Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK

by Mark Lane

  Has hope for the truth vanished, and do we see the darkness of a winter’s night beckoning us? It is more like the spring bursting with new discoveries, for in spite of the universal and active endorsement of the false report by almost all of the means of communication in America, television networks, newspapers and news magazines, in spite of the Cronkites and their clones who acted as salesmen for a shoddy and suspect product in hours of one-sided programming, very few in our country have accepted it. Eye- and ear-witnesses to the assassination, came forward to tell the truth. Not the princes concerned for a place near the throne, but teachers, students, workers, businessmen, mechanics, doctors and hundreds of other ordinary people. In a short period of time, every national survey and poll demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of Americans rejected the conclusion of the Warren Commission that Oswald was the lone assassin.

  Not one word of dissent from the commission’s finding was permitted on the television networks for more than a year after the assassination, and the report was treated as sacrosanct with our opinion makers urging us to have faith in it, as if it were not a political document but rather had been handed down from Mt. Sinai; there was near universal media acceptance and approval of the report.

  Perhaps the most revealing fact about the polls on this subject conducted by the traditional experts—Harris, ABC News, the Scripps Howard News Service, Time/CNN and Fox News utilizing Opinion Dynamics—is that their surveys appear to have originated in September 1966.11,12 At the outset the Hoover Report—later to become the Hoover/Warren Commission Report—was widely believed in the enforced absence of an alternative. However, one month after the publication of Rush to Judgment in August 1966, the first polls revealed that 46 percent of Americans suspected that there had been a conspiracy.13

  Silent Voices

  Acquilla Clemons

  Acquilla Clemons was an eyewitness to the murder of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. The Warren Commission stated that Oswald had killed Tippit but could provide no credible evidence to support its conclusion. When I visited Dallas in search of witnesses for a documentary film, three friends, Shirley Martin and her two daughters, participated in that effort. We located Ms. Clemons, an African American woman who had been threatened by two men who said they worked for the Dallas Police Department and ordered her not to talk. At first she was reluctant to discuss the matter, fearing that we might be associated with the police. She then recognized me in my role over the years in the civil rights movement and agreed to a filmed interview, which took place at her home at 618 Corinth Street in Dallas.14*

  She said that two men had been involved in the murder. One was “kind of heavy” and the other “was tall and thin and wore light khaki trousers and a white shirt.” Oswald was certainly not heavy; neither was he tall. When shown pictures of Oswald, Ms. Clemons said that he was not one of the two men she had seen.

  She said that Dallas police officers wearing guns had visited her and said that if she talked to anyone about what she had seen she “might get hurt.” She also said that one of the police officers said that if she talked to the Warren Commission, she “might get killed.”

  She said that two men were standing near Tippit’s police car and that one of them shot him. One of them then waved to the other and they ran from the scene in opposite directions. She did not know if both men had fired at Tippit.

  Her statements were corroborated by other witnesses who saw men running from the scene and who stated that Oswald was not one of them. Her more specific testimony would have destroyed the case that was being fabricated. Physical evidence also supported the facts revealed by Ms. Clemons and even confounded and confused some of the Warren Commission members. Four bullets had been recovered from Tippit’s body, yet the FBI stated that only one bullet was provided to it for examination by the Dallas Police Department, which asserted that it was “the only bullet that was recovered.” But wait, more than a quarter of a year later, three other bullets appeared. The FBI expert stated that “it was not possible” to “determine” whether the bullets had been fired from a gun identified as belonging to Oswald.

  Hale Boggs, a member of the commission, stated that he was confused by the fact that three bullets taken from Tippit’s body had been manufactured by Winchester-Western and one bullet had been manufactured by Remington-Peters, and that shells from both manufacturers had been found at the scene. Rankin, the general counsel for the commission, replied, “There is a slight problem here.” The commission offered several surreal “possible explanations for this variance” of course, not including the possibility that two men had been involved, since its oft-repeated mantra, Oswald acted alone, was inviolable.

  Instead, in yet another astonishing feat of reverse conjuration, the Warren Commission made Ms. Clemons disappear. The Warren Commission did not interview Ms. Clemons and her important testimony was, therefore, never considered. While her name does not appear in the commission’s report, she was anonymously dismissed in a section entitled “Speculations and Rumors”15 where the commission gathered inconvenient evidence.

  Regarding Ms. Clemons, the report stated that there was speculation that “an unidentified woman” had seen “two men involved in the shooting and that they ran off in opposite directions afterward.”16 The commission’s perplexing finding was that such a woman did not exist. It is clear that the Dallas police (a group relied upon by the commission for evidence) did not want Ms. Clemons to testify and that the FBI, the commission’s primary source, knew all about her long before the report was issued.

  At numerous lectures, I spoke of her observations in some detail as I did when interviewed on various local radio programs. The many hundreds of pages of FBI files reveal that special agents were always present and always recording my words and preparing copies of transcripts of every word. For example, on August 21, 1964, Hoover wrote to Rankin about my appearance on the “Barry Gray radio program over station WMCA in New York City.”17

  He wrote that I had discussed the substance of Ms. Clemons’s observations, that the FBI had monitored the program and recorded it, and that he was enclosing two original copies of the tape recordings and “two copies of a verbatim transcription of the program prepared by this bureau,” and that one copy of the recording and the transcription “will be maintained (by the FBI) for future reference.”

  Both the FBI and the Warren Commission had known of the proposed testimony of Ms. Clemons for months before the report was written and before I was asked to appear before the commission during July 1964. To accommodate the commission’s request, I returned from Europe to testify. I was not asked about her observations.

  During September 1964, Dorothy Kilgallen published an interview with Ms. Clemons that was featured in the New York Journal-American. The filmed interview that I conducted with Ms. Clemons, shown first at the movie theatre at Carnegie Hall in New York and later elsewhere throughout the country, as well as Ms. Kilgallen’s independent interview, refutes the conclusions of the FBI and the commission that she did not exist.

  She was a courageous woman who came forward to tell the truth about what she witnessed although her life had been threatened. Her words were dismissed without inquiry by the president’s commission. Yet this discriminatory treatment was far less severe than the suffering of others who made a similar journey.

  Dorothy Kilgallen

  Of course I knew of Dorothy Kilgallen. She was a star of a leading national television program What’s My Line?, and a columnist for a New York daily afternoon newspaper, the Hearst-owned New York Journal-American. What I was curious about was why she was calling and asking me to visit at her Manhattan town house. It was an invitation that I could not refuse. She had a drink in her hand and offered me a cocktail, another invitation I accepted. She got down to business at once. She knew of my interest in the Kennedy assassination and her own preliminary inquiries had made her doubt the official version. I was aware of the fact that the host of her program, John Daly, was the son-in-law
of Earl Warren. She suggested that we share information, but not sources, about our separate investigations. I knew that although a number of volunteers were working with me and conducting useful interviews in Dallas that her resources reached to a higher and secret level that I could not begin to match. I agreed.

  Dorothy said that she had reason to believe that her telephone was being monitored and would be greatly surprised if mine had not been tapped by the federal government for some time. In order to reduce the opportunity for such surveillance, she suggested that in telephone calls we use code names for the person calling, Miss Parker for her and Mr. Robinson for me, and that we only call from public pay telephones.

  She said that she was aware of the circumstances; she wanted the truth to be known and the government wanted to suppress it. She was a well-known establishment figure, and her distrust of authority surprised me. She told me that after she had obtained a copy of Jack Ruby’s testimony, then classified top secret, she had difficulty persuading her newspaper to publish it until she agreed to take full responsibility for any response. The Journal-American published the lengthy transcript as a series in August 1964. Three hours after the first article was on the newsstands, two special agents of the FBI visited her home to interrogate her about how she had secured it. Of course, she did not reveal her source, but she told the agents that a man, not a woman, had provided the document and that John Daly, then the director of the Voice of America, was not the man. She explained that she had learned that Warren was investigating an innocent secretary whom he considered a suspect and that since she knew that Daly’s relationship to Warren might cause him to be considered as the source, she wanted to resolve those issues at the outset.

  Dorothy was also known for her coverage of social events and entanglements, so I was not surprised when she told me that she had asked the FBI agents why they arrived so quickly when it took the Chief Justice so long to question Ruby and other important witnesses, adding, “Jackie wasn’t questioned for months. Why, Warren knows Jackie very well; kisses her when they meet. No one can say that she couldn’t see him. She had been seeing Marlon.” In fact Mrs. Kennedy was asked a few questions by Warren and his counsel at a private meeting with Robert Kennedy in attendance for the first time on June 5, 1964, at 4:20 PM.18 The interview lasted ten minutes. It took place more than half a year after the assassination. Years later when I met Marlon Brando, the Marlon I presumed Dorothy had referred to, discretion prevailed and the subject never came up. Jack Ruby also testified more than six months after the assassination.19

  Dorothy and I met many times and exchanged information, including the interview with Acquilla Clemons she published in her newspaper, always by appointments made in telephone conversations that were likely overheard in spite of our inadequate efforts at disguise. She was married to Richard Kollmar, who, while agreeing with his wife’s views, believed that she was endangering her life with a pursuit of the evidence. She knew that the FBI had focused its legions upon our work. She wrote in the Journal-American the FBI “might have been more profitably employed in probing the facts of the case rather than how I got them.” Of course, it was not the facts that the FBI sought—it was instead a method to suppress them.

  Her close friend, she told me one afternoon, was Florence Smith, who she said had an ongoing relationship with John Kennedy. She was a journalist “and the one person I can trust with the work we are doing.” After Dorothy managed to arrange an interview with Jack Ruby during 1965, she told Florence and other friends that she was about to “break the case wide open,” and that, aware of what happened to others with decisive information, she had given her notes to Florence. In one telephone call to me she said that she needed just one more trip to Dallas to complete her work. Then, she said, she would share all of her findings with me.

  On November 8, 1965, Dorothy died. Two days later, Florence, who had been ill, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. No notes or memoranda about Dorothy’s investigation could be located. Later I met with Richard Kollmar who told me that Dorothy had died because of her efforts to investigate the assassination. He said he would not talk to me about that subject since “enough innocent people have already died.” Six years later he committed suicide. The medical explanation for Dorothy’s death was that it may have been caused by a moderate amount of alcohol together with an ordinary sleeping pill or a suicide. Lee Israel, a biographer and editor, wrote an excellent and well-researched biography called Kilgallen20 in which she explored Dorothy’s life and death. She interviewed a number of key witnesses about Dorothy’s last days and her observations were based upon all of the available evidence, including, but certainly not limited to, the medical records. She concluded that Dorothy had been murdered.

  Roger Craig

  Roger D. Craig served in the United States Army and later joined the Dallas Sheriff’s Department. One year after becoming a deputy sheriff he was named Man of the Year by that department for his work in capturing an international jewel thief. During the next three years he was promoted four times. Although the Secret Service had assured Kennedy he would be safe in Dallas and that all local police and deputy sheriffs had been integrated into the federal protection plan, Craig knew those assertions were untrue. The sheriff had told Craig and other deputies that they had no duties to perform on November 22, 1963, and that the local police also had been similarly instructed unless they were directing traffic. That day, Roger Craig stood in front of the Sheriff’s Department Building as a spectator awaiting the motorcade. When he heard the shots he ran toward the grassy knoll, from which witnesses stated they believed the shots had originated.

  Roger Craig’s observations on November 22 established him as an important witness in Dealey Plaza. Immediately after hearing the shots he interviewed a witness who told him that he had seen two men on the sixth floor of the book depository just before the shots were fired. Upon entering the book depository he, along with other officers, located the alleged murder weapon. He saw Lee Harvey Oswald at the scene fifteen minutes after the shots were fired. He saw Oswald enter a light-colored station wagon, driven by another person. Later, at police headquarters, he saw Oswald and identified him as the person he had previously seen. He heard Oswald make statements that were of crucial importance.

  Each of these observations by a trained and respected law enforcement officer destroyed the essential presumptions and conclusions of the Warren Commission. Two men on the sixth floor at the relevant time rebutted the conclusion that any one man acting alone had fired from that position. The rifle, which Craig and others found on the sixth floor, was not a Mannlicher-Carcano, although the commission concluded it was and also asserted that it had been owned by Oswald. In fact, while this was not proof of Oswald’s guilt, it was the only evidence against him.

  If Oswald was in Dealey Plaza fifteen minutes after the assassination, then the Warren Commission’s neatly fabricated timeline for his movements, which allowed the commission, in the absence of any credible evidence, to conclude that Oswald had killed police officer J. D. Tippit a little later that day, would have been rendered void. Oswald’s statements made in police headquarters and in Craig’s presence indicated not only that he was innocent but that he was secretly involved in some activity with others21

  No Warren Commission member ever met Craig. A deposition was taken solely by an inexperienced attorney, David Belin, who had been practicing law for just a few years. A deposition, to paraphrase Black’s Law Dictionary, is a witness’s testimony taken by a lawyer outside of the courtroom that is to be used in the preparation for a civil or criminal case. It is, in fact, a “pretrial discovery device.”22 Many experienced trial lawyers have written treatises on the subject; they often stress the need for preparation by counsel before conducting a deposition since the rules for taking testimony during a deposition are far more liberal and relaxed than those that apply at trial. After many years of practice, I also wrote an essay about techniques that may be employed in depositions.23 There is no evidenc
e to support the conclusion that Belin was properly prepared for questioning Roger Craig. His deposition transcript was not used as preparation by the commission since Craig was never permitted to testify before any member of the Warren Commission.24

  In federal practice, the deposition is often a means to prepare counsel for trial and generally not a substitute for testimony before a court. The jurors are the triers of fact in most cases unless the defendant has waived a jury trial, in which case the court becomes the trier of fact. It is generally of crucial importance for those charged with determining the facts to observe the witnesses’ testimony in order to determine credibility.

  Craig stated that he ran up the grassy knoll into the area behind the wooden fence because police officers and others were converging on that point and witnesses were saying that the shots had originated from there. He encountered a man behind the fence who stated that he was a Secret Service agent and had the credentials to prove it. This area was not explored by Belin.

  Craig, while under oath, told Belin that he interviewed two eyewitnesses, Arnold Rowland and his wife, Barbara, minutes after the assassination. He testified that Arnold Rowland told him that a few minutes before the shots were fired, he saw two men on the sixth floor of the book depository building, one of whom held a rifle with a telescopic site.25

  Craig also testified that after he entered the book depository with two other deputy sheriffs and a number of Dallas Police Department officers, it was decided to search the building. He said he was approximately eight feet from Deputy Sheriff Eugene Bloom when the rifle was discovered.26 He added that Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz arrived with a criminal identification man and that photographs were taken of the weapon before the weapon was moved. Belin did not ask Craig even a single question about the make and caliber of the alleged murder weapon.27 However, when I was present at a filmed interview with Craig, he was asked to describe the weapon.28 Craig had previously said and repeated many times that the weapon he observed was a German Mauser, caliber 7.65. Seymour Weitzman, a Dallas deputy constable, was a weapons expert who was called to the scene. In an affidavit sworn to on November 23, 1963, Weitzman described it as “a 7.65 Mauser, bolt action, equipped with a 4/18 scope, a thick leather brownish-black sling on it.”