Longtime CIA officer Pete Bagley had some very interesting
things to say about Oswald to JFK researcher Malcolm Blunt in 2012: “OH NO, HE
HAD TO BE WITTING!” (that is a witting, willing asset/agent of the CIA)
QUOTE
It was during a meeting in 2012, that the
most telling moment in their relationship took place. Malcolm Blunt laid out in
front of Pete Bagley, piece by piece, the documents demonstrating the capture
of the Oswald paper trail by the Security Office Security Research Staff (SRS) after
Oswald’s defection in 1959. Bagley carefully examined the documentation. He was
especially interested in the details reported by H.C. Eisenbess in 1976, on the
Office of Central Reference (OCR) dissemination of non-CIA documents - discussed
at length in a previous section of this chapter.
At this point, the same switch that had turned
on in Bagley’s brain when Kondrashev told him that that the Polyakov defection
sequence was no coincidence, turned on again. And so, Bagley, right out of the
blue, put the following question to Blunt: “Okay, was he witting or unwitting?”
Bagley knew Malcolm would have no trouble understanding who “he” [Oswald] was.
Blunt replied, “You can’t ask me that question, how would I know?”
At this and, raising his voice, Bagley responded,
“No, No, you have to know! Was he witting
or unwitting?” Challenged in this manner, Malcolm had little choice but to
proffer a guess. With some reluctance he replied, “Okay, unwitting.” With even
firmer emphasis Bagley countered, “OH NO - HE HAD TO BE WITTING!”
Malcolm believes that these were Bagley’s
thoughts that resulted from suddenly seeing the documents that had been
withheld from SRD: “Yes, I think in that instant
he saw that this high school dropout, a
nothing, a nobody, may have indeed been utilized.” By many observers, Pete Bagley was considered the
“best counterintelligence analyst of the cold war era,” as the International
Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence later said about him.
He had served as Chief of Counterintelligence in the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division
(SRD/CI) and Deputy Chief of SRD and been Nosenko’s case officer. His reaction to
the documents that Blunt showed him was a telling moment. It was, as Malcolm told
me and Alan Dale later, “a significant departure from Bagley’s normal cautious phrasings.”
Bagley said nothing more at the time. When asked about no mention of Oswald
in Spymaster,
Malcolm recalls “he went sideways and I didn’t press him.” Malcolm’s moment with
Bagley that day reminds of of the day I was sitting across the table from Jane
Roman, the liaison officer for James Angleton. Just as Malcolm had done with Bagley,
I was showing her documents one at a time. When I asked her what she thought of
the untrue statement about the CIA paper trail on Oswald in the HQS cable to Mexico
Station in October 1963, she replied: “Well, to me, it’s indicative of a keen
interest in Oswald, held very closely on a need-to-know basis.” The chains
moved down the field that moment with Roman. And they moved again during Blunt’s
moment with Bagley.
UNQUOTE
[John Newman,
Countdown to Darkness: The Assassination
of President Kennedy, Volume II, pp. 29-30]
Tennent H. “Pete” Bagley – CIA officer
– obituary in the Washington Post – Bagley dies on Feb. 20, 2014 at the age of
88
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/tennent-h-pete-bagley-noted-cia-officer-dies-at-88/2014/02/24/b2880bf2-9d6c-11e3-a050-dc3322a94fa7_story.html
NYT obituary
- https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/us/politics/tennent-h-bagley-who-aided-then-mistrusted-a-soviet-spy-dies-at-88.html
Saturday,
20 March 2021
The Devil is
in the Details: By Malcolm Blunt with Alan Dale
Web
link: The Devil is in the Details: By Malcolm Blunt with Alan
Dale (kennedysandking.com)
Review
by James DiEugenio
Malcolm Blunt may, in fact, be the most important
little-known JFK researcher of our generation. Jim
DiEugenio uses this review of Alan Dale’s excellent new oral history, The
Devil is in the Details, to survey Malcolm’s crucial contributions to the
evidence that has been exposed today and to pay tribute to his tireless,
selfless, and insightful work.
This book is an oral history. The interviewer
is Alan Dale and the interviewee is Malcolm Blunt—with minor appearances by
authors Jefferson Morley and John Newman.
Dale is the executive
director of Jim Lesar’s Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC). He
has worked with authors like Newman and Joan Mellen. He is a close friend and
admirer of Malcolm Blunt, who is, by far, the major personage in the book. Unfortunately,
many people, even in the critical community, do not know who Malcolm is. Why is
that?
That is because every once in a while there
comes a character in the JFK case who isn’t interested in doing interviews,
starting a blog, writing books or articles, or getting on the radio. This type
of person essentially wants to dig into those 2 million pages that were declassified
by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). He or she wants to find out
what is and is not in that treasure trove. I was lucky enough to know someone
like this back in the nineties. His name
was Peter Vea. He was an American living in Japan at the time the ARRB was forming.
He said he was returning to the USA, relocating to Virginia and planned on visiting
the National Archives to see what had been declassified. He asked
if I would be interested in him sending me some of these documents. I said, of
course I would. Many of the articles in Probe magazine were
based upon the discoveries that Peter made in the archives. And Bill Davy’s fine book, Let Justice be
Done, owes much to Peter’s work. But yet, Peter is virtually unknown today.
Malcolm Blunt took up Peter’s baton. The
extraordinary thing about Malcolm is this: he does not live in America. He lives across the pond in England. He
travels to America to make long visits to the National Archives. Up to now, he
has not written a book. He shares his discoveries with other researchers who he
thinks would be interested in the particular subject matter. I know this
because I have been the sometime recipient of his largesse.
In this book, Alan Dale tried to elicit some
of the discoveries Malcolm has made in his many visits to the Archives. In that
regard, it is an unusual book, since I know of no prior attempt to do such a
thing. The volume is made up of ten long
interviews done from 2014–18. There is a lengthy back matter section,
consisting of 8 appendixes and a penultimate 3-page section labeled as
“Afterthought.”
II
A ways into the book, on page 321, Malcolm explains
why he decided to take this route as his journey of discovery for the
assassination of John F. Kennedy. He explains that he was disappointed in most
of the books he was reading, which he thought were rather theory heavy but
factually light. Plus, so many had different ideas as to what happened. He
decided to go the alternative route: no theories, just as many facts as he
could find in the documents. He started in Dallas at the police archives there
and then moved to the National Archives in Washington. There he began with FBI
files and then he went into everything else.
One of the first discoveries he made was rather
important. Contrary to what the official
story had been, the FBI did not receive the assassination evidence out of Dallas after Lee
Harvey Oswald was shot. They were in receipt of it over the weekend and then
returned it to Dallas on Sunday. (p. 19) In his testimony before the Warren
Commission, FBI employee James Cadigan gave away this information. Since the
hearings were closed, Commissioner Allen Dulles had that part of his transcript
excised from the record. (p. 20)
Maybe one reason for doing that is because
the Dallas inventory of exhibits differs from the FBI inventory list. One example being that the FBI had turned Oswald’s
Minox camera into a light meter. Malcolm also notes that the Minox in the
National Archives—there were two shown to Marina Oswald during her House Select
Committee on Assassinations interview—is inoperable. It is sealed shut. (p. 23)
Malcolm thinks the reason for this is that it would reveal police officer Gus
Rose’s initials inside the camera. And that would prove the police picked
up the camera on their weekend visit to Ruth Paine’s home. Resisting FBI pressure tactics, Rose always insisted
he picked up a camera there and not a light meter. (John Armstrong, Harvey
and Lee, p. 910) This chicanery would indicate that both Dulles and FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover wished to keep that camera out of Oswald’s hands. They
wanted no indication in public that Oswald owned what was considered at that
time a rare and expensive spy camera.
With Jefferson Morley visiting, Malcolm and
Alan review what they consider another landmark on the road to discovery about
the JFK case. This was the Morley/Newman
interview with Jane Roman. (p. 29) In 1963, Jane Roman was a senior liaison
officer for the CIA’s Counter Intelligence staff, which meant—among
other things—that she handled communications with other federal offices. Morley saw her name on a routing slip concerning documents
about Oswald before the assassination. He located her in the
Washington area and he and Newman talked to her in the autumn of 1994. Morley
had fished out a document that Roman had signed and sent to Mexico City saying
that, as of 10/10/63, the latest information CIA had on Oswald was a State
Department report from May of 1962.
Here was the problem: that
Oswald cable was clearly false. Because—as was her position—she
had read and signed-off on, at the minimum, two FBI reports on Oswald from
1963. They arrived on her desk just a week prior to October 10th and
one described Oswald being arrested in New Orleans. Her signature was on both
Bureau reports. When presented with this puzzle as to why
she had been part of a false declaration to Mexico City, Roman replied that her only rationale would be that the Special
Affairs Staff had all the data about Oswald under their tight control. She also added that she was not in on any sabotage aspect
as far as Cuba went. She then said that the
person in control of the cable to Mexico City would have been Tom Karamessines,
who was the right hand man to Dick Helms. Helms was the Director Of Plans in
1963, in other words he was in charge of covert operations. (Jefferson Morley,
‘What Jane Roman Said”, at History Matters.com)
When Newman pressed her on
what this all meant, Roman replied with something that was probably a milestone
at the time. She said, “To me it’s indicative of a keen
interest in Oswald held very closely on a need to know basis.” She then added that there must have been a reason to
withhold that information from Mexico City. (John Newman, Oswald and
the CIA, p. 405) For the first time, someone had an oral declaration from a
CIA employee that the Agency had a keen interest, on a need to know basis,
about Oswald. This was just weeks before the assassination.
And Richard Helms’ assistant was the principal officer on the cable. Later in the book, Malcolm will relate another
conversation with a different CIA employee and it will echo this one, except it
will be about Oswald back in 1959—before his defection to Russia.
III
Blunt now goes into areas that, as far as I
know, no one has ever broached before. Everyone
knows about the CIA and its 201 files, sometimes called personnel files. This
was a rather common file within the Agency that had about five different
reasons to be opened. Yet I had never heard of a 301 file.
These are corporate files held in Record Integration Division (RID) and also in
the Office of Security (OS). They included companies, charities, churches,
banks, and financial service companies. The CIA had interests in dropping
people into these organizations for cover purposes. (p. 354) What makes this even
more important is another disclosure Blunt made earlier. That is the CIA had something called an IDN system in
place prior to 1964. That system named individuals who had been targeted at
their organizations. (p. 289) I don’t have to tell the reader how helpful
that combination should have been to any real inquiry into the JFK case e.g.
with Reily Coffee Company. And why was IDN dismantled in 1964?
Malcolm also points out two pieces of
internal subterfuge that impacted the inquiry of the Warren Commission. As he
was going through the FBI documents at the
Archives, he noticed the code UACB on many of them. What that meant in FBI
lingo was this: Do not follow this lead. The acronym literally
stands for: Unless Authority Communicated
from Bureau. (p. 264) Malcolm said that, within the first 48 hours, many
of the FBI documents were marked like this in the bottom left hand corner. (p.
118)
This perfectly jibes with
what the late FBI agent Bill Turner once told this reviewer. Turner
had been in the FBI for about ten years. He had left by the time of the Kennedy
assassination. He had now become a journalist, but he still had ties within the
Bureau. In 1964, he was writing a free-lance article on the JFK case. He asked a couple of active agents if he could see
some of their reports. He then saw more of these later when the Commission
volumes were issued. He immediately recognized something was wrong.
As Turner told this reviewer, there were
three steps in any FBI investigation:
1. The
gathering of all relevant leads
2. The
following out of those leads to their ultimate end, and
3. The
collation of all-important information into a report that did not come to a
conclusion.
He then said if you did not do step two—which clearly the agents had not done in the
JFK case—then your report was worthless. But, in spite of that, the FBI
had come to a conclusion about the Kennedy case anyway. To him, this was a dead giveaway that the fix was in
from above. FBI agents simply did not act like that on their own. These two
sources of information on the same key issue dovetail with each other. They
help explain why the Warren Commission ended up being stillborn.
Malcolm then expands on this point—and again
in a way I had not seen before. The US Attorney’s office in Dallas had accumulated
four boxes of witness statements and sent them to the National Archives in
1965. This included statements from people like Ruth Paine. According to
Malcolm, the boxes contained statements
that were “excised from testimony; it’d been cut out. It’s what the US
attorneys down in Dallas called ‘No Good Testimony’.” (p. 256) When
Blunt went looking for it, he found it has been reduced to two small gray
boxes, he said there is “a little bit in the first box; not much in the second
box.” (ibid)
Again, one should relate to this something
that Barry Ernest discovered. It is what is referred to today as the “Stroud
letter.” Marcia Joe Stroud was an
assistant US attorney in Dallas. In 1964, she was reviewing some
witness depositions from the Texas School Book Depository. One was Victoria Adams and another was Dorothy Ann
Garner, Adams’ supervisor at the Scott Foresman bookseller’s office in the
Depository. While searching through the National Archives, Barry
saw a cover letter dated June 2, 1964. In part, the letter read as follows:
Mr. Belin
was questioning Miss Adams about whether or not she saw anyone as she was
running down the stairs. Miss Garner, Miss
Adams’ supervisor, stated this morning that after Miss Adams’ went downstairs,
she (Miss Garner) saw Mr. Truly and the policeman come up.” (The Girl on the
Stairs, p. 215)
As Barry writes in his book,
the feeling he had when he read this was like
getting punched in the stomach. In the entire 888 pages of the Warren Report,
one will not see the name of Dorothy Garner. And she was not called as a witness
before the Commission. Yet, Stroud had sent this cover letter
over Adams’ testimony to the Commission early in June of 1964. The Commission
took testimony until early September. (Walt Brown, The Warren Omission,
p. 238) This letter certified that after Adams and Sandra
Styles went down the stairs, Depository supervisor Truly and policeman Marrion
Baker came up the stairs. In other words, the idea that Adams was on the stairs
before or after Lee Oswald came up is highly improbable. One has to wonder, was this part of the “no good
testimony” that the Dallas US attorneys took? Except this one survived. But it was not discovered until 1999.
IV
Malcolm was and is quite
interested in Richard Snyder. Snyder was the State Department employee in Moscow
who first greeted Oswald at the American embassy after his arrival
there via Helsinki. The book certifies the fact that, as Greg Parker and Bill Simpich
have also mentioned, Snyder worked for the
CIA before he joined the State Department. He was a part of Operation REDSKIN. This
was an attempt to recruit students studying Russian at places like Harvard. At
this time, Snyder was being supervised by Nelson Brickham of the Soviet Russia
Division of the CIA and one of the people
he pitched was Zbigniew Brzezinski. Yet,
Snyder denied he was working for the CIA at this time. (p. 107) As
Parker wrote, when he went to Moscow, at the time Oswald was in his office,
there was an assistant named Ned Keenan with Snyder and Ned had been part of
the REDSKIN project. (p. 44)
This circle closes after
Snyder left the State Department; he applied for a position in the CIA. As Malcolm notes, they placed him at work for an agency
called Joint Press Reading Service. His job there was to read and analyze
foreign publications. (p. 280)
The book also reminds us
that Snyder’s colleague at the embassy, John McVickar, somehow knew that Oswald
would be placed at work at a radio factory in Minsk. (p. 217) Once
he got there, Moscow surrounded him with their agents. According to Malcolm, at
one time, the KGB enlisted as many as 20
assets to surveil Oswald. (p. 220) And as Ernst Titovets revealed in his
book, Oswald: Russian Episode, this included using spies on buses
and also bugging his apartment. (Titovets, pp. 61, 115) In the
light of this, the recent book co-authored by former CIA Director James Woolsey
about the Russians recruiting Oswald as an assassin to kill President Kennedy is
preposterous.
This all coincides with another genuine find
by Malcolm Blunt. He allowed Kennedys and King to use this
hidden jewel in Vasilios Vazakas’ fine
series, Creating the Oswald Legend, Part 4.
(Click here for details) I
am speaking here about the stunning discoveries by Betsy Wolf about the creation
and routing of Oswald’s file at CIA after the defection.
We have seen above how the Russians clearly suspected that Oswald was
not a genuine defector, to the point that they used an extensive combination of human and electronic
surveillance to monitor his every move. What happened at CIA would
imply they were correct. There is no trace in the Warren Report or its 26
accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, that they had any hint of what
Malcolm uncovered at the National Archives. It was not until over a decade
later that the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) began to uncover
this troubling but revealing mystery about Oswald. The person who did it was HSCA researcher Betsy Wolf. Yet most
of the startling discoveries she made were not detailed or explained in the
HSCA report or its accompanying volumes. In fact, as Malcolm found out, much of her work only exists in the form of her
handwritten notes. He could not find where her original work product about the
Oswald file had been typed into memorandum form. Further, her work was deemed
so sensitive that much of it was delayed on a timed-release pattern
(i.e. it was not declassified until after the Assassination Records Review Board
closed its doors in 1998).
Since much of what Malcolm
discusses in the book is based on Wolf’s notes, I will source most
of what follows from those notes as used by Vasilios in his first-rate
article. Betsy Wolf was puzzled by the
fact that the CIA had not set up a 201 file on Oswald after they knew he had
defected to Moscow—in fact they did not do so until 13 months later. What
further bewildered here was this: he had
offered the Russians secrets of the U2 spy plane. Oswald was
familiar with the U2 from his tour in the Far East at Atsugi air base in Japan
where the high altitude aircraft was housed. In late October of 1959, the CIA
was getting this kind of information through both the Navy and the State
Department; the latter since Snyder was a diplomat. This data—plus the fact that there were more than
five documents on Oswald at CIA—should have caused the opening of a 201, or
“personnel file.” In fact, Betsy discovered that four documents on
Oswald arrived at CIA the first week after the
defection. Yet, in apparent violation of
CIA’s internal guidelines, no 201 file was opened.
This leads to the second conundrum about the
routing of Oswald’s original file: its destination. In an interview the HSCA
did with CIA Officer William Larson, he said that the Oswald documents should have gone to the Soviet
Russia (SR) Division. (HSCA interview of 6/27/78) They did
not. These early files instead went to Office
of Security (OS). What made that puzzling is that in this same
interview, Larson said that OS did not set up 201 files. (Ibid) And Malcolm adds this: there was a bridge between OS and
CI/SIG (Counter Intelligence/Special Investigations Group). This was James
Angleton’s super-secret compartment which, quite literally, spied on the Agency’s
spies. (p. 31)
Just from the above, this is all rather
fishy. Did someone not want a 201 file set
up on Oswald? When Betsy interviewed Director of Central Reference
H. C. Eisenbeiss, he said that the way documents were funneled into the
Agency—called dissemination of files—was governed by written requests from
customer offices. (Wolf notes of 9/18/78) This
would indicate that someone from OS directed Oswald’s files bypass the general
system and go only to OS instead. After all, as Malcolm notes, some
of these early documents from State and Navy had multiple copies attached for
expected distribution to various departments. In one case, as many as fifteen
copies were included. (pp. 344–45)
Only toward the end of her
search did Betsy find out what had happened. Betsy’s notes include an interview with the former OS chief
Robert Gambino. According to Malcolm, her handwritten
notes are the only place anyone can find anything about this particular
interview. (Wolf notes of 7/26/78) Gambino told
her that CIA Mail Logistics was in charge of disseminating incoming documents. In other words, someone
made this request about the weird routing of Oswald’s files from OS’s Security
Research Service. (p. 324) And this was done prior to Oswald’s
defection. Malcolm concludes that with what Betsy unearthed, there should
now be no question that the CIA knew Oswald was going to defect before it
happened.
An important part of the
book deals with Malcolm’s friendship with CIA officer Tennent ”Pete” Bagley. Bagley
worked out of the Counterintelligence unit in the Soviet Russia division; he
also worked in Europe at, among other stations, Bern and Brussels, where he was
chief of station. Malcolm met him after he was retired and living in Brussels.
In retirement, Bagley was writing books about his career. They largely focused
on the CIA’s battles with the KGB, for example, on whether or not Yuri Nosenko was a plant or a real defector. Bagley
thought he was the former.
While putting together Betsy Wolf’s
discoveries about the odd nature of the opening of Oswald’s files at CIA HQ,
Malcolm decided to talk to Bagley about it. He
told him how his old Soviet Russia division was zeroed out of information about
Oswald’s defection for 13 months—even though, at times, the CIA was getting 15
copies of an Oswald document. (pp. 344–45) Malcolm then drew the
routing scheme up as he had deciphered the entry path from Betsy’s work.
Bagley looked at the
illustration of the routing path. He then looked up at Malcolm and asked him
something like: OK, was Oswald witting or unwitting? Malcolm did not want to answer
the question, but Bagley badgered him. He blurted out, “Unwitting.” Bagley firmly replied: Nope. He had to be witting and
knowledgeable about how the CIA was using him and, therefore, he was working
for them in some capacity.
In this reviewer’s opinion, what Malcolm
Blunt did on this issue— excavating the
heroic work of Betsy Wolf, piecing it together part by part, then showing it to
Bagley—constitutes one of the keystone discoveries made possible by the ARRB. Its
importance should not be understated. It is a hallmark achievement.
V
Malcom follows up on this discovery by
commenting on it in two ways: one through a comparison, one by creating a
parallel. He and Alan note that another
defector’s files, Robert Webster, did not enter the system like this. They
were normally distributed and went to the Soviet Russia Division. (p. 68) He then says that this almost incomprehensible CIA
anomaly with Oswald in 1959 is then bookended by another attempt to rig the
system (i.e. with Oswald in Mexico City in the fall of 1963). What
are the odds of that happening to one person in four years? (p. 295) He also
adds that, to him, the weaknesses in the Mexico City story are the
tendentiousness of the alleged trip down and his return. Both David Josephs and
John Armstrong agree with that analysis.
Malcolm’s recovery of Betsy Wolf’s notes also
contributed something else that was important about Mexico City. Something
that, to my knowledge, no one knew before. Miraculously,
Betsy got access to a chronology penned by Ray Rocca. As James Angleton’s first
assistant, Rocca cabled Luis Echeverria on November 23rd. Echeverria
was the Secretary of Interior in Mexico who would eventually take over the Mexico
City inquiry—thereby foreclosing the Warren
Commission and getting out ahead of the FBI. Rocca wired Luis about
the relationship between Oswald and Sylvia Duran. How did Rocca know that Echeverria would eventually be running the
inquiry about Oswald at that early date? At that time, James Angleton was not
even in charge of the CIA investigation for the Warren Commission.
Secondly, on that same day, a CIA agent escorted Elena Garro de Paz to the Vermont Hotel.
This is the woman who would try to discredit Duran by saying that Duran was
seen at a twist party with Oswald and had some kind of sexual affair with the
alleged assassin. Since Duran worked at
the Cuban embassy, this implied that somehow Castro was a part of the plot. (John
Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pp. 379–85) How on earth did anyone know about the significance
and the opposition of these two witnesses within 24 hours of the crime?
In addition, there is this nugget of new
information. The National Security Agency (NSA) had intercepts on Mexico City
communications. The Warren Commission knew about this. So J. Lee Rankin sent a
letter to Jack Blake of the NSA about this information, since he knew it was
independent of the CIA coverage. (pp. 63–65) There is no evidence today that
there was a reply.
Malcolm explored the papers of a relatively
unknown personage who I recently wrote about, Comptroller of the Currency James Saxon. While going
through his papers at the Kennedy Library, he came to the same conclusion I
did: Kennedy was using Saxon to challenge
the suzerainty of the Federal Reserve Board. (Click here for details)
In fact, he even goes further than I—and even author Donald Gibson—did in that
regard. He tells Alan that Kennedy wanted Saxon to actually attempt to
supersede the Federal Reserve as far as its control of the banking system. (p.
269) This was Kennedy’s way of loosening the money supply and injecting a
Keynesian stimulus into the economy. (p. 270) This would serve as a complement
to his tax cut and would precede his planned capital improvements
program. Malcolm also adds that—because of
this—the longtime chair of the Federal Reserve—hard money banker William McChesney
Martin—was not a fan of Kennedy. (ibid) And for whatever reason, Lyndon Johnson
agreed with Martin. The new president did not renew Saxon’s five
year term when it expired in 1966.
Because Malcolm has spent so much time in the
National Archives, he is in a good position to alert us as to what is there and
what is not—but should be. One of his most
interesting discoveries is the fact that the Office of Security file series on
Oswald has a rather large hole in it. Since Oswald’s file was
originally opened by that department, they later put together a series on the
alleged defector. Both CIA Directors,
Robert Gates and George Tenet, called for the assembly of all CIA files on
Oswald for the Review Board. Yet that series did not come forth
until the Board called for it themselves. They did this based on the work that
Betsy Wolf had done for the HSCA, this is how they proved it existed. (pp.
327–28) It was supposed to consist of seven volumes. Yet somehow today, it is missing Volume Five. That
one does not exist today. Yet as Malcolm notes, Betsy Wolf took notes on it, so
it did exist at one time.
This is only the beginning of a very serious
problem about these Kennedy assassination files. As Malcolm and John Newman note, somehow, some way, many of them have simply
disappeared. (p. 240) And it’s not just from NARA. Malcolm found
out that the papers of author Edward Epstein from his book Legend were
housed at Georgetown. Reader’s Digest had financed the rather large budget for that
book, which included payment for a fleet of researchers, including Henry Hurt. They
then placed much of the documentation under the name of their since deceased
editor, Fulton Oursler Jr., at Georgetown. One
of the boxes contained many of the interviews done with the Marines who knew Oswald.
Some of these subjects were not interviewed by the Warren Commission. These
were made off limits to Malcolm and he told Pete Bagley about it. Bagley
knew Oursler and got permission for Malcolm to see the interviews. Blunt flew
over and requested the box. When he got it,
the Marine interviews were gone. (p. 51)
VI
There are many other areas that I have not
addressed, simply because this review would be twice as long if I did. But I would
like to close this discussion of Blunt’s discoveries with the story of Cliff Shasteen. Shasteen was the 39-year-old
proprietor of a barber shop who cut Oswald’s hair in Irving, where
Ruth and Michael Paine lived. You will not find his name in the Warren Report
and the reader will soon understand why. He said that he cut Oswald’s hair about
every two weeks, a total of three or four times, while other barbers who worked
for him also cut Oswald’s hair. (WC Vol. 10, p. 314) Oswald usually came in on
a Friday night or on a Saturday morning. Cliff also recalled a youth, aged
about 14, who came in with Oswald, and once by himself—and that was about four days
before the assassination. (WC Vol. 10, p. 312) While there by himself, he began
spouting Marxist philosophy, shocking the adults in his presence, including
Shasteen. (Ibid; see also Michael Benson, Who’ Who in the JFK
Assassination, p. 415) As Benson notes, even though Shasteen testified before
the Commission, neither they nor the FBI ever found out who the sometime
companion was. Shasteen greatly regretted not taking him out for dinner to find
out where he got his philosophy from.
Malcolm and Alan mention this intriguing
incident and the testimony of grocery store owner Leonard Hutchison, where
Shasteen said he also saw Oswald. (p. 265; see also Sylvia Meagher, Accessories
After the Fact, pp. 364–65) But for many years, the identity of the
companion who wanted to put on a show, minus Oswald, was unknown. Thanks to
some fine work by Greg Parker, we now have a good idea who the “Marxist” was.
His name very likely was Bill Hootkins. (p.
305; also, click here and scroll
down) And this is where it all gets rather interesting. In fact, it may explain
why the FBI never found out his identity.
At this time, late in 1963, Hootkins was Ruth
Paine’s private Russian language student. Ruth worked with the sons and
daughters of the Dallas elite at a private school, St. Mark’s. She had an
agreement to tutor them at that facility, so she would pick Hootkins up at his
home, drive him to the school, and then return him to his house. What makes
this even more intriguing is that Hootkins became a rather proficient and
prolific actor, and his career may have started at this time. (Click here for details)
According to Parker, FBI agent Jim Hosty knew
about Ruth’s work at St. Mark’s and later learned about the Hootkins lessons.
But as Parker notes, somehow, no one in the FBI put together Hootkins and
Shasteen, even though Shasteen’s description fit Hootkins quite well. And Ruth
Paine had Hootkin’s contact details in her address book—a point which Ruth
tried to brush off. But as Shasteen also noted, he saw Oswald drive up to his
shop with Hootkins in a car he described that matched one of the Paine
automobiles. (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 582)
Parker incisively notes the manner in which
Ruth answered questions to the FBI about the incident. When asked if she had
any idea about who the kid was, she said she knew of no boy of 14 associated
with Oswald from the neighborhood. As Greg notes, Hootkins was not from that
neighborhood. She also denied ever letting Oswald drive her car alone. Yet,
when Oswald drove to Shasteen’s, he was with Hootkins. The answer also leaves
open the possibility that it may have been her husband Michael who allowed
Oswald to take the car.
Of the early critics, only Sylvia Meagher
ever mentioned Shasteen and Hutchison. But this reviewer finds it interesting
that one of the lead investigators on Shasteen was FBI agent Bardwell Odum. (WC
Vol. 10, p. 318) As most of us know, Odum
was quite friendly with the Paines. In fact, as Carol Hewett points
out, Odum cooperated with the Paines to
posthumously separate Oswald from his Minox camera. (The
Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 238–49)
According to Parker, the other two barbers working with Shasteen had their
statements “fragrantly altered” by the FBI. “They were specifically told what
to add—and what was added had the sole purpose of trying to distance Hootkins from
the whole affair.” (3/19 email from Parker)
Blunt takes this intriguing episode a bit
further. It only seems that no one noticed this rather
interesting episode. It appears that someone, somewhere actually did notice.
During his talk with Shasteen, Oswald was asked where he picked up his yellow
shoes. Oswald said he went down to Mexico every so often and that is how he got
them. (p. 303) It turns out that Malcolm later discovered that this might be a
case of file seeding, that is of an agency planting disinformation in another
agency’s files, because it turned out that the CIA began sending materials over
to the FBI about one Ramon Cortez. Cortez was in the import/export business and
owned a company called Transcontinental, which sent black market vehicles from
the USA into Cuba. Cortez owned a shoe factory in Tijuana called Clarice. The
CIA began to push the Cortez/Transcontinental documents onto the FBI in, get
this, December of 1963, when they had this information in 1961.
As much file work as
Malcolm has done, and for as long as he has done it, he still understands the
Big Picture issues. Led by people like Paul Hoch, Tony Summers, and Peter
Scott, he addresses what had been the conventional wisdom about Jim Garrison
for many years. Namely that there was no there, there. And whatever was there
was worthless. Blunt takes issue with that
thunderous cliché. He says that Garrison was a patriotic man who was doing his
best under the stress of a terrible attack by the CIA. When Malcolm reviewed
his materials, he concluded that “the guy did miracles, really.” (p. 378) He
then mentions the newest documents on Permindex, which John Newman used for
Jacob Hornberger’s ongoing webinar. (Click here for details)
About John Kennedy’s assassination, he states that considering who he was and where he was headed—for example in the
Middle East—his loss was incalculable. (pp. 273, 384) He sums it up
tersely with, “Jesus Christ! What we lost when we lost that man.”
Let’s all hope we don’t lose
Malcolm Blunt.
·
James DiEugenio
One of the most respected
researchers and writers on the political assassinations of the 1960s, Jim
DiEugenio is the author of two books, Destiny Betrayed (1992/2012)
and The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today (2018),
co-author of The Assassinations, and co-edited Probe
Magazine (1993-2000). See "About Us" for a fuller bio.
