.

Many of America’s darkest moments, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. among them, spawned mysteries and conspiracy theories. And so it was with the death of Robert Kennedy. How could it be that Kennedy was shot from behind while Sirhan was standing in front of him? Sirhan’s revolver held eight bullets, but some insisted nine shots had been fired. And a ballistics expert concluded the bullets had not been fired from the same gun.

Must Reads: The busboy who tried to help a wounded Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 dies. His life was haunted by the violence

Los Angeles police grudgingly reinvestigated the shooting in the 1970s, but reached the same conclusion: Sirhan was the lone gunman.

For his own part, Sirhan was little help. He testified that he had been at a firing range earlier that day, had come to the Ambassador to attend a party and had briefly left the hotel and then returned after deciding he was too drunk to drive. The rest of the night was enveloped in fog, he said.

Sirhan offered contrition at his parole hearings, but always stopped short of taking full blame.

“Sen. Kennedy was the hope of the world and I injured, and I harmed all of them and it pains me to experience that, the knowledge for such a horrible deed, if I did in fact do that,” he testified after being recommended for parole in 2021.

To Schrade, none of it added up. The police investigation felt rushed and sloppy, and key pieces of evidence had been ignored, he said. The closer he looked, the more convinced he was that Sirhan did not shoot Kennedy.

“Yes, he did shoot me. Yes, he shot four other people and aimed at Kennedy,” Schrade told the Washington Post. “The important thing is he did not shoot Robert Kennedy. Why didn’t they go after the second gunman? They knew about him right away. They didn’t want to know who it was. They wanted a quickie.”

In 2016, Schrade testified on Sirhan’s behalf but the parole board, as it had before and would again, denied him parole.

“Sirhan, I’m so sorry this is happening to you,’ Schrade shouted as Sirhan was led away in handcuffs.

When Gov. Gavin Newsom rejected parole for Sirhan in January 2022, marking the 16th time he’d been denied freedom, Schrade was saddened, but hardly surprised.

“He did not shoot Robert Kennedy and should have been released long ago,” he said.

Schrade is survived by a sister, Louise “Weezie” Stone Duff. His wife, Monica Weil, died in 2019.

READ MORE AT THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

Spate of global assassination attempts hints at a violent new era

By Adam Taylor
November 4, 2022 at 12:10 p.m. EDT

Supporters of former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan chant slogans during a protest condemning the shooting that wounded him Thursday. (Fareed Khan/AP)

The attempted assassination this week of former Pakistani leader Imran Khan came just days after an intruder broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in what prosecutors say was a failed bid to harm or kidnap her. Weeks before that, a man approached former Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Buenos Aires and tried to shoot her in the face at close range.

That attack followed the July assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe by a man wielding a homemade gun in Nara city. And Abe was slain almost exactly a year after gunmen killed Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in a raid on his home in Port-au-Prince.

Together, these high-profile acts of violence potentially point to a new, volatile era in global politics, experts say. After years in which terrorist bombings dominated the headlines, this new spate of attacks is reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s, when major U.S. figures such as President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. were killed in pivotal moments.

“There’s never going to be an end to individuals who want to assassinate public individuals,” said Colin P. Clarke, director of research and policy at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consultancy. But Clarke also said there were several factors that could lead to a rise in assassinations, including the “decline, at least in some parts of the world, of jihadi organizations” that favored different tactics.

In their place, “you’ve got the rise of far-right extremists who are far more decentralized,” he said. “And then you’ve got what people are calling ‘salad bar terrorism,’ which is when they kind of pick and choose different aspects of what motivates them to engage in these types of acts.”

Data from the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD), which includes figures up to 2020, shows a sharp increase in assassination attempts on government figures around the world starting in 2014. The number of assassinations has stayed consistently high since then — even as the number of terrorist attacks has fallen.

A police car blocks the street below the San Francisco home of Paul and Nancy Pelosi on Oct. 28. (Eric Risberg/AP)

It’s a trend that may have been overlooked in recent years. Erin Miller, program manager at GTD, noted that most of the attacks targeted low- to mid-level officials — and not prominent political leaders such as Khan or Pelosi. The most recent statistics, she said, were dominated by insurgent-led attacks in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover in 2021.

GTD’s data suggests that the late 1980s was another period when assassinations spiked. Miller said terrorist attacks such as suicide bombings that often kill indiscriminately were used much less then.

“Targeting political leadership was a tactic used to get attention for a cause with less risk of alienating the civilian population,” Miller said. “In more recent years, assailants adopt both targeted assassinations and mass-casualty strategies.”

Part of the shift may be structural. As groups like the Islamic State lost their territory, Clarke said, there was a rise in violence committed by people working alone, some of whom had been radicalized online to hate or target specific individuals.

To some extent, there may also be a tactical logic to the shift. Assassination attempts on individuals can often prompt significant political changes. Some attacks have changed the course of history, though not always in precisely the way their perpetrators intended: The killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Austria-Hungary in 1914, for example, is considered the spark for World War I.

Views of assassinations can also change over time. In India, the assassin who killed beloved independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi has retroactively been branded a “patriot” by some supporters of the country’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Some historians consider the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a far-right extremist in 1995 a disastrous moment for the Middle East peace process. But almost three decades later, the far right has emerged as kingmaker in the country’s most recent election.

Even in Japan, the shocking assassination of Abe in July sparked a surprising turn: The country took the alleged assassin’s motives seriously.

The alleged killer, Tetsuya Yamagami, told police he wanted to carry out the assassination because his mother had made large donations to the Unification Church, a religious group with which Abe apparently had close ties. After the killing, Abe’s former party pledged to end its relationship with the church, though it later backtracked.

Nara police direct pedestrians and traffic near the spot where former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot while delivering a campaign speech on July 8. (Hiro Komae/AP)

Japan, while generally nonviolent, has a significant history of political assassinations. But some countries that had long avoided attacks on senior officials have seen assassinations in recent years: Two British lawmakers have been killed in separate politically motivated attacks since 2016.

In Brazil, where there has long been political violence around election periods, the number of violent incidents involving political party representatives and supporters in the lead-up to the 2022 vote “eclipsed” that in the election four years before, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

At least some of the apparent rise in assassinations may be due to technological changes. Abe was shot with a “craft-made” gun created with readily available materials. Designs for similar weapons, which can be bought without a background trace and sometimes produced in a way that avoids metal detectors, can be found easily online.

There have been reported assassinations attempts via drone in recent years, such as the 2018 attack on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro during an event in Caracas. Maduro survived the alleged attempt, a low-tech echo of U.S. drone attacks like the one that killed Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020.

“Cruder technology lowers the barriers to entry for attackers, allowing even untrained or unprepared extremists … to attempt serious plots,” Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, two experts in counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote for the War on the Rocks website.

Experts have also noted an increase in assassinations committed with state backing, including the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the killing of Kim Jong Nam by North Korean agents, and numerous deaths linked back to the Russian state.

But the ever-widening political polarization around the world, aided by online echo chambers that can radicalize potential perpetrators and demonize potential victims, has only added to the risk of assassination — as in the attack at Pelosi’s home that left her husband, Paul, wounded.

Clarke noted that figures on both the left and the right in the United States have been targeted in politically motivated attacks. In some ways, the spate of attempted killings felt worse than what came before.

“We’ve been here before. We’ve survived it,” Clarke said of U.S. political violence. “But there are people I speak to who say this feels fundamentally different. It feels like nothing’s beyond the pale, at least in terms of the rhetoric.”

READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON POST

Investigation into the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him

Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961.

Courtesy of Dr. Susan Williams

United Nations General Assembly

Seventy-sixth session
Agenda item 131

Letter dated 25 August 2022 from the Secretary-General addressed to the President of the General Assembly

I have the honour to refer to General Assembly resolution 74/248 concerning the investigation into the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him on flight SE-BDY on the night of 17 to 18 September 1961.

In accordance with paragraph 1 of resolution 74/248, in March 2020 I reappointed Mohamed Chande Othman as Eminent Person to continue to review the information received and possible new information made available by Member States, including by individuals and private entities, to assess its probative value and to draw conclusions from the investigations already conducted. Owing to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in December 2020 the General Assembly decided, with my support, to extend the mandate of the Eminent Person, and also requested me to report to the Assembly before the end of the seventy-sixth session on progress that had been made.

I recall that I had previously appointed Mr. Othman as Eminent Person for successive periods in 2018 and 2017, pursuant to General Assembly resolutions 72/252 and 71/260, respectively, and I reported to the General Assembly on progress made in 2019 (A/73/973) and 2017 (A/71/1042). I also recall that I had previously appointed Mr. Othman as Head of the Independent Panel of Experts, established in accordance with Assembly resolution 69/246.

I renew my profound gratitude to the Eminent Person. The United Nations is indebted to him for this exemplary and consequential work in the pursuit of the full truth concerning the tragic event.

I am encouraged that the Eminent Person has received significant new information and that further advancements in the body of relevant knowledge have been made, following the review of many thousands of pages of records and forensic tests and consultation with experts. I note that such new information includes the areas of probable intercepts by Member States of relevant communications; the capacity of the armed forces of Katanga, or others, to have conducted a possible attack on flight SE-BDY; the presence in the area of foreign paramilitary and intelligence personnel; and further new information relevant to the context and surrounding events of 1961.

As in the 2019 report, the Eminent Person assesses that it remains plausible that an external attack or threat was a cause of the crash. I take note of the conclusion by the Eminent Person that it would not be reasonable at this point to reach a conclusion as to the cause of the tragic event based on presently available but incomplete information. At the same time, I am encouraged by the conclusion of the Eminent Person that, given the growing body of evidence, there remain only a limited number of hypotheses to explain what occurred on that fateful night.

I wish to express my gratitude to Member States, independent high-ranking officials appointed by Member States (Independent Appointees) to conduct reviews of their intelligence, security and defense files and private individuals and entities for their cooperation with the Eminent Person and their willingness to provide additional information.

I am encouraged that key Member States have committed at a high level to full cooperation and provided assurances that search requests have or will engage appropriate security, intelligence and defense agencies, and that Independent Appointees from a number of Member States have provided, and may provide in future, additional information. I am also encouraged by the significant information that has been provided to the Eminent Person by private individuals and non-governmental entities.

At the same time, the Eminent Person notes that: (a) no significant information has been provided by key Member States since mid-2017; (b) it is almost certain that further relevant information exists, including radio or other communications; (c) Member States have yet to discharge their burden of proof to show that they have conducted a full review of their records and archives resulting in full disclosure; (d) Independent Appointees may need more time to provide information; and (e) it would be neither judicious nor responsible to reach a conclusion without the benefit of all potentially material information, in circumstances where such information has been shown to be almost certain to exist.

Accordingly, I support the recommendation of the Eminent Person that the United Nations appoint an independent person to continue the work undertaken pursuant to the current mandate of the Eminent Person. I also support the Eminent Person’s recommendation that key Member States be again urged to appoint or reappoint Independent Appointees to determine whether relevant information exists in their security, intelligence and defense archives. More broadly, I call on Member States to ensure comprehensive access to all archives and provide relevant information, more than 60 years after the tragic event, and agree with the proposal of the Eminent Person that potential modes of disclosure and conditions of confidentiality be offered to Member States, without necessarily requiring that relevant information be disclosed in full or publicly.

I also support the Eminent Person’s recommendation that all Member States be encouraged to make assistance available to the independent person, including forensic analysis or other research.

Finally, I support the recommendation of the Eminent Person that the United Nations continue to work towards making key documents of the Dag Hammarskjöld investigation publicly available through a dedicated online collection, including documents pertaining to the 1961 United Nations Commission on Investigation, the 2013 Hammarskjöld Commission, the 2015 United Nations Independent Panel of Experts and the 2017 and 2019 reports of the Eminent Person, as well as his present report.

It remains our shared responsibility to pursue, with renewed urgency, the full truth of what happened on that fateful night in 1961. We owe this to Dag Hammarskjöld, to the members of the party accompanying him and to their respective families. We owe this also to the United Nations. I consider this to be our solemn duty and I will do everything I can to support this endeavour.

I call on the General Assembly to remain seized of the matter and to endorse the report of the Eminent Person and his recommendations, as discussed above.

(Signed) António Guterres

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