HeraldNet: Digging into JFK’s death remains a lifelong passion

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"You ignore the scholars on the Garrison investigation: Joan Mellen, Bill Davy, Jim DiEugenio and Paris Flammonde"

A minority of outcasts from the conspiracy community . Would be hard to accept them as scholars when 99% of those who advocate conspiracy have disparaging words for their support of Garrison ...eh ?

"Ivon had indeed found many people that identified Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand, however those people refused to go on the record for the reason that most of those people were infuriated with Jim Garrison due to his crackdown on Bourbon Street"

All of the people who could identify him as CB , most were infuriated ? How about the few that weren't ? What excuses did Loui dream up for them ? Shallow excuses are a dime a dozen .

"Go ahead Mr. Lowry, travel to the Archives and take a look for yourself. It is all there."

I don't mind admitting , I'm not homosexual and I don't dislike homosexuals , but if you look at there agenda I would suspect some of the things they say . You apparently think because it's in the National Archives it's gotta be the real deal ? Funny , but when they (Archivists) brought out the box of evidence that contained Ufo debrise (weather balloon) in the Roswell case it was uniformally dismissed as non-sense by Ufo buffs .

"I will not bother to go into the credibility of Edward Jay Epstein, the man who admired and held a friendship with James Jesus Angleton, the chief of the CIA's Counter-Intelligence unit. See Epstein's book Legend, and you will see that Angleton is acknowledged. Enough said!"

This is strictly opinion , just because he had a friendly relationship doen't necessarily mean that it has sinister conotations .... right ?

Patricia Lambert, which you say wrote the "definitive debunking of Garrison's neurological fiasco." Lambert used many sources in her book that have all been proven to be compromised. One of those sources is James Phelan, a longtime FBI informant and the man who provided the FBI with many of Garrison's documents. The ARRB had three FBI documents released to the public which exposed Phelan's doings. It has also been learned that Phelan and Lambert were longtime friends, and Phelan's own daughter referred to Lambert as her godmother!**

Does Phelan's employment record reflect upon what was inside of Garrison documents ? When Garrison's family released his files to the National Archives it reveiled the dark side of Jim Garrison : See Max Holland, "The Demon in Jim Garrison," Wilson Quarterly, Vol. XXV, No. 2, Spring 2001.

"Lambert wrote that David Ferrie and Clay Shaw did not know each other, and this has been torn to bits and pieces. Even Lou Ivon, Garrison's chief investigator, stated that David Ferrie himself had admitted to knowing Clay Shaw! Ferrie had even told Ivon that Shaw hated President Kennedy while Lambert depicts Shaw as a liberal who deeply admired Kennedy."

This from a man who worked for Garrison on a probe he did not support full heartedly . He got so desperate to produce results for his boss that at one point he took out his gun and pushed it down the throat of one of Garrison's suspects , in order to get 'The truth out of him' ? Another time they left a MC rifle in the room that they were questioning a suspect , hoping he would put his finger prints on it .

"Dean Andrews, the man who "feared" for his life if he talked about Bertrand. Andrews, to this date, is the only person who ever stated that Davis was Bertrand. What of Andrews? He was charged with perjury and convicted! This is "breathtaking in its absurdity." Authors Jim DiEugenio and Bill Davy dealt with Lambert at length, and I suggest interested readers view http://www.ctka.net/pr599-lambert.html."

Watch Jim Garrison's own version of the affair , The Jim Garrison Tapes , were the presiding judge says that Garrison had his own hand picked Grand Jury that was practically bribed into doing whatever he wanted done . SOP by Garrison , when he couldn't get his preconceived ideas to fit he would routinely charge perjury and in the atmosphere of N.O. where the truth was for sale , anything could and usually did happen .

"The claim that Garrison and Carlos Marcello were connected is also another myth. This came about in September 1967 when Life magazine printed stories stating that Garrison had mob connections. Now this is something! Garrison spends his time padlocking all illegal pinball operations in New Orleans, and shutting down all B-drinking and prostitution, including a bar owned by Marcello's brother, yet he is receiving payoffs?"

Well I think we can assume that he wasn't getting kicked back enough $ . Why else drag David Ferrie (Marcellos pilot) into the fray ? The last thing Marcello wanted was to be dragged into defending Ferrie . He never knew when he would need a brilliant pilot to get his chestnuts out of the fire or a South American jungle ...eh ?

"Carlos Marcello operated outside of Garrison's jurisdiction as well. While Garrios was district attorney of Orleans Parish, Marcello operated out of Jefferson Parish."

I see Marcello had boundrys to contend with eh ? Ever hear of a 'Major Mafia Cindicate Leader' who stayed put in the outskirts of town when the real money was in the Big City ? The fact is Garrison never admitted in his life time that Marcello was mafioso soso . Pretty tough act to stay put with when every 3rd grader knew this . I guess maybe Carlos met Jimbo half way on the money arraingement .

"Another interesting anecdote is that Marcello had confided to Governor John McKeithen that Garrison needed to be removed from office because he was considered "unreliable" simply because Garrison could not be bought (See Mellen, p. 18)"

No doubt for a decent discount price . Mobsters are crazy about 'their thing' but they aint 'stewpid'. So did any quote come up on what Garrison thought he was worth ?

"And what about Garrison's million dollar house? His papers at the Archives reveal that Garrison had taken out second and third mortgages on his home just to get by! And all people who knew Garrison knew him as a man who did not give a good ******* about money and material items. Garrison repeatedly would leave National Guard checks sitting in his desk for months at a time before cashing them at the bank. Shortly after his memoir was published by Sheridan Square Press and the distributor claimed bankruptcy and an injunction immediately froze all of Garrison's royalties from the book. Garrison borrowed $10,000 just so he could do some local promotion. Later when Oliver Stone bought the rights to his memoir, Garrison granted his editor 10 percent of his own royalties and even cut the bankrupt publishers in on the deal! Garrison paid the final $50,000 mortgage on his home (the home that the mob sold him for $35,000) after receiving his dues as an advisor to Stone's movie. That's some payoff!"

What was the amount borrowed is the question not how much the final payment on the mortgage was . .

"Mr. Lowry states that I have filled my mind with "conspiracy novels". Well, I would say that this is incorrect. I have, on the other hand, filled my mind with what I like to call cover-up novels. 27 navy blue volumes that hold the great seal of the President of the United States on its cover yet contains more fiction than an Edgar Allen Poe poem! I have familiarized myself with both sides of the spectrum, analyzing the data and drawing conclusions off of the evidence itself. That's the key Mr. Lowry, the evidence itself. You attack my work without it having even been half-way completed, yet the sources you use insult my intelligence."

I suggest absorbing the info I gave you it's just the tip of the iceberg . When a pleathora of bad commentary on a person is posted it doesn't take brain surgeon to figure out something in rotten in New Orleans .

"Your entitled to your opinion, however, when you put it forth to be fact, I expect some endnotes that provide a much more reliable source than a McAdams website post which is all that you have used. Show me the proof. Back up what you are saying in a manner academically rather than running off at the mouth. Historical accuracy is important in a case such as this, and that is just not what I am seeing.

Mitchell Warriner

Notes

*It's also interesting to note that Lou Ivon is also the man who read Clay Shaw his rights when he was arrested."

McAdam's draws from a deep well of credible professionals and amatuers . Plus he has the added benifit of being believable , knowing that conspiracy mannikenspeak is fraught with logical absurdities , leaps of logic , faith based cultism and last but not least , that JFK couldn't of been killed by many different people , who had many different reasons , who did it in many different ways , and were backed by many different entity's . I don't know if it occured to you , but you're under a severe handicap when trying to convince readers at this late date that the most unbelievable of characters like Jim Garrison can be salvaged for something other than scrap .

Concerned regards for your success .

Tom Lowry
cdddraftsman

PS BTW : Mr. MW : "a moderate degree of neurasthenia or a hypochondriasis"

Contemporary opinion :

Neurasthenia has largely been abandoned as a medical diagnosis. The ICD-10 system of the World Health Organization categorizes neurasthenia under
"F48 - Other neurotic disorders".
tom lowry | Mar 3, 2010 12:44 pm | 0 replies | Request removal

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Decoding Jim Garrison
UNCLASSIFIED

The Power of Disinformation

The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination

On 2 June 1961, just weeks after the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee convened to take testimony from Richard M. Helms, then an assistant deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In those halcyon days of the Agency's relationship with Congress, it was rare for a CIA official to give a presentation that senators had every intention of making public. The subcommittee, dominated by some of the fiercest anti-Communist members of the Senate, undoubtedly wanted to help repair the Agency's tarnished image. The hearing, entitled "Communist For-
geries," would surely remind Americans of the threat that Communism posed to Western interests and the Agency's frontline role in containing that threat.[1]

Helms began his testimony by describing an episode that had just faded from the headlines. It proved just how virulent and resilient a lie can be when everything around it seems to fall into place. Although Helms never used the precise term, the scheme he described would eventually become better known by its KGB appellation: dezinformatsiya or disinformation.

For years, Soviet propagandists had sought to impugn the United States by linking it to France's brutal colonial war in Algeria. The effort was a mediocre success until 22 April 1961, when four Algerian-based generals organized a putsch against President Charles de Gaulle, who was trying to extract France from the seven-year conflict. Coincidentally, one of the plotters, Air Force Gen. Maurice Challe, had served in NATO headquarters and was unusually pro-American for a senior French officer. This fact provided the basis for a fabrication that the plotters enjoyed the CIA's support.[2]

"This lie was first printed on the 23rd of April by a Rome daily," Helms testified. In English, the headline in Paese Sera read, "Was the Military Coup d'Ã©tat in Algeria Prepared in Consultation with Washington?"[3] The very next day, Pravda, citing Paese Sera, ran a story alleging CIA support for the revolt, as did TASS and Radio Moscow. Other Soviet Bloc and then Western outlets picked up the story, which gathered credibility with every re-telling. Eventually Le Monde, the most respected and influential newspaper in France, ran a lead editorial that began, "It now seems established that some American agents more or less encouraged Challe." The vehemence of the US Embassy's denial was primarily taken as an indication of the allegation's truth.[4]

As the story spread to this side of the Atlantic, the controversy grew to such a pitch that it threatened to disrupt President Kennedy's state visit to France, scheduled for May 1961. Relations remained testy until Maurice Couve de Murville, France's foreign minister, went before the National Assembly and sought to quell the allegation.[5] Altogether, Helms observed, the episode was an "excellent example of how the Communists use the false news story" to stunning effect. And it had all started with an Italian paper that belonged "to a small group of journals published in the free world but used as outlets for disguised Soviet propaganda"»instead of having this originate in Moscow, where everybody would pinpoint it, they planted the story first in Italy and picked it up from Italy"»."[6]

Helms's testimony reveals that the CIA's Counterintelligence (CI) Staff had a sophisticated understanding of how dezinformatsiya worked by no later than 1961.[7] Yet six years later, a grander and more pernicious concoction originating in the same newspaper, Paese Sera, would go unexamined, unexposed, and unchallenged. This lapse, while understandable in context, proved a costly one for the Agency over the long run. Paese Sera's successful deception turns out to be a major reason why many Americans believe, to this day, that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.[8]

Garrison Opens His Investigation

The complex story begins in early February 1967, when the FBI and CIA learned about a striking development in New Orleans. Two years after the completion of the federal inquiry into President Kennedy's death by the Warren Commission, the local district attorney, Jim Garrison, had opened his own investigation into the November 1963 assassination.[9] Whatever Garrison was up to, he did not seem intent on involving the federal government. So both the Bureau and the CIA simply awaited the next development, believing, like most Americans, that no responsible prosecutor would dare reopen the case unless he truly had something.

On 17 February, the New Orleans States-Item revealed Garrison's reinvestigation to the world and ignited a media firestorm. The first legal action, however, did not occur until 1 March 1967, when Garrison ostentatiously arrested an urbane local businessman named Clay Shaw and charged him with masterminding a plot that culminated in President Kennedy's death.[10] Both the Bureau and the CIA rushed to their respective files and ran name traces on Shaw, a man who had never been linked to the assassination despite Washington's painstaking investigation. Insofar as the Agency was concerned, only one sliver of information was noteworthy. The businessman now charged with the crime of the century had once been a source for the CIA through its Domestic Contact Service (DCS).

The CIA's concerted effort to gather foreign intelligence from domestic sources had its roots in World War II. After the conflict, careful analysis revealed that a coordinated effort to collect information known to American citizens might have averted some bitter failures. Thus, when the CIA was formed in 1947, it was handed responsibility for the overt collection of foreign intelligence within the United States, and DCS offices were discreetly opened in several major cities. DCS officers sought contact with American citizens who traveled abroad and were in a position to acquire significant foreign intelligence as a routine matter. The highest priority, naturally, was attached to debriefing Americans who traveled behind the Iron Curtain or to international conferences where they met Soviet Bloc citizens. Although all DCS relationships with individual Americans were routinely classified "secret," the information gleaned was often no more confidential than what could be gained from a close reading of the Wall Street Journal. By the mid-1970s, DCS files contained the names of 150,000 Americans who had willingly provided information or were promising sources.[11]

Shaw had volunteered his first report to the DCS in 1948, the year that the division of Europe into antagonistic blocs hardened. His offering concerned Czechoslovakia, a country whose fate had gripped Americans' imagination. Until February 1948, Czechoslovakia had been a pluralistic, democratic state, mindful of Soviet national security concerns but linked economically and intellectually to the West. Then, in the space of seven days, it was abruptly transformed into a Communist dictatorship, a shattering development because it suggested a replay of events that had led to the last world war. In December 1948, Shaw informed the CIA about the new regime's effort to expand exports via the New Orleans Trade Mart. He shared details about a lease for exhibition space that had been negotiated with a Czech commercial attachÃ© based in New York.[12]

That voluntary report led to an extended relationship on matters involving commercial and international trends. Shaw was an observant businessman who traveled widely. It was effortless for him to pick up the kind of information useful to analysts inside the US Government. Over the next eight years, Shaw relayed information on 33 separate occasions, his fluency in Spanish helping to make him a particularly astute observer of trends in Central and South America. His reports about devaluation in Peru, a proposed new highway in Nicaragua, and the desire of Western European countries to trade with the Soviet bloc"”a subject of keen interest to Washington because of worries about technology transfers"”were invariably graded "of value" and "reliable."[13]

Why the relationship ended after 1956 is not revealed in any of the recently declassified CIA files or Shaw's own papers. Whatever the reason, the documentary record is clear: Shaw was not handed off by the DCS and developed as a covert operative by the CIA's Plans (now Operations) Directorate. The relationship just lapsed. He had never received any remuneration and probably considered the reporting a civic duty that was no longer urgent once the hostility between the two superpowers became frozen in place and a new world war no longer appeared imminent.[14]

Upon reviewing Shaw's file after the businessman's arrest, Lloyd Ray, chief of the New Orleans DCS office, expressed some concern but saw no reason to be alarmed. "While I do not expect that this office will become involved in the matter," Ray wrote in a 3 March 1967 cable to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, "nevertheless there is always the possibility of this." Ray had joined the DCS in 1948 and knew Shaw personally. A lawyer by training, he suggested briefing Lawrence Houston, the CIA's general counsel, on the facts of the relationship "to be on the safe side."[15]

European Leftists Fan the Flames

The day after Ray's cable, on 4 March, the left-wing Roman newspaper Paese Sera published a "scoop" that would reverberate all the way to New Orleans and Langley. According to the afternoon daily, Clay Shaw was no mere international businessman. That profession was a facade for his involvement in "pseudo-commercial" activities via the Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), a trade-promotion group headquartered in Rome from 1958 to 1962. The defunct CMC had been "a creature of the CIA," according to Paese Sera, "set up as a cover for the transfer to Italy of CIA-FBI [sic] funds for illegal political-espionage activities." Revealingly, one of the CMC's most nefarious acts, according to Paese Sera, was support for the "philo-fascists" who had attempted to depose Charles de Gaulle in the early 1960s.[16]

The plausibility of the Paese Sera allegations was strengthened immeasurably by a contemporaneous media firestorm. On Valentine's Day, Ramparts magazine had ignited a controversy over CIA subsidies.[17] As elite news outlets raced to outdo Ramparts by revealing the methodology and extent of covert CIA funding around the world, it became known that anti"‘communist elements in Italy had been among the beneficiaries of the CIA's overseas largesse. Moreover, as was the case in 1961, Paese Sera's 1967 scoop was built around certain undeniable facts: the CMC had existed in Rome; Shaw had been a board member; and now he was charged with having conspired to murder President Kennedy.

The Italian defense, interior, and foreign affairs ministries denied the allegation of a link between the CMC and the CIA, and mainstream Italian newspapers limited themselves to pointing out the Roman connection of the businessman arrested in New Orleans.[18] Other outlets, however, showed less restraint. On 5 March, the day after Paese Sera's scoop, l'UnitÃ , the newspaper of the Italian Communist Party, published a front page story headlined, "Shaw"»was a Rome agent of the C.I.A." Moscow's Pravda picked up the story on 7 March, publishing it under the simple headline, "Clay Shaw of the CIA." The same theme appeared in the 8 March edition of l'HumanitÃ©, the newspaper of the French Communist Party, which reported that the "CIA used [Clay Shaw] for its activities in Italy"»where [he specialized] in the financing of political groups considered to be "˜intransigent anti-Communists'."[19] Similar stories then popped up in the leftwing Greek and Canadian press, all of which echoed Paese Sera's
observation that "in this complex and still obscure matter the CIA certainly has a hand."[20]

Oddly, despite its vast intelligence-gathering apparatus, the Agency missed the seminal article, probably because Paese Sera was not a strict Communist party organ, and therefore not monitored daily.[21] Once the accusation began appearing in organs like Pravda, however, the story grabbed the attention of the CIA's CI Staff, which ran file traces on CMC and PERMINDEX, its Swiss-based parent corporation. The results were uniformly negative. Neither company was a proprietary or front, nor had either been used to channel funds to anti-Communists as alleged. Agency files also proved that Shaw had never been asked, after 1958, to exploit his affiliation with the CMC for any clandestine purpose. "It appears that all of the Pravda charges are untrue," reads the Agency's most detailed review of its links to Shaw, "except that there was a CIA-Shaw relationship."[22]

This emphasis"”that there was a "relationship""”marked a conceptual turning point. By focusing on a tangential truth rather than the overwhelmingly falsity of the allegation, the Agency effectively donned a set of blinkers. With its attention fixated on the DCS link, it never dawned on the CIA that a disinformation scheme was at the root of its problem with Garrison"”despite Paese Sera's well-documented involvement in dezinformatsiya and the fact that efforts to link the CIA to the Kennedy assassination had been a staple of communist-oriented publications for three years.[23]

For the Agency, the eight weeks between 4 March and 25 April 1967 were the calm before the storm. During this period, Clay Shaw's alleged connection to the CIA went unremarked in the United States, save for a brief reference in a leftwing New York newspaper, the National Guardian.[24] Still, the "gruesome proceedings" in New Orleans, as DCS Director James Murphy labeled them, were grounds for concern if not alarm. Garrison seemed intoxicated by the world's attention and was acting like a carnival barker rather than a DA investigating a grave matter.

Helms, who had become Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) in 1966, asked Ray Rocca, chief of Research & Analysis for the CI Staff, to stay abreast of the situation. During the lull, a lively debate took place between the CI Staff and the DCS over what to do. The latter argued against devoting more time and effort to what already seemed to be a "sensational hoax." Rocca, however, wanted to stay ahead of the disclosure curve, and ultimately his position prevailed. The CIA intensified its monitoring weeks before Garrison actually trained his sights on the Agency. "We regret to have to burden you with this sort of coverage," wrote DCS Chief Murphy in a 20 March letter to the New Orleans office, "but [it] could be damaging to the Agency if some link could be exploded by enterprising news hounds."[25]

Unbeknownst to the Agency, Garrison had been convinced by the Paese Sera article that Shaw was linked to the CIA; that association, in turn, implicated the CIA in a cover-up of the Kennedy assassination. A diary kept by Richard Billings, a LIFE editor who worked closely with the DA in the early stages of the investigation, corroborates the timing and impact of the foreign disinformation on Garrison. Billings's entry for 16 March, less than two weeks after the publication of the first Paese Sera article, notes that, "Garrison now interested in possible connections between Shaw and the CIA"»article in March issue Humanities [l'HumanitÃ©] supposedly mentions Shaw's company [CIA] work in Italy."[26] Six days later, the DA had at least one of the articles in hand. Garrison "has copy [of story about Shaw] datelined Rome, March 7th, from la presse Italien [sic]," Billings records. "It explains Shaw working in Rome in "˜58 to "˜60 period."[27]

Dezinformatsiya thus exerted a profound influence on the prosecution of Clay Shaw. Overriding the opposition of his top aides, who had begged him to drop the case, Garrison now persisted because the DA believed he had nabbed an important "covert operative."[28] Under the duress and publicity of indictment, Shaw would surely fold. And the moment he cracked, Garrison imagined that it would be easy to unmask the sequence of events leading to the assassination in Dallas.

US Media Pick Up the Thread

Despite the flurry of articles in Europe's pro-Communist press, the sensational revelation about Shaw was not playing well at home. This was a problem for a DA whose modus operandi required a steady drumbeat of positive publicity. Garrison dared not bring up the allegation openly, as he later explained in a letter to Lord Bertrand Russell, the famed British philosopher who was also an avid conspiracy buff. Doing so might hand skeptics in the media the ammunition to destroy his controversial probe.[29] Critical articles had begun to appear, including a devastating exposÃ© of Garrison's sources and methods that ran in the 23 April Saturday Evening Post.[30] Garrison wanted the Italian story in the news, but via a hidden hand.

On 25 April, the New Orleans States-Item published a front page, copyrighted story. The headline read, "Mounting Evidence Links CIA to "˜Plot' Probe," and the primary source of the article was "Garrison or one of his people."[31] The story went on to report that Shaw, the pivotal figure in Garrison's investigation, had been linked to the CIA "by an influential Italian newspaper." It took more than 20 column inches before the article notedthat Paese Sera was "leftist in its political leanings." (The US State Department routinely labeled the afternoon daily a "crypto-Communist" newspaper.) Inexorably, the Associated Press picked up the New Orleans States-Item scoop for distribution on its national wire. It was reprinted, in truncated form, in hundreds of newspapers nationwide on 26 April. Even the august New York Times ran a brief item from the wires about the "mounting evidence of CIA links" in District Attorney Jim Garrison's probe of the assassination.[32] As Richard Billings noted in his diary, "Now Garrison is hard on the trail of the CIA."[33]

The New Orleans States-Item exclusive confirmed the Agency's worst fears. Just as the media were beginning to catch on that Garrison's case was flimsy, the DA was moving to draw the CIA into the maelstrom. In a long memo prepared on 26 April, Rocca concluded that it would be "unwise to dismiss as trivial any attempts by Garrison to link the Agency to his plot." Though it is impossible to discern what the New Orleans DA "knows or thinks he knows," wrote Rocca, the grim truth, given the Ramparts exposÃ©, was that the "impact of such charges"»will not depend principally upon their veracity or credibility but rather upon their timeliness and the extent of press coverage."[34] From this point on, Garrison would not utter a word without it being parsed inside Agency headquarters.

Having laid the groundwork with his calculated leak to the New Orleans States-Item, Garrison now unleashed a barrage of sensational accusations. In no particular order, Garrison alleged that Kennedy's alleged assassin Lee Oswald had been under the control of the CIA; the CIA had whitewashed the real assassins; the CIA had lied to the Warren Commission and concealed evidence with the FBI's connivance"” no, the CIA had lied to the FBI too![35] As with Senator Joe McCarthy, the legitimacy conferred by public office gave Garrison a license for audacious mendacity, a privilege he exploited to the hilt. These charges made for new accusatory headlines in New Orleans and elsewhere throughout the month of May, but also served a second purpose. They had the simultaneous effect of blunting the increasing number of articles criticizing the DA's probe. The impression left was that Garrison was being put under siege because he dared to tell the truth.

A Rock and a Hard Place

The CIA occasionally responded to a specific allegation from the barrage, but never issued a substantive, thorough rebuttal for fear that it would only create a larger problem for itself and for Shaw. Disclosing the Shaw-DCS connection was ruled out as too explosive, given the nature of Shaw's indictment and the spotlight the Agency was already under because of the Ramparts exposÃ©. At the very least, DCS sources and methods would be scrutinized, and virtually all Americans traveling abroad would fall under suspicion. Every businessman or scholar who had ever cooperated voluntarily would think twice before doing so again. The DCS as a whole would likely be damaged, perhaps irreparably. Then, too, the Agency had to contemplate the cost of disclosure to Clay Shaw. Garrison's scapegoating of the CIA left officers more persuaded than ever that the DA knew about Shaw's DCS contact, and that he probably intended to distort the connection during Shaw's trial.[36]

Despite the surface placidity of the CIA's "no comment" responses, internally the Agency was seething. The "Red Flash" and "Red Comet" editions of the New Orleans States-Item, in particular, were received with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for Pravda. The CIA had weathered public debacles like the Bay of Pigs and the Ramparts exposÃ©; had deflected criticism in the press and from books; and had resisted attempts to broaden Congressional oversight. Never in its 20-year existence, however, had it confronted such a challenge from an elected public official with legal, albeit limited, authority. Garrison's allegations"” the "grossest we have seen from any responsible American official""”gave the Agency fits, just as they did Shaw and Shaw's lawyers.[37] For months, the tactics of what Rocca called "that wild man down there" preoccupied senior CIA officers. When Shaw's trial appeared imminent, DCI Helms ordered an ad hoc committee to formulate a strategy"”six of CIA's highest officials comprised this "Garrison Group."[38]

Ray, the New Orleans DCS chief, sent reports back to headquarters about efforts to goad the Agency into a reaction that would be good for a few more headlines. Ray also expressed concern over the possibility that Garrison might bug DCS offices or tap its telephones, so a secure communications link with CIA headquarters was established. As the "bizarre and unsubstantiated" campaign to implicate the CIA reached a fever pitch in the late spring, an Agency internal memo dated 6 June observed that Garrison had "attacked CIA more vehemently, viciously and mendaciously than has any other American official or private citizen whose comments have come to our attention. In fact, he [has] outstripped the foreign Communist press, which is now quoting him delightedly."[39] Left-leaning and Communist organs presented Garrison's allegations as affirmation of America's deeply confused and corrupt political system. The KGB delighted in such Garrison quotes as one saying that the CIA was "infinitely more powerful than the Gestapo [had been] in Nazi Germany."[40]

With the benefit of hindsight, it is apparent that the Agency never gained its footing amid Garrison's blizzard of accusations, even though there were scattered clues as to what was going on behind the scenes.[41] On 1 May, for example, Jack Miller, a former assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, called the CIA's general counsel to offer some intelligence that had come to Miller "from within Garrison's office." Miller's inside information was that a "left-wing newspaper published in Rome, the Paese Sera," was the source for the story that Shaw was a director of the CMC and that the CMC was a "CIA organization." Miller apparently did not know, or did not convey, how much importance Garrison attached to the ostensible revelation. There is no evidence that the CI Staff followed up on his inside information.[42]

The CIA Continues To Play It Low Key

Like the Agency, Shaw's lawyers were groping their way through the fog of charges generated by Garrison via the media. Shaw's lawyers were confident that their client was leveling with them and publicly denied that he was a clandestine CIA operative.[43] In September 1967, however, when a trial appeared imminent, there was a revealing contact between Shaw's attorneys and the Justice Department. The defense team was "confused by the [CIA] smoke-screen Garrison was raising," and wanted to talk to someone in the federal government "who could steer them as to the true facts and circumstances," according to an 18 September CIA memo.[44]

Some sharing of information might have helped, but Agency officials found the request for cooperation too risky, newly available documents show. "New Orleans is such a seamy maze that the risk of under-the-table deals is always present," concluded a 25 September Agency memo. "Moreover, if Garrison learned of federal assistance to Shaw's lawyers, he'd play it to the hilt."[45] Shaw's defense team thus returned to New Orleans empty-handed and puzzled over the government's apparent nonchalance, given that Washington was very much on trial, too.

Via this brief contact, the CIA learned that one of its assumptions was wholly incorrect. All along, Agency officials had presumed that Shaw told his lawyers about the DCS relationship once his alleged link to the CIA became an issue. But after meeting with Shaw's defense team, Justice Department attorneys shared their "very clear impression" that Shaw had not confided in his own lawyers.[46]

Overhanging everything, insofar as the CIA was concerned, was the upcoming trial. The Agency had to proceed on the assumption that Garrison would play his trump card in the courtroom and flummox the jury. "The fact that Garrison's charges against CIA are false," noted a 13 September memorandum, "does not mean that when he goes to court his case will collapse like a house of cards."[47] The decision on how to prepare for that dreaded day was outlined in a memo submitted by Houston to DCI Helms in October 1967. It is perhaps the most revealing CIA document generated during the entire affair, as it lays out all the sundry allegations of CIA involvement and the truth in each instance. The CIA general counsel's recommendation, developed in consultation with other members of the Garrison Group, was stark: other than active resistance to any subpoenas from Garrison, the best course of action was to do nothing.[48]

The catch, Houston acknowledged, was that a tight lip threatened to leave Shaw at Garrison's mercy. Shaw's lawyers would have no way of refuting allegations without documents and testimony from the CIA. Yet a controlled disclosure of exculpatory information seemed unachievable. A local judge would be under intense pressure to rule that the federal government could not both submit material evidence and hide behind claims of national security or executive privilege. Under these circumstances, Houston reasoned, the best thing to do would be to take no action whatsoever, and hope that the defendant would win acquittal without CIA intervention. If Shaw were to "be convicted on information that could be refuted by CIA," concluded Houston, "we may be in for some difficult decisions."[49]

As it turned out, the dilemma Houston described did not materialize for more than a year. Shaw's talented legal team, determined to win an acquittal, introduced several motions (including a request for a change of venue) that had the effect of postponing the trial repeatedly.

Meanwhile, Garrison kept fine-tuning his theory about the assassination. In February 1968, he unveiled what would be his final and enduring explanation during a Dutch television show hosted by a left-wing, anti-American journalist named Willem Oltmans.[50] According to Garrison, it was no longer the case that the CIA was an unwitting accomplice to the murder and then an accessory after the fact. No, the truth had turned out to be much worse. Garrison now averred that the Agency had consciously plotted the assassination, executing the plan in concert with the "military-industrial complex." Both had a vested interest in the continuation of the Cold War and the escalation of the hot war in Vietnam. President Kennedy wanted to end both conflicts; that was why he had to be assassinated.

The shift in Garrison's line went largely unnoticed at first"”except at the CIA, which was monitoring the DA's every utterance. As Rocca observed in a March 1968 memo, "Garrison has now reached the ultimate point in the logic of his public statements"». This is by and large the Moscow line." For a fleeting moment, Rocca, one of the Agency's most esteemed counterintelligence experts, seemed to be musing about the possibility of a Soviet hand in all that had happened, given that the statement fit so neatly with Moscow's known goals. But Rocca's insight never went further than this brief speculation.[51]

Around the same time in 1968, Garrison began to recognize that an adverse legal outcome would detract from what he had achieved in the public mind. Many of his key assistants didn't believe the accusations about CIA involvement; moreover, none of them could be proved in court. While expressing confidence that the Shaw indictment would never actually be tested in a courtroom, Garrison remarked to Tom Bethell, one of his investigators, that we have "made our point."[52] On this one issue, the undesirability of a trial, the CIA was in complete agreement with its New Orleans nemesis. The Agency vastly preferred no trial, even if it meant Garrison prattling on forever about CIA involvement, uncontradicted by a decisive verdict. By the time Shaw finally achieved his day in court on 21 January 1969, he was probably the only party who wanted to be there.

The Trial

The trial lasted 35 days. Despite two years' worth of allegations and a specific promise of testimony that would "rock the nation," Garrison's case was remarkably unchanged from the loopy account presented at Shaw's preliminary hearing in March 1967. As such, it was decidedly anticlimactic. Nonetheless, the Agency's apprehension was palpable throughout the trial. It closely monitored news accounts and ran name-checks on the jurors and some witnesses. Officers were in attendance throughout.

The prosecution, to the Agency's surprise, never mentioned the CIA in the courtroom. The stance of the lead prosecutor, James Alcock, was probably decisive in this regard. No one on Garrison's staff had belittled the notion of CIA complicity more than Alcock.[53] The closest Garrison came to articulating his conspiracy theory about CIA involvement was during the summation, when he appealed to the jury to deliver a message to those who had plotted the coup d'Ã©tat.[54] The jurors were not impressed, and rendered a unanimous verdict of "not guilty" after deliberating 54 minutes.

Ultimately, it had been left to Shaw's attorneys to raise the issue that had caused such anxiety within CIA headquarters for two years. They did so with dispatch, in one question during direct examination of their client. "Have you ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?" asked lead defense attorney F. Irvin Dymond. "No, I have not," replied Clay Shaw, reserving for himself a small kernel of truth that no one else in the courtroom needed to know.[55]

Bittersweet Victory

A "glorious, a wonderful, a sweet, and a very grand victory," one of the defense lawyers called it. Yet for Shaw, relief was short-lived. Within 48 hours, Garrison rearrested Shaw on two counts of perjury, neither of which pertained to Dymond's question. If convicted, he faced a 20-year prison sentence. Garrison's private correspondence right after the verdict makes clear that he hadn't wavered from the conviction that Shaw was an "important CIA operative," although he still never uttered those words in public.

With the media now firmly on Shaw's side"”even the New Orleans States-Item had done an about-face after the verdict"”the defendant's lawyers allowed their client to begin speaking publicly. That openness resulted in the most expansive answer Shaw would ever give on the subject of the Paese Sera allegation. Still, he chose to keep concealed his unpaid cooperation with the DCS.

The idea [behind the CMC] was to have one place where buyers coming into the Common Market area would find all the Common Market countries represented in one (trade) center"». It turned out to be either badly planned or badly organized and it closed very shortly, and that was the last I ever heard of it. I never heard that it was a CIA operation and I don't know that it was"». Other than what I've told you, I know nothing more about the Centro Mondiale Commerciale. I have never had any connection with the CIA.[56]

In 1971, Shaw's lawyers reached a court willing to put an end to Garrison's abuse of prosecutorial authority. On 27 May, Federal Judge Herbert W. Christenberry enjoined Garrison from prosecuting the perjury charges and, for that matter, ever hauling Shaw into a courtroom again in connection with the Kennedy assassination.[57] The CIA let loose a sigh of relief along with the long-suffering defendant. The Agency had been cautiously following the case all the while, even though it no longer generated adverse headlines"”in fact, it was getting almost no headlines at all. "Looks like Mr. Garrison is on the ropes and will have all he can do to keep the hornets away," noted DCS Director Murphy in October 1971, as he officially closed the file.[58] Garrison's pursuit of Shaw was now widely regarded as a legal farce and a fraud. The episode had even precipitated a bitter split among the many critics of the Warren Commission report on the assassination, nearly all of whom had flocked to Garrison's side in 1967. Now many of them considered the Orleans Parish DA to be the Joe McCarthy of their cause. Just as the Wisconsin senator disgraced anti-Communism by making reckless charges that ruined innocent peoples' lives, they believed that Garrison had irrevocably set back the case against the Warren Report by persecuting an innocent man.

Battle Over Perceptions

Although 1971 marked the nadir of Garrison's legal quest, the Agency was mistaken in assuming that the struggle over public perceptions had ended. An abject failure in courts of law, Garrison's probe achieved a latent triumph in the court of public opinion. The DA's message became part and parcel of what has been called "the enduring power of the 1960s in the national imagination."[59]

Garrison triumphed in this sphere partly because his thirst for vindication was unlimited. He sloughed off Christenberry's decision and adopted the position that the validity of his investigation ought not to be judged on its legal results. To anyone who would listen, he claimed that the "company" (a.k.a. the CIA) was the all-powerful entity that had thwarted his investigation. The defiant mood in the DA's camp was captured in a 10 July 1971 letter to Garrison from Ralph Schoenman, Bertrand Russell's former personal secretary and a like-minded conspiracy theorist who remained staunchly supportive. Schoenman proposed the strategy that Garrison would eventually pursue.

I have thought about the situation with the company right now. One of their primary objectives is to keep you off balance, defensive, always on the run from them and never able to pause sufficiently to regain the offensive"». Paradoxically, by stopping you from using the courts against Shaw, they have FREED you to put the case into a book. Now it cannot be considered sub judice or prejudicial to a trial. So, I suggest urgently that we take the offensive. Let's get out a book, hard and fast, which nails the case against Shaw that we couldn't get into the courts"». let's put THEM on the defensive by blowing the Shaw case sky high with a muck-raking book that closes in on the company even closer.[60]

Before Garrison could follow Schoenman's advice, however, the DA had to contend with a $5 million dollar lawsuit lodged by Shaw, although his finances were so depleted that he could barely afford to file. The retired businessman had retained four lawyers and a small army of private investigators to keep pace with Garrison. Shortly after giving his first deposition, Shaw died in August 1974, his lifespan doubtlessly shortened by having his world shattered.

As the episode faded from view, the Paese Sera articles became akin to the Dead Sea scrolls of the investigation, an inner secret shared by Garrison's shrinking band of die-hard believers. Shaw was a "high-ranking CIA operative in Italy" and the Paese Sera articles proved it. Within this small circle of pro-Garrison conspiracy buffs, the DA was the person who had been martyred, victimized by the vast but hidden power of "the company"andits "disinformation machinery." The alleged link between Shaw and the CIA became a staple of conspiracy books published in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era.[61]

In December 1973, former CIA officer Victor Marchetti went public with information that fanned the embers. Marchetti, executive assistant to the Deputy Director of CIA before his 1969 resignation, had been present at several high"‘level meetings in which DCI Helms expressed sympathy for Shaw's predicament. Marchetti overheard Helms instructing General Counsel Houston to help Shaw, consistent with the Agency's interests. Marchetti aired this information shortly before publishing his 1974 exposÃ©, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. In keeping with his now-antagonistic relationship with the Agency, he couched the disclosure in such a way as to suggest that it was just as likely that the CIA had concealed a nefarious connection with Shaw as an innocuous one.[62]

Unfounded assertions of CIA complicity were bolstered inadvertently by a series of investigations of the Intelligence Community in the 1970s. The 1975 Rockefeller Commission report was followed by the 1976 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the 1979 report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). All examined the CIA's activities both before and after Kennedy's assassination, and, in the case of HSCA, specifically looked into Shaw's supposed role as a high-ranking operative. The bottom line in each instance gave no credence to any of Garrison's allegations about Shaw and the CIA. Inexorably, however, the mere fact that such questions were asked helped fashion Garrison into something of a prophet in the public mind.[63]

In 1979, Shaw's link to the CIA was dredged up again when former DCI Helms gave a deposition in a libel case. The lawsuit involved a 1975 book entitled Coup d'Ã©tat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, yet another book that had swallowed the Paese Sera deception.[64] Although not party to the suit, Helms was deposed by the defendants' attorney. Under oath, he divulged the kernel of truth that the Agency and Shaw had struggled to keep secret when Garrison's probe was at its height. Helms accurately described Shaw's contact with the CIA from 1948 to 1956: at "one time, as a businessman, (Shaw) was one of the part-time contacts of the Domestic Contact Division."[65] Garrison, by then a Louisiana state judge, pounced on Helms's disclosure and distorted it. Garrison wrote in his memoir that the disclosure represented "confirmation"»that Clay Shaw had been an agent."[66]

Losing the Fight

Bolstered by these developments, Garrison tried to implement the advice rendered by Schoenman in 1971: write a "muckraking book" that would bring the Shaw-CIA connection front and center. It took Garrison more than four years to find a publisher for his memoir, although he hawked it with a promise to reveal, for the first time, the actual CIA hand in the assassination. Fifteen major publishers rejected the manuscript. Finally the memoir found a home at a small New York-based press, which printed On the Trail of the Assassins in 1988. For the first time, Garrison made explicit the connection between his grand conspiracy theory and Shaw's link to the CIA (Paese Sera's version). To explain why he had not made the affiliation known when it presumably might have counted"”during the trial"”Garrison claimed that he did not learn about Shaw's CIA activities in Italy until after 1969.[67]

None of this seemed to matter, least of all to the CIA, until the publisher of Garrison's memoir thrust a copy into the hands of filmmaker Oliver Stone during an international film festival in Cuba.[68] That chance encounter eventually led to the endorsement of Paese Sera's disinformation by a major Hollywood film, JFK. In the movie, Garrison (portrayed by Kevin Costner) confronts Shaw (played by Tommy Lee Jones) with an Italian newspaper article exposing Shaw's role as a CIA operative. The confrontation, of course, never occurred in real life; yet the scene captures a hidden historical truth. The epicenter of Garrison's prosecution, and the wellspring for his ultimate theory of the assassination, was the DA's belief in a fantasy published by a Communist-owned Italian newspaper.[69]

According to one historian who admires Stone, the movie JFK probably "had a greater impact on public opinion than any other work of art in American history" save Uncle Tom's Cabin.[70] While that may be hyperbole, not many Hollywood films can claim to have generated new legislation. JFK ignited a public clamor for millions of pages of documents that had been "suppressed" as part of the government's alleged massive cover-up.

In response, Congress passed a sweeping statute in 1992, the President John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act, which forced open all federal records relating to the assassination and an unexpected amount of state, local, and private records as well"”including those of the former Orleans Parish district attorney. The law directed that these documents be catalogued and housed at the National Archives.

Oliver Stone likes to assign full credit for the legislation to his film, which is something of an exaggeration. The coincidental end of the Cold War also played a critical role in the enactment and implementation of the 1992 law. More disingenuously, Stone claims that while the records declassified by the statute have not produced a "smoking gun," they have opened "a clear historical record of a cover-up taking place."[71]

In truth, one legacy of Stone's JFK is an altogether ironic one. Far from validating the film's hero, the new documents have finally lifted the lid on the disinformation that was at the core of Jim Garrison's unrelenting probe. The declassified CIA records document that everything in the Paese Sera story was a lie, and, simultaneously, reveal the genuine nature and duration of Clay Shaw's innocuous link to the CIA. These same records explain why the CIA never responded appropriately to the disinformation, as it had in Helms's 1961 Senate testimony and would later do in swift response to such schemes in the 1980s. Finally, the personal files turned over by Garrison's family underline the profound impact that one newspaper clipping had on a mendacious district attorney adept at manipulating the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Senate Judiciary Committee, Communist Forgeries (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961). In September 1961, "Communist Forgeries" became the first Senate hearing ever translated into three foreign languages (Spanish, French, and Italian).

[2] Ibid., pp. 2-4.

[3] "Preparato in accordo con Washington il colpo di stato militare in Algeria?" Paese Sera, 22-23 April 1961.

[4] "Communist Forgeries," pp. 2-4.

[5] "Paris Rumors on C.I.A.," The New York Times, 2 May 1961, and "French Minister Tries to Halt Rumors of U. S. Role in Mutiny," The New York Times, 6 May 1961.

[6] "Communist Forgeries," pp. 2-3.

[7] The KGB's emphasis on dezinformatsiya as a particularly useful "active measure" (the Soviet term for covert activities) is a staple in intelligence literature. Among the earliest reliable accounts is Ladislav Bittman, The Deception Game: Czechoslovak Intelligence in Soviet Political Warfare (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Research Corporation, 1972). See also Vladislav M. Zubok, "Spy vs. Spy: The KGB vs. the CIA, 1960-1962," Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, Issue 4, Fall 1994, pp. 22-33.

[8] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 219-220. On the 30th anniversary of the assassination, according to national polls cited by Moynihan, three-quarters of those surveyed believed the CIA had murdered the President.

[9] Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, had lived in New Orleans for five months prior to the murder, which provided the pretext for Garrison's probe.

[10] For the circumstances of Shaw's arrest, see Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison's Investigation (New York: M. Evans, 1998). At the time of the arrest, Garrison had no knowledge of any actual or presumed link between Shaw and the CIA.

[11] Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States, Report to the President (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, June 1975), pp. 208-210.

[12] Subject: Clay L. Shaw, Enclosure 21, Microfilm, Box 23, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection (hereafter HSCA/CIA Collection), John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, National Archives (hereafter JFK NARA). See also Information Report No. 00-B-9381, Central Intelligence Agency, 27 December 1948, File JFK-M-04 (F2), Box 1, Miscellaneous CIA Series (hereafter CIA Series), JFK NARA. Seven of Shaw's reports are contained in this file.

[13] Memo to Director, DCS, from Chief, New Orleans Office, re Clay Shaw, 3 March 1967, JFK-M-04 (F3), Box 1, CIA Series; Memorandum re Garrison Investigation: Queries from Justice Department, 28 September 1967, Box 6, Russell Holmes Papers; various Information Reports, JFK-M-04 (F2), Box 1, CIA Series"”all JFK NARA.

[14] Memo to Chief, New Orleans Office, from Chief, Contact Division, re Case 20791, 4 June 1956, JFK-M-04 (F2), Box 1, CIA Series, JFK NARA.

[15] Memo, Director, DCS, from Chief, New Orleans Office, 3 March 1967, JFK-M-04 (F3), Box 1, CIA Series, JFK NARA.

[16] "Clay Shaw (arrestato per Kennedy) ha svolto un'oscura attivitÃ a Roma," ("Clay Shaw Carried Out Obscure Activity in Rome") Paese Sera, 4 March 1967. The "scoop" ran for three successive days in Paese Sera. An accurate description of the CMC's purposes is found in "Rome's Trade Center"”How It Came To Be," Chicago Daily Tribune, 17 September 1960.

[17] On 14 February 1967, Ramparts and The New York Times simultaneously revealed that the National Students Association had knowingly accepted cash subsidies from the CIA. See Michael Warner, "Sophisticated Spies: CIA's Links to Liberal Anti-Communists, 1949-1967," International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 9, No. 4, Winter 1996/97, pp. 425-433; Sig Mickelson, America's Other Voice: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (New York: Praeger, 1983), pp. 121-124; and Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 85-94. In addition to lending the Paese Sera story credence, the Ramparts exposÃ© may have helped precipitate the disinformation to begin with.

[18] Corriere della Sera, for example, ran a story on 5 March entitled "Shaw fu nel consiglio di un centro economico di Roma," ("Shaw Was on the Council of an Economic Center in Rome") that did not mention the CIA at all.

[19] "Clay Shaw a travaillÃ© Ã Rome pour les services US d'espionnage," ("Clay Shaw Worked in Rome for US Intelligence"), l'HumanitÃ©, 8 March 1967.

[20] "Vasta eco alle rivelazioni di Paese Sera sull'attivita italiana di Clay Shaw," ("Vast Echos from Paese Sera's Revelations on the Italian Activities of Clay Shaw"), Paese Sera, 6 March 1967. It is possible, of course, that the stories simply reflected sloppy and sensational journalism rather than intentional disinformation. Yet one of the entries pertaining to Italy from the so-called "Mitrokhin archive" suggests a KGB provenance. Vasili Mitrokhin, the former KGB archivist who defected to Britain in 1992, brought with him 25,000 pages of handwritten notes about highly sensitive documents. One brief note refers to a disinformation scheme in 1967 that involved Paese Sera and resulted in publication of a false story in New York. See Max Holland, "The Demon in Jim Garrison," Wilson Quarterly, Vol. XXV, No. 2, Spring 2001.

[21] Though not the official organ, Paese Sera was a proprietary company of the Gruppo Editoriale PCI, and thus owned by the Italian Communist Party. Gaetano Fusaroli, Giornali in Italia (Parma, Italy: Guanda Editore, 1974), pp. 300-301.

[22] Memo for Chief, CI/R&A, "Trace Results on Persons Connected with Centro Mondiale Commerciale," 24 March 1967; and "Subject: Clay L. Shaw," Enclosure 21; both in Microfilm Box 23, HSCA/CIA Collection, JFK NARA. Counterintelligence officers retrieved Italian coverage of the story as it appeared in Corriere della Sera and Il Messaggero, but not the seminal Paese Sera article.

[23] Memo from Rocca to Houston, 1 March 1968, Box 85, HSCA/CIA Collection, JFK NARA. Though outdated, the best work on Soviet exploitation of the assassination remains Armand Moss, Disinformation, Misinformation, and the "˜Conspiracy' to Kill JFK Exposed (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1987). See also Christopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 225-230.

[24] "New questions raised on JFK killing," National Guardian, 18 March 1967. The New York-based Guardian may well have been the publication referenced in the note from the Mitrokhin archives.

[25] Memo to Chief, New Orleans, from Director, DCS, 20 March 1967, JFK-M-04 (F2), Box 1, CIA Series, JFK NARA.

[26] "Clay Shaw a travaillÃ© Ã Rome pour les services U.S. d'espionnage," l'HumanitÃ©, 8 March 1967.

[27] "Dick Billings's Personal Notes on Consultations and Interviews with Garrison," p. 25, Richard Billing
tom lowry | Mar 3, 2010 11:16 am | 0 replies | Request removal

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Mr Warriner's Dubious "Scholars"
Mitchell Warriner, in his reply to Tom Lowry, made the following statement:

QUOTE ON:

You ignore the scholars on the Garrison investigation: Joan Mellen, Bill Davy, Jim DiEugenio and Paris Flammonde...

QUOTE OFF

Trouble is, at least two of the people he mentions; Mellen and DiEugenio, have terrible errors of research in their published works re Garrison.

Mellen's A FAREWELL TO JUSTICE book uses, as a MAJOR source, one Thomas Edward Beckham, who claims to be depicted in the well known WDSU film of Lee Harvey Oswald handing out Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) material in front of New Orleans International Trade Mart in August, 1963.

In fact, Mellen states that Beckham "confirms that this is indeed he" in the photo section of her book!

Only problem is, it ISN'T! The man in the film is a Japanaese businessman named Ehara, who ran a business out of International Trade Mart in 1963; Mellen's star witness is exposed as a liar, blowing a TERRIBLE hole in the credibility of Mellen's book!

As for DiEugenio, in his book, DESTINY BETRAYED, he posits that the 45 copies of the Corliss Lamont authored pamphlet, THE CRIME AGAINST CUBA, that the CIA library ordered in 1961 from the FPCC in NY somehow became the 50 copies of the VERY SAME publication that Oswald was sent by the FPCC in 1963.

This is simply PURE SPECULATION on DiEugenio's
part; and the paragraphs he writes preceding this speculation are RIDDLED with factual errors concerning Oswald's FPCC activities in New Orleans.

If these people are Warriner's *scholars* then I suggest he might need to rethink his conclusions. BTW, shortcomings in the work of Mellen and DiEugeneio, as outlined above, are provable using documents from NARA; just the way Warriner would like it.

Regards,

Tim Brennan
Tim Brennan | Feb 23, 2010 4:28 am | 0 replies | Request removal

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A Lifelong Passion or Hoax ?
Mr. D "I am also replying to Mr. Lowry. Although where to start is a quandary."

Here let me help you. Lets start at the beginning of where the snowball started to roll. As the saying goes sometimes a crowbar won't bend a cobweb and other times a leaf will start a avalanche......

Mark Lane, conspiracy darling and first 'Conspiracy Superstar'. The standard to which all other CTer's have been judged within the critical community that does a exceedingly bad job at self criticism. Mark Lane in all fairness is a competent lawyer and when he is asked to criticize fellow conspiracists he does a pretty good job. However some of his own actions have caused a great deal of merriment in some 'lone nut' advocate circles......

For example...... :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown
During the summer of 1978 , Jones hired 'JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theorists' Mark Lane and Donald Freed to help make the case of a "Grand Conspiracy" by intelligence agencies against the Peoples Temple .[1]

Jones told Lane he wanted to "pull an Eldridge Cleaver", referring to a fugitive Black Panther who was able to return to the United States after repairing his reputation . [2]

In September 1978 , Lane spoke to the residents of Jonestown , providing support for Jones' theories and drawing parallels between Martin Luther King , Jr. and Jim Jones . [3]

Lane then held press conferences stating that "none of the charges" against the Temple "are accurate or true" and that there was a "massive conspiracy" against the Temple by "intelligence organizations ," naming the CIA , FBI , FCC and even the U.S. Post Office . [4]

Though Lane represented himself as disinterested , Jones was actually paying him $6,000 per month to generate such theories . [5]

[1] Reiterman, Tim and John Jacobs . Raven: The Untold Story of Rev. Jim Jones and His People . Dutton , 1982. ISBN 0-525-24136-1 . p.440 .

[2] Ditto page 441 .

[3] Goodlett , Carlton B. Notes on Peoples Temple , Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple .

[4] Jonestown Project : San Diego State University . Excerpted from The Need For A Second Look At Jonestown , Rebecca Moore and Fielding M. McGehee , III , editors . Lewiston NY : Edwin Mellen Press , 1989 .

[5] See [1] Ditto page 446 .

end ......

THE ASSASSINATION OF JOHN F. KENNEDY
by Historians DeLloyd J. Guth and David R. Wrone .
Published in 1980......

BTW it is subtitled :
A COMPREHENSIVE AND LEGAL BIBLIOGRAPHY, 1963-1979......

On p. viii of the preface they write...... :

"We wish to lift the subject out of the quagmire of often
bizarre speculations and exploitation by the likes
of Mark Lane"......

And on p. xxii......

"Lane's RUSH TO JUDGMENT provides a classic example
of subjective gimmickry , with it scholarly cosmetic of 4,500
footnotes , containing hundreds of substantial errors and
repetitions . Quotations within the text have been quietly
changed in over two hundred instances from original
documented versions , important material has been
excised from the evidence in order to highlight the
trivial or to mislead"......

Misleading the House Select Committee :

Mark Lane has been a purveyor or Martin Luther King conspiracy
theories too , and he represented King's killer , James Earl Ray ,
before the House Select Committee on Assassinations . After
investigating Lane's claims , the Committee chastised him :

"Many of the allegations of conspiracy the committee investigated
were first raised by Mark Lane , the attorney who represented James
Earl Ray at the committee's public hearings . As has been noted , the
facts were often at variance with Lane's assertions. . . . In many
instances , the committee found that Lane was willing to advocate
conspiracy theories publicly without having checked the factual basis
for them . In other instances , Lane proclaimed conspiracy based on
little more than inference and innuendo . Lane's conduct resulted in
public misperception about the assassination of Dr. King and must be
condemned" . (House Select Committee Report , Page 424 , footnote 16)......

Back to Garrison ...... Why bring up Lane first you ponder?.......John : "Even one of Garrison's most ardent advocates and a personal friend of the onetime DA had to take exception to the fictionalized Garrison case portrayed by Oliver Stone in "JFK." From Mark Lane, "Fact or Fiction? The Moviegoer's Guide to the Film JFK," Rush to Judgment, 1992 ed : "Stone chose as his hero Jim Garrison. I was delighted when I first heard that news. However, unwilling to record history and true only to the Hollywood concept of a technicolor version of black and white in which no grays are countenanced, Stone, to prove how correct Garrison had been, was determined to demonstrate how guilty Clay Shaw had been. After a lengthy trial Shaw had been acquitted in record time by a jury whose deliberations were extended primarily because they were enjoying a wonderful New Orleans meal provided by Mother's restaurant, a New Orleans gastronomical landmark. Stone was confronted with a problem. If the evidence Garrison had gathered had not been sufficient to establish Shaw's guilt in the minds of an objective juror, how could he, Stone, prove Shaw's guilt to the satisfaction of his audience? Here Stone becomes inventive. He was neither bound by the cumbersome rules of evidence nor the rules of criminal procedure. He could create celluloid evidence. Shaw had died; therefore, Stone was not bound by the laws of defamation which apply, in the United States, only to the living. Apparently, the less-codified rules of common decency were not an impediment either" (p. xxxi)......

Was Jim Garrison a outrageous liar and did Garrison do a 'job' on Clay Shaw considering ?......

Patricia Lambert :

Garrison said Shaw had been Q'd 3x's before being arrested & only became a suspect after the 2nd interrogation; Shaw had been questioned 2x by Garrison's office & had been a suspect almost since the investigation began......

Garrison claimed he had been against using witness Charles Spiesel; everyone else remembered Garrison being the one who made the decision to use Spiesel......

Garrison said that David Ferrie was still alive at the time of Shaw's arrest Ferrie died on 2/22/67 it was Ferrie's death that brought forth Perry Russo, Garrison's sole justification in arresting Shaw on 3/1/67.......

Garrison claimed that Ferrie was to be indicted before he died; there were no plans to arrest Ferrie at that time, as James Alcock confirmed......

Garrison was asked how many witnesses he had at the time of Shaw's arrest; Garrison refused to answer. (Alcock testified that Russo was it)......

Garrison was asked "hadn't put Bundy on the stand knowing his story had undergone many changes" Hadn't Garrison stated to a staff member, "We did not tell him to lie; put him on the stand"? He refused to answer......

Garrison was asked if anything came out of his investigation aside from the Shaw persecution; Garrison said yes when asked to elaborate he refused......

Garrison said a "public report detailing his investigation" would be forthcoming "to the citizens of New Orleans" (It never arrived.)......

end ....

.John/Lambert : "Garrison's father. Earling had an alcohol problem and a criminal record. The latter which Lambert noted in long and wearisome detail. It was a clear attempt at guilt by bloodline. What Mellen states though counters all of that. Jane, Garrison's mother, left Earling when young Jim Garrison was barely six years old. (p. 5) After that, Garrison never saw Earling again. He did look him up many years after his death. And the son broke down when he noted that the authorities had written on a legal document that his father had "no family"(p. 225)......

"Garrison graduated from law school in 1949. He later decided to get a Master's of Civil Laws, which he did......

In 1950, he tried his hand at writing short stories . One of these was ironically called "The Assassin"......

And now you know what was forming in his devious little delusional mind years prior to the JFK Assassination......

.John : Peter Noyes writes......:

"Garrison was wrong about Clay Shaw and Edgar Eugene Bradley [another Garrison suspect]. The case against them was a monumental fraud. Every time Garrison opened his mouth in the days after Ferrie's death, his appearance of credibility appeared to be giving way to one of lunacy"......

Hugh Aynesworth, perhaps the most perceptive observer of the circus in New Orleans wrote : "Jim Garrison is right. There has been a conspiracy in New Orleans -- but it is a plot of Garrison's own making. It is a scheme to concoct a fantastic 'solution' to the death of John F. Kennedy, and to make it stick; in this cause the district attorney and his staff have been parties to the death of one man and have humiliated, harassed and financially gutted several others.' The trial was a sham; it was perhaps the most disgraceful legal event of the twentieth century" (Legacy of Doubt, 108-9, 111,114).......

.John : "In spite of the current popularity of Garrison in conspiracy circles, most mainstream conspiracist authors have blasted Garrison and his New Orleans "investigation." : http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/buffs_on_jim.htm

......Soooo what do other conspiracists say about the strange and erratic behavior of the societal malcontent Jim Garrison?......

Dr. Michael L. Kurtz author of 'Crime of the Century' The Kennedy Assassination from a Historian's Perspective writes of Oliver Stone's movie 'JFK' : "As a historian, I find the distortions of Jim Garrison and Oliver Stone appalling. Garrison's case was based almost entirely on the dubious testimony of Perry Raymond Russo" (1993 ed., xiii).......

David Lifton author of 'Best Evidence' : "I think its ugly when the power of the state is arrayed against an innocent man "” and the witch hunt that took place in New Orleans back in 1967-69 will always remain exactly that : an ugly incident in the annals of jurisprudence......Garrison was intellectually dishonest, a reckless prosecutor, and a total charlatan"......

Sylvia Meagher author of 'Accessories After the Fact' : "as the Garrison investigation continued to unfold, it gave cause for increasingly serious misgivings about the validity of his evidence, the credibility of his witnesses, and the scrupulousness of his methods. The fact that many critics of the Warren Report have remained passionate advocates of the Garrison investigation, even condoning tactics which they might not condone on the part of others, is a matter of regret and disappointment" (1992 ed. pg.456-7).......

Harold Weisberg : "You have every right to play Mack Sennett in a Keystone Kops Pink Panther," Harold Weisberg wrote to Oliver Stone while JFK was in production, "but as an investigator, Jim Garrison could not find a pubic hair in a whorehouse at rush hour" (Robert Sam Anson, "The Shooting of JFK," Esquire, November 1991; reprinted in Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film, pg.221).......

David E. Scheim author of 'Contract on America': The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy : "as Garrison's case unfolded, his specific accusations became increasingly outlandish and the thrust of his efforts increasingly questionable. Especially bizarre was Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw . . . It took the jury less than an hour to find Shaw innocent of Garrison's extravagant accusations" (p.48).......

Henry Hurt author of 'Reasonable Doubt': "Jim Garrison's performance proved to be disappointing, particularly after months of highly publicized promises of what he would present at the trial. He produced no witnesses to suggest CIA involvement in an assassination conspiracy. He produced nothing, really, that went beyond what had been presented at the preliminary hearing two years earlier. To many observers, Jim Garrison seemed obsessed with the destruction of Clay Shaw" (Ibid., 278). " (pp. 276-7)......

Anthony Summers Author 'Conspiracy' (First Paragon House paperback edition, 1989), in "Update . . . November 1991 :"Those who have long labored to uncover the truth about Dallas might be expected to be happy about [the movie] J.F.K. In a sense they are . . . [But] three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone . . . has made some bizzare decisions. From a vast array of scholarship, he picked a book by Jim Garrison, former District Attorney of New Orleans, as his main work source . . . . You will find only a sprinkling of references to Garrison in this book. His probe has long been recognized by virtually everyone -- including serious scholars who believe there was a conspiracy -- as a grotesque, misdirected shambles. As Esquire magazine pointed out this November, there were things director Stone did not at first know about Garrison. About his separation from the U.S. Army, "following diagnosis that he was in need of long-term psychotherapy." About his "close association with organized crime, whose soldiers and capos he rarely prosecuted, about "the bribery and income-tax evasion trials in which he was exonerated. Yet, even when he did learn these things, Stone persisted in his association with Garrison and a bunch of other buffs, so-called witnesses and experts whom serious observers dismiss as cranks or worse"......

Harrison Livingstone author of 'Killing the Truth' : "The Garrison affair was sown with the seeds of its own destruction by the premature charging of a suspect (Clay Shaw) with no case against him" (pg. 537).

G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings' co-authors of 'Fatal Hour: The Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime' : "The evidence of Shaw's participation in a conspiracy was flimsy, and from his indictment to eventual acquittal in 1969, the course of the investigation was downhill to disaster (Ibid., 53). The testimony of the 'star witness,' Perry Raymond Russo, had been blatantly concocted" (Ibid., 193).

Mr. D : "Including two women who admitted that they were angry at Garrison for his anti-racketeering activities."......

Glad you brought that up. Reminds me of Kennedy's "anti-racketeering" crusade, which was, in fact, simply a 'Protection Racket' :

"Mobsters who were Republicans, who contributed to Nixon and backed Nixon for President -- Jimmy Hoffa and Dave Beck, etc.-- were hounded into prison on trumped up charges, while mobsters who were Democrats, contributed to the Kennedy campaign and backed JFK for President -- Walter and Victor Reuther -- were allowed to commit crimes with impunity! (On the Hoffa frame-up, see Ralph de Toledano) Reading between the lines somewhat, David Talbot, writing in 2007, admits that, although everybody believes in a JFK "assassination conspiracy", nobody has ever been able been find proof of one; thus, it is like believing in ghosts."......

Well there you have it again in a lone 'Nut' shell, so to speak. Sorry not much wiggle room for 'Garrison Apologists' and twin bed mates of disaster when coming to grips with 'Big Jimbo', MR. MW and Mr. D. We've heard from all sides and it's up to the readers to decide now......

Tom Lowry......
cdddraftsman@yahoo.com......

"He went from a highly intelligent eccentric to a lunatic in the period of one year. . . . Every time press interest in the case would start to wane, he would propound a new theory. One week it would be 14 Cubans shooting from storm drains. The next week it would be H. L. Hunt and the far right in Dallas. This was no Robin Hood "” no Untouchable either."

Rosemary James in Newsweek, 12/23/91.
tom lowry | Feb 22, 2010 5:50 pm | 0 replies | Request removal

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The Breathtaking Absurdity of Tom Lowry & John McAdams
Mr. Lowry, the only thing that is “breathtaking in its absurdity” is that you continue to use sources such as Patricia Lambert, Edward Jay Epstein, and John McAdams as if these are highly respectable and reliable people. You ignore the scholars on the Garrison investigation: Joan Mellen, Bill Davy, Jim DiEugenio and Paris Flammonde, and even more incredible, you ignore the evidence itself that lies at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

It is interesting that you quote Lou Ivon, Garrison’s chief investigator, as stating that he received “negative results” while searching New Orleans for “Clay Bertrand.” I had the opportunity to interview Lou Ivon* and I learned quite the opposite. Ivon had indeed found many people that identified Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand, however those people refused to go on the record for the reason that most of those people were infuriated with Jim Garrison due to his crackdown on Bourbon Street (This issue is appropriately covered in Joan Mellen’s book A Farewell to Justice, pp. 121-127). Three homosexuals in New Orleans and two in San Francisco confirmed that Shaw and Bertrand were one and the same. The names of the people that confirmed Shaw as Bertrand is extensive: Barbara Bennett, Rickey Planche, Valentine Ashworth, Greg Donnelly, Thomas Breitner, Raymond Broshears, David Logan, Jessie Parker, Ronald R. Raymond – and it goes on and on. Go ahead Mr. Lowry, travel to the Archives and take a look for yourself. It is all there.

I will not bother to go into the credibility of Edward Jay Epstein, the man who admired and held a friendship with James Jesus Angleton, the chief of the CIA’s Counter-Intelligence unit. See Epstein’s book Legend, and you will see that Angleton is acknowledged. Enough said! Patricia Lambert, which you say wrote the “definitive debunking of Garrison’s neurological fiasco.” Lambert used many sources in her book that have all been proven to be compromised. One of those sources is James Phelan, a longtime FBI informant and the man who provided the FBI with many of Garrison’s documents. The ARRB had three FBI documents released to the public which exposed Phelan’s doings. It has also been learned that Phelan and Lambert were longtime friends, and Phelan’s own daughter referred to Lambert as her godmother!** Lambert wrote that David Ferrie and Clay Shaw did not know each other, and this has been torn to bits and pieces. Even Lou Ivon, Garrison’s chief investigator, stated that David Ferrie himself had admitted to knowing Clay Shaw! Ferrie had even told Ivon that Shaw hated President Kennedy while Lambert depicts Shaw as a liberal who deeply admired Kennedy. If this is not enough, Patricia Lambert spends a good portion of her book claiming that Clay Bertrand was Eugene Davis. David vehemently denied ever using this alias, and the man who claimed Davis was Bertrand was none other than Dean Andrews, the man who “feared” for his life if he talked about Bertrand. Andrews, to this date, is the only person who ever stated that Davis was Bertrand. What of Andrews? He was charged with perjury and convicted! This is “breathtaking in its absurdity.” Authors Jim DiEugenio and Bill Davy dealt with Lambert at length, and I suggest interested readers view http://www.ctka.net/pr599-lambert.html.

The claim that Garrison and Carlos Marcello were connected is also another myth. This came about in September 1967 when Life magazine printed stories stating that Garrison had mob connections. Now this is something! Garrison spends his time padlocking all illegal pinball operations in New Orleans, and shutting down all B-drinking and prostitution, including a bar owned by Marcello’s brother, yet he is receiving payoffs? Carlos Marcello operated outside of Garrison’s jurisdiction as well. While Garriosn was district attorney of Orleans Parish, Marcello operated out of Jefferson Parish. Another interesting anecdote is that Marcello had confided to Governor John McKeithen that Garrison needed to be removed from office because he was considered “unreliable” simply because Garrison could not be bought (See Mellen, p. 18). And what about Garrison’s million dollar house? His papers at the Archives reveal that Garrison had taken out second and third mortgages on his home just to get by! And all people who knew Garrison knew him as a man who did not give a good ******* about money and material items. Garrison repeatedly would leave National Guard checks sitting in his desk for months at a time before cashing them at the bank. Shortly after his memoir was published by Sheridan Square Press and the distributor claimed bankruptcy and an injunction immediately froze all of Garrison’s royalties from the book. Garrison borrowed $10,000 just so he could do some local promotion. Later when Oliver Stone bought the rights to his memoir, Garrison granted his editor 10 percent of his own royalties and even cut the bankrupt publishers in on the deal! Garrison paid the final $50,000 mortgage on his home (the home that the mob sold him for $35,000) after receiving his dues as an advisor to Stone’s movie. That’s some payoff!

Mr. Lowry states that I have filled my mind with “conspiracy novels”. Well, I would say that this is incorrect. I have, on the other hand, filled my mind with what I like to call cover-up novels. 27 navy blue volumes that hold the great seal of the President of the United States on its cover yet contains more fiction than an Edgar Allen Poe poem! I have familiarized myself with both sides of the spectrum, analyzing the data and drawing conclusions off of the evidence itself. That’s the key Mr. Lowry, the evidence itself. You attack my work without it having even been half-way completed, yet the sources you use insult my intelligence. Your entitled to your opinion, however, when you put it forth to be fact, I expect some endnotes that provide a much more reliable source than a McAdams website post which is all that you have used. Show me the proof. Back up what you are saying in a manner academically rather than running off at the mouth. Historical accuracy is important in a case such as this, and that is just not what I am seeing.

Mitchell Warriner

Notes

*It’s also interesting to note that Lou Ivon is also the man who read Clay Shaw his rights when he was arrested.

**See http://www.ctka.net/2008/bugliosi_5_review.html
Mitchell Warriner | Nov 30, 2009 1:16 am | 1 replies | Request removal

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Re: The Breathtaking Absurdity of Tom Lowry & John McAdams
In reply to The Breathtaking Absurdity of Tom Lowry & John McAdams by Mitchell Warriner (Mr.MW)...... "Patricia Lambert, Edward Jay Epstein, and John McAdams as if these are highly respectable and reliable people. You ignore the scholars on the Garrison investigation: Joan Mellen, Bill Davy, Jim DiEugenio and Paris Flammonde" ...... I'll repeat it again since Mr. MW has apparently been on the 'Space Shuttle' , cut off from reality. Conspiracy Literature constitutes the largest body of fraudulent work ever assembled on any one given subject known to man. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if 'Conspiracy Apologists' have come up with 218 different assassin's, helpers, spotters, and getaway men in Dealey Plaza, firing from 12 different locations, upwards of 15 shots, backed by 44 major entity's worldwide in the 46 years since the assassination took place, that there's something terribly wrong with the critical community of researchers who's top priority is personal profit and self aggrandizement. Bottom line 'The JFK Assassination Tragedy Conspiracy Hoaxing Community' is riddled with fraudulent behavior and the fact that Dr. McAdam's has exposed it is a pretty tough lone 'Nut' to swallow by Mr. MW. The bigger problem is that Mr. MW caters to the contemporary reality that the American public has also gagged on the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald demised CamelWhatEver in 8.9 seconds of his one hour lunch break, all by his lonesome, without so much as breaking a sweat. An extreme embarrassment to those who try to distance their failed left wing world view from the leftest Marxist Oswald who killed Kennedy ...... And just think, if Marina Oswald had just gone to bed with her husband the night before the assassination, instead of wanting to watch JFK on TV, we might be lambasting JFK right now for losing the Vietnam War instead LBJ ...... Amazing! ...... But not to worry the critical community has many many different choices to choose from : LBJ (Unpopular Vietnam War), GHWB (His son's equally unpopular Iraq War), AAMOF there are dozens to choose from, just pick a person you irrationally hate the most and there's a book to read, a video to watch. Trans-historical conspiracy's do apparently exist in 'Paranoid Mentality' that drives 'Conspiracy Theory's' as Robbins and Post observed : "The "˜JFK Paranoid Message' will give more and more, and then it will give even more. The entertainment resources of the "˜JFK Paranoid Message' are unrivaled. It offers puzzles, drama, passion, heroes, villains, and struggle. As always when the story-line is tied to an historical event, especially one that involves
"˜romantic characters' and "˜unexpected death', then "˜fiction', "˜history',
and "˜popular delusion' can be joined in the pursuit of profit. The story, moreover, need never end. If evidence appears that refutes the JFK conspiracy, the suppliers of the discrediting material will themselves be accused of being part of the conspiracy. The "˜Paranoid Explanatory System' , based upon
"˜Circular Thinking Patterns' , is a closed one. Only confirmatory evidence is accepted. Contradictions are dismissed as being naive or, more likely, part of the conspiracy itself". The Garrison persecution of Clay Shaw in a lone 'Nut' Shell ...... Mr. MW. "more incredible, you ignore the evidence itself that lies at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland" .... You're expecting us to believe that 'Conspiracy' is so efficient that they could bump off an 'Irish Mobster' president and yet at the same time left a paper trail of evidence easily found and archived, by the critical community that had and has no prior investigative experience to speak of? How exciting. Hmmmm ? Who was running this 'conspiracy'? The 'CIA' or 'The Apple Dumpling Gang'? Here's "more incredible" things and stuff by Mr. MW "Lou Ivon, Garrison's chief investigator stating that he received negative results in identifying Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand." ...... More of the same Conspiracy SOP, after the investigation, after the jury took 53 minutes to acquit, after Judge Christenberry concluded that Garrison never had any "factual basis for questioning Shaw about the assassination" in the first place, and noted that Garrison "resorted to the use of drugs and hypnosis on Russo, purportedly to 'corroborate' but more likely to concoct his story", referring to Garrison's treatment of Shaw as "outrageous and inexcusable", "a case of continuing harassment and multiple prosecutions" with the likelihood that both would "continue in the future." Christenberry then granted the defense's request for a permanent injunction , after all of this embarrassment it takes a pretty gullible person to believe that Garrison was credible ...... Mr. MW blabs on : "27 navy blue volumes that hold the great seal of the President of the United States on its cover yet contains more fiction than an Edgar Allen Poe poem!"...... The Warren Commission Report is a USG Report that is supposed to contain everything pertinent to the 'Deed'. It's full of contradictions, innuendo, mistakes, and here-say evidence and testimony intended as a contemporaneous record of those four days for future posterity. It's not a trial of Lee Harvey Oswald as you would have people believe. AAMOF when introduced by the defense in the Clay Shaw persecution even Garrison was shocked, and nearly fell off his rocker, while cowering in his office, when word came that the Warren Commission Report was to be excluded from the trial. Ruled "Hearsay". Must be pretty embarrassing that Mr. MW would bring up the WR without checking on it's contextual relationship to reality. He will also have to contend with John McAdam's review of his book if it's ever published (In grave doubt....ie. no interest) at 'Washington Decoded' where he cut to ribbons the latest JFK fantasy installment by James W. Douglas : .John "The notion that Kennedy was killed because he intended to withdraw from Vietnam has become the conventional wisdom among conspiracists, and a recent treatment of that theory, James W. Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable, has drawn some attention. But unfortunately, the author not only distorts history, but unintentionally paints a very unflattering portrait of JFK. See our review of the book here : http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2009/12/unspeakably-awful.html ...... The rest of Mr. M's comments are treated with the same silliness as the above, everyone who doesn't tow the 'conspiracy line' is "compromised"and "discredited" using the SOP of fraudulent literature in a
'Conspiracy of Deceit': Sell emotion first, Scare reader away from primary document's and when using those documents distort it's meaning, Distort evidence and the meaning of that evidence, Emphasize eyewitness testimony, Emphasize unsworn witnesses, Raise non-essential issues, Omit complete
context of the evidence (WR .... Mr. MW was clueless as to it's context), Promote yourself to expert , Don't solicit the other side of the story and if you do distort the meaning, Accuse the defenseless (Clay Shaw), Emphasize preliminary information, Recycle discredited evidence repeatedly over and over and over again ...... Mr. MW goes on a undocumented excursion into fantasy land on several other issues including but not limited to : "confirming Shaw as Bertrand" by a bunch of nobodies that no one has ever heard of before ......
All in all Mr. MW has no standard rules of logic and evidence that must be applied "“ in other words, one has to understand the qualitative difference between primary and secondary sources of evidence and one must have a general familiarity with the principles of sound logic, i.e. how to recognize and avoid (or refute) fallacious arguments. He makes no attempt to supply alternate thesis' but grabs hold of conspiratorial conjecture immediately by his material presented which are his biased and subjective interpretations (ie. credible conclusions or assertions cannot be based upon gossip, rumor, hearsay, anecdotes, half-truths, gross exaggerations, personal prejudice, malice, or outright falsehoods) Some of which are Mr. MW specialty that also include biased selection of evidence in order to discredit someone by suppression of pertinent data and a inability to provide high-quality evidence when making highly pejorative accusations. In addition, there must be recognition that, sometimes, available evidence may be incomplete, ambiguous, or incapable of being verified. Normally there is recognition that honorable and intelligent people may arrive at fundamentally different interpretations of whatever data is under scrutiny , one has to recognize the difference between innocent errors versus intentional acts of omission and commission. The latter category would include such matters that I have not addressed here, smallish matters that Mr. MW seems to think are important while ignoring Garrison's 'Big Picture' which is a mosaic painted by a madman bent on maniacal mayhem and the continued 'Hi-Jacking' of history Mr. MW that has all the hallmarks and water stains of the continued perpetration of a JFK Assassination Tragedy Conspiracy Hoax. Tom Lowry cdddraftsman@yahoo.com
tom lowry | Feb 22, 2010 11:43 am | Request removal

A Lifelong Passion?
Jim DiEugenio's (Mr.D) reply doesn't really add anything to the discourse or the points that .John made and I reiterated upon. AAMOF he uses the same meaningless and discredited sources that got him in the mess he's in today. Like Garrison to believe in a 'Conspiracy Too Big' ultimately has so many problems in logistics and logic as to be unbelievable to say the least. I don't buy into it and I'm going on record to say I won't be reading Mitchell Warriner's book, but will dissuade as many people as I can to stear clear of just another 'Buff' book full of holes.

"Some people never learn. I warned Mr. Lowry about using the discredited John McAdam's web site, but he persists."

Sour grapes

A literal translation and what CTer's are red white hot about is the fact that the most popular web site in the world and the number one web site in the world dealing with the JFK Assassination is not conspiracy oriented, but in fact debunks "the welter of non-sense" that people like Mr. D have foisted upon the American public through a campaign of seriously silly lies and propaganda, bias and conspiracy priorities, and his near-total lack of regard for balance, objectivity, and accuracy. Mr.D thinks repetitions, even when telling 'The Big Lie' will stick to the wall when enough of that kind of mud is slung. There is not a single, reputable historian of intelligence who would agree with him on any of the points he's brought up. If he can find one who isn't selling his mothers soul for the tail end of an anchovy please provide us with his name.

"Only on McAdams' web site can Jim Phelan still be called an insider. James Phelan was not an "insider', he was a liar from the beginning. As he did not write about Garrison's vice campaign in the Saturday Evening Post as he said he did. David Chandler wrote the essay, and Phelan only put his name over it Joan Mellen unearthed that fact in her biography of Garrison."

Please provide proof that Chandler wrote the piece and not Phelan. He seemed to me to have a pretty good 'insider' knowledge about the inner workings of Garrison's Soviet Style Show Trial and persecution of Clay Shaw. I read Mellon's work and I must say she couldn't find water even if she fell out of a boat. .John : "Garrisonites are a rather peculiar and paranoid cult among conspiracy believers, and Joan Mellen's book 'A Farewell to Justice' is the latest to defend DA Jim Garrison, whose ill-conceived campaign to convict Clay Shaw of the JFK assassination was the subject of the movie "JFK." :
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/jfkmovie.htm Yet, like the movie, Mellen has fallen into the trap of believing the most incredible sources and adopting the most outlandish theories in an attempt to vindicate the DA, as Patricia Lambert shows in this review of the book : http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/mellen.htm In another essay, Dave Reitzes discusses Garrison's central, critical witness, a fellow named Perry Raymond Russo. Mellen accepts his testimony, which Reitzes shows was vastly unreliable : http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/Reality.htm Finally, Lambert shows how Mellen blew off the testimony of a key reliable witness, one Dr. Frank Silva, when it conflicted with the Garrison version of events :
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/silva.htm

"You won't find it on McAdams web site. Phelan was further revealed to be a liar on the stand at the Shaw trial. (See Destiny Betrayed, pgs. 202-203) Documents later revealed that he was a an FBI informant at the time he worked on the Garrison case, and also an asset of the FDA."

Another biased pro-conspiracy hoagwashing cited in 'Destiny Betrayed'. Well at least one 'Federal Agency' was concerned enough about Garrison's
'Mental Distortions' ; Did they compel Phelan to slip Garrison some Librium or Thorazine into his food ? Just curious.

"When confronted with the declassified documents that revealed he was a stoolie, he still lied. (See The Assassinations, pgs 313-318 for a long and detailed expose about Phelan's compromised career.) How anyone can take this fabricator seriously today is incomprehensible. Only on McAdams' web site could it happen. The idea that the CIA did not torpedo Garrison's inquiry is silly. Former CIA agent Bill Boxley admitted he was an infiltrator to Lou Ivon and, later, that there was a Garrison Desk at CIA. Further, the new CIA docs prove this by saying such a group did exist and they thought Shaw would be convicted if Garrison was not interfered with."

More undocumented absurdities and distortions of the CIA files. I can assure everyone that if a 'Conspiracy Apologists' like Mr.D says one thing bet your bottom dollar that the opposite will be the truth. Max Holland : "Notes of former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin published in 99' stated the small NY firm of Marzani & Munsell, received subsidies totaling $672,000 from the (KGB) in the early 1960s. Efforts to implicate the CIA by the KGB finally hit the jackpot once the "dupe" named Jim Garrison took interest and he arrested Clay Shaw in March 1967 and charged him with conspiring to assassinate Kennedy. Owing to a clever piece of KGB disinformation planted in Paese Sera, a Communist-owned Italian newspaper."

Factoid : "We have this in the actual documents now for all to see. (See Part 5 b of "Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Bugliosi's Bungle" at ctka.net.) So they went ahead and interfered and obstructed Garrison's case. I detail with precision and evidence how this was done in that essay. The declassified files of the ARRB were very helpful in this regard. Garrison became a state judge because two phony trials led to his defeat for re-election as DA--and the end of his investigation of the Kennedy case."

I do say just because Garrison wiggled out of the bribery charges against him (Both jury's paid off by Marcello's henchmen) doesn't mean he wasn't guilty.

Garrisons case in it's entirety :

Judge Christenberry concluded that Garrison never had any "factual basis for questioning Shaw about the assassination" in the first place, and noted that Garrison "resorted to the use of drugs and hypnosis on Russo, purportedly to 'corroborate' but more likely to concoct his story." He referred to Garrison's treatment of Shaw as "outrageous and inexcusable" -- "a case of continuing harassment and multiple prosecutions" with the likelihood that both would "continue in the future." Christenberry then granted the defense's request for a permanent injunction. THAT'S WHEN GARRISON LOOKED FOR SOME OTHER WAY OF HOAXING FOR A LIVING.

"The fact they were malicious and false prosecutions is proven beyond doubt in his book. The prosecution suborned perjury and then falsified tape recordings. (See Chapter 19, On the Trial of the Assassins.) The object was to defeat Garrison, and then get a more friendly DA in the office who would destroy Garrison's evidence. Which Harry Connick admitting doing. He ordered grand jury testimony on the Kennedy case to be burned and evidence files destroyed. He then lied about it. (See part 5a of the aforementioned article at ctka.net"

A fairly SOP of the Conspiracy Hoaxing Industry is to claim that files that were never in existence to begin with were "burned" and "destroyed". Yet no copies exist to corroborate this concoction. Hmmmm ? Sounds like another Tall Tale.

"The rest of what Mr. Lowry says is nothing but cheap smears. This empty bombast is meant to detract from the fact that I, like about 80% of the public in the USA, and probably more abroad, think President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy."

This of course caters to the fallacy of popular sentiment. That a widely held view is in fact the truth. If this is the case provide proof from your fellow hoaxers that Ufo's, Bigfoot, Lockness Monster, and all the rest of the 'Popular Delusions' of our times are in fact real. I didn't think you could, so forget about those and I'll settle for just one micron of solid physical evidence that conspiracy took the life of JFK. Pretty daunting task eh Mr.D ?

"Lowry and Mr. McAdams, like the Warren Commission, and people in the MSM, believe in the Magic Bullet theory--that a bullet can go through two people, seven layers of skin, smash two bones, change direction through soft tissue, and then reverse trajectory and force its way back out of a wound. And after all that, emerge intact, with no blood or tissue on it."

Well I don't see any wounds ballistic experts denying the Single Bullet Theory is anchored in sound scientific fact. That bullets as they slow can go fast enough to break bones but not fast enough to deform the bullet when passing through two people. DVT for short!

Google : Deminishing Velocity Theory.

"They also believes that when people are struck by rifle blasts from the rear, they ricochet with tremendous force backwards towards the rifle blast. And both of these bizarre reactions and events, which no one can recall happening before, occurred to one person in six seconds. Oh, really? That's a hard one to sell Mr. Lowry. As Garrison termed it, It's a fairy tale. Keep on trying to reverse the laws of physics though. Maybe one day you can prove Newton and Galileo wrong. But it won't be outside of McAdam's web site. Jim DiEugenio"

AAMOF it is "outside of McAdam's web site" as this 200 page monograph length physics treatise proves mathamatically :
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/Scientific_topics/Physics_of_head_shot/Physics_of_the_head_shot.html .... Found at 'The Academic JFK Assassination Site'.

Prof. Kenneth Rahn :

"The physics monograph shows that the quick forward movement of JFK's head is fully explained by a Mannlicher-Carcano bullet from the depository (and indeed requires such a bullet), and secondly that the following two-phase movement of JFK's head and torso to the rear requires a quick mechanical recoil (jet effect minimal) followed by a longer, slower bodily recoil, most likely in the form of a stiffening of the back (neuromuscular reaction)."

Well it looks like you're batting zero again James and it's looking like the 'JFK Conspiracy Hoaxing Industry has met it's match in Dr. McAdam's and his trusty Lt. yours truely ..... Something I never try to minimise by any sense of false modesty.

Tom Lowry
cdddraftsman@yahoo.com
tom lowry | Feb 22, 2010 7:55 am | 0 replies | Request removal

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A Lifelong passion
Some people never learn.

I warned Mr. Lowry about using the discredited John McAdams web site, but he persists.

Only on McAdams' web site can Jim Phelan still be called an insider. James Phelan was not an "insider', he was a liar from the beginning. As he did not write about Garrison's vice campaign in the Saturday Evening Post as he said he did. David Chandler wrote the essay, and Phelan only put his name over it. Joan Mellen unearthed that fact in her biography of Garrison. You won't find it on McAdams web site. Phelan was further revealed to be a liar on the stand at the Shaw trial. (See Destiny Betrayed, pgs. 202-203) Documents later revealed that he was a an FBI informant at the time he worked on the Garrison case, and also an asset of the FDA. When confronted with the declassified documents that revealed he was a stoolie, he still lied. (See The Assassinations, pgs 313-318 for a long and detailed expose about Phelan's compromised career.) How anyone can take this fabricator seriously today is incomprehensible. Only on McAdams' web site could it happen.

The idea that the CIA did not torpedo Garrison's inquiry is silly. Former CIA agent Bill Boxley admitted he was an infiltrator to Lou Ivon and, later, that there was a Garrison Desk at CIA. Further, the new CIA docs prove this by saying such a group did exist and they thought Shaw would be convicted if Garrison was not interfered with. We have this in the actual documents now for all to see. (See Part 5 b of "Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Bugliosi's Bungle" at ctka.net.) So they went ahead and interfered and obstructed Garrison's case. I detail with precision and evidence how this was done in that essay. The declassified files of the ARRB were very helpful in this regard.

Garrison became a state judge because two phony trials led to his defeat for re-election as DA--and the end of his investigation of the Kennedy case. The fact they were malicious and false prosecutions is proven beyond doubt in his book. The prosecution suborned perjury and then falsified tape recordings. (See Chapter 19, On the Trial of the Assassins.) The object was to defeat Garrison, and then get a more friendly DA in the office who would destroy Garrison's evidence. Which Harry Connick admitting doing. He ordered grand jury testimony on the Kennedy case to be burned and evidence files destroyed. He then lied about it. (See part 5a of the aforementioned article at ctka.net)

The rest of what Mr. Lowry says is nothing but cheap smears. This empty bombast is meant to detract from the fact that I, like about 80% of the public in the USA, and probably more abroad, think President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. Lowry and Mr. McAdams, like the Warren Commission, and people in the MSM, believe in the Magic Bullet theory--that a bullet can go through two people, seven layers of skin, smash two bones, change direction through soft tissue, and then reverse trajectory and force its way back out of a wound. And after all that, emerge intact, with no blood or tissue on it. They also believes that when people are struck by rifle blasts from the rear, they ricochet with tremendous force backwards towards the rifle blast. And both of these bizarre reactions and events, which no one can recall happening before, occurred to one person in six seconds. Oh, really?

That's a hard one to sell Mr. Lowry. As Garrison termed it, It's a fairy tale. Keep on trying to reverse the laws of physics though. Maybe one day you can prove Newton and Galileo wrong. But it won't be outside of McAdam's web site.

Jim DiEugenio
James DiEugenio | Dec 2, 2009 12:21 am | 0 replies | Request removal

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A Lifelong passion
I am also replying to Mr. Lowry. Although where to start is a quandary.

How about his inveterate use of the web site of John McAdams. Mr. McAdams is to say the least, not objective, when it comes to the JFK case. And there have been several exposes written about him. Suffice it to say, he once used a false name to attend a JFK researchers conference. Not knowing that there actually was a person in the JFK critical community who had the name of Paul Nolan, he actually used that alias. At times, he actually uses the comments on his JFK forum in lieu of references to actual books on the case. For instance, Michael Kurtz wrote an essay in Louisiana History journal in 1980 about the many connections between Oswald, Guy Banister, and David Ferrie. This was two years before he wrote his book Crime of the Century, in which he postulated that Castro killed JFK. On page 203 of that book he mentions that previous essay, and he also lists it in the bibliography and footnotes.

Using a POST FROM HIS FORUM, McAdams said that Kurtz never wrote about the sightings of Oswald and Banister before he wrote his book in 1982. And when Kurtz was asked about this he allegedly replied that he did not think they were important. Obviously, for someone to use a post instead of a book is academically flawed. But clearly, the post was wrong since Kurtz HAD written about the Oswald associations before he wrote his book. He then mentioned them in the book, and he did source them in the book. Mr. Kurtz did not use them in the book to build a case for cpnspiracy because he clearly states he does not think the CIA was involved in Kennedy's assassination.

Mr. McAdams has also said that Dan Campbell mentioned seeing a young man in Guy Banister's office who had the hair style of a Marine, but Campbell did not say that this was Oswald until years after he made that initial quote. The first writer that Campbell talked to on the record was Tony Summers. If you open his book, then titled "Conspiracy", and turn to page 293, you will see that Campbell does mention a young man with a Marine haircut in Banister's office. Two sentences later, Summers writes that when Oswald came on TV after the assassination, Dan realized that this was the man in Banister's office. Most rational people would not think two sentences is a long time to wait for a positive ID. This is why it is a danger to use information from that web site. Mr. Lowry seems unaware of that. Now he is warned.

Let me conclude with a concrete example. Mr. Lowry uses a quote from Lou Ivon--excerpted by Mr. McAdams with no context-- saying that Garrison's investigators had not been able to identify Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand in their visits to the French Quarter. What Mr. Lowry does not note in his post is that Mr. Garrison acknowledged this in his book. (p. 85) In her biography of Garrison, Joan Mellen explains that many bar owners resented Garrison for closing down many saloons in his attempt to shut down racketeering. Therefore they would not cooperate with him in his JFK probe. But when Garrison personally stopped going on these searches for Bertrand, they got numerous identifications of Shaw as Bertrand. Including two women who admitted that they were angry at Garrison for his anti-racketeering activities. As Bill Davy proves in his book, even the FBI knew Shaw used that alias. (Let Justice be Done p. 193) Further, an internal FBI memo shows that Shaw's name had come up in teh Bureau's December 1963 investigation of the Kennedy murder. (Ibid p. 192)

Mitchell Warriner is on the right track. I look forward to his book.

Jim DiEugenio
James DiEugenio | Nov 28, 2009 4:25 pm | 0 replies | Request removal

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