by Jim Marrs
The original intent of the conspirators seems to have been to reunite the President’s body with the empty Dallas casket at Walter Reed . . . and then take the Dallas casket, with the body inside it once again, to Bethesda. This plan was foiled by the President’s widow, who refused a helicopter ride back to the White House, and instead insisted on remaining with the Dallas casket all the way to Bethesda Naval Hospital. This decision of hers, which no one could countermand, created major problems for those in charge of the cover-up who had been planning to quietly reintroduce JFK’s body back into the Dallas casket at Walter Reed. It . . . created unwanted witnesses to multiple casket entries at Bethesda, and to the broken chain-of-custody for the body.
Horne also was able to confirm reports that the autopsy was controlled not by the medical personnel, but by military authorities crowded into the autopsy room. When the doctors started to examine Kennedy’s throat wound, first thought to mark a tracheotomy and only later revealed as a bullet wound, according to witnesses, it was Admiral Calvin Galloway, Bethesda’s commanding officer, who told them, “Leave it alone. Don’t touch it. It’s just a tracheotomy.”
Horne found that the lead autopsist, Navy Commander Dr. James J. Humes, dissembled about a number of things including the time that Kennedy’s body arrived at Bethesda. He said based on official reports, Humes’s Warren Commission testimony that the body arrived at 7:35 p.m. was “intentionally misleading, deliberately off by an hour.”
According to witness Paul O’Connor, Humes was “scared to death” during the autopsy. Horne said this was “no wonder” as “Humes had been involved in obstruction of justice, in a grisly charade forced upon him by his military superiors in order to create a dishonest photographic and x-ray record, and was about to reveal the questionable results of his handiwork to a morgue packed with over 35 visitors, many of them of Flag rank.”
Bethesda technician James Jenkins described the JFK autopsy as a “circus” and said that Humes was being carefully directed through the procedure by Dr. George Burkley, the president’s personal physician, through Admiral Galloway. Jenkins added, “People need to understand that this was a cover-up. For what reason, I can only speculate, but certainly the evidence—presented by Humes to the public—was not the evidence we found at the autopsy.”
Horne also demonstrated that Dr. Burkley was untruthful in several statements he made to both the Warren Commission and the later House committee. “If he were alive today, he would be subject to prosecution for perjury,” noted Horne.
The Zapruder Film: Fundamental or Fraud?
Over the years, many serious researchers have questioned the authenticity of the famous Abraham Zapruder film. Horne dealt extensively with the famous Zapruder film in his volumes because, he wrote, assessing the legitimacy of the film could lead to a better understanding of what really happened.
Like most Americans, Horne had initially accepted the film as legitimate evidence in the assassination. But in June 1997, he said the ARRB staff “became aware of evidence that pointed toward the possible creation of a modified version of the Zapruder film the weekend of the assassination at Kodak’s main industrial plant in Rochester, New York.”
Horne wrote, “Throughout that summer, I became painfully aware that asking Kodak to perform an authenticity study of the Zapruder film for the ARRB (and the fact that Kodak agreed to do so on a pro bono basis, free of charge!) constituted a potential conflict of interest of major proportions.”
Because of both time and financial considerations, Kodak was allowed to continue with the authenticity study, conducted by Rollie Zavada, a former Kodak employee called out of retirement. However, his report was presented only five days before the ARRB ceased operation, leaving no time for questions or further study. Furthermore, while the Zavada study listed some characteristics indicating the film was an original, it also carried technical language and exhibits that some, including Horne, felt cast doubt on the film’s authenticity.
Confusion over how and where the Zapruder film was processed began immediately. Originally taken by Secret Service agent in charge Forrest Sorrels and reporter Harry McCormack to WFAA television station for processing, they found the station was not equipped to develop 8 mm color film. So the film was taken to the Eastman Kodak Company plant that was already processing the color transparencies of witness Phil Willis. Both Sorrels and Willis recalled that the Zapruder film was processed at the Kodak plant but a December 1963 FBI report from agent Robert Barrett quoted Zapruder as saying the processing took place at the Jamieson Film Company on Bryan Street.
A more serious question concerning the legitimacy of the Zapruder film stemmed from revelations out of the 1975 President’s Commission on CIA Activities headed by then–vice president Nelson Rockefeller. In response to requests from the Commission, the CIA admitted that the agency’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) had performed a shot and timing analysis of the film, shot internegatives of the film, performed a print test, produced three print copies (the exact number of copies reported after the assassination weekend), and created four briefing board panels displaying twenty-eight enlargements of frames from the film. It is unclear exactly when all this involvement with the Zapruder film took place except that it was done before mid-December 1963 and apparently even took place prior to the film’s being turned over to Time-Life on Monday, November 25, 1963. If this was the case, it was altered before anyone—at either Time-Life or the government—got to view it.
Such early covert handling of the Zapruder film led some assassination researchers to believe the government, in the form of the CIA’s NPIC, may have doctored the film long before anyone in the public got to see it. Author Richard Trask commented, “The available records, unfortunately, give us scant information as to what in fact the CIA or NPIC did with the analyzing of the film.”
Trask apparently was unfamiliar with Homer A. McMahon, who in 1963 was manager of NPIC’s color lab, and his assistant Morgan Bennett Hunter, as neither was mentioned in his book. In 1997 this pair, located and interviewed by the ARRB, revealed that the Zapruder film indeed was worked on at NPIC the weekend of the assassination. McMahon also recalled that the film was flown from Dallas to a state-of-the-art CIA-funded Kodak lab in Rochester, New York, where it was actually developed rather than in Dallas. He remembered the film was brought to NPIC by a “Bill Smith” of the Secret Service from Rochester, although no such agent could later be found. Smith told McMahon he personally had obtained the film from the amateur who exposed it (apparently Abraham Zapruder), flew it to Rochester for developing, and then ferried it to the Washington Navy Yard for the NPIC work. Hunter later recalled a Secret Service agent being present along with a military captain named Sands. Smith ordered both Hunter and McMahon never to discuss their work with the film and to refer any queries to Captain Sands.
McMahon also told the ARRB that he and Hunter worked with the film Smith provided to produce blowups of approximately forty frames. He added that the film was never copied as a motion picture. Only selected frames were blown up to produce the briefing or presentation panels. McMahon added that although he conducted no official analysis, it was his opinion at the time that Kennedy was shot six to eight times from three separate locations. But he said Smith argued there were only three shots from behind and “you can’t fight city hall.”
In 2003, Kodak’s Zavada wrote, “There is no detectable evidence of manipulation or image alteration on the ‘Zapruder in-camera original’ and all supporting evidence precludes any forgery thereto. The film that exists at NARA [the National Archives and Records Administration] was received from Time/Life, has all the characteristics of an original film per my report.”
But the issue of alterations remains unsettled. Recall that the Dallas surveyors, Robert West and Chester Breneman, said they conducted their survey of Dealey Plaza on the morning of November 25, 1963, with the use of eight-by-ten-inch color photo prints of the Zapruder film frames. While it has been truthf
ully argued that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to retouch a tiny 8 mm movie frame, it would be simple to blow up each frame to eight-by-ten-inch size, perform some retouching, and reshoot the frames individually. When run as a moving film, especially if reshot with the original camera, it would be most difficult to detect alterations.
The evidence indicates that the Zapruder film manipulated at NPIC was not even the real film. “If McMahon was correct that he had viewed the original, 16mm-wide, unslit double 8 movie film the weekend of the assassination, and if it was really developed in Rochester at a CIA lab run by Kodak (as he was unambiguously told it was), then the extant film . . . is not a camera original film, but a simulated ‘original’ created with an optical printer at the CIA’s secret film lab in Rochester,” explained Horne.
In 2009 Peter Janney, author of the revealing book on JFK confidante Mary Pinchot Meyer, Mary’s Mosaic, interviewed at length Dino Brugioni, former head of NPIC’s Information Branch. Brugioni recalled participating in the NPIC production of assassination briefing boards using an original Zapruder film on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination. These boards reportedly were ordered by the Secret Service but delivered to CIA director John McCone. On December 9, 1963, based on analysis of the boards, McCone told Robert Kennedy “two people were involved in the shooting.” McCone attempted to show this evidence to President Johnson but was brushed off. In the 1990s, the CIA finally turned over some of the briefing boards to the ARRB.
Brugioni identified “Captain Sands” as Navy Captain Pierre Sands, who served as deputy director of NPIC, and described the CIA-backed Kodak lab in Rochester, known as the “Hawkeye Plant,” as a facility that “had everything” including an optical printer, a film printer used for making optical effects through the use of special lenses and a projector to transfer images to film stock, and, in fact, “had the capability to do almost anything.”
Additional proof of government manipulation of the Zapruder film prior to its purchase by Time-Life on November 25, 1963, came from Hollywood special effects experts.
Hollywood Takes a Look
In 2008, Sydney Wilkinson, with more than twenty years’ experience in the Hollywood postproduction industry, became intrigued by the Zapruder film. She was surprised to learn there had never been a nongovernmental scientific imaging study of its authenticity. After contacting the National Archives and Records Administration and being given authorization by Dallas’s Sixth Floor Museum, which holds the Zapruder copyright, she obtained a certified third-generation 35-millimeter “forensic version” (untouched) duplicate negative of the film.
This was scanned directly to a 6K DPX digital form using a Northlight scanner, today considered state-of-the-art technology in feature-film postproduction. The digital file exactly replicates the film’s image and reveals all information in each frame via 6144 by 4668 pixels. In comparison, home HD TV is only 1920 by 1080 pixels.
Wilkinson was stunned by what she found in the blown-up frames. “When I viewed the frames following the head shot, I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck,” she recalled. “In the frames that weren’t blurry—frames 317, 321, 323, and others—a solid black ‘patch’ on the rear of his head jumped out at me. It was clearly artificial.” Some believe this patch was painted on to mask the massive exit wound in the right rear portion of his head indicating a shot from the front.
More than two dozen film industry professionals—special-effects artists, film editors, imaging specialists, and technical engineers, including restoration and preservation professionals at major studios—evaluated the Zapruder frames and all perceived the painted patch on the rear of his head. “They are convinced this black patch was artificial and not a natural shadow on the back of JFK’s head,” said Wilkinson.
Ned Price, a film restoration expert at a major studio, exclaimed, “Oh, that’s horrible, that’s just terrible! That’s such a bad fake.” Paul R. Rutan Jr., president and chief technician of a Hollywood film restoration company, noted, “We are not looking at opticals [original images]; we are looking at artwork.” Their observations were confirmed by others but most did not want their names involved, such as the film expert who commented, “I am as convinced as I can be that frame 317 is a man-made special effect placed there to deceive.”
Leo Zahn, a director and cinematographer with thirty years’ experience including extensive work with the standard 8 mm format of the 1960s and ‘70s, explained:
In Frame 317, the shadow on the backside of JFK’s head looks like an artifact not created by sunlight striking an object. This shadow with razor-sharp edges and almost d-max (maximum film density) looks more like a patch. . . . For comparison I have pulled Frame 295 (1.5 seconds before Frame 317) where JFK’s head is in similar position to the sun, and here the shadow on the backside of his head looks the way it should on Kodachrome film.
The ARRB’s Douglas Horne noted:
The considered opinions of [these] professionals, who together have spent over five decades restoring and working with films of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (when visual effects were done optically—not digitally) in that one moment [have] superseded the statements of all those in the JFK research community who have insisted for two decades now that the Zapruder film could not have been altered, because the technology did not exist to do so.
But the evidence of alteration aside, other problems remain with the historic film. Trask, Horne, and most assassination researchers agree that contrary to the popular opinion that the Zapruder film represents photographic historic truth, just like any other photo, it merely captures a brief period of time and is actually subjective, open to the viewer’s interpretation. “The fact [is] that the different possible interpretations of the Zapruder film—even if we assume that the extant film is the authentic camera original film—are almost endless, and are not getting simpler with the passage of years,” noted Horne.
So now, along with fake government documents and phony autopsy X-rays and photographs, the public must understand that even the Zapruder film, long heralded as the ultimate truth of the assassination, cannot be accepted at face value.
Jack Tunheim, by 2012 a Minnesota federal district judge, said all but a few of the JFK assassination documents are now public. “Is there a cache of records someplace? I don’t think so. We looked as far and as wide as we possibly could,” proclaimed Tunheim to a Minnesota news station. “It would have been a violation of law to not turn over records to us for our decision making. I just don’t think there was much left.” Tunheim said that after many years of seeing all the available evidence—from Oswald’s rifle and bullets, to Kennedy’s autopsy photos, to FBI and CIA documents—he has not seen any direct evidence of any kind to change the verdict, which is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
However, researchers claim many thousands of records, especially CIA documents, are still being withheld.
Researcher and historian William E. Kelly Jr., one of the founders of the Coalition on Political Assassinations, in an open letter to Judge Tunheim in 2012, wrote:
It was with deep regret and some indignation that I read your comments regarding the JFK Assassination records that remain withheld, their numbers and the lack of any other cache of records someplace. . . . In fact, all the evidence isn’t “out there” and there are many thousands of records, especially CIA documents that are still being withheld, so many in fact that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) can’t count them or say exactly how many.
Kelly said the National Archives estimates that 1 percent of the known records still remain classified, which would mean there are still an estimated 50,000 still-secret records. Not a few, there are so many they can’t even tell you how many documents are still sealed or how many pages are being withheld, and they’re not going to count them until they are required to do so. Kelly said:
Just among the CIA records alone, there are over 1,000 documents identified by the ARRB that are currently locked in a sealed vault
at the Archives II facility in College Park, Maryland, and are scheduled to be released to the public in 2017, but are expected to remain sealed indefinitely at the request of the CIA. According to some reports, the CIA has already identified the documents that they intend to ask the president to postpone beyond 2017.
Some assassination records were destroyed even after the ARRB was formed to obtain them. Page 149 of the ARRB’s final report dryly noted:
Congress passed the JFK Act in [October] 1992. One month later, the Secret Service began its compliance efforts. However, in January 1995, the Secret Service destroyed Presidential protection survey reports for some of President Kennedy’s trips in the fall of 1963. The Review Board learned of the destruction approximately one week after the Secret Service destroyed them, when the Board was drafting its request for additional information. The Board believed that the Secret Service files on the President’s travels in the weeks preceding his murder would be relevant.
The website JFK Facts, moderated by former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley, described the JFK assassination as “the key political and historical issue of our time.” The site noted:
The JFK Records Act, passed unanimously in 1992, is no longer being enforced. Since the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) dissolved in 1998, its recommendations have gone unheeded, especially the one requesting that the historical and archival associations that recommended them continue to conduct oversight of the law. Congress has failed to hold any oversight hearings on the JFK Act in over 15 years and shows no inclination to do so.
Far from closed, the JFK assassination case continues to raise even more questions. JFK Facts asked:
If JFK was killed by a deranged lone nut, why are so many records from 1963 considered so significant in 2012? Why were records destroyed? Who ordered their destruction? Where are the Air Force One tapes? Why can’t they be found? Why are so many CIA documents about undercover officers with pre-assassination knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald classified for reasons of national security? Why doesn’t Congress oversee the JFK Records Act? Why don’t they hold public hearings on these issues and get answers to these questions?