Saturday, 20 March 2021
The Devil is in the Details: By
Malcolm Blunt with Alan Dale
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.
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.
