Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation Into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination
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As Al Carrier also notes:
It is clear that there were enough Dallas Police Department motorcycle officers present to provide ample security to the President and his party. (There were eighteen two-wheeled motorcycles in the motorcade.)2
The LBJ team also attempted to change the passenger configuration of the Dallas motorcade in order to get Governor Connally, a longtime LBJ ally, out of the limousine in which Kennedy was riding. Unlike the other changes, this redirection of plans was overruled by President Kennedy’s people. Since the purpose of the President’s trip to Dallas was to mend political fences, it was important to the President that the much more conservative Governor Connally ride with Kennedy, and that the much more liberal Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough be seen riding with the more conservative Lyndon Johnson, as originally planned. The attempted change is very noteworthy, as the prestige position is always to be seated with the President, yet Johnson attempted to remove his close ally from that honor and place a political enemy there instead.
Contrary to misinformation, “the interviews conducted by Vince Palamara with agents involved in the motorcade security clearly show that the agents were not hampered in their duty. They all describe the President and his advisors as being easy to work with and who did not interfere with their duties of protection.”3 Former Secret Service agents expressed to Palamara that JFK would never have ordered an agent off the bumper of his car; quite to the contrary, he respected their decisions on protection and deferred those matters to their judgment.4
A further and little-known point is that, when it comes to security, the Secret Service has full authority to overrule even the President of the United States—and has been known to do so. For example, after the attacks on September 11, 2001, President Bush insisted on returning to Washington and issued that order. The Secret Service countermanded that order and redirected Air Force One to Offet Air Base in Nebraska because that is what their security protocol dictated.5
Analysis reveals that other standard protection protocols were also blatantly absent. Typically, in any Presidential motorcade—even in 1963—Secret Service agents ensured that manhole covers along the parade route are bolted shut, that open windows in buildings are closed, that all overpasses along the route are completely cleared of civilians, and that tall buildings are monitored for possible shooters. Those standard precautions were visibly absent from the protection in Dallas.
The responsibility for the security stripping on the Dallas trip does not appear to lead directly to the Secret Service, but rather to Vice President Lyndon Johnson and
1 Ibid, citing Bill Sloan & Jean Hill, JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness (Pelican: 1992).
2 Carrier, “The United States Secret Service: Conspiracy to Assassinate a President”
3 Carrier, “The United States Secret Service: Conspiracy to Assassinate a President”
4 Palamara, Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect the President
5 Carrier, “The United States Secret Service: Conspiracy to Assassinate a President”
those under his immediate control. Decisions that weakened security were made by Assistant Dallas Police Chief George Lumpkin, top Lyndon Johnson aide (and “hatchet man”) Cliff Carter, Democratic National Committee (DNC) advance man Jack Puterbaugh, Emory Roberts, the Secret Service agent in charge of Johnson’s protection detail, and Floyd Boring, a higher ranking member of the Secret Service. Those are the individuals reportedly responsible for the choice of the parade route (which took the President into the long slow turn and left him exposed in Dealey Plaza), the weak motorcycle formation, the absence of agents on the riding bumpers of the President’s car, and the inadequate protection along the parade route in general.
Professor James Fetzer’s extensive study in 2000 concluded that:
Secret Service policies for the protection of the President were massively violated during the motorcade in Dallas.1
The procedural deviations were numerous:
More than a dozen Secret Service policies for the protection of the President seem to have been violated during the motorcade in Dallas, including no protective military presence; no coverage of open windows; motorcycles out of position; agents not riding on the Presidential limousine; vehicles in improper sequence; utilization of an improper route, which included a turn of more than 90 degrees; limousine slowed nearly to a halt at the corner of Houston and Elm; the limousine came to a halt after bullets began to be fired; agents were virtually unresponsive; brains and blood were washed from the limousine at Parkland, even before the President had been pronounced dead; the limousine was stripped down and being rebuilt already Monday, the day of the formal state funeral; a substitute windshield was later produced as evidence; and so on—discoveries that are strengthened and extended by Vincent Palamara and Douglas Weldon, J. D., in this book .2
Motorcade Route
Vince Palamara’s many years of research and communication with former U.S. Secret Service personnel assisted him in learning who, as Palamara puts it, “was actually to blame for the slow 120-degree turn, the Main-Houston-Elm juncture, which was a violation of Secret Service protocol and common sense.”3 The evidence, as far as pushing for the route change (which did occur) taking the motorcade into the dangerous dog-leg turn route, leads primarily to Dallas Assistant Chief of Police, George Lumpkin, with probable assistance at the approval level from senior Secret Service member, Floyd Boring.4
•
1 James H. Fetzer, Ph.D., 2001, “‘Smoking Guns’ in the Death of JFK”: http://www.jfkresearch.com/prologue.htm
2 James H. Fetzer Ph.D., Murder in Dealey Plaza: What We Know Now that We Didn’t Know Then (Open Court: 2000).
3 Vince Palamara, Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect the President, 2006
4 Ibid.
George L. Lumpkin, Assistant Police Chief of Dallas in 1962, recommended the route to the Secret Service. He stated that the alternative route (reaching the Trade Mart by avoiding the slow 120-degree turn) was rejected because “it was filled with winos and broken pavement,” and because Kennedy wanted exposure and there would not have been large crowds there (nor were there many in Dealey Plaza which was past the downtown portion of the motorcade where they had experienced the largest crowds).1 Lumpkin was also a Colonel in Army Intelligence and rode in the pilot car of the Kennedy motorcade that day; he was also the officer who ordered that the Texas School Book Depository Building to be sealed off after the assassination, as well as the man who specifically chose Ilya Mamantov to be Marina Oswald’s Russian interpreter following the assassination.
Aides to Vice President Johnson apparently approved that route and also authorized its publication in the newspapers.
It was apparently Texas Governor John Connally who had pushed for the Trade Mart to be the site of President Kennedy’s luncheon/speech, even though Connally himself conceded that it was a security nightmare. Had the speech been scheduled at one of the other sites that were being seriously considered, the motorcade would never have taken the dog-leg turn onto Elm Street into Dealey Plaza.
The Dallas Police Department also told the Secret Service that they would secure whatever route was selected. They clearly did not secure the route adequately, nor did the Secret Service. As former Secret Service agent Lynne Meredith wrote:
I have always believed that the following adverse situations all contributed to the unfortunate and unnecessary death of President Kennedy. . . . No Secret Service agents riding on the rear of the limousine. . . . Inadequate security along the entire ten-mile motorcade route from the airport to downtown Dallas that day, particularly in the buildings along the route of travel. . . . The motorcade route published several days in advance . . .2
Revelations of recent years have cast deep doubts on even the possibility of the government’s official version of the JFK assassination being valid:
• It has been substantiated that high-ranking CIA officers had pre-knowledge that
Mary Pinchot Meyer would be murdered;3
• CIA officer E. Howard Hunt made “deathbed testimony” that CIA officer Cord Meyer (ex-husband of Mary Pinchot Meyer) and Vice President Johnson organized the JFK assassination;4
• It has been substantiated by author Ed Haslam that a covert cancer laboratory in New Orleans linked Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, David Ferrie, Guy Banister, Dr. Mary Sherman and Judyth Baker;5
• Judyth Baker’s book, Me & Lee, has not only confirmed the cancer laboratory and the involvement of the above individuals, but documented that
1 Ibid.
2 Palamara, Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect the President
3 Janney, Mary’s Mosaic
4 Hunt, Bond of Secrecy
5 Haslam, Dr. Mary’s Monkey
• its purpose was to develop a rapid-onset cancer to be used as a bioweapon against Fidel Castro.1
Covert anti-Castro efforts in the early 1960s were much more prevalent than most Americans realize. The U.S. embargo was crippling Cuba economically:
Add to that years of U.S.-sponsored covert warfare waged against Cuba (from blowing up Cuban oil refineries to infecting Cuban livestock with viruses), and it is amazing Castro’s government survived at all.2
Then the inevitable discussion of how to assassinate Castro started. No one even suggested that the U.S. had not been trying, despite the fact that assassinating a foreign head of state was explicitly illegal.3
A New Orleans District Attorney discovered that the plot to assassinate President Kennedy originated within the womb of the plans to assassinate Castro. He also learned that the nucleus of the conspiracy was in New Orleans and that Lee Harvey Oswald’s false “defection” to the Soviet Union, as well as his connections to former FBI man Guy Banister, tied Oswald in to the U.S. intelligence community, especially its epicenter in Lafayette Square in New Orleans:
In the blocks surrounding Lafayette Square were the local offices of the FBI, the CIA, and the Secret Service. Across the square from Banister sat Chairman Herbert of the Armed Services Committee of the U.S House of Representatives, whose job it was to prepare the U.S. military’s budget for Congress’ approval and to hide the CIA’s budget from both Soviet and American scrutiny.4
Lee Harvey Oswald, our so-called “lone-nut assassin,” was operating right in the middle of this intelligence center. It has been established that he worked closely with Banister—and was seen often in Banister’s office—and also worked nearby as a “cover” job at a coffee company with Judyth Baker.
One block away was the Reilly Coffee Company where Lee Harvey Oswald worked. The address stamped on the famous “Hands Off Cuba” flyers that Oswald handed out that hot August day in 1963, was 544 Camp Street: The Newman Building. Banister’s wife found similar flyers in her husband’s office after his death.5
It’s noteworthy that Banister and Reilly were two of the most conservative anti-Castro members of the whole New Orleans community. The fact that they both assisted Lee Harvey Oswald in acts that appeared to be pro-Communist is highly suspicious. With
1 Baker, Me & Lee
2 Haslam, Dr. Mary’s Monkey, 144.
3 Ibid.
4 Haslam, Dr. Mary’s Monkey, 148.
5 Haslam, Dr. Mary’s Monkey, 148-149.
the benefit of hindsight, the technique was obviously a method of setting up Oswald’s intelligence “legend” so that he could be used operationally.
Garrison concluded that Oswald was involved with both Banister and Ferrie during the summer of 1963, and that Banister was Oswald’s “handler” who arranged events, such as the trip to the mental hospital, to make Oswald later appear to be a convincing political assassin.1
It has also become quite apparent, with the benefit of newer information, that those connections were exactly what “needed to be covered up” in the confusing aftermath of the assassination and its would-be investigations. In fact, the footprints of federal agents had been all over the case:
Garrison related how he had tried to find Guy Banister’s files in 1966, several years after Banister’s death in September 1964. His investigators sought out Banister’s wife, who told them that upon her husband’s death, his files had been promptly removed from his office before she got there. She was told they were removed by federal agents.2
What Garrison had figured out that was so dangerous was the existence of “a right-wing medical-political alliance at work in New Orleans in the 1960s, and that Dr. Alton Ochsner was at the center of it.”3 It was all related to anti-Castro intelligence activities and that was the missing factor in the equation to “. . . explain the extreme manner in which the New Orleans Police Department shut down the investigation into Mary Sherman’s murder and sanitized the reports . . .4
Investigative author Ed Haslam confirmed the worst of District Attorney Garrison’s suspicions. Haslam identified a secret laboratory that had been used by David Ferrie and Dr. Mary Sherman for developing a “galloping” (rapid-onset) cancer. He also discovered the existence of a linear particle accelerator at a separate laboratory, but also in New Orleans, being used for a secret anti-Castro research project at that time, involving Lee Harvey Oswald that was probably responsible for the intense destruction to Dr. Sherman’s body.5
This was a true bombshell discovery, as it was a real game-changer in the “big picture” of the JFK assassination. Imagine the potential consequences: “What would have happened to the ‘lone-nut’ theory if the public began to suspect that Lee Harvey Oswald had been spying on a top-secret U.S. Government laboratory?”6
Mr. Haslam’s grisly discoveries continued when his investigation of the gruesome death of Dr. Sherman led him to author-investigator Judyth Baker, who had been a prime witness in those very events in which Dr. Sherman had been involved. The
1 Haslam, Dr. Mary’s Monkey, 149.
2 Ibid, 158.
3 Ibid, 166.
4 Ibid, 244.
5 Haslam, Dr. Mary’s Monkey, 243-271.
6 Ibid, 269.
amazing history was pieced together into the puzzle: “She and Lee Harvey Oswald stood side-by-side in an underground medical laboratory located in David Ferrie’s apartment on Louisiana Avenue Parkway in New Orleans, and that she was the laboratory technician that handled the cancer-causing monkey viruses which were being used to develop a biological weapon for the purpose of killing Fidel Castro.”1
Judyth (Baker) reports that Lee (Oswald) secretly worked as a team member on Ochsner’s bioweapons project, that Oswald met with Ochsner personally, and that it was actually Oswald who requested that Dr. Ochsner set up his media coverage to help position him as a pro-Castro activist, so that he could get into Cuba more easily and develop their bioweapon to sympathetic doctors, who would use it to kill Castro.2
According to Judyth Baker, Dr. Mary Sherman displayed “to her a collection of microscope slides of a ‘galloping cancer’ that Mary had developed by exposing the cancer-causing monkey viruses to radiation.”3
The development of that biological weapon was successful:
Furthermore, she said, after successfully killing numerous monkeys with their new biological weapon, this group had tested it on a human subject in a mental hospital, killing the human.4
The success of the bioweapon project—which involved Jack Ruby—had major implications in Ruby’s well-expressed allegations that he had been injected with cancer cells.5 It was not some vague notion that came from nowhere. He knew that a “super-cancer” had been developed as a weapon to be used covertly and that someone like himself would also make an excellent candidate for its use.
The implications of all these were quite dramatic in themselves:
Like the cover-up which dumped Mary Sherman’s burned and mangled corpse at her apartment, Lee’s murder was deemed a “necessity” to protect the underground medical laboratory and its sponsors. Thus was silenced the man who could have explained what really happened (or perhaps, what did not happen) in Dallas on
November 22, 1963.6
Baker testifies to the historical record—and backs it up with documentation—that while she and Lee Harvey Oswald were together in New Orleans, it was very clear that he was working “penetration” on behalf of U.S. intelligence and was not only infiltrating, but attempting to preclude, a plot against the life of President Kennedy. That information coincides with the testimony of veteran Military Intelligence operative,
1 Haslam, Dr. Mary’s Monkey, 284, citing Judyth Baker, Me & Lee.
2 Ibid, 337, citing Judyth Baker, Me & Lee.
3 Ibid, 322, citing Judyth Baker, Me & Lee.
4 Ibid, 285, citing Judyth Baker, Me & Lee.
5 Ibid, 307, citing Judyth Baker, Me & Lee.
6 Ibid, 301, citing Judyth Baker, Me & Lee.
Richard Case Nagell who—as a double agent for the U.S.—was also tracking Oswald for Soviet Intelligence.1 Baker concludes that “Lee infiltrated the plot to kill President Kennedy, was set up as the patsy, and was then murdered to protect the real assassins by silencing him.”2
As Ed Haslam observed, the fact that the secret research project was linked to leaders in American medicine of the stature of Dr. Alton Ochsner and Dr. Mary Sherman, practically necessitated a cover-up:
Connecting Ochsner to Oswald not only rules out “lone nut” as a realistic description of Oswald, but it helps us understand how convenient “lone nut” was for protecting Ochsner (and others) from inconvenient questions about both the bioweapon project and the JFK assassination.3