This Real Deal episode, incidentally, concerns the Murchison ranch ‘party’ the night before JFK’s murder, attended by witness Madeleine Brown –LBJ’s mistress– who swore to the occurrence there of a secret high-level closed-door meeting at which J.Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, John McCloy, LBJ and others were present. The Murchison meeting is the presumed green light for the next-day assassination.
According to Warren Commission testimony, tourist pictures of Oswald in Minsk include those taken by Rita Naman, Monica Kramer, and “Mrs. Marie Hyde” (more below)
...”[That the] United States government..demonstrat[ed] almost paternal solicitude for Lee Oswald’s welfare even while he was in the Soviet Union comprised, to my mind, a steady uninterrupted pattern. And the preferential treatment did not end with the arrival of Lee and Marina and their young daughter in New York in June of 1962…
DeMohrenschildt’s fourth wife Jeanne had moved to Dallas in 1953 where she got a job designing for Nardis sportswear: “While Jeanne designed clothing, her co-worker Abraham Zapruder cut the patterns and material.” [p79, Family of Secrets] ” Jeanne had been born Eugenia Fomenko in 1914 in Harbin China..to Russian parents… [S]he and her first husband, Robert LeGon, had fled Manchuria when it was under Japanese control… Eventually, they made their way to New York, where brother Sergei was working on the top-secret Manhattan Project… [p78, ibid.]
In March of 1957, when Banister made this statement, Oswald was being trained on radar in Florida. The man who designed nuclear weapons “down to the size of an artillery shell” was Theodore B. (‘Ted’) Taylor, who left Los Alamos between 1956 and 1957 to join the creative staff of General Atomics, subsidiary of General Dynamics, in La Jolla CA. Ted said that General Atomics was like “Los Alamos West”. More on Ted Taylor below.
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1954 turned out to be a banner year for nuclear expansion following Eisenhower’s December ’53 “Atoms For Peace” speech to the U.N. General Assembly in New York. U.S. atmospheric tests that year took place exclusively in the Pacific Proving Grounds, scheduled as Operation Castle beginning March 1, 1954 with test ‘Bravo’.–a test so unexpectedly radioactive from more-than-double its predicted megatonnage, that an outcry over the fallout came in from around the world. AEC chairman Strauss was a shipboard observer at Bikini Atoll for Bravo which was the first and only bomb test he ever personally attended.
The military response to Castle-Bravo was to cancel two of its planned detonations, including the largest, and space the remaining tests farther apart, adding more than three weeks to the operation. The Salk polio vaccine field tests on American schoolchildren were also commensurately delayed.
Chairman Strauss returned to Washington at the end of March. filed his report about “wind shift”, and proceeded with his historic AEC tribunal against Robert Oppenheimer. Boris Pash and the FBI were indispensable Strauss allies throughout, and by May’s end Oppenheimer was banished, relegated to return to Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study under the authority of Strauss, who was chairman of the IAS board.
The pseudonymous Torbitt File, written by lawyer David Copeland and bearing the title “Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal”, makes this claim:
Cubans in the Congo
It appears that intoning “Bay of Pigs” or “anti-Castro” as an explanation for CIA paramilitary operations connected with the New Orleans Banister apparatus occurs with liturgical frequency, however at the timing of the earlier Schlumberger bunker “heist” by Novel and his compatriots, the CIA was farther afield assisting in the secession of Katanga from its mother state of the (former Belgian) Congo. Mineral rich Katanga had been the object of covetous colonialism for the whole of the 20th century. Lewis Strauss, the Warburgs, and Herbert Hoover had once spear-headed a plan to make Katanga the center of a “United States of Africa”, even as Edgar Sengier of the Union Miniere du Haut Katanga was then in the process of arranging uranium yellowcake for delivery to the Manhattan Project.
When the nationalist Congolese overcame their occupation rule winning independence for their country in June of 1960 and inaugurating Patrice Lumumba as the first prime minister of new Zaire, Allen Dulles issued an ‘urgent’ directive for his demise. CIA intervention included providing Katanga’s ‘leader’ Tshombe with an army of mercenaries: Cuban exiles and other soldiers-of-fortune induced by “high pay” and other Agency perks. Tshombe was ultimately blamed for Lumumba’s murder on January 17, 1961, in the very last days of Eisenhower’s administration.
New Orleans native Gordon Novel himself had a violent Neo-Nazi racist past, if the Congolese operations had any ideological personal meaning. He later expressed great admiration for his CIA cohorts as the “best people” and “real patriots”.
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Patrice Lumumba, died by CIA-assisted assassination January 17, 1961:
“Apparently what happened is that this [CIA] man William Harvey..recruited someone by the codename QJ/WIN to assassinate Lumumba… [Harvey] was supposed to recruit people from the underworld..[and] suggested using..Corsicans… They didn’t want to bring in the [Sicilian] Mafia because [CIA] were protecting [them] as payback for their help… [Harvey] hired this man QJ/WIN on November 1, 1960 in Frankfurt for the Lumumba operation.” http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/01/29/tempelsman-s-man-weighs-in-on-the-murder-of-patrice-lumumba/
Sweden’s UN Secretary General, then residing in NYC, died in a mysterious plane crash on September 18, 1961, on his way to negotiate a ceasefire on behalf of Tshombe’s Katanga. Sweden too, uncoincidentally, was seeking to acquire atomic bombs and join the Nuclear Club.
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Early in Europe’s WWII, Union Miniere du Haut Katanga and its chief Edgar Sengier had a pre-arranged shipment of Congolese uranium yellowcake shipped to the U.S., to sit dockside on Staten Island, New York awaiting its use in the future Manhattan Project. Sengier’s good friend Lewis Strauss later sang the Belgian’s praises for his remarkable “foresight”. Later on, in 1942, following an alleged act of enemy sabotage at the New York docks, the US Navy negotiated a dock protection contract with Meyer Lansky for the duration of the war. This arrangement between the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence and Meyer Lansky (or, as some sources purvey it, Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano) was dubbed Operation Underworld (and also published as The Luciano Project). Luciano’s role, ultimately, was to accept deportation from prison back to Sicily where he helped re-institute the Sicilian mafia, crushed under Mussolini, and aid the passage of Allied troops. Lansky, afterward, reigned as the Syndicate’s top man.
“Thus, the intelligence-mob collaboration established with Operation Underworld did not end after World War II. On the contrary, postwar narcotics overseas were subordinated to anti-Communist activities; and they were used as cover for ongoing use of mob assets, above all drug traffickers, around the world.
…”In this way, FBN [Federal Bureau of Narcotics] officials protected top-level international drug traffickers who were also anti-communists.” –p166-167, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by Peter Dale Scott
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Garrison described the Schlumberger ammunition retrieval : “The CIA, which was also supportive of the French OAS generals [Organisation Armee Secrete, in French!], had supplied Schlumberger with anti-personnel ammunition and in this operation at Houma [air base], following the demise of the OAS, was simply getting its ammunition back…which was then divided equally between Ferrie’s apartment and Banister’s inner office until the time arrived for its transport to Miami.” (p40, On the Trail of the Assassins)
But the French generals, based in Algeria and Spain, at this point were still far from their demise. “The most notorious OAS-sponsored effort was the attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle in 1962.” (p136, A Farewell To Justice, 2005, by Joan Mellen), which continues, “Banister operative Tommy Baumler remarked that ‘those who killed John F. Kennedy were those who wanted to kill de Gaulle.’ He was referring to the CIA, Clay Shaw, Banister and…PERMINDEX…”
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Unique Little Missiles
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Reactor fuel pellets
Did they look like this?
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“In the wake of their [Bay of Pigs] defeat the bitter Cubans turned their wrath against the President who, they claimed, had not given the troops enough air support. However, according to an official government inquiry into the matter, the real reason for the overwhelming defeat was the failure of the CIA to provide the Cuban rebels with enough ammunition. The report added that the CIA had unilaterally stopped a convoy of supplies and ammunition to the troops –without the permission of the President.” [ref. Theodore C. Sorenson, Kennedy, p335 and The Hoffa Wars, p133, by Dan E. Moldea, 1978]
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During the JFK murder investigation and the probe into Oswald’s weapon:
“The Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition..raised questions about CIA involvement… In the mid-1950s, four million rounds of this ammunition was purchased by the Marine Corps, prompting the author of the FBI document to state: The interesting thing about this order is that it is for ammunition which does not fit and cannot be fired in any of the United States Marine Corps weapons. This gives rise to the obvious speculation that it is a contract for ammunition placed by the CIA with Western Cartridge Corporation under a USMC cover for concealment purposes.” –p.201, Crossfire, by Jim Marrs, 1989
Did Oswald, under the alias Alek Hidell, purportedly mail-order a Mannlicher-Carcano to procure this unusual ammunition?
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The surreptitious ammunition transfers from the Houma air base and beyond by the Banister outfit are among the most compelling and under-described of pre-assassination events. They occurred over a long period from at least the spring of 1961, before the Bay of Pigs, until the FBI raid in the summer of 1963. Despite the “major lead” provided to Jim Garrison’s investigation, an intentional effort to downplay or disregard the significance of this traffick was announced by Garrison in his October 1967 Playboy interview:
Playboy: “The New Orleans States-Item of June 14, 1967 quoted [Gordon] Novel as saying that if he were granted immunity from the assassination investigation, he would be willing to testify on a number of points, including ‘international fraud, mysterious intelligence activities from November 1959 to date [Oct.1967] in the Southern quadrant of the USA and certain islands off Florida, seditious treason, hot war games and cold munitions transfers, ten 1950-model Canadian surplus Vampire jet supporter aircraft and certain Cuban-Anglo-French sabotage affairs of early 1961.’ Why did you reject this offer?”
Garrison: “These are all intriguing… but that isn’t the subject of my investigation.”
(excerpted from Part 3)
Earlier in the same interview, Garrison responded to the “who, how, and why” question concerning a conspiracy of assassins with this reply:
…“On the operative level, you find anti-Castro Cuban exiles…[who] believed sincerely that Kennedy had sold them out to the Communists. On a higher, control level, you find a number of people of ultra right-wing persuasion –not simply conservative, mind you, but people who could be described as neo-Nazi… After Kennedy’s domestic moves toward racial integration and his attempts to forge a peaceful foreign policy, as exemplifies by his signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, they found [a] target.
So both of these groups had a vital stake in changing U.S. foreign policy… The CIA was involved with both of these groups…
There was, in fact, a triangulation of CIA-supported anti-Castro activity between Dallas –where Jack Ruby was involved in collecting guns and ammunition for the underground– and Miami and New Orleans, where most of the training was going on. But then, Kennedy, who had signed a secret agreement with Krushchev after the Missile Crisis pledging not to invade Cuba if Russia would soft-pedal Castro’s subversive activities in the Americas, began to crack down on CIA operations against Cuba. As a result, on July 31, 1963, the FBI raided the headquarters of the group of Cuban exiles and Minutemen training north of Lake Pontchartrain and confiscated all their guns and ammunition –despite the fact that the operation had the sanction of the CIA. This action may have sealed Kennedy’s fate.”
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The FBI raid, which may have even depended on information provided by Oswald, could have sealed his fate too. Approximately eight weeks later, at the end of September ’63, Oswald took the alleged trip to Mexico City where he was said to visit both the Cuban and Soviet embassies –key (but false) evidence against him for a role in an international communist conspiracy. Just exactly what Gordon Novel was offering in testimony, had a deal been made, slipped away as a lost opportunity. Novel moved on and is currently divulging secrets about Alien Contact. (See ‘Hidden Hand’, which includes Gordon Novel and Jim Marrs)
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Mary, Vary and Ferrie
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An alternate story about the Schlumberger munitions cache moving through New Orleans suggests itself in a few particulars of Ed Haslam’s book, Dr. Mary’s Monkey [DMM], originally titled Mary, Ferrie, and the Monkey Virus. The featured center of activity in DMM is a high-energy particle accelerator hidden in the laboratory of the Public Health Service naval hospital. According to Haslam, the accelerator was used in developing a mutant virus for an urgent anti-cancer vaccine countermeasure against the SV40 monkey virus-contaminated mass polio vaccines. Haslam claims this secret medical do-gooding was assigned to the supervision of Dr.s Alton Ochsner and Mary Sherman with the outside assistance of Judyth Vary [Mrs.Baker], David Ferrie, and Lee H. Oswald. No evidence exists of Haslam’s anti-SV40-cancer program, but it’s a matter of record that Alton Ochsner supported the “community service” activities of the Banister-connected Cubans, which included the transfer, support, and resettlement of incoming refugees. Among these efforts was the use of a laundry truck known to have hauled off the munitions plunder more than once.
Unfortunately, Dr. Mary’s Monkey does not prove that a particle accelerator was actually on the grounds of the New Orleans PHS in 1963. Nonetheless, as described, the machine in question bore the requisite assembly of industrial use equipment –not for medical purposes! Haslam’s multi-story accelerator split the primary vertical beam on a reflective hub set below in a basement chamber, directing the fractioned energy horizontally into thick fireproof containers resembling kilns. Inside such containers any number of high-energy transformations are possible, such as altering the molecular configuration of metal, wood or rubber to create new ‘metamaterial’ products.
It happens that in 1961, coincident with the munitions transfers, one of the foremost American physicists from the UCBerkeley Rad Lab, Dr. Luis Alvarez, was granted a patent for an accelerator of this type designed to reconstitute spent nuclear fuel (or depleted uranium). It is easy to imagine, and much more plausible in application, that the NOLA accelerator in Ed Haslam’s scheme was re-producing nuclear fuel with the appearance of ammunition.
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Recall Jim Garrison’s words: …”control was so careful that ammunition was kept far-flung in outlying areas. Dispersal was the rule… in New Orleans only small amounts were kept at Banister’s office at any one time.” If these munitions emitted a particular radioactive signature it would be wise to manage their storage in this way. On the Houma military base, which was guarded and active 24/7, perhaps it made no difference when the cache was militarily protected, but we are also to believe that the transfers were protected as a sanctioned trade under the watchful eyes of government operatives, even in the open on the streets of downtown New Orleans –why then would these munitions require dispersal and isolation? What made these munitions “unique” and who, with any firearms experience, would use the word “unique” in describing them? Were they variously labeled for purposes of special handling and destination routes? Was all the ‘cancer research’, including the disease cases of David Ferrie and Jack Ruby, more expressly intended for themselves as special handlers of carcinogenic cargo?
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Robert Oswald remarked on the physical changes in his brother Lee, returned from Russia at age 22, as having thinned wire-textured hair and a sallow complexion –very unlike the robustly youthful marine he had last seen in the fall of 1959. Signs of early aging, like LHO’s, are a common and predictable side-effect of radiation exposure. The black-and-white photo below on the right shows not just thinning hair but patches of scalp which can be confirmed in the video images of Oswald being taken through the Dallas PD hallway.
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Judyth, Lee Oswald’s 1963 summer girlfriend, attests to the gunrunning she herself participated in helping to unload weapons shipped to NOLA’s waterfront in crates of bananas and furniture.
According to Judyth, discussing Lee Oswald:
“He believed that the world could be changed without violence –he believed in nonviolence… In the Marines, he was a member of a group that was against nuclear bombs, against nuclear war… He really was a double agent… Lee was in the middle of a lot of different operations… [and] was a very busy man… [a] real patriot…and a very brave man.” (www.radiofetzer.com, 2010 archives,
http://nwopodcast.com/fetz/media/jim%20fetzer%20real%20deal-judyth%20vary%20baker.mp3)
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LHO newly turned 24yrs.
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Particle accelerator designer/builder and Manhattan Project veteran Luis Alvarez lent his formidable authority as a physicist to the Warren Commission, affirming its conclusions. Next to Leo Szilard and Ernest O. Lawrence, Alvaraz was the beneficiary of a privileged relationship with Adm. Lewis Strauss.
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Alvarez Zapruder film ‘jiggle’ analysis:
Film and audio analyses:
Zapruder observations:
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Alvarez patent: April 19, 1960 US2,933,442, Electronuclear reactor “…is described in which a very high-energy particle accelerator is employed with appropriate target structure to produce ..material in commercial quantities by nuclear transformations… The fertile material of the lattice is converted by neutron absorption reactions to an artificially produced material, e.g. plutonium, where depleted uranium is utilized as the fertile material.”
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Stealing plutonium fuel pellets, it turns out, was easy if you worked in an AEC contract plant. See the post ‘JFK File: Signs of Traffick”
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David Ferrie, ‘suicided’ on the fifth day after the NOLA
States-Item announced the Garrison probe on Feb.17, 1967.
Harold Weisberg:“The Warren Commission never conducted any investigation of Ferrie!” p168, Oswald in New Orleans, Weisberg, 1967. “Coronor Nicholas Chetta announced on February 28 that there was evidence of neither suicide nor murder… Coronor Chetta said death had to have come before four a.m. on February 22. George Lardner Jr, Washington Post reporter, was with Ferrie in his flat until four a.m. ‘Ferrie was certainly living when I said goodbye to him’…Lardner said…” [p164,ibid.]…“the corpse of David Ferrie shared the unkempt second-floor flat at 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway with three thousand books, including a full assassination library..[and] in the words of the Associated Press dispatch of February 28, ‘a blue 100-pound practice aerial bomb (exactly what the FBI seized when it raided the New Orleans invasion camp on July 31, 1963)...” [p163, ibid.] “..there is no denial of the third-hand report that the FBI had been investigating Ferrie ‘several weeks before 11-24-63’ “ [p182, ibid]
Ferrie was arrested by Garrison 11-25-63.
He appeared to be a common denominator in New Orleans assassination activity. A most interesting bit of disregarded evidence about Ferrie concerned the “Winnipeg Airport Incident”:
Two and a half months after the assassinations of JFK and Oswald, a 35-year-old businessman named Richard Giesbrecht who was waiting to meet a client, overheard a conversation in the airport restaurant lounge between two men, one of whom was Ferrie –‘positively’ identified, however, only after his death became front page news four years later. At the time of the conversation, Giesbrecht took notes. The men were discussing Oswald, how much his wife knew and then, “Ferrie asked about paper or merchandise coming out of Nevada. Latin Accent said it was too risky and that a house or shop had been closed down at a place called Mercury…[but] a good shipment had reached Caracas from Newport…”
Giesbrecht may or may not have been wrong in his ID of Ferrie –the man he saw wore eyeglasses– and others with ‘Ferrie’ that day, including a third man who pursued Giesbrecht attempting to contact the airport’s RCMP office, have also eluded identification, but the location mentioned in the conversation is unmistakable.
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‘Gateway’ to the NTS and Groom Lake
Mercury, Nevada is a “closed town”, according to wikipedia –an artificial barracks-turned-town on the Atomic Energy Commission’s Nevada Proving Grounds. “The town started in 1950 at the beginning of operations of the Nevada Test Site as Base Camp Mercury… In the early 1960s the town population grew to over 10,000… In 1962, the Desert Rock Airstrip was added for the visit from President John F. Kennedy on December 8. The town flourished until 1992 when all but subcritical nuclear testing ended… The population shrank rapidly thereafter..[to] a skeleton crew of scientists and military…last..recorded about 500 people.”
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Another Atomic Energy Commission facility factored into the Oswald-centered JFK-assassination scheme in a curious way: On July 26, 1963, the visitor registry at the Oak Ridge Tennessee Atomic museum was signed in the handwriting of Lee H Oswald, giving the address of Dallas Rd. Dallas. At the time, Oswald was still a resident of New Orleans, yet to make his public pro-Castro appearances.
Additional, but implausible and unusual “sign-ins” under Oswald’s name occurred in other places after this, though the Oak Ridge registry appears to be standing the test of time. LHO was unemployed on July 26, fired from the Reilly Coffee Co. a week earlier on the 19th. He filed for unemployment on the 22nd and does not reappear in the NOLA paper trail again until the 29th. Many sources have noted that Oswald did not drive a car, but Judyth says he did and liked to drive fast.
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“USSR” is scribbled after “Oswald”. Was it tampering after-the-fact?
If Oswald was actually in Oak Ridge on July 26, just a few days later the FBI in New Orleans launched its raid on the scattered munitions cache held by the Banister crew. On the same day as the Oswald visitor sign-in, President Kennedy broadcast to the public the signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
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Boris Pash, and the FBI, maintained permanent offices at Oak Ridge.
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According to Bill Kelly’s timeline, on July 27th “Lee H. Oswald makes a speech against communism to Jesuits in Mobile, Alabama.” Two days later on the 29th “The Dallas FBI office asked the New Orleans FBI office to ‘verify’ both LHO and Marina’s presence in New Orleans.”
Oswald was, during these last days of July, on a “family trip” with his uncle, aunt (the Murrets), and Marina, scheduled to visit the Jesuit seminary outside Mobile where his cousin attended.
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Incidentally, Judyth recalls that the ‘mentor’, Col. Philip Doyle, who arranged for her to leave highschool in Florida and join in current elite cancer research prior to New Orleans, was a man with “close friends who had significant contacts to Oak Ridge…[and] did teach physics…”, adding that “he selected a few of us and worked with us, however..he was in a big community of retired military officers who supplied us with, like, geiger counters…” (www.radiofetzer.blogspot.com, May 3 2010, podcast archive) The name Doyle is linked to Permindex and also to a curious and brief New Orleans encounter with Oswald caught on film.
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* Richard Giesbrecht
was 100% certain that the odd-looking man he overheard in the Winnipeg Airport lounge was David Ferrie, as told to author/journalist Paris Flammonde.
Mercury, Nevada was but one significant AEC location mentioned by the airport men; the other was Kansas City in reference to a meeting that would soon be held as a “textile” business gathering. Kansas City, Missouri was host to a special Atomic Energy Commission facility called the “Kansas City Plant” where for a period of time, reactor fuel slugs were made, though the main work of the plant focused on weapons components and assemblies.
“NIOSH has information that KCP workers inspected and assembled uranium components, machined uranium slugs, and handled uranium billets [small cylinders] and ingots… In February 1951, KCP set up a machine shop to produce 1,000 slugs per day to fuel AEC production reactors…. [p.21, NIOSH document] …The first report [to NIOSH] of DU handling at KCP was in April 1958, however DU machining began September 9, 1958…” [p.23]
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*The KCP, Kansas City Plant, situated in the Bannister Federal Complex
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According to information from Giesbrecht to Flammonde:
“...the [men] began speaking of a meeting to take place at the Townhouse Motor Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri on March 18. They mentioned that the rendezvous would be registered under the name of a textile firm… Ferrie mentioned that an ‘aunt’ (or ‘auntie’?–gay patois for an older homosexual) would be flying in from California. A name which Giesbrecht thought sounded like ‘Romeniuk’ was mentioned several times…. the author [Flammonde] inquired whether the word might have been ‘Romanian’ but [Giesbrecht] did not know…”
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[Flammonde interviews Giesbrecht]:
Flammonde: “From the photographs you have seen of David Ferrie..[with] a three year lapse between seeing the man and the photograph… on the basis of that, what would you say your certainty that it was Ferrie was? Fifty percent? Eighty percent?”
Giesbrecht: “I would say a hundred percent.”
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Initially, the Minneapolis FBI responded to the Giesbrecht/RCMP information with enthusiasm, calling it the break they’d been waiting for. Within a few months, however, Giesbrecht would be told that it was “too big”. Confusion over the location of the “Townhouse Motor Hotel” was to reign at FBI offices until the matter was dismissed. Researcher Peter Whitmey added, “… I had no idea whether or not the Kansas City or Wichita offices followed up on the “Townhouse” lead, since I had not received any document in this regard as a result of my FOIPA request. However, by inputting “Townhouse Motor Hotel” during a search of the NARA website, I discovered that there was, indeed, a four-page report, dated April 9, 1964. Initially, the FBI in Kansas City made inquiries with the Townhouse Motor Hotel on Seventh and State Streets in Kansas City, Kansas, as well as the Coates House Hotel on Tenth and Broadway in Kansas City, Missouri to no avail. In addition, the report included the results of a further investigation conducted by the Wichita, Kansas office, after discovering that there was a Townhouse Motel on the corners of Kellogg and Broadway. As in the case of K.C., there was no reservation for a textile group scheduled on or about March 18, nor for anyone by the name “Romaniuk…”
In this same link is another turn of Giesbrecht’s ‘hearsay’, written down by his lawyer Harry Backlin the day after the airport incident: “Reference was made in Backlin’s detailed letter to a planned ‘sales meeting’, the first since November, to be held in ‘a place sounding like Townhouse in Kansas City’. Mention was made of the names ‘Kellogg’ and ‘Broadway’…”
No researcher yet has suggested that the men involved in the airport incident may have been using an informal name code, counting even use of the name Oswald, but we can consider going along with Sherlock Holmes on this one and “ruling out the impossible” (names and places that don’t match) for a remains closer to truth.
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James P. Hosty
described as the Dallas FBI ‘handler’ of Oswald, was transferred to
Kansas City Missouri after the issuance of the Warren report (but transferred later, in 1965):
“As a consequence for not arresting Oswald before the assassination, Hosty was banished by Hoover to the Kansas City KS FBI bureau. In those days it was considered by the director as the graveyard for agents who failed in the line of duty. But Hosty’s opinion of Kansas City…was a great place for him and his late wife Janet to raise their nine children, and a good place for an FBI agent to work.” http://www.donmooreswartales.com/2013/11/22/james-hosty/
–note that this interview erroneously names the state of Kansas, ironically the one ‘Kansas City’ with an actual Townhouse Motor Hotel, listed as the Cross Lines Tower in wikipedia today.
Peter Whitmey remarked that Hosty was the only assassination case investigator familiar with Giesbrecht: “Hosty indicated to me that he was aware of the Giesbrecht allegations and had, in fact, read both the FBI reports and the RCMP’s own statement, which he claimed were furnished to the Warren Commission.”
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Kansas City Missouri Chief of Police Clarence M. Kelley
Far from an FBI agent’s wasteland, Chief Kelley, installed in 1961 on the recommendation of Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, innovated and updated policing there to a national model. After Watergate, and following the resignation of the hapless Patrick Gray, Kelley became Director of the FBI on Nixon’s final appointment to the post.
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Hosty was the only known FBI agent to interview Oswald at the Dallas Police Department after his arrest. Hosty additionally handled the investigation into the “Sylvia Odio encounter”, a visit allegedly made by Oswald and two Latin men to the Dallas apartment of Ms. Odio in late September ’63. Oswald’s ‘official’ whereabouts at that time put him in Mexico City, though known and confirmed to have been an imposter, the identity of the Odio visitors remains unresolved. Hosty himself said, “I’m also the third of three Agents who was assigned to the Lee Oswald case. The first one John Fain had it for two years and he is the one that interviewed Oswald twice before the assassination. Then the second Agent to have it assigned was Milton Kaact. K-a-a-c-t… Milton Kaact was in New Orleans… Oswald was interviewed one time in New Orleans by Jack Quigley… I got the case in October of 1963, one month before the assassination, lucky me. I never did interview Oswald until he was arrested… I was forbidden to interview Oswald because he was a contact case. As you [FBI] all know..when they contact the Soviet Embassy, you may not interview them without specific permission. In this case, I am sure it would never have been granted because the CIA was involved… I might add that I found out later that all of the, quote, CIA agents, unquote, who were conducting the surveillance were actually FBI Agents who had left the Bureau, gone to the CIA and had set up a system almost identical to what we had in New York and Washington Field Office. I got that straight from the legal attache [legat] from Mexico. I forget his name…but he told me and several other agents…in September of ’63 that these were all ex-FBI.”
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At odds with Hosty’s account is another that asserts, “Dallas FBI agent James P. Hosty Jr. For over a year in 1962-63, Hosty had been keeping occasional tabs on Oswald and his wife, Marina.” p55, The Man Who Knew Too Much, by Dick Russell, 1992
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More references to pre-assassination activity in Kansas City, known to the FBI, includes ties to David Ferrie, Jack Ruby, and the anti-Castro Cubans.
Example:
Researcher-author-lawyer Harold Weisberg wrote about an alleged Castro “spy” named Fernando Fernandez, who was caught and tortured in Miami trying to infiltrate an anti-Castro group called CDM or MDC (Christian democratic movement), ostensibly to get back into Cuba. “Fernandez must have known better: Infante told the FBI that what really worried Fernandez, why he really wanted to get out of the country, was his fear of prosecution by the federal authorities at Kansas City. Fernandez confessed just this, in detail. He had operated ‘an employment agency wherein he imported Mexican women to act as maids to the Kansas City area’..as a sideline while attending Kansas City University, ‘and this activity resulted in investigation by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Fearing arrest by INS, Fernandez left Kansas City and came to Miami…desiring to return to Cuba… Fernandez also told the the Miami FBI that ‘he traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana, to receive commando training at a farm about 30 miles north of New Orleans..[which was] inadequate and it appeared to Fernandez that the MDC was conducting a racket by exhibiting the ‘commandos’ in training to wealthy Americans who were asked to contribute to the anti-Castro cause… Ultimately, Fernandez was relocated..[w]ith the help of the Catholic Cuban Relief, [and] sent to Chicago [where he was] charged with ‘encouraging and inducing the illegal entry of aliens…” [sentenced February 1964]. Weisberg adds that “one reason for federal silence about this New Orleans training camp could be..embarassment at having tolerated such consummate incompetence. They could not plan and execute the capture of a home for crippled octogenarian women. The time had come…” pp157-161, Oswald in New Orleans, 1967
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Professor Peter Dale Scott records that “As the FBI agent assigned to handle both arms trafficking and the Oswalds before the assassination, Hosty quickly became a party to some the FBI’s most serious cover-up activities. [p119, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK] “One possibility…is that Oswald was indeed an FBI informant…and that in Dallas James Hosty, the FBI liason on gunrunning cases, was using Oswald to investigate gunrunning.” [p120, ibid.]
“On January 24 1964, the Warren Commission heard from Dallas district attorney Henry Wade and Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr that Oswald had been an FBI informant since September 1962, that he had a government voucher for $200 at the time of his arrest, and that FBI Agent James Hosty’s name and phone number were in his address book…[which] proved to be true… As to the story that Oswald was an FBI informant, I doubt that Oswald was directly on the FBI payroll. A more likely possibility is that he worked for a private security agency which in turn reported to the FBI, the way that ex-FBI and ex-Office of Naval Intelligence agent Guy Banister, according to a CIA document, reported to the FBI in New Orleans. It is time to look more closely at Oswald’s extraordinary career, in which he appeared to develop revolutionary sympathies while in the Marines, established communications with the Communist party, and nevertheless was able to gain an employment at a firm (Jaggars-Stiles-Stovall in Dallas) which did classified work for the US.Army requiring a security clearance.” [p243, Deep Politics…,1993]
*
Professor Scott uses an example of a dual agent in the person of Robert C. Ronstadt who
“went to work for a Los Angeles firm, Allied Records, that was concerned about possible Communist employees. At the same time, Ronstadt began to sell subscriptions to the Communist Daily People’s World, and after some months he became a Communist Party member in the spring of 1947. Ronstadt, who had originally passed his FBI entrance exam in 1942, later explained…that his job had been to smoke out potential Red sympathizers. His actual employer was the private investigative firm of [McCarthy and Dunn]
, industrial security consultants to Allied Records… After Ronstadt succeeded in joining the Communist party, he ceased to work for McCarthy and Dunn, and for the first time was paid directly by the FBI as an informant. [p244]
“Oswald’s business career is suggestively like Ronstadt’s… According to the Warren Commission, Oswald’s [Jaggars-Stiles-Stovall] job was found for him by the Texas Employment Commission (WR719). However, according to investigative journalist Anthony Summers, George deMohrenschildt’s wife and daughter both said that deMohrenschildt, who as we saw had CIA connections in both Dallas and Washington, arranged for the job… Shortly after beginning work, in the same month of October [1962], Oswald and his wife established social contact with Max Clark, the chief of industrial security for the General Dynamics plant in Fort Worth which secured the controversial TFX contract in the fall of 1963.
“Thereafter, Oswald’s proximity to potential subversives, worthy of investigation, seems to have been continuous… Even during his next job, at the Reily Coffee Company in New Orleans, both he and his co-workers talked of moving soon to the newly opened NASA Space Center in nearby Michoud…[p245]
“All this suggests that, like Ronstadt, Oswald’s true employer may not have been the firms, but a private investigative agency doing industrial-security work. This would explain the FBI’s zeal to cover up the paycheck anomalies, and the reluctance of the government, to this day, to release Oswald’s income-tax records.” [p246, Deep Politics and the Death Of JFK, 1993]
In the next chapter of Scott’s book, chapter 16 page 254, the author poses his inquiry into the title: “Oswald as a Double Agent for Hoover”, capturing the essence if not the substance of the point at hand.Were the documents available to him, Dr.Scott might have perused the Dual Agent memos of the FBI and AEC which were closed out, refiled, and signed off by William Sullivan on September 30 1964, four days after the initial publication of the finished Warren Re[ort.
*
…. According to FBI/AEC Dual Agent Memo April 13, 1949, “
the field was instructed over two years ago to develop confidential informants. Recently such offices were instructed to make an effort to promote some Communist into a position with the Atomic Energy Commission because it was felt that he could be of more assistance..from the standpoint of subversive coverage and..espionage… Supervisors in the [Bureau]
are constantly alert to discover some individual who might be utilized as an informant.”… “
but prior to making any definite arrangements with them, Commissioner Strauss..will be contacted on a confidential basis… Memo July 18 1949, [Strauss]
requested that we let him meet the Special Agents selected so that he could..vouch for them. He stated..he would not mention it to any of the other Commissioners.” Evidently, the FBI was deterred from planting informants when the Agents were rejected by AEC contractors for employment. The Director informed all concerned to take no action. Memo Feb.28, 1950, “
It may be pointed out that at the time this matter was first discussed with Commissioner Strauss…he stated that he could be helpful in placing undercover Agents. Later, Admiral Strauss advised that he would rather not actively assist… You will recall that Admiral Strauss is leaving..on April 15, 1950.” (3/4 down page). The result of this memo series, ending in August 1953 with Strauss’s return to the AEC, was a request by the now Chairman Strauss for the Bureau to re-initiate the undercover program. The FBI responded: “
Strauss was advised that our personnel and funds would not permit such a program… Strauss was further informed that collaterally, the lack of cooperation…lack of centralized control in AEC and the absence of an adequate inspection system were factors which the Bureau considered. Mr. Strauss..wanted the Director to know that centralized control..and inspection..would definitely be accomplished..after his reorganization of the Division of Security.”
http://www.governmentattic.org/4docs/FBIundercoverAECfacilities_1949-1964.pdf
*
* The most conspicuous facts about the FBI/AEC Dual Agent memos are the ten year gap in the record (1954-1964) at the time of greatest nuclear promotion and the curious closure of the files a few scant days after the Warren Report rolled off the presses. Rarely is it ever mentioned in the scheme of “who benefited” after JFK’s assassination that the fledgling government-funded nuclear power complex ballooned to new heights starting in January of 1964. The available record of early memos [1949-1953] also corresponds with the timing of the discovery of atomic spies Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenberg ring, and the successful tests of H-bombs by the U.S. and USSR. “In August 1949 FBI Liason Charles Bates asked AEC security to investigate the activities of Klaus Fuchs, a physicist of British citizenship who had worked at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge during the war.” p114, No Sacrifice Too Great, by Richard Pfau, 1984. The statement has been made by Hans Bethe that if Fuchs had passed H-bomb secrets from Los Alamos to the Soviets it would have been harmless because they were then ‘headed in the wrong direction.’
Prosecution of the Rosenbergs was another FBI/AEC collaboration.
*
*
Supervising the would-be atomic agents in the dual FBI/AEC start-up was FBI agent and Dallas, Texas native
Charles W. Bates, born in the north suburb of Lewisville along with his twin brother. The Bateses were close family friends of Texas congressman Sam Rayburn and the boys looked on him as a second father, according to author Priscilla McMillan in
The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a fact which impressed J. Edgar Hoover. Charles Bates’s maternal aunt was Sam Rayburn’s secretary, Alla Clary, who was well-known in Washington D.C. and a local celebrity in her hometown of
McKinney Texas.
During the secretive 1954 AEC tribunal against Oppenheimer engineered by chairman Strauss and abetted by Hoover, Bates became the special courier for files and messages between the two chiefs. “Hoover had chosen his go-between with care. At the age of thirty-four, Bates, a good-looking, gregarious man with slicked-back dark hair, dark skin, and sometimes dark glasses, had become part of Strauss’s inner circle… He spent nearly all his time at the AEC and had entree to everyone in the building. Not only did he deliver the FBI’s wiretap reports, but he carried verbal messages between Hoover and Strauss… Bates now looked on Hoover, too, as a second father and came up with pretexts to drop in at his office… Bates got along with Strauss… Eventually Strauss relied on Bates and sometimes turned to him for advice. Hoover relied on Bates..to help him gauge Strauss’s frame of mind.” [p189, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 2005, Viking/Penguin]
*
Of the three boys born to Kate Clary Bates, ‘Benjamin Clary’ (the likely twin) became a doctor in Austin, ‘Charles William’ in the FBI, and ‘Uncas Daniel’ who remained in Dallas working for the city’s Water department. On 11-22-63 if it means anything, there was also a water hydrant incident on the motorcade route which blocked traffic at about the same time an ‘epileptic seizure’ event took place in Dealey Plaza. (called in by DPD patrolman F.T.Chance, who requested dispatch to get help from the water dept.)
*
*
Marina Oswald and author Priscilla Johnson (Mrs.) McMillan
The purveyor of the privileged and secretive relationship among Hoover, Bates, and Strauss is none other than the “writing collaborator for the Agency” Priscilla Johnson, who interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald in 1959 at the Hotel Metropole in Moscow. At the time Mrs. McMillan was representing NANA, the North American Newspaper Alliance, which has been called an “OSS-CIA asteroid” founded by Ernest Cuneo, the WWII White House liason with British intelligence. She published three books in her career; Krushchev and the Arts (with Leopold Labedz) in 1965, Marina and Lee in 1977 (reissued for 50th anniversary of JFK’s death), and The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer in 2005.
Johnson McMillan herself was to benefit from a privileged and exclusive relationship living-in with Marina Oswald in 1964 while the Warren Commission was in session. “[Priscilla] once was an assistant to Senator John F. Kennedy and went on to become an acknowledged expert on Soviet affairs. It is Mrs. McMillan who has been responsible for much of the information concerning Oswald’s personal life shortly before the assassination.” [p.120, Crossfire by Jim Marrs].
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Priscilla Johnson earned a bit of extra notoriety for having “dated” Senator John F. Kennedy: “Though Priscilla refused to sleep with him, Jack enjoyed their playful, teasing relationship…’Jack,’ Priscilla told him, ‘if you get divorced, cease being Catholic, and get out of politics, I might think of you seriously.’ [Jack said] ‘You’ve been stringing me along all these years because I’m an interesting political figure.'” –p231, All Too Human, 1996, by Edward Klein
*
Lawyer Mark Lane stated that, “The FBI, in its previously top-secret documents, had considered only two persons to be suspects in the assassination of President Kennedy. One, of course, was Lee Harvey Oswald. The other was Priscilla Johnson…” [p.67, Plausible Denial] “Priscilla Johnson had met Oswald in Moscow in 1959, almost as soon as he arrived there”…[p.68] “Johnson had been assigned by the CIA to meet with Oswald and interview him.” [p.69, ibid.] Lane relates how during the last days of the Warren Commission, “the unresolved question…[about when] Oswald was supposed to have been in Mexico City for a week [Sept.26-Oct.3, 1963]…had no evidence of his presence [there]” until the sudden appearance of bus tickets, found by Johnson, folded inside a magazine in Marina’s hotel room.
*
Of the two books authored by Mrs. McMillan in her career, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005) positioned her as something of a go-to expert on Oppenheimer and the origins of atomic weapons (dontcha know– see “manhattan project voices” on the web). Two other writers of note already mentioned in this post seem to have followed an associated course: Kai Bird with American Prometheus (2005) and Philip M. Stern with the 1969 publication of The Oppenheimer Case. Stern dedicated his book to his mother, Edith Rosenwald, heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune amassed by her father Julius and expanded by her brother, Lessing J. Rosenwald.
Among numerous titles and offices held by Lessing Rosenwald was the wartime (WWII) presidency of Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study, where Admiral Lewis Strauss, future chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, shared the executive as vice-president. The IAS produced essential research and technology for the Manhattan Project and weather control. The men were also to share over the course of many years office holdings in the American Jewish Committee, where Edgar Bloom Stern additionally held membership. We know today that the AJC sponsored ‘Frankfurt School’ psychology and the conferences which led to the creation of MK-Ultra, the CIA’s secret mind control programs.
*
As for Strauss insider and ‘dual atomic agent’ veteran
Charles W. Bates, he “
was at different times head of the FBI’s offices in Chicago, Cleveland and Omaha, Neb., and served seven years [1958-1965]
as the legal attache at the U.S. Embassy in the United Kingdom [London],
another Hoover appointment. In the [legat]
position, he was chief of the FBI [intelligence]
liason office covering England, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.”
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Charles-Bates-79-long-FBI-career-3095966.php
It is not possible to locate Bates’s actual whereabouts during his long-term London service, interfacing with MI5, MI6, and other U.S. agencies, though it is doubtless that Bates and Oswald were familiar during LHO’s transit through London and Helsinki. Bates later surfaced in a more public way: “In 1969, Charles Bates was a special agent at the Chicago office of the FBI when police killed Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark while they were sleeping [during a 4am raid on a family apartment]… In 1971, Bates was transferred to Washington D.C. According to Watergate burglar James McCord…on June 21, 1972 (four days after the break-in), White House attorney John Dean checked with acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray as to who was in charge of handling the Watergate investigation. The answer: Charles Bates –the same FBI official who in 1974 would be in charge of handling the SLA investigation and the search for Patty Hearst.” http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/patty-hearst-the-twinkie-murders
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*
Another ‘Bates’, Miss Pauline V. Bates, had an unusual encounter with Oswald only days after his return from the USSR to Fort Worth in June of 1962. Oswald sought legal stenographer services to type his loose notes from Russia, notes that “were very bitter against Russia” according to her Warren testimony. He left her with the impression, as the local headline reads after the assassination, that “He Was Secret Agent For U.S.” Was Oswald feeding his legend*, his legacy, or naming his handler?
[legend: cover story]
The oddity of Oswald’s first seemingly voluntary act as a redeemed American was the 3-day effort for the uncommunicative Oswald to get ten dollars worth of typewritten pages from Ms. Bates, a job paid for but left unfinished.
Asking the obvious: Was Pauline Bates a relative of Charles Bates? She said that she was first in the phonebook and rejoined with a statement that she was also the only ‘legal’ stenographer in the area, qualified for work with law enforcement.
*
Watergate Note:
At the time of the June 1972 hotel break-in, Charles W. Bates was an assistant director of the FBI, chief of the CID, Criminal Investigations Division. J. Edgar had died weeks before on May 2, and was replaced by Nixon appointee and loyalist L. Patrick Gray. To fend off interference from the White House and CIA, four senior FBI asst. directors, now known to have worked collectively as ‘Deep Throat’, conspired to leak evidence about White House activities to the press: They were W. Mark Felt, Charles Bates, Robert G. Kunkel and Richard Long. In September of ’72, Dir.Gray announced that two of them would be leaving the capitol. Kunkel would be transferred to St. Louis and Bates would “exchange jobs” with the SAC in San Francisco.
*
The infamous slush fund for Nixon’s CREEP, used in part for the Watergate burglars and exposed during the House investigation by Wright Patman, included laundered cash provided by “Robert H. Allen, a mysterious nuclear weapons materials executive. Allen was chairman of Gulf Resources and Chemical Corporation in Houston. His company controlled half the world’s supply of lithium, an essential component of hydrogen bombs… Robert H. Allen was Texas CREEP’s chief financial officer… In keeping with its strategic nuclear holdings, Allen’s Gulf Resources was a kind of committee of the main components of the London-New York oligarchy.” p247, George Bush, The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, 1992
Business filings in Delaware list Gulf Resources and Chemical Corporation as established on January 20, 1961 –JFK’s inauguration day and an important Oswald imposter event that helped set up a false trail in Dallas while LHO was still in the USSR.
“A decade after Watergate, it was revealed that the Hunt family had controlled about 15 percent of Gulf Resources shares. This Texas oil family hired George Bush in 1977 to be the executive committee chairman of their family enterprise, the First International Bank in Houston.” p248, ibid. The Patman investigation was derailed and shut down: “House Republican leader Gerald Ford led the attack on Patman from within the Congress…” p249, ibid.
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*
Another Presidential assassin took a potshot at Gerald Ford in Charles Bates’s San Francisco jurisdiction —really in his jurisdiction– when S.F. FBI informant, linked to the SLA, Sara Jane Moore fired off a round on September 22, 1975, less than three weeks after Manson girl Squeaky Fromme attempted the same in Sacramento Sept.5. Had the attempt succeeded, Nelson Rockefeller would have become president.
*
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One of those bizarre crimes in which Charles Bates had direct involvement was the Chowchilla schoolbus kidnapping — Chowchilla CA became a post-assassination focal point in the mid-70s when an alleged former CIA contract agent named Claude Barnes Capehart, said to have been photographed at the Texas School Book Depository on 11-22-63, ‘retired’ to Chowchilla. There Capehart came to the attention of (former District Atty.) Judge David Minier who had ruled on Bates’s Chowchilla kidnapping case, and followed up on Capehart after learning about him “from the FBI”. Judge Minier filed a lawsuit against the CIA for the release of JFK assassination records.
*
*
While agent Oswald was in Japan, FBI and Deep-Throat conspirator Robert G. Kunkel was the U.S. embassy legat in Tokyo (1957-1959). When Oswald made his 1959 journey through the UK, Helsinki and USSR, as stated, Bates was the legat in London. British author of Official and Confidential, Anthony Summers, used Charles Bates as a vital source of information in the telling of J. Edgar Hoover’s secret life. Summers did not mention, however, any special relationship between Bates and Hoover or anyone else. What became situationally clear in Summers’ book just the same, was Bates acting on the special bidding of Hoover– example of implicating JFK in the ‘Profumo Affair’ sex scandal in Britain. For the brief remainder of Bates’ days in Washington D.C. after Hoover’s death and the Watergate break-in, he could have spent his time destroying documents which were known to have disappeared from the FBI repositories by the truckload.
*
*
The
Profumo Affair was not just a sex scandal for Britain’s Defence Minister but a Soviet spy ring: [2013, The Mirror]
“Christine Keeler comes clean and admits to being a spy… [Stephen] Ward used that first meeting [between Keeler and Profumo]
to steal secret letters from Profumo’s briefcase detailing the delivery of nuclear weapons to Germany… Christine says she has now seen FBI documents that prove she was being watched by them.” http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/profumo-affair-christine-keeler-comes-1940402
At least three of Christine Keeler’s friends came to Washington DC:
“JFK got involved with the sex parties arranged by Bobby Baker, connected, it seems, to Stephen Ward in London… By 1963 Kennedy realized that [LBJ] was behind Baker’s operation..to.. blackmail politicians in Washington…” http://www.educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=20893
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*
“Legal Attaches..are expected to coordinate their investigative activities with other U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, such as the DEA and CIA… Historically, organized crime has been the top priority of the Tokyo Legat… FBI seeks candidates for Legat and ALAT [assistant legat]
positions who have broad knowledge of FBI programs…and require minimal guidance and direction from FBI headquarters.” http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fbi/legat.pdf
*
*
*
By the time young Oswald reached Japan, “according to the declassified 1956-57 Far East Command ‘Standing’ Operating Procedures for Atomic Operations, 13 separate locations in Japan had nuclear weapons or components, or were earmarked to receive nuclear weapons in times of crisis or war… It is true that..the bombs stored on the mainland lacked their plutonium and/or uranium cores, and that the nuclear-armed ships were a legal inch away from Japanese soil. All in all, [an] elaborate stratagem maintained the technicality that the United States had no nuclear weapons ‘in Japan’.”
Journalist Yoichi Shimatsu adds that Prime Minister Nobusuke
“Kishi secretly negotiated a deal with the White House to permit the U.S. military to store atomic bombs in Okinawa and Atsugi naval air station outside Tokyo. (Marine corporal Lee Harvey Oswald served as a guard inside Atsugi’s underground warhead armory.) In exchange, the U.S. gave the nod for Japan to pursue a ‘civilian’ nuclear program… On his 1959 visit to Britain, Kishi was flown by military helicopter to the Bradwell nuclear plant in Essex..[and later]
uttered the famous statement that ‘nuclear weapons are not expressly prohibited’ under the postwar Constitution’s Article 9… Covert weapons development..is rife with problems. In the event of an emergency, like [the Fukushima meltdowns]
, secrecy must be enforced at all cost…” http://www.rense.com/general93/hid.htm
*
“In the 50-year history of U.S. overseas nuclear deployment policy, Japan has consistently been positioned as an important nuclear base in Asia. When the overall occupation of Japan by the U.S. came to an end [c. 1951]
, an overseas nuclear war command center was established in the central part of Tokyo at the end of 1952. This was one of two such establishments in the whole world, with the other one near London.” http://www.jcp.or.jp/english/e20008_niiharo.html
*
It soon followed that “President Eisenhower then authorized the use of war-gold [‘Golden Lily’ or ‘Yamashita’ treasure, combined with Nazi and Fascist loot, known as the Black Eagle Trust [or Japan’s Showa Trust] to set up the LDP [Liberal Democratic Party, which was neither], interfering in the domestic political process in Japan, putting the Japanese people back under a one-party dictatorship under a man –Kishi– who had been involved in armed robbery, narcotics, and slave labor since the 1930s.” –Sterling and Peggy Seagrave (p.236, Gold Warriors)
*
Manchurian Candidate-style mind control, as Atsugi was transitioning for coexistence with a constitutionally self-governed Japan, was then initiated as Project Bluebird.
*
” ‘I went into Atsugi just as World War II ended, taking some of MacArthur’s bodyguard in there,’ says Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, a former Pentagon-CIA liason officer (1955-63). ‘A montrous stairway went down into caverns you could drive a truck into. A huge underground base. The agency used it for a lot of things.’ “ –p135, The Man Who Knew Too Much, by Dick Russell, 1992
*
***
Harold Weisberg (author previously of Whitewash and Whitewash II):
“At one o’clock in the morning of December 15, 1966, in the Oakland California studios of Radio Station KNEW, I had just finished appearing on..[a] lengthy phone-in radio program… There was a man on the line who..wanted to speak to me but not on the air [and] firther, he wanted the assurance that our conversation would be private… [p85]
“This man had been in the Marine Corps with Oswald. From his personal experience, he did not believe a single word about the Oswald..that became public with the [Warren] Report. He had agonized in silence for..three years…[and] had built a successful life, had a family, and was worried about the possible consequences…
“[H]e would only talk in anonymity…
“Briefly, it is his story that Oswald was bright, not a kook of any kind, not a blatant or proselytizing Marxist, and really a quiet serious guy. They knew each other socially… He never heard Oswald say anything about Communism, for or against, in all this time.
“More important is what he disclosed about Oswald’s position in the Marine Corps. The unit in which both served, said my informant, was one of three similar ones of which one was always in Japan and the others in the United States. Their function was classified. Every man in the outfit carried a security clearance. [p86]. They had a security designation of which I had never heard. These were that kind of unusual military organizations. Of all the men in the outfit, five had special ‘top’ security approvals. The entire complement carried a minimum of ‘confidential’ (the grade the official file records Oswald as having). Above this there were ‘secret’, ‘top secret’, and a special one, ‘crypto’. Of all the men only five were ‘crypto’. One of these was Lee Harvey Oswald!
” ‘Can you possibly be wrong?’ I asked him.
“He insisted not.
” ‘Could your memory be playing tricks?’
“No, he was positive. He went farther when I questioned him about ‘crypto’, which he indicated was ‘black box’ stuff. I took it to mean a connection with nuclear weapons.
“If correct, this is more than in disagreement with the entire official story of Oswald, his relations with the government and the assassination… In every way he could, this man insisted he was not in error, that he knew. And he went into more detail..[about Oswald’s] ‘hardship’ discharge so he could care for an allegedly destitute mother… the mysterious caller specified that Oswald spent his last two or three weeks in the service with CID. [military intelligence]” –pp85-87, Oswald in New Orleans, by Harold Weisberg, 1967
*
Godzilla comes to Tokyo 1954
Popular interpretation has it that the Godzilla impulse arose from the Bikini “Castle-Bravo’ test of March 1, 1954, attended by Chairman Strauss, and the contamination of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon #5, but the not-so-secret arrival of nuclear weapons on Japanese shores suggests itself.
*
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Is that Godzilla!? –no, it’s detonation Castle-Bravo:
“This radiological calamity had a significant impact on world opinion and helped spark the movement for a nuclear test moratorium which ultimately led to the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty… Until recently, an extensive collection of documents on nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands was readily available on a Department of Energy website: The Marshall Islands Document Collection. It no longer has an online presence. In the fall of 2013, at the time of the U.S. government shutdown, this important collection disappeared from the web.”http://www.nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb459/
*
“In 1954, the Japanese government began funding a [U.S. approved]
nuclear research program. In December 1955, it passed the Atomic Energy Basic Law, establishing the Japan Atomic Energy Commission… the JAEC…[and]
purchased its first commercial reactor from Britain but quickly switched to US-designed light-water reactors. By mid-1957, the government had contracted to buy 20 additional reactors...” –Peter Kuznik, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,
http://www.thebulletin.org/japan-nuclear-history-perspective-eisenhower-and-atoms-war-and-peace-0
Atoms for Peace plans called for Japan to become a nuclear showcase. It was even proposed to site the first power generating station in Hiroshima, but the groundswell to ban nukes originating from “a group of middle class housewives in the Suginami ward in Tokyo… grew into a nationwide movement… Lewis Strauss..told the White House press secretary [that the fishing boat] was really a ‘Red spy outfit’, a component of a Russian espionage system. At the request of Strauss, the CIA investigated..and categorically denied it. Nonetheless, Strauss continued to maintain that the irradiation of the Lucky Dragon ‘was no accident’ for the captain..must have been ‘in the employ of the Russians’.” apjjf.org/-Lawrence-S.-Wittner/4636/article.html
*
The 23-man crew of Lucky Dragon #5 were all hospitalized in Tokyo after reaching their home port of Yaizu. All had suffered “nausea, fatigue, vomiting, anorexia, conjunctivitis…leukopenia, thrombopenia, and mild to moderate anemia” with a host of persistent skin disorders from radiological exposure. News in the U.S., some coming from fact-finding congressmen, assured the public that the fishermen would recover in “2 to 3 weeks”. Two AEC health investigators were sent to observe the patients. www1.american.edu/ted/lucky.htm
In September more than six months after Bravo, the first and allegedly only Lucky Dragon crewman to do so, died of radiation injuries. The others survived, recovering in a 2 to 3 years time. Six weeks after the radio operator’s death on September 23, the FBI opened it’s first Tokyo Legal Attache office in the embassy, November of 1954.
*
*
*Richard Case Nagell
“The Man Who Knew Too Much” told journalist Dick Russell, “I knew Lee Harvey Oswald before 1962. We had a casual but purposeful acquaintance in Japan when he was stationed there in the Marines. My association with him, then and later, was strictly with an objective.” p80, The Man Who Knew Too Much, by Dick Russell
Nagell’s objective was military intelligence, then working for the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) coming off a two-year stint with it’s more secret Field Operations Intelligence (FOI) unit headquartered in Tokyo. FOI had its ostensible start under the leadership of MacArthur’s WWII intelligence chief Charles Willoughby: “In correspondence with Allen Dulles, Willoughby described his having ‘solved’ his intramural battles with the CIA in occupied Japan ‘thru the creation of a J.S.O. (Special Operations) in which CIA had autonomy but co-ordinated with us in covert operations to avoid crossing wires’… Willoughby also set up the original 441st Counter Intelligence Corps Group… [T]he Asian network he had left behind was flourishing. MacArthur, Willoughby, and the CIA had midwifed a string of bone-crushing regimes calling themselves the Iron Triangle, as author Sterling Seagrave has written. These included Chiang Kai-shek’s old Kuomintang on Taiwan, right-wing strongman Syngman Rhee in South Korea, as well as puppet governments in the Philippines and Japan. By 1954, elements within South Korea’s Headquarters Intelligence Division (HID) and Chiang’s own spy net would unite conservatives from across the continent to battle the ‘red hordes’. They called themselves the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL). Their prime mover in Tokyo was Nobusuke Kishi, another war criminal freed by Willoughby… And [Kishi’s] seventy-five thousand [75,000]man National Police Agency, first established by MacArthur and Willoughby, spent much of their time keeping an eye on American servicemen and tourists with possible ‘subversive leanings’.” pp128-129, ibid. By 1955 “Willoughby was living on Park Avenue in New York.” p130, ibid.
“Meanwhile, the Munich-based Gehlen apparatus with which Dulles and Willoughby worked soon extended its tentacles far into Asia, its operatives hooking up with those of the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League.On Taiwan in October 1957, an international meeting was held setting the stage for a grand global alliance of such forces. Chiang Kai-shek, Syngman Rhee, and South Vietnam’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, all sent representatives to the steering committee. German veterans were included, notably Fritz Cramer– a former Nazi Abwehr officer who then headed up a private vigilante group that ferreted out German leftists at the behest of private industry. Its U.S. sister organization was the American Security Council (ASC), a private Washington group set up in 1955 by ex-FBI agents that built an index of over one million alleged ‘subversives’ for major corporations seeking security checks. Willoughby, a friend of Fritz Cramer, eventually sat on the ASC’s board… This event coincided with Oswald’s arrival in the Far East… In Tokyo the Nagell and Oswald paths were soon to cross for the first time.” pp131-132, ibid.
*
In September of 1963, after posting an assassination warning to J.Edgar Hoover, Nagell went into a bank in El Paso Texas and fired two shots into the ceiling corner. He left the building and sat in his car until surrendering minutes later to an El Paso officer. “During the course of his El Paso trial in 1964, Nagell was asked to describe the [Army’s] CIC. ‘Well…the mission is to investigate any matters relating to treason, subversion, espionage, disaffection, that might be taking place within the military establishment or that might be conducted by civilians which are employed by the corporations, factories or concerns which are under military contract… And overseas..[CIC] have police powers… In fact, overseas they are just like the FBI in some ways.'” [p97, The Man Who Knew Too Much] …[Nagell] also told me [author Russell] the FBI was working overseas when they weren’t supposed to be.” [p26, ibid.] “As Nagell wrote years later, ‘What it all boils down to (the impetus behind the government’s diligent prosecution of me in the 1960s, the true reason for my lengthy imprisonment, all of this injustice) can be explained in one sentence: I informed the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and others, as early as September 17, 1963, that Lee Harvey Oswald and two of his Cuban associates were planning to assassinate the President of the United States… and nothing was done about it.’ “ p441, ibid.
*
According to Nagell, the Soviets had induced him to work for them, even at times when Nagell believed he was working for the CIA: “In the summer of 1963,’ as Nagell wrote to Senator Richard Russell, ‘I received instructions to initiate certain action against Mr. Oswald, who was the indispensable tool in the conspiracy, and thereafter depart the United States legally.’ Nagell was to try to persuade Oswald ‘that the deal was phony’… [p429] “In the event that Nagell failed in his attempt to get Oswald to back away from the ‘phony deal’, he was supposed to meet with him –and then kill him– in Mexico City… According to [Nagell’s lawyer] Fensterwald memo of a 1973 conversation with Nagell, ‘The USSR ordered Nagell to eliminate Lee Harvey Oswald because they thought it might be an extreme embarassment to them if he was caught, not because he was one of them, but because of his history.’ ” [p438] “Whatever else Nagell may have been involved in with Oswald, Nagell has never been willing to say… What alarmed Nagell was that he found himself caught in the middle of something going on between American and Soviet intelligence.” p440, The Man Who Knew Too Much, by Dick Russell, 1992
*
Author Russell claims that “This book marks the first time that any known meeting between Oswald and Soviet intelligence in Japan has ever been alleged. Though I have only Nagell’s word that it occurred, the name of ‘Nicolai G. Eroshkin’ under a heading of former military attache at the Tokyo embassy does show up in the notebook taken from Nagell by the FBI in 1963. Nagell maintained that Oswald and the Russian colonel had more than one meeting, though he has never specified what they may have talked about. But Nagell did add that almost since the day ‘Oswald first saw Eroshkin at the embassy, the Soviets suspected the Marine of being an agent of one of the U.S. intelligence services.’
“Something else was going on around Colonel Eroshkin in 1957 and 1958. The CIA was trying to entice him to defect to the American side.” [p.136]
[A Japanese official and personal friend of Nagell’s]“Jun Murai, head of the Tohoku Regional Police Bureau and formerly director of the Cabinet Research Office, Japan’s equivalent of the CIA…’warned [Nagell] that the Japanese had penetrated the [Eroshkin] project and believed that it entailed something else, something unlawful that might further strain the already tense relations then existing between Japan and the USSR.’ Murai made ‘pointed reference to some unsavory incidents that had occurred over the past several years involving the CIA’…” [p138, The Man Who Knew Too Much]
*
Incidental to Russell’s research, on a prompt from Nagell regarding his 1963 suspected-KGB contact ‘Oaxaca’ in Mexico, who requested a meeting with Oswald through Nagell [the September ’63 Mexico City trip], Russell introduces a curious fellow named Albert Alexander Osborne, a.k.a. John Howard Bowen. Albert Osborne sat next to Oswald on a bus ride for 18 hours into Mexico. The figure of Osborne/Bowen, whom the FBI believed to be one person with a duel-identity, remains a mystery today, deepened in that Dick Russell’s detailed reference to Osborne in his 1992 book was wholly omitted from the 2003 re-issue of the Man Who Knew Too Much.
* Albert Alexander Osborne
a.k.a. John Howard Bowen, born and raised in England, had only one clearly traceable residence-location from where he came and went in the United States in
Knoxville Tennessee, the nearest city to the Manhattan Project’s Oak Ridge Facility. It may even be that Albert Osborne adopted his second identity as Bowen in Knoxville in 1943 as Oak Ridge was being built and inhabited. Bowen was said to have left Knoxville after the summer of ’43. Over a ten year period beginnng in 1953, “Bowen” infrequently but occasionally announced his status as a missionary in Mexico through articles sent to the Knoxville Journal. Osborne later took refuge in Knoxville again in 1964 to escape hounding by the FBI according to his anonymous friends. The FBI at least caught up with Osborne in Nashville in March of ’64 for what was his third and last interview with the FBI. After this he was officially written off as a con man and witnesses were told to forget about him. He died in San Antonio, Texas in 1966 at age 77, believed to be caused by food poisoning.
Besides his infamous September of ’63 bus ride with Oswald in Mexico, Osborne the traveler left New York City for the U.K. six weeks later on November 13. The journey included a novel visit to his English siblings who hadn’t seen him in 40 years and then, as his sister told it, Osborne departed for London, arriving on or near November 18, 1963. He returned to New York on an Icelandic Airlines flight originating in Luxembourg on December 5. Albert Alexander Osborne, whose name-parts were variously used as aliases by Lee Harvey Oswald (or his impersonators), was not the only Oswald contact trekking to London in the months or weeks before the assassination of President Kennedy.
*
Luxembourg is a tiny sovereign nation surrounded by France, Belgium, and Germany and
“is one of the world’s largest financial centers as well as worldwide leader in the investment industry and the largest international private banking center in the Eurozone.” http://www.relbanks.com/europe/luxembourg
*
Independent of Nagell, Russell revealed a forewarning of Kennedy’s assassination from a military source; a young Army codebreaker stationed in Metz, France named Eugene B. Dinkin. Metz is less than 40 miles from the city of Luxembourg in Luxembourg. Dinkin’s troubles began, according to a superior officer, when “During a troop information class on the subject ‘Duty, Honor, Country,’ Private Dinkin made a 25-minute speech on the government’s stockpiling of atomic bombs…’ On September 24, 1963…Dinkin was given a psychiatric evaluation” which resulted in the revocation of his ‘crypto’ clearance and a transfer. Within a month, Private Dinkin initiated a personal campaign to warn U.S. authorities about a planned assassination against the U.S. president scheduled for late November. “So Dinkin suddenly left his unit. On October 25, he set set out to try to contact certain European ambassadors in the nearby nation of Luxembourg, in hopes that his message would then filter through their intelligence networks back to the United States. Nobody would give him the time of day except the Israeli ambassador to Luxembourg, who, Dinkin writes, advised him how best to present his case at the American embassy there.” [p554, The Man Who Knew Too Much] Private Dinkin was shortly to learn “through the military grapevine” that the Army was going to lock him up as a psychotic –he went AWOL and took his message to the press office of the U.N. in Geneva Switzerland, followed by a visit to Frankfurt, then on to the U.S. embassy in Bonn, W. Germany where he failed to convey his warning. Advised to return to his unit, Dinkin was promptly arrested and hospitalized on November 13 and held incommunicado, finally ending his travels stateside weeks later; “transferred on December 5, 1963 to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington D.C…[and] began receiving ‘therapy'” for his “unfortunate condition [of] schizo-assassination prognostication.” [p556, ibid.]
*
Osborne is very reminiscent of the “wandering bishops” written about by Peter Levenda, at least four of whom were working with Guy Banister in Louisiana (David Ferrie, Jack Martin, Thomas Beckham, Tommy Baumler). A week after the southbound Mexico bus ride, allegedly, Osborne returned to the US heading for New Orleans –one day later, Oswald returned and headed for Dallas where he lodged at the YMCA. Osborne too, frequented the local ‘Y’s on his travels, having been found by the FBI at a Y in Nashville.
The wandering bishops of New Orleans in the JFK assassination plot were tied to two men who inducted them through “apostolic succession”, and both were working with the FBI by the time of the Garrison investigation in 1967: those two were Carl J. Stanley and Walter (Wolodymr) Propheta. Bishop Propheta in New York was even “installed as Primate” of the American Orthodox Catholic Church in ’67 by J. Edgar Hoover, according to Levenda. Another overlap occurrs relevant to 1963 with “yet another personality close to the Propheta organization [who] was the famous wrestler Antonino Rocca –retired from wrestling at that time– claimed to be an agent of the CIA working out of Lebanon; he further claimed that he was running Phantom jets into Israel under diplomatic radar by having them shipped to Luxembourg first and then flying them into Israel…” [p283, Sinister Forces, by Peter Levenda]
Again, similar to Osborne, was
Fred Lee Crisman*
Characterized as a roving minister and con man from Tacoma Washington, Crisman’s colorful background included a role in the first recorded UFO encounter known as the Maury Island incident in Puget Sound 1947. Crisman was a former military man, ex-employee of Boeing and allegedly Lockheed as well. He went on to promote his UFO and alien technology experiences in Amazing Stories magazine. Guy Banister, claims Peter Levenda, was sent in from Butte, MT in those days as the FBI’s “X-Files” officer. There were in fact nuclear aircraft in the works from the late ’40s up until the Kennedy years, specifically contracted to General Dynamics‘ California facilities. (General Dynamics and subsidiaries, Convair and General Atomics —see the record of physicist/weaponeer Ted Taylor, below)
According to Garrison’s investigators:
“Our information indicates that since the early sixties he [Crisman] has made many trips to the New Orleans and Dallas areas in connection with his undercover work for that part of the warfare industry engaged in the manufacture of.. ‘hardware’ –meaning those weapons sold to the U.S. government which are uniquely large and expensive.” https://archive.org/stream/nsia-CrismanFredLee/nsia-CrismanFredLee/Crisman Fred Lee 03#page/n0/mode/2up, Harold Weisberg documents archive
Crisman was a ‘business partner’ with the younger Thomas Beckham, and friends with both Banister and Clay Shaw, alleged to have been the first person called by Shaw after his indictment.
Investigator and photo analyst for Garrison, Richard E. Sprague, authored The Taking of America, 1-2-3 (1976) wherein he leveled his own indictment against Shaw, Ferrie, Osborne, Crisman, Ferrie, Nagell, Oswald and others as co-plotters.
*
*
*Theodore B. (Ted) Taylor
*
, Los Alamos(1949-1956), General Atomics, Project Orion (nuclear spaceship)
Physicist Freeman Dyson said of his colleague, Ted Taylor, “He was the first man in the world to understand what you can do with three or four kilograms of plutonium, that making bombs is an easy thing to do…” p79, The Curve of Binding Energy, by John McPhee, 1973
…“Taylor once designed an implosion bomb that weighed twenty pounds… Studying ordinary artillery shells, he replicated their external dimensions in conceiving fission bombs that could be fired out of guns.” p78, ibid.
“So far as we know, everybody in the world who has tried to make a nuclear explosion since 1945 has succeeded on the first try.” p100
…”There is good, better, and worse, but there is no nonweapons-grade plutonium in the nuclear industry.” –Dr. Ted Taylor, p113, The Curve of Binding Energy
In the early sixties, Ted Taylor turned his attention to the issue of nuclear safeguards. “Safeguards cost money, which means a diminution of profit… Safeguards suggest dangers, which belie the promise of Atoms for Peace, and thus can be a hindrance to the promotion of nuclear commerce. The Atomic Energy Commission, as a whole, is profoundly dedicated to the growth and spread of nuclear power…” pp46-47, ibid.
Another of McPhee’s sources, Russell Wischow who formerly worked for the AEC, added that “Safeguards are frustrating. The stuff is difficult to quantify. You can’t put it into a vault and keep it there. Once it is in the manufacturing cycle, you open it up to pilferage.” p48. Wischow was replaced by Charles Thornton who told McPhee, “The aggregate MUF [Material Unaccounted For] from the three diffusion plants alone is expressible in tons. No one knows where it is. None of it may have been stolen, but the balances don’t close. You could divert from any plant in the world in substantial amounts and never be detected.” p49, The Curve of Binding Energy
“When the Chinese exploded a uranium bomb in 1964, it was assumed that the Chinese were not smart enough to have figured out the technology of isotopic separation. Therefore, the Chinese must have stolen the U-235. Where? No one could guess. Some months later, though, it was disclosed that sixty kilograms of U-235 was unaccounted for at a nuclear-fuel-fabricating plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania. Perhaps the Chinese had stolen the uranium in Pennsylvania. While this speculation was going on, the [U.S.] government revealed…the presence of a gaseous-diffusion plant at Langchow.” p12, ibid.
And there, apparently, the matter rested.
*
The plant in Apollo PA was called NUMEC, the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, co-founded by Zalman Shapiro in 1957 and co-owned by the Stern family of New Orleans –Edith Rosenwald Stern, friend and supporter of Clay Shaw from the International Trade Mart. MUF at NUMEC during the ’60s caused a stir as an alleged supply source for Israel’s clandestine weapons.
“One of the most celebrated of the MUF cases occurred in the fall of 1965, when a [NUMEC] plant at Apollo Pennsylvania came up 207 pounds short in its inventory of highly enriched uranium, worth about $1 million at the time. The AEC had the plant closed down and began looking for the material. Thirteen pounds turned up in air filters… Another 15 pounds was discovered at a mountaintop burial pit, 8 miles [away]. But there were still 148 pounds missing at the end of the search…” p179, Unacceptable Risk, by McKinley C. Olson, 1976
*
The significance of author McPhee citing the Material Unaccounted For (MUF) from NUMEC as the sole reference to suspect weapons-fuel gains by the Chinese in 1963-64 is a narrowing of the window-in-time that accurately describes the effort of the Israelis to acquire weapons-fuel. The Israelis later confessed to smuggling NUMEC fuel for their reactor at Dimona, recorded by Gordon Thomas in Gideon’s Spies (1999), however, assigning the contraband coup to year 1968. Mr. Thomas did not specifically cite ‘1968’ in his book, but later ‘concurred’ in a separate statement given during an investigation. The story made big news. The Apollo smuggling operation within the greater sphere of U.S.-Israel relations included using the political pressure of the Jewish Vote applied by American Zionist Abe Feinberg, a pressure that could only be effective in the re-election bid of JFK, and therefore in keeping with the 1963-64 time frame.
*
According to Gideon’s Spies:
“Trouble had begun in 1956, when France had sent a twenty-four megawatt reactor to Israel. Ben Gurion announced its purpose was to provide a ‘pumping station’ to turn the desert into an ‘agricultural paradise by desalinating a billion cubic gallons of seawater annually.’ [A desalination ‘nuplex’ for Israel was the brainchild of Lewis Strauss, proposed in 1956 and reconstituted with Eisenhower’s approval as the “Oasis Plan”] The claim promptly led to the resignation of six of the seven members of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission…
“Ignoring all opposition, Ben-Gurion gave the order for the reactor to be sited in the Negev Desert, close to the bleak, sand-blown settlement at Dimona.. south of Tel Aviv... [p80]
“Three months after the reactor had been installed, a small nuclear material processing company opened for business in a converted World War II steel plant in the unappealing town of Apollo, Pennsylvania. The company was called the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, Numec. Its chief executive was Dr. Salman Shapiro.
“On LAKAM’s computer database of prominent American Jews with a scientific background, Shapiro was also listed as a prominent fundraiser for Israel. Rafi Eitan knew he had found a potential answer to how to provide the Dimona reactor with fissionable material... [p81]
“The son of an orthodox rabbi… [Shapiro was] an important member of the nuclear research and development laboratory at Westinghouse; the corporation was contracted to the United States Navy to develop submarine reactors… Shapiro, in his ‘typical discreet way’, had provided several million dollars for the Technion Institute in Haifa that offered tuition in science and engineering.
“In 1957 Shapiro had left Westinghouse and set up Numec. It had twenty-five stockholders, all openly sympathetic to Israel. Shapiro found himself head of a small company in an aggressive cutthroat industry. Nevertheless, Numec had won a number of contracts to recover enriched uranium, a process that usually led to the loss of a quantity of uranium during the salvage operation. There was no way of telling how great or when the loss had taken place. [p82]
…“[T]he already uneasy relationship between Israel and the United States over the desire of the Jewish state to become a nuclear power increased when Ben-Gurion traveled to Washington in 1960. At a series of meetings with State Department officials, he was bluntly told that for Israel to possess nuclear weapons would affect the balance of power in the Middle East. In February 1961, President John F. Kennedy wrote to Ben-Gurion suggesting that Dimona should be regularly inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“Alarmed, Ben-Gurion flew to New York to meet with Kennedy at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel… But Kennedy was firm: there had to be an inspection… He returned home convinced ‘a Catholic in the White House is bad news for Israel’. The prime minister [p83] turned to the one man in Washington he could trust, Abraham Feinberg, a Zionist supporter of Israel’s nuclear aspirations.
At one level, the native New Yorker was the most important Jewish fundraiser for the Democratic party. Feinberg made no secret of why he had raised many millions: every dollar was to ensure the party backed Israel in Congress. He had also discreetly provided many more additional millions of dollars to create Dimona. The money came in cashier’s checks to the Bank of Israel in Tel Aviv, thus avoiding the accountability of the Israeli foreign exchange controls. Ben-Gurion told Feinberg to ‘sort out the boy. Make the putz understand the reality of life’.
“Feinberg’s method was straightforward political pressure– the kind that had already infuriated Kennedy when he was running for office. Then, Feinberg had bluntly told him: ‘We are willing to pay your bills if you will let us have control of your Middle East policy’…
“Now he used the same direct approach: if President Kennedy continued to insist on an inspection of Dimona, he should ‘not count on Jewish financial support in the next political election’…
“Nevertheless Kennedy was resolute…”
*
–more reading, “The Eisenhower Administration and the Discovery of Dimona: March 1958-January 1961” –when Secretary Herter asked the Israelis where the financing came from he was told “from [the United States]” —
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb510/
*
“At some point in his AEC career, [Lewis] Strauss..met and befriended his Israeli counterpart, Ernst David Bergmann… neither Strauss’s biographer nor his son Lewis, who has had access to all of his father’s personal papers, knew that the two had met. The friendship with Bergmann provides the strongest evidence of Strauss’s sympathy for the Israeli nuclear weapons program… rules were bent for Strauss… [who] privately was in favor of a nuclear-armed Israel.” pp85-86, The Samson Option, by Seymour Hersh
“Dino Brugioni briefed Strauss regularly on U-2 nuclear intelligence, but found him inscrutable when it came to information on the Israeli nuclear reactor: ‘I never knew what he was thinking; never understood him”…Brugioni had his own reasons for wondering about Strauss. He knew there was evidence inside the CIA suggesting that American and European Jews had been directly involved in the financing and construction of Dimona from the start. ‘There was a fervor…The attitude was ‘You had to protect Israel and anybody who did not suffered.’ “ p90, ibid.
“Abraham Feinberg shared Lewis Strauss’s belief in operating behind the scenes on behalf of Israel…” p93, ibid. “The issue of Jewish political power and the Israeli bomb was complicated during these years by the fact that John Kennedy was intellectually and emotionally committed to a halt in the spread of nuclear weapons.” p98, The Samson Option
*
Evidence of an operational Dimona reactor in mid-1963: pres-.elect JFK was briefed by Secretary of State Cristian Herter that Israel’s Dimona plant was capable of producing 90 kilograms of plutominum by 1963.
Rafi Eitan claimed to have boldly arranged shipment of NUMEC fuels to Israel in 1968 under the noses of the FBI and U.S. State Department, likely as cover for the earlier acquisition. The overtly marked radioactive containers observed by U.S. agents were meant to discourage inspection or interference –U.S. officials were dared to interfere, according to Eitan’s story, and assured that transport would continue under diplomatic immunity if they tried.
*
As further evidence of the conjunction in smuggling of drugs, small arms, and nuclear weapons materiel, author Gordon Thomas referenced this minor discovery, also at a much later date: “Justiano Torres was a courier for a Colombian drug cartel who had expanded into trafficking in even deadlier substance. [His] suitcase contained, in sealed containers, the two hundred grams of plutonium239 that [Soviet scientist] Tashanka had sold him. It had a street value of $50 million…[and was] sufficient to make a small nuclear device.” [p87, Gideon’s Spies]
*
The Israeli bomb project began “In the spring of 1952 [when Ben-Gurion] started his nation on the path to nuclear weapons… acting on the recommendation of Ernst David Bergman…in the Ministry of Defense…
“Of particular importance to Israel was the relationship established with the French atomic energy commission [the CEA]. Israeli scientists were granted access to the Saclay Nuclear Research Center as well as Chatillon…” [p237, Spying on the Bomb, by Jeffrey Richelson, 2006]
…The [Israeli] cabinet.. chose to start small with a reactor purchased from the United States and located at Nebi Rubin, south of Tel Aviv. But an opportunity to advance Israel’s quest for nuclear weapons, with French assistance, arose out of a foreign policy fiasco. France had already become an important military supplier to Israel, largely owing to [Shimon] Peres… The director general of the Defense Ministry and future Prime Minister [Peres] also played a significant role in obtaining additional assistance that went far beyond training scientists at Saclay and Chatillon.
Shortly after Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal in late July 1956, [the] French..asked Peres..whether Israel was willing to participate in a military operation along with France and Britain to seize the canal… [p238, ibid]
“In mid-September, before the military campaign began, the Commisariat l’Energie Atomique [CEA] and IAEC [Israel Atomic Energy Commission] agreed, in principle, on the sale to Israel of a small research reactor similar to the EL-3 at Saclay. But t he military campaign turned into a debacle when Soviet leaders threatened missile attacks on the invaders and Eisenhower responded with condemnation rather than support. On November 8, Ben Gurion sent Peres and foreign minister Golda Meir on a covert mission to France to determine what kind of support the French would provide in case the Soviets made good on their threats against Israel…
“What Israel wanted was an upgraded version of the reactor that the CEA had planned to provide Israel, one similar to the large G-1 (40-megawatt thermal power) reactor at Marcoule, which was capable of producing between twenty-two and thirty-three pounds of plutonium a year. In addition, Israel wanted France to provide the technology required to extract plutonium from the spent reactor fuel, and requested…an underground plant attached to the reactor.” [p239] ….By [mid-1959, with settled supply agreements in place] construction of the [Dimona] nuclear facility was well underway… But political changes in France threatened to bring the joint effort to a halt well before the research center could be completed.
“The potential stumbling block was French president Charles de Gaulle, who was determined to end his nation’s close military collaboration with Israel, in part because of fear of Arab reaction if the extent of cooperation became known. In 1959 [deGaulle] had been talked out of his plan to simply abrogate the nuclear agreement. In 1960, after the departure of pro-Israeli atomic energy minister Jacques Soustelle, [the] French…made three demands..[including] international inspections. Unless Israel complied, France would refuse to supply the natural uranium needed to fuel the reactor.
“Accepting the French demands, particularly for international inspections, would threaten the plan to produce fissile material for atomic bombs… High-level discussions between deGaulle and Ben-Gurion followed in June 1960…[which resulted in] terminating official involvement through the CEA… Israel was able to take over most of the effort…” [p241, Spying on the Bomb, by Jeffrey Richelson]
*
*deGaulle and Kennedy
Soustelle
“In 1955, Soustelle was sent to Algeria as Governor General by Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France; he developed a network of ‘colonialist’ supporters independent of his government position, networks that were to become a leading part of the Algerian Secret Army Organization. His provocative behavior led to his removal from office.
“Returning to France, Soustelle was re-elected to parliament and became president of the France-Israel Alliance Caucus on the eve of the French government’s collaboration with Great Britain and Israel in the Suez invasion. [About this time or shortly after, Soustelle became the Minister of atomic energy]
“It was only after deGaulle’s return to power [c.1958] that Soustelle openly discarded his ‘Gaullist’ clothing and went into exile, taking leadership of the OAS Algerian terrorists and other parallel groups. Soustelle’s terrorists had the active support of David Ben-Gurion and Israeli intelligence. Financing for the OAS and other bands came from the Permindex Corporation. This assassination bureau was established by British-Canadian Major General Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, who channeled monies through the U.S. FBI Division Five (which Bloomfield set up during World War II). Permindex engaged in over 30 attempts to assassinate President deGaulle, notable among them the [1962] Petit Clamart incident to which Soustelle was directly linked.
“Seeking refuge in Switzerland, Israel, Madrid and Rome, Soustelle in the following period obtained aid from sources in the United States associated with William F. Buckley and his National Review circle…” [Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) Volume 6, No.44, Novemeber 13, 1979]
*
“It was out of the World Commerce Corporation that Permindex was formed [the post- WWII apparatus of Canadian millionaire and “master spy” William Stephenson who maintained British intelligence wartime espionage operations on the 35th and 36th floors of New York’s Rockefeller Center]”…“Schlumberger Ltd [owned by Mrs. Dominique Schlumberger deMenil, whose] husband, Jean deMenil, was a Permindex board member and close collaborator of [Louis] Bloomfield since the war. Involved in oil diagnostics [which uses radioactive ‘downhole’ explosives and tools] the firm [Schlumberger] served as a cover for Permindex operations internationally. During WWII, deMenil had been the head of deGaulle’s Free French Forces in Venezuela together with Jacques Soustelle.
“In 1962, the Secret Army Organization of Permindex board member Jean deMenil oversaw an assassination attempt against.. deGaulle…”
*
Permanent Industrial Exhibition, Perm-ind-ex, was chartered in 1956 Basle Switzerland. In 1959, a Permindex center was opened in Rome called Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). The head of Rome’s CMC was Georgio Mantello, a.k.a. George Mandel and often referred to as Mantello-Mandel. Permindex/CMC would later move operations to Johannesburg South Africa, c.1964.
*
“The leadership of PERMINDEX included a longtime asset of CIA Deputy Director for Plans Frank Wisner. His name was Ferenc Nagy and he was the president of PERMINDEX… Briefly, in 1945, he had been prime minister of Hungary. But it was Nagy’s CIA history that catapulted him to the leadership of PERMINDEX…
“Confirming deGaulle’s thesis that PERMINDEX funded the OAS is that Nagy was a ‘munificent contributor’ to Jacques Soustelle… In 1960, Soustelle met in WashingtonD.C. with Richard Bissell, then heading the CIA’s clandestine services. A year later, Soustelle went into exile…Two years after that he would be accused of colluding with OAS in the attempted assassination of deGaulle…
“In New Orleans, [Banister’s secretary] Delphine Roberts identified Nagy from his photograph as someone she had seen at Guy Banister’s office.” –p137, A Farewell To Justice, by Joan Mellen
*
Researcher Maurice Philipps:
“Documents found in the Bloomfield archives gave us more details on the structure and leadership of Permindex. For instance, they show that Ferenc Nagy was the active leader of Permindex and, in 1960, was making contact with David Rockefeller in order to develop the New York City World Trade Center on the model of the CMC [or Centro Mondiale Commerciale, based in Rome, and itself modeled on the New Orleans International Trade Mart]…. Nagy eventually moved to Dallas, TX, where he was residing in 1963, allegedly engaged in anti-Castro activities.”
*
[The Rockefeller Foundation, ‘RF’] “would have preferred to distance themselves from the dubious honor bestowed by Ernest O. Lawrence, who unwittingly boasted that ‘if it hadn’t been for the RF, there would have been no atomic bomb.’ As [they] saw it, the Foundation now shared the awesome prospect of writing the ‘world’s obituary’ and shared in the responsibility of controlling the future use of atomic energy.” –p219, The Molecular Vision of Life, by Lily E. Kay, 1993
*
In January of 1960, Lee Oswald took up his position in Minsk at the electronics factory. Over the next few months his mother began to worry: “On June 3, 1960, Hoover sent a letter to the State Department warning that someone posing as Lee Harvey Oswald in Russia might try to get hold of Oswald’s passport… Also in the letter was an FBI report from Dallas dated May 12, 1960 in which Oswald’s mother, Marguerite.. said she was worried about the safety of her son. She had written to him in Russia…[and] all letters had been returned to her. The State department added a notation, issuing orders that Oswald’s passport would not be returned to him through the Russian postal system but only in person; and the passport was actually handed over to a man calling himself Oswald in July 1961…” –p111, The Assassination Chain
The next month, August of 1961 and perhaps only days later, three American women who were traveling by car had brief encounters with Oswald. Two of them, Rita Naman and Monica Kramer, were roommates from Solvang,CA who started their journey in Britain. The third, Mrs. Marie Hyde, from the Seattle/Tacoma area of Washington, joined them in Moscow after engaging the women to give her a ride to Poland. Miss Naman reported to the Warren Commission that she took pictures in Minsk of a small group of people including Oswald standing by her car. One picture, at least, taken by Naman with Mrs. Hyde’s camera, showed Mrs. Hyde in a photo with Oswald. That photo apparently was sent to the CIA, shown neither to the Warren Commission nor the public. No testimony or photo image from Mrs. Marie Hyde has ever been published. Only a coincidence of surnames suggests a possible link between Mrs. Marie Hyde and Ruth Hyde, the wife of Michael Paine, an avid Russian speaker who befriended the Oswalds through the Dallas White Russian fellowship.
Outstanding in the background of Ruth Hyde Paine was a generations-long family friendship with the Herbert Hoovers. Ruth’s husband Michael Paine, as many researchers note, bore a strong resemblance to Lee Oswald.
*
* Ruth Hyde Paine
*
Michael and Lee
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” ‘I think the only really effective clandestine collection on Russia came from defectors,’ Richard Bissell said later… ‘It was part of the duties of the clandestine service to receive and encourage defectors, and some extremely valuable ones came in. But I don’t think clandestine collection is ever going to be a useful activity in a totalitarian society. The reason is only partly the difficulty of infiltrating agents into the country.’ “ –p374, Dulles, A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles…, by Leonard Mosley, 1978
Bissell’s methods of getting information out gets no mention from Mosley.
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Judyth said that Lee Oswald knew Ruth Paine a “long time before” she befriended Marina and Lee in Dallas. (The Real Deal interview Part One, April 30, 2010, www,radiofetzer.blogspot.com)
In the 1990s, Ruth
“admitted to her friend that her father [William Avery Hyde]
had worked for the CIA as an ‘executive agent’. Apparently while he was traveling abroad for Nationwide Insurance and then later while working for the Agency for International Development, he would gather intelligence information for the agency…Ruth’s sister [Sylvia Hyde Hoke]
worked for the CIA as a staff psychologist in 1961…” http://www.jfklancer.com/pdf/Paine.pdf
Michael spent 3 years of college training in academic physics at Harvard and Swarthmore, netting a job in Bartol Research Foundation’s nuclear labs in 1951. Ultimately without a degree due to poor performance as a scholar, he still found a good position with Bell Helicopter Research in Texas, helped, they say and with certainty, by family connections. His mother Ruth Forbes (ex-Paine) married Bell helicopter inventor and scientist Arthur Young when Michael was 18. On his father’s side, the influence was Trostkyite socialism. The politics of the Paines, it appears, was liberal and leftist, and their legacy in the conspiracy was to contribute the incriminating evidence of a violent and lone nut Oswald. The ‘lancer’ article above remarked on the extensive official interviewing of Ruth and suggests that they might have had “the wrong Paine”. Was Michael Paine someone to watch?
Despite the relentless obsequiousness of Mrs. Paine’s Garage, author Thomas Mallon passes on something Michael said to a coworker at Bell, told to SA Hosty after the assassination: “George Stephenson, a Bell engineer who sold him a used car in the fall of ’63, would tell FBI agent Hosty that he recalled Michael Paine stating, ‘I may have a problem here and I may have gotten myself into something and I better try to get out of it.’ Mr. Stephenson stated that he understood by this statement that Michael Paine was concerned about having the wife and children of [Lee Oswald] reside with his wife in view of his pro-Communist statements. Michael doesn’t remember this conversation…” p183, Mrs. Paine’s Garage, by Thomas Mallon, 2002