NYT op-ed: J.F.K.’s Death, Re-Framed

Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff officially announces the death of President Kennedy, attributing the death to a bullet that entered through the front of the skull.

The Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy . . . was instantly implausible because the authors hid the secrets they knew (and ignored the ones they didn’t). —David Ignatius, Washington Post Book World

That recent appraisal reflects a growing consensus that the Warren Commission largely failed in its duty to our nation. Echoing that sentiment, the Gallup organization has reported that 75 percent of Americans polled do not believe the Commission’s major conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the “lone assassin.” Gerald McKnight now gives profound substance to that view in the most meticulous and devastating dissection of the Commission’s work to date.

The Warren Commission produced 26 volumes of hearings and exhibits, more than 17,000 pages of testimony, and a 912-page report. Surely a definitive effort. Not at all, McKnight argues. The Warren Report itself, he contends, was little more than the capstone to a deceptive and shoddily improvised exercise in public relations designed to “prove” that Oswald had acted alone.

McKnight argues that the Commission’s own documents and collected testimony—as well as thousands of other items it never saw, refused to see, or actively suppressed—reveal two conspiracies: the still very murky one surrounding the assassination itself and the official one that covered it up. The cover-up actually began, he reveals, within days of Kennedy’s death, when President Johnson, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach all agreed that any official investigation must reach only one conclusion: Oswald was the assassin..

“Just when scholars deemed the John F. Kennedy assassination ‘case closed,’ along comes Gerald McKnight to shatter certain fundamental assumptions. Breach of Trust is a shrewd, well-researched, deeply provocative investigation into the gross delinquencies of the Warren Commission. Essential reading for anybody trying to solve the twentieth century’s great murder mystery.”--Douglas Brinkley, James H. Clark Professor of U.S. History and Director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Tulane University

The CIA's concerted effort to distance itself from Oswald is contradicted by disclosed facts. For example, a special unit of the agency's Counterintelligence (CI) staff, the Special Investigations Group (SIG), had a pre assassination file on Oswald. The SIG was staffed by a select handful of operatives whose mission was to ferret out any foreign attempt to penetrate the CIA. John Whitten, the former chief of the agency's Western Division, noted that the SIG worked on cases that were "so sensitive ... that they should not be handled by one of the area divisions." Raymond G. Rocca, deputy to the agency's CI chief, James J. Angleton, disclosed to a congressional committee that he was certain the KGB had debriefed Oswald about U.S. radar secrets and any information he had about the agency's top-secret U-2 spy plane."

These revelations indicated that the CIA's attempt to distance itself from Oswald was a tactical charade. Why did the supersensitive SIG have a file on an ex-marine defector? Why did the CIA wait for a year before opening a file on Oswald after learning about his defection? Even more inexplicable is the CIA's contention that it never debriefed Oswald before or after he returned to the United States. If the CIA was certain that the KGB had questioned Oswald about the U-2, then it was in the agency's interest to find out what his Soviet interrogators had wanted to know, where he had been questioned, and much more. That is, if his defection had not been staged.

Assuming Oswald's defection was genuine, the Soviet branch of the agency's CI Division would have needed to know if the redefecting Oswald had been "turned" while in Russia and was returning as a KGB "sleeper," or dormant agent. Angleton, who was famously ensnared in his own web of Cold War paranoia, would never have missed an opportunity to aggressively debrief Oswald if he had indeed breached security. Angleton's suspicions of the Soviet menace were so ingrained that he never retreated from his deep conviction that the KGB was behind the Kennedy assassination. As mentioned earlier, it was Angleton who wrested the CIA's in-house investigation away from John Whitten because he either was convinced or pretended to believe that the purpose of Oswald's trip to Mexico City had been to meet with his KGB handlers to finalize plans to assassinate Kennedy.

One of the most closely held of Helms's secrets had to do with George E. Joannides, the JM/Wave contact officer for the DRE in 1963. Helms never revealed that the CIA was funding the directorate when the DRE had contact with Oswald, who was publicly agitating in favor of the Castro revolution in New Orleans during the months of July and August. Joannides probably knew more about Oswald and his relationship with the DRE and other anti Castro exile groups in New Orleans than anyone else in the government. It was Helms who assigned Joannides to the CIA's Miami station because he was skilled in psychological warfare and disinformation operations. It was Helms who assigned veteran clandestine officer John Whitten to head up the CIA's in-house investigation of the Kennedy assassination and then withheld from him important information from Oswald's pre assassination file. When Whitten protested, Helms removed him and turned the investigation over to Angleton. It might have been just another awkward coincidence that David Atlee Phillips, the DRE's first contact officer, was chief of covert action in the Cuban Section of the CIA's Mexico City station when Oswald arrived in Mexico City in September 1963."

Thomas Powers's biography of Richard Helms, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, could not have had a more fitting title. Helms kept Joannides and his DRE connections secret through four investigations into the Kennedy assassination." Joannides's name did not publicly surface until the 1990s, when the so-called JFK Act led to the establishment of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Over a four-year period the ARRB, empowered to declassify JFK files, dislodged somewhere between four and five million pages of declassified documents. Joannides's record was one of those files, and his personnel records revealed that he had been the DRE's contact officer when the CIA claimed it had no contact with the directorate in 1963. But his file was purged, according to the Washington Post's Jefferson Morley, who is the researcher responsible for introducing Joannides into the historiography of the JFK assassination. Morley described the file as "thin." There were no reports in the Joannides file for the entire seventeen months that he was the DRE's contact officer. All that his personnel file revealed is that Joannides was paying the directorate for "intelligence" and "propaganda." John Tunheim, now a federal judge in Minneapolis, chaired the ARRB. After reviewing all the CIA suppression and stonewalling surrounding the Joannides story, Tunheim remarked to Morley, " shows that the CIA wasn't interested in the truth about the assassination..
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmcknight.htm

It is important that all of the facts surrounding President Kennedy's Assassination be made public in a way which will satisfy people in the United States and abroad that all the facts have been told and that a statement to this effect be made now.

1. The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.

1. The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin

that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.

Over the years, one of the many ways in which the lone nut scenario in the JFK assassination falls apart is this: If Oswald only had three shots, how could he make them in the time allotted by the Zapruder film? All credible experts on this matter have conceded, he can't.

Now, a scientist would say, if the only scenario that would make Oswald the lone assassin doesn't work, scientifically, than it had to be a conspiracy.

Max Holland has a different method, one which the Bush Administration seems to live daily: If the facts don't fit the desired conclusion, alter the facts. This is exactly what Holland does in his column today, co-written with Johann Rush:

If one discards the notion that Zapruder recorded the shooting sequence in full, it has the virtue of solving several puzzles that have consistently defied explanation. The most exasperating one is how did Oswald, who was able to hit President Kennedy in his upper back at a distance of around 190 feet, and then in the head at a distance of 265 feet, manage to miss so badly on the first and closest shot?

A first shot earlier than anyone has ever posited gives a plausible answer.

Incredible. The reason no one has posited a first shot earlier is because there's never been any evidence to support that!

So who does Holland turn to to support the insupportable?

Amos Euins.

I have a decent memory of all that I've read over the years, and as soon as I saw Euins referenced, I started laughing. Evidently Holland didn't bother to read Euins testimony, or was praying no one else had, because Euins is not the witness he wants to highlight.

Euins heard FOUR shots, which means there was a conspiracy. And Euins saw a man with a big white bald spot fire a gun, which means it wasn't Oswald on the sixth floor!

Now - at this point, you have three options, only one of which is useful. You can believe Holland. You can believe me. Or you can actually go look at the data yourself. I highly recommend you always choose option three. Don't just believe. Find out. On any topic.

Because most of you don't have access to the Warren Commission hearing evidence, I've summarized the key points here. You can check this out by going to a library and double checking this for yourself. But here is what Euins had to say. Interestingly, the man questioning Euins, who took his testimony re a fourth shot, was none other than Arlen Specter, the current Senator from Pennsylvania, and the man who ultimately gave the world the "magic bullet" scenario in which, like Holland, Specter simply remade the facts in the image of the conclusion he wanted..