Washington Decoded

A Miss

 

Hit List

Richard Belzer & David Wayne

Skyhorse Publishing. 368 pp. $26.95

 

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By Ron Capshaw

     As the historiography of the Kennedy assassination approaches its 50th year, the pendulum seems to be swinging back to the Oswald-did-it-alone thesis of the much-maligned Warren Commission. The Dallas Police Department (DPD) in recent years unearthed records that showed Oswald’s fingerprints on the trigger of the Mannlicher-Carcano. The DPD also revealed that the tramps arrested on the day of the shooting were in fact tramps and not fleeing assassins or point men for the plot.

    For those who argue that anything coming out of the DPD, that collection of Southern crackers in collusion with the military-industrial complex, is suspect, there are those who present evidence with no political axe to grind. Computer analysis of supposed bullet trajectories from the grassy knoll show that for a head shot to have come from there the shooter would have had to be elevated 40 feet from the ground—a matter that witnesses that day might have noticed. A non-partisan sniper recently tried to duplicate a shot from the grassy knoll and concluded that it would have passed through the president’s head and ripped Jackie’s face off.

    But Oswald as the lone assassin seems to run aground when the matter of the mysteriously dying witnesses comes up. Even those that believe in the Warren thesis contradict themselves about the witnesses. A stalwart liberal friend of mine once said in the same breath that he believed Oswald did it alone and that the deaths of the witnesses was very much mob behavior.

    And we have Jack Ruby to thank for this, or “Sparky” as he was known to his friends. Ruby’s televised murder of Oswald set tongues wagging, or as Christopher Hitchens said, once Oswald’s mouth had been shut, “everyone else’s was free to open.”

    Richard Belzer’s  is certainly open. Belzer is one of these actors who take their film or TV roles to heart. We’ve seen this all before: Jessica Lange, or Sissy Spacek, believe that by playing farmers, they acquire the expertise to testify before Congress on the plight of the agrarian community. Belzer plays a homicide detective on TV, but somewhere from script to his own writings, the concept of empirical and forensic evidence seems to have eluded him.

    Hit List, with its CIA using dart guns to induce cancer and/or heart attacks, goes beyond even Oliver Stone, who after all, only showed a witness dying by having lethal pills shoved down his throat. Jack Ruby is injected with cancer while in prison; Guy Bannister suffers a heart attack by dart. Even J. Edgar Hoover is not immune from a death-dealing poison administered by White House operatives.  Lee Bowers, the railroad man in a 14-foot-high tower, not noticing the 26-foot-higher platform of the grassy knoll sniper, is drugged before being run off the road and killed by driver on a dirt road in Midlothian, Texas. (Geraldo Rivera posed the best rebuttal to the need for Bowers’s supposed murder when he rhetorically asked, why kill Bowers when it seemed he already told all he knew?).

    The authors could have been on surer footing with the death of Eladio De Valle and Johnny Rosselli. Both were killed in violent ways; De Valle, with ties to the anti-Castro community in Miami, was shot in the heart and had his head split open with an axe; Rosselli was found in a 55 gallon oil drum stabbed, shot, and legs sawn off.

    But that is not enough. Belzer argues that both Ferrie’s death in New Orleans and De Valle’s in Miami were coordinated by the assassins to occur at the same time (walkie- talkies anyone?).

    On Ruby, they cannot argue for any pre-planned assassination of Oswald. In a death- bed interview with his defense attorney, while those “injected cancer cells” were supposedly raging, Ruby stated he never knew Oswald and intercepted him quite by accident, as he was out telegraphing money to one of his strippers at the Western Union office near police headquarters. That Ruby did not know exactly what he was going to do beforehand is evidenced by him leaving his beloved dog, who he bizarrely called his “wife,” in the car.

    That he did it, not on orders from the mob or Allen Dulles or Hunt oil, but to keep Jackie from the stress of a trial, was borne out in a comment he made to Assistant DA Bill Alexander after being arrested: “That son of a bitch killed my president!”

    Like Oliver Stone, Belzer quotes Ruby’s jailhouse testimony to Earl Warren about the conspiracy of Nazi-types taking over the country and how he believes he cannot talk freely in Dallas. Like Stone though, Belzer cherry picks Ruby’s testimony, leaving out key comments that contradict the Belzer/Stone thesis.

    Ruby also said, “No one else requested me to do anything. I never spoke to anyone about attempting to do anything. No subversive organization gave me any idea. No underworld person made any effort to contact me. It all happened that Sunday morning.”

    Belzer lays much stock in the Ruby quote that “a whole new form of government is going to take over our country” without providing the preceding quote that made suspect anything Ruby said about conspiracies, i.e., the “Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment.”

    Like many conspiracy-mongers, Belzer gives the CIA a wet-work capability they simply did not have. After all, this group couldn’t knock off Castro, and their attempts—poison scuba suits, exploding cigars—were the last word in musical comedy (apparently those cancer-causing blow darts weren’t considered). William F. Buckley, in a bit of gallows humor, concluded that the CIA couldn’t have killed Kennedy because the president was murdered. If actually tasked with the assignment, the CIA would have characteristically missed JFK and killed everyone else.

    Belzer details many other journalists and witnesses who were allegedly knocked off.  But consider who wasn’t killed. Why not LBJ? After all, he should have earned the wrath of the anti-Castro/CIA group since, right after assuming office, called off the Kennedy brothers’ “goddamn Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean” (JFK was a better bet for the Castro plots, as before November 22, he had stepped up the assassination plots against the dictator). If the CIA/mafia had such a reach as to kill J. Edgar Hoover then why not slip some cancer-causing cells into one of Johnson’s sirloin steaks?

    At the same time, eyewitnesses like Jean Hill, who had the seemingly dangerous testimony of having seen a man firing from the grassy knoll, lived till 2000. Victoria Adams, who claimed she didn’t see Oswald running down the Depository stairs beside her after the shots were fired (and hence, he could not have been on the sixth floor) is still alive and well. Marina Oswald, the person closest to Oswald, is still up and running.  Perhaps they had quicker reflexes to dodge those darts.

   Historians and even some conspiracy theorists may consider Belzer a trespassing amateur. But the reality is that the former stand-up comedian, and the CIA he conjures up are made for each other. Both inadvertently provide us all with prat-falling comedy.

©2013 by Ron Capshaw

 

 

 

 

RFK OK’d Sabotage Against Cuba in November 1963; Overruled by JFK

 

 UPDATED

 

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By Max Holland

 

    Ever since the Church Committee’s investigation of the intelligence community in the mid-1970s—if not earlier—it has been well known that Robert F. Kennedy was deeply involved in the Kennedy administration’s efforts to subvert and overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro. RFK regularly attended meetings of the so-called Special Group of the National Security Council, which directed and coordinated US policy toward Cuba, including most covert operations. And as Harris Wofford observed in his 1980 book, Of Kennedys and Kings, within the Special Group the attorney general

was the driving force behind the clandestine effort to overthrow Castro. From inside accounts of the pressure he was putting on the CIA to “get Castro,” he seemed like a wild man who was out-CIAing the CIA.

    Still, extant records specifying RFK’s direct involvement are few and far between.

    One of seven documents released by the National Archives in response to a Judicial Watch lawsuit, however, is an EYES ONLY memo that reveals Robert F. Kennedy personally signed off on a sabotage operation against Cuba in November 1963.

   

 The November 1963 document released to Judicial Watch is a brief, one-page proposal for a “low-key sabotage operation” with the plan to be accomplished by a commando group on or about 8 November 1963. Using demolition charges and incendiaries, the commandos were to destroy a pier and warehouse on the northern coast “as part of our continuing long-range program.”

   Sterling J. Cottrell, the coordinator of Cuban affairs, submitted the sabotage proposal to Robert Kennedy on November 4. The next day, the operation was one of several items discussed at a special meeting of the Special Group (SG), which included RFK; McGeorge Bundy, the president’s national security adviser; John McCone, CIA director; Richard Helms, CIA deputy director for plans; U. Alexis Johnson, deputy undersecretary of State for political affairs; Cyrus Vance, secretary of the army; Dr. Albert “Bud” Wheelon, CIA deputy director for science & technology; Colonel Ralph Steakley of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Bruce Cheever, deputy to Desmond FitzGerald, the head of the CIA’s Special Affairs Staff, which ran espionage, paramilitary, and other intelligence operations against Castro.

    Cheever presented the proposal, which had been given the designation No. 3111, to the Special Group. The SG tentatively approved the operation along with two others: No. 3112, a sabotage operation directed against a sawmill located in northern Oriente province; and No. 3115, which involved the infiltration of a radio operator to provide communications for a “ratline,” an emergency escape route for Agency assets and agents in Cuba.

    At the conclusion of the November 5 special meeting, Mac Bundy put all three operations in a “fail safe ” status. They were to proceed as planned “pending concurrence in each case by higher authority ”—meaning until the president himself signed off on them. The next day, however, President Kennedy disapproved all Cuban operations scheduled to run before November 12. Thus, only one of the three operations, No. 3115, received presidential sanction.    

    In the mid-1990s, the November 4 document was one of seven identified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) as “assassination-related” and contained in the papers of Robert F. Kennedy. But none of the seven were released, according to the ARRB, by the time it ceased operating in September 1998. Records in the RFK papers required the express permission of an RFK Donor Committee before they could be released. As of January 2011, according to an internal memo from the John F. Kennedy Library, the seven documents remained closed because the RFK Donor Committee “never formally ruled to open them.” However, after Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit it turned out that six of the documents were in fact open to the public because copies of them existed in files not controlled by the Donor Committee. They had already been released and were available in the JFK Assassination Records Collection at the NARA II facility in College Park, Maryland.  Only the document cited above had not been made part of the Assassination Records collection.

    The Judicial Watch lawsuit was filed subsequent to a December 2012 Freedom of Information Act request by Washington Decoded’s editor Max Holland. Upon notification that all seven documents were open to researchers, the lawsuit was dropped. Nonetheless, further steps are being taken to ensure the availability of all government records in the RFK papers that are related in any way to the JFK assassination.

 Villanova Professor David M. Barrett, a member of Washington Decoded’s editorial board, provided the documents about what happened to proposed operation No. 3111.

©2013 by Max Holland

Defending CHAOS

                

MH/CHAOS: the CIA’s Campaign Against the Radical New Left and the Black Panthers

Frank J. Rafalko

Naval Institute Press. 336 pp. $32.95

 

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By Jay Peterzell

 

    I doubt that anyone who hasn’t read Richard Helms’s April 1975 testimony before the Rockefeller Commission can really understand why he called Daniel Schorr a **********.

    It’s true that an unwelcome season of inquiry had settled on the CIA. And true that two months before, on the CBS Evening News, correspondent Schorr had reported President Ford’s concern that the Rockefeller panel might find out about the CIA’s role in assassinations of foreign leaders—a secret Helms did not think should ever be breathed,  much less investigated.[1]

    Yet these circumstances could hardly suffice to provoke Helms, a former director of Central Intelligence famous for his cool, seemingly unflappable manner. There had to be something more. And there was.

    By now the US ambassador to Iran, Helms had made the arduous journey back to Washington once already, in January 1975, to appear before the Rockefeller Commission. While there he had also been obliged to correct his 1973 sworn testimony before a Senate committee that the CIA had not engaged in domestic spying; that he had not formed a unit in the agency to do this; that he couldn’t recall the White House asking him to do it and would not have done it if asked.[2]

    But while it’s one thing to make and retract sweeping misrepresentations, it’s quite another to be dragged through them point by point. And that’s what had just happened to Helms now, after being called back from Tehran a second time. The staff and members of the Rockefeller Commission no longer took the ex-director’s word for anything. He would be asked a question, say he couldn’t remember, then be shown a document of unforgettable significance that he had written or one that been addressed to him. He would be asked a question, give his answer, then be shown a document contradicting what he had just said. Is this your signature? Is this your name? Then the whole cycle over again. It’s hard to imagine how unpleasant this must have been.

    For two and a half days the sardonic, courtly, resentful Helms kept a grip on his composure. But on the third day, when he emerged from his torment in the vice president’s office and found himself ambushed by Schorr, who with what Helms can only have seen as gloating journalistic insincerity, camera running, extended his hand and said, “Welcome back”—Helms let go.

    “You son of a bitch!” he shouted at Schorr. “You killer! You cocksucker! ‘Killer Schorr!  Killer Schorr!’—that’s what they should call you.” Still upset, Helms strode to the press room, held a brief exchange with reporters and tried to escape the building, only to find himself once again pursued by Schorr. “Get away from me! Killer!” he said. But Schorr was trying to explain where the assassination story came from. President Ford had blurted it out during a luncheon with editors from The New York Times, then put it off the record, but word had gotten out—

    Hearing this, Helms calmed down. He said he admired most of Schorr’s reporting with the exception of one sentence, he wasn’t sure which. He apologized for losing his temper. “We shake hands,” Schorr wrote the following year. “Our conflict is over.”[3]

    That’s according to Schorr.  But here is Helms, five years later, in Thomas Powers’s The Man Who Kept the Secrets:

Schorr says that Helms cooled and apologized. Helms denies it, still angry.  He did not apologize, he never apologized! He thought Schorr’s was a stinking broadcast, maligning the names and reputations of CIA people who had never committed any assassinations. Helms still thinks it was a stinking broadcast, wrong and unfair. Maybe gentlemen apologize, but Helms felt he had nothing to apologize for. He did not apologize.[4]

 

*                             *                             *                             *                             *

 

    These old resentments fester, and no one has apparently harbored them longer than Frank Rafalko, a CIA officer who has written a defense of Operation CHAOS, the agency’s intelligence collection program against US political dissidents in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[5]

    Rafalko joined the CIA in 1967. In 1969 he was drafted by the counterintelligence staff’s Special Operations Group (SOG), which ran CHAOS, and assigned to the branch dealing with the Black Panther Party. In 1972 he became chief of the computer section that prepared studies of dissidents for other agencies. He left SOG after CHAOS ended in 1974. Except for a year and half abroad, he spent the rest of his career in counterintelligence positions, retiring from the agency in 2000.

    So he was there, at the heart of one of the most controversial episodes in the CIA’s history—in fact, the iconic controversial episode, which led the US government for the first time to closely examine the role of secret intelligence in a democracy, and eventually enact oversight provisions and laws that put it on a firmer constitutional basis. Notwithstanding that public airing, Rafalko states he wrote his book because he felt a duty to tell the American people “the entire story.”

The DeRonja-Holland Report

 

 

FORENSIC METALLURGY ASSOCIATES

Springfield, Virginia

 

 

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Technical Investigation Pertaining to the

First Shot Fired in the Kennedy Assassination

22 November 1963

 

 By
              
Frank S. DeRonja

Forensic Metallurgy, M.S. Metallurgical Engineering

and

Max Holland

Special Consultant

20 November 2011

Introduction

    In May of 2010, producers at the National Geographic cable channel, NatGeoTV, requested Forensic Metallurgy Associates to participate in an inspection of a traffic signal assembly in Dealey Plaza at the intersection of Elm and Houston Streets in Dallas, Texas.

    On 22 November 1963, this assembly consisted of a transformer base situated on the northwest corner of the intersection; a vertical steel pole, 18.5 feet in height, affixed to the base; a curved horizontal mast arm with an effective length of 15 feet, attached to the pole and supported by two brace rods; and a traffic signal that was attached onto the end of the mast arm.[1]

    President Kennedy’s limousine passed underneath this signal assembly prior to his fatal shooting and just before Abraham Zapruder began filming the assassination (see figure 1, below). The purpose of the inspection was to determine if the signal assembly displayed any bullet metal damage. If so, that would corroborate that Lee Harvey Oswald fired his first shot from a sixth floor window in the Texas School Book Depository just before the Zapruder film began, and that the bullet missed the presidential limousine and its occupants because it struck the signal assembly overhanging Elm Street.[2]

   

Figure 1: Still photo taken during a re-staging of the assassination by the Secret Service on 27 November 1963. The ghost image, which is inserted, approximates the position of the presidential limousine on November 22 at the moment Abraham Zapruder re-started his camera.

 

  Although the Warren Commission (1964) and House Select Committee on Assassinations (1979) considered various explanations for why the first shot missed, the signal assembly had never been subjected to any forensic examination. This oversight occurred because the obstruction presented by the signal assembly to the line of sight from the sixth floor window occurred before the Zapruder film started, and the film was always presumed to have captured the entire shooting sequence (see figure 1, above).[3]

    This report summarizes the results of inspections of various portions of the traffic signal assembly; corresponding forensic metallurgy observations; limited laboratory testing of exemplars; and the relationship of the technical findings to known factual information. All of the photos accompanying the report can be enlarged by clicking on them.