Press Release

Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named “Vault 7” by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.

The first full part of the series, “Year Zero”, comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.

Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

“Year Zero” introduces the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of “zero day” weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.

Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency’s hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA’s hacking capacities.

By the end of 2016, the CIA’s hacking division, which formally falls under the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other “weaponized” malware. Such is the scale of the CIA’s undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook. The CIA had created, in effect, its “own NSA” with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.

In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.

Once a single cyber ‘weapon’ is ‘loose’ it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor stated that “There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber ‘weapons’. Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of such ‘weapons’, which results from the inability to contain them combined with their high market value, and the global arms trade. But the significance of “Year Zero” goes well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective.”

Wikileaks has carefully reviewed the “Year Zero” disclosure and published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the distribution of ‘armed’ cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA’s program and how such ‘weapons’ should analyzed, disarmed and published.

Wikileaks has also decided to redact and anonymise some identifying information in “Year Zero” for in depth analysis. These redactions include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States. While we are aware of the imperfect results of any approach chosen, we remain committed to our publishing model and note that the quantity of published pages in “Vault 7” part one (“Year Zero”) already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.

Analysis

CIA malware targets iPhone, Android, smart TVs

CIA malware and hacking tools are built by EDG (Engineering Development Group), a software development group within CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence), a department belonging to the CIA’s DDI (Directorate for Digital Innovation). The DDI is one of the five major directorates of the CIA (see this organizational chart of the CIA for more details).

The EDG is responsible for the development, testing and operational support of all backdoors, exploits, malicious payloads, trojans, viruses and any other kind of malware used by the CIA in its covert operations world-wide.

The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell’s 1984, but “Weeping Angel”, developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.

The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom’s MI5/BTSS. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake-Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In ‘Fake-Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.

As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks. The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.

The CIA’s Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed numerous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones. Infected phones can be instructed to send the CIA the user’s geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone’s camera and microphone.

Despite iPhone’s minority share (14.5%) of the global smart phone market in 2016, a specialized unit in the CIA’s Mobile Development Branch produces malware to infest, control and exfiltrate data from iPhones and other Apple products running iOS, such as iPads. CIA’s arsenal includes numerous local and remote “zero days” developed by CIA or obtained from GCHQ, NSA, FBI or purchased from cyber arms contractors such as Baitshop. The disproportionate focus on iOS may be explained by the popularity of the iPhone among social, political, diplomatic and business elites.

A similar unit targets Google’s Android which is used to run the majority of the world’s smart phones (~85%) including Samsung, HTC and Sony. 1.15 billion Android powered phones were sold last year. “Year Zero” shows that as of 2016 the CIA had 24 “weaponized” Android “zero days” which it has developed itself and obtained from GCHQ, NSA and cyber arms contractors.

These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman by hacking the “smart” phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.

 

What is the total size of “Vault 7”?

The series is the largest intelligence publication in history.

HERE is the documents page.

READ MORE:WikiLeaks Press Release

RELATED:WikiLeaks Vault 7: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

The cause and manner of death of Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations needs to be studied further, the city medical examiner said Tuesday, a day after the diplomat fell ill at his office at Russia’s U.N. mission and died at a hospital.

Further study usually includes toxicology and other screenings, which can take weeks. The case was referred to the medical examiner’s office by the hospital, spokeswoman Julie Bolcer said.

Vitaly Churkin, who died a day before his 65th birthday, had been Russia’s envoy at the United Nations since 2006. He was the longest-serving ambassador on the Security Council, the U.N.’s most powerful body.

The medical examiner is responsible for investigating deaths that occur by criminal violence, accident, suicide, suddenly or when the person seemed healthy, or if someone died in any unusual or suspicious manner. Most of the deaths investigated by the office are not suspicious.

The Security Council held a moment of silence Tuesday in memory of Churkin, whom U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called “not only an outstanding diplomat but an extraordinary human being.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin esteemed Churkin’s “professionalism and diplomatic talents,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to the state news agency TASS. Moscow has not yet given a date for the funeral.

Diplomatic colleagues from around the world mourned Churkin as a master in their field, saying he had both a deep knowledge of diplomacy and a large and colorful personality.

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said that while she and Churkin did not always agree, “he unquestionably advocated his country’s positions with great skill.”

Her predecessor, Samantha Power, described him on Twitter as a “diplomatic maestro and deeply caring man” who had done all he could to bridge differences between the U.S. and Russia.

Those differences were evident when Power and Churkin spoke at the Security Council last month, and Power lashed out at Russia for annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and for carrying out “a merciless military assault” in Syria. Churkin countered that Democratic former President Barack Obama’s administration, which Power served in, was “desperately” searching for scapegoats for its failures in Iraq, Syria and Libya.

Churkin died weeks into some major adjustments for Russia, the U.N. and the international community, with a new secretary-general at the world body and a new administration in Washington. Meanwhile, the Security Council is due this week to discuss Ukraine and Syria.

From Moscow’s vantage point, “Churkin was like a rock against which were broken the attempts by our enemies to undermine what constitutes the glory of Russia,” TASS quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying.

Churkin’s U.N. counterparts “experienced and respected the pride that he took in serving his country and the passion and, at times, very stern resolution that he brought to his job,” said General Assembly President Peter Thomson, of Fiji. But colleagues also respected Churkin’s intellect, diplomatic skills, good humor and consideration for others, said Thomson, who called for a moment of silence at the start of an unrelated meeting Monday.

Churkin emerged as the face of a new approach to foreign affairs by the Soviet Union in 1986, when he testified before the U.S. Congress about the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. It was rare for any Soviet official to appear before Congress.

In fluent English, Churkin provided little new information about Chernobyl but engaged in a friendly, sometimes humorous, exchange with lawmakers who were not accustomed to such a tone — or to a representative in a fashionably well-fitting suit and a stylish haircut — from the Soviet Union.

After he returned to the foreign ministry in Moscow, he ably dodged questions and parried with Western correspondents, often with a smile, at briefings in the early 1990s. Within the government, he proved himself an able and flexible presence who survived numerous course changes after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He held ambassadorships in Canada and Belgium, among other posts.

Churkin told Russia Today in an interview this month that diplomacy had become “much more hectic,” with political tensions rising and stability elusive in various hotspots. At the time, he looked in good health, reporter Alexey Yaroshevsky tweeted Monday.

MORE AT NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Originally posted on Feb. 15, 2017, at 7:21 a.m. Updated on Feb. 15, 2017, at 10:58 a.m. 

NEW YORK — He was found just before 7 a.m. on Election Day, lying on the floor of the Russian Consulate on the Upper East Side.

The man was unconscious and unresponsive, with an unidentified head wound — “blunt force trauma,” in cop parlance. By the time emergency responders reached him, he was dead.

Initial reports said the nameless man had plunged to his death from the roof of the consulate. As journalists rushed to the scene, consular officials quickly changed the narrative. The anonymous man had not fallen dozens of feet from the roof of the consular building, they said, but rather had suffered a heart attack in the security office, and died.

By the time the man’s body left the morgue the next day, Donald J. Trump was president-elect of the United States. It was the culmination of a sensational, bitterly divisive political campaign that US intelligence agencies would later say Russia actively sought to manipulate and skew in Trump’s favor. With the election results, the world had turned upside down, and the death of the man at the consulate quickly faded from view.

Police officers said the death of Sergei Krivov — his name revealed here publicly for the first time — looked natural, and listed the case as closed.

But who was Krivov? And how did he really die? Three months after he was found dead, as tensions between the US and Russia reach a fever pitch, the New York City medical examiner isn’t sure he had a heart attack after all.

As far as paper trails go, dying is a messy thing, even under normal circumstances. But in the months since Krivov’s death, it’s proven nearly impossible to find out how he died, who he was, and how, if at all, federal authorities were involved in any investigation.

English-language news reports said Krivov, identified then only as a 63-year-old Russian national and Manhattan resident, was a security officer. But a November report from Sputnik, the English-language Russian media outlet, says he was a consular duty commander.

That position is no ordinary security guard. According to other public Russian-language descriptions of the duty commander position, Krivov would have been in charge of, among other things, “prevention of sabotage” and suppression of “attempts of secret intrusion” into the consulate.

In other words, it was Krivov’s job to make sure US intelligence agencies didn’t have ears in the building.

The duty commander would also have had access to the consulate’s crypto-card — the top secret codebreaker used to encrypt and decrypt messages transmitted between the consulate and other Russian channels. It was likely Krivov who helped transmit cables in and out of the heavily guarded building.

Despite being described as a Manhattan resident by the NYPD, Krivov is a phantom in public records. No one with his name, or any iteration of it, has lived in Manhattan for years, and the only other two Krivovs listed in New York state didn’t return calls asking if they knew a Sergei (in the NYPD’s files, Krivov’s name is not transliterated as “Sergei” or “Sergey” but as the less common “Cergej”). Neither were listed as related to one. An NYPD officer looking at the case file told BuzzFeed News no family was listed.

The NYPD told BuzzFeed News the responding officers were in contact with “whoever was in charge of the consulate” for information regarding Krivov.

But when BuzzFeed News went to Krivov’s address, listed in the NYPD’s files, at 11 E. 90th St., it wasn’t a residence. It’s a Smithsonian-owned office building for its neighboring Cooper Hewitt design museum. It’s located a block behind the Russian Consulate, which is at 9 E. 91st St. One of the consulate’s public entrances is 11 E. 91st St.

Asked about the discrepancy, the NYPD insisted that 11 E. 90th St. was the address they had been given for Krivov, apparently by Russian consular officials.

“No one is living here — this is where my desk is right now,” a Smithsonian employee at the address said when BuzzFeed News called.

It’s unclear how thoroughly or for how long the NYPD investigated Krivov’s death. Multiple officials declined to offer any details about the investigation. Several officers told BuzzFeed News the case is listed as “closed.”

“The narrative of the story is kind of vague, it’s not saying much,” one officer said, scanning the incident report with BuzzFeed News on the phone. “With all cases like this, it is investigated by the detective squad,” he said. “For some reason it was closed out.”

A separate officer said the case was listed as “no criminology suspected, natural causes.”

The medical examiner’s office, though, says their investigation of Krivov’s death remains open.

“The cause and manner of death are pending further studies,” said Julie Bolcer, a spokeswoman for the office. “There are no results to share yet.”

After BuzzFeed News published this story, the Medical Examiner’s office said that, while it did continue investigating the cause of death, the office had determined Krivov died naturally.

“This is a natural death,” Bolcer said. “We are doing advanced studies to characterize the details of the underlying disease.”

Further, the office said it is not unusual for the NYPD to close the case despite the lack of a clear cause of death, since the office had said the death was not suspicious. Toxicology tests were completed, the office continued, and the results were not going to be related to the death.

But others who spoke with BuzzFeed News said his disconnect between the medical examiner’s office and the NYPD is not normal. In standard practice, a death investigation would not be formally closed by police officers until the medical examiner had reached a determination on the death.

“It’s open until you can get a cause of death….there has to be a complete circuit with a case,” said Marq Claxton, a former NYPD investigator. “That case is going to stay open until there’s a final determination, it could be a homicide, it could be something, it could be accidental or whatever.”

A separate medical examiner official said Krivov’s body had been released the day after his death, but declined to say to whom the body was released. That the medical examiner no longer has the body, but testing continues, suggests toxicology screening of tissue or blood samples.

It’s not necessarily uncommon for toxicology tests to take weeks or even months to come back. The medical examiner’s office would not specify the kind of further testing being done.

None of the five major funeral chapels or funeral homes in upper Manhattan knew of any recently deceased person named Krivov. The New York City Health Department declined BuzzFeed News’ request to search for records related to Krivov’s death, saying that by standard practices, any search had to be requested by a family member. The city’s burial desk, which tracks documentation from funeral homes, said it only files paperwork and doesn’t have a searchable database.

The NYPD denied BuzzFeed News’ request for the incident report, saying the request did not contain enough details, including the date, precinct, and location of Krivov’s death, or the incident number. BuzzFeed News’ request in fact included all of that information. A separate denial said the incident report “is not a public record and can only be obtained through due process of law (Court Ordered Subpoena).”

According to experts and former police officers, incident reports are not generally withheld by the NYPD.

“The incident report, after an investigation is closed, typically that is releasable,” said Michael Morisy, the founder of MuckRock, a nonprofit organization dedicated to government transparency and records laws. “It’s really weird that they would categorically state that was rejected…incident reports are not broadly exempt from public records law.”

In a last-ditch effort to find where Krivov’s body may have been taken, BuzzFeed News called Aeroflot airlines, the only major carrier with direct flights between New York and Moscow. Aeroflot would not say whether it had flown a body from New York to Russia in the days following Nov. 8. Information about body transports, it said, was classified and could only be released by a government entity.

As police made their way to the consulate that Election Day morning, Americans’ interest in Moscow had reached a fever pitch of Cold War–era proportions, fueled by a near-constant barrage of reports detailing a wide-ranging Russian intelligence operation that the US intelligence community says was designed to undermine the US election.

It stands to reason that Krivov, who was nearing the upper end of the mortality curve for Russian men, may have died a completely natural death, and that much of the hand-wringing over the incident is due to bureaucratic red tape rather than suspicious circumstances.

But given the unique circumstances — and a backdrop of plummeting US–Russia relations — the lack of information has done little to quell theories. The more questions that were asked about Krivov, the less people wanted to talk.

“No one seems to want to discuss this,” one law enforcement source said, after reaching out to other law enforcement officials to see what they had heard about the case.

In the hours following Krivov’s death, the NYPD had said it would identify him following notification of his family. When BuzzFeed News asked for his identity months later, police immediately said the request would have to go to through the US State Department.

The State Department, after being initially responsive, abruptly told BuzzFeed News it wouldn’t help, and said the information would have to come from the Russian Consulate.

“I’m not sure why they would or would not want to share this,” one State Department official said in a follow-up phone call, referring to the NYPD and the State Department. A New York police officer eventually gave BuzzFeed News Krivov’s name.

The incident — and the lack of information surrounding it — has raised eyebrows in Washington.

Two sources to whom BuzzFeed News spoke, who requested anonymity to discuss the probe, said Krivov appeared to be a heavy drinker, which law enforcement concluded led to his natural death.

“I don’t think there’s anything there,” one US intelligence official said.

The State Department also refused to say whether Krivov was registered as a foreign agent, how long he had been in the US, what his immigration status was, and whether they had any contact with the Russian mission regarding his death.

When asked about the incident, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said: “Are you serious?” She continued: “He had heart problems, he had heart attacks. It’s weird that your outlet is interested in this.”

“The employee of the Consulate General of Russia Sergei Krivov passed away on November 8, 2016,” the consulate told BuzzFeed News. “An American doctor that was admitted to the Consulate General stated without a doubt that the death was by natural reasons. Medical examiners are currently establishing the cause of his death, but it is believed that the man suffered a heart attack.”

The FBI said it was not involved in investigating Krivov’s death. It declined to comment further and deferred to the NYPD.

The NYPD did not give BuzzFeed News an official comment on the investigation. BuzzFeed News spoke with the NYPD several times for this story, including with the precinct involved in the incident and the NYPD’s public affairs office.

Krivov’s place of employment — a palatial stone compound in Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side — has long been one of the premiere spy hotspots in the decades-old espionage war between the US and Moscow. Where many aficionados would understandably expect Washington, DC, to be prime real estate for cloak-and-dagger theater, New York City is oft-trodden territory, not least for its hosting of the United Nations.

It is unknown whether Krivov worked with Russian or US intelligence agencies. His work may not have even put him near any intelligence operations that were being run out of the consulate.

According to FBI court documents from 2015, the foreign arm of the Russian intelligence service, the SVR, likely keeps a secure office space inside the Manhattan consulate where Krivov worked.

In criminal documents filed against Evgeny Buryakov, Igor Sporyshev, and Victor Podobny — three undercover Russian foreign intelligence agents working in New York City — the bureau described “a secure office in Manhattan used by SVR agents to send and receive intelligence reports and assignments from Moscow (the ‘SVR NY Office’).”

The criminal complaint does not say specifically that the “SVR NY Office” is in the Manhattan consulate, but the document does say it is “located within an office maintained by the Russian Federation in New York, New York.”

It’s an open secret, US intelligence officials say, that the consulate is a staging ground for Russian intelligence operations. It’s also a coveted target for US agents. And its importance, officials say, has been underscored as US intelligence agencies try to get their arms around the Russians’ sweeping operation to manipulate the US election.

“That’s always a target,” the US intelligence official said of the Manhattan consulate.

In an unprecedented report issued in early January, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, the intelligence community writ large detailed the concerted Russian effort to manipulate and undermine the US election. Key to the intelligence community assessment were a multitude of intelligence channels, including signals intelligence — or SIGINT — like intercepted electronic communications or IP addresses. The specifics of where that SIGINT came from, and what it consisted of, remain secret.

BuzzFeed News has filed a FOIA request with the NYPD for the police report on Krivov’s death, and any related paperwork. That request was received, but a determination has not yet been made as to whether the department will provide them.

Maybe those documents will provide insight into a death that, for now, remains a mystery. Nov. 8 began with his death, and ended with one of the most contentious political upsets in history. After that, Sergei Krivov simply vanished.

READ MORE AT BUZZFEEDNEWS

 

Twenty-six Seconds – A Personal History of the Zapruder Film

By Alexandra Zapruder          (Hachette Books, NY, 2016)

Review by William Kelly

The Provenance of the Z-Film

Alexandra is the granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder, who took the most famous home movie of all time, a 26 second – 486 frame film of the assassination of President Kennedy. And she is the daughter of Henry, a Harvard-Oxford educated lawyer who served in the Kennedy Justice Department and oversaw the copyright fight for the film.

Alexandra herself is no slouch. She has a Masters degree from Harvard, is a founding staff member of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and is author of “Salvaged Pages: Young Writers of Holocaust Diaries.”  But in writing this ostensibly non-fictional account of the film they neglect to include an index, so I had to read the whole book to get to the part I was interested in – the Zapruder Film’s time at the National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC).

But this book is not a history of the film itself, it is personal account from the family’s point of view, and the film’s impact on culture and society, while neglecting its political and historic implications.

After filming the murder, Abe – aka “Mr. Zee,” returned to his nearby office in the Dal-Tex building, placed the camera in his safe and called his son Henry to tell him the president was dead. Henry said he was shot but not yet reported dead, but Abraham knew better and set his son straight, explaining what he saw as the motorcade came into the camera’s picture frame: “As it came in line with my camera, I heard a shot. I saw the president lean over to Jacqueline. I didn’t realize what happened. And then I realized – I saw his head open up and I started yelling, ‘They killed him! They killed him!’ The president is dead. I saw the president’s head explode. How could this happen in America?”

As Alexandra notes, “He had known almost immediately that this (media frenzy) would be the dilemma of the film. The very night after the assassination he was visited by nightmares, some of which would haunt him for the rest of his life. But the one that pressed in on his dreams the most that night was not about the murder of the president but about the film. He dreamed he was walking in Times Square in New York, surrounded by the theaters and the flashing marquee lights. There, on the street corner, in front of a sleazy theater, stood a man in ‘a sharp double-breasted suit,’ hawking tickets to his home movie, shouting to all those who passed by, ‘Come inside to see the president murdered on the big screen!’ From deep inside his subconscious, it was his anxiety about what to do with the film that rose most prominently to the surface…The crux of the dream’s horror, in my mind, is that he would become the hawker on the street himself.”

According to Alexandra, “The reel of film that was loaded in the camera on November 22, 1963 was Kodachrome II safety film, a color film that was less grainy,…but was not easy to develop and had to be sent to a Kodak lab for processing.”

That would be at 3131 Manor way, near Love Field, where at the same time LBJ was being sworn in as President aboard Air Force One.

Because the Kodak lab in Dallas couldn’t make duplicates, “for that they sent films to Kodak headquarters in Rochester, New York,” but the Jameson Film Company in Dallas could, “provided that the original was kept in the unslit 16mm form so that they could run it on their 16mm duplicating printer.”

Kodak provided three rolls of 8mm camera film, but Jameson didn’t know what exposure was used, so they estimated it at optimum calculated exposure, and then printed one somewhat over- and the other somewhat underexposed, so they had at least one optimum copy.

The original film was given the identification number “0183.”  But the three duplicates were numbered  as follows: Copy 1 – “0185” (below optimum exposure);  Copy 2 – “0186” (optimum exposure);  and Copy 3 – “0187” (above optimum exposure).  None of the copies contained the visual information between the sprocket holes.  The original remained unslit.  The apparent of absence of a copy numbered “0184” was unexplained.  Why wasn’t that number used?

According to Alexandra, Secret Service Agent Max Phillips at the SS office on Ervay Street was given two copies.  Copy 1 was retained in Dallas, “while Copy 3 was put on a plane that very night, bound for Chief Rowley at Secret Service headquarters in Washington D.C.,” sometime after 9 p.m.

Alexandra writes: “As early as Saturday morning, November 23, there was no single life of the ‘Zapruder Film.’ There were four versions – the original and three duplicates – each of which travel their own path, creating its own reverberations and consequences…”

On Saturday morning the Dallas FBI “borrowed” Copy 1 from the Dallas Secret Service, but didn’t inform their bosses in Washington.  When the Washington FBI office learned about the film from Time Magazine, Special Agents James Bookhout and Robert Barrett were ordered to make a duplicate of Copy 1.  But Bookhout and Barrett claimed to have been unable to make a duplicate and returned Copy 1 to the SS Dallas office.

Copy 1 was subsequently sent via commercial American Airlines Flight 20 that departed Dallas at 5:20 p.m. on Saturday, November 23, 1963 bound for Washington D.C.  In Washington, additional copies were made from Copy 1 at a commercial lab on Monday, November 25. Copy 1 was returned to the Dallas SS office on Tuesday, November 26, along with a duplicate (third generation) copy.

On Saturday, November 23, the original Zapruder film was sent by “courier” to Life Magazine’s Chicago printing plant, R.R. Donnelley.  Meanwhile the Life magazine crew was destroying the 200,000 printed copies of the original November 29^th edition of the magazine.  That issue featured a story on the Bobby Baker scandal that had threatened to destroy the political career LBJ.  Lyndon Baines Johnson, however, was now the President of the United States.

The duplication process in Chicago resulted in some mutilation of the original Z-film. Entire frames were spliced out.   A photo of what appears to be the un-slit original that is now at the Sixth Floor museum in Dallas, provides no indication as to exactly when the original 16 mm film (with two running 8mm strips) was slit and made into the 8mm film that exists today at the National Archives.

Sometime during the weekend, the movie (ostensibly a copy), was viewed in New York City by Life magazine executive C. D. Jackson, a CIA-affiliated Cold Warrior.  Jackson decided that Life should buy all of the rights to the film, not just the still prints of individual frames, and to suppress the full-length running film.  As a result, the film would remain unseen by the general public for more than a dozen years.

Much of Alexandra Zapruder’s book concerns financial transactions involved with the ownership of the film.  Alexandra defends her family’s parlay of the original $50,000 to $150,000 and the subsequent buy-back for $1, followed by the re-sale of the film to the US government for many millions. The Zapruder family kept the copyrights and gifted the rights to the historic film to the Sixth Floor Museum, an admirable donation.

 

It has also been pointed out that Alexandra neglects to mention that a leading copyright authority of his time, Melville Nimmer, considered the Z-film an example of a work whose copyright ultimately would not have been protected due to First Amendment considerations.

 

Alexandra castigates Joshia Thompson and Robert Groden for theft, accusing them of acknowledging their unauthorized copying of the film in order to promote their conspiracy theories. While she also seems annoyed that bootleg copies were printed, and doesn’t seem bothered at all that there is no precisely accurate account for the film’s time in the government’s hands. She expresses the opinion that Life’s suppression of the film was essentially in good taste.

“Meanwhile,” writes Alexandra, “it appears that at some point in early December, the Secret Service in Washington enlisted the help of the CIA in analyzing the film. This part of the story turns out to be maddeningly confusing. There is scant official documentation and conflicting, sometimes unreliable testimonies from those involved. As a result, there are widely divergent conclusions about what happened and the implications. Trying to isolate the hard evidence and write an account based upon it is hampered by conspiracy theorists who have comingled facts and speculation to form narratives that proliferate in print and on the Internet.”

Wait a minute, I thought that’s what we were doing – trying to isolate the hard evidence and write a conclusive narrative of events as they really occurred. Isn’t that what we are trying to do? And while the crazy conspiracy theorists have failed to do that, so does Alexandra.

For starters, it wasn’t “at some point in early December,” it was the day after the assassination – Saturday, November 23, and Sunday November 24 – when the Z-film visited the NPIC on two entirely different occasions. There events occurred that have been detailed elsewhere.

The December date probably stems from CIA document number (1641)-450  [RIF: 104-10423-10308 link to Smoking Doc #3   [ http://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=7154 – relPageId=2 ], discovered by Paul Hoch, that officially documents the Z-film’s residency at the venerable NPIC.

But the official documentary record doesn’t provide the detail and context that some individuals who were there have described – Ben Hunter, Homer McMahon and Dino Brugioni –  NPIC staff employees who actually handled the film.

Alexandra actually leaves out the fascinating story of how we came to meet these men and get their stories on the record.  It was the April 2, 1997 Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) public “Hearing on the Status and Disposition of the Zapruder Film,” which was aired on CSPAN cable TV that supplied an impetus.

That program got low general ratings, but was seen by a key suburban Washington D.C. housewife.  When she learned about the ARRB’s interest in the Zapruder Film, she called the Board to inform them that her husband, Ben Hunter, had mentioned that he had worked on the film.  An employee at NPIC on the weekend of the assassination, he was called in to do special work for someone important.

While Hunter, McMahon and Brugioni were all interviewed on the record by the ARRB, Alexandra only quotes Doug Horne, the military analyst on the ARRB staff, from an interview he gave Dick Russell (which I posted on the internet [ http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/11/doug-horne.html  ] ).  Instead Alexandra defers to Richard Trask.

“After getting lost in this labyrinth more times than I could count, I eventually found a guide in Richard Trask, author of ‘National Nightmare on Six Feet of Film: Mr. Zapruder’s Home Movie and the Murder of President Kennedy,’ and a measured and reliable historian of these events. According to Trask, the likely scenario is as follows: As we know, the Secret Service had flown Copy 3 of the film from Dallas to Washington on Friday night, November 22.”

“The agency then urgently enlisted the help of the CIA to make copies of certain frames of the film. Late Saturday (or possibly Sunday) night Ben Hunter and Homer McMahon, two employees of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), were called to the lab. The NPIC was a little-known office charged with solving national intelligence problems by using photo interpretation and imagery analysis.”

This is an understatement, as the NPIC was founded in the CIA by Art Lundahl, who had previously headed the Navy Photo Interpretation Center and was hired by the CIA to develop their National Center, which operated out of the upper floors of a downtown Washington D.C. Ford motor dealership.

The primary responsibility of NPIC was to receive U2 spy plane (and later CORONA spy satellite) photos that were processed at the secret “Hawkeye Works” plant affiliated with the KODAK camera company headquarters in Rochester, New York. When Homer McMahon was tape recorded saying the person who brought the film to NPIC mentioned that the film was processed at the Rochester facility and he used the “Hawkeye Works” code name for the secret plant whose name was still classified in 1997 and had to be excised from the recorded interview with McMahon.

Art Lundahl, the founder and head of NPIC, was first recognized for his analysis of UFO films and photographs in the Navy, but made his mark during the Cuban Missile Crisis when his briefing of the President in October 1962 provided conclusive proof of long range soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and sparked the crisis. Kennedy was so impressed by Lundahl’s briefing he sent Lundahl to London to brief the American Ambassador David Bruce and then on to Paris to brief deGaulle and ensure their support in the crisis.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved with the loss of only one U2 pilot, the President and Attorney General visited Lundahl’s NPIC offices and labs above the Ford dealership and immediately ordered that they be provided quarters in Building 213 on the grounds of the Anacosta Navy Yard and given the budget and latest technology they needed.

It was to Building 213 where the Z-film was taken and it was for a special project that the NPIC staff technicians were enlisted to work on.

“Hunter and McMahon were put to work making enlargements of the film, a task that was described as ‘above top secret.’”

Trask: “The work done on the film was accomplished using the special ’10-20-40 processing enlarger’ with a full-immersion ‘wet-gate’ used to create internegative prints forty times the original size. These internegatives were then utilized to produce multiple color prints of selected frames.”

Alexandra Zapruder says, “It’s not clear what, if anything, the Secret Service did with these reproductions of the film until early December, when they – again in conjunction with the CIA and NPIC – seem to have analyzed the film more thoroughly.”

“Nearly nothing is known about the NPIC handling of the Zapruder Film until the mid-seventies, when first-generation assassination researcher Paul Hoch came across CIA Document 450…This record confirms that the NPIC analysis took place and establishes that two sets of briefing boards with enlargements of the film were created, though the document does not state when or by whom.”

Well we know that two separate sets of briefing boards were made during two separate Z-film visits to the NPIC – one attended by Hunter and McMahon and the other by Dino Brugioni.  Neither Hunter and McMahon, on the one hand, nor Brugioni on the other, were aware of the other’s role in the two sets of activities.

We also know that Art Lundahl used one set of the briefing boards to brief CIA director John  McCone on Monday morning because when he got back to his office Lundahl said that the briefing went well and thanked all of those who assisted him. While we have some of the original briefing boards, we don’t know what Lundahl told McCone in the briefing.

We do know that after the NPIC briefing using the Z-film photos on briefing boards, McCone told Robert Kennedy the CIA concluded that there were two shooters, as RFK related that information to Arthur Sclesinger, who dutifully noted it in his journal.

But who was briefed by whoever used the second set of briefing boards?

And what became of the documentary record of what Alexandra Zapruder says, “amid rising questions about whether the early FBI and Secret Service accounts of the assassination were correct, the CIA and NPIC undertook a more comprehensive analysis of the enlargements from the film in order to try to establish the timing and impact of the shots fired at the motorcade.”

What became of that “more comprehensive analysis”?

Alexandra Zapruder apparently doesn’t care.

“Who cares when it happened?” she says. “After all, a report of two security agencies working together to glean as much information as they could about the president’s assassination seems innocuous enough. But don’t be fooled.”

She says this link to the CIA has become fodder for elaborate conspiracy theories that she blames on “the very different readings of the testimonies provided by these aging former NPIC personnel.”

There wouldn’t be such fodder for conspiracy theories if the official records of the two briefings and “comprehensive analysis” were on the public record, as they should be by this time.  But in the meantime, we do have the recollections of the NPIC technicians who actually did the work on the Z-film.

After he was interviewed on tape, and uttered the “Hawkeye Works” code name for the secret Kodak plant in Rochester. [ Undercover: Covert photographic operations center existed at Kodak plant | Rochester Business Journal New York business news and information ]

Then McMahon was brought back, apparently after being reprimanded for his original candid testimony. But this time he sang another tune, telling Jeremy Gunn (on July 14, 1997) that he was a recovering drug addict and alcoholic with “senile dementia,” thus attempting to destroy the credibility of his previous statements.

Brugioni can’t be so easily dismissed, as he wrote the CIA book on photo forgery, and a synopsis of the Z-film event for the official history of the NPIC, a several hundred page long, still-classified document. But rather than asking what became of all the missing official records on these events, and what is the true provenance of the original Z-film and the three first generation copies, Alexandra Zapruder simply blames silly conspiracy theorists for muddling up the works.

Alexandra mentions that one copy of the Z-film was brought to the NPIC by a Secret Service Agent identified as “Bill Smith,” and of course there is no Secret Service Agent named Bill Smith.  It has been speculated that it was just a common name made up for the moment.  But there is a NPIC officer named Bill Smith, a longtime employee who married a high level CIA officer who had also worked a NPIC and had been implicated in a social scandal with another government official.

This Bill Smith attended annual NPIC employee picnics, but denied in a phone conversation that he was the “Bill Smith” who brought the Z-film to NPIC.  In retrospect it seems he could have got the same message Homer McMahon got, namely, that any discussion of such matters is not the party line.

As for the missing records of the Z-film residencies at NPIC, we do have other examples of missing NPIC records, including accounts of a number of NPIC technicians assigned to the CIA’s JMWAVE station in Florida. They all testified to the ARRB separately that there was a CIA program called PATHFINDER, the files of which were not kept in the regular files at JMWAVE, but kept separate in the NPIC section of the station.

PATHFINDER was described as a CIA plan to kill Castro using snipers with high powered rifles with scopes shooting at him as he rode in an open jeep en route to Xanadu, the DuPont estate, which just happened to be next door to the home of Rolando Cubella (AMLASH), who the CIA’s Desmond Fitzgerald was briefing in Paris at the time of the assassination of President Kennedy.

While PATHFINDER was reportedly “disapproved” by Higher Authority, NPIC had provided he CIA with aerial photos of the area and detailed floor plans to assist them in the operation that appeared suspiciously similar to what happened at Dealey Plaza.

And what became of all the official NPIC records that should have been responsive to the JFK Act and included in the JFK Collection at the NARA where all interested parties could read them and decide for themselves what happened to JFK?

Why isn’t Dino Brugoni’s report on the Z-film event at NPIC from the NPIC official history not included in the JFK Collection at the Archives?

According to an ARRB report on an interview with an NPIC secretary, Robert F. Kennedy himself ordered all the NPIC records related to the assassination compiled and sent to the Smithsonian Institute instead of the NARA, where they should have been sent.  In any event, they have for now disappeared into an Orwellian “memory hole” where missing records are deep-sixed.

Alexandra also apparently ignores the well-known fact that Jean de Mohrenschildt, a close personal friend of the accused assassin had at one time worked for Alexandra’s grandfather in the dress business, a coincidence that could have drawn out some interesting additional factors that remain to be explored.

In his book on photo fakery, Dino Brugioni says that it is so easy to manipulate or misinterpret photographs that they should not be utilized as evidence in a court of law, and indeed, like the acoustical evidence in the assassination, none of the photo evidence is conclusive of anything. The Backyard (“mission” photos), the Tramps, Badgeman, the Man in Mexico City, Prayer Man, the Zapruder film – none of them provide any basis for consensus as to what they tell us or mean, regardless of whether they are authentic or not.

And so the bottom line is that Alexandra Zapruder’s book “Twenty-Six Seconds” is more of “a personal history” rather than a definitive account of the provenance of the Z-film. A precise accounting of the film’s chain of possession, and the potential repercussions of that history, have yet to be realized.

Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press | February 10, 2017 Updated: February 10, 2017 3:34pm

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has appointed Tanzania’s former chief

justice to review potential new information, including from South Africa, on the mysterious 1961 plane crash that killed U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold.

 

Read more at the San Francisco Chronicle