Tuesday, February 23, 2016

List of Withheld Records - A Preliminary Report

Note - this is a first draft - I will add more links and graphics ASAP. - BK 

GEMS OF THE FAMILY JEWELS

LIST OF WITHHELD JFK ASSASSINATION RECORDS – A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS
AND THE TOP TEN ISSUES IT PRESENTS.

BY W. KELLY

   “It may seem to those nourished on the exploits of James Bond ,…that journalistic activities have little to do with intelligence work. But intelligence is a mosaic. General material about background and people’s interrelationships can be both illuminating and important. Quite often missing pieces of the mosaic emerge that make a previously incomprehensible picture unexpectedly clear.” – Mary Bancroft (Autobiography of a Spy, William Morrow, 1983 p. 150)

A nation’s history and its official secrets are often considered the Family Jewels, and America’s secret records of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are considered the most precious secrets that the government refuses to give up, even reveal to its own citizens.

The real Deep Political secret records never see the light of day and are Deep Sixed so they are forever gone, though occasionally one will float to the surface and be saved and placed on a shelf in a secure and temperature controlled vault where many of the nation’s most precious secrets are stored.

Among the official archival records there is the JFK Collection at the Archives II industrial warehouse of records in College Park, Maryland. The JFK Collection was instituted by the JFK Act of 1992 – a bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. H. Bush. It requires all of the government’s records on the assassination of President Kennedy be released to the public by October 2017, a fast approaching date that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) says it will meet despite the reluctance of other agencies of government.

The only way an official record can still be withheld beyond that date is by an order of the President of the United States, whoeverf he or she may be, and this is an issue that is certain to be brought to the attention of each of the candidates for that office.

But we don’t have to wait until October 2017 to get a glimpse of these Family Jewels because, thanks to the determined efforts of a few intrepid researchers we have a new document – which purports to be a list of the  over 3,000 JFK assassination records still being withheld that are scheduled to be released in 2017.

Both independent researcher Michael Ravnitzky and reporter Bryan Bender can be credited for seeking this document and breaking this story. Ravnitzky first requested the document, and had it posted at Russ Baker’s WWWW web site. Bryan Bender who wrote about this story for the Boston Globe and now does so for the digital journal Politico, also requested the document under the Freedom of Information Act and has followed up with a series of FOIA requests for other records. So far Jefferson Morley at JFKFacts.org and the British Daily Mail have followed up with additional stories.  

This list of withheld JFK assassination records is like a small port-hole window through which we can shine a little light into the dark world of secrets being kept in the government’s vault. Though we will have a much better picture window view of them on stage, under the lights and in great detail when all of the records are released to the public for everyone to read, this one document gives us some insight into what we will find. 

The new document purports to answer a lot of questions concerning the withheld records but actually creates fresh doubts and sparks new questions - like how many records are still being withheld? And why isn’t the JFK Act  being strictly enforced by Congressional oversight, as it should be?   

At first glance the 146 page spread sheet list of RIFs – Record Identification Forms, for the most part lists their topic, agency of origin and how many pages they are – gives us some concrete numbers that have thus far been missing. 3, 603 and 3,063 still with held documents have been the most frequent numbers thrown about – but Raymon Herrera, who has put together a program to reconfigure the documents in a more readable form says that there are actually 3,568 RIF records listed.  

If you use the NARA’s hopelessly outdated digital data base you come up with tens of thousands of records that are listed as withheld in full or in part but in fact are readily available as they were released in a number of earlier data dumps, sometimes accelerating the release of the records years before they were required to.
The dumping of tons of documents into the public domain at one time is also a deliberate obstrufustion tactic in which the really significant gems of informative facts are included among useless information, thus insuring it won’t be found for years, at least until some intrepid researcher requests it or accidently stumbles across it, discovers it and recognizes its significance. One small piece of the Dealey Plaza Mosaic, as Mary Bancroft would put it, a piece that makes it all so unexpectedly clear.

At first glance a quick survey of the new list of still withheld JFK assassination records requires the creation of a new list of issues this document raises, beginning with the total number of records still being withheld. 
 Then there’s the question of exactly how many are being withheld by each agency of government? Is it really 3, 568 or is that a number that will change over time as we sift through the records.

This document gives us the names and subject matter that is the topic of each document, at least some of them, and discloses or explains why some of the records are being withheld, many under (b)(3) 26 U.S.C. &6103 – the IRS personal privacy law. Does this law trump the JFK Act? Will it be used to keep records withheld beyond October 2017 even without a presidential order?

Some of William Manchester’s records are also among these records, including interviews with Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy. Manchester has placed a personal time of release that is beyond the JFK Act, so which one rules? Will William Manchester’s personal last will and testament over rule the JFK Act, or will that issue be used to continue the withholding of the records with or without the president’s approval? 
  
The list indicates a few things right off the bat including the fact that hundreds of the documents are identified as being “illegible,” meaning you can’t read it, which begs the question - why the agencies of government would withhold a record that can’t be read, and why would the ARRB approve the withholding of such a record?

Another thing that jumps out of the list is the fact that there are many Warren Commission documents still being withheld, when it was previously alleged by the NARA that all of the Warren Commission era records had been released.

In addition, while the House Select Committee on Assassination (HSCA) MLK records were not included in the JFK Act, there are many MLK and MLK assassination records on the list, as well as a number of records concerning racial riots, anti-war demonstrations and the 1968 Democratic National Convention, all of which occurred years after the assassination. Why are these documents being included among the JFK Assassination Records Collection?

Some of the withheld records, such as the Collins Radio documents are labeled “NBR” – Not Believed Relevant, yet they most certainly are as Collins Radio made the Air Force One radios and operated the relay station that broadcast the signals. This begs the question as to why they would include dozens of irrelevant records on political demonstrations that occurred years after the assassination, yet try to with hold the most significant records that are directly connected to the assassination?

Of the  ONI records being withheld, it is noteworthy that the ONI Defector Files are not among them, which indicates that they have been deliberately excluded from the JFK Collection, not given a RIF number and are simply being withheld without being included among the official list of records being with held.

Other ONI records, such as the 119 Reports we know exist or did exist at one time, and the assassination records of ONI chief Admiral Rufus Taylor, are not listed either, so they are not being withheld, and won’t be released in October 2017, but must be considered missing, lost, stolen or intentionally destroyed. Why is there is no investigation into what became of these missing records?

Most noteworthy is the fact that some of the records listed as being withheld have already been released, though in most cases, in redacted form.

The Subjects-Topic of the documents on the list can be broken down into four categories – names of individuals, organizations, places and record  types. I have listed as many of the individuals mentioned as I can at JFKCountercoup2 -  https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=522635142791807512 - allposts/postNum=2 

I have previously reviewed some of the background off Judd McIlvaine, the University of Missouri Journalism grad who specialized in Central and South American news and whose interview with the Church Committee is among the list of withheld records. It was quickly established that McIlvaine had also been interviewed at length by others and there are related government records already released, so whatever it is in this record that is being suppressed is probably already available from other sources.

As some researchers have noted, some records being withheld by one agency have already been released by another agency. If you want to get some deep background on a particular record that’s listed you can go to the NARA or MaryFerrell.org data base and type in the first two groups of the RIF number and it will lead you to other documents in that field, sometimes even the exact document that’s listed as being withheld has already been released and is available on line.

One series of documents on the list relates to JFK advance man John Byrne and one Bill Turner - not the recently deceased former FBI agent, but the Exalted Ruler of the Fort Worth Elks Club. He sked JFK’s advance man John Byrne if the president would stop to visit his club house, a request that was politely rejected. But apparently he generated a half dozen reports and official documents that have been officially deemed so secret that they must be kept from the curious and reading public in order to maintain the nation’s security.

But you can read about Byrne’s successful and fateful advance trip to Fort Worth in the article “The Day Before Dallas” that he wrote for Prologue, the glossy NARA magazine, in which he mentions the requests he received from various Texas civic leaders, including Bill Turner, the Exalted Ruler of the Elks. Maybe there was a plot to kill the President at the Elks Club, or some other issue of national security, one that we will learn the answer to come October 2017.

Whether the JFK Collection contains all of the official records as required is yet to be seen but one thing is for certain, there will be another data dump come that day, and the most precious of secrets will be made available to the public for all to see, but it will be up to the researchers, historians, journalists and reporters who will have to dig through the morass to find the real gems that are the final pieces to Mary Bancroft’s Mosaic, the total picture of what really happened at Dealey Plaza.

Bancroft was also fond of quoting her uncle  C.W. Barron, who often reminded her, “Remember that facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie!”

So `the Top Ten Issues this document presents and the questions they pose are:

1) How many records are still being withheld?
2) How many agencies are involved and how many are being withheld from each agency?
3) Why are there so many described as “illegible”? Why were they withheld and why did ARRB agree to withhold them?
4) How many Warren Commission records are still being withheld? The zero answer previously provided by NARA is clearly incorrect.
5) Why are MLK assassination records, race riots and the DNC 1968 records, clearly unrelated to the assassination included in the JFK Collection when they are clearly NBR?
6) Why are the Collins Radio records described as NBR when theyv are relevant?
7) How come the ONI Defector and ONI Director Files are not listed among the still withheld records when they are still being withheld?
8) Why are there so many records listed as withheld when in fact they have been released and are available?
9) What about the records we know exist that are not among the JFK Collection – ONI 119 Reports, ONI Director Files, Richard Sprague’s HSCA records, the original Air Force One radio tapes and other such records? Is the NARA actively searching and seeking these records?
10) Will the AOTUS – Mr. Ferraro – ever get around to publishing an index and guide to the JFK Collection as the JFK Act law requires?

And finally, when will the appropriate committee of Congress hold public hearings on the JFK Act, inquire as to why there are so many missing and possibly destroyed records, and see to the strict and proper enforcement of the JFK Act?

After all, these records - the Family Jewels are the history of America – our history, our nation, and they do not belong to any secret government agency, classified redactor or petty bureaucrat – they belong to the citizens who paid for them and legally own them, as the secrets of the assassination are all our secrets.

And as Dan Ellisberg asked, once we learn the secrets, what are we going to do with that new knowledge?


Bill Kelly can be reached at billkelly3@gmail.com

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Restoring Oliver Stone's Mercedes - the Elephant in the Archives

Restoring Oliver Stone’s Mercedes - the Elephant in the Archives
By William E. Kelly (billkelly3@gmail.com) 

Image result for Oliver Stone testifying before Congress 1992 

“It may seem to those nourished on the exploits of James Bond,…that journalistic activities have little to do with intelligence work. But intelligence is a mosaic. General material about background and people’s interrelationships can be both illuminating and important. Quite often missing pieces of the mosaic emerge that make a previously incomprehensible picture unexpectedly clear.” – Mary Bancroft (Autobiography of a Spy, William Morrow, 1983 p. 150)

The JFK Act of 1992 requires all government records on the assassination of President Kennedy to be released to the public in full by October 2017, unless kept sealed by the President, a daunting task since they don’t even know exactly how many records are still being withheld.

The efforts to obtain the release of the records began before the Warren Commission concluded its business, and picked up steam after the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded their investigation, sealed their records for fifty years, and exempted itself from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), requiring an act of Congress to free them.

After many years of fruitlessly lobbying Congress a small group of persistent researchers suggested that an attempt be made to take advantage of the surging publicity surrounding Oliver Stone’s yet unfinished and unreleased JFK movie.

Just as the film “Executive Action” had a trailer at the end of the movie that mentioned the fate of many of those assassination witnesses who died suspiciously, it was suggested that the same technique be used to call attention to the still secret JFK assassination records. Such a widely viewed statement could stimulate the public’s interest in the records, and indeed it did, so much so that practically every Congressman was asked about the sealed records and agreed to do something about it.

But rather than just release the HSCA records we sought, Congress went beyond what we asked for and extended the law to include all of the JFK assassination records of every government agency, but at the same time kept the HSCA records on the MLK assassination sealed, as they remain today.

Oliver Stone was one of the few outside the national security think tank system to testify before a preliminary Congressional hearing and given an opportunity to talk directly to the legislative committee responsible for government records and complained about the MLK records being left out of the law saying, “What do I have to do to get you to release them, make a movie about the MLK assassination?”

When he was asked what he expected to find in the files, Stone replied that he didn’t expect a “smoking gun” document that would prove conspiracy because most of the important records will have been purged, but he did expect there to still be a few important pieces to the puzzle that will give us a more accurate picture of what happened at Dealey Plaza.

Stone compared the existing JFK assassination records to a 1963 Mercedes-Benz automobile left on a street in Harlem. Thirty years later it would have been stripped of its chrome, tires, radio and accessories, but the frame would still be there and you would still be able to identify it as a Mercedes.

The JFK Act was passed unanimously by Congress and reluctantly signed into law by President George W. H. Bush as one of his last official duties before leaving office. It was left to be carried out by President Clinton, who appointed the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), headed by Federal Judge John Tunheim to oversee identifying and releasing the records to the public. The law established the JFK Records Collections at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) at the new Archives II building in suburban College Park, Maryland.

So far millions of pages of documents have been released from many agencies of government, yet so many records remain sealed from the public that the archivists responsible for them can’t tell us how many there are still being withheld.
It has been said that there are no Warren Commission records withheld or redacted, and a number 3,603 documents has been thrown about as the number of records still being withheld, but it’s hard to nail down exactly what these records are, and how many pages there are, as some documents contain hundreds of pages.

Many documents listed on the NARA JFK Collection’s digital public data base that are listed as still being withheld have in fact been released in full or in part in a number of massive data dumps over the years, with many documents labeled still withheld among them.

THE NEW SPREAD SHEET

Now we have a spread sheet list of a few thousand documents with RIF numbers, so they have been processed by the ARRB, a list said to be that of the still withheld records.  [FOIA - Freedom of Information Act / JFK-List-of-Denied-Docs-redacted.pdf ] The list was first obtained by an JFK assassination researcher Michael Ravnitzky who filed an FOIA request for them, and first posted on line by Russ Baker’s  WhoWhatWhy.org [ BREAKING NEWS: List of Withheld JFK Assassination Documents - WhoWhatWhy ] and is being followed up on by Jefferson Morley at JFKFacts.org and at POLITICO, by former Boston Globe reporter Brian Bender, who has been on this story for years.

There are many researchers now poring over this list, and a number of things come to my attention right away, including the fact that some of these items are already in the public domain, and others or copies of others have already been released in the previous data dumps.

For the uninitiated, every document and record identified for inclusion in the JFK Collection at the National Archives is given a Record Identification Finder – a RIF number that begins with three digits that refer to the originating agency – and then a series of numbers that refer to the serial the record is contained in.

Using the National Archives JFK Collection Web site or the Mary Ferrell site, you can type in the RIF number and see if it has already been released, or as Bill Simpich has suggested, to find other documents that are in that series that gives you an idea of what the subject matter is if the subject is still classified, as many are.

REASSEMBLING OLIVER STONE’S MERCEDES

This is the just be beginning of the process that must be used to reassemble Oliver Stone’s Mercedes.

Around the same time we were working with Oliver Stone to free the JFK files, my uncle Stephen Skip Hayes, a Catholic priest wrote a homily about our work, and compared it to the ancient story of the blind men describing different parts of an elephant. And that’s kind of what we are doing, each taking a different part of the historical record and describing what’s there and how it relates to what happened at Dealey Plaza.

There are a number of ways to locate new and important records from the data dumps, like a needle in a haystack, by following a few procedures.

As Peter Dale Scott has proposed in his “Negative-Template” thesis, the most important records are the ones we will never see, that have been purged from the official record, intentionally misfiled, stolen and/or destroyed. Second in line are the ones they are trying to keep sealed, and these are the ones we are looking at.

There is also the technique used by the college professor who recently discovered thousands of previously unknown documents written and signed by Walt Whitman, America’s Poet Laurate. Knowing Whitman’s signature by sight, he went looking through the Civil War records of the Attorney General, where Whitman worked as a secretary for two years, and expecting to find a few, was surprised to find thousands, so many that it will take years for Whitman scholars to go through them all. The idea is to go to a section of the archives where you would expect to find what you are looking for.

In any case, we are now in the process of describing the elephant at the Archives, and rebuilding Oliver Stone’s Mercedes, a task that when completed, should give us a view of what really happened at Dealey Plaza, and if the Mercedes was driven by a deranged loner or was controlled by a highly sophisticated covert intelligence operation. 



RECORD # TITLE TO FROM CREATED DATE AGENCY FILE # ORIGIN RECORD SERIES
# OF PAGES 

178 SERIES - the first 13 records are documents from the 1975 Rockefeller Commission

178-10004-10424 (b) (1)  05/01/1975 CAR/HARDY JEWELS 1  CIA  SUBJECT FILES 08/16/1993 17 pages

178-10004-10395 STURGIS TAPES, 4/4/75 04/04/1975 ROCKCOM STURGIS TESTIMONY/TAPES  ROCK ASSASSINATION FILE 08/13/1993 10 pages

178-10004-10394 MC ILVAIN TAPE (DUPLICATE)   00/00/1975 ROCKCOM A-III (c) interview Tapes ROCK  ASSASSINATION FILE 08/13/1993 5 (PAGES) Unclassified No transcript Date Unknown Two dicta belt envelope

[BK Notes - This refers to TV reporter Judd McIlvain - who covered Central America for ABC and is listed among the Rockefeller Papers (also still classified) For more on McIlvain see:


178-10004-10392 TAPE OF MR. WILLIAM K. HARVEY’S INTRERVIEW, 4/10/75

178-10004-10391 TAPE OF INTERVIEW OF COLONEL SHEFFIELD EDWARDS APRIL 9, 1975

178-10004-10390  (b) (1)

178-10004-10389 TAPES OF INTERVIEW W/WILL WILSON 5/15/75

178-10004-10388 (b) (1)

178-10004-10387 (b) (1)

178-10004-10386 TAPE OF CONVERSATION WITH MC GEORGE BUNDY, APRIL 8, 1975 (W/BELIN)

178-10004-10215 CASTRO  BUCHEN, PHILIP 08/07/1975 MATHENY DAVID BELIN’S SUMMARY REPORT WH ROCKEFELLER COMMISSION

178-10004-10196  CURTIS, E.G. 01/13/1961 DAVIS SSC-TRUJILLO ASSASSINATION, CUBA, CHILI DOS GENERAL SUBJECT FILE 08/10/1993 7  Top Secret Detailed me(mo?) Whiting, Will Gray, et al.

Image result for 1963 Mercedes Benz in junkyard

Image result for 1963 Mercedes Benz in junkyard
1963 Mercedes-Benz - Original - Thirty Years Later - Being Restored




Second Series – 104

104-10010-10249 ACCESS RESTRICTED    04/21/1964 CIA 201-289246 WC JFK  06/25/1993 7 pages Unclassified OSW15:V56B 1993.06.25.18:01:030250: THIS ITEM HAS BEEN WITHDRAWN BECAUSE IT CONTAINS SECURITY CLASSIFIED INFO OR OTHERWISE RESTRICTED INFO. DRAFT MEMO  FOR THE RECORD


104-10013-10277 WITHHELD 01/01/1964 CIA 201-2889248  CIA JFK 06/29/1993 1 page Unclasssified  OSW17:V3 1993.06.29.09:19:02:840800: THIS DOCMENT WAS PART OF THE NAME FOLDER ENCLOSURE TO RECORD NUM 111100001100007. PUBLIC DISCLOSURE OF THIS RECORD IS POSTPONED PEDING REVIEW BY THE ASSASSINATIONS RECORDS REVIE BOARD. DOCUMENT IN NOFORN 

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Valkyrie at Dealey Plaza - "The Conspiracy Alone Must Speak"

VALKYRIE AT DEALEY PLAZA - 'The Conspiracy Alone Must Speak." 
(as revised)

– By William Kelly (billkelly3@gmail.com) 


 VALKYRIE AT DEALEY PLAZA - 'The Conspiracy Alone Must Speak."  

“We now know what happened at Dealey Plaza to a fairly good degree of certainty.  The motives were piling up – the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the two-track backchannel to Cuba – the motives were piling up to the point they had to assassinate him. I think it’s now pretty obvious, with the information we have today, that the mechanism of it came out of the allegiance between the CIA and the Mafia. They already had an assassination apparatus set up for killing Castro, and they just switched targets and they killed JFK instead."   
                                -  Former FBI agent William W. Turner at Dallas COPA 2003

Keeping the CIA plots to kill Fidel Castro from the Warren Commission was one of the major deficits of the Warren Report and calls into question their primary conclusion that the assassination of President Kennedy was the work of a lone deranged gunman - Lee Harvey Oswald.

It doesn’t matter whether the Cuban-connected Oswald was a lone shooter or a patsy since the CIA plots to kill Castro throws a major wrench into the deranged lone nut scenario, and adds a political motive to the murder.

Besides  the CIA-Mafia plots that began during the Eisenhower administration there were other CIA plans to kill Castro that came later in the game and have a much more serious bearing on what happened at Dealey Plaza,  especially the Valkyrie plot.

In his new and important book "The Devil's. Chessboard" David Talbot mentions the role Allen Dulles and his agent-mistress Mary Bancroft played in the July 20, 1944 plot to kill Hitler - code named Valkyrie.  [1]

As Talbot points out and Dulles suspected would become fodder for conspiracy theorists, Mary Bancroft was a close personal friend of the mother of Michael Paine, the chief patron and sponsor of Oswald and his family.

Besides that two degrees of separation between Oswald and Dulles/Bancroft, the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler is mentioned a half-dozen times in the course of the assassination narrative, and while the significance of this has yet to be fully drawn out, the recurring Valkyrie theme that runs through the JFK assassination story certainly merits further scrutiny.

As mentioned in my review of  "Devil's Chessboard" [2]  when it comes to killing Castro the Valkyrie plot has been ignored - despite its numerous direct ties to what happened at Dealey Plaza, beginning with Lee Harvey Oswald and Volkmar Schmidt.

OSWALD AND VOLKMAR SCHMIDT

Phillip Shenon devotes a whole book “A Cruel and Terrible Act” [3] to the subject of a Mexico City Twist Party where Oswald was supposedly encouraged to kill JFK by some Cuban Communist diplomats. It's a party that Oswald could not have possibly attended as I have talked with two other Americans who were also reported present at the party and write about in my review of Shenon’s book – "A Cruel and Terrible Twist." [4]

But there was another party that was attended by Oswald where he was encouraged to commit political assassination - that of General Walker, which he is also accused of attempting to do. 
It was at a February 1963 gathering at Volkmar Schmidt's Dallas home, a party that George deMohrenschildts set up specifically for Oswald to meet Michael Paine. DeMohrenschilts said he wanted Oswald to meet Michael Paine because of their mutual interest in political ideology. Paine's father Lyman Paine was a founder of the Trotskyite communist party in America and Oswald subscribed to their magazine The Militant. While Michael Paine wasn’t at the party, his wife Ruth was and she met Marina and they became famously friends up until the assassination. It was at that party when Schmidt says he talked privately with Oswald for over two hours and first brought up the subject of the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler.

In a phone conversation with Schmidt [5] he told me that while talking with Oswald he used a reverse psychology technique he learned from a German doctor who knew some of those involved in the Valkyrie coup when he mentioned the plot to kill Hitler to Oswald.

While discussing right-wing general Walker, Schmidt said he compared Walker to Hitler and asked how different the world would be if Hitler had been assassinated? Schmidt implied Walker should be killed before he became another Hitler.

Born in Germany and raised in his formative years by the German doctor, Schmidt was an oil geologist, as was his friend George deMohrenschilts. Schmidt was recruited in Germany by Magnolia Oil of Dallas - the company that used the red Pegasus sign as its logo and later merged with major conglomerates. [6]

Schmidt said that when he learned that Oswald had been accused of taking a shot at Walker and killing JFK he felt terribly guilty, especially every time he drove through Dealey Plaza, as he believed he was responsible for planting the assassination seed in Oswald's mind.

Schmidt said, "naturally it was a terrible responsibility, and for years when I drove past the underpass I literally had to cry because, you know.... But I exonerate myself completely because I had the best intent, embarrass Kennedy... I may have triggered it. Actually, a few days after I talked with him, he bought his weapons."

OSWALDS TO NEW ORLEANS

Shortly after the Walker incident Oswald packed up all his family belongings and was about to suddenly and unexpectedly move his family to his home town of New Orleans. But Mrs. Paine, who was driving them to the bus station, suggested Marina should stay with her in Texas while Oswald went on alone to New Orleans, find a job and apartment and then she would drive them there when he was settled in.

And that he did. While reconnecting with his mother's sister, his aunt Muriel and uncle Dutz Murret he got a job at Reily Coffee and an apartment on Magazine Street. Ruth Paine then drove Marina, the daughter and the Oswald's belongings, including the rifle, to New Orleans, where they settled in. [7]

After an interesting and eventful summer in the Crescent City the Oswalds considered returning to Texas when Ruth Paine wrote to the pregnant Marina and invited her to come and live with her in Texas until she had the baby. If she agreed, Ruth Paine wrote, Marina should write her a letter “in care of Arthur Young, Paoli, Pennsylvania,” where she would be visiting her husband's mother Ruth Forbes Paine Young. [8]

RUTH FORBES PAINE YOUNG – MARY BANCROFT AND ALLEN DULLES

Ruth Paine was on a summer station wagon vacation with her kids driving to Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C. and Ohio visiting friends and family, including the suburban Philadelphia farm of her husband's mother, Ruth Forbes Paine Young. Another one of the places Ruth Paine visited at the invitation of Michael’s mother was the Forbes family Naushon Island off Massachusetts.

As described by yachtsman Walter Cronkite, “Just off Woods Hole is Hadley Harbor on Naushon Island, a favorite anchorage or cruising boats. At the end of a narrow twisting passage through huge rocks, it is a scene of bucolic bliss. The Forbes family (of whom publisher-adventurer-balloonist-sailor Malcolm Forbes is one) owns the island, and great mansions grace its hilltops like castles on a Scottish moor. The harbor shore itself, besides the grassy shelf on which horses, cows, and sheep graze, is lined with the support mechanism for an island population – a slip from which the Forbes’ small private ferry runs over to Woods Hole, and a boatyard which cares for the fleet of pleasure craft. The gracious Forbes not only permit anchorage in their harbor, but they even have set aside one of their small islands on which visiting yachtsmen are invited to stretch their legs. Hadley’s quiet a welcome refuge on those many days when strong winds whip up the comparatively shallow waters of Buzzard’s Bay and justify its notoriety as perhaps the Atlantic Coast’s roughest sailing round.” [9]
An eccentric heiress and humanitarian member of Cord Meyer's World Federalists, Ruth Forbes Paine had married the equally eccentric Arthur Young, genius inventor of the Bell Helicopter 47A - the MASH helicopter with glass bubble and girders. [10]

Michael Paine and Ruth Hyde had met and were married in Philadelphia, and after apprenticing as a helicopter designer with his step-father-in-law, Arthur Young arranged for Michael Paine to get a job at Bell Helicopter in Texas. So it was in care of Arthur Young that Marina wrote to Ruth Hyde Paine agreeing to the new arrangements - Marina would go to Texas to have the baby and wait for Ruth Paine to pick her up in New Orleans.

Most significant however is Michael's mom Ruth Forbes Paine Young and her close association with Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles's agent and mistress who was intimately involved in the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler. [11]

In the late 1930s Ruth Forbes Paine traveled with Mary Bancroft on a steamship to Europe when Bancroft met a Swiss businessman who she would marry, putting her in position, when the Second World War broke out, to meet and work in the OSS with Allen Dulles. While with Dulles, the top OSS chef in Europe, Bancroft met Hans Bernd Gisevius, a Nazi officer who was deeply involved in the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler.

THE VALKYRIE PLOT TO KILL HITLER

Years in the making the Valkyrie assassination and coup plan stemmed mainly from disgruntled military officers and fell to Claus Von Stauffenberg to carry out on July 20, 1944, leaving a briefcase bomb under a map table next to Hitler in the Wolfsschanze Wolf's Lair bunker in Bavaria.

In drawing up the Valkyrie plan Von Stauffenberg broke it into two parts - Phase One would be the order to have the home national army seize all key government and communication buildings in response to a revolt by the foreign slave labor, the part of the plan that would be approved by Hitler himself. Phase Two, the secret part, was the assassination of Hitler.

The control of the radio and media centers was an instrumental part of the plan, as Von Stauffenberg put it, "the conspiracy alone must speak."

A third part of the plan was a psychological warfare twist to blame the assassination on the SS and Gestapo, whose leaders would be rounded up by the real coup planners, the military generals.

Dulles and Gisevius had opposed the use of a bomb, preferring a pistol up close or a sniper in a motorcade ambush as more likely to succeed and their fears proved true. Gisevius supported the coup but was against the bomb plot, as he told Von Stauffenberg: "I just I have the feeling we'll never succeed. I'm not speaking through fear. But I have a feeling very few of us will be alive this time next year, regardless of what happens with your bomb."

The bomb failed to kill Hitler and hundreds, some say thousands were subsequently rounded up and executed, but Gisevius escaped with the assistance of Bancroft and Dulles, who provided him with fake credentials.

After the war Bancroft translated Gisevius' account of the history of the Third Reich and following Gisevius’ testimony against the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg, which sent them to the gallows, Dulles brought Gisevius to Washington as a CIA consultant. In Washington Dulles arranged for the ex-Nazi officer to stay with his deputy Tom Braden, who lived with his wife and their eight children in a big house near RFK's Hickory Hill, where their kids played games and sports with each other. Braden would write a book "Eight Is Enough" that would be made into a popular family TV show and pattern for The Brady Bunch. An episode on the ex-Nazi living with all those kids would certainly be entertaining. And as Talbot notes, Braden also interviewed Allen Dulles for the Kennedy Presidential Library. [12]

So after visiting Michael's mother, Mary Bancroft's good friend in Philadelphia, where she got Marina's letter, Ruth Paine drove to DC and visited her sister, who worked at the CIA, and then went on to Ohio to see her father before picking up Marina in New Orleans. [13]

Arriving in New Orleans in late September Ruth Paine stayed the night and the next day took Marina, the daughter and the Oswald's belongings, including the rifle, and drove them to Texas. Early the following morning Oswald slipped out of New Orleans and went to Mexico City to visit the Cuban and Soviet embassies.

THE JOINT CHIEFS ARE BRIEFED ON THE VALKYRIE PLAN

The same September 25th day in Washington DC CIA officer Desmond Fitzgerald briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, temporarily chaired by Air Force Chief Gen. Curtis LeMay while Gen. Taylor was on a special mission to Vietnam.

Fitzgerald reported to the Joint Chiefs on the CIA's Cuban covert operations with emphasis on how the military could support them, an assignment given USMC Gen. Victor H. "Brute" Krulak, Special Assistant for Counter Insurgency Activities, whose aide Colonel Walter M. Higgins, Jr. was in attendance. Higgins' memo of the meeting, released under the JFK Act, includes the bullet point that Fitzgerald mentioned the CIA was studying the Valkyrie plot and adapting it to use against Castro. [14]

As Higgins wrote in his memo on FitzGerald’s briefing: “He commented that there was nothing new in the propaganda field. However, he felt that there had been great success in getting closer to the military personnel who might break with Castro, and stated that there were at least ten high-level military personnel who are talking with CIA but as yet are not talking to each other, since that degree of confidence has not yet developed. He considers it as a parallel in history; i.e., the plot to kill Hitler; and this plot is being studied in detail to develop an approach.”

September 23-25, 1963 was a busy time on the Devil's Chessboard as there were many moves by key players besides Ruth Paine moving Marina and the rifle to Texas, Oswald leaving for Mexico and Fitzgerald briefing the Joint Chiefs on the CIA’s detailed study of the Valkyrie plot.

JFK also signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, against the advice of the Joint Chiefs, then on September 23, JFK signed National Security Action Memo 261 approving "Project Four Leaves," assigning the "highest national priority category for development and production" a military communications "in response to a recommendation from the Secretary of Defense," an order that remains classified. [15]

THE CONSERVATION TOUR


JFK then he left September 25 on a "Conservation Tour" with his Secretary of Interior, the first stop in northeast Pennsylvania to visit the rural estate of Mary Pinchot Meyer's mother in Milford. Mary Pinchot had met JFK thru his schoolmate William Attwood, who would later become an intermediary between JFK and Castro. Mary had married Cord Meyer, an ex-Marine who founded the World Federalists – an international organization in support of a strong United Nations, one that included Philadelphia college student Priscilla Johnson, Michael's mom Ruth Forbes Paine Young and Walter Cronkite. Cord Meyer joined the CIA in 1951 and became one of Dulles' top assistants, replacing Tom Braden as chief of the International Organizations Division. [17]

While Mary Meyer had separated from Cord Meyer, she maintained her friendship with JFK and she accompanied him on the first leg of the Conservation Tour that took JFK to her mother's house in Pennsylvania. JFK then moved on to Wisconsin and the Mid-West during which the details of the president's November trip to Texas were officially announced to the press. [18]

D. H. BYRD’S TSBD AND AFRICAN SAFARI

When Oswald returned to Texas from Mexico in early October he stayed at the YMCA before taking out a room at the Beckley Street rooming house in Oak Cliff.

By mid-October Ruth Paine had learned from her morning coffee clatch with neighbors that there was a job opening at the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) and made a phone call to arrange for Oswald to get a job in a building owned by D.H. Byrd, an oil tycoon and aviation pioneer. Byrd was the founder of the Civil Air Patrol in Texas, an organization that Oswald was affiliated with in New Orleans. Byrd was alo on the board of directors of LTV and good friends with Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay. [19]

Byrd financially supported his cousin Admiral Byrd’s polar expeditions, whose remote radio communications were intercepted and passed on to the Navy by a young Cedar Rapids, Iowa amateur radio buff Arthur Collins. By the beginning of World War II Collins’ company would have US military contracts and after the war, because he was a close personal friend with General LeMay, Collins handle all of the radio communications for the Air Force Strategic Air Commands and Air Force One and senior cabinet and military aircraft. [19a]

At the time of the assassination, when a sniper was shooting at Kennedy from his building, Byrd was on an African Safari with a German Barron Werner von Alvensleben, who used a high powered Mannlicher rifle to hunt. [20]

Von Alvensleben’s father of the same name was described in OSS reports as a German assassination expert and an avid supporter of the Valkyrie plot who was sentenced to prison and concentration camps with those who were arrested for their participation in the plot. He also wrote a manifesto supporting the plot after it failed. [21]

So besides Volkmar Schmidt using the Valkyrie plot to instigate Oswald to shoot Walker, Michael Paine’s mother was a close personal friend of a key participant in the Valkyrie plot – Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles’ mistress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were briefed on the CIA’s detailed study of the adaption of the Valkyrie plot to use against Castro, and the owner of the TSBD building from which shots were fired was at the time on a safari in Africa with a German Barron and son of an assassination expert who wrote a manifesto in support of the Valkyrie plot and served time in prison with some of its participants.

Dallas newspapers reported that after the assassination D. H. Byrd returned home to line the walls of his study with animal head trophies, and invited the German Barron to visit, showing off his trophy room that contained one of the TSBD Sixth Floor windows, said to have been the window from which a sniper shot at President Kennedy.

VALKYRIE IN CUBA

Based mainly on the Higgins Memo reference of the Desmond Fitzgerald briefing the JCS Washington attorney Jim Lesar, director of the Assassinations Archive and Research Center, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the CIA documents related to the CIA study of the Valkyrie plot that was to be used against Castro. [22]

But we don’t have to wait until we get those records as we can see for ourselves from other records how the CIA tried to adapt the Valkyrie plan to be used against Castro, as they did try to recruit some disenchanted Cuban military officers who were close to Castro including Rolando Cubella (AMLASH) and Gen. Almeida, both of whom have been reviewed and analyzed elsewhere. [23]

Among the differences in the Valkyrie plan and the post-Mafia CIA plans to kill Castro we find that the idea of using a bomb was discarded in favor of a sniper attack on Castro while he was riding in an open Jeep, a common situation.

Certain aspects of the Valkyrie plan that were adopted to be used against Castro included the use of the military, the murder of Castro, the takeover of the Cuban government and the control of the media and the Northwoods style psych-war media campaign to blame the assassination on communists. [24]

When news of the CIA's plans to kill Castro were made public it was at first suggested that Castro retaliated and killed JFK before the CIA could kill him, and some like John Rosselli even claimed that one of the teams sent in by the CIA by boat was captured by the Cubans and turned and sent back to kill JFK. [25]

But others like Bill Turner claim it was more likely that one of the CIA plans to kill Castro was redirected to kill JFK instead, and that’s what former CIA officer David Atlee Phillips privately surmised. [26]

If that was the case then it must have been a CIA plan that utilized a sniper attack on an open car motorcade, one of a number the CIA had on the shelf ready to go, waiting for the right situation to present itself.

Among the CIA plans to kill Castro that utilized snipers attacking an open car in a motorcade were the Hemingway House affair [27] - discussions after the fact, and the Pathfinder plan to shoot Castro when he visited a north shore resort he was known to frequent. [28]

In his book “The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination” by Lamar Waldron (Scribe 2013 p. 228) Lamar Waldron writes (about a October 18, 1963 CIA Memo on Cubela):

“The CIA admits it tried to persuade Cubela to poison Fidel, but CIA files also show that the Miami CIA station, where David Morales ran operations, was prepared to provide rifles to him. Cubela owned a house next to Fidel’s home at Varadero Beach, the resort to which Fidel drove on many weekends in an open jeep in a sort of re-creation of his triumphant drive across Cuba after the Revolution. AMWORLD files indicate that at one point the CIA planned to use snipers to assassinate Fidel as he drove toward his beach house. Clearly, having Fidel’s neighbor Cubela as part of a plot would be very advantageous. The CIA could use his house as the sniper’s nest and/or even blame him for Fidel’s murder.”

Of those anti-Castro Cuban teams trained at JMWAVE, some were trained in using explosives to attack coastal oil facilities, operations approved by the Special Group Augmented (SGA) of the National Security Council (NSC), while other plans, like Pathfinder, were officially, according to the language in the documents “disapproved,” apparently by the same SGA of the NSC that approved other missions. 

While one team was trained in small boat operations and basic military commando techniques by US Army Ranger Capt. Bradley Ayers, another team was instructed in the use of explosives and yet another was a sniper team, that included a team financially supported by “Colonel” John Rosselli at Point Mary, a remote government owned area just north of Key Largo.

Both the Hemingway House affair and Pathfinder plan required accurate high powered rifles with scopes, similar to the ones they offered to Cubela and attempted to infiltrate into Cuba on October 31, 1963 when the CIA raider ship The Rex, using Collins Radio cover, deposited anti-Castro commandos with high powered rifles with scopes who were captured and paraded on Cuban TV the next day. The story made the front page of the November 1, 1963 New York Times, and the names of the captured commandos are mentioned in "Red Friday," the book written by Carlos Bringuier, the DRE Cuban Oswald was arrested with in New Orleans. [29]

One important aspect of the Valkyrie plan was a psych war operation to blame the assassination of Hitler on the SS and Gestapo, and monitor and control the media so "only the conspiracy speaks," just as the Dealey Plaza operation included blaming the assassination on Castro and a psych war campaign using CIA media assets that continues today.

Besides the assassination and psych-war aspects of the Valkyrie plot that could have been adapted to use against Castro and may have been redirected to JFK at Dealey Plaza, there was one other important part of the Valkyrie plan that could have been used - getting the victim to sign off on the operation.

Von Stauffenberg drew up the Valkyrie plan as a response to a possible revolt by slave laborers by mobilizing the home guard to quell the revolt and seize key government buildings and communications facilities.  Hitler approved and signed off on the plan without knowing the secret Phase that required his elimination. [30]

If this part of the Valkyrie plan was adapted for use against Castro it should be noted that the National Security Council and JFK did approve a number of violent covert operations against targets in Cuba, but JFK rejected the assassination plans. RFK however, did pressure Des Fitzgerald and others to step up their Cuban ops against Castro and RFK was personally introduced to some of the anti-Castro commandos who were being sent to Cuba to attack strategic installations and infiltrate rifle teams. [31]

The National Security Action memo authorizing a special military communications project Four Leaves could also be revealing once it is declassified.

The use of Phase One and Phase Two parts of the plan is another interesting parallel between Valkyrie and Dealey Plaza as they are the same terms used by Von Stauffenberg for Valkyrie and Peter Dale Scott to describe the official response to the assassination of JFK.

According to Scott's analysis the original Phase One is the disinformation cover story to blame the assassination of JFK on Castro, that could have instigated a full scale US military attack on Cuba, which was subsequently superseded by the Phase Two promotion of the deranged lone assassin being responsible for the act. [32]

DES FITZGERALD BETS AGAINST CASTRO

As the CIA officer responsible for covert operations against Cuba, Des FitzGerald was the person who briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the CIA's "detailed" study of the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler. FitzGerald was also the case officer for Rolando Cubela (AMLASH), one of the military officers they were recruiting to kill Castro. So it is interesting that FitzGerald, like the military officers in the fictional "Seven Days in May" used a gambling bet as a way of communicating their willingness to go along with the coup plans. 

In “The Very Best Men” – Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA" Evan Thomas writes: “….Halpern, FitzGerald’s assistant, regarded him (Cubela) as an assassin and claims that FitzGerald did as well.” 

Sam Halpern: “Des was really more interested in starting a coup, and he hoped that Cubela could organize other army officers. But in coups, he understood, people die. The way to start a coup is to knock off the top man. Des felt it was a long shot, but it might work. We were desperate. Des was willing to try anything.” 

Evan Thomas writes: “FitzGerald did not think it was such a long shot that he was unwilling to make a small bet, giving reasonable odds. Just six days before he formally signed off on a high-powered rifle for AMLASH (Cubela), he accepted a little wager from Michael Forrestal, an official on the National Security Council staff who was a member of the Georgetown crowd (his father, James V. Forrestal, had been the first secretary of defense). A memo in FitzGerald’s personal files records a $50 bet with Forrestal on ‘the fate of Fidel Castro during the period 1 August 1964 and 1 October 1964. (Apparently, Fitzgerald saw a window of vulnerability for the Cuban leader that was roughly coincidental with the 1964 U.S. presidential election campaign.)”

“Mr. Forrestal offers two-to-one odds ($100 to $50) against Fidel’s falling (or being pushed) between the dates 1 August and 1 October 1964. In the event that such a thing should occur prior to 1 August 1964 the wager herein cancelled. Mr. FitzGerald accepts the wager on the above terms.”

Memo is dated November 13, 1963, “One day after FitzGerald briefed Kennedy on the progress of the Cuban operation and one day before the Special Group approved his plan of continued covert operations against the Castro Regime.”

Thomas: “Nine days later the assassination of John F. Kennedy dramatically increased the odds that FitzGerald would lose his bet.”

According to Thomas, “On November 22, 1963, Des FitzGerald had just finished hosting a lunch for an old friend of the CIA, a foreign diplomat, at the City Tavern Club in Georgetown, when he was summoned from the private dining room by the maître d’. FitzGerald returned ‘as white as a host,’ recalled Sam Halpern. Normally erect and purposeful, FitzGerald was walking slowly, with his head down. ‘The President has been shot,’ he said.”

“The lunch immediately broke up. On the way out the door Halpern anxiously said, ‘I hope this has nothing to do with Cubans.’ FitzGerald mumbled, ‘Yea, well, we’ll see.’ In the fifteen minute car ride back to Langley, FitzGerald just stared straight ahead. He was well aware that in Paris, at almost the moment Kennedy was shot in Dallas, one of his case officers had been handing a poison pen to a Cuban agent to kill Castro. It was at the very least a grim coincidence. FitzGerald knew that, in September, Castro threatened to retaliate against attempts to kill him. ‘United States leaders should think that if they are aiding in terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe,’ the Cuban leader had publicly declared.”

“The warning that Cubela might be a ‘dangle,’ that he might be secretly working for Castro, took on an ominous new meaning. Now FitzGerald had to wonder: Had Castro killed Kennedy before Kennedy could kill him?” [33]

Or, as WillIam Turner suggested, was one of the CIA plans to kill Castro turned on Kennedy at Dealey Plaza?

MEANWHILE – BACK AT THE PENTAGON

At the time of the assassination General Maxwell Taylor and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were meeting with the West German General Staff a group that possibly included General Hans Speidel. Some of these general staff officers had been ranking officers in the Nazi military at the time of the Valkyrie coup, such as Speidel, NATO commander (1957-1963), Germany’s first four star general, former chief of staff to Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. According to his obituary, at the “time of his disillusion with the foolhardiness of some of Hitler’s military strategies led him into conversations with a group of senior officers who were plotting a bold revolt against Hitler Many of the Plotters Executed. General Speidel was assigned by the plotters to persuade Rommel to join in, possibly to become head of the revolutionary government if the conspiracy succeeded….Rommel, who had been wounded three days before the assassination attempt, was forced to take poison. General Speidel was arrested,…imprisoned in Berlin, he was released by the United States troops at the end of the war.”

Both William Manchester and General Taylor make mention of the visit of the German Generals to the Pentagon, but a recently released “History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff” (The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy 1961-1964, [35-36-37] provides some interesting details:

“Admiral Anderson and General LeMay found themselves increasingly out of step with civilian leaders, LeMay clashed repeatedly with Secretary McNamara and struck civilians as being too bellicose in times of crisis….. Kennedy considered replacing both men but McNamara advised him that was one too many.  Accordingly on 6 May the White House announced (1) that Admiral David I. McDonald, who was commanding the Sixth Fleet, would succeed Anderson on 1 August and (2) that LeMay’s term would be extended for one year only….”

“A sudden, tragic transition took place on 22 November 1963. The JCS were in the Pentagon conferring with their West German counterparts. General Taylor was taking a post-lunch nap when an aide awoke him to say that President Kennedy, who was in Dallas, had been shot and seriously wounded. The JCS assembled around 1400 in Taylor’s office, where Secretary McNamara soon joined them. They discussed what to do and finally instructed worldwide commands that “this is the time to be especially on alert.” Then the JCS rejoined the Germans. After telling them what he knew, Taylor insisted that they resume their talks. Not long afterward, Taylor received a note stating that the President was dead; he circulated this paper to his JCS colleagues surreptitiously without interrupting the discussion. The Germans may have been puzzled as, one by one, the Chiefs excused themselves for a time and returned. Finally, late that afternoon, Taylor gave the grim news to the Germans. “I have rarely seen such ashen faces,” he relates, “or heard such words of spontaneous grief.” 
Such ashen faces and spontaneous grief were not similarly expressed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, except perhaps by the Chairman, a close Kennedy family friend.

Certainly some of those German general officers, on witnessing the behavior of the American military officers being informed of the sudden death of their Commander in Chief, flashed briefly on the events of the July 20 1944 failed attempt to assassinate Hitler.

Then in 1964 German intelligence chief Otto John used the anniversary observance of the July 20th coup attempt in Berlin to suddenly disappear and resurface behind the Iron Curtain as a double agent and spy whose betrayal consolidated General Reinhard Gehlen’s position as head of the German intelligence apparatus, as Talbot details in his book.

More recently, in 2008 Tom Cruise started as von Stauffenberg in “Valkyrie,” a major motion picture that brought the Hitler assassination plot into the popular cultural mainstream.

The results of the Jim Lesar/AARC FOIA request will also add more details to this line of inquiry.
In conclusion, if the CIA plans to kill Fidel Castro had anything to do with the assassination of JFK at Dealey Plaza then the CIA's “detailed” study and proposed adaption of the Valkyrie plot to be used against Castro should be given close and careful examination because of the repeated references to it in the assassination narrative. 

Notes –  Valkyrie at Dealey Plaza Revisited - “The conspiracy alone must speak.”

1) Talbot, David. “The Devil’s Chessboard” (HarperCollins, 2015) Re: Valkyrie, p. 134. “Dulles arranged for Mary….to work with the tall, imperious double agent Hans Bernd Gisevious…. (who) became involved in the July 20, 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, barely fleeing with is life to Switzerland when it failed.”

2) Kelly, William. Review of “The Devil’s Chessboard” :

3) Shenon, Phil – “A Cruel and Shocking Act” (Picador, 2015)

4) Kelly, William. Review of Phil Shenon’s “Cruel and Shocking Act.”  [http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2015/03/phillip-shenons-cruel-and-shocking-act.html  ]

5) Kelly, William. January 1995 Telephone conversation with Volkmar Schmidt.http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/volkmar-schmidt-interview.html. Schmidt said that Dr. Wilhelm Keutemeyer of Heidelberg served as a foster father whose associates Frederick von Halen and Von Trott were directly involved in the Valkyrie plot. Schmidt: “….naturally it was a terrible responsibility, and for years when I drove past the underpass I literally had to cry because, you know. But I exonerate myself completely because I had the best intent, embarrassed Kennedy, and I certainly didn’t tell him to take a pot shot at him.”

6) Magnolia Oil. Jim Braden, who was arrested as a suspect at Dealey Plaza, and his associate Victor Pierre were evicted from Dallas by Sheriff Bill Decker and branded the “Honeymooners” for trying to swindle the heiress of a founder of Magnolia Oil. Volkmar Schmidt lived with two others who worked for Magnolia Oil, including the son of a Radio Free Europe administrator.

7)  Warren Report, p. 730. Ruth Paine drove Oswald’s family and belongings to New Orleans and back to Texas in late September. Also see Ruth Paine’s Summer Vacation report by Carol Hewett, Barbara Lamonica and Steve Jones, 1995 COPA Conference presentation.

8) Ford, Gerald, with John Stiles “Portrait of the Assassin” Re: Marina’s letter to Ruth Paine in care of Arthur Young, Paoli, Pa. (BK: This is the only published reference I know of that mentions this letter).

9) Cronkite, Walter. “North by Northwest” (Tabletop book) Also note that Woods Hole nautical acoustics lab was a very busy place on April 10, 1963 when Oswald was supposedly taking a shot at General Walker, the USS Thresher submarine went down. Later a group Justice for the Crew of the Thresher (JFCOTT) reportedly threatened JFK.

10) Young, Arthur. Inventor of the Bell Helicopter 47A.http://www.arthuryoung.com/about.html  (BK: I also have an extensive three hour tape recorded interview with Young from when I sat with him for hours in his library.)

11) Bancroft, Mary. “Autobiography of a Spy” (Wm. Morrow, 1983) p. 55, for Ruth Paine Forbes’ association with Mary Bancroft. (p. 202-240) for the roles Dulles, Bancroft and Gisevius played in the July 20, 1944 Valkyrie Plot to kill Hitler.

 12)  Braden, Tom.  Talbot, David. "Devil's Chessboard" (p. 369, p.547 JFK Library interview), p. 553 (Rockefeller financial support for covert ops). Bancroft, Mary. “Autobiography of a Spy” (Wm. Morrow, 1983)

13) Hewett, Lamonica, Barber. Ruth Paine’s Summer Vacation. – The Confessions of Ruth Paine- DPQ http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2015/10/steve-jones-confessions-of-ruth-paine.html   /http://www.manuscriptservice.com/DPQ/dparchiv1.htm - RUTH

14) Higgins Memo: http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2014/04/higgins-memo-numbered-w-bullet-points.htm  - 13. "He commented that there was nothing new in the propaganda field. However, he felt that there had been great success in getting closer to the military personnel who might break with Castro, and stated that there were at least ten high-level military personnel who are talking with CIA but as yet are not talking to each other, since that degree of confidence has not yet developed. He considers it as a parallel in history; i.e., the plot to kill Hitler; and this plot is being studied in detail to develop an approach."

15) Four Leaves http://whd.jfklibrary.org/Diary/  - White House Diary - For Monday September 23 1963 – SUBJECT: Assignment of Highest National Security Priority to Project FOUR LEAVES. In response to a recommendation by the Secretary of Defense, the president, under the authority granted by the Defense Production Act of 1950, today established the program listed below as being in the highest national security priority category for development and production. “President Kennedy assigns the highest national security priority to Project FOUR LEAVES to develop and produce a military communications system.” FOUR LEAVES McGeorge Bundy THE WHITE HOUSE DIARY SEPTEMBER 23 1963 [http://www.jfklibrary.org/White%2BHouse%2B...eptember/23.htm]

17) Meyer, Cord. “Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA.” Also see: [ https://jfkcountercoup.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/jfk-and-mary-p-meyer/  ]

18) Texas Trip officially announced. “President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas was first announced to the public in September 1963.” – Associated Press Timeline.


20) Von Alvensleben, Werner. ‘‘Baron In Africa‘‘ - "Hunting history is rife with the tales of derring-do with 6.5mm cartridges. W.D.M. Bell whacked many elephants and Werner von Alvensleben slew hundreds of buffalo with what they termed a “small-bore rifle,” namely, the 6.5×54 Mannlicher-Schönauer." Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/08/12/gun-test-alexander-arms-6-5-grendel-hunter/#ixzz3qMkGtu2F  

Also see: Dallas Morning News 1-9-64; 1-19-64; “Time Out From Safaris”

And OSS X2 Report on Werner von Alvensleben (Code name DRAM - the father as assassination expert) [http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2015/10/oss-x-2-report-on-werner-von-alvensleben.html ]

21) Metacas, Eric. "Bonhoeffer – Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy" (Thomas Nelson Pub. 2010 p. 502) Among those there (in prison) were "....the nearly seventy year old Count Werner Von Alvensleben, who in 1934 had refused to take the infamous oath of allegiance to Hitler, and who had been persona non grata with the Nazis ever since." (p. 507) At Buchenwald "Count Von Alvensleben was in cell number four...was typical of many arrested after the July 20 plot in that he had done nothing more than be on friendly terms with some of the plotters. Thousands had been arrested for this crime. Anyone related by blood was guilty of Sippenhaft (liability of kin), whereby relatives of the accused were arrested and punished: wives, parents, and children too. Some small children were taken away from their parents, never to be seen again."

22) Lesar, Jim. AARC FOIA Request to CIA for records related to the study of the Hitler plot as mentioned in the Higgin’s report of Desmond FitzGerald’s briefing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, September, 1963.

23) Waldron, Lamar. Series of books on JFK of how CIA plot to kill Castro was hijacked by mobsters – “Ultimate Sacrafice,” “Legacy of Secrecy” and “The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination.” Also note: “John Rosselli said it was also his theory that Castro was behind the assassination…He said he knew that a team had been sent to kill Castro, had been captured and tortured, and turned to kill Kennedy.” – Bayard Stockton in "Flawed Patriot – The Rise and Fall of CIA Legend Bill Harvey" (Potomac Books, 2006)

24) Psych War aspect to the plan. Dan Hardway: “You have to look at the JFK assassination as an operational plan….with disinformation. (If) the assassination was a mob hit, it wasn’t a mob hit like the ones they had done previously. They used a different MO in JFK, they used a patsy, and they used disinformation, both of these techniques they had learned from the Agency.”
Peter Dale Scott:  on Managed Oswald Stories: “In the days after the murders in Dallas, the U.S. Was flooded with dubious stories, most of them swiftly discredited, linking Oswald to either a Cuban or Soviet conspiracy. Those which most preoccupied the FBI and CIA all came out of Mexico. These stories exhibited certain common characteristics. 1. They all came from either directly from an intelligence source, or from someone in the hands of an intelligence agency…. The Stories changed over time, to support either a pro-conspiratorial hypothesis (“Phase One”) or a rebuttal of this (“Phase Two”). 3. The Warren Commission was led to believe that the “Phase One”stories were without basis. In fact a number of unresolved anomalies suggest that behind them was some deeper truth, still not revealed. 4. As just noted, the two main sources, Silvia Duran and Gilberto Alvarado, gave varying stories while detained by the DFS. Of the two, Duran was actually tortured, and Alvarado reportedly threatened with torture… In retrospect, these stories should not have been taken seriously. In fact the CIA was able to rely on them, not as a source of truth, but as a source of coercive influence over the rest of the government. It will help us to understand what was going on if we refer to the stories, not as ‘information’ or even as ‘allegations,’ but as MANAGED STORIES."

25) The Rex. New York Times, November 1, 1963, page 1. 

26) Phillips, David Atlee: “I was one of the two case officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald. After working to establish his Marxist bona fides, we gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba. I helped him when he came to Mexico City to obtain a visa, and when he returned to Dallas to wait for it I saw him twice there. We rehearsed the plan many times: In Havana Oswald was to assassinate Castro with a sniper's rifle from the upper floor window of a building on the route where Castro often drove in an open jeep. Whether Oswald was a double-agent or a psycho I'm not sure, and I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the President's assassination but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt.” From unpublished novel.


28) Pathfinder Documents. Dupont Estate. Re: Pathfinder records - ARRB interviews with NPIC employes stationed at JMWAVE, where the CIA officers kept the Pathfinder documents filed separately from regular station files by keeping them in the NPIC  section. 

ARRB Memo: (a) A folder, stored in the Photo Interpretation...Area at JMWAVE contained materials related to a plan to assassinate Castro in the Bay of Pigs Resort area where he maintained a yacht and was known to vacation. The plan, possibly with the code word PATHFINDER...apparently had been disapproved and not under active consideration at the time. Our people did not participate actively in the plan in any regard. (b) While assigned to the Imagery Analysis Service, a number of our photo interpreters supported Carl Jenkins of the DD/P concerning a plan to assassinate Castro at the DuPont Veradero Estate, east of Havana. Castro was known to frequent the estate and the plan was to use a high powered rifle in the attempt. The photo interpreter support was restricted to providing annotated photographs and line drawings of the estate. To our knowledge this plan was never implemented

29) Bringuier, Carlos. "Red Friday" (C. Hallberg, 1969)

30) Forman, James. “Code Name Valkyrie – Count Von Staufenberg and the plot to kill Hitler,” who quotes Gisevius: “I just have the feeling we’ll never succeed. I’m not speaing through fear. But I have a feeling very few of us will be alive this time next year, regardless of what happens with your bomb.”

31) Ayers, Bradley. “The War that Never Was” (Bobs-Merrell);“The Zenith Secret” (Vox Pop/Drench Kiss Media); [Excerpts:http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2012/12/excerpts-from-zenith-secret.html ]

32) Scott, Peter Dale. “Deep Politics” Series, the most recent being “Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House.” http://www.amazon.com/Dallas-63-Against-Forbidden-Bookshelf-ebook/dp/B013S42VFQ ]

33) Thomas, Evan. “The Very Best Men – Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA" (Simon & Schuster, 1995 p. 303)

34) Waldron, Lamar. “The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination” (Scribe, 2013 p. 228)

35) Manchester, William. “Death of a President”

36) Taylor, Maxwell. Swords and Plowshares (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 206

37) Poole, Walter S. Pentagon Historian. “History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy 1961-1964” (Volume VIII 1961-1964 Office of Joint History, Office of the Chairman o the Joint Chiefs of Staff . Washington, D.C. – (Government Printing Office, 2011 Page 4 – Page 20 digital version)

38) Talbot, David. “The Devil’s Chessboard” (Re: Otto John’s defection)