Thursday, July 14, 2016

 THE PROSECUTOR’S TALE

(With Apologies to Chaucer)

By Dan L. Hardway © 2016

A Tale Well Told

For the past few years Robert Tanenbaum has been telling a fascinating tale of a 1976 encounter with David Atlee Phillips.  I first heard his presentation at Duquesne University’s Wecht Institute’s Passing the Torch Conference in October, 2013.  He told the story with great detail, drama and flourish.

Tanenbaum served as head of the Kennedy task force of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (“HSCA”) from late fall 1976 until July 1977.  He began work there around the same time as the HSCA’s first Chief Counsel, Richard Sprague.  One afternoon a week while working for the HSCA, Tanenbaum told us, his office was open to anyone who wanted to see him.  On one such afternoon Mark Lane showed up at Tanenbaum’s office just long enough to hand him an envelope.  Lane told him, without any further explanation, that he knew that Tanenbaum would “do the right thing” with the document that was in the envelope.[1]  The envelope contained a copy of the initial report on the FBI investigation of the assassination sent to the head of the Secret Service, James K. Rowley, on November 23, 1963, under a cover letter signed by J. Edgar Hoover.  Tanenbaum calls that report “the Hoover Memorandum.” The early investigation report contained in the Rowley Letter contains the following paragraph:

“The Central Intelligence Agency advised that on October 1, 1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported that an individual identified himself as Lee Oswald, who contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring as to any messages.  Special Agents of this Bureau, who have conversed with Oswald in Dallas, Texas, have observed photographs of the individual referred to above and have listened to a recording of his voice. These Special Agents are of the opinion that the above referred to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald.”[2]

With this ammunition in hand, Tanenbaum asserted, he subpoenaed David Atlee Phillips to appear before the HSCA sitting in executive session.  Mr. Tanenbaum did not tell us when this hearing was held.  Listen while he masterfully sets the scene:

“Seated opposite me at the table, at this long table, rectangular, was David Phillips.  He appeared as though he had just walked out of a coffin.  He was ashen, thin, three-piece suit, very erect.  He sat down.  He was sworn in.  The stenographer was to my left and he was where the gentlemen is right here in front of me.  The rest of the committee was off to my right.”[3]

Having set the scene in the Committee hearing room so graphically in our minds, Tanenbaum then described how he initially questioned Mr. Phillips to establish Phillips’s story about Oswald’s visit to the Soviet Embassy and Cuban Consulate, which Tanenbaum, based on the Hoover Memorandum, believed would be false.  The details of the case, in Tanenbaum’s telling in Pittsburgh, weren’t really exact in detail, but his point was to let us know that he’s tying David Phillips down in his testimony so as to catch him in a lie.  He tells us that Phillips testified that the surveillance camera was broken on the day of Oswald’s visit and, consequently, the CIA sent out the wrong photo.  He relates that Phillips testified that the CIA’s Mexico City listening posts recycled the tapes used to record intercepts at the Cuban and Soviet diplomatic facilities every 7 to 14 days.  He tied Phillips down that it was his sworn testimony that the tape was not in existence on November 1, nor on November 22, nor on November 23, 1963.

Tanenbaum continued his dramatic account of the hearing:

“I then looked at him, and he was staring at me, and I sort of have this effect on people when I question them in court, mostly defendants.  I said there are three people in this room who now know you have committed perjury, you, me and Detective Fenton who’s standing off to the right.  I’m going to give you the chance to purge yourself.  And he stared at me and said nothing.  I then asked Cliff [Fenton] to circulate the memo that I received from Mark Lane.  And the memo states as follows in substance: ‘It’s from J. Edgar Hoover to all supervisory personnel in the FBI worldwide, dated November 23, 1963.  And it states that our agents, seven of them who had been questioning Lee Harvey Oswald for the past seventeen hours – keep in mind this is a pre-Miranda case– who have questioned him for the past seventeen hours have listened to the tape made by an individual on or about October 1, 1963, inside the Russian Embassy in Mexico City calling the Cuban Embassy and they can state categorically that the voice on the tape is not the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald.’ So I, he now read it.  This is your chance. And in his, what we call demeanor evidence, appellate courts, Judge Breck, do not have the advantage of demeanor evidence.  He looked at me and I will give you the cleanest version I can, and that is to say that in his mind his staring at me and my having the gall in his alleged mind to ask these questions of him would be the equivalent of him obliterating my presence.  He simply folded up the document and he left the room.”[4]

In Mr. Tanenbaum’s telling, one of the members of the Committee immediately questioned him – Tanenbaum – “Why didn’t we get this document before?”  In Pittsburgh, Tanenbaum didn’t explain why the Memorandum wasn’t passed to the Committee members in advance of the hearing nor did he tell us how he answered the Congressman.  He doesn’t say whether he told them how the document came into his possession, but he did tell us that he responded by telling the Committee members at the hearing, “We’re not playing that game, that’s the game that was played with the Warren Commission.”  He said he explained to the members that he was going after the unredacted good stuff.  He boldly told the Committee members, “This is what we are going to do.  In order, since we are not a grand jury, we should invite him back with a lawyer, and tell him he is now committing contempt because he was subpoenaed and there’s more questions to be asked and he committed perjury and try to have him absolve himself of that and tell us the truth.”[5]  In response, according to Tannenbaum, the Committee remained silent.

In Pittsburgh, Tanenbaum then related that, after this confrontation, the Committee’s funding was cut and he had to intercede personally with every member of the House, and the Speaker of the House, to get the staff paid.  As he tells the tale, the Chairman of the HSCA, whom he identifies at this point as Louis Stokes, then called Mr. Tanenbaum to his office to tell him about all the compromises that have to be made to run a Congressional Committee.  In Tanenbaum’s telling, this conversation appears to be about prosecuting Phillips for contempt and perjury.[6]  Tanenbaum boldly told him that if the Committee was going to do nothing about Phillips, then he had his resignation.   Returning to his office, Tanenbaum says he called Richard Sprague in Philadelphia and told him to come to D.C., “that the curtain had come down.”[7]  Sprague came down as requested and met, asking Tanenbaum what he thought they should do.  Tanenbaum told him, “We’re going to resign. He said, ‘OK.’” Tanenbaum called the Chairman and told him, “Get the Committee together, Dick and I are going to resign.”[8]  Tanenbaum says he told the Committee that he was resigning because their investigation was a sham.  In spite of his expressed low opinion of the Committee’s will to investigate, the Chairman and at least one member, Christopher Dodd, asked him to take over as Chief Counsel.  Richard Sprague agreed with them and urged him to take the job.  None of them got it, according to Tanenbaum.  He wasn’t interested in the job, or in getting the Chief Counsel’s job after telling Sprague to resign.  He was concerned with the truth and had determined that no one else was, Sprague included evidently.[9]

In Tanenbaum’s tale, “They [the HSCA] never called Phillips back.  So he just walked out on the Committee…. I said we would not accept redacted documents. Not only did my successor accept redacted documents, but he couldn’t even take notes from them.”[10]  And so, we are left to conclude, the best opportunity to have had the JFK murder solved by America’s best prosecutor/novelist was lost.  But Robert Tanenbaum maintained his integrity.

Robert Tanenbaum repeated a very similar tale in an interview with Len Osanic and Jim DiEugenio on BlackOp Radio on May 14, 2015.  In most of its details, the story pretty much tracks the tale told in Pittsburgh a year and a half before.  He again attributes the resignations to the Committee’s reluctance to do anything about the “phony Oswald in Mexico City.”[11] In both venues Tanenbaum told a story about him and Clif Fenton, his chief investigator, reviewing Gaeton Fonzi’s files from his work with the Church Committee.  After they completed that review at Tanenbaum’s house, Fenton, according to Tanenbaum’s telling, looked at him and said, “We’re in way over our heads here.”[12] Unfortunately, that may be the truest statement in the prosecutor’s tale.

The Spymaster’s Actual Testimony

Having worked for the HSCA as a researcher in 1977 and 1978 with a primary responsibility for looking into Oswald’s activities in Mexico City, I was, naturally, quite intrigued with Tanenbaum’s tale.  In the 18 months I was in D.C., David Atlee Phillips and his activities were very much in the focus of my attention.  When I first started working on the Mexico City area of investigation, I reviewed all the materials the Committee had up to that point on Phillips.  I read his executive session testimony.  I waded through his book, The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service.  But, sitting there in Pittsburgh, I couldn’t remember anything at all resembling the drama described by Tanenbaum.  If this confrontation had occurred, I wanted to see the transcript.  I knew that Tanenbaum’s statement that the HSCA never called Phillips back before them was incorrect.  I prepared Mickey Goldsmith for that hearing, which was held on April 25, 1978.  I attended the hearing, as did Ed Lopez and Gaeton Fonzi who both had spent extensive time working on Phillips after Tanenbaum jumped ship in late summer of 1977.[13]  Phillips was also called back for one last interview with staff – Gaeton Fonzi, Charles Berk, and me – in August of 1978 as we were trying to wind up our work.[14]  His assertion that Phillips was never called back before the Committee is just the beginning of the problems with the prosecutor’s tale.

David Atlee Phillips was first called to testify before the HSCA on November 27, 1976.[15]  This is the only time Phillips testified before the HSCA while Richard Sprague was Chief Counsel.  I had a copy of this transcript when I began work on Mexico City and Phillips.  In addition to the two Committee members who were present for the hearing, the record indicates that the following Committee staffers were also at the hearing: Richard Sprague, Kenneth Brooten, Donovan Gay, Richard Feeney, Jonathan Blackmer, Jeremy Akers, Linda Conners, Jackie Hess and Robert Ozer.[16]   Conspicuously absent from that list – and from the hearing – was one Robert Tanenbaum.  According to the transcript of the hearing, Tanenbaum did not participate at all in the hearing.  He wasn’t even there.  All the questioning of Phillips, except that done by Congressmen, was done by Chief Counsel Richard Sprague or Kenneth Brooten, a staff attorney.

Three exhibits were used at the November hearing.  The first was a redacted copy of the October 8, 1963, cable from the CIA’s  Mexico City station to Headquarters first reporting Oswald’s contact with the Soviet Embassy.[17]  The second was a redacted copy of an October 16, 1963, memorandum from the CIA’s Mexico City Chief of Station, Win Scott, to the ambassador, providing some of the information contained in the other two exhibits.[18]  The third exhibit was a redacted copy of the Headquarters response of October 11, 1963 to the Mexico City Cable.[19]  Conspicuously absent from this list is the Hoover memorandum Tanenbaum said Mark Lane gave him.

Phillips did testify, under Richard Sprague’s questioning, about the erasure and reuse policy for tapes in the Mexico City Station,[20] and about the possible erasure of the Oswald tape.[21]  No exhibits were used in this portion of the questioning, which occurred quite early in an examination that lasted more than three and a half hours, long enough to cover 134 pages of transcript.  It appears that, if Mark Lane had indeed given a copy of a Hoover memorandum to Tanenbaum, Tanenbaum had either not provided it to his boss or the Committee or, if he provided it, they decided not to use it in interrogating Phillips.[22]

At the end of the three and a half hours of questioning, David Phillips was still sitting in the witness chair when Sprague admonishes him that the testimony he has given has been in executive session and “is not to be discussed anywhere.”  The Committee continued Phillips’s subpoena and advised him that he remained subject to recall should the Committee wish to ask more questions.  The hearing ended with Congressman Preyer, one of the members of the HSCA whom Tanenbaum says he respects, saying, “I want to thank you, Mr. Phillips….”[23] The transcript of Phillips’s one appearance before the HSCA while Tanenbaum was employed by the Committee is not nearly as dramatic as the prosecutor’s tale told in Pittsburgh.  According to the transcript of the November hearing, Phillips giving Tanenbaum the evil eye and stomping out in contempt of Congress just isn’t there.  For that matter, neither is Tanenbaum.

I have not been able to find any transcript of any hearing where Phillips testified other than the HSCA executive sessions on November 27, 1976, and April 25, 1978.  Robert Tanenbaum was at neither of these executive session hearings.

How the Spymaster Came to be Called to Testify the First Time.

The actual historical record indicates that Phillips’s appearance before the HSCA on Saturday, November 27, 1976, was a rather spur of the moment affair.  Journalist Ron Kessler had written an article that appeared in the Washington Post on Friday, November 26, 1976, entitled “CIA Withheld Details on Oswald Call.”  The article reported statements made by David Phillips about Oswald’s call to the Soviet Embassy.[24]

The same day as the Kessler article appeared in the Post, Jeremy Akers of the HSCA staff called the CIA and spoke with Lyle Miller, the Deputy Legislative Counsel to ask whether Win Scott had been head of the Mexico City Station in 1963 and whether David Phillips had served there at that time.[25]  Mr. Miller also recorded that he had been informed by the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) that David Phillips had been requested to appear before the Committee that afternoon “to confirm certain information in the newspaper article.”  Phillips wanted to be relieved of his Security Agreement.  Mr. Miller contacted Phillips and told him he was not relieved from the agreement.[26]  As it turned out, Phillips did not testify that same day, but did appear the following day.

The CIA treated the Kessler articles, and Phillips’s testimony, as a security breach and began an investigation.  In connection with that investigation, the Inspector General (IG) of the CIA, John H. Waller, reported to the DDCI in a Memorandum dated December 1, 1976, that it was the intent of the IG to “let Sprague or his investigators have generally unfettered access to our relevant files here in this building.  Those documents he wishes to take out would be given a minimal sterilization.  Those documents which he wishes to have taken out and declassified would be sterilized for that purpose.”[27]  At that early stage it appears from the records available to us today, that the HSCA had not asked for any documents from the CIA.  It was true that the HSCA, at that time, had no access to CIA classified documents – or the classified documents of any other government agency for that matter – because no one on the HSCA staff had a security clearance.  But, as we will see, even Sprague accepted the fact that no one without a security clearance could see classified information under the relevant U.S. laws.

The Actual Record

Other details in Tanenbaum’s fantastic tale are also impossible to verify in the record.  Tanenbaum worked much of the magic in his well-spun Pittsburgh tale by collapsing time and conflating events in regard to these details.  His claim that the CIA denied access to documents is mirrored by his claim that what the HSCA eventually got was access to redacted copies from which they could not take notes.  The CIA followed the law and made the Committee wait until staff members received security clearances before giving them access to classified documents.  Once staffers had passed background checks, the CIA gave staff members unexpurgated access to everything we asked for, at least until close to the end of the HSCA’s life when they began to seriously stonewall on Mexico City.[28]  The staff members took extensive notes from classified documents and many, although not all, of those notes are now in the National Archives.  As noted above, Tanenbaum’s claim that the CIA flatly denied access is true only if you leave out the fact that, in the time-frame he is talking about, no one on the staff had their security clearance and the HSCA had not yet requested access to documents.  Thus Tanenbaum creates a very false impression of what was happening.

Richard Sprague, after becoming Chief Counsel in November, 1976, tried to negotiate a Memorandum of Understanding with the CIA so that HSCA staff could gain access to CIA materials, something he never accomplished.[29]  From the CIA’s perspective, Sprague, in the fall of 1976, appeared to be cooperative and sympathetic to the Agency’s concerns.  Negotiations aimed at obtaining such an agreement had only barely begun at the time Phillips first testified.[30] This explains why Sprague used expurgated FOIA copies of the documents used to confront Phillips at the November 1976 hearing.

Sprague met with the CIA’s Legislative Counsel, George Cary, two days after Phillips’s November 1976 testimony.  The concern was that the HSCA staff had not received security clearances from the FBI.  They also addressed the memorandum of understanding that would provide staffers with access to CIA documents.  The CIA counsel found the discussions to be “thoroughly friendly.”  Sprague assured them that “he has no desire to obtain any more classified information than is absolutely necessary and he is very mindful of the need to ‘run a tight ship’….  He also advised … that all employees hired by the Committee thus far have been appointed subject to security clearance, including himself.”  At that point, the Agency’s Legislative Counsel thought that Sprague “fully understands our intentions and desire to cooperate and to be forward leaning….”[31]

It is hard to find any record of Tanenbaum’s involvement in the negotiation of a memorandum of understanding between the CIA and the HSCA.  One exception was a meeting on December 8, 1976.  CIA Legislative Counsel and the CIA’s Deputy Director of Security met on that date with Tanenbaum, Robert Lehner and Stephen Fallis from the HSCA, to discuss the Memorandum of Understanding and FBI background checks for HSCA staffers.  Counsel Cary noted, “Since this is a new world for these gentlemen, they did not have a very clear comprehension of security clearance procedures despite the fact that DCID 1/14 and Executive Order 10450 had been left previously for their study.”[32]  Fallis seemed to have led the discussion on the part of the HSCA staffers.  The CIA’s Security representative explained the procedures to the staffers who then “seemed to have a better understanding of the good reasons for clearing their people” and Cary felt “that they will go the 1/14 route, particularly after they talk to Mr. Sprague.”[33]  He reported, “The meeting ended with Sprague’s arrival and I think on a positive note.  It appears that Lehner, Tanenbaum and Fallis realize they are in a new ball game and that we demonstrated that we wished to be cooperative.”[34]  There is no record of Tanenbaum having told them that he would never accept expurgated documents.  But, then again, that does not appear to be what the CIA was offering.

The negotiations eventually led to a draft agreement in February 1977 and work on ironing out the details was set to begin.[35]  But Sprague and Tannenbaum never completed the work.  In that same month the implosion that led to Sprague’s resignation took over the dynamic of the Committee.  Tanenbaum would not receive his security clearance until July 15, 1977, shortly after Robert Blakey took over as chief counsel and shortly before Tanenbaum’s departure from the staff.[36]

Tanenbaum’s spin on Sprague’s resignation is also dependent on collapsing the time frame between David Phillips’s testimony in November 1976 and Richard Sprague’s resignation in March of 1977.  You can see this plainly when he talks about the funding crisis for the Committee.  The way he presents it in the tale he told in Pittsburgh, he makes it sound like the HSCA’s funds were slashed because of his alleged confrontation with Phillips.  He doesn’t ever say it directly, but he tries to maneuver you into a place where you are comfortable in drawing that inference.  Sprague and Tanenbaum were hired in November, 1976, not long before Phillips’s testimony.  The HSCA had been created in September of that year by the 94^th Congress.  In December, 1976, Sprague submitted his budget request for 1977.  He requested a budget of 6.5 million dollars.  The HSCA voted unanimously to recommend that the House approve the budget.

In addition to the budget, the HSCA authorizing resolution also had to be passed by the new (95^th) Congress in order for it to continue work.  Reauthorization of a select committee is usually a routine matter in early January of the first year of a new Congress.  Efforts by the HSCA to do so, however, were stymied when a Republican Congressman from Maryland objected.  The budget request, and Sprague’s plan to use lie detectors and stress evaluators in his investigations, created controversy and for a time the continued existence of the HSCA with the large staff Sprague was hiring, was in doubt.[37]  On February 2, 1977, the House re-authorized the HSCA but only for a four-month period.  The authorizing resolution also required the HSCA to make public written rules governing its procedures by March 31, 1977.  Congress also only funded the HSCA with $84,000.00 for the four months which, as represented by Mr. Tanenbaum, was not enough to cover the salaries of the staff.[38]

Sprague fought with the new Chairman of the Committee, Henry Gonzalez of Texas.  Gonzalez wanted to meet the budget short-fall by cutting staff.  Sprague wanted to keep the staff and ask them to take pay cuts.  The plan to use polygraphs and stress tests was also a point of contention between them.  On February 10, 1977, Gonzalez fired Sprague.  The HSCA members overrode Gonzalez and kept Sprague on as chief counsel.  Gonzalez resigned as Chairman of the Committee on March 1, 1977, and Louis Stokes of Ohio assumed the position.  With all the controversy generated by these events, it was becoming increasingly doubtful that the HSCA would be continued after the end of April when the authorizing resolution was set to expire.  The rules required by the authorizing resolution, however, were adopted by the HSCA under the leadership of Chairman Stokes in a unanimous vote in early March.  Under Stokes’s leadership, the investigation began to move forward with staff briefings of the members on March 9 and 10 and public hearings on March 11 and 16.

Congressman Gonzalez, however, lobbied against Sprague being retained as chief counsel of the HSCA.  On March 28 and 29 he presented his version of his controversy with Sprague in speeches on the house floor.  No one involved in the controversy at the time said anything about David Atlee Phillips, his testimony, or whether he should be prosecuted for perjury or contempt.  Gonzalez said that he had been treated “shabbily” by his cohorts in the House and that Sprague was guilty of “insubordination…deceit and dishonesty” and “malfeasance.”[39]  Sprague resigned at midnight on March 29, 1977.  His resignation was accepted by vote of the Committee on March 30, 1977.  On the same day, the House passed a resolution authorizing the HSCA through the life of the 95^th Congress.  On April 25, 1977, Congress passed a budget of 2.5 million dollars for the HSCA for 1977.  On June 20, 1977, the HSCA hired Robert Blakey as Chief Counsel.[40]  On August 29, 1977, the HSCA and the CIA completed a Memorandum of Understanding that granted staffers unexpurgated access to CIA documents.[41]

Gaeton Fonzi’s View

Tanenbaum frequently expresses his respect for Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the HSCA.  This is something about which he and I would certainly agree.  Gaeton was a wonderful human being, an excellent investigator, a fine writer and a man of integrity.  Interestingly enough, Gaeton’s account of the early 1977 implosion of the Committee tracks the account I have sketched above but in more detail.[42]  He had the impression that Tanenbaum didn’t want him “to know how chaotic things were in Washington.”  Gaeton reports, “About a week after the Committee was temporarily born again [in February 1977], I received a call from Bob Tanenbaum.  ‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘World War III has started in Washington.  It’s Gonzalez vs. Sprague.  You wouldn’t believe it.  Gonzalez is taking back his stationary.’”[43] He goes on to describe the fight between them over franking privileges.  Gaeton thinks the political pressure was getting to Tanenbaum at this point.  He reports, “Tannenbaum became paranoid.  He took a few staff members into his confidence and distrusted everyone else.”[44]  According to Gaeton, “[w]hat drove Richard Sprague to resign as chief counsel appeared obvious. His proposed use of controversial investigative equipment, unrestricted investigation, his refusal to play politics with chairman Gonzalez….”[45]  Sprague did indicate, in retrospect after his resignation, that if he had it to do over, he would have started his investigation with an investigation of the CIA’s role.[46]  He did not indicate that Phillips or his testimony had any role in his resignation.

In the period after Sprague’s departure and before the hiring of a new chief counsel, Gaeton continued to try to conduct an investigation in Miami without much guidance from Tanenbaum or anyone else in D.C.  He made his first trip to D.C. and the HSCA offices in mid-April, 1977.  He reports:

“The staff was in sorry shape.  Morale was horrendous.  Many of the junior lawyers complained to me that Tannenbaum treated them like children.  Tannenbaum complained to me that many of them were children.  ‘They can’t figure out a thing for themselves,’ he moaned.  The wheel-spinning had gotten to everyone.  For many, the frustration peaked when Tannenbaum ordered the staff to outline the 26 volumes of Warren Commission evidence and testimony – an exercise in redundancy.

“After Sprague departed and it eventually became apparent that he wouldn’t be the new chief counsel, Tannenbaum’s attitude deteriorated.  He hung on until Blakey settled in and then left Washington for private practice in California.”[47]

In all of his writings, so far as I have been able to find, Gaeton never recorded anything that indicated that a supposed confrontation with David Phillips had anything to do with Sprague and Tanenbaum’s resignations.  Given Gaeton’s tendency to tell all he safely could of what he knew, Tanenbaum apparently never told his tale to Gaeton.

When Was the Tale Told?

Tanenbaum was not inactive between Sprague’s resignation and his own.  Remember, the Committee members wanted to be able to present a solid appearance of investigative progress when the issue of continuing the life of the Committee came up in April.  As part of the plan to do so, Tanenbaum briefed the Committee on the staff’s best investigative leads at an executive session held on March 17, 1977.  Tanenbaum briefed the HSCA on a woman who had come forward identifying herself as the Babushka lady in Dealey Plaza who was willing to testify that Jack Ruby had earlier introduced her to Oswald as being “CIA”.[48]  He reported that the investigators had developed information from a nurse at Parkland about recovery of bullet fragments from Governor Connally and the hope that they could “track down those fragments” and “conduct scientific tests on them,” including “possibly neutronic relation [sic] tests.”[49]  He proceeded to brief the members on his contacts with Willem Oltmans in regard to George De Mohrenschild.[50]  Tanenbaum then commented on “Mr. Trafficante and others of his ilk.”[51]  Most of the comments turned out to be about Jim Brady, aka Eugene Hale Braden.  Tanenbaum then advised the members that the staff had “information that a person who is now a doctor, who was a resident at the time in Parkland Hospital, noticed wounds on the governor’s body that appeared to be somewhat inconsistent with the official reporting of what happened.”  The staff hadn’t really heard from him, Tanenbaum hedged, but one of the doctor’s friends had come forward and told them about it.[52]  Notice there is not a word about Phillips, Mexico City or the CIA.

The March 17, 1977, executive session transcript was accidentally released to the press.  A young reporter by the name of Jerry Policoff who was covering the HSCA for New Times wrote a long letter to Christopher Dodd, a member of the Committee from Connecticut, about “a section of the transcript that was largely glossed over by most of the press…. the briefing given the committee by Robert Tannenbaum [sic] regarding leads currently being pursued by the staff.”[53] Jerry, in his own inimitable manner, gets right to the heart of the matter.  “Mr. Dodd I must be frank in telling you that I was appalled to find that in his seven months with the committee Mr. Tannenbaum has apparently learned next to nothing about the case and takes seriously several leads that are dismissed as nonsense or disinformation by most if not all of the more knowledgeable critics…. If this is the material Tannenbaum feels is credible enough to present to the committee I shudder to think about what he is holding back.”[54]  Mr. Policoff then proceeds to give a fairly good summary of the already widely known credible information discrediting each of the issues raised by Tanenbaum in his briefing.

As I continued to look into this story, I wondered if maybe Tanenbaum had told others about his confrontation of David Phillips.  I know from my experience that documents can go missing, even from the files of Congressional committees, once they get into the CIA’s hands.  Maybe there was a missing executive session transcript out there where this integrous prosecutor confronted the steely-eyed contemptuous perjurer even though I’ve been unable to find it.  Or, at least, maybe Tanenbaum told this tale before the Duquesne conference.  In terms that a prosecutor would understand, such a consistent earlier telling would bolster the credibility of the testimony under question.  On the other hand, finding inconsistent earlier statements discredits the testimony under question.

Like Gaeton and I, Tanenbaum testified before the Assassinations Record Review Board (ARRB) in 1996.[55]  I hoped that Tanenbaum had told his tale to the ARRB and that they had made an effort to track down the missing executive session transcript. Tanenbaum does tell the ARRB about Phillips’s executive session testimony, saying he was “stunned and disappointed” when Phillips lied.  But, then instead of telling a tale like the one he told in Pittsburgh, he gives them a very tame description of Phillips’s November 27, 1976, testimony without any claim of having actually participated in the hearing.[56]  He also states that after Phillips testified “[w]e of course then came up with” a copy of the Hoover memo.  But Tanenbaum doesn’t tell the ARRB anything about any dramatic confrontation with Phillips or Phillips refusing to answer and departing in contempt.[57]

In his ARRB testimony, Tanenbaum also mentions David Phillips in connection with the budget crunch of early 1977 in the midst of his usual professions of independence, integrity and love of country.  He told them:

“when it became clear that we had to recall David Phillips to the Committee, when it became clear that we had to probe into this area that burst forward like ripe peaches falling from trees, the CIA’s involvement with anti-Castro Cubans and Lee Harvey Oswald, where the Committee almost shut us down virtually. That is to say, we could no longer make long distance telephone calls. We had franking privileges removed.”[58]

He also told them that there were “a lot of records with respect to Antonio Veciana, who had formed Alpha 66 with the help of Bishop Phillips [sic] and the whole connection of Oswald with the intelligence community.  That was the prime area. Where they are today of course I have no idea.”[59]  Maybe these were the records that Gaeton says he “later learn[ed] Tannenbaum [sic] and Fenton were secreting most of my memos away in the back of their file drawers, fearful of information in them leaking out.”[60]  Most amazingly, he doesn’t tell the ARRB that there is another transcript out there somewhere where he confronted Phillips.  Consequently, it appears that the ARRB never investigated the possibility of a missing transcript.

Tanenbaum testified before the ARRB on September 17, 1996.  Probe Magazine published an interview with Tanenbaum in its July/August 1996 issue.[61]  In that interview, the following exchange occurred between Tanenbaum (BT) and Jim DiEugenio (JD):

“BT: …. Phillips testimony was that there was no photograph of “Oswald” because the camera equipment had broken down that day and there was no audio tape of “Oswald’s” voice because they recycled their tapes every six or seven days. The problem with his story was, we had obtained a document, it was from the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, it was dated November 23^rd, 1963, the very next day after the assassination. This document was a memo to all FBI supervisorial staff stating, in substance, that FBI agents who have questioned Oswald for the past 17 hours approximately, have listened to the tape made on October 1st, by an individual identifying himself as Lee Henry Oswald inside the Russian Embassy, calling on the phone to someone inside the Cuban Embassy and the agents can state unequivocally that the voice on the tape is not the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald, who is in custody.

“JD: Did you have this document while you were questioning Phillips?

“BT: No. It was a whole separate sequence of events that occurred. But, I wanted to get him back before the Committee so we could confront him with this evidence, because we were in a position to demonstrate that that whole aspect of the Warren Report, and what he had testified to, was untrue.  And of course, the Committee was not interested in doing that.”[62]

At this point, I think it’s safe to say that the prosecutor’s tale has been discredited beyond belief by his own prior statements as well as the transcript of Phillips’s actual November 1976 testimony.  We can also safely conclude that a transcript of the hearing Robert Tanenbaum fantasized about in his Pittsburgh presentation will never be found, unless, maybe, it is in one of his best-selling novels.  If you are inclined to look for it, you might want to start with the novels published between 1996 and 2008, as it appears Tanenbaum changed his story about Phillips sometime after his 1996 interviews[63].  I’m not about to spend the time necessary to read those novels to see if I can find it.

Conclusion

Why would a man who professes to possess such high levels of integrity and honesty so inflate this story?  I’m afraid I can’t answer that.  You would have to ask him and, so far as I know, no one has done so yet.[64]  An even more cogent question is why does Tanenbaum work so hard, and so deceptively, to make it look like this imagined confrontation with Phillips was the reason the HSCA imploded five months later causing Sprague, and ultimately himself, to resign?  Is there, maybe, some salve there for an old guilt felt from abandoning ship when the ship got into waters over his head?  Maybe it’s easier to live with yourself if you can convince yourself you didn’t abandon the task but were rather run off for being just to dad-blamed honest and virtuous.

It’s been almost three years since I first heard the prosecutor’s tale at Duquesne.  In that time, I’ve thought about it quite a bit.  At first, I thought that, maybe, Tanenbaum was talking about a deposition.  But I couldn’t find a deposition transcript and, re-listening to his tale, its clear that he’s talking about an executive session of the Committee.  I thought, maybe, I’d just missed seeing a transcript – that Phillips had been called before the HSCA more than once in 1976.  But my searching has not found a transcript and has pretty conclusively shown, at least to my satisfaction, that the prosecutor’s tale is fabricated from whole cloth.  I could not let the issue rest, even when I’d set it down and try to walk away from it, because this area – David Phillips and the disinformation campaign he ran until he died – is too important to the JFK case to leave the possibilities unexplored.  It is also too important to let more and more misleading, obfuscating, and untrue propaganda about it to go unrefuted.

I have published this reluctantly.  I am not a master researcher in the extant public JFK materials, although I like to tell myself I’m getting better at it.  I may be wrong about both the Hoover Memorandum and the prosecutor’s dramatic confrontation with the spymaster in an executive session of the HSCA.  Maybe there is another November 23, 1963, memo from the Director to “All Supervisory Agents.”  Maybe there is an executive session transcript of Tanenbaum confronting Phillips.  Either way, it’s time for the prosecutor to produce the transcript of the hearing and the Hoover Memorandum or explain what has happened to them.  If he can’t, then he should take the opportunity that he says he wanted to offer Phillips: He should come back before the body politic before whom he has testified and purge himself of falsehoods.

ENDNOTES

[1]. Robert Tannenbaum, An Analysis of Government Misconduct: The House Select Committee on Assassinations, presented at Duquesne University’s Wecht Institute’s Passing the Torch conference, 10/18/2013, (hereinafter “Analysis”) beginning at time marker 26:35.

[2]. RIF 104-10400-10027, Letter to Rowley, 11/22/63.  In his tale, Tanenbaum describes the memo as being from the Director of the FBI to “all Supervisory Agents” on November 23, 1963. I have not been able to find such a document.  This cited document to Rowley is, I believe, the document to which Tanenbaum refers.

[3]. Tanenbaum, Analysis, time marker 28:11 to 28:42.

[4]. Id. at 30:51-33:07. You really have to see the performance, and the demeanor evidence, to really appreciate it.  You may view it at http://www.c-span.org/video/?315655-3/kennedy-assassination-conspiracy-theories-robert-tanenbaum-james-lesar.  Note, however, that my time references in this article are taken from a copy of the video downloaded from the Wecht Institute and the CSPAN video includes several minutes of introduction so the time references run approximately 45 seconds behind the times I have used.  This quote, for example starts at approximately time mark 31:34 on the CSPAN copy.

[5]. Tanenbaum, Analysis, time marker 33:46 – 34:12.

[6]. Id. beginning at 35:55. Tanenbaum notes, in an aside, that the only person he knows of in modern history who was ever referred for prosecution for perjury (lying to Congress) was Roger Clemens.  An interesting side question would be how he has managed to never have heard of Richard Helms’s badge of honor.

[7]. Id. at 41:46.

[8]. Id. at 44:00 – 44:13.

[9]. Id. at 46:30. Tanenbaum doesn’t interrupt his narrative flow to tell us here that he did agree to stay on until a new Chief Counsel was chosen.  I have tried to find a transcript of the HSCA meeting Tanenbaum says Chairman Stokes called at Tanenbaum’s request where he told them what he thought of them before they asked him to stay on as head of the Kennedy staff anyway, but, so far have been unable to find a transcript of such a meeting.

[10]. Id. at 47:56 – 48:50

[11]. Robert Tanenbaum, Black Op Radio #731a, May 14, 2105 at approximately time marker 49:15.

[12]. Id. at time marker 57:30; Tanenbaum, Analysis, time marker 25:20

[13]. RIF 180-10110-10016, HSCA Hearing Transcript, 04/25/1978, at p. 5.

[14]. Memorandum titled David Atlee Phillips, 08/24/1978, copies available from author.  This document, which I wrote, has not, to my knowledge, been located at NARA or otherwise released in response to the JFK Act.  The copy I now have is redacted and was recently supplied to me by a researcher working in the JFK research community.  I do not know the provenance of the document but I do recognize it as a poor copy of the document I wrote.  The notes and materials collected in preparation for, and used in the interview, have not been found to date.

[15]. RIF 180-10131-10328, HSCA Hearing Transcript, 11/27/1976

[16]. Id. at p. 4.

[17]. Id at p. 75 [p. 71 of Transcript]; RIF 1993.06.16.16:38:42:060000, Classified Message MEXI 6453, 10/10/1963.

[18]. RIF 180-10131-10328, at p. 90 [p. 87 of Transcript]; RIF 104-10015-10051, Memorandum from Win Scott to Ambassador, 10/16/1963.

[19]. RIF 180-10131-10328, at p. 90 [p. 87 of Transcript]; RIF 1993.08.12.17:31:16:400030, Classified Message DIR 74830, 10/11/1963.

[20]. RIF 180-10131-10328, at p. 20 [p. 17 of Transcript].

[21]. RIF 180-10131-10328, at pp. 21-26 [pp. 18-23 of Transcript].

[22]. I have to note two things here about the memorandum upon which Tanenbaum says he was going to base his novelistic prosecution of Phillips.  First, the actual document doesn’t come anywhere near to saying what Tanenbaum said it did in Pittsburgh.  The existence of a tape of Oswald’s call is a hotly contested issue in JFK research and is beyond the scope of this article.  But regardless of whether such a tape existed at the time of the assassination, the actual memo Tanenbaum talks about does not say, necessarily, that it was purported to be Oswald on the tape.  The subject of the statement was the man in the photograph that was sent from Mexico City to Dallas on November 23^rd.  In that context, the statement “have observed photographs of the individual referred to above and have listened to a recording of his voice” could be a reference to a recording of the voice of the person in the photograph who was not Oswald.  In that case, Phillips’s testimony that all the recordings of Oswald had been erased and reused could not be shown to be false simply by this ambiguous double hearsay statement.  If they photographed the wrong man, even if there was a tape, the tape may have been of the wrong man as well. As such, the memo provided a very thin reed upon which to bring a perjury charge.  And I have to add a personal note here.  I interviewed Phillips.  I watched him testify to the Committee. He was smart, very smart.  Gaeton Fonzi and I confronted him with questions that seriously agitated and disturbed him.  I don’t think that being confronted with the Hoover memo would have disturbed him much.  And he would never have done something as stupid as walking out on a Congressional committee hearing where he was appearing after having received a subpoena.  This is not to say that David Atlee Phillips did not lie to Congress.  He did.  He lied about the existence of a tape and many other things.  But that, too, is another story.

[23]. Id. at pp. 136-138 [pp. 133-135 of Transcript].

[24]. RIF 1993.08.03.19:34:54:090059, Ron Kessler, CIA Withheld Details on Oswald Call, Washington Post, p. 1, 11/26/1976.  The November 27, 1976, HSCA questioning of Phillips focused on the discrepancies between his sworn testimony and the statements he had made just the day before to Kessler.  Phillips was questioned hard about his motivations for making statements to the press the day before he testified that were not consistent with the testimony he offered to the Committee.  In response he referred to his soon to be published book.  Sprague returned to that at the end of the hearing, asking him to comment on the advantage gained by him in making the comments to the media.  Phillips acknowledged that, “[h]aving sold this book, I obviously want it to be successful, one reason being that I have five more kids to send through college.  So there is no question I am looking for an opportunity to get publicity, which will help with the book.”  But, he went on to explain that the publicity had been unwelcome and disturbing to him and his family because an inference could be based upon it that he “might have played a role in a coverup of the murder of one of my Presidents….”

[25]. RIF 1993.07.22.16:06:24:960340, Memorandum for the Record, 11/26/1976.

[26]. Id.

[27]. RIF 104-10147-10059, Memorandum for DDCI, 21/01/1976.

[28]. See, e.g. Dan Hardway & Edwin Lopez, The HSCA and the CIA: The View from the Trenches, AARC Conference, September 2014, available at http://2017jfk.org/watch/;  Declaration of Dan Hardway, Morley v. CIA, Civil Action No. 03-02545, (D.C. Cir. 2016) available at https://aarclibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Doc.-156-1.-Dan-L.-Hardway-Declaration.pdf.

[29]. See, for example, RIF 1993.08.04.16:33:35:430058, Memorandum for the Record, 11/10/76.

[30]. Id.

[31]. Id.  Emphasis added.

[32]. RIF 104-10322-10262, Memorandum for the Record, 10/08/1976.

[33]. Id.

[34]. Id.

[35]. See, for example, RIF 1993.08.05.11:02:36:46004, Memorandum for Coordination and Review Staff from Inspector General, 02/14/1977.

[36]. RIF 1993.08.04.16:05:05:280005, HSCA Security Procedures and Clearances, 19 Oct 76 – 26 Dec 78, at p. 245.

[37]. There was, evidently, a misunderstanding between Sprague and the then Chairman of the Committee, Henry Gonzalez, about what the HSCA’s budget would be while it awaited reauthorization with the consequence that the amount was overestimated and more staff than could be paid for was hired beginning January 1, 1977.  See, e.g., Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York 1993) at p. 181.

[38]. Congressional Quarterly Almanac, Assassinations Committee, 1977, available at https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal77-1203687.

[39]. Id.

[40]. Id.

[41]. RIF 180-10141-10123, HSCA/CIA Memorandum of Understanding, 08/29/1977.

[42]. RIF 104-10404-10057, Gaeton Fonzi, Who Killed JFK, The Washingtonian, November 1980, at pp. 40 – 43.

[43]. Id.

[44]. Id. at p. 41

[45]. Id. at p. 44.

[46]. Id.

[47]. Id. at pp. 45– 46.

[48]. RIF 180-10110-10239, HSCA Executive Session, 03/17/1977, at p. 95. [p.100 of Transcript].

[49]. Id. at p.97 [p.102 of Transcript].

[50]. Id. at p. 98 [p. 103 of Transcript].

[51]. Id. at p. 99 [p. 104 of Transcript].

[52]. Id. at p. 101 [p. 106 of Transcript].

[53]. RIF 180-10084-10418, Letter to Chris Dodd from Jerry Policoff, 04/17/1977.

[54]. Id.

[55]. ARRB, Testimony of Robert Tannenbaum, Los Angeles, California, 09/17/1996.

[57]. Id.

[58]. Id.

[59]. Id.

[60]. Fonzi, Who Killed JFK, at 45.

[61]. Probe, The Probe Interview: Bob Tanenbaum, (Vol. 3, No. 5, 1996), available at http://www.ctka.net/pr796-bti.html.

[62]. Id.

[63]. The earliest version of the prosecutor’s tale that I’ve been able to find appears in David Talbot’s 2008 book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Free Press) at pp. 382-385.  Talbot’s retelling was, apparently, based on his interview of Tanenbaum sometime prior to the book’s publication.  See page 382 note at page 444.  Talbot repeats Tanenbaum’s story without questioning or substantiating any of the details.  He dryly notes: “It was a dramatic confrontation.”  Talbot concluded, as have many others who have heard the prosecutor weave his dramatic tale, “It was a taste of what might have been, if key suspects in the JFK assassination had been thoroughly subjected to this type of skilled prosecutorial scrutiny.”  Were that the truth was equal to the reputation created.

[64]. When Jim DiEugenio interviewed Tanenbaum on Len Osanic’s Black Op Radio on May 14, 2015, he evidently forgot his earlier interview for Probe magazine.  They discuss the confrontation with the Hoover Memorandum beginning at around the 1:03:50 mark but never raise the prosecutor’s prior inconsistent statement.

The AARC presents a new series of lectures commemorating and honoring the legacy of President Kennedy, the inspirational meaning of his term of office, and the consequences of his assassination sixty-one years ago.

In the words of the distinguished British scholar Malcolm Blunt, “Jesus Christ, what we lost when we lost that man.”

With the permission of the author, following is David Talbot’s unpublished response to a November 2023 request from the OpEd page editor of the New York Times to submit an OpEd piece on the JFK assassination story for the 60th anniversary.  Without comment or explanation, this summation, written by an informed and uncommon historian whose expertise on the tragic power and poignancy of the subject is indisputable, was rejected and has not been published until now.

Courtesy of David and his indefatigable research assistant, Karen Croft, here is David’s essay from one year ago:

The JFK Assassination at 60: What Did We Know and When Did We Know It?

By David Talbot

The official story of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination is finally falling apart, nearly 60 years after gunfire erupted in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza. The mother of all conspiracies turns out to be true, according to a media barrage this anniversary season, including a new film, podcast, book, scholarly conference and news revelations.

That “lone gunman” version always stretched credulity, relying on a “magic bullet” that allegedly caused seven entry and exit wounds in President Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally before emerging in nearly pristine condition on a hospital stretcher. In his recent book, The Final Witness, former Secret Service agent Paul Landis asserts that he found the bullet on the back seat of the presidential limousine after it only slightly penetrated the back of the president. In other words, there was nothing magic about the bullet at all.

Despite the shaky case for a single assassin, this story was promoted by government authorities as soon as Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the shocking crime on November 22, 1963. And it was embraced by the Warren Commission, the inquiry panel of distinguished public figures appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, when it released its report the following year.

The press, too, eagerly applauded the Warren Report, with Washington Post reporter Robert J. Donovan acclaiming it as a “masterpiece of its kind” and Anthony Lewis of the New York Times predicting the report would “completely explode” conspiracy theorists like Mark Lane, author of the skeptical Rush to Judgement.

Privately, prominent people like French President Charles de Gaulle and Robert F. Kennedy, President Kennedy’s brother and attorney general, dismissed the Warren Report as a publicity exercise – or “baloney” in de Gaulle’s contemptuous estimation, designed to head off a potential “civil war.” (TDC, 567-8)

“Better an injustice than disorder,” the French president said of Oswald’s silencing by triggerman Jack Ruby. “In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States.”

Robert Kennedy and his grieving sister-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy were worried that President Kennedy’s assassination could spark something even more catastrophic. To avoid a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, a week after the president was killed, the Kennedys dispatched close family friend and painter William Walton, who was due to meet with Russian artists as part of an exchange mission, to confer secretly at a Moscow restaurant with Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet intelligence agent. The two Kennedy brothers had come to trust Bolshakov — whom Newsweek called “the Russian New Frontiersman” (Brothers, 31) — as a back-channel to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at critical times like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Over their meal — which took place during the height of the Cold War, when suspicions between the superpowers were high — Walton passed a remarkable message to Bolshakov. Bobby and Jackie Kennedy believed that JFK was the victim of a high-level domestic conspiracy, not a Communist plot, as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had told them. Walton also told the stunned Soviet agent that RFK planned to pursue a political career and he would resume his brother’s policy of détente with Moscow if he made it to the White House. (Brothers, 25-33)

Bobby Kennedy — who was elected to the Senate from New York in 1964 and ran for president in 1968 before he too was cut down by an assassin’s bullet – was the first prominent JFK conspiracy theorist. “With that amazing computer brain of his, he put it all together on the afternoon of November 22,” RFK’s friend, journalist Jack Newfield, told me for my 2007 book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, which chronicled Bobby’s confidential search for the truth about Dallas. RFK –who was his brother’s principal emissary to the dark side of power – suspected that the plot against JFK grew out of the CIA’s unsavory operations against Cuba, which employed gangsters, anti-Castro militants and other ruthless characters.

Over the years, other leading men and women of the time came to share Bobby Kennedy’s suspicions about the JFK assassination, including philosopher Bertrand Russell; comedian Mort Sahl; musician David Crosby of the Byrds; poet Allen Ginsberg; and writers Robert Graves, Katherine Anne Porter, Ray Bradbury and Paddy Chayevsky. Terry Southern — who cowrote the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove, which conveyed the darkly macabre humor of the nuclear doomsday era – bitterly denounced the official version of President Kennedy’s assassination in a survey mailed to over 300 prominent citizens in the 1960s. “The absurdity of the Warren Report is patent and overwhelming,” Southern wrote at the bottom of the survey. “One has only to browse through any of the 26 volumes to know at once what a complete farce, charade, and incredible piece of bullshit it is.”   (Brothers, 316)

Even at least three members of the Warren Commission itself – Senators Richard Russell and John Sherman Cooper as well as Representative Hale Boggs – did not buy their own report’s lone gunman conclusion. But the persuasive Lyndon Johnson and devious commission chief counsel J. Lee Rankin herded the dissenters into unanimity.

By the 1970s, following the Vietnam War debacle and the Watergate revelations, Senator Frank Church established some supervision over the CIA, at least for a time. In late 1975, as the Church investigation was winding down, Senator Richard Schweiker, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, persuaded Senator Church to let him set up a subcommittee on the JFK assassination. After his brief but intense investigation, he concluded “Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence.”

That spirit of inquiry led to the formation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which found in its 1979 report that President Kennedy was indeed the victim of a “conspiracy,” a historic break from the government’s lone gunman dogma. But the HSCA’s conclusion was vague about the likely culprits, leaving the CIA off the hook, and it was overshadowed by the earlier Warren Report.

In 2001, journalist Jefferson Morley informed G. Robert Blakey, the House assassination panel’s chief counsel, that his investigation had been sabotaged by its CIA liaison, an agency official named George Joannides, who turned out to have a shadowy connection to the Kennedy case. “Joannides’s behavior was criminal,” said the furious Blakey, who is now an emeritus professor at Notre Dame University’s law school. (Brothers, 388) The revelation about Joannides turned Blakey’s focus more on the CIA and its web of contractors.

In 2019, Blakey and other prominent JFK experts – including Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the surgeons who worked on the mortally wounded president at Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital – signed a public statement that I helped arrange, which concluded that “the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy was organized at high levels of the U.S. power structure, and was implemented by top elements of the U.S. national security apparatus using, among others, figures in the criminal underworld to help carry out the crime and cover-up.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/01/25/kennedy-king-malcolm-x-relatives-scholars-seek-new-assassination-probes/.

Polls since the JFK assassination show that the American public consistently views the lone gunman story with skepticism. While the Warren Report convinced most Americans, by the 1970s there was a growing suspicion that elements of the government itself were involved in the plot, as revealed in a Newsweek poll taken 20 years after the crime. Since then, the poll numbers have fluctuated, but a solid majority still believe Oswald was not the sole assassin.

https://www.history.com/news/why-the-public-stopped-believing-the-government-about-jfks-murder

Strangely, one of the few holdouts for the official version of the JFK assassination is the mainstream media. But even there, support for the Warren Report has grown shaky. During my research for Brothers, 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt and former Washington Post executive editor, Ben Bradlee — two of the grand men of U.S. investigative journalism (both now deceased) – told me of their own dark suspicions about Dallas. “I just never believed (the official story) for one second,” Hewitt told me in 2005, the year after he stepped down at 60 Minutes. He suspected “disgruntled CIA types” were responsible for JFK’s murder, but he claimed his investigative team could never nail it down. (Brothers, 393-4)

I asked Bradlee in 2004 why the Washington Post didn’t devote investigative resources to the JFK murder story. After all, Bradlee wrote a warm 1975 memoir of his companionship with the president, Conversations with Kennedy. Bradlee initially sidestepped the question. But by then occupying an emeritus position at the newspaper, he leveled with me. It would have damaged his budding journalism career, he admitted, if he had explored who killed his friend. He feared “that I would be discredited for taking the (Post newsroom) down that path.” (Brothers, 392-3)

The New York Times, too, has grown less confident in the Warren Report over the years. By 1992, even Times reporter and columnist Anthony Lewis evolved from scourging the report’s critics to a less certain position. “Maybe with all that happened, Vietnam and Watergate, today’s reporters would have come to it with more resistance,” he told the Village Voice that year.

In recent months, Peter Baker, the Times’s White House correspondent, has covered two important developments in the Kennedy case, the Landis revelation about the magic bullet and the discovery that the CIA was secretly reading Oswald’s mail before the Kennedy assassination. This was an eye-popping story because the agency had long claimed that Oswald was off its radar before the assassination — a dubious assertion about a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union, threatening to reveal military secrets, and then returned to this country with a Russian wife. Baker is clearly open to new information about the JFK case.

Despite the public’s ongoing suspicions about the Kennedy case, which led to the febrile conspiracy culture in this country, and the media’s belatedly aroused interest, the government continues to stonewall. In direct violation of the 1992 JFK Records Collection Act, which sought to release all government documents related to the Kennedy assassination, Presidents Trump and Biden repeatedly delayed declassification of some 4,000 documents, most of them stubbornly held by the CIA. After nearly six decades, when all the key players are dead, there is no “national security” justification for this government secrecy. By law, this historical material belongs in the hands of the press and the public.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/jfk-assassination-documents-national-archives.html

I’m among those researchers who’ve sued the government for access to these records. While working on The Devil’s Chessboard, my 2015 book about Cold War-era CIA Director Allen Dulles, I filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the CIA and State Department for the passport and travel records of William Harvey, the spy agency’s assassinations chief. Before the JFK assassination, Harvey – an impassioned Kennedy opponent – was spotted on a plane to Dallas by his deputy, F. Mark Wyatt, even though Harvey was stationed in Rome at the time. Wyatt later concluded that Harvey played a role in the assassination. But the government agencies successfully blocked my legal effort at transparency.

https://casetext.com/case/talbot-v-us-dept-of-state-1

(The Devil’s Chessboard 474-8)

And yet, as we approach the 60^th milestone of the JFK assassination, we are finally shaking free the truth about this purposely mysterious case. Amid the avalanche of JFK memorials this season, there are some worth tuning into.

Hollywood actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner teamed up with longtime Kennedy assassination author Dick Russell to produce the podcast Who Killed JFK? On November 22, documentary filmmakers John Kirby and Libby Handros will release Four Died Trying, their film series on the major assassinations of the 1960s, starting with the episode on JFK. This follows the 2021 documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by director Oliver Stone, the man whose 1991 movie JFK inspired the current generation of Warren Report skeptics.

On November 15 through 17, the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University will sponsor a scholarly conference titled “The JFK Assassination at 60,” featuring speakers like former Secret Service agent Landis, presidential historian Barbara Perry, retired Army intelligence officer and author John Newman, Dealey Plaza forensics experts Josiah Thompson and Dr. Gary Aguilar and me.

Meanwhile, journalist Jefferson Morley, who’s been working the Kennedy beat for over 30 years and now edits a Substack blog called JFK Facts, continues to report on the historic events in Dallas as a hot news story, working closely with Rex Bradford at the Mary Ferrell Foundation – the leading electronic repository of Kennedy records – to break big headlines.

As I’ve long said, quoting the musician Leonard Cohen, there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. Nowadays, it seems like the light is pouring through.

*********

Courtesy of David Talbot

David Talbot is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government and Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.

The AARC presents a new series of lectures commemorating and honoring the legacy of President Kennedy, the inspirational meaning of his term of office, and the consequences of his assassination sixty-one years ago.

In the words of the distinguished British scholar Malcolm Blunt, “Jesus Christ, what we lost when we lost that man.”

Bill Simpich continues with part 2 of his research into the complicity of journalists in the JFK assassination, the careers that profited from this crime, and what happened to the journalists who tried to take a stand – with a special focus on two Dallas/Fort Worth journalists, Kent Biffle (Part 1) and Thayer Waldo (Part 2), and their relationship with both the case and the Oswald family from 1959 to 1967.  There will also be an emphasis on how a few law enforcement officers like Dallas police officers George Lumpkin, Pat Gannaway, and Jerry Hill, Assistant DA Bill Alexander, and local Secret Service agent Mike Howard succeeded in manipulating the national media into demonizing Lee Oswald as the lone assassin in the first hours after the assassination and afterwards.

The Dallas Journalists & Law Enforcement that Molded the Assassination Coverage

By Bill Simpich

You thought that story was wild. Wait till you hear this story.

Okay, I’m Bill Simpich and I’m going to offer you the biography of Dallas reporter Thayer Waldo, a story that has never been told properly. I think you’re going to enjoy it and really be thinking hard after you hear it.

Thayer Waldo wrote for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and he claims to have been the last individual to shake hands with President Kennedy at Love Field before his car drove off. And Mr. Waldo is reported in this police report I’ve got here, as being at the Trade Mart waiting for the motorcade to arrive.

“Mr. Waldo, accompanied the captain to the police car. Mr. Waldo stated to me that he heard the first bulletin which came over the Dallas police radio, and it was, ‘Bulletin. The president has been shot. It is feared that others in his party have been wounded. The shots came from a triple overpass in front of the presidential automobile.’”

And for those of you who are geographers, that’s also the same direction as the grassy knoll. The sixth-floor of the Book Depository, conversely, is behind the automobile.

If you take a look at the dispatch, the dispatch says just that. You hear Jesse Curry saying, “Go to the hospital, Parkland Hospital, have them stand by. Get a man up on top of the triple underpass and see what happened up there.”

Then you turn to the newspaper the following day and unlike all the other stories, what you see is Mr. Waldo’s article saying, “Security Question Remains Puzzler.  Behind the tangled web of tragic circumstance surrounding the assassination one unanswered question: How could it have been permitted to happen?”  Nobody else is asking that question. Nobody.

Now, Mr. Waldo had a very interesting background. His wife in the late 1930s was a woman named Grace Clements. She was not only a head of what’s known as the surrealist painter’s movement, she was an artist, but she was also a member of the local communist movement in the Oakland area. So, he saw the communist movement, if you will, firsthand. And he also—it’s kind of like Mr. Oswald, Mr. Waldo had an interesting background, because his father was a business manager at the Stars and Stripes. He was a captain of infantry during the previous war, World War I. And the Stars and Stripes, of course, is a daily newspaper of the United States Armed Forces. He was a president and editor of McClure Newspaper Syndicate. He was well -connected, very tied to the military. And Mr. Waldo is very familiar with the communists.

Now, he went to South America after World War II. And here’s from the FBI reports. “Thayer Waldo reported to Stringer for Drew Pearson.” Remember Drew Pearson, famous journalist for the Washington Post, had the racier stories, more liberal type stories? “In Uruguay in 1948, where he known for inaccurately reporting embassy events, he allegedly friendly with a group of Spanish communists in Uruguay. Reports from Uruguay also disclosed that Waldo derogatory remarks regarding U.S. policy in Latin America and expressed himself as sympathizer in Soviet politics.”

Then it goes on, “Waldo also reportedly served as correspondent to Pearson and Ecuador in Colombia. After being invited to Ecuador by President Galo Plaza, Subject took steps in 1950 to renounce U .S. citizenship…” Like Oswald, sound familiar? “… and obtained Ecuadorian citizenship in order advance official position with latter government. Later decided retain US citizenship…” Again, just like Oswald. “In 1953 was administrator of El Sol, leftist daily in Quito.” That’s Ecuador. “Then he launched the Pacific Post newspaper later that year with a man named Francis Sutherland. That lasted for a small time, only until the two men had a falling out. This falling, the feeling was aggravated when Sutherland charged that Waldo had raped his wife. After the breaking of the partnership, Mrs. Sutherland is reported to have stated that Waldo carried with him his CP (Communist Party) membership card and that he had tried to convert her to communism.”

All this business about the Sutherland’s, I question how much of this is true, whether it is true. So much of this, I think, Waldo and maybe working with Mr. and Mrs. Sutherland, I think all this deserves a lot more investigation to find out why he’s getting painted with this broad brush.

“In June ’53, Waldo deported from Ecuador by the new president. They changed presidents quite a bit for writing derogatory articles concerning the Ecuadorian government.” So, first he’s invited, then he’s kicked out, he’s deported from Uruguay, and we’re gonna see more deportations in his history to come. “January ‘60, Havana Station reported Waldo as American newsman from Mexico City in Havana, who might be offered editorship of the English Language Times in Havana.”

So, he’s, and then late January ‘60, “Mexico station reported subject discussed six-week tour of Cuba with a embassy officials. And then the files show he resided in Mexico City for two years prior to late 1960.”

So, there’s that piece of story, but then here’s another; here’s an FBI or CIA story. This is “1960, Waldo is identified as an overt contact of the Office of Naval Intelligence and he was living in New York City with the BCIU First Avenue, New York City.” The BCIU has lots of guests like the ambassador, George Allen, like the director of the USIA, US Information Agency, Intelligence -oriented, and the executive editor of the Washington Post.

What’s the BCIU? it is the Business Council of the International Americas, and he’s their media consultant. He’s tape recording dozens of interviews with dozens of individuals for Spanish language radio programs where the council will broadcast for medium wave outlets in that area, and the English version is going to be used by the Voice of America. So, you can tell this guy is somehow working both sides of the street.

Here’s the San Francisco Chronicle article saying, “This reporter,” (Waldo reporting to himself about himself) “… spent the first half of 1960 in Cuba. At that time, with the U.S. Embassy, still in operation, fully staffed, eight of its personnel were CIA agents, three worked for the FBI, each of the armed services have from one to five operatives assigned to intelligence work. No special effort was required to learn these facts or to identify the individuals so engaged. Within 30 days of arrival in Havana, their names and agency affiliations were made known to me without solicitation by other correspondents or embassy employees. The latter included one CIA man who volunteered the identities of all three persons accredited to the FBI and a Cuban receptionist, outspokenly pro-Castro, who ticked off the names of three CIA agents with entire accuracy, a later check confirmed. In addition to embassy staffers, the CIA had a number of operatives. I knew 14, but I’m satisfied there were more among the large colony of resident U.S. businessmen.”

He is giving away the company store in the newspaper! In the newspaper. This is highly treacherous material that’s not supposed to be out there.

So, this is really, really, bizarre for him to be putting this in the paper. If he’s putting this in the paper, he’s doing it on purpose to, at the directions of people in intelligence, otherwise they literally wouldn’t be doing it.

Okay, now, from July 1963 to October 1964, Waldo is serving as the feature editor of the Star-Telegram in Fort Worth, Texas. And furthermore, I think it’s worth mentioning here that in 1956, while working for the El Paso Herald Post, he became acquainted with a man named John Sutton, who was then a lieutenant in the U.S. Army in Fort Bliss, Texas, assigned to special communications. He did not see Sutton again until Waldo, having spent about a year and a half in the Dominican Republic on a BCIU project, and as correspondent for a number of U.S. papers, accepted that job of feature editor for the Star-Telegram. Again, that’s the middle of 1963. So, he’s got this working relationship with Sutton, which is going to come up soon here.

Now, Waldo, not only does he shake hands with JFK, claims to be the last guy, but he went directly from the Trade Mart to the police headquarters, the afternoon of November 22, within 30 minutes after learning the president was shot. “When I arrived to Dallas police headquarters, I was the first reporter in any medium so far as I know. Certainly, there was no other evidence to reach the third floor of headquarters. No one attempted to stop me or ask for any identification at that time.”

So, but he’s had quite a day there.

George Butler

And over the next couple of days, his big contact becomes a man named George Butler, who was a lieutenant or captain, as he describes it, in the Dallas Homicide Division. On the day that Oswald is, shot two days later, the 24^th, “Butler came to the Commerce Street end of the ramp, and called out the reporters, “Come in.” Waldo said he and the other reporters entered the ramp at which time a uniformed officer checked their credentials. He said that Butler was an extremely nervous man, so nervous that “when I was standing asking him a question after I’d entered the ramp and gotten down to the basement area,” (and Butler is the head of security according to Waldo) “… just moments before Oswald was brought down, he was standing profile to me and I noticed his lips trembling as he listened and waited for my answer.” Waldo said that when the Dallas detectives escorted Oswald out of the hallway and into the ramp, “it was necessary for them to walk within a few feet of the rear end of the parked police car where Waldo was standing with the ABC man.” Waldo said, as they passed, “the ABC man pushed the microphone out in front of Oswald’s face and asked, ‘Do you have anything to say?’ A man in a hat made one long lunging step from Waldo’s right to the front of Oswald, shoved out his hand, and shot Oswald.”

Now, so Butler, in my mind, is one of the key suspects of this entire plot involving JFK, Oswald, Tippit, you name it.

After a week after the assassination, this man I mentioned, the Army officer in El Paso, John Sutton, who is now living in Fort Worth, he asked Waldo if they could meet at the Dallas Press Club. When they met, Sutton told him he had an informant that had seen Ruby and Tippit and Bernard Weissman together at the Carousel Club.

Remember this story?

This is not the same story, by the way, as the Jarnigan story. This is another story. And he was reluctant to come forward because he had an affair with a stripper that the informant did, and feared he would lose his work and his family if it got out.

Now, as I mentioned earlier when I was talking about Commission Document 1, the FBI report that came out in early December, that report said that Oswald, “a loner all his life, acted by himself.” So, it got leaked to the press. And the question got out pretty quickly, why was the FBI probe leaked to the press?

Very, very good question people were asking that at that time the FBI etc, look pretty sweet with this kind of thing going on. Meanwhile, Sutton and Waldo get together and Sutton introduces him to his informant.

He tells him his informant is Phil Burns, white male late thirties five foot eight, hundred forty-five pounds, chestnut hair glasses, employed at an advertising agency on account of one of Sutton sponsors. Sutton told Waldo a little bit later that he had called the advertising agency and learned Phil Burns’ actual name; his actual name was Paul Bridewell.

Burns said to Waldo that Ruby introduced him to J.D. Tippit and Bernard Weissman. They shook hands. Burns walked away. Heard nothing.

If you want to know my opinion about this whole story about Paul Bridewell, Phil Burns, whether it was made up by Sutton or made up by somebody else. I don’t think Waldo made it, but I’ll tell you this much, I think the whole story about Ruby introducing him to Tippit and Weissman was made up by Burns. It was to get Waldo engaged in red herring type stories.

Dorothy Kilgallen

Waldo said that he was too scared to publish the story and other information that he had about the assassination. He’d been working with Mark Lane at this point. Mark Lane introduces Waldo to Dorothy Kilgallen. Her article about the Tippit, Ruby and Weissman meeting appeared on the front page of the Journal American. And this is like December 8th, two weeks or so, I think, after the assassination.

Around that same time, Marguerite Oswald’s in the paper. She’s going, “I know my son.” And she thinks, as we know, that her son is an agent for American intelligence.

And so, this whole article, December 8th, just attacks Marguerite Oswald up and down the street. And the Journal American picks it up from the AP. The Journal American loves dirt on a variety of subjects. They are really a dangerous outlet in terms of foisting crazy stories.

And you see they’re at the top of the list of press that Hoover watches very carefully. He’s got a little stamp. The stamp has the Washington Post, the Daily News, the Evening Star, the Washington Papers. Then you got the Herald Trib, Journal American, Mirror, Daily News, Post, New York Times. Then you got the communist press, The Worker, The New Leader. Then you got the capitalist press, the Wall Street Journal. You got the popular press, The National Observer, which is nowhere anymore and back to the communist press of People’s World. Those are the 12 people he thought were most important, those papers were the most important on the JFK case.

Can you imagine? It shows you what his agenda is. Meanwhile, more nonsense is getting into the press courtesy of Lonnie Hudkins. Hudkins Advises on December 17th, he’s just returned from a weekend in Dallas where he’s talked to Allan Sweatt from the Chief Criminal Division He’s the Chief, Sheriff’s Office. It’s his opinion Oswald’s being paid $200 by the FBI as an informant in connection with their subversive investigations. He furnished the alleged informant is S-172.

I mean, this is a kind of informant that Jim Hosty worked with all the time. They got paid $200.

Here’s another letter from Hoover to the Warren Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin.

Who’s doing this, spreading this story? Joe Goulden, who’s writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He uses 179. Goulden is the guy, by the way, who handles the documents of the Estate of David Atlee Phillips. Goulden is not the guy who I consider a truth teller. And the other people who work with Hudkins to spread this story was Bill Alexander and Hugh Aynesworth, who said they made it up to try to prove that their phones were being tapped by the FBI. I don’t believe these gentlemen for a single moment about anything for a variety of reasons, most of which I think you already know.

Now, here’s the National Guardian, which is the left-wing newspaper in the United States, a progressive news weekly. Their headline is “A Grave Doubt Plagues the United States” and “Is Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer’s Brief,” and they run Mark Lane’s brief attacking the evidence, where some of this evidence is now getting squirreled right inside Mark Lane’s stuff, which I think actually wound up hurting Mark Lane’s credibility. He’s got a lot of good stuff and the bad stuff, I think, is this kind of nonsense.

Now shortly after Rankin writes Marguerite a letter saying,

“I would like to acknowledge receipt of your telegram requesting your attorney be permitted to cross -examine any witnesses whose testimony is taken by this commission, in particular testimony Marina Oswald, and I enclose a copy of your letter to your attorney, Mark Lane.”

Mark Lane and Marguerite want him to have the right to cross-examine these witnesses.

And here is one of the great, great events of dirt, and it comes right from Marguerite’s testimony to the Warren Commission. She’s going to fly out in early February of ’64 to testify, her and Marina. And so, she told Mr. Mark Lane, “I’m not going in the car with Mr. Mike Howard.” He’s the Secret Service guy. And there was another Mr. Howard, by the way, who came that day, and that was Pat, Mike’s brother. I don’t know whether he was his brother or not. We’ll have to find out.

“Sir, that day I was going to leave for Washington. And I said, ‘Mr. Lane, I’m scared to death.’ He says, ‘Don’t worry. I will call Mr. Walden …’“ That’s Mr. Waldo who is the Star-Telegram reporter, “’… and ask him to accompany you.’ And Mark Lane called Mr. Waldo of the Star-Telegram and asked him to company me and Mr. Walden did accompany me with these two Secret Service men to the airport. And when Mr. Walden entered my home, I told him I’m so glad you were here because I didn’t want to go with this agent by myself.”

And I’ve got a photo here courtesy of, none other than Dale Myers, where he superimposes Waldo’s picture with the headline on the Star-Telegram, “Witness to Assassination Waits to Name Oswald. Negro to Give Details.” Who was that witness? Who was that Negro? Well, here’s Mark Lane quoting from what Mike Howard said to him after he dropped off Marguerite.

Mike says to Mark Lane, “Wait till that old black boy gets up in front of the Warren Commission and tells his story. That will settle everything. Yes, sir. He was right there on the same floor looking out that next window, and after that first shot he looked and saw Oswald and then he ran. I saw him in the Dallas Police Station. He was still the scaredest cat “n” I ever saw him. I never saw him tell the officer, ‘Man, you don’t know how fast and fast is ’cause you didn’t see me run that day.’ He said he ran and hid behind the boxes ’cause he was afraid Oswald would shoot him.” Mike Howard then explained that the Negro witness had been arrested by the Special Services Office of the Dallas Police for gambling. And since he was familiar with that branch of the Dallas Police, he immediately gave himself up to that branch. Mr. Howard alleged that he had visited the Negro witness while he was in custody of the special services in the Dallas jail.

And then what happened was, Thayer Waldo ran that article the next day, not with those exact words, but saying that there was a witness who was in protective custody by the Dallas Police. And it was a six-column piece and it made a lot of headlines that you can imagine and lots of letters and this and that. And then Thayer Waldo wound up writing the declaration after Lane tipped off the paper that– and others, I might add– as to Waldo’s identity.

And Mike Howard was his informant. Mike Howard had really pulled a fast one up on Waldo is what had happened.

Waldo writes a declaration.

Well, the way he told it was, “Well, when that old black boy—(this is coming again from Mike Howard)– well, well, then when that old black boy gets before the Warren Commission and tells what he knows, that will stop them all talking.” Pat Howard turned half around in his seat and gave me an elaborate wink with raised eyebrows as if to say, ‘So here’s what I was telling you about.’ He looked and saw Oswald kneeling at the next window with a rifle aimed at the street. Mike Howard said the Negro later told the Dallas police officers to whom he surrendered, ‘I was scared to death. I thought he would kill me too. I just turned and ran way over to the far side of the room and squeezed me down beyond some empty crates.’”

So yeah, Mark Lane pretty well accurately got what Thayer was told by Mike Howard. And Waldo wrapped up his statement to his editor saying under penalty of perjury, “They slapped a vagrancy charge on him so they could hold it, Mike said. He was still just about the scaredest negro I ever saw, nothing but whites to his eyes.” About as racist as you can get. “They have now transferred him somewhere else, I understand. I don’t know where.”

So, here’s the letter Mike Howard wrote, and we just dug this out of the archives a couple weeks ago. Thank you very much, Chad Nagle, for the hard work. What Mike told Forrest Sorrell’s back in February ’64 was, “He was supposed to have heard the shots just above him and had hidden for fear that he might have been shot also. When the Negro found out someone had shot the president, for fear of getting involved, he allegedly had a record of vagrancy or some other minor violation with the Dallas Police Department. My brother and I were laughing about it, not paying any attention to our passenger till he leaned from the back seat and said, ‘Is this Negro going to testify before the Warren Commission?’ I laughed. I said, I didn’t know; that I had never talked to the man and wasn’t even assigned to the assassination investigation. My brother said, ‘I don’t know the name of the Negro or where he was now.’ My brother said, ‘They’re probably holding him in protective custody on a vagrancy charge.’ We all laughed. And then Mike goes, ‘I did not know Waldo was a reporter at the time, he was riding in my car. I knew him only as a friend of Mark Lane, the lawyer of Oswald and his mother, Marguerite.’”

But Pat Howard testified about many months later to the FBI, and Pat admitted, “Mrs. Oswald identified this individual who was to accompany them as Thayer Waldo, a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.” Period.

So, the Howard’s couldn’t even get their own story straight, but they didn’t think they were going to get in trouble, and you can bet they did not get in trouble.

The Waldo report to the FBI after this happened, after the article ran a couple days later, Waldo told the FBI that after the story was originally written, the source, Mike Howard, called him on the phone, and the only change in the story was the fact that the witness was not on the sixth floor but on the fifth floor.

He had to massage that little bit and that was the part he massaged and told Forrest Sorrels and then he changed it and then he told Thayer that he got that little part wrong. A pretty important part to get wrong, I might add.

“Jack Revill, Special Services Bureau, Dallas Police, advised he knows of no witness was being held in protective custody. He stated that in his opinion with respect to the story in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the witness referred to may possibly be Charles Douglas Givens.”

Charles D. Givens

Now, who’s Charles Douglas Givens? I’ll tell you who Charles Douglas Givens is. He was on the sixth floor during the morning filling orders with Lee Oswald on November 22. Lee was standing by the elevator in the building at 11:30 when Givens went to the first floor. When he started down in the elevator, Lee yelled at him to close the gates in the elevator so Lee could have the elevator returned to the sixth floor. On the morning of November 22nd. Givens observed Lee reading a newspaper in the Domino room where the employees eat lunch about 11:50 AM.

So here we are 11:50 AM; Given sees Lee eating lunch, reading the paper.

Now, Givens was only one of four witnesses who stated they saw Oswald on the first floor during lunchtime. William Shelley, supervisor of the floor laying crew said, “I do remember seeing him when I came down to eat lunch about 10 to 12,” as did the building’s janitor, Eddie Piper, who said he saw Oswald just at 12 the clock. Carolyn Arnold saw him at about 12:20. Pat Speer points out that Givens began to change his story within days of Howard’s talking to Waldo.

The February 21st ’64 cover story of Life Magazine, which treated Oswald’s sole guilt as a proven fact, revealed a few minutes after noon as the president and his wife were pulling away from the airport in the open presidential limousine, an employee in the School Book building, Charles Givens, saw Oswald on the sixth floor and said, “Let’s go down and watch the president go by.” “Not now,” Oswald responded. “Just send the elevator back up.”

So, what that means is that now, instead of seeing Oswald in the lunchroom at 11:50, they’re saying, “Oh, right after noontime, Mr. Givens saw Oswald up on the sixth floor and staying on the sixth floor.” That’s pretty serious.

Marguerite Oswald

So, here is the exchange between Marguerite and Earl Warren. I want people to understand just how strong Marguerite was during this period of time before we finish the Givens story.

Earl Warren: “It’s not an accusation about your son. It’s an accusation about your son in Texas courts. That’s an entirely different proceeding. We’re here to do justice and be fair to everyone. And it’s our main and only purpose in serving on this commission. None of us cherish this responsibility.”

Mrs. Oswald: “I’m sure, sir.”

Earl Warren: “And the only satisfaction we can derive is to be fair to all concerned. And I assure you that’s our objective.”

Mrs. Oswald again: “I do not imply this commission will not be fair; I know about the men on the commission; they’re all fine men including yourself Chief Justice Warren. But I do state a fact that I do not think that you can come to a true conclusion. I want that for the record.”

And she says, “I implore you, I implore you in the name of justice, to let my son, Lee Harvey Oswald, accused of assassinating the president, I the mother of this man who’s the accused mother, be represented by counsel.”

Chairman: Before you leave Mrs. Oswald, may I say to you first the commission’s not here to prosecute your dead son, it is not here and it was not established to prosecute anyone.”

And Marguerite says, “I’m not in agreement with you. One thing I want to make clear, we do not know the questions you’re asking to myself or Marina or the other witnesses and I contend that you cannot ask him the pertinent questions because you don’t know what I know and what Mr. Lane knows. And so, you will have an analysis in the long run, a conclusion.”

And then Rankin says to Mrs. Oswald, “He was being prepared to become an agent inspired by his recruiting officer?”

Marguerite Oswald: “Yes, sir.”

Rankin: “By what you have told us about reading the Communist literature and this one pamphlet and also the manual of the Marine Corps?”

Marguerite Oswald: “Yes, sir, and then living to when he’s age 17 to join the Marines, which I knew and which he did at age 17 on his birthday.”

Now Rankin goes, “What else do you base your idea that he was ever an agent or became an agent on?”

Mrs. Oswald: “Many many things. We always watched I Led Three Lives, the program about Philbrick, we always watched that, and when Lee returned from the Marines in the service, the three days he was there with me, the program was on and he turned it off. He said, ‘Mother, don’t watch that. That is a lot of propaganda.’”

We’ve heard Robert say he watched it, but that’s Mrs. Oswald. And she also tells us that after he came back from the Marines, he said it’s propaganda, which of course was true.

Mark Lane

Mark Lane talks about the Warren Commission’s refusal to appoint him, he said the dead and absent were tried in the courts of Nuremberg as a last resort to prevent embarrassment, they appointed the president of a bar association to conduct the defense of Oswald. And then they forgot all about it.

And Lane added, “It is the first time in history that counsel has been appointed forgetting about the counsel retained by the family.” The guy did nothing. He sat there like a, you know, like a mannequin.

In April, Givens changes his story to the FBI. No longer Oswald’s alibi witness. Givens was now the Warren Commission star witness. He alone, among all the witnesses, is supposed to have seen Oswald on the sixth floor of the Book Depository by 11:55 and never saw him downstairs between 11:30 to 12:30. And this comes from Don Thomas’ essay, Rewriting History, “Hence Givens gave two accounts of Oswald’s whereabouts, one in November that tended to corroborate Oswald’s alibi, and a second in April that tended to incriminate him, yet his statement in November contained no mention of Oswald on the sixth floor, while the statement in April contains a denial that he’d seen Oswald elsewhere.”

So, that’s the Givens wrap up, and that’s the way the Givens story has been told for the last 60 years, as not an alibi, but rather the great accuser.

Now, Waldo, about a month later, in May, he gave a deposition to the Warren Commission and he told the FBI later on that he didn’t get into all these events and the reason why was because he was enjoined before beginning his formal declaration please confine yourself exclusively to the events of November 24th 1963.

Now as damning as it was about George Butler, you don’t read anything else about George Butler anywhere. And Waldo’s statements about all these other events, which were incredibly important, were not allowed to be part of the testimony.

Now, what did Waldo do? He offered an Warren Commissioner interview person, Leon Hubert, a manuscript he wrote with reporter Ed Johnson, called The Dallas Murders. He offered it to him on the record. Hubert didn’t want it. So, who did he work with instead? Dorothy Kilgallen.

That’s who he gave his story to, as I mentioned. And that was published, I had the date wrong. It was actually not published until September the 3rd, 1964.

Who else was he working with? He was working with people like Jim Koethe and Bill Hunter. And Ed Johnson. Koethe was the one focused hardest on the book publicly. Waldo did not want to be publicly associated. He was scared for his life, scared for his family. Koethe’s associates were Waldo, Johnson and Bill Hunter. Koethe, Waldo and Johnson covered the presidential visit for their papers and all three of them covered the assassination and the ruby trial. Koethe’s task for the book was an in -depth study of the leaders in Dallas. Koethe was killed supposedly with a karate chop coming out of his shower later in September 64, days after Kilgallon’s heart attack and then falsely accused of being gay. Bill Hunter, who had been assisting on the book, had been killed five months early, shot while sitting down in a police station by a Long Beach officer who first said he had dropped his revolver and then changed his story and said he was playing quick draw like Quick Draw McGraw with his partner when the gun went off.

Within a week, I’ve done work on grand with around grand jury proceedings and arrest and this is unbelievable what I’m gonna tell you here. Within a week, a 22-year-old ex-con from Alabama named Larry Earl Reno was picked up selling Koethe’s personal effects and held on suspicion of murder.

As opposed to his personal effects he had in his house, the notes of his book. They were never found, just like Dorothy Kilgallen a year later. When the Reno case came before the grand jury, district attorney Henry Wade secretly instructed the jurors not to indict an extraordinary move for a chief prosecuting officer with as strong a case as he had. So, he put on a whole case and then he told the jurors not to indict.

Can you imagine? And the jurors went along with Wade. And then, you know, Dorothy Kilgallen went on to write a column a month later saying, Maybe You Didn’t Know. And she was furious about the whole situation involving the Warren Commission report, which just came out days earlier, days after the Koethe killing.

Kilgallen wrote, “At any rate, the whole thing smells a bit fishy. It’s a might too simple that a chap kills the president of the United States, escapes from that bother, kills a policeman, eventually is apprehended in a movie theater under circumstances that defy every law of police procedure, and subsequently is murdered under extraordinary circumstances.”

Now, as a result of this terrible drama with the article that blew up in his face in May of ’64, Waldo was asked, basically, to depart from his newspaper, and then he was asked to depart, as we’ll see, from Mexico himself in 1967.

How did this series of events occur? Bill Turner was quoted in the Mexico City paper in ’67 telling this story. Waldo explained his resignation from the University of the Americas in Mexico City as resulting from pressures applied to university officials by powerful American business interests following his talk at the Foreign Correspondents Club, debunking the war on reporters. Waldo went on vacation in Los Angeles. In July, Turner said he wired his resignation and then followed up with a letter to the head of the university.

So, he wound up writing for the local paper in Illinois called the Alton Evening Telegraph, a real step down.

From then, Waldo had a pretty tough life. He wound up living in Mexico in the 1980s. I found a good article about reuniting a child he gave up for adoption two years before he died. He died in 1989 under mysterious circumstances in the embassy in Mexico City.

And the question has to be asked, was he one of ours or was he one of theirs?

And by ours, I mean the research community as opposed to theirs, meaning the people who were involved in the cover-up of this assassination, if not worse.

And I am confident in walking through this material that Thayer Waldo was one of ours and the other side spent its time packing the record, or attempting to pack the record through him.

And the last thing I want to say is that Bridwell story, the informant, the fellow who Waldo wound up telling the story to, he was already out of the business and he was a guy in. He said, maybe you can do something with it. And the guy he gave the Bridewell story to was no one else other than Larry Shiller, who wrote all those bogus books with poor Norman Mailer, who was forced to do it because he hadn’t paid his taxes, needed to curry favor with the powers that be. So, he wrote Oswald’s Tale and all those other books.

I love Norman Mailer. I’m not a fan of Larry Shiller for obvious reasons. And Larry worked with the FBI trying to find this guy and they had nothing but bogus leads, like him living in Oregon and this and that. But I found a guy who I think really was Bridwell and which led me to believe that Sutton was probably on the level and Waldo was probably on the level ’cause I found a guy named Paul Bridwell who had Texas connections, had Texas lineage. Although he didn’t grow up there, he had spent time there. And in fact, he left the service in July of 1963 and probably found himself at that advertising agency in Dallas.

The guy’s name, Paul Bridwell.  Well, he was there at Guadalcanal and he was out there in Saipan. And years later, its commanding officer had the duty of protecting the CIA headquarters out there on Saipan.

And so, when they were out there looking for all people, you’re not going to believe this, Amelia Earhart. He gave them some good leads and at the same time, he made their job very difficult. He was security -oriented. I don’t think Bridwell was involved in killing JFK. And I don’t think he probably wasn’t even wittingly involved in the cover. He may have been unwittingly. He may have been wittingly. His job was security. He was a security guy. He made sure people were not able to get to the far side of the island where the CIA facility was. He did give our local reporter a couple of helpful leads on the Earhart story, I believe, I don’t believe they were phoney.

So, there it is. It’s wheels within wheels. I think Waldo was one of ours.

Thank you.

NOTABLES:

Jim Koethe – Dallas reporter, murdered Sept 1964 by a karate chop by an unknown assailant in his home.  The notes to his book on the assassination were never found.

Bill Simpich: Civil Rights attorney, author of ground-breaking articles focusing on the hidden intricacies of the CIA, a leading and insightful analyst of the intelligence files associated with Lee Harvey Oswald’s enigmatic episode in Mexico City seven weeks prior to President Kennedy’s assassination. Bill’s eBook, State Secret, was published in 2013 and may be read in its entirety courtesy of Bill and the Mary Ferrell Foundation:  State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald.

The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend is the story of twelve individuals with intelligence connections who shaped the life and stories around Lee Oswald – who built his “legend.” From Oswald’s sojourn to the Soviet Union to his time as a re-defector in the US South, Bill sifts through the record to uncover surprising truths about the man and his legend.

This series is the backstory of the research that culminated in Bill’s book State Secret. A brand-new preface, epilogue, and the text of each essay – including links to the primary documents in the National Archives – can be read by clicking HERE.

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