Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (31 page)

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Authors: Richard Belzer,David Wayne

Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #Political Science, #History & Theory, #Social Science, #Conspiracy Theories

BOOK: Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups
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3. Refer to
The Man Who Knew Too Much
by Dick Russell for a detailed history of the Eroshkin incident (Russell; 2003)
4. Oswald failed a Russian proficiency test on February 25, 1959. Only 6 months later he was totally fluent in the dif-ficult language, as witnessed by 2 native Russian speakers; his wife, Marina and George de Mohrenschildt. “In 1974, a document classified by the Warren Commission ... revealed that Oswald had attended the U.S. Army’s School of Languages at Monterey. Monterey is not open to just anyone who happens to have a language hobby. One is sent by the government, for training in a specific language pertaining to a specific assignment. Oswald learned Russian at Monterey.” (Parenti;
Dirty Truths;
1996) (Parenti’s claim has been disputed.) There is also substantial and reliable evidence that Oswald’s Intelligence “double” was a native of the Soviet Union (see
Harvey and Lee,
John Armstrong, 2003)
5. Oswald’s Military Intelligence file was secretly destroyed by the Department of Defense (House Assassinations Committee Final Report; 1978; pp. 223-24); Quotation above is from Dr. John M. Newman, former Executive Assistant to Director, National Security Agency
6. Former Military Intelligence operative Tosh Plumlee has testified that in addition to training with Oswald at the Nag’s Head facility, he received confirmations on two separate occasions from his Military Intelligence superior officers “that Oswald was ONI.” (Interview with author; 2006)
7. For a very thorough dissection of the profiles of the two separate Oswalds, see “Harvey and Lee: Military Records-Soviet Union,” John Armstrong, in
JFK Deep Politics Quarterly,
July, 2011
8. See “Harvey and Lee: Military Records-Soviet Union,” John Armstrong, in
JFK Deep Politics Quarterly,
July, 2011
Also see:
Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?
November 20, 2003, Frontline, PBS;
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/etc/ script.html
Lee Harvey Oswald, Parts 1 and2,
Robert Harris, February 23, 2008, July 17, 2008;
http://www.jfkhistory.com/Youtube.html

On the surface, the incident was a huge public relations disaster and of major embarrassment to the United States. Historically, however, its effect was much more dramatic. The eventual result of the incident was not just the shoot-down of the plane, but the torpedoing of the Big Four Summit Meeting (United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain and France) of great importance between the superpowers, and hence, an extremely expensive continuation of the Cold War.

President Eisenhower refused to apologize for the incident to the satisfaction of the Soviets, and the would-be peace talks came to an abrupt halt as a result.

“There is a very strong likelihood that Lee’s defection was designed to provide the fertilizer to allow the Soviets an excuse to end the talks. This is exactly what did happen. On May 17, 1960, the peace talks fell apart. Khrushchev cited the U-2 incident and referred to America’s ‘aggressive actions.’ If this was Lee Oswald’s mission, it succeeded.”
262

Powers reportedly blamed radar secrets leaked to the Russians by Lee Harvey Oswald as the reason for the shoot-down of the U-2 spy plane Powers had piloted. Oswald had a Top Secret security clearance and may have had access to radar secrets and classified information on the U-2 surveillance flights, which he helped monitor from the Atsugi, Japan base where he had been recently stationed. More importantly from an intelligence standpoint, especially if the mission was to torpedo the peace talks—it would have been
perceived
that he could have had access to those secrets.

The conclusions of Gary Powers, an experienced CIA operative, merit serious attention—he was one cool customer. When asked how high he was flying in his spy plane when he was shot down in Soviet air space, Powers calmly responded:

“Not high enough.”
263

COLONEL L. FLETCHER PROUTY

Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty was a twenty-three-year military veteran who became the model for “Mr. X” in the film
JFK
by Oliver Stone. He rose to the level of Focal Point Officer, the key liaison between the CIA and the Air Force for covert operations, after having also been the Briefing Officer for the Secretary of Defense. In short—at the highest levels of government—he was privy to many secrets, in general, and in matters of espionage, in particular. His website is a wealth of information for researchers, historians, and students:
http://www. prouty.org/

Colonel Prouty’s conclusions about Lee Harvey Oswald are stark and direct:

“Oswald was a patsy. There’s no question about it.”
264

Evidence Exonerating Lee Harvey Oswald:

1.Oswald paraffin-tested negative for gunfire residue on his cheek, which is highly indicative that he had not fired a rifle recently. Although the presence of gunfire residue, detected by paraffin-testing, is not necessarily indicative of having recently fired a weapon, its absence is highly indicative of not having recently fired a weapon. See “Bugliosi Fails the Paraffin Test,” Pat Speer, 24 July, 2007;
http://jfkaccountability.type- pad.com/reclaiming_history/2007/07/bugliosi-fails-.html
2.Oswald’s fingerprints were not found anywhere on the rifle by the FBI. It is quite reasonable to assume that the FBI very thoroughly examined the weapon supposedly responsible for the murder of the President of the United States. They initially found no prints of Oswald’s anywhere on the weapon. After a highly questionable chain-of-evidence and a very mysterious FBI visit to the funeral home where Oswald’s body was in the process of being embalmed for burial, a partial palm print of Oswald’s was supposedly later identified on the same weapon that had been previously examined in great detail. The funeral director testified that he knew that the FBI came to the funeral home and took both fingerprints and palm prints of Oswald because, after they left, he had to clean off the ink to prepare the body. See testimony of mortician Paul Groody of Miller Funeral Home: “‘Agents’ fingerprinted Oswald corpse”;
http://youtu.be/P2W_-ID8RMI
3.Ballistics testing did not incriminate Oswald in any way. The FBI performed both neutron activation analysis and emission spectography for the Warren Commission and reported that the tests were inconclusive (Fuhrman, 2006). Furthermore, the FBI Lab’s chief metallurgy expert for more than two decades, William A. Tobin, concluded that the lead analysis used for the initial one-gunman conclusion was fundamentally flawed and that bullets from another gun also struck President Kennedy. See “Study Led By Former FBI Scientist Says Multiple Shooters In JFK Assassination,” John Solomon, May 17, 2007, Washington Post; accessible at:
http://www.informationliberation.com
/?id=22026
4.Officer J. D. Tippit was shot with an automatic and Oswald had a revolver, and there are obvious and marked ballistics differentiations between the two. Two very experienced witnesses (a police Sergeant and a former combat Marine) testified they were certain that the crime scene gun at the shooting of Officer Tippit was an automatic, not a revolver (Oswald had a revolver). See: “Did Oswald Shoot Tippit?”, Michael T. Grifith, 2002;
http://www.kenrahn.com/jfk/the_critics/griffith/With_Malice.html
5.No witness could ever place Oswald at the actual crime scene. As Dallas Chief of Police Jesse Curry noted:
“We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Nobody’s yet been able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand.”
—Jesse Curry
Chief of Police
Dallas Police Department
(Dallas Morning News, Nov. 6, 1969, in Jim Marrs, Crossfire, 1990)
6.The rifle discovered in the Book Depository building was initially identified as a 7.65mm Mauser (an excellent rifle), not as a 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano (an extremely poor rifle) by the members of the search team which found it. They made that identification with certainty, even having read that word on the rifle itself, and were veteran police officers experienced with weapons (one had even owned a gun shop). Officer Weitzman, who had operated a sporting goods store, was extremely familiar with rifles and described the weapon found on the sixth floor in no uncertain terms: “This rifle was a 7.65 Mauser bolt action equipped with a 4/18 scope, a thick leather brownish-black sling on it.” Roger Craig, who was also part of the search team, even recalled seeing the word “Mauser” inscribed on the metal of the rifle. Weitzman and Craig refused to alter their testimony and were harassed for the remainder of their short lives. See: The Guns of Dealey Plaza, John S. Craig:
www.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/11th_issue/guns_dp.html
7.The sight on the supposed murder weapon was not even aligned properly, meaning that a shooter would not actually have hit what had been lined up in the sight. A 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano was a notoriously poor weapon and would no doubt have been one of the last choices an assassin would have made. It was nicknamed “The Peacekeeper” by Italian soldiers because if you fired at what was lined up in your sight, it was joked that you would never actually hit anyone. Much has been written about the absurdity of an assassin even considering as ludicrous a weapon choice as the 6.5 Mannlicher for an assassination attempt.
8.Colonel William C. Bishop was the Senior Military Intelligence member of the CIA’s Executive Action assassinations project. Colonel Bishop was not only an expert on assassins, he actually collected them for Executive Action and was also personally responsible for making the hit on President Trujillo of the Dominican Republic in 1961. Colonel Bishop stated flatly:

 

“Oswald was a decoy. There’s no way in hell he could have fired three shots in that space of time, with that accuracy, with that weapon … I’ll tell you one damn thing. Whoever set up that poor little son of a bitch did a first-class job.”

 

See: The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, 1993
9.ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) conducted its own secret investigation of the JFK assassination that reached the following conclusions:
▸ Oswald was not the shooter
▸ Oswald was incapable of masterminding the assassination See Ultimate Sacrifice, Waldron & Hartmann, 2006
10.Scientific voice analysis and evaluation of Oswald’s recorded voice overwhelmingly indicated that Oswald was being truthful about his innocence. Psychological Stress Evaluation (PSE) is a scientific method of measuring voice stress. George O’Toole explains the function: “Stress is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of lying; it must be interpreted, and therein lies the margin of error. But the absence of stress is a sufficient condition of truthfulness. If someone is talking about a matter of real importance to himself and shows absolutely no stress, then he must be telling the truth.” As historian Michael Griffith notes: “The PSE has been shown to be reliable in several tests. It is used by hundreds of U.S. law enforcement agencies, and it is accepted as evidence in more than a dozen states.”

 

•“Oswald denied shooting anybody—the president, the policeman, anybody. The psychological stress eval- uator said he was telling the truth.”
•“There is no other plausible interpretation of the Oswald PSE charts than the explanation that Oswald was simply telling the truth.”
•“My PSE analysis of these recordings indicates very clearly that Oswald believed he was telling the truth when he denied killing the president.”

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