The Big Con at Dealey Plaza

THE BIG CON at DEALEY PLAZA

“President Kennedy’s assassination was the work of magicians,” said Hevve Lemarr of French Intelligence. “It was a stage trick complete with actor’s accessories and props. And when the curtain fell the actors and even the scenery, disappeared. But the magicians were not illusionists, but professionals, artists in their own way.”

It’s natural that well planned and executed covert operations are seen to be like magic tricks. That’s why covert operators are often called spooks.

The “spooks” we’ve come to know in the Great Game rank as power playing Knights, Bishops and Rooks. E. Howard Hunt was known as “Knight,” and David Atlee Phillips, who was born on Oct. 31 – Halloween, was known to some as Mister “Bishop.”

Then there’s Ed Lansdale, Frank Wisner, William Harvey, and George Joannides, now legends in their field. Each had covert aliases and code names to conceal their identities, or as the Cubans called them, “war names.”

The use of aliases is only one attribute all covert intelligence operatives have in common. Other similar attributes include the use of post boxes, dead drops, safe houses, microdots, codes and ciphers, as well as standard trade crafts as outlined in Allen Dulles’ book “The Craft of Intelligence.”

Of those who standout in the history of espionage during he Cold War – Phillips, Hunt and Lansdale, one thing they all had in common was they were trained in the arts of psychological warfare by a man they considered a legend among legends – Paul Linebarger.

Paul Linebarger’s lack of recognition is a testament to his success.

In his classes, often taught at night at his home, Linebarger didn’t just use his own book “Psychological Warfare,” now recognized as a classic text on the subject, but had his students read David Maurer’s “The Big Con” for examples of how successful convert operations are planned and executed.

In the introduction to his book “Intelligence Wars – American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda,” Thomas Powers relates an interesting conversation he had with General William Odom at a party hosted by former CIA intelligence officer Haviland Smith.

Powers asked General Odom how the CIA could have uncovered and infiltrated Al Qaeda before 9/11.

General Odom, the former Army Chief of Staff and director of the National Security Agency said simply – “Like the Sting.”

Like The Sting.

He was of course, referring to the popular, award winning film staring Robert Redford and Paul Newman, but was also giving away the secrets behind the magic, the secrets of the Big Confidence games.

DAVID MAURER’S “THE BIG CON.”

The movie the Sting is based in part on Professor David Maurer’s “The Big Con,” a study of street slang of the American confidence men of the early part of the last century. Maurer’s “The Big Con” was first published in 1940 and updated and republished later as “The American Confidence Man.” The book began as a linguistic text on the slang and lingo of the grifters and confidence men, but became a manual on how the big confidence scams are played.

Maurer, a professor at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, wrote that, “My approach is simple. I determine who the good professionals are, secure their assistance, and work with them much the same as an anthropologist might work with an American Indian tribe he is studying.”

“I have scrupulously refrained from passing any judgments with a moral bias. My only aim is to tell for the general reader, the story of American confidence men and confidence games, stripped of the romantic aura which commonly hovers over literature of the modern big-time criminal.”

When Professor Maurer saw the movie “The Sting” when it first came out in the early 1970s, he felt like he was stung. Maurer recognized his story of The Big Con was the basis for the screenplay, without credit, authorization or restitution, and filed suit.

Eventually and reluctantly, the movie studio recognized and compensated Maurer before the case went to court. They could produce no other published work from anywhere that mentions Henry Gondorf, one of the movie’s protagonists (Played by Paul Newman), and a real life person and character in Maurer’s book. Gondorf, according to Maurer, was a bartender in and Big Con artist who set up “Big Stores” in the 1920s in Chicago, Atlantic City and New York, running the type of Big Cons portrayed in the film.

Unlike small con swindles, which usually take a sucker for whatever he has on him, the Big Con games bilked greedy and ripe victims for much larger sums, and depends upon actors performing a more complicated scheme as well as the cooperation of the local law enforcement.

Maurer defines a Big Store as “An establishment against which big-con men play their victims. For the wire and the pay-off, it is set up like a poolroom which takes race bets. For the rag, it is set up to resemble a broker’s office. Stores are set up with a careful attention to detail because they must seem bona fide. After each play, the store is taken down and all equipment stored away in charge of the manager.”

Maurer, who interviewed many of Gondorf’s friends and fellow con-artists, explained that the purpose of the Big Con is to convince the Mark to deliver cash in a scheme that goes astray, with the Mark separated from his money but none the wiser to the real scheme. Big Con artists didn’t consider themselves thieves because their greedy targets really give them the money.

Everyone in the con, except the Mark, are actors, each having a name and a role to play. There is the Manager who sets up the store, the Roper, who is also known as “the Outside Man,” who identifies the Mark, brings him to the store, and assists in fleecing him. The Mark is “a victim, or intended victim, someone with money from out of town. The local Dicks (Cops) are on the Take when the Fix is in, and paid off under the stipulation that local citizens wouldn’t be taken as Marks.

The Roper identifies and brings the Mark to the Inside Man, who Mauer identifies as “The member of a con mob who stays near the Big Store and receives the Mark whom the Roper brings. Inside men are highly specialized workers; they must have a superb knowledge of psychology to keep the mark under perfect control during the days or weeks while he is being fleeced.”

When the deal goes down, everyone in the Store is part of the Sting except the Mark, who is given the convincer, then separated from his money and made to feel like its good that he got out without getting killed or arrested. After the best Stings, the Mark doesn’t even realize what really happened.

When General Odom told Powers that counter-intelligence agents operate “like the Sting,” he meant that the best covert operations are conducted very much like the Big Con confidence schemes, as Paul Linebarger taught them.

PAUL M. A. LINEBARGER

It’s not even that surprising that General Odom would use the Sting as an example of how the crafts of intelligence works best, mainly because the best black artists in the CIA during the Cold War were trained by Professor Paul M. A. Linebarger (July 1913-1966), whose book on Psychological Warfare and Propaganda (Combat Forces Press, 1948; 1954) is the classic textbook on the subject.

Besides being professor of Asiatic Studies at John Hopkins, Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger was also a part time professor at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), a transparent front for a CIA think tank. It wasn’t until after his death that Linebarger was exposed as being science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith, and that he had worked with E. Howard Hunt in Mexico City.

Those CIA recruits who were invited to take Linebarger’s SAIS classes, which he taught at his home at night, were required to use trade-craft in avoiding detection to get there so as to avoid being followed.

Among Linebarger’s students were E. Howard Hunt, David Atlee Phillips and Ed Lansdale, three of the most prolific covert operators during the Cold War.

When Paul Linebarger gave his lectures to young CIA officers, he warned them that these techniques should never be used domestically, or it would totally destroy our form of democracy. Well those techniques were used in the assassination of President Kennedy, and are being used today, and democracy has never been the same.

Another Big Store front in the assassination drama, besides Zenith Technical Services at JM/WAVE and the TSBD itself, was the President’s Suite at the Fort Worth hotel the night before the assassination. It was decorated with exquisite works of original art supplied by a friend of Ruth Paine from Philadelphia, a coincidental fact we would not even know had the President’s not called to thank her, his last phone call on this earth.

That the accused assassin worked at the scene of murder should not be surprising, especially if the Big Con techniques were used as suspected. Other accomplices probably worked there too. That the building, the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) was owned by D.H. Byrd, the founder of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), should not be surprising either. Byrd was a close associate of many of those who benefited from the Dealey Plaza Sting – General Curis LeMay, Gen. Cabel and Art Collins.

Besides the Big Con that was Dealey Plaza and the Big Store that was the TSBD, there was Zenith Technical Enterprises, the false front for JM/WAVE, where the evidennce from Dealey Plaza and Oak Cliff lead back to.

As described by former Army officer Bradley E. Ayers, assigned there to train the Cuban commandos, JM/WAVE was set up like a con-artists’ Big Store. “…The Miami headquarters was covered under a civilian corporation known as Zenith Technical Enterprises. The station, or ‘company,’ was located on the University of Miami’s South Campus, adjacent to the abandoned Richmond Naval Air Station, which had been developed by the Navy during World War II as a dirigible base….They had missed no detail in setting up the false front of Zenith Technical Enterprises…a firm doing classified government research….There were phony sales and production charts on the walls and business licenses from the state and federal governments. A notice to salesmen, pinned near the door, advised them of the calling hours for various departments. The crowning touch was a certificate of award from the United Givers’ Fund to Zenith for outstanding participation in its annual fund drive.”

Zenith Technical Services came complete with a front office, secretaries, photos and awards on the wall and a CEO, though in reality it was nothing more than a fake Hollywood wild west town façade.

“I was totally amazed that the cover branch was able to create new people, to change identities, appearances, credentials, passports, or whatever might be necessary for a specific mission,” says Ayers. “Some agents had as many as three or four identities, each used for a different task. Characters and personalities materialized and disappeared as if by magic. I came away from the cover branch with a disconcerting awareness. I had always assumed that people were who and what they said they were. Suddenly it seemed apparent that, at least in the CIA, any person could simply be playing a cover role. I resolved that I’d never again accept anyone at face value. I did not know then that my resolve would return to haunt me.”

Nor is it a coincidence that the head of JM/WAVE’s maritime operations Gordon Campell introduced Ayers to his “Outside man,” using the same slang and terminology as the con-men Maurer interviewed for his book.

Then after the assassination of JFK, which Ayers suspects was an operation connected to the Cuban ops he was working with at JM/WAVE, the “Outside Man” is mysteriously killed in Ayers’ presence, and Gordon Campbell, Ayers later learns, officially died in 1962, both leaving Ayers holding the black bag.

As Hevve Lemarr of French Intelligence said, “President Kennedy’s assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with actor’s accessories and props. And when the curtain fell, the actors and even the scenery, disappeared. But the magicians were not illusionists, but professionals, artists in their own way.”

Related Unsolved Homicides / Jurisdictions

RELATED UNSOLVED HOMICIDES – And their Jurisdictions. Human Hearts to chew.

UNSUB : Unknown Subject/suspect

1) Henry Marshall – June 3, 1961– Franklin, Texas. Gassed with Carbon Monixide, shot seven times with rifle, originally ruled suicide.

2) John F. Kennedy – November 22, 1963 – Dallas, Texas. Shot in head by sniper(s).UNSUB#1 & UNSUB#2.

3) J.D. Tippit – November 22, 1963 – Dallas, Texas. Dallas policeman shot by pedestrian. UNSUB #3.

4) Lee Harvey Oswald – November 24, 1963 – Dallas, Texas. Suspect shot by JACK RUBY in police custody.

5) Karyn Kupcient – November 26, 1963 – Los Angeles, California. Strangled in apartment. UNSUB #4.

6) Jack Zangretti – Dec., 1963 – Lake Lugert, Texas. Chicago mobster shot by UNSUB #5.

7) Jim Koethe – Sept. 21, 1964 – Dallas, Tx.. Reporter assaulted in apartment by UNSUB #6. (Same MO as #4).

8) Mary Pinocot Meyer – October 12, 1964 – Georgetown Canal, Washington D.C. Assaulted by UNSUB #7.

9) Elidio Delvalle – February, 1967 – Miami, Florida. Murdered in automobile on streetcorner by UNSUB #8.

10) Martin Luther King, Jr. – 1968 – Memphis, Tenn. Shot by sniper UNSUB #9.

11) Robert F. Kennedy – June, 1968 – L. A., California. Shot by handgun UNSUB #10 with Sirhan B. Sirhan.

12) Salvadore Allende – September 11, 1972 – Santiago, Chile. Assassinated during military coup.

13) Charles Horman – September, 1972 – Santiago, Chile. Murdered by assassination squad of Augusta Pinochet.

14) Jose Dela Torriente – April 12, 1974 – Florida. Former Collins Radio Cuban, shot by sniper UNSUB #11

15) Dave Yaras – 1974 – Chicago. Mobster murdered gangland style. UNSUB #12

16) Charles Nicoletti – 1974 – Chicago. Murdered gangland style. UNSUB #13

17) Sam Giancana – 1975 – Chicago. Murdered gangland style. UNSUB #14

18) John Roselli – July, 1976 – Florida. Shot on boat, chopped and deep sixed in oil can. UNSUB #15

19) Orlando Letelier/Ronnie Moffitt – September, 1976. Dupont Circle, Washington D.C. Double bombing victims.

20) Navy Lt. Pitzer. Bethesda, Maryland. Suspicious death, considered murder. UNSUB #16

21) Others to be added. Unknown Victims yet to be identified.

“I met Murder on the way –

He had a mask like Castlereagh:

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven bloodhounds followed him.

All were fat; and well they might

Be in admirable plight,

For one by one, and two by two,

He tossed them human hearts to chew.”

– The Masque of Anarchy. From: “Studies In Murder” by Edmund Lester Pearson.

Volkmar Schmidt Interview

Telephone Interview with Volkmar Schmidt. January, 1995. William E. Kelly

Kelly: Hello, Volkmar Schmidt?

Schmidt: Speaking.

K: I’m a journalist from Atlantic City and I’m affiliated with the Committee for an Open Archives in Washington D.C. First let me make sure I’m talking with the right Volkmar Schmidt. Were you friends with George DeMohrenschildt.

S: Yes. Who are you affiliated?

K: I’m a freelance writer and I’m associated with the Committee for an Open Archives, which lobbied for the release of the JFK assassination files that they are now releasing. I think it’s important as a journalist to try to track down as many witnesses as possible and talk with them to get as much information on the record as possible.

S: I have no problem with that at all.

K: I recently talked with Betty McDonald.

S: A wonderful lady. I think she has a new last name.

K: Yes, Miller. Do you have a few minutes to talk with me?

S: Absolutely, no problem.

K: Can you relate to me how you first came to meet DeMohrenschildt and Oswald?

S: I met the DeMohrenschilt through some of the people who worked with me at the research lab.

K: Magnolia?

S: Yes, Magnolia, or Mobil Oil. I think the fellow who got us in touch was Everett, Doctor Glover, and they knew that two of us at the research lab, Norm Fredrickson and myself wanted to study Russian. So we were introduced to them. I forget the details, but it was through the people at the FRL (?). Soon after I met them they arranged this dinner party at their place at which they invited Lee Harvey Oswald. That was the only time I met the Oswalds.

K: You talked with him at length that night?

S: Yes, I spent about two solid hours with him.

K: What was your impression of him?

S: The same impression as my colleagues had, who all met them because I had arranged a party after that for them to meet Lee Harvey Oswald and his family. I was gone on a lengthily business trip then. A very disturbed man. A man desperate, spiritually, totally desperate. That’s why I talked with him, to try to get him back to sanity. His determination to leave an imprint in history was just incredible. The warning flags went right off for me that this man was ready to explode and do harm to him and others. Specifically what flashed to me, the logical suicide of Dostoevsky, that story, a man is devoid of spiritual meaning in life, then the knowledge of power of intellect creates a great dilemma. That’s what Dostoevsky beautifully put down. So anyway, I had been around people who were even more disturbed during my youth because I grew up in the house of a psychiatrist.

K: I read in Epstein’s book that you studied in Heidelberg with Dr. Kuetemeyer?

S: I didn’t study medicine, my friend did, but I was in his house and saw how he treated patients, as many as he could in his big house, six sometimes. He had many dinners with psychotic people.

K: I was in Heidelberg when I was a student. It’s a beautiful town, with the castle on the hill.

S: My daughter is now studying just below the castle and is just as happy as a bird.

K: What happened to Kuetemeyer?

S: He died of a heart attack, the old man, and his son, my best friend, his son, committed suicide because of betrayal by his father. But I’m in close touch, they are like my family, with the mother, the wife of Professor Kuetemeyer, and his daughters, so whenever I go to Germany, which is about once every season.

K: I was in Berlin when the wall came down.

S: You are very lucky. I must admit that that was one occasion when I truly had to cry.

I never expected it to happen in my lifetime.

K: Epstein mentions that Kuetemeyer was involved in the July 20th plot to kill Hitler.

S: Not directly, but he was certainly, and many of his friends were in the circle of those who tried to kill Hitler, Stauffenberg, and several of his close friends were executed, and one of the sons of his friends, lived at his house and became and is still a very close friend of mine. Fritz from Holland.

K: IÕve been looking at some of the history books on that incident but didn’t come across his name.

S: Fritz first name Frederick, Von – the symbol of nobility, Von Halen. He was actually arrested before the plot came out. He knew about the plot and was tortured to death. And another gentleman who was involved was Von Trott, a friend of Kuetemeyer.

K: I was also reading how Carl Jung was trying to influence the situation and was wondering if Kuetemeyer and Jung were associated?

S: Yes, definitely, he definitely followed Jung and professor Whitesager (?). Dr. Kuetemeyer was a psychosomatic specialists, but he also followed Jung and he treated patients as a psychiatrist and he was also a professor of religion at Heidelberg. He lectured on literature and such.

K: And you studied with him?

S: I grew up in his house basically. My father had passed away and so half the time I stayed there, not overnight, but I had many, many dinners, and Prof. Kuetemeyer’s wife asked me to call her mother. It was mutual, I contributed something and they were very kind to me.

K: How did you come to Dallas?

S: I got a job with Magnolia in Germany because I worked for the German subsidiary as a co-op student in Germany, so they hired me after I graduated. They interviewed me in Paris and hired me on the strength of my thesis work.

K: DeMohrenschildt had some high praise for your work.

S: I didn’t know that.

K: On research on petroleum bearing rock formations?

S: Yes. I’m a specialist, and I’m still appreciated although I am ready to retire now.

K: Can you give me some more of your impressions of Oswald?

S: Oswald found out that if you really want to do something you can succeed in a lot of things, it just takes determination. That’s how he learned Russian, hea? It took incredible determination. And he pulled himself out of really low class upbringing in Fort Worth, which was hell, so he was a bitter young man because of social injustice, which quite frankly existed in Texas especially. So he was a nothing, who tried to make something out of himself. And he was looking, like many Americans, for notoriety. It was subconsciously, the only avenue to succeed. He would kill himself if he could leave a mark, and he left a terrible mark. So he was a very, very desperate man.

K: You mentioned General Walker when you talked with Oswald?

S: Yes, Professor Kuetemeyer told me you know, to deal with people like this who are disturbed, you have to use empathy, be slightly over zealous yourself to like up with them and that total insanity, towards reality. When I heard how hateful he was towards Kennedy and Cuba, which was kind of irrational, I tried to say “hey, there’s something much more real to be concerned about,” because I don’t know about Castro, but I know about this Walker, he’s kind of a Nazi, yea? Not so bad as those Nazis in Germany, but I had specifically mentioned to Lee Harvey Oswald, that Walker had given a speech to the students at the Mississippi campus and those guys went off and killed a couple of journalists.

K: Yes, reporters died during those racial riots.

S: Absolutely, and here’s something that we have to protest, and think about it. But I said it has to be all constructive, yes? There was a racial problem and you have to bring justice to the minorities.

K: So do you think your conversation with Oswald about Walker may have instigated him to take a pot shot at him?

S: Yes, he did, and naturally it was a terrible responsibility, and for years when I drove past the underpass I literally had to cry because, you know. But I exonerate myself completely because I had the best intent, embarrassed Kennedy, and I certainly didn’t tell him to take a pot shot at him.

K: I didn’t think you told him to do it, just because you were talking to him about it…

S: I may have triggered it. Actually, a few days after I talked with him, he bought his weapons.

K: It’s a shame that it’s been 30 years and we are just beginning to look at the files.

S: One thing is that the DeMohrenschildts were terribly afraid of all kinds of things, people disappearing and what not, and were afraid to talk about it. They also said that Oswald didn’t do it, but I think it could have been that they had the key in their hand. When they saw this nut giving them a picture with, “the Nazi killer.” It was totally irresponsible for George DeMohrenschildt not to make a noise about it. He told me about it.

K: He knew that Oswald had the rifle.

S: Yes.

K: Now DeMohrenschildt had a shady background himself. And by shady I mean he had these affiliations with intelligence agencies, which leaves open the possibility that the assassination was a covert operation disguised as a patsy as the lone nut. Do you think that is possible?

S: No. He (DeMohrenschildt) was a bit of a nut, but he was also a very spread out person. He was totally irresponsible, the playboy, being the old man, but he was loyal in certain ways to his family and friends, and I don’t think George used this to make money, but he was an opportunist to the first degree, but he had some ideals, like Hemingway.

K: He was a debonair kind of guy.

S: He was too disorganized to be a truly efficient conspirator. He was a good operator.

K: You knew him up until he died?

S: Up until hid death, and I could have probably avoided his suicide because he wrote me a very moving, desperate letter to me, asking if he could come and stay with us in my basement. A desperate letter. And I probably would have let him come, but his wife Jean and her dogs, she would have been a vexation to my wife.

K: That’s a shame, because I read his manuscript, “I’m a Patsy,” and I learned that Jean just died recently.

S: I lost touch. She became a vexation to me. I visited her, and she became more and more irrational. And she used the daughter of a Mexican friend, a common friend of my family and really disturbed her life.

K: Do you know what became of the slide show of their walking trip through Mexico and Guatemala?

S: I don’t know what happened to that.

K: Did you see that?

S: Yes.

K: What was your impression of that?

S: Well it was truly an adventure when he and Jean got together and traveled through the back country there. It was an adventure trip.

K: Yes, I was interested in it and was disappointed that it wasn’t among the official records.

S: He wrote a whole story about it. I read a manuscript on it. Do you have that manuscript?

K: No, but I was trying to locate it.

S: It was interesting. They ran into bandits, and so forth, and visited Mexican friends. The guy had spirit and guts, very smart, spoke many languages. He was a fellow, despite all of his flaws, which I saw, I was really a loyal friend to him. And he knew that I am a solid Christian in my actions, and he respected my honesty and I respected him, despite all his flaws, for whatever good was in his personality. It shows a lot. There was also a lot of irresponsibility in him.

K: What about Michael Paine, did you know him?

S: I did not know them very much, but they were a wonderful family that I knew through the circle of young professionals at the Magnolia labs.

K: Magnolia was at one time owned by a man named Little, did you know him?

S: That must be before me. When I came in it was solidly in Mobil Oil’s hands.

K: I think he must have been in the 50s.

S: I came in 1961.

K: Then you moved to Canada.

S: I moved to Canada in 1968, but I still worked for Magnolia and Mobil Oil until 1976, so I was very often down in Dallas.

K: When you organized the party for the Paines to meet the Oswalds, you were on a business trip?

S: A whole bunch of people came there, but I was on a trip to Libya and overseas. But I put some money down and arranged it, and did my best.

K: You were trying to help Oswald out.

S: Absolutely, especially Marina. That was the other thing. I saw Marina and the little child and Oswald just didn’t take any notice of them, and I thought, “boy, are you in trouble.”

K: What about Glover?

S: Glover, he got married, his second marriage, maybe he’s divorced by now.

K: Is that a German or Russian girl?

S: Hungarian girl, who I met, but she wasn’t my girl friend, but I met her, and maybe I even introduced her to him. Anyway, we were room mates – Pierce, myself and Glover. And Norman Fredrickson, it’s all romantically involved, he married my sweetheart from Germany, but because my sweetheart had left me.

K: Where are they now?

S: He was with the U.S. Geological Survey, but when we last met he didn’t mention her, and I talked all about my marriage and daughters and all.

K: And Pierce was murdered?

S: By a Negro fellow who just wanted to get money from him.

K: A robbery, hea?

S: It was a robbery.

K: Well Betty McDonald Miller had some nice things to say about you.

S: I’m glad. Actually I was down there when PBS invited me and I walked memory lane there.

K: Thank you for talking to me. Do you mind if I call you back if I have any more questions?

S: No, I don’t mind. You see the one thing I can do, is you have to be very honest and upright and open to anybody. I’m not scared of conspiracy. If anybody wants to go after me, fine.

K: Well my goal, as a journalist, the only thing I am after is the complete truth.

S: That’s what I do to, because I see how easily people misinterpret things, including Epstein, who misinterpreted a number of things.

K: I was disappointed when I talked with Betty McDonald when she said she never talked to Epstein, but was interviewed by his secretary. I do all my own interviews, and try to talk to as many people as possible. And thank you for talking with me.

S: Well good luck, it is an important endeavor.

xxxyyyzzzz

Foreknowledge & JFK Assassination

FOREKNOWLEDGE AND JFK ASSASSINATION

Sun Tzu said: “Now the reason the enlightened Prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men is foreknowledge.”

“What is called foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits nor from gods. Nor by analogy with past events, nor from calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation.” – The Art of War – Chapter XII – Employment of Secret Agents.

One of the hallmarks and “fingerprints of intelligence” that makes the assassination of President Kennedy a covert intelligence operation is the foreknowledge certain people had of the event, and expressing it to others before it occurred.

– Bray – See: Bray v. Bendix trial transcripts re: JEFCOTT.

– Cambridge, England – Telephone call. See: Bowen, Howard.

– Cheramie, Rose – Jack Ruby associate. See: Louisiana State Police (HSCA)

– Dinkin, Eugene B. – American soldier in Germany, claims to have picked up on the assassination plot from Army Security Agency monitor of OAS, the Algerian French Generals, went AOL and tried to inform American ambassador. See : Russell, Dick, TMWKTM.

– Grace, William – “Shortly before the assassination an executive of the Grace Lines was found unconscious in the street. Taken to a hospital, he mumbled that the president was to be shot. He had an appointment with Army Intelligence agents before he was found.” – (Paris Flamonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy). Also : “An executive of the Grace Lines suffered a concussion after coming into contact with an Army Intelligence agent. While in a delirium he said, ‘The President is in danger!…”. [Also NoteLHO wrote to mother/brother he “made reservations on a Grace liner.” ]

– Martinez, Jorge Soto – On Nov. 1, told Lillian Springler at Parrot Jungle in Miami JFK to be killed by “Lee, been to Russia, Mexico.” JSM lived in apartment above Mike McLaney’s garage, former Cuban Customs, worked at Fountainblu Hotel.

– Martino, John – To his wife, on the morning of the assassination (See: Summers, Vanity Fair, SWHT), also Larry Hancock’s “Someone Would Have Talked.”

– Milteer, Joseph – (RIP Feb. 28, 1974) Alias Samuel Steven Story. See: William Agusta Somerset – Agent 88 – undercover conversations. NO, April 63.

– Odio, Syliva – See: Fonzi, Gaeton (HSCA; The Last Investigation)/ Russell, Dick (TMWKTM).

– Oxnard, California telephone call – See: Peter Noyes, Legacy of Doubt.

– Paine, Michael – Was talking about political assassination as JFK was being killed.

– Philbrick, Herbert – See: Jean Hill. Philbrick expressed foreknowledge of the assassination.

– Rivera, Jose, Dr. (Col. USAR) – See: Adele Edisen (ARRB). Rivera not only expressed foreknowledge of JFK’s assassination, but also of his son Patrick’s premature death and that LHO would move into the apartment on Magazine Street, New Orleans before LHO knew.

– Underhill, G. Garrett – See: Turner, William, Ramparts.

CIAir

CIAIR – Dr. Ralph Cox and USOA vs. CIAIR – Weak Link in the Covert Action Chain

When Dr. Ralph Cox left the military after serving as a Navy flyer during World War II he didn’t return to his Pittsburgh dental practice but instead bought some government surplus airplanes and began the United States Overseas Airlines, based in Rio Grand, near Wildwood, New Jersey.

In 1947 there were hundreds of similar, small, independent airlines like Cox’s USOA, mainly servicing remote areas that were considered unprofitable routes for the large scheduled airlines.

By 1962 USOA was one of the largest, most reliable, safe and financially stable supplemental air carrier in the country, operating six DC6s and 12 DC4s, most of which were clear of any debt.

A few years later the planes were grounded and the company bankrupt, mainly because their long-held and properly serviced Military Air Transport (MAT) government contracts were suddenly and mysteriously diverted to a few, newer, smaller and untested airlines, including Southern Air Transport (SAT).

Although Cox suspected political schennigans were somehow involved at the time, it is now well known that SAT was a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the other airlines who received the diverted contracts had secret intelligence connections.

“The CIA put us out of business,” said Cox, who has been running a camp ground at the Jersey Shore, not far from the Cape May County International Airport where the USOA once operated.

When the CIA’s connections to Southern Air Transport were first revealed in 1975 by Victor Marchetti and John Marks in their book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, both Cox and Richard Newman, of California Air Charter both separately sued the CIA and the Civil Newman failed to get monetary restitution and Cox’s case was thrown out of court on a technicality, both men wanted to get back into the air and fly again.

At his home Cox sifts through reams of files he claims supports his case while he explains how, even before the CIA buried them, the CAB tried to suppress the small independent airlines to the benefit of the major carriers. This was done not only to the detriment of the industry, but also hurt the pockets of the general public and even endangered the nation’s security, as well as eliminating their jobs and livelihoods.

“We were a good, solid airline, and not a fly-by-night operation,” Cox asserts. “We owned all our own equipment and planes and had good, dependable employees.” Newspapers and magazine clips of the period show that USOA developed one of the first flight simulators to train pilots, successfully serviced remote points that were unprofitable to the major carriers – like Alaska and Okinawa, pioneered group charters and was the frits airline to employ native stewardesses, breaking a once stringent segregation barrier.

USOA, along with other small, independent carriers, were branded “Non-Scheduled Airlines” by the Civil Aviation Board (CAB) and nicknamed “non-skeds.” They were the little guys in the same business as TWA, United, Eastern and Delta. They’re the ones who provided emergency airlift relief and support to Berlin, Israel, the Congo, Korea and the Defense Early Warning (DEW) outposts in the artic. The industry’s collapse made the evacuation of South Vietnam a major fiasco.

Although the CAB has been disbanded and the industry “deregulated,” the non-skeds are still out of action. They not only lost their business, but their wings, and they want to fly again.

The non-skeds’ case against the CIA became a newsworthy issue in the 1980s because of the SAT involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. In fact the whole secret operation came unwound when the Sandinistas shot down a SAT Contra supply plane in Nicaragua. Baggage handler Eugene Hasenfus survived the crash and was captured. In his pocket was the name and phone number of Feliz Rodrigez, the Cuban Bay of Pigs Brigade veteran and personal friend of George W. H. Bush.

This was not the first time a CIA operation was blown by an airman who survived being shot down over enemy territory. In 1958 Allen Pope was shot down and captured while working on Gen. Ed Lansdale’s “Indonesian Operation.”

Pope was a Civil Air Transport (CAT) pilot who, once he was released from the Indonesia prison in 1962, went to work for SAT. Alex E. Carson, the attorney for SAT at the time, was also the lawyer for Double-Check Corporation and CARAMAR – the Caribbean Marine Aero Corporation, the CIA front companies that hired the Alabama Air National Guard pilots to fly during the Bay of Pigs, some of whom were killed during the invasion. Secret CIA operations in Indonesia, Cuba and Nicaragua were all blown by the weak link in the covert action chain – the air link.

One of the most significant players in the Iran-Contra deal was Al Schwimmer of the Israel Aircraft Industry, who first proposed the United States swap arms for American hostages in Iran in the first place.

Adolph “Al” Schwimmer, an American born Israeli citizen and close advisor to former Israel President and foreign minister Simon Perez, helped instigate the Iran-Contra affair by suggesting the American hostages in Iran could possibly be exchanged for military hardware. Israel then refused to permit Schwimmer to testify before Congress on the special prosecutor investigating the Iran-Contra scandal.

According to Cox, Schwimmer used to operate out of the Burbank, California airport. “He leased one of my planes to assist the early government of Israel,” said Cox, “but eventually they ended up stealing the plane.” Since they used the USOA plane to ferry diplomats, arms and other cargo to the fledging country of Israel, U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay threatened to shoot it down for violating U.S. neutrality laws.

“When the Israelis learned about LeMay’s threat,” relates Cox, “pointing to a Life magazine article and photo, “they appropriated the plane, painted El Air markings over the USOA insignia and used it to begin their national airline.” Cox said he was later paid the insured value of the plane, but not for the time it was used by Schwimmer.

Stewart Steven, in his book The Spymasters of Israel, reports that, “….Al Schwimmer, the remarkable American Jew who, in 1947, became one of the founding fathers of the Israel Air Force by purchasing old aircraft in the United States and cannibalizing them to produce serviceable planes for Israel. Since then, Schwimmer had risen to become president and chief executive of Israel Aircraft Industries, which he started from nothing and which now employs 15,000 people.”

Steven also details Schwimmer’s role in the 1968 covert operation that led to Israel obtaining the blueprints for the French Mirage jet fighter aircraft, and refers to him as one of the world’s most knowledgeable arms dealers.

According to the President’s Tower Commission Report on the Iran-Contra affair, Schwimmer was initially responsible for suggesting the arms for hostages deal with the Iranians, and for leasing the cargo aircraft that was used to ferry U.S. missiles to Iran.

A private, commercial air cargo plane had to be leased because, as one insider put it, “jaws would drop if a plane with Israel or U.S. markings landed in Iran.”

But when it came time to transfer the arms, Schwimmer’s lease for the planes had expired, and retired General Secord was called to acquire new planes, and he resorted to the old CIA standby – Southern Air Transport – SAT.

SAT was founded in Miami, Florida in 1949 by F.C. “Doc” Moor and Stanley G. Williams. On October 1, 1960 the CIA paid $500,000 fo the little airline that had only $100,000 in assets, and according to Christopher Robbin’s book Air America, “….immediately began to fly international MATs contracts to undisclosed destinations.” While Air America ran the CIA’s Far Eastern routes, Southern Air Transport took care of the Latin American routes. The CIA also owned Air Asia, Intermountain Aviation and several other air charter companies.

The whole Iran-Contra connection began to come unraveled when the SAT plane was shot down by Sandinistas in Nicaragua while delivering arms to the Contras, and Eugene Hasenfus survived. Although the CIA maintained that it no longer owned SAT, agency attorneys and corporate managers with intelligence connections maintained control over the airline. “I don’t care what they say,” said Cox, “I believe SAT is still controlled by the CIA.”

“At first we had to fight the CAB,” Cox relates, “but they were a political entity, and we could deal with them, but how do you fight the CIA? We had to fight the federal government every step of the way.”

The CIA has acknowledged that it owned SAT from 1962 until 1973.

The CAB, by over-regulation, had forced the Non-Skeds to rely on Military Air Transport (MAT) contracts to survive, contracts that were safely and successfully fulfilled for many years.

But suddenly millions of dollars in MAT contracts were cut off and given to the small, relatively unknown Southern Air Transport.

“Although we had a spotless record, without one passenger ever getting so much as a scratch, they grounded our planes,” explained Cox, “and the military was banned from using the types of planes we had. So all of a sudden, we had ten planes rotting on the runways.”

The independent airlines that ferried U.S. troops and relief supplies around the country and the world for years, to Israel in 1948, Hungry in 1955, Belgian Congo in 1960 and Berlin in 1962 were suddenly grounded.

On September 24, 1964, $250 million in MAT contracts were diverted from some 30 independent airlines, including USOA, and given to SAT and five other CIA linked carriers. USOA filed for bankruptcy.

“We didn’t know what happened until ten years later,” said Cox bitterly. As a conservative, Republican, anti-Communist veteran, Dr. Ralph Cox didn’t suspect secret government collusion at first, and really didn’t learn the specifics until 1974, when Marchetti and Marks wrote about the CIA links to the airline industry in their book.

“There was dirty works at the crossroads all the way through,” said Cox, “but we didn’t know it. We naively thought that we were dealing with the federal government, like the Post Office, a neutral, unbiased entity. Well, we’ll never believe that again.”

The CIA didn’t even underbid the other airlines. “In some cases, they even charged more,” Cox said.

According to a congressional aide who looked into the matter for then Congressman William Hughes, “This whole story is kind of intriguing. It’s the kind of thing you expect to find in a cloak and dagger mystery novel. But actually it had quite an impact on Cape May County’s economy. If they had been able to stay in business and grow, they would be quite significant players in the airline industry today.”

By the mid-1950s the approximately 500 supplemental airlines had been widdled down to 150 Non-Skeds, and in 1962, the 30 airlines that had shared the $250 million in MATS contracts were suddenly shut out and the contracts given to six small, relatively new air carriers. Two of them, Air American and Southern Air Transport, were wholly owned subsidiaries of the CIA.

Although he didn’t know the CIA was involved, Cox did notice that Southern Air Transport and the five other airlines that received the MAT contracts were all represented by Coates Lear or connected to Lear’s National Air Carriers Association (NACA).

Since Cox’s USOA had serviced a U.S. Navy contract that was picked up by the Air Force, Cox knew that Lear worked out of the D.C. law office of Zuckert, Scoutt & Rasenberger.

Mr. Eugene Zuckert, a senior partner in the firm, was the Secretary of the Air Force, and Coates Lear was his law partner. Both Lear and Zuckert served as presidents of the NACA. Gerald Scoutt later replaced Ed Daley as Chairman of the Board of World Airways.

Lear was attorney of record for World Airways, Capitol Airlines, ARCO and a major stockholder of Overseas National Airlines, all companies that received the MATS contracts. (The other airline that received MATS contracts was Los Angeles Air Services, which became Trans-International, which was under Ted Burwell, another CIA connected officer).

Because of its destructive, below cost military contracts, ONA reported a minus net worth of nearly $4 million in 1960, and used a number of DC7s that American Airlines had made available to General Leasing Corporation, a subsidiary of the Convair Division of General Dynamics.

Continental Airlines hired Pierre Salinger as a corporate officer. Salinger possibly knew of the CIA connections to the airlines because of his position as President Kennedy’s assistant.

Continental also obtained government contracts, including lucrative troop transport contracts delivering soldiers to Vietnam. Continental opened a Nevada based subsidiary, Continental Air Services, and made Robert Rousselot president. Rousselot, an ex-Marine pilot, was an old CIA China hand who had worked for CAT for 17 years.

Recognizing Lear’s influence in the awarding of the MATS contracts, Cox went to Lear and asked him to help arrange for the USOA to continue receiving the MATS contracts in order to stay in business. Lear told Cox, “the boys won’t let you in,” as if it was some elite private club for members only. Cox called the CIA connected airlines “MATS Mistresses.”

In 1962 Cox testified before a Congressional committee that the new policies, “…practically eliminated independent supplemental air carriers, even though Congress has always held them to be a vital part of our economy and our national security.”

The too-few of Ed Daley’s World Airways planes were sent to evacuate Saigon and Da Nang, which certainly indicted how the failure of the supplemental airline industry was a direct threat to our national security. The two World Airways planes that landed in Da Nang to evacuate civilians were swamped by thousands of refugees, some of whom hung on to the wheels of the jets as they took off. South Vietnamese soldiers beat off women and children to make the flight.

Eventually Congress decided to investigate these matters, but when Robert Roussoulet was scheduled to testify before a Congressional committee in 1976, he mysteriously failed to appear, and never did testify.

One CIA director eventually asked the simple question, “How many planes does the CIA own?” But the answer came back that they really didn’t know. In fact, one of the CIA airlines had more employees (30,000) than the CIA itself.

On February 5, 1963 the CIA airlines were formally organized under the umbrella of EXCOMAIR – the Executive Committee for Air Proprietary Operations. EXCOMAIR was, “to provide general policy guidance for the management of air propriety projects and review recommendations for approval of air proprietary project actions.” Lawrence Houston was appointed chairman of the committee.

In the fall of 1963 Coats Lear was killed by a shotgun blast to the head. Although some suggested it was suicide, others believe he was murdered.

Lear was a law partner in Eugene Zucker’s firm, and Zuckert, as Secretary of the Air Force, was involved in the awarding of contracts.

Ed Driscol, the man who handled the administration of many of the MATS contracts at the Pentagon, became Executive Director of the Civil Aeronautics Board after the death of Lear. Later, Driscol became VP at World Airways, one of the companies he funneled MATS contracts to from the Pentagon and CAB.

Driscol was the Director of Transportation under Joseph Imire, the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force and John H. Rubel, the Asst. Secretary of Defense. With CAB chairman Alan S. Boyd, they effectively ended the competitive bidding for MATS contracts and arbitrarily awarded them to their favorite airlines connected to the CIA and/or Lear & Zuckert.

Ruble, Imire and Driscol all resigned shortly before the death of Lear. While Driscol went on to the CAB and World Airways, Ruble and Imire became Vice President of Litton Industries, a major defense contractor.

Another explanation for Lear’s death is provided by Amos Heacock, another independent airline owner put out of business by the CIA, who believes that is a connection between Lear’s demise and the assassination of President Kennedy shortly thereafter.

Heacock believes Lear’s law partner, Eugene Zuckert, as Secretary of the Air Force, had something to do with the scheduling of the President’s visit to Texas. He may have been responsible for the upkeep of Air Force One and Two, the planes provided for Executive office use by the President, Vice President and the cabinet.

According to this theory, Zuckert, as Secretary of the Air Force, obtained foreknowledge of the assassination, information that was also picked up by Lear. This either drove Lear crazy enough to kill himself, or made him unstable and a threat tothose planning to kill the President, so Lear also had to die.

Zuckert, a graduate of Yale University, served as the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force from 1947-1952 and was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1952-1954. He left the Nuclear Science and Engineering Corporation of Pittsburgh (no longer listed in the phone book) where he worked from 1960-61, to become Secretary of the Air Force. The NE&E Corp. is described in “Elites in American History” as “a relatively small Pittsburgh based concern which was backed by various financial interests, chief of which was probably New York’s Lehman Brothers, a concern with great politico-economic influence.”

One of the most important decisions Zuckert made as Air Force Secretary concerned the F-111 jet fighter contract. Although every independent study recommended that the contract be awarded to Boeing, which designed both a less expensive and better performing aircraft, the contract went to General Dynamics.

This decision was made by four men – Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatrick, Secretary of the Navy Fred Korth and Air Force Secretary Eugene Zuckert.

Gilpatrick was a former Wall Street law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and had previously represented General Dynamics, while Korth was president of Continental National Bank of Ft. Worth, Texas. General Dynamic’s Ft. Worth Plant eventually received the bulk of the contract.

[William Kelly’s research is supported in part by a grant from the Fund For Constitutional Government Investigative Journalism Project.]

Luis Angel Castillo

On March 22, 1996, The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper reported on the arrest of a Soviet spy, former NSA clerk Robert Stephen Lipka, who was identified by the FBI counter-intelligence and British MI5 from information supplied by a former KGB archivist (Mitrokin) and defector. While the Millersville, Pennsylvania man was being arranged in court, Lipka claimed that while at NSA he saw documents that identified the real assassin of President Kennedy.

When a reporter asked Lipka, as he was being led away, what was the assassin’s name, Lipka responded, “Luis Angel Castillo.”

On March 23, 1996 I wrote to the Ford Library requesting the ROCKCOM records of Luis Angel Castillo. On February 10, 2000, I received the following document.

CASTILLO, LUIS ANGEL

Date: 02/02/00

Page: 1

JFK ASSASSINATION SYSTEM

IDENTIFICATION FORM

AGENCY INFORMATION

AGENCY : ROCKCOM

RECORD NUMBER : 178-10002-10315

RECORD SERIES : ASSASSINATION FILES

AGENCY FILE NUMBER: A-I (1) INTERVIEWS – ASSASSINATION

ORIGINATOR : ROCKEFELLER COMMISSION

FROM : CARGILL, MASON

TO : FILE

TITLE : LUIS ANGEL CASTILLO

DATE : 05/19/75

PAGES: 9

SUBJECTS : CASTILLO, LUIS ANGEL

DOCUMENT REQUEST, ROCKEFELLER COMMISSION

CIA

CONSPIRCY THEORIES, CASTRO

DOCUMENT TYPE : MEMORANDUM

CLASSIFICAITON : SECRET

RESTRICTIONS : 1A, 1B, 1C, REFERRED, MANDATORY REVIEW MATERIAL

CURRENT STATUS : RELEASED WITH DELETIONS

DATE OF LAST REVIEW : 02/02/00

OPENING CRITERIA : CIA APPROVAL

COMMENTS:

COMMISSION ON CIA ACTIVITIES WITHIN THE UNITED STATES

Washington D.C. 20500

May 19, 1975

MEMORANDUM

To: David W. Belin

From : Mason Cargill – MC signed off

Subject: LUIS ANGEL CASTILLO

In the afternoon of May 12, 1975, I talked with Scott Breckenridge of the Inspector General’s office. He told me that the Agency’s files concerning Castillo were finally located in the East-Asia Division of the DDO. Those files dealing with Castillo are files of the “201” type. However, these files were not filed with normal 201 files. Breckenridge could give no explanation for this anomaly.

He gave me a brief overview of what he said the documents in the file demonstrated. According to him, Castillo left the United States, probably Chicago, in late 1966 or early 1967 for the Philippines. He was traveling under a Philippine passport which he borrowed from a Philippine national illegally in the U.S. Apparently he did so to make the U.S. authorities believe that the illegal Filipino had left the country and therefore to assume that he would not be deported.

In the Philippines he was arrested by the security service and interrogated extensively. At first he claimed to be a Castro agent whose purpose was to establish contact with the Huk guerrillas in the Philippines. Later he said that he had been part of an effort by Cuban Premier Castro to assassinate President Kennedy. He stated that he was one of fourteen Cuban agents stationed at various points at Kennedy’s parade route in Dallas. Breckenridge also said that the documents indicate that during his interrogation Castillo would occasionally go into some type of hypnotic trance. Further, the Philippine interrogators administered truth serum to him during the interrogation.

RMC:clb

SECRET

DECLASSIFIED with portions redacted

JFK Assass. Rec. Collections Act of 1992

FAI, NSC, CIA Concurrence

NARA date 2/2/00 By KBH

PHOTOCOPY

FROM
GERALD FORD LIBRARY

(page) 2.

In the opinion of Breckenridge, Csatillo’s story, as documented in these files, probably cannot be dismissed out of hand as inherently incredible. Breckenridge still has no present memory of how the team preparing the 1967 IG report on the assassination came to be aware of Castillo or what follow up action, if any, was taken on the basis of these documents. He suggests that another person who worked on the 1967 report, Ken Greer, may have worked on this Castillo angle and would be the person to contact for such information. He stated that Greer is now retired and living in Wisconsin. Breckenridge also stated that these files do not indicate whether or not Castillo was ever actually deported to the United States and if so whether the FBI ever interrogated him. (But see item 12 below, which indicates Castillo returned to Chicago on February 10, 1968, and evaded the authorities.) Apparently the Agency has no knowledge of Mr. Castillo’s present location.

The Agency’s documents on Castillo are contained in two manila-type folders, legal size. The first is entitled “Luis Angel Castillo, 201-817248, thru April 1967.” The second bears thee identical title except for the date, which is “May 67 – .”

The first title, through April 1967, contained the following items of interest:

1. Filed immediately after a cable, dated March 3, 1967, from [REDACTED] to Headquarters, is a copy of an interrogation of Luis Castillo by a Philippine agent of the National Bureau of Investigation. This document is about 20 pages long and in it Castillo outlines his story.

His parents were Cuban nationals. He left Puerto Rico to attend school in Cuba in about 1960. He states he was trained for several years as a Cuban intelligence agent. In late 1966, he changed identities with a Filipino living in Chicago named Antonio Reyes Eloriaga, at the direction of the Cuban Intelligence Service, for the purpose of using Eloriaga’s Philippine passport to go to the Philippines, where he was supposed to contact the Huk guerrillas.

Castillo stated that on July 2, 1962, during a speech, Fidel Castro threatened to retaliate against President Kennedy. He said Castro said Kennedy made two attempts on

(page) 3.

his life and he was prepared to order that Kennedy himself be assassinated by Cuban intelligence agents. Castillo also claims to have been in Dallas at the time of the assassination of President Kennedy, although he is unclear as to exactly what he was doing. He claims he was taking pictures of buildings and people in Dallas. There is one other reference to the assassination of President Kennedy in this long transcript. On the last page of the transcript, below a large blacked-out area, is the question, “What other information do you have in connection with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?” Castillo answered that all he knew was that Fidel Castro had made these threats against Kennedy in his speech of July 7, 1962. It appears that the blacked-out portion of the transcript may contain certain questions and answers dealing with the Kennedy assassination.

My personal impression from this transcript is that Castillo was not in control of his faculties. He is at times quite rambling, incoherent, and sometimes inherently incredible. He states that in the Philippines he wrote a letter to the President of the Philippines offering to assassinate the leader of the Huk guerillas.

2. A cable, dated March 8, 1967, from [REDACTED] to Headquarters. In this cable the [REDACTED] gives Headquarters a brief outline of the transcribed testimony of Castillo described in paragraph one. Essentially the [REDACTED] is giving certain details of what Castillo claims was his history, for the purpose of allowing headquarters to attempt to independently corroborate these details, in order to establish Castillo’s credibility. The cable states that Castillo is in effect telling a “pretty wild story.”

3. An FBI report, dated April 13, 1967, Subject: Luis Angel Castillo. This report contains factual statements made by Castillo in the Philippines, and reports on the FBI’s attempt to corroborate these events, which Castillo alleged to have taken place primarily in a Chicago area. With some exceptions, the FBI could not corroborate these events. They concerned basically hospital and employment records which Castillo claimed would show that he had been treated by a certain hospital or employed by certain organizations.

(page) 4.

4. An FBI report, dated April 13, 1967, on Luis Angel Castillo. This report summarizes a Newark, New Jersey arrest report on Luis Castillo. He was arrested for robbery and given a sentence in a reformatory, from which he was paroled. One statement in the report was: “There were strong indications of homosexual tendencies on the part of Castillo, and he was described as being of low average intelligence with an unstable personality.

5. Cable, dated April 19, 1967, from [REDACTED] to Headquarters. Paragraph one of this cable reads as follows:

“During first two weeks of April, subject underwent consecutively truth serum, truth serum-hypnotism, and hypnotism during interrogations at [REDACTED].” While confirming some earlier points in his sworn statement, subject consistently maintained

he among 14 other Cuban intel agents who deployed along street in Dallas on day President Kennedy was assassinated. He stated plot and operation were directed by Russian looking women named Jean Dole of Two Chipawa Court, Madison, Wisconsin.

[REDACTED] cannot vouch for professionalism of [REDACTED] interrogators and above seems patently spurious.”

Paragraph two reads in part: “LNYMA”** Representative indicated he would eventually have to effect Subject’s travel to U.S. since he deported by error and according to LNERGO*** subject is wanted by Bureau of Parole, Trenton, New Jersey, for violation of parole.”

· [REDACTED] appears to stand for the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation.

· **”LYNMA” probably stands for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

· *** “LNERGO” probably stands for the U.S. FBI.

(page) 5.

6. Cable, dated April 21, 1967, from Headquarters to [REDACTED] (signed by William E. Colby, Chief, Far-East Division) Paragraph one reads:

“Par 1 [REDACTED] 9456 [Cable referred to in paragraph five above] has created

strong reaction here. Although inclined to agree [REDACTED] evaluation Castillo aka Eloriga Reyes case, there are disturbing verifications of story and lines to other individuals. Believe we cannot allow case to idle along. Case primarily LNERGO LNYUMA responsibility here, but we want [REDACTED] actively and directly involved so long as locus remains Phils.”

Paragraph three reads: “Unless LNYUMA plans effect travel to U.S. in near future, headquarters still prepared send qualified officer assist [REDACTED] investigation.

7. Cable dated April 24, 1967, from [REDACTED] to Headquarters. This cable transmits a verbatim transcript of two interrogations of Castillo by the Philippine NBI. This interrogation contains Castillo’s recitation of the details of his activities on the day President Kennedy as killed. He claims to have been working for one Jean Dolf who placed him under hypnosis in Chicago. He was on the second floor of a building with a rifle when Kennedy was shot by someone else. The rifle had been given to him by a man who had taken its pieces from a bowling bag and assembled it.

8. Newspaper articles of April 1967 from the Philippines indicate that Castillo’s story of participation in the Kennedy assassination received wide publicity. For instance, an article dated April 22, 1967, in the Saturday Chronicle gives practically all the details that Castillo gave to the Philippine NBI during the interrogations. An even more detailed account of Castillo’s story is contained in an article in the April 22, 1967, edition of the Philippines Herald. These newspapers contain the statement that NBI psychiatrists had examined Castillo and found him to be sane. An article on Castillo and his story appeared in The Washington Post of April 22, 1967.

9. One press item of interest was published by the AP on April 23, 1967, from Washington. One paragraph of the report reads as follows:

“A spokesman for Representative Gerald R. Ford, Republican-Michigan, a member of the Warren Commission, said the congressman would not comment until he had more information. He said Ford might have a statement if the reported confession of Luis Castillo, described as a communist agent for Cuba, was made available officially.”

10. Cable, dated April 25, 1967, from the American Embassy in Manila to the Security of State in Washington clearly indicates that the State Department considered Castillo to be unbalanced. Paragraph three of this cable reads:

“Apart from questions of delicacy and prudence, one reason why embassy has not sought to offer good officers to alleged American citizen is that he appears, in some respects, be irrational, and has created most of his own problems here. Shortly after arrival he telephoned Chief of Staff MATA with offer to establish contact with Huks in order assassinate prominent Huk leaders. (When asked how he would recognize leaders, he replied that they could supply him with description.) MATA referred him to one of army intelligence agencies which after two interviews concluded he was both unbalanced and semi-illiterate before turning him over to NBI.”

11. FBI report on Castillo, dated April 24, 1967, forwarded to the CIA on April 25, 1967. This contains a complete FBI report on Castillo (i.e., his background, U.S. criminal record, etc.) Only the last paragraph of the FBI report deals with Castillo’s allegation that he was involved in a plot to assassinate President Kennedy. This paragraph reads:

(page) 7.

“With reference to subject’s allegations concerning the assassination of President Kennedy, it s to be noted that the extensive investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination developed no indications that anyone other than Oswald was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.”

The second file, beginning with documents of May 1967, contain the following items of note:

12. Memorandum, dated May 3, 1967, for the record, Subject: Luis Angel Castillo by [REDACTED], FE/PMI/P. This gives the CIA’s version of the events beginning with the arrest of Castillo. It substantially agrees with all of the documents discussed above.

13. Cable, dated June 20, 1967, from [REDACTED], to Chief, Far-East Division, Subject: Current Status of Illegal Immigrant Luis Castillo. This cable states that the Philippine NBI was still holding Castillo incommunicado in a hospital in the Philippines. The cable indicates that the Philippine officers strongly suspect “subject could have been conditioned by someone to attempt assassination of President Marcos.” Paragraph three of this cable reads as follows:

[REDACTED] office who mentioned that a Russian hypnotism expert, Libidev or Livibed, visited Manila while on World Health Organization business in February 1967 when subject had just come to Philippines and was still at large before his arrest. [REDACTED] suspected this Russian might have contacted subject to “maintain hypnotic control” which allegedly subject has been placed under before leaving WOLADY.”

(page) 8

Paragraph five of this cable reads: “While we are minimizing time devoted to this case, [REDACTED] will keep in close touch with [REDACTED] and report further developments.”

14. Cable, dated June 26, 1967, from [REDACTED] to Headquarters. This indicates that a [REDACTED] within Philippine NBI had reported indicated that Castillo had signed a new statement on June 26, 1967, identifying himself as one Manuel Angelo Ramirez. In this statement Castillo claimed to have been a WOFACT (probably referring to CIA) employee who participated first Bay of Pigs invasion, then in the assassination of President Kennedy. He also indicated that he had been sent to the Philippines to attempt to assassinated President Marcos. Cable indicated that the NBI did not believe Castillo’s claim about his CIA status and its involvement in assassinations, but needed to “clear up” the subject’s claims. Paragraph three contains the statement that, “We briefed minister and will brief FBI and INS on FYI only basis, at first opportunity.”

Paragraph four of this cable reads:

“Subject’s story getting more absurd and we frequently point this out to [REDACTED] Nonetheless, Para 1 [referring to assassination allegations referring to CIA] is a leak to local press, no matter how far fetched the story, it could be embarrassing.”

15. FBI report dated February 15, 1968, indicates that Castillo had arrived at Chicago O’Hare International Airport from Manila at approximately 11 p.m., February 10, 1968. On February 14 officers from the Sheriff’s Department of Cook County, Illinois, visited Castillo’s mother’s home in an effort to arrest him with a warrant charging him with parole violation. They were advised that on February 13 Castillo left his mother’s home in an automobile with a number of unidentified male individuals. His mother added that she did not expect to see her son again.

(page) 9.

16. FBI report, dated Decemeber 30, 1967, on Luis Angel Castillo. This report contains the text of a letter which Castillo sent to his mother in Chicago on December 4, 1967, while he was still under interrogation by the NBI in Manila. In the letter he claims that all of his confessions were the result of NBI torture and none of them were true. He explains that since the NBI recently got a new director who is anti-American, he was then being tortured to force him to claim that he is a CIA spy who was sent to the Philippines for the purpose of assassinating President Marcos. His mother turned the letter over to the FBI as soon as she received it.

17. Memorandum for the record, dated June 18, 1969, by J.F. Devanon of the Los Angeles Field Office, Subject: Victor Arcega, Hermosa Beach, California. This memorandum describes contact the Los Angeles field office had with Arcega. Arcega, on May 26, 1969, telephoned the Los Angeles field office of the CIA on the listed telephone number. He claimed that he had information on a Cuban communist in the Philippines and agreed to mail the particulars to the CIA’s P.O.Box. The letter he subsequently wrote is attached to this memorandum. In it Arcega claims to have been the hypnotist used by the NBI in its interrogation of Castillo in 1967. He claims that he used the name Vicente Sanchez.

Arcega, in 1969, was a proof reader for the Los Angeles Times, who was about to be deported to the Philippines because his visa was expiring. He claims that Castillo had been subject to prior hypnosis and had been programmed to undertake certain actions when certain key words were said to him. One key word dealt with the assassination of President Marcos of the Philippines. The letter does not state why Arcega is providing this information to the CIA at this time. The file does not indicate what follow-up if any CIA undertook as a result of this letter.

It should be noted that the summary of the interrogation cabled to headquarters on April 24, 1967, discussed above, included a report on Castillo, signed by one “Vicente Sanchez, Hypnotist.” It is not clear how Arcega would have known the name used by the hypnotist in 1967 had he not either been the hypnotist or been associated with the NBI in some other capacity.

END OF DOCUMENT

BK Research Notes: Under a list of MK/ULTRA experimental records is ARTICHOKE Docs 59-155: Bordentown New Jersey Reformatory. Boston Psychopathic (Hyde-Massachusetts Mental Hospital); Brain Studies; Brainwashing (1) Brainwashing (2): Project Calling Card: John Marks Chapter 6, conclusions: Chadwell, W.H.: CBW Work File: Dr. Wallace Chan: Cold War Late 1953-55 (1): Cold War Docs (1) (Project Artichoke, Bluebird): Cold War Docs (2): Control of Behavior – General: Cybernetics: Defectors: University of Denver: Destruction of Files: Diseases: Drug Research and Operations….”

This is the same Bordentown N.J. Reformatory where Castillo was apparently tested and paroled from and is currently a fugitive at large for parole violations.

Also, P.D. Scott mentions Castillo in regards to the I.G. Report:

“Almost certainly the CIA knew of the three-man plot against Castro in March 1963, whether or not it was itself involved. As I have written elsewhere, there was at least one other three-man assassination team that was sent, this time with CIA support, against Castro in 1963. These three men were Eddie “Bayo” Perez and the other two survivors of the so-called Bayo-Pawley mission, sent in the summer of 1963 by Roselli’s close friend and room-mate John Martino. The recently released CIA documents confirm ‘the large amount of assistance from JMWAVE’ (the CIA’s Miami station) for this mission, and also the efforts of John Martino to exfiltrate Angel Luis Castillo Cabrera ‘Bayo’s brother-in-law, to join them.”

“This Luis Castillo is the ‘Castillo’ cited by the IG Report on p. 118 as corroboration of the counterplot…”

Scott cites Hickle and Turner, The Fish Is Red, 171-73, Scott, Deep Politics, 113-17. Dispatch of 7/26/63 form COS, JMWAVE to Chief, SAS (Fitzgerald), concerning JMWAVE’s Relationship to Pawley (‘assistance’).

Scott: “Whether or not one believes Castro’s intelligence networks to have been involved, one can entertain the hypothesis that a shooter team, in effect licensed by the CIA to kill Castro, might then have returned from Cuba and killed the President instead. Such an idea, floated by Martino and later Roselli, would have exerted pressure on the CIA whether true or untrue. The mere appearance that a CIA team had been ‘turned around,’ while other killers took care of the actual job, would have been enough to coerce the CIA and its friends into the ranks of those claiming to be true believers in a lone assassin.”

Chapter 12 of W. H. Bowart’s Operation Mind Control, is Four Faces of Zombie, about Luis Angel Castillo, with additional details.

Bill Kelly on Coast to Coast AM 11/22/07

Coast to Coast AM radio show. November 23^{rd, 2007, 3 am – EST. WOND 1400}

George Noorey: William Kelly, journalist by trade, from Browns Mills, New Jersey, has done extensive research into the assassination of President Kennedy since 1970s. His articles have appeared over the years in both print and online forums and newspapers and magazines. An expert on Lee Harvey Oswald and the Cuban connections to the case, and a co-founder (with John Judge) of the Committee for an Open Archives (COA). Also co-author of the Committee for an Open Archives magazine, he is currently campaigning for Congressional Oversight Committee to hold a legally mandated review of the JFK Assassination Records Act. He also supports the creation of a grand jury to reopen the investigation to reopen what he calls the unsolved homicide of President Kennedy. Bill Kelly. Hey Bill, how are you?

Kelly: Hi George, I’m doing good. Thanks for doing this show.

GN: My pleasure. Happy Thanksgiving.

Kelly: Thank you, and I’m glad to hear about your daughter in St. Louis having a baby.

GN: It’s getting close. The direction you’re going now, you’re looking for information? You want a grand jury; you’re looking for more data, where does it lead from here?

Kelly: Well, I’m not really advocating any particular theory. I’m trying to get the government to do its job, and I think it’s about time, after fifteen years we’ve had the JFK Act in force, they’ve never had any hearings on it. And I think the oversight hearings are long over due and I think if they are held, and the people who have destroyed records or refuse to release records they’ve been ordered to release, and claim they don’t have records we know exist, and they are put on the hot seat, and Congressmen ask them the hard questions under oath, I think we’ll get some good answers.

GN: I hope so. Now tell us a little bit about this JFK Assassination Records Act.

Kelly: Well Congress passed the act fifteen years ago, a few years after John Judge and I formed the Committee for an Open Archives, which unsuccessfully lobbied Congress to release the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) records, which were locked away for fifty years in 1979.

GN: John Judge by the way, working with our producer Lisa Lyons, helped put together this show tonight and John will be our guest for the final half hour tonight. Go ahead Bill.

Kelly: Yea, so we lobbied Congress for years to free the assassination records, and Congress wouldn’t pay any attention to us at all. Then Ollie Stone did the movie “JFK” and we asked him to put a little rider at the end of the film to say that the files were locked away and he did that. And that instigated Congress to pass the JFK Act when people wrote letters and contacted their Congressmen and asked why these files are still locked away. The overwhelming amount of people who talked to their Congressmen about it, convinced them to do this. And now it’s been fifteen years and we haven’t had any hearings on the oversight of this act.

There is a new chairman of the oversight committee, Henry Waxman (D. Calf.), who has done hearings on other subjects, and we’re trying to convince him to hold hearings on the JFK Act sometime in the next year.

GN: Okay, but a lot of the records are still tucked away, for how long?

Kelly: Well, there all suppose to be released by 2019, but we don’t want to wait that long, we think they all should be released now.

GN: They haven’t been all chopped up and thrown away.

Kelly: They have released millions of records, but the ones that we’ve requested that we know have some important stuff in them have been with held for national security reasons. And there’s a court case right now that people should be aware of – Jeff Morley vs. the CIA, regarding the Joannides documents. If you read his article in the current issue of Playboy Morley outlines some of the reasons why these records are important. It’s great that he’s in court right now challenging the CIA to release these records that should have been released by the JFK Act, but they still refuse to do so because of national security.

GN: Bill, let me ask you a couple of questions.

Kelly: Yea?

GN: If during the period when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, if it were publicly acknowledged that members of the government conspired to kill him, what would have happened at that time, if that were true and that come out?

Kelly: Well the Constitution allows for the government to carry on no matter what happens. The Lincoln assassination is history now, a hundred years over, but the Kennedy assassination is still a current event, an unsolved homicide that isn’t in the historical category yet.

GN: What I’m leading towards though, lets say that happened, and members of the government conspired and killed him, and now a hundred years plus later they finally go into records and say….

Kelly: They did show that the Lincoln assassination was a conspiracy, and in fact they hung people for being part of it at the time.

GN: But if we were told today that high level members of the government conspired to kill the president then, today we’d say ho-ho hum, we know that because it’s old news. Isn’t that what’s going to happen in 2019?

Kelly: Yes, if we wait that long. I think Cyril Wecht hit the nail on the head when he was talking to you earlier tonight when he said “the case is still to hot for the government to handle” and we’re going to have to wait until all the main people are dead. I think that will happen in the next ten years, but I think we should act now. I think the government is poised to act now, the people want the government to act now, and the oversight hearings are mandated for the review of the JFK Act. But I think we should have a grand jury too.

We should present the evidence of crimes related to the assassination, before a grand jury right now, and let the grand jury take the evidence and see where it goes.

GN: Is there anything new Bill that has come out let’s say over the last five, ten years, that the Warren Commission would have loved to have had?

Kelly: Well of course, the whole Castro assassination angle never went before the Warren Commission and every years, every month now, it seems something new comes out. I think this is becoming a hot case again, and is no longer a cold case. We’ve had David Talbot’s book “Brothers” published, we’ve had Bugliosi’s book published, we’ve had the E. Howard Hunt book and stories come out, and you had a guest on tonight talk about a new book on James Files. I think there are a lot of things happening on this case, and I think it’s going to continue happening, and it’s going to go from a cold case to a hot case real soon.

GN: Bill, you don’t have a specific theory, but you do believe…..

Kelly: I believe, from my study of the case indicates as Cyril Wecht said earlier, it was a coup d’etat by the highest levels of government. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a big, grand conspiracy, but it was an effective assassination and coup.

GN: That’s frightening.

Kelly: It is, and it’s frightening that the government, because of the national security implications, will not reveal the truth of what happened. I think that’s the reason why we have to get to the truth – for the same reasons they say they can’t release the records to the public – and that’s because our national security is at stake.

GN: Do you think that every standing President to date, knows what happened?

Kelly: Well, Yes. Yes, they figured it out. That’s why they appointed the Vice Presidents they appoint. Because they know what happened to Kennedy in 1963. The coup that took place really happened in 1960 at the Democratic National Convention when they put LBJ on the ticket as the Vice Presidential candidate. That allowed the coup to take place.

GN: Why did Kennedy go along with that? Did he need the South and Texas that much?

Kelly: I think they were blackmailed into it, and Joe Kennedy was involved. The deliberations during that event included Phil Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, who was the one who set it up and has written extensively about it. But LBJ was put on the ticket against Bobby Kennedy’s wishes, and against the President’s wishes at the time, and that allowed the coup to take place at Dealey Plaza.

GN: I wonder if behind closed doors during that election if Kennedy and Johnson looked at each other and said, “I hate your guts.”

Kelly: Well, LBJ was not a nice person. I think anyone who studies him at any length realizes pretty much that he was just a bad person, in my view.

GN: When they talk about these documents being with held for reasons of national security, as it directly relates to the assassination, what could that be? What could be so important that the national security would be at stake?

Kelly: Well, the documents that Jeff Morley is trying to get concerns these gentlemen who worked for the CIA, Joannides, George Joannides…..

GN: There was just this big article in Playboy….

Kelly: Yes, and those records have to do with JM/WAVE, that was the CIA base in Florida that was set up to handle Cuban matters, and the JM/WAVE files contain a lot of records that are relevant to the assassination and they should have been released with the JFK Act and are sill being with held. Someday we’re going to see them, and we will read them and find out why they are being with held.

GN: We have a new story here that Kennedy might have been assassinated in Chicago on November 2nd, 1963. It’s possible all these groups you’ve heard about – the mob, the Cuban connection, the Oswald connection, it’s possible they all had different dates they were going to get him.

Kelly: Well, there are many theories and many people didn’t like him and different groups may have tried to kill him, but in the end what happened in Dallas only happened one way, and in the end individual people did it, and not organizations like the mob and CIA, though the individuals may have been part of those organizations. Only individuals can be held accountable for murder so we have to name names, individuals, and pretty soon I think we will be close enough to do that.

GN: Bill, the subsequent deaths of witnesses and participants is absolutely uncanny.

Kelly: Well there’s a natural attrition that takes place over time. When I asked the archivist at the National Archives twenty years ago why the records were locked away for fifty years, he said that was the time estimated that the people mentioned in the documents would be dead. So now, thanks to the JFK Act, we have many of the records now, and after 45 years, there’s still a five year window of opportunity that there’s witnesses still alive. Now I know you’re implying that there were mysterious deaths, but it wasn’t only mysterious deaths, there’s some blatant homicides – open unsolved cases today – Rosselli, Giancana, I have a list of a dozen related homicides that if prosecutors around the country get together and try to solve, the resolution of these cold cases will indirectly lead to solving of what happened at Dealey Plaza.

GN: I think you are right, but those individuals lived very dangerous lives. But we have a lot of witnesses in the JFK case who were normal people who died strangely.

Kelly: Yes we do. And we have others that had stories they wanted to tell who silenced. And we have a few of them that are still out there, and if the can just hang on for another year maybe we can get them to testify before a Congressional hearing or a grand jury and actually solve the case.

GN: Is there another Garrison out there?

Kelly: It’s not a Garrison you are looking for. I think you need a young, aggressive prosecutor who is hungry, similar to assistant DA who solved the Medgar Evers assassination and got a conviction there. That case provides a blueprint for how it can be done. You need a young, aggressive assistant prosecutor who is willing to take on the responsibility of pushing this.

GN: He has to have a boss though, who will allow him to do it.

Kelly: Well there’s a new DA in Dallas, and a new Sheriff in town too, and they’re both black and both liberal. The new DA in Dallas has been letting people out of jail who were convicted by former DA Henry Wade on false evidence. They’ve come up with new DNA evidence and concluded they were innocent. We hope to be able to convince this new District Attorney to convene a grand jury to investigate the assassination.

GN: How pointed do you think some of these documents might be, how specific?

Kelly: The records are a whole different matter from the grand jury. Whether you believe in a conspiracy or you believe Oswald did it because he was nuts, you still want the records released to the public. Gerald Posner has even signed on to a letter asking for the CIA records Morley wants to be released. I think everyone wants to free the files, and I think we have a real good shot at having Congressional oversight hearings in Washington next year. March 17th, St. Patty’s Day, is the beginning of Sunshine Week throughout the country in which reporters and journalists talk about secret records and the need for open records in an open government. We’re trying to get the Waxman committee to hold hearings on the JFK Act oversight hearings that week. And being broadcast from Los Angeles, you might have your listeners there to contact their representative, Henry Waxman, who is chairman of the Oversight Committee and represents LA and Hollywood, and encourage him to hold the oversight hearings on the JFK Act that are mandated by the law. Your daughter in St. Louis is represented by Rep. William Clay, the chairman of the subcommittee responsible for the National Archives. Clay is the one who would conduct the hearings, decide on what witnesses would testify and he has to be convinced of the necessity to hold these hearings as well.

GN: How come nobody has leaked the information that are in these documents? Are they in a vault?

Kelly: People have been talking. Larry Hancock wrote a really good book called “Someone Would Have Talked” that just came out this year, the best and the most important book to come out on the assassination in a long time. He writes about John Martino and some of the Cubans who did talk. And then there’s Bradley Ayers, who wrote The Zenith Secret about what went on at JM/WAVE. He talks about Gordon Campbell and Shackley and the CIA guys who ran those Cuban down there, and if they are related to what happened at Dealey Plaza, then what Bradley Ayers says about JM/WAVE is very important.

GN: What do you think about the late Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt’s deathbed confession?

Kelly: Well if you look at his career, he was a disinformation and psychological warfare specialist.

GN: In the end he was trying to mislead us?

Kelly: He wrote novels in the same fashion as Ian Fleming, and there’s a lot of reality laced through his novels, so when he writes non-fiction, you have to question what’s what? And now that he’s dead, we are left with what he wrote, but his son might be on to something.

GN: I think so to. Could a grand jury subpoena these still secret documents?

Kelly: Absolutely. Absolutely. If there is a grand jury going, you will have the body exhumed and a proper forensic autopsy performed that should have been done years ago.

GN: We’ve had Dr. Cyril Wecht on earlier, a pathologist.

Kelly: Dr. Wecht works with us at COPA, he was a director of the Coalition on Political Assassination.

GN: He was responding to a question of why we haven’t DNA’d the bullets?

Kelly: Well that’s a test that a grand jury would order have done.

GN: The fact that nobody is doing anything tells you what, Bill?

Kelly: It tells us that the government doesn’t want answers to any questions.

GN: Exactly, why?

Kelly: Well the people who took over the government in 1963 are still in power today, and like Cyril said, until these people die off they’re not going to let go of the truth of what happened.

If we proceed the way I want to go, and that is to have the oversight hearings in Congress on the JFK Act and get a grand jury going, I think we can answer some of the questions in our lifetime.

GN: Do they care?

Kelly: I don’t think it matters if they care. The things I am asking for are mandated by the Constitution – it’s the way government works. This is the way things should be done. Laws passed by Congress should be enforce and overseen by those responsible, and a murder should go to a grand jury. It’s never been before a grand jury, except by Garrison in New Orleans, and I don’t think he did it right.

GN: He tried. His intentions were good.

Kelly: His intentions may have been good, but he didn’t have all the resources or the evidence that he should have had and that we have now.

GN: Do you think – the old Jack Nickelson line, “You can’t handle the truth,” do you think American’s can handle the truth.

Kelly: Absolutely. In order to have an open government in a democracy you need to inform the people of what the truth is and let them decide. Even those who believe Oswald did it alone because he was nuts support the idea of releasing the records and having an open government.

GN: And get it behind us and move on. I think most Americans already believe there was a conspiracy here.

Kelly: 80% do. And the thing is this case is slowly slipping from an unsolved homicide into the realm of history, and I think by the 50th anniversary it will reach that point. Right now, at the 44th we still have a window of opportunity to get these living witnesses to testify under oath and answer the questions. And I think we should get a grand jury going and present the evidence as it is and let the grand jury decide if there’s enough evidence to indict someone.

GN: Okay Bill, thank you for your information on the push here to get more records and a grand jury.

Kelly: And thank you for doing the show tonight and having such good people on – Cyril Wecht, Gary Aguliar, Bob Groden, John Judge, they’re all good people and friends of mine.

GN: Alright, Bob Groden is next on Coast to Coast, stay tuned.

END OF SEGMENT

Thursday Night at the Cabana Lounge

THURSDAY NITE AT THE CABANA LOUNGE – A Harmonic Convergence –

By William Kelly

It had all the appearances of a normal Thursday night in Dallas in 1963. A big convention was in town, the hotels were booked solid, restaurants were busy, the nightclubs were jumping and the President was due to visit the next day.

The President’s impending visit however, was almost an afterthought, and was not even mentioned in most conversations that night. Instead, it was a typical social evening, except the next day, those who socialized at the Cabana lounge that Thursday night would play peculiar roles in the unfolding drama that included the murder of the President.

When Jim Braden and Morgan Brown checked into the Cabana that Thursday morning, they told the desk clerk they would be staying until Sunday, November 24, and were assigned room #301. They would go to their rooms for a while before having a few drinks downstairs at the Bon Vivant lounge.

Ed Meyers and his companion Jean Aase moved from the Love Field Ramada to the Cabana because, Meyers later said, of the noise at the airport.

Meyers would later recall that he had previously stayed at the Cabana on other occasions he was in Dallas, including the grand opening gala, which was said to be quite an affair since Doris Day was one of the owners and the Cabana would become known for its high powered Hollywood entertainment.

Lawrence Meyers’ brother Ed was staying at the classically refined Adolphis Hotel, across the street from the seedy Carousel Club, but Ed and his wife Thelma came over to the Cabana for a special party. Ed and Thelma owned a number of Pepsi Cola franchises in Brooklyn, New York, and had just returned from Mexico City where they met with Larry’s son Ralph, who was also said to be registered at the Cabana that night. Ralph had served in the Army Security Agency, was trained in Russian and the Monterey Language Institute and served at a top-secret base in Turkey before working as a Chicago bus driver. Ralph was described as being a journalist living in Mexico City.

Larry Meyers and his girlfriend Jean, Ed Meyers and Ed’s wife and maybe Ralph, would later be joined at the Meyers’ table by Jack Ruby. They would all eat dinner, have a few drinks and share a toast and a few laughs on a typical Thursday night in Dallas. None of them were aware of the catastrophic events that would overtake them the next day. Or were they?

The circumstances of that evening would never be adequately explained, the official chronology of events, whether by contrivance or mistake, can be shown to be wrong, and significant lines of inquiry would be left dangling as loose ends that would never be completely resolved.

In reconstructing the events around the assassination of President Kennedy, the official government investigators put together a chronology of Jack Ruby’s activities, beginning with the morning of the assassination, Friday, November 22, 1963. According to the Warren Report: “Scrutiny of Ruby’s activities during the several days preceding the President’s arrival in Dallas has revealed no indication of any unusual activity.”

“The Commission has attempted to reconstruct as precisely as possible the movements of Jack Ruby during the period November 21 – November 24, 1963. It has done so on the premise that, if Jack Ruby were involved in a conspiracy, his activities and associations during this period would, in some way, have reflected the conspiratorial relationship…Ruby’s activities during this 3-day period have been scrutinized for the insights they provide into whether the shooting of Oswald was grounded in any form of conspiracy.”

The official chronology reads: “The evening of the President’s visit. – On Thursday, November 21, 1963, Jack Ruby was attending to his usual duties as the proprietor of two Dallas nightspots – the Carousel Club, a downtown nightclub featuring striptease dancers, and the Vegas Club, a rock & roll establishment in the Oaklawn section of Dallas…Ruby arrived at the Carousel Club at about 3 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, as was his custom, and remained long enough to chat with a friend and receive messages from Larry Crafard, a handyman and helper who lived at the Carousel….”

“Ruby’s evening activities on Thursday, November 21, were a combination of business and pleasure. At approximately 7:30 p.m., he drove Larry Crafard to the Vegas Club which Crafard was overseeing…Ruby returned to the Carousel Club and conversed for about an hour with Lawrence Meyers, a Chicago businessman. Between 9:45 and 10:45 p.m., Ruby had dinner with Ralph Paul, his close friend and financial backer. While dining Ruby spoke briefly with a Dallas Morning News employee Don Campbell, who suggested that they go to the Castaway Club, but Ruby declined.”

“Thereafter, Ruby returned to the Carousel Club where he acted as master of ceremonies for his show and peacefully ejected an unruly patron. At about midnight Ruby joined Meyers at the Bon Vivant Room of the Dallas Cabana where they met Meyers’ brother and sister-in-law. Neither Ralph Paul nor Lawrence Meyers recalled that Ruby mentioned the President’s trip to Dallas. Leaving Meyers at the Cabana after a brief visit, Ruby returned to close the Carousel Club and obtained the night’s receipts. He then went to the Vegas Club which he helped Larry Crafard close for the night; and, as late as 2:30 a.m., Ruby was seen eating at a restaurant near the Vegas Club.” (WR.p.334)

In 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) compiled a more comprehensive account of Ruby’s activities, but it too would be defective. In a chronological listing of events for November 21, 1963, the HSCA reports:

“At about 11 a.m., Max Rubberg,…saw and talked to Ruby at the AAA Bonding Service…Between noon and 2:30 p.m., John Newman received a call from Ruby at the Dallas Morning News about ads for Ruby’s clubs. Mrs. Norman E. Lewis…saw Ruby sometime during the day in a car at the expressway and Main St. and a few minutes later at Munger and Live Oak streets….Ruby was seen at the Carousel Club by Joyce Lee McDonald,…Sam Campisi,…saw Ruby with Ralph Paul at the Egyptian Lounge..for 45 minutes, beginning about 9:45 or 10 p.m. Ruby had a steak during the evening at the Egyptian restaurant and was seen by Joe Campisi. From 10 to 11 p.m., Jean Aase, Chicago, and Lawrence Meyers saw Ruby at the Carousel Clbu and later, about midnight, saw Ruby at the Cabana Motor Hotel, Dallas. At the Cabana, Ruby was seen by Edward Meyers, Brooklyn, N.Y…”

The HSCA report then begins a more detailed narrative chronology of Ruby’s activities for the next day, when he awoke about 9:30 a.m. on that fateful Friday, November 22, 1963, but it is the events of that Thursday evening, November 21, that are more significant in developing evidence of conspiracy.

The basic official version of vents was maintained by both the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee in 1978. Ruby’s presence at the Cabana Motel that night later became significant when it was revealed that mob courier Jim Braden and his oil man associate Morgan Brown were also registered there that night, even though there is no evidence they met with Ruby or Meyers.

As far as I can determine, the official story remained unchanged and unchallenged until Beverly Oliver wrote an article in the Third-Fourth Decade Magazine, defending herself against attacks concerning her credibility. Some researchers had questioned whether she really is the “Babushka Lady” who filmed the assassination in Dealey Plaza. Seen in photos and films of the assassination, and branded the “Babushka Lady” because of her attire, she remained a mystery women until she came forward in 1970 after meeting Gary Shaw.

She subsequently told researchers and wrote in her book, that while visiting the Carousel Club one night in early October, 1963, Jack Ruby introduced her and Jada to Lee Harvey Oswald, who Ruby said, “was from the CIA.”

While there is still some doubt about the “Babushka Lady,” no one else has yet to come forward to make a similar claim, and her film, which she says was confiscated by FBI agent Regis Kennedy, may yet turn up. Whatever the final verdict is on these points, Beverly Oliver remains a credible witness on other aspects of the case, especially as to what happened on that Thursday night. It has been ascertained without a doubt, that in November, 1963, Beverly Oliver was a 17 year old, blonde entertainer (singer) at Abe Weinstein’s Colony Club, knew Jack Ruby and despite her age, was a frequent visitor to his Carousel Club. And apparently had a date with Ruby on the night before the assassination, the details of which come into play.

In defending herself in the “Third-Fourth Decade” article Oliver almost off handly mentions that she was at the Cabana lounge on the night before the assassination, dancing with a man she knew as Donny Allen Lance, who she later identified as Jack Lawrence. She knew “Lance-Lawrence” from the Carousel Club, which he frequented with Ruby’s roommate George Senator.

While Jack Lawrence has denied visiting the Carousel Club, or dancing with Beverly Oliver at the Cabana lounge on the night before the assassination, stirring more controversy over Oliver’s credibility, her response is: “He’s not the first married man to deny visiting the Carousel Club, there must be ten thousand men who have denied being there. I don’t know why he has to lie, because I’m not accusing him of anything.”

Indeed, why does it matter if Jack Lawrence went to the Carousel Club or danced with a seventeen year old blonde at the Cabana lounge?

Lawrence was an automobile salesman for the local Lincoln-Mercury dealership, who lived at the Dallas YMCA, and was separated from his wife, who lived in West Virginia. [See: JACK LAWRENCE].

I too want to know why such an apparently innocuous item on the chronology would be a subject of contention.

According to Beverly Oliver, Jack Ruby invited her to a party at the Cabana Motel, where they met Mr. Meyers. Ruby and Meyers talked while she danced with a man she knew as “Donny Allen Lance,” a Carousel patron and friend of Ruby’s roommate George Senator. After dancing she rejoined Ruby and Meyers at their table, then accompanied them to the Egyptian Lounge for dinner. They returned to the Cabana shortly before midnight.

Seems pure and simple, cut and dried, no problems there. Except for the official record. At first reflection the difference in the sequence of events does not appear to be that important, or significant, especially if the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald himself had not yet decided to kill the President. If there was no conspiracy, no-one was supposed to be cognizant of the historical events that would overtake them within the next 12 hours.

But if there was a conspiracy, there should be general circumstantial and some specific probative evidence of conspiracy even if those responsible for the crime attempted to conceal the particulars. Applying Professor Peter Dale Scott’s “negative template” methodology, which considers what is omitted from the official reports as most worthy of further inquiry, what actually occurred that night must be of supreme significance.

Even if Beverly Oliver is not the “Babushka Lady,” and did not meet Lee Harvey Oswald “from the CIA” at the Carousel Club, and even if Jack Lawrence is not the Donny Allen Lance she claims to have danced with, there is evidence to support her contention that Ruby had dinner with Lawrence Meyers at the Egyptian Lounge that night. And if true, this exhibits clear, hard, probative evidence of conspiracy that can be introduced into a court of law.

It is significant that Ruby ate dinner with Lawrence Meyers, rather than Ralph Paul, as the official record reflects, because Meyers was accompanied to Dallas by one Jean Aase (aka Ann West), who received a telephone call from the New Orleans law office of G. Ray Gill, on September 24, 1963. Gill was the attorney for New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello, and Sept. 24 is the day Oswald departed New Orleans for Mexico City.

In addition, while at the Egyptian that night, Ruby and Meyers made some phone calls from the private office, where the restaurant’s owners are known to have made phone calls to Marcello [See: Dallas policeman Joe Cody ].

The Egyptian Lounge is where Ruby met Dallas Morning News advertising salesman Don Campbell, who provided Ruby with an alibi for the not only his whereabouts at the time of the assassination, but for when Ruby was at Parkland Hospital, a fact that Ruby tried to conceal.

Finally, the official record states that Ruby only stayed at the Cabana for a few minutes, around midnight, when it appears that he was there more than once that evening, staying much later than the official record reflects and for reasons that had an effect on the outcome of the weekend’s activities.

In recapping the events of that night, the FBI report [Dec. 20, 1963] places Lawrence Meyers and his companion Jean Aase with Ruby at the Carousel Club early that evening.

“[Meyers]….stated he pursued his normal business affairs [selling sporting goods equipment to department stores] ….and in the evening following dinner he went to Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. Mr. Meyers stated that on this trip to Dallas he was accompanied by Miss Jean West who he had known casually in Chicago. He described Miss West as a ‘rather dumb, but accommodating broad.’ He further pointed out that his association with Miss West is not known to members of his family or to his business associates. When he and Miss West arrived at the Carousel Club he introduced her to….Jack Ruby, and Ruby joined them at their table…” [WCE2267].

Mary Ferrell’s chronology reads: “Between 9:45 and 10:30 Jack went tot eh Carousel Club. Between 10 and 11 Jack met with Lawrence Meyers and Jean Aase at the Carousel Club. Stripper Betty MacDonald, (aka) Joy Dale also saw Meyers and Jean Aase at the Carousel Club.

Betty MacDonald knew Meyers from the previous month – in October, when she was working at a failing Dallas State Fair show called “How Hollywood Makes Movies.” [Note: Can anyone get a make on this film, there must be a record of who produced it and what it’s all about – BK]

At Ruby’s urging, Meyers gave MacDonald a $300 check for undisclosed services, which Ruby cashed (keeping a %), and when the show folded, Ruby took in MacDonald as a dancer and roustabout Larry Crafard as an all around gofer and assistant. MacDonald, who knew Jean Aase as “Ann West,” went shopping with Meyers’ companion while he was otherwise occupied – with Ruby or playing golf.

When Lawrence Meyers and Jean Aase arrived at the Carousel Club that evening they found Ruby serving as the Master of Ceremonies between strip shows. Since the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA) rules prohibited stripper shows from being continuous, there were twenty minute breaks during which time Ruby spun a roulette type “big wheel” and gave away prizes. According to Mary Ferrell’s chrono, “Dallas Morning News employees Charles Miller and George Landers saw Ruby give away the prizes and watched him ask a drunk person to leave the club… Beckey Jones, the Carousel cigarette girl, saw Jack there, as did Billy Don Williams.”

The FBI report notes: “Meyers advised that he and West remained at the Carousel Club for approximately one hour, returning to the motel at about 11:00 PM. Mr. Meyers stated that while at the Cabana he had invited Ruby to join him at the Cabana Motel for a drink with him and his brother, Edward Meyers, and Edward’s wife, who were attending a [Bottler’s] convention in Dallas. He said that shortly thereafter, Jack Ruby came to the motel where he was introduced to his brother and his wife. Ruby remained at the motel for only a few minutes before he left, saying he had to return to his club.”

At about 9 o’clock that evening, still at the Carousel Club, Meyers said he told Ruby to “meet me at the Cabana Motel at 11 o’clock that evening.”

Warren Commission Counsel Bert Griffin had the foresight to ask Meyers where he had been in the time between he left the Carousel Club and when he met Ruby again at the Cabana around midnight. Meyers responded: “I haven’t got the vaguest recollection of where I had dinner that night.” (WC Vol. 15. 626).

When Beverly Oliver was asked to repeat her recollections of that night a number of times, she added a few more details each time. “There’s a lot of misconceptions about that night,” Oliver said, “but all I know is that there was a big party. I’ve since learned it was a Pepsi Cola bottling party, but I didn’t know what it was when I went except that Jack was going to this party and wanted me to go with him to meet with a friend of his. We went to the Cabana…and went upstairs to the Mezzanine, where there was a party going on. Jack spoke with a couple of people but did not introduce me. He met this Mr. Meyers on the Mezzanine, they shook hands. We went back downstairs to the Bon Vivant Room, a supper club with a big dance floor, which had top name big band orchestras.

Oliver: “We sat in the Bon Vivant Room, had a drink, Donny Allen Lance and I danced a few dances, I came back to the table and Jack said he wanted to go have a steak. I asked why we didn’t just eat right there, but Jack said he wanted to treat Mr. Meyers to a real steak. So we went to Campisi’s Egyptian Lounge around 10 or 10:30. I didn’t know Mr. Meyers very well. I don’t know much about him. I was just around him for a short while. He was very neat looking, well dressed, and demanded respect. Even Jack called him ‘Mister Meyers.’ I do remember he had a brother there, but I never met the brother, and I was under the impression that he had a female companion with him, and that’s why we didn’t stay too long at Campisi’s. They went and made a phone call back in Joe’s office,…and as soon as they made that call we left and went back to the Cabana. When we got there, before midnight, they went their way and I went mine.”

“All I know is what happened,” Oliver asserts, “I can’t explain the official reports because I haven’t read them. I need to be shown some stuff before I get worried about what went on that night. I know that if anything fishy happened that night it happened after we went back to the Cabana and I left.”

Although Oliver said she doesn’t know who Ruby and Meyers called from Campisi’s office that night, it has been established that Joe and Sam Campisi were close associates of Carlos Marcello of New Orleans. Since Joe Campisi first met Carlos Marcello on a golf course, Campisi testified that he sent Marcello 240 pounds of sausage every Christmas, and phone records reportedly indicate that Campisi called Marcello as many as six times a day.

In addition, Dallas Policeman Joe Cody told Nightline (Nov., 1994) that, “Jack (Ruby) knew the Campisis. I’ve seen them together on numerous occasions. Jack ate there at he Egyptian Lounge. He’d come in and they’d shake his hand and sit down. Sometime Joe Campisi would sit with him. If I came in, I’d sit with Joe Campisi and Jack Ruby. We knew each other well….The Campisis did know Carlos Marcello because one day I was in Joe Campisi’s office and he called Marcello on the phone, and I talked with Carlos on the phone.”

In his 1978 testimony Joe Campisi confirmed that the only time Jack Ruby visited his home was to have a barbequed steak, supporting Ruby’s contention that Campisi enjoyed a reputation for fine steaks. Although Joe Campisi said he was off that Thursday night, his brother Sam told the FBI that Ruby did have dinner there, but said that Ruby’s companion was Ralph Paul, instead of Lawrence Meyers.

Meyers told the House Committee in 1978 that he recalled having dinner with Ruby sometime that weekend, but thought it was Saturday night, after the assassination, but when Ruby’s whereabouts have been established elsewhere. In addition, Meyers too, as with Carlos Marcello, said that he came to know Joe Campisi from playing golf with him and they became friendly when Meyers relocated to Dallas.

While Jack Lawrence denied visiting the Carousel Club, he did admit (to Sheldon Inkol in the Third-Fourth Decade) that he did go out drinking that Thursday night with co-workers from the Lincoln-Ford dealership, “at a piano bar on Mockingbird Lane,” a few blocks from Campisi’s Egyptian Lounge.

Dallas Morning New ad man Don Campbell was also at the Egyptian Lounge that night, and asked Ruby to accompany him to another bar. According to Mary Ferrell’s records, “Campbell asked Jack to go to the Castaway Club after supper, but Jack refuses because the manager of the Castaway Club had hired Joe Johnson’s band away from Jack at the Vegas Club.”

After leaving the Egyptian, “We then went back to the Cabana,” recalls Oliver. “We were back at the Cabana by midnight, when my ride picked me up and took me to Fort Worth. They went their way and I went mind. I have absolutely no recall of any suspect conversation or anything fishy that night. At least if it did it was not under my earshot, or happened after I left.”

The official chronology is succulently summarized by Gerald Posner (“Case Closed,” Random House, 1993, p. 368): “After dinner, (Ruby) returned to the Carouse….Shortly before midnight he drove to the Bon Vivant room at the Cabana Motel, where he joined his Chicago friend Meyers, Meyers’ brother Eddie, and sister-in-law Thelma. When Ruby found out that Eddie Meyers worked for Pepsi Cola, he spent the conversation trying to interest him in his twistboard product…Ruby left the Cabana Hotel by 12:30 A.M. and returned to the Carousel to get the night’s receipts.”

The Warren Report (p. 334) also refers to Ruby’s time at the Cabana as “a brief visit” while Seith Kantor (in the “Ruby Cover-Up,” Zebra Books, 1978, p. 81), reports, “Ruby spent only a short time in the Bon Vivant Room with Meyers,…his movements for the next two hors are unknown. But at 2:30 (A.M.), Ruby telephoned an employee at his own club (Crafard)…and said he was STILL at the Cabana.” (CD5226).

Kantor wrote: “Ralph Paul, a back-room business associate of Ruby’s, told the Warren Commission that Ruby could be very secretive about his comings and goings. Ruby didn’t want his employees to know when he slipped out of town, in order to keep them from stealing his profits, Paul said.” Ruby did slip in and out of Cuba on at least three occasions, keeping two of them secret even from his friends, and he was secretly in Las Vegas fro two days the week before…Ruby kept his appearances at Parkland Hospital and at the Dallas Police station on Friday and Saturday secret. He concealed the relationships he had with a wide range of people – such as Tom Davis the gunrunner, and such as a mystery telephone voice he delt with in the days leading up to the shooting. Ruby was getting a series of phone calls at the Carousel from an unidentified man who would never leave a message when Ruby was out. Larry Crafard, the young handyman at the club, asked Ruby about these strange telephone calls but Ruby told him to mind his own business.” (“Ruby Cover-Up,” p. 104)

Mary Ferrell’s chronology notes that during the two hours of missing time, when Ruby was known to have been at the Cabana, “Jack got angry with the Cabana motel employees for not telling him about a telephone call. He searched the records of the Bon Vivant Room booth B26 for the name. They think it was Martin, Martins or Martel. The Secret Service checked Jack Martin and Layton Martins to see if they were the man.”

It is not recorded what Ruby did after he left the Meyers’ table at the Cabana at 12:20 A.M., and began to look for “Mr. Martin,” but at 2:30 A.M. he joined Larry Crafard at the Lucas B & B Restaurant, next door to the Vegas Club, which Crafard had managed and closed that night. Between 3:30 and 4 in the morning Ruby dropped off Crafard at the Carousel Club and returned to his apartment, where George Senator was already asleep.

Meanwhile, driving east in an Oldsmobile station wagon with Arizona plates and a Goldwater bumper sticker, Chauncey Holt and the three other passengers – Joe Canty, Leo “the Lips” Moceri and Charles Nicoletti were supposed to meet Cuban Homer Echavarria at the Cabana Motel that night, but had car trouble that delayed them until early the next morning.

Holt said that he helped manufacture false identifications, including some Secret Service credentials, under orders from George Twombly, a CIA affiliated California bank president and Vice President of a major bottling company, who was probably at the bottler’s convention in Dallas that weekend. Twombly, Holt said, was an associate of Donald Kendell, the attorney for Pepsi who was definitely at the convention with Richard Nixon.

Holt also said that Jim Braden’s friend Morgan Brown, who checked into the Cabana that night, had a brother, Melvin Grant Brown, an accountant for Twombly. [Note: Braden’s Washington D.C. attorney is also named Twombly].

There have also been reports that Jack Ruby’s boyhood friend from Chicago, Dave Yaras, was also registered at the Cabana that night. Yaras was, at the time, a prominent figure in the Chicago Syndicate anti-Castro Cuban nexus and a Florida Teamster officials. According to Holt, whose brother was also a Teamster official, it wasn’t a coincidence that the connected mobsters stayed at the Cabana, which was owned by actress Doris Day and her attorney, Jerry Rosenthal, whose partner, Duane Clark shared office space with Jim Braden at 8500 Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles, California.

Ed Reid (in “The Grim Reapers,” Bantam, 1970, p. 230) wrote, (Jay) “Sarno, who owns fourteen hundred shares in the Desert Palace (casino)…has a real talent for knowing where the money is. He and his partner, Stanley Mallin,…put together a chain of plush motels called Cabana, stating in Atlanta, Georgia, and spreading out to Dallas, Texas, and Palo Alto, California. An interesting story behind the Cabana concerns the business merger of two fairly well-known names: Doris Day, America’s Number One screen virgin, and James Riddle Hoffa, America’s Number One purveyor of labor’s pension funds. Doris, with Cabana partners Sarno and Mallin, has benefited greatly from loaned Teamster pension greenbacks, $5 million worth.”

Jim Braden, Morgan Brown, Ed and Thelma Meyers, Ralph Meyers, Lawrence Meyers, Jean Aase, Jack Lawrence, Jack Ruby, Beverly Oliver, Dave Yaras, Homer Echevaria, Mr. Martin, Phil Twombly, Don Kendell, Richard Nixon and a belated Chauncey Holt, Joe Canti, Leo Moseri and Charles Nicoletti. What a crew to have at a party.

The next morning Jack Ruby stopped by the offices of H.L. Hunt while Morgan Brown was visiting there, and then spent more than two hours at the Dallas Morning News preparing his club ads with Don Cambell, who he was with the night before at the Egyptian Lounge.

Beverly Oliver says she filmed the assassination as the “Babushka Lady,” while Jim Braden was taken into custody as a suspicious person at the scene. Jack Lawrence passed through Dealey Plaza on the way to work and promptly vomited when he got there. He later called the authorities that Lee Harvey Oswald had taken a car for a spin from the dealership a few weeks earlier and was fired for doing so.

Ed Meyers went to the Pepsi convention with Kendell and possibly Twombly, while Nixon left town earlier that morning.

Jean Aase stayed in her Cabana room while Lawrence Meyers played a round of golf at an Air Force golf club north of Dallas.

Although they had registered at the Cabana until Sunday, Morgan Brown abruptly checked out of the Cabana Motel at 2:01 P.M., as Lee Harvey Oswald was being interrogated for the first time and Chauncey Holt and two other “tramps” were being escorted from the rail yard behind the Texas School Book Depository to the Dallas Sheriff’s office where Braden was also taken. After being released, Holt claimed that he caught a ride to Redbird Airport from Braden, who went on to Houston by commercial flight to catch up with his fleeting pal Morgan Brown.

Braden and Brown then went to New Orleans where they shared office space with oil geologist Vernon Main, Jr., on the 17^{th floor of the Pierre Marquette office building, where Carlos Marcello’s attorney G. Ray Gill has his offices and from where someone called Jean Aase’s Chicago apartment on Sept. 24th, 1963, the day Lee Harvey Oswald left New Orleans for Mexico City.}

Jack Ruby meanwhile, stalked, shot and killed Oswald, while Larry Crafard took five dollars out of the Carousel cash register and hitch-hiked out of town.

Lawrence Meyers and Jean Aase left Dallas without notifying authorities of their contacts with Ruby. He was never asked, during his testimony, whether he had dinner with Ruby at the Egyptian Lounge on the night before the assassination.

Lawrence Meyer’s brother Ed and his wife went back to Brooklyn to run their Pepsi Cola company, while Ralph Meyers went on to study the early Indians of Mexico.

Ralph Paul, in his answers to questions put to him by investigators, never mentions having dinner with Ruby the night before the assassination, bolstering Oliver’s contention that it was Mr. Meyers who accompanied her and Ruby to the Egyptian, rather than Paul.

Joe Campisi visited Jack Ruby in jail, where Ruby died of cancer before he could be retried.

Betty McDonald provided an alibi for the assailant of a Tippit murder witness who subsequently changed his story, but not before she was arrested and found dead, hanging in her cell.

Nicoletti is said to have been in another city at the time, but he was murdered before he could testify before the HSCA. Moceri disappeared, Canty died in a plane crash, but both Braden and Morgan Brown testified before the HSCA, testimony that was classified and locked away until the JFK Act of 1992.

Jean Aase, Jack Lawrence and Larry Crafard have all been located by researchers, but none have testified on the record about what happened that night.

Beverly Oliver is now married to a minister, and doesn’t understand why her story of what happened that Thursday night is so strange or controversial. It was just a typical Thursday night in Dallas.

When the Beatles came to Dallas they ducked down in their limo when they passed through Dealey Plaza and they stayed at the Cabana Motel, which is now a prison.

[Note: Many thanks to Earl Golz who provided Cabana recipts for Braden and Brown; and Peter Whitmey for locating Jean Aase and Larry Crafard. I look forward to their testimony when we get to Congress and court.]

xxxyyyzzz

Collins Radio Connections

THE COLLINS RADIO CONNECTIONS to the Assassination of President Kennedy

By William E. Kelly – Revised from report originally published in Backchannels magazine and presented at the national conference of the Coalition On Political Assassination (COPA), October 10, 1994.

If the assassination of President Kennedy was the result of not only a conspiracy, but a covert action and coup d’etat, as many people believe, there should be evidence of this from both the scene of the crime(s) as well as from the highest echelons of power among those who took over the government. This would be especially so if the assassination was not the actions of a lone-nut or a foreign attack by Cuban or Soviet intelligence service sponsors, but an internal manipulation of policy and control, an inside job.

As Edward Luttwack describes in his “How-To” book Coup d’etat – A Practical Handbook (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968, p. 117), “Control over the flow of information emanating from the political center will be our most important weapon in establishing… authority after the coup. The seizure of the main means of mass communication will thus be a task of crucial importance.”

At the scene(s) of the crime, eyewitness testimony is always suspect. Homicide detectives prefer more solid leads that provide documented evidence that can be introduced in court, such as fingerprints, telephone and automobile license records.

There are a number of automobile license records of significance in regards to the assassination of President Kennedy, including the tampered photo among the possessions of Lee Harvey Oswald of the license on 1957 Chevy in General Walker’s driveway, plus the license numbers of cars seen in Dealey Plaza photos immediately before and after the assassination.

Most significant however, is the Texas plate PP4537. This number was jotted down on a piece of paper by an elderly Oak Cliff mechanic T. F. White, who noticed a man acting suspiciously behind the wheel of a 1958 two tone Plymouth sedan shortly after the murder of Dallas Policeman J.D. Tippitt in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas. The car was parked behind a billboard in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant, with the driver, like White, watching the flurry of Dallas police cars racing down the street with sirens blaring, called to the nearby scene of the shooting of Tippit.

White walked across the street to get closer and exchanged glances with the man, who quickly drove away. White wrote down the license tag PP4537 on a piece of paper and forgot about it until later that day when he saw Lee Harvey Oswald on television and recognized him as the man he saw acting suspiciously in the Plymouth earlier that afternoon.

A few weeks later, when Dallas radio reporter and later mayor of Dallas Wes Wise gave a talk at the Oak Cliff restaurant, the owner of the garage where Mr. White worked mentioned the suspicious Plymouth to Wise, who then met White. White reluctantly told his story, but was reluctant to get involved, and Wise had to use all his powers of persuasion to convince White to share the information with him. Wise promised White he would not be brought into the investigation, but tat he, Wise, would handle it. “Do you have the piece of paper with the license number on it?” Wise asked, and sure enough, White had it right there in his pocket and gave it to Wise. It read: PP4537.

White told Wise that nobody knew who or what was really behind the assassination of President Kennedy and he really didn’t want to get involved, but he handed over the paper to Wise, who passed it on to the police and FBI.

A quick check of the Texas plate #PP4537 indicated that it was assigned to Carl Mather, of Garland, Texas. When the FBI went out to the listed Garland address they found the two tone 1958 Plymouth right there in the driveway and knocked on the door. Mrs. Mather answered, acknowledged the car belonged to her husband, who was then away at work at Collins Radio, in nearby Richardson, Texas. When asked where her husband and the car was on Friday, November 22, 1963, she said that the car was in the parking lot at Collins Radio until sometime in the afternoon when her husband returned home and picked up the family to go to the Tippit residence to pay their respects to the widow and family of their good friend, who was murdered that day.

Instead of going out to Collins Radio to interview Mather however, the FBI went first to Mr. White, who Wes Wise had promised wouldn’t be involved, and took additional statements from him, changing his story for the official reports and exchanging the two tone Plymouth to a red Ford Falcon. CBS News made a polite inquiry years later, leaving Carl Mather out of the documentary program they aired but listed Mrs. Mather in the programs credits. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) briefly looked into the affair, granted Mather immunity from prosecution to testify and then failed to question him under oath. The HSCA published a short report they titled “The Wise Allegation,” when in fact Wes Wise made no allegations, and merely followed up on his reporter’s instincts. He came up with an automobile license plate number that was scene near the murder of a Dallas policeman that was traced to one of the victim’s best friends, Carl Mather, whose alibi is that he was at work at the time, at Collins Radio.

Documents later released under the JFK Act indicate that Mather was questioned by HSCA investigators and claimed that he worked on electronics at Collins, his specific job being the installation of the radio equipment aboard Air Force Two – the Vice President’s plane.

That this lead was not properly investigated, and remains uninvestigated today, is because such an inquiry actually does lead to the heart of the plot to murder not only Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit, but as many believe, is tied directly to the assassination of President Kennedy. If the Tippit murder is connected to the assassination of the President, as the official stories alleges, then the Tippit murder may be the “Rosetta Stone” that could explain the mysteries of both murders.

The significance of the Collins Radio connections becomes apparent with a quick review of the published record, and that:

1. On November 1, 1963 the New York Times published a photograph of the ship the Rex, which Fidel Castro identified as the boat that dropped off a team of assassins in Cuba a few nights previous. The Rex was docked at Palm Beach, Florida, near the JFK family compound, and the Rex’s Halloween eve mission was in clear violation of President Kennedy’s March 1963 edict that no para-military raids against Cuba were to originate from U.S. shores. According to the article in the NYTs, the Rex had been sold by the Somoza regime in Nicaragua to the Belcher Oil Company, its dock fees paid by the CIA front company Sea Ship Inc., with the Rex then being leased to the Collins Radio Company of Richardson, Texas, “for scientific research.”

2. Founded by Arthur Collins, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Collins Radio first made news headlines when young Collins was an amateur radio buff with the only (home made) radio receiver who could pick up the radio transmissions of Navy Commander Richard E. Byrd from his polar exploration expedition. [Richard Byrd is the cousin of the founder of the Civil Air Patrol and owner of the Texas School Book Depository building].

3. Collins Radio became a major defense contractor during World War II, and following the war, participated in Operation Paperclip, hiring Dr. Alex Lipisch, the former Nazi scientist who developed the Delta I glider and ME 163 Komet jet fighter. For Collins, Lipisch was assigned to the boat development program that worked with General Dynamics in attempting to build and refine a sleek, swift speedboat – the V20 – that could be used for Cuban infiltration missions like the Rex mission. It was later used in Vietnam.

4. David Ferrie’s telephone records reflect that in the weeks before the assassination he made frequent calls from the New Orleans law office of G. Ray Gill to the Belcher Oil Company of Dallas, Texas, the company that was the listed owner of the Rex.

5. In the week before the assassination, a reservation was made at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club for a large party of Collins Radio employees.

6. The Dallas P.D. Intelligence Division maintained a paid informant who worked at Collins Radio and reported on fellow employees who appeared suspicious or subversive, including one who was reported to subscribe to the leftist I.F. Stone Weekly.

7. When Lee Harvey Oswald returned to Texas from Soviet Russia, George DeMohrenschildt introduced him to retired Navy Admiral Chester Bruton, an executive at Collins Radio, with the idea of Oswald getting a job there, as he had worked in a radio factory in Minsk, USSR. Oswald and Marina visited Bruton with DeMohrenschilt.

8. At the time of the assassination Adml. Bruton was working on a top-secret nuclear submarine communications project for Collins, with the Navy’s nuclear sub radar and communications HQ being based at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, close neighbors of Michael Paine’s family island.

9. In 1963 Collins Radio began receiving large military contracts including one for the construction of a microwave communications network in Southeast Asia, specifically Vietnam.

10. After Oswald was murdered while in Dallas police custody by Jack Ruby, his widow Marina P. Oswald married former Collins Radio employee Kenneth Porter.

11. In Miami, Florida, a Cuban exile, and former executive of Collins Radio, was murdered, assassinated in a still unsolved homicide.

12. Collins Radio supplied and maintained the equipment used by the Voice of America, all manned NASA space flights, the Strategic Air Command (SAC), as well as all equipment used for the CIA’s Guatemalan and Cuban operations. Most significantly, Collins Radio was responsible for installing and maintaining all radio equipment aboard Air Force One, Air Force Two and the Cabinet’s plane.

13. According to the Collins Radio Annual Report to stockholders for 1963-64, Collins Radio not only installed and maintained the radios aboard most military and executive branch planes, they also operated the station known as “Liberty” at their Cedar Rapids, Iowa headquarters, which served as a relay station for all radio communications between the White House, the Pentagon, Air Force One, Air Force Two, the Cabinet plane and Andrews AFB in Washington.

[This “Liberty” station is misidentified on most transcripts of the edited version of the radio transmissions from Air Force One on 11/22/63. “Air Force One, the Presidential airplane, was placed in service in 1962 using communications equipment developed and manufactured by Collins. The aircraft…was modified to meet special requirements…In 1962, the station many remember as “Liberty” was opened and operated from the new communications building….(in Cedar Rapids, Iowa)…Collins had a contract with the Air Force to serve as either the primary communications station or as a backup whenever Air Force One, the presidential aircraft, and other aircraft in the VIP fleet carried cabinet members or high ranking military officers. Over the airwaves the station’s call word was ‘Liberty.’” – From Collins Radio – the First 50 Years.]

In his book The Making of a President – 1964, Theodore H. White wrote: “There is a tape recording in the archives o the government which best recaptures the sound of the hours as it waited for leadership. It is a recording of all the conversations in the air, monitored by the Signal Corps Midwestern center ‘Liberty,’ between Air Force One in Dallas, the Cabinet plane over the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs’ Communications Center in Washington….On the flight the party learned that there was no conspiracy, learned the identity of Oswald and his arrest; and the President’s mind turned to the duties of consoling the stricken and guiding the quick.”

According to the analysis of E. Martin Schotz and Vincent Salandria (in History Will Not Absolve Us, 1996), “And yet the White House had informed President Johnson and the other occupants of Air Force One, all of them witnesses to the hail of bullets which had poured down on Dealey Plaza, that as of the afternoon of the assassination there was to be no conspiracy and that Oswald was to be the lone assassin. If White’s report were correct this would mean that federal officials in Washington were marrying the government to the cover-up of Oswald as the lone assassin virtually instantaneously. This could have occurred only if those federal authorities had had foreknowledge that the evidence would implicate Oswald and that he would have ‘no confederates.’ An innocent government could not have reacted in such a fashion internally.”

Unfortunately, there is no longer “a tape recording in the archives of the government,” as the original, unedited, multiple tape recordings of the AF1 radio transmissions cannot be located despite an Act of Congress, the request of the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) and numerous Freedom of Information Act requests. Our government seems to have simply lost the recordings, with no records being kept of their whereabouts or destruction, if in fact they were destroyed.

The Final Report of the ARRB (p. 116) notes:

“6. White House Communications Agency. “WHCA was, and is, responsible for maintaining both secure (encrypted) and unsecured (open) telephone, radio and telex communications between the President and the government of the United States. Most of the personnel that constitute this elite agency are U.S. military communications specialists; many, in 1963, were from the Army Signal Corps. On November 22, 1963, WHCA was responsible for communications between and among Air Force One and Two, the White House Situation Room, the mobile White House, and with the Secret Service in the motorcade.”

“The Review Board sought to locate any audio recordings of voice communications to or from Air Force One on the day of the assassination, including communications between Air Force one and Andrews Air Force Base during the return flight from Dallas to Washington D.C. As many people are now aware of, in the 1970s, the LBJ Presidential Library released edited audio cassettes of the unsecured, or open voice conversations with Air Force One, Andrews AFB, the White House Situation Room, and the Cabinet Aircraft carrying the Secretary of State and other officials on November 22, 1`963. The LBJ Library version of these tapes consists of about 110 minutes of voice transmissions, but the tapes are edited and condensed, so the Review Board staff sought access to unedited, uncondensed versions. Since the edited versions of the tapes contain considerable talk about both the forthcoming autopsy on the President, as well as the reaction of a government in crisis, the tapes are of considerable interest to assassination researchers and historians.”

“Given that the LBJ Library released the tapes in the 1970s, the paper trail is now sketch and quite cold. The LBJ Library staff is fairly confident that the tapes originated with the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). The LBJ Library staff told the Review Board staff that it received the tapes from the White House as part of the original shipment of President Johnson’s papers in 1968 or 1969. According to the LBJ Library’s documentation, the accession card reads: “WHCA?” and is dated 1975. The Review Board staff could not locate any records indicating who performed the editing, or when, or where.”

“The Review Board’s repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes.”

At the time I delivered my report on “The Collins Radio Connections” to the National COPA Conference in Washington in October, 1994, the Washington Post had just then exposed the true occupant of a new, mammoth, suburban Virginia building. It was not the headquarters for Collins Radio/Rockwell International as had been previously reported, but they had just been the cooperating cover company for the super secret National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), just as Collins Radio had served as a cover for the CIA in the operation of the Rex in Cuba in1963.

Also, in the October, 1998 issue of John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s George Magazine, – David Wise reported on how the NRO had “lost” $6 billion in U.S. taxpayer’s money, and specifically mentioned the fiasco surrounding the construction of the HQ building, or which Collins/Rockwell served as a cover company.

[William E. Kelly is a freelance journalist whose research into the assassination of President Kennedy is partially sponsored by the Fund For Constitutional Government Investigative Journalism Project. He can be reached at: bkjfk3@yahoo.com]

Julio Fernandez

JULIO FERNANDEZ

On the night of President Kennedy’s assassination, Clare Booth Luce, the wife of Time-Life publisher Henry Luce, received a telephone call from Julio Fernandez, a crew member of an anti-Castro Cuban attack boat that she financially co-sponsored with William Pawley.

Pawley, a Miami multi-millionaire, staunch right-wing conservative and former owner of the Havana bus system and airlines before Castro, had helped General Claire Channault form the original Flying Tigers during World War II. He also served as U.S. Ambassador to Brazil and Peru, and persuaded Clare Booth Luce to help finance a fleet of motorboats that attacked Cuba like the Flying Tigers fought the Japanese.

According to a Congressional Report, “Pawley envisioned them as Cuban ‘Flying Tigers’ flying in and out of Cuba on intelligence gathering missions.” Luce agreed to sponsor one boat and its three-man crew, one of whom was Julio Fernandez. She met with her Cuban commandos in New York on three occasions and published a story about them in Life Magazine.

She referred to them as “my boys,” but until the night of the assassination, hadn’t seen or heard from them since the October, 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the raids were said to have been discontinued.

On the night of the assassination however, Julio Fernandez called Luce on the telephone and told her he had some information on Lee Harvey Oswald, the President’s alleged assassin. Luce claimed Fernandez told her that Oswald had approached the anti-Cuban group that Fernandez belonged to and offered his services as a potential assassin.

“The Cubans however, didn’t trust Oswald,” the report continues, “and suspected him of being a communist, and decided to keep tabs on him. They eventually penetrated Oswald’s ‘cell’ and tape recorded his talks, including his bragging that he could shoot anyone, even the Secretary of the Navy.”

Fernandez told Luce that Oswald came into some money, went to Mexico City and then Dallas. Fernandez said that he still had tape recordings of Oswald as well as photographs of Oswald and samples of the handbills he had distributed on the streets of New Orleans.

Luce later said that she advised Fernandez to contact the FBI immediately, and didn’t think about the incident again until the Garrison investigation in 1967. She then recontacted Fernandez, and he told her that one of the members of his group has since been suddenly deported and that another had been murdered. He himself, wanted nothing more to do with the Kennedy assassination.

When Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi tried to track down Fernandez, Luce said that “Julio Fernandez” may have been the Cuban’s “war name,” like those used by Sylvia Odio’s visitors, “Angelo” and “Leopoldo,” and the Congressional report concludes, “no such individual was every found.”

But there is a Julio Fernandez, a suspicious suspect investigated by the Pennsylvania State Police and the FBI and whose records are published among the exhibits of the Warren Commission. This Julio Fernandez was a Cuban professional who may have known about an association between Jack Ruby and Lee Oswald before the assassination.

On November 27, 1963, Corporal Theodore Lezar was stationed at the Hollidaysburg, Pa. State Police barracks when Robert Steele, of Altoona, Pa., stopped in and advised that he had some information that might have a bearing on the assassination of President Kennedy.

Steele, the brother of Mrs. Margaret Hover, of Martinsburg, Pa., told Lezar that sometime in the third week of October, 1963, his sister found some items in the dry leaves immediately below her porch. The items included an envelope, a used train ticket and a throwaway trailer advertisement, which had hand, scrawled notes on the back that might have a relation to the assassination.

The envelope was from the Seaboard Airline Railroad Company of Miami, Florida. The used ticket indicated the holder had a coach reservation on the railroad for seat #48, Car #3E, on a train leaving Miami at 12:40 pm on September 29, 1963, arriving in Washington D.C. the following day.

The back of the trailer advertisement contained the names “Ruby” “Lee Oswald” and the “Silver Slipper,” as well as some drawings of a window, some other names and a six-digit number.

When the State Police interviewed Mrs. Margaret Hover at her home she confirmed what her brother had told them, saying that at first she thought the items belonged to her estranged husband, who was in the trailer business and she showed them to her daughter, remarking that “Ruby” and “Lee” were probably women her recently divorced husband was seeing.

She then realized however, that the items came from her neighbor’s yard, where similar items were being burned in a trashcan.

The FBI then got involved and interviewed Mrs. Hover’s daughter, who also confirmed the fact that her mother found the items and showed them to her, and indeed the names “Ruby” and “Lee Oswald” were written on the back of the advertisement.

Of course, this is the FBI at work, so instead of going over to the neighbor’s house right away, they talk to the daughter’s husband, who told them his wife tends to exaggerate, was on tranquilizers and believed everything her mother told her, effectively discrediting her.

Mrs. Hover then produced the envelope and train ticket, but could not locate the trailer advertisement with the names on the back. Interviewed again, the daughter continued to maintain the names were there and wouldn’t back down under FBI pressure.

So, Special Agents of the FBI J. Edward Kern and Richard Randleman of the Pittsburgh, Pa. Field Office reluctantly went to the door of the neighbor who burned his trash in his backyard. Their report became Warren Commission Exhibit #3076.

Mrs. Hover’s neighbor, Dr. Julio Fernandez, explained to the FBI that he was a Cuban refugee and former editor and publisher of La Nacion newspaper in Cuba. As Minister of Information in the regime of Carlos Prio Soccaras, he at first welcomed the Castro revolution, but then turned against it when Castro became a communist.

Fernandez said that his brother-in-law, Antonio Larraz, had been a Captain of Police under Batista, but the Batista government was oppressive. Fernandez emphasized to the FBI that he was not a communist and was not on welfare, but working as a Spanish language teacher at the local high school and was trying to build a better life for himself in the United States.

In addition, Fernandez told the FBI that his sister-in-law, Aurora Fernandez was the mayor of a small rural town in Cuba and his wife, a Spanish attorney, worked for a Cuban refuge relief organization in Miami, and with the Catholic Welfare Society.

Although Fernandez didn’t know anything about the trailer advertisement with the names on the back, nor did he know Lee Oswald or Jack Ruby, he did acknowledge that his son Julio Fernandez, Jr., had used the train ticket to travel from Miami to Washington.

The official investigation ended there, but I called Mrs. Hover on the telephone in the early 1970s after reading the reports published in the Warren Commission, when she still lived at 105 South Walnut St., Martinsburg, Pa., and she reiterated the facts as they occurred and added some new information. Mrs. Hover said that Fernandez often worked late into the night typing a manuscript, and that his son Julio Fernandez, Jr. was an artist and often away at School, Penn State. She also noted that Fernandez had signed a three year teaching contract with the high school and recently purchased a home in Martinsburg which he began to renovate when suddenly he sold the home and left town, possibly relocating to Rye, New York.

In addition, Mrs. Hover said that years after the FBI interviewed here two men in suits came around asking more questions about the incident, indicating that there was still some investigation of Fernandez years after the FBI lost interest, yet before Fonzi began looking for him.

According to Royce Bierma, Dr. Julio Fernandez, who was born on January 3, 1909, died on August 2, 1992 in Miami, Florida. [Can someone provide an obituary on Fernandez?]

JULIO FERNANDEZ AT POINT MARY

Bradley E. Ayres, in his Zenith Secret, identifies Julio Fernandez as a team leader from the Point Mary safe-house and Karl, a CIA case officer, as being director of the Elliot Key Project. Shortly after the assassination, Clare Booth Luce said she received a phone call from Julio Fernandez.

Also shortly after the assassination a Julio Fernandez, Sr. was investigated by Pennsylvania State Police and the FBI after a Martinsburgh, Pa. neighbor considered his burning of papers and typing late into the night suspicious. She retrieved some of the burnt papers which included the names Lee and Ruby and a train ticket to Florida, showed them to her daughter and told her brother, who notified the State Police of a possible connection to the assassination.

Fernandez told the police that he was a Cuban exile, former Cuban newspaper publisher, who was teaching Spanish at the local high school. His son, Julio, Jr., an art student at nearby Penn State University, used the train ticket that summer to attend a conference of Cuban exile journalists at the University of Miami, a conference that lasted five weeks.

Shortly thereafter Fernandez packed up and left town, later pursued fruitlessly by HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi.

Fernandez, Jr. however, was enrolled at Penn State when the relatively small art school there received as a guest lecturer, Sir Athony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, and former MI5 counter-intelligence agent who was later revealed to be the fifth man in on the Cambridge Spy ring.

If in fact, the anti-Castro Cuban commando operations run by the CIA were indeed infiltrated thoroughly by pro-Castro Cuban G2 intelligence, and shared such information with their Soviet allies at the KGB, does Blunt’s sudden and surprising visit to the obscure Pennsylvania art school have a connection with at least one particular student there – Julio Fernandez, Jr.?

And is this Julio Fernandez or his father of the same name, identical with the Julio Fernandez of the Point Mary safe-house and lived near who worked with Bradley Ayers at JMWAVE?

And is this the same Julio Fernandez supported by Clare Booth Luce, who called her on the night of the assassination?