This film is a courtroom dramatization and examination of what might have happened had Lee Harvey Oswald been brought to trial for the murder of President John F. Kennedy.
The actor playing Wesley Buell Frazier was older than Frazier himself is now. The real Wesley Buell Frazier was only nineteen at the time.
On the Trail of Delusion, Episode 24, Lawrence Haapanen on UFO’s, Jim Garrison, & the JFK murder
TRANSCRIPT:
(INTRODUCTION:)
I want to thank everybody for coming this afternoon. My name is Fred Litwin. Noted author Fred Litwin. And of course, Fred is also the author of I was a teenage JFK conspiracy freak, On the trail of delusion. and Oliver Stone’s film Flam. The demagogue of Dealey Plaza. Fred Litwin is here. He’s a longtime author and certainly watcher of politics. Joining us, Fred Litwin, great to have you here. Thank you very much.
[Music]
Welcome to another edition of ON THE TRAIL OF DELUSION, where I try to separate the wheat from the chaff and try to give you something substantial on the JFK assassination rather than the usual gruel you find on YouTube and around the internet. Today my guest is Larry Haapanan who is an historian out west um who’s been long involved with the JFK assassination. He’s been involved with the military and investigating UFOs and he’s got a long career on the history side uh both JFK the presidency and the assassination. So welcome Larry. And uh first question is how did you get into the JFK assassination? Well, um I guess because it happened. Uh and at that time, November 22nd, 1963, I was attending u college at the University of Washington. I was a history major and um I also happened to be an ROTC cadet. So the day it happened, I was wearing my army uniform, Army ROC. I later shifted over to Air Force, but I I happened to be home for lunch and uh an older woman from down the hall knocked on the door and said she wanted to use our phone and apparently she was having trouble with hers and she said the president had been shot and of course I was dumbfounded and so I watched the coverage on TV for a while. Then I went to uh back to class. Everything was cancelled that afternoon and uh of course that whole weekend was kind of a you know a bewildering uh unreal kind of a experience uh all the way through the shooting of Oswald and the the funeral the following Monday in Washington. And uh so as a history major, I kind of perked up my ears and was, you know, paying maybe more attention than the average person to what seemed to be history in the making. I um in my teenage years, I was a kind of a Civil War buff and that peaked an interest in the Lincoln assassination, right? And I had a book by Otto Eisenchiml that I picked up at a secondhand bookstore. And uh you know, so I had I had a past interest in that. So the Kennedy assassination wasn’t the first one I got interested in, but I waited, you know, of course, uh eager to find out what the Warren Commission would decide, right? uh immediately after the report was made public, the networks, TV networks had special programs on the Warren Report and so I audio taped uh I think ABC’s special report right on that and for quite a long time then afterwards I was kind of you know pretty content to let the Warren report be a accurate summation, you know, of of what had happened. I guess maybe I wasn’t going as far as Gerald Ford when he said the Warren report would stand like a gibraler of factual literature through the ages to come. But nevertheless, during the years to come, I I uh pretty much um thought the War Report had dealt with it adequately. But then in 1966, I made the dubious choice, I guess, that that kind of changed my life in a way of of getting a copy of Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane right after it came out, right? And that made me think that perhaps there was a conspiracy. And so then I started delving into the 26 volumes at the university library you know and getting books by Weissberg for example and later Sylvia Maher and Edward j. Estein of course nd looking you know what articles began to appear in magazines like look and ramparts and Saturday Evening Post and Minority of One and Esquire. Then of course in I guess February 1967, I was walking down a street in Los Angeles. I think I was there on a debate trip and you know there was a headline, Jim Garrison is investigating the assassination. So of course I began following the u the Garrison investigation which I probably will touch on later. So that’s how it happened. So yeah, I mean I mean Mark Lane was very very influential. I mean, did you start corresponding with some of these people back then? Uh, no, I didn’t. In 1967, I graduated and got my commission in the Air Force and went on active duty. From the money I got from my first paycheck, I ordered the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission. I hadn’t been able to afford the $76 before that. That doesn’t sound like a lot today, but back then it would be like a whole month’s rent. You know, it was many hundreds of dollars in today’s money. and and so I began researching the 26 volumes on my own. And then in 1968, I joined up with a couple of other guys from Seattle, my hometown, in the Washington State Citizens Committee of Inquiry. Then I began to meet, you know, know other people. You knew you knew George Renard from Seattle and Paul Hul and Halverb and Bill Turner in the Bay Area and Fred Nukem in Los Angeles and through him David Lifton and Ray Marcus I met uh William Costalano other people of that area and George Renar, right? You knew you knew George? Oh yeah, George Rener was a lifetime friend of mine. We Right. Yeah. I continued to uh know him for decades. He passed away in 2017 and and uh I really lost a friend when he passed away. Yeah, he has some of the more interesting letters and stuff uh that are out there. I don’t know if there’s anything more in his papers, but it was always interesting to read a George Rener uh letter. Well, yeah, he had a terrific sense of humor as did Fred Nukem. They they their letters would sometimes, you know, turn to satire and jokes. And George mailed uh Fred a dead cockroach on one occasion and that was named Andy. And you know, they they had in particular a real uh humorous uh take on things at time. What was your experience just curiosity with Raymond Marcus? Because I I sort of gather from some of his letters he seemed rather pedantic, but what what was your experience with Raymond Marcus? I met him once when he came over to Fred Nukem’s house and I happened to be staying with Fred. Okay. Fred and Ry had a very contentious relationship to put it mildly because Fred loaned him a copy of the Zapruder film and Ray wouldn’t give it back and you probably know about that. Yeah. That’s all related to the Farewell America story. Uh you bet. Yeah. Okay. So, look, tell how did you get involved with the with the Garrison investigation and what did you do um for for Jim Garrison? Well, yeah. The ironic part of it is I was a serving officer in the US Air Force. Therefore, I had a kind of a arms length relationship with the garrison investigation. But uh what happened was um Ed Jeffs who was a reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune and chair of our committee in the Seattle Tacoma area, he um called me one day when I happened to be home in Seattle because I would go there uh sometimes on weekends or on leave and um he said, “Hey, we’re southern cops.” which of course wasn’t technically true, but you know, he was trying to joke around a little about it because he had gotten these letters from Garrison’s office appointing him and me as representatives of Garrison’s office. This is in like September 68, you know, several months before the Shaw trial, right? And uh the office would send those letters out to literally God only knows who or how many. And I know I had one, Ed had one, Fred Nukem had one, which I’ve seen, and you know, I’m sure others. Do you still have yours? Oh, definitely. Okay. Love to see that. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I take I have mixed emotions because on the one hand, I thought there was um some hope for the Garrison investigation and then Fred and I turned out to be disillusioned about that after the Shaw trial, but at the same time, I felt like I was doing something, right? The president had been shot down like a dog in the street, and there were what seemed to be good questions that had been raised about it. And the vast majority of Americans, you know, may have thought that there was a conspiracy, but they weren’t doing anything. They weren’t lifting a finger, right, to look into it themselves. And so, um, I didn’t have any direct communication with Garrison’s office. And that was I I think the way I wanted it, but I did go through uh Steve Burton occasionally. He was the uh citizens committee of inquiry chairman in Los Angeles, right? A young college student at the time. Basically, I went out on my own, you know, to kind of uh pursue a u a avenue of inquiry that nobody else was pursuing on Garrison’s investigation. And that was looking into G. Clinton Wheat. Clinton Wheat is a uh another fellow who was subpoenaed by Garrison, I think at the same time as Dr. Stanley Drenin, right, in Los Angeles. And that came about because Lauren Skip Hall had uh told Garrison about these two guys and and he knew them both well. and um you know he talked to Garrison about how they had been uh leaders in the right-wing movement in the LA area and um and wheat had had meetings in his home in Los Angeles where where uh people like uh Colonel um Gail of the California Rangers and Edward Eugene Bradley and uh Paul and you know other people right Garrison was u at least somewhat interested in uh you know they were uh people that would go to these meetings these so-called patriotic meetings at wheat’s house and so Garrison wanted to talk to wheat and Dannon Dannon went to court and got a judge to um turn down uh Garrison’s request for Drenin to go testify on the grounds that Grant Drenin said he had patience as a physician. He had patients that depended on him for uh treatment and he just couldn’t tear himself away from LA, right? And the judge went along with that. Wheat, on the other hand, just went on the lamb. He just picked up uh and it so happened that he had been living for several years just outside Clamoth Falls, Oregon, which is where I was stationed at the Air Force at the time. So I was uh you know we and and I had been in the same place. Um so that put me kind of Johnny on the spot to uh look into wheat. So Wheat was from Louisiana. He was a convicted murderer who had gotten a pardon. Um he was um a heavy equipment operator by occupation and had moved to LA, owned a very large house and um set himself up as you know kind of a leader of the far right there. In 1964, he chaired something called uh committee of 1 million Caucasians to march on Congress. Uh they didn’t actually have a million people show up at that time. And he was also a guy who the FBI had an eye on. And um he he moved to LA or from LA to to Oregon. Was Was he a Minute Man as well or? Well, I’d put him You know, it’s hard to separate the groups in LA. That’s right. The California Rangers, the Christian Defense League, the NSRP, right? They they over overlapped. Yeah. Uh I think in their membership and in their uh certainly in their goals. So whether he was ever officially a Minute Man, I doubt. But um he was part of that paramilitary. Right. Right. Yes. So I set off to try to find out what happened to him and I got in touch with reporters at the Reading Record Search Light newspaper down in California, right in California. And they were covering this because wheat had been traced to a cabin in a remote location in Shasta County, California. and they had actually interviewed his wife. Uh but he had disappeared a second time. Uh one day a car arrived. He piled in and people drove him away leaving his wife behind. And um so I was able to, for example, you know, listen to a taped interview with Mrs. Wheat. Uh one one reporter in particular um Wes Hughes was very uh active in uh investigating wheat and that that and also you know other associated characters. So, um, I kind of teamed up with Wes Hughes for a while, and I also got myself acquainted with Hal Hunt, who lived in Bernie, California, and he was the right-wing racist publisher of, uh, the National Chronicle, uh, which had a rather wide readership, I think, in the far right. and he was an old fellow who was sort of uh I guess hungry for some kind of company or someone to pay any attention to him. So I would occasionally drop by and talk with him at his office and um we got along pretty well although of course I was totally out of step with his uh political beliefs. But he thought that I was kind of a fellow traveler with his cause. So or else I wouldn’t be there. Uh so he would um he would tell me things and uh was you know quite um talkative uh and and so that was interesting. And then I talked to people in law enforcement. I really don’t know why some of these I talked to right-wingers in Los Angeles about wheat and his male. Uh, one lady in particular, her daughter, a teenager, had uh, apparently run off with a fellow named Joseph Raymond Kerry who was originally from Texas and been living in Southern California and and he was apparently a minute man. and uh Carrie and this lady’s daughter had disappeared and she had written to all kinds of the local hardight paramilitary types in these different groups I previously mentioned. So she gave me a list of the people that she’d written to to look at and it was, you know, kind of like a who’s who of the more notorious characters, right? White wing in the LA area whose names I ran across in print in various places or newspaper stories or so on, but I never found wheat despite my uh digging. Do we know what ever happened to him? Yes. He he died in 1979 in Shasta County, California. In other words, he eventually came back to Shasta County with his wife, right? In the 70s, I guess, and lived there until his death and then he was buried back home in North in Louisiana, right? Yeah. His his wife told the story that she had heard from somebody who said they were an army man and that she would go to Colorado Springs. She could see your husband again. And apparently he made some illusion to an army fort. Uh I forget the name of it off hand that was near Colorado Springs. She herself seemed to be kind of doubtful about where he had initially gone. Hal Hunt told me something interesting though because we were talking about wheat, you know, basically uh taking off for parts unknown after he was subpoenaed. And and Hunt told me that if Wheat went to New Orleans and talked to the DA, the whole right wing would be finished. And I think that’s kind of an exact quotation of what he said. I guess there was a fear that wheat had um such an inside knowledge of this far right wing of of characters. It would not be a good idea for him to sit in front of a grand jury. Yeah. I mean I think of I mean uh Edgar Eugene Bradley who was in the middle of that crowd. I mean, it appears that the only reason Garrison got interested in him was basically a feud between him and some of the other right-wingers. Oh, you bet. Yes. In August 1968, I went to Los Angeles and a meeting was set up between me and the two major witnesses against Bradley. Uh, and I guess I can name them because I doubt they’re alive, but Carol and Tom Thornhill, right? Yeah. Yeah. names that a lot of people I think will recognize if uh and they told me all kinds of things, you know, about how Bradley was this uh leader of a faction of the Minutemen that wanted Kennedy dead, not really a Dew faction, but a rival faction. And then um I went down again in early ‘ 68 after the Shaw trial. And one night at Fred Nukem’s I said, “Why don’t we phone Bradley and see if we can talk to him?” And Fred was a little dubious about that, but I got on the phone and I talked to Bradley and he said, “Come on over.” So Fred and I went to Bradley’s house and u he met us at the door and said, “Don’t you Garrison guys ever give up?”
Well, we assured him that we were not strictly speaking garrison guys at that point. And then he um he proceeded to tell us the ins and outs of that feud, right? And how there had been an attempt to firebomb his house, you know, and he had been more or less thrown out of his own church. Not that he was the preacher, but he was a I guess founder or leader of a uh church there in Los Angeles, right? And um you know, and and how he had been feuding with people like Adelot Thornhill and um Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. Well, there was even a lawsuit. They were they were suing each other as well. There was a big lawsuit going on. Oh, I know. I went and I’m thinking in 1971 I went to LA and yeah attended one of the court sessions in that lawsuit. Oh really? Wow. Yeah. Carol uh Inelot and Tom Thornley were out in the hallway. I guess if they looked at me they they perhaps didn’t recognize me from meeting me in ‘ 68. Dennis Mau was there with them. Okay. Yeah, of course he was the young fellow who had supposedly known about a uh rattling plot to kill Kennedy in LA in 1960. Am I right, I think. And that’s when he was like 14 years old or something. I was Yeah. 15, 14, right? Um but I didn’t actually I never met Mau, but I did see him because he was there. And then I sat in the courtroom with the with Bradley or near Bradley and yeah that was yeah eventually he won the suit and was awarded $1.
I he suffered all kinds of personal uh u difficulty and uh you know he was a u reserve deputy sheriff and when Hubert Humphrey visited LA in 1968 he was told you know we we don’t want you in on any security arrangements concerning Humphrey’s visit because if something happened to Humphrey you know and you were there uh it would be you know terrible. So it did that was one way it affected him but of course his reputation suffered. He talked about going in a store once and you know the proprietor you know when they found out who he was said and oh are you’re the guy that killed Kennedy. Yeah. He had to suffer through that. Now, in uh August 68, Fred Nukem and I went to Edgar Eugene Bradley’s house again and we had a sitdown interview with Jerry Patrick Heming and Lawrence Howard and that of course Patrick Heming um dominated the conversation to the point where I don’t remember anything that Howard had to say, but Right. P Jerry Patrick Heming of course is, you know, well known as having been a a teller of tall tales and a and a blabbermouth and and somebody you know that you just really had to ask yourself uh what what what has he said that is true or you know he he he he told us for example you know that he met Oswald in LA or rather a suburb of LA in 1959 right Oswald was a murdered um El Toro at the at the home of the uh Cuban council in LA. You know, he had very interesting stories, but that was kind of uh a unique I thought it was kind of a unique place where we would end up interviewing Howard and and Heming at Edgar Eugene Bradley’s house. Fascinating. I mean, my my favorite Heming story is this the year that he he he u he was on a panel at JFK Lancer, the conference in Dallas, and he was so rambling and incoherent that everybody started laughing and there’s a write up on the web of that of that session where they just can’t believe just like how, you know, this guy’s completely incoherent, you know, just making up these stories. It was it was quite a funny little writeup. between 68 and 71, I met Bradley on several different visits to LA, you know, and and he was a very personable guy. Uh seemingly, you know, very sincere and uh it was a, you know, I had a whole different take on him, of course, than the one I had when I first went to LA. And all I knew was Garrison has had this guy arrested, you know, and wow, I’m in the same city as Edgar Eugene Bradley. I didn’t even know him. But what I did know him, of course, are and and he he went on being uh in in associated with Fred Nukem. I think Fred testified I I’m not sure about this, but I think Fred testified at his uh tri at the trial, you know, when he sued Okay. Bible. He was going originally to sue other people. Yeah. As well. I think Mark Lane. I have I have a copy of of like the four-page uh suit against Mark Lane. Yeah. But I don’t I don’t know. I assume it didn’t really go anywhere. Yeah. I didn’t meet Mark Lane until 71, but Well, it’s it’s it’s just it’s f I mean fascinating. I mean, I really feel for Bradley. I mean I when I point out to people that you know Garrison I mean I mean he made a he charged Bradley with with conspiracy to to assassinate Kennedy and then like oops I made a mistake. I mean that’s it’s quite a mistake to make. Yeah. Yeah. Um Bradley told me once that he was visiting the Pacific Northwest and dropped in on Fred Chrisman uh after this was all over. It would have been, I think, between 68 and 70. And I guess they had a I would have loved to have been there for that. I guess they had a chat, you know, where they compare notes on what it’s like to be a garrison suspect. So, you know, this is all amazing material. What So, tell us a bit about Fred Chrisman and and and that part of your work uh for the for the Garrison investigation. Yeah. Well, I occasionally got asked to do something to look into Chrisman. Uh, we had kind of a division of labor in that up in the Seattle Tacoma area. Uh, Ed Jeffs who covered Chrisman as a reporter, you know, for the Tacoma News Tribune. Uh, so Eds and George Rener. Um, my two uh, comrades up there. I hope the word comrade doesn’t get misinterpreted. uh in in the committee they they hand did most of the investigating of Chrisman and um I did the wheat into things, you know, because by by mere chance I guess um you know we organized the committee of inquiry before either Weat or Chrisman had actually been subpoenaed. They were not yet subpoenaed as witnesses by Garrison. So, and then it just so happens that Chrisman crops up in Ed and George’s backyard, so to speak. And then a few months later, uh, or excuse me, earlier, um, Wheat, who lived just outside the town where I lived in Oregon, uh, got subpoenaed. So, we were both kind of, uh, lucky to be so close. some of his characters and so but occasionally I would get asked to do something or I would talk to people about Chrisman. Uh like I went to Veil, Oregon where he went to high school and I talked to a couple of people there who knew him. Uh another occasion I u was asked to look into some gypsy who uh was supposed to be tied up with uh with Chrisman, right? And this lived in Oregon. So I I kind of got the Oregon end of the Chrisman um u detective work. Yeah. And well, didn’t he have a house in Oregon or his wife his wife or his wife’s father had a house in Oregon? Well, his father, Fred Chrisman, Senior, right, uh lived in Portland and um had raceh horses. He had a, as I understand it, a concession at the racetrack there. And yes, he does seem to have had a ranch or farm. Now, that got made into a big deal. And that’s what brought Fred up the coast from LA in July 68 after uh Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Fred wanted to leave the country for a while. He just, you know, couldn’t put up with it. He wanted to go to Canada to Vancouver Island and just get away from America and Americans for a while, which he did. But on the way up, he stopped and visited me in Clamoth Falls, Oregon. Right. Yeah. Out of the blue, I got a knock on the door one day after after I came home from the base. And here’s Fred Nukem in a, you know, with a beard wearing sandals and I was there in my Air Force uniform. So, we kind of made a contrast. And but we really, you know, warmed up to each other very quickly and we went out to dinner together. I I took him out to the wheat place after wheat disappeared for parts unknown. The house he’d been living in, an old school house, burned to the ground. And I I would imagine he was the one that burned it, right? But um yeah, so I took I took the Nukems out there and showed him that. So um and then Fred kept going up the coast on the way to Vancouver Island and uh stopped to see George and Ed or you know and then on his way back I was in Seattle. So we all had another little reunion then. But yeah, Fred uh was sent up north uh as kind of a u side to his heading for Vancouver Island to look into Chrisman. And he did find a Chrisman farm in u the rural part of Oregon west of Portland. Well, I I have to laugh because Garrison Babe, pardon? No. Well, Garrison was the one who wrote a a memo to the HSCA saying, you know, look, isn’t it strange? Shaw went to Portland after San Francisco after the assassination. And guess what? You know, uh, Chrisman has a farm or his father has a farm out there. Isn’t that strange? Yeah. And one rumor had it that uh G. Clinton Wheat fled to that farm before he went back down to Chasta County, which I think is ridiculous, right? Yeah. And another version was that there were uh Sato masochistic parties or something that went on there. I mean there there were rumors uh going around about the Chrisman farm or the white farm uh you know that never of course had any uh any real basis but but yes his father does seem to have had a farm. And so Chrisman was involved in the sort of the Mory Island uh hoax. Yeah. 1947. Do you want to talk a bit about that or you had recently I know as a guest Adam Golitlightly? Yeah. And he mentioned my name I two or three times. I I’ve been trying to uh do some research that might be helpful to him. And uh yeah, Maui Island of course was this case where Fred Chrisman and another guy named Harold Doll, you know, supposedly reported um these doughnut shaped flying saucers going over Doll’s boat out in Puget Sound near Mauy Island and dropping debris on the boat that killed the dog and injured uh Doll’s son. And then a couple of early UFO spotters, Kenneth Arnold and Amil Smith, came to Tacoma. Arnold had been hired by Ray Palmer, you know, who was a publisher of Amazing Stories and Flying Saucer Magazine and Fate magazine later, right? Uh Palmer paid um Arnold to go there to look into Mari Island and Arnold recruited Smith to come with them. And then um and they had discussions with Chrisman and Dah. And then a couple of uh at their behest, a couple of Air Force uh UFO investigators from Hamilton Air Force Base in California flew up in a B25 and talked to Chrisman Adall and supposedly got a hold of some of these fragments and then the two the two officers Davidson and Brown in flying back their their B25 crashed and they were killed. So that’s kind of the whole thing in a nutshell. Of course, it was written off by the FBI and the Army Air Force as a hoax. It got a lot of newspaper publicity, particularly after the B25 crash. Yeah. Um, I think what separate, you know, I’ve asked myself, what makes Mari Island unique, if anything in that early period where there were UFO sightings and other hoaxes going on all over the country, but particularly in the West Coast. And I guess what stands out is number one, it had this dramatic element to it. This kind of sci-fi approach to what happened that none of the other UFO sightings had. They were all just visual sightings of shiny things uh or bright things in the sky. Here you had donutshaped flying saucers that were dropping debris on people, right? Uh, and you know, so it had this sci-fi element to it that nothing else had going. And and also, um, secondly, oh, by the way, Chrisman was a big fan of sci-fi. Um, I had somebody tell me that he should have been a science fiction writer. uh you know, somebody who knew him uh told me that, but he he perhaps Maui Island was his way of u you know, making some money if they could get their story published and number two, you know, allowing him to be kind of the sci-fi author in a way. The other thing though about Mari Island was the death of the two pilots or or officers, you know, that was just a terrible tragedy. Yes. And again, put a whole different cast on it. It made it a bigger more more uh I guess as uh as Ed Rupel the the project blue book chief later called it. You know he he said it was the second biggest hoax and the dirtiest hoax you know that they ever that ever happened in UFOs. So the deaths just added to the sensationalism and the publicity and all that kind of thing that it got. So it stood out. Yeah, it was tragic. I mean, it’s hard to then to admit, you know, it was a hoax after two people have been killed. I mean, it’s just a it was horrible, horrible thing. Yeah. I met the nephew of one of the pilots or the officers, Philip Lipson and Charlotte Lever, who I’ve known for years. Uh they wrote a book about Mahari Island and then they appeared and I came along at a UFO festival south of Seattle a number of years ago and uh two guests showed up. One was the nephew of one of the pilots and the other was a lady who was Hal Doll’s or Harold Doll’s daughter. But but his Yeah. the pilot the pilot’s uh nephew he he was just very broken up and this is like you know decades later but he just seemed to be very broken up and emotionally affected by uh kind of you know reminiscing about that whole event. Yeah. That was really tragic. Yeah. Yeah. Very tragic. And so then Crispen went on and he I mean he he met Thomas Beckham and they they were sort of two characters who got involved in a variety of little schemes. I mean at one point Chris Chrisman even did a UFO conference I think at one point. Oh yeah. He he went to one or two UFO conferences that I know of. Yes. Um yeah, he continued occasionally to try to get some mileage out of the fact that he had been, you know, at the there at the beginning, you might say. And uh he he, you know, he was touted or at least by him or or Harold Dah, you know, as being a kind of like a character out of the Invaders television show and that he was the most knowledgeable guy on UFOs around and so on. So what is the theory? What’s the theory that about Chrisman and the JFK assassination? Where how does how does he supposedly fit into the assassination? after Beckham was subpoenenaed I think in December uh the around the end of 1967 and he was subpoenaed because of his association in New Orleans in the early 60s you know where the anti-cast movement and was supposed to be kind of a knowledgeable guy when it came to people like uh Banister or Yeah or whatnot Jack Martin too. Yeah. So he got subpoenaed, but also there had been letters and contacts from people to Garrison’s office saying, “You ought to look into Beckham.” Beckham after got subpoenaed said, “Uh, gosh, the only time I was ever in Dallas was with my manager.” You know, I I was a country singer, still am, and my manager then was uh Fred Chrisman, and we did make a trip to Dallas, but that was 1966. So he publicly brought Chrisman’s name up uh almost a year before Chrisman got subpoenaed and um somebody in Garrison’s office made a you know had had had noticed an anonymous letter that mentioned Chrisman and Beckham that had been written in I think May 67. So in February 68, Bill Boxley, who was a investigator for Garrison, sat down with Bob Lavender in San Francisco and Lavender met Beckham in Omaha. And then not that long later after Beckham had a, you know, parted company with Chrisman in the Puet Sound area, Lavender shows up in uh in Olympia, Seattle, Tacoma, that area associated with Chrisman. And Lavender told Boxley, you know, all kinds of things uh about Chrisman. There were uh you know the anonymous letters particularly the one from Florida which I think was written in late ‘ 67 it uh you know spelled all kinds of allegations about Chrisman that he knew Klay Shaw that he knew Tippet which is really I think crazy uh that New Orleans dozens of times you know and so on and so forth. all these things kind of piled up and eventually led to uh and then Ed Jeffs who who you know would report on Chrisman in Tacoma um he was investigating and in touch with Garrison’s office and so eventually you know in November 68 uh uh Chris got called as a witness and he he went down to New Orleans and testified and didn’t have anything very valuable to say about anything. And uh you know there are several things about Chrisman though that I think deserve to be brought up. One is he had a very brave and distinguished record as a um Army Air Force pilot in World War II right in the China Burma India Theater. He did, I think, what looks to me like some good work on behalf of the gypsies in Tacoma that really got uh quite a bit of notice and drew attention to the plight of gypsy people, not just there, but across the country. It’s kind of an underrepresentative, ignored, left behind kind of a segment of the population. So, I think he did some good work on behalf of gypsies. I personally don’t consider that to have been a a con job on Chrisman’s part as much as it was, you know, a sincere attempt to help them. And then of course he had a many years as a teacher uh and school administrator you know so he really did some positive constructive things in his life but he would also turn around and get involved in in some dubious activities from time to time. Uh some of which maybe he didn’t even want to get involved in. So tell tell us a bit about um you know the fact Garrison included Chrisman in in the first draft of his book on the trail of the assassins. Yeah. Before that was published he he had Chrisman in there and then uh so he he had contact you know he had trouble getting it published and I think he had contacted you and and Fred Nukem for some help in adding some information about Chrisman. Yeah I had continued to to research Chrisman over the years. I got I met a fellow named Khani Hanohano in Seattle in 1971 at a UFO study group and he after I got out of the Air Force and Colani uh was a had a strong interest in Chrisman. So Colani and I collaborated for many years in researching Chrisman. Um, and uh, you know, in 1978, I was listening on radio to the broadcast on NPR, I think, of the, uh, House Select Committee hearings. Uh, and one day they bring up Chrisman, you know, and their photographic panel had looked at those photos of the tramps, right? You know, one of them could not be ruled out as Chrisman. They couldn’t say definitely it was, but they couldn’t. So I contacted the House Select Committee and ended up talking because they called me back. I think Cliff Fenton, the chief investigator for the House Select Committee. I told Fenton that when I taught high school in Oregon in the mid70s, I met a woman who had been a teacher with Chrisman at Reineer High School. And I, you know, I asked her, “Well, do you remember what went on and so on?” And and she told me about distinctly remembering Chrisman being in high in the high school the day of the assassination. And so I told Cliff Fenton about that. They ended up, as you know, I’m sure, getting u uh you know, affidavits, the teachers that had taught with him and could vouch for that. And of course, even in his book, Murder of a City, that came out in 1970, he said that’s what he was doing. But that hadn’t gotten much attention or that would that been pretty much overlooked. That book wasn’t a bestseller. It wasn’t widely read. Um, so anyway, the House Committee’s report ended up saying, you know, we we were able to exclude Chrisman despite what the photographic panel said. He, you know, he he’s clearly not one of the tramps, right? So, in n in the late 80s, Jim Garrison was working on his book on the trail of the assassins, and he contacted Fred Nukem and asked him if he could help him out in any way with the Chrisman end of his research, which at that time, as you said, was going to be a big part of the book. Yeah. And by that time, you know, he thought Chrisman was a CIA agent. And uh well, Fred turned to me because he knew I had been doing research on Chrisman far beyond, you know, what we did back in the 60s. So I wrote to Garrison and I later had a phone call with him, uh, you know, where I said basically, it’ll do your book more harm than good to put Chrisman in it. Well, on the phone call, Garrison explained to me some of the reasons, you know, we had for wanting to uh finger Chrisman, like the fact that Chrisman taught in a town in Oregon that wasn’t too far from Dallas, Oregon, where Larry Craford was from originally. And it was kind of like, yeah, but not even at the same time. um you know so he gave me some very weak reasons. But one thing that you had a a uh installment of your blog cover was was something that I independently arrived at myself and that was that Garrison thought Chrisman because he’d worked at Boeing represented this conglomeration of aerospace companies that was behind the assassination. Right. Yes. Yeah. in the late ‘ 68 that that was a big revelation for Garrison that aerospace companies like General Dynamics or Lockheed or North American or Boeing in particular uh you know that some group of those companies uh I don’t need I don’t mean to indict all of them that was his bag but uh you know he really thought that was who was behind the assassination and Chrisman was obviously uh still working for Boeing. Yeah. In fact, he worked there from 60 to 62 in the personnel department. I I talked to a woman who had worked in the personnel department back when Chrisman was there and she told me that he had a pretty mundane job and um you know, it definitely didn’t involve u any cloak and dagger kind of stuff that Garrison described to it. Well, I spoke I spoke to uh the publisher I think apprentice hall, one of the companies that turned down Garrison’s book and I spoke to him and he basically said one of the problems was that Garrison had promised all this information about Chrisman and the CIA and nothing materialized and that was one of his chief reasons for turning down the book. Yeah. I found on the internet and and you may have done so as well the actual letter from the editor or publisher. Yeah. Explaining that to Garrison. Yeah. That that what you just have the material you have on Chrisman is just too weak. So it turned out back when I talked to Garrison, of course, I had no idea that that was happening. So, it turns out my call to Garrison wasn’t the only or even an important reason why he dropped Christmas in the book, but maybe it had a little bit to do with it. I don’t know. Well, I’m sure it had a lot to do with it, but uh perhap what I don’t know is is did uh didclar, who is the editor of his book, did he also help uh or take, you know, tell Garrison to take out Chrisman? Okay. I I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, the the scar papers are locked up in the AARC, and I’m just dying to get to look at those papers, which might tell us more about um the editing of Garrison’s book. You bet. Well, there’s so much we know and even so much more that we don’t know and would like to, you know, and it’s a shame that we don’t have access. But, of course, it would take a hundred people a lifetime of work to to go through a lot of what’s out there that that we unfortunately uh don’t have the time to look at or or have access to. Yeah, I’m I’m hoping that the ARC does digitize a lot of their stuff because they have an awful lot of interesting material um that’s just sort of sitting there in like they have like five different warehouses um in the DC area. So, I’m I’m wish they would digitize it. Well, right. or as another example of what’s sitting around somewhere, I hope, you know, is the uh 40 filing cabinets and stuff that David Lifton accumulated because I don’t think everything in it would be garbage, you know. No, I’m sure he had a lot of Garrison material and he had all sorts of stuff, letters from other other researchers and Oh, yeah. and the results of interviews that he did. Yeah. Some of which he never mentioned in print. Yeah. I know. Oh, I mean that that stuff is somewhere and I’m I wish somebody would digitize it. I I can tell you that somebody is now digitizing Gayan Fon’s records. Mhm. Which is I have like a banker’s blocks full of correspondence with Lifton. Okay. He was, you know, I only met him once in my life, but uh 25 years ago or so, you know, we kind I I became in close contact with him again. And for years, you know, he would share and I was, you know, not always convinced by what he was sharing, but uh I I enjoyed knowing him. I enjoyed knowing Lift. Yeah. I I had one phone call with David Lifton and and uh I had called him in Las Vegas. I wanted to talk about the the the question whether uh General Lameé was at the autopsy. And it was a very very it was a fun conversation with with David in his apartment. There was only one small space where he got good cell reception. And so if he moved slightly, he would lose connection. At one point we did lose connection. And he immediately sent me an email. Call me right back. And I called him back and we spent over an hour on the phone. He was reminiscing about, you know, the different different uh publishing companies that took on best evidence. And it was a bit of a reminiscing time for him. I think, you know, he appeared to me a bit lonely or wanted somebody to talk to. Yeah. I had a lot of long conversations with him or conversations that would come at late pretty late at night for me and uh it was always enjoyable to talk to him. Uh and he yeah he would reminisce quite a lot. So, just uh you know, we don’t have that much time left, but can you tell us a bit about your um your work in the military uh on investigating UFOs? Sure. Yeah. I was stationed at Kingsley Field, an Air Force base in uh Clamoth Falls, Oregon for three years. And um it wasn’t long after I got there that they decided that I ought to be as a you know brand new second lieutenant with not enough work I guess to do. Uh that in addition to my job as base disaster preparedness officer that was my main duty there for three years. They would make me the uh UFO project officer for the base. And that meant that u I would investigate in the field UFO reports that arrived from people generally in the southern Oregon northern California area because we were very close to the California border. We were kind of what I thought of as the greater Mount Shasta area in the manner of speaking. So, and a few months went by before I got my first uh report to look into, but over a period of time from 68 on, and of course, this was for project blue book. So, I would send reports to them and also to the Condan Committee at the University of Colorado, which was investigating UFOs under an Air Force contract. And some cases I investigated I didn’t report because they just didn’t seem to have anything to go by. You know, like somebody saw a little light in the sky going over at night, which could be anything, right? So, I would talk to them and then I would, you know, and take the written report. they’d fill out a form and you know then I would decide not to send it into project blue book because they wanted something that was more sub you know sub had some substance right so um every few months on average I would get a report uh and I think maybe twice I sent in a report in writing you know or by fax to um to project blue book and the conan committee And then after the con or after the project blue book was shut down in December 69, a few months went by. And in April 70, I got another report. At that point, I decided, well, I may not be working for Project Bulbick anymore, but I’ll go investigate it anyway. It was a report by a couple of Air Force sergeants of what they thought was a landing of a UFO on a mountain in Northern California. That turned out to be very interesting. Um, they were good witnesses. They they showed me a picture that they made of the UFO that looked very interesting, right? It it looked a lot like a picture I’d seen of a UFO in France. And um I had a geer counter with me and a Polaroid camera. And when I took a photograph of what they said was where the UFO landed, you know, with a Polaroid camera, you’d pull the thing out and then you could watch it develop, as you may remember. Yep. Yeah. So, I’m looking at this photograph, visualize in front of my eyes, and what I’m looking at is the sergeant off in the distance, trees and logs, and then what looked like flames of fire coming out of the ground. I thought, you know, now that may have been an anomaly of the film. I I totally recognize that in retrospect, but you can imagine my reaction and looking at this photo and seeing what I couldn’t see with the naked eye that looked like fire coming up, right, from the ground. But so that turned out to be very interesting. But I had nobody to report it to. Project Blue didn’t exist anymore. So um I just put it in my file, which I still have. I still have my file of all my reports and notes and photos and things like that because otherwise I would have just it would have gotten thrown away, right? Project blue ended. So, what what do you make of the current activity with UAPs that’s going on right now? I you know, I don’t know really what to make of it. It’s kind of bewildering. Um, I never been much of a believer in u in the actual existence of of some kind of alien hardware flying around in our skies. So, uh, even though I have a interest in flying saucers that goes back to my real really back to my childhood, I was a regular reader of Fate magazine as a teenager and I bought books about UFOs back when I was maybe 10 or 12. And as I Yeah. So I had this long history of interest in UFOs. But when I actually started investigating them, I found that the witnesses were very reputable, credible people. But my the difficulty is how do I as the investigator establish what it was they saw or even really for sure what it looked like or how it behaved, right? So they would draw me diagrams and give me a description, but then you know it was a case of do I really think this is truly unidentified? Um I’ve got some statistics here. the two years uh 1968 and 1969.
Um 68 there was only project rule book only uh categorized three sightings that whole year as unidentified and then in ‘ 69 only one. So, I came in at a point where Project Blue Book was treating very very few UFO sightings as being truly unidentified. Um,
for what? Well, I’m I’m just amazed that like Luna has her hearings uh in Washington and then she she actually was on Joe Rogan show claiming that our advanced technology today is because of of aliens. I mean, it’s just it’s I I couldn’t believe she actually said that. And uh Well, I can believe she said it, but I can’t believe it’s true.
That’s true. Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. Well, yeah, go ahead. Oh, well, yeah, go on to another topic if you have time. Yeah. I mean, I think what I’d like to do is just sort of um there’s so much more to talk about. I mean, I’d just like to get your thoughts on the current state of JFK assassination research, what you think about the assassination today, and how that’s changed over the years. I It’s a just a generally broad topic. Well, I think I’ve grown more skeptical over the years, you know, about many of the claims that are made, the conspiracy theories and so on. I’ve decided now that I’ve got to a certain point in life that I would like to be neutral on the subject of the JFK assassination. I know that’s a way of probably alienating everybody else who has any interest in this subject, but I’d kind of like to take the stance that I’m neither pro- conspiracy theory nor totally anti-conspiracy theory because I think there is some uh possibility, you know, kind of thinking from an epistemological viewpoint that we don’t know quite enough to be able to say flatly that there was no conspiracy of any kind. Um Oswald might have conspired with the groundkeeper at Daily Plaza, you know, so that that guy would make his lawnmower backfire and be a distraction as Oswald fired the shots. I’m not saying that happened. Please don’t get that. I’m saying that would be But that kind of conspiracy, of course, would thrill no one. No one would knock themselves out for decades trying to prove that kind of conspiracy. It it just wouldn’t rise to the level of what would make people who believe in a conspiracy happy, right? Yeah. But on the at the same time, some kind of low-level conspiracy that doesn’t have to include everyone and their brother uh or every, you know, every letter agency of the government. uh you know you can’t rule totally 100% with 100 you know moral conviction rule that out and I don’t imagine um the uh you know what I’m saying is going to make some people happy but uh on the other hand the conspiracy theories that have come along you know the the the thing is to look at them each in turn and see what’s wrong with them and there’s always something wrong uh or there’s always something lacking or something more that I’d like to see before I would buy into them. So individual conspiracy theories I have yet to be convinced. Um, but you know, I think debunkers, if you want to use that term, it’s really kind of a unpleasant term in a way, you know, like UFO debunkers. But, um, you know, the the people that that the conspiracy theorists would would despise as being debunkers are really doing the conspiracy theories a service as cons, you know, being critics of what they do. Uh it’s setting up guard rails. It’s saying, “Look, if you want to have a decent conspiracy theory, don’t do this or don’t bring up that, right?” But, you know, uh uh yeah, kind of narrow your thinking and try to weed out the garbage and the untruths and the mistakes that you’re making and then see what you have left and maybe build on that. Um yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree with that. I’m surprised that more conspiracy believers don’t do some of that work. Um, policing themselves. It’s it’s very important. The other thing I would say about a possible conspiracy is I think the one thing that I don’t know about is was somebody egging Oswald on that we don’t know about in Jim Host thought so. You know, Jim Hosty, who I got to know back in 1983 when he came and talked to my uh JFK assassination class in Kansas. He came on two different occasions and and spoke at link both times. I also met him once at his home and we talked on the phone and corresponded for years after that. Um, you know, he talked about the Castro regime murder mount. That’s the way he put it. that he thought that perhaps not with intent as far as Oswald was concerned, not that they were particularly addressing him, but you know, he was just influenced by and egged on in a way by the rhetoric that was coming out of Havana. Now I think eventually Hosty went a little bit further than that because in his book Assignment Oswald, you know, he says in in a he makes an assertion that I think has gotten very little if any attention. He asserts in Simon Oswald that Oswald was photographed in Mexico City on a street with Kikakov.
I think by the time he wrote ASSIGNMENT OSWALD which was like around 10 years after I met him, he brought that up which he had never mentioned to me but you know so I think Hostie over time became a conspiracy theorist but thought that it was the Cuban and or the Russian uh governments that were behind it. Right? more than just Oswald picking up something from the news that Castro may have said. Yeah. Castro did it theory was also bought into by other people like um you know two men that in ‘ 63 were very much involved in Cuban affairs in the department of the army were Alexander Haig and Joseph Calfano. and they both expressed over the years their conviction that Castro was behind the assassination. And uh I don’t know that we can totally rule that out. Also Gus Russo’s theory about uh Oh yes, Gus Russo. You bet. Yes. Yeah. And we I guess we normally think of him as being anti-conspiracy, but on the other hand, he he certainly uh did some intriguing research on the on the Castro angle. Yeah, very much so. Okay, look, I think there’s a lot more we can talk about in this. We’ll we’ll probably have to do another interview at another time, but thank you very much for session. It was a lot of fun. Thank you very much
Welcome to another edition of On the Trail of Delusion, where we try to separate the wheat from the chaff and try to give you something interesting on the JFK assassination as opposed to some of the ridiculous slop you’ll see on the internet and on YouTube.
So today my special guest is Adam Gorightley who is an author who has written many many books but also has a terrific website http://www.historiadiscordia.com which you’ll see a link to in the bottom and his articles have appeared in all sorts of publications on the internet underground magazines countercultural publications. But what’s of real interest to us here on this podcast is that Adam has done some absolutely fundamental amazing work on people like Kerrie Thornley, Fred Chrisman, Thomas Beckham, and Raymond Brochures. These are all names that sort of came out of or were associated with the Garrison investigation. And so I’m very happy to have Adam with me today. And Adam, tell us how you got into, looking at some of these characters.
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Fred. Well, let’s start with Kerrie Thornley. Back in the early 90s or so I became aware of him probably even earlier than that. I was during that period uh like I start had started writing for Z and I was really interested in conspiracy theories and UFOs and paranormal and all this kind of far out stuff. Thornley came into my awareness. First of all, I saw some articles he had written for a Zine called FACT SHEET FIVE, which was really an important Zine during that period. FACT SHEET FIVE was basically a catalog this guy named Mark Zunder put out listing all the Zines available. 2:42 He did this month after month, put a lot of work into it. And there was I saw a column called Conspiracy Corner by this Kerrie Thornley guy and it’s like I actually couldn’t make a lot of sense out of it but uh I became more aware of 3:01 him and as uh time went on uh I came across a book called Conspiracies Coverups and Crimes by an author named Jonathan Vankin you might be familiar with. 3:13 Yeah. and uh he was covering some of the more far out conspiracy theories in that 3:20 book becoming prevalent at the time and some of the characters one of whom was Kerrie Thornley 3:27 and just a thumbnail sketch Thornley had known Oswald and the Marines for a 3:34 short period of time then got sent over to Japan where uh Oswald had been 3:40 previously stationed at Atsugi and he was working on a book at during that 3:45 period called the IDLE WARRIORS which was like being a Marine during peace time, the cold war and kind of the 3:53 malaise and things going on with that period. And he based them uh the main 4:00 character in the book was Johnny Shelburn which Thornley based on 4:06 himself and other Marines he had known in that period including Lee Harvey Oswald. And so Thornley got over to uh 4:13 Japan and that’s when he around the time that Oswald defected and he went “whoa I’m going to change the focus of this book to be entirely on Oswald “you know. So that was kind of the first curiosity that he had known Oswald in that period and was writing a book about 4:32 Oswald uh prior to the Kennedy assassination. And so Venin covered that in his article 4:40 about Thornley. And he also got into some of the more far out theories 4:46 surrounding Thornley who was investigated and uh indicted by I’m not 4:52 sure if he was ever indicted. Fred Litwin: Yeah. No, he was. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. By Jim Garrison. And Garrison had these 5:01 smattering of theories. one that Thornley was the second Oswald that he 5:06 was connected to the military and the aerospace industry and they were somehow 5:11 involved and he also claimed that Thornley was CIA and uh on and on and on 5:18 and so Thornley denied all those accusations initially but then later like in the ‘7s 5:25 after the Garrison investigations he started thinking about that and he was also some would say suffering from uh 5:33 paranoid schizophrenia, which might have been uh helped along by, you know, the 5:40 prosecution of Jim Garrison causing that paranoia. But he started he 5:45 was looking back and he now by this time he was thinking, well, maybe Garrison got some things right. There was a lot 5:51 of odd stuff going on during that period. And how did I happen to run a, 5:57 you know, my paths and Oswald come together? Was there some other sinister force there? You know, was the 6:04 conspiracy setting him up as an alternative pepsi? So he started 6:09 believing all these things or entertaining these uh notions and uh 6:15 ultimately at one point he started to believe he was a part of the MK Ultra 6:21 project and that he he and Oswald were part of a Nazi breeding experiment to 6:27 create, you know, these future assassins of America. his life kind of spiraled 6:32 out of control during that period. But and so that was kind of a nutshell of uh 6:37 Thornley in that book uh Venin put out. It was just one chapter and I I was 6:43 fascinated by the guy started collecting materials and 6:48 uh Ven said it one point he was uh considering um writing a biography of 6:56 Thornley. I go, “Oh man, I’ll love it when that came out.” But he never got around to that and I had this material 7:03 and eventually I had enough content I felt to pursue writing a book on 7:09 Thornley and that turned out to be the prankster and the conspiracy which was published in u 2003. So I guess you’re 7:18 asking how I became interested in these characters. that was one of the characters and how they became 7:23 and and and you also published uh this book Caught in the Crossfire um which I have to say is an absolutely fantastic 7:30 book and anybody anybody interested in Carrie Thornly this is the book to get. 7:36 It’s chalk full of primary sources, documents, photographs, stories. I mean 7:42 it’s it’s absolute essential reading and you’ll find links to it in in the comments below. 7:47 Came into contact. How did this happen? It was kind of odd how I came into contact. We were never quite clear how 7:53 our paths crossed, but I met up with a guy named Bob Newport. And uh this was 7:59 after I wrote the Thornly book. I think I might have Yeah, I interviewed him for the Thornly book actually. He was 8:05 friends with Thornley uh growing up and he uh mentioned he had some Discordian 8:12 archives and I didn’t even mention that uh Thornley and a buddy of his named 8:17 Greg Hill started this spoof religion back in the late 1950s called 8:23 Discordianism which is the worship of the Greek goddess and of chaos and discord. It was kind of started as a 8:30 spoofed religion but became a kind of collective for different artists where they shared ideas and it was kind of a 8:38 platform to u kind of riff on uh 8:45 different religions and philosophy and politics. And it was a circle of different writers and artists that 8:53 exchanged uh sometimes humorous stuff, collages. They had these things called 8:59 groovy packs where they’d send a bunch of things in a uh envelope with a joint 9:04 usually and you take the joint out and take a hit and put put your own spin on 9:09 this uh collection of materials sent to you and send it on to the next guy. And 9:14 a lot of this material became like these projects ended up in a book called the 9:19 Principia Discordia which you could say was uh kind of the Bible of Discordianism. So 9:26 anyway, where I was going with all this and here’s a here’s a book that that you know another very important book uh uh 9:34 the sort of the origins of uh the Discordian Society which you were you were part of writing this book 9:40 right and that’s where I was going. um Newport told me at one point uh he had 9:48 some uh what he called the Discordian archives and I actually met him at at 9:54 Robert Anton Wilson’s house in like 2001 and he brought an armload of this material and I thought, “Oh, this is 10:00 some great uh stuff.” You know, I’d like to maybe use it for a book at uh some 10:06 point. He said, “Well, you’re welcome to do that. I’ll let you I’ll let you take some of this along. There’s more I 10:12 have.” But so I borrowed that and scanned it and started working on this book. And later on, we’re like in 2009 10:19 or so, he said, I was in LA where he lived and he said, “Well, come on over and you can have everything.” And it 10:24 turned out to be oh, a dozen of boxes, which was all the material that Greg Hill had put together 10:32 for these uh archives over the years. And a lot of them were I mean, he just saved everything. He’s all his 10:40 correspondents and he’s saved, you know, the carbons of what he sent out to 10:45 people and there was just a wealth of material and some of that stuff in there was uh files on the garrison 10:53 investigations and a lot of uh communications Thornley was having with different people during that period. saw 11:01 that the material that kind of fell in my lap uh has been used for these 11:07 different projects. Is that is that material in in some sort of physical archive somewhere? 11:13 I’m actually uh working on that right now. The archive is at my house here. 11:19 Okay. And u it should be going into a uh library archive. Uh it’s probably going 11:27 to happen at the end of this uh year or early uh next year. Uh more news 11:34 to follow on that. But uh yeah, I’ve been working it placing it at a library 11:40 for quite some time and uh university library. 11:46 That’s good. I um I’m struck with with Thornley in the fact that you know Garrison went so far as to think that he 11:53 was the body in the in the Oswald photograph in the backyard you know and 11:59 I mean it’s just and and and what’s amazing is you know bro people like brochers were sort of into selling that 12:07 as well you know you know oh I know I recognize those hips you know I mean it’s it’s so ridiculous 12:14 I guess we Oswald is the one who started that rumor cuz I think he’s 12:20 Was it he or someone and said that Well, that’s not me. My head’s been super imposed on uh that uh photo of me. Where 12:29 was it? In Fort Worth or wherever he Yeah, it was in his backyard in down in Dallas on Ne holding the communist 12:37 literature in one hand and I guess the rifle. I’ve been there. I’ve been to that house. Oh, backyard. 12:43 And so anyway, that kind of rumor got started and uh Garrison heard about it 12:50 and uh he just pick up on these things. Um Thornley’s dad was a photo engraver 12:57 of some sort. So he thought that his father or Thornley would have had 13:03 the skills to do that and that. But then brochures testified. I guess it was 13:10 brochures who really said, “Yeah, that was uh Thorn Lee in the backyard posing 13:16 as Oswald.” And that started a lot of the second Oswald stuff. And there was 13:22 witnesses uh Garrison said he had several witnesss who saw Thornley with 13:28 Marina Oswald, but that never really panned out when I was looking at there was one witness who came forward, but 13:35 you know, it all seemed sketchy. was Yeah. And and I mean he he he told I 13:41 mean he even wrote a memo to the HSCA about the backyard photograph and you know how lucky we might be because the 13:48 father was a photo engraver. And then you know he he was just so insistent. Garrison so believed that Thornley was 13:55 in New Orleans um when Oswald was there and they must 14:00 have crossed paths because Barbara Reed you know said that you know they had been together. 14:06 another character write about. Yeah. And there was some overlap as I 14:11 recall because there was a few weeks. Yeah. Uh them being at the same who knows. 14:18 Well, yeah. You would have thought uh Thornley would have recognized Oswald 14:24 quite obviously, but and if he had seen Oswald, he would have been really interested in talking to him 14:29 and really uh there’s no reason to hide that. I mean, he would have been really interested. 14:34 Barbara Reed claims she saw them together in a coffee house or a 14:40 restaurant. And uh then if you look through some of that materials, there 14:45 supposedly was a second witness and there was an affidavit uh produced by this fellow. I forget his 14:52 name, but it was never signed. So it seemed like one of those things where Reed or Garrison put it together and 14:59 say, “Here, sign this so we can have another witness.” and whoever it was didn’t sign it. That kind of tells you 15:05 something. Um, yeah, Reed was a character herself. We talked about the Discordian society, 15:12 this kind of prank religion of these uh it was a real mix of like libertarians, bohemians, uh, 15:21 pranksters. And really when it started in the Southern California, it was just 15:28 three guys. uh Hill Thornley and Bob Newport. But when they went to New 15:34 Orleans, they uh kind of started in New Orleans branch of the Discordian Society 15:40 there with a another character called Roger Leven who kind of got sucked into 15:46 the Garrison Investigation at one point. And Barbara Reed was involved and Reed claimed that she was the goddess Iris 15:53 herself. She was involved in all kinds of stuff. I mean, she was uh pretty 15:59 fundamental to the uh resurrection of the old style jazz scene being uh 16:07 reinvigorated there in New Orleans. That’s something certainly positive you can say about her. And uh 16:13 but she was also one some people described her as she was somebody who 16:19 always put herself in the middle of these different situations whether she 16:25 whether she actually had any uh connection to them and you know there’s rumors that her and Garrison had some 16:33 type of relationship and and she was basically 16:38 kind of like Jack Martin uh initially a witness but Then they become part of the 16:44 investigation team. So you can see how this whole thing was so conflicted, you 16:50 know. Yeah. And Weisberg would spend a lot of time at Barbara Reed’s house and and trying to sort of get information from 16:58 her or bounce ideas off of her and they’d all meet at her house, all these people together and and it was like a 17:05 cauldron of rumors. I mean I mean New Orleans, everybody was talking in New Orleans. 17:11 I think Thornley made the mistake. At some point he met uh Reed uh he’d 17:18 returned to New Orleans for a little bit of time like in ‘ 64 after the assassination and the topic came up and 17:27 I think she confronted him at that time saying well yeah I saw you uh with 17:33 Oswald don’t you remember that? He’s going, “Well, no, you know, I think I guess it 17:40 could have been possible and I didn’t recognize him.” And that kind this opened up the 17:46 the whole thing to spin out of control. 17:52 Yeah. And I, you know, I feel I feel for for Thornley. I mean, he was dragged to New Orleans and indicted and he didn’t 17:58 have a lawyer and and uh you know, these gar, you know, the garrison’s men are trying to convince him of whole variety 18:05 of things and cross-examining him and and uh you know, I mean, my god, he was 18:10 put through the ringer and then you had the ridiculous Harold Weisberg actually asking I think Fred Nukem to can you 18:18 draw some some whiskers on a picture of Thornley to make him look like Oswald. 18:23 Yeah, I was looking at some of that uh material today and somehow 18:29 Thornley did have a lawyer at one point named Lavine and somehow they came 18:34 across this correspondence with the DA’s office with uh Fred Nukem and they sent 18:41 Weisberg was involved. They sent a photo of Thornley out of the Tampa Times and 18:46 they asked uh N uh Nukem if he could retouch it. a lot of basically the 18:52 hairline to uh make him look more like Oswald. I guess they’re pursuing this uh 18:59 theory. So once again, uh who I don’t know exactly what they did with that 19:04 photo, but it wouldn’t be surprised me if his investigators had the touched up photo and taken around. Do you recognize 19:13 this uh fellow, you know, and and then Weisberg wrote the letter on DA stationery and then 19:19 Yeah. Yeah. To make it look all official. And it was just a bizarre bizarre incident. 19:26 And then I mean and then David Lifton got involved because he became friends with Carrie Thornley and realized this 19:33 is all silly. Yeah. And so he started writing about that out in Los Angeles. It was just um an 19:40 interesting Sylvia Maher was a friend of Carrie Thornley’s. Mhm. Yeah. She wrote a letter uh kind of 19:47 defending him. Uh and uh yeah, they exchanged several letters and 19:52 and he sent her a lot of Discordia stuff and and they exchanged letters and and I 19:58 think she contributed to his defense fund and you know she she early on realized this is all so ridiculous. 20:06 But he was Thornly was uh poking the bear we might say when it came to uh 20:11 Garrison. Uh he was he wrote a few different things saying how Garrison was 20:18 an out of control authoritarian and things like this and they even became 20:25 part of a Discordian prank called called Operation Mindfuck 20:30 right where uh and it had to do part of that came out of um there was that dude 20:37 Howland Chapman who I guess was supposedly an investigator. He’s a Gilly 20:42 Plaza regular as they called him. And uh he was a John Burch Society guy who 20:49 believed that the Illuminati was involved in the assassination which was a pretty common kind of John Burchian 20:57 thing at that time that was being spread. But he was the one who came up with, as I understand it, he got a hold 21:04 of those uh three [ _ ] photos and got those to uh Garrison. 21:09 Anyway, Thornley heard about Chapman and Chapman was the one who really convinced Garrison that there was a shot from the 21:15 sewer, right? That Yeah, that too. You know, so you have this you have this 21:20 thing Chapman goes to see Garrison, convince him there’s a shot in the from the sewer and like one day later Garrison is issuing press releases, you 21:27 know, there’s a shot from the sewer. I mean, it’s we’ve we’ve solved it. There was whatever 21:33 two men, three men men, six men, men on the triple overpass. It was 21:39 constantly changing, you know, but he denounced it like we’ve solved it. It’s over. 21:44 Yeah. It’s a done deal. Um I was going to say this. So this Illuminate Illuminati 21:51 thing tickled Thornley and Robert Anton Wilson, these other guys and they got interested in uh 21:58 researching the Illuminati and they tied it into the Discordian society and some of the prank letters they sent I mean 22:05 they’d send stuff to like Welch with the John Burch Society and other people but 22:10 apparently they sent some to Garrison claiming yeah that the Illuminati was behind the assassination. 22:17 And I found one in Weisberg’s files. It was Robert Anne Ton Wilson wrote a spoof 22:24 letter along those lines to uh Weisberg. And Weisberg was one of the ser of this 22:30 bunch too, you know. 22:36 Well, yeah, in in a certain sense, but yeah. 22:42 So, so yeah, Thornley, you know, a fascinating character. Um uh but that 22:47 you know led you to write about you know people like uh Beckham Chrisman and Brochers. I don’t know if you want to 22:53 talk about one of those characters. Um, yeah, with brochures. Um, 23:01 I’ve been a reading Kennedy assassination books for a long time like you as a young man and u 23:10 you know I came came across uh oh different pro garrison stuff back in 23:18 the mid 80s or so you know and I go wow that’s a lot of his theories and the 23:26 people he claimed were perpetrators involved in the conspiracy. They show up 23:31 in other books. People were repeating this. So, it was and of course Oliver Stone ended up running with it. But, you 23:38 know, you see that stuff as a young guy and it’s like, wow, this is the district attorney of New Orleans. He’s got a lot 23:45 of power and you hear him talk, you know, charismatic guy and all that. It’s like, yeah, he start repeating this 23:52 stuff as fact. it, you know, later on you dig into it, it’s like, huh, maybe 23:58 not so much. Yeah. Um, so, uh, but I remember seeing brochers 24:04 mentioning a book, uh, by Bernard Festerald. Yeah. Coincidence or Conspiracy, I think it 24:11 was called. Yeah, it was a paperback book. Yeah. Which I have. Yeah. Bernard Festerwald. Yeah. And it’s like a who’s who and good 24:17 resource at the time. Um, and brochures was in there. And once again, it’s one of those characters. It’s like what? 24:23 This guy, they said he knew Ferry knew that Ferry was part of the assassination team, but 24:31 then brochures had also threatened the LBJ at one point. He was also involved 24:38 in UFOs. It’s like what is that this guy, you know? Then um 24:44 as I was writing the first Thornley book um 24:49 started coming across you know in the National Archive files of Garrison brochure statements and yeah he’s making 24:57 all these claims that uh Thornley was part of this group of 25:02 assassins that were also homosexuals and uh that somehow that was part of the 25:10 motive and he connected seemingly connected did Clay Shaw and Ferry and 25:15 Thornley to the assassination. And yeah, he had these crazier ideas like the 25:21 superimposed uh photo and I in uh in the Discordian archives I came across uh 25:29 other materials in the correspondence and I think you mentioned this in your book where a friend of uh Thorn Lee’s 25:37 named Luis Lacy had some interactions with brochures in the around 1970 you 25:42 know so I kind of incorporated that into the book and showed what a kind of she 25:49 she thought he was nuts. Um, it had to do with uh I don’t know if I need to go 25:55 into the all all the details, but uh but he he was another one of these characters kind of like Barbara Reed 26:02 involved in a lot of different stuff. Some of it seemed uh pretty positive, 26:07 you know, like he was helping homeless people in his mission there in San 26:12 Francisco. And he was he had a hand in uh what do he what was it the first uh 26:19 gay liberation day in San Francisco, but then he was somebody who’d always have a 26:24 falling out with people and got into a big row with lesbians in San Francisco. 26:30 So they kind of kicked him out in following years of being involved in the 26:36 gay liberation. So he kind of started his own. He he had this group called the Lavender 26:42 Panther which were like gay vigilantes that were take going to take on uh 26:49 people who were beating up gays and he was just always showing up in uh papers. 26:55 But he’s also kind of a unhinged guy who’s always getting into confrontations 27:00 with uh people and had mental issues. And here we go. This is one of your uh 27:06 you were you were a priest caller. He was sort of a supposed reverend, a man of the cloth, but uh but who knows how 27:14 real that is. And well, he got some credentials through the Universal Life Church, right? Yes. 27:19 Which anybody could get get at that time. And so you and so did uh the likes 27:25 of Fred Chrisman, uh Carrie Thornley. I mean, a lot of people were becoming universal life ministers for a lot of 27:32 different reasons. Tom Beckham as well. Uh part of it was to run scams. 27:39 You know, I think some people during the Vietnam War era thought they could avoid 27:44 the draft be becoming a minister. And so there’s a lot of different motivations, 27:49 but uh Garrison be came across that these guys were all ministers and stuff 27:56 that led to another one of his theories that they were these so-called somebody 28:01 later called these wandering bishops that were using these fringe or obscure 28:07 religious uh churches organizations as fronts to hide their activities as 28:15 political assassins. I mean, and part of that I think was based on 28:23 Jack Martin was feeding that them that information, but he was also involved in these groups as well, you know, uh, with 28:30 David Ferry. So, it’s like you’re involving all these other people’s, but your main witness witness 28:38 uh, you’re letting slide because he’s feeding you the information he want you 28:43 want to hear. you know, uh, Jack Martin. Jack Martin, another 28:49 crazy, unreliable narrator, just like Barbara Reed and, uh, Reverend Braymond 28:56 Raymond Brochures. And these were some of uh Garrison’s uh Yeah. I mean, I love the fact that that 29:01 brochures would went on went on uh a TV show and basically claimed that he had 29:07 channeled Lee RB Oswald at a seance, you know, and Oswald said, “Well, I’m 29:13 innocent.” You know, and and and that’s when the Garrison’s men really got interested. Oh, you know, well, he also 29:19 said he knew fairies, so they got interested. They they brought him to New Orleans. Of course, that was a great 29:24 holiday for brochures. He was off with the boys for a week, you know, having a great time. 29:31 Chrisman too got a vacation with he and his lawyer and he there was a big uh 29:36 Chrisman was trying to get more squeeze more money out of uh Garrison at the time. He was uh given $500 29:44 for he and his lawyer to go to New Orleans. And Gresman said, “Well, that 29:50 that’s not enough, you know, to pay our time.” But you look at $500 and 29:56 When was that? 19 68. 68. It’s more like uh I don’t know three 30:03 or $4,000. So was plenty. And he spent that weekend there and had a uh good 30:08 time apparently. Yeah. En enjoyed it. Uh 30:14 talking to I uh interviewed his son Fred Chrisman Jr. 30:20 who’s uh around. Oh wow. And uh he said that Yeah. He said that 30:25 uh Chrisman was uh absolutely thrilled, almost giddy to get the attention and go 30:32 to uh New Orleans. Uh Thornley’s wife or ex-wife that by that time wasn’t 30:38 thrilled at all. She was pissed and kind of upset by the whole thing. They were separated at the time. And so Fred 30:45 Chrisman Jr. had those memories. Do you think uh do you think I mean I mean Garrison learned about Chrisman through 30:52 uh and Beckham through an anonymous letter. Do you think Chrisman wrote that letter first? Yeah. First let me say Chrisman 30:59 had an extensive uh history of writing fake letters. So under uh assumed names. 31:07 Um some other insights from uh Fred Chrisman Jr. 31:14 But uh he lived with his his Chrisman and his wife were separated, 31:20 but uh Fred Jr. would visit like in the summer there in Tacoma. And Chrisman had 31:28 a uh office uh underground office, underground lair where he’d uh do what 31:36 uh Chrisman Jr. called uh his father would do his disinformation work. And 31:43 what he the setup he had uh he had there was a large desk there with three 31:48 different typewriters. So he he’d use different typewriters to produce letters, you know, that’d be harder to 31:54 trace. And he he’d collect uh different uh stuff like letter heads from 32:01 wherever, government agencies. if there was an estate sale or like a law firm 32:07 that went out of business, he’d collect different things that he could emboss to make it look official. So, there’s a lot 32:14 of evidence that he concocted a lot of letters and I have a few of those just 32:21 to show them in the book I’m working on on Chrisman. But unfortunately, a lot of 32:26 his files got his home files got tossed out. Chrisman Jr. has a few examples of 32:33 stuff and uh photos that he shared with me. So yeah, Chrisman had a history of 32:39 doing that. There’s two anonymous u letters. Uh the first one was uh 32:49 named five uh people who were involved who had information. So two of the 32:55 people named were Chrisman and Beckham. There was uh also uh Sergio Aracha and Lewis Rebel. 33:04 They were part of that friends of Democratic Cuba 33:11 anti-Castro uh group. Somehow they got lumped into this letter. And also somebody called 33:16 Martin Graci. There’s no Martin Graci. There was a Julio Graci. Uh so 33:24 and there was Bob Bob Lavender as well. Well, Bob came later. I guess he came 33:30 later. I think uh at least uh Garrison suspected 33:35 and Boxley, his investigator, they suspected he wrote this uh letter. It 33:41 wasn’t signed, but he’s connected to that letter. And that’s why Boxley went 33:46 to interview him about that. and he had some of the same information that appeared in that 33:52 letter. So, it’s hard to say exactly if uh 33:58 uh Lavender what his role was. Was he just repeating that information he had heard overheard 34:07 from Beckham and Chrisman or was he a collaborator in this uh farce? So, there 34:14 was that letter. Then there was the uh second anonymous letter 34:20 that that first anonymous letter was like 67 and early 68 uh was the one that 34:28 is just a one-page letter anonymous not signed to anybody. There’s this guy you 34:33 need to check on in Tacoma Chrisman. Uh he travels around the 34:40 country and he’s involved in this thing. Jim, you need to look at this guy. 34:46 Whatever. And that that seems more like a uh Chrisman letter. You just don’t 34:52 know for sure, you know. Yep. But Chrisman had this habit of or 34:59 he was trying to build this mystique around himself. I mean, it goes back to the UFO days and 35:07 uh I believe hoaxing the Mory Island UFO incidents in his letters about 35:14 battling the underground creatures, the daros in Burma during World War II. it 35:20 he was just creating this uh mystique around himself as this action 35:27 man who was involved in paranormal events and was a deep cover secret 35:34 agent. There is the famous uh document called the easy papers. Are you familiar with that? 35:40 Yeah. And I’m pretty sure Chrisman concocted that. It’s like a six-page 35:48 document allegedly written by an analyst at CIA who pulled Chrisman’s uh file to 35:57 lay out this information about him. And it’s obviously a hoax, but yeah, it 36:03 reads just like uh other Chrisman um 36:08 hoax letters. I shared that with Fred uh Chrisman Jr., Right. And 36:15 I’m not I’m not a big fan of AI or any of that, but he said we got a my son and 36:21 wife uh want to run this through chat GPT to compare it to uh his book Murder 36:28 of the City Tacoma, right? Which is right here. Yep. And according to Chatch GPT, 36:37 uh it’s the same author. Huh. Okay. What that means, I don’t know. There’s a 36:43 lot of slop that’s comes with AI, but it it was an interesting analysis. 36:50 Yeah. So, yeah. And and of course, you know, Garrison receives these anonymous 36:55 letters and he then has to bring Chrisman in to testify and Chrisman said nothing. I mean, really nothing. And 37:02 then Garrison went on to tell the HSCA, “You got to look at this guy Chrisman. He’s he’s a he’s a real suspect uh in 37:10 the assassination.” And lo and behold, he’s not even in Garrison’s book. Yeah, he had a bee in his bonnet about 37:17 uh Chrisman for sure. Um well, he was as you know, he was in the original version 37:25 of uh Chrisman’s book. Yeah, he was he was in the original version of Garrison, 37:31 excuse me. Yeah, Garrison’s book, but was removed later. I talked to Larry Hapen about that um 37:40 when uh Garrison was uh writing that called his assassination memoir whatever 37:47 on the trail of the assassins. Yeah, you’re familiar with that title. Um he intended yeah to have a chapter on 37:54 Chrisman. I think the first publisher looked at I forget who this was now, but 38:00 they said, “You promised us a connection with the CIA and it’s just not here with 38:06 Chrisman. You know, it’s not working at all.” There you go. Yeah. And so Garrison 38:12 regrouped and he contacted Fred Nukem who was involved in that touchup photo 38:18 and said at that time the U House select committee assassinations had ended and 38:25 Garrison wasn’t happy with the work they did on Chrisman. He he it was his opinion he gave them a bunch of leads to 38:32 follow where they could have proved it but nothing uh they you know determined 38:37 that Chrisman had an alibi and I mean comparing him to the photos, I guess, of 38:43 the three tramps, I guess, of the million different people claimed were 38:49 the three tramps. I guess Chrisman maybe vaguely looked like the old man [ _ ] 38:54 but uh whatever the case, uh Nukem 39:00 suggested Larry Happen is the guy who really looked into Chrisman during that uh period in 6970. 39:07 and happened and got a hold of Garrison and said so many words you know you’re barking up 39:15 a tree there it’s going to undermine your book by using this information about Chrisman 39:22 because like I saidan had determined he’s the one who found out that Chrisman had an alibi he’s a uh 39:30 he was a teacher I forget he was might have been teaching high school at that time and was at some conference or 39:37 something and met up with uh one of the persons who worked with 39:44 Chrisman at where was he at? That might have been I think it was Reneer High School in Reneer, Oregon 39:53 who uh saw Chrisman there on the day of the assassination and they provided 39:59 written uh records to the House Select Committee on Assassination. So I mean 40:05 that so that was kind of a important piece of uh information 40:12 witnesses that Hannan brought uh forward that basically threw a wet towel over at 40:18 least Chrisman being in Daily Plaza on the day of the assassination. Of course that didn’t stop any of these theories 40:26 from growing since Chrisman died after the House Select Committee on Assassination. Man, 40:32 you can get online and punch in Chrisman and uh a lot of people are sold on the 40:37 theory that he was one of the three tramps. 40:43 Yeah. No, and you know, and it’s and it’s it’s it’s and I mean even Garrison was like, “Well, isn’t it amazing that 40:49 Chrisman was uh you know, living uh in Oregon and and and Fred Clay Shaw went 40:55 to uh Portland after San Francisco after the assassination. He must have they 41:00 must have crossed paths. That’s why he was going to Oregon to see Chrisman. And he’s writing this to the HSCA. I mean, 41:08 it’s just incredible. Hey, I’ve been to Portland many times, too. Yeah. I’ve been to Tacoma, Seattle. So, 41:17 yep. As I could be connected. So, yeah. No, a fascinating character. Looking forward to your book. I think 41:23 it’s going to be a really really uh really good book. And uh we’ll go into uh Chrisman in more detail when that 41:29 book comes out. Uh Beckham sure Beckham is another you know character who is associated with Chrisman who went on to 41:37 become not only a garrison suspect but Joan Melon’s key suspect in her book 41:42 Farewell to Justice. What can you say? Um boy where to start with Beckham. I mean he was a lifelong 41:48 conman. you’d done some good work on him as well. I have an extensive write up in 41:54 the book, but he was involved in one scam over another over the years. He was 42:00 like a lot of people associated with Chrisman. He had it used different aliases. Mark Evans was one as a uh 42:08 rockabilly and southern singer or sometimes a uh preacher of some sort. He 42:14 had all these different scams and like Chrisman and uh some of these other 42:20 folks they were uh connected to were involved in diploma mills of one type or 42:28 another. And somehow the two uh and Beckham was pretty young. He was in his 42:34 early 20s at the time he met Chrisman in 1966. Was a pretty accomplished conman 42:40 by that time. And uh during the fall, I 42:46 guess he got there supposedly in the spring of ‘ 66 through the fall, they started a bunch of dummy companies. One 42:53 of them was a course to teach law enforcement that cost uh $500, 43:01 you know, and the FBI got involved in breaking that up. They’re also involved 43:06 in a kind of a scam charity called the Northwest Relief Society that uh would 43:13 leave uh donation cans in different bars and stuff and the Olympia PD I think got 43:18 in and broke that up. And I think there might have been more serious stuff going on. There’s definitely allegations that 43:26 there was a stolen car ring and just a lot of shady stuff. But uh Beckham 43:33 basically split. This was his mo in the end of ‘ 66 and went to uh Omaha where 43:40 he started the same kind of shenanigans again. A lot he’d go and uh he’d start 43:46 like a uh thrift store which he’d also set up as a universal life church where 43:53 he could be a minister like in the basement and it would like a fly by night. He’d 44:00 be there for a uh few m few months or a few weeks uh allegations that he was 44:07 fencing stolen material. Then he’d move on to the next scam. My 44:15 my favorite Beckham scam is in the early 60s when he he promoted a Ricky Nelson 44:20 concert and and of course lo and behold he brings in a Ricky not the Ricky Nelson 44:26 but somebody else with the same name and well it might have been him it might have been him posing as ran off with the 44:33 money and he did the thing on a more serious level the same like I said the same mo in 76 where and this was in Alabama he 44:42 started collecting money for for a benefit for a couple of police officers that were killed for a country and music 44:49 show. He claimed that initially Ernest Tubs was going to be there with his group and but he got indicted for wire 44:58 fraud and whatever and he ended up u federal indictment being prosecuted by 45:06 uh Jeff Sessions, a future attorney general of these United States. But he 45:12 used he got off. who was acquitted and he used the claim that he was working for the CIA and so he was like doing a 45:21 lot of this stuff in the interest of national security. I don’t know but it was there was enough 45:28 reasonable doubts in the juror’s minds to uh get him uh acquitted. 45:34 He had started another things he was starting were these fake detective 45:40 agencies and once one he named this the central 45:46 intelligence alliance or something he used the initial CIA so he was kind of being 45:53 truthful that he had started he he’d worked for the CIA 45:59 but yeah quite a uh character but it was that time. Yeah. And so came out of that 46:07 uh trial that uh once again these rumors were surfacing again that he’d worked 46:14 for the CIA somehow involved with the Kennedy assassination. That’s 46:20 when the House Select Committee got started uh talking to him again during 46:25 that period when he was being uh prosecuted for that Alabama scam. He was 46:32 in jail in Pineluff and that the HSCA started talking to him there and 46:38 interviewed him a couple more times. Uh, and he told and and from what I 46:44 understand, he got immunity to talk to them. So he could say any damn thing he wanted to and and he was 46:52 always kind of working the scam seemed like over the years to create a this 46:59 false story that he could uh profit on about him being involved in the uh 47:05 Kennedy uh assassination as an unwitting kind of dupe who got sucked into the 47:11 thing and he was during the uh time he was being uh He was talking to the HSCA. 47:20 He was also shopping around a book which was I guess some version of which was 47:25 later published in the 2000s called the remnants of truth. Yeah, it’s definitely remnants of uh 47:33 truth. So yeah, it was something he’s always trying to uh I mean my my favorite is when he was 47:38 testifying before the HSCA, he was listing off all his degrees, a degree in 47:44 this, degree in that, all the universities, and he said, “I have more degrees than a thermometer.” 47:50 He actually he stole that from uh one of his earlier uh trials when he was uh in 47:59 I think it was when he was in Omaha. He got busted for a diploma mill 48:05 and the judge chastised him and that the district attorney there said, “Uh, yeah, 48:10 this man has more degrees than a thermometer.” And so Beckham loved that and he 48:17 started using it himself. And that’s what’s funny about that book of his remnants of truth. 48:23 And not a really a whole lot in there about the Kennedy assassination. I mean, there’s a few pages. There’s like a 48:31 dozen or more pages of all his diplomas. Yep. There’s personal testimonies from his 48:38 family members. It’s like, okay, it’s it’s a bizarre book. And and uh I I 48:44 mean, it’s just what a what a bizarre story. And I can’t believe that Joan Melon bought it. I mean I mean he 48:50 actually she was convinced that he had converted to Judaism. She has a picture picture of him in his 48:56 in in these re rabbitical robes, you know, in her book. And then she has some claims that he had some sort of military 49:03 document that he gave her that convinced her that he was, you know, involved in all this. And of course, you never see 49:08 the document. Yeah. That was similar in that same book. Um I believe it’s in the 49:14 introduction of the book. She also goes after Thornley claiming he was CIA and 49:19 that she saw a document that proved that. And I later I asked her at the 49:26 time and that was when did that book come out? 2005 or something or 49:32 emailed her asking if I could get a copy of that. So at the time I read that I go whoa that’s you know I took it kind of 49:39 half seriously. I’d like to see that document that proves I finally she never sent me the 49:46 document at the time. She said she was sick or something. and when she got better, she’d get it to me. And but I 49:53 pursued I emailed her a couple times, never heard back. I finally figured out what the document was. And you can see 50:00 it in a post that the story of Discordia uh called was Carrie Thornley, CIA. 50:08 And so, no, that document did not prove Thornley was CIA. You can go people want 50:15 more information, they can go read that. But yeah, there’s and so there’s also the document where she claims the 50:23 document was from Chrisman claiming that Beckham was part of this operation at a 50:30 place called the farm. I think secret military kind of clockwork orange place 50:36 where they were creating these military assassins. And so yeah, I never bothered 50:42 asking her. I’d like to see what the document sounds like. another phony thing that maybe who knows Chrisman 50:48 cooked up or who knows we’ve never seen it. Why don’t you show it, you know? 50:54 Yeah. Um, now he does uh Beckham uh he does uh have a 51:04 ministry there in uh where is that Kentucky or at least did 10 15 years ago 51:10 and an actual uh church chapel that was a former u synagogue I think 51:18 right and so he’s kind of a self-styled uh 51:23 dude [Laughter] Uh yeah. So I guess he can say whatever 51:30 he wants to say. He’s a minister of after some fashion, I guess. 51:36 Yeah. You know, I strongly recommend people go read his uh his testimony 51:41 before the Garrison Grand Jury. It is abs it’s absolutely hysterically funny 51:46 when you read because it just the way he lists off his degrees and and the way he 51:52 answers questions and and uh you know and he he actually was accusing Garrison 51:57 of homosexuality in his grand testimony. That was the big bombshell he dropped at 52:03 the end just Yeah. Um what I think he was uh doing 52:10 it’s uh that he was he was nervous of obviously of going back to New Orleans, 52:17 but I don’t think he was nervous about Kennedy assassination stuff. He still had some charges hanging over his head 52:25 for a number of uh things. There was that uh store that he and his brother 52:32 ripped off. They both worked in this uh clothing store and they stole a huge amount of uh the uh 52:40 merchandise there and were going to start their own stores. Once again, you look at the numbers, it was like $12,000 52:46 of merchandise. So, you’re talking in today’s numbers $100,000 worth of 52:52 stuff. So, that charge was still hanging over his head. his brother had uh 52:59 already uh served his time, but uh Beckham, as he was want to do, had been 53:06 able to skip out on I think uh it looked like he faked uh a suicide at that time, 53:12 went into a mental facility, then got out of there before he could face those 53:18 charges. So that those were still going on. And uh there was also the uh 53:23 statutory rape charge that had never really been adjudicated either. So he 53:29 had had these things going on. And if you look at his testimony, he kind of touches on on all that stuff and 53:36 provides alternative facts of what you actually happened that he wasn’t. So, I 53:43 think he was just trying to spin and cover for his past criminal 53:49 activities. If if you kind of read between the lines and a lot of that stuff and he never 53:55 he never really addresses questions. He just goes off on and then of course he he he ends up 54:03 telling the HSCA about his involvement in the assassination. They they realize it’s all ridiculous. But then years 54:09 later, Garrison believes, “Oh, there’s a confession tape, right?” Yeah. It’s it’s it’s Beckham. And Garrison’s all 54:16 excited. I’m I’ve been vindicated. There’s a confession tape, you know, and I was right all along. 54:22 And it was just was just it was just Beckham, you know. Well, Guy Russo has a uh good story 54:29 about the confession tape. Yeah. Gus Gus Russo. Yeah. You interview You interviewed him. Did 54:36 he talk about that? Okay. Yeah. Well, he basically he went to see Beckham in his office in uh I don’t know, Kentucky or 54:43 Omaha and Beckham is all these fake diplomas on the wall and and at some point uh he sort of says, “Yeah, it’s 54:49 all ridiculous. Let’s just play guitar and they end up guitar the the afternoon rather than talk about anything 54:55 serious.” Well, Russo has this story where he uh 55:01 he was working with Bernard Festerwald and uh going to the National Archives 55:08 looking for stuff. And this was like uh kind of after 55:13 during and after the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And at that time, all that was available 55:22 were like old FBI files and other stuff. the House Select Committee stuff had 55:28 been embargoed and um and part of that embargo came 55:35 from the Black Congressional Caucus really started the force that started those 55:42 hearings on the different assassinations and they uh were trying to keep a lid on 55:48 the U MLK materials just because of the hijinks of the FBI all 55:55 that they thought it would tarnish his image. You know, there’s all the wire taps of his 56:02 affairs, alleged affairs, and that type of stuff. So, that’s kind of the reason there was the embargo on those 56:07 materials. But, and has Gus told you this story before? No. No. Go ahead. No. 56:12 Okay. And so, he was going in there and u 56:19 looking for stuff. And one day he went into a little al cove where he found a 56:25 uh like a uh sheet that listed a bunch of uh stuff and he looked at the 56:31 numbers and it was related to the embargoed material. So he took he 56:37 grabbed whatever this was a uh sheet of paper that was somewhere in this alco 56:42 took it back to his desk and started writing down all these he rec it didn’t say the house select committee and 56:49 assassinations he just recognized the series of numbers he goes whoa that’s 56:54 interesting that’s all the embargoed material 56:59 and there’s a a list of everything one of the stuff on there was confession tape da da Huh? So what he did, he 57:08 thought maybe I can do something with this list. Um he thought 57:16 during certain times like during lunch uh breaks and uh maybe on weekends there 57:23 was more inexperienced staff there uh students uh and people maybe not quite 57:31 uh as swift on the uptake as the regular archivist who manages. I’ll take some of 57:38 those numbers to them and see what they bring back to me. And sure enough, they brought back to him some of these 57:44 embargoed materials. Uh, a lot of them were these cassette tapes, 57:50 right? Yeah. And so he So he’s kind of freaking out here. Whoa. 57:56 He goes back and one of them, I’m not sure if he ever actually listened to the 58:01 uh Beckham tape, but he started listening to these tapes on the 58:07 equipment there. And the archives would uh supply you 58:12 with a tape player and a duplicate thing where you could make copies. So that was the plan. he was going to come in there 58:19 during lunchtime, start getting these embargoed classified materials basically 58:27 and uh but he it it was going to take a long time and so uh Fster said, “Well, 58:35 maybe we can get some machine where you can high do a high-speed dubbing.” and they got a hold of this big clanky 58:43 huge machine that he was somehow able to get into the archives and started uh 58:49 burning multiple copies at high speed and got busted by somebody caught him 58:56 there. They would first they caught him with you can’t use that high-speed machines. You’re going to break the damn 59:01 tapes. Oh, okay. Well, they and he got clearance from the people at who are 59:07 working during lunchtime. But this is one of the regular archists and he so you got to stop that right now. You 59:13 can’t use them. The archives started walking away. He turned back and saw it was the embargoed material and he just 59:19 flipped out, you know, and took all the material and u re so hight tailed it out of there 59:26 and went back home to Maryland or where it was that weekend uh expecting the FBI 59:31 to raid him, but nothing ever came of it. Uh, and you could, you should ask 59:37 Gus. He has a write up of this. It’s like a dozen pages of this whole uh, 59:43 experience. But that’s when he first heard about that uh, confession confession tape which led him to doing 59:51 some research on Beckham and like you said uh, going to his storefront and 59:57 guess he was in Kentucky at that time and figuring out Yeah. that he was just a uh good humored kind of con man. And 1:00:06 they ended up jamming on guitars and singing uh that night. 1:00:12 Yeah. It’s it’s it’s I mean it’s just I mean I could I could I could just sense how excited Garrison was to believe that 1:00:20 he was finally being vindicated, you know, by by Thomas Beckham. I mean it’s just so funny. Well, there 1:00:28 yeah, there had been these rumors about the uh confession tape and Garrison heard about it. Different stappers was 1:00:35 saying there’s a con uh confession and so that was spreading through the you 1:00:42 know JFK research community at that time. It was the hot hot thing. 1:00:47 Beckham’s confession tape which confessed to all number of things. Yeah. and 1:00:54 implicated dozens of different people, you know, that had uh materialized 1:01:01 during the Garrison investigation. I mean, Beckham connected them all or 1:01:08 claimed that, you know, they were all connected. Oswald, Ruby, 1:01:13 uh, Banister, etc., etc. Yeah, he loved to drop names. I mean, 1:01:19 he’s just absolutely incredible. And uh what a what a character. I mean just 1:01:24 really funny. I mean if I if you again if you read his testimony either the HSCA or Garrison’s grand jury, you can’t 1:01:30 help but laugh when you read it. I mean it’s actually quite funny when you read it. I don’t know. I just don’t know how Garrison 1:01:36 could have taken him seriously um after that. But he did. Of course another name is not in Garrison’s book. 1:01:43 He left Beckham out of his book as well. That is true. Yeah. 1:01:48 I wonder why. Yeah. But like I said, Joan Millan ran with it and gave him his story and other 1:01:56 shot in the arm. Yep. And and yeah, and she she bought a hook, line, and sinker, including the 1:02:01 fact that he even converted to Judaism, which was absolutely hysterical. And it was his own branch of Judaism, 1:02:08 right? It was his own special branch, you know. I don’t know. I don’t know what the heck it is, but he wears a yarmaka. And uh I 1:02:14 think I think uh he might have some uh 1:02:19 family ties are Jewish to Judaism, but it’s Yeah, it’s pretty 1:02:25 Well, he changed he sort of changed his name for a while. So it was like B apostrophe E C E sound like it was a a 1:02:33 Jewish name. Yeah. Yep. You can’t make this stuff up. 1:02:40 Okay. So tell me what’s next? You’re writing a book on Chrisman. Tell us about your your upcoming book and where you’re going to go from there. 1:02:47 Yeah, it’s about it’s almost done. Like I mentioned, I uh interviewed Fred 1:02:52 Chrisman Jr. which was interesting getting uh hold of him and he’s been really uh 1:02:59 helpful in the endeavor and other people I mentioned like Larry Hapan and uh 1:03:04 Hannon, that’s how you say it. Yeah. Larry happening and uh number of other people. It it’s 1:03:12 been going on for numbers years. It was kind of like the uh Thornley book where just out of an 1:03:19 interest I’d gathered material on Thornley and you know after a while you 1:03:24 just have so much stuff and written articles related to Charisman. It got to 1:03:30 a point, well, maybe this is a book. And yeah, I’ve learned 1:03:35 quite a bit over time to really expand on, you know, what’s out there already. 1:03:42 Well, I can’t wait till it comes out and we’ll have you back on to uh discuss the book when the book is published. Uh it’s 1:03:49 it’s definitely a needed book and uh your stuff is absolutely magnificent. So, uh, u, we’ll put links into your 1:03:56 books in the description of the of the podcast and, uh, I strongly recommend everybody go and buy Adam Goritley’s 1:04:02 books. They’re just terrific. Yeah. And check out Historia Discordia that has some of JFK assassination 1:04:09 stuff, but lot of good stuff. A lot of stuff on these characters are are on online on 1:04:15 your website. Very important stuff with documents, photographs, um, etc. A lot of good primary material. Yeah, I got 1:04:22 pretty obsessive for a while with some of those posts there. I look back at them now, it’s like, good lord, 10,000 1:04:30 words in a blog post. The hell’s wrong with you? Yeah, it’s too much. 1:04:37 Okay. Well, thank you very much and uh we’ll be back in touch uh sometime next year. 1:04:42 Okay, sounds good. Thanks,
Technical Notes:
This was originally shot as a 1280 by 720 ZOOM Call. I edited the first few shots using Adobe After Effects (“detail Preserving Upscale” with the rest edited with Adobe Premiere and it’s basic scaling feature. ( I think I over did the extreme close up on the guests face.)
I downloaded several book covers from AMAZON and other websites. Then I cut them up and layered them in Adobe Photoshop. Then I animated them into motion graphics pieces in Adobe After Effects.
One of the animated book covers has some 2d animation made with Adobe Animate (formerly Flash. The Masonic “33” and the spinning Atomic symbol were made with Animate:
On The Trail of Delusion, Episode 23, Daniel Evans
Lifelong JFK Assassination researcher and Dallas area Tour guide Dan Evans tells Fred Litwin about his journey into JFKA obsession and what he tells visitors what he thinks about Conspiracy Theories.
If you believe most Conspiracy media, you’d think the same people who theoretically got away with killing the President left conclusive evidence of their crimes in locked off files. The same blood thirsty super villains that are said to have murdered witnesses, confiscated and either edited or suppressed all the photos and documents that might reveal the truth of the conspiracy, didn’t destroy the incriminating material in the files?
The sealed off files have the names of the government agents who conducted the investigation(s) and THAT needs to be kept secret!
TRANSCRIPT:
Noted author Fred Litwin and of course Fred is also the author of I was a teenage JFK conspiracy freak, on the trail of delusion and Oliver Stones film flam-the demagogue of Dealey Plaza F
red Litwin is here he’s a longtime author and certainly Watcher of politics
joining us
Fred Litwin great to have you here
thank you very much
so welcome to another edition of on the trail of delusion where I try to separate the wheat from the chaff and actually try to give you something sub stal on the jfk assassination rather than the usual crap that you find on the internet or on YouTube and so I’m really delighted once again to have my friend Robert Reynolds here to discuss the JFK assassination files there is no other expert no other person on this planet who knows as much about the assassination files as Robert Reynolds and so it’s just a delight to have him to have him with us once again this is his second appearance on the trail of delusion so welcome Robert well it’s great to be here Fred I’ve really been trying to get back for another for another go around and working hard well you you’ve been really busy I mean you have posted some absolutely important very important articles on your blog which will be linked to Below in the notes um so anyways why don’t you lead it off and tell us a bit about the files okay um uh I guess the best way I can do that is sort of introduce how I got involved in this and and it’s the simplest explanation is I started a Blog um after I had read some of the first files that were released from Nara in 2017 and um been doing that for I guess almost over seven years almost eight now and so that’s what I do and I guess that’s why I’m here um so maybe I can um perhaps give people a a general introduction to the subject a really quick one um so the blog I run is called the JFK Arc doino and um it’s basically a series of occasional notes about the JFK assassination records collection and hence the name of the block and what is that um the JFK assassination records collection which I will from now on call The Arc is the US government’s primary collection of Records on the assassination of President Kennedy it also includes all the records they’ve got on the multiple ass investigations of the assassination and a bunch of stuff on the Cold War background uh the collection was established by the JFK act which is a law passed by Congress in 1992 and this law gave final custody of the records to the National Archives and Records Administration
which I’ll call narrow from now on uh the JFK act also created a limited term Federal board called the assassination records review board which I’ll call the AR arrb and the arb’s function was to secure review and oversee release of all those records so by the time the board closed up shop in 1998 uh it had put more than 300,000 records in the collection about 88% of them released in full and so already we get these technical terms that are such a pain in the butt to explain um but basically uh Records are not Pages um call them do documents or even uh collections of documents sometimes they’re not even documents there are things like recordings or photographs the release is a very tricky term but here let’s just say it means um you can see everything in the records if they are released in full everything is there for you to see there’s nothing that’s been left out right um so 88% were released in full what does that mean it means 12% of the arc records were not released in full how come the JFK act allowed for postponing sensitive government and personal information in the records up until a final release date of 26 October 2017 and this is not a random number this is 25 years after the bill was signed into law as soon as the law was passed um it had this provision which allowed departments bureaus and a agencies which provided the records um to request redactions subject to a caseby case review by the arrb now redaction is another one of these technical terms redacting refers to removing information usually text okay that’s the vast majority of the collection uh removing text from a document and replacing it with a holder um that indicates something has been removed okay they’re not permanently removing it they’re removing it from the copies that they make public and the arc uses currently uses a blank box as a holder so one blank box indicates one redaction okay and that’s how we count count boxes now it’s not quite that simple but it’s pretty close so um even though the arrb had very strict um guidelines about what what they would let people redact um 12% of the records met their strict criteria and um as a result they were these portions of these records sometimes a whole record was held back for periods of time ranging from a few years I.E maybe 1995 up until 1997 uh all the way up until October 2017 which is the final release date but even before October 2017 Nara had already begun releasing some of the information previously held back they did this obviously with the consent of the agencies that were processing all this stuff um and the first one of first big release of this was in uh July 2017 and want went there were repeated releases of uh information that had been redacted previously redacted stuff from 2017 all the way up until 2023 and even after all this uh there is still a small number of Records today that have portions held back exactly how much information is still held back and how significant is this information for people who are interested in the JFK assassination that’s the kind of questions that interest me and that’s what I write about in the blog now a lot of people have been uh talking about this regular news um on the YouTube on podcasts and all these places since president Trump signed an executive memo which ordered senior government officials to come up with a plan to release the stuff that was held back in the arc what can I say it was clear even before the election that he was going to do something like this and so I started working on my project uh in December and I’ve been working on this for about three months now going over all the redacted records yet again not the first time I’ve done this but I’m doing this in agonizing detail this time every last page um to come up with my own wish list that I’m gonna send to Trump and ask him if he can please get these out right away and that’s that’s what I’ve been doing and so the stuff that you mentioned is up on the web page uh the probably the most useful one for people who care about this maybe not not even that interesting subject is a an Excel sheet that lists all of the currently redacted CIA records in the arc and it gives things like um how many redactions there are remember redactions are the boxes blank boxes that of thing so how how many CIA documents are there that that have redaction still in in in the collection I originally said uh 1484 but it looks like it’s down to 1482 these numbers go down um and I you know I I I feel like I should justify why they’re they they weren’t right the first time and the thing is that I use the postponement documents that the Departments and agencies sent to uh president Trump and to the National Security Council that give these documents give detailed lists of all the records that they say uh we still want to keep some stuff held we still want to hold some stuff back in these records uh Records are identified by record numbers and sometimes they’re called riff numbers because RI is an abbreviation for Reader information form which is the finding Aid that all every record has staple to it or on top of it actually not even that um but now we’re getting into the details that I talk too much about okay so so you have these uh 1500 documents so you’ve gone through you know what’s in those redactions I mean tell tell us a bit about you know we you could tell from the document as what kind of redactions are there so what what are what are what’s been redacted in those documents they they have they were required all of the agencies that want to do this are required to tell people what kind of stuff they’re holding back and to explain why they want to do this and they they have to give a schedule for when they’re actually finally going to release them if they can’t tell people a date then they have to at least tell them how often they’re going to look at them again and see if they can let them out now so um I call these explanations of what’s being held back I call them redaction categories and the CIA has three types of redaction categories um but they they mix sometimes especially in the long complicated documents um you get mixt of them the three three types are people uh information relating to people uh information relating to locations and information that’s CIA locations okay they’re not going to try and hide hellsinki or something like that um but the CIA had and perhaps has a Station in Helsinki and they don’t want that released or they didn’t um and that’s a complicated story about why they didn’t but that’s they felt that’s very important and there’s still locations of CIA facilities that are held back and finally the third detail is called operational details as you can imagine this is pretty complicated but um it turns out that this time around there’s probably the the thing that struck me that I’m seeing now that I didn’t see in the earlier releases is they releasing cover details and when the CIA stations people overseas outside the country they they can’t just put up a sign that says CIA you know apply for weapons here or CIA spill your guts here they can’t do that they have to have some sort of cover and this is not just the CIA this is every country in the world that have an intelligence agency does this and so uh different kinds of cover um most of them are official cover meaning that they have some official government status right obviously State Department is a very important one uh you US military can provides cover for CIA officers and then there’s non-official covers which if you watch Mission Impossible you know that these guys are called knock officers non-official cover officers and there’s the knock list good God is there really a knock list you gotta be kidding me there’s not a knock list and I got up put a list of all this stuff together um but but they do have um you know this this kind of cover and um they’re particularly tight mouthed about that obviously some of them are business Commercial cover deep commercial cover is a phrase that’s been released okay so when you go through you know when you I mean you can go and look at all these documents anybody can go look at these documents now and see for themselves what’s redacted for for the large part most of them you could read almost the entire document and get a real good feel for what’s in there yeah okay so um first let’s uh let me just mention that um I’m distinguishing in my on my blog and when I talk about it I try and distinguish between two basic ways of holding stuff back number one I call withheld withheld documents means you can’t see it period but there is B basic metadata information about the document how many pages who does it belong to What’s the title uh who is it from who is it to Etc okay and there are 515 records that are withheld right and there 499 of them are income tax returns and the reason is that the JFK act says you we don’t we we let the United States tax code U forbids the release of personal uh income tax returns and we want you to continue that in the collection so that’s that um in fact some of them can come out if the people concerned were to sign an agreement and this gets into a this is a specialized subject I’ll just leave it there right every else in the collection is
released 99% of the collection is released in full that is there is nothing held back 99% is a lot yeah okay and I mean it is hundreds of thousands of things and the total amount of records that have something held back in them is my estimate was at first uh 2544 2544 that number has gone down it’s probably really close to about 2,500 right why because I was looking at the documents the ageny sent to the NSC and as they’re sending in those documents they they have a deadline right where they have to send in the document but they kept on looking at the stuff later and they were actually release stuff after they sent in those documents because they were under severe pressure to get this stuff out okay so that that’s uh like for example I found another 1520 NSA documents that were released in full that they said you know we’re applying for we want to redact these still and then they decided no we’re going to release that stuff so um in those documents that have redactions um the question is how much are they holding back right yeah and so looking we’re looking at boxes that’s one thing how big is the box that tells you they’re holding something small or big back and then how many boxes that’s that’s the other thing right and so um the biggest box you can have is what I call a whole page redaction that is to say there’s a box on the page and that’s basically all you get it’s a little tricky because sometimes they put like a page number on it okay right or there’s a stamp at the top says top secret don’t tells and uh you know that that’s still that’s still a whole patod action right uh but some of them there’s really it’s really a messy border right a lot of the FBI documents have like a title at the end a very short title at the top of the page right Memo from Belmont okay is it is it and then you have no idea what Belmont said right everything that Belmont said is gone but you have you know at that page Memo from Belmont and then nothing else not even a page number and so those that’s that’s the biggest kind of redaction you can get right and uh the number
one record for whole page redactions is an FBI record that has I don’t know okay because it’s it’s so it’s extensive right it’s a 1,400 plus page record um that was part of the FBI’s administrative file for the church committee and of those 1417 Pages 350 of them have redacted have redactions and I would say that they’re probably close to 200 pages that are whole page redactions that’s the biggest one however um This Record has nothing whatsoever to do with the JFK assassination which is uh I’ll I’ll back it up if we want to talk about this later right in fact most of these records are they are class they are labeled um by the agencies that contributed them they are labeled either NBR or n uh not believed re relevant or not assassination related and um the vast majority of them are are that kind of record yeah and hasn’t hasn’t tonim said that basically all the assassination related documents are really out there um here’s what he said okay this is an important point that I don’t think that I emphasized the last time I was on so I’m gonna I have a I have my script to read here okay so uh the ARB was determined to release before went out of business they were determined to release any and all records judged Central to the assassination story and they said we did it there’s the board members staff or members have always vigorously defended their perform their record in this regard and so tun uh John tunan who was the chair of the ARB uh told Vincent bugliosi who in his massive book buosi said what else is in there there’s got to be some goodies in there and he said the board protected IE released uh held back excuse me protected I.E held back nothing not one document or page that was centrally related to the facts of the assassination itself so that’s you know that’s not obviously they held back 12% right and then and he didn’t you know I feel like you don’t quite get an idea of the scale of how much was hold back 12% of course is is a small percentage but remember there are five million pages so it was a lot right and the first set of releases in 2017 um release a bunch of stuff and Trump said uh you know I people were you know giving him a hard time about this when the stuff started coming out he said I didn’t mean it that way I meant it you know really get it out there and so they did it again they took a six-month break they took they took another six month to go over everything that they had said we’re going to hold back again and they released a bunch more stuff another 5,000 plus records and by the time they got through with this it was a substantially reduced he heap of paper that they were holding back um in 2021 Biden said we’re g to start releasing this stuff guys you know first put out the stuff that you know you’ve decided you don’t want even want the hassle of writing about it okay and so they released another 1500 records then 2022 they released a lot of Records okay many of them were short redactions just single page records um but it it really killed a lot of it and by the end of 2022 they said basically we have
it’s in different parts okay this is the postponement documents but say there were 4,500 pages right um then in 2023 they started releasing more right and and one reason there’s some confusion about this is because people are not really didn’t really go over the 2023 releases close enough but we do have the postponement documents which give us exact numbers for what was left at the end of 2022 except that sometimes you know even more is gone right and so this is you know going over this in agonizing detail is how I figure out where where stuff is held back and where it’s not I mean it’s incredibly boring and it’s bad for your eyesight I I spent 5 hours today going over a 1444 page FBI document I knew it it’s really explicit there’s nothing in here that has anything to do with JFK right and and uh but it there’s redactions okay how many redactions 1,444 pages there are four Social Security numbers redacted in this
document I spent five hours going through it my eyes felt like they were bleeding at the end I’ve been over it twice um I’m pretty sure that maybe I missed one okay right big hairy deal I missed one social security number in 1400 pages that is not unusual for the documents that we’re looking at so so but you know so T I’m said you we we’ve released all the assassination related records do you think there’s still assassinated amongst the redactions are are are many of them actually related to the assassination or any of them or do we know I believe I believe that I mean I’ve looked at this okay I bear in mind what tunheim said to buosi uh nothing was held back that was centrally related to the facts of the assassination itself I I believe that’s true right pretty cl to true now um related to the investigations of the assassination yes there was and last time we talked I said they they held back a bunch of stuff I said that more than once but I wasn’t talking about the facts of the assassination okay so take it back quick and uh um I mean some of the things that were one reason that people were dissatisfied with the investigation is that some of the you know how do you know that right Oswald visited the Russian Embassy in Mexico City uh four weeks six weeks how long was it like six weeks before he he shot Kennedy how do you know that right that’s a question that everyone wanted to ask and they refused to say until uh the hsca they started having newspaper stories about how they had a telephone tap but they still didn’t say how do you get the telephone T and uh it’s only in 2018 that we finally find out that um the CIA had a very close liaison relationship with the Mexican Government and they actually did joint operations including tapping the telephones of the Russian Embassy and this is something that they would they you know pounded their heads and didn’t want to do that and the the ARB was going to make him do that in 1998 and the state department finally you know submitted a memo saying well if you do that our estimate is that the Mexican Government will fall so don’t do that theb said oh well all right and so they were in a very difficult situation and ton heim’s words in that statement to buosi is he’s thinking exactly of that facts of the assassination itself now facts of the investigation some things were held back because how do you know that’s investigation right yeah and I you know I’ve been struck I’ve I’ve gone through I mean I you know I don’t have the time to go through every document but when I do go through some of those CIA documents I’m always struck by the fact that I can read the whole document and and like a city is is redacted in the distri ution list right like but I but I can see the whole document I mean a few years ago somebody sent me a Clay Shaw document that had just been released and and I was very excited oh Clay Shaw document and I opened it up and I said well I’ve seen this before and the only thing that was now unredacted was the name of the CIA agent who wrote it right so um and this is um very much the arrb style and um um it’s it’s actually they’re actually doing what the CIA asked them to do they said don’t don’t tell don’t make us publish the names of people who work here if it’s people who are you know acknowledged administrative heads of the CIA yes now in England they they didn’t used to do this who is the head of MI5 who who is the head of MI6 right don’t no no no we’re not going to tell you that and if you attempt to publish that in your newspaper we’re going to send you a d notice yeah yeah if you ignore the D
notice not good now Americans don’t believe in D notices and nothing like that and besides they have to have you know the CIA heads to come in front of of Congress so they can rre them over the cols yeah um these other guys the sorry the the officers who are stationed abroad cannot be identified unless you want to make sure that they never go abroad again right so it’s there were very explicit cases the hsca was going to identify this one CIA officer who had just been assigned I think it was to Germany he had been he was one of the people who questioned nenko right and they wanted they wanted to get this down because they were very unhappy the way nenko a Soviet Defector was treated and he said if you do that then my career is over and so they they finally said okay we won’t do that and uh a lot of these people were there was one guy Tom Flores who who was who after he retired he lived in Venezuela but he was the head of the cia’s Cuban force and you know he there were there were lots of these guys yeah I know that guy he see them and so he got a letter from CIA saying ARB is looking at all this stuff and they’re going to publish some stuff and some of it has your name on it and he said I’ll see you in court um because it was a it was not just a matter of okay whatever you say it was a a a legal deal and if you if you cause me this kind of problem I’m not just going to sit back and take it and it turns out that there’s I’ve seen at least one document where it’s a guy actually whose name got spilled actually got got compensated so that kind of thing is held back right and I I remember seeing some documents in the ARB from I think it was a John Witten who uh a CIA guy who uh had a student in my John skelo I think and he had written the ARB saying uh well you know I’m I’m I’ve immigrated I think to Mexico and and if you release some of the stuff with my name I they may determine I lied on my immigration forms and you’re going to cause me a lot awful lot of problems well he was he made he made a big stink he was in he was in Vienna though and uh he he it was they actually sent people to talk to him to interview him and uh it was towards the end they felt really bad because I mean it was his situation was tough and you know what better way to totally screw someone’s someone someone up right yeah so tell me a bit about uh you you you got all the freedom of access information about um what’s happened under the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration about uh the releases and and you’ve put a lot of documents up on your website uh for people to see so tell us a little bit about um the whole process and what you learned in from your Freedom of Information Act yeah right okay this is um this was a a a request that was actually filed by Larry schnap and but uh couldn’t he he he didn’t send us anything so um max Holland uh submitted a request to a foyer request to Nara and said could you please send me everything you sent Larry snap right and they said why sure Max and they sent everything they sent they sent Larry so um um uh and Max said take a look at this and you know see what you think and it was very interesting um I didn’t see any of the Biden stuff but it was very clear from the documentation that Biden released that they they didn’t change anything they did it the same way um so there is this um component it was done in NC and um I I don’t know what people think NSC is but NSC is belongs to the president and they do what he says and it would never occur to someone to not do what he says they’re there to do what the President says and sometimes they get in big trouble for it but they do it anyway right right this is where Oliver North was yeah yeah he says he’s doing the stuff on your own well wait a minute right right uh so so but there are a bunch of people there it’s a big thing it’s sort of the president’s buffer with these other gigantic federal agencies and they’re there to crack the whip and make those guys because they’re executive agencies and so they do what the President says and the NSC is there to crack the whip that’s it and so the documents um were I mean they were Nara documents essentially but the there was at least one person from Nara copied on all of these documents which was 99% well they were all emails but they all had a t a lot of them had attachments that gave us the documents that were very basic interesting important and so it turns off it turns out that Nara was uh was on it from the beginning they they wanted this stuff out they were very dubious of many claims of this stuff being too important to release and they um brought in NSC and told them what they so these guys have to review their records they’re going to release this or not and they then you have to send us the stuff if you’re going to release and you’re not going to release and tell us why right and so and so that that’s their review and they have to send this to the NSC and the NSC gives it to Nara and Nara gives it to their team and their team knows this stuff and they look at and say no no no no that’s not that’s not what the JFK Acts says uh no no no no that’s not what the arrb decided uh so that’s not that’s not going to work out and sometimes it was just you know so you say that you’ve got to withheld all this but how come you’ve already released these names like 20 times what are you doing you know did you not look at what you had released before please and so um they were polite to the FBI um they were very blunt to the CIA I mean they had nothing but bad things to say to the CIA about the way they did it which is which is correct the cia’s releases in 2017 were crap and they gave them six months to go back over them again and they did indeed throw out a lot they did indeed turn out a lot more stuff a lot but it wasn’t consistent and they shouldn’t they should have they should have taken longer to do it and they should have twisted their arms even harder and we could have had some of this stuff couple of years earlier right okay my that was my conclusion with that is that they Trump was in too much of a hurry to say look what I did and you know he just said get it out I just wanted out is there’s stuff in there that that’s important and everyone finally sort of scratched their head and said yeah some of that stuff still can’t come out and he said okay just you know get it out and then I’ll and then you know we’ll wait a couple of years and look at it again that was the the essence of it now there have been things said about some of these foyer emails Nara Nara emails uh the I don’t think are true I don’t think it’s accurate um there I’ve read a claim that NC the National Security advisor told his guy in NSC to
tell Nara to recommend holding back all of these records he ordered him to do it not true if I if they if it’s in there I wanna I I want I want a citation I want to see it there’s no doubt that they talked to NFC guys about what they’re going to write to president Trump because you have to coordinate if you don’t coordinate it’s like everyone’s saying something different president is very angry guys get your ducks in a row right if there’s a disagreement you have to sit down you send your head honchos in sit down in front of me and talk it out right right so and so there’s there’s no order in there telling them to to recommend to Trump that all these things be held back not true opposite is true NC and Nara are ganging up on the agencies to to twist their arms even harder he said if you guys want to hold back you write your recommendation and we’ll write
ours which is a threat it’s not a threat it’s just a just a statement yeah that you know we’re gonna you know you want you’ll have you will then have to explain to the president why you think we’re
wrong not and remember Trump has already said he wants it out right he wants as much as humanly possible so you’re not and here’s the main guys that are administering this thing and they say we think that can go out and you’re going to argue that it no it can’t to a guy that wants it all out right good luck in the end they they so what happened in the with these email messages it it was I believe that Nara had a strategy though it’s not it’s not stated straight out I think that they said okay they’re redacting way too much they’re holding back way too much so here’s what we’re going to do we’re going to get them to release something from every record no more records withheld in full except for the ones that are mandated by the JFK act and they did it in 2017 and some of it was really just formalism okay so you know they let off one paragraph in a in a in a 200 Page record okay great Le they let out something so we can say right that there are you know no records that are now withheld in full so what um a couple two questions what do you expect in the upcoming releases from Nara and are there any particular documents that you think we uh you’re waiting for that are should that should be interesting a lot of stuff there’s hundreds of pages held back in some FBI records uh there are two kinds of FBI records that have a lot of that have a lot of pages whole page redactions uh one kind is Martin Luther King documents and there’s actually um a Court ruling that sealed those um and it’s it was very puzzling to me that all this ml MLK stuff came out and it turns out that this is a complicated story so I’ll just give a very the this short story is this the church committee went into the FBI’s surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King in detail and the they got the FBI to submit all kinds of documents and they dragged up FBI agent after FBI agent and grilled them to a crisp and so there’s a ton of this material in the FBI administrated files for the church committee they call it the SSC Senate select committee right right so the FBI SSC theasin file or administrative file was filled with this stuff and for some reason for well for reasons that I I believe it was actually an accident um they they released almost all of those um this is a people didn’t realize this ex until a couple of people who who knew their stuff about FBI MLK looked at it and basically said holy [ __ ] uh they released about 50,000 pages of documents from the SSC file and um big chunks of them thousands and thousands and thousands of pages were on Martin Luther King so uh there some of it was I very sad to read but um the latest Martin Luther King biography written by uh a guy named Jonathan a EIG uh won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for history and uh he uses he uses a lot of this he’s looked at it very carefully right so so that was released and there’s a lot of to me very interesting stuff about the intelligence agencies um there’s a detailed description of sort of the history of the what do they call it the DCd uh domestic contacts division that the FBI put together wow in their documents and so it’s very interesting stuff it’s helpful for background but has absolutely nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination just nothing and the reason and the ARB said we don’t want to release it we don’t we don’t want it in our collection why do we want to dump do a document dump 50,000 pages in our collection which is about a totally different subject and uh I apparently Nar missed those memos instead they found the the finding AIDs that the FBI filled out and they said where are the documents and the FBI said oh well they’re over here well you’re they’re supposed to be here no no they’re not and they said yes they are go get them so they did and they’re still releasing them um this is most of the almost all the FBI documents are like this so so what do you think those 2400 New FBI documents are that that uh we’ve seen in the Press
lately uh I’m sure that they’re field office files they’re field office files I heard I have a great find too I heard that um they uh a lot of them are apparently dollar if they’re Dallas field office files I could easily see how they were duplicates uh I would find it very hard to understand how there could be anything new in there FBI documents FBI files are massively redundant they make no mistake about it it they have to be to be useful I mean otherwise it’s a giant pain in the butt to find things right so I think I if they’re field office files I don’t see how they could be and they’re from Dallas um I I don’t believe that there’s 14,000 pages of new stuff he said 2400 pages that were you know JFK potentially V JFK stuff this already tells you there’s a bunch of Cru in there and uh um 2400 pages of Dallas info what could it be right most people don’t realize how much stuff is in there the the Dallas field office files on JFK assassination were merged into the head headquarters file right headquarters file is over 100,000 pages long um it’s you know it’s the front piece on my blog site you want to see picture the picture yes right right that’s the that’s the that’s the headquarters file on the assassination that’s what 100,000 Pages looks like and so um how could there you know what what manner of material was it that somehow didn’t get looked at okay and is not I mean is not in the field office F the Dallas field office file that was released in full to Nara uh very frustratingly this is so I’m this is answering the second part of your question what do I want to see what do I think is really interesting y I want to see the Dallas field office file yes it’s in the it’s in there but there’s nothing on online it was only very recently when Mary frell the Mary frell Foundation website put up uh I think it was like 3,000 pages of of Dallas field office files on the first five days of the assassination it’s it’s gold it’s the stuff I wanted to read and it it it fills in lots of gaps that people have been saying oh they are hiding this and they’re hiding that another not it’s in the it’s in the field office files it just didn’t get published didn’t get released and that leads to my my question on the fact that that what I’m really interested in is the digitization of the collection which will tell us a lot about the assassination and other details rather than the few documents that have redactions uh this is you know if I were Trump my executive order said you have you have two years to do it I’m going to give you you know I don’t know I don’t care you know 20 million I want it done in two years right that’s that would that would transform our understanding of the history of the assassination um but he didn’t do that because all these people are are yelling about these 2500 records yeah that I mean of the 2500 records how many have whole page redactions I would say about 60 maybe May with the FBI Files you know 65 70 right right and the other 2500 files 2,440 files there I would say at least half of them have only one thing redacted one or two things in the entire F in the entire record one or two what could be there what could it be what could it be that’s so fascinating it might be a couple of people’s names that I would now now I can you know connect a few things I think that Ruben ephron’s name who we’ve you’ve written about before was an example of that on the other hand there was this guy named Phil Heath that wrote uh something for who used to work at the Miami CIA station he wrote this thing for the JFK task force the CIA set up in the 70s and you know his name was released okay so what we already knew that the guy who wrote this what his position was yeah in in in W in the JM wave station we knew we knew who he was we just didn’t know a name and having his name doesn’t doesn’t doesn’t give us anything it’s not not useful right not not not important not important I want to know it yes so okay so my position on this stuff is I want the information but I’m not going to pretend that there’s some deeper significance to it the ARB made its decisions on how to handle this stuff Congress appointed ARB to make these decisions carry out ARB decisions it’s only fair on the other hand if you’re going to hold it back for you know a few more years even 10 years even 20 years fine there’s nothing in there I think is is is that important I could be wrong about some things I’m happy to I would be happy for people to tell me makes it so important but no one is doing that they just say oh there’s there’s there’s important stuff in there I don’t another isn’t one thing isaed one thing is left out what is it is a guy’s name it’s the name of some City it’s the name of some CIA base and some in Germany it’s got to be Ram ramot R what is the a Ramstein right right r I’m struck by the fact that most of a good example would be um on the digitization most of the HSC record hsca records are not online uh Mary Ferell is a great source but a lot of hsca stuff is not there and uh that’s why I always go to narra myself to to Maryland because uh there’s so much there to discover in those files it’s it’s it’s ridiculous hsca is is the main thing and they published probably less than 5% less than 5% of those records are available online that’s ridiculous y so and and so I’ve actually talked to n i written to Nara about this and I saying when are you going to do this when are you g to do this he said well we’re working on we’re working on the Waring commission stuff but when we do going and that’s going slow well this is you know I I I Trump could light a fire under their butts right he says you I mean he could he could tell them you know I want you to prioritize stuff like hsca he could say that right and they’ do it like that and then suddenly you know we would have hundreds of thousands of pages that we’ve never seen before Y and instead they’re wasting their time on this yeah can you trying to twist people’s arm to release the social security numbers of people who aren’t dead yeah so and and and the way they do the digitization you want to comment a bit about the way I mean we have they have a new web page up which has uh uh some of their new digitized records on the Warren Commission uh do you want to comment on that oh it’s it’s I uh Nar is an archive and so archists are very finicky people right they want paper that has only 0.00001% acid so that all their stuff won’t turn yellow and become dust in 10 years I understand this and simplifies with it because I have I bought books in Taiwan that must have been like 10% acid you know they burn your hands and they’re they are dust you know if I try and open them it just kind of you know there’s little sigh and the whole dust dissolves into a the book whole book dissolves into a pile of dust so I understand they’re picky about this and they’ve also been you know people say you they’re hiding stuff what do you mean they’re hiding stuff well they didn’t they didn’t give us scans of the backside of the documents and so what they’re doing with the Waring commission documents is they’re scanning both sides of it now it’s you know it’s only like 1% of these things have anything on the backside so you know half of the stuff they’re scanning is blank pages this is this is annoying then um they’re scanning them using Tiff format which is highly accurate right but uh takes up a lot of space on my hard drive buddy and I have to download it off the internet and that takes even more time and then and then they are taking the they are making these available they are posting these on the website as single pages right they said they’ve scanned like a 100,000 pages of Warren Commission documents you mean I have to download not a file but 100,000 Pages maybe 200,000 if they’re actual pages with both sides 200,000 Pages half of them blank and I have to download them all and then put them into a PDF and run my OCR on it to find out to get an index of this stuff have you asked them about that I I I asked them what well I was asking them you know are you going to do something when are you going to do something about hsca and they said after the warrant commission I you know I I try not to hassle the guy I I’ve only talked written back and forth to a couple of guys I did write to um uh a couple of the people who are overseeing the project um and I got them to they had this one CIA record that was had like four pages four whole page redactions and I wrote to them and said hey the I we have the arb’s you know decision on this thing and it said that they they wanted to release these things and they did release these things and now it’s it’s redacted again and you fix that and they said yeah we we looked at that and said yeah they did it wrong and so they released everything in that in that record which is a lot except for two names so they they take it serious ly right right right and they take this business about um accidentally publishing people Social Security numbers they they take that very seriously and so that’s good I I’ll I suppose I could write to them and say can you guys like hurry up yeah we don’t have the money we don’t have the people you know we’ll we just have all we have is time yeah I mean I mean thank God the Mary feral Foundation we’ll take the narra documents and then OCR them so at least we can search within them so that is good right right we have to wait for that but it’s just it is frustrating I am happy to see that they did digitize The Garrison recordings yeah yeah that was great um th were so what do you think of those well I have I already have a lot of them that I’ve gotten in the past through uh um through requesting it from Nara so I have a lot of it already there’s a few obious a few I don’t have some of the tapes are not uh very hard to listen to but I listen I listened to one yesterday which I which I also had it’s it’s interesting it’s a tape recording of Jack Martin and this is this is right before the uh NBC program uh which criticized Garrison and so this is a tape recording over like four or five phone calls of Jack Martin and he starts off calling up Aaron con head of the Metropolitan crime Commission and he says you know I could I he says the NBC people want to talk to me I could blow Garrison out of the water but what do you think I should do and Aaron con says you know what just tell the truth just go and tell the truth that’s all I can advise you he said yes but if I tell the truth Garrison will come after me and he’s going to ruin me and I need some help and and and con says just tell the truth and then he calls up um his lawyer step Plotkin who also represents Gordon Novel you think I should do should I tell the truth what should I do and Plotkin sort of says yeah you know just just tell the truth and then he calls up um Rick Townley who is a WDSU reporter working on the NBC report and Martin says you know um I’d like to tell you the truth I could blow Garrison out of the water but you know what I have no money and Garrison’s GNA come after me so I need can you guys do something for me and Townley to his credit says you know we can’t pay you that’s our strategy we do not pay people for information and to make a long story short Martin hangs up the phone and then he actually puts a note on the recording I’m trying what I’m trying to do here is I’m trying to coax the NBC people into paying me to prove that they are not honest about this and that’s what I’ve been trying to do here and of course uh so it sort of shows that the NBC people were honest yes right I want to put this online but I have to transcribe um the conversations but it’s pretty it’s it’s pretty it’s a fun one yeah that’s very interesting it it shows that the NBC people knew that Jack Martin is a snake in the grass is what shows yeah and so anyways um but yeah I am looking forward to more of the digitization I I I think let’s I think we should so basically what what are your expectations for what’s going to come from Trump I
I I think that um more stuff is going to come out I think that a lot of these whole page redactions are going to get whittel down um it I mean some of this material is information from other foreign governments and so you really shouldn’t release that unless they say it’s okay right but you know it seems that President Trump doesn’t really care what other foreign governments think and so who knows what could come out in some cases um but I think that he probably wouldn’t release the social security numbers it’s just so unhinged so already that tells you that there’s going to be about 400 records that will still have redaction in and there’s this there’s this problem with the way people treat these records it’s just it’s just it’s not like any they’re not treated like any other archival records They they’re it’s a fallacious approach it’s they they have embedded in them serious research fallacies and I I all I can say is that I I think that um there will still be records redacted even after this go around um but uh it they could they could shrink it more but it’s so irrelevant I I don’t know what to say you know I mean there’s really nothing that I want to see there but I do have okay so I have to have a favorite right that I’m push okay ready yeah okay I want to I want to see uh Lee Harvey oswalt’s 20115 now it’s actually released almost totally in full but they released it in pieces and um there is a complete microfilm copy of the file which has been which has not been released period and the deal was that they’ll release that after the individual pieces have all been released right that was the that was the thing so they don’t have to waste time and energy of you know the of doing these uh how doing these dou releases right right and I think at this point there’s so little left on in the Oswald file uh that’s redacted right there are may be 25 records 25 records I mean like Pages 25 pages that have like one or two redactions one or two words right so good enough just release the whole thing thing that’s about 30,000 Pages 25 30,000 pages and it will all be in one place and you’ll be able to sit down and read it like a book right right and that would be I think perhaps one of the most interesting things in the collection now you even that is you know interesting to who now that I’ve spent all this time learning about this stuff it’d be very interesting to me and so I’m selfish in these things and of course there is uh a bunch of stuff of of Interest that’s outside of the collection uh now they there there’s been um there’s stuff that NRA actually has right that people have donated to them or they have you know picked up some way or another and it would be very nice indeed to see all that online that would be great but here’s the question so you mentioned the 2400 Pages 2400 FBI records or whatever um and I and I said I don’t think there’s going to be very much stuff in there that’s new at least maybe they belong in the collection maybe they don’t right you have to look at them please don’t just throw them in there because they’re saying oh there’s some kind of stuff that it showed up you know we did a new digital registry of our records and this showed up in in our search and so we’re not even gonna review it we’re just going to publish it oh my God please don’t do that I mean archival collections need to be selected right if they’re not selective they’re worthless they’re just giant piles of paper why are you making me go through these piles of paper I want you to go through these piles of paper and then give me the stuff that’s relevant forget about important
relevant yeah so I I my question is is there stuff that’s in other places in other agencies in CIA you know archive in Warrington that is you know relevant and that we you know that they can somehow go in and pull it up I don’t I I don’t 100% deny it but I think that uh some of the stuff is just not so would have to be an Act Congress to get a release of let’s say the RFK material on Cuba at the JFK Library I think most of that a lot of that is out but I I can’t I can’t be 100% sure I don’t know about that there’s other stuff B there’s other places besides the JF FK collection The Arc that has JFK material the JFK library has lots of JFK material it’s not in the collection but some of it could I mean if if this stuff about wave is relevant there’s a lot of stuff in the JFK Library that’s relevant they just didn’t stuff it in the collection if you read um Don Bon’s book yeah he got he got a lot of NSC material from the LBJ Library it’s not in the JFK collection is it relevant well it’s about it’s certainly about you know the the Mongoose and and these other issues Yeah by way that’s a very good book his book is terrific oh yeah that’s a great book and he found this stuff and it’s there and so the JFK collection is not an excuse to not research anywhere else it’s not and it you have to know how to use it right and it h you have to it has to be well Chosen and it’s like people don’t just give us the records and will will go over them uh oh please give me a break you have no idea what what’s involved in this what do you you know it’s just crazy some of this stuff and a lot of this stuff is mythical I’ll I’ll be blunt mythical so for
example uh Bill Harvey’s travel records this just really bothers me um this this claim that that Harvey traveled from took a plane from Rome to
Dallas it come it doesn’t come and supposedly it’s from Mark Wyatt right is that the story I believe that’s the story it’s from a CIA gay CIA guy in Rome who accidentally ran into Harvey on the airplane and um his daughter said that doesn’t sound right where does this story come from this comes from from BREC
calie okay that’s you know that’s it as far as I’m concerned I don’t you know I he’s I’ve read some of his stuff I you know no right no no I I don’t I don’t I don’t think it’s right I don’t think it’s correct I think it’s you know some some stuff I I won’t he’s he’s deceased so I can slander him but I I don’t know all I know is that I don’t find his stuff reliable and that leads to the fact that there is sort of a some conspir come some uh researchers are really after a fishing Expedition ah well there’s a there’s a there’s a story behind some of this so that like some of this material that I clearly has nothing to do with the assassination but it does have to do with CIA misdeeds or FBI misdeeds and you can think of it this way that because JFK was assassinated and didn’t get to fill out his term and carry out his the promise of his presidency so we have things the bad terrible things that happened later and these records of CIA and FBI misdeeds are relevant because they show us how bad things got I think that’s putting it sort of uh what can I say you know I’m trying to put it rationally right right and it’s so easy but it’s easy for people to say oh you know um Eladio delal I mean he was he was involved in the assassination so we need his 2011 file well you know there’s no evidence that he was involved so but yeah you want the 2011 file but that does that mean the CIA has to release it just because you think it’s it’s relevant right right I think that’s absurd I think that’s absurd I mean you you know why based on what do you think that he’s relevant now some people might say no it’s it’s relevant I think David Kaiser said that’s that’s relevant I think that’s relevant I don’t know what to say yeah yeah could there be a permanent should there be a permanent body which judges whether or not this stuff should be released this is something that I I find to be I mean a permanent
right then there’s no end to it this is not this has nothing to do with the JFK act yeah it doesn’t invis it envisions no such thing there will always in a hundred years people will still be coming up with more things they want to see that’s right yeah it it’s never ending I have a solution okay okay it’s the Ripple option okay here’s what you do close down the CIA close down all intelligence agencies then release every piece of paper that they have in their in their files so that they won’t be producing more of this stuff and we eventually have a chance to go through it all why do I call this the Ripley option what did Ripley say when the aliens got out of control on the planet and took over all the and ate all the colonists and we getting ready to eat them she said I think we should take the spaceship back up into orbit and nuke the planet it’s the only way to be
sure well thank you for that
solution it’s a great way to end this seriously it’s not serious it’s a joke it’s a joke any parting comments before we go it’s been fascinating talking to you it’s really really interesting uh yeah I I I I’ve had a great a great time talking to you I feel like I you know you you know so much about some of this stuff also that it’s very it’s very helpful to me and uh I’d like to just say one more time y i I really hope that people will try and look at what’s left that’s not available I mean you can find it it’s not that hard do it yourself okay this this this idea that there’s a vast Trove of material still in there is just wrong so recalibrate you know for the researchers recalibrate your approach and focus on the stuff that You’ got which is really a lot I mean it’s a lot just the stuff online at Mary frell at Nara it’s a it’s huge quantities of things and you can really do interesting stuff with it right and I would say for a lot of researchers um go to Nara there’s there’s all sorts of stuff there that’s not online that is fully public that you can go and research and find out about right yeah so I think that trying to get if people can focus on that I think that that would be a very positive development on the other hand I think that you know instead of worrying so much about this really really small amount of stuff that’s left if if you know they could focus more on getting the stuff online yeah it would be a tremendous boom to research you know regardless of what you think about you know the the assassination itself of the events of the assassination the history of the assassination would be vastly enriched by putting this material online yeah I totally agree that’s what I’m waiting for well thank you very much Robert and I’m sure we’ll be talking to you another uh couple of weeks or months when after the after the stuff comes out so uh stay tuned my fingers crossed yeah okay thank you very much
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